By CESAR RUIZ AQUINO

1.

Because the writers workshop began in 1962 we somehow thought, wrongly, that the world of writers came to Silliman also at that time. I was in that workshop, a callow youth from Zamboanga who had come to Dumaguete for the first time, unaware that his grandfather, whom he never saw, was a Negrense.

Well, in time we learned that Dumaguete had been some sort of Southern writer’s Shambala forever. Ricaredo Demetillo was here in the 50s. He’s the poet who gave Sands & Coral its name. Like the Tiempos and Franz Arcellana, a graduate of the Iowa workshop.  The book that we knew him for at that time was The Authentic Voice of Poetry, the first book-length attempt in the country at formal literary criticism of the Filipino poets then on the scene, pre-eminently Villa, Joaquin, and Lansang. Others who had been on the campus were Aida Rivera-Ford, Dolores Feria who was later to become my teacher in the European Novel at UP Dilliman, and Antonio Gabila. In fact Gabila was very much on the campus when we came, only people were not so aware of him because he had stopped writing.

In June after the workshop I returned to Silliman to enroll as a college sophomore. I only stayed for a semester and I’m afraid I don’t have enough literary memories to regale the interested reader with. Edith Tiempo was my teacher in Creative Writing.  Not one of my classmates in the class turned out a writer, though Ephraim Bejar became a theater director and, in a not so defined, rather general fashion, some kind of supporter for what may be called the literature of national awareness. I lived at Woodward Hall and for a week or so had for one of my roommates Williamor Marquez, who wrote in imitation of the prose style and manner of Ernest Hemingway.  He had a real writing talent but he stopped writing when he left Silliman. I was not to see him again until 16 years later in Manila when he had become a man of piety, having had a fundamentalist American pastor for a foster father whose boat, which I never had the good fortune to ride or even just see, he inherited.

Marquez kept company with Eph Bejar and a certain Bert Ferrer, campus editors both, who held the Tiempos in respect and affection, these being their literary mentors and of national fame.  I remember Bejar walking into our Woodward Room carrying a paperback by Henry Miller— A Devil in Paradise. That was the first Henry Miller book I ever saw and, I think, browsed. Ferrer always wore dark glasses and when I saw his eyes for the first time I remember that they looked as disarming as his voice. He was an Ilonggo.

There was also Myrna Peña-Reyes who wrote exceedingly clipped, terse, imagist poems a la Emily Dickinson but, in person, was so unliterary and so unarty (though I think it was an effort) that I do not wonder why we never became friends. In Myrna’s choice of a model poet and Williamor’s of a model writer we see of course the influence of the Tiempos. But how to account for Bejar’s reading of Henry Miller? And Ferrer’s dark glasses? Not to mention Marquez’s somewhat droll habit of going to and coming from the Woodward bathrooms in the nude?  Surely these were not the New Criticism.

2.

In the very early 60s the new thing in literature, the phenomenon, were the beatniks of America and the Angry Young Men of England.  Actually they came in the 50s but the cultural time lag delayed their shock wave here and, anyway, I don’t think we really got to read them in depth. It seems the virus was transmitted to us through the movies—in, or by, Marlon Brando and James Dean.  Two new names in Philippine letters represented this trend or quality. These were the gifted young poet praised by Demetillo in his book, Jose Lansang Jr., who lived on the UP Diliman campus and who had been to Greenwich in New York—and Wilfrido D. Nolledo who was writing very conspicuously, very self-consciously eccentric short-stories that amounted to a revolution in Philippine letters. Really the quality of Nolledo’s prose was so excitingly new, that the others who were writing at the time generally paled into immediate pedestrianism.

