The creative editor is one
who, to paraphrase the Surrealist Manifesto, brings together two seemingly
disparate objects, the reviewer and the book, to create something new, rich,
and strange. It’s no surprise that the New
York Review is the most distinguished of contemporary literary journals and
that Bob Silvers is the most respected and honored editor of our time.
My talk tonight, “Is
the Uninspired Life Worth Living?”—obviously a
reflection of “Is the unexamined life worth living?”—Thoughts on Inspiration and Obsession. I
think I should begin by evoking Magritte’s famous painting of 1928, The Treason of Images, with its simple
literal depiction of a pipe, you know, and the provocative caption beneath, “This
is not a pipe,” because this is not a traditional lecture so much as a quest
for a lecture in the singular, a quest constructed around a series of
questions: Why do we write? What is the motive for metaphor? “Where do you get
your ideas?” Do we choose our subjects or do our subjects choose us? Do we
choose our voices? Is inspiration a singular phenomenon or does it take
taxonomical forms? Indeed, is the uninspired life worth living?
So I located about nine
types of inspiration, some of which overlap, which I’ll talk about tonight, and
if I suddenly run out of time, I’ll just skip to the end because I make a point
at the end. Nobody will miss what’s in the middle, and I can always say the
best parts had to be left out, (laughter) and I’m really looking forward to
having questions from the audience. It’s always so lively and unexpected,
sometimes very unexpected, sorts of questions one gets. So: Is the Uninspired Life
Worth Living? Thoughts on Inspiration and Obsession.
“Why did I write?
What sin to me unknown dipped me in ink, my parents’ or my own?” Alexander Pope’s
great epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot, 1734, asks this question both
playfully and seriously. Why did the child Pope take to verse at so young an
age, telling us as many a poet might tell us with a kind of modesty that
enormous self-confidence can generate, “I lisped in numbers but the numbers
came,” it’s a very famous line, by which the poet means an intuitive,
instinctive inborn sense of scansion and rhyme, for which some individuals have
the equivalent of perfect pitch in music. You are born with it or you are not.
For sheer virtuosity in
verse, Pope was one of the great masters of the language. His brilliantly
orchestrated couplets lend themselves ideally to the expression of wit, usually
caustic, in the service of the poet’s satiric mission. The predilection to “lisp
in numbers” suggests a kind of entrapment, though Pope doesn’t suggest this.
The perfectly executed couplet with its locked-together rhymes is a tic-like
mannerism, not unlike punning, to which some individuals succumb involuntarily.
I’ll say
parenthetically that there is such a thing as pathological punning and rhyming.
It’s a symptom evidently of frontal lobe syndrome, a
neurological deficit caused by injury or illness. I
say parenthetically, because I’m married to a neuroscientist and I know things
that I wouldn’t have known otherwise that simply verge upon the morbid. Almost
any kind of talent for literature could be traced back to some strange
neurological deficit as they call it. And so punning and rhyming as sort of a
compulsive behavior which not many people do but some do, it’s fascinating.
Even as others react with pained amusement or if not with revulsion and alarm.
Pope’s predilection for “lisping
in numbers” seems to us closely bound up with his era and his talent a talent
of the era, that is the eighteenth century, that revered the tight-knit grimace
of satire and a very sort of expository and didactic poetry from which, half a
century later, Wordsworth and Coleridge would seek to free the poet. Pope never
suggests, however, that the content of poetry is in any way inherited like the
genetic propensity for scansion and rhyme. He would not have concurred, and who
among the poets among most of us with so concur, with Plato’s churlish view of
poetry as inspired not from within the individual’s imagination but from an
essentially supernatural daemonic source.
To Plato, poetry
had to be under the authority of the state, in the service of the quote “a
mythological generic good.” That it might be imitative
of any specific object was to its discredit. The idea of imitation was a
negative thing. “No ideas but in things,” the rallying cry of William Carlos
Williams in the twentieth century, would have been anathema to the essentialist
Plato, like emotion itself or worse yet passion, the passions, these were
negative things. Thus all imitative poetry, especially
the tragic poetry of Homer, should be banished from the Republic as it is, “deceptive,
magical, and insincere.” With the plodding quasi-logic of a right-wing
politician, Plato’s Socrates dares to say, this is from Eon, “In fact all the good poets who make epic poems like Homer use
no art at all but they are inspired and possessed when they utter all those
beautiful poems and so are the good lyric poets. They are not in their right
mind when they make their beautiful songs. As soon as they mount on their
harmony and rhythm, they become frantic and possessed, for the poet is an airy
thing, a winged and a holy thing. He cannot make poetry until he becomes
inspired and goes out of his senses and no mind is left in him. Not by art,
then, they make their poetry, but by divine dispensation. Therefore the only
poetry that each can make is what the muse has pushed him to make. These beautiful
poems are not human, not made by man, but divine and made by God, and the poets
are nothing but the gods’ interpreters.”
