The taste of honey : $b The note book of a linguist — John Shaqi
The taste of honey : $b The note book of a linguistUnderwood, Edna Worthley
History
The taste of honey : $b The note book of a linguist
Underwood, Edna Worthley
Literature -- History and criticism
Down there not so many people who can not write, but who want to,
are able to get past Spanish editors, who sometimes love art for
its own sake. They do not so often try to put off upon cultivated
readers astonishingly advertised books of short stories, written by
prize fighters, long-distance swimmers, bronco-busters, aviators,
prize-winning high-jumpers, telling you gravely at the same time,
that if they do these things well, it follows logically, they write
short stories well, which is part of America’s original procedure in
destroying genuine ability.
Calderon has some sentence-pictures which I have remembered, showing
savage mountain land and lonely jungle.
“... _aquel poblado solitario_ ... that lonely little settlement,
where life kept the golden color of autumn mornings—in some barbarous
land.” What side-glancing, plaintive light he has shivered across the
words!
I am changing my opinion of Baroja. I have been hasty. In his later
books many of which I read at one time, I stumble upon something
that makes me think of nuggets of unknown metal, which scientists
have neither named nor been able to classify, rolled up perhaps by
clear water of streams in lonely mountains, in some lonely land. But
still I feel that just as his life may lack some combined joy and
interest to weld it firmly into use and unity, effect the miracle
of—_Let there be life!_—his written art lacks the same thing, some
fiercer flame of love, to let it hold together, resist the forces
that crumble. It lacks the _glue_ of art’s practiced and perfected,
surface-logic.
Just as the mother of Redon—painter of exotic, super-terrestrial
flowers—was born in Martinique, and then moved to Marseilles where
the painter first saw the light, and began to feel force of her
baffled homesick dreams of unseen—but too vividly remembered—tropic
nights, tropic days, over seas that are hauntingly lovely, so the
grandfather of Francis Jammes—poet and short story writer—lived in
the Antilles, Guadalupe, in the village of Point-à-Pitre, and here
the poet’s father was born, heir to certain antique memories and
haunting comprehensions.
As for Francis Jammes himself, he lived always in France, between the
Pyrenees and the Atlantic, or as he expresses it, between a grain of
sand and a drop of water. It is a tiny Pyrenean village—_Orthez_.
Yet in the soul of Jammes there were inherited moments of
homesickness for something he had never seen, for that glamourous
giddy sun that gilds the seas of the south.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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