Even 30 years after his death, Pablo Neruda is still the object of extraordinary affection in Chile, and the best-loved of all Latin America’s poets. Gabriel García Márquez (with customary hyperbole) has called him ‘the greatest poet of the 20th century in any language’. Others concede that his work is uneven — the poems praising Stalin are dreadful — but then again, says one admirer, ‘the Andes themselves are also an uneven work’.
Adam Feinstein isn’t out to rock the boat. His book is meant as a celebration, the first full biography of Neruda in English, published in the centenary year of the poet’s birth. Like its subject, his study is large, warm-hearted and engaging. It is short on analysis of the poetry, but allows plenty of space for the recollections of Neruda’s friends. Occasionally Feinstein doesn’t quite join up the biographical dots — I’m sure that’s because of a desire to keep the book to a manageable size.
A few telling scenes from Neruda’s childhood cast light on his later work. We see him riding with his father, a train-driver, through southern Chile, alive to the smell and noise of the forest. In a scene that mirrors one in Don Quixote, his father, infuriated by the boy’s passion for poetry, throws all his notebooks out of the window and sets fire to them in the patio below.
But Neruda pursued his ambition with determination. In Santiago, he drifted around the cafés in a pretentious poet’s cape — which later had to be pawned — writing the poems for his first collection, Crepusculario. The second collection, Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair, made him famous at the tender age of 20. It includes the celebrated Poem 20, ‘Tonight I can write the saddest lines’.
In spite of his fame, Neruda continued to be poor for years. Feinstein’s biography follows him through a series of lowly consul’s postings until he arrives in Spain, gets caught up in the Civil War and for the first time sides publicly with the Left.
This was a crucial moment in Neruda’s development as a political poet, and Feinstein identifies one pivotal evening back in Chile. Neruda had gone to give a poetry reading to the porters at Santiago’s market. Their emotional response to his work determined him to change the direction of his writing, addressing himself to workers, rather than striving to impress intellectuals. ‘Poetry is like bread,’ said Neruda, ‘and must be shared by everyone, the literate and the peasants, by all our vast, incredible, extraordinary family of peoples.’
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