Herself (38 page)

I begin to remember how many artists of the past have had two of them. My prejudice is that we should always carry our critic head a little negligently under the arm, like a collapsible top-hat. In the nineteenth century, the writer-artist sported his less self-consciously; the poets wrote the best literary criticism of the age, and even in the letters of George Eliot (who all her life, according to Gordon S. Haight in his preface to her
Letters
, suffered from “a morbid lack of self-confidence” in her work), we see nevertheless how widely and naturally she expects any writer to range. Europe expected it. There are periods that tolerate this, just as the gardener is allowably the authority on roses, the vintner on wine. Ours is not one of them.

To do this of course, one must have formidable artists. I think I would always rather read the notebooks of Matisse than the essays of Roger Fry—and a look at Fry’s paintings in their room at Kings hasn’t disabused me. (Though I would also rather read Hindemith on music than E. M. Forster; an artist has to be in his own art, for this kind of authority.) To have a fan’s passion for an art, or even like Fry to help disseminate and explain its new forms, is a kind of hostess function, never to be confused with an artist’s data on art’s essences.

Literary criticism has yet another confusion at its very heart, in that anyone talking about the medium seriously is in effect using it—and had better have the powers of the artist as well. This often convinces literary critics that they are artists. It convinces me that artists are the best of them. Only the artist can be trusted never to confuse essences with statuses. And every judgment he makes involves him. This is true of the most minor review or conversational flight.
He has no light words
.

The French understand this. To the end that some become exaggerates of it, as the later Sartre becomes the art-spider who must cling to the corpus of Genet for his energy while his own work in art dwindles, appendage to that suddenly monster second head. (At a certain point in that sort of game, perhaps there is no turning back.) Yet when we say then “But
au fond
, he was always
philosophe
,” something is added. We are subscribing then to the abiding continuum of human thought.

When I was sixteen, Jules Romains seemed to me both boring and mysteriously seductive; I sensed that he was part of some luminous tradition my own hadn’t prepared me for. A few years on, Gide bowled me over, above all for his seriousness; for his hairsplittings in the realm of orthodoxy I cared nothing. What was this temper of mind that suited me down to the ground though I might war with its contents? Or feel outside it, as with Simone Weil, whose atmosphere I nevertheless
recognized
to the point of shock—for I was no
religieuse
.

I had been a philosophy student though, happy to deliver a paper on any closed system, from Schopenhauer’s
The World as Will and Idea
to a flirt with Kant and Hegel—always holding my breath in wait for that wonderful, acolyte moment when I would see the angel-plan spread out before me, and could hope to believe. Spinoza, as a Jew and hence somehow already in my blood, didn’t interest me—perhaps here as elsewhere I always had a taste for Christian boys. Mystics like Jacob Boehme drew me, but uneasily, as half on the road to art and artists like Blake. In the French attitude what I had found was what the world had long recognized as a perfect agar in which critique could nourish endlessly: the spirit of
rational
inquiry, in a
religious
temperament. It was my air. I too wanted to lay my life on a line.

But did I want that same air for art?

English after all was my language and spirit. Once past Spenser, or midway in Shakespeare, the air turns Protestant. Since Dr. Johnson, a large part of literary talk had been just that—talk, coffee-house common-sensical, with heaven around the corner in Grub Street. Then had come the message of Matthew Arnold’s muscular speeches—we must cope—then Ruskin’s sentimentality of the chaste, and Pater’s watered-down Marcus Aurelius—a whole silly-season of flowers set in a dry sink. Shaw had been a journalist, D.H. Lawrence a bitter heckler; though coping was glorious at times, nothing I saw in English criticism matched the high, tonally fixed seriousness of the French. But the language itself was a fountain to be leaned upon, not formless but forming—always literally more words in it than French, looser, more open to change, yet not as heavy-spawning as German. A fine wool of a language, English, to which cockle-burrs can cling, yet which still has the watercolor vowels and voice-syrups of a Romance tongue. Its writers of the twentieth century have leaned on it like a rationale. And I with them. It suited what we like to think is our lawlessness.

