Faulkner is a serious, difficult, and daring writer. He is also, to some, a shocking writer. And finally, to a few, he is a writer only intermittently readable. The latter do not have the key to his mind, which may well be their loss. To this class I belong. If you need guidance through Faulkners special inferno, I sug- gest Malcolm Cowley^ Introduction to his Portable Faulkner, a brilliant exercise in sympathetic clarification.
C.F.
119
ERNEST HEMINGWAY
1899-1961
Short Stories
In perspective it is Hemingway^ short stories, rather than his more ambitious fiction, that stand out. In them the defects of his attitudes have neither time nor space in which to expose themselves. The bellicosity, the conscious virility, the exaltation of violence and toughness, the bravado, the conception of women as romantic receptacles—these are ali muted in his marvelous tales. By the same token the famous style, perfectly suited to the illumination of intense moments or isolated situa- tions, gains a power in the short story it does not always possess in the longer works. It seems fair to say that, by virtue of his reverence for truth, the originality of his prose, the bone-bare exactness of his dialogue, and the charge of his emotion, Hemingway ranks among the first half-dozen of the world's masters of the short story.
Though he seems to grapple with ultimates, such as death, passion, and the defeat or persistence of human hopes, Hemingway's total world is actually not a large one. In even the lesser novelists we have already met more and wider gateways to human nature. To match him with the greatest is probably pointless. Beside Stendhal [67] he seems young; beside Henry James [96], primitive; beside Tolstoy [88], simply minor. Yet his achievement is solid. Building on a foundation laid down by Mark Twain [92], he quite literally remodeled the English sentence. He forced it to reveal, without wasted motion, the exact truth of a moment, an insight, an experience. This contri- bution to literature is not merely technical. It is moral. Hemingway taught language honesty.
His greater tales (with which we must class the novella The Old Man and the Sea) are now as much a part of our American heritage as "Rip Van Winkle" or "The Fali of the House of Usher." "The Snows of Kilimanjaro,,, "The Undefeated," "My Old Man," "The Killers," "Fifty Grand," and dozens of others compel us, no matter how often we reread them, to relive the experience the creator once felt so deeply. Whether or not we accept Hemingway's view of life, we cannot reject these tales of the veld, the buli ring, the barroom, the ski slope, the race- track, the prize ring, the Michigan woods. For they pass beyond the novel settings and beyond the once-novel style. Emotion and the control of emotion are here held in exquisite poise. An artist who is also an honest man succeeds in telling the truth.
Note: The 1987 Complete Short Stories ofErnest Hemingway, the so-called Finca Vigia edition, is the only exhaustive collection.
C.F.
120
KAWABATA YASUNARI
1899-1972
Beauty and Sadness
Kawabata was orphaned early and grew up under difficult cir- cumstances, a fact that some critics have seen as the source of the atmosphere of deep melancholy that pervades his writing.
In my view, however, Kawabata's stance is less likely to have to do with the hardships of his childhood than with the tension he seemed to feel throughout his life between beauty and sadness, or more precisely between sexuality and a sense of loss. Although his work, like that of other Japanese writers of his generation, shows strong European influence (particularly, in Kawabatas case, from the French Symbolists), he is in many ways a traditionalist, closer in mentalitй to Murasaki [28] than to Tanizaki [114].
When Kawabata was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1968, the novel most often mentioned as his great work was Snow Country (1948), a tale of sexual obsession set in the snowy mountain fastness of northwestern Japan. I com- mend that book to your attention, but to my own taste Beauty and Sadness (1961) is a more subtle, and a more moving, work. It tells of the reunion of an elderly man and a woman artist whom he loved long ago, of the jealous rage the artist's young protйgйe conceives on her behalf for having been jilted in that affair, and of the terrible revenge she wreaks on the old mans family. Love, regret, obsession, eroticism, and evil blend in Kawabata's slight, almost ephemeral prose, where more is implied than is ever made explicit, and where throat-catching beauty goes hand in hand with thefrisson of danger. Kawabata is said to have been greatly influenced by Bashх [50] and other renga (linked verse) poets of the seventeenth century, and something of this can be seen in the leaps of imagination and the mental filling-in of plot development that he requires of his readers. His prose is a sort of gossamer that seems to shimmer in ones consciousness, engaging the imagination but never revealing itself fully.
If you find yourself becoming a fan of Kawabata's work, I would suggest reading also one of his less-well-known novйis, The Master of Go, about an old champion and a young chal- lenger in Japan's chesslike national game of strategy. It is particularly interesting to read this novel alongside Nabokovs great tale of chess obsession, The Defense [122].
JORGE LUIS BORGES
In 1972 Kawabata became despondent over the grotesque public suicide of his friend and protйgй Mishima Yukio [131] and, far more quietly and decorously, committed suicide himself. Given the obsessive qualities of Kawabatas work, it is somehow difficult to imagine his life ending otherwise.
J.S.M.
121
JORGE LUIS BORGES
1899-1986
Labyrinths, Dreamtigers
Since this book's first appearance, Latin American writers have been looming larger on our literary horizon (see also Gabriel Garcia Marquez [132]).
Borges, scion of an intellectual middle-class family, was born in Buenos Aires, where most of his life was lived. His ancestry was Spanish and English, with a small infusion of Portuguese-Jewish blood. Like Nabokov [122], he learned English prior to his native tongue. He was strongly influenced by English writers from Caedmon to Chesterton and H.G. Wells.
Following his partially European education Borges began his career as a poet. His fathers death and a near-fatal illness made 1938 a year of crisis for him. From this year dates the finest of his "fictions," a form peculiarly his own in which his genius is most clearly reflected. Slow in growth, his reputation became international with the publication in 1944 of his collec- tion Ficciones. It was more formally recognized in 1961 when Borges shared with Samuel Beckett [125] the coveted international Formentor Prize.
Although hardly a political man, Borges opposed the Perуn dictatorship and as a result was demoted from his post of librarian to that of poultry and rabbits inspector. After Perуn's fali in 1955 he was named director of the National Library of
JORGE LU IS BORGES
Argentina. By that time his always defective eyesight had wors- ened; from the age of fifty-six he was totally blind, this man who described himself as one "who imagined Paradise in the shape of a library."
Borges's vast and esoteric learning, which pervades his stories, makes his range of allusion somewhat forbidding to many readers and on occasion imparts to his work a bookish flavor. But these seeming hindrances are little more than a faзade of irony. Behind it works a mind of almost dismaying subtlety in which a metaphysician, a logician, and a visionary (but not a mystic) occupy continually shifting positions. His constant theme, whether he offers us science fiction, detective stories, tales of violence, or logical nightmares, is the "hallucinatory nature of the world." For him the universe is not something made. Rather it is dreamt. Or perhaps it is a great Book, whose tone is that of "irreality, one of aifs requisites."