April 21, 1998

Octavio Paz, Mexico's Literary Giant, Dead at 84

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Related Articles

An Octavio Paz Sampler

Octavio Paz, Mexican Poet, Wins Nobel Prize (October 12, 1990)

The New York Times on the Web: Books

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By JONATHAN KANDELL

ctavio Paz, Mexico's premier poet and essayist and one of the towering men of letters in the second half of this century, died on Sunday at a temporary residence in Mexico City. He was 84.

Mexican President Ernesto Zedillo announced the death on Monday as he was returning from the Summit of the Americas in Chile. "This is an irreplaceable loss for contemporary thought and culture -- not just for Latin America but for the entire world," Zedillo was quoted as saying by the government news agency Notimex.

Zedillo did not give a cause of death or say when Paz died. Last year, Paz said that he was suffering from a disease that was "long and wretched," but did not elaborate.

Paz's writings ranged far beyond his native land in their subject matter and reflected the cultural influences of his many years abroad. His output was prolific -- more than 40 volumes of poetry and essays, many translated into dozens of languages.

In awarding him the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990, the Swedish Academy of Letters hailed Paz for "impassioned writing with wide horizons, characterized by sensuous intelligence and humanistic integrity." The academy also quoted one of Paz's poems as his literary credo:

Between what I see and what I say
Between what I say and what I keep silent
Between what I keep silent and what I dream
Between what I dream and what I forget:
Poetry.

"He is one of the greatest poets that the Spanish-language world has produced," said the Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa, himself a perennial Nobel candidate. Helen Vendler, professor of English at Harvard, said Paz's "ecstatic and fluid Spanish gave Hispanic poetry a new and transfigured dimension."

Yet Paz was probably even more widely read as an essayist. "The Labyrinth of Solitude," his classic 1950 exploration of the formative influences on Mexican character, became a rite of passage into the world of intellect for his compatriots and required reading for anybody interested in Mexico.

The author and scholar Roberto Gonzalez Echevarria, observed: "As an essayist Paz has taken the role Jose Ortega y Gasset played earlier; he has been a translator in the broadest and profoundest sense. He has made the leading artistic and ideological trends in the world intelligible and relevant to Hispanic culture. And he has fashioned a Spanish capable of speaking the discourse of modernity; even when those of us who write in Spanish disagree with Paz, we must do so it in the language he has given us."

In Latin America, artists, writers and intellectuals are often called on to act as political arbiters, lending legitimacy to governments or credibility to their opponents. Paz willingly entered the fray. A short, handsome man with piercing eyes and a thick mane of hair, he gained renown and disapproval for his centrist, sometimes conservative political views, which often sailed against the left-wing tide of his fellow Latin American intellectuals.

Octavio Paz was born in Mexico City on March 31, 1914, the son of a lawyer whose ancestors were partly Indian and a mother whose parents had emigrated from Spain. His paternal grandfather was a journalist and novelist who fought with the patriot Benito Juarez against the French occupation of Mexico in the 1860s. His father was a veteran of the Mexican Revolution of 1910 who went into exile to represent the peasant guerrilla leader Emiliano Zapata in the United States.

Growing up in an outlying neighborhood of Mexico City, Paz once described his family's descent into genteel poverty after the revolution: "The house gradually crumbled around us. We had to abandon one room after another because the roofs and walls kept falling down." Sitting around the dining table, young Octavio listened to his elders talk about the war against the French and the revolution, a scene which he vividly captured in his poem, "Interruptions From the West":

My grandfather, taking his coffee,
would talk to me about Juarez and Porfirio,
the Zouaves and the Silver Band.
And the tablecloth smelled of gunpowder.

My father, taking his drink,
would talk to me about Zapata and Villa,
Soto y Gama and the brothers Flores Magn.
And the tablecloth smelled of gunpowder.

I kept quiet:
who was there for me to talk about?

Young Paz often withdrew to his grandfather's library -- "an enchanted cave," he called it -- and immersed himself in fiction from abroad: "We were shipwrecked with Sinbad and with Robinson Crusoe, we fought with D'Artagnan, we took Valencia with the Cid." The literature and news from foreign places instilled a feeling -- so common among third-world intellectuals earlier in this century -- that he was living on the margins of history. "For us Spanish-Americans, the present was not in our own countries: it was the time lived by others -- by the English, the French, the Germans," he recalled in his 1990 Nobel lecture. "It was the time of New York, Paris, London. We had to go and look for it and bring it back home."

