Through art, as in dreams, we can experience this truth, this root of life, as Yeats calls it. Through art, we can respond ideally to truth as we cannot in life. To suggest the nature of that truth—which is the writer’s “material”—I should like to go outside literature for a moment and draw on the view of a painter—Veronese, who in 1572 was called before the Holy Office at Venice to explain why, in a painting of the Last Supper, he had included figures of loiterers, passers-by, people scratching themselves, deformed people, a man having a nosebleed, and so on: details then held unfit to appear in a holy subject. When this grave charge of blasphemy was pressed on Veronese by the examiners, who asked him why he had shown such profane matters in a holy picture, he replied, “I thought these things might happen.”5
Despite the convoluted theories expended on the novelist’s material, its essence is in those words. Paraphrasing a text from Revelation 15:3, W. H. Auden wrote in his poem “The Novelist,” that the novelist must “among the Just / Be just, among the Filthy, filthy too, / And in his own weak person, if he can, / Must suffer dull all the wrongs of Man.”6
The task of the poet or novelist is to convey states of mind and of being as immediately as possible, through language. Immediacy of language is not always or necessarily simplicity, although simplicity is a highly desirable and immensely difficult literary instrument. Valéry says that of two words, we should always choose the lesser.7 But we don’t always have a lesser word that meets out need—although it can be said that veracity tends to express itself with an eminent simplicity, in art as in life; just as discursiveness can often be an index of falsehood.
Without diminishing the merits and advantages of brevity, however, literature cannot be looked on as a competition to employ as few words as possible. Rather it is a matter of seeking accurate words to convey a human condition. And of deploying words so that tone, context, sound, and syntax are ideally combined, without a show of contrivance. That is the proper and agonizing business of literature, in which much of the writer’s suffering originates: “the intolerable wrestle with words and meanings,” as T. S. Eliot called it.8 Every writer who is serious about his craft experiences a sense of profaning pure meaning with unworthy words.
Flaubert told George Sand: “When I come on a bad assonance or a repetition in my sentences, I’m sure I’m floundering in the false. By searching I find the proper expression, which was always the only one, and which is also harmonious. The word is never lacking when one possesses the idea. Is there not, in this precise fitting of parts, something eternal, like a principle? If not, why should there be a relation between the right word and the musical word? Or why should the greatest compression of thought always result in a line of poetry?”9
Great practitioners of language have supplied new words and new usages when, in the literal sense, words failed them. In most cases, we echo their innovations unthinkingly, because they satisfy, they meet the case. At other times, they bear the maker’s seal so distinctly that they can’t be uttered without a mental nod in the author’s direction. But these great innovators cannot provide a pattern for lesser talents; as Jacques Barzun has said, magnitude creates its own space.10 More usually, the writer works with words in common use, developing as great a range and as original and independent a voice as possible.
Some writers will bring the whole weight of considered language to their task. Some build their impression in single strokes—whether light or powerful. For the imaginative writer, words must be the measure of talent—to an extent not necessarily true for writers dealing in information and “ideas.” The intentions of a novelist or poet are, of course, important, but he or she must be judged on gifts of expression that may not be commensurate with them. The intentions of a historian or a critic, on the other hand, form the basis of our ultimate judgment of his writings, whatever his abilities or deficiencies of communication. The ear of the imaginative writer is ideally tuned to the highest sensitivity, and his distinctive method of transcription is perhaps somewhat misleadingly called style. It is, I think, a recurring error of criticism to treat “style” as an insubstantial literary contrivance distinct from the author’s so-called material. Asked to justify his employment of “fine allusions, bright images, and elegant phrases,” Dr. Johnson replied with what might be an ideal definition of style: “Why sir, all these ornaments are useful, because they obtain an easier reception for the truth.”11
I have said that language bears special responsibilities: The writer’s vigilance over language and attention to language are themselves an assumption of responsibility. When, with the Renaissance drama, men and women began to speak—through literature—with individual voices, rather than as types (as they had done in medieval morality plays), there was a humanistic assumption of personal accountability for what was uttered. And so we have continued, in theory at least, to regard it. Our words, whether in literature or in life, are accepted as a revelation of our private nature, and an index of the measure of responsibility we are prepared to assume for it.
Even the most imposing speech can, of course, be a confession of evasion. Evasion is rooted in fear, just as responsibility arises from conviction; and the sense of private responsibility through words has proved very hard to maintain. George Orwell said that in order to write fearlessly, one must think fearlessly; and for this it is necessary to have an independent mind.12 We see that the medieval forms of class and collective responsibility provided a shelter that has been sought ever since through linguistic distortion and pretension.
Our modern age is peculiarly afflicted in this way. Along with the transforming powers of technology and mass society, there developed in the nineteenth century a sort of Industrial Revolution in human expression—an increasing tendency to renounce personal opinion in favor of generalized or official opinion, and to evade self-knowledge and self-commitment through use of abstractions: a wish, in fact, to believe in some process of feeling more efficient than the human soul. There was also an associated new phenomenon of mass communications and mass advertising—that, of new words and usages not spontaneously but speciously brought into wide circulation as a means of profitably directing the human impulse. (The word “jargon,” incidentally, anciently derives from the twittering of geese.)
