As for his verse, Neruda was dedicated to completing and publishing his first book, Crepusculario (The Book of Twilights), its title referencing the scarlet fans of the sun’s last rays as seen from his window on Maruri Street. His friends at Claridad offered to publish the book, but under the condition that he come up with the money to print it himself. This was Neruda’s only option at the time. So he sold the few cheap pieces of furniture he had and pawned his black “poet’s suit,” as well as the watch that José del Carmen had solemnly given to him as a gift (how insulted he would have been had he known!). It was only enough to start the printing process, and the inexorable printer wouldn’t hand over any copies until Neruda paid in full.
It was at this critical moment that Hernán Díaz Arrieta entered Neruda’s life. Arrieta, who went by the pen name Alone (using the English word), would become one of Chile’s most influential literary critics. At the time he met Neruda, he was writing for the Santiago newspaper La Nación. Though Alone wasn’t part of the younger crowd, he already knew of Neruda and recognized him by sight one day on one of Santiago’s main avenues, La Alameda.
As Alone wrote in a book nearly fifty years later, Neruda struck him as “pale, with a melancholy air, visibly malnourished, inclined to be silent.” A bit scatterbrained, with “perfunctory manners,” Neruda described his circumstances to Alone: he couldn’t get the printed edition in his hands until he paid the full amount in advance, which he couldn’t afford. The muchacho, the kid, as he appeared to Alone, didn’t ask for anything; he just related the situation.
The timing of the encounter was fortuitous: Alone had just cashed in on some nice capital gains from a stock tip his friend had given him. The money, Alone later admitted, made him feel powerful. With a slight show of grandeur, he generously offered to help fund the printing. Neruda accepted the gift with modesty and gratitude.
Thanks to Alone’s donation, The Book of Twilights was released to the public in June 1923, a month before Neruda turned nineteen. As he wrote in his memoirs, “That moment when the first book appears, with the ink fresh and the paper tender, that enchanted and ecstatic moment, with the sound of beating wings and of the first flower opening on the conquered height, that moment comes only once in the poet’s lifetime.”
The book itself marks a significant moment in Neruda’s advancement in both his self-and social cognition since arriving in Santiago. Neruda’s achievement in The Book of Twilights derives from that growth, from his ability to capture not just the moods of the poet himself, but also the essential characteristics of his generation. It was a generation—not just in Chile—that had been tremendously affected by the monumental global events of the past decade, coming of age during the destruction and inhumanity of World War I, the October Revolution, and the surging movements of socialist anarchism, syndicalist anarchism, and communism around the world.* This series of global changes moved writers and all kinds of artists to develop new styles to express the new realities of mass society: postwar desolation, disillusionment, and sexual disappointment.†
While these world events were churning in the exterior, at home in Santiago the events of the century’s first two decades were quickly changing the city. It was exciting to some, but provoked anxiety among many of Neruda’s generation. As Raymond Craib, an expert on Chile’s student movements at the time, writes:
The dizzying array of technological changes that pumped elite self-confidence also primed consternation. Mass culture could appear threatening, and not “culture” at all. In the new world of the cinemas, social classes mixed. New forms of association between workers and students created feelings of disassociation among others accustomed to more rigid class boundaries. The “death of God” and the crisis in artistic representation had its corollary in the rise of a politics that questioned the very possibility of representation. The continuous influx of migrants from the north, the concomitant growth of the city, and the networks of mobility within it meant that Santiago’s neighborhoods were increasingly traversed by a teeming raif of urban strangers.
Thus The Book of Twilights wasn’t an illustration of a generation caught in the drunken excesses of bohemia, but rather of youths unable to grip all these convulsive changes around them—paralyzed, if you will, in their moment of crisis. Their enthusiasm was equally mixed with despair, and their idealism was inhibited by an apathy, often to the point of inertia.
This sentiment is portrayed in an article Neruda wrote for Claridad several months after The Book of Twilights was published, so emblematic that it was printed on the front page:
We are wretched. We play at living, we pretend to live, every day; every day we expose our skin to the sun, reflections of so much ignominy crawling beneath the sun, tainted by all the lepers on earth, torn to shreds by so much scratching at the filth that surrounds us; throw-away, sterile, useless, filled with unsatisfied anxiety and sacrificed dreams. In that daily piece of existence, peering out to receive malice and give it back, friends, we are whole. With our ruin uselessly patched over by old heroic illusions of other men in other times. With our roots, feverish with mud, mixing the swamp with the junkyard, futilely covered by the awning of the infinite sky. That’s what we are, friends, and less than that. What have we done with our life, friends? Disgust and tears, tears slip out as I ask you, what have you done with your lives?
In Book of Twilights, Neruda joined the vanguard writers of the 1920s in his own way. He wrote skillfully with emotional complexity. To paint this portrait