But first, he struggled to establish himself as a poet and social critic in Mexico. By the age of 19, he had published his first volume of poetry, "Luna silvestre" (Sylvan Moon). Quitting the National University of Mexico after deciding against a career in law, he founded two short-lived magazines for writers and intellectuals. Then, in 1937, he went off to Spain, working for the Republicans as a propagandist in the civil war begun by the Fascists. With the Republican army crumbling before Gen. Francisco Franco, he moved briefly to Paris. Before the 1930s ended, he was back in Mexico, where in quick succession he edited two literary magazines while continuing to write poetry and essays.

For a while Paz eked out a living as a minor employee in the National Archives and as a bank clerk. Then, beginning in 1945, he embarked on a 23-year career in the diplomatic service, a path favored by many Latin American intellectuals who sought to live abroad and support their writing. "If I had stayed in Mexico, I probably would have drowned in journalism, bureaucracy or alcohol," Paz explained.

As consul and ambassador, he lived in San Francisco, New York, Paris, Tokyo and New Delhi. "My ambassadorial work was not arduous," he said. "I explored new poetic worlds, knew other countries, lived other sentiments, had other ideas."

Everywhere, his appetite for literature was insatiable. In the United States, he devoured Walt Whitman, Hart Crane, William Carlos Williams, Ezra Pound; in Europe, T.S. Eliot, Federico Garcia Lorca, the French symbolists and surrealists; in India, the Ramayana, the Upanishads and the Bhagavad Gita; and in Japan, the haiku poets. They all exerted influences on the content, esthetics and structure of his poetry.

"I learned precision of language from Japanese poetry," said Paz, citing one example. "We Latin people sometimes wax eloquent in our writing, but the Japanese teach us economy -- not to waste words."

His long poem, "A Draft of Shadows," included the following haiku-like lines:

Like drizzle on embers,
footsteps within me step
toward places that turn to air,
and the sun razes the places as they dawn,
hesitantly, on this page.

Similarly, he found himself drawn to the French surrealists following his experiences in the Spanish civil war and incorporated their spirit into his poetry. "Surrealism was not merely an esthetic, poetic and philosophical doctrine," he once told an interviewer. "It was a vital attitude. A negation of the contemporary world and at the same time an attempt to substitute other values for those of democratic bourgeois society: eroticism, poetry, imagination, liberty, spiritual adventure, vision."

Despite his long sojourns abroad, Paz never turned his back on Mexico. Indeed his most renowned works -- "The Labyrinth of Solitude" and the epic poem "Sunstone" -- demonstrate his fierce passion for his native land. "The temples and gods of pre-Columbian Mexico may be a pile of ruins," he said in his Nobel address. "But the spirit that breathed life into that world has not disappeared. It speaks to us in the hermetic language of myth and legend, in forms of social coexistence, in popular art, in customs. Being a Mexican writer means listening to the voice of that present -- that presence."

But his life and studies abroad and his restless intellect impelled him to range far afield in his writings. Besides incorporating the myths and history of Mexico, his poetry could embrace Western existentialism and romanticism, Eastern Zen and Hinduism -- and sometimes, several of these currents simultaneously. For example, he claimed one of his poems was inspired by both the vertical scrolls of an Indian Tantric painting and the verses of the French symbolist poet Mallarme.

In his essays, Paz displayed such confidence in his erudition that there was seemingly no subject he hesitated to tackle -- archeology, music, art, philosophy, politics, religion. With humor and gusto, he could turn the most arcane incidents into a platform for the broadest discourse. For instance, a report on New Guinea aborigines fleeing in horror at a recording of an Edith Piaf song was the spark for a Paz essay, "Edith Piaf Among the Pygmies," on the difficulty of journeying between cultures.

Gonzalez Echevarria, a professor of Spanish at Yale University, reviewing "The Collected Poems of Octavio Paz" and "Convergences," essays in art and literature, in The New York Times Book Review in 1988 said, "Mr. Paz is a vestige, an homme de lettres alive to all that is happening around him, willing to incorporate everything into his meditation, convinced that his perspective as a literate, nonspecialized observer is one worthy to be taken into account not only by intellectuals but by the public at large."

