The Trouble with Nick

The trouble with Nick Joaquin is that he prefers to listen than to be interviewed, to write than to be written about, to be read than heard. There is nothing wrong with that, except that he’s a damn good biographer, but he’s a biographer’s nightmare. He’s a giant of Philippine letters, but he hates big crowds that reek of a society page’s who’s who, and even crowds made up of writers and journalists.

(This article by Marra PL. Lanot appears in the book The Trouble with Nick & Other Profiles, published by UP Press, 1999. National Artist Nick Joaquin died last week.)

He was a stripling of 17 when his very first published work appeared in the Tribune, one of the leading publications of pre-World War II Manila. The Tribune’s literary editor, the late poet-essayist-astrologer Serafin Lanot, had read the poem and immediately liked it. Recognizing talent, he wanted to meet the unknown writer in person. Was the mystery poet using his real name or a pseudonym?

Lanot asked around, and when nobody could tell him who Nick Joaquin was, he waited for the literary contributor to collect his fee.

When the teener came for the payment of his poem, the editor approached him. But the teener saw his editor and, scared and shy, fled down the stairs without a word, leaving Lanot disappointed and flabbergasted.

Undaunted, Lanot, who was also at that time a reporter with a nose for news and a knack for tracking down sources, asked the cashier about the boy who had come to collect payment. It turned out that the budding poet was working as a proofreader in the composing department of the Tribune. That was 1934.

It wasn’t until about thirty years later that the above anecdote came to light. When Nick met Serafin Lanot again at the latter’s residence sometime in 1965, Nick pointed at Serafin, who was four years his senior, and kept repeating that Serafin was his “discoverer,” much to the latter’s chagrin. “Of course not! I’m not your discoverer,” countered Serafin. “What am I? Christopher Columbus?” And for revenge, Serafin reminded Nick, this time to Nick’s consternation, of that incident at the Tribune.

A decade later, Nick’s “Three Generations” was published in the Herald Midweek Magazine. Not long after, he started winning prizes for his writings. The Philippines Free Press citation for the best short story went to “Summer Solstice” in 1945, to “Guardia de Honor” in 1949. “La Naval de Manila,” an essay on Marian devotion, also won in a literary contest conducted by the Dominicans. Then, the University of Santo Tomas awarded him an A.A. (Associate in Arts) certificate.

The young man clearly had a gift for literature, and he was on his way to greater heights when he suddenly entered St. Albert College, a Hong Kong seminary run by Dominicans. The Dominicans were apparently impressed by Nick, and they must have hoped that, by giving him a two-year scholarship, they could add another intelligent mind to their ranks.

Nick loved reading, and the seminary seemed the perfect place to gobble up all the books he could lay his hands on. But the place was perched on top of a hill that offered a breathtaking view of Hong Kong. The Crown Colony’s scenic wonders, and the bustle of an island in the throes of modernity, distracted this student from prayer. All the more did the desire to write swell in him­ until the priests disallowed any further literary activity and made him choose between staying in the seminary and leaving.

Nick opted out, and in 1950 he found himself back in the Philippines. Jobless and out of school, he decided to earn a living. Finishing a degree course was out of the question, because he was already disgruntled with formal education. Although he had tried to complete four years at Mapa High School in Intramuros, Manila, he dropped out on his third year. When asked by the family why he did so, he griped that he wasn’t learning anything in the classroom.

He worked at various odd jobs, including being a stage hand in vaudeville, where his brother Ping was a famed jazz pianist. And he resumed contributing poetry and fiction to metropolitan magazines and winning national literary awards. He joined the Philippines Free Press as proofreader in the ’50s and went on to become staff writer, film reviewer, and literary editor. Taking the pen name Quijano de Manila, he turned out iridescent, pulsating full-length feature articles every week.

As Quijano (the name is an anagram of Joaquin), he would be found at the scene of a crime, in a court battle, on the trail of a visiting dignitary, in a concert hall, in the middle of a political rally, in a boxing ring, anywhere he could hear, see, and smell firsthand the subject of his article. Hence, he knew what he was saying. He was the first highly-respected writer, for instance, to mention in print that Nora Aunor was a very good actor, even in her unmemorable teen flicks, long before critics praised her acting.

