The late novelist and literary critic Edilberto Kainday Tiempo, whose 112th birth anniversary we will be celebrating this August 5th, was someone known in Philippine literary circles for not mincing words, especially when it came to the appreciation and criticism of literature. He very much took creative writing as something almost sacrosanct, and so, when he saw the crafting of it falter, especially in his formalist view of things, he would not hesitate to call attention to that failure, sometimes with shocking honesty.

In the early 1990s, for example, EKT was invited by the University of the Philippines to do a lecture on the novelist Carlos Bulosan—it was for some important anniversary of that writer’s life—and much to the astonishment of the assembly, he called Bulosan’s work a “failure of sensibility.” Later, he was asked by the writer Elmer Ordoñez why he did it, and apparently, with an impish grin, Tiempo replied: “Because I know you guys in UP like Bulosan.”

Many alumni of the Silliman University National Writers Workshop, which he famously co-founded in 1962 with his wife the National Artist Edith Lopez Tiempo, have fond memories of sessions where the Tiempo couple would disagree vehemently over the merits of a story or a poem taken up for workshop, with EKT often souring over the work. He spared no one his criticism, not even protegees like Cesar Ruiz Aquino, who once won the Palanca for the short story “Stories,” which EKT soon roasted in an issue of Sands & Coral, much to Sawi’s dismay. He even critiqued giants of Philippine literature, even beloved writers like Manuel Arguilla, which EKT faulted for switching the point of view in his story “Caps and Lower Case.” [But EKT greatly admired “Midsummer,” and once, according to Ordoñez, dwelled at length on the imagery of “papayas in bloom” in Arguilla’s idyllic story during a literary workshop in Cebu.]

Born in 1913 in the town of Maasin, Southern Leyte, EKT attended Maasin Institute for both his elementary and high school years, where he became the editor of the school paper Hilltop News in his senior year. It just so happened that all of his teachers in high school were trained at Silliman University. In the seventh grade, he wrote a piece about a girl that his history teacher, a valedictorian from Silliman, was in love with. The story, titled “Postscript,” would later be published in the Philippines Graphic on 12 July 1934, where it was placed among the “20 Best of the Year” list by Jose Garcia Villa. [Tiempo, however, believed that the story was so badly written that he could not salvage it for his first story collection, A Stream at Dalton Pass, as he did with most of his older stories.]

After graduating from high school, Tiempo taught at the local elementary school for a year and handled all subjects. He finally decided to relocate to Dumaguete and study at Silliman Institute in 1932, taking up education. He had originally planned to take journalism but since there was no offering for a degree in that field at Silliman at the time, he contented himself with taking all the English and literature subjects available in the university, where his teachers in English happened to be all American.

Tiempo soon became the editor of The Sillimanian and realized that it was in literature where his real interest laid, and not in journalism. His studies served to instill in him a love for literature, but he always felt that he lacked a thorough knowledge of literary criticism which he felt was needed in order for him to have a “healthy literary development,” as the education he got all seemed to be purely academic, despite coming from some of the best teachers in English in the country.

Tiempo graduated from Silliman Institute in 1937 with a bachelor’s degree in English. After graduation, he was immediately asked to teach at Silliman but he had promised to return to Maasin, where he eventually stayed for the next two years. During this time, he came upon a short story in Philippine Magazine written by a writer named Arlyne Lopez. He was so struck by the quality of the writing that shortly afterwards, he wrote a story entitled “Sea Drifts,” where he used Arlyne’s full name and eventually had it published in the same magazine.

A few weeks later, he received an angry letter from Arlyne’s sister, Edith Lopez, who demanded to know of the “truth” behind his relation to her sister, and why he had used her name. Edith and her family believed that Tiempo had met Arlyne on a boat trip to Surigao where she was going to stay with a sister who was married to an American who owned a gold mine there, as his story featured a similar boat scene. Tiempo replied, explaining he had never met Edith’s sister—and the two soon found themselves keeping up a correspondence, much to the chagrin of Edith’s mother.

However, Edilberto and Edith would not meet each other in person until a year later when Tiempo would finally visit her in Solano, Nueva Vizcaya, her hometown. By then, Tiempo had already become a widely published and read author, with many of his short stories and essays having been published in various national magazines.

In 1939, Tiempo pursued his graduate studies at the University of the Philippines where Edith was also studying Pre-Law. After only one semester, the two decided to get married without finishing any of their degrees, and with that decision also came the choice to move to Dumaguete for good in 1940. EKT had finally taken the teaching post at Silliman he was promised, and there Edith also resumed her studies, taking up a degree in English.

