Herself (20 page)

What are artists for, if not to embody this? There had always been those of whom it would afterwards be said that they were born for it. Or are spewed up by these life transferences? To have more than national ideas swaying their heads, yet these doomedly vying there.

Mishima, born in 1925, educated at the Peers School where the Spartan fires of militarism still burned, graduating as its highest honor student mid-war, spent half his youth under the clangor of historical glory, and all his manhood with the American conqueror standing sentinel at every streetcorner of Japan’s culture. Grounded deeply in his own literature, he was widely read in Western, classical and modern, and evidently far beyond that French influence, so marked in writers like Kawabata and Dazai, which was now waning, though it would linger in him in his debt to their diarists, from Amiel to Gide and the early Sartre. Eventually he would range and adapt at will, from the Greeks to De Sade, while all the while his novels and stories swell with the most intimately proud mapping of his own country’s topography, the people in it, on farm or shore, in town or temple, forever referentially hemmed in by whatever hills face where, and what weathers come from them. Behind all, always localized like another hill, is their ancestry.

We tend even now to forget, under the stereotypes we have managed to maintain ever since Commodore Perry’s expedition (and even under a war, seventy-five years on, that has all but completed his task) how Westernization of Japanese spirit and object has been going on since the roughly coincidental Meiji restoration of 1867. In the continuous dialogue between the two young male classmates of
Spring Snow
, Honda, whose father is a Supreme Court justice trained to respect German logic, and who is a law student (like Mishima himself, who graduated from the School of Jurisprudence) says at various times, of history and of Kiyoaki: “To live in the midst of an era is to be oblivious of its style … The testimony of your contemporaries has no value whatsoever … You detest that bunch on the
kendo
team, don’t you?” … In the midst of turmoil, each man builds his own little shelter of self-awareness. … You have one characteristic that sets you quite apart; you have no trace whatsoever of willpower. And so I am always fascinated to think of you in relation to History.”

Mishima’s first account in
Sun and Steel
is of a child, himself, who, as it were the opposite of one of Bettelheim’s autistics, refused to perceive the body, and was let into reality through words. In time “words” however useful and powerful a fetish, become the corrosive evil, and “ideas” foreign to that romantic ideality of the body which he craves. In his attempt to straddle and manipulate the two he becomes the novelist, but only increasing further his “thirst for reality and the flesh.” In this small book, most certainly a classic of self-revelation, his pursuit of that “second language” is examined with such dispassion and self-insight that paraphrase must only distort; we are in the range now of a metaphysics where every sentence counts, and delivers its poignant message with a kinesthetic shock. “As a personal history, it will, I suspect, be unlike anything seen before,” he says, and he is right. In his journey from the black Styx of the inner life to the blue sky of the outer as reflected in ordinary men’s eyes, he sees at every point the parable of his own life. He is taking us down that psychic canal, in very nearly complete consciousness.

Having experienced all the glorification that the verbal arts can give, he seeks “the essential pathos of the doer” and “the triumph of the non-specific,” learning that for him “the tragic pathos is born when a perfectly average sensibility momentarily takes unto itself a privileged nobility …”? and “endowed with a given physical strength, encounters that … privileged moment especially designed for it.” Imagination is now arrogance; he is intent on pursuing the words through the body, whose muscles will elucidate the mystery. “To combine action and art is to combine the flower that wilts and the flower that lasts forever … the dual approach cuts one off from all salvation by dreams.” He is led to explore the lapsed concept of consciousness as passive. He will seek to replace imagination by duty; since that word has so faded in Western form, I take it in the more Japanese sense of “obligation.” Concluding that what dignifies the body is its own mortality, he seeks the
sought
death that will give the most solemn proof of life. And finds that “the profoundest depths of the imagination lay in death. … I could not help feeling that if there were some incident in which violent death pangs and well-developed muscles were skillfully combined, it could only occur in response to the aesthetic demand’s of destiny. Not that destiny often lends an ear to aesthetic considerations.” That is everywhere the tone—of an ego stretching beyond itself, to an appreciation of what the ego is. And giving us, in that so human extra, the one thing that Mishima himself may not see.

