Silences
Page 21
SILENCES, P. 9
*I see: one out of twelve.
SILENCES, P. 10
*Gail Godwin writes of one such professional, her mother, who wrote true confessions and women’s fiction to support her children and herself. She made her stories “true to life” problems, fought (unsuccessfully) for true endings, wrote the best she dared (sometimes borrowing a phrase from Katherine Mansfield or Woolf). (In an essay deploring the lack of strong female models in fiction, Godwin did not realize she had just described one—in life.) What the mother was not free to accomplish, the daughter is.
**No, Wilde was not referring to homosexuality, but a disordered, narcissistic, insulated way of life.
SILENCES, PP. 9–10
*He was also not capable of—and therefore more vulnerable to damage from—“the need to wrest from his art means of carrying on his daily life.”—Enid Starkie, in the biography of Baudelaire.
**Excerpts from My Heart Laid Bare appear on pages 287–289.
SILENCES, P. 10
*Olive Schreiner, From Man to Man, 1883. (An unnoted ancestor of Virginia Woolf’s classic imagining—in A Room of One’s Own—of what Shakespeare’s life would have been, had he been born into a female body.)
SILENCES, P. 10
THE WORK OF CREATION AND THE CIRCUMSTANCES IT DEMANDS FOR FULL FUNCTIONING
In placid hours well-pleased we dream
Of many a brave unbodied scheme.
But form to lend, pulsed life create,
What unlike things must meet and mate:
A flame to melt—a wind to freeze;
Sad patience—joyous energies;
Humility—yet pride and scorn;
Instinct and study; love and hate;
Audacity—reverence. These must mate,
And fuse with Jacob’s mystic heart,
To wrestle with the angel—Art.
—Herman Melville
THE WORK OF CREATION AND THE CIRCUMSTANCES IT DEMANDS FOR FULL FUNCTIONING
Among journals, accounts, letters of “the practitioners themselves.” (A personal selection):
Virginia Woolf: A Writer’s Diary. (We are now beginning to have the letters as well.)
Anton Chekhov: certain letters; his Notebooks.
Katherine Mansfield: Journal, Letters.
Franz Kafka: Diaries, all letters (Letters to Milena, etc.).
Albert Camus: Notebooks (Actuelles).
Joseph Conrad on Fiction; the prefaces; certain of his letters.
Herman Melville: passages in Pierre; certain letters and marginalia.
André Gide: Journals.
Rainer Maria Rilke: letters; passages in Malte Laurids Brigge and in the poems.
Henry James: Notebooks; the prefaces.
Scott Fitzgerald: The Crack-Up.
Gustave Flaubert: many of the letters.
Cesare Pavese: The Burning Brand.
Jessamyn West: Hide and Seek.
Also invaluable: Thoreau’s Journals; Van Gogh’s Letters (Dear Theo remains the best collection if the three volume Collected Letters is unavailable). Many collections of letters of writers: Sherwood Anderson’s; those by the younger D.H. Lawrence; Malcolm Lowry’s letters to his publisher about Under the Volcano in The Letters; Louise Bogan’s. Reading the Dostoyevsky Notebooks for The Idiot, or Notebooks for Crime and Punishment or Gide’s for The Counterfeiters, along with the books themselves, is fascinating and suggestive.
“Constant toil is the law of art, as it is of life”
If an artist does not spring to his work as a soldier to the breach, if once within the crater he does not labor as a miner buried in the earth, if he contemplates his difficulties instead of conquering them one by one, the work remains unachieved, production becomes impossible, and the artist assists the suicide of his own talent. . . . The solution of the problem can be found only through incessant and sustained work . . . true artists, true poets, generate and give birth today, tomorrow, ever. From this habit of labor results a ceaseless comprehension of difficulties which keep them in communion with the muse and her creative forces.
—Balzac, Cousin Bette
Unconfined Solitude
I doubt I shall succeed in writing here, I have not the sense of perfect seclusion which has always been essential to my power of producing anything.
