The Three Houses of Pablo Neruda

I always enjoy museums and art galleries and rarely miss an opportunity to visit one, but I only go looking for writers’ houses (which can contain elements of both) if I feel a special liking for the work and its creator, or curiosity about the life. The little chateau at Muzot above Sierre where Rilke completed The Duino Elegies and wrote The Sonnets to Orpheus in one of the greatest transports of inspiration in the history of literature; Robert Louis Stevenson’s Vailima above the harbour at Apia in Samoa; Virginia Woolf’s modest Monk’s House, Rodmell; and Henry James’s more imposing but unostentatious Lamb House at Rye are among the most memorable I have seen. None of these has moved me quite as much as Barbara Hepworth’s beautiful studio and garden at St Ives in Cornwall, with its view across church tower and slate rooftops to fishing boat masts, harbour and bay. And no writer’s house has struck me quite as forcibly as those of Pablo Neruda, which have now become national monuments, preserved by an independent foundation which protects them from the vagaries of changes of government and fashion as part of the National Heritage of Chile. When I saw them last year I had the impression that they had been carefully lifted out of the political into the world of the musée imaginaire.

The Latin American republics have an unusual record in relation to their most famous writers. A number of French authors – Claudel, St John Perse, Giraudoux – were trained and experienced diplomats, but Ruben Dario, Gabriella Mistral, Alfonso Reyes, Pablo Neruda and Octavio Paz were appointed to diplomatic posts by their countries because they were poets and as a reward and incentive for being writers, which was presumably taken to indicate highly educated and adminstratively competent. Certainly the records seem to prove that they carried out their responsibilities with skill and flair even if a few of them had notable fallings out with their governments or changes of regime. Impossible to imagine an Australian government appointing Judith Wright or A.D. Hope to such positions, even if it is equally unlikely that either would have accepted such a post. The late Gardner Davies, the noted Mallarmé scholar, was given a sinecure as cultural attaché at the Australian Embassy in Paris for many years. The poet J.R. Rowland was a lifelong diplomat: there are now several poets who work in the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, but Australia has no record of recognition in this area.

Neruda had three houses built for him in the later years of his life from the money acquired from his published work and international prizes, to mark his profound attachment to the country of his birth after years of exile and life abroad. All were intended to be left to the people of Chile rather than as monuments to himself. All are highly individual and well worth visiting both for their own sake and for the glimpse they seem to give into some aspects of the poetry. All command superb views and outlooks. Each one makes an impression of robust vigour; rather plain looking, colorful on the outside but playful, self-indulgent and warmly welcoming inside, perhaps with a touch of self-importance or mockery. All three contain collections of exquisite objects – rows and rows of glass paperweights and wine goblets, boxes of seashells, glass cases of butterflies and insects – but there is nothing finicky or precious about the houses themselves, which rather recall ships with rooms like cabins, and spiral stairs that suggest descent into boiler or engine rooms. All of the houses are portioned out into a series of separate smaller rooms or annexes and have the sense of proportion one associates with luxury yachts or small cruisers. Everything is comfortably shipshape and in place.

Neruda’s house in Santiago, La Chascona, carefully restored after the pillaging and looting it suffered in the days following Pinochet’s overthrow of the Allende regime, is in the Bellavista area, not far from the zoo, in a small, very attractive artistic street that reminds one of similar corners in other parts of the world – say a side street in Hampstead or Montparnasse – but with its own unique Spanish and Chilean colonial touches: inner courtyard, ceramic tiles, small wall fountain.

Once in the door and up the stairs out of the dazzling heat of the day the shape and design of the house start to open out. The whole is built as a series of bungalows or studios on a cliff-side slope, new sections added over the years when Neruda could afford it, and organised around a central garden space. Next to the front office is a long dining room and bar: Neruda was a great lover of the fruits of the earth, a bon viveur and a connoisseur of food and wine which he so often celebrated in his writing. Throughout his life he collected colored wineglasses and goblets and believed that wine tasted differently depending on the color of the glass from which it was drunk. The dining room and bar have the planned economy of a galley, but some largeness of gesture, perhaps the exuberant size of some of the glasses, saves the whole from any constricting sense of tightness and neatness.