This measure of renunciation of independent and eccentric views that accompanied the growth of mass culture has inevitably infected aesthetic matters. The public has been encouraged, in some quarters, to put its faith in a self-appointed critical authority that, in the words of one modern critic, will “deal expertly” with literature and other arts, relieving readers of time-consuming burdens of private response and private choice. While commentary and scholarly attention have always been directed toward literature and always will be, an entirely new modern industry has grown up of “interpretation.” (I make this distinction with the past in the same spirit that a certain schoolmaster in England used to tell his students: “Remember that the intellectual is to the scholar as the cad once was to the gentleman.”)
A body of attitudes has developed that seeks to neutralize the very directness to life that is nurtured by art, and to sever the private bond, the immortal intimacy, that has existed between reader and writer. The great writers do not write as if through intermediaries. The new phenomenon is notably one of explication rather than comprehension—the concept of art as a discipline to be contained within consistent laws, the seductive promise of a technology to be mastered by those who will then be equipped to dictate and regiment taste. All this turns on what W. H. Auden called the inability of certain critics to acknowledge that works of art can be more important than anything critics can say about them. As an ominous result we are getting, in literature, an increasing response not to poems and novels but to interpretations. Not to the thing but to the self. While the students of such interpreters can—and do—expound their mentors’ views by the hour, it has become very rare to hear them spontaneously quote a line of poetry.
It is always tempting, of c
ourse, to impose one’s view rather than to undergo the submission required by art—a submission akin to that of generosity or love—that evokes the private response rather than the authorized one. But art is not technology and cannot be “mastered.” It is an endless access to revelatory states of mind, a vast extension of living experience and a way of communing with the dead. An intimacy with truth, through which, however much instruction is provided and absorbed, each of us must pass alone.
The degradation of language in the extreme versions of these current explicatory approaches to the arts should be the first concern of anyone wishing to penetrate them. The supposedly “clinical” approach to art necessitates a dehumanized and labored vocabulary and a tone of infectious claims to higher seriousness—a seriousness that proposes itself as superior to art. The unconscious of the modern critical body deserves some exploration, if only to probe its effects on the life of the imagination and to discover why critics of this kind so seldom step aside to allow art to speak, inimitably, for itself—art frequently appearing in their discussions as “mere material” for dissection and classification, and for self-advancement.
Every child knows that it is easier to dismantle a complex creation than to reassemble it. Of similar pedants, Seneca wrote that “No one lets humanity down quite so much as those who study knowledge as if it were a negotiable skill.”13 And it may be that what we suffer from now is simply a new stage of the immemorial attempt to exorcise great mysteries that are inimical to human vanity. I would attach it also to a modern incapacity for wholeness, for synthesis. The power of a work of art ultimately derives not from classifiable components but from an enigmatic quality of synthesis, which does not lend itself to analysis. We do not know why art should exist or why a few human beings should be capable of producing it and even fewer of doing so with enduring excellence. We are often unable even to discern such gifts clearly during an artist’s lifetime.
To return from these heights to my own case: I may say that I have found that a great deal of literary discussion seeks to impose consistency for the purpose of proposing “patterns.” Of course, some writers work according to a more readily recognizable method than others do. Yet I think that each author’s approach—and to each of his own works—will differ. Writers share common difficulties, but they nurture individual ways of contending with them. Similarly, in the work itself, I think that “form” means little unless the quality brought to it can seize it as an opportunity. Like style, form is after all simply the idiosyncratic way one has discovered to convey one’s idea.
For me, the ear has an essential role in literary meaning. The arrangement of words, phrases, sentences should sound on the mental ear as effectively as possible, in the silence of the writer’s intimacy with his or her reader. For both writer and reader, this is a sensibility refined by reading—that is, through love of literature. For the writer it is often intuitively present in the work—if by intuition we understand a synthesis of intelligence, understanding, and feeling. And it will be intuitively felt and enjoyed by the reader if it is effective. These matters are not devices to pull the wool over the reader’s eyes: They are attempts to regain that shared root of life of which Yeats wrote.
The other question most asked of a novelist is to what extent he or she is autobiographically present in the work. Much modern fiction particularly invites that inquiry. Again, any reliable answer will vary greatly from one author to another. And—I should add—there are rather few reliable answers: authors are unlikely to lay all their cards on the table; there is no reason why they should. For myself, I feel that I drew more on private and even subjective experience when I was first writing and that this diminished as time went on. Even in the first stories I wrote, whole lives and scenes came into my imagination without apparent basis in my acquaintance with life. When we speak of “writing from experience,” we usually define experience as whatever has happened directly—or merely—to ourselves. That was to some extent my youthful view. As I got older my experience became more and more what I observed in others, what I imagined of other lives, what I could divine of the infinite range of human possibilities. Thus one may come to speak of writing from experience without simply referring to events and sensations directly affecting oneself.