—Nathaniel Hawthorne at Brook Farm
The Homely Underpinning for It All (to Add to the Conrad Truth)
You know how much I used to love Plato. Now I realize he lied. The things of this world are not a reflection of the ideal, but the product of human blood and hard labour. It is we who built the pyramids, hewed the marble for the temples and statues, we who pulled the oars in the galleys and dragged wooden ploughs for their food, while they wrote dialogues and dramas. . . . We were filthy, and died early deaths. They were aesthetic, and carried on subtle debates, and made art.
—“Letter from Auschwitz” (a young poet to two poet friends) in Tadeusz Borowski, This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen*
The Constant Toil; The Terrible Law; The Frightful Task
From eight o’clock in the morning till half-past four in the evening, Pierre sits there in his room;—eight hours and a half!
In the midst of the merriments of the mutations of Time, Pierre hath ringed himself in with the grief of Eternity. Pierre is a peak inflexible in the heart of Time.
He will not be called to; he will not be stirred. . . .
Is there then all this work to one book, which shall be read in a very few hours; and, far more frequently, utterly skipped in one second; and which, in the end, whatever it be, must undoubtedly go to the worms?
Not so; that which now absorbs the time and the life of Pierre, is not the book, but the primitive elementalising of the strange stuff, which in the act of attempting that book has upheaved and up-gushed in his soul. Two books are being writ; of which the world shall only see one, and that the bungled one. The larger book, and the infinitely better, is for Pierre’s own private shelf. That it is, whose unfathomable cravings drink his blood; the other only demands his ink.
Who shall tell all the thoughts and feelings of Pierre in that desolate and shivering room when at last the idea obtruded, that the wiser and profounder he should grow, the more and more he lessened the chances for bread. . . .
But his is the famishing which loathes all food. He cannot eat but by force. He has assassinated the natural day; how then can he eat with an appetite? He cannot sleep, he has waked the infinite wakefulness in him, then how can he slumber? Still his book, like a vast lumbering planet, revolves in his aching head. He cannot command the thing out of his orbit; fain would he behead himself, to gain one night’s respose. At last the heavy hours move on, and sheer exhaustion overtakes him, and he lies still—not asleep as children and day laborers sleep—but lies still from his throbbing and for that interval holdingly sheathes the beak of the vulture in his hand, and lets it not enter his heart. Morning comes; again the dropt sash, the icy water, the flesh brush, the breakfast, the hot brick, the ink, the pen, the from eight o’clock to half-past five, and the whole general inclusive hell of the same departed day.
Ah shivering thus day after day in his wrappers and cloak, is this the warm lad that once sang to the world the Tropical Summer?
—Herman Melville
I sit down religiously every morning, I sit down for eight hours, and the sitting down is all. In the course of that working day of eight hours I write three sentences which I erase before leaving the table in despair. Sometimes it takes all my resolution and power of self control to refrain from butting my head against the wall. After such crises of despair I doze for hours, still held conscious that there is that story that I am unable to write. Then I wake up, try again, and at last go to bed completely done up. So the days pass and nothing is done. At night I sleep. In the morning I get up with that horror of that powerlessness I must face through a day of vain efforts. . . .
I seem to have lost all sense of st
yle and yet I am haunted by the necessity of style. And that story I cant write weaves itself into all I see, into all I speak, into all I think, into the lines of every book I try to read . . . I feel my brain. I am distinctly conscious of the contents of my head. My story is there in a fluid—in an evading shape. I cant get hold of it. It is all there—to bursting, yet I cant get hold of it any more than you can grasp a handful of water. . . .
I never mean to be slow. The stuff comes out at its own rate. I am always ready to put it down . . . the trouble is that too often, alas, I’ve to wait for the sentence, for the word. . . . The worst is that while I’m thus powerless to produce, my imagination is extremely active; whole paragraphs, whole pages, whole chapters pass through my mind. Everything is there: descriptions, dialogue, reflection, everything, everything but the belief, the conviction, the only thing needed to make me put pen to paper. I’ve thought out a volume a day till I felt sick in mind and heart and gone to bed, completely done up, without having written a line. The effort I put out should give birth to Masterpieces as big as mountains, and it brings forth a ridiculous mouse now and then. . . .