Yet somewhere is a thought-continuum we too yearn for and must have. Nowadays the phrase “He’s a renaissance man” is slang. Said not as if we are the forceful owners of a world on the way to knowing everything, but like men who wish that all knowledge once again was one. Or that one man—each—could have a “universal” portion of it. We think of Goethe, the poet-dramatist and novelist of
Elective Affinities
who could also discover the intermaxillary bone in man and quarrel with Newton over their theories of light, as able to do this, aside from his gifts, only because he lived at a time when the intellectual life could be the size of a duke’s court, under smaller astronomies than we shall see again. But because knowledge is “larger” now, and no part of the world is sealed to it, must this be the end of seeing the connection of art, philosophy, and yes, science—as real as they ever were in that smaller continuum? Surely the closer interconnection of the physical world is telling us otherwise. In
death
and life.

I begin to see that agnosticism is a pale life unless, like any other religion, it is lived. Because I broke through the egg at the chickhole marked Art, doesn’t preclude a temperament as religious as the churched, or an inquiry as rational as—the rational. In my work, it begins to seem to me, I am no longer the “novelist” or “short-story writer” which the American mode likes to have me. Nor even a writer only, though for passports and pickpockets that will do. I am the thing being written at the time. I am
this
one, now.

Going back over one’s work, one can see from earliest times certain para-forms emerging. If one is crazy, these are
idées fixes;
if one is sane these are systemic views. A mind is not given but makes itself, out of whatever is at hand and sticking-tape—and is not a private possession, but an offering. Every “essay” I had ever written was in effect a way of telling
what
was offered to
whom
. I had always had to write everything, no matter the subject, as if my life depended on it. Of course—it does.

My father once gave me a fine sled, a Flexible Flyer. Though he’d often seen me ride bellywhopper on the old one, now for some reason, perhaps because I was a girl, he knotted two thick ropes through the steering wing of the new sled, one to the hole in each side. Once he had done this, I took to sliding down our steep hill sitting up holding the reins—which earned me the jeering name “High Coachman.” I persisted. I liked the view.

About the same time, the Irish “Director” (an actor I imagine) whom the Mt. Neboh Sunday School hired every year to stage its elaborate children’s musical, had a chat with my mother. As a fair ballet student since I was six, I was trying out for the star part—and for the blue spotlight on the rose-sequined tutu. Poor man, he couldn’t tell her that my long ten-year-old bones and solemn face, plus a certain soft-shoe expertise I had concealed from her and the ballet-mistress, made me a cinch for the comedy trick—or that the other part was always slated for the President of the Congregation’s little blond cuddly. “Why do they all want the classic stuff!” he said, clutching his bald spot. “When she can tapdance to hellandgone!”

So now and then I say a funny thing in the forum. I have since learned how serious the comedy trick can be. But my taste for the High Coachman view remains.

This then is my vita. I have no light words.

But outside the “work,” the words turn different, differently.

Anti-criticism is the one great dialectic tradition within which an artist can afford to be. Men who go to war for their convictions too often become the monster they meet.

Yet, in art, surely one doesn’t fight the human soldier but the killer-process? Surely no one critic is
digne
enough to be the great enemy. And the killer-spirit may invade from anywhere. In the arts, nowadays it seems not to come huge on all fours, breathing false flame from fine nostrils. Rather, it tends to inhabit small, wan people, bilious with desolation, whose demon keeps them building matchstick bridges across the bloody flux.

In anti-criticism, I begin to see there are only two causes for going to war:

The proposed or predicted “death” of an art, or of some part of it. The setting up of “boundaries” which an art “must” have.

Neither of these propositions understands the very nature of art. The nature of the killer-spirit is that it will always find a dead art, or a caged one, more examinable.

Anti-criticism has therefore only two positives:

Art has no law-and-order per se—being a
way
to it. In art, death does not die—is not a dying.

During my first teaching year, I was asked to inaugurate a series of lectures on the novel to be given by experts in their fields: Leon Edel on James, James Clifford on
Pamela,
etc. It was suggested I speak on the novel generally. “But I haven’t yet written one!” I stammered. That didn’t seem to be a prerequisite.

