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 Larry Francia edited a selection of Villa’s poems including the poet’s hitherto unpublished illustrations.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.