Through my dark glasses
This must be one of the hardest things, having to write the introduction to this collection of column pieces, book introductions, essays and speeches, interviews, written and spoken during a lifetime devoted to the word and whatever its ramifications. Before the year he died in 2002, a book of his essential writings edited by Bert Florentino and published by the De La Salle University Press came out barely seeing the light of day.
It feels strange of course, reading through his columns that appeared in 1949, a significant period of our history that saw the country rebuilding after the war. It might be called literary criticism of the first water, for the most part constructive, and the intramurals and tampuhan between artists and writers are chronicled faithfully, without benefit of the occasional, perhaps necessary footnote. But no matter, the blanks must stay as they are, a blind spot of a literary past, though the wealth of information and insight the columns themselves present is incalculable and not to be underestimated.
There are somewhat familiar names, mostly of dead men and women, who nonetheless were harbingers of a nascent literary movement for whom English was a second language, but in which same language — it would not be too farfetched to speculate — they also dreamed in. To wit: the dancing genius Manuel Arguilla martyred by the Japanese, Arcellana’s quarrels with Manuel Viray and Leopoldo Yabes, who in later years would become old friends in a twilight of old men, mention of the muse Estrella Alfon, the doctor Arturo Rotor, the Davao writer-editor Gerry Sicam, the Tiempos of Dumaguete and the fledgling journal Sands and Coral featuring a promising young writer Reuben Canoy, and St. Nick Joaquin surfacing every once in a while like the kumpare that he is, names and faces familiar and maybe hovering in the subconscious of childhood. The columns written in ’49 (street number of the ancestral house in UP Village) were under the title “Through a Glass, Darkly,” and 62 years later they still reveal a brightness hovering.
Other column samples are titled “Art & Life” and “Memo Pad” for Herald Midweek Magazine and Philippine Collegian respectively, the former written just before the Pacific War and the latter in the early ’60s.
Funny but they don’t write columns like these anymore. After having read through this book, somehow what struck me was the problem or is it dilemma of Philippine journalism today: there are too many columnists, and too few writers, that is, real writers who will live and die by the written word, as opposed to mere rumor mongers. No more small beers nor through glasses darkly, just an assembly line of commentaries written through dark glasses with a glass of stale beer by the side. Sorry, but theirs was another time, which perhaps we need to be reminded of to be able to survive the age of hacks.
The essays and speeches are, as they call it, sui generis, and regard highly the oral tradition of writing, proof further of Arcellana’s remark when asked why he seldom wrote or was rarely putting out to publish: “I disappeared into the classroom.” Now any amount of misguided romance can be read into that statement, but it’s true as far as can be gleaned from the groves of academe, Diliman side, and his commencement address to students graduating in 1989 with a generous narration by the poet Carolyn Forche echoes as if delivered again in the campus grounds at dusk, in the biting heat and humidity of another summertime, yet perhaps the same one. Or the speech delivered at St Paul’s College Dumaguete City, titled “The Pride of Fiction” on the occasion of a writers workshop in the late ’60s, who is to say that the words are any less true, the way he quotes the deus ex machina of a writing fellow who finds comfort in playing god to get justice: “I killed him” the young writer explained on why a wayward wall in a story suddenly collapses on the villain.
There’s more, and maybe too many to mention in the span of these dark glasses — the interviews that are a trove of anecdotes and possible apocrypha, down to the last pause and breaking into laughter, yes we can hear him alright loud and clear after all these years, and the book introductions including for the first novel of Krip Yuson, and the first story collection of Butch Dalisay, former students of his who became good friends. Though in spirit and temperament closer are Cesar Ruiz and Erwin Castillo, whose short stories of the new wave the older writer had selected for a PEN anthology in 1962.
Not much more to say except that it is a privilege if not signal honor to do the pasakalye for this, which mother says should have been written 10 years ago. So here it is, hopefully not too little too late.