They [the ideas and words] creep about in my head and have got to be caught and tortured into some kind of shape.
—from Letters of Joseph Conrad
This Incomprehensible Master: Work
As regards work, he [Cezanne] says that up to his fortieth year he had lived as a Bohemian. Only then, in his friendship with Pissarro, did work dawn on him—to such an extent that he did nothing but work for the last 30 years of his life. Without real pleasure it seems, in continual rage, ever at odds with his every endeavour, none of which appeared to him to achieve what he regarded as the ultimate desirable. . . .
Old, ill, wearied every evening to the point of unconsciousness by the regularity of his daily work (so much so that he often went to bed at six o’clock as soon as it became dark after a supper mindlessly eaten) surly, mistrustful . . . he hoped from day to day still to attain that triumph . . . and does not know whether he has really succeeded. And sits in the garden like an old dog, the dog of this work which calls him again and again and beats him and lets him go hungry. And still he clings with all his strength to this incomprehensible master.
—Rainer Maria Rilke
Subterranean Forces
Before subterranean forces will feed the creator back, they must be fed, passionately fed, what needs to be worked on. . . . A receptive waiting that means, not demands which prevent “an undistracted center of being.” And when the response comes, availability to work must be immediate. If not used at once, all may vanish as a dream; worse, future creation be endangered, for only the removal and development of the material frees the forces for further work.
Something probably lurks in it, something that I have only to woo forth. Let me live with it a while, let me woo it, even if I sit here in mere divine leisure every patient morning for a week or two.
—Henry James
These poems are the fruit of long labor: trials, repetitions, rejections, choices—months, even years of reflection.
—Paul Valéry
Your work is unbeautiful, alright let it be unbeautiful. It will grieve you, but it must not discourage you. Nature demands a certain devotion, and she demands a period of struggling with her. . . . It is the experience and hard work of every day which alone will ripen in the long run and allow one to do something truer and more complete. . . . You will not always do well, but the days you least expect it, you will do that which holds its own with the work of those that have gone before.
—Vincent Van Gogh
Look sharply after your thoughts. They come unlooked for like a bird seen on your trees, and if you turn to your usual task, disappear, and you shall never find that perception again. Never, I say, but for years perhaps, and I know not what events and worlds may lie between you and its return.
—Emerson
One sentence follows another, is born of the other, and I feel as I see it being born and growing within me an almost physical rapture. This artesian welling up is the result of my long subconscious preparation.
—André Gide
SILENCES, PP. 11–13
SILENCES, P. 12
*Viking edition, 1965. This is expressed in its own way on the last pages of George Orwell’s The Road to Wigan Pier.
SILENCES, PP. 13–14
SUBTERRANEAN FORCES—AND THE WORK OF CREATION IN CIRCUMSTANCES ENABLING FULL FUNCTION
The writing of The Waves (1926–1931) partial selections from Virginia Woolf’s A Writer’s Diary
1927 June
. . . I read—any trash . . . Slowly ideas began trickling in . . . the Moths,* which I think I will write very quickly. . . . the play-poem idea; the idea of some continuous stream, not solely of human thought, but of the ship, the night etc. all flowing together: intersected by the arrival of the bright moths. A man and a woman are to be sitting at table talking. Or shall they remain silent? It is to be a love story; she is finally to let the last great moth in. . . . But it needs ripening. I do a little work on it in the evening when the gramophone is playing late Beethoven sonatas.
1928 November
As for my next book, I am going to hold myself from writing till I have it impending in me: grown heavy in my mind like a ripe pear; pendant, gravid, asking to be cut or it will fall. The Moths still haunts me, coming, as they always do, unbidden, between tea and dinner, while L. plays the gramophone. I shape a page or two; and make myself stop. . . .
