. . . For disappointment and humiliations embitter the heart and make an aching in the very bones.
1878, also to Dixon
You ask, do I write verse myself. What I had written I burnt before I became a Jesuit and resolved to write no more, as not belonging to my profession, unless it were by the wish of my superiors; so for seven years I wrote nothing but two or three little presentation pieces which occasion called for. But when in the winter of ’75 the Deutschland was wrecked in the mouth of the Thames and five Franciscan nuns, exiles from Germany by the Falck Laws, aboard of her were drowned, I was affected by the account and happening to say so to my rector he said that he wished someone would write a poem on the subject. On this hint I set to work and, though my hand was out at first, produced one. I had long had haunting my ear the echo of a new rhythm which now I realised on paper.
1880, the beginning of heavy duties in Manchester, Liverpool, and Glasgow, to Dixon
I do not think I can be long here; I have been long nowhere yet. I am brought face to face with the deepest poverty and misery in my district. . . .
. . . The parish work of Liverpool is very wearying to mind and body and leaves me nothing but odds and ends of time. There is merit in it but little Muse, and indeed 26 lines is the whole I have writ in more than half a year, since I left Oxford.
1881, to Bridges
Every impulse and spring of art seems to have died in me, except for music, and that I pursue under almost an impossibility of getting on. . . .
1881, also to Bridges
. . . The vein urged by any country sight or feeling of freedom or leisure (you cannot tell what a slavery of mind or heart it is to live my life in a great town) soon dried and I do not know if I can coax it to run again. One night, as I lay awake in a fevered state, I had some glowing thoughts and lines, but I did not put them down and I fear they may fade to little or nothing. I am sometimes surprised at myself how slow and laborious a thing verse (now) is to me. . . .
1881, to Dixon
My vocation puts before me a standard so high that a higher can be found nowhere else. The question then for me is not whether I am willing (if I may guess what is in your mind) to make a sacrifice of hopes of fame (let us suppose), but whether I am not to undergo a severe judgment from God for the lothness I have shewn in making it, for the reserves I may have in my heart made, for the backward glances I have given with my hand upon the plough, for the waste of time the very compositions you admire may have caused and their preoccupation of the mind which belonged to more sacred or more binding duties, for the disquiet and the thoughts of vain-glory they have given rise to. A purpose may look smooth and perfect from without but be frayed and faltering from within. I have never wavered in my vocation, but I have not lived up to it. I destroyed the verse I had written when I entered the Society and meant to write no more; the Deutschland I began after a long interval at the chance suggestion of my superior, but that being done it is a question whether I did well to write anything else. However I shall, in my present mind, continue to compose, as occasion shall fairly allow, which I am afraid will be seldom and indeed for some years past has been scarcely ever. . . .
1881, to Bridges
My Liverpool and Glasgow experience laid upon my mind a conviction, a truly crushing conviction, of the misery of the poor in general, of the degradation even of our race, of the hollowness of this century’s civilisation: it made even life a burden to me to have daily thrust upon me the things I saw. . . .
1883, to Bridges
Some of my rhymes I regret, but they are past changing, grubs in amber; there are only a few of these; others are unassailable. . . .
. . . Some others again there are which malignity may munch at but the Muses love.
1884, to Bridges
Mr. Patmore [Coventry Patmore, the poet] did not on the whole like my poems [which had been sent him], was unconverted to them. . . . AND WHAT DOES ANYTHING AT ALL MATTER? . . . I am in great weakness.
1885, to Baillie
The melancholy I have all my life been subject to has become of late years not indeed more intense in its fits but rather more distributed, constant, and crippling. One . . . is daily anxiety about work to be done, which makes me break off or never finish all that lies outside that work. It is useless to write more on this: when I am at the worst, though my judgment is never affected, my state is much like madness. I see no ground for thinking I shall ever get over it or ever succeed in doing anything that is not forced on me to do of any consequence.
1885, to Bridges, enclosing fragments of a poem, “St Winefred’s Well”
. . . I once thought well of the pieces, I do not know that I do now. But A and B please me well enough. You will see that as the feeling rises the rhythm becomes freer & more sprung. I think I have written nothing stronger than some of these lines. . . .
. . . if I were otherwise than I am it would brisk me up and set me to work, but in that coffin of weakness and dejection in which I live, without even the hope of change, I do not know that I can make, or, making, could keep up the exertion of learning better. . . .
1885, also to Bridges
Dearest Bridges—I must write something, though not as much as I have to say. The long delay was due to work, worry, and languishment of body and mind—which must be and will be; . . . I think that my fits of sadness, though they do not affect my judgment, resemble madness. Change is the only relief and that I can seldom get.
. . . we compose fragmentarily and what I had here and there done I finished up and sent as samples to see if I cd. be encouraged to go on—and I was encouraged; that is by your last [letter], for before you thought they wd. not do. There is a point with me in matters of any size when I must absolutely have encouragement as much as crops rain; afterwards I am independent. However, I am in my ordinary circumstances unable, with whatever encouragement, to go on with Winefred or anything else. I have after long silence written two sonnets . . . if ever anything was written in blood one of these was. . . .
