The 100 Most Influential Writers of All Time (32 page)

In 1891 Tagore went to East Bengal (now in Bangladesh) to manage his family's estates at Shilaidah and Shazadpur for 10 years. There he often stayed in a houseboat on the Padma River (i.e., the Ganges River), in close contact with village folk, and his sympathy for their poverty and backwardness became the keynote of much of his later writing. Most of his finest short stories, which examine “humble lives and their small miseries,” date from the 1890s and have a poignancy, laced with gentle irony, that is unique to him, though admirably captured by the director Satyajit Ray in later film adaptations. Tagore came to love the Bengali countryside, most of all the Padma River, an often-repeated image in his verse. During these years he published several poetry collections, notably
Son
ā
r Tar
Ä«
(1894;
The Golden Boat
), and plays, notably
Chitr
ā
ngad
ā
(1892;
Chitra
). Tagore's poems are virtually untranslatable, as are his more than 2,000 songs, which remain extremely popular among all classes of Bengali society.

In 1901 Tagore founded an experimental school in rural West Bengal at
Ś
antiniketan
(“Abode of Peace”), where he sought to blend the best in the Indian and Western traditions. He settled permanently at the school, which became Vi
ś
va-Bh
ā
rati University in 1921. Years of sadness arising from the deaths of his wife and two children between 1902
and 1907 are reflected in his later poetry, which was introduced to the West in
Gitanjali, Song Offerings
(1912). This book, containing Tagore's English prose translations of religious poems from several of his Bengali verse collections, including
G
Ä«
t
ā
ñjali
(1910), was hailed by W. B. Yeats and André Gide and won him the Nobel Prize in 1913. Tagore was awarded a knighthood in 1915, but he repudiated it in 1919 as a protest against the Amritsar Massacre.

From 1912 Tagore spent long periods out of India, lecturing and reading from his work in Europe, the Americas, and East Asia and becoming an eloquent spokesperson for the cause of Indian independence. Tagore's novels, though less outstanding than his poems and short stories, are also worthy of attention; the best known are
Gor
ā
(1910) and
Ghare-B
ā
ire
(1916;
The Home and the World
). In the late 1920s, at nearly 70 years of age, Tagore took up painting and produced works that won him a place among India's foremost contemporary artists.

(b. June 13, 1865, Sandymount, Dublin, Ire.—d. Jan. 28, 1939, Roquebrune-Cap-Martin, France)

T
he Irish poet, dramatist, and prose writer William Butler Yeats was one of the greatest English-language poets of the 20th century. He received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1923.

In 1867, when Yeats was only two, his family moved to London, but he spent much of his boyhood and school holidays in Sligo, in western Ireland, with his grandparents. This country—its scenery, folklore, and supernatural legend—would colour Yeats's work and form the setting of many of his poems. In 1880 his family moved back to Dublin, where he attended the high school. In 1883 he attended the Metropolitan School of Art in Dublin, where
the most important part of his education was in meeting other poets and artists.

Meanwhile, Yeats was beginning to write. His first publication, two brief lyrics, appeared in the
Dublin University Review
in 1885. When the family moved back to London in 1887, Yeats took up the life of a professional writer. He joined the Theosophical Society, whose mysticism appealed to him because it was a form of imaginative life far removed from the workaday world. His early poems, collected in
The Wanderings of Oisin, and Other Poems
(1889), are the work of an aesthete, often beautiful but always rarefied, a soul's cry for release from circumstance.

Yeats quickly became involved in the literary life of London. He became friends with William Morris and W. E. Henley, and he was a cofounder of the Rhymers' Club, whose members included his friends Lionel Johnson and Arthur Symons. In 1889 Yeats met Maud Gonne, an Irish beauty, ardent and brilliant. He fell in love with her, but she was not in love with him. Her passion was lavished upon Ireland; she was an Irish patriot, a rebel, and a rhetorician, commanding in voice and in person. When Yeats joined in the Irish nationalist cause, he did so partly from conviction, but mostly for love of Maud. When Yeats's play
Cathleen ni Houlihan
was first performed in Dublin in 1902, she played the title role.

