Let us just for the moment feel the pulses of Ulysses and of Miss Dorothy Richardson and M. Marcel Proust, on the earnest side of Briareus; on the other, the throb of The Sheik and Mr Zane Grey, and, if you will, Mr Robert Chambers and the rest. Is Ulysses in his cradle? Oh, dear! What a grey face! And Pointed Roofs, are they a gay little toy for nice little girls? And M. Proust? Alas! You can hear the death-rattle in their throats. They can hear it themselves. They are listening to it with acute interest, trying to discover whether the intervals are minor thirds or major fourths. Which is rather infantile, really.
So there you have the ‘serious’ novel, dying in a very long-drawn-out fourteen-volume death-agony, and absorbedly, childishly interested in the phenomenon. ‘Did I feel a twinge in my little toe, or didn’t I?’ asks every character of Mr Joyce or of Miss Richardson or M. Proust. Is my aura a blend of frankincense and orange pekoe and boot-blacking, or is it myrrh and bacon-fat and Shetland tweed? The audience round the death-bed gapes for the answer. And when, in a sepulchral tone, the answer comes at length, after hundreds of pages: ‘It is none of these, it is abysmal chloro-coryambasis,’ the audience quivers all over, and murmurs: ‘That’s just how I feel myself.’
Which is the dismal, long-drawn-out comedy of the death-bed of the serious novel. It is self-consciousness picked into such fine bits that the bits are most of them invisible, and you have to go by smell. Through thousands and thousands of pages Mr Joyce and Miss Richardson tear themselves to pieces, strip their smallest emotions to the finest threads, till you feel you are sewed inside a wool mattress that is being slowly shaken up, and you are turning to wool along with the rest of the woolliness.
It’s awful. And it’s childish. It really is childish, after a certain age, to be absorbedly self-conscious. One has to be self-conscious at seventeen: still a little self-conscious at twenty-seven; but if we are going it strong at thirty-seven, then it is a sign of arrested development, nothing else. And if it is still continuing at forty-seven, it is obvious senile precocity.
And there’s the serious novel: senile-precocious. Absorbedly, childishly concerned with what I am. ‘I am this, I am that, I am the other. My reactions are such, and such, and such. And, oh, Lord, if I liked to watch myself closely enough, if I liked to analyse my feelings minutely, as I unbutton my gloves, instead of saying crudely I unbuttoned them, then I could go on to a million pages instead of a thousand. In fact, the more I come to think of it, it is gross, it is uncivilized bluntly to say: I unbuttoned my gloves. After all, the absorbing adventure of it! Which button did I begin with?’ etc.
The people in the serious novels are so absorbedly concerned with themselves and what they feel and don’t feel, and how they react to every mortal button; and their audience as frenziedly absorbed in the application of the author’s discoveries to their own reactions: ‘That’s me! That’s exactly it! I’m just finding myself in this book!’ Why, this is more than death-bed, it is almost post-mortem behaviour.
Some convulsion or cataclysm will have to get this serious novel out of its self-consciousness. The last great war made it worse. What’s to be done? Because, poor thing, it’s really young yet. The novel has never become fully adult. It has never quite grown to years of discretion. It has always youthfully hoped for the best, and felt rather sorry for itself on the last page. Which is just childish. The childishness has become very long-drawn-out. So very many adolescents who drag their adolescence on into their forties and their fifties and their sixties! There needs some sort of surgical operation, somewhere.
Then the popular novels – the Sheiks and Babbitts and Zane Grey novels. They are just as self-conscious, only they do have more illusions about themselves. The heroines do think they are lovelier, and more fascinating, and purer. The heroes do see themselves more heroic, braver, more chivalrous, more fetching. The mass of the populace ‘find themselves’ in the popular novels. But nowadays it’s a funny sort of self they find. A Sheik with a whip up his sleeve, and a heroine with weals on her back, but adored in the end, adored, the whip out of sight, but the weals still faintly visible.
It’s a funny sort of self they discover in the popular novels. And the essential moral of If Winter Comes, for example, is so shaky. ‘The gooder you are, the worse it is for you, poor you, oh, poor you. Don’t you be so blimey good, it’s not good enough.’ Or Babbitt: ‘Go on, you make your pile, and then pretend you’re too good for it. Put it over the rest of the grabbers that way. They’re only pleased with themselves when they’ve made their pile. You go one better.’