He also wrote about his impressions on his travels to China when China’s Bamboo Curtain was just beginning to open to a curious, paranoid world. As he reported the ups and downs of Fidel Castro’s Havana, he raved about Cuban mulattas, whom he considered the most beautiful women in the world. And when he could not be around to give an eyewitness report, he conducted in-depth interviews or did intensive research that allowed him to recount in vivid detail what transpired long before he was born or what occurred in a place he had never been to.

He became one of the most important journalists of the time, introducing a literary style in Philippine reporting, as well as giving a name and a face to data and statistics, to theories and problems, preceding his peers in the field in this country by some thirty years. Hence, in Nick’s writing, an NPA guerrilla had angst, and an intelligence agent was a woman in love. A boxer, a singer, a ballet dancer, a bishop, a president, a villain­ all revealed a personal life that made you wonder: Was Nick a mere journalist or a psychologist? Was he doing a piece based on real events and people or was he creating fiction?

For his was no hackneyed journalese but a style and a language all his own. In fact, no one has come up with a word such as Rizalesque to refer to Rizal’s use of Spanish. But Joaquinesque and Joaquinesquerie have been coined by Filipino critics to describe Nick’s baroque Spanish-flavored English or his reinventions of English based on Filipinisms. In “Candido’s Apocalypse,” for instance, go for lost and going for lost are Nick’s loose­ and fun ­translations of magwala and nagwawala.

During the incumbency of President Diosdado P. Macapagal, Nick also served as a member of what was then known as the Board of Censors for Motion Pictures. When President Ferdinand E. Marcos assumed office in 1965, Nick was one of the first reappointees, along with the late Jose A. Quirino, writer, journalist, and television host. In fact, in the first few weeks of the new administration, Nick and Quirino, popularly known as JQ, had to do the work of the entire board.  

The two buddies had a grand time reviewing local and foreign movies. They saw no reason to quarrel when it came to film. Good or bad, they simply classified and passed all the movies they screened. They were censors who refused to cut or ban any film, for they believed in the intelligence of the moviegoers, and in the democratic right of Filipinos to see or not to see the movies of their choice. The two also found time to publish as many movie reviews as they could.

In between his jobs as reporter, literary editor, and movie censor, Nick never stopped writing fiction, poetry, drama. He never ceased trying out new forms, or striking out in new directions, like translating Rizal’s poems from Spanish into English.

In 1957 the Harper Publishing Company had awarded him a fellowship to write a novel while in the United States and Mexico. The result was his first novel, The Woman Who Had Two Navels, published in 1962. The CCP Encyclopedia of Philippine Art, published by the Cultural Center of the Philippines, cites the convergence in that novel of some of the author’s favorite themes: “the clash between the spiritual and the mundane, between tradition and modernity, between appearance and reality, and between male and female.”

Straddling with ease the drudgery of earning a living and the art of self-expression, Nick Joaquin has won honor and recognition in good measure. He has several first prizes from the Don Carlos Palanca Memorial Awards for Literature­ for short stories such as “La Vidal” and “Doña Jeronima,” and for a three-act historical play, The Beatas. The first Stonehill Novel Award went to The Woman Who Had Two Navels. His reportorial work earned him several ESSO journalism awards, including Journalist of the Year.

The Manila Critics Circle gave him the National Book Award for the following books: The Aquinos of Tarlac: An Essay in History as Three Generations; The Quartet of the Tiger Moon: Scenes from the People Power Apocalypse; Culture and History: Occasional Notes on the Process of Philippine Becoming; The World of Damian Domingo: 19th Century Manila (co-authored with Luciano P.R. Santiago); and Jaime Ongpin: The Enigma: The Profile of a Filipino as Manager.

In 1961 he received the Republic Cultural Heritage Award for literature, then the highest form of national recognition bestowed on an artist. From the city government of Manila came the Patnubay ng Sining at Kalinangan Award in 1964. In 1976 he was conferred the title of National Artist in Literature.

