Remembering Octavio Paz.

DURAN, MANUEL

I first met Octavio Paz in Paris, in 1951. I was studying Spanish and comparative literature at the Sorbonne. Paz was the Cultural Attache of Mexico. Born in 1914, he had started to write poetry while still very young, around 1931, and was already famous in Mexico and well known in France and elsewhere.

What struck me from the start was that he was a great conversationalist, brimming with ideas and original remarks, yet he also knew how to listen. Early success had not spoiled him. An individualist and a rebel in the Romantic tradition, he had an affinity for lost causes. He had been in Spain during the civil war, taken part in antifascist meetings, spoken in favor of the Spanish Loyalists. Now, in France, he sided with the surrealists of Andre Breton just as the French public, always fickle, was about to consign them to oblivion and favored only writers associated with the Resistance, such as Vercors, Camus, Sartre. (The surrealists had fled France at the beginning of the German occupation, spending the war most of them in the United States: they had always been against armies, war, flag-waving, and the state in general.) I confess my admiration for Paz was tinged with envy. He seemed to be the happiest man in the world. Physically handsome, with beautiful wavy brown hair (I was beginning to lose mine), happily married (or so it seemed at that time) to a young and brilliant Mexican woman, Elena Garro, herself a gifted playwright and novelist with a secure place in modern Mexican letters, Paz was by then both rich and famous. (There was no doubt about his fame, and he was living in a luxurious apartment lavishly furnished with antiques, no doubt the property of the Mexican Embassy in Paris.)

Paz has occasionally reminisced about his Mexican childhood. He once gave a picturesque description of his early years:

As a boy I lived in a place called Mixcoac, near the capital. We lived in a large house with a garden. Our family had been impoverished by the revolution and the civil war. Our house, full of antique furniture, books, and other objects, was gradually crumbling to bits. As rooms collapsed we moved the furniture into another. I remember that for a long time I lived in a spacious room with part of one of the walls missing. Some magnificent screens protected me inadequately from wind and rain. A creeper invaded my room. . . . A premonition of that surrealist exhibition where there was a bed lying in a swamp. (Rita Guibert, Seven Voices, Knopf, 1973)

Only the year before I met him, in 1950, Paz had published El laberinto de la soledad (Eng. The Labyrinth of Solitude). An instant success, this book of essays went through many editions in a short time and was translated into several languages. It was to establish Paz's international reputation and is still required reading in many college courses about Latin America. Yet the book is hard to describe, harder yet to classify. Is it sociology? History? A personal approach, full of brilliant intuitions, it was the antithesis of an academic monograph. No notes, no bibliography, no statistics. It was history, sociology, myths, habits, dreams, innumerable aspects of a rich, complex, contradictory culture as seen by the mind and the heart of a poet.

In my mind I liked to depict Paz as a modern young Goethe, albeit more to the left in politics than the German poet. Later on, toward the end of his life, he was still handsome and had changed very little physically, but had grown a beard and resembled vaguely the bust of Socrates I once saw in a museum: he told me his favorite subject was then love, physical and spiritual love as compared to, and contrasted with, lust, "the Double Flame," as in the title of one of his best books of essays; and since Socrates had declared that love was his favorite subject (who can forget the final pages of the Symposium?), I came to the conclusion that through the miracle of reincarnation a rebours, Goethe had simply gone back in time and had become Socrates.

I met Paz many more times, in Mexico City, in New Haven, in Norman, Oklahoma, where he came to accept the Neustadt Prize in 1982-and I am proud to point out that I championed his cause during the jury deliberations and was able to convince the other jurors: Paz received the award. I should add that his accomplishments made my task very easy. What I think is relevant now is that both in Paris and in Oklahoma, and later in Mexico City, Paz gave me the clear impression that he saw the role of the poet in the modern world as much more public and, as the French used to say, "engage," than in the past. Many great poets of the ancient world, such as Homer and Vergil, had been essentially public poets, not private poets. Neither Dante nor Shelley-and it would be hard to find two writers more dissimilar in personality and style-could be said to be "private": in both we sense the urge to inform and ultimately to change society. Even "private" poets such as Rimbaud and Mallarme turn out later on to help define a culture that belongs to the whole society, and therefore are, in a limited yet effective sense, public poets.