1885, also to Bridges
If I could but get on, if I could but produce work I should not mind its being buried, silenced, and going no further; but it kills me to be time’s eunuch and never to beget. After all I do not despair, things might change, anything may be; only there is no great appearance of it. Now because I have had a holiday though not strong I have some buoyancy; soon I am afraid I shall be ground down to a state like this last spring’s and summer’s, when my spirits were so crushed that madness seemed to be making approaches—and nobody was to blame, except myself partly for not managing myself better and contriving a change. . . .
1886, to Dixon
. . . I have written a few sonnets; that is all I have done in poetry for some years.
. . . It is not possible for me to do anything, unless a sonnet, and that rarely, in poetry with a fagged mind and a continual anxiety: but there are things at which I can, so far as time serves, work, if it were only by snatches.
1887, to Bridges
It was quite right to tell me what Woolridge thought—that is what I wanted to know—and to use it as a dissuasive, if you liked; but not as a discouragement (yr. own word): discouragement is not what my complaint, in my opinion, needs. Our institute provides us means of discouragement, and on me at all events they have had all the effect that could be expected or wished and rather more. . . .
1887, also to Bridges
Tomorrow morning I shall have been three years in Ireland, three hard wearying wasting wasted years. . . . They should see my heart and vitals, all shaggy with the whitest hair. In those I have done God’s will (in the main) and many many examination papers. . . . I only need one thing—a working health, a working strength. . . .
1888, to Bridges
I laughed outright and often, but very sardonically, to think you and the Canon [Dixon] could not construe my last sonnet; that he had to write to you for a crib. It is plain I must go no farther on this road: if you and he cannot unders
tand me, who will?
Hopkins died in 1899 at the age of forty-five.
. . . Only what word
Wisest my heart breeds, dark heaven’s baffling ban
Bars or hell’s spell thwarts. This to hoard unheard,
Heard unheeded, leaves me a lonely began.*
. . . See, banks and brakes
Now, leavèd how thick! lacèd they are again
With fretty chervil, look, and fresh wind shakes
Them; birds build—but not I build; no, but strain,
Time’s eunuch, and not breed one work that wakes.
Mine, O thou lord of life, send my roots rain.**
Herman Melville (1819–1891)
“O who shall reveal the horrors of poverty in authorship that is high?”:
1849
When a poor devil writes with duns all around him, and looking over the back of his chair, and perching on his pen, and dancing in his inkstand—like the Devils about St. Anthony—what can you expect of that poor devil? What but a beggarly Redburn?
1851
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; and the malicious Devil is forever grinning in upon me, holding the door ajar. My dear Sir, a presentiment is on me,—I shall at last be worn out and perish, like an old nutmeg-grater, grated to pieces by the constant attrition. . . . 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, and all my books are botches.
1863 All attempts at making a living from writing had failed. Melville yielded himself to silence, except for occasional poetry; burned the work no one had cared to publish (“Have I not saved you from the drear/Theft and ignoring?”) and wrote to it—and to work that sought to be written, the poem “Immolated.”
Children of my happier prime,
When one yet lived with me, and threw
Her rainbow over life and time,
Even Hope, my bride, and mother to you!
O, nurtured in sweet pastoral air,
And fed on flowers and light, and dew
Of morning meadows—spare, Ah, spare
Reproach; spare, and upbraid me not
That, yielding scarce to reckless mood,
But jealous of your future lot,
I sealed you in a fate subdued.
1865–1885 (Fragments from the years of occasional poetry)
From Camoëns
(Before)
And ever must I fan this fire?
Forever in flame on flame aspire?
Ever restless, restless, craving rest—
The Imperfect toward Perfection pressed!
Yea, for the God demands thy best.
The world with endless beauty teems,
And thought evokes new worlds of dreams:
Hunt then the flying herds of themes!
And fan, yet fan thy fervid fire,
Until the crucibled gold shall show . . .
(After)
What now avails the pageant verse,
Trophies and arms with music borne?
Base is the world; and some rehearse
How noblest meet ignoble scorn.
Vain now thy ardor, vain thy fire,
Delirium mere, unsound desire:
Fate’s knife hath ripped thy chorded lyre. . . .
From The American Aloe on Exhibition
[flowering once every hundred years]
But few they were who came to see
The Century-Plant in flower:
Ten cents admission—price you pay
For bon-bons of the hour. . . .
But lone at night the garland sighed
While moaned the aged stem:
“At last, at last! but joy and pride
What part have I with them?
Let be the dearth that kept me back
Now long from wreath decreed;
But, Ah, ye Roses that have passed
Accounting me a weed!”
From Thy Aim, Thy Aim?
Thy aim, thy aim?
. . . By some deed shall ignite the acclaim?
Then beware, and prepare thee
Lest . . . yearning be sequelled by shame.
