*Time influences the reader’s appreciation of the work, especially with these early Residence poems. Today one can feel the greatness of a poem like “Dead Gallop.” But having read the literature produced since that time, a reader now would not be as astonished as those who read it at the time it was first published. “Dead Gallop” came out in the midst of a postwar enchantment with existentialism, when readers were not accustomed to the poem’s enigmatic prosody, perhaps never having read anything like it before.
*The violent objectification of the woman described in this scene establishes a pattern of disturbing misogynistic behavior that would continue during Neruda’s time abroad. Perhaps even more disturbing to today’s reader is the fact that this description comes from what Neruda wrote in his memoirs, fifty years later. There are no archival records for this event. Therefore, it is impossible to verify this description, to fully assess whether these events took place and, if they did, whether the young woman consented to sex with Neruda or was raped by him.
*There’s a natural urge to try to understand why Neruda may have conjured up Josie, but there isn’t necessarily a way to know definitively whether he did. Josie is the lens through which Neruda processed his experience, and there was some benefit to him in transforming an experience, which in the actual moment we know was difficult, boring, frustrating, and disappointing, into this story, something of some lasting value. And there is a wide gap in his archives, in the testimonies of others during this period—he could take advantage of that here. Still, we can only speculate how much truth there is behind the elements of the Josie Bliss story and how much is pure fantasy. Better than speculation may be to just rest with the fact that we have a little mystery here, and leave it pretty much at that.
*The nomenclature Neruda uses when referring to Asians—especially here in a quote from his memoirs, rather than a contemporary comment—is significant. It was conventional for Latin Americans to refer to people from the Indian subcontinent as hindú, regardless of their religion, to distinguish them from the indigenous indios of America. In Sri Lanka, the Sinhalese majority are Buddhists, and the religious difference between them and the Tamil Hindu minority is of great importance to those groups (as is the distinction among criollo, mestizo, and indio in Chile). The fact that Neruda ignored this difference speaks to his failure to recognize (or care about) the realities of the land in which he lived.
*The Huxley novel had actually been influenced by the Englishman’s recent travels through India and the Far East. The sojourn was seen as a watershed for Huxley’s intellectual development, where “idealism and mysticism had been found wanting and were rejected,” and make for an interesting comparison to Neruda’s experience. And as Neruda read these books amid his own insecurities and uncertainties of class and privilege, it’s interesting to note too that Point Counter Point features a character based on Huxley’s friend D. H. Lawrence, a character who acts as a spokesman for dissolving class divisions, for living life with intuitive emotions, not “British stiff-upper-lip constraint.”
†George Keyt’s sister, Peggy, was the aunt of the highly regarded author Michael Ondaatje (known for The English Patient, among many others). Ondaatje was born in Sri Lanka in 1943 and left in 1954. In a memoir, he wrote, “An aunt of mine remembers [Neruda] coming to dinner and continually breaking into song, but many of his dark claustrophobic pieces in Residence on Earth were written here, poems that saw this landscape governed by a crowded surrealism—full of vegetable oppressiveness.”
*Teresa’s niece Rosa León Muller, who was very close to her aunt, believes Neruda wrote to Teresa as well. Teresa kept in constant communication with Neruda’s sister, Laura, during this period and, Rosa sensed, was still in love with him. She didn’t marry until she was forty-five, rejecting her many suitors. She may have loved Neruda strongly, but not enough to overcome her parents’ objections. Just before her wedding, Rosa, just a little girl at that point, remembers sitting next to Teresa, who was sitting next to a trunk, “taking out everything that had to do with Pablo Neruda. She took out letters; she took out clippings. She told me, ‘No. I’m going to burn these things because I don’t have any reason now that I’m going to get married.’ She burned a lot.” Any letters from Neruda when he was in Asia may have been burned then.
*As appalling as the rest of the passage is, Neruda was at least not wrong on a purely factual basis to compare the figure of this woman to South Indian statuary. While there have been Tamil people in Sri Lanka for a very long time, ethnically they trace their lineage back to Tamil Nadu, “Land of Tamils,” a region that covers southeast India, nearly touching the northwest tip of Sri Lanka. Neruda visited this area—at the time referred to by the British as Madras (after its principal city, now named Chennai)—between his stints in Burma and Ceylon. The vast majority of Tamils are Hindu (see footnote on Neruda’s use of hindús to describe the locals here).
*Opium appears in Latin American literature as well, perhaps most notably in Rubén Darío’s 1888 story “El humo de la pipa” (“The Pipe’s Smoke”), written in Valparaíso. After dinner, the host comes with a pipe for the guests, already inebriated on alcohol. “Oh, my desired Orient, for whom I’ve suffered the nostalgia of the unknown!!” With every puff comes a