Paz was from the beginning a poet, a thinker, a man fully aware of the social dimensions of his work. He was, among so many other things, a builder of bridges between cultures-for instance, between Mexico and Spain. Mexican culture owes much to Spain: language, religion, a system of values. Yet most Mexicans are reluctant to acknowledge this debt. Not so Octavio Paz. Not only did he play a role in the Spanish Civil War; after the war he befriended many Spanish writers exiled in Mexico. One of the many literary magazines he helped to create opened its pages so wide to exiled Spanish writers that when the magazine folded, a wit explained that the publication had died a victim of "the Spanish influenza."

France is another country whose culture had penetrated deeply in Mexico during the nineteenth century. This influence reached its climax at the end of the century, during the Porfirio Diaz era. It had weakened since: Paz did much to reestablish the old links, writing extensively about Levi-Strauss, structuralism, and other important trends in contemporary French letters. He was always curious, always open-minded about other cultures, the very opposite of the narrow, parochial, obtusely nationalistic Mexican writers lampooned by Carlos Fuentes: "Do not read foreign authors . . . only Mexican writers . . . for whoever reads Proust . . . proustitutes himself!"

Paz did much to introduce Oriental cultures to a Hispanic audience. He translated into Spanish the great Japanese poet Matsui Bash[angle quotation mark, right], in collaboration with a Spanish-speaking Japanese author. He wrote poems and prose articles about Japan and especially India, where he was Mexico's ambassador for several years. (He resigned his position in 1968, after the Mexican government massacred hundreds of protesting students intent on achieving a more democratic political system.)

He was also a remarkable art critic-and I assume most readers of WLT are not aware of this fact. I remember reading several articles about art and artists, dealing with Mexican painters such as Coronel, and Indian painters, and especially his memorable introduction to the catalogue of an international exhibition of Mexican pre-Hispanic art, and I was always impressed by the clarity and sensitivity of his prose, exceptional in a field where many critics are vague, confusing, often misleading, or simply incapable of explaining to the average reader what to see and how to put it in perspective. There is no doubt in my mind that Paz is one of the best art critics of our century. I want to emphasize this aspect of his career because I am aware that it has been neglected or simply ignored by his international audience.

On the other hand, Paz's work as a literary critic has been celebrated both in the Hispanic world and in many countries of the Western hemisphere, especially in France, England, and the U.S., and, I should add, this aspect of his work deserves all the praise it has received. Paz is an outstanding and most original literary critic. Reading a few pages of The Bow and the Lyre or Children of the Mire will convince any student of literature that in Paz's critical prose sensitivity and a clear mind go hand in hand. His analysis of the poetic imagination, his interpretation of the Romantic and post-Romantic literary scene, are probably without parallel among today's great works of literary criticism. The works just mentioned are only two among a vast production of books and articles, most not yet translated into English. When all of Paz's critical works are finally available in English, as they should be, our readers will be able to appreciate fully the extent of Paz's originality and the brilliance of his critical mind.

There is still another facet to Paz's personality: Paz as a public figure. His impact upon public opinion in Mexico had always been considerable: his resignation as Mexico's ambassador to India when the Mexican government ordered the massacre of students in 1968 endeared him to a whole sector of the Mexican middle and upper classes, utterly tired of the establishment's corruption and cruelty. Paz thus became the idol of Mexican students. He had come back to his native country fully empowered, mature, famous, able to give his readers a key to the development of contemporary cultures. The years Paz spent in New Delhi were especially important in his personal life: in New Delhi he met Marie-Jose, a gifted, beautiful, intelligent, vivacious French woman who became his second wife, his constant companion, his femme inspiratrice.

