Tag Archives: Romulo

Penman No. 426: A Provinciano Comes Home

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Penman for Monday, October 25, 2021

THIS THURSDAY, October 28, a small and socially-distanced book launch will be held at the Development Bank of the Philippines in Makati to honor one of the DBP’s guiding lights, and one of the most distinguished and accomplished economists and diplomats of his time. I was privileged to have been asked to write this book, titled O, Ilaw: The Life and Legacy of Leonides S. Virata, by the late Leo’s son Luis Juan or Buboy, himself a highly successful businessman.

Few people below 65 will remember Leo Virata now, which was one reason why the book, published by the Cavite Historical Society, was written. For Buboy, it was to make sure that his children and grandchildren will know his father the way he did, and to introduce Leo to a new generation of Filipinos now sadly too used to seeing government officials and businessmen as crooks. 

Leo Virata was, in various phases of his life, both a public servant and a pillar of the business community. Born in Imus, Cavite in 1918 to the family that bred his eldest brother Enrique and Enrique’s son Cesar, Leo was an academic standout from grade school to college, graduating cum laude in Business Administration from the University of the Philippines before being sent on to Harvard, the University of Chicago, and Northwestern University for graduate studies. Caught by the war in the US, Leo then became Gen. Carlos P. Romulo’s indispensable aide, all the way to the United Nations. 

He returned to the Philippines after the war to set up the research department at the new Central Bank, a convergence point for the best and brightest young economic minds of the time, including Horacio Lava, Benito Legarda Jr., and Sixto K. Roxas. He then moved to Philam Life in 1952 as financial vice-president and vice-chairman of its investment committee, spearheading the company’s support for vital economic projects, including Filoil, Far East Bank, Bacnotan Cement, and Manila Doctors Hospital, among others. 

After almost two decades in the private sector, Leo was taken in by President Marcos in 1969 as Secretary of Commerce and Industry, before being appointed chairman of the DBP in 1970. The bank was then saddled by bad loans, but Leo cleaned up the mess as best he could and reoriented the bank to support countryside development. Tragically, he died in 1976 aged only 58 of lung cancer, and was universally mourned for his brilliance, his dedication to public service, and his integrity (when he took over the DBP, he explicitly ordered his relatives not to visit him at his office).

When Buboy asked me to write his father’s biography a few years ago, I had heard of the name but knew very little of the man himself, and immediately I realized how difficult it would be to reanimate the character of a subject who had been gone for over 40 years. Almost always, in my previous assignments, I had had the luxury of working with subjects who were still very much alive and blessed with elephantine memories (as Wash SyCip was) or had roomfuls of catalogued materials gathered over the decades waiting to be sorted out (as Ed Angara did). Family members are a great resource, and Buboy and his wife Libet gave me all the help they could, but sadly Leo’s wife Bebe Lammoglia Virata—a renowned art collector—and Buboy’s sister Vanna had passed on. 

Thankfully, some luminaries whom Leo mentored or influenced were still around—among them, the journalist Jake Macasaet, and businessmen and public officials such as Manny Zamora, Louie Villafuerte, Cesar Zalamea, Titoy Pardo, and Johnny Litton—from whom I was able to get the most interesting vignettes about Leo and his times. (Among other things, Leo did not let his relationship with Marcos intrude into his decisions, and could say no to the man; the Viratas had lost land to the Marcoses, recovered only after EDSA.)

Writing a biography requires more than fleshing out someone’s Wikipedia entry. I always remind my clients that I’m a novelist rather than a professional historian, so my interest lies in capturing a character inside and out, trusting the story to reveal the subject’s strengths and weaknesses without having to editorialize on his or her behalf.

My writing stalled for about a year as I struggled to fill in gaps about Leo’s professional and personal life. Impossible as it seemed, I wanted to hear the man himself; Leo was a prodigious speaker and crowd-pleaser (the title of the book adverts to his favorite kundiman, which he would sing at the drop of a hat). I got a terrific break when Buboy unearthed two scrapbooks bulging with Leo’s memorabilia and notes from his years in the US, as a student and as CPR’s right-hand man. Finally, in this collection of postcards, concert tickets, restaurant menus, and such ephemera—alongside his correspondence with CPR—the person emerged, standing on the verge of an outstanding career, finding his footing in a world wracked by war, thousands of miles away from the groves of Imus.

Despite having traveled the world and having married an Italian mestiza, Leo remained a provinciano at heart. When Leo died, hundreds of townsfolk and schoolchildren lined the road leading to his grave in his hometown, which considered him a hero. I wonder how many of our leaders today will deserve that kind of farewell.

Penman No. 412: CPR and the Art of Autobiography

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Penman for Monday, April 26, 2021

TWO WEEKS ago, I gave an online lecture sponsored by the National Commission for Culture and the Arts (NCCA) and the University of the Philippines Baguio on the subject of Carlos P. Romulo as a National Artist for Literature. I was frankly surprised to have been asked to speak on CPR, or “the General” as he preferred to be addressed. I am no expert on Romulo, and while our lifetimes coincided for about 30 years, I never had a chance to meet the man, not even at the University of the Philippines, which he served as President from 1962 to 1968.