In 1996 came the Ramon Magsaysay Award for journalism, literature, and creative communication. The RM Awards are touted as Asia’s version of the Nobel Prize. But art critic Alejandro Roces wrote somewhere that it was Nick Joaquin who was doing the RM Awards an honor, and not the other way around.

The latest of his many prizes was Tanglaw ng Lahi Award in 1997. This is the highest award with which the Ateneo de Manila University honors Filipino artists.

Awards heaped on Nick Joaquin, however, fail to swell his head. What matters to him is his art, not what others say. For he does not pander to critics’ tastes or shrink from censors or kowtow to powers that be. If he could help it, he would not bother to appear in social gatherings in his now-famous Mexican guayabera. He does not need to be seen and remembered by the press. All he wants is to write, and write well.

To write­ and also to command a price. Back in the ’70s, Asiaweek magazine dubbed him a megabuck writer. Though tickled pink, Nick Joaquin scoffed at the description.

In a talk delivered in connection with his Ramon Magsaysay Award, Nick spoke of  his “Jekyll-and-Hyde split personality” as writer/journalist: “You know, actors say that there are no small parts, there are only small performers. So I say: there are no hack-writing jobs, there are only hack writers. If you look down on your material, if you despise it, then you’ll do a hack job.”

Which means, he is not wont to condemn people. He may accept or reject offers, choose his assignments, name his price, but always, he approaches his subject with an open mind. He casts aside preconceived notions or prejudices, if any, and readies himself for new information, new insights, new ideas.

He may not absorb everything new, but at least he is willing to listen. Many times, he enjoys playing the devil’s advocate, extracting all that he can from his subject, secretly putting himself in the other person’s shoes. Many times he succeeds in understanding all facets of the topic on hand.

Perhaps it is safe to say that with Nick Joaquin the journalist and writer, there are no major or minor works, only literature. 

His published titles to date exceed two dozen. Now a rare collector’s item is a slim Peso Book entitled Selected Stories, published in 1962. Some of his better-known books include: Prose and Poems (1962); The Complete Poems and Plays of Jose Rizal (1976); Tropical Gothic (1979), a collection of his later fiction; Tropical Baroque (1979), a collection of his full-length plays, including Tatarin, Fathers and Sons, and The Beatas; his second novel, Cave and Shadows (1983); and Collected Verse (1987). Among his
nonfiction books are La Naval de Manila and Other Essays (1964); Culture and History: Occasional Notes on the Process of Philippine Becoming (1988), Rizal in Saga (1996), and A Question of Heroes (1977), all thought-provoking, albeit controversial, collections of essays and biographical narratives.

There is no question that the best known and the most often performed Filipino play is Nick Joaquin’s A Portrait of the Artist as Filipino. Staged for the first time on March 25, 1955, at the Aurora Gardens in Intramuros, Manila, it has been presented in both English original and Tagalog translation in various parts of the country and abroad. It was made into an English-language film by director Lamberto Avellana, National Artist in Film. The Pilipino translation, Larawan, was first staged by the Philippine Educational Theater Association (PETA) at Fort Santiago. A musical version, with libretto by the late Rolando S. Tinio, who also directed it, and music by Ryan Cayabyab, has just been completed.

Nick’s writings remain enduringly popular. Only recently, the short story, “May Day Eve,” was presented as modern opera by a group from the University of the Philippines College of Music. Movie producers buy the rights to Nick’s fiction and children’s stories. He is also in demand to do biographies of artists, politicians, generals, cardinals, and captains of industry.

When Nick Joaquin was still with the Philippines Free Press, he would often be seen pounding at his typewriter, copying his own handwritten article, a well-thumbed dictionary beside him. Visitors, whom he often entertained, came in and out of his room, but he managed to meet his deadline. This was literature in a hurry in action. He must have had little or no time to revise his feature stories, because his life was
always between deadlines.