Across a small courtyard a winding staircase leads into a circular sitting room with lavish leather chairs and several sculptures. Chile was in the middle of a prolonged drought with an electricity and water crisis while we were there. The Mapocho River that runs through Santiago was reduced to a thin trickle and in places the riverbed showed nothing but dusty pebbles and boulders. Nevertheless, I couldn’t help wondering what it would be like to have to cross from cabin to cabin on a rainy day or during a semi-tropical downpour.

The fullest section of La Chascona, which was built in 1955, was the large study-library which stands by itself in the far corner of the garden. It is a beautifully organised room with a high window looking down over the city. (It can be no accident that this house is situated in the Bellavista area.) The library here is the most complete of all the houses and now contains all of Neruda’s books that have survived. We were not allowed to take any photographs inside the rooms, only in the gardens. I hope that was because the Foundation has plans for a future in postcards or photographic volumes and wants to protect its copyrights, and not for security reasons. I noticed on the shelves handsome early editions of the complete works of Melville and Poe, Whitman and Conrad. There were sets of the major nineteenth-century French poets – Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Mallarmé and Lautréaumont – in their white Pleiade jackets and celluloid covers. In his early student days Neruda planned to be a teacher of French. He spent some important years in Paris and there are various signs throughout his houses of his great love of French art and literature, photos, postcards, prints and maps. The books in his library looked as if they had been well used and were not just possessions on display, though some of the sets may well have been acquired in his later more affluent days in homage to admired authors. There was an impressive mappemonde-globe resting on a long table, perhaps a late reproduction item and probably acquired by Neruda in his travels.

A small room off the front office was lined with photographs, giving a biographical outline of the main dates and events of Neruda’s life – photos from his early consular years in Java, Singapore, Rangoon, Colombo, Barcelona, Madrid, Buenos Aires, Mexico; his years in exile; meetings with Federico Garcia Lorca and Paul Eluard. We were in Santiago while Pinochet was still under house arrest in England waiting extradition to Spain and there was widespread speculation on how the case would develop. One Chilean woman said to me ‘Sure, bad things were done in the past but we want to forget about all that and move on. Pinochet is now a very old man.’ The democratic elections that were to bring Ricardo Largos to power had not yet been held though we witnessed a number of street parades and demonstrations supporting him and there was already a palpable sense of change and freedom in the air. But standing in that small room which outlined the main dates and events of Neruda’s life. I noticed that all mention of his association with the Communist Party and with Allende’s regime had been omitted as had the fact that he had received various prestigious prizes and awards from Eastern Europe during the Cold War (including the Stalin Prize for Peace and Friendship among Peoples) before the Nobel Prize for Literature came to him in 1971. Perhaps this was part of a calculated attempt to defuse him politically during the Pinochet years or to guarantee the establishment of the Neruda houses on a non-political and totally independent footing. Neruda is a great national poet, the modern lyrical-epic poet of Chile, and this particular display seemed anxious to focus on the poet rather than the political figure.

A few days later we were in Valparaiso, a place I have longed to see since my school days in Hobart and to which so many of the merchant ships which passed through that once busy port seemed to be heading. As we drove towards the coast I was often reminded of parts of Tasmania and outback New South Wales, not only by the eucalyptus trees that South America owes to us, as we owe it our jacaranda trees, but even by some of the small country and seaside towns we passed through, as well as the hills, the light and the sky.

La Sebastiana, the house above Valparaiso that Neruda started building in 1959, is the most impressive of all his residences, and the one that suffered most from looting and vandalism at the time of the takeover by the Pinochet military dictatorship. It too has a superb position high above the great port and harbour and the waters of the South Pacific and it holds something of the atmospheres of a large lighthouse, a lookout and a fort. It now has a carefully tended garden, pebbled pathways, neat clipped sections of lawn and beautiful tropical plants along with cacti, succulents and native shrubs. Just to one side of the path to the main entrance is a metal seat, a chaise longue in fact, with a silhouette profile of Neruda cut into the back where one can sit and have a photo taken, facing towards the poet as though in conversation.