I did have a brush with Romulo’s writing in grade school when, for reasons I now forget, my declamation piece was his exuberant essay “I Am a Filipino.” Of course I already learned from our Social Studies class that he had been the President of the United Nations General Assembly, so I had a sense of the man as a Filipino who had proudly made a name for himself and for his country in the world.

Like many of you I also remembered Romulo as the diminutive figure sloshing through the surf in Leyte Gulf behind the hulking Douglas MacArthur. But indeed he was someone whose physical stature, at five-foot-four, was often preceded and magnified by his towering reputation. 

Romulo’s was unquestionably a long and stellar life, stretching from the start of the American occupation in 1899 to the last year of Marcosian rule in 1985. He was a participant in and witness to many of the most dramatic moments of the 20th century. Even his association with President Marcos in his later years as Foreign Minister—an appointment clearly meant to lend credence to the martial-law regime, as CPR himself realized and later regretted—has now largely been overlooked by scholars and critics. 

But of all the tributes paid to CPR, the one that seems to have escaped the public imagination is that of Carlos P. Romulo as National Artist for Literature—a fact that many Filipinos, including writers, appear to be ignorant of. I must confess to wondering myself how Romulo’s literary achievements stack up alongside those of Nick Joaquin, F. Sionil Jose, Jose Garcia Villa, Virgilio Almario, Amado Hernandez, and so on.

Romulo was declared a National Artist, along with the film director Gerardo de Leon, by virtue of Presidential Proclamation No. 2207, signed by President Marcos on June 10, 1982. He was only the third awardee for literature, following Amado Hernandez in 1972 and Nick Joaquin in 1976.

We are not privy to the deliberations of the awards committee for that year and to what procedures were followed. But somehow there arose the suspicion that CPR was summarily given the National Artist Award by Marcos, whom he served as Foreign Minister from 1978 to 1984, as a political favor or reward. Putting politics aside for the time being, the niggling question remains: what exactly should Carlos P. Romulo be recognized as a National Artist for Literature for? What can he teach contemporary Filipino writers?

That Romulo was a prodigious and talented writer cannot be disputed. He is on record as having published 22 books, including one novel (The United, 1951) and a book of plays, but comprising mostly what we would today call creative nonfiction—autobiography, biography, and historical reportage. While his novel—set in the US, with American characters—achieved some success, I strongly doubt that this was or could be the main foundation on which his literary reputation rests. 

Rather, I propose that it is Romulo’s nonfiction reportage that distinguishes him most strongly as a writer of and about his time, and one of the most articulate chroniclers and propagandists of the Philippine midcentury. 

Much of this achievement has to do with Romulo’s uncanny ability to position himself in our history as witness and party to some of its most momentous events. He lived an extraordinary life that led him from Camiling, Tarlac to Columbia University and then back to the Philippines, where he became a teenage reporter, then editor, then university professor, presidential adviser, aide-de-camp to Gen. MacArthur, US Army general, “the last man off Bataan” as one of his book titles says, postwar diplomat, presidential candidate, university president, foreign secretary, and international statesman. 

That life and his encounters with the world became the raw material for his books and his reportage, which won him the Pulitzer Prize for Correspondence in 1942. If you want to know Romulo and his times, look no farther than his 1961 autobiography, I Walked with Heroes. It best displays him as a master of what could be a vanishing literary form in these days of Twitter, Instagram, and generally abbreviated and instantaneous commentary.

I was not expecting to appreciate the book and its author as much as I eventually did. It is a pleasurable, engaging, and instructive read, written by someone who has a story to tell and knows how to tell it. The problem with Romulo, to be plain about it, is, well, Romulo. Like most people whose reputations precede them, he invited the impression of possessing a well-nourished ego, which the armchair psychoanalyst might say was likely a form of overcompensation for his short stature. 

What we get at the end of I Walked with Heroes is, to be sure, a varnished portrait of CPR and his contemporaries, but not incidentally we also follow a nation in progress, emerging from colonialism to a fragile postwar independence. And therein, I suggest, lies its value and Romulo’s strongest claim to literary fame, in his ability to interweave the personal with the public—not on the tiny frame of selective memoir but on the wall-sized tapestry of comprehensive autobiography, a diminishing art for many reasons. Our writing has become increasingly smaller in scope and ambition. Accustomed to tweets and Facebook tags, our writers and readers today think of time in terms of fleeting seconds, and lack the memory and capacity for historical reflection.

And then again perhaps we simply lack the kind of larger-than-life personas (pun intended) that CPR and his contemporaries represented. With or without ghostwriters, our Presidents no longer write their autobiographies, or even their memoirs, as Quezon and Elpidio Quirino did. Perhaps they fear that the written word will return to haunt them. But then again why should autobiographies be expected to tell the whole truth and nothing but?