After the rapid decline and death of the controversial Irish leader Charles Stewart Parnell in 1891, Yeats felt that Irish political life lost its significance. The vacuum left by politics might be filled, he felt, by literature, art, poetry, drama, and legend.
The Celtic Twilight
(1893), a volume of essays, was Yeats's first effort toward this end, but progress was slow until 1898, when he met Augusta Lady Gregory, an aristocrat who was to become a playwright and his close friend.

Yeats (along with Lady Gregory and others) was one of the originators of the Irish Literary Theatre, which gave its first performance in Dublin in 1899 with Yeats's play
The Countess Cathleew
. To the end of his life Yeats remained a director of this theatre, which became the Abbey Theatre in 1904. In the crucial period from 1899 to 1907, he managed the theatre's affairs, encouraged its playwrights (notably John Millington Synge), and contributed many of his own plays that became part of the Abbey Theatre's repertoire.

The years from 1909 to 1914 mark a decisive change in his poetry. The otherworldly, ecstatic atmosphere of the early lyrics has cleared, and the poems in
Responsibilities: Poems and a Play
(1914) show a tightening and hardening of his verse line, a more sparse and resonant imagery, and a new directness with which Yeats confronts reality and its imperfections.

In 1917 Yeats published
The Wild Swans at Coole
. From then onward he reached and maintained the height of his achievement—a renewal of inspiration and a perfecting of technique that are almost without parallel in the history of English poetry.
The Tower
(1928), named after the castle he owned and had restored, is the work of a fully accomplished artist; in it, the experience of a lifetime is brought to perfection of form. Still, some of Yeats's greatest verse was written subsequently, appearing in
The Winding Stair
(1929). The poems in both of these works use, as their dominant subjects and symbols, the Easter Rising and the Irish civil war; Yeats's own tower; the Byzantine Empire and its mosaics; Plato, Plotinus, and Porphyry; and the author's interest in contemporary psychical research.

In 1922, on the foundation of the Irish Free State, Yeats accepted an invitation to become a member of the new Irish Senate: he served for six years. In 1923 he was awarded
the Nobel Prize for Literature. Now a celebrated figure, he was indisputably one of the most significant modern poets. He died in January 1939 while abroad.

Had Yeats ceased to write at age 40, he would probably now be valued as a minor poet writing in a dying Pre-Raphaelite tradition that had drawn renewed beauty and poignancy for a time from the Celtic revival. There is no precedent in literary history for a poet who produces his greatest work between the ages of 50 and 75. Yeats's work of this period takes its strength from his long and dedicated apprenticeship to poetry; from his experiments in a wide range of forms of poetry, drama, and prose; and from his spiritual growth and his gradual acquisition of personal wisdom, which he incorporated into the framework of his own mythology.

(b. June 28, 1867, Agrigento, Sicily, Italy—d. Dec. 10, 1936, Rome)

L
uigi Pirandello was an Italian playwright, novelist, and short-story writer who won the 1934 Nobel Prize for Literature. With his invention of the “theatre within the theatre” in the play
Sei personaggi in cerca d'autore
(1921;
Six Characters in Search of an Author
), he became an important innovator in modern drama.

In 1891 Pirandello gained his Doctorate in Philology for a thesis on the dialect of Agrigento. In 1894 his father arranged his marriage to Antonietta Portulano, the daughter of a business associate, a wealthy sulfur merchant. This marriage gave him financial independence, allowing him to live in Rome and to write. He had already published an early volume of verse,
Mal giocondo
(1889), which paid tribute to the poetic fashions set by Giosuè Carducci. This was followed by other volumes of verse. But his first significant works were short stories.

In 1903 a landslide shut down the sulfur mine in which his wife's and his father's capital was invested. Suddenly poor, Pirandello was forced to earn his living not only by writing but also by teaching Italian at a teacher's college in Rome. As a further result of the financial disaster, his wife developed a persecution mania, which manifested itself in a frenzied jealousy of her husband. His torment ended only with her removal to a sanatorium in 1919 (she died in 1959). It was this bitter experience that finally determined the theme of his most characteristic work, already perceptible in his early short stories—the exploration of the tightly closed world of the forever changeable human personality.