The poets whom Plato
disdained and feared were analogous to our rock star performers, you may not
know that, but they recited their poems before large and enthusiastic
audiences. We can assume it wasn’t the fact that these poets were popular, as
Homer was popular, to which Plato mostly objected, but the fact that his
particularly heavily theologized pulp philosophy didn’t form the content of
their utterances. The poet’s right mind should be under the authority of the state.
Indeed, each citizen’s right mind should be part of the hive mind of the
Republic. That the freethinking, rebellious, and unpredictable poet
type must be banished from the claustrophobic Republic is self-evident. In one
of the great ironies of history it was to be Plato’s Socrates who was banished
from the state.
So that’s one theory of
poetry, and then in contrast to that, the worksheets of poets as diverse as
Dylan Thomas, William Butler Yeats, Elizabeth Bishop, Philip Larkin, and many
others suggests how deliberate is the poet’s art and how far from being
inspired by a mere daemon. Though it’s often the poet’s wish to appear
spontaneous and uninspired, see William Butler Yeats’s
poem “Adam’s Curse.”
“We sat together at one
summer’s end,
that beautiful, mild woman,
your close friend,
And you and I, and talked
of poetry.
I said, ‘A line will take
us hours maybe;
Yet if it does not seem a
moment’s thought,
Our stitching and
unstitching has been naught.
Better go down upon your
marrow-bones
And scrub a kitchen
pavement, or break stones,
Like an old pauper in all
kinds of weather;
For to articulate sweet
sounds together
Is to work harder than all
these, and yet
Be thought an idler by the
noisy set
Of bankers, schoolmasters,
and clergymen
the martyrs call the world.’
And
thereupon
That beautiful mild woman
for whose sake
There’s many a one should
find out all heartache,
On finding that her voice is
sweet and low
Replied, ‘To be born woman
is to know—
Although they do not talk
of it at school—
That we must labor to be beautiful.’
I said, ‘It’s certain,
there is no fine thing
Since Adam’s fall but needs
much labouring.’”
Very different from the
Beats’ notorious admonition, “First thought, best thought.” To appear
spontaneous and unresolved even as one is highly calculated and conscious, that’s
the ideal, as Virginia Woolf remarked in her
diary in an aside that seems almost to prefigure her suicide in 1941 at the age
of fifty-nine. This is from The Writer’s Diary, April 8, 1925: “I do not any longer feel
inclined to doff the cap. I’d like to go out of the room talking with an
unfinished, casual sentence on my lips, no leave-takings, no submission, but
someone stepping out into darkness.”
Inspiration is an elusive
term. We all want to be inspired if the consequence is something original and
worthwhile. We would even consent to be haunted and obsessed if the
consequences were significant. For all writers dread what Emily Dickinson
calls, “zero at the bone,” the dead zone from which inspiration has fled. What
does it mean to be captivated by an image, a phrase, a mood, an emotion? “A picture held us captive, and we could not get outside it
for it lay in our language and language seemed to repeat it to us inexorably.”
This is from Wittgenstein’s Philosophical
Investigations.
Most serious and productive
artists are haunted by their material. This is the galvanizing force of their
creativity, their motivation. It is not and cannot be a fully conscious or
volitional haunting. It is something that seems to happen to us as if from without,
no matter what craft is brought to bear upon it, what myriad worksheets and
notecards. Here is Emily Dickinson’s cri de coeur. “To
whom the mornings stand for nights, what must the midnights be?” Most of
the Dickinson poems we revere and have lodged deeply into us are beautifully
articulated, delicately calibrated cries from the heart. Formulations of
unspeakable things at the point of which poetic inspiration has become
terror-filled.
