Category: elmer ordonez

Carlos Bulosan on writers after the war

By Elmer Ordonez

Retrieved from my chaotic files is a copy of Carlos Bulosan’s typewritten notes (five pages) on Filipino writers after the war. It was sent years ago by Prof. Epifanio “Sonny” San Juan (the leading authority on expatriate writer Carlos Bulosan) who had done assiduous research on the Bulosan papers at the University of Washington library.

Bulosan died of tuberculosis Seattle in September 1926. The accolades for Bulosan were marred by the comments of two Chronicle columnists who dismissed Bulosan as a plagiarist and therefore worthless as a writer. The plagiarism charge diminished somewhat Bulosan’s stature diminished somewhat and was neglected by the literary community caught up with New Criticism and the Cold War.

A group of us (Frankie Sionil Jose, Alejandrino G. Hufana, B. Burce Bunao, and myself) put out Comment to foster nationalist consciousness against what Leopoldo Yabes called conformism and the fear of ideas as a result of the McCarthyite witchhunt in the country. Prof. Dolores Stephens Feria had an article on Bulosan, her close friend in Los Angeles. Unfortunately I no longer have the 2nd issue of Comment (1957) which has Feria’s essay. In 1960 Prof. Feria, published in the Diliman Review, her collection of letters from Bulosan titled Sound of Falling Light. Thereafter Bulosan would became a literary icon during the radical 60s to the present for his progressive writings and union organizing in the West Coast.

As for the plagiarism charge, Sonny San Juan said this involved Bulosan’s story “ The End of the War” in a New Yorker issue (1944)—a case that was settled our of court. He said he compared the two texts and noted only some similarities in plot— no outright lifting of lines or passages. The critic said Shakespeare did adopt whole stories/plots from other literary works. Any graduate student in English would know the bard’s sources—like Ovid’s Metamorphoses, The Mirror for Magistrates, and Plutarch’s Lives.

In the 90s Prof. Edilberto Tiempo gave a lecture in UP Diliman denigrating the literary work of Bulosan by using formalist criteria– which received no small amount of disagreement from the audience.

I asked good friend Ed Tiempo afterward why he did it. With an impish grin, he replied, “because I know you guys in UP like Bulosan.” I first met him in August 1970 when both of us read papers in a conference on American literature in Srinagar, Kashmir. His paper was on New Criticism, mine was on impressionist writers James and Faulkner. I invited him to the UP Writers workshop in Cebu the following year. He said he would in turn invite me to his Silliman workshop. Martial law intervened.

Clearly leftist Bulosan was not Ed Tiempo’s cup of tea. He called Bulosan’s work a “failure of sensibility.” He also faulted Manuel Arguilla for switching point of view in his proletarian story “Caps and Lower Case” but otherwise admired “Midsummer” at the Cebu workshop—dwelling at length on the “papayas in bloom” in the idyllic story.

Bulosan’s Notes on the Foreword of Philippine Prose and Poetry, Volume Four, were written for Prof. Yabes although Bulosan wrote about the UP scholar: “Leopoldo Y.Yabes. Ilocano. He wrote several articles about me . . . Probably the best critic and historian, besides being a Marxist. He is also a linguist. Like Laya, he studied languages by himself. (Yabes) translated The Laughter of my Father into Ilocano.” Yabes and Bulosan were co-editors of the original manuscript of Philippine Short Stories (1925 -1940 that they tried to get published in the US in the late 40s. The UP Press published it in 1975, followed by two more volumes covering post-war stories.

In Bulosan’s Notes NVM Gonzalez was: “Probably one of the most versatile. Saw him in SF when he was sent to the US on a scholarship after the war.” NVM on his return in 1950 joined the English department in UP Diliman and introduced the concept of a writers workshop, with craft as its primary concern.

On the authors of the fourth volume of Philippine Prose and Poetry (PPP) published in the early 50, he said his notes were “to better understand Philippine writing today in English and my place among contemporaries . . . Contributors are all college grads except—who?” Bulosan was just a high school graduate citing Manuel A. Viray, Maximo Ramos, and Juan C. Laya as having gone to the same school as he did in Lingayen.

