That dead one administered the rule of cruelty
from his ubiquitous statue.
That still effigy controlled all life . . .
—“The Episode”
As Neruda turned sixty, Memorial de Isla Negra was published to a rush of general acclaim. The book is among Neruda’s finest, as he had mastered a personal tone that is forthright and direct.
It’s an interesting title, connoting the different layers of metaphors in this lyrical account of his life. Alastair Reid wrote that the Spanish word memorial should be “shaken free of association with the English word ‘memorial,’ for Neruda wrote not a systematic autobiography in poem form but a set of assembled meditations on the presence of the past in the present, an essential notebook.” Still, Neruda seems to draw from the Latin roots of the word “memorial” to evoke a feeling of remembrance or celebration of this place, Isla Negra, this sanctuary to which he always returned, with all of its restorative and reflective powers.
A bilingual dictionary defines the Spanish word memorial as a “formal petition; memorial” or, in law, as a “brief.”* Neruda used a future-oriented word for an autobiographical reflection. It implies another dynamic to the book: Neruda was asking not just his detractors (the book sometimes reads as defensive) but all his readers, present and future, to use this petition, this brief, to judge his life and his choices. It is an open book with which to sympathize and affirm his essence, as written in front of the sea, as he moved toward his final years.
* * *
Maruca passed away on March 27, 1965. Destitute, she was buried in a common grave in Holland. Neruda asked Delia, still living at La Michoacán, to annul their marriage, and she obliged. It was never recognized in Chile anyway, since he had never divorced Maruca. He was now free to legally marry Matilde, which he did that October.
Neruda and Matilde traveled restlessly, going by ocean liner from Montevideo to Europe and continuing via train or plane. Over the rest of 1965, they would visit Paris three times, Moscow twice, Budapest twice, East Berlin, Hamburg, England, Helsinki, Italy, and Yugoslavia.
At the same time that Matilde and Neruda were in Budapest on the invitation of the Hungarian government, Neruda’s good friend, the Guatemalan novelist Miguel Ángel Asturias, was there with his wife. Fifteen years earlier, Neruda had borrowed Asturias’s passport to flee to exile in Europe. Both were asked by the Hungarian government to write something that would show off the Socialist country nearly a decade after the Soviets intervened. They decided to demonstrate the beauty and strengths of the transforming country in an ode-like manner, using its cuisine to draw out sympathy and sentiment. The result is a minor work of both prose and poetry, named Comiendo en Hungría (Eating in Hungary), the reader going along the Danube and out in the countryside for delicious meals and drinks, from foie gras to bruschetta, spiced with Gypsy music and old red wines.
In Yugoslavia, Neruda attended the 1965 International PEN Club meeting. There he started a warm relationship with the playwright Arthur Miller, who was then the international president of the club. The PEN Club was founded in 1921 “to promote friendship and intellectual cooperation among writers everywhere; to emphasize the role of literature in the development of mutual understanding and world culture; to fight for freedom of expression; and to act as a powerful voice on behalf of writers harassed, imprisoned and sometimes killed for their views.” Miller invited Neruda to come to New York for the next year’s meeting, but his visa was denied by the State Department because he was a Communist.
In March 1966, Miller wrote to Neruda from his home in Roxbury, Connecticut, that efforts to get him a visa were advancing. Another letter sent a little later stated that “private conversations with Washington indicate there will finally be no problem in your entering the country.” It ended, “In short, try to come. The place is full of your friends, as you know. It is important you come. My wife speaks perfect Spanish, so that makes it more important. Your wife must come too. Here in the country we have good friends, writers, dogs, cats, birds, trout, whiskey . . .”*
The substantial pressure on the State Department from domestic and international cultural groups and individuals, led by Miller behind the scenes, eventually convinced officials to grant Neruda’s visa in time for the PEN Club meeting. President Lyndon Johnson became involved himself. It wasn’t just Neruda’s case but the whole policy that was under question. Decades later Miller told a biographer that the Johnson administration “became nervous that it would not be good to be seen banning such a famous figure and realized that it would be wise to relax the ban.” The State Department even admitted that the visa policy had “marred this country’s image as a free and open society.”*
On Saturday, June 11, 1966, twenty-three years after hosting him at the Library of Congress, the poet Archibald MacLeish introduced Neruda at the Poetry Center at the 92nd Street Y in New York: “It is my privilege and very decidedly my honor to introduce to you a great American poet. A great American poet in the precise and particular sense of the word ‘American.’ The precise and particular sense which includes not only the United States but Chile and not only Chile but the United States.” The words were dramatically delivered, and the auditorium responded with fervent applause.
MacLeish continued, stating that Neruda has “accepted for himself, as few other poets have in the centuries of American life, the American commitment which it imposes.” He clarifies that he does not mean that Neruda’s definition of the American commitment would be the same as his or others’, nor that all U.S. citizens accept the terms in which Neruda might express it. “I merely imply—more than imply—state, that if the American commitment is to be found anywhere, it is to be found in Walt Whitman’s love of mankind. And if
