I was at the time very interested in the theatre, but became dissatisfied with the conditions under which writers work there, with the status of writers compared with actors and directors. I saw that, before the writer could reach his audience, he had first to go through the censorship of the Lord Chamberlain,13 then through the dictatorship of the director, and then through the egocentricity of the actors: all of whom could at worst twist his work into something quite different, or at best filter it. Until we have a theatre where the writer is the absolute authority on the production of his play, let alone one where he actually produces it himself, as Brecht did, then the theatre must, I think, remain a highly unsatisfactory medium for a writer.
Even so, I might have written for the theatre had I not come to another conclusion at about the same time: that the theatre audiences in London are just not worth writing for, neither the popular one which regards a ‘good show’ as on a par with the dinner they have before it and the Babycham they have after it, nor the pseudo-intellectual cult audience which will obediently see whatever it is smart or fashionable to see, and which will remain soggily unmoved to action by the revolutionary writing or ideas.
Television was out for similar reasons, and so was the cinema, though I consider film to offer potentially the widest scope to a writer as a pure form: but at the moment it is still so hedged around with economic and pseudo-moral limitations that it is one of the most frustrating media to work in.
The next most free form was the novel, gloriously free of almost any form of censorship, capable of enormous variations within its compendiousness, a great ragbag of a form in which I could make my own shapes as I liked. Furthermore, it needed no equipment other than a pencil or paper, no entrepreneurs, before I could reach at least a small audience of friends. And, from a practical point of view, there was more chance of what I had to say reaching a larger audience: there were 2,352 novels published in England in 1961, and I doubt if more than 200 new plays ever reached a stage that year.
Since this lecture is being given at a university there is one slight digression I should like to make at this point. It seems to me likely that the majority of writers fall into that section of the population which has been since 1944 (and will continue to be) exposed to a university education. This gives the university a new responsibility which I do not think has been generally appreciated. Certainly it was not at my college, where my English year were told ‘If you want to be a great actress or a great writer or something like that, then wait until you leave. You’re here at college to get a degree.’ This active discouragement of writing – for which I had decided at the late age of 23 to go to university, imagining that the best way to learn about writing was to find out how others had written – this discouragement came as a great surprise, and I believe it to be common to many universities, though I hope not here. I repeat, the university has despite itself acquired a special responsibility towards potential writers, and this is not generally realised, I believe.
So, after the cramping idiocy of a degree course which gave me a quite useless knowledge of Anglo-Saxon – the time spent on which I still bitterly regret as time utterly wasted – I began to read contemporary novels by writers whom I understood to have considerable literary reputations. None of these appeared to have read Joyce, let alone Beckett, for they were using techniques and conventions as dull and as oldfashioned as ever. Nor were they paying attention to language. It is not their subject-matter that I object to – this is often both new and interesting. John Wain, for example, has, rightly, a reputation for having introduced new subject matter into the English novel; but his technique and the literary conventions he accepts are certainly not new. Wain, and most other novelists writing today, are working in a traditional novel form which was spent, exhausted by the early part of this century in England. A similar thing had happened with poetic drama a hundred years earlier – Keats, Shelley, Browning and Tennyson all wrote blank-verse plays which are thumping failures. But they are failures not because they were written by bad poets, obviously, but because the blank verse form was finished, clapped-out.
But it would be wrong of me to base the whole of my case on writers like Wain, Amis and their school as I don’t think serious critics imagine they are any more than mediocre. I would not criticise William Golding’s use of language, for example, but his book Lord of the Flies seems to me faulty in one very important aspect that I want to use as an example of another failing I find in contemporary novels. Apart from the fact that if you don’t believe in original sin then you can’t take Golding’s book seriously – for on those actual occasions when children have been removed from civilizing restrictions, have they reverted to being savages and killed one another? – apart from this, the point I want to make is that the ending of the book is a pure deus ex machina: the arrival of the naval officer just in time to prevent the main character from being killed seems to me a completely false ending, and typifies the harmful effect of narrative conventions on those novelists who seem unable to conceive a novel without a story. A novel may tell a story; but it equally may not, if the writer so choose. And, as far as I am concerned, in attempting to convey my truth it is necessary to avoid telling stories. The child’s euphemism for telling lies makes my point for me: Telling stories is telling lies.
You may object that there is no reason for reading a novel which does not provide some impetus, some forward notion. To which I retort that it is impossible to write two sentences having the same subject without creating a narrative progression, and it is this narrative progression which provides a reason for the reader to go on reading, whether or not there is a story: if he is interested in the character or subject he will go on reading. And I believe, if he is not interested in either of those things he would not go on reading the piece even if it were telling a story, either.
I believe, therefore, that not only is storytelling unnecessary, but it also involves a fatal falsification, a fatal movement away from truth in literature.