It would be easy to think that having visited one Neruda house, one has seen them all. They have many features in common: their ground plans seem to be much the same, the sailing ship atmosphere, bars that look and feel like ships’ cabins, and they all display wonderful collections of various kinds – shells and butterflies, model ships in bottles, glassware, wineglasses, primitive and colonial South American paintings. But it would be a mistake to merge them all together. Each house has its own unique design and shape, its own slightly different atmosphere and features, and each has very individual variations on basic themes. La Chascona has the city of Santiago and the orange-grey Andes mountains in the background; La Sebastiana looks from on high out across the city and the harbour of Valparaiso and it makes a greater impression of size and airiness. It is a real house, a home, rather than a pied-à-terre. Like its companions, it was lived in before it became a museum. And each house has its particular place in Neruda’s biography. Presumably because of its position, it was the house where Neruda had planned a landing stage for spaceships. Devotee of science fiction, Poe and Verne and visionary Rimbaud, he was convinced that interplanetary travel would be a feature of the future and a rudimentary outline for a landing pad or a space for such a development is indicated in one of the upstairs rooms. This may well have been one of Neruda’s broad jokes but we were told it in all seriousness by the guide who led us around.

Valparaiso itself must be one of the most amazing places in the world. Its haunting name – with its touch of Paradise – suggests how it must have appeared to its first discoverers. Although it is now the administrative and parliamentary capital of Chile, it is an old port and it has some of the aspects of a shanty town, having become run-down and neglected in the upheavals of recent years. It is a steeply sloped place of colorful wooden houses, chalets and villas with long glassed-in verandahs and balconies. But with its tiers of weatherboard houses, many of the most fanciful shapes, some of Swiss and Austrian alpine designs, it must once have been extraordinarily beautiful and striking. Many of the once superb old houses now look derelict and worm-eaten, ready to blow away in dust and flames, while the more recent stand out in stone and concrete. The great harbour should ideally be full of sailing ships, barques, brigantines, four-masted clippers, whalers and windjammers; but it still makes a very busy and lively impression with its yachts, fishing boats, barges, frigates, tugs, trawlers, container ships, freighters and warships of the Chilean navy.

Like the other houses, La Sebastiana, now fully restored, shows further additions to Neruda’s principal collections of a lifetime: more glass, more paintings, seascapes and still lifes, a vitrine full of scrimshaw, a couple of ships’ figureheads which reminded me of those that used to be on display and for sale in Patmore’s secondhand furniture shop up Liverpool Street in Sydney when I lived there during the early 1950s; a marvellous old rocking horse, crocheted quilts on old-fashioned iron bedsteads with brass knobs. One room displayed a series of nineteenth-century prints of Africa, Asia, Europe and America and an impressive collection of old maps of the world, maritime charts and nautical instruments which reminded me of the imagery of Kenneth Slessor, a poet who has more in common with writers like Neruda and Borges than is often realised.

From one wall a huge photographic blow-up of Walt Whitman surveyed the room with a look of shrewd benevolence, gazing towards the door that was supposed to open onto those future journeys to the stars. Standing in these rooms with their photographs and postcards of Rimbaud and Lautréamont I again saw the importance they had in Neruda’s imaginative world: Le Bateau Ivre seemed to outline the journey of Neruda’s life, and Lautréamont, having been born, like Laforgue, in Montevideo, must have had a special significance for him as a South American.

As well as journeys to the stars, Neruda, the guide told us, planned to establish an aviary here, perhaps a kind of sanctuary, which would hold specimens of all the birds of the world. Like Judith Wright, Neruda loved their colors and shapes, and he greatly regretted the disappearance of so many different species. Now the room holds only the embalmed scarlet form of a rare Venezuelan bird that swings from the ceiling in a transparent perspex envelope.

As in most National Heritage set ups around the world, there are rooms which are simply not open to the public, kitchens and bathrooms in particular, but there was evidence enough elsewhere that Neruda, celebrant of cooking and the dinner table, was a considerable collector of domestic objects, kitchen- and table-ware, plates and cups and saucers and soup tureens, whole dinner sets in fact, as well as bathroom accessories such as florally decorated porcelain washbasins and handbasins and lavatory bowls. There were a few solid items of French provenance standing around among the bric-a-brac, like Duchamp ready-mades: obviously never installed for use, just collected and kept, perhaps they had been waiting for their moment to inspire an ‘Ode to a pot de chambre’ or a ‘Hymn to a Bidet’.

