“The Last Giant” silently boomed the huge black headline of Newsweek International’s cover story on the death, April 4, 1998, of a man who could have won the Nobel Prize for either poetry or prose. He won it mostly for his poetry, though at home and beyond he was best known for his prose, which was uniquely culturally probing, challenging and eloquent.
In many ways that is unfortunate. For his poetry is dizzying in its reach, its versatility, and its lyrical boldness and soaring excellence.
We are of course speaking of historian, poet and political, aesthetic and cultural analyst Octavio Paz, born 100 years ago March 31, 1914. His death in 1998 left an echoing space on the international literary scene that no one seems to have even tried to fill. That is not to say there are not scores of admirable Mexican writers. Certainly there are. But Paz, despite controversies some of his work stirred, bestrode the Mexican – and Latin American – intellectual and aesthetic world like a philosopher king.
And even those who sharply differed with him praised him as his death – by cancer at the age of 84 – was observed in a manner reserved for a head of state. His coffin, draped with a huge Mexican flag stood in the Palace of Fine Arts as Mexico’s elite paid homage. Thousands of Mexican citizens, some carrying copies of his books, in long lines patiently waited for hours to silently do the same. The president spoke, also other national luminaries. Not a few of these had ideological and philosophical differences with Paz. One of those was Colombian novelist Gabriel Garcia Marquez, who said, “(So ended) a torrent of beauty that has saturated the 20th century.”
Paz and Garcia Marquez clashed over Marquez’s fidelity to Fidel Castro. Thus, the many who had burned Paz in effigy in the streets of Mexico City early on for having the temerity to probe into the Spanish and indigenous roots of the Mexican character and culture, mixed with others who put aside their outrage at having their rabid political stances dissected by one of their own. Paz defined Marxism as “an intellectual vice … if there is a reactionary sector in Latin America, it is the leftist intellectual. They are people who have no memory. They never admit to ever making a mistake. (Marxism) is the superstition of the 20th century.”
Paz wrote nearly 60 volumes of poetry and prose (counting both revised material and collections bound in a single volume and reissued). That number does not include the stack of regular articles and essays he turned out for the most influential magazines he founded and edited: Plural and Vuelta.This lavish high-standard output began in his teens. Born in Mexico City, he was reared in his paternal grandfather’s large, ancient house in the Pre-Columbian village of Mixcoac (now part of Mexico City). From Jalisco, Ireneo Paz, a former soldier who fought with Benito Juarez against the invading French, was a liberal intellectual, novelist and publisher who filled his house with a library of 6,000 to 7,000 books. In that “enchanted cave,” Octavio roamed from room to room absorbing a bountiful treasure of Mexican and European history, poetry and fiction. The old man argued with Paz’s impulsive, alcoholic father, Octavio Paz Solorzano, over Mexico’s future. But soon the father was gone to join the peasant army of Emiliano Zapata. He rose in rank quickly and soon became Zapata’s representative to the United States.
Paz was 17 when his first poetry was published. At 19 he published “Luna Silvestre” (“Wild Moon”), his first collection of poetry. Like his grandfather, he soon founded, with friends, his first literary review, “Barandal.” In 1937, he quit law studies to go to the Yucatan, work in a Merida school for sons of peasants and workers. Influenced by T.S. Eliot, he began working on the first of his ambitious, long poems, “Entre la piedra y la flor” (“Between the Stone and the Flower”), published in 1941. Also in 1937, Paz was invited to the Second International Writers Congress in Defense of Culture in Spain during that nation’s civil war. His participation was prompted by his backing of the Republican opposition against the fascist Francisco Franco. There he worked as a propagandist, but one gets the feeling that perhaps he asked too many questions to become a member of the Communist army in Spain. Among others, Pablo Neruda, the famed Chilean poet and Communist enthusiast, who became, more or less, Paz’s sponsor in Spain, told him to return to Mexico and organize for the Republican cause. Unfortunately, that cause was crumbling before the better armed forces of Franco, financed and supplied by Mussolini and Hitler. Twenty-three-year-old Paz went to Paris, which was an eye-opener, especially for its visual and philosophical history. Most eye-opening was the latest art, a subject about which Paz has written a good deal. Picasso had just painted Guernica, which was freshly being exhibited. Also the paintings of Joan Miro, the Spanish surrealist that Paz would later come to know well. In Mexico before the 1930s ended, Paz edited two literary magazines while busily continuing to write poetry.
