Octavio Paz.(Review)

Octavio Paz Itinerary: An Intellectual Journey, translated by Jason Wilson. Harcourt Brace, 128 pages, $22

How would the reading public react if a beloved, widely read American author--a poetic commentator on art, love, and history, with a world reputation and a Nobel Prize--were to publish a long apologetical essay ascribing virtually all of his creative inspiration to the successful struggle of the free world against Communism?

It is hard to imagine so versatile a writer in America today. But even if our culture boasted such a figure, it is even more difficult to conceive of such an essay being greeted with anything but howls of outrage. That is if it were even to see print. After all, some politically incorrect writings of Saul Bellow, a Nobel laureate, resulted in nothing less than an op-ed by a New York Times reporter expressing something close to criminal intentions about Bellows person. (The reporter in question, of course, suffered no sanction from his employer for putting his aggressive fantasies in print.)

Yet just such a work was published, five years before his death, by the Mexican writer Octavio Paz (1914-1998), Nobel laureate in 1990 and an authentic poetry superstar. Itinerary is now available in English. To begin with the most stunning point: according to Paz, his entire creative career as a Latin literary giant grew out of the influences he underwent while living, at two different periods, in the United States. Far from viewing the U.S. as an imperialist monster crushing his spirit--as such lesser lights as Gabriel Garcia Marquez, for example, have portrayed it--Paz saw his experiences in California and New York as profoundly liberating.

To understand Itinerary and its significance, it is necessary to follow Paz himself back to the beginnings of his intellectual consciousness, which was formed less in Mexico, where he was born, than in Los Angeles, where he lived, albeit briefly, as a child. His father had fled there during the Mexican Revolution. An associate of the peasant revolutionary chieftain Emiliano Zapata, the elder Paz was temporarily forced across the border by the changing fortunes of his faction. From this experience, we might extrapolate one of the main aspects of Paz's career: the intensity with which he came to equate revolution with human suffering.

But Paz himself derived another meaning from his early period in Los Angeles. Although he never says it explicitly, he clearly perceived the United States as a refuge of free thought. Perhaps most importantly, his childhood journey across the border left him with a painful, but inevitably fruitful, confusion about his identity. After he returned to Mexico, his chauvinistic compatriots, observing that he spoke English as well as Spanish, labeled him a foreigner. Their rejection deeply affected him. As he wrote in Itinerary seventy years later, "My experiences in Los Angeles and in Mexico weighed down on me for many years. Sometimes I felt guilty--we are often accomplices of our persecutors--and would say to myself: yes, I am neither from here nor from there."

Paz was, like any other youthful intellectual of that time, sympathetic to the Soviets. But the Spanish Civil War changed everything, as it did for George Orwell and John Dos Passos. "I discovered that the revolution is a child of criticism and that the absence of criticism [on the side of the Spanish left] had killed the revolution" he recalled, somewhat wistfully. His first doubt began on a train going into Spain, in the company of the English poet Stephen Spender, the Cuban Communist writers Juan Marinello and Nicolas Guillen, and others including the Russian author Ilya Ehrenburg and the Chilean Pablo Neruda.