Pirandello's early narrative style stems from the
verismo
(“realism”) of two Italian novelists of the late 19th century—Luigi Capuana and Giovanni Verga. Success came with his third novel, often acclaimed as his best,
Il fu Mattia Pascal
(1904;
The Late Mattia Pascal
). Although the theme is not typically “Pirandellian,” since the obstacles confronting its hero result from external circumstances, it already shows the acute psychological observation that was later to be directed toward the exploration of his characters' subconscious. Other novels, notably
I vecchi e i giovani
(1913;
The Old and The Young
) and
Uno, nessuno e centomila
(1925–26;
One, None, and a Hundred Thousand
), followed.

Pirandello also wrote over 50 plays. He had first turned to the theatre in 1898 with
L'epilogo
, but the accidents that prevented its production until 1910 (when it was retitled
La morsa
) kept him from other than sporadic attempts at drama until the success of
Così è
(
se vi pare
) in 1917. This delay may have been fortunate for the development of his dramatic powers.
L'epilogo
does not greatly differ from other drama of its period, but
Così è
(
se vi pare
) began the series of plays that were to make him world famous in the
1920s. Its title can be translated as
Right You Are
(
If You Think You Are
). A demonstration, in dramatic terms, of the relativity of truth, and a rejection of the idea of any objective reality not at the mercy of individual vision, it anticipates Pirandello's two great plays,
Six Characters in Search of an Author
(1921) and
Enrico IV
(1922;
Henry IV
).

Six Characters
is the most arresting presentation of the typical Pirandellian contrast between art, which is unchanging, and life, which is an inconstant flux. Characters that have been rejected by their author materialize on stage, throbbing with a more intense vitality than the real actors, who, inevitably, distort their drama as they attempt its presentation. And in
Henry IV
the theme is madness, which lies just under the skin of ordinary life and is, perhaps, superior to ordinary life in its construction of a satisfying reality. The play finds dramatic strength in its hero's choice of retirement into unreality in preference to life in the uncertain world. The production of
Six Characters
in Paris in 1923 made Pirandello widely known, and his work became one of the central influences on the French theatre.

The universal acclaim that followed
Six Characters
and
Henry IV
sent Pirandello touring the world (1925–27) with his own company, the Teatro d'Arte in Rome. It also emboldened him to disfigure some of his later plays (e.g.,
Ciascuno a suo modo
[1924]) by calling attention to himself, just as in some of the later short stories it is the surrealistic and fantastic elements that are accentuated.

After the dissolution, because of financial losses, of the Teatro d'Arte in 1928, Pirandello spent his remaining years in frequent and extensive travel. In his will he requested that there should be no public ceremony marking his death—only “a hearse of the poor, the horse and the coachman.”

(b. July 10, 1871, Auteuil, near Paris, France—d. Nov. 18, 1922, Paris)

M
arcel Proust was a French novelist and is best known as the author of
À la recherche du temps perdu
(1913–27;
In Search of Lost Time
), a seven-volume novel based on Proust's life told psychologically and allegorically.

Proust was the son of an eminent physician of provincial French Catholic descent and the daughter of a wealthy Jewish family. After a first attack in 1880, he suffered from asthma throughout his life. In 1896 he published
Les Plaisirs et les jours
(
Pleasures and Days
), a collection of short stories at once precious and profound, most of which had appeared during 1892–93 in the magazines
Le Banquet
and
La Revue Blanche
. From 1895 to 1899 he wrote
Jean Santeuil
, an autobiographical novel that showed awakening genius. A gradual disengagement from social life coincided with growing ill health and with his active involvement in the Dreyfus affair of 1897–99, when French politics and society were split by the movement to liberate the Jewish army officer Alfred Dreyfus, unjustly imprisoned on Devil's Island as a spy. Proust helped to organize petitions and assisted Dreyfus's lawyer Labori, courageously defying the risk of social ostracism.