In the sixteenth century we find the memoirs of Comines, full of commentaries on the times of Louis XI and Charles VIII; in the seventeenth century there were those of Sully, Richelieu, and de la Rochefoucauld, and the celebrated memoirs of Cardinal de Retz, which Voltaire has praised as having the air of grandeur, impetuous genius, and inequality. In the eighteenth century we find the Confessions of Rousseau, so touching in their nakedness; the memoirs of Beaumarchais, which, according to Voltaire, are the most singular, the strongest, the boldest and the most comic; and also the writings of the men of the French Revolution: Talleyrand, Napoleon, Barras, Guizot. In the last century, the two thick volumes by the Goncourt brothers are a minute report of the literary and artistic Paris of their day.
It could be said that all notable writers have thought it important to deliver the judgements and secrets of their intimate life to us. Gide left the most interesting journal of this century. After him came François Mauriac, with Mémoires Interieurs; then Simone de Beauvoir, Jean-Paul Sartre, Marcel Pagnol, Jean Giono, and many others. There is even Anti-Mémoires by André Malraux. The politicians, too, thought memoirs indispensable for the sake of their posterity. Among the memoirs of this century, the ones that might be said to attain real grandeur, political and literary, are those of General de Gaulle. All the others are more or less clever literary variations, and to some of them we may append the phrase that has been written today about the journal of Goncourt: a monument of stupidity and vanity."
In England, after the seventeenth century an abundant production of diaries began to appear. The famous diary of John Evelyn comments on seventy years of English life; during about the same period Samuel Pepys was writing what the British delight in calling "the most illustrious diary of the world." Jonathan Swift and Walter Scott left their memoirs, as well as Wellington; James Boswell wrote a long register of his travels, of the manners and politics or his time. In our day Katherine Mansfield just as other women who wrote memoirs in England has left us a journal full of delicately graceful poetry. Churchill, who incarnated the bold spirit of an epoch, has also built a monument for history with his memoirs.
In Italy, Benvenuto Cellini, Vittorio Alfieri, and Silvio Pellico became famous through memoirs; in Germany, the memoirs of Goethe, Weber, Frederick II, and Metternich are the most remarkable of a copious production.
In Russia, the diary of Marie Bashkirtsef in the second part of the last century had a sensational posthumous publication. The author was a fascinating beauty (who died at twenty-four) with an admirable talent for the intimate confession. The memoirs of great writers like Tolstoi and Gorki help us to better understand their personalities and their work. Today Ilya Ehrenburg has published two volumes containing some interesting pages about his youth in Paris and the dark days of the Stalin era. About Stalin and the Stalin era, his daughter Svetlana Alliluyeva has recently written Twenty Letters to a Friend, It is a fascinating human document—though of no political value—helping us reflect on the influence of the idiosyncrasies of one man not only on the lives of many people but also on the life of a great nation. It is a pity that the author did not send her manuscript abroad while remaining in her own country, waiting in proud modesty for the consequences reserved for her in the future, as Boris Pasternak did.
In the United States two irreverent and outspoken men have appeared in modern times: Frank Harris and Henry Miller. Harris (1856-1931), in My Life and Loves, gives a sketch of the European artistic and mundane scene at the end of the last century and the first quarter of this one with description of gallant adventures so vivid in eroticism and lewd detail that it would make Casanova blush.
Henry Miller (b. 1891) is a much more powerful writer: his autobiographical works are full of a fierce joy of living, the force of the natural impulses, passion, humour, energy, and audacity. He takes a rowdy part in the comedy of life and laughs at it boisterously. Among his books, Tropic of Capricorn, Tropic of Cancer, and Black Spring overflow with robust individualism, gusto for adventure, and strong verve tinged with extremes of lyricism and cruel sarcasm. He pretends to be the inheritor of Rabelaisian tradition, and is indeed the best successor.
Of all the books of memoirs of this century, Letter to Greco by the Greek Nikos Kazantzakis stands out as a report of a soul in quest of liberty and truth. The search is made through the communion with those encountered in his path: Christ, Buddha, Lenin, Ulysses, and the figures of amazing men and women who lived life to its fullest but left no name.
This vast panorama of memoirs verily began much before with the memoirs of Socrates, written by Plato, the memoirs of Xenophon, the commentaries of Caesar, the confessions of Saint Augustine. The fundamental differences between these Western works and the congeneric works of Japan derive from the fact that Japanese diaries are written without a historical perspective, and do not intend to record important facts for posterity. They pretend neither to impose the writer himself nor to explain his or her own personality to influence the judgement of future critics and historians.
We get the impression when we read the diaries of Heian ladies that they wrote for themselves, or, at most, for the people of their own time (the court, their friends, and their living critics). They followed the general custom of diary-writing; they never imagined that we would read and write about them today. Even in Murasaki Shikibu's work, the historic perspective is absent. Sei Shonagon gives us the impression of writing for her own pleasure. The bitter authoress of The Gossamer Years seems to have written for her own consolation and pleasure. She complains about her unfaithful husband, and thus alleviates her suffering.
Another point on which the Japanese and Western diaries differ is the way the authors disclose facts about their intimate lives. The Japanese never confide completely, never dare to declare the deep feelings and apprehensions of their souls. The Western diary is the report of the fight between a writer and his pride to express all his deep, intimate feelings at the risk of wounding his own dignity and his honour.
Rousseau pledges: "I want to show, my fellowmen, man in all the truth of nature, and this man is myself." This he considers an enterprise which has no example." The same is the pledge of Chateaubriand in the Mémoires d'Outre Tombe, in which he wants to give an account of myself to myself," to "explain my inexplicable heart." Chateaubriand's unreserved wish to communicate the life of the soul and his anxiety to go deep into its secrets are mingled with shame, the threat of truth, and humiliation. This is unknown in classic Japanese literature.
Later in the Meiji era we find more intimate works when travel diaries and journals appear. One written by Ichiyo Higuchi(1812-96) became a classic. But maybe the most interesting among these was Romaji Nikki (The Romaji Diary) (1909) of Takuboku Ishikawa. While showing its kinship to the classic Japanese diary in its serene candour and natural simplicity, it is related to the West in its vibrant confused emotion, vehemence, and the tortured individualism of its deep confessions. Though some of his verses intermingled with prose retain an old lyricism, others are redolent of brutal Western analysis: "Your eyes must have the mechanism of a fountain pen."
If we go deeper, we can find a common line joining Eastern and Western diaries: the aim to explore the rational meaning of experience, to understand deeply, to explain man's nature, and so to attain wisdom. As the Greeks taught us, the knowledge of one's self is not an aim, it is a way to wisdom. That is what Montaigne pondered in retirement at his chateau de Perigord; and what Kamo no Chomei sought in his ten-feet-square hut. And the light of wisdom that both East and West seek to attain does not differ: it is the light that makes clearer our way to happiness; it is accumulating experience and offering it to men of the future so that they may be able to enjoy a fuller life.
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CHAPTER IV. THE PICARESQUE NOVEL |
A NOVEL OF THE PEOPLE
In the seventeenth century a bourgeois culture, free from Chinese influence, arose in Japan. The popular literary form was fiction.
