Redeemers (22 page)

In his published writings of the period, no trace appears of this growing separation from his earlier enthusiasm but in the middle of March, according to Elena Garro, Paz received unexpected news, like a sudden blow: “I saw that Octavio Paz, at breakfast time, cried out with tears, ‘Bukharin . . . ! No! Bukharin, no!' Then I read in the newspaper that they had put a bullet in his neck.” It was Stalin's third major purge of old communists. The Sunday edition of
El Nacional
(on March 13, 1938) had included Bukharin's “confession” and described the sentence of death. Before these facts, Paz began to shelter and nurture a dissident view of politics, but as yet it still remained unexpressed. And though, years later, he would confess that he had felt admiration for Trotsky, he left no public record of such feelings. Despite his being a voracious reader of texts on the Russian Revolution and authors who, like Bukharin, had been comrades of Trotsky, he never tried to meet that major protagonist of Bolshevism who lived for more than three years in Paz's own city.

When André Breton, the father of literary surrealism (and an out-spoken critic of Stalin), arrived in Mexico to visit Trotsky, the young Paz only was present anonymously in the audience at some of his lectures. Escorted by Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo and a handful of Trotskyist sympathizers, Breton remained in Mexico from April to August 1938. He traveled through the country and signed, together with Trotsky, the “Manifesto in Favor of Independent Art,” which was published in
Partisan Review
, but his activities were subjected to harsh criticism not only by hard-line communists but also by some of Octavio Paz's friends. One of them, Alberto Quintero Álvarez, who had been co-editor of
Barandal
, attacked Breton's aesthetics, condemning “the indecipherable obscurity” of the “automatic procedure” of surrealism, whose “experiments” seemed to him “empty of tenderness, heart beat, of all that we wish to bring back to our magic, inexplicable act: our creative act, engaged and secret.”

Quintero Álvarez's article appeared in
El Popular
, the newspaper that had just been founded by the foremost leader of the workers of Mexico, Vicente Lombardo Toledano. A Catholic in the 1920s, a convert to Marxism in the 1930s, Lombardo had traveled to the Soviet Union in 1936, published a book called Voyage to the World of the Future (
Viaje al mundo del porvenir
), and founded his newspaper with a group of young disciples. Though Paz was not a member of Lombardo's inner circle, he began to work on the paper as a member of the editorial page staff. He would receive submissions and write editorials, putting his name to some of them and leaving others unsigned. For a writer in that position, it was impossible and unthinkable to seek out Breton, much less Trotsky, because for
El Popular,
which was aligned with the viewpoints of Moscow, Trotsky was an obvious ally of Hitler. The newspaper steadily attacked Trotsky and gave no coverage to the Dewey Commission, formed by American leftist intellectuals, which conducted a thorough investigation of Stalinist charges against Trotsky, including thirteen interviews with Trotsky himself in Mexico, and firmly refuted the collaborationist accusations. Trotsky, for his part, called Lombardo a Stalinist agent. But most of Paz's generation followed Moscow's line on Stalin's great rival.

It was perhaps understandable. The enemy was Adolf Hitler, who day by day was moving toward a confrontation with the world and had no lack of sympathizers in Mexico. The natural battle was with Nazism. And Mexico itself was passing through a period of profound nationalist exaltation. On March 18, 1938, President Lázaro Cárdenas had nationalized the oil fields, expropriating English, Dutch, and American companies. During that same period, the first writers in exile began to arrive from Spain. Paz approved of the nationalization but concentrated his personal and literary energies on welcoming the Spanish exiles. In
El Popular
, he saluted the poet León Felipe as a “great poetic spirit” and continued:

 

And we wish to draw the true and deep meaning of the revolutionary movement throughout the world from these words of the poet: “Then our tears will have a more illustrious origin.” Then, when the human revolution will have eliminated the last villain, the last bourgeois: “our joys, our sorrows will be purer.” Through the mouth of the poet we wish to say that we do not renounce our humanity, our sorrow and joy, but we struggle to secure this humanity, completely.

