Silences

by Shelly Fisher Fishkin

  *Hardy’s “Candour in English Fiction.”

  SILENCES, P. 7

  *There is strong parallel between Hopkins and Emily Dickinson; both almost unpublished in their lifetime; both among the most original and greatest poets of their time; both obsessed by fame which they knew rightfully belonged to them (fame as Hopkins defined: “recognition belonging to the work itself”); both reaching out and clinging to the few recognized persons in letters who took them seriously, accorded them response. Obloquy continues to be heaped upon Thomas Wentworth Higginson (in my view, undeservedly) in regard to not getting Dickinson published—none upon Bridges, who became Poet Laureate of England. In addition to what becomes evident in the correspondence quoted here, Bridges waited twenty-nine years after Hopkins’s death to begin to publish the poems, and then, in an apologetic and patronizing preface, expounded on Hopkins’s “bad faults.”

  *From “To seem the stranger lies my lot, my life.”

  **From “Thou art indeed just, Lord.”

  SILENCES, PP. 7–8

  SILENCES, P. 9

  *“The ‘novel of the soil’ had not then come into fashion in this country. The drawing room was considered the proper setting for a novel, and the only characters worth reading about were smart people and clever people . . .” —Willa Cather, “My First Novels, There Were Two.”

  *Cather became so ashamed in this time of The Troll Garden that she hid its existence. When her friend Elizabeth Sargeant (Willa Cather: A Memoir) heard of it, and asked for a copy to read, Cather refused, dismissing it as “unfledged stories.” Cather “would say disparagingly, ironically [to her], that she could never write stories of Nebraska—Swedes and Bohemians were just a joke in New York—everybody would laugh.”

  Years later, in “My First Novels, There Were Two” (1931), Willa Cather reiterated this: “O Pioneers was set in Nebraska, of all places. As everyone knows, Nebraska is distinctly déclassé as a literary background. O Pioneers was not only about Nebraska farmers, the farmers were Swedes! Since I wrote O Pioneers for myself, I ignored all the situations and accents that were then thought to be necessary.”

  SILENCES, P. 8

  SILENCES, P. 8

  SILENCES—ITS VARIETIES

  And now in age I bud again,

  After so many deaths I live and write;

  I once more smell the dew and rain,

  And relish versing. O my only Light,

  It cannot be

  That I am he

  On whom Thy tempests fell all night.

  —George Herbert, 1593–1633

  Censorship Silences

  Immoral! Immoral!

  Immoral! Immoral! Under this cloak hide the vices of wealth as well as the vast, unspoken blackness of poverty and ignorance and between them must walk the little novelist, choosing neither truth nor beauty, but some half-conceived phase of life that bears no honest resemblance to either the whole of nature or to man.

  —Theodore Dreiser, 1902

  Having to Censor Self

  If you do not tell the truth about yourself you cannot tell it about other people. As the nineteenth century wore on, the writers knew that they were crippling themselves, diminishing their material, falsifying their object. “We are condemned,” Stevenson wrote, “to avoid half the life that passes us by.” What books Dickens could have written had he been permitted! Think of Thackeray as unfettered as Flaubert or Balzac! What books I might have written myself.

  —Virginia Woolf

  Work Withheld: Not published in one’s lifetime (Mark Twain); or held for years waiting for a changed atmosphere (E.M. Forster: Maurice). Has other work by other writers been put aside, or kept from burgeoning, because of fear that its content would deny its being published?

  Publishers’ Censorship: The silencing—or being driven to the novel form—of story or novella writers because “there is no market for stories.”

  Political Silences

  Involvement: When political involvement takes priority, though the need and love for writing go on. Every freedom movement has, and has had, its roll of writers participating at the price of their writing.

  The Complete Silencing by Governments

  Lives of the Poets

  Otto-René Castillo was born

  in Quezaltenango

  Guatemala

  in 1936 and was killed there

  in March of 1967 while fighting

  with the Revolutionary

  Armed Forces.

  The poem

  by Javier Heraud, written

  in 1963 in La Paz

  Bolivia,

  was one of the last by the poet

  before his death.

  Peruvian,

  he was killed

  at the age of 21

  while fighting for the

  liberation

  of his country.

  Leonel Rugama, another young

  Latin American

  martyr, was assassinated

  in January 1970,

  in Managua

  Nicaragua.

  The house

  where he and two comrades hid

  was surrounded by 1500

  national guardsmen and the battle

  lasted 4 hours. Before

  they went in

  to finish him off, Rugama answered

  the demand that he surrender

  with “¡Que se rinde

  tu madre!”

  Carlos Maria Gutierrez is

  Uruguayan,

  well known

  as a revolutionary journalist.

  Diario del Cuartelo

  came directly out of a

  prison

  experience in 1969

  and is his first

  and only book of poems. His first

  and only book

  of poems.*

  Political Silences. A woman form:

  Anna Tsetsaeyva, also known as Marina Cvetaeva, the Russian poet, in exile

  It is my notebook that keeps me above the surface of the waters.

