Memoirs by Pablo Neruda

First published:Confiesco que he vivido: Memorias, 1974 (English translation, 1977)

Type of work: Memoir

Time of work: 1904-1973

Locale: Chile

Principal Personages:

• Pablo Neruda, the author
• Salvador Allende, the President of Chile from 1970 to 1973
• Federico Garcia Lorca, a Spanish poet and Neruda’s friend

Form and Content

Pablo Neruda died on September 23, 1973, in Santiago, Chile. Only twelve days earlier, the government of Salvador Allende, which Neruda strongly supported, had been overthrown in a bloody military coup. He was engaged in the final editing of his memoirs when death interrupted, so it is impossible to know what, if any, changes he would have made. The manuscript was prepared for publication by his wife, Matilde Neruda, and Miguel Otero Silva; the Spanish language edition first appeared in print the following year.

Memoirs is an appropriate title, for the book is far more a series of anecdotes linked by lyrical passages of poetic prose than it is an exhaustive, or even extensive, life history. For the most part, Neruda commits himself to the past tense, but he occasionally slips into the present tense, presumably to heighten the sense of immediacy in his account. The book is composed of twelve chapters, the contents of which are arranged chronologically. On occasion, however, Neruda will temporarily abandon chronology so that he can combine several incidents or impressions for thematic purposes. Neruda was an intensely political personality, and the narration of many of the incidents is charged with political implications. Still, it would not be fair to characterize Memoirs as an essentially political book or even one whose structure has been largely determined by political considerations.

The bulk of the book, as might be expected, is devoted to Neruda’s adult life. Only the first chapter, “The Country Boy,” deals with his childhood and adolescence. His school days, his first sexual encounters, even the loss of his virginity— all are treated rather cursorily. Neruda characterizes himself as a poet from his earliest boyhood, and it is clearly of his life as a poet that he wishes to speak. By chapter 2, “Lost in the City,” he is boarding a third-class railway carriage for the trip to Santiago and the university. There he will quickly become involved with organizations of activist left-wing students, a colony of bohemian poets (most of whom are also students), and a gallery of eccentric characters from all walks of life. The tone of the book is set.

Critical Context

Events conspired to make Memoirs an eagerly awaited book. Neruda, the recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1971, had also been a member of the Communist Party of Chile since July 8, 1945. He had been active in Allende’s presidential campaign in 1970 and was named ambassador to France when the Popular Unity Party won the election. In the last years of his life, he labored both as a poet and as a practical politician to keep the Marxist government in power and to prevent civil war. The very dramatic situation—Neruda’s completion of his autobiography, the overthrow of the Popular Unity government, Allende’s violent death, and the poet’s own death, all virtually coinciding—assured a sizable and expectant audience for the posthumously published Memoirs.

While indispensable to a study of Neruda’s life and work, Memoirs is not a major contribution to the genre of autobiography. Critics have noted that Neruda’s expansive tone is belied by his reticence concerning many subjects—a reticence that leaves gaping ellipses in his narrative. On page 130, for example, Neruda reveals that in 1937 he was living in Paris with Delia del Carril. She is next mentioned on page 216; it is 1952, and Neruda is leaving her for Matilde Urrutia. His only child, Malva Marina—who was born in Madrid on October 4, 1934, and died eight years later in Europe—is never mentioned at all. Memoirs cannot, therefore, be considered a work of self-revelation in the tradition of the confessions of Saint Augustine or Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

Neruda’s anecdotes are entertaining, often fascinating, but they sometimes seem disingenuous as well. He states in his preface that many of his memories are blurred. In his reconstruction of them, the stories make the appropriate point almost too perfectly. Their climaxes, like those of artistic creations, are completely satisfying. Neruda’s memories are the stuff of poetry to him, as all his perceptions have been since childhood. Consequently, Neruda the poet frequently takes the narrative out of the hands of Neruda the chronicler.

Neruda first states that he is a Communist on page 135 and mentions the fact several more times thereafter, but he states that he is a poet on the second page of his text and repeats that assertion several hundred times more, on virtually every page of the book. The pseudonym Pablo Neruda, assumed because his father objected to a son who wrote poetry, emphasizes this second identity. His subjective and uneven autobiography is a poetic response in prose to the facts of his life, and therein lies its value. It is not as a husband, father, or political activist that history will judge Pablo Neruda, but as a poet.

Bibliography

Agosin, Marjorie. Pablo Neruda, 1986. Translated by Lorraine Roses.

Bizzarro, Salvatore. Pablo Neruda: All Poets the Poet, 1979.

Howes, Victor. Review in The Christian Science Monitor. March 8, 1977, p. 18.

Maurer, Robert. “A Confession of Life,” in Saturday Review. IV (February 10, 1977), pp. 18-20.

Neruda, Pablo. Pablo Neruda: Addresses, Essays, Lectures, 1980. Edited by Emir Rodriguez Monegal and Enrico Mario Santi.

Rodman, Selden. Review in National Review. XXIX (March 18, 1977), p. 340.

Yglesias, Jose. Review in The New York Times Book Review. LXXXII (March 13, 1977), p. 3.