The Narrow Road to the Deep North records a six-month journey in 1689 that took him north from Tokyo (then called Edo), then west over the mountainous spine of Japan to the coast of the Japan Sea, then southwest and south over the mountains again, ending at the town of Ogaki (near modern Nagoya). This journey involved traveling on foot through coun- try that even today is rugged and remote, and BashĉTs travei account contains hints of some anxious days traversing narrow and uncertain roads. But the air of the book reflects mainly its authors cheerful and optimistic disposition, his love of new experience, and his conviction that things will work out ali right in the end.
In my view The Narrow Road is an example of a very rare thing—a perfect book. I would not change a syllable of it. By the time he wrote it Bashх had completely mastered the art of combining prose and haiku verse into a seamless narrative of the utmost simplicity and economy of style. It is a very short book, far less than a page per day for his six-month journey. (Contrast this with the long-windedness of many travei writers today.) Everywhere he went, Bashх distilled his response in haiku verse. In untalented hands haiku are simply boring and insignificant little snippets of pseudoverse (and many people think of haiku the way they think of abstract painting: "Anyone could do that." Anyone can try, that is; the results are usually awful.) In the hands of Bashх and a few other masters, haiku are tiny marvels, each one a small flash of Zen enlight- enment. The Narrow Road shows a genius at the height of his powers.
J.S.M.
51
DANIEL DEFOE
1660-1731 Robinson Crusoe
Robinson Crusoe is one of the most famous books in the world. Its publication, however, though successful, was a minor inci- dent in its authors crowded, singular, and not entirely unspot- ted life. A butchers son, Defoe traveled widely in his youth; was once captured by Algerian pirates; went bankrupt for sev- enteen thousand pounds—which he later paid off; supported William of Orange in 1688; served as pamphleteer, propagan- dist, and secret agent under four sovereigns; changed his alle- giance without ever abandoning what we would today call a liberal political position; got into trouble through his partisan writings and was stood in the pillory, from which rather unlit- erary vantage point, with true middle-class enterprise, he man- aged to sell quite a few copies of a broadside entitled "Hymn to the Pillory"; saw the inside of a prison; wrote Robinson
Crusoe, the first of his novйis, when he was almost sixty; in ali composed over four hundred books and tracts, very few of which bore his name on the title page; and, according to one account, died hiding out from his credito rs. He also married and engendered seven children.
Defoe was perhaps the first truly outstanding professional journalist (or hired hack, if you prefer) in England; the father of the English novel (try his Moll Flanders, if you haven't read it); and a master of the trick of making an invention seem so true that to most of us Robinson Crusoe (a figment, though suggested by a real episode) is a living person.
Robinson Crusoe is supposed to be a boys' book. However, like its greater cousin Huckleberry Finn [92], it is a boys' book only in that it satisfies perfectly those male dreams that happen to be most vivid in boyhood but continue to lead an under- ground life in most men until they die. Virtually every male dreams of being completely self-sufficient, as Crusoe is; of building a private kingdom of which he can be undisputed lord; of having that deliciously lonely eminence emphasized in time by the establishment of a benevolent colonial tyranny over a single slave (Friday); of accumulating wealth and power that can never be endangered or vulgarized by competition; of enjoying success through the wholesome primitive use of mus- cle and practical good sense, as against the effete and trouble- some exercise of the intellect; of doing ali this in an exotic set- ting quite remote from his dull daily habitat; and finally of living in a self-made Utopia without any of the puzzling responsibilities of a wife and children. (Robinson Crusoe and Moby Dick [83] are the two great novйis that manage superbly without involving more than one sex. They have never been popular with women.)
Robinson Crusoe has no plot. Its hero, though a sturdy stick, is nonetheless a stick. On reflection, the book's smug mercantile morality seems offensive. Ali this matters not at ali against the fact that it is a perfect daydream, a systematic and detailed wish-fulfillment. Its appeal is heightened in that the most romantic experiences are related in the baldest prose. Its utter lack of fanciness makes the daydream respectable. We believe it precisely because it is not "literature."
When we were young we could see only that it was enter- taining. Now, rereading it, we can perhaps see why it is also, as books go, immortal.
C.F.
52
JONATHAN SWIFT
1667-1745 Gulliver's Traveis
Thackeray [76] once said of Swift: "So great a man he seems to me, that thinking of him is like thinking of an empire falling.,> Swiffs mind was not comprehensive, perhaps not even very subtle. But it was extremely powerful, it was the mirror of an extraordinary temperament, and so its frustration, decay, and final extinction do suggest the tragic dimensions of which Thackeray speaks.
Swift was an Anglo-Irishman, born in Dublin and dying there, as Dean of St. Patrick^ Cathedral. Like his fellow coun- tryman Shaw [99], he had a genius for exposing the vices and weaknesses of his age. Like Shaw, too, he was a master of the English language, so that today his prose can be read with pleasure even though much of what he wrote about is of inter- est only to scholars. But here ends the parallel. Shaw's was one of the most successfully managed careers in history, Swift's one of the least. Shaw died after bestriding his world like a colos- sus. Swift died much as he foresaw, "like a poisoned rat in a hole."
His century is often called the Age of Reason, and he was one of its chief ornaments. He did worship reason: Gulliver may be seen as a picture of the consequences of humanitys refusal to be reasonable. The irony is that this apostle of reason should also have been a man of volcanic, baffled passions; that the terrible fits of dizziness and, later, deafness from which he suffered beginning in his twentieth year led him at last to the loss of that reason he so much admired; that some enigmatic lack apparently precluded what we think of as a normal sex life; that his split allegiance (was he an Irishman or an Englishman?) helped to unbalance him; that his semiexile in Dublin for his last thirty-two years was a permanent cross to his spirit, even though the Irish loved him as their champion. This man should have been the intellect and conscience of England. But melancholy marked him for her own; ambition denied withered him; and so his life, whose inner secrets we shall probably never know, was what the world called, and he himself called, a failure. Pointing to a blighted tree, he once remarked that he, too, would die first "at the top," and so he did, a ruined monument to frustration.