Tanpinar, Halid Ziya Usakligil

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HALID ZIYA USAKLIGIL

Ahmet Hamdi Tanpinar

Halid Ziya Usakligil is no more. He was not only in thefirst ranks of the generation we call Edebiyati Cedide (TheNew Literature) but he was also one of its first writers. His

long productive life enabled him to be the last of thisgeneration too. His life is like a parenthesis that encloses animportant period of our cultural and literary history.

Our fiction truly starts with Halid Ziya. Namik Kemal hadonly experimented with this genre. Mithad Efendi whostarted his career about the same time as Namik Kemal

undeniably instilled a taste for reading among the masses of people. But his writing was always devoid of form which isthe first requirement in a work of art. Although in his work he dealt with certain problems, he had a grasp of theantagonisms in our life and occasionally he could eveninvent an engrossing plot he was not able to bring thewarmth of life into his writings. Some of the local types

he discovered could only be incorporated into the artof fict ion after they were remolded in the hands of HuseyinRahmi.

Halid Ziya and his generation grew up in the first years of Abdűlhamid's reign. Around 1884 our literature had alreadyseparated itself from Namik Kemal with a new style and

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-- who is hardly remembered today; he was the one who

persuaded Muallim (teacher) Naci -- a man open to greatfriendships and lived his emotions naively - to translateTherese Raquin. After his two books Hugo andVoltaire and his criticism attacking Namik Kemal typeof literature a new movement was born. Sami PasazadeSezai joined this movement with a style which was afractured and affected form of Namik Kemal's style.

Around the same time Nabizade Nazim's short storieswere published; among them were "Zehra" and "KaraBibik" which was a realistic depiction of rural life.

Halid Ziya Usaklical's work, like all the novels and short stories of

Edebiyati Cedide, presents the mature stage of a movement whose

aim was to break away from Namik Kemal's school and style. Today

it is hard to associate with it. Because the generation of Namik Kemal

who had started out with a yearning for realism fell into a framework of

arbitrariness and deluded themselves as soon as they broke away from

the old literature. Those who separated themselves from Namik Kemal

also became slaves of a new arbitrariness both in language and in thecomposition of their writings. This is reason why they were considered

" Alla Franca” for a long period of time.

If the conditions of Abdülhamid era and this ruler's omnipresentsuspicions did not hinder this generation of writers from being openlyinvolved in the problems and the turmoil in the country, would their

work have been any different? It is hard to say. However, it iscertain that the writers of Edebiyati Cedide not only identifiedthemselves with a spirit in their society that gave direction to life butthey were even guided by it. The westernization of Fikret, Halid Ziyaand Mehmed Rauf was a social phenomenon; the wheel of historicalnecessities was behind it. Fikret who was more of a sociallyconscious man than his friends both before 1908 - as the conditions

itt d d ft 1908 d d ith ll hi i ht t th i



humanity, freedom and justice. He actively searched for something

beyond a rebellion of the victimized directed toward the self withall its force and turned into internal despair. Thus he managed totransform westernization that was a historic and social necessity into acluster of well defined ideas, i.e., a system. Cenab could not do this; hetoyed with rootless feelings and words in a sterile aesthetism. HalidZiya takes his place between these two poles.

His work does not crystallize around a clear and radical view of society. That is why we find in his work the dimensions of the realsociety only from time to time and in fragments, juxtaposed with theaspired modes of life. Halid Ziya is not the kind of writer whoprese nts his time direc tly but rathe r in the absence of certainessential elements. Perhaps Mai ve Siy ah (The Blue and the Black)has to be put in a different category though. This novel depicts the

life of middle class intellectuals in a period of our hi st or y:the contradictions of this life, the disparities in education, theyearnings, the sorrows and the hopes. But it must be emphasized that

Mai ve Siyah depicts an artistic milieu; and this milieu is confinedwithin the limits of school, printing house, bookstore, and the Babi AliAvenue. The characters can be connected with real life onlyth rou gh th e i r backgrounds. These are the most alluring aspects of the

novel; i.e., the education of Ahmed Cemil, the story of his sister andRaci and his wife. Halid Ziya achieves a universality in certainpassages. The novel does not deal with love as such. Ahmed Cemil'sdistant love for his friend's sister is more like a dream than love and isnot the weak point of the novel as some had claimed but its strong point.Because, for Ahmed Cemil, this young girl is not exclusively a loveobject but a life style, a level of affluence he wants to achieve; inother words, it is the natural world of his dreams. I thi nk Mai ve Siyahpresents us with the indigeno us story of our adventure. The onlyfault to be found in the book is its handling of this yearning for an ideallife in a narrow frame and hence its shallowness. Even in the days of Namik Kemal type of westernization, to write books like thewe s t e r n e r s a n d t o p u bl i sh newspapers were considered to be veryspecial, very progressive and open minded compared to listening to

i



Aski Memnu (The Forbidden Love) too like Mai ve Siyah is a novel that

is bound by its own fate. Just as Ahmed Cemil is devas tated by afew encounters with reality, Bihter (the heroine of The Forbidden Love) destroys the rich and elite household of Adnan Bey equippedwith cooks, servants and a governess, and imbued with an oddkind of sensitivity. Bihter's beauty, her female instincts, herdifferent family background, her sacrifice for her family formoney present her as more alive and more powerful than the people

aro und he r. She ent ers thi s hou se li ke a lightning bolt strikingthe hothouse. Aski Memnu is a l i t t l e h e l l w i t h i n a f a m i l y . A s e tof contrary situations bring out the strong points of the novel. Bloodties, love, lack of willpower, sin intertwine all the characters of the novelto each other; so much so that even death and separation cannotunravel these knots. It is perhaps a bit strange that both novels end upthe same way. In Mai ve Siyah Ahmed Cemil and his mother and in

