Pablo Neruda
Spanish Civil War

After returning to Chile, Neruda was given diplomatic posts in Buenos Aires and then Barcelona, Spain. He later succeeded Gabriela Mistral as consul in Madrid, where he became the center of a lively literary circle, befriending such writers as Rafael Alberti, Federico García Lorca, and the Peruvian poet César Vallejo. His only offspring, his daughter Malva Marina (Trinidad) Reyes, was born in Madrid in 1934, the product of his first marriage to María Antonia Hagenaar Vogelzang. Reyes was plagued with severe health problems, particularly suffering from hydrocephalus. She died in 1943 at the age of eight, having spent most of her short life with a foster family in the Netherlands after Neruda ignored and abandoned her, forcing her mother to work solely to support her care. Half of that time was during the Nazi occupation of Holland, when the Nazi view of birth defects was that they denoted genetic inferiority. During this period, Neruda became estranged from his wife and instead began a relationship with Delia del Carril, an aristocratic Argentine artist who was 20 years his senior. Reyes was repudiated, mocked, and abandoned by her father and died in utter indigence when she was 8 years old in war-devastated and Nazi-occupied Netherlands.

As Spain became engulfed in civil war, Neruda became intensely politicized for the first time. His experiences during the Spanish Civil War and its aftermath moved him away from privately focused work in the direction of collective obligation. Neruda became an ardent Communist for the rest of his life. The radical leftist politics of his literary friends, as well as that of del Carril, were contributing factors, but the most important catalyst was the execution of García Lorca by forces loyal to the dictator Francisco Franco. Through his speeches and writings, Neruda threw his support behind the Spanish Republic, publishing the collection España en el corazón (Spain in Our Hearts, 1938). He lost his post as consul due to his political militancy. In July 1937, he attended the Second International Writers' Congress, the purpose of which was to discuss the attitude of intellectuals toward the war in Spain, held in Valencia, Barcelona, and Madrid and attended by many writers including André Malraux, Ernest Hemingway, and Stephen Spender.

Neruda's marriage to Vogelzang broke down, and he eventually obtained a divorce in Mexico in 1943. His estranged wife moved to Monte Carlo to escape the hostilities in Spain and then to the Netherlands with their very ill only child, and he never saw either of them again. After leaving his wife, Neruda lived with Delia del Carril in France, eventually marrying her (shortly after his divorce) in Tetecala in 1943; however, his new marriage was not recognized by Chilean authorities as his divorce from Vogelzang was deemed illegal.

Following the election of Pedro Aguirre Cerda (whom Neruda supported) as President of Chile in 1938, Neruda was appointed special Consul for Spanish emigrants in Paris. There he was responsible for what he called "the noblest mission I have ever undertaken": transporting 2,000 Spanish refugees who had been housed by the French in squalid camps to Chile on an old ship called the Winnipeg. Neruda is sometimes charged with having selected only fellow Communists for emigration, to the exclusion of others who had fought on the side of the Republic. Many Republicans and Anarchists were killed during the German invasion and occupation. Others deny these accusations, pointing out that Neruda chose only a few hundred of the 2,000 refugees personally; the rest were selected by the Service for the Evacuation of Spanish Refugees set up by Juan Negrín, President of the Spanish Republican Government in Exile.
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