Always the same sort of baking-powder gas to make you rise: the soda counteracting the cream of tartar, and the tartar counteracted by the soda. Sheik heroines, duly whipped, wildly adored. Babbitts with solid fortunes, weeping from self-pity. Winter-Comes heroes as good as pie, hauled off to jail. Moral: Don’t be too good, because you’ll go to jail for it. Moral: Don’t feel sorry for yourself till you’ve made your pile and don’t need to feel sorry for yourself. Moral: Don’t let him adore you till he’s whipped you into it. Then you’ll be partners in mild crime as well as in holy matrimony.
Which again is childish. Adolescence which can’t grow up. Got into the self-conscious rut and going crazy, quite crazy in it. Carrying on their adolescence into middle age and old age, like the looney Cleopatra in Dombey and Son, murmuring ‘Rose-coloured curtains’ with her dying breath.
The future of the novel? Poor old novel, it’s in a rather dirty, messy tight corner. And it’s either got to get over the wall or knock a hole through it. In other words, it’s got to grow up. Put away childish things like: ‘Do I love the girl, or don’t I?’ – ‘Am I pure and sweet, or am I not?’ – ‘Do I unbutton my right glove first, or my left?’ – ‘Did my mother ruin my life by refusing to drink the cocoa which my bride had boiled for her?’ These questions and their answers don’t really interest me any more, though the world still goes sawing them over. I simply don’t care for any of these things now, though I used to. The purely emotional and self-analytical stunts are played out in me. I’m finished. I’m deaf to the whole band. But I’m neither blasé nor cynical, for all that. I’m just interested in something else.
Supposing a bomb were put under the whole scheme of things, what would we be after? What feelings do we want to carry through into the next epoch? What feelings will carry us through? What is the underlying impulse in us that will provide the motive power for a new state of things, when this democratic-industrial-lovey-dovey-darling-take-me-to-mamma state of things is bust?
What next? That’s what interests me. ‘What now?’ is no fun any more.
If you wish to look into the past for what-next books, you can go back to the Greek philosophers. Plato’s Dialogues are queer little novels. It seems to me it was the greatest pity in the world, when philosophy and fiction got split. They used to be one, right from the days of myth. Then they went and parted, like a nagging married couple, with Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas and that beastly Kant. So the novel went sloppy, and philosophy went abstract-dry. The two should come together again – in the novel.
You’ve got to find a new impulse for new things in mankind, and it’s really fatal to find it through abstraction. No, no; philosophy and religion, they’ve both gone too far on the algebraical tack: Let X stand for sheep and Y for goats: then X minus Y equals Heaven, and X plus Y equals Earth, and Y minus X equals Hell. Thank you! But what coloured shirt does X have on?
The novel has a future. It’s got to have the courage to tackle new propositions without using abstractions; it’s got to present us with new, really new feelings, a whole line of new emotion, which will get us out of the emotional rut. Instead of snivelling about what is and has been, or inventing new sensations in the old line, it’s got to break a way through, like a hole in the wall. And the public will scream and say it is sacrilege: because, of course, when you’ve been jammed for a long time in a tight corner, and you get really used to its stuffiness and its tightness, till you find it suf
focatingly cozy; then, of course, you’re horrified when you see a new glaring hole in what was your cosy wall. You’re horrified. You back away from the cold stream of fresh air as if it were killing you. But gradually, first one and then another of the sheep filters through the gap, and finds a new world outside.
PARIS LETTER (1924)
I promised to write a letter to you from Paris. Probably I should have forgotten, but I saw a little picture – or sculpture – in the Tuileries, of Hercules slaying the Centaur, and that reminded me. I had so much rather the Centaur had slain Hercules, and men had never developed souls. Seems to me they’re the greatest ailment humanity ever had. However, they’ve got it.