Aski Memnu Nihal and her father stay together but reduced to ruins.The plot in Aski Memnu d e v e l o p s v e r y f a s t . P e r h a p s t h i s i s d u eto t h e weaknesses of the protagonists to bear the weight of theirtransgressions. In fact if we take away Bihter's presence thatilluminates this crowd of weak creatures and enables them to look intotheir souls we have hardly anythi ng left save a couple of namesand a couple of masks. From today's point of view some of the most

beautiful parts of the novel are the ones that give us the glimpses of a corner of Istanbul and the Bos ph or us of th at ti me . Ha li d Zi yadepicts this Istanbul as it was lived then. Also The Notebooks of a Dead Man gives us the Bosphorus of that time -- perhaps as much as

Eylül does -- with a flair that is enjoyable even today. This is a first inour literature.

Halid Ziya was not one of the bold writers who perceived themselvesinside life and opened a new road as in the Russian novel. He did notenter into life recklessly. We can even say that he did not even feelthe fever of this life. He, like all his literary colleagues,adhered to the French novel that was the fashion of his time. Theconditions of intellectual life in the country were not yet ready tosurpass these mode ls. Unti l the app eara nce of Yahya Ke mal

th l ti hi f lit t ith th t f f



west with an awareness beyond imitation. He was the one who

introduced the authentic Turkish -- the one spoken in the street and athome -- into our literature. We learned the real value of ideas and thesecret of relating the problems of the country with what we werereading. He was the one to introduce to us the authentic values of French culture with which we were in close contact for almost ahundred years. I am not claiming this opinion only for my generation;this is true for those who came before us too.

Halid Ziya's generation lived in a limited circle of art. Even theirlanguage is the product of this circle. It was impossible todiscover the real world with this language they had invented in theirstudios. Wherever we perceive the beginnings of a literature we seethe street joining the desk of a writer. Malherbe had listened to thesounds of the street. Dickens had introduced the street into literature.

The expression "The key to the street" in one of his bookscould perfectly explain this novelist. Pushkin too hadpossessed the key to the street. This magic key was never in thehands of Halid Ziya. But this is not his fa u l t , n o r h i sgeneration's either. This was a historical fact. We had enteredinto western culture carryin g a very old and a ver y stro ngtradition. Because of this we started out with facile adaptations. We

needed a different kind of athlete to break up all these encumbrancesand plunge into the sea.



Throw your heart into the whirlpool,

Go far in the deep, become a spirit.

To utter this and to do it is a difficult lob. In an age whe n writ ers ,coming fro m a cer tai n c las s, lived like a froth above the society, itwas not easy to encounter the life outside. One had to love this life

and be acquainted with it, but we had our eyes set on differenthorizons.

Halid Ziya did not open the road to our hearts for us, but he showed theway to notice those around us. It was thanks to him that we first cameupon the outside world as we were supposed to do. We considerthis a small matter now, but when he started it may have been the most

important thing. Because it meant moving away fro m th e wo rl d of abs trac tio ns into the rea lm of authentic feelings. We startedseeing the objects and our surroundings with him. Halid Ziyawas a born novelist. He possessed the most important qualities of theart of fiction such as inventing plots and creating characters. Tounderstand him better one has to read Turkish fiction from its earlybeginnings. After seeing the attempts at fiction writing that did riot even

have a decent dialogue prior to his writing, it is easy to r e a l i z e w h e non e su dd en ly co mes u po n his we ll structured novels what anedifice he built in our literature. His head was not buzzing with greatsocial problems. His main theme was individual happiness, but hestumbled in this because he could not treat social life in depth. With hisstyle he put up a struggle to depict the environment. He made us seewhat we could not see and discern some of the nuances.

Some of the passages in his work show how far he can reach if he



abandons his models and concentrates on observation of life. The

Clock-Maker Brothers has this quality. This minor masterpiece isthe beginning of short story in our literature. If Halid Ziya had been aman of sudden revolutions his work would have changed much aftert hi s st ory. But he ha d a c c e pt e d t he e st abli shed order.Because of this in Ferdi & His Company he misses all thepossibilities that social contradictions offer a novelist. Yet, wemust not forget that it was only through him that we could

attain the value of the universal in the art of fiction.

Halid Ziya could not go beyond his epoch, but he represented itwithin certain limits he imposed on himself and he elaborated it.The continuance of some of the types he created through the lives of many generations shows that these types have a dynamism of their own.He was the man who introduced a certain kind of sensitivity and a way

of seeing into our society.Halid Ziya's life is worthy of praise as much as his work. He wasamong those who dedicated their whole lives to literature. He keptworking until the end of his life. Although his friends insisted on astrange denial of the new he tried his best to understand it and keptabreast with his times. The changes he made in the vocabulary of hisearly works prove his great attachment to these works. He was never astranger to new movements around him.

In his long and prolific life he witnessed some reactions against hiswork, but he knew that what was achieved with faith could not beobliterated. Perhaps because of this belief he faced all theobje ctions calmly.

Halid Ziya is the founder of the Turkish novel. He will have his share ineach victory this tradition may achieve in our land.



Ahmet Hamdi Tanpinar. Edebiyat Uzerine Makaleler, pp. 296-300.

Istanbul: Milli Egitim Basimevi, 1969.Originally published in Ű lk ű , #85, 1 Nisan, 1945, pp. 1-2.

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Tanpinar, Halid Ziya Usakligil