Once again there was the bar with cocktail cabinet and rows and rows of coloured glasses and goblets; in the bedroom women’s shoes, dresses in a wardrobe, leather armchairs and a fireplace designed by Neruda himself though built by an architect. One room was devoted to a series of photographs covering the time of Neruda’s exile in Capri.

Like Neruda’s houses, the city of Valparaiso also makes a very eclectic impression. Strong German and Jugoslav (especially Croatian) influences are visible in the designs and shapes of the houses and our minibus stopped briefly in front of a German-style stone and cement house with swastikas set into the wall above the entrance and a couple of Alsatian dogs prowling in the grounds. It was hard to know what to make of this. Was it some pre-war manifestation of local support for Hitler or some kind of post-war defiance? So much has been written about former Nazis escaping to and hiding in various parts of South America that our alarm bells inadvertently started ringing. My knowledge of the history of Chile is limited to a tourist smattering but it is quite clear from many surnames in public life that the German presence has been long established in the Southern Cone.

Apart from a few Easter Island artefacts or imitations of them, Neruda does not seem to have collected any pre-Columbian items at all; no older indigenous items were visible. Much of his life, apart from his years in the East, was centred in Europe, where most of the elements in his various collections were assembled. When it came to South American objects, I had the impression that his collector’s interest focused mainly on seventeenth- and eighteenth-century colonial items: maps, still lifes, primitive and maritime paintings, insects and seashells, and that these were supplemented by substantial collections of dolls, toys and games from all around the world.

My wife and I had flown to Santiago after spending ten days in Buenos Aires and we had been immediately struck by the differences between the two countries whose capitals we liked so much. Buenos Aires is modern and cosmopolitan, a predominantly nineteenth- and twentieth-century city, something like a mixture of Paris and New York, looking towards Europe across the Atlantic. We happened to be there during the centenary celebrations of Jorge Luis Borges, that most European of Argentine writers, whose familiar face was featured in all the marvellous bookshops in the Avenida Corrientes and Florida together with various new editions of his work. There is a Borges path or walk from his former apartment in Calle Maipu around the different Borges sites, and the Centro Cultural Borges put on a fine exhibition of photographs and editions.

Santiago on the other hand looks towards the Pacific, Polynesia, New Zealand and Tasmania. There are more Indian faces in the street. and a manifest indigenous political presence. Santiago looks less prosperous than Buenos Aires and more rural and agricultural. One afternoon we saw a man leading a donkey down a footpath of the Avenida del Libertador General Bernardo O’Higgins not far from the CBD; it carried a double bag of cactus fruit on its back. The Spanish-Catholic colonial heritage is much more vividly present in churches and museums than anything we saw in Argentina.

After three days long and leisurely exploration around Santiago – the wonderful Franciscan monastery and museum, the markets and the magnificent old Mapocho railway station, now turned like the Quai d’Orsay and other similar places around the world into heritage sites – we decided to make another organised trip to the coast to see another Neruda monument, this time his house at Isla Negra – the oldest of all his houses, the first one he acquired, in 1939, and the one he seems to have lived in the longest and referred to most often in his poetry and prose. Our fellow travellers on this excursion were a young American couple; he of Pennsylvanian German background studying to be a Lutheran pastor and teaching English to Spanish students. We had gone on the only available day trip as part of a small bus group led by an American pilot who had lived in Chile since 1963. He told us he was married to a Chilean and that he had lost his job when Allende nationalised the airlines. He had nothing but praise for Pinochet and the Pinochet years which, he said, had brought unprecedented prosperity to the country. ‘The military government improved everything. If you didn’t stir up trouble, you didn’t get into trouble.’ He was not pleased when I said I wanted to visit Neruda’s house at Isla Negra though the Lutheran knew the poet’s work and spoke highly of it: ‘Neruda, that old whisky drinking commo – had the best of everything for himself.’ I heard him say something about ‘womaniser, best suits made overseas, best whisky…everything went to his friends in Cuba and Russia’, but I couldn’t tell at that stage if he was talking about Neruda or Allende. Later he said that the stories about the disappeared ones were just bits of myth. ‘All of the commos went into exile after Allende turned the machine gun on himself. They knew they would never have it so good again. They are the disappeared ones; they fled the country.’ After a while his diatribe trailed off and we concentrated on the vineyards, the orchards and the market gardens that sped by and then the huge windswept places along the coast – Cartagena, San Antonio, San Jose, fashionable seaside resorts in summer.