He (barely) supported himself with a minor job in the National Archives, and then as a bank clerk. In 1944 he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship. He went to Los Angeles and then the University of California at Berkley, before heading for New York where he studied such poets as T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, William Stevens and William Carlos Williams. Eventually his stay outran his money. In dire circumstances, he later recalled, ”I even thought of joining the U.S. Merchant Marines. Then the same day Hiroshima occurred, Federico de Onis called me. The Mexican poet Juan Jose Taboada had just died, and Columbia University wanted to pay homage to him. It offered 50 dollars for critical appraisal of Taboada’s work. I accepted in a hurry – for the 50 dollars, not because of the poetry.”
In 1945 Paz luckily snagged a position with Mexico’s diplomatic service which sent him to New York and then to Paris. Thus began a fortuitous 23-year career as diplomat, a road many Latin American intellectuals took. It afforded them a living while sending them abroad where their work immediately or later would thrive.
Paz had instructively experienced the United States in 1944, and was impressed. And he had already closely examined surrealism. While fulfilling his diplomatic duties in New York, he began working on a manuscript that would become his most well-known and widely praised work, “The Labyrinth of Solitude.” Once in Paris, because, he has said, “My ambassadorial work was not arduous,” Paz was able to finish “Labyrinth.” It was originally published in Mexico City on February 15, 1950 by Cuadernos Americanos. Paz then revised and expanded it for a second edition published by Fondo de Cultura Economica in 1959. A resident of Jocotepec, Lysender Kemp, gave the English-speaking world a great gift with a brilliant feel for Paz’s way with the Spanish language by translating the book for the Grove Press, whose first printing came out in 1961. However, once the manuscript was in Mexico and “available,” portions of it were reproduced by aficionados of Mexican literature by “ditto” and bootlegged widely. That meant bilingual fans would translate whatever portions were available, creating amateurish products. The widening popularity of such work as Paz’s and others encouraged Grove Press to put together an issue of its “Evergreen Review” literary quarterly, devoted to Mexican writers, poets and artists. The issue was called “The Eye of Mexico” and lead with “Todo los Santos, Dia de los Muertos,” excerpted from Kemp’s translation of “Labyrinth.”
His consular and then ambassadorial responsibilities also allowed for visits home, as he was assigned to posts, including Tokyo and New Delhi. Each new culture provided him with reams of insights into cultures he would have never have experienced if he had remained in a writer exclusively headquartered in Mexico.
But as savvy biographers have noted, he never turned his back on Mexico. His two great creations from his bifurcated intellect turned out the prose masterpieces “Labyrinth” and the epic poem “Sunstone.” Both reflect his “fierce passion for his homeland,” as one critic said. Esteemed poetry and literary critic, Helen Vendler of The New Yorker, noted, “Nothing in the visible estrangement of poetry from prose is more astonishing that their estrangement in one person. Octavio Paz … is a torrential writer, whose successive books of prose and verse have enriched our (20th) century.”
Paz’s rich, often dizzyingly transporting poetry does not prepare readers for cultural excavations of hidden prose – and the sly implications alongside bold, often outright misplaced hope – regarding Mexico’s political extravaganzas of often undisguised thievery and brutality. Yet Paz, like all Mexican writers before Carlos Salinas de Gortari’s presidency (1988-1994), was hobbled by the autocratic censorship of the long ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI). His principal journalistic publication, Plural, was shut down by President Luis Echeverria in July 1976 for its criticism of the president’s monomaniacal “governance” of the state. Paz swiftly founded “Vuelta,” a freshly inspired (by Echeverria’s crazed fascism), independent, literary and critical journal, soon to be lauded throughout the Spanish-speaking world.
Still, a new generation of leftist and sadly Castro-loving journalists didn’t think Paz was a true leftist. Yet Paz was never just a leftist – he saw farther down the line that leftists wished to follow. Such critics forgot he had watched the Communists operate in Spain. And there were his first-hand experiences elsewhere in the world. He thought the right blind and deaf, the left too ready to embrace totalitarianism. “He loved to quarrel about politics,” said an acquaintance. “It was hard to speak to him on the telephone. There was always an argument,” said another. Paz himself was disturbed. He had misjudged Salinas de Gortari, and disliked the collateral damage of the North American Free Trade Agreement, which he had supported. Yet he “converted Mexico into a sacred text that cried out to be deciphered,” wrote his friend Enrique Krauze. “He was a miner and an alchemist of Mexican identity (“Labyrinth” and his brilliant meditation on Sor Juana de la Cruz), his essays inducing readers to think probingly about a deeply flawed political system, Paz sought to “to tear the veil and see.”