At the Free Press, Nick Joaquin was ever approachable, even by janitors and typesetters and clerks. Over bottles of beer, they dumped on Nick all their problems and complaints about wages and working conditions. These gripe sessions eventually led to the formation of a labor union on the premises. Nick, management’s fair-haired boy, surprised Free Press bigwigs by joining the union and becoming its president.

When things turned ugly­ - the union was harassed and branded as communist-led - ­Nick and company, including star staffers Gregorio C. Brillantes, Jose F. Lacaba, and Danny Dalena, and some close to 30 personnel from the administrative and the printing press department, bolted the magazine and started a new weekly, the Asia-Philippines Leader. Nick was its first editor in chief.

It was now 1971. The year before, the First Quarter Storm, as the political turmoil of that period began to be known, had forced citizens, the media included, to take sides. When the Leader was launched, students were battling Malacañang and men in uniform to oppose the oil-price hike and demand a higher minimum wage for workers and agricultural laborers, political candidates were gearing for a forthcoming presidential elections, and the specter of martial law hung in the air. The following year, Marcos proclaimed martial law and clamped down on the print and broadcast media. Writers and journalists were arrested, interrogated, harassed, tortured, detained indefinitely, and salvaged.

Perhaps by virtue of his reputation, Nick was untouched by Marcos’s iron fist. When the martial-law regime instituted the National Artist program, it was compelled to recognize that formidable reputation and to give the award to Nick in 1976. His first move as National Artist was to secure the release of an imprisoned writer. Later, at a ceremony on Mount Makiling attended by First Lady Imelda Marcos, Nick delivered an invocation to the goddess of the mountain during which he spoke of freedom and the artist. He was never again invited to address formal cultural occasions for the rest of the Marcos regime.

Martial law ended the free-for-all, and Nick, who was temporarily out of work, quietly compiled his historical and journalistic writings, which National Bookstore eagerly published starting in 1977. Nick’s pocketbooks were released singly or in twos, one after another: Nora Aunor & Other Profiles; Ronnie Poe & Other Silhouettes; Reportage on Lovers; Reportage on Crime; Amalia Fuentes & Other Etchings; Gloria Diaz & Other Delineations; Doveglion & Other Cameos; Language of the Streets and Other Essays; and Manila: Sin City and Other Chronicles.

At about this same time, he started writing stories for children. Imaginative take-offs of Philippine folklore, they were commissioned by Eugenia Apostol’s Mr. & Ms. magazine and collected in such books as Pop Stories for Groovy Kids, complete with full-color illustrations.

Today, Nick is editor in chief of Philippine Graphic magazine and publisher of its sister publication, Mirror Weekly, a women’s magazine. He once wrote a column, “Small Beer,” for the Philippine Daily Inquirer, and now has a column in Isyu, an opinion tabloid.

Not only is Nick a witness and chronicler of events, as in The Quartet of the Tiger Moon: Scenes from the People Power Apocalypse; he is also one who records what is happening around him and transforms it all into literary art, as in the very memorable story “Candido’s Apocalypse.” Indeed, the thin thread separating Nick Joaquin the writer from Quijano de Manila the journalist is well-nigh invisible. Whatever he writes, he writes with relish. Whatever he offers to the readers, he offers with the sensibility and the sensitivity of a literary great.

From where does this genius come?

Nick Joaquin was born on May 4, 1917, in Paco, Manila. His mother, Salome Marquez, a teacher of English and Spanish, was a wide reader of literature. She read poems and stories to her little children. His father, Leocadio Joaquin, a veteran of the 1896 revolution, was a respected and much-sought-after lawyer.

Nick’s sister, Nene, recalls how their father’s job would take Leocadio to Tayabas and as far away as Surigao, often handling cases involving disputes over land and coconut plantations. Their father would often emerge victorious, and he would sometimes come home with a sack full of money. He would empty the sack on the table, as the children gaped and clapped in glee, and then he would hand over every hard-earned centavo to their mother. He would also recount stories of his travels and adventures to his wife and children.