So when I came to write my first novel Travelling People I had these two negative things in my mind – dislike of the technical limitations and uncarefulness of most contemporary writers, and their dependence on the crutch of telling stories. But I also had positive elements, which all added up to ‘what I wanted to say’. I had a theme – the conflict between illusion and reality – in a particular example, the refusal of an old man to accept that he is no longer young; a setting: the Lleyn peninsula in North Wales; and a mass of minor subject matter (observed, amalgamated and worked-out), which I had acquired over some years.
From these elements I re-thought the novel form for myself. I also re-read the chief novelists of the eighteenth century, during which period the form itself was new in English and all kinds of ideas and possibilities were being tried. The main result of my re-thinking was complete dissatisfaction with the convention of using only one style or literary technique for a novel. The range of my subject-matter was so wide and so varied that no one style I knew was capable of accommodating it while yet maintaining that truth to reality that I believe to be essential. From this dissatisfaction grew naturally a technique of allowing the subject-matter to dictate the style in which it was to be conveyed, and thus to determine it organically. This meant that sections of subject-matter would begin and end themselves naturally and not arbitrarily; and could correspond to chapters, each with its own style or convention. This, I remembered, was similar to the method of Ulysses. But I had approached it from the opposite way round: Joyce chose his style and imposed it on his material, whereas I was allowing the material to dictate the style.
Travelling People employs eight separate styles or conventions for nine chapters: the first and last chapters share one style to give the book cyclical unity within the motif announced by its title and epigraph. This is the shape of the book, a circle, this is its unity, its reason for the reader going on reading: it is not a story. [...] There are interludes between the chapters which serve various functions usually
connected with reminding the reader that he is reading a book and deliberately attempting to destroy his suspension of disbelief; rather in a way that Brecht constantly reminded his audiences that they were in a theatre, watching a play. I also use various visual devices to heighten or point certain events and effects. Thus when a character has a heart attack a random pattern grey section indicates this visually; a regular grey pattern indicates recuperative unconsciousness; and when the reader reaches a section completely black then he should not have to call on his knowledge of Sterne to know what has happened.
In this novel, and in all my later work, I was grateful for the advice and constructive criticism of Anthony Tillinghast, a contemporary of mine and later an academic at Liverpool University until his death last November. At first I showed my work to Dr Tillinghast as it was written, in a spirit of testing a critic to see what use he was in down-to-earth, practical terms. And the experiment worked surprisingly well: Travelling People would have been a worse book but for his interest in it, and it is appropriately dedicated to him and to his wife. I miss his help.14
The result of all this re-thinking is a novel which is in that minor tradition that runs from Petronius and Apuleius through Rabelais, Cervantes, Burton, Nashe and Sterne to James Joyce, Samuel Beckett and Flann O’Brien in this century. The tradition of the stupidly misnamed anti-novel, in fact, which may be anti-conventional but which should really be acknowledged as the tradition of the ultra-novel, the essential novel, the novel for the novel’s sake and not for the story’s sake. The approach in this minor tradition is anti-conventional, and its spirit is primarily that of the man who realises the futility of the human condition and can bear it only by laughing at its ludicrousness. Sterne put it best:
. . .’tis wrote, an’ please your worships, against the spleen! in order, by a more frequent and a more convulsive elevation and depression of the diaphragm, and the succussations of the intercostal and abdominal muscles in laughter, to drive the gall and other bitter juices from the gallbladder, liver, and sweetbread of his majesty’s subjects, with all the inimicitious passions which belong to them, down into their duodenums.
Anyone who can make anyone else laugh about any subject at all is on the side of humankind against a chaotic and callously indifferent universe. When Travelling People does not follow all my theorizing, it is invariably for the sake of the comic. I also tried to keep its complexities well this side of obscurity, and to make it as readable as possible.
In technique, my second novel Albert Angelo is a logical progression in the direction taken by the first one. That is to say, subject-matter and function are allowed organically to determine form and style. But this is one of the few resemblances between the two novels. Since their respective subject-matter differs so much, then their respective forms are correspondingly dissimilar.
This time, I found the problem impossible of solution, and on one level Albert Angelo is a dramatisation of this near impossibility of conveying truth in a vehicle of fiction. The problem, and its solution or avoidance, are epitomised in the quotation from Beckett’s The Unnamable which forms the epigraph:
When I think, that is to say, no, let it stand, when I think of the time I’ve wasted with these bran-dips, beginning with Murphy, who wasn’t even the first, when I had me, on the premises, within easy reach, tottering under my own skin and bones, real ones, rotting with solitude and neglect, till I doubted my own existence, and even still, today, I have no faith in it, none, so that I have to say, when I speak, Who speaks, and seek, and so on and similarly for all the other things that happen to me and for which someone must be found, for things that happen must have someone to happen to, someone must stop them. But Murphy and the others, and last but not least the two old buffers here present, could not stop them, the things that happened to me, nothing could happen to them, of the things that happened to me, and nothing else either, there is nothing else, let us be lucid for once, nothing else but what happens to me, such as speaking, and such as seeking, and which cannot happen to me, which prowl round me, like bodies in torment, the torment of no abode, no repose, no, like hyenas, screeching and laughing, no, no better, no matter, I’ve shut my doors against them, I’m not at home to anything, my doors are shut against them, perhaps that’s how I’ll find silence, and peace at last, by opening my doors and letting myself be devoured, they’ll stop howling, they’ll start eating, the maws now howling: Open up, open up, you’ll be all right, you’ll see.
