Wilfrido D. Nolledo

Wilfrido D.Nolledo was born in 1933 in Manila. Ding [as Wilfrido D. Nolledo was fondly called] broke into print at age fifteen with a report on the Cabanela–Anduha fight for The Sporting World.^[1] He studied Literature at the University of Santo Tomas and at age twenty emerged as a fiction writer, publishing a series of short stories in the Manila Chronicle’s weekly magazine, before winning the top prize in the1954 Marian Year Literary Contest for his story, “The Beginning.” He was selected as one of the Ten Outstanding Young Men for literature in 1963, and during his heyday in the 1960s and 1970s, “was known as the enfant terrible of Philippine letters for his dense narrative and bravura English prose” in works that combined history, myth and magic.^[2] But the Nolledo cult truly began with his work in the Philippines Free Press.

Nolledo worked as a staff member at the Philippines Free Press from 1963 to1966. Alfred Yuson, who was also on the staff, recalls that “Nolledo savored the elbow-bending with young writers. Even as he knew that we looked up to him forhis trailblazing literary worth, he championed our petty little causes and was quick to offer encouragement.”^[3] Nolledo received some thirteen Carlos Palanca Memorial Awards over his career.^[4] In 1966, he was granted a Fulbright–Hays scholarship to attend the University of Iowa. After participating in the prestigious Iowa Writers’ Workshop, he eventually served as the editor of the Iowa Review. In 1972, he returned to the Philippines and wrote for various national magazines while scripting for movies. He moved back to the United States in 1990 to join his family, where he was writing his last novel, A Cappella Dawn. Nolledo died in Los Angeles in 2004.

It was in Iowa that Nolledo both perfected his style and created his masterpiece novel, But for the Lovers. In Iowa, however, Nolledo felt, at first, rather lost: “Terrible, terrible, my first three months in the Writers Workshop . . . Being the lone Asian in my class, I became a sort of oddity. It even surprised the attendant eggheads that I spoke English at all. I would go home to my crummy little room and brood.”^[5] As Nick Joaquin tells it, during that first year at Iowa, Nolledo collaborated with a young English writer named Stephen Gray on a James Bond–style thriller, alternating writing the chapters. Stephen Gray sent the manuscript to his New York literary agent, John Hawkins, who turned it down but was fascinated by the chapters Nolledo had written. Hawkins flew to Iowa for a day but could not locate Nolledo; Ding was at the movies. When he got back to New York, Hawkins wrote to Nolledo, asking if he had started a novel of his own and offering to be his agent.^[6] This was the beginning of But for the Lovers.

“And I discovered one thing,” Nolledo related, “that writing a novel can be the hardest thing in the world. Especially if one is surrounded by similar combatants who, in the agonizing process of turning out a book, experience bouts of madness.” “The Workshop is shot through with neuroses,” he explained. “Local hippies have composed a song about it that goes: ‘In the ballad of the Sade café . . .’ Suicide, adultery, breakdowns, pot, LSD, sleep-in studymates, conmen, hustlers of every stripe—you name it. The scene is loaded. I would really have gone home if Blanca and the children had not been able to make it. I had nightmares in New York, a nervous breakdown in Chicago, and was a frequent patient at the Student Health in Iowa City. Now, with Blanca and the children here, things have picked up.”^[7]

As Nick Joaquin narrated it: “On May 7, 1968, Ding signed a contract with Random House, undertaking to finish the novel within ten months. Wife Blanca says that during those ten months Ding was at work on the novel every night. He couldn’t write in the daytime, while the babies were underfoot. Only after they had been put to bed could he sit down and write, while beer bottles multiplied at his elbow.”^[8] In October 1970, three years after he started it, But for the Lovers was published in New York. Considered a long-lost Filipino classic, But for the Lovers finally came home to the Philippines more than fifty years after its initial publication in the United States with the recent Philippine edition by Exploding Galaxies.

