The New Lifetime Reading Plan

Most of his novйis and short stories are laid in Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi. This invented region has now become hallowed literary ground, like Hardy's Wessex [94]. The novйis' time span covers almost a century and a half, beginning in 1820. They form a connected series, something like Zola's Rougon-Macquart family chronicle or Balzac's more loosely linked "Human Comedy" [68]. Through accounts of the fortunes of a number of related families, Faulkner exposes, in a style of great complication and variety, the tragedy, and some of the comedy, of his violent, haunted, guilt-ridden Deep South. Mainly represented are three worlds: that of the black; that of the degenerate aristocracy, typified by the Compsons in The Sound and the Fury; and that of the even more degener­ate emergent commercial class, whose emblem is the horrify- ing Lem Snopes.

The two novйis recommended above are considered by most critics among Faulkners finest; they are certainly among his most violent in theme and trail-blazing in technique. His champions also single out for high praise Light in August and Absalom, Бbsalom! as well as the Snopes trilogy (The Hamlet, The Town, The Mansion). My own favorite is The Reivers.

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.