General Francisco Bahamonde Franco was a brutal ruler whose Nationalist civil war victory would not have been achieved without aid from fellow fascists Hitler and Mussolini, US corporations that backed Hitler (more), and the Catholic Church. The longevity of El Caudillo’s rule was assisted in its later years by the mania of Communist fear-mongering amidst blinkered and increasingly generous benefactors in the US and throughout his career due his exceptionally skillful manipulations of both sides of the political fence, as well, his suppression of oppositional voices.
It’s remarkable to me that in this ode to Leo Trotsky (via Hit & Run) complete with expressions of contempt for what he describes to be Pablo Neruda’s erosion of “the solid Catholic values” found amongst the “gassy vocabulary” and “inflated rhetoric” of Rubén Darío that writer Stephen Schwartz would whittle Franco’s regime into the dust he believes Neruda’s work should now be pounded.
Why does Neruda deserve this posthumous censorship? According to Schwartz:
IN HIS DISTINGUISHED WORK Beyond Death and Exile, Louis Stein notes that the anarchists and anti-Communists “were given a disproportionately small share of the available places.” A leading Spanish anti-Communist leftist, Federico Solano Palacio, went further, declaring that some 86 percent of the applications for transportation by anarchists were thrown out. Solano Palacio specifically cited the example of the Winnipeg. The Catalan labor historian Josep Peirats wrote in 1993: “Before World War II stopped all departures, [three ships] sailed to Veracruz, Mexico. Later on, the Winnipeg sailed to Chile. . . . These trips were administered by the Communists. . . . They granted or denied passports [and] strictly screened passengers at points of embarkation. The same procedure applied to transport to Chile, where Pablo Neruda, the Chilean poet . . . did the screening.”
As an admirer of Neruda’s poetry I’m interested in investigating this allegation which on its face seems at odds with the plight of Spanish Republicans, at least in France, at the time:
Maybe the most massive and striking experience was endured by the RepublicanSpaniards who by the hundreds of thousands crossed the French border between December 1938 and February 1939. Not only did they first suffer the terrible conditions of theconcentration camps, but they also wholeheartedly wished to fight against the dictatorship by all means, as workers or as soldiers. They were, however, considered from the start as “reds”, i.e. as dangerous communist elements.13 Le Boulou, Amélie-les-Bains, Prats-de-Mollo, Saint-Cyprien, Argelès, Bram, Le Vernet, Gurs, Barcarès: the listing of the French camps is but a painful and a never-ending succession of names.14 They have nothing in common with Auschwitz or Buchenwald, yet they reveal nevertheless the alteration of democratic principles and the inexorable breakdown of the Republic. Thousands of Spanish prisoners were progressively incorporated into hard labour units called Compagnies de Travailleurs Étrangers (Foreign Workers’ Companies), from March-April 1939, as back-up elements of the French Defense organisation or in the French economy, mostly in the service of private farms or industries. Because of the general mobilization among French citizens and the needs of the national economy, these Spaniards played a growing part in the war effort because many of them were skilled workers and committed to the struggle against fascism. At the end of the year, the internment camps were almost empty, but this situation would not last after the military defeat of the French army and the political triumph of the Vichy regime.
Historian Leopoldo Castedo, for one, provides a first-hand glimpse of his journey on the Winnipeg and the kind of assistance he received from Neruda.
Schwartz’s claim that Federico Garcia Lorca‘s work, for one, transcended the “pseudo-Whitmanese of Neruda” presents a curious contradiction as well:
In 1927 Garcia Lorca gained fame with his romantic historical play Marina Pineda, where the scenery was constructed by Salavador Dali and the distinguished actress Margarita Xirgu played the heroine. By 1928, with the publication of PRIMER ROMANCERO GITANO, he was the best-known of all Spanish poets, and leading member of the ‘Generation of 27’, which included Luis Cernuda, Jorge Guillen, Pedro Salinas, Rafael Alberti, and others. In 1929-30 Garcia Lorca lived in the city of New York, on the campus of Columbia University. Unable to speak English, he suffered a deep culture shock. However, in his early letters to home he expressed his enthusiasm about contemporary American plays. His suicidal mood was recorded in posthumously published POETA EN NUEVA YORK (1940, Poet in New York), in which he praised Walt Whitman. The poet condemns the frightening, physically and spiritually corrupted city, and escapes to Havana to experience the harmony of a more primitive life.
Finally, Schwartz’s declaration that the poetry of others including Vicente Aleixandre ( I find his work fine enough in its own right) is “extraordinary” in comparison to Neruda’s is a personal opinion and certainly not an absolute.
We were the sun’s chosen ones
By Vicente Aleixandre
We were the sun’s chosen ones
And we didn’t know it
We were the highest star’s elected
And we didn’t know how to answer its gift
Anguish of impotence
Water loved us
The earth loved us
The woods were ours
Ecstasy was our only home
Your glance was the universe face to face
Your beauty was the sound of the dawn
Spring was loved by the trees
Now we are just a contagious grief
A death before its time
The soul that doesn’t know where it is
Winter in the bones without a flash of lightning
And all this because you didn’t know what eternity was
You didn’t understand the soul of my soul on its ship of darkness
On its eagle’s throne wounded by the infinite
‘O Southern Cross, O clover of scented phosphorus,’
LXXXVI From: ‘Cien sonetos de amor’
O Southern Cross, O clover of scented phosphorus,
with four kisses this day penetrated your beauty
and traversed my hat and the shadows:
the moon went turning round a coldness.
Then, with my love, and my beloved, oh diamonds
of blue frost, serenity of Heaven,
mirror, you appeared, and night filled itself
with your four vaults of trembling wine.
O palpitating silver of fish, pure and polished,
emerald cross, parsley of the radiant shadows,
glow-worm nailed to the unity of Heaven,
rest in me, let us close our eyes, yours and mine.
Sleep with Man’s darkness for an instant.
Light, inside me, your four constellated numbers.