SAINT THAIS

SAINT THAIS

I, Lord, the world of men
confess to find, in leaving,
as rare and lovely as when
my lost locks I sat weaving;
find earth fast pair believing
thought I wish it not again,
though I bear thee, dovelike greeting,
my heart of a Magdalen.

- Such love must burn its eyes
and take veil upon veil,
which is like the serpent wise
and like the lion mighty,
yet is frail as the frail
blue doves of Aphrodite.

NICK ... BOW

Nick ... bow
by Adrian Cristobal
05/09/2005 Philippine Graphic

For the Ravens, the young writers who emerged in the 50s and are now in the departure lounge in their 70s. THE WRITER was Nick Joaquin; he remains so to this day as the only honorary Raven. Except for Virginia R. Moreno, known in her time as 'the literary dictator of U.P.', the Ravens are all male (two generically), but she's the most assertive of the group, having waged
many battles and wars for literature and film. If Nick Joaquin isn't remembered for his battles, it's because he quietly won them.

I remember one. It was a time when the National Artist Award for Literature sought the writer instead of the other way around. The outrageous Xoce Garcia Villa and the Marxist Tagalog poet Amado V. Hernandez did not have any supporters and advocates who filled forms in order to qualify them for the award. When it was Nick Joaquin's turn to receive it, there were grave doubts that he would accept it. It was martial law and some writers were in detention, one of whom was Jose "Pete" Lacaba. Pressed by friends who were connected to Malacanang to accept the award, Nick Joaquin imposed as a condition Pete's release from Bicutan. As a refusal of the honor on the part of the foremost fictionist in the country would make the National Artist Award trivial, to say the least, Pete was released and Nick regally accepted the award.

That incident remains one of the most memorable moments in Philippine literature. Henceforth, there would be political finagling, even on the part of presidents, in the selection of National Artists, although it did produce worthy awardees like the Tagalog poet, critic, and translator Virgilio Almario, otherwise known as Rio. Nick Joaquin -- the Ravens never referred to him as merely "Nick", and only, when he became one of us in the camaraderie of letters and liquor -- had a good and kindly eye for erstwhile young writers. Among them are Pete Lacaba and Gregorio Brillantes. He did not, however, write literary criticism, out of a deep, sense of what is ethical. When he liked a literary piece, he said so, when he didn't like it, he kept his opinion to himself. What he wrote was literary appreciation, of which Jose Rizal was the singular beneficiary.He made the finest translation of Rizal's "Mi Ultimo Adios," and transported Garcia Lorca's "Verde yo te quiero verde" into English. Xoce Garcia Villa would never let us forget Nick's beautiful line: "the frail blue doves of Aphrodite".

Not that Nick was less of a poet but his most memorable story was "Three Generations", which popularized the crab as the symbol of our ailing society. Many an indifferent writer and enthralled, if mediocre, teachers of literature have made their reputation by discoursing on the crab and the image of the senator who gave up poetry as if they were personal discoveries.

Indeed, Nick Joaquin had been used and misused for all kinds of literary and academic pretensions, which strengthens the argument that he was a living legend. At one time, when I was talking about a famous plagiarist, Nick told me that the plagiarist had plagiarized him many times. When I asked why he never once complained publicly, he said, "He's not a writer, after all". That's the only damning remarks that he has said of anyone who considered himself a writer.

Nick's public image is that of a man who always had a bottle of beer in hand. If there's anyone who has popularized San Miguel beer, it wasn't Fernando Poe Jr, but Nick Joaquin. His happiest moments, besides being with writers he liked -- the late Larry Francia, Virgie Moreno, etc -- and, of course, with his family -- were spent in beer joints drinking with policement and assorted denizens of the city. His column was even entitled "Small Beer", though there was nothing small in his consumption, his literary vision, and large humanity. His generosity, after all, was legend. No man I know has placed so little value on money and so high a value on friendship.

Ambassador Chua, the owner of Graphic, was once asked why Nick Joaquin stuck with Graphic when he would have been paid handsomely writing for another publication. Without a moment's hesitation, the ambassador replied, "Nick Joaquin is the Graphic, and the Graphic is Nick Joaquin."