  . . . It will soon be Christmas. To tell you the truth, I’ve been driven so hard by life that I feel nothing. Through these years (1917–1927) it was not my mind that grew numb, but my soul. An astonishing observation: it is precisely for feeling that one needs time, and not for thought. Thought is a flash of lightning, feeling is a ray from the most distant of stars. Feeling requires leisure; it cannot survive under fear. A basic example: rolling 1½ kilos of small fishes in flour, I am able to think, but as for feeling—no. The smell is in the way. The smell is in the way, my sticky hands are in the way, the squirting oil in the way, the fish are in the way, each one individually and the entire 1½ kilos as a whole. Feeling is apparently more demanding than thought. It requires all or nothing. There is nothing I can give to my own [feeling]: no time, no quiet, no solitude. I am always in the presence of others, from 7 in the morning till 10 at night, and by 10 at night I am so exhausted—what feeling can there be? Feeling requires strength. No, I simply sit down to mend and darn things: Mur’s, S.’s, Alya’s, my own. 11 o’clock. 12 o’clock. 1 o’clock. S. arrives by the last [subway] train, a brief chat, and off to bed, which means lying in bed with a book until 2 or 2:30. The books are good, but I could have written even better ones, if only . . .

  “The knife of the perfectionist attitude in art and life.”

  This haunting sentence, not in the original talk, is from What the Woman Lived (1973), letters by the consummate poet, Louise Bogan—to me one of our most grievous “hidden silences.” (Woman, economic, perfectionist causes—all inextricably intertwined.)

  Silences of the Marginal

  The writer of a class, sex, color still marginal in literature, and whose coming to voice at all against complex odds is exhausting achievement.

  “Only eleven [black writers] in the hundred years since 1850 have published novels more than twice.”*

  Nineteen fifty was evidently the watershed year. Since 1960, any single year has seen mor
e than nine novels by black writers that are their second, third, or fourth books.

  They are reaping the (hard-won) benefits of having been born in the more favorable nineteen thirties, forties, fifties, instead of into their parents’ generations. They grew into a time of rising economic levels (still low, but for more, above an all-conditioning economic imperative); ever higher levels of literacy and education (however painfully gotten); shorter work hours; great mass migrations seeking more humane conditions of life; visible struggle; and, with the fifties, a resurgence of black consciousness—all providing a more enabling soil and climate.

  Bone did not take into account fiction privately published, nor did he have the advantage of recent bibliographies (such as those by Rush, Myers, Arata: Black American Writers, 1973) which disclose a wealth of writers, most of them born since 1920—and indicating eloquently what was silenced in the generations before—(and their own generation)—(“lives that never came to writing”).

  These bibliographies also indicate how vulnerable nearly all (especially first-generation writers) were to lessenings and silencings; revealing numbers of poems and stories that never came to books—and long interims between works. Marks of all marginal writers.

  They do not, except by inference, reveal “the complex odds.” No one has as yet written A Room of One’s Own for writers, other than women, still marginal in literature. Nor do any bibliographies exist for writers whose origins and circumstances are marginal. Class remains the greatest unexamined factor.

  “The sacrifice of talent, in pieces, to preserve its essential value”

  Scott Fitzgerald: “But one hundred and twenty stories”:

  The roller skates rain down the streets.

  The black cars shine between the leaves.

  Your voice, far away . . .

  I have asked a lot of my emotions—one hundred and twenty stories. The price was high, right up with Kipling, because there was one little drop of something—not blood, not a tear, not my seed, but me more intimately than these, in every story. It was the extra I had. Now it has gone and I am just like you now.

  Once the phial was full—here is the bottle it came in.

  Hold on, there’s a drop left there. . . . No, it was just the way the light fell.

  . . . If I hadn’t abused words so, what you said might have meant something. But one hundred and twenty stories. . . .

  April evening spreads over everything the purple blur left by a child who has used the whole paint box.

  —“An April Letter” in The Crack-Up.

  Absences That Are a Kind of Silence (“But one hundred and twenty stories. . . .”)

  “A professional makes the pot boil,” said Henry James who certainly did. “It’s the only basis of sanity and freedom.”

  Some writers, happily, are able to do so—and by writing their best (sometimes the best) work. (Think of, in our time, Ernest Hemingway, Thornton Wilder, Robert Penn Warren, John Hersey, Saul Bellow, John Cheever, Bernard Malamud, Nabokov, Salinger, Joyce Carol Oates, John Updike, E.L. Doctorow, bestsellers all.)*

  There is another kind of professional who, also beginning with aspiration and capacity, ends up making the pot boil—but by Fitzgerald’s “sacrifice of talent, in pieces, to preserve its essential value.”

  Easily distinguishable from the meretricious, the sleazy (along with the conscientious, capable free lancer), they are the producers of the good in the daily stream of publishing: the made-to-order, the topical, the popular, the entertainment, the ghost writing—the current staples. Like Rebecca Harding Davis, they remain serious writers—committed to substance, respecting language and craftsmanship. If they cannot make each piece art, they make it as readable, believable, and rewarding as possible. Sometimes—notably with science fiction, Gothic, detective, mystery—their work is so distinguished, they establish a new form in literature.

