In the meantime, he had gotten a manuscript into the hands of Alfredo Cóndon, the aspiring Chilean writer who hosted Neruda in Paris, only to pass out on the floor of the Russian bar. What Cóndon lacked in literary talent he made up for with his personal wealth and contacts. He had already connected Neruda with Carlos Morla Lynch, the writer-diplomat based at the Chilean embassy in Madrid, where Cóndon was now a secretary. While Morla Lynch wasn’t able to get Neruda transferred to Spain, he did get him to Java.
Now Cóndon came to him with the Residence manuscript, entreating him to find a publisher, so Morla Lynch passed the manuscript and the charge on to Rafael Alberti, a leading figure in the exciting, influential generation of young writers in Spain at the time. “From the very first reading,” Alberti recalled, “those poems surprised and astonished me, so distant, as they were, from the tenor and atmosphere of our poetry.” He passed the book all around Madrid, believing that “such an extraordinary book of new revelations had to come out in Spain. I proposed it to my few friends who were editors—failure. I then began a correspondence with Pablo. His replies were anguished . . . In one of his letters, he asked me for a dictionary and for my forgiveness for the grammatical errors that his letters might contain.”
When Alberti arrived in Paris in 1931, he told Alejo Carpentier about this “absolutely extraordinary poet” who was serving as a consul in Java and was unknown in Europe, and that he should publish him. Carpentier had fled political repression in Cuba and was straddling the worlds of surrealism and journalism in France. He was working as the editor of a new magazine, collaborating with other stellar Latin American members of his generation residing in Paris. The endeavor was run and funded by the young writer Elvira de Alvear, another recent arrival in Montparnasse. She came from the Argentine bourgeoisie and financed the publication from income she regularly received from back home. As Carpentier recounted later, he wrote to Java, and Neruda sent him the manuscript, whose poetry amazed him. He talked to de Alvear, and they decided to first print some of the poems in the next issue of the magazine and then publish the whole book. There would even be an advance of 5,000 francs. Alberti sent a cable to Neruda with the news. But then, as a repercussion of the Depression, Argentina passed a law restricting the exportation of capital. De Alvear was forced to return home. Neruda never got the francs nor was Residence published in France. Everything seemed to be more of a struggle now—after having book after book come out over the past years, he no longer seemed to be infallible when it came to publishing. Even the fate of de Alvear’s finances seemed like a direct reversal of the good fortune Neruda had when he ran into Alone, just after he got his stock tip money, and the critic agreed to pay off Book of Twilights’ printer.
Neruda kept tight to his stubborn, arrogant conviction of not settling for anything “less” than having the book be published in Spain, wasting three years as he passed up opportunities for paying contracts with solid publishers in Argentina and Chile. He even had his latest (albeit much less significant) work, El hondero entusiasta, published by Nascimento in Santiago without a second thought. Nascimento had now published five books of Neruda’s—perhaps not to the greatest sales volume, but nearly all of them worthy endeavors, and the more important ones made their way to Europe, the United States, and elsewhere.
But after three years, Neruda couldn’t hold back any longer. He was still too arrogant to allow a full release outside of Spain, but he was dying to get something out there, while still holding on to his cards so that he could flush out a noble debut in Europe. He thus arranged with Nascimento to do a limited release of one hundred deluxe copies, with paper from Holland, each signed by the poet himself. For Neruda, this strategy kept the book seemingly within his control. (It was unlike Neruda’s previous books: all those since Twenty Love Poems—venture, El habitante, Anillos, even the new El hondero entusiasta—were selling hundreds of copies each.) And most important, he would still leave open the opportunity for a Spanish publisher to print a full run of popular editions that would be considered the real first edition. These one hundred were more for friends, for the literati, for reviewers. He hoped all of their enthusiasm would create a buzz and attract a Spanish publisher.
But when Nascimento did publish the hundred copies, some critics were unenthusiastic, reacting less to the lines themselves than to Neruda’s whole approach; they felt Neruda’s ego had grown too big, while others were simply jealous. Some were both, such as Pablo de Rokha, one of Neruda’s nemeses throughout his literary life, a poet who amassed a torrential body of work and was important enough to one day have a Santiago high school and neighborhood named after him. De Rokha had already criticized Neruda in print, and now he attacked him again in the newspaper La Opinión, ten days after the publication of the first Residence, audaciously titling the article “Epitaph to Neruda.” “Neruda is the master, the owner and victim of the mask, of that ‘poet’s mask’ that initiates and defines Residencia,” wrote de Rokha. The book’s tone is “excessive and treacherous”; Neruda’s words “hang like rags; the mask is wet, it’s been rained upon inside.”
He was clearly alluding to Neruda’s only major poetry recital since his return, which had been at a theater staged with Asian masks, as if out of a Chinese opera. Neruda had given his reading standing behind one of the giant masks,