The Joaquins had ten children, eight boys and two girls. Nick was the fifth child. He must have inherited his fondness for reading from his mother and his writing talent from his father, an analytical, brilliant, and fiery orator who wrote his own speeches and legal briefs. He read all the books in his father’s library­poetry, fiction, history, the Bible, everything.

The boy Nick, or Onching to family and close relatives, was very religious, always praying whenever he could, which partly explains why he accepted the invitation to enter the seminary in Hong Kong. But how he must have reveled in his father’s personal accounts of the time when Leocadio served as a colonel in the Philippine Revolution in Kawit, Cavite. Leocadio Joaquin was a close friend, a compadre, of General Emilio Aguinaldo, who would later hail the bemedaled army officer as the best lawyer in the country.

Young Nick, quiet and shy, must have imagined himself amid the smoke and fire of the Revolution. Though his father fought Spain, he and all his brothers and sisters grew up speaking Spanish at home and with relatives. Nick now wields English like his mother tongue, yet he would use it to defend Philippine independence, and also to insist that the coming of the conquistadores was ultimately good for the Philippine archipelago because, for one, Spain turned our scattered islands of different languages into a nation.

When Leocadio Joaquin died, Nick lived with his older brother Enrique, or Ike. Nick and Ike, who passed away several years ago, became so close that years later, Ike volunteered to be Nick’s personal literary agent. Ike wanted to protect his younger brother from unscrupulous individuals, because Nick simply had no knack for taking care of money matters. He didn’t want to bother himself with copyright and the business aspect of his writing. People who commissioned Nick to write a book; who needed movie rights to his works; who wanted to reprint or anthologize articles, novels, poems, plays; who wanted to translate and stage plays, etc., had to go through Ike.

The bright-eyed, curious youth, grew up between two world wars. He absorbed everything he saw. He knew the latest fashion and observed various architectures. His long ears drew in every sound, every tune heard, from Mexican canciones to American jazz numbers, from the bawdy songs at the corner sari-sari store to the sarsuwela and bodabil on Avenida Rizal. He danced the tango and spoke the latest kanto boy slang.

He loved to eat, and was a connoisseur of Spanish, American, and Filipino cuisine. Whenever he had money, he would go to the theater and watch a movie, at times reviewing a particular favorite. He did all these, as he does them now. Added to his current hobbies, aside from frequenting piano bars and the hangouts of new rock bands, is buying all the books he couldn’t buy as a youth.

From boyhood to teenhood to adulthood, Nick’s world was Manila, the Manila of his affections­Paco, Malate, Intramuros, Luneta, Sampaloc. Later, his world stretched farther to cover San Juan, Mandaluyong, Makati, Quezon City, the entire country.

Nick’s Manila is a city without butterflies, a landscape not of flaming sunsets and flowery meadows. Instead, it is a landscape of pagan rites, of fiestas and festivities, of noise and pageantry. It is filled with the ilustrado, the revolucionario, the patriarch, the rebellious daughter, the urbanite. It teems with people, the Filipino people.

He also paints the inner landscape of his characters, who are pulled by all sorts of tensions, filled with passion, torn between sensuality and spirituality, at once attracted to and repelled by power. His style is scintillating, and although his characters experience demotic desires, they’re made of fire and ice.

While fascinated with history, Nick Joaquin is very much immersed in the present. Manila is the chief source of his material. This is the city of his childhood, the city of his coming of age. He has opted to live in the world he knows best, to live in it and with it, and he has chosen to transpose, translate, interpret that world through literature.

In Nick Joaquin, inborn talent and the literary bent inherited from both parents have been further honed by discipline. He wakes up very early in the morning to read the newspapers. Then, from 9 a.m. to 12 noon, no one is allowed to disturb him. People who call him at those hours are told that he is in the bathroom or in Zamboanga. His close friends suspect that those hours are his writing time. He must be in his library on the second floor of his house, which is so clean a fly wouldn’t be in the least interested in passing through it. The library is bare, except for the volumes on the bookshelves that line all the walls and, in the center, a table and chair with a manual typewriter.