“The first Day’s Night had
come—
and grateful that a thing
So terrible—had been
endured—
I told my Soul to sing.
She said her Strings were
snapt—
her Bow—to atoms blown—
And so to mend her—gave me
work
Until another morn.
And then—a Day as huge
As yesterdays in pairs,
Unrolled its horror in my
face—
Until it blocked my eyes.
My Brain—begun to laugh—
I mumbled—like a fool—
And tho’ ‘tis Years ago—that
Day—
My brain keeps giggling—still.
And Something’s odd—within.
That person that I was—
And this One—do not feel
the same—
Could it be Madness—this?”
This is the very voice of
inwardness, compulsiveness, the soul at the white heat, of which Dickinson speaks in the remarkable poem that seems
almost to deconstruct the Platonic charge of God inspiration.
“Dare you see a soul at the
white heat?
Then crouch within the
door.
Red is the fire’s common
tint
But when the vivid ore.
It quivers from the forge
without a color but the
light
of unignited blaze.”
There is another Dickinson whose inspiration is clearly more benign,
drawn from the small pleasures and vexations of daily life, a shared and
domestic life in her father’s house in Amherst, Massachusetts.
“A rat surrendered here
A brief career of Cheer
And Fraud and Fear.
Of Ignominy’s due
Let all addicted to
Beware.
The most obliging Trap
Its tendency to snap
Cannot resist—
Temptation is the Friend
Repugnantly resigned
At last.”
Surely the most brilliantly
crafted poem ever written on the subject of a rat found dead in a trap. And
behind the house—
“A narrow fellow in the
grass
Occasionally rides;
You may have met him—did
you not
His notice sudden is,
The grass divides as with a
comb,
A spotted shaft is seen,
And then it closes at your
feet,
And opens further on.
Several of nature’s people
I know, and they know me;
I feel for them a transport
Of cordiality.
But never met this fellow,
Attended or alone,
Without a tighter breathing,
And zero at the bone.”
In a tersely titled poem “Pig,” by our
contemporary Henri Cole, the
trapped, doomed animal that is the poem’s subject fuses with the poet observer
in the way of a vivid and revealing dream.
“Pig”
“Poor patient pig—trying to keep his
balance,
that’s all, upright on a flatbed
ahead of me,
somewhere between Pennsylvania and
Ohio,
enjoying the wind, maybe, against the
tufts of hair
on the tops of his ears, like a Stoic
at the foot
of the gallows, or, with my eyes
heavy and glazed
from caffeine and driving, like a
soul disembarking,
its flesh probably bacon now tipping
into split-
pea soup, or, more painful to me,
like a man
in his middle years struggling to
remain
vital and honest while we’re all just
floating
around accidental-like on a breeze.
What funny thoughts slide into the
head,
alone on the interstate with no place
to be.”
Parenthetically
I should remark that when I taught several writing workshops at San Quentin in
2011, on my first meeting with the inmate writers, I read this poem of Henri
Cole’s about the pig who had gotten out of his, he was trapped, he got out of
his pen and was on the flatbed and was sort of out there enjoying the breeze,
in fact I had to read this poem twice. The inmate students were riveted and moved by this poem in which
they saw themselves all too clearly and it was very influential for them.
In these striking poems by
Dickinson and Cole, the poet appropriates a natural sighting of one of nature’s
people. These are not found poems except in their suggestion that the poet’s
sighting has an element of accident, one within the range of all of us, the rat
in a trap, the snake in the grass, the pig on the flatbed being borne along a
highway to slaughter. The poet is a seer and the poem is the act of
appropriation.
We might wonder would the
poem have been written without the sighting? Would another poem have been
written in its place at just that hour? Is it likely that the poet’s vision is
inchoate inside the imagination and is tapped by a sighting in the world that
triggers an emotional rapport out of which the poem is crafted. If we consider
in such cases that what the poet has made out of the sighted object that is but
is not contained within the subject we catch a glimpse of the imagination akin
to a flammable substance into which a lighted match is dropped.
Dickinson’s poems and her
letters as well, which seem so airy and fluent, give the impression of being
dashed off. In fact, Dickinson composed very carefully, sometimes keeping her
characteristically enigmatic lines and images for years before using them in a
poem or in a letter. It’s a fact that the human brain processes only a small
selection of what the eye sees. So too the poet is one who sees the significant
image to be put to a powerful use in a structure of words while discarding all
else.
