Neftali Ricardo Reyes Basoalto, a country boy who grew up in a remote, rainy, forested area in southern Chile, an area called Araucania, an indigenous name, became Pablo Neruda, a name he created so he could publish poetry without his father’s knowledge. His father and mother, who died less than a month after his birth, originally came from the wine country of central Chile. His father became a conductor for a ballast train in this southern region. His descriptions of his childhood are of a shy boy who loved nature in all its forms and books. Later, he wrote letters to girls for his friends. Yet, he says he wrote his first poem when he had barely learned to read. Overcome with emotion, he wrote a poem to his stepmother, the only mother he knew. When he showed it to his father, his father asked to know what he had copied it from.
Later, he moves to Santiago to attend university, always poor, always wearing black, always carrying books. He joins a Student Federation and becomes acquainted with other young poets. He writes, “I saw a refuge in poetry with the intensity of someone timid.” After he struggled paying for the printing of his first book, he wrote, “…the writer’s task…must be a personal effort for the benefit of all.”
He wins a literary prize at school, his books are popular, and he finds himself acquiring a job at a Chilean consul in Rangoon but to get there he and a friend end up in France and Portugal, then Japan, then Singapore, before finally arriving at his destination. Thus, began his life as a consul official in places all over the world, including Spain just before and at the beginning of Franco’s rise to power.
After witnessing so much poverty, so many conflicts benefiting the rich, he becomes an avid supporter of the Chilean Communist Party–a form of communism unlike what most think of when they think of communism. The communism he and his friends support includes working on behalf of the poor, the common laborer, the disenfranchised against the wealthy elite who controlled most Latin American countries during his lifetime and in many cases still do.
He states, “I want to live in a world where beings are only human with no other title but that, without worrying their heads about rules, a word, a label…I want the great majority, the only majority, everyone, to be able to speak out, read, listen, thrive…I have taken a road because I believe that road leads us all to a lasting brotherhood…an inexhaustible goodness…”
Later, he chose to live at Isla Negra, a sort of hideout especially in winter where he could write. Then he returned to Chile. He helped his friend Salvatore Allende campaign for the presidency of Chile. After Allende became president, he appointed Neruda to be ambassador to France. In 1971, Neruda won the Nobel Prize. In 1972, the US blockaded Chile and Neruda returned and completed the final edit of his memoirs. He was welcomed back with a ceremony at the National Stadium in Santiago with a huge crowd in attendance. In 1973, a military coup, supported by the US, overturned the government and assassinated Allende. Less than one month later, Neruda died. Shortly thereafter, news spread worldwide that his two houses in different parts of Chile had been ransacked and vandalized by the new government and its forces.
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