1929 December
. . . Blundering on at The Waves. I write two pages of arrant nonsense, after straining; I write variations of every sentence; compromises; bad shots; possibilities; till my writing book is like a lunatic’s dream. Then I trust to some inspiration on re-reading; and pencil them into some sense. Still I am not satisfied. . . . I press to my centre. I don’t care if it all is scratched out . . . and then, if nothing comes of it—anyhow I have examined the possibilities. But I wish I enjoyed it more. I don’t have it in my head all day like the Lighthouse and Orlando.
1930 January
“And now I can think of nothing else.” Thanks to my pertinacity and industry, I can now hardly stop making up The Waves . . . after 6 months’ hacking.
1930 January
. . . I cannot yet write naturally in my new room, because the table is not the right height and I must stoop to warm my hands. Everything must be absolutely what I am used to. . . . I am stuck fast in that book—I mean glued to it, like a fly on gummed paper. Sometimes I am out of touch; but go on; then again I feel that I have at last, by violent measures—like breaking through gorse—set my hands on something central. . . . But how to pull it together, how to comport it—press it into one—I do not know . . .
1930 February
. . . If I could stay in bed another fortnight (but there is no chance of that) I believe I should see the whole of The Waves. . . . [in] these illnesses . . . something happens in my mind. It refuses to go on registering impressions. It shuts itself up. It becomes chrysalis. I lie quite torpid, often with acute physical pain. . . . Then suddenly something springs.
. . . Ideas rush in me; often though this is before I can control my mind or pen. . . . My mind works in idleness. To do nothing is often my most profitable way.
1930 March
Yes, but this book is a very queer business. I had a day of intoxication when I said, “Children are nothing to this”: . . . felt the pressure of the form—the splendour, the greatness—as perhaps I have never felt them. But I shan’t race it off in intoxication. I keep pegging away; and find it the most complex and difficult of all my books. . . . I have not yet mastered the speaking voice . . . and I propose to go on pegging it down, arduously, and then re-write, reading much of it aloud, like poetry. . . . At any rate, I have taken my fence.
1930 April
. . . I have never written a book so full of holes and patches; that will need re-building, yes, not only re-modelling.
1930
May
. . . I begin to see what I had in my mind; and want to begin cutting out masses of irrelevance and clearing, sharpening and making the good phrases shine. One wave after another.
1931 February
Here in the few minutes that remain, I must record, heaven be praised, the end of The Waves. I wrote the words O Death fifteen minutes ago, having reeled across the last ten pages with some moments of such intensity and intoxication that I seemed only to stumble after my own voice, or almost, after some sort of speaker (as when I was mad) I was almost afraid, remembering the voices that used to fly ahead. Anyhow, it is done; and I have been sitting these 15 minutes in a state of glory, and calm, and some tears. . . . How physical the sense of triumph and relief is! Whether good or bad, it’s done; and, as I certainly felt at the end, not merely finished, but rounded off, completed, the thing stated—how hastily, how fragmentarily, I know; but I mean that I have netted that fin in the waste of water which appeared to me over the marshes out of my window at Rodmell when I was coming to an end of To the Lighthouse.*
Subterranean Forces
It is the great quantity of what is not done that lies with all its weight on what wants to come out of the soil.
—Rainer Maria Rilke
“The quiet, patient, generous mornings (yielding to ‘the surging chaos of the unexpressed’) will bring it,” James wrote in his Notebooks. If there had been “other claims, other responsibilities so that writing could not be first”; if he (or Woolf) had had only occasional mornings or none; if Conrad had not been able to “sit down religiously every morning . . . for eight hours” with his “crises of despair”—would they have created a body of work? If Pierre (Melville) had gone out to a job that 8:00 to 4:30 instead of into his desolate and shivering room, how long would his unfinished book have revolved in his head?
*Later, The Waves.
*September 30, 1926.
SILENCES, PP. 13–14
WHEN THE CLAIMS OF CREATION CANNOT BE PRIMARY