Isla Negra differs from Neruda’s other two houses in that it is situated directly on the sea, overlooking nothing but a long stretch of rocky ironstone coast and the vast waters of the Pacific. I had always thought it must be a promontory or a small island close to shore but it is in fact part of the mainland resembling many similar seaside places in Australia, just hidden and isolated from the main road by a slope and a turning. It is here that Neruda lies buried, his grave in the garden facing the huge swell of the sea and the immense grey and blue of the sky. Part of the main house looks like an Australian seaside shack, but the whole compound is solidly constructed out of stones and protected by a severe wall and iron gates. If it suffered depredations and vandalising like the other houses after the fall of the Allende government – it was closed to all access by the Pinochet military for some years – it has now been carefully restored and renovated and a couple of new annexes seem to have been built to display the various collections to best advantage.

Isla Negra was the place that Neruda seems to have been most attached to; it was originally his writer’s getaway and is the most isolated of all his houses. It was the subject of a fine book edited by Sara Facio of photographs taken in the last years of his life but, perhaps because a number of the more private rooms were not open to the public, it made a less personal impression than the book evoked. One section suggests a room in a natural history museum, which is of course what it has in a way become. But all the houses also make a slightly fantastic impression, like pieces of strange surrealist sculpture. ‘This man had no taste,’ a young German tourist said to me. ‘He was weird.’ And while this reaction was far from being mine, I could see where it was coming from.

As with the other houses a sense of order and careful organisation reigns. We are in a supervised cultural monument now but it isn’t hard to imagine the convivial life, the meetings and the wining and the dining with so many friends and visitors that must have taken place there during Neruda’s lifetime. Wandering in the garden and on the shore where his face is carved on a rock, I reflected that while two of Neruda’s favorite poets – Baudelaire and Mallarmé – are associated with cats, mirrors and interiors, it seems appropriate that he should have been a dog-lover and associated with horses, mountains and the sea.

It turned into a rather cold and blustering day, the weather intermittently wet and wild. Perhaps we had reached a saturation point in our travels; perhaps something of our tour guide’s hostility to the changes that were in the Chilean air had started to seep in and gave the visit a touch of haste and unfriendliness. I felt I needed much more time to look around and absorb things than we were allowed. There were more objects and collections crowded here than in the other houses and less time to give to them. In one room there was a life-sized papier-mâché horse looking so real that I assumed that it was a stuffed carcass until better informed. Isla Negra has the finest of Neruda’s collections of insects – beetles, spiders, dung beetles and a case of enormous Brazilian butterflies – as well as of seashells. Indeed seashells seem to have been for Neruda what butterflies were for Nabokov. He collected them and bought them throughout his lifetime and while many of them, according to his Memoirs, have been lost, all his houses contain great numbers and varieties. His largest collection of toys, ships’ figureheads, anchors, bells, ships in bottles and miniature musical instruments (mostly guitars and mandolins) is here as well as a huge array of glass jars, bottles and intricate glass paperweights. In the garden with its wind-bitten succulents and sturdy picket fence on the edge of the beach an old locomotive engine stands abandoned amid small native palms and agaves. A huge ship’s bell swings from a post.

There is a sense of opulence in all of Neruda’s houses, even of self-indulgence, but the collections are idiosyncratic rather than ostentatious and most of the objects seemed to have been picked up over the years at markets and fairs. Whatever their value now, they were obviously acquired at a time when such objects could have been obtained for very little money and because they interested and were liked and enjoyed by the poet himself. They were not bought to be resold or for financial gain but to be left to his country like his houses, one of which at least was intended as a writers’ retreat or centre.

Neruda’s houses are potentially the most surrealistic I have seen. The many varied objects in them could provide material for some startling juxtapositions, something rarer and more daring than a sewing machine and an umbrella meeting on a dissecting table, the provocation of a lobster telephone or the disorientation of a clam playing an accordion. But such contrivances belong more to the realm of fancy and fantasy and they would be out of keeping with the robust, essentially practical, almost nautical atmosphere that prevails. In Neruda’s houses everything remains basically down to earth and rooted in this world just as it does in his poetry.