But Paz's opinions could grate on writers who felt he was treading too nonchalantly on their fields of expertise. In a 1993 review for The Times Book Review of Paz's "Essays on Mexican Art," Hayden Herrera, the biographer of Frida Kahlo, upbraided him: ""While Mr. Paz admires the authenticity of Kahlo's self-portraits, he is, like many men of his generation, somewhat appalled by them. To him, her display of surgical and psychological wounds is 'self-gratification in bathos.' Her narcissism is tiresome: 'I feel that I am before a complaint,' he complains, 'not before a work of art."' According to Ms. Herrera, Paz as an art critic was trading on his eminence as a poet, relying "on the reader's willingness to meet him halfway."

At other times, though, Paz could display a mastery of subjects that could impress even the specialists. His 1982 book on the 17th-century Mexican poet and nun, Sor Juana Inez de la Cruz, titled "Sor Juana, or the Traps of Faith," was hailed as a major literary biography and study of colonial culture.

Paz also displayed exquisite timing. After long denying their legacy from Spain, Mexicans were just beginning to rekindle their interest in the colonial era. And Sor Juana also proved to be a historical heroine that the Mexican feminist movement needed.

Throughout his life, Paz relished his role as political gadfly to his left-leaning fellow Latin American intellectuals. "My sin is that I criticize socialism ... from a socialist point of view," he told Alan Riding of The New York Times in a 1983 interview. "Intellectuals have a semireligious attitude, so it's difficult for them to criticize their own religion. Therefore, they hate me as they would a heretic. If they could, they'd send me to the stake."

Even as an unknown writer in his early 20s, Paz crossed political swords with Pablo Neruda, the great Chilean poet who was lionized by younger authors and artists throughout Latin America. It was with Neruda's encouragement that he traveled to Europe in the late 1930s intending to side with the Republicans in the Spanish civil war. And when he moved to Paris when the Loyalist cause was lost, it was with Neruda's help that he met many leading European intellectuals, almost all of them Marxists.

"Neruda became more and more Stalinist, while I became less and less enchanted with Stalin," Paz once recalled. "Finally we fought -- almost physically -- and stopped speaking to each other. He wrote some not terribly nice things about me, including one nasty poem. I wrote some awful things about him."

A truce came only in the 1960s, with an exchange of books between the two men. Neruda died a few years later. "It was sad, but the possibility to be friends again with a man I liked and admired so very much was one of the best things that has ever happened to me."

Paz's career was marked by plenty of other quarrels with his peers. The publication in 1950 of his non-fiction masterpiece, "The Labyrinth of Solitude" -- acclaimed as "a central text of our time" by the critic Irving Howe -- aroused the ire of many of his compatriots. An exploration of national character, it portrayed Mexicans as a people wounded and confused by centuries of bitter divisions between Indian and Spanish cultures, radical atheism and religious fanaticism, revolutionary idealism and official corruption, machismo and mother worship.

Because of these traumas, Paz asserted, Mexicans protected themselves by hiding behind masks and withdrawing into a labyrinth of solitude: "The Mexican can bend, can bow humbly, can even stoop, but he cannot back down, that is, he cannot allow the outside world to penetrate his privacy."

The book initially affronted not only government officials, who asserted that the 1910 revolution had set the country on a path of social justice and prosperity, but also many Mexicans who held a more joyful, exuberant image of themselves.

Forty years after the publication of "The Labyrinth of Solitude," Paz observed, "I had broken with the predominant esthetic, moral and political ideas and was instantly attacked by many people who were all too sure of their dogmas and prejudices. Now I see those quarrels as a blessing: if a writer is accepted, he'll soon be rejected or forgotten. I didn't set out to be a troublesome writer, but if that's what I've been, I am totally unrepentant."

Paz's criticisms of Mexican society were soon embraced by a new generation of intellectuals. Beginning in the 1950s, Carlos Fuentes unfurled an even more caustic vision of post-revolutionary Mexico in such novels as "Where the Air Is Clear" and "The Death of Artemio Cruz." Then, in 1968, the massacre of anti-government demonstrators, most of them students, in Mexico City by army troops ripped away the facade of benevolent democracy disguising the country's authoritarian government -- one of the many "Mexican masks" that Paz described in "The Labyrinth of Solitude."