 

Paz himself was far from living a life of bourgeois comfort. Economically, the Paz family had fallen from its previous status. Octavio supported himself through his newspaper work and continued to receive a small salary from the Ministry of Public Education. To supplement his income, he took a job as an inspector of currency for the National Banking Commission. (His daughter, Laura Elena, “Chatita,” would be born in December 1938, and in February 1940, Elena would begin work as a reporter for the magazine
Así
.)

Paz remained a central animator of the Mexican literary scene, especially influential as a bridge between generations and between Mexican writers and the Spanish exiles. His emphasis on Spain continued. (In 1937 he had published Under Your Clear Shadow and Other Poems on Spain (
Bajo tu clara sombra y otros poemas sobre España
) and in 1938 his first Brief Anthology of Contemporary Spanish Poets (
Voces de España
). At the end of 1938, he took an initial solid step toward economic self-sufficiency, founding the magazine
Taller
(Workshop), which issued a thousand copies every two months until February 1941. It was financed primarily by Eduardo Villaseñor, a generous Maecenas, lover of literature and sometime poet, who was undersecretary of the treasury at the time and would later (1940–46) become director of the Bank of Mexico. Yet the finances of the magazine continued to be precarious and, toward the end of 1939, Paz secured a loan of 150 pesos from Alfonso Reyes (one of Mexico's two most important writers in the early twentieth century, along with José Vasconcelos). Paz promised to “repay it at the earliest opportunity.”

March 31, 1939, coincidentally Octavio's twenty-fifth birthday, marked the final fall of the Spanish Republic. Paz would continue to defend it and, at least once, not only with words. On April 10, while dining with Elena at a restaurant in the city's center, Paz got into a fistfight with some patrons who shouted “Viva Franco!” According to the newspaper account, “Police took some women from the restaurant who were bleeding and others with their clothes torn.” Octavio, his wife, his brother-in-law, and the husband of Elena's sister were taken to the police station. The story is illustrated with a photo that includes a defiant-looking Elena. The caption reads: “two tough women arrested for the same brawl.”

In the second issue of
Taller
(April 1938), Paz had published a polite but firm disavowal of the literary stance taken by the generation of the Contemporáneos as well as a program for his own generation. He titled the article “Reason for Being” (
Razón de ser
). Of his masters, the Contemporáneos, he wrote, “their intelligence was their best instrument but they never used it to penetrate the real and construct the ideal, but rather, gently, to escape from everyday living . . . They created beautiful poems, rarely inhabited by poetry.” The young generation was in debt to them for creating a formal “instrument,” but the young had to apply that tool to nothing less than the salvation of humanity:

 

to carry the revolution to its ultimate consequences, giving it . . . lyrical, human and metaphysical coherence . . . to gain, with our anguish, a land that is alive, and a man that is alive . . . to construct a human order, just and our own . . . a space in which we can construct the quality of being Mexican and rescue it from injustice, cultural ignorance, frivolity and death.

 

But despite this desire to be “revolutionary,”
Taller
was no less avantgarde than the magazine
Contemporáneos
, publishing—along with many young Mexican and Spanish writers—translations of T. S. Eliot and of earlier poets central to modernist concerns: Rimbaud, Hölderlin, Baudelaire. And external events also attenuated
Taller
's revolutionary spirit. For its authors, both Mexican and Spanish, the outbreak of World War II was much less surprising than the signing (on August 23, 1939) of the Hitler-Stalin nonaggression pact, which preceded by seven days the war that began on September 1 with the German invasion of Poland. The treaty would hold till Hitler's blitzkrieg attack on the Soviet Union in June 1941, and the shock of its signing on the worldwide left was deadly. Few Marxists could persuasively defend it. But Lombardo's
El Popular
did, with determination: “A people that does not desire territory, a nation that does not attack weak peoples, the USSR is showing the world that only a socialist, proletarian regime can reject war as a means of life, as a recourse for expansion . . .” But in response, Paz resigned from
El Popular
, perhaps thinking that the warnings of Trotsky may have been partially correct. And then in 1940, there was the armed attack on Trotsky's Mexican home led by the painter Siqueiros and, in August of the same year, Trotsky's assassination. Widely condemned abroad, the killing was not even mentioned in the leading Mexican literary and intellectual magazine
Taller
. Nor did Paz write about it elsewhere.

