When PEN, the international writers’ organization of which Bill and I were members, heard that I was going to Chile, they asked me to do a mission for them too. On September 23, at the height of the coup, the Nobel Prize–winning Chilean poet and political activist Pablo Neruda had died of heart failure. He was nearing seventy and had been ill with cancer, but there was also the sense that the coup simply broke his heart. He’d been a progressive all his life, a supporter of Allende, and for a while he’d been Allende’s ambassador to France. Pinochet banned any public demonstrations at Neruda’s funeral, but thousands defied him and poured into the streets in what was the first public protest of the new regime. In the initial days of the coup, government agents had ransacked his house, during which he’d made the wonderful statement, “Look around. There’s only one thing of danger for you here—poetry.” Maybe that was how the story spread that Neruda’s widow, Matilde Urrutia, buried his last manuscript in concrete on a particular street corner. PEN asked me to try to recover it and smuggle it out. I did go and look, but saw no signs of fresh concrete, and nobody in Chile could give me any information. Either the story was a canard, or that manuscript remains buried there still.
One day, when Susanna and I returned to our hotel from one of our fake shopping trips, the elevator operator stopped at the fifth floor instead of the eighth, where our room was. When I pointed out his error, he patronizingly replied, “Oh, Mrs. Horman, you forgot where your room is. It’s there.” He pointed. Curious, I knocked on the door. The family of Charles Horman, Frank Teruggi’s friend, answered. The operator had mistaken me for Charles’s wife. (Later, Sissy Spacek would portray her, and Jack Lemmon played Charles’s father in Costa-Gavras’s 1982 film
Missing.) They were the only other Americans staying at the hotel.
Charles’s body turned up at the city morgue soon after I met the Hormans. He had apparently been executed in the stadium some weeks earlier. So had his friend Frank Teruggi of Chicago.
After two weeks of meeting extraordinary people, hearing their stories, and witnessing incredible scenes, it was time for Susanna and me to leave so that we could get Mrs. Allende the information for her UN presentation. The underground was finishing up the copying of all the documents they wanted me to smuggle out. I had our tickets on a Braniff Airways flight in my pocket. This was when I was most frightened for my daughter. If I were caught, she would surely be arrested with me. And then what?
For our last day in Chile, a particularly gray one, we accepted an invitation to a lunch swim party at the home of the chief executive of the Ford Foundation outside Santiago. There would be other Americans there to provide some cover, and it seemed like a good place for the courier from the Vicaría, a young priest named Fernando Salas, to pass me the documents. Then we’d go collect our bags, check out, and fly away. Or so I hoped. So there I was, standing in a swimming pool again, roped into a conversation with an unattractive American I didn’t know. I kept watching nervously for Fernando. Meanwhile, the taxi driver who had brought us loitered outside, keeping tabs on us as always. As time passed I began to fear that Fernando had been arrested. Were we next? Losing my cool, I made a snap decision to confide in our hostess, whom I’d instantly liked. She was very sympathetic to my mission, but also concerned.
“You might get picked up,” she told me. “They watch us closely. Two of our guests were arrested here last week by the DINA [Pinochet’s secret police]. But since they had registered with the American embassy on arrival, they were rescued by an official the next day. So not to worry.”
But we hadn’t registered with the embassy, I told her. Our government under Nixon was openly cooperative with the Pinochet regime. Alerting our embassy to our presence would have meant almost certain failure.
“Oh dear,” she said. “Well, at least let me give you some pointers on how to hide the documents on your person, if your priest can get them to you.”
She took me into a private room and presented me with a big leather bag that had a false bottom. “Leave now,” she told me. “Go back to your hotel and get your things. Hide any documents in the bottom of the bag, or in your bosom under your bathing suit, with a shirt and sweater on top. Sew some into the hem of your skirt. Then go catch your flight and get out of Chile.”