Paris is still monumental and handsome. Along the river where its splendours are, there’s no denying its man-made beauty. The poor, pale little Seine runs rapidly north to the sea, the sky is pale, pale jade overhead, greenish and Parisian, the trees of black wire stand in rows, and flourish their black wire brushes against a low sky of jade-pale cobwebs, and the huge dark-grey palaces rear up their masses of stone and slope off towards the sky still with a massive, satisfying suggestion of pyramids. There is something noble and man-made about it all.
My wife says she wishes that grandeur still squared its shoulders on the earth. She wishes she could sit sumptuously in the river windows of the Tuileries, and see a royal spouse – who wouldn’t be me – cross the bridge at the head of a tossing, silk and silver cavalcade. She wishes she had a bevy of ladies-in-waiting around her, as a peacock has its tail, as she crossed the weary expanses of pavement in the Champs Elysées.
Well, she can have it. At least, she can’t. The world has lost its faculty for splendour, and Paris is like an old, weary peacock that sports a bunch of dirty twigs at its rump, where it used to have a tail. Democracy has collapsed into more and more democracy, and men, particularly Frenchmen, have collapsed into little, rather insignificant, rather wistful, rather nice and helplessly commonplace little fellows who rouse one’s mother-instinct and make one feel they should be tucked away in bed and left to sleep, like Rip Van Winkle, till the rest of the storms rolled by.
It’s a queer thing to sit in the Tuileries on a Sunday afternoon and watch the crowd drag through the galleries. Instead of a gay and wicked court, the weary, weary crowd, that looks as if it had nothing at heart to keep it going. As if the human creature had been dwindling and dwindling through the processes of democracy, amid the ponderous ridicule of the aristocratic setting; till soon he will dwindle right away.
Oh, those galleries. Oh, those pictures and those statues of nude, nude women: nude, nude, insistently and hopelessly nude. At last the eyes fall in absolute weariness, the moment they catch sight of a bit of pink-and-white painting, or a pair of white marble fesses. It becomes an inquisition; like being forced to go on eating pink marzipan icing. And yet there is a fat and very undistinguished bourgeois with a little beard and a fat and hopelessly petit-bourgeoise wife and awful little girl, standing in front of a huge heap of twisting marble, while he, with a goose-grease unctuous simper, strokes the marble hip of the huge marble female, and points out its niceness to his wife. She is not in the least jealous. She knows, no doubt, that her own hip and the marble hip are the only ones he will stroke without paying prices, one of which, and the last he could pay, would be the price of spunk.
It seems to me the French are just worn out. And not nearly so much with the late great war as with the pink nudities of women. The men are just worn out, making offerings on the shrine of Aphrodite in elastic garters. And the women are worn out, keeping the men up to it. The rest is all nervous exasperation.
And the table. One shouldn’t forget that other, four-legged mistress of man, more unwitherable than Cleopatra. The table. The good kindly tables of Paris, with Coquilles Saint Martin, and escargots and oysters and Chateaubriands and the good red wine. If they can afford it, the men sit and eat themselves pink. And no wonder. But the Aphrodite in a hard black hat opposite, when she has eaten herself also pink, is going to insist on further delights, to which somebody has got to play up. Weariness isn’t the word for it.
May the Lord deliver us from our own enjoyments, we gasp at last. And he won’t. We actually have to deliver ourselves.
One goes out again from the restaurant comfortably fed and soothed with a food and drink, to find the pale-jade sky of Paris crumbling in a wet dust of rain; motor-cars skidding till they turn clean around, and are facing south when they were going north: a boy on a bicycle coming smack, and picking himself up with his bicycle pump between his legs: and the men still fishing, as if it were a Sisyphus penalty, with long sticks fishing for invisible fishes in the Seine: and the huge buildings of the Louvre and the Tuileries standing ponderously, with their Parisian suggestion of pyramids.
And no, in the old style of grandeur I never want to be grand. That sort of regality, that builds itself up in piles of stone and masonry, and prides itself on living inside the monstrous heaps, once they’re built, is not for me. My wife asks why she can’t live in the Petit Palais, while she’s in Paris. Well, even if she might, she’d live alone.