Nick Joaquin is the writer.

Nick Joaquin campaigned for a nation built on the truth

By Rene Q. Bas, Assistant Executive Editor

NICK JOAQUIN occupied the intellectual consciousness of the FEU writers when I entered the university in the late fifties. That was because Dean Alejandro Roces was shaking up the campus into developing a passion for literature and cultural nationalism, and Sarah Joaquin and Mrs. Josephine Cojuangco-Reyes were championing the FEU Drama Guild.

The campus intellectuals included some of the best short-story writers of the time, like the late Agustin “Ben” Benitez and Azucena “AG” Grajo-Uranza (who has two Palanca Award novels to her name). Both Ben and AG became friends who encouraged me to continue writing poems and short stories.

AG and her best friend, Eva San Jose (who became Mrs. Alberto Florentino), infected me with their love for Nick Joaquin’s work and their their reverence for the words and artistry of A Portrait of the Artist as Filipino, an elegiac play that must, however, be read as a novel. AG always spoke in hushed tones about the magic of the play that we saw presented by Lamberto Avellana—not on the stage but in the Sunken Garden in Intramuros.

That was also the time when I first discovered the metaphysical outlook—from reading the Apologist Frank J. Sheed and translations of Saints Thomas Aquinas and Augustine lent to me by the late Fr. Michael Nolan, then the young and handsome chaplain of FEU’s Student Catholic Action. I found Nick Joaquin’s writings reinforcing that outlook within me—and my version of nationalism.

‘Great metaphysical seeing’

Later it gave me a thrill to read that Jose Garcia Villa—another icon in Philippine literature whom Dean Roces had persuaded to break his life of exile in New York for a spell to share his august existence among us Filipinos at UP and FEU—had valued Nick Joaquin for being metaphysical. Villa said not only that Nick Joaquin “is our only poet who has language, who writes poetry, and who reveals behind his writing a genuine first rate mind” but also that he “is a writer with real imagination, an imagination of power and depth and great metaphysical seeing.”

Joaquin’s rich body of works has contributed to the post-World War II Filipinos’ understanding of their place in history, the uniqueness and importance of their being—despite the antipathy toward him of some nationalist writers. They labeled as nostalgic hispanism Joaquin’s insistence on the reality that until the Spaniards came the people who were the ancestors of today’s Filipinos had no “national consciousness.” Joaquin in fact maintained that it was the martyrdom of Gomburza—the priests Gomez, Burgos and Zamora—three and a quarter century after Magellan discovered the Philippines for the Europeans, which marked the beginning of Filipino nationalist consciousness.

What Nick Joaquin, the historian, advocated in handsomely crafted essays was not for Filipinos to become sentimentally attached to their Hispanic heritage but for them to become a mature people who know the truth about themselves. He never failed to remind that this truth includes the fact that much of our being is what we have become as a result of the impact on our native cultures of the Roman Catholic Christianity brought to us by the Spaniards. He wanted us Filipinos to chart our destiny as a people guided by the truth.

Nick Joaquin wrote this dedication on my copy of The Complete Poems and Plays of Jose Rizal Translated by Nick Joaquin: “For Rene Bas: Happy reading of what I hope you find to be Happy de-Hispanizing!”

His 1988 book, Culture and History, corrects a wrong historical viewpoint that erroneously leads Filipinos to believe that their sense of nationhood should be traced to a nonexistent golden age in the pre-Hispanic past and that the Spanish conquest should be blamed for aborting the development of Filipinos as an Asian people.

Against that viewpoint, Joaquin argued that “before 1521 we could have been anything and everything not Filipino; after 1565 we became nothing but Filipino.”

The essays collected in A Question of Heroes paints realistic warts-and-all portraits of the leading names in our pantheon.

Few doubt that Joaquin—born Nicomedes Marquez Joaquin on May 4, 1917, in Paco, Manila—was the greatest Filipino writer in English.

Joaquin was a dropout from the Dominican seminary in Hong Kong. He went to church almost daily and had a special devotion to the Santo Domingo Church’s Our Lady of La Naval.

