As their romance became more intense, so did the obstacles between them. Just like with Amelia and Teresa, Laura’s parents took actions to prevent their eighteen-year-old daughter from sleeping with a famed bohemian “Don Juan” poet. They called on the family in whose residence Laura stayed to watch her every move and to try to prevent contact between the lovers.
Enraged and indignant, Neruda conspired to kidnap Laura, with her consent. His partner in the operation was Eduardo Barrios, the same writer who had helped convince Carlos Nascimento to publish Twenty Love Poems. He owned a car—the key to the operation. The two waited until midnight, flashing the car’s headlights to send off the agreed-upon signals. But Laura had lost her courage to attempt such a brazen act. While the idea had seemed thrilling and romantic at first, its potential repercussions were too severe. The writers waited and waited, but Laura never came out. Neruda returned to Santiago, sullen with disappointment.
Neruda’s financial situation was as desperate as his love life. Despite Twenty Love Poems’ popularity, the number of copies actually sold was slim, the royalties a pittance. José del Carmen, having realized that his son had suspended his studies, completely cut off the allowance he had been providing.
Upon Neruda’s solicitation, Nascimento hired Neruda to assemble an anthology of selected works by the Socialist French Nobel laureate Anatole France. But that money did not sustain him for long. Writing for Claridad couldn’t keep him afloat, nor could the pieces he placed here and there in mainstream newspapers. Since he would not be graduating from the Pedagogy Institute, he could not teach in a formal setting for lack of formal credentials. He didn’t teach informally either. He did receive some compensation for recitals and talks, but he was not actively marketing himself as a speaker for hire.
Though his sister, Laura, served as intermediary, delivering secret small gifts of cash from his stepmother, Neruda depended as much on his renown in the bohemian world to pay for meals and drinks as he did on his uncertain cash flow. When he returned to Santiago from Temuco at the end of March 1925, he didn’t even have a room in a pension to call his own. He considered leaving Chile but didn’t have the resources to do so.
Nascimento, meanwhile, was eager for more work from his star poet and gave him a tiny advance for a new book. Though it was just a minor financial contribution, it may have served as valuable encouragement during Neruda’s travails to tackle new creative terrain.
Rubén had mentioned that when he returned from Mexico, Neruda was in such a state that it seemed “his soul was spinning around itself, seeking its own center . . . he wanted to renew himself in some way, to examine himself from a different dimension.” The desire for self-exploration, the craving for new perspectives through which he might ground himself, was leading Neruda to experiment once again with his style—he’d revive himself through the creative process.
Facing another aesthetic crossroads, Neruda recommitted to uncharted literary adventure and experimentation. Despite the love poems’ unique potency, he was restless and determined to break with their lyrical realism and with poetry’s traditional forms in general. He was done with realism. He now intended to “strip poetry of all its objectiveness and to say what I have to say in the most serious form possible.”
This resulted in his discovery of a unique avant-garde form. It was void of rhyme and meter, and used no punctuation or capitalization in an attempt to better replicate the raw articulation of the subconscious. He strove to bring his poetry even closer to “irreducible purity, the closest approximation to naked thought, to the intimate labor of the soul.” Neruda didn’t even use capital letters in the title of the book that this experiment produced: tentativa del hombre infinito (venture of the infinite man). Twenty-five years after its publication, reflecting on what the experience did for him as a writer, Neruda would call venture “one of the most important books of my poetry.”
With venture he was developing a unique form of automatic writing, a technique that enabled him to successfully move forward from the realism of his earlier poetry. In fact, he expounded on this new creative process in an article in Claridad the very month Twenty Love Poems was published, June 1924. It is titled, appropriately, “A Scattered Expression”:
I write and write without being enchained by my thought, without bothering to free myself from chance associations . . . I let my feelings loose in whatever I write. Disassociated, grotesque, my writing represents my diverse and discordant depth. I build in my words a construct with free matter, and while creating I eliminate what has no existence or any palpable hold.
The approach Neruda delineates in this article is in line with many of the tenets of the surrealist movement developing in Paris. Yet “A Scattered Expression” appeared four months before André Breton published the Surrealist Manifesto in Paris, showing that Neruda was right there with the avant-garde, if not, in his own way, even a bit out in front of it. His writing method wasn’t an appropriation; Neruda’s method was very much his own.
Surrealism stems from the principle that true creative force comes from the unconscious and that art is the main vehicle for its release. As Breton wrote in his manifesto,