This is from
someone’s journal.
“This is to be
fairly short to have Father’s character done complete it in and Mother’s and
Saint Ives and childhood and all the usual things I try to put in—life, death,
and so forth. But the central figure is Father’s character sitting in a boat
reciting, ‘We perished, each alone,’ while he crushes a dying mackerel.” This
is Virginia Woolf musing in her diary for May 14, 1925, on To the Lighthouse, about which she will say months later, she is
being “blown like an old flag by my novel, I live entirely in it and have come
to the surface rather obscurely and am often unable to think.”
By one of these wonderful
coincidences, I just saw some worksheets of To
the Lighthouse in the Berg Collection about half an hour ago, and she talks
about having this strange fluency which is not typical of her writing.
A different sort of
inspiration is the sheerly autobiographical, the work created out of intimacy
with one’s own life and experience. Yet here also the appropriating strategy is
highly selective, as in memoir the writer must dismiss all but a small fraction
of the overwhelming bounty of available material. What is required beyond
memory is a perspective on one’s own past that is both a child’s and an adult’s
constituting entirely a new perspective. So the writer of autobiographical
fiction is a time traveler in his or her life and the writing is often, as
Virginia Woolf noted, “fertile and fluent.”
“I am now writing
as fast and freely as I have written in the whole of my life, more so, twenty
times more so than any novel yet. I think that this is proof that I was on the
right path and what hangs on my soul is to be reached there. The truth is, one
can’t write directly about the soul. Looked at, it vanishes but look elsewhere
and the soul slips in.” That’s so beautiful. That’s from A Writer’s Diary, February 6, 1926.
John Updike’s
first novel, The Poorhouse Fair, in 1959, published
when the author was twenty-six, is a purposefully modest work composed in a
minor key. Unlike Norman Mailer’s first novel, The Naked and the Dead, 1948, also published when the author was
twenty-six. Where Mailer trod onto the literary scene like an invading army
with an ambitious military plan, Updike seems almost to have wished to enter by
a rear door, claiming a very small turf in rural eastern Pennsylvania and
concentrating upon the near at hand with the meticulous eye of a poet.
The Poorhouse Fair is in its way a bold
avoidance of the quasi-autobiographical novel so common to young writers, the
novel of which the author’s coming of age is the primary subject. Perversely,
given the age of the author, The
Poorhouse Fair is about the elderly, set in a future only twenty years
distant and lacking the dramatic features of the typical future dystopian work.
Its concerns are intrapersonal and theological. By 1959 Updike had already
published many of the short stories that would be gathered in The Olinger Stories one day which
constitutes his own coming of age novel, freeing him to imagine an entirely
other original debut work.
The Poorhouse Fair, as Updike was to explain
in an introduction to the 1977 edition, was suggested by a visit in 1957 to his
hometown of Shillington, which included a visit to the ruins of a poorhouse
near his home. The young author then decided to write a novel in celebration of
the fairs held at the poorhouse during his childhood with the intention of
paying tribute to his recently deceased grandfather. In this way The Poorhouse Fair both is not but is an
autobiographical work, as theological concerns described elsewhere in Updike’s
work were those of the young writer at the time.
Appropriately, as many of
you probably know, Updike wrote another future-set novel near the end of his
life, Toward the End of Time, 1997, in which the elderly
protagonist and his wife appear to be thinly, even ironically disguised
portraits or caricatures of Updike and his wife in a vaguely postapocalyptic
world bearing a close resemblance to the Updikes’ suburban home in Beverly
Farms, Massachusetts. Is it coincidental that Updike’s first novel and his near
to last so mirror each other? Both have theological concern and both are
executed with the beautifully wrought, precise prose for which Updike is
acclaimed. But no one could mistake Toward
the End of Time, with its bitter, self-chiding humor and tragically
diminished perspectives with the work of fiction of a reverent and hopeful
young writer.
4. Love at First Sight
In literary inspiration, as
in life, such a blow to one’s self-sufficiency and self-composure can have
profound and vigorous consequences. For here’s another sort of inspiration
which we might call the encounter with the other.