Bulosan recalls the 1939 visit of Fred Mangahas and Salvador P. Lopez in Los Angeles. He acknowledges his debt to Mangahas who as literary editor of the Herald Magazine gave him a page every Sunday, his poetry, stories and letters. “God, how I wrote and wrote in those days!” They met again after the war, with Fred as a Palace official; SP Lopez (“very brilliant”) as alternate (to Carlos P. Romulo) permanent delegate to the United Nations.

Of the writers who later became National Artists, he recalled Jose Garcia Villa who “never recognized my talents”; NVM Gonzalez, “probably one of the most versatile”; Carlos Quirino, “tall, suave, handsome”; Nick Joaquin, “probably the most intense writer in the islands . . . Tolstoi type.”

Bulosan met Bienvenido Santos in Washington, DC, during the war and worked in the same office. He also remembered Juan Collas, “the first to write about me in the Philippines way back in 1937 when my first group of poems appeared in Poetry, Chicago, entitled “The Unknown Quantity.”

He remembered Arturo B. Rotor (a wartime Cabinet member of Quezon) who “wrote Quezon’s autobiography” presumably The Good Fight; Stevan Javellana who had probably written the best novel (Without Seeing the Dawn) about the Philippines; and Yay Panlilio, an intrepid woman reporter who became a Marking guerrilla leader. (To be continued)

Literature (art) and propaganda

The writers workshop method was imported from abroad by NVM Gonzalez and the Tiempos whose workshops continue to train our writers in the formalist manner. Generations of students fell under the spell of this pedagogy and a few of them, now grey-haired, are the ones quick to tag as propaganda works with varying degrees of advocacy. 

By Elmer Ordonez

The PEN forum on what I thought would be literature and propaganda proceeded on a false start.

The invitation I got said the subject was literature (art) and propaganda. It turned out the other panelists received invitations to speak on “the uses of literature.”

When speaker after speaker spoke on such a broad topic I thought I was in the wrong forum. But moderator Bien Lumbera began his introductory remarks that in the early days oral literature was used to instruct the young on the moral values of the community. He then made a leap in time and alluded to propaganda as “falling into disrepute” in the 50s. He cited this as a result of the Cold War, the conflict between the Soviet Union and the United States.

On the topic “the uses of lite-rature,” poet Gemino Abad cited his classic comment that without “language (or literature), we have no memory, no history, no culture, no civilization. But a people is only as strong as their memory.”

Another mentioned social realism but did not speak on it at length, and I remember that was what we discussed at the launching of Rony V. Diaz’s three part novel Canticles for Three Women – and comparing it with Jose Rizal’s novels, that were written during the Propaganda Movement, the prelude to armed rebellion waged by the Katipunan. Literature then was unabashedly propaganda but the term did not carry the stigma attached to it by art for art’s sake proponents and Cold Warriors in later years.

Jun Cruz Reyes ventured that all literature is propaganda. In fact, what imaginative literature has in common with outright propaganda is the appeal to emotion not to intellect. I was told that in the UP English department which taught literature for decades using formalist textbooks propaganda is no longer used as a tag for literary work with some kind of advocacy.

Corollary to Jun’s statement would be—no literature is ideology free. And this seems to be generally accepted..

We may well be beating a dead horse – the issue between literature and propaganda, which I earlier called “popular but banal.”

Mila Carreon Laurel of UP gave a periodization of lite-rature in the country, which with my emendations, started with the Propaganda Movement with the works of Rizal and the Solidaridad, the early decade of American Occupation with the “seditious playwrights” and Lope K. Santos’ Banaag at Sikat and early class conscious litera-ture, writing in both armed (e.g. Sakdal) and parliamentary struggles for independence, the proletarian trend pursued by the Philippine Writers League in the 30s, the formalist tendencies of the late 40s and 50s, the resuscitation of nationalist literature during the 60s, and the influence of Mao’s Talks at the Yenan forum on art and literature on national democ-ratic writers during the First Quarter Storm and martial law under which flourished under-ground literature.