Nolledo and Lansang both came to the Silliman writers workshop as writing fellows. The other fellows included Greg Brillantes and Gilda Cordero-Fernando (the two great no-shows), Petronilo Daroy, Virgilio Samonte, and Socorro Federis-Tate. All the fellows had published short-stories in the national magazines. Moreover, Daroy had published a book criticism, The Politics of the Imagination.  Looking back on these names now, one cannot help seeing that the Tiempos had sat down and carefully chosen the definitive list of the top young writers of the time. Too bad, Brillantes and Fernando were unable to come. They would have enforced the judgement that this workshop, the first ever, was also the best ever in the country.  In the panel were Ed and Edith Tiempo, Nick Joaquin, and Franz Arcellana. The Jun Lansang then was the Jun Lansang who wrote 55 Poems, to this day still the book of lyric poems in this country. The Brillantes who failed to show up was the Brillantes who wrote The Distance To Andromeda, still one of the authentic Philippine short-story masterpieces, written when the author was in his early or middle twenties, and adjudged first-prize winner in the Free Press. The Nolledo who came and stayed for the entire three weeks was the Nolledo who wrote Rice Wine, Of Things Guadalupe, and Kayumanggi Mon Amor, stories that influenced, quickened, and sent a generation of future Filipino novelists crashing into the sky.

3.

Repeat, the fellows in 1962 were not, as workshop fellows go these days, campus writers. They were published writers and national prize-winners. By today’s standards, the fellows then should have been panelists—or at least the best of them.

And sure enough, there were auditors then who should have been writing fellows.  These were not the Silliman English teachers who all attended—but the handful of youngsters whose stories and poems were actually taken up and two of whom enjoyed, since they were not from Dumaguete, free lodging at the Alumni Hall where the fellows stayed.  These youngsters were Williamor Marquez, David Martinez, Wilfredo Pascua Sanchez, and myself.  Marquez was Silliman’s bet, Martinez was from St. Paul’s College Dumaguete, Sanchez was from UP Diliman, and I was from Zamboanga City. We were all four of us teenagers and it seemed we stole the show from the fellows because we were so young and we were writing passable, publishable (all four of us in fact contributed stories that Joaquin, then also the literary editor of the Free Press), promising, really hooray stuff.  I remember Marquez voicing his objection to Nolledo’s experimental writing after the panelists had discussed a Nolledo story in a uniformly appreciative note.

Nolledo was then thirty.  It was as the 50s waned that he started publishing those strange, or strangely written, stories of his and zoomed to local stardom shoulder-to-shoulder with his contemporary Greg Brillantes. Nick Joaquin and Virgie Moreno and Franz Arcellana took turns saying how good and baroque and brilliant the young man was. Nolledo seemed to embody the new things then like the Sputnik, the first rocket successfully launched into space. Joaquin was saying something of the sort.  How the young writers like Lansang and Nolledo were a different, new breed writing with the bomb in their subconscious and you could feel it in their rhythm and in fact, the Bomb, Joaquin said, was not only a subliminal fear and anxiety but had actually exploded in Lansang’s mind.

Nolledo subsequently, in the late 60s, went to Paul Engle’s Iowa workshop and stayed there for about ten years.  He became a friend of the Chilean novelist Jose Donoso whose The Obscene Bird Of Night ranks with Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude (Columbia) and Infante’s Three Trapped Tigers (Cuba) as the three great novels from Latin America in this century.  But recently Nolledo’s novel, But For The Lovers, produced during his stay in Iowa, was published anew in an edition that bears a word of introduction from Robert Coover (or Robert Stone I can’t remember). The intro says that Nolledo’s novel is a neglected masterpiece. It also says that Nolledo was writing magic realism a good decade ahead of the Latin Americans.

In conversation at the 1962 workshop, Nolledo told Sanchez he liked Dylan Thomas. Indeed Dylan Thomas seems the literary artist likely to have influenced him. The title of his novel is a quote from a Dylan Thomas poem. I suspect that Nolledo’s heightened language, his extravagant prose, was done under the intoxicating influence of Dylan Thomas and Nick Joaquin, particularly the Nick Joaquin who wrote the prose of “May Day Eve” and “The Summer Solstice.” 

4.