In But for the Lovers, Hidalgo de Anuncio, a jaded Spanish vaudevillian, takes back to the boardinghouse of Ojos Verdes a girl lost in the streets of World War II’s Japanese-occupied Manila. With his attendant Molave Amoran—wistful guitarist and thief—the payaso guides his lost crew through the startling grotesqueries and tragedies inside a devastated Manila, as the novel leads inexorably to the 1945 Battle of Manila. This payaso announces like a literary psychic: “The Spanish Novel in the Philippines will be commemorated in English. Everything else is posthumous.”^[9] An extreme response to the Filipino writer’s obsession with the question of identity, as Bienvenido Lumbera put it, this novel sums up the motifs of the search for identity as Nolledo had pursued it for an entire decade.^[10] But his linguistic pyrotechnics in English, and stretching into Tagalog and Spanish, as well as American argots, push his literary achievement well beyond merely an identity question, displaying unshakeable literary prowess. Teodoro Luis Jr. wrote: “It is outstanding among Philippine Anglophone letters because it bends a colonial language like English to its breaking point in order to capture the complexities of post-war Philippines and Filipino identity.”^[11] Despite how little it is known, what we have here is truly a masterpiece of global literature in formal terms.

But for the Lovers’ historiographical merit lies in its resistance of the simplistic good/bad binaries of our received narratives of national and imperial history, to instead recenter the longer history of Philippine suffering while keeping skeptical distance from the “saviorism” of foreign intervention in general. There is a powerful political critique and historical interpretation embedded in the novel’s prose experimentation. The formal rendering of the historical argument of the double haunting of the American “liberation” of the Philippines during the World War II Battle of Manila is one of the finest examples of aesthetic prose work encountered in global literature—one we will not spoil for readers who have not yet picked up the book. Suffice it for now to say that Nolledo’s plays with temporality—his back and forth between conquerors and saviors—is a most sensitive historical critique.^[12]

“The postcolonial is perverse,” as the Filipino critic J. Neil C. Garcia wrote;^[13] and this novel’s play with the grotesque, with the bodily, historical irony, and the fever dream of blurred, dizzying sensations, belying precise individual identifications, amid humorous, chillingly realistic ethnographic descriptions of a living community and panoply of characters from all political sides, captures that perversity in a way no other Philippine novel has—precisely because of its formal prose qualities. There is a uniquely harrowing picture of war presented here. Nolledo shows how war fractures societies, buildings, families, neighborhoods, identities, and minds, among other things. 

Not only this standout, standalone novel, Nolledo’s short stories also carry his unalloyed linguistic mastery in every word, and capture for all times, but especially for his time, the mindbending puzzle of history, of existence, and of the postwar Philippines. Yuson says that “each summer in Dumaguete, Cesar Aquino would recite nuggets of Nolledo’s prose to the young workshoppers,” of Silliman University’s National Writers Workshop. “As the 20th century ended, Cesar found among his otherwise sorry files a vintage photograph in black-and-white, of the first workshoppers’ and panelists’ group way back in 1962. It had been given to him by Ding Nolledo. At the back of the edge-frittered photo was an inscription scrawled by hand: ‘Cesar, Tell them our story. – Ding’”^[14]

Once upon a time in a galaxy far, far away, when prose was in flower and that visa was not even a twinkle in his eye, Grandpa would enjoy a morning constitutional with his compadre, which meant having San Miguel for chocolate, or Breakfast at Quijano de Manila’s. The talk was about movies, maybe a Tennessee Williams Retrospective (Ah, flores para los muertos!) and literature in general (this was when curling up with a good book was not yet a “read”), while munching on grill-broiled tahong (mussels were somehow tastier in the vernacular), doing backup on a Sinatra standard (“. . . her hair undone, when I was twenty-one”), and perhaps crying a little in their cerveza. Wasn’t there something down-home and deliciously eclectic about listening to the “autumn of my years” in the middle of May? But then the venue was V. Agan, the humor kind of free-fall and easy, its resonance carrying 359 years over into its natural sequel. For all that was Puro Joaquin, and to paraphrase Ol’ Blue Eyes, if we may, it was a very good century. 