Joaquin’s novels and stories often deal with the coexistence of the primitive and the cultured dimensions in the human psyche. His most graphic work that contains this concept is the short story “The Summer Solstice.”

A schizophrenic generation of Filipinos

In the novel The Woman Who Had Two Navels, the vivid human drama turns into an effective metaphor to portray the schizophrenic generation of Filipinos whose Spanish-Catholic heritage was still very much alive in their being while they were also being raised under the American version of civilization.

Joaquin was also a consummate journalist. In the fifties and sixties he began writing his reportage pieces under the pen name Quijano de Manila. These were journalistic works—on crime, politics, entertainment and various celebrities—marked with the vividness of short stories and the depth but not the academic drone of sociological treatises. In the USA, works of the kind that Joaquin called reportage had appeared only in The New Yorker at first and then came to be called “the new journalism.”

Joaquin started his literary career by contributing poems and essays to national magazines. He published his first poem in 1935 in The Tribune.

He joined the Philippines Free Press magazine in 1950 as proofreader. He soon became a staff writer, signing his work as Quijano de Manila. Then as the Free Press literary editor, he influenced the careers of young writers, most of whom have become icons of Philippine literature themselves.

He later edited the Asia-Philippine Leader magazine. And became editor in chief of the Philippine Weekly Graphic. He was publisher of the Mirror magazine when he died.

His short stories have won every major prize in the Philippines, including the Palanca Memorial Awards for Literature. In 1996 he was chosen Ramon Magsaysay Awardee for literature and journalism.

He received the Republic Heritage Cultural Award in 1961 as journalist of the year.

His essays, short stories and poems have been collected into best-selling books, most of which are out of print.

A first-rate biographer

He also wrote first-rate biographies. His last work, Abe: A Frank Sketch, which he finished writing in February and is now being prepared for printing, is a biography of another cultural icon, the late editor, writer, art enthusiast and painter Emilio Aguilar “Abe” Cruz.

Joaquin was born in Paco on Calle Herran, the son of Leocadio Y. Joaquin, a lawyer and a colonel of the Philippine Revolution, and Salome Marquez, a schoolteacher. After three years of secondary education at the Mapa High School, he dropped out of school to work on Manila’s waterfront and in odd jobs.

He read widely at the National Library but before that he had read all the books in his father’s library.

He is survived by his sister Carmen Joaquin Enriquez, the wife of the former mayor of Zamboanga City, Joaquin Enriquez.

His other siblings are the late publisher Enrique (Ike) Joaquin, the jazz pianist Porfirio (Ping) Joaquin, Augusto Joaquin, Adolf Joaquin and Generosa Joaquin.

President Arroyo expressed deep emotion over Joaquin’s death. Spokesman Ignacio Bunye said the President felt it as a personal loss because Joaquin was a good friend of the Macapagal family.

She declared Sunday, May 2, a day of national mourning for Joaquin.

She said: “In writing of politics and history, Nick taught us that without memories, we are orphans, without memories we are fated to repeat the past and all of its mistakes.

“But he always gave us hope and the promise of a new beginning. Even as we lay him to rest, I see a new light on the horizon. I see a new Filipino emerging: confident, self-assured, forward-looking. I see a new nation rising from the field of our past battles.

“In memory of Nick, let us come together this day to build a society worthy of our heroes, our artists, and our best selves.”

Joaquin’s ashes were buried at the Libingan ng mga Bayani at Fort Bonifacio, Makati City. He was given a three-gun salute.

Fellow National Artists and some of his close friends paid tribute to him.

Nick Joaquin and his contemporaries

Sunday, May 09, 2004
Nick Joaquin and his contemporaries
By Elmer A. Ordoñez

Nick Joaquin, National Artist for Literature, born in 1917, belongs to the generation of writers, almost all of who had passed away. I say almost because Edith Tiempo, National Artist for Literature, born in 1919, is still very active in Dumaguete. Dominador Ilio, poet and engineer, born in 1913, still resides in Diliman. Silvestre Tagarao, fictionist, born in 1919, whose riveting book All This Was Bataan (1991), could still be around. There may be others.