Subjected to scholarly interpellation, Romulo’s reportage on himself and the history swirling around him will surely raise many questions about whether this and that really happened the way he recalls it. But he is a master of narrative, and as fastidious as he was about his suits and uniforms, he clearly sought to portray a positive image of himself as the avatar of his people—“a small man from a small country”—for which no autobiographer in his position can be faulted for attempting.

Penman No. 305: More Autographs and Memories

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Romulo

Penman for Monday, June 4, 2018

 

FOUR YEARS ago, I wrote a column-piece titled “Autographs and memories,” largely about a visit that Beng and I made to an exhibit of autographs at the National Archives in Washington, DC, where I ogled the signatures of such as Ezra Pound, Adolf Hitler, Albert Einstein, and a score of American presidents and notables. I wished loudly that we would have a similar exhibit curated and mounted, say, at the National Museum.

Having ventured into collecting mid-century genre paintings, I’m slowly building up a digital archive of artists’ signatures. Those of our National Artists are pretty well covered by numerous coffee table books (so well that I’m sure some enterprising souls have made an industry out of copying them), but I’m more interested in the less-known likes of Serafin Serna, Gabriel Custodio, Crispin V. Lopez, Ben Alano, Jose D. Castro, and Fortunato Jervoso, among others—painters born shortly after the turn of the century and who may have studied under Fernando Amorsolo, or been influenced by his style.

When it comes to literature, however, then I do feel happily obligated to collect works signed by our National Artists, and have shamelessly invoked the privilege of friendship to solicit signatures to go with the books of Virgilio Almario, Bien Lumbera, and F. Sionil Jose—and, when they were alive, NVM Gonzalez, Franz Arcellana, Edith Tiempo, and Nick Joaquin. I’ve just as assiduously sought out those of such estimable and historically important writers (apart from my close personal writer-friends) as Carlos Bulosan, Zoilo Galang, Bienvenido Santos, Aida Rivera Ford, Tita Lacambra Ayala, Greg Brillantes, and Resil Mojares. On my wish list remain the autographs of Manuel Arguilla and Stevan Javellana, ideally on their books—and dare I even add Jose Rizal?

I never was his student (although Jimmy Abad and Luigi Francia were, half a generation ahead of me), but I had always wished to meet Jose Garcia Villa. The closest I would get was a signed copy of his 1949 book, Volume Two, courtesy of eBay.

Villa.jpeg

The Web may be the bane of many a bibliophile yearning for the tactile pleasures of typeset pages and deckled edges, but it also happens to be a nearly inexhaustible trove of hidden treasure, like the seabed where gold-laden galleons lie.

It was where, a couple of weeks ago, I chanced upon a book inscribed by the late dramatist and poet and National Artist Rolando Tinio to a “Lito, Lito,” whom he gently urges to move away from English, like Tinio himself did. Tinio had directed one of my plays in the late 1970s, but I must have been so awestruck that I never got to ask him to sign anything, not even the playbill.

That reminded me of another departed National Artist I wouldn’t have been too shy to swipe a signature from—but also never did. Lino Brocka and I collaborated on about 14 movies, and I corresponded with him frequently, especially when I was sending him scripts and storylines from graduate school in the US in the late 1980s until he died in 1992. But I don’t recall that he was ever the writing kind. (Instead, unmindful of time zones, he’d call me at 3 in the morning.) For all the work we did together, I can’t locate a single note from Lino.

I did secure an autographed book and a note—neither of them meant for me—online, signed by another National Artist for Literature (yes, the one we very often forget about, perhaps because he distinguished himself in so many other fields): Carlos P. Romulo, who received that honor in 1982.

My only encounter with Gen. Romulo was through a speech of his that I memorized and declaimed in grade school—the one that describes Filipinos as “short sunburnt men who love to fling the salty net” (I must’ve flung that net a thousand times in my impassioned recitations)—but I knew him to be a personage so highly accomplished and acclaimed that one university wag would claim that CPR had “more degrees than a thermometer.”

The book, Crusade in Asia, was inscribed by CPR to a “Howard W. Ashley” of Jacksonville, Florida, and was accompanied by a typewritten and signed letter also dated April 17, 1958 on the letterhead of the Philippine Embassy in Washington, DC, where CPR was serving as ambassador between 1955 and 1962. In the note, Romulo thanks Ashley for meeting him at the airport at midnight—a gesture that had unintended consequences, as CPR writes that “I am still worrying about the $127.00 that you have to pay for the repair of your Cadillac.”

Rebuke

Speaking of CPR, by coincidence—the kind that antiquarian collectors tend to run into more often than others—I came across an article by E. R. Rodriguez, Jr. in the Aug. 19, 1967 issue of The Chronicle Magazine.It details a mortifying exchange of long letters between a younger CPR and his boss, President Manuel L. Quezon, who delivers a stinging rebuke to his irrepressibly articulate aide for going on a private book tour while serving as a government official. That deserves its own column one of these days—but what I’d give for a signed original of what MLQ said!