I don’t believe any more in democracy. But I can’t believe in the old sort of aristocracy, either, nor can I wish it back, splendid as it was. What I believe in is the old Homeric aristocracy, when the grandeur was inside the man, and he lived in a simple wooden house. Then, the men that were grand inside themselves, like Ulysses, were the chieftains and the aristocrats by instinct and by choice. At least we’ll hope so. And the Red Indians only knew the aristocrat by instinct. The leader was leader in his own being, not because he was somebody’s son or had so much money.
It’s got to be so again. They say it won’t work. I say, why not? If men could once recognize the natural aristocrat when they set eyes on him, they can still. They can still choose him if they would.
But this business of dynasties is weariness. House of Valois, House of Tudor! Who would want to be a House, or a bit of a House! Let a man be a man, and damn the House business. I’m absolutely a democrat as far as that goes.
But that men are all brothers and all equal is a greater lie than the other. Some men are always aristocrats. But it doesn’t go by birth. A always contains B, but B is not contained in C.
Democracy, however, says that there is no such thing as an aristocrat. All men have two legs and one nose, ergo, they are all alike. Nosily and leggily, maybe. But otherwise, very different.
Democracy says that B is not contained in C, and neither is it contained in A. B, that is, the aristocrat, does not exist.
Now this is palpably a greater lie than the old dynastic life. Aristocracy truly does not go by birth. But it still goes. And the tradition of aristocracy will help it a lot.
The aristocrats tried to fortify themselves inside these palaces and these splendours. Regal Paris built up the external evidences of her regality. But the two-limbed man inside these vast shells died, poor worm, of over-encumbrance.
The natural aristocrat has got to fortify himself inside his own will, according to his own strength. The moment he builds himself external evidences, like palaces, he builds himself in, and commits his own doom. The moment he depends on his jewels, he has lost his virtue.
It always seems to me that the next civilization won’t want to raise these ponderous, massive, deadly buildings that refuse to crumble away with their epoch and weigh men helplessly down. Neither palaces nor cathedrals nor any other hugenesses. Material simplicity is after all the highest sign of civilization. Here in Paris one knows it finally. The ponderous and depressing museum that is regal Paris. And living humanity like poor worms struggling inside the shell of history, all of them inside the museum. The dead life and the living life, all one museum.
Monuments, museums, permanencies, and ponderosities are all anathema. But brave men are for ever born, and nothing else is worth having.
A LETTER FROM GERMANY (1924)
We are going back to Paris tomorrow, so this is the last m
oment to write a letter from Germany. Only from the fringe of Germany, too.
It is a miserable journey from Paris to Nancy, through that Marne country, where the country still seems to have had the soul blasted out of it, though the dreary fields are ploughed and level, and the pale wire trees stand up. But it is all void and null. And in the villages, the smashed houses in the street rows, like rotten teeth between good teeth.
You come to Strasburg, and the people still talk Alsatian German, as ever, in spite of French shop-signs. The place feels dead. And full of cotton goods, white goods, from Mülhausen, from the factories that once were German. Such cheap white cotton goods, in a glut.
The cathedral front rearing up high and flat and fanciful, a sort of darkness in the dark, with round rose windows and long, long prisons of stone. Queer, that men should have ever wanted to put stone upon fanciful stone to such a height, without having it fall down. The Gothic! I was always glad when my card-castle fell. But these Goths and Alemans seemed to have a craze for peaky heights.
The Rhine is still the Rhine, the great divider. You feel it as you cross. The flat, frozen, watery places. Then the cold and curving river. Then the other side, seeming so cold, so empty, so frozen, so forsaken. The train stands and steams fiercely. Then it draws through the flat Rhine plain, past frozen pools of flood-water, and frozen fields, in the emptiness of this bit of occupied territory.
Immediately you are over the Rhine, the spirit of place has changed. There is no more attempt at the bluff of geniality. The marshy places are frozen. The fields are vacant. There seems nobody in the world.
It is as if the life had retreated eastwards. As if the Germanic life were slowly ebbing away from contact with western Europe, ebbing to the deserts of the east. And there stand the heavy, ponderous, round hills of the Black Forest, black with an inky blackness of Germanic trees, and patched with a whiteness of snow. They are like a series of huge, involved black mounds, obstructing the vision eastwards. You look at them from the Rhine plain, and know that you stand on an actual border, up against something.
The Bad Side of Books Page 20