We couldn’t wait any longer for Fernando. We got back into our government taxi and returned to the hotel. When we opened the door to our room, we saw it had been ransacked. Suitcases and drawers had been emptied. The room was an unbelievable mess. Our fears mounted. We began packing our bags. Suddenly, the closet door opened and a man stepped out. I thought my heart would fly out the top of my head. But it was Fernando, the brave and handsome young priest whom I will never forget. When he’d seen us drive off in a government taxi he decided it was too risky to follow us to the party, so he’d waited for us in our room instead. When the DINA men entered to search it, he jumped into the closet and was able to lock it somehow from the inside. My heart pounding, I took the documents from him. We stashed some in the bag, sewed some in my skirt, and hid the rest in my well-padded bosom. Then we bade Fernando goodbye and took our bags down to the desk.
“Oh, Mrs. Styron,” the receptionist said, beaming. “You’ll be happy to know we changed your Braniff ticket to LAN Chile, which only stops in Lima before New York. Much quicker!” Adrenaline rushing, I took the ticket and passed it to the farthest bellboy, with the travel agency’s card Felicia Bernstein’s brother-in-law had given me two weeks earlier. Pressing dollars in his hand, I said, “Hurry and change this back to Braniff, now.” To the man behind the desk I said, “Oh, thanks anyway. But I must meet my friend at Braniff’s lounge just before takeoff.”
“He’s not in Santiago,” the receptionist replied.
“He’s coming especially from the lake today to give me things to bring his sister in New York,”
I countered, inventing. Then I grabbed a large postcard from the desk and wrote, under his nose:
To Senator Edward Kennedy: Dear Teddy—leaving Santiago—see you in D.C. Friday—if I don’t make it (ha! ha!) send a posse to Chile! Bill and I had been friends with Teddy and all of the Kennedys for years. Teddy had no idea that I was on a mission to Chile, but I figured his name would give this man behind the counter pause. I asked him for a stamp. He read the postcard and looked extremely puzzled, as I’d hoped. When he turned and went behind a curtain to show it to a colleague, Susanna got the tickets from the bellboy. We made our getaway and fled to the airport. On our way out there, I was well aware that we were being tailed by government agents. We were also secretly being followed by new Chilean friends. There wouldn’t be anything they could do to stop me being arrested, but at least they could let someone know.
In the terminal, there were two security lines, a male and a female official at the head of each, checking people’s bags and persons before they passed through the metal detectors. Susanna cleverly pulled me out of the line as I was waiting apprehensively for a big woman to strip-search me. Susanna pulled me over to her line where a man was in charge. She later told me she had done that because she figured a man would not pat me down as vigorously as a woman would, and she knew I had secured the most important papers under my bathing suit top covered by two shirts and a jacket. Brilliant of her, again! We walked through the metal detector and ran to the gate where the Braniff plane was waiting. It looked beautiful—not least because Alexander Calder, our neighbor uphill in Roxbury, Connecticut, had painted it. A few months before, I’d seen an article in
Time magazine about his having agreed to paint a Braniff jet with a big, colorful mural that had elements of the American flag and the sunrise in it, and here I was looking at it. “Oh boy,” I thought, “Sandy’s come to get us!”
Joanne Fox-Przeworski remembers seeing us again at the airport. In fact, she stood in line right beside us, also smuggling documents. Quite by happenstance, she had booked the same flight we had. She’d been instructed to hide her documents in the folder with her ticket. That way, when she raised her arms for the patdown, she’d be holding the documents away from her body. She thought it was terribly risky, and remembers her heart pounding like mad as she stood there, but it worked. Father Grant was also smuggling documents out, hidden under his hat and a toupee.
When we boarded the beautiful Sandy Calder jet, Susanna and I were seated in the last, windowless row. We had the two inner seats. The man who took the aisle seat, blocking us in, was clearly an agent, doubtless of DINA. We could not have escaped had we chosen to try. Susanna and I made a big show of chatting mindlessly about our Chilean vacation on the flight to Lima. We got off at the airport there for the layover before the announced reboarding—and locked ourselves in the ladies’ room, where we stayed for two hours, until we were sure the plane (with our bags) had left for New York. We emerged to a nearly emptying terminal, no DINA agent in sight, and got ourselves a very late flight to Dallas.