He had been a highly
successful young writer with his first two novels quickly written in his early
twenties following his seafaring adventures in the South Seas: Typee: A Peep at
Polynesian Life, 1846, and Omoo: A Narrative of Adventures in the South
Seas, 1847. Now he was working energetically on a third seafaring
novel narrated in a similar storytelling voice, this time set on a New England
whaling ship called the Pequod. Herman Melville as a young man had sailed with a New
Bedford whaler into the South Pacific where after eighteen months he’d jumped
ship in a South Seas port. Going to sea for Melville was “the beginning of my life.”
While Melville was working
industriously on this new novel when a book of short stories came in the house,
Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Mosses from an Old Manse, which had been published a few
years before, in 1846. Melville at thirty-one, younger than Hawthorne by
fifteen years, read this collection of anecdotal and allegorical tales with
mounting astonishment. There was the affable, sunny Hawthorne, as he seems to
have been generally known, but there was the other darker and deeper Hawthorne.
“It is that blackness in Hawthorne that so fixes and fascinates me,” as
Melville would say.
Soon Melville was moved to
write the first thoughtful appreciation of Hawthorne, “Hawthorne and His
Mosses,” 1850, in which Melville speculates “that this great power of blackness
in Hawthorne derives its force from its appeal to that Calvinistic sense of
innate depravity and original sin from whose visitations no deeply thinking
mind is always and wholly free.” Hawthorne’s influence upon Melville was
immediate and profound. What would have been another seafaring adventure tale,
very likely another bestseller, was transformed by the enchanted Melville into
the intricately plotted, highly symbolic and poetic Moby-Dick, the greatest of nineteenth-century American novels, as
it is one of the strangest American novels.
Hawthorne seems to have
entered Melville’s life at about chapter twenty-three of this new novel, transforming
its tone and ambition. That is so bizarre and so
wonderful if you’re a writer yourself to sort of fantasize that something’s
going to come in and completely shake you up right in the middle of your novel
and make it much better. Again one is moved to think of a flammable
material into which a struck match has been cast with extraordinary incendiary
results, for Melville was consumed by Hawthorne’s prose style as well as
Hawthorne’s tragic vision, which he was to align with the Shakespeare of the
great tragedies and their great soliloquies.
The result is a novel that
is unwieldy, extravagant, and unique. Unsurprisingly dedicated to Hawthorne “in
token of my admiration for his genius.” Moby-Dick was published in 1851, which is the year of Hawthorne’s The House of the Seven Gables but only
one year after Hawthorne’s The Scarlet
Letter. For Melville this homage to the older Hawthorne seems to
have constituted the great passion of his life.
From a letter to
Hawthorne in 1851: “I felt pantheist then. Your heart beat in my ribs and mine
in yours and both in God’s. A sense of unspeakable security is in me in this
moment on account of your having understood the book. Whence come you
Hawthorne, by what right do you drink from the flagon of life? And when I put
it to my lips, lo, they are yours and not mine. I feel that the Godhead is
broken up like the bread at the supper, and we are the pieces. Hence this
infinite fraternity of feeling. The very fingers that now guide this pen are not
precisely the same that just took it up and put it on the paper. Lord, when we
will be done changing? It’s a long stage and no end in sight and the night
coming and the body cold, but with you as a passenger I am content and can be
happy. I shall leave the world, I feel, with more satisfaction for having come
to know you. Knowing you persuades me more than the Bible of our immortality.” That’s
such a beautiful letter.
It’s a bitter irony and
must have been a considerable shock to the ecstatic young Melville that Moby-Dick, in which he had poured his
soul, was to most readers of the era, including even educated reviewers,
unreadable. A great classic we are accustomed to consider it today and yet a
crushing failure to the young author, who had realized only $556 from
royalties. Reviews were generally negative, some of them savagely negative,
even in the UK, where Melville’s early South Seas adventure romances were
overnight bestsellers.
It was such bad luck that
Melville’s British publisher brought out the novel before his American
publisher, and had not had time to incorporate Melville’s new title, Moby-Dick, which was to have replaced The Whale. Worse luck that the British
publisher failed to include the last page of the novel. (laughter) Which
includes the epilogue, which is rather important to the novel. In fact, some of
the reviewers made fun of the fact that, “Well, how could this person be
telling this story when the Pequod
went down and everyone drowned?” You know, sort of ridiculing the writer. And
some of the front matter of the manuscript was, I don’t know why, was moved to
the back of the book and became a very unwieldy appendix. Who knows what
happens? It was the case at this time that British publishers could remove from
the manuscript anything politically questionable or “obscene” not only without
conferring with the author but without informing him. So
things have improved a little since then.