The newly-married couple was barely settled in Dumaguete when the Pacific war erupted. World War II put a stop to the stories and to the poetry that were beginning to be published in Dumaguete, as Silliman itself [now a university in 1939] grinded to a halt. Many of its faculty and students soon began taking to the mountains of Negros to escape the expected brutalities of the occupying Japanese forces—and EKT soon served in the USAFFE, and later drew upon these experiences, as well as his knowledge of the Filipino resistance movement, for his novels. His novel Cry, Slaughter!, then known as Watch in the Night, was even smuggled out of the Philippines during the Japanese occupation and later published in New York.

After the war, EKT obtained his M.F.A. from the University of Iowa and his Ph.D. in English from the University of Denver. In addition to having been a Guggenheim and Rockefeller fellow, Dr. Tiempo, alongside wife Edith, spent around four years studying literature and creative writing in the Iowa Writers Workshop. Upon returning to the Philippines in 1962, the Tiempos founded the famous workshop after the objectives of the Iowa writers’ clinic. In the 1960s, he taught in two American schools, but it was Silliman University which Tiempo chose as his base, serving over the years as department chair, graduate school dean, vice-president for academic affairs, and writer-in-residence.

He reaped numerous honors for his writing, among them the Cultural Center of the Philippines Prize, Palanca Awards, the National Book Award, and a prize in the U.P. Golden Anniversary Literary Contest. He authored over a dozen books in his lifetime. Titles include the story collections A Stream at Dalton Pass and Other Stories [1970], Finalities: A Novelette and Five Short Stories [1982], Rainbow for Rima [1988], Snake Twin and Other Stories [1992], The Paraplegics and Five Short Stories [1995], as well as the novels Cry Slaughter [1957), which had four New York printings and six European translations, To Be Free [1972], More Than Conquerors [1982], Cracked Mirror [1984], The Standard Bearer [1985], and his final novel, Farah [2001], which he died see in print since he died in in September of 1996.

He also published a collection of his literary criticism, Literary Criticism in the Philippines and Other Essays [1995]—an important tome since he was one of the first writers in the Philippines to distinctly pursue this genre of writing.

From the title essay in that collection, we get EKT brandishing his disappointments in what passed for literary criticism in the Philippines: “Non-critical reading is quackery. Anything that at first appears obscure or incomprehensible is slightly dismissed, and so John Donne or Gerard Manley Hopkins or James Joyce gathers dust. There is no more distressing statement than the following, made by a Filipino critic reviewing a local quarterly: “Of the four poems in the issues I like A—’s best because he has the greatest clarity.” As though clarity or obscurity ultimately decides the success or failure of a work.

“The usual result of uncritical reading is the impressionistic approach which certain critics in the century take. An example is the following statement made by Carmen Guerrero-Nakpil, one of the judges in the Philippines Free Press short story contest: ‘Of the fifty odd short stories eligible for the Philippines Free Press contest this year, ‘The Wings of Madness’ by Fransisco Arcellana moves me most. It is as intense, as baffling, as disjointed as life itself. I was fascinated by the brooding, neurotic pace; the quite frenzy; the flawless prose. Of course, it is not perfect, it is not even up to other Arcellana stories. It does not seem to hang together, I suppose short story experts would say it is not a story at all. But I thought it was the best of the lot.’

“To begin with, if ‘it does seem to hang together,’ and the supposed ‘short-story experts may say it is not a story at all,’ why did she choose it as ‘the best of the lot’? To consider Arcellana’s story ‘the best of the lot’ because ‘it moved me most’ is an example of affective fallacy. In defining the term in relation to poetry (a term applicable to all literary forms), W.K. Wimsatt, Jr. and M.C. Beardsley speak of affective fallacy as ‘a confusion between the poem and its result (what it is and what it does) …. It begins by trying to derive the standard of literary criticism from the psychological effects of the poem and ends in impressionism and relativism. The result…is that the poem itself, as an object of specifically critical judgment, tends to disappear.’

“This impressionistic attitude is evident in Teodoro Locsin’s critical introduction to Nick Joaquin’s first book. In discussing ‘The Summer Solstice,’ for example, he says, ‘The story is a masterpiece. I have read nothing like it. It is a terrifying experience.’ He goes on to relate how the story had not failed to touch an American woman. ‘We have read stories by many of the new American writers. These stories are competent, significant, clever, curious, full of tricks. They are the works of bright intelligences, skilled artisans, etc. There is only one thing wrong with them. They do nothing to you.’ The essay closes with the sentence-paragraph: ‘The stories of Joaquin are an experience.’

“Comparing Joaquin’s stories with those of ‘many of the new American writers’ (who would include his own contemporaries like John Updike, John Cheever, Flannery O’Connor, Donald Bartheleme, Bernard Malamud, and even Eudora Welty and Katherine Anne Porter whose story collections were published in the 1950s) shows Locsin’s gross lack of understanding of the short story…

“If we were to apply Locsin’s and Carmen Nakpil’s criterion to music, Sinatra and Elvis Presley were great artist because they made American female teenagers swoon, whereas Bach and Beethoven may send a lot of people to sleep.”

Ouch.