The contemporaries of Nick Joaquin began writing well before the Second World War. The patriarch of that generation may well be Jose Garcia Villa, National Artist for Literature, born in 1908, who with Federico Mangahas, born in 1904, and Salvador P. Lopez, born in 1911, formed the UP Writers Club in 1927, which was to set the tone and pace not only of campus writing, but Philippine literature in English as well. The Literary Apprentice and the Philippine Collegian were considered national publications.

Villa gained international stature in America where he went on self-exile after being suspended from the university for a poem “Man-Songs,” considered “obscene” by a Manila court. From the United States he exercised great influence on the Manila writers through his modernist poetry, his critical essays, and his Roll of Honor for short stories. His Footnote to Youth (1933), a collection of stories, Many Voices (1939), book of verses, Poems of Doveglion (1941), Have Come, Am Here (1942), and Selected Poems and New (1957) constitute the corpus of Villa’s fiction and poetry. Jonathan Chua of Ateneo was able to retrieve the critical essays accompanying Villa’s Roll of Honor choices in the thirties in The Critical Villa (2002). Larry Francia edited a selection of Villa’s poems including the poet’s hitherto unpublished illustrations. It was launched in Diliman in 1988.

Villa’s associates abroad were leading poets in the US and Britain including Dylan Thomas who, like Villa, was a regular at the White Horse Tavern in Greenwich Village, New York—where I met Villa for the first time in 1957, introduced by the younger Jose Lansang. Villa started writing poems in mid-twenties in UP High School where he edited the school annual The Clarion. We of the fifties generation worshipped Villa. I even wrote my baby thesis on him.

His comma poems created a stir when they came out in the 1948-49 Literary Apprentice edited by Armando Manalo, who included the comments of Edith Sitwell, David Daiches, Marianne Moore, Babeth Deutsch and Eliot Paul along with Francisco Arcellana, Lydia Arguilla-Villanueva, Manuel A. Viray, and Angel Hidalgo—younger contemporaries of Villa and the generation of Nick Joaquin.

Manalo, the Apprentice noted: “The section on Villa has received an inordinately large amount of criticism, chiefly those who have never read him. Some of the most conscientious objectors are professors who have not caught up with the trans-Pacific cultural lag. There is no special reason for this belated tribute to Villa. Unless you wish to recall that exactly 20 years ago, Villa was expelled by the University for writing un-edifying poems. Let us take this as self-criticism still absolutely pertinent to our time. Comstockery is like sin: it thrives where it can exist unchallenged.” This was the period when Cristino Jamias said that the campus was “full of singing birds, and everyone threatened to write.”

The elders who suspended (not expelled) Villa in 1929 included the poet dean of the College of Law who could not abide the modernist trend in Villa’s poetry. This was also the time when Victorio Edades had problems with the conservative UP professors of fine arts and debated with Guillermo Tolentino, sculptor, on the issue of modernism v. classicism in art. Edades found a haven in UST where he was able to develop its school of fine arts and lead in art modernism.

Jose Garcia Villa, S. P. Lopez, Federico Mangahas, Jose Lansang, Arturo B. Rotor were original founding members of the UP Writers Club (1927), which raison d’etre was to put out the Literary Apprentice. Villa left for the US after winning his travel money from the Philippines Free Press for the prize-winning story “Mir-i-nisa.” But as soon as he was settled, he continued to be active in the local literary scene. Besides the Apprentice and Collegian, Villa read stories in the Philippine Magazine (edited by A.V. Hartendorp), Herald Midweek Magazine, Graphic, National Review, Sunday Tribune Magazine and Story Manuscripts (put out by the Veronicans) for his Roll of Honor.

The Veronicans was formed in 1935 by UP and non-UP-based writers including Arcellana, Manuel Arguilla, Narciso Reyes, Hernando Ocampo, Salvador Faustino, Delfin Fresnosa, Angel de Jesus, T.D. Agcaoili, Manuel A. Viray, N.V.M. Gonzalez, Oscar de Zuniga, Lazaro Espinosa, Armando Malay, Antonio Gabila, Lazaro Espinosa, Pacita Pestano, Lina Flor, and Ernesto Basa. Nick Joaquin was not known to be a Veronican, but later he condescended to join the post-war Ravens as honorary member.