After the workshop, Dr. Edilberto K. Tiempo wrote a paper which he had occasion to read at some literary gathering in Manila later that year. That paper dealt with what was done in the workshop by three young writers. These were Nolledo, Sanchez, and myself.  The late old man (not really that old, he was younger then than I am today) perfunctorily saying a good word or two for the new direction these young writers were taking, proceeded to build a critical stand against it.  He particularly took to task Sanchez’s “Moon Under My Feet.” I still think that story, the work of a sixteen-year-old, an amazing masterpiece. And that Dr. Tiempo may have been right in his critique of “The Summer Solstice” but was wrong in his opinion of “Moon Under My Feet.” I’ve read the story through four decades and my admiration for it has grown with each reading.

How swiftly Sanchez came upon the heels of his namesake, the erstwhile daring young man of the Philippine literary trapeze, Nolledo. After Sanchez, the literary scene was never the same again. And not only because he revealed himself, at the 1962 Silliman summer writers workshop, as the new sensation in Philippine writing, taking the new fiction farther, much farther than Nolledo who now appeared to be merely a precursor, but because along with Sanchez came a whole new bright bunch of literary youngsters, Erwin Castillo and Ninotchka Rosca and Alfred Yuson, foremost. At the UP campus, Sanchez was idolized by an inner circle of coevals who were themselves gifted albeit more shyly so.  Rosca was writing opaque (a description popularized by Teddy Locsin, editor of the Free Press when he applied it to Willy Sanchez), rather murky precious prose in imitation of Sanchez which she later consciously discarded in her activist, political years. Before this change from Frenchy bohemianism to the literature of commitment (you can say, from Genet to Malraux) she had written a story called “Diabolus of Sphere,” which won her the prestigious Free Press first prize.  The story’s title could have come straight from Sanchez. Like Nolledo, she subsequently migrated to the U.S. In 1976, I saw her again at some party in Diliman where she noticed the book I was carrying under my arm, Count Julian by Juan Goytisolo, Spain’s celebrated expatriate writer, and sort of chided me for it, saying it was the same stuff we used to indulge in back in the 60s at the UP.

By the 90s, Ninotchka published three novels in the US. The first of these appears to be the best—State of War, wildly praised by our women writers and at least two men, Edgar Maranan—who confessed his admiration for Ninotchka as a writer from his formative years the early 70s—and Juaniyo Arcellana who is a practitioner of what might be called magic criticism. Nick Joaquin gave State of War a sober review in his column, the gist of which seems to be that Ninotchka succeeds not as a novelist of our history (she commits a historical howler or two, Joaquin showed) but as playful writer, imaginative fictionist, or poet.

5.

Now why do I write at some length about Ninotchka who was from UP Diliman?  Well, first—as I said—she was one of those who belonged to a movement that Nolledo initiated. Second, she came to the 1964 Silliman summer writers workshop. Third, not many people know it but she had been briefly a ward of the Tiempos.  And really it may be false to draw a dividing line between North and South even in a literary reminiscence that is more or less private.  I think that’s one of the effects of the Silliman summer writers workshop—obliteration of such a boundary.

This holds true too in the case of Willy Sanchez. Sure, Willy was the literary wunderkind of Manila in the 60s and the 70s—but in Dumaguete? In Dumaguete, yes—it was in Dumaguete that he met Jun Lansang, Ding Nolledo, Nick Joaquin, Franz Arcellana, Pete Daroy, and of course, the Tiempos of Silliman. It was in Dumaguete that his story “Moon Under My Feet” was first read. And yes, by the way, he had a sister at Silliman who eventually married her boyfriend, a nephew of the Garcias of Amigo Subdivision. There’s also the fact that he attended the Silliman workshop three times—in 1962, in 1964, and in 1970.

The “blinding thing” as Erwin Castillo put it in our mature, reviewing years, Willy Sanchez too left for the U.S. in the golden (if false gold) years of the Marcos regime and there incredibly stopped writing altogether. Today, more than twenty years after, one still asks, is this really true? Is Willy Sanchez really not going to write again ever? I think he will just surprise us one of these days. And I wouldn’t be too surprised.  After all Ninotchka came out with her novel well into the 90s. Before that they were all saying she was a 60s thing, to talk about whom was to mumble in a time-warp, wake up man. Well, who woke up?

