Word: pyre
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Think of Shelley, who died by drowning and whose heart was snatched from the funeral pyre by his fellow romantic, Trelawney. Or of Dylan Thomas, a sacrificial votary of drink (Olympian draughts, of course). Since the winter day in 1963 when Sylvia Plath turned on the gas and laid her head in her kitchen oven, she has become a goddess of the thanatophiliacs...
...novel ends, Honda, who has begun to sound like a Japanese Humbert Humbert in his pursuit of his Thai princess-now a student in Japan-secretly watches her in a lesbian embrace. Then Honda's mansion at the foot of Mount Fuji burns to the ground like a pyre at Benares, the flyaway ashes sporadically sizzling into his new swimming pool. The combination of filigreed Oriental pornography and slightly cheap Götterdämmerung has sometimes been a contaminating tendency in Mishima's work. But the rest of the book plausibly suggests a writer whose gifts amount...
...successful. He is crude in the sense that a Michael Curtiz or Roaul Walsh was crude, aiming for direct actions which are emotionally arousing but possess a sort of integrity: they don't score moral points. At one moment, a Teutonic Savanarola is thrown onto a witch's pyre of his own fashion, but there is no audience gratification-this though the priest, aside from the town merchant, is the film's leading villain. The motivations are too involved, and the action itself is one which goes beyond personal conflict; it is treated as such. Like a good old Warner...
...found wisdom. Each adventure turns out to be a con game, with somebody else working the con and Hatterr as the game. Attempting to exorcise the mystical fit of an itinerant bard, he is himself accused of being possessed by a spirit and is nearly burned alive on a pyre. "Damme," he says, "this is Life and contrast...
Potatoes for the Pyre...