Selected Writings (Dario, Ruben) (5 page)

It should be added that at this time Darío also started to serialize a novel called
El hombre de oro
(Man of Gold), which was influenced by Flaubert’s
Salambó
. As for Whitman, who also tried his luck at writing a novel, for Darío the excursion was not a high point in his career: the volume is more derivative than anything else he ever did, abstruse, distracted. He clearly did not have a talent for long fictional narratives. Nor would he stop traveling and getting himself romantically involved. Then there were the newspaper deadlines to meet, for journalistic squibs were, in the end, his only regular means of support. Actually, these two elements, women and journalism, played a crucial role as Darío’s career entered its last creative stage. Women sometimes seemed almost the entire focus of his attention. He was known as a regular visitor of prostitutes. He also wrote profusely on women. In the short story “The Ruby,” one of the characters says: “. . . I have been but a slave to one, an almost mystical adorer of the other.” Sometimes Darío discussed their role as labor at the dawn of the twentieth century in societies such as Germany, England, and the United States, in order to persuade people that in Latin America “the working mother will make hardworking children, and good citizens”; he also talks of the Nicaraguan woman as possessing “a kind of Arabian languor, a native-born insouciance, joined to a natural elegance and looseness in her movements and her walk.” But when Darío talks about Spanish women, his lyricism is unequaled. He chants:

 

As his first and second marriages attest, Darío also sought to commit himself to women, even though his itinerant life often unraveled those commitments. But the picture that emerges in short stories like “The Palace of the Sun” is never that simple. In it the Nicaraguan talks of anemic maidens overwhelmed by melancholy, a favorite
fin-de-siècle
malady. Darío talks of “something better than arsenic and iron for rekindling the crimson of lovely virginal cheeks.” What does he recommend? The message is allegorical. He tells the mothers of those maidens, “your enchanting little birds’ cages must be opened, especially when the spring-time comes and there is ardor in the veins and sap, and a thousand atoms of sunlight are buzzing in the garden like a swarm of gold among the half-open roses.” When describing the female body, the Nicaraguan’s language is invariably lush. He talks of the “pink flesh” of precious princesses, describing them as “gay, delicious songbird[s] of black eyes and red mouth.” They are voluptuous in their innocence, nymphs that become not only love objects but idols to be adored. In “The Ruby,” Darío states: “My human woman loved a man, and from her prison she was sending him her sighs. The sighs passed through the pores of the earth’s skin and found him, and he, still loving her, would kiss the roses in a certain garden, and she, his beloved, would have sudden convulsions . . . in which she would pucker her pink, cool lips like the petals of a damask rose.” In the spirit of the Romantics, Darío seems infatuated by a woman’s nakedness, which he describes by invoking flowers—roses, lilies, ivory hillocks crowned with cherries. His infatuation reaches such a degree that it often makes him lose all inhibitions. Voyeurism leads to lust, and lust might result in violent possession. This approach might appear scandalous to our eyes, but think of popular examples in Darío’s age, like Bram Stoker’s
Dracula,
first published in 1897, as well as Alexandre Dumas’s play
La dame aux camélias,
on which Giuseppe Verdi’s
La Traviata
is based. Women in them are discontented beings or sheer objects of uncontrollable male desire, or both. Surely Darío was not unique in his fixations.

In 1899, Darío, again traveling to Spain—first to Barcelona, then to Madrid—met Francisca Sánchez, an illiterate peasant from Navalsáuz, whom Darío taught to read. The couple relocated in Paris, where he worked as a correspondent for
La
Nación,
focusing on the
Exposition Universelle de Paris
. His pieces for
La Nación
were at times reportage and others columns and op-eds. And this was only the principal newspaper he worked for. His articles were reprinted in others elsewhere in the Spanish-speaking world, as well as in weekly and monthly magazines. Plus, on occasion Darío worked as an editor himself for a periodical. This effort needs to be seen in context. Latin America was swept by a spirit of independence that had begun in 1810. Throughout the century, the nations of the continent strove to break away from Spain as an imperial power and to establish autonomous, self-sufficient nation-states all across the hemisphere. By the conclusion of the nineteenth century, a new bourgeoisie was on the rise in major urban centers on this side of the Atlantic, from Mexico to Peru to Argentina. This was also the period in which positivistic thinking penetrated the region, encouraging the educated classes to endorse science and technology as approaches that needed to replace the awkwardness of religion, which had prevailed as a system of thought throughout the colonial age. Modernity, then, arrived just as open markets and free thinking made inroads among the educated.

In substantial ways, the
Modernista
revolution was an intellectual modality that needs to be seen as intimately related to the consolidation of capitalism in Latin America. I hinted at this in the brief discussion of Darío’s short story “The Bourgeois King,” but in fact this socioeconomic aspect might be found in numerous places in his work, from
Azul
. . . through
Los raros
to
El canto errante
(The Wandering Song). Angel Rama, in his book
Rubén Darío y el modernismo,
disagrees with scholars who suggest that
Modernismo
was a reaction to capitalism. Instead, he suggests that it is a by-product of it. Rama analyzes Darío’s self-awareness as a dilettante, his view of the poet as a conduit expressing dissatisfaction with contemporary life, his faith in Catholicism as a way to satisfy humans’ ancient desire to communicate with the supernatural, and so on. One should also add to this Darío’s role as a journalist, the only way a Nicaraguan of humble means or background could support both his career as a poet and also his role as a diplomat, which enabled him to travel far and wide and gain exposure to aspects of Western civilization he would otherwise not have had access to. Indeed, at the time the average middle-class citizen of a Central American country never even dreamed of traveling within the region, let alone abroad. In that sense, Darío, thus, is a
rara avis
: year by year, most of his life was spent overseas. Guatemala, Chile, Spain, and France were important destinations, and for a while became homes, too; and Darío also traveled to Gibraltar and Morocco, Italy, Cuba, and Mexico, where, by the way, he participated, in 1910, in the hundredth anniversary commemoration of
El Grito de Dolores,
the battle-cry for independence.