Some of the Veronicans wrote stories that were not acceptable in big magazines; hence they put out Expression, a little magazine of experimental writing. Its Story Manuscripts made it into the writing mainstream.

Two Veronicans, Franz Arcellana and NVM Gonzalez, became National Artists for Literature, and one, Hernando Ocampo, a Natonal Artist for Visual Arts. Before he became known as a painter, Ocampo wrote and published at least 12 stories including “We and They.” They deserve to be put together and published to show his literary side.

The older writers, Lopez, Mangahas and Lansang, and others formed on the eve of the war in Europe the Philippine Writers League, which set the radical tone of literature during the Commonwealth. They supported the social justice program of Quezon and took antifascist and anti-imperialist positions. Inevitably they collided with the followers of Villa like Arcellana, Alfredo E. Litiatco of La Salle, and dramatist Jose Lardizabal. A kind of literary polemics (on the issues of literary dictatorship and committed writing v. art for art’s sake) filled the pages of the Herald Midweek Magazine and the Sunday Tribune Magazine.

I suspect though that majority of the writers during the Commonwealth were, as Fidel de Castro, a poet and UP Writers Club member, told me in the fifties, “bitten by the radical bug.” Except Franz who regretted after the war Arguilla’s involvement in politics: “He should have left patriotism to others. We have too many patriots. We don’t have too many writers.” Arguilla, a guerrilla officer, was killed by the Japanese. Litiatco died of illness during the Occupation. De La Salle named its writing center after him.

Nick Joaquin who worked as a proofreader in the Manila Tribune apparently kept to himself, but he published his first poem in 1935 and his first story “Of Tinsel and Grease” in 1937. He was not known to have mixed with the Veronicans or the Philippine Writers League. He worked as a laborer during the Occupation, but managed to contribute two stories, “The Woman Who Felt Like Lazarus,” and “It Was Later than We Thought,” and an essay “La Naval de Manila” for the Philippine Review. Mangahas, who was noted for his satirical essays (including one ostensibly in praise of Quezon who unwittingly had it framed) said of Joaquin’s essay:

“This is quite elegant if elaborate form of the mystical slave complex that has to find complete emotional fulfillment around a few naval victories for incipient, inept imperialism, and the faith. Anthropology and history can be put to more intelligent uses.”

Incidentally Claro M. Recto saw the framed essay of Mangahas in Quezon’s study and chided him. Quezon in fury smashed the frame and had Mangahas fired from his teaching post in the UP Department of English. Eventually Mangahas ingratiated himself with Quezon who took advice from him as a Palace intellectual. This is how the Philippine Writers League of which Mangahas was president was able to get Quezon to support the Commonwealth Literary Contest.

The war in Europe hanged like a pall over the literary scene alive with writers competing for the Literary Contest. The 1940 awards produced a bumper crop of stories, poems and essays. The 1941 Contest was much leaner in prizes for the subsidy was considerably reduced. Practice blackouts were then held regularly. The last Commonwealth celebration I attended on November 15, 1941, was held in then open fields of Quezon City along the boulevard that ended its pavement in what is now the Delta crossing. The parading troops and cadets marching to the tempo of “El Capitan” were an augury of the war that came on December 8, 1941 in the country.

Mangahas said in February 1941: “The world crisis is very much in evidence here. It struck the writers intimately when it induced the government to curtail the literary contests to their present narrow scope in their second year. But this development is trivial by the side of the problem of the preservation of freedom as now menaced by the march of fascism in many places Writers will write, contests or contests; but when there is absolute regimentation such as visualized under a fascist order; it is difficult to conceive of any authentic literature coming into flowering at all.”

Nick Joaquin’s “It was Later than We Thought” published in 1943, during the Japanese Occupation, using the epistolary mode, portrays a family caught up in the time’s confusion just before the Pacific War—the blackouts, the air raid drills, the near panic. But Lulu, the journalist in the Cabrera family, manages to keep her head and gives advice to the girls in “these parlous times.”

