The title Vallejo finally chose perfectly captures the conflict: the generational antagonism established on the two shores (the parents and older children represent the old aristocracy; and the younger children, the new social order). Between these shores runs the unstoppable river, where water serves as the figure of historical transformation, tacitly evoking Heraclitus of Ephesus. The drama of the play surges out of the implacable flow of history, indifferent to whatever gets in its way. Although the tension arises from the conflict among Vera and her husband, Vallejo’s point of attack comes through Vera’s attempt to stop her younger children from embracing the new social order. Her downfall results not from the revolution, but from her inability to accept social reality in the wake of the revolution, and it’s precisely this state of denial that leads to her daughter’s tragedy, with unmistakable resonance of the early generational insight of Trilce LVI, which complains about the grown-ups who “understood themselves even as creators / and loved us even to doing us harm.”86
The River Flows between Two Shores isn’t Vallejo’s best play, but it has redeeming qualities, and these he fought for tooth and nail. Such an ambitious endeavor for our Andean author—a full-length play set in Moscow about the generational conflict after the Russian civil war—bled into melodrama, and we get the sense that Vallejo recognized this, since he had the mind to salvage the successful shorts, The Final Judgment and Death. Additionally, we mustn’t forget that, contrary to his more mature stage writing (Brothers Colacho and The Tired Stone), The River Flows between Two Shores is the only full-length play that wasn’t adapted from a novel he’d previously written, thus revealing his absolute fearlessness as a writer willing to venture into unknown waters of genre and explore extremely complicated, controversial topics.
The case is different with Brothers Colacho. In 1932 Vallejo adapted his novel Tungsten into this full-length farce and edited it thoroughly thereafter, even imagining one of the revisions, Presidents of America, as a screenplay. None of the iterations was ever produced in the author’s lifetime, and the script, never published. Although Vallejo has the tendency of pouring salt on the wound of social conflict in all his plays, in Brothers Colacho it stings the most. The play is about two poor merchants, Acidal and Mordel Colacho, who rise from their humble beginnings into social and political positions of power and, through this transition, they’re quick to exploit members of the working class as they once were exploited. Here, exploitation occurs as a result of the lack of education, specifically the basic skills of mathematics and spelling. Acidal and Mordel are able to cheat the indigenous patrons of their store because these astute store owners know how to calculate and spell and their humble clients don’t. What makes their characters ruthless (and the play hysterical) is their sanctimony and ignorance. While gloating about their intelligence, they reveal their own stupidity.
Whereas Tungsten can be read as Vallejo’s nod at Gladkov’s Cement (1925), when we imagine what a production of Brothers Colacho would look like, The Gold Rush (1925) of Chaplin appears before our eyes. Like the novel that gave rise to it, Vallejo’s farce formulates a systemic critique of Peruvian government, which in 1930 was suffering grave problems brought on by the administration of Augusto B. Leguía and then several other fleeting administrations that ensued, a period when infamous deals were struck with the governments of imperialist countries. And Vallejo’s foresight must be recognized, since in Brothers Colacho he predicts that Peru would end with a dictatorship, which it did, led by Gen. Óscar R. Benevides.
At the heart of the play is a critique of collusion, since Vallejo isn’t against only U.S. imperialism but exploitation of all kinds, and he goes to great lengths to show that corruption, like that which occurred in the mining industry of the Peruvian Andes, was fostered by native power brokers. The self-inclusive feature of this argumentation is precisely what makes the Colacho brothers so despicable and the premise of the play so universal. Driven by personal greed, they sell out their own people behind a facade of sanctimony. Their malice—with its self-serving logic and part-time morality—makes their sociopolitical success detestable and drives the farce to hilarity.
Now, we turn our attention to what is considered one of Vallejo’s greatest literary accomplishments: Human Poems. The first edition was published in Paris in 1939, by Georgette de Vallejo and Raúl Porras Barrenchea (Les Editions des Presses Modernes), with an epilogue by Luis Alberto Sánchez and Jean Cassou. Composed in 1923–38 and comprising a cache of 108 texts, half of which were dated in the autumn of 1937 and half undated, the collection doesn’t appear to have a deliberate order, except for the final fifteen poems titled España, aparta de mí este cáliz. It’s safe to say that had Vallejo lived longer, these poems would’ve received further editing, and the collection a title, since critical consensus affirms that the phrase Poemas humanos was not Vallejo’s invention.
Human Poems counts as the first of two major works of a poet who has reached maturity. No longer obsessed with the convoluted syntax and idiosyncratic morphology which he had flaunted in Trilce with that artistic perversion and love for the cryptic, in this collection Vallejo has a much more universal and far-reaching agenda, transitioning from “multiplicity to integration.”87 Through a complex system of historical references and toponyms in tune with the currents of high modernism, Vallejo’s poetry—interchangeably in verse and prose at this stage—refuses to forego its sentimentality and confessional mode that had defined him from the start. Now, saturated with pathos, not unlike the tragicomic aesthetic of Chaplin, the poetic voice begins its outward turn and starts to express a cosmic vision through the experienced lens of a man in his prime.
Whereas it was the nostos that drove the poetic of The Black Heralds and the kryptikos that created tension in Trilce, we perceive in Human Poems the poet yearning for the world to become a kosmos in which fields of maize transmute into human fields, and these into the “[s]olar and nutritious absence of the sea, / and oceanic feeling for everything!” as we read in the poem “Telluric and Magnetic.” In this quest for a complex orderly self-inclusive system, the manifestation of the poet’s desire for completion takes the form of complaints that he has only ever been given life and never once death; yet this feeling is frustrated by the very language that expresses it, as we see in the poem “Today I like life much less,” where he writes, “I almost touched the part of my whole and restrained myself / with a shot in the tongue behind my word.”
This notion of language as an obstruction from reaching cosmic totality was prefigured in the image of the Venus de Milo from poem XXXVI of Trilce, but in Human Poems the poet doesn’t appear to have only accepted his “orphanhood.” Instead, he starts acquiring a quasi-Whitmanian everythingist vision; although contrary to his democratic forebear, Vallejo’s gaze is set on the promise of socialism. Thus, in “The peace, the wausp, the shoe heel, the slopes,” he seeks to fraternize with “[t]he horrible, the sumptuous, the slowest, / the august, the fruitless, / the ominous, the convulsive, the wet, the fatal, / the whole, the purest, the lugubrious, / the bitter, the satanic, the tactile, the profound.”
From the experimental poetics of Trilce and Scales to the compositions we find in Human Poems, the direction of the poetic voice begins its outward turn, and the thematics shift from the existential concerns of the individual to the universal crises of the species. This can be explained by Vallejo’s adoption of a sort of Marxism that, as Ricardo González Vigil shows, “was ‘critical’ and ‘creative,’ loyal in this regard to Marx and not to the dogmas fabricated by his disciples.” In Human Poems Vallejo’s fundamental sensibility underlies his Marxism, formed during his childhood years with its Andean household background, his Christian and pantheistic upbringing, and his early awareness of injustice and sociocultural marginalization. These are poems seeking Peruvian roots and the origin of being, leading the poet “to accept the Revolution as the (dialectically superior) return trip to the paradise of the origin, the communal model of the Indian (cf. ‘Telluric and Magnetic’ and Tungsten) galvanized by the Bolsheviks (‘Angelic Salutation,’ Russia in 1931, and Reflections at the Foot of the Kremlin)