From 1 to 3 p.m., nobody must rouse him from his siesta. Part of that time could also be spent for a second bath or more writing. Then, from about four o’clock onwards, he’s out of the house, roving the streets of Manila, his Manila.

Nick Joaquin may not be much of a hero to some people. His flaws - ­and who hasn’t any? - ­may include a Taurean stubbornness, eccentricity, male chauvinism, being a spendthrift, whatever. There are detractors and there are detractors. But one cannot doubt his being a true artist, his loyalty to friends, his sense of justice, his faith in humanity.

Nick always tries to find the good in everything, even in the bad. In Jose Rizal’s Maria Clara, for instance, Nick finds a strong woman, not a weakling. He contends that, contrary to most people’s opinion, Maria Clara in the novel Noli Me Tangere goes to the nunnery not out of weakness but out of strength. In Philippine colonial times, a woman normally would not dare disobey parental wishes, and a single, nubile lass, pretty and rich at that, was expected to marry. Maria Clara, however, does not heed her foster parents’ command that she marry the man of their choice, and instead chooses to enter the convent. She does so even against the plea of her real father, Padre Damaso. Maria Clara, Nick argues, finds the strength to live in spiritual confinement rather than to marry or to commit suicide.

Nick also draws strong women characters in his fiction and plays. He is apparently attracted to strong women who speak out their mind and defy tradition, as in  “Summer Solstice,” “May Day Eve,” “Doña Jeronima,” The Woman Who Had Two Navels, Tatarin, The Beatas, and others.

Feminist readers, however, point out that the women characters are more neurotic and guilt-ridden than “liberated.” They end up inescapably bound by tradition as wives and daughters in a society where the patriarch reigns supreme. “Liberation” becomes temporary, a fantasy, a deception. The independent woman, to those who deconstruct Nick’s fictive heroines, is an exception, an oddball, an item of exotica.

How complex it is to be a genius, true. And yet, and yet, in a basically non-reading country like the Philippines, a literary household name like Nick Joaquin remains a mystery. Today’s youth are weaned on Instamatic cameras, television, the movies, computer games, the Internet, and CD-ROM. Some of them think that Nick Joaquin is a screenwriter, that he is a drunkard, that he’s only that guy in a beer commercial on television, that he is bald, or worse, that he is dead, as in dead.

Young students may be aware of what he has written and may even guess the titles of some of his books. But do they read him? For a surprisingly large number, the answer is no. Still, everybody bewails the fact that our country has not yet produced a Nobel Prize winner. Fictionist N.V.M. Gonzalez in an interview said that Filipinos cannot help the country win a Nobel Prize in Literature unless they first learn to read and appreciate Philippine literature. As it is, people mistake or interchange the titles of works written by one author for another.

It’s a good thing that budding writers do have more outlets now than right after martial law, thanks to the likes of Nick Joaquin, who has always been very supportive of new talents. He is one of the few journalists who fight for newspapers and magazines to have a regular literary section. He knows a good writer when he reads one, and he never tires of encouraging the talented to go on writing. Almost a whole generation of writers in the ’60s and ’70s look up to him as a great influence on their writing.

Nicanor G. Tiongson, critic, playwright, and former artistic director of the Sentrong Pangkultura ng Pilipinas (Cultural Center of the Philippines), cites Nick Joaquin’s significant insight into history. Nick, explains Tiongson, has done a valuable interpretation of the conflict between the “dying Hispanic heritage and the emergent American value system.”

Tiongson points out another major contribution of Nick Joaquin, which is in the realm of language. “Nick’s unusual use of the English language is very reflective of Filipino sensibility. As a Filipino artist, he creates another reality which contains a very Hispanized morality expressed in Anglo-Saxon terms.”

As for the play, A Portrait of an Artist as Filipino, Tiongson considers it as “very important in Philippine dramaturgy. Of the Filipino plays in English, it’s the play because of its depth and breadth. It is pioneering in its time.”

