He came to regret the self-absorbed, melancholy tone of his early work, and moved to celebrate his joy in life and in simple objects (his houses express this same joy).
Neruda, as Feinstein shows, was guilty of cowardice, especially in his failure to denounce the mistreatment of writers in the Soviet Union. He was capable of great courage, too. After a scorching indictment of Chile’s political brutality, in 1948 he was forced into hiding, and later escaped across the Andes into Argentina.
It was while he was in hiding that he produced some of his greatest work — ‘trapped as I was in my corner, my curiosity knew no bounds’. In 1971 he was awarded the Nobel Prize.
The portrait emerging from this book is of a kind, often misguided, funny man. In 1957 he was arrested, while bed-bound, in Buenos Aires:
The stretcher on which the four policemen were carrying me became a knotty problem as we descended stairways, entered elevators, crossed hallways. The four litter-bearers suffered and puffed. To make their distress even greater, Matilde told them that I weighed 110 kilos.
Neruda is surely to thank (or to blame?) for the flocks of young poets to be encountered in Santiago these days. Last time I was there one of them offered to write a poem about my eyes — for five dollars. It’s a moot point whether Neruda would have approved of this petty capitalism.
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