Letters from Manong

Every Christmas season since we met some years ago, Manong Frankie Sionil Jose would send me one of his books, some of them dog-eared first editions that had been in his possession for decades.

All books came with his handwritten dedication, and nearly all were accompanied by letters handwritten on stationery of his La Solidaridad bookstore.

For the social media generation, there is little appreciation for anything handwritten, where messages and words are not abbreviated and sent off at cyber speed, and where each word is carefully chosen to capture what the writer wants to convey as precisely as possible.

These days, it seems, attention to grammar and spelling, whether in Filipino or English, is considered Jurassic in mass communication.

All the more reason for me to appreciate handwritten notes, especially those written by a National Artist for Literature. Many of the letters carried Manong Frankie’s commentaries on raging issues of the day, and several of which encouraged me to keep writing. I have kept all of his letters, together with all the sappy Hallmark greeting cards bearing my life partner’s handwritten messages of deep affection for me, now so tragically missed.

I didn’t swap books with Manong Frankie in all the Christmases past. Instead I sent him my home-baked breads and pastries, since he told me he had no problem with his blood sugar.

Last Christmas was no different; I dropped off my holiday wreath bread at La Solidaridad, but didn’t try to see him. In his last letter to me, which accompanied the book he sent for Christmas, Manong wrote, “I am OK but now confined in a wheelchair because of a heart problem.” So I didn’t want to disturb him, or risk infecting him with anything in the time of Omicron.

Now I wonder if I should have risked it, for just one final chat with him, on the top floor above the bookshop where he liked to entertain guests from widely diverse sectors of society.

His gift to me last Christmas is a book written by one of my favorites: the late American author Kurt Vonnegut Jr. Not my best liked among the Vonnegut novels, “Slaughterhouse Five” – the author’s fictional account of his real-life torture as a prisoner of war in a slaughterhouse in Dresden, Germany – but a non-fiction paperback with a 2019/2020 copyright, “Pity the Reader.” This carries Vonnegut’s tips “on writing with style,” expounded on by one of his students at the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop in the 1960s, Suzanne McConnell.

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It’s the only book Manong has given me that was written by someone else, so I’m guessing he would want me to disseminate its message. Believing that writing will never be a lost art, here are Vonnegut’s tips, verbatim:

1. Find a subject you care about, and which you in your heart feel others should care about.

2. Do not ramble, though.

3. Keep it simple. … Simplicity of language is not only reputable, but perhaps even sacred.

4. Have the guts to cut… your eloquence should be the servant of the ideas in your head.

5. Sound like yourself.

6. Say what you mean to say.

7. Pity the readers. They have to identify thousands of little marks on paper, and make sense of them immediately. They have to read, an art so difficult that most people don’t really master it even after having studied it all through grade school and high school – twelve long years.

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Manong Frankie wrote simply but in lyrical prose – the reason he is the only Filipino writer whose many works of fiction I have read and enjoyed. From his novels, it was depressing to realize how little has changed in our elite-controlled, rent-seeking society.

Also, the setting of most of his novels was Pangasinan, my paternal grandmother’s home province. Manong had been prodding me to join him on a day trip to his hometown of Rosales.

I’m sorry now that I kept procrastinating in accepting until the pandemic struck and canceled all such trips. Maybe because he remained perfectly lucid and kept writing, unfazed by controversy when his views riled readers, I thought he would live forever and there would be time enough for that day trip.

Will we still have another F. Sionil Jose? Equally important, will there still be readership for such work?

I have read nearly all his novels, but I confess that my reading preferences have also changed, to what my literature professors would likely think is for the worse. I’m sure I’m not alone.

In my youth I got through English literature class by reading the illustrated comics version of Shakespeare. At the UP Diliman library I devoured JRR Tolkien’s “The Lord of the Rings” trilogy, not Charles Dickens’ “A Tale of Two Cities.”

I did enjoy J.D. Salinger, John Steinbeck, Ernest Hemingway, Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Hermann Hesse’s “Steppenwolf,” and even poetry mostly of the Beat generation and Sylvia Plath.

These days, poetry writing seems as Jurassic as handwritten letters. I have become spoiled by easy reading for younger generations: “Harry Potter,” “The Hunger Games” and the “Divergent” series. I’m waiting for the third installment of my kid brother Richard’s teen-lit fantasy series, “Kelly Drake and the Tears of the Dragons.” And I have become addicted, like many, to passive entertainment. Instead of falling asleep with a well-written book in my hand, I binge-watch on Netflix.

In a rare spark of interest in a fiction novel, I’m reading French writer Hervé Le Tellier’s 2020 international bestseller “The Anomaly.” The novel won France’s most prestigious literary award, the Goncourt Prize, but that wasn’t what grabbed my interest in the paperback sent by a former colleague who is now in the US. What made me start reading was the blurb describing the novel as “high literature (that) follows the lead of a bingeable Netflix series…”

It would have been great to find out what Manong Frankie thought about Netflix. But I’m guessing he would have liked the idea of anything that would revive interest in reading, and writing as an art.

Manong Frankie, master artist, you are sorely missed.