Description
Manuel Rodriguez Sr. (1912-2017)
River Festival
In the 1960s I was a young university professor at the University of Hong Kong. Before moving there, I had been active as an emerging poet in the literary scene in the United Kingdom, and had been president of the Poetry Society at Oxford. In the fall of 1962 I was invited by the British Embassy in Manila to attend a Conference of Asian Writers in Manila as the UK representative, and of course I accepted enthusiastically.
The conference was scheduled to start on December 26, Boxing Day. The drawback was that I would miss Christmas with my wife and new-born son, since in those days there were only a few flights each wek between Hong Kong and Manila. So I arrived in Manila a couple of days before Christmas, checked into the Manila Hotel, and wandered haphazardly around the city. Immediately I liked the feel of the place and its energy, which was very different from the aggressively commercial ambience of Hong Kong.
On the evening of Christmas Eve I was sitting in the lobby of the hotel, reading a book and feeling a little lonely. Out of the corner of my eye I noticed a handsome early-middle-aged man walk past rapidly. He had several younger men with him. A few minutes later he came back and stood in front of me. I looked up. “What are you doing? Who are you waiting for?” he asked. Wryly, I explained that I was waiting for a conference that was due to start in two days’ time. “Are you on your own?” he asked. “You can’t spend Christmas on your own. Come along with us. We’ll show you how to celebrate Christmas in the Philippines.”
As one of the followers explained, I had been whisked up into the entourage of the Vice President, Emmanuel Pelaez. He insisted on me sitting in the limousine next to him, and from that point on, the next day and a half turned into a dream-like whirl of different houses, parties, music, friendly people, beautiful women, exotic food and a lot of drink. Pelaez was warm, generous, commanding — You have to try this; try that, that, that” - and always on the move. I don’t recall going to bed during those two nights, just grabbing a couple of hours sleep in a rattan chair on a balcony somewhere.
Somehow, I remembered that I had been invited to lunch on Christmas Day at the British Embassy. When I mentioned this I was given a Vice-Presidential car and driver, and arrived in style much to the surprise of the secretary who had been assigned to look after the insigni ficant poet. The lunch was painfully dull compared to the celebrations I had come from - diplomatic small talk, tasteless food and sour wine. There was some discussion of the crisis in Anglo Philippines relations that was happening at that time, as a result of the Philippines claim to Sabah, and I was grilled about anything I might have overheard. But I hadn’t heard anything, and wouldn’t have told these pompously undiplomatic diplomats if I had. After lunch, the airconditioning was cranked up so that it would feel “more English” and everybody stood around the piano singing Gilbert and Sullivan. I escaped back to the Philippines as quickly as possible.
I made it, rather hungover, to the opening of the conference on Boxing Day morning. That day, too, was the opening of an exhibition of contemporary Filipino art, which had been timed to coincide with the conference, and which was opened by Mrs. Pelaez. I was excited by what I saw there. (For some time as a teenager, I had been more interested in finding myself as a visual artist rather than as a writer; I had written many reviews for arts magazines in London, and participated in some group shows as a painter as well.) I liked the energy, the light, the optimism of many of the paintings that were in that show in Manila. At one point, the Vice President came over and put his arm around my shoulders: “How are you doing? How do you like our artists?” “Very much,” I said. I pointed out a painting by Hernando Ocampo and another by Cesar Legaspi. “And this one by Manuel Rodriguez; there’s so much life in it and a lot of atmosphere. I’ve always lived by the ocean and I can feel the rhythms of the sea in this.” He stood and looked at it with me. “You should go and visit him in his studio; maybe he will sell it to you.” He laughed, then spoke to a couple of the young observers at the conference whom I had been taking to (students at UP) and I guess he suggested that they should go with me to the Rodriguez workshop. That evening, as he made a speech at the opening dinner, was the last I ever saw of this generous, warm man who had taken me under his wing.
The conference took up all my time and energy for the next two days. Very quickly, I felt there was a danger of the it being taken over for propaganistic anti-left purposes, and I shared that opinion with more senior writers such as the novelist N.V.M. Gonzalez, who agreed with me and who later became a good friend, as well as with a number of the younger student writers who were there as well. I remember making an impassioned speech about the need for art to resist being coopted by narrow political agendas.
But before the end of the conference, along with several of my new friends, I made a point of going to meet Manuel Rodriguez in his gallery/workshop in Ermita. I loved the atmosphere there, the mess, the openness, the emphasis on craft and the general sense of a supportive, energizing communty between Rodriguez himself and all the younger artists who were working there. It’s the same atmosphere that I’ve always tried to generate in my own teaching and work in the theatre. Rodriguez seemed genuinely pleased that I had come to tell him how much I liked what he was doing. We arranged a price for the painting, and when the art exhibit closed on the final day of the conference, he wrapped it for me. I carried it on to the plane to Hong Kong and it has been a part of my life ever since.
signed (upper left) 1962
oil on canvas
24” x 36” (61 cm x 91 cm)