I called unsuspecting Ted Kennedy from the Dallas airport and told him I was coming back from Chile and had sent him a postcard, suggesting we get together sometime soon to talk about my mission there. When we arrived the next day at JFK, he had sent a young assistant to meet me and asked me to come to Washington on the spot. I said goodbye to Susanna, who returned home to Connecticut after a memorable vacation. Wearing my old travel clothes, I accompanied Teddy’s assistant to the event that he was attending. Little did I know it was a big formal party honoring Kissinger. Teddy greeted me, hugged me, and said, “Come with me, Henry Kissinger is arriving at the other end of this room.” I looked around at everyone in formal clothes and protested, saying I did not wish to meet Kissinger. Teddy laughed and dragged me to the ramp where Kissinger would soon ascend. As I stood there, he came through a door below and shook the hands of everyone waiting to greet him. Flashbulbs flashing. Photographers recording. Near the top of the ramp, he met me and I refused to shake his hand—to his apparent consternation (but to the photographers’ delight!).
Next morning I went to Teddy’s office and talked with him about my trip, my disgust with Kissinger’s American-led coup. He assured me that he would work to help its victims.
We were safely back in the United States with the precious documents from Chile for Mrs. Allende. She used the information in her speech at the UN. Hortensia and I met in New York and then in Paris at the French Bicentennial, where a musician played as we walked with my longtime mentor Sean McBride, Nobel laureate, founding member of Amnesty, and son of Maud Gonne. Hortensia and I kept in touch for years. I still treasure the glass Chilean compotes she gave me. I don’t remember if Susanna and I ever did get our bags back. I am aware now that the mission to Chile was a turning point in my life…
Following graduation from Wellesley, my Baltimore and Wellesley girlfriend Susie Diggs and I rented an apartment on Sparks Street in Cambridge, apparently an unusually independent move for two young women at the time. I enrolled at Harvard and became immersed in poetry courses taught by John Crowe Ransom and Richard Wilbur.
Ransom was a sort of father figure (at sixty or so) of poetry for me.
He introduced me to the New Criticism I pursued the following fall at Johns Hopkins University graduate school. I loved his gentle tone, his way of rhyming, his subtle perceptions and reining in of emotions. “Bells for John Whiteside’s Daughter” was an early memorized favorite. In person, he charmed me with his excitement about his new grandchild. He was old-fashioned, but he influenced my belief in the necessity of the intensive-extensive meaning of each word I would use in my future poems.
Richard Wilbur—already a well-known poet in his late twenties, a scholar and translator—was an influence on my life in more than one way. Having graduated from Wellesley as class poet, I thought I needed to learn the history and craft of contemporary poetry, which I did not really know. In those days, Wellesley did not permit an English major to take more than one writing course. I had signed up for the essay freshman year, and was not pleased with the teacher and her dislike of contemporary thought or activism; the eighteenth-century nature essay was her only passion, and I fretted, realizing I would be forbidden to take a poetry course. I signed up for Wilbur’s course at Harvard on Modern English and American Poetry. Mr. Wilbur was any student’s dream: young, handsome, knowledgeable, a brilliant lecturer and reader of poetry, good-humored and relaxed, open to questioning. The only teacher who surpassed him, with the widest mind I ever encountered, was Peter Sacks (I audited his classes decades later when I was a fellow at Harvard’s Kennedy School). Dick Wilbur’s lyric rhymed poems became a model for me. When we found ourselves by chance walking through the Villa Sciarra on a hill in Rome perhaps three years later, a long, casual friendship ensued. Aside from a visit with his wife and kids to Roxbury, and poetry gatherings, plus talks I attended when he was poet laureate, our paths crossed again at the Century Association once, and through other close girlfriends before he died.