Why ‘invent’ characters when you know yourself much better? How can an invented character stand exactly for what you want to say unless he is you?
So, Albert Angelo sets up a character who is an architect manqué and who has to earn his living as a teacher and has lost most of his sense of direction as a result of a broken love-affair. Then, after some 160 pages of this situation, I, as author, suddenly and violently break through this character to speak in my own voice and say directly what I had been trying to say less than successfully through this objective correlative.
It is no accident that my hero, Albert, is an architect, for I believe that my aims have much in common with those of many contemporary architects. [...] In this century architects have been presented with radical new techniques (ferro-concrete, plastics, new finishes) which they are painfully, with many bosh-shots, learning how to use. Similarly, Joyce presented writers with new techniques and concepts which – infinitely more slowly than an architect – a handful of people are trying to learn to use.
Various unconventional devices are used in Albert Angelo for effects which I felt I could not satisfactorily achieve by any other means. [...] These methods are adopted solely to solve my problems, the problems of saying what I believe to be true as nearly as possible, and for no other reason. The point is that there are writing problems today which just did not exist even fifty years ago, and to attempt to solve them with the methods and techniques of Dickens and the nineteenth century is like trying to make new discoveries in physics without taking Einstein into account. I think particularly of a writer like Angus Wilson, a brilliant observer of contemporary mores, but whose style is directly comparable to Dickens – to Wilson’s great loss, I believe. Where I depart from convention it is because convention has failed, has proved inadequate. Each of my books is a specific solution to a specific set of problems. They are not exemplars for anyone else; by definition, no other book could or should be written like them.
To turn to poetry. And first of all to make an elementary distinction which experience has taught me has to be made whenever I speak about the subject, if there is not to be a danger of being completely misunderstood. The distinction is between poetry and verse. Poetry is the art-essence, the thing that hits you in the pit of the stomach, a physical feeling that shouts yes! A moment of recognition of some sort of truth. Poetry can be found in all arts: it is, I repeat, the art-essence. Verse, on the other hand, is the mechanical putting together of elements of speech into patterns. Different languages take different elements: the Greeks and Romans used quantity, the length of syllables, and arranged them in patterns of longs and shorts. English verse since Chaucer’s time has taken the element of stress or accent, and arranged patterns of stress and non-stress.
Verse can be taught; poetry cannot be taught.
Some verse contains poetry. There is more which does not. In the work of Pope, for instance, there is much wit, intellect, discussion and satire in verse: but there is very little poetry. This is not to disparage Pope: it is merely to describe his work.
Whether there is poetry or not in my work is a matter of opinion: I think there is. It does not seem to me that one can usefully discuss it.
One can usefully discuss verse technique. I have already said that blank-verse is clapped-out, after centuries of honest toil and excellent service. My own problem was to find a verse form – that is, a pattern of speech elements – that was suited to what I had to say. What I had to say was largely anti-heroic, anti-romantic, and I was determined to sa
y it in the language, the colloquial language if necessary, of the mid-twentieth century. This could not be done in blank verse nor in any other combination of sing-song iambics. Colloquial speech just does not run in patterns of de-da, de-da, de-da, de-da, de-da. Not real speech, that is.
My solution, which I came to independently though I later found that many Americans had been experimenting with it for a number of years, was to make patterns by using syllables as the speech element of my verse. With this system of prosody, the stresses in a line could fall exactly where they did in natural speech.
Furthermore, it seemed to me that since most poetry reaches its audience in printed form, a metre which is easily apprehended visually, as any syllabic one is, would seem to be more appropriate than those metres which depend on sound, like stress or quantitative ones. Syllabic metres can also be recognised by ear easily enough, provided the audience is not expecting a stress metre or is prepared to pay sufficient attention to a different metrical element.
I recently heard Nathalie Sarraute15 speaking about her work, and she compared literature to a relay race in which the baton of each generation’s new discoveries was handed on. Not only did pre-war novelists in England drop this baton, but now they don’t even admit they’re in a race. Even now, of writers in English apart from Samuel Beckett, I can think of only Rayner Heppenstall, Philip Toynbee and Christine Brooke-Rose16 besides myself who are attempting, in different ways, to do something new in the novel, who are accepting that their starting-point is where Joyce left off.
Some rhetorical questions from Tristram Shandy are in order here:
Shall we for ever make new books, as apothecaries make new mixtures, by pouring only out of one vessel into another? Are we for ever to be twisting and untwisting the same rope, for ever in the same track, for ever at the same place?
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