Anyway it was Erwin Castillo who won the race in the 60s, at least in the considered opinion of the Free Press literary editor. While Willy wrote stories that grew more and more opaque and impenetrable, Erwin offered an alternative metafiction rendered less inaccessible by a neo-primitive, Hemingway quality. And how many times was Erwin Castillo in the Silliman writers workshop? He successively attended in 1963 and 1964. Then returned as a grizzled  veteran in 1971. I was not in any of these workshops. But was in close contact, even actually worked in the same advertising office, with him in the later 70s when—like the rest of his generation, the generation most injured by the dictatorship, Sanchez, Rosca, Mojares, Madrid, Lacaba—he drifted into silence, into Remontadoism. He came again successively in 1992 and 1993 and I couldn’t believe the telegram that came that May of the presidential election. He came because he wanted to finish a novel he was writing at Dostoevskyan speed: The Firewalkers. He needed, one surmises, a breath of the workshop atmosphere of old to keep going.  Even if that worksop atmosphere consisted solely of a drinking buddy’s company.  But he did attend the sessions for a week—interacted with the fellows.  The novel was serialized in the Graphic that same year.  In book form, it had a blurb each from National Artists Nick Joaquin and Franz Arcellana.

6.

There were other bright young writers in the 60s. Not all were of the style or temper or manner set by Nolledo. Appropriately enough, Nolledo’s coeval who preceded him by a year or two, Gregorio Brillantes, was writing from an opposite pole. It can be said that to be a young writer then was to choose between two poles or two paths—to write like Nolledo or to write like Brillantes.  Brillantes was winning the top prizes earlier than Nolledo.  His writing tended towards sure, solid, balanced craft. What we call conventional or traditional as opposed to experimental or new wave or futurist. Edith Tiempo favors the art of Greg Brillantes over that of Nolledo. It is the style of Timothy Montes and Charlson Ong and Susan Lara. Carlos Cortes and Juaniyo Arcellana and Bimboy Peñaranda, on the other hand, are children of Nolledo. In the 60s, the young writers who were in the Brillantes mold were Resil Mojares and Renato Madrid, both based in Cebu, who were giving the Manila young writers decent competition. Unforgettable were the 1966 Free Press awards in which Castillo won first, Madrid second, and Mojares third. It was the coming of age of a generation.

While the Free Press helped to foster a forum or even scene for the writing then being done in the country, Silliman maintained a proudly independent enclave of sorts. The Tiempos conducted, besides the summer writers workshop, semestral classes in literary criticism and creative writing. Silliman naturally suffered from sheer numerical limitation, but there were very good times. I remember a 1967 class under Dr. Ed Tiempo where my classmates were Kerima Polotan, Antonio Enriquez, Darnay Demetillo, Vic Montes, the Ceniza couple, and Florence Baban. The next year, a poetry class under Edith Tiempo where some of the students were her daughter Rowena, Darnay Demetillo again, Voltaire de Leon, and myself.  I remember a Georgia Jones from New York who introduced Exupery’s The Little Prince to me. There was Dale Law also taking up his MA, looking at the Zorba the Greek that I carried and telling me P.A. Bien, one of Kazantzakis’ translators, was his teacher.  There were the British boys, Terence Ward of London and Roger Wade of the Isle of Man, like Law, non-writers but serving to enhance the English Department’s reputation though the British boys did not even belong to it. The English majors then also had the advantage of being in the neighborhood of a Speech and Theater department that had Amiel Leonardia put on plays like All My Sons, Death of a Salesman, Sleep of Prisoners, Six Characters in Search of An Author, Rashomon, Waiting for Godot, Romeo and Juliet, and Zoo Story.  I remember first meeting the theatre people at the 1967 summer writers workshop poetry reading at Faurot’s studio (as it was called then, not yet the “End House” of a later day). 

