NO PRIZE FOR HIS PASSION

Author: By Charles E. Claffey, Globe Staff

Date: Thursday, October 20, 1988
Page: 85
Section: LIVING

"It doesn't mean much," Paz said of the prize during an interview in the Charles Hotel last Thursday, the day the announcement of the Nobel winner was made in Stockholm. No, he is not acquainted with the work of the Egyptian novelist, playwright and screenwriter.

It should be noted that most lists of prospective Nobel finalists this year included the names of Paz and his countryman Carlos Fuentes, who have been at sword's point recently over their divergent political, literary and intellectual views -- and, especially, because of a magazine article scathingly critical of Fuentes, an essay that some commentators maintain was orchestrated by Paz.

Paz was visiting here last week in connection with the publication by Harvard University Press of the English translation of "Sor Juana," his biography of the 17th-century Mexican poet and nun, Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz, one of the great literary figures of her era.

He is the ultimate Renaissance man, a diplomat and belletrist, a man who has been as comfortable in a foreign embassy setting as in a literary salon. He published his first book of poetry in 1933, when he was 19. He was a magazine publisher before he went to Spain in 1937 to attend a congress of antifascist writers. He stayed in Spain for a year, taking up the Loyalist cause.

He returned to Mexico by way of Paris, where he stayed long enough to become influenced by the Surrealists. Much of his writing reflects the Surrealist doctrine, which he has been quoted as saying includes a negation of the contemporary world and a substitution of different values for those of the democratic bourgeois society: "eroticism, poetry, imagination, liberty, spiritual adventure and vision."

Politics and literature are inextricably entwined in Latin America, and especially so in Mexico, and Paz's name was invoked recently in the furor over the anti-Fuentes article that appeared last summer in an American magazine and in a Mexican intellectual journal.

The essay by Mexican author Enrique Krauze appeared first in the United States in the weekly New Republic and also in the monthly Mexican literary journal Vuelta. Paz is the director of the magazine and mentor to Krauze, who is the managing editor.

Fuentes was limned in the essay as a clever manipulator, the key to whom is found in Hollywood instead of Mexico, a man whose "hasty and imprecise judgments" of history and politics prevent him from "any intrinsic understanding of Latin American phenomena" and disqualify him from acting in his favorite role as "the self-designated spokesman" for Mexico and Latin America to readers in the United States.

Defenders of Fuentes charged that Krauze was guilty of "political rancor and literary jealousy" and that he had joined a right-wing conspiracy against Fuentes that was masterminded by Paz. Fuentes' loyalists claim that Paz, 74, ordered the attack on the 59-year-old Fuentes because he feared that Fuentes had moved ahead of him to become the leading Mexican contender for the Nobel Prize.

Paz in the interview restated his comment carried in an article earlier this month in the New York Times Book Review that he had nothing to do with the dispute.

"I am a good friend of Fuentes," he said. "I like his writing. We have differences, yes. I don't agree with his literary judgment."

Was the scalding Vuelta-New Republic essay unfair to Fuentes? "Unfair? No. Passionate? Yes." All of his life, Paz said, he has followed the dictum of the French poet Baudelaire that "if a writer's criticism is to be good, it must be passionate. Any criticism must be partial. Impartial criticism is for academics."

That said, Paz moved on to discuss his biography of Sor Juana. The idea for the book, he said, arose in part out of his preoccupation with her and his interest in the past of his native Mexico. "We can neither understand the United States nor Mexico until we go to our roots."

The setting for "Sor Juana" is the Viceroyalty period of colonial New Spain. Juana Ines, one of six illegitimate children, was a woman of intelligence, talent, wit and beauty who was taken into court as a protegee of the vicereine. At 20, after five years as a favorite at court, she abruptly left and entered a convent, where she read voraciously and wrote poems and plays -- both profane and sacred.

"Sor Juana is a mirror of me, a consciousness, without trying to be," Paz said. "She is a writer, an open mind, in a closed society. Her predicament was similar to the predicament of many writers in the 20th century -- those in the totalitarian countries of Europe.

"She was a poet but she also was an intellectual. This is important. She was a modern poet because she was a good critic, and a good poet must have a clear mind."

Paz noted also that Sor Juana intrigued him because "she was a woman persecuted because of her sex, persecuted by the prelates of the church. She was criticized because the clergy felt that a religious writer should not write about profane matters. She wrote love poetry. The Catholic Spanish Church had many priests who led erotic and scandalous lives but who were never persecuted. They were exasperated that a woman should be allowed to write."

Eventually, the clergy stopped her writing. "I believe that she was a good person, but that she did not want to become a saint. You cannot make a saint by decree, she once told her confessor. She also talked about the rights of women to her confessor, and of her love for knowledge."

Sor Juana never left the convent. She died there when she was about 45.

Paz said that his career as a diplomat did not impede his artistic life. It was instead, he said, "the best thing that could have happened to me. It is very good for a writer to be something else, to have a profession. To be only a poet is not too good.

"Before I was a diplomat, I was a journalist. It is a great exercise to have to write something every day. Diplomacy for me was a kind of journalism; I had to write reports."

He added that he felt that a career as an academic is probably inimical to a serious writer. "It is interesting but very dangerous to live only in the world of books."

Paz's poetry uses a strong sense of place and the transience of time to highlight moments. He has written that he always believed in Goethe's maxim that "all poems are occasional, the products of circumstance."

Much of his poetry makes the point that we cannot integrate ourselves until we learn how to relate to others, how to love.

Four years ago, when he was honored on his 70th birthday in Mexico City, Paz spoke of the relationship of art to politics and politics to love. He has been married for 24 years to Maria-Jose Tramini, a Frenchwoman he met when he was the ambassador to India.

"Love and politics are the two extremes of human relations, the public and the intimate, the plaza and the alcove, the group and the couple.

"Because of this, the multiplication of forced labor camps and the threat of atomic extermination are inseparable from the crisis of love in the 20th century. They are symptoms of the same illness. If our world is to recover its health, the cure should be dual: Political regeneration includes the resurrection of love."

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