None of those pages had the metal needed for the reconstruction, none of my verses brought the health and sustenance that were needed there. And I renounced them. I did not want old sorrows to discourage new lives. I did not want the reflection of a system that was able to induce such anguish in me to deposit the terrifying slime with which our enemies had darkened my own youth in the midst of building hope. I didn’t allow a single one of those poems to be published in the people’s democracies. And even more, today, having returned to these American lands of which I am a part, I confess that I don’t want to see those poems printed here either.
Neruda’s comments seem to have evolved from a gathering the year before, the 1948 World Congress of Intellectuals in Defense of Peace in Wrocław, Poland, where the Soviet writer Alexander Fadeyev had delivered a lengthy speech. In it, he had excoriated American culture as well as the writings of a handful of Western writers, including Henry Miller, Eugene O’Neill, and the French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre. “If hyenas could type and jackals could use a fountain pen they would write such things,” he shouted, words that brought the Eastern Bloc members to a raucous applause but horrified American and British delegates. Henry Miller, for example, was problematic for his “erotic obsessions” and Sartre for his “intellectual fornications,” as one Communist put it.
The attack against O’Neill, in particular, baffled the French philosopher Julien Benda. Yes, the nature of the American’s plays—often bleak, rather nihilistic, displaying hopelessness—may have been incongruent with the pure positivity of the Stalinists’ social realism. But still, Benda knew O’Neill, for one, to be a leftist writer. The searing severity of the personal attack against him and the others just seemed too much to Benda. After the speech, he complained to a Soviet writer, Ilya Ehrenburg (one of Neruda’s new good friends). How could Fadeyev truly compare O’Neill and others to jackals? “Is that fair or, to put it at its lowest, wise? And why do we have to clap every time Stalin’s name is mentioned?” Benda affirmed that he wasn’t in support of the United States’ policies, but that seemed beside the point.
At the time of the 1949 peace congress, Neruda seemed sincere in the renunciation of his own poetry as well as in his condemnation of authors who were writing negative, abstract works. His premise was that writers had an obligation in the face of a war, waged by imperialist capitalists against “democracy,” that threatened the entire world. His speech condemned the escapism of the existentialist literary style that had been permeating literature, illusory work that purposely elevated evasion, anguish, neurosis, and frustration and benefited the bourgeoisie and the allied governments: “In the throes of death, capitalism fills the cup of human creation with a bitter brew.”
In his speech, Neruda attacked writers who fell out of the cultural doctrine just as ruthlessly as Fadeyev had. He not only invoked Fadeyev, but also took his insults a step further. He shook the Mexico City crowd, insisting that
when Fadeyev said in his Wrocław speech that if hyenas could use a pen or typewriter, they would write like the poet T. S. Eliot or like the novelist Sartre, it seems to me he insulted the animal kingdom: I don’t believe that animals, even given intelligence and expression, will come to create an obscene religion of death squads and repugnant vices, like these two so-called maestros of Western culture.
Neruda then turned on other writers he had once cherished, lauded, and even translated, such as Rilke. He accused them of fomenting sadness and anxiety in the population, the antithesis of what the times demanded. There was no place for anything but optimistic, inspiring work invested in political unity and progress. Neruda’s words were harsh and uncompromising, the first display on such a large stage of his new bombastic, proselytizing tone. Neruda continued, detailing what he saw as the bourgeoisie’s “intense support” of these detrimental writers: “In the past years we’ve seen how our snobs [said in English] have represented Kafka, Rilke, and all the labyrinths that don’t have an exit, all the metaphysics that have fallen like empty crates from the train of history.” The snobs, he went on, have turned into “defenders of ‘spirit,’ into howling Americanists, into professional mud-makers of the pool they splash in.”
Regardless, Neruda’s fans rallied behind his words. In 1950, Samuel Sillen, a sponsor of the March 1949 Scientific and Cultural Conference for World Peace in New York City, reaffirmed, somewhat bombastically, what Neruda had just said:
Walt Whitman once wrote that the great poet enlisted in a people’s cause “can make every word he speaks draw blood.” This is true of Pablo Neruda. He is a poet-in-arms. He creates living art in the struggle against a dying society. And the blood he draws is that of an imperialism which hired the executioners of his native Chile and which now threatens to plunge the entire world into a catastrophic war.
As Neruda has said, before the warhawks of Wall Street and Washington can hurl the atom bomb they must first annihilate men morally. That is
