Living voice: Erwin E. Castillo

At the Francisco Arcellana Library at the U.P. Faculty Center last Thursday, about 70 writers and literature students gathered to enjoy a talk by poet and novelist Erwin E. Castillo.

Billed as a Fellowship Colloquium, it was part of the Living Voice in Conversation Series offered regularly by Likhaan: The UP Creative Writing Center and the Department of English and Comparative Literature.

The program handbill says of the featured writer, who is the UP-CWC National Fellow for Fiction for 2000-01:

"Born on 29 September 1944, Erwin E. Castillo first studied in public schools, then attended U.P., and, on a U.S. State department scholarship, the University of Iowa in Iowa City. He is now in semi-retirement after spending almost 40 years in professional communications, although he continues to sit on the board of the companies he founded. He also actively consults with personal clients in business, sports and politics.

"Erwin E. Castillo first began publishing stories, and later, poems in the old Philippines Free Press when he was literary editor of the Collegian. Since then, his works have been published and anthologized here, in Europe and in the United States. he has won a few prizes such as the Free Press, Palanca, Leader, Tagayan, and the ASEAN, which was the forerunner of the SEAWrite Prize.

"The Firewalkers, his first novel, was published in 1992. He is currently working on two novels: Stranger Sweets, which includes a total re-invention of Rizal’s unfinished book; and Cape Engaño."

Castillo’s talk focused mainly on the writing of the latter work-in-progress, a gargantuan novel that he has labored on for seven years. Here we share excerpts of the talk as well as the dialogue with the audience.

To know Erwin is to be mesmerized at his prowess as a raconteur, to laugh and sing with him over spirits, as happened later in the evening.

"This may be how a story begins. Ten years ago I attended the Dumaguete writers’ workshop. And my friend, the poet Cesar Ruiz Aquino, and I had a long drinking session way into the night. And we were in the company of a young woman whose name and face escape me now. But we got into a rather rowdy story-telling session.

"So I was telling this young woman the story of how every year, the seven people who actually rule the world met in some shabby place. They gathered once a year, the seven people who ruled the world. They came to some shabby place, where they set up some sort of gaming device. They sat around, they played, they won, they lost, they quarrelled. And they decided what was going to happen to people and to nations.

"I told Cesar and this girl that that year the meeting place was going to be Manila, that the seven men would come from wherever they lived, that they would land incognito in Manila. They were going to take an FX taxi to go to their place, to set up their thing. But what was going to happen was that some policemen were going to take them, the policemen were going to take the FX taxi and take, maybe not all of these men but a few of them, as a kidnap-for-ransom.

"And that what was going to happen was that there was going to be negotiations. And then Joseph Estrada, who was head of the Presidential Anti-Crime Commission, was going to lead a botched atempt to rescue the kidnapped people. And that Joseph’s policemen were going to kill them. That was the complete story.

"The objective correlative of that story, obviously, well, there may be two, maybe three... There is an anti-Semitic drivel that there are old Jewish men who control our fate – Hitler’s favorite story. And of course there is another Jewish story – the story of Job.

"In the story of Job, it seems that God and the devil, every morning, take a paseo. This is how I remember it. Ang Diyos at ang demonyo, pag umaga, maglalakad. Magkaibigan sila, they’re old friends, comfortable like Jolicco (Cuadra) and myself. They meet, they drink coffee, they take a walk. So the story of Job was, God and the devil walked and saw the servant Job, with his family, his flock, his children, his beloved wife... And God said, ‘My servant Job, how he serves me. And the devil, his friend with whom he was taking a paseo – Manichaean maybe – said, ‘He serves you only because you’ve given him so much money, a flock, etc.’ God said I don’t think so, and the Devil said, I think so. And God said, would you like to put some money on that? And of course the devil said, how much? And they make the wager. As a result of the wager, you remember the story – Job’s beloved wife and children are killed, not to mention his flock, and the camels, etc. And when Job is tormented by his loss, God appears to him in the form of a whirlwind. Job was saying, my wife is dead, my children are dead, why did this happen?

"The narrator has already told us, it happened because of a bet. Somebody made a bet, and now here’s this terrible whirlwind preaching, saying to the victim, ‘You are a human being, you don’t know anything. Human beings are too small to question this, etc, etc.’ All rather unfair, of course.

"Now when I was a young man, I was in love with a very pretty girl, since we were both in high school, like childhood sweethearts. And suddenly (here at UP) she was Lantern Queen at the Christmas parade. There I was with Jolicco Cuadra and Willie Sanchez, we had our bottle and were out watching the parade, and the Lantern Queen passed by.

"There is a poem by Robert Graves. The poem is ‘Love Without Hope.’ And it goes like this: ‘Love without hope as when the young bird catcher... said to the squire’s own daughter as she passed by....’ Love without hope. That was exactly how I felt.

"Well, I’m talking objective correlatives, and this is how the novel grew in my mind. Another story... St. Joseph and the Virgin were walking in a cherry orchard. They were not married, they had not had sex. And the Virgin told Joseph, ‘Gather me some cherres, for I am with child.’ Joseph flew in anger... ‘In anger flew him, and said let the father of the baby gather cherries for thee.’

"And so we can do nothing but rail in anger and thank God for our capacity for violence, that sometimes we are able to lash out. And that was how Cape Engaño began.

