The Portuguese insist that he was the hero of Madame de Stael’s Corinne, and that in that book, the portrait of him is true, and very carefully drawn from life—once when they were happy together and free, away from war-torn France.
Delightful short stories are written in French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Russian, but almost never in America. The reason is not that Americans can not write them or are less talented. The fault lies with the editors. The good short story, as its creator made it, and God, can not get through to the reading public. First it has to be changed to suit the policy of the magazine. It may be a magazine which prints square purple stories with pink corners; or, round green stories with yellow dots. Secondly, it has to be changed to suit the personal inclination of the editor. He may like only oblong white stories with crimson points. Thirdly, the editor must change it a little to comply with his dignity, and carry out what he considers duty. What is the result? A kind of ruin for which there is no name. Then the story has to suit the season of the year, and religious, social, and political conditions of the community.
All this à propos of many books of short stories from old Spain, and the Spanish lands to the south, which I have had recently. Calderon shows an enticing geographical background, in remote South American places, especially interior Peru. But he does not write so well as Coll, and some of the older Venezuelans.
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.