Paz, who at the time was Mexico's ambassador to India, resigned his post in protest and joined other Mexican intellectuals in denouncing the government. A year later, he wrote "Critique of the Pyramid," a slim book of essays in which he asserted that Mexico's development was paralyzed by institutions created by the revered 1910 revolution and that the only way for the country to resolve the political and historical crisis precipitated by the 1968 massacre was to wholeheartedly embrace democracy.

But for most dissidents, whose icons were Fidel Castro and Che Guevara, such notions smacked of tepid, bourgeois reformism. "My point of view put me in opposition simultaneously to the government and the left," said Paz. "The 'progressive' intellectuals, almost all of whom wanted to establish a totalitarian socialist regime, attacked me vehemently."

Paz's outspoken criticism of Cuba's brand of socialism placed him increasingly at odds with his colleagues. It led to a prolonged, sometimes acrid feud between him and the more left-leaning Fuentes -- no doubt fanned also by their rivalry as Mexico's leading writers and candidates for the Nobel Prize. Their opposing views often surfaced in the intellectual magazines they helped edit -- Vuelta, where Paz held sway, and Nexos, where Fuentes exerted strong influence.

In a conciliatory gesture at a testimonial dinner for Paz's 70th birthday in 1984, Fuentes hailed him for having "changed forever the face of Mexican literature," and asserted that despite their disagreements "there is more that unites us than separates us."

But the bickering continued, and at times could make both literary giants seem petty. When Fuentes organized an international conference of artists and intellectuals in Mexico City in 1992, he neglected to invite Paz until the last minute, provoking the poet-essayist to denounce the novelist's behavior as "immoral" and "scandalous."

In recent years, Paz was severely criticized for his friendship with President Carlos Salinas de Gortari and his support for Salinas's pro-business reforms. Paz also antagonized Mexico's left wing by strongly backing the 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement, which was intended to liberalize trade and investment between his country, the United States and Canada.

But the following year Mexico plunged into economic crisis, and Salinas went into self-imposed exile, tainted by political and financial scandals.

While Paz seemed to have grown too politically conservative for many Mexican intellectuals, he could also articulate their concerns and complaints in phrases memorable enough to make them wish he was on their side.

On the chasm separating Americans and Mexicans, for example, he had this to say in a 1979 article in The New Yorker: "In general, Americans have not looked for Mexico in Mexico; they have looked for their obsessions, enthusiasms, phobias, hopes, interests -- and these are what they have found. In short, the history of our relationship is the history of a mutual and stubborn deceit..."

In a 1992 New York Times article, the same man who scorned socialist censorship also took capitalism to task: "The market, blind and deaf, is not fond of literature or of risk, and it does not know how to choose. Its censorship is not ideological: it has no ideas. It knows all about prices but nothing about values."

And in a 1994 interview in New Perspectives Quarterly, Paz asserted that Mexico was "condemned to modernize" its economy and society: "I say condemned because seeing the United States, Europe and Japan I think modernization is not a benediction. It is a kind of air-conditioned hell."

In a rare public appearance last year, Paz was honored during the inauguration of the Octavio Paz Foundation, a former government building that will be used as a center for studying the arts, including his works. He showed up at the ceremony slumped in a wheelchair, unshaven and looking weak. But he ignored a three-page prepared text to speak extemporaneously for 20 minutes, praising President Zedillo and others and citing great poets.

Paz had a daughter, Helena, from his first marriage, which ended in divorce. He lived the last two decades of his life in an apartment in the heart of Mexico City, with his second wife, Marie-Jose Tramini, whom he wed in 1964. They both survive him.

His routine was to write during the late morning into the afternoon, using a pen instead of a computer or typewriter. "Writing is a curse," he said. "The worst part of it is the anguish that precedes the act of writing -- the hours, days, or months when we search in vain for the phrase that turns the spigot that makes the water flow. Once that first phrase is written, everything changes: the process is enthralling, vital and enriching, no matter what the final result is. Writing is a blessing!"

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Other Places of Interest on The Web

The Official Website of the Nobel Foundation: A Biography of Octavio Paz and the Text of His Nobel Lecture

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