"Anyway, Cape Engaño has maybe 100 different characters. When I wrote a very thin novel called The Firewalkers and I gave it to Nick Joaquin, I said, the next time I’m going to give you a Russian novel, with all these characters and all these names. And that’s what I’m trying to do with Cape Engaño. A hundred characters, with all that dialogue. It is really a one-person story, about being confronted by powerful forces that have made a bet.

"Seven powerful people controlling the world... what are they like? To become an angel you have to be very very rich... In my invention, the angels that I imagine don’t look too impressive. They’re cheap, they’re stingy, they don’t brush their teeth too often. And when I told Cesar Aquino that Joseph Estrada was going to kill them, Cesar was very happy...

"My description of the book makes it appear that it is about money, or about a concern for material things... But that is only in a certain sense... We are poets, and there is a reverse snobbery about material things. This is natural. There is no money in poetry and there is no poetry in money.

"Those are the concerns of the book, but the book is not like that at all. The abstract framework is about power, about people who become angels, about people concerned not with material things anymore, but about power and bets..."

Castillo begins to read an excerpt.

"I will read In the hold of the McCullough…."

Follows the reading from the novel-in-progress. Castillo has a powerful, mellifluous voice, and everyone is mesmerized. After the reading, Castillo announces that he will field questions, but that first –

"I will quote a passage from John Gardner, and maybe, it was also what I was talking about in my own stupid way... The question that is asked is: ‘Why is there evil in this world?’ It is a question I think the novel has answered. Why is there evil in this world? To thicken the plot."

Now we share part of the open forum, with UP-CWC Director Cristina Pantoja Hidalgo asking the first question: "Do you see your novel as a lashing out?"

"No, no, Jing. One of the ideas that has always fascinated me is the idea of lashing out. But the work doesn’t really concern itself with that. I have a feeling that we write because there are certain difficult questions that children ask, and that there are no other answers than to respond with a story."

Jing Hidalgo: "What might have been the question that led to The Firewalkers as an answer"

"Why do we die? Why did father die? Maybe, maybe. Why did mother die? Maybe that. One of the questions that Cape Engaño tries to answer is: why are we so poor? It is Jolicco’s question and my own. Why are we so poor? And there are no answers. I enjoy writing violence, as when we were younger we enjoyed inflicting violence. No, no, that was for Jolicco, that’s just a joke.

Butch Dalisay: "One of the things I admire about The Firewalkers and this new novel you just read from is the fact that your work is suffused with a kind of muscularity – lots of action, it keeps moving and moving, in contrast to the pervasive stillness and quietude in too many works today where you have characters sitting in cafes, chatting with each other, about life in the universe and all that. But you have a lot of physical action. Have you always written like this? Or did you go through a phase of another kind of writing?"

"Hemingway was the teacher, although when we were younger we did not acknowledge this. It was fashionable to be influenced by Europeans and others. And Mr. Hemingway who was boorish, rough, and had a popularly perceived anti-mind stance – which was not true, of course – was a hero. And so that was how we waned to write. We were interested in physical action in our daily lives. We were athletes, and it was fun. And of course (there was) a fascination for violence, even ritual violence, confrontations and such.

"Maybe, Butch, I was writing for certain friends, like the painter Sonny Yñiguez, who wanted knives drawn. And I also wanted to see knives drawn, at least in my mind. Which is not to say, I think, that ideas, in the abstract, are not as voluptuous as physical things. Yes, they are voluptuous,. With a brightly conceived idea, spoken in a way – the impact is sexual.

"Every particle in the universe attracts every other particle. Wow! Di ba? I mean, Butch, if I had ideas like that, then maybe the physical stuff would not be as rich. But in the absence of such intellectual power, then shotguns work."

Amelia Lapeña Bnifacio: "With seven chapters, of one hundred pages each, how much more of the novel do you have to go?"

"I work with a computer. Every six months or so, I print out the whole caboodle. I make a hardcopy, and I go around my house, saying, ‘Doce kilos de Mama!’ (laughter)

"I don’t know if this also happens to other writers... The world overtakes the situation, and suddenly I have to examine another phenomenon. Franz Arcellana used to say, that when he was writing short stories, he would get so tired of the goddammed thing that he’d send it off, just to get rid of it.

"I want to do that. The story is formed, the story is complete, the story has an ending. And if I may say so, it’s nice, a rather nice ending. It has everything. But there are things inside that are not quite...

"John Ciardi talked about Dante, ano, the planning, the preparation, wow, magnificent! Which means a piece of work is like this, pinlano, pinlano, maganda, Dante, wow, magnificent!

"But of course there is also sheer joy of – as with Cape Engaño – in Hemingway’s phrase, ‘to sail by the light of Havana...’ There is a destination, there is a halo of a place called... whatever. The night is dark. You row your boat. There is rain, there is water, all the elements of the weather, there is the condition of the boat, there is yourself, how much food and things. And then you sail. When you’re going to reach there, I do not know, I do not know. I have no idea.

"The end is there. We used to have a drinking game, Cesar Aquino, Willie Sanchez and myself. This was how we played it. We would say the ending of a story, and the drinking session is making up the story.

"It is not the story itself that is difficult now. It is something else. It is missing out on nuance, on kuwan, on things... or not getting the physical things right, or, anyway... a dissatisfaction. It is terrible. And we all know this.

"There is a joy also, and of course a great frustration, in trying to devise a new way of working that seems to fit the material. Yun yata, yun yata ang kuwan." (Laughs like a maniac.)