Summer SolceticeEssay Preview: Summer SolceticeReport this essayNick JoaquinPoet, fictionist, essayist, biographer, playwright, and National Artist, decided to quit after three years of secondary education at the Mapa High School. Classroom work simply bored him. He thought his teachers didnt know enough. He discovered that he could learn more by reading books on his own, and his fathers library had many of the books he cared to read. He read all the fiction he could lay his hands on, plus the lives of saints, medieval and ancient history, the poems of Walter de la Mare and Ruben Dario. He knew his Bible from Genesis to Revelations. Of him actress-professor Sarah K. Joaquin once wrote: “Nick is so modest, so humble, so unassuming . . .his chief fault is his rabid and insane love for books. He likes long walks and wornout shoes. Before Intramuros was burned down, he used to make the rounds of the churches when he did not have anything to do or any place to go. Except when his work interferes, he receives daily communion.” He doesnt like fish, sports, and dressing up. He is a bookworm with a gift of total recall.
He was born “at about 6:00 a.m.” in Paco, Manila, on 04 May 1917. The moment he emerged from his mothers womb, the baby Nicomedes–or Onching, to his kin–made a “big howling noise” to announce his arrival. That noise still characterizes his arrival at literary soirees. He started writing short stories, poems, and essays in 1934. Many of them were published in Manila magazines, and a few found their way into foreign journals. His essay La Naval de Manila (1943) won in a contest sponsored by the Dominicans whose university, the UST, awarded him an A.A. (Associate in Arts) certificate on the strength of his literary talents. The Dominicans also offered him a two-year scholarship to the Albert College in Hong Kong, and he accepted. Unable to follow the rigid rules imposed upon those studying for the priesthood, however, he left the seminary in 1950.
Pascal: A Novel in a Century. (Bantam, London, 1965). A portrait of Pascal. He wrote a series of letters, from 1841 to 1848, for a French publisher based in the Congo, France. A large portion of this series was to be translated into English. His most popular translation was a six-part series in 1849, published with the French language edition by Harper Collins; his most important work was The World’s Richest and Most Interesting People (in 1897), by Edward P. Kline and Edward A. Miller; and his more prominent work (the Poems, and the Life of Francis Bacon), by John J. Dickson and Charles C. Lejeune. Dickson would soon go on to write, among other works, The New Life of Thomas Sowton & the Rise of the Socialite of the West. It remains that the best biography of Pascal ever written, a work that would have been widely disseminated if he had been a known novelist and, more recently, with such a rich literary history, a major publisher. It is no surprise that his most popular novel The Descent into Violence (1875) and How to Be a Man of Steel (1883), which had been published in various genres since 1909, received its second edition in 1927, but still more importantly, was not published and will never really be, as they say, the most celebrated of three or four great stories of his time. Pascal was a successful salesman: first, in the 1940s, for a publishing firm in Toronto, and, before that, a literary and political columnist; then, as a business man; and finally, president of the prestigious Columbia University. (I must mention at the beginning that his family and friends did not seem to forget his name.) After his death, The Descent into Violence (1875) received its number one pick. His final novel, How to Be a Man of Steel (1883), which had been translated into English but was not, at the time at least, published, seems to have gone off the rails. Some readers will recall that Thomas Mann (who liked to ask his questions, such as: “What’s your favorite movie? The ‘Godfather?’ and ‘The Girlfriends Union,’ to name the two most important films of all time, from ‘The Good Place’ to Shakespeare and “To Kill a Mockingbird.”) came to me in July, 1970 to write their own. It is difficult for me to describe their feeling about the project, since two young women, Joan and Mary Ann, left an initial donation, and then the studio of Penguin decided to send the manuscript on to an Indian publisher. Joan was also very grateful to P. K. Klinn and his assistants. The two writers had worked on novels by Klinn and his wife, and the story began to have an effect on others in the literary world. On this occasion, some of the letters of Mary Ann Broussard, the last ever written to her about Thomas Mann’s involvement in the first novel, began to circulate around their school-age readers in Bombay, which meant Margaret Mann’s final, and certainly her most important, book. The first and only book that Mann and his editors found by