Here was a literary and historical situation where indeed art and literature for art’s sake became totally irrelevant. When one professor of English said at a conference that the formalist approach was “non-negotiable” she sounded anachronistic. The professor was among the last survivors of the critical pedagogy developed by John Crowe Ransom, the father of New Criticism, in the early forties.

The Cold War at its height in the 50s saw the use of English text books written under the tenets of New Criticism. As a beginning instructor in the 50s I had to use the prescribed Approach to Literature by Cleanth Brooks, James Purser, and Robert Penn Warren, all New Critics. The writers workshop method was imported from abroad by NVM Gonzalez and the Tiempos whose workshops continue to train our writers in the formalist manner. Generations of students fell under the spell of this pedagogy and a few of them, now grey-haired, are the ones quick to tag as propaganda works with varying degrees of advocacy. During the 50s the literature produced by the left were invariably labeled propaganda by academics. The “free world” writers themselves like Ayn Rand and the disaffected ones in The God That Failed volume or Congress for Cultural Freedom were no slouches in the uses of propaganda.

Nowadays writers are urged to use their talents to combat environmental degradation (as in the last Philippine Pen conference on climate change), corruption in government, human rights abuses and extrajudicial killings. It is not enough for writers to bear witness; they are invited to take social or political action, write or sign petitions, join demonstrations, and even man barricades.

No more will writers just bask under the glory of prizes won in literary contests. Historically writers have given up their lives like Rizal (against Spanish tyranny), Andres Bonifacio (for independence), Manuel Arguilla (against Japanese fascism), Lorena Barros (for national democracy), or they have sacrificed their individual freedoms as did national democratic writers like Jose Maria Sison, Pete Lacaba, Bien Lumbera, Boni Ilagan, Petronilo Daroy, Luis Teodoro, Ed Maranan, Alan Jazmines, Mila Aguilar, and many others.

Hence, propaganda in its USIS and Cold War sense or formalist meaning should be laid to rest. Let it be used rather in the sense of the Propaganda Movement or the continuing people’s struggles for a safe and healthy environment, peace and social justice, freedom and sovereignty.

A memorable decade: Writers before the war

A book burning incident occurred sometime in the early 40s when younger writers led by Alejandro Abadilla and Teodoro Agoncillo cast into a bonfire the works of the so-called traditional and balagtasan writers. This was unfortunately reminiscent of the book burnings in the fascist world where books of Communist or Jewish writers like Thomas Mann were consigned to the flames. 

By Elmer Ordonez

The thirties may well be my favorite decade. Born at the start of the Depression, I began to be fully aware of the world around me when the family moved to a house in Paco in 1933 prior to my schooling in 1935. I remember my mother telling me in a calesa in Bustillos about the presence of “Sakdalistas” in the Sampaloc plaza. In 1936 I began to follow on radio and the Tribune the outbreak of the “guerra civil” in Spain. There were also heard marching songs of the Falangistas. At San Marcelino Church I saw young mestizos in uniform in formation and giving the fascist salute. I would read later in Renato Constantino’s histories about the parades of “Franquistas” in Manila joined in by students and faculty of elite Catholic schools. By late 30s I was primed for the outbreak of the war in Europe and local preparations for the Pacific war like the building of air raid shelters (models shown in UP Padre Faura, and the practice blackouts (mentioned in NVM Gonzalez’s The Winds of April).

Maybe: Incidentally, The Satire of Fedrico Mangahas, ed. by Ruby Kelly Mangahas and James Allen’s The Radical Left on the Eve of the War rekindled my long-standing interest about a historic decade.

Another book Komunista (Ateneo University Press, 2011) by Jim Richardson has provided more context to the period – particularly the involvement of writers and intellectuals in what was essentially a working class enterprise.

