Despite all the initial excitement and attention surrounding the publication of Book of Twilights, Neruda’s spirits sank yet again. Adding to the psychological pressure of constant recognition was the fact that, just as his father had predicted, the book did nothing to improve Neruda’s finances. In truth, having discovered how much attention his son was paying to his poetry rather than his studies, José del Carmen reduced Neruda’s allowance. La mamadre (the more-mother), as Neruda called his stepmother, Trinidad, managed to sneak him some much-needed cash through his sister, Laura. Early in 1924, Neruda ran into Pedro Prado, the older poet who had so warmly embraced Neruda when he arrived in Santiago. When Prado asked him where he was currently living, Neruda answered, “In an alley with a lot of people; I’m not going to give you the address, because I haven’t paid the rent and they’re going to kick me out tomorrow or the next day.”
He had just published a significant book of poetry, but he was nervous and forlorn. He saw himself standing at a significant crossroads, unsure and anxious over what direction to free his emotion, to take his poetry, the two always interconnected. In an op-ed that appeared on the front page of Claridad several months after The Book of Twilights had been published, he asked his generation: “What have we done with our life?”
He provided, as the article continued, his own interpretation: “All of you, everyone, the best, the brightest, you have consented to mutually annihilate yourselves,” Neruda answers, “like the person who completes a task, who works toward his destiny. I have seen you kissing, biting, eating away at yourselves, dirtying yourselves, belittling yourselves, always equally monotonous and brutal . . . Water that returned to the earth. Cloud that the gust of wind turned to ashes.”
He, though, is a poet, and turns to explain what has become his personal manifesto of 1923, at the age of nineteen:
And me? Who is this that you challenge, what purity and entirety can you claim? I, too, am like you. Like you belittled, tainted, dirty, wasted, guilty. Like you. We are swallowed by the same ferocious throat, the same terrible monster. But, listen to me, I must free myself. Do you understand? The leap to a great height, the flight into the infinite sky, it will be I who takes it, and before you do. Before I rot I must be different, transform myself, free myself. You can continue the show. Not me. I’m leaving all of this, I’ll tear off these clothes in which you met me yesterday, and, crazy in turmoil, drunk with liberty, convulsed with threats, I shout out to you: Miserables!
He was now fixed on making a decisive turn at this crossroads to take his poetry in a different direction, in search of his true voice; to take the leap out of the misery that his previous work didn’t relieve; to find personal liberation through lyrical transformation. The route he set for himself was “provoked by an intense love passion.” The goal: “to encompass man, nature, the passions, and specific events, all into one work.”
Around the time he published that exposition in Claridad, feeling especially anxious about his poetry, Neruda made another trip to Temuco to restore his strength; his hometown served as a refuge, despite the ever-present tension with his father. One night, in the second-floor bedroom he grew up in, Neruda had what he’d later call a “curious experience.” Sometime past midnight, just before going to bed, he opened the window and looked out into an extraordinarily silent night. Then, as he described it in his memoirs, “The sky dazzled me. The entire sky was alive with a swarming multitude of stars. The night was newly cleansed by the rain and the Antarctic stars unfurled above my head.”
As if possessed by some sort of cosmic euphoria, he went to his desk, the same desk where he wrote his first poems in his math books. He wrote a poem, deliriously, as if trying to transcribe a dictation. The next morning he read it over with pure joy. Neruda felt he had discovered the new style he had been searching for: dramatically more exuberant, more open, just like the night sky under which it was composed.
When he returned to Santiago, he showed one of the new poems to his friend Aliro Oyarzún, who was well respected for his literary knowledge. “Are you sure those lines haven’t been influenced by Sabat Ercasty?” Oyarzún asked. Anxious, but ready to roll the dice, Neruda sent the poem to the Uruguayan poet himself, the man he had so boldly written to soon after he arrived in Santiago. He was just as bold this time:
Read this poem. It’s called “The Enthusiastic Sling-Shooter.” Someone told me that he saw your influence in it. I am very content with the poem. What do you think? I’d burn it [if it were true.] I admire you more than anyone, but how tragic is this racking my brain for words and symbols and turns of phrase. It is the greatest pain, greater still, more than ever, and for the first time (like in other things that I sent you) I thought I was in uncharted territory, in a place [land] that was destined to be mine alone.
The reply from Montevideo, according to Neruda, was: “Seldom have I read such a poem so significant, so magnificent, but I have to say it: yes, there is something of Sabat Ercasty in your verse.”
Sabat’s letter contained high praise, yet to Neruda, his