—Wilfrido D. Nolledo, “Saving Fil-Am (Or: I Never Promised You a Theme Park)”^[15]

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^{[1]Quijano de Manila, “Nolledo’s First Novel,” Philippines Free Press (17 October 1970), 5; 71–72.}

^{[2]Tomas U. Santos, “13 Thomasians nominated for National Artist Awards,” The Varsitarian (13 March 2008),accessed online 23 August2024: https://varsitarian.net/circle/20080313/13_thomasians_nominated_for_national_artist_awards}

^{[3]Alfred A. Yuson, “But for Nolledo,” The Philippine Star (15 March 2004), accessed online 22 July 2025: https://www.philstar.com/lifestyle/arts-and-culture/2004/03/15/242670/nolledo}

^{[4]“Since winning first prize for a short story he submitted to the Marian Year Literary Contest at UST at age 22, Nolledo received a string of literary awards for his short stories, novels, and plays.He won four times in the short story contest of the Philippines Free Press: second prize for ‘Maria Concepcion,’ 1959; third prize for ‘Kayumanggi Mon Amour,’ 1960; first prize for ‘Rice Wine,’ 1961, and ‘The Last Caucus,’ 1963. At the Carlos Palanca Memorial Awards for Literature, he won three third prizes for the following short stories: ‘In Caress of Beloved Faces,’ 1960; ‘Adios, Ossimandias,’ 1961; and ‘Rice Wine,’ 1962. His Palanca award–winning one-act plays are Island of the Heart, second prize, 1956; Legend of the Filipino Guitar, second prize, 1958; Amour Impossible, third prize, 1961; Turn Red the Sea, first prize, 1963; Rise, Terraces, second prize, 1964; Flores para los Muertos (Flowers for the Dead), second prize, 1966; and Dulce Estranjera (Sweet Stranger), third prize, 1974. His three-act play The Terrorist Dialogues won first prize in the Palanca Awards in 1977. He won the Palanca grand prize for his novels ‘Sangria Tomorrow,’ 1981, and ‘Via con Virgo,’ 1984. In 1953, he was given the Ten Outstanding Young Men award by the Philippine Jaycees.” [Fernandez, Doreen G., and Elmer L. Gatchalian. “Nolledo, Wilfrido D.” CCP Encyclopedia of Philippine Art Digital Edition, EPA, 2023, https://epa.culturalcenter.gov.ph/9/80/5535/. Accessed 22 July 2025.]}

^{[5]Quoted in de Manila, “Nolledo’s First Novel,” 5; 71–72.}

^{[6] De Manila,“Nolledo’s First Novel,” 5; 71–72.}

^{[7] De Manila,“Nolledo’s First Novel,” 5; 71–72.}

^{[8] De Manila,“Nolledo’s First Novel,” 5; 71–72.}

^{[9] Ryan Fuentes, “But for the Lovers,” In Lieu of a Field Guide (25 September 2015), accessed on 17 October 2024: https://booktrek.blogspot.com/2015/09/but-for-lovers.html}

^{[10]Bienvenido Lumbera, “Chapter 4: Literature under the Republic (1946–1985)” in Philippine Literature: A History and Anthology, ed. Bienvenido Lumbera and Cynthia Nograles Lumbera (Manila: Anvil Publishing, 2005), 194–195.}

^{[11] See: Luis V. Teodoro Jr., “Toward the Insurgent Seventies,” in Two Perspectives on Philippine Literature and Society, ed. Belinda A. Aquino (Hawaii: Philippine Studies Program, Center for Asian and Pacific Studies, University of Hawaii, 1981), 20–22.}

^{[12] Ryan Canlas argues that the postmodern strategies employed by the writer should not be confused for a refusal to put forward a coherent sociopolitical critique. Rather, But For The Lovers, in its stylistic evocation of antebellum Manila and the chaotic chorus of varying Manilense voices to be silenced by the “apocalyptic” return of theAmericans coinciding with the bombing of the city, may provide a new “hermeneutic” through which one may read the Anglophone Philippine novel as a corollary of American imperialist genocide. See: Ryan Canlas, “But for the Apocalypse: Wilfrido Nolledo’s Dark Mirror of Empire,” Kritika Kultura [Online], 0.24 (2015), 157–178.}

^{[13] See Garcia’s preface to the two-volume, The Postcolonial Perverse: Critiques of Contemporary Philippine Culture.“What is postcolonial is necessarily perverse, since perversion is the frustration of teleology and its requisite purity, the undermining of the normative and the narrative, the transitivity that troubles the supposedly pristine, eternal, and abiding. These are precisely what postcolonialism must imply, being that it is, among other things, the historically situated labor of arriving at a critical awareness of colonialism's fractured and translated (and therefore eminently appropriable) ‘nature.’”}

^{[14]Yuson, “But for Nolledo.”}

^{[15]Quoted in Yuson, “But for Nolledo.”,” The Philippine Star.}