Writers who figured in the first half of the 30s were founders and early members of the UP Writers Club (1927)—Fred Mangahas, Jose Garcia Villa, Gabriel Tuason whom I have always believed tried to humor their foreign advisers with the avowed purpose of the club which is “to elevate the English language to the highest pedestal.” Shortly after, Fred Mangahas began his satirical columns in the Tribune. Salvador P. Lopez, Jose Lansang, and Arturo B. Rotor followed the steps of Mangahas and Villa in establishing themselves in the literary community. Villa left in 1929 for New Mexico to make a name as a poet in the United States but at the same time influenced Filipino writers by sending his annual “honor” and “dishonor” rolls of stories and poems to the Manila press.

In 1936 James Allen arrived in Manila he made a note about the young writers whom he found problematical. He cited one who wrote a story satirizing the intellectuals who visited Central Luzon for a solidarity meeting with the workers and peasants. Interestingly Manuel Arguilla’s “The Socialists” has always been considered part of the proletarian writing during the Commonwealth. Allen’s reading of the story may well be different. Arguilla went on to write more stories “Epilogue to Revolt” and “Caps and Lower Case” for a volume titled How My Brother Leon Brought Home a Wife and other stories which won the first prize (in short fiction) in the Commonwealth Literary Contest.

The “young” writers at the second half of the decade would constitute the Veronicans led by Francisco Arcellana some of whom pursued the “art for art’s sake” doctrine of Villa as against the “literature with social content” of the Philippine Writers League whose prime movers were Villa’s colleagues Mangahas, Lopez, Lansang and Rotor.

A parallel but not similar conflict was seen in the Tagalog writers community. A book burning incident occurred sometime in the early 40s when younger writers led by Alejandro Abadilla and Teodoro Agoncillo cast into a bonfire the works of the so-called traditional and balagtasan writers. This was unfortunately reminiscent of the book burnings in the fascist world where books of Communist or Jewish writers like Thomas Mann were consigned to the flames.

The debate over textual and contextual criticism, balagtasismo and modernism, formalism and historical criticism has persisted to this day in the academe. The more popular but banal issue is called “literature (art) and propaganda.”

On campus, the young writers that would have interested James Allen were Renato Constantino, Angel Baking, Sammy Rodriguez, Juan Quesada and other young intellectuals, mostly from UP, calling themselves the Phylons. Alfredo V. Lagmay and Felixberto Sta. Maria later moved on to become scholars in academe. Allen left the country in 1938 but I wonder if he had occasion to meet them, perhaps in the Ivory Tower café in Malate, run by leftist writer Ma. Gracia de Concepcion, or at the People’s Book Center in Escolta.

As a grade school student I could only feel the vibrations of intellectual ferment and social unrest (especially after reading “We and They” by Hernando Ocampo in my Grade VI class) which would only make full sense after the war—doing research on the Filipino short story in English from 1935 to 1955 and meeting the writers themselves.

A literary clash between Fred Mangahas and a Spanish- tradition bound Nick Joaquin occurred in the pages of Philippine Review (during the Japanese Occupation) with the article of Mangahas critiquing the essay of Joaquin waxing lyrical about the La Naval celebration in chilly October. Otherwise the class struggles and aesthetic concerns of the writers during the 30s were shrouded by what Jamias called “total intellectual blackout.”

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The Role of the Novelist

The post-launch smaller crowd at Solidaridad were all concerned about the fate of the nation in the light of the impeachment trial. … We ventured that the reason why there seems no end to elite rule is that those in power create or reproduce the conditions for their own reproduction or perpetuation considering that they control the coercive and ideological instruments or agencies of the state. Otherwise, as Marx said, they won’t last a year.

By Elmer Ordonez

The top floor of Solidaridad Book Shop built after the war on Padre Faura, Ermita, Manila, is ideal for a book launching because, for one, it can accommodate about 50 people, the usual number attending such an event. More than that can be a tight squeeze in a space accessed only by a steep narrow staircase from the mezzanine used as office. Frankie Sionil Jose has his nook, the “den of iniquity” as he calls it, in the top floor where writers have met –other National Artists like Nick Joaquin and NVM Gonzalez, Philippine PEN members, and visiting literary figures like Mochtar Lubis, Norman Mailer, Wole Soyinka, and Mario Vargas Llosa, to name a few.