Nick Joaquin and his contemporaries—NVM Gonzalez, Franz Arcellana, Bienvenido Santos among others—after the war showed what the Filipino creative genius is capable of—a flowering of authentic literature. The post war writers like F. Sionil Jose and his generation deserve a separate piece.

Jose Marte Abueg's Ode to Old Nick

Salamander: Ode to Old Nick

Salamander on the wall, melancholy
and soundless, recalling the eve
of May, April day in sudden repose.
In our withered garden, our
diminished realm. Outside
the lone, deep sepulcher
newly unsealed.
Rise, old Solomon,
intone your myths, call in
serpents to bring jewels, stories, gifts.
Summon minstrels, dancers,
magicians to usher in
mists, enigmas, music
in riddles. Wake Sheba once more,
her temple of veils ransack anew
for icons, alchemies, portraits
of essences. Banish the shadows,
ban the unexamined, unearth
our caves. Tame our apes of dead
syllables. Cast out the pale, mute
unimagined. Demolish, old
salamander, this wall
of the unwritten. Let the peacocks
loose to roam, multiply again
in the aviary of your word garden.
Conjure history, texture, prose,
bring forth tale and ritual, weave
legendry and novel, pageantry
and poem—embroider our navels.
Genius lit like a mirror at the midnight
of generations, with Joy, Pleasure,
Aphrodite, or merely us, lay
blue eggs of frail young doves. Viva!
Viva, Old Nick! Open your eyes!

(For Nicomedes Joaquin, 1917-2004)++

Poetry

Six P.M.

Trouvere at night, grammarian in the morning,
ruefully architecting syllables—
but in the afternoon my ivory tower falls.
I take a place in the bus among people returning
to love (domesticated) and the smell of onions burning
and women reaping the washlines as the Angelus tolls.

But I—where am I bound?
My garden, my four walls
and you project strange shores upon my yearning:
Atlantis? the Caribbeans? Or Cathay?
Conductor, do I get off at Sinai?
Apocalypse awaits me: urgent my sorrow
towards the undiscovered world that I
roam warm responding flesh for a while shall borrow:
conquistador tonight, clockpuncher tomorrow.


The Innocence of Solomon

Sheba, Sheba, open your eyes!
the apes defile the ivory temple,
the peacocks chant dark blasphemies;
but I take your body for mine to trample,
I laugh where once I bent the knees.
Yea, I take your mouth for mine to crumple,
drunk with the wisdom of your flesh.

But wisdom never was content
and flesh when ripened falls at last:
what will I have when the seasons mint
your golden breasts into golden dust?

Let me arise and follow the river
back to its source. I would bathe my bones
among the chaste rivulets that quiver
out of the clean primeval stones.

Yea, bathe me again in the early vision
my soul tongued forth before your mouth
made of a kiss a fierce contrition,
salting the waters of my youth!

Sheba, Sheba, close my eyes!
The apes have ravished the inner temple,
the peacocks rend the sacred veil
and on the manna feast their fill—
but chaliced drowsily in your ample
arms, with its brief bliss that dies,
my own deep sepulchre I seal.



From Bye Bye Blackbird

1.
A death in the family. Relatives
you haven’t seen since the last
death in the family reappear
like furniture from your past
reassembled for a movie about it;
reassembling now only as props:
footlight (as it were) and backdrops,
to celebrate not a death but the family
here having one of its final stops,
here it continues where it stops.

2.
No one is here as a person,
only as the correct representative
of his branch of the line. Only
the man that’s dead is here as himself,
is discussed as such. “Rather lonely,
his last days.” “Well, he was on the shelf
all of these years.” “He was renting
that crummy apartment?” “No, just a part
of it, the upstairs.” “Collapsed, alone
with his cats—whom someone should be representing.
They were so dear to him.” “From the start
of the stroke, unconscious.” “Four o’clock dawn.”
“Died like his father, cerebral hemorrhage.”
The crowd wake was a lively tone.