The Poet Armed

THE ROCK GARDEN (251 pp.)--Nikos Kazantzakis--Simon & Schuster ($4.50).

In 1936, Japan and China were on the verge of war and hardly in the mood for poetry. But the great Greek Poet-Novelist Nikos Kazantzakis chose that year to make a trip to the Orient. There his poetic values came under heavy bombardment. In this transparently autobiographical novel, as slender in plot as it is rich in philosophy, Kazantzakis records the intellectual combat.

On the surface, Japanese life seemed to have the "feathery Buddhist consistency of dreams." In reality, the Japanese were feverishly girding for war, as if for a sacred mission. "These little Japanese," noted Kazantzakis, "have an implacable purpose: to create a new human type which has no fear of death; which, on the contrary, aspires to death as to the supreme crown of life." "You white men," a Japanese contemptuously tells him, "have lost the essence of man: the impulse toward something that is more than yourselves."

Contempt for Beauty. Kazantzakis is doubly resented: as a white man and as an apolitical, uncommitted man in a time of passionate commitment. He tries to mediate between East and West, between Japanese and Chinese. But everywhere he is rebuffed. "We were born in an age of war," a Chinese tells him. "Let us fight, then. Without intellectual shilly-shallying. Let us choose, right or left matters little, but let us choose."

Kazantzakis takes a poet's delight in the beauties of the ancient Orient. In Peking, he lovingly explores every crevice of crumbling palaces. "Praised be luxury," he cries, "superfluous luxury, the peacock's plume! That is what civilization is: to feel that luxury is as indispensable as bread." But the Chinese are embarrassed by their past and consider it fit only for tourists. They scoff at Kazantzakis' bourgeois concern for beauty. "I hate beauty because it dries up hearts," a Chinese tells him. "Your heart, so tender in appearance, is dry and cruel, like the hearts of all artists. You do not think of human suffering, but of the expression on men's faces and the intonations of their cries when they suffer. We men of action . . . fight to put an end to their suffering."

Ceaseless Combat. In the course of his trip, Kazantzakis does not make a single friend. The closest he comes to friendship is when a Japanese grudgingly confesses: "Your absence is more disagreeable to me than your presence." When he falls in love with a willowy Chinese girl, she is whisked away to serve in the war effort. "Her individual suffering," Kazantzakis muses, "had assumed its true proportions, lost like a tiny sigh over the immense and dolorous face of China!"

What saddened Kazantzakis' life, however, strengthened his art. His experiences steeled his poet's nerves, shaped the hard philosophy of his later masterpieces, The Odyssey and The Last Temptation of Christ. Life is ceaseless combat, Kazantzakis learned, and the poet's fight is the fiercest of all: to translate experience into words, to "transform flesh into spirit."

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