It happens, I think, at some juncture in his own painfully exact report of the romantic attraction a beautiful, doomed death comes to have for him. At some false jointure of, the samurai gesture with a misconceived ideal of Christian martyrdom—“I yearned for the twilight of Novalis”—the analysis begins to serve the yearning. Up to then, he has pursued his own awareness, as he says, as one pursues erotic knowledge—both in
Sun and Steel
and elsewhere. Set a group of graduate students to count the blood-images which beset every book, to clock where the blood begins—is its psychological source in that dream in
Confessions of a Mask
where the narrator eats the entrails of the boy who is a belly suicide? Does the bloodbath culminate in “Patriotism,” in the mad formality of the marital double seppuku? “There in my murder theater” they will find Mishima before them. No doubt a legion of psychiatrists with whips (for each other) can attribute it all: the black-mass sadism of
Madame de Sade
(madame!), the sexual-sensual transliteration which make a mortally ill man die “groaning like a bride,” the lack which makes woman a
bas relief
or a ritual—to the arrestment of a homosexual personality. Such simplification won’t do. In
Confessions of a Mask
Mishima has already said: “The thought that I might reach adulthood filled me with foreboding”—and much more. Just as in
Sun and Steel,
he is mortally aware of what “the destruction of classical perfection” must in practice mean to him.

Often, even if we refuse the psychiatric labels, we will attach the sociological or literary ones; we tend to think of writers outside the western framework, if not as “simples” or “originals” then as the primitive genii of other anthropologies or thought-systems which attract us for their qualitative difference—as Buddhism does the solid Madison Avenue matron or the floating intellectual—rather than for their intelligence. In dealing with
Sun and Steel
, as with all Mishima’s work, one is encountering a mind of the utmost subtlety, broadly educated, in whose novels for instance, the range may even appear terrifying or cynical, to those who demand of a writer steadily apparent, or even monolithically built views. These are there, indeed touchable at every point in his work, but the variation of surface, and seeming reversals of heart or statement, sometimes obscure this. And the Western split may have done it, in his work as in his life. So that, as he foresaw, his death better explains both. Leaving us to review the explanation.

Mishima’s Western scholarship is very touching, all the more for the possibility that as he rejected words for body, dead literature for live action, or tried to bring the two down to the “average” coherence, he was also denying the Western impurities that had early ensnared him. For everywhere, his references to
our
literature,
our
martyrs, are hallowed, reverent to what he borrows or admires, and sometimes as oldfashioned as our own youth. (When since, have I heard mention of Amiel or seen a modern writer lean on him?) He takes our classics as seriously as we did once, as a matter for life and death. And death he does illuminate and widen for us, but—in a paradox he might well have anticipated—only when he takes his own unique path of experience and learning, not ours. For though he makes analogues with the martyrs of a Christianized West, in the end, the once-proud grail of Western existence, addled and dusty as this has come to be, eludes him. What does not occur to him is that the sought death may be as artificial as imagination, against the sought
life
.

Still, he is telling us that death is one of life’s satisfactions. We may not be able to believe it, or may wish that death had not so enhanced itself for him. But he tells us how he came to this pass, with a sanity that ought to be exquisite enough for our own. And crosses cultures to do it, to tell us how a man bent on
seppuku
might come to it by way of St. Sebastian.

Can Westerners understand such a death as easily as they understand dying like a pricked gray flab in a hospital? Or accept the artist who tosses his life in the balance, as easily as they do those who jerk to the very end of the galvanizing money-string, or distil their life-knowledge only in teaspoonsful of ipecac for the applause of a liverish coterie? Mishima is explaining his life and death in admirable style, in words that hold their breath, so that the meaning may breathe. In a low voice just short of the humble. On the highest terms of that arrogance which decrees him the right to. Our souls may not be cognate, but he makes us feel again what it is to have one. And understand the persuasion of his. If he had been otherwise in his youth—a porter, a woman, a dancer—the tower of his symbols might have built another way. But to ask him to break out of the mystic cage of his logic is like asking it of Thomas a Kempis or Augustine, or to be a Catholic praying for the conversion of the Jews. What he is telling us is that he is
a priori
this kind of man, and that insofar as we cannot break out of the cage of our bones, so are we. Here is not a man with an opinion; he is telling us how he was made. To paraphrase him in words not his, or with muscles not his, is to try to build a china pagoda with a peck of nails.
Sun and Steel
’s power is that it is a book one must experience step by step, led as if by a monk, or by a great film-master, from inner tissue to outer and back again, along his way. It is not necessary to accept that way. But only the frivolous will not empathize with what is going on here; this is a being for whom life—and death too—must be exigent And were.

