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PART ONE—SILENCES
In Heaven a spirit doth dwell
“Whose heart-strings are a lute”;
None sing so wildly well
As the angel Israfel. . . .
And the shadow of [his] perfect bliss
Is the sunshine of ours. . . .
If I could dwell where Israfel
Hath dwelt, and he where I,
He might not sing so wildly well
A mortal melody,
While a bolder note than this might swell
From my lyre within the sky.
—Edgar Allan Poe
Had Milton’s been the lot of Caspar Hauser,
Milton would have been vacant as he.
—Herman Melville
If Goethe had been stolen away a child, and reared in a robber band in the depths of a German forest, do you think the world would have had Faust and Iphigenie? But he would have been Goethe still. At night, round their watch-fire, he would have chanted wild songs of rapine and murder, till the dark faces about him were moved and trembled.
—Olive Schreiner
If Tolstoy had been born a woman . . .
—Virginia Woolf
If. . . .
1962
SILENCES IN LITERATURE
Originally an unwritten talk, spoken from notes at the Radcliffe Institute in 1962 as part of a weekly colloquium of members. Edited from the taped transcription, it appears here as published in Harper’s Magazine, October 1965.
(Several omitted lines have been restored; an occasional name or phrase and a few footnotes have been added.)
1962
SILENCES
Literary history and the present are dark with silences: some the silences for years by our acknowledged great; some silences hidden; some the ceasing to publish after one work appears; some the never coming to book form at all.
What is it that happens with the creator, to the creative process, in that time? What are creation’s needs for full functioning? Without intention of or pretension to literary scholarship, I have had special need to learn all I could of this over the years, myself so nearly remaining mute and having to let writing die over and over again in me.
These are not natural silences—what Keats called agonie ennuyeuse (the tedious agony)—that necessary time for renewal, lying fallow, gestation, in the natural cycle of creation. The silences I speak of here are unnatural: the unnatural thwarting of what struggles to come into being, but cannot. In the old, the obvious parallels: when the seed strikes stone; the soil will not sustain; the spring is false; the time is drought or blight or infestation; the frost comes premature.
The great in achievement have known such silences—Thomas Hardy, Melville, Rimbaud, Gerard Manley Hopkins. They tell us little as to why or how the creative working atrophied and died in them—if ever it did.
“Less and less shrink the visions then vast in me,” writes Thomas Hardy in his thirty-year ceasing from novels after the Victorian vileness to his Jude the Obscure. (“So ended his prose contributions to literature, his experiences having killed all his interest in this form”—the official explanation.) But the great poetry he wrote to the end of his life was not sufficient to hold, to develop the vast visions which for twenty-five years had had expression in novel after novel. People, situations, interrelationships, landscape—they cry for this larger life in poem after poem.
It was not visions shrinking with Hopkins, but a different torment. For seven years he kept his reli
gious vow to refrain from writing poetry, but the poet’s eye he could not shut, nor win “elected silence to beat upon [his] whorled ear.” “I had long had haunting my ear the echo of a poem which now I realised on paper,” he writes of the first poem permitted to end the seven years’ silence. But poetry (“to hoard unheard; be heard, unheeded”) could be only the least and last of his heavy priestly responsibilities. Nineteen poems were all he could produce in his last nine years—fullness to us, but torment pitched past grief to him, who felt himself “time’s eunuch, never to beget.”
Silence surrounds Rimbaud’s silence. Was there torment of the unwritten; haunting of rhythm, of visions; anguish at dying powers, the seventeen years after he abandoned the unendurable literary world? We know only that the need to write continued into his first years of vagabondage; that he wrote:
Had I not once a youth pleasant, heroic, fabulous enough to write on leaves of gold: too much luck. Through what crime, what error, have I earned my present weakness? You who maintain that some animals sob sorrowfully, that the dead have dreams, try to tell the story of my downfall and my slumber. I no longer know how to speak.*
That on his deathbed, he spoke again like a poet-visionary.
Melville’s stages to his thirty-year prose silence are clearest. The presage is in his famous letter to Hawthorne, as he had to hurry Moby Dick to an end:
I am so pulled hither and thither by circumstances. The calm, the coolness, the silent grass-growing mood in which a man ought always to compose,—that, I fear, can seldom be mine. Dollars damn me. . . . What I feel most moved to write, that is banned,—it will not pay. Yet, altogether, write the other way I cannot. So the product is a final hash . . .
Reiterated in Pierre, writing “that book whose unfathomable cravings drink his blood . . . when at last the idea obtruded that the wiser and profounder he should grow, the more and the more he lessened his chances for bread.”
To be possessed; to have to try final hash; to have one’s work met by “drear ignoring”; to be damned by dollars into a Customs House job; to have only weary evenings and Sundays left for writing—
How bitterly did unreplying Pierre feel in his heart that to most of the great works of humanity, their authors had given not weeks and months, not years and years, but their wholly surrendered and dedicated lives.
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