  Able to reach and touch people, they often directly affect their time as few “quality” writers are able to. But many are a Silence—that is, an Absence from deeper, more lasting literature.*

  Virulent Destroyers: Premature Silencers

  But o! each visitation

  Suspends what nature gave me at my birth,

  My shaping spirit of Imagination.

  —Coleridge in his “wilder’d and dark,”

  “my head is cloudy, mazy” time . . .

  Morality and its philistine judgments have nought

  to do with me. . . . But I have learned this:

  it is not what one does that is wrong, but what one

  becomes as a consequence of it.**

  —Oscar Wilde, De Profundis

  Malign mystique surrounds and protects those virulent destroyers of capacity, those premature Silencers: alcoholism, drug use to dependency, suicide. Contrary to the actual lives of most writers of achievement, these are not intrinsic to the artist being—though certain “savage god” humans batten on the belief that it is so.

  The Seasons in Hell of Coleridge, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Artaud—their agony over “what one becomes as a consequence” (evidenced in their own testimony and in that of their lives, deaths, yes, and in the lives, deaths of too many other writers—Dylan Thomas, John Berryman—living others I will not name)—are obscured. It is not new forms, intensities, enhanced visionary sense, that comes: it is the ravaging and obliteration of the capacity for them; loss of power for work, impairment of critical judgment, logorrhea, blurredness, or aridity; premature death; suicide.

  “I am suffering from a frightful malady of the mind,” writes Antonin Artaud when coherence was still possible for him:

  . . . a kind of erosion. My thoughts evade me in every way possible. There is something that is destroying my thinking, something that does not prevent me from being what I might be, but which leaves me in abeyance; a something furtive which takes away the words I have found, which step by step destroys in its substance my thinking as it evolves, which diminishes my intensity, which takes away from me even the memory of the devices and figures of speech by which one expresses oneself. What will restore to me the concentration of my forces, the cohesion that my mind lacks, the constancy of its tension, the consistency of its own substance?

  And again Rimbaud:

  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.

  I no longer know how to speak.

  Baudelaire’s own account is required reading. Capacity for sustained work was essential to him.

  I’ve never possessed either facility in conception or in expression. It should be self-evident that the small amount of work I’ve produced has been the result of long and painful labour . . . labour by which a revery becomes a work of art.

  But sustained work became more and more impossible,*

  When the nerves of a man are strained by an infinite amount of anxiety and suffering, the devil, in spite of all the good resolutions, slips every morning into his brain in shapes like: why not enjoy or rest one day more in oblivion of these things? Tonight at one fell swoop I’ll accomplish them. And then night comes and the mind reels at the thought of the number of things left undone again, overwhelming melancholy induces sterility, and next day there is the same old comic-tragedy, the same resolution, honesty, confidence.

  There began endless timetables of work to be accomplished; then the revenant desolation of My Heart Laid Bare, when—added to the harm of years—even the physical basis for carrying through will or work was gone. The humiliating litany of “Hygiene. Morality. Conduct. Method.” could not avail. “Too Late!”**

  Foreground Silences

  The Emerson letter to Whitman (from which my phrase comes), July 1855:

  I am not blind to the worth of the wonderful gift of Leaves of Grass. I find it the most ex
traordinary piece of wit and wisdom that America has yet contributed. I am very happy in reading it, as great power makes us happy. It meets the demand I am always making of what seemed the sterile and stingy nature, as if too much handiwork, or too much lymph in temperament, were making our western wits fat and mean. I give you joy of free and brave thought. I have great joy in it. I find incomparable things said incomparably well, as they must be. I find the courage of treatment which so delights us, and which large perception only can inspire. . . .

  I greet you at the beginning of a great career, which yet must have had a long foreground somewhere for such a start. . . . It has the best merits, namely, of fortifying and encouraging.

  Silences Where the Lives Never Come to Writing

  What has humanity not lost by suppression and subjection? We have a Shakespeare; but what of the possible Shakespeares we might have had who passed their life from youth upward brewing currant wine and making pastries for fat country squires to eat, with no glimpse of the freedom of life and action necessary even to poach on deer in the green forests; stifled out without one line written, simply because being of the weaker sex, life gave no room for action and grasp on life? Here and there, where queens have been born as rulers, the vast powers for governance and the keen insight have been shown; but what of the millions of the race in all ages whose vast powers of intellect and insight and creation have been lost to us because . . . their line of life was rigidly apportioned to them. What statesmen, what leaders, what creative intelligence have been lost to humanity because there has been no free trade in the powers and gifts.*

  SILENCES, P. 9

  SILENCES, P. 9

  *A “found poem.” It comes from Margaret Randall’s Part of the Solution, where it serves as a biographical introduction to Randall’s translations of revolutionary Latin American poets, and was arranged as a poem by Lillian Robinson: “I have made no changes except to set Randall’s words as verse, and to repeat the last phrase.”

  SILENCES P. 9

  *Robert Bone. The Negro Novel in America, 1958.