Obviously one of the highlights of Paz's life was his being awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1990. This came as a complete surprise: Paz himself had no inkling that the prize would go to him until the very last minute. I remember clearly having dinner with him, together with a group of professors and graduate students, at Silliman College (one of the colleges that are part of Yale University), the night before the award was announced. Someone-tactlessly, I thought-mentioned the Nobel Prize and asked him what were his chances of getting it. He answered briefly that he did not think he would ever get it, adding that he never thought about the prize any more and changing the conversation to another subject. I have to conclude that either he was an excellent actor, which I doubt, or else he was as much in the dark about the impending award as was everybody else in the room.

During the years that preceded his death in 1998, Paz created new literary and cultural magazines, such as Plural and later Vuelta. He also appeared many times in televised roundtables. This aspect of Paz's personality is perhaps the one that has elicited more negative comments and fewer sympathetic reactions among his viewers. The main network of Mexican TV, Televisa, has always been favorable to the PRI and its successive presidents. Had Paz been co-opted by the administration? The reality is probably much more complex, yet still vaguely disturbing. Paz, in his later years, tended to sympathize with President Zedillo because he thought that Zedillo's main rival, Cuauhtemoc Cardenas, had never explained to his followers where he intended to take them and had not surrounded himself with a team capable of solving the many complex problems that bedevil contemporary Mexico. Another source of controversy was a disparaging article about Carlos Fuentes, the famous novelist, that appeared in Paz's magazine. Paz was not the author of the offending article. He assured me, moreover, that he was out of Mexico when the article appeared and that he did not see its text before it was published.

We should never forget that Paz was cast into a public role not out of vanity but because he believed from the very beginning of his career that poetry must play a more active role in today's societies. He believed poetry, or rather the act of creating poetry, need not be rooted in loneliness. It can also be a dialogue, a dialogue that implies, even demands, the existence of other beings. Paz knew by instinct and intuition what the German philosophers of the Romantic era-Fichte, Schelling, Hegel-found out through long years of reasoning, and what has been restated in our century by Martin Buber: there is no "I" without a "Thou," no individuality without an otherness; we are all part of a whole, part of a plurality, without giving up our individual selves. As he stated in his speech accepting the Neustadt Prize for 1982:

In esthetic terms, Plurality is a richness of voices, accents, manners, ideas and visions; in moral terms, Plurality signifies tolerance of diversity, renunciation of dogmatism and recognition of the unique and singular value of each work and every personality. Plurality is Universality, and Universality is the acknowledging of the admirable diversity of man and his works. . . . To acknowledge the variety of visions and sensibilities is to preserve the richness of life and thus to ensure its continuity. (WLT 56:4 [Autumn 1982], p. 596)

Plurality means tolerance, acceptance of other viewpoints, freedom to make statements that others may accept or reject. Only in a society committed to freedom and democracy can plurality flourish. Language is a tool that allows us to delve into ourselves and into the world around us; language is also a mirror that shows us our own face and a window through which we see clouds and stars. Language is also a shuttle that goes back and forth, weaving reality, weaving the whole world around us. The shuttle goes back and forth in one of Paz's most ambitious philosophical poems, Blanco:

The spirit

Is an invention of the body

The body

An invention of the world

The world

An invention of the spirit.

Six lines pregnant with meaning, part of a long philosophical poem that has few parallels in contemporary literature. For Paz, besides being a great lyrical poet, has time and again reached deep and sustained visions, such as only a metaphysical or philosophical poet can reach. How many philosophical poets can we find in the Western literary canon? Not many. Dante, certainly, and also Lucretius, Shakespeare, Quevedo, Calderon, Milton, Donne, Baudelaire, Mallarme, T. S. Eliot. Also Coleridge, Keats, Novalis. The hallmark of the philosophical poet is that he is not alone, even when he thinks he is. He is constantly urged by an inner demon to go forth and explore, to try to understand, as Baudelaire puts it, "le langage des fleurs et des choses muettes," and to find his role, his place in the cosmos. Not only for himself, for all of us. This, I think, is what Octavio Paz wanted to accomplish. Correction: this is what Octavio Paz has accomplished.

Yale University