But for Nolledo we would not have the writers of the generation after him born in the ’40s, Krip Yuson and Sawi Aquino and company, whose early purple prose was greatly influenced by the man who they later outgrew but the indelible mark on the work of their generation was there, clear as black and blue. Hear Krip saying "In praise of dazzling Ding" and how he visited the prototype in Panorama City late last decade, student of the ambidextrous movie review visiting the master of the carambola cinema verite of the old Observer Magazine, or is it newspaper edited by the venerable Yen Makabenta?
Read Sawi write in "The Seventh Floor," how "all work and no play would make Nolledo a dull wordboy," and wondering, what was that story in the ’60s or ’70s where a girl is saved by a giant tortoise at sea? Could have been stuff of myth or miracle, but it might have been by Ding.
But for Nolledo we would not have the writers born in the ’50s either, Bimboy Peñaranda, Carlos Cortes, Ding’s fellow Tomasian Eric Gamalinda, and yours truly, hehehoha, who taught Nolledo’s story "Rice Wine" to La Salle students sometime in the ’90s, recalling how Quevedo fell and the red house in the distance like that Jimi Hendrix song over yonder. Class, look at me (this with one finger over the shut mouth) and even now the no longer remote Danton Remoto steps up to the mic to say, "My God, isa-isa na silang namamatay!" Danton of course being with the man for a year or so in the post EDSA I Observer with offices along Quezon Ave., conveniently located beside the Ginza Massage Parlor and a stone’s throw away from the Chino Foodhaus, not that it mattered to either of them for varying reasons.
In the Centennial issue of Sands & Coral, the literary journal of the Silliman University in Dumaguete City, Aquino writes of the very first national writers workshop in that city in 1962, and where Nolledo and Sawi were fellows: "The Nolledo who came and stayed for the entire three weeks was the Nolledo who wrote ‘Rice Wine,’ ‘Of Things Guadalupe,’ and ‘Kayumanggi Mon Amour’ stories that influenced, quickened, and sent a generation of future Filipino novelists crashing into the sky."
The great no-shows at the prototype workshop, as Sawi described them in his essay "The Summer of 1962 et al.," were of Nolledo’s generation, Greg Brillantes and Gilda Cordero Fernando.
Again Sawi writes: "Nolledo was then 30. It was as the ’50s waned that he started publishing those strange, or strangely written, stories of his and zoomed to local stardom shoulder-to-shoulder with his contemporary Greg Brillantes. Nick Joaquin and Virgie Moreno and Franz Arcellana took turns saying how good and baroque and brilliant the young man was. Nolledo seemed to embody the new things then like the Sputnik, the first rocket successfully launched into space. Joaquin was saying something of the sort. How the young writers like Lansang and Nolledo were a different new breed writing with the Bomb in their subconscious and you could feel it in their rhythm and in fact the Bomb, Joaquin said, was not only a subliminal fear and anxiety but had actually exploded in Lansang’s mind." Lansang being Jun Lansang, author of Poems 55 who was saved from the Bomb by a Bicycle.
My own memory of Ding the man is sketchy at best. I remember meeting him at a watering hole along Vito Cruz St. in 1977, beside the Rizal Memorial Coliseum, where Recah Trinidad was teaching young sportswriters the rudiments of drinking. There was the usual rowdy gang of Danny Dalena and Erwin Castillo, but Nolledo seemed to materialize out of thin air, yet remaining inauspicious and unassuming in a corner, quietly nursing his beer until he blurted out of the blue: "Freddie Hubalde, he’s the real artist." 1977 being the year Hubalde won the MVP, and though the season was not yet over either for the Crispa Redmanizers or the Balic-balic Bulls, the prescient writer already knew the basketball player had it in the bag.
I’ve written about this before, how Nolledo and Joaquin used to drop by the house on Maginhawa St., and while they were seated at the dining table the family dog Igor would lick their shoes from under. Igor, now long dead, licked the shoes of great men who nonetheless exclaimed to everyone’s amusement, "We don’t need compassion, we need passion!"
That could well be the best advice one could give to the writing generations long removed from Joaquin, Nolledo et al., "Don’t give us your compassion, we need passion!" It still rings true long after Quevedo fell, how words uttered nonchalantly to a pet could be sound advice for a writer as a young dog.