Once, Frankie invited the leading figures of the Partido Komunista ng Pilipinas (PKP) in a seminar on the Huk rebellion. After a heated and recriminatory discussion Frankie concluded that egos must have gotten in the way of the revolution. Frankie’s Solidarity (now defunct) published the proceedings of the meeting . Other radicals and armchair revolutionaries have met in the same venue; hence, Frankie likes to call the top floor of his book shop a den of conspiracy and lost causes.

(Actually Solidaridad Book Shop is the best stocked bookstore in town catering to the intelligentsia since the early 60s. No pulp fiction or romance pocketbooks here. Just good literature and scholarly work.)

It is in this historic setting that Rony V. Diaz’s novel Canticles for Three Women was launched last Saturday. The discussion focused on why the country, ruled by the elites, cannot break the impasse of poverty, hunger and official corruption. Rony’s novel seeks to show the rot in our society –as Jose Rizal’s novels did to expose the social cancer of friar-dominated Philippines.

“I am no Rizal,” Diaz said when it was noted that Rizal’s novels triggered the 1896 Revolution. He said that his aesthetics prevent him from making a case for armed revolution – though he mentioned the activities of the Huks and other armed groups.

I pointed out that Rizal, with his knowledge of revolutionary practice limited to anarchist socialism in Europe tried to create an anarchist character in Simoun but who failed in his plot to destroy the social and political elite under one roof by a bomb planted in an overhead lamp. It takes conscience-stricken Isagani, seen as Rizal’s persona because of his reformist ideas, to throw the lamp with the bomb into the river just in time. The dying Simoun’s jewels left in the care of Father Florentino who also reflects Rizal’s reformist prescription of education for social change, are cast by the Filipino priest into the Pacific Ocean – praying that they be retrieved and used by those pure in heart for the benefit of the oppressed people.

The banned Rizal’s novels which were circulated surreptitiously by ilustrados (like Jose Ma. Basa) nfluenced those who would lead the armed uprising in the 1890s, a time when the Propaganda movement was at its height here and abroad. The friars were of course furious and had Rizal on his return from abroad arrested and deported to Dapitan. Thus, the birth of the Katipunan led by Andres Bonifacio. .

A writer for a business paper asked, “after Rizal’s novels, what?” There were of course the “seditious plays” of Aurelio Tolentino et al at century’s end, the socialistic novels of Lope K. Santos and Faustino Aguilar, the incendiary Sakdal and PKP tracts, proletarian writings in the 30s, Amado Hernandez’s anti-imperialist novel Mga Ibong Mandaragit, and underground or resistance literature (produced mainly by national democratic writers up to the present).

Fiction in English has not seen any novels approaching the subversive quality of Rizal’s until Frankie Sionil Jose’s anti-oligarchic novels particularly Mass where the principal character joins the underground, Sin where the mestizo elites are excoriated by the author, and The Feet of Juan Bacnang where the malevolent characters are shown to be recognizable contemporary politicians — like the actual persons in society portrayed or caricatured in Diaz’ Canticles for Three Women. Otherwise many novels in English seem to have been written for literary contests like Palanca and Asia Man.

The post-launch smaller crowd at Solidaridad were all concerned about the fate of the nation in the light of the impeachment trial. A lawyer in the defense secretariat was asked to sit with them. A witch hunt, the pro-Corona lawyer promptly said. The discussion turned out to be a replay of arguments for or against the chief justice.

So we ventured that the trial was an instance of the conflict of two rival factions of the elite and that these factions would ultimately come to terms and reconcile common interests. In his closing argument, the chief defense counsel hoped that the trial whatever its resolution would lead to national unity, i.e. the consolidation of the ruling classes..

We also ventured that the reason why there seems no end to elite rule is that those in power create or reproduce the conditions for their own reproduction or perpetuation considering that they control the coercive and ideological instruments or agencies of the state. Otherwise, as Marx said, they won’t last a year.

It is indeed a tall order for those below and the concerned middle class represented in Frankie’s den last Saturday to upset this order of things, and as the novelist said his aesthetics can go only so far –describing the state of society. That’s what Rizal’s first novel Noli did in the first place.