Did Darío ever consider his roles as journalist and diplomat as important as that of poet? No, he never did. He was a poet first and foremost. None of his diplomatic work left any imprint. Actually, he often convinced friends and acquaintances to name him to a post for no other reason than to be far away from Nicaragua. As a journalist, on the other hand, he was unquestionably prolific as well as influential. Darío was active at a time when the perceptions of journalism were already being differentiated between the European model and its counterpart in the United States. In the Old Continent the view was that newspapers offered the facts with little embellishment: the duty of reporters was to be succinct in conveying the news. But on this side of the Atlantic, and especially in Latin America, the approach was to mix journalism and literature, to entertain as well as to inform. It is easy to see where Darío’s sympathies fell. He wrote: “Today, and always, ‘journalists’ and ‘writers’ must of necessity be confused with one another. Most essayists are journalists. Montaigne and de Maistre are journalists in the broad sense of the word. All observers of, and commentators on, life have been journalists. Now, if you are referring simply to the mechanical aspect of the modern profession, then we can agree that the only persons who merit the name
journalist
are commercial ‘reporters,’ those who report on daily events—and even these may be very good writers who with a grace of style and a pinch of philosophy are able to turn an arid affair into an interesting page. There are political editorials written by thoughtful, high-minded men that are true chapters of fundamental books. There are chronicles, descriptions of celebrations or ceremonies, written by reporters who are artists, and these chronicles might not be out of place in literary anthologies. The journalist who writes what he writes with love and care is as much a ‘writer,’ an ‘author’ as any other. . . . The only person who merits our indifference and time’s oblivion is he who premeditatedly sits down to write, for the fleeting moment, words without the glow of burnishing, ideas without the salt taste and smell of blood. . . . Very beautiful, very useful, and very valuable volumes could be made up if one were to carefully pick through newspapers’ collections of ‘reports’ written by many persons considered to be simple ‘journalists.’ ”

 

In 1905, just as the expectations for the century were settling in, Darío offered his greetings to
“la nueva era”
by publishing his book
Cantos de vida y esperanza: Los cisnes y otros poemas
(Songs of Life and Hope: Swans and Other Poems). The volume appeared under the aegis of the Taller de la Revista de Archivos. It might be significant to remember that much like the rest of Dario’s books, this perennial classic had a first printing of only five hundred copies, which took a while to be sold. Then as now, poetry, needless to say, was not an item destined for mass consumption. Of Whitman, too, it is known that several decades after publishing
Leaves of Grass,
only three hundred had been sold. In spite of this “eternal truth,” Darío was dismayed. Not that he was a popularist, but he surely disliked one aspect of the elitism of poetry: “Ask booksellers how many editions they have published and how many copies they have sold of great poetry, of books of travel, of novels—ask them, and the reply will be terribly mortifying to your spirit! . . .”

Azul
. . . ,
Prosas profanas,
and
Cantos de vida y esperanza
form a triptych wherein Darío’s stylistic mission is best understood. However, compared with the other two, in
Cantos
Darío strikes a decidedly amending tone, reformulating his own aesthetics, arguing with his antagonists, and generally looking at his own place as a poet not only at the past and present time but also into posterity. I for one see this volume as Darío’s most compact and complete single volume, but one dealing less with innovation than with recapitulation. At a time when poets died young—among the
Modernistas
Martí died at the age of 42, Rodó at 46, José Asunción Silva at 31, and Gutiérrez Nájera at 36, only Lugones lived to the “advanced” age of 64—Dario was almost 40 years old, a mature man by the standards of his period. His mood makes him look back and reconsider his previous work. He also feels the need to expand, to look beyond his horizon. Octavio Paz wrote that Darío “expresses himself [here] more soberly, more profoundly, but his love for the brilliant word does not diminish. Nor does his taste for rhythmic innovation disappear; on the contrary, these innovations are surer and more daring.”
Cantos de vida y esperanza
includes poems to Cervantes and Goya, songs to melancholy, and more than sixty other poems, his most prolific production ever. The book also reflects Darío’s political transformation at the time of the Spanish-American War in 1898. The struggle shook him to the core. He denounced the United States in a series of poems and articles written for various periodicals. Still, he perceived the United States—or better, he misunderstood it—as a godless empire whose hemispheric fortune was on the rise. He simultaneously admired and detested it, thinking that the best solution for a hemispheric harmony was a neighborly pact between north and south. His poem to Theodore Roosevelt includes one of the most famous words Darío ever wrote: the monosyllabic
no
. This might sound preposterous; after all, how often does the word appear in his oeuvre? Thousands of times, no doubt. But its position in the poem “To Roosevelt” is exemplary and has been read as a political statement. Herein a fragment: