Salute to their comrade professor

Two nostalgia persons: Geraldine C. Maayo with her former professor Elmer A. Ordoñez Photo by Elizabeth Lolarga

Dr. Elmer A. Ordoñez’s influence on his students extends widely. That’s how an ideal and effective professor should be.

Although retired from teaching, he remains a literary scholar and a prolific writer. His latest book is also his first novel, Snows of Yesteryear (University of the Philippines Press).

He told the blogger: “I keep track of the output of every generation following mine. I’m not limited to creative writing. I am open to other forms of discourse and categories of writing produced in the various contexts of the times.”

In the ’60s he immersed himself in the works of committed writers and those produced in the writers’ workshops at the UP and Silliman University. He observed, “In the ’70s there emerged alternative forms–resistance literature, underground writing, literature of refusal–many expressed in forthright language in underground publications, some in veiled forms such as allegory like Pete Lacaba’s acrostic poem published in above-ground journals. Others were circulated by hand in mimeograph like Hulagpos or Mga Tula ng Rebolusyon.”

He read the works of writers groups like Galian sa Arte at Tula, Philippine Literary Arts Council with its journal Caracoa, Philippine Writers Union with its Siglaya and Mithi. This literary scholar delved into the regional cultural forms such as the isymaling (Samar), baliling (Mindanao), composo (Negros), salidom-ay (Ilocos) that underground writers appropriated. He called all these “emergent writing” or “anti-hegemonic literature.”

While wartime matured his generation, he said of the generations after him and the possibility of social justice being achieved, finally: “Each generation of writers will figure out what oppresses them. Our generation was traumatized by the war or we experienced direct oppression. We knew what we missed–peace and freedom. But the Cold War affected us in another way.”

He noted the “escapist trend in writing. Instead of writing about the war, there was a tendency to look inward. These writers were influenced by the models used by their writing mentors–Joyce’s ‘Araby’ and ‘The Dead,’ Hemingway’s ‘The Killers’ and the stories taught in writers’ workshops. These were tales on self-discovery, disenchantment and disillusion.”

He recalled the question of Wallace Stegner who taught creative writing at Stanford University. In a visit to the Philippines, Stegner asked “Where are the stories about the Huk rebellion, the peasant unrest?”

Ordoñez said, “Our generation was too preoccupied with the craft of fiction and couldn’t be bothered with new hostilities. I shouldn’t generalize, but this was how my generation coped with the Cold War—by turning inward. There are exceptions to be sure.”

Asked who and what he is reading now, he listed Jim Richardson’s Komunista: The Genesis of the PKP 1902-1935, Amelia Lapeña Bonifacio’s Binondo: Once Upon a War, Emmanuel Calairo’s Cavite Sa Digmaan, Luis Teodoro’s Vantage Point and Rizal’s annotated edition of Morga’s Sucesos de Filipinas. He is also rereading Edmund Wilson’s Memoirs of Hecate County.

Four English majors who were his students, then colleagues, at the UP of the ’60s pay him tribute with their memories.

Geraldine C. Maayo, retired professor from the UP School of Labor and Industrial Relations and a fictionist, said Ordoñez “had a gentle disposition, a gentle voice. Everything about him was gentle: the way he walked, the way he lectured. He had just come from Oxford. He was an authority on Joseph Conrad. But we never saw anything in him that suggested that he thought he was and should be recognized as an authority. He always lectured in that gentle voice of his, occasionally smiling. He always had a prepared lecture. He struck me as a respectful man, respectful of everybody and definitely of his students. Also a bit shy.”

She said of him as a writer, “I like the way he writes, what he writes about. We converge in this aspect. We write of things that are very personal to us. We are both nostalgia persons, sentimental persons.”

Poet-novelist Mila D. Aguilar recalled that Ordoñez was her last Research in Comparative Lit professor before she graduated in’69. She had taken too many Humanities subjects and had forgotten about this requirement.

She said, “He gave me a 1.0 (Excellent) and got me to teach at the department the very semester after without my having to get my transcript of records. Elmer was a thorough liberal, kind to a fault. When he got me to teach, together with Charito Ramirez and Gelacio Guillermo, he shoved aside many other applicants who were waiting in the wings. He would not have known that the three instructors he recruited subsequently became radical, if not apparently yet. The ones he shunted were absolute conservatives. As a result, he was labelled a progressive, in fact blamed when the three of us disappeared into the netherworld of the underground.”

Now that she relates to him as a friend, she said, “Elmer is still the same, thoroughly liberal and kind to a fault. He has a wide-ranging view of things, insisting that Emilio Aguinaldo was not a traitor for the simple reason that he listened to the prominent people of Cavite where he lived.”

Yet, she continued, “he can be very truthful. In 2000, I asked for his recommendation for a renewed teaching post in the English department. He correctly stated that though I was creative and all, my weakness was in research. That got me to rethink my life. From then on I became an avid researcher if not in physical libraries, which I still find difficult to access, at least on Google and the Internet.”

Essayist-fictionist Jenny Llaguno described Ordoñez as “the quintessential mentor—was, is and will be ever patient, ever brilliant, ever shy, ever soft-spoken. He has a lodestone of wisdom to share. This has not changed in the thirty years of my relationship with him as a student, editor and friend.”

She noticed that lately “he is not as quick to answer because of hearing impairment. His voice falters before an audience. His hair has turned grey, but these are changes brought on by time and loss. A certain melancholy vis-a-vis a certain smile shades his face, a certain longing, too, for his wife. He taught me how to focus when I got derailed in answering an examination question, how to copyedit/proofread, how to be discursive. He has not really changed.”

Essayist-book artist Delfin Tolentino Jr. of UP Baguio recalled being in Ordoñez’s Modern British Literature class. “I was on my way to getting a flat 1.0 until I flunked a long exam where I attributed a couple of excerpts to the wrong poets. The bluffer was finally caught!”

He continued, “Elmer was the department chair at the time. They were the heady days of activism. We pilloried him for refusing to get involved. His radicalization came later. By that time, we were no longer in touch. When we met again after his exile, his first words to me were: ‘Delfin, I am no longer a wishy-washy liberal!’”—Elizabeth Lolarga

Steinem, Capote, Holly Golightly, a stray cat

To paraphrase the subject of this biography, this is what 60 looks like.

Visiting Simone de Beauvoir in France in the '70s. Heilbrun wrote of the French woman: "When it transpired that she had served Sartre and remained in some way dependent on him, her claim to our regard was declared compromised."

With a cat named Crazy Alice

Delfin Tolentino Jr. of UP Baguio introduced me in the 1990s to feminist scholar Carolyn Heilbrun through her detective novels written under the pseudonym of Amanda Cross. The titles were beguiling (Death in a Tenured Position, The James Joyce Murder, Poetic Justice) and reflected an author who was certainly steeped in literature. 

Thanks to Del, I read the bulk of those novels first before he introduced me to the real Prof. Heilbrun behind Writing a Woman's Life and later, The Last Gift of Time. Del wrote in a note that the latter may be the last we'd read by her because by then, she had died by her own hand.

So many gifts of reading from Del that I can say my Baguio years have been constantly deepened by diving into his collection.

This summer he handed me Heilbrun's biography of Gloria Steinem, she of the aviator eyeglasses, streaked hair, the empowerment of women ("God may be in the details, but the goddess is in the questions. Once we begin to ask them, there is no turning back"). I'm supposed to do another handover of the book, this time to Del's former professor, Edna Z. Manlapaz. I haven't planned a trip yet to the Ateneo Library of Women's Writings to complete the change of hands. This gave me enough time to savor the book.

Meanwhile, I'm running these excerpts by way of bookmarking the convergence of Steinem, Capote (a writer I also admire), the fictional character of Holly Golightly and the appeal of New York City to the girl from Toledo, Ohio (Steinem):

"And then there was Truman Capote. Steinem interviewed and wrote him up twice, in 1966 for Glamour and in 1967 for McCall's and did not speak with him outside of those interviews, but his writing had influenced her long before that. In 1961 she saw the movie--she had already read the story--Breakfast at Tiffany's, and Holly Golightly would seem to speak for her in many ways. When she decided to add blond streaks to her dark brown hair, it was to imitate of the rebelliousness of Holly. (From then on she would streak her hair.) But more important than the way Holly Golightly looked was how she left home. As Doc describes it, "Reading dreams. That's what started her walking down the road. Every day she'd walk a little further; a mile, and come home. One day she just kept on." For some reason, that way of leaving home spoke to Steinem. (It was, of course, also the way she left men--Steinem and Holly Golightly shared an unwillingness to commit.)...

"As one reads the story today, other touches from Breakfast at Tiffany's resonate: Holly saying, "I want to still be me when I wake up one fine morning and have breakfast at Tiffany's." She has cards that read "Holly Golightly, Travelling." She answers, when asked about it: "After all, how do I know where I'll be living tomorrow?" Holly Golightly has a cat with no name. "'Poor slob,' she said, tickling his head, 'poor slob without a name. But I haven't any right to give him one: he'll have to wait until he belongs to somebody.'" In fact, in the 1970s there arrived at Steinem's apartment a stray cat named Crazy Alice, which, although named, came for only a few years.

"Steinem, like Holly, travelled too much. Holly's room, like Steinem's, had a "camping-out atmosphere; crates and suitcases." Steinem's did not look as though everything was "packed and ready to go," but certainly, with its boxes of papers and piles of books, it could not be called "decorated," or substantial, or done up. Gerald Clarke, Capote's biographer, thought that Holly Golightly was based not so much on any woman that Capote had known as on Capote himself. This seems likely, and illuminates the ready understanding between Steinem and Capote."

Grand dame reading

For young reader Bianca Ysabel Lolarga Susi who turned 10 years old today

Of the hundreds of pictures that our grandmother, Telesfora Cariño Lolarga, arranged in her scrapbooks that have survived changes of residence, this one retrieved from one of her vintage suitcases stored in another Baguio house is a favorite.

On the Play List of this blog is a site called Awesome People Reading devoted to authors and celebrities doing just  that--reading hard copy (scripts, letters, magazines, pamphlets, newspapers and books, of course).

Lola's gesture of reading (she must have been in her 30s here in the original family home on Pepin street, Sampaloc, Manila, since then sold and demolished) is typically her, a woman who was both solitary and social.

Sometime between the years 1992 and early 1997, I bought Suzanne Juhaz's Reading from the Heart: Reading, Literature and the Search for True Love (Penguin Books, 1994). The title jumped out of a bin of yellowing titles in a Baguio bookstore (Nini and Pancho Lapuz's late lamented Legato) when I was full-time mother to two daughters, part-time freelancer and all-the-time reader. In the lulls when the kids were in school or I was waiting for a kettle to boil or the coffee to drip or giving up on the idea of doing the day's house cleaning and dusting, books were my refuge, haven of rest, escape and enduring passion. As they are today.

These days, I go into debt because of book purchases I cannot curtail. My priorities are all skewed, family members like to reprimand me.

And after I'm done with the last page, it's time to hand the title over to the next similar spirited reader or add it to a bundle of read books for turnover to a group that Prof. Delfin Tolentino Jr. put up in the 1990s--the Friends of the UP Baguio Library, friends who love the printed word enough to want to share their "loot."

I am reminded of the group because two nights ago, Rita Ledesma, fellow First Draft member, turned over to me two big and heavy bags of book for the University donated by her former grade school classmate, Pinky Farolan, another passionate reader. Thank you, Pinky and Rita--these books, once brought up to Baguio, will fill the hours of some incoming students there in the new semester. No frigate like a book, indeed.

Meanwhile, some lines from Ms. Juhasz's prologue describe how reading makes the real world tolerable. These lines explain why the people I read about, whether in fiction or non-fiction, have always been more real to me than the ones I live and have to deal with:

"Talking about books with other people is a delight, which may be one reason why I made it my profession. It complements those many hours spent alone with a book. And yet, reading isn't exactly solitary, either. I'm alone in the room when I read, but not in my mind. And maybe that's the key, because the society of the book--its world that I can enter, as well as the deeply intimate and always developing relationship with the author as the book incarnates her--keeps me from being lonely. I am lonelier in the real world situation I've just described--when no one seems to understand who I am--than by myself reading, when I feel that the book recognizes me, and I recognize myself because of the book."

That said, let me now get on with what supports my addiction--meeting a writing deadline.