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LETTER from LONDON |
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PABLO NERUDA
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Sometimes a great notion
involves unlikely people
By MICHAEL JOHNSON
of TheColumnists.com
A few weeks ago, Chileans celebrated the 100th birth anniversary of their greatest poet, the late Nobel Prizewinner Pablo Neruda. This champion of the little guy, this “people’s poet” who also served as Salvador Allende’s ambassador to Paris, was much revered for his imagery and he remains one of the most recognizable names of the Latino literati. From Santiago to San Francisco there were readings and moments of silence.
Few realized, however, that Neruda is better remembered by some for a Harper’s magazine article 20 years ago that told the story of his coming up from Santiago for four weeks during a losing season and playing third base for the New York Mets. He was 61.
“It could not have been a better experience for me,” the paunchy poet was quoted as saying.
The article went on: “Unfortunately, the same cannot be said for the Mets. Among the terrible third basemen the team has had, none had been worse than Neruda. Over 28 ballgames in a four-week period, Neruda saw 70 chances at the hot corner and muffed 45 of them. In 87 appearances at the plate he was struck by pitches no fewer than 17 times.” Neruda was quoted as explaining: “In the north, the ball is thrown very fast. Sometimes I had trouble escaping its path.”
The article, by novelist Vincent Passaro, then chronicled Neruda’s demotion to the Mets’ Tidewater farm team, a humiliation the aging poet disliked intensely. “There is little meal money and the bus rides are very, very long. Some of los lavados (older players) are mean, bitter, drunken men whose mothers should never have given birth to them,” he said.
Neruda’s real talents aside, author Passaro had produced one of the finest examples of a neglected genre--the comic spin on the great and the good. Pablo Neruda, of course, could not have snagged a line drive if his life depended upon it.
This is more than mere fiction. It is a delightful marriage of real people cast against type, a few semi-factual situations, some twisted humor and an overlay of sheer lunacy. E.L. Doctorow started the modern version with his novel “Ragtime” 30 years ago, a pastiche involving Houdini, J. Pierpont Morgan, Henry Ford and Sigmund Freud.
S.J. Perleman knew how to do it, and Woody Allen produced a classic variation with his “The Kugelmass Affair” in which his lead character enters the pages of “Madame Bovary”.
But the Harper’s article has remained in my “Funny” file for several years and I have shown it around to wacky friends on five continents. Serious people simply don’t get it. One man, a perfect 800 on his math SAT, read it, looked up at me and asked, “Is this true?”
I have made it a point to collect examples of the genre ever since and recently came across another one in that same file--“Stalin in the Bronx.” This is a tale of the notorious dictator’s clandestine visit to the Bronx in 1936, at the time of the Popular Front and a furious public debate over his shortcomings, to raise money for the cause. He had shaved off his mustache to confuse the FBI and other Stalin-haters.
The author, Suzanne Ruta, wrote that Stalin loved her mother’s lemon meringue pie so much he had second helpings. She eventually produces a menu from a local restaurant with the autograph “Djugashvili” inscribed. Although she had trouble learning details of the visit, she muses, “Who knows, perhaps it would turn out that like an evil Johnny Appleseed, Stalin had come to our shores only to sow the seeds that blossomed, long after his death, into what we call the neoconservative movement.”
More recently, Garrison Keillor took similar liberties with facts in his novel “Love Me,” which describes J.D. Salinger trying to get someone to read several cartons of his unpublished childhood memoirs. Salinger also makes a detour from literature to appear on the television game show Hollywood Squares. John Updike, Brendan Gill and William Shawn also play madcap roles in the story. In the hands of Keillor, facts are greatly overrated.
For me, though, the master of the genre is T. Coraghessen Boyle, who has written almost believably of his date with Jane Austen (she had cold hands). He took her to a steamy Italian film but she asked to leave in the middle as “great nude thighs slashed across the screen.” He proposed a nightclub next but Jane says, “Oh, do let’s walk. The air is so frightfully delicious.”
A later short story collected in “T.C. Boyle Stories” along with the Jane Austen piece beats that one. It imagined a torrid love affair between President Dwight Eisenhower and Nina Khrushcheva, protected by the narrator bodyguard, Paderewski, pronounced by Ike as “Paderooski.”
As Paderewski notes in “Ike and Nina”: “I feel privileged to have witnessed one of the great passions of our time, a love both tender and profane, a love that smouldered beneath the watchful eyes of two embattled nations and erupted in an explosion of passionate embraces and hungry kisses.”
The story peaks when Khrushchev stages his famous U.N. tantrum and lectures the United States on points of etiquette, “jowls atremble, fists beating the air, while Nina, her head bowed, stood meekly at his side.” Ike observes the outburst and whispers to Paderewski in a pinched voice, “My God, he knows.”
©2004 by Michael Johnson. The photo is courtesy of the www.nobel.se website.
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