After Harvard, I honored my promise to move back to Baltimore and live with my mother for a year or so. Although, as I’ve said, she was never a hands-on mother, she was kind, warm, and concerned that I have a good, successful year. She was unfailingly welcoming to my old Baltimore friends and new Johns Hopkins classmates, who enjoyed her mutually. She seemed obviously interested in each of their lives. Because Mom never criticized my friends, I thought she approved of each of my potential beaux. Not true, I learned later when I introduced her to Bill. And Dylan Thomas before him.
I enrolled in the Johns Hopkins University graduate school, earning a master’s in creative writing, with a bit of philosophy, courtesy of George Boas, and prose classes seated next to wisecracking John (then Jack) Barth. My two years were serendipitous. During my second day on campus, crossing the grass near Charles Street, I was approached by a TV crew who asked if they could interview me on camera. Flattered, I asked why, and the response was “We’re doing a series on regional American accents and you have the best Baltimore [‘Ballimer’] accent we’ve heard.” I was momentarily demoralized, remembering I’d spent four years in Massachusetts trying to lose that rather nasal, hard-to-describe accent. (As a kid, I had listened to my mother and her girlfriends taking weekly French lessons at our house with Mademoiselle La Rue. Their strong Baltimore accents made French unappealing or amusing, and I promised myself I would shed mine.) But the succeeding classes and fellow students—many guys my senior who had returned from World War II service and benefited from the GI Bill for education—made for a lively, varied group of companions. There was only one other girl, Julie, a serious, accomplished thirty-year-old I aspired to be like.
Two meetings with outside speakers at JHU—extraordinary Dylan Thomas and ordinary-seeming William Styron—played interesting roles in my on-and off-campus life. I first met Dylan Thomas one sunny mild afternoon in 1951 on the green-lawned Johns Hopkins University campus. As a poet, I’d been asked to be his guide and keep him company on his first American visit, and to make sure he got to his 6:00 p.m. reading and talk in the auditorium.
Thomas, whose poetry I admired greatly and memorized sporadically, was more charming than I’d anticipated—funny, observant, easygoing, flirtatious, unassuming, curious, and wicked. I say wicked because my strict instructions were not to let him drink before his evening performance. At about 3:00 p.m. he rolled up his left pants leg and took out a bottle of booze, downing it all. At about 5:00 p.m., ditto on the right leg.
At just before 6:00 p.m., upstairs in the office of program director Elliott Coleman (which fortuitously had stairs leading from his door directly down to the auditorium), Dylan was standing over Elliott’s large, beautifully appointed mahogany desk looking at the professor’s papers atop an elegant leather desk set, when I announced that it was time to go out and down the stairs. “Oh,” Dylan said amicably, and proceeded to throw up all over the desk and its contents. Disbelieving, I watched him wipe his mouth, smile at me, and walk out the door. Needless to say, I had to do my best to clean up pronto, so I missed at least half of his applause-punctuated delivery. I managed to sit down in the auditorium in time to hear him recite insouciantly, “When I was a windy boy and a bit . . .” How winningly he performed.
About a year later, the poet returned to the United States for an appearance in Washington, D.C. I received a call from Richmond Lattimore, his host, saying Dylan had prompted him to ask if it was okay for the two of them to visit me at my house in Baltimore where I was living with my mother. I was delighted. Mother was not. She had read in the
Baltimore Sun that Dylan had drunkenly knocked over and destroyed a big valuable (“Grecian”?) urn in some fancy lady’s apartment in New York City. “But, Mom,” I protested, “we don’t have any urns. And your china is all locked in the glass breakfront.”
Richmond and Dylan were fine guests. We found lots to talk and laugh about. My elegant mother’s rare scowl appeared only when, late in the evening, Dylan took his last drink(s) seated somehow under our grand piano, and had to be coaxed and cajoled to leave—with kisses and promises to meet next in Wales.
I still wake up once in a while reciting “When I was a windy boy and a bit . . .” and I occasionally enter the dark, which I never want to face, saying to myself, “Do not go gentle into that good night.”
Copyright © 2023 by Rose Styron. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