. . . Then if, living, you kindle a flame,
Your guerdon will be but a flower,
Only a flower,
The flower of repute,
A flower cut down in an hour.
. . . And, dying, you truly ennoble a name—
Again but a flower!
Only a flower,
A funeral flower,
. . . The belated funeral flower of fame.
The belated funeral flower of fame.
Willa Cather (1876–1947)
In 1906, when the thirty-two-year-old Willa Cather’s first book of fiction, The Troll Garden, was published (in it, two imperishable Nebraska and Pittsburgh-inspired stories: “Wagner Matinee” and “Paul’s Case”), she had been writing and publishing for years. (Assorted earlier writings, now being collected, already fill two thick volumes.) A future of steady, ever more distinguished productivity seemed assured.
Yet that year the abundant flow ceased. For the next five years she produced one (mostly Jamesian) story a year, stories which she later repudiated, forbidding their ever being republished. In 1912, there was a novel (also Jamesian), Alexander’s Bridge, which—as with the stories—she later rejected, characterizing it as an attempt to be acceptably literary, that is, “genteel” in treatment, milieu; written because
. . . usually the young writer must have his affair with the external material he covets; must imitate and strive to follow the masters he most admires, until he finds he is starving for reality and cannot make this go any longer. Then he learns that it is not the adventure he sought, but the adventure that sought him, which has made the enduring mark upon him.
The master she most admired in 1906 was Henry James. Cather had sent The Troll Garden to him on its publication, with a letter. James never responded. When Cather learned that her friend Witter Bynner knew him (as a result of having sent James his first book), she asked that he inquire of its reception. Bynner did so, in spite of remarks from James on “lady novelists who victimize the supine public.” James wrote back:
I have your graceful letter about “The Troll Garden” which only reached me some time ago (as many works of fiction duly reach me), and if I brazenly confess that I not only haven’t read it, but haven’t even been meaning to (till your words about it thus arrived), I do no more than register the sacred truth. That sacred truth is that, being now almost in my 100th year [he was sixty-three], with a long and weary experience of such matters behind me, promiscuous fiction has become abhorrent to me, and I find it the hardest thing in the world to read almost any new novel. Any is hard enough, but the hardest from the innocent hands of young females, young American females perhaps above all. This is a subject—my battered, cynical, all-too-expert outliving of such possibilities—on which I could be eloquent, but I haven’t time and will be more vivid and complete some other day. I’ve only time now to say that I will then (in spite of these professions) do my best for Miss Cather—so as not to be shamed by your so doing yours.
Cather was given the reply; waited. No letter ever came. (Perhaps, or so I wish to believe out of regard for his literary judgment, James did not open the book.)
It was after this that the constriction of writing (a true hidden silence) began.
The course of Willa Cather’s development had not been as that of the young writer she describes above. She had not had to work her way through imitation; she had begun—unselfconsciously—with writing the “reality” that had made “the enduring mark” on her. But her landscapes and people, her developing vision of what was significant in them, even her direct, vigorous voice, were outside the prevalent, the admired, as was increasingly being impressed upon her.
* James himself, the model, was in massive contradiction—attitude, content, form (not excellence)—to all that was deepest in her to write. By the time she sent him The Troll Garden, she was starving for validation that her “reality” was material for art; for encouragement to go on. His seeming disesteem was the last heaviness added to the other near-unendurable pressures to scorn, deny her own material and vigor—write in the manner and of what was not hers; almost give up on herself as a serious writer.*
There is a postscript. Another “master,” another decisive letter. Sara Orne Jewett (of the classic Country of the Pointed Firs) whose work Cather treasured for, among other qualities, “revealing in ordinary country people the treasure of life and feeling that lay below the pinched surfaces.” Jewett befriended Cather in the constricted years, believed in her, and it was her letter (partially quoted in “One Out of Twelve”) with its concern that Willa Cather quit McClure’s Magazine, manage “time and quiet” to “perfect her work . . . write life itself,” which reread in print when the Jewett letters were issued after her death in 1911, gave Cather the “courage” (confidence) to fight again for writing circumstances, again began writing her “reality”—its first flowering, O Pioneers.
William Blake (1757–1827)
About 1807–1827, in the “years of obscurity,” and the last years.
Class reasons, and the repressive times.
Jane Austen (1775–1817)
The years 1800–1811.
Woman reasons: she was powerless in all major decisions deciding her life, including the effecting of enabling circumstances for writing.
If the acknowledged great in achievment, possessing inner confirmation of their achievement; sometimes the stout retainer of habituated productivity and/or outside recognition as well, can be silenced—what, inescapably, does this bespeak of the power of circumstance?
What does it explain to the rest of us of possible causes—outside ourselves—of our founderings, failures, unnatural silencings?
SILENCES, PP. 6–7
*Mostly from The Life of Thomas Hardy, ostensibly by Florence Emily Hardy, but actually dictated, or selected from notebooks and letters, by Hardy himself (except for the account of the last of his life).
Silences Page 19