In an article in the Sunday Inquirer Magazine (August 1, 1996), critic Doreen Fernandez writes: “Nick Joaquin has enriched the English language by reinventing it in his unique way. No one else has written so much, so variedly, and so well about so many aspects of the Filipino.”

Bienvenido Lumbera, 1995 RM Awardee for literature, opines: “I think Nick Joaquin’s significance in Philippine literature is his exploration of the Philippine colonial past under Spain as well as his handling of language. Then, of course, there is his probing into the psychology of social changes as seen by the young, in such short stories as ‘Doña Jeronima,’ ‘Candido’s Apocalypse,’ and ‘The Order of Melchizedek.’”

Wrote the late National Artist in Literature Jose Garcia Villa: “Nick Joaquin is, in my opinion, the only Filipino writer with a real imagination­that imagination of power and depth and great metaphysical seeing­and which knows how to express itself in great language, who writes poetry, and who reveals behind his writings a genuine first-rate mind.”

From another fellow National Artist in Literature Francisco Arcellana comes this assessment: “Nick Joaquin is the most distinguished Filipino writer in English. He has written plays, novels, poems, short stories, and essays, not to mention reportage and journalism. The predictable thing is that, whether he’s writing literature or journalism, it’s always of the highest skill and quality.”

Nick Joaquin himself doesn’t seem to mind if young people don’t read him or if they mistake his works for those of others. With little children, he plays hide-and-seek and assumes the role of a ghost who scares the wits out of the innocent. On a number of occasions, his behavior shocks polite society. While watching a play, he may criticize an actor in a stage whisper, or even talk back­probably a throwback to his days in vaudevile, where actors and audience often engage in unscripted dialogue. In moviehouses, he has been known to sing along during musicals. At ceremonial affairs, he has been seen dozing off right in front of somebody delivering an important, boring speech.

But everybody smiles and laughs, whether flattered or dumbfounded, when called “Dah-ling!” by Nick Joaquin, himself the darling of the literati. No one really knows if he has just uttered a term of endearment or an absent-minded greeting to someone whose name he has forgotten or whose face he cannot place at all.

Poet and fictionist Rowena Tiempo Torrevillas, in a collection of essays, Face to Face with Missing Pieces of Myself, recalls her second encounter with Nick Joaquin in the United States, her first being in Dumaguete at age 11:

“I was thirteen then … an ugly age to be, and I was designed to walk at wrong angles with the universe.

“He looked down at me and said, Why it was the best age, he wished he could be 13 again. I didn’t believe him. I am sure he remembers none of this incident; the skill with which he launched into that tiny proto-flirtation proves that he must have performed the same act of kindness and gentility countless times, and with people who were more in need of it than I. When grateful little girls grow up to be instructors in literature, they learn to give a name to the sort of generosity of spirit such as Nick Joaquin spent on me that evening. They call it ‘insight.’

“He opened doors for me, and saved the seat next to him, and extracted my gauche opinions with such skill that I was only vaguely aware of what was happening; but by the time we were driving home with him I was completely intoxicated. The long, snow-laden rolling Iowa hills on either side of the road streamed by, touched with a pearly grey purity I seemed not to have seen in them before, even the bare branches were part of the inarticulate poetry that had something to do with the sound of the big gruff voice.”

Nick’s effect on the young Rowena has been felt by other teenage girls. Nick is not a brute, they conclude, but a nice fatherly person. A godfather to blossoming Cinderellas he is, and a willing accomplice to young rebels who are bent on seeing the world and becoming writers.

To his wards, he is both guardian angel and bad influence. He is at once confidante and courier of secrets. So, how do you solve a problem like Nick Joaquin? You don’t. Just let him be. Just as he lets others weave myths and legends around him.

At 80, Nick Joaquin is as prolific a writer as ever. And whatever is said about him, whether as great writer or good friend, he’ll merely scowl and say, while bringing a beer bottle to his mouth: “I couldn’t care less [pronounced leish]!”

(The National Artists of the Philippines. Manila: Cultural   Center of the Philippines, National Commission for Culture and the Arts, and Anvil Publishing, 1998)

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