The 1967 writers workshop was my second workshop and I attended as a fellow. Again the Tiempos hosted and from Manila the guest panelists were Kerima Polotan and NVM Gonzales.  The participants came from various places in the Philippines. Bobby Villasis of St. Paul College and Elsie Martinez of Silliman were the hometown fellows.  There were Jun Cañizares, Ric Patalinghug, Eddie Yap, and Nelson la Rosa from Cebu. Two guys from Manila—Mar Arcega and Romy Virtusio—and two guys from Zamboanga, Tony Enriguez and myself. Two nuns—Sister Delia and Sister Imelda, the latter of a beauty that I fear far exceeded that of the works submitted to the workshop. A girl from Manila, Joy Dayrit.  An observer who later became a poet herself and coordinator of the Silliman workshop: Merlie Alunan. Lately I came across an article by Merlie in which she writes that she was in the 1963 workshop where Bert Florentino, Andy Afable, Raymond Lorca, Roger Sicat, and Erwin Castillo attended. This puzzles me, unless it’s a lapse in memory on Merlie’s part or else she is experimenting with history as fiction—or is it fiction as history. There was also Edgar Libre-Griño, Sands & Coral editor and cousin to two other girls from Manila, the Osorio sisters.

Elsie Martinez outshone her elder brother Danny who appeared to have stopped writing after 1967, though he has recently made a comeback by winning top Palanca prizes in both the short-story and poetry categories. Elsie wrote poetry in the 60s and one short-story that won her the Palanca first prize—“All About Me.”  She was a dear friend of Bobby Villasis and both turned playwrights in the 80s. This seems to some a desertion, the literature of theater being somewhat remote and inaccessible in our country.  No matter that the greatest Philippine literary work in English so far is a play—A Portrait of The Artist As Filipino. I think myself that the Filipino writer must always write with his fellow Filipino writers in mind.  If I am correct in this then the Filipino writer must sooner or later face the challenge of the novel. Rosca of my generation has made three bids. Krip Yuson has two. Resil has hinted he will write an alternative Leon Kilat novel. Erwin has published one, withheld another, and will soon blow our minds with Cape Engaño, his third, which I have read in parts and found better than many of these touted magic realists of Latin America. As for Willy—it’s as his name indicates, WILL HE?  Will he write again?

Postcript

To say, as I did early in this essay, that the literary current in the air then (the early 60s or even late 50s) were the beatniks and the angry young men may be misleading. The actual stuff that were being read was not Osborne or Sillitoe or Wilson or Ginsberg or Kerouac. At Silliman it was Hemingway, Faulkner, Yeats, Housman, Frost, Eliot,Joyce, Conrad, Thomas, Crane, James among other names in the modernist tradition and noticeably Anglo-Saxon. At the UP, the names to read and to drop were predominantly European: Federico Garcia Lorca, Rilke, Kafka, Mann, Proust, Camus, Sartre, etc. It was in the 60s, of course, that Barth and Pynchon and Barthelme and other postmoderns emerged in the U.S. but we did not get to read them until the 70s. The “avant garde” authors then were Jean Genet, Henry Miller, and Samuel Beckett, figures who came at the tail-end of modernism. The list can include Lawrence Durrell and Vladimir Nabokov, whose dazzling prose was so natural to take if you were already addicted to Nolledo.

[Reprinted from Sands & Coral Centennial Issue, 2001]  

Cesar Ruiz Aquino was born in Zamboanga City, and has a Ph.D. in Literature from Silliman University. He writes both poetry and prose for which he has won virtually all the national awards in the Philippines and one international – the SEA Write Award from the royal family of Thailand in 2004. His books include the short story collection Chronicles of Suspicion, the poetry collections Word Without End, In Samarkand, Caesuras: 155 New Poems, Like a Shadow That Only Fits a Figure of Which It is Not the Shadow, and Fire If It Were Ice, Ice If It Were Fire, and the personal anthology Checkmeta: The Cesar Ruiz Aquino Reader. He lives in Dumaguete City.