His silence before the behavior of the Soviet Union (and the Stalinist execution carried out in the heart of his own country) may have been a faithful reflection of his personal dilemma. During the Spanish Civil War, his faith in Russian policies had weakened but not his hopes for the revolution. In what direction should he turn? The route of conventional religion (followed by Eliot and later by W. H. Auden) was impossible for him. Paz had always inclined toward the anticlerical Jacobinism of his father and grandfather, not the pious Catholicism of his mother. The fascist option—chosen by Ezra Pound and José Vasconcelos—would have been equally impossible. Paz detested the fascism that had destroyed the Spanish Republic and he rejected Nazism for its treatment of the Jews and because he considered the movement (seen through his Marxist lens) as the child of capitalism and imperialism: “you can count the various reasons that have made Hitler possible, but they are all included in two words: capitalism and imperialism. Hitler is their final fruit.”

And seen from the same viewpoint, neither England nor the other liberal democracies were an option he could support. They were nations that had let Spain die and were marked by “the hypocritical rhetoric of the bourgeois pseudo-democracies.” With all these doors closed to him, Paz's feeling of solitude deepened. He did not glimpse the possibility of a democratic anti-Stalinist socialism like that favored by George Orwell or the young American writers associated with
Partisan Review
(a journal that Paz, with his concentration on Spanish and French culture, was not even aware of). In Mexico, almost no one represented that current.

In 1954, Paz would write a defense of
Taller
, which he would come to consider the matrix for the major journals he later directed. The journal had not merely “embraced social causes” but, for most of its writers, “love, poetry and revolution were three ardent synonyms.” It can be said that love and poetry, as in Paz's own work, were sumptuously present in the magazine, but the theme of revolution gradually diminished, perhaps lingering only in certain blasphemous pages by León Felipe, whose poems would later inspire Che Guevara.

In 1981, he would carry his retrospective analysis further (or he would encounter it on his personal path, as often happened with Paz). His generation had lived with the hope of a future “revolutionary fraternity.” They had believed in the imminence of the “Great Change”; they had wanted to return to the “Great Whole,” to “recreate the unity of the beginning from the beginning” and reestablish—like the nineteenth-century Romantics—a fusion of the words “poetry” and “history.” And in fact Paz felt that “our defense of the freedom of art and poetry would have been flawless if not for one great moral and political failure that now makes me blush. In
Taller
, one could profess and express any idea except that, due to a prohibition no less rigorous for being unspoken, one could not criticize the Soviet Union.”

 

VII

The beginning of 1941 saw the last issue of
Taller.
Paz was then earning his living at a boring, thankless job. For five years he would spend six full workdays a week with his hands buried in currency, counting money to be taken out of circulation and then burned. The ironic paradox was startling. In
Taller
, he had once written that “money has no end or object. It is simply an infinite mechanism that knows no law but that of the circle . . . It has no earthly flavor. It serves for nothing, since it aims toward nothing.” And in Yucatán he had written his poem against the money that moved the strings of enslavement on the henequen plantations. Now the brute presence of money had turned against him and was moving the strings of his own subsistence.

Mexican culture at the beginning of the 1940s was undergoing a major change in its practical structure and its orientation. A small magazine like
Taller
had to compete for funding (now almost always governmental) with new institutions, with journals and cultural initiatives directly connected with academia. Culture was abandoning its revolutionary vocation and turning institutional, passing from the small independent publisher to the university and larger institutional publishers. Some of them, like the Casa de España or the Fondo de Cultura Económica, were of excellent quality.