The author reveals himself, to some degree, in almost any work of fiction, whether intentionally or inadvertently; whether in incidental disclosures or in a gradual emanation of personality. There seems no need for esthetic or “moral” regulation of this—even though it has been a subject of critical “decrees.” I enjoy what Byron called the author’s “addresses from the throne”14 if they are done well enough and are seen as part of an inspired whole—as in Dickens or George Eliot or Hardy or Conrad, where author’s asides are numerous. Again, it seems to me a question of the order of talent. Anything whatever may be achieved by genius. Or, at the least, the scope and power of genius may make acceptable to us features that are intolerable in lesser talents.
The last theme I would like to touch on is the context in which work is produced. The attempt to touch truth through a work of imagination requires an inner center of privacy and solitude. We all need silence—both external and interior—in order to find out what we truly think. I have come more and more to value the view of Ortega y Gasset that “without a certain margin of tranquility, truth succumbs.”15 However passionate the writer’s material, some distance and detachment are needed before the concept can be realized. In our time, the writer can expect little or nothing in the way of silence, privacy, or removal from the deafening clamor of “communications,” with all its disturbing and superfluous information. In addition, novelty and the merely up-to-date are urged on writers not only in the name of innovation but virtually as some new form of moral obligation, while critical explication hovers like a vulture. Social continuity and social order—or even the illusion of these—are so disrupted as to have almost gone out of business. The sense of territory and the identity of one’s readers are similarly obscured or dispersed. The necessary margin of tranquility for creative work must now presumably be developed somehow in the writer’s own consciousness. That involves the exclusion of many other claims—including rightful ones—if one is to preserve some inwardness amid the din.
The poet Montale, whom I mentioned earlier, spoke not long before his recent death of the modern rejection of solitude and singularity, saying that “the wish to huddle in groups, to create noise, and to escape from thought is a sign of desperation and despair.” He said that the need to accept a group ideology and generational conformity is contrary to the nature of art and of poetry. Similarly, for the artist, Montale said that the subordination to a method of thinking that one has not worked toward oneself implies a surrender to uniformity, to officialism: “Only the man who lives in solitude can speak of the fatal isolation we all suffer under this inhuman, mass-produced communication. Being in fashion and famous now seems the only accepted role for the contemporary artist…. And I ask myself where this absurd absence of judgment will lead us.”16
This brings me around to my starting point. There is at least one immense truth which we can still adhere to and make central to our lives—responsibility to the accurate word. It is through literature that the word has been preserved and nourished, and it is in literature that we find the candor and refreshment of truth. In the words of Jean Cocteau, the good and rightful tears of the reader are drawn simultaneously by an emotion evoked through literature, and by the experience of seeing a word in place.17
THE LONELY WORD
1. VIRGIL AND MONTALE
Last September in Italy, two events were simultaneously honored: at Naples, the two thousandth anniversary of the death of Virgil; and, at Milan, the death, at the age of eighty-four, of Eugenio Montale. The Virgilian ceremonies at Naples were an intensification of bimillennial commemorations, which included public readings of the Aeneid, dozens of scholarly articles in daily newspapers (which also carried special weekend color supplements on the po
et), and innumerable other observances engaging the entire Neapolitan populace and noted throughout the Italian nation—as, by scholars, throughout the world. In the cathedral of Milan, the funeral of Montale was attended by the president and premier of Italy; while outside the Duomo an immense crowd stood in hot sun, breaking—as a newspaper reported—into “oceanic applause” as the poet’s coffin emerged. Banner headlines announcing Montale’s death were followed over many days by special newspaper pages of appreciation and reminiscence and, of course, examples of the poet’s work. A private memorial, only relatively less public than that held at Milan, subsequently took place at Florence.
It may thus be said that the press of Italy was to a great extent occupied, throughout the month of September 1981, in paying tribute to two poets who died just two thousand years apart, neither of whom had courted popular attention.
At his death in his fifty-first year, Virgil left the twelve books of his Aeneid, written in the latter part of his life and apparently completed in 19 BC, the epic that through subsequent centuries has stood in the civilized Western consciousness as a chief literary representation of man’s high heroic struggle to transcend his mortality and fulfill, by historic lofty actions, his greater destiny; its theme simply and grandly stated in its celebrated opening words: “Arms and the man I sing.”
Montale, in a brief poem written in his later life—a poem about a lost cat on a city street—tells us that on that street in past years—that is, during the fascist era—there had occurred events “fit for history, unfit for memory” (Fatti degni di storia, indegni di memoria).1
So we have two poets, each a master of language and literary form, each accorded in life the highest formal recognition: the one favored by Augustus, the other a Nobel laureate; born in the same peninsula: one near Mantua, the other at Genoa; both profoundly affected by the public events of their troubled times; both of plain, respectable parentage. The public destiny proclaimed by the one as indivisible from the private; by the other, our contemporary, scorned as a contamination with which no decent person can associate himself. In the one, human existence ideally ennobled by superhuman striving. By the other, existence justified only on its most intimate terms.
We Need Silence to Find Out What We Think Page 3