I spoke from the one point of view I thought I could contribute—a writer’s. My tone—which struck the note for all work of this kind I would do later—was personal. For a writer, the editorial “we” is a falsehood. We have only “I.”

I often wonder why people are always being so much more solicitous about the novel, than of other forms of literary expression—always giving out greatly exaggerated rumors of its death, always rushing to resuscitate it, somewhat in the way worthy matrons used to rush hot soup to that rather deplorable family at the end of the town. Meanwhile, look around you. Poets are often still reduced to reading each other; Broadway is always complaining about the dearth of good plays, yet no one ever seriously proclaims the death of either drama or verse. No, the truth of the matter is that the novel has only lately become respectable, worthy of being talked about in the universities. The kind of people who in their hearts still believe that “real” knowledge can’t reside in the specious world of the imagination, who will pay lip service to poetry and drama because these have been going on long enough to have anthropological value—(you know: the kind of man who would be ashamed to say aloud that he never reads a poem or sees a play, but who tells you virtuously that he “has no time for novels”)—these people sometimes manage to make us feel that the novel, like that deplorable family, might, for its own good, be better dead. The truth of the matter is that the novel is as protean as any other form of expression. Like them, it does die sometimes—but, take heart—only, like them, when it becomes too respectable, in being the thing done at that time. Then lo, one day another changeling is found under a cabbage leaf somewhere—in Dublin or in Mississippi. …

I’d like to tell about some particular novels and what I got from them at certain times.

One of the first things we are told is that novels are useful as an accessory to history. By this people usually mean that when we read a novel written in a vanished era, or retrospectively
about
it, we can acquire, and painlessly too,
first
a mass of concrete data on how people lived in those days—the cut of their clothes and their manners, the slant of their architecture, the cadence of their speech—and
secondly
, a much more amorphous mass of data known as the “spirit of the age.” The first kind of data, the concrete, might be thought of as the “Did they or did they not have bathrooms, and what kind?” department—certainly it would be for our era—the second kind of data, the “What did they say to themselves in the mirror when they were shaving”—that is, in the event that they shaved. The first category I won’t belabor; certainly novels do provide a great deal of such material, in my mind, although the account books and all the other minutiae that people leave behind them do this in more detail, and although the novel—and this is important—always provides such material “by the way.” The second category—the “spirit of the age” and how a novel interprets that, bears more explanation and examination. For the fact is that novels, good novels, are
not
accessory to history but in themselves a very special kind of history, in which the people always take precedence over the era. Such novels don’t tell us how people lived and thought, but how
some
people did so, and—as it happened—at a certain time. They do give us the spirit of the age, but only as subsidiary to the “spirit of human beings.” No doubt this is why certain people regard novels as untrustworthy.

The truth is that a good novel, like any work of art, is not an accessory to anything. It stands alone. For two reasons. First—it is an artistic attempt as opposed to an inclusive one; it abstracts from the world to compose a world of its own; it does not attempt to give all the facts but the pattern of some of them. Second—no matter how deceptively objective in method, the novel always has a stance. It is rooted in the peculiar semantics of a special kind of mind—one sensitive to the overtones of facts and to the overtones of people—and to the odd sonorities produced when these two combine. Its comments on the history of human beings are always, in the highest sense, prejudicial—no doubt why I regard them as so trustworthy.

I might say a word here about modern so-called “historical” novels, and about the special dissatisfaction I get from them. By this I mean the novel not written in a past era, or fairly close to it—within say two or three generations—but the novel which goes back an untouchable distance to recreate an era that the author can know only through other people’s facts and other people’s books. Some time ago, when a friend gave me for comment his new “historical” novel—one that had taken four years of research, and in the writing of which I knew there would be considerable ability, I accepted it with a sinking feeling and protected myself by saying, “You mustn’t mind in case I don’t enthuse; I’ve a blind spot somewhere, or else my standards are inexcusably lofty—anyway, about the only historical novels I want to read are
War and Peace, Henry Esmond,
and
The Virginians
.” He looked at me blankly and said: “But of course they aren’t really historical. The Napoleonic wars were only 25 years before Tolstoi was born, and as for Thackeray—the period is only
background
for the people!” And of course he was right—it was I who was confused.