A J. hotel which I can recommend to anybody as charming, clean, exactly as in the best movies with Marlon Brando—and that I wish I were out of. The JNR—little did I know—but I am ahead of my story, though scarcely strong enough to pen it.

Waseda, on Tuesday, was a success. Beautiful private U., rather like Stanford in status I should say, founded by Baron Okuma some 60 yrs ago. Rolling, usual garden which-we looked at through fine rain. Professor Tatsunoguchi, fat version of yesterday’s professor (as to ego—much fatter) translator of Twain, etc., etc. Also had interpreter. They were very dubious about the question-and-answer or seminar method—I finally suggested we ask the students to write their q’s thus evading the horrid necessity of their standing up. This we did—the interpreter rapidly translating both my prefatory remarks, and later, the interchange. As a matter of fact I was a howling success.

I began by referring complimentarily to the J. writers I had been reading—this, the compliment, one must do here, even more than the usual politeness, and even if one believes it! Told them I did not lecture, that I was interested in the past—as all writers are, but not as a scholar—this is the line that divides the writer and the scholar. Paid a passing compliment to scholars, of course. But the writer’s time was, now—he cd not wait for the respectability of being dead. And since the students’ time was also “now,” I hoped we cd talk together. We wd do this as it was done in America—explained process etc. They did ask all sorts of questions—“Why can I get no knowledge of Am. local customs and dress from reading Faulkner”—explained that it was an imaginative world—that they wd not find their favorite Faulkner and Erskine Caldwell a trustworthy guide to a tour of the average street, even in the South. They asked what we thought of new Rus. lit.—I explained that we didn’t know much of it, told Pat’s synopsis of their state-approved novels, “Boy meets Girl, B. meets tractor, B. gets tractor.” Interpreter asked, puzzled what was a tractor—when I spread my arms and said—“a great big farm machine”—they rocked. A good many serious questions which I answered so. Found myself declaiming, in answer to q.: “What do you feel is the function of place, if there is a place, for literature in today’s scientific world?” Answer—“To reinterpret humanity to science.” This, I was told later, went over big—one forgets that Hiroshima is always in their minds. And so on—anyway I was glad to have “vindicated” the Amer. method to some extent.

Then that evening, off for Kyoto by rail—pure hell, though funny. Found out later, had 2nd-class tickets—1st class almost imposs. to get. Had a lower in a 4 berth watchamacallit. Airless, the sheets perfumed. Three Jap. gents in other berths. Kimono and slippers come with each berth—I lay rigid, telling myself
not
to be Western. Compromised by stripping to underwear, which meant I had to close curtains. My downfall therefore on my own head. Fan going above, but even with curtains ajar in the dark—awful. No chance of going to john as a persistent stream of gents all night, and one who was apparently perishing of tuberculosis or senile bronchitis, spent the night there. In morning, the gentlemen stand about reflectively in underwear, in aisles and berths, anywhere, leisurely tying their ties, donning their trous. I saw no women—all at home apparently, where I should have been.

Met by John Reinhardt of the Cultural Center, extremely nice as is his wife—just out of Manila post. Says Mrs. Nakpil is brilliant, shd meet. Doesn’t think much of B. Santos’s writing. Says all those boys have a knack for getting “Rockefeller grants, grants of all kinds. Mrs. N. and Nick Joaquin prob. the best writers, not N. V. M. Gonzalez. Had a Western shower and breakfast, then off to this hotel, where they understood my statement that I wished to nap, not eat, for a “Bath”—so I had it. Terrible solecism, soaped in it, not yet knowing. No one saw—but they will know. Discovered that the dreadful sickly-sweet smell, which I had shed at once in Reinhardt’s, by taking off everything but my convenient sack dress, had returned
after
the shower. Of course, it
is
the soap, all the cleaning stuff—and inescapable. I wish I had not such a sharp nose. (N.B.—Can an action, like soaping, be a solecism—no, but I am too humidity bloated to find words. Hands, eyes, etc., are puffed. Oh me—and Manila and Bangkok are to be worse??)