N.V.M. Gonzalez redux

National Artist N.V.M. Gonzalez published three novels: The Winds of April, A Season of Grace and The Bamboo Dancers. His collections of short stories include Seven Hills Away; Children of the Ash-Covered Loam; Look, Stranger, on This Island Now; Selected Stories; Mindoro and Beyond and The Bread of Salt. His nonfiction books include Kalutang: A Filipino in the World, The Father and the Maid, Work on the Mountain and The Novel of Justice. Some of these books are still in print, courtesy of the University of the Philippines Press.

This vast body of work examines the Filipinos’ life not just in Mindoro and Manila, but also in “Mother America.” All of it, as one astonished nationalist said, shaking his head in bewilderment, in beautiful English.

In his preface to The Bread of Salt, Professor Gonzalez acknowledged that for Filipinos, English might be an alien language in which to write their fiction. But he defended his choice of language by saying that “an alien language does not fail if it is employed in honest service to the scene, in evocation of landscape and in celebration of people one has known from birth.” He also chided the nationalist, adding, “The whole language issue muddles up the real issue. The language of fiction is not English or Tagalog or any other language. The language of fiction is gesture, action, incident, people’s behavior.”

On the other hand, critics have commented with favor on “a feeling of the vernacular” in the fiction of N.V.M. Gonzalez. A vernacular rhythm to the language conveys a sense of place to the reader. In the Mindoro stories, for instance, the reader knows that the characters, although they speak in English, are speaking in the language of the people of Mindoro.

Richard R. de Guzman, writing on A Season of Grace in The Virginia Quarterly Review, said: “It is in countering the myths in the Philippines’ irretrievably lost native past, of her people’s weakness, of the near-total triumph of the foreign that Gonzalez’s fiction is unique. Such countering is most beautifully realized in A Season of Grace, his masterpiece, and surely one of the four or five most beautiful novels to come out of the Third World.”

N.V.M. Gonzalez taught at the State University after his fellowship grant in the United States. In 1968, he left the Philippines to teach overseas. He was a Visiting Associate Professor of English at the University of Hong Kong and a Leverhulme Fellow at the same university in 1969. For nearly 18 years, he was based at California State University in Hayward, and held visiting professorships at the University of Washington and the University of California Los Angeles. The University of Washington Press published The Bread of Salt and Other Stories to wide acclaim. But all along, he kept his Philippine citizenship.

Professor Gonzalez returned to his homeland to teach at Ateneo de Manila University and the University of the Philippines. Elmer Ordonez, his former student and also a former professor at the State University’s Department of English and Comparative Literature, said: “Along with the American critic Leonard Casper and the Tiempos of Silliman University in Dumaguete City, he helped push formalist criticism in the university. N.V.M. would discuss Henry James and Percy Lubbock in the classroom. One of his students was Andres Cristobal Cruz, who would later join a writers’ workshop in Tagalog by Liwayway Arceo and A.C. Fabian. The workshop was held in Bataan. I think that what Andres Cristobal Cruz learned from N.V.M., he brought over to the writers of Liwayway magazine. So if you’re talking of influences, then that’s one influence he had on other writers.”

Professor Gonzalez had received a harvest of awards for his work. Among them are the 1954 Republic Award for Merit in Literature, the 1960 Republic Cultural Heritage Award, the 1961 Rizal Pro-Patria Award the 1980 Pambansang Alagad ni Balagtas Award from the Writers’ Union of the Philippines, and the 1990 Award for the Arts from the Cultural Center of the Philippines. The greenest laurel leaves were, of course, the National Artist award for Literature given to him by a grateful nation in 1997.

In 1987, UP awarded the college drop-out with a Doctor in Humane Letters for “shaping the Philippine short story and the novel, and making a clearing within the English idiom and tradition on which he established an authentic vocabulary.” He was further cited “for his visions and auguries by which he gave the Filipino sense and sensibility a profound and unmistakable script read and reread throughout the international community.” The State University also named him its first international writer-in-residence; he gave workshops on the novel and the short story at the undergraduate and graduate levels.

Surely, he had legions of admirers, but some critics found his statements then “too reactionary.” In the Age of Postmodernism, he still talked about the diachronic and the synchronic and the books of Mircea Eliade as if they were just discovered a week ago. But to his credit, he applied these theories to the actual task of creative writing. He explained how the critical apparatus could help sharpen one’s fiction and enlarge one’s vision. There were sparks of originality in those insights – something that could not be said of his critics, some of whom mistook critical fashion for thought.

And when he talked to young writers, Professor Gonzalez would say: “Don’t call it he craft of writing. Call it the routine of writing because to say craft is to endow it with a certain mystique. There is no mystique in the actual act of writing. The mystique lies in the thinking out of what to write.”

The hardest part in writing, then, is turning the ideas over in one’s head, looking for the image, if you’re writing a poem, or the voice, if you’re writing fiction, that will show “gesture, incident, action and people’s behavior.”

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Email: [email protected] Danton Remoto’s novel, Riverrun, has just been published by Penguin Books.