On the whole, American
reviewers followed British reviewers. Crushing opinions of the novel. Not one
American reviewer took time to note that the American edition differed
significantly from the British, so probably they didn’t read it. Like merely
human-size harpooners surrounding a mighty Leviathan, such crude reviewers had
the power to kill sales of Melville’s books and destroy the energies and hope
of Melville’s youth. He continued to write after Moby-Dick but never regained his own optimism. Even his attempt to
cultivate a new career lecturing to lyceums ended when he couldn’t resist
mocking his audience, the quasi-intellectualism and pretension of the lyceum
circuit. I have to really admire him for that—having failed completely writing
a great novel he then couldn’t help but mock his audiences so he soon had no
invitations. He had integrity, I guess. “Dollars damn me,” Melville said. He
had not enough of them.
By the time Melville died
in 1891, even his early bestsellers were out of print and his name was
forgotten. The account that Melville’s name was printed in the New York Times obituary as Henry
Melville is evidently not true, but evidently a Hiram Melville seems to have crept into
print a few days later. So I don’t know where Hiram Melville came from. Both
his sons had predeceased him, which would have been a terrible tragedy, the
younger, Malcolm, by his own hand. His marriage seemed to have been difficult.
His wife’s genteel parents kept urging her to leave him on the grounds that he
was a heavy drinker and insane.
It is significant that
Melville’s final work of fiction, the posthumously published novella Billy Budd, is a starkly imagined
allegory of innocence, evil, and tragic atonement so Hawthornian in its prose
and vision it’s as if Melville’s beloved collaborator had assisted him one
final time. Inspiration in this instance was ravishing, irresistible, a
double-edged sword. In the short run it led to what seems unmistakably like
failure in the author’s tragic experience but in the longer run great and
abiding posthumous success.
5. She was stalled in a new
ambitious novel, her seventh, that was to be a “study of provincial English
life.” Her most recent novel, Felix Holt, with a similar ambition, had been published two years before
and had had disappointing sales. She knew the setting well, in fact intimately,
the Midlands of England in the 1830s. But after a desultory beginning in 1869, Middlemarch was set aside for a year following domestic
distractions. Uncharacteristically, the highly professional fifty-year-old George Eliot hadn’t been writing on the new novel with
much enthusiasm or inspiration.
But then, in May 1870,
Eliot and her companion George Henry Lewes visited Oxford, where they had lunch
with the rector of Lincoln College and his (conspicuously) younger wife,
neither of whom they knew well. The Pattisons were perceived as an oddly
matched husband and wife, not only because Francis Pattison was twenty-seven
years younger than Mark Pattison, but because while Francis was beautiful,
lively, and charming, Mark was “a wizened little man, without evident charm,
prone to depression.” A highly private, reclusive scholar of classics and
religion.
Clearly this marriage among
unequals made a powerful impression on George Eliot, who shortly thereafter
began Middlemarch anew, this time
opening with a vivid portrait of Miss Dorothea Brooke, a beautiful,
intelligent, and idealistic young woman who makes the grievous error of
marrying a much older clergyman/scholar, the pedantic, self-pitying Edward Casaubon.
Just as the rector’s young wife Francis had hoped to assist him in his
scholarly work, so too Eliot’s Miss Brooke hopes to assist her husband in his
quixotic effort to write “the key to all mythologies.” Eventually Francis Pattison
would leave her dull, embittered husband to live in close proximity to a male
friend in Europe. After years of stoic resignation as Mrs. Edward Casaubon,
Dorothea becomes a widow and remarries this time a far more suitable man. As Casaubon
never completes “the key to all mythologies,” so Mark Pattison never completed
his work of scholarly historical ambition.
Deciding to begin Middlemarch not as she’d originally
planned with the young physician Lydgate and the Vincy family into which he
marries but rather with Dorothea was indeed inspired. For with this stroke one
of the great themes of Middlemarch is
forged, the devastation of youthful female idealism under the heavy hand of
patriarchal convention. Without the impetuous but always sympathetic Dorothea,
who like her American counterpart Isabel Archer of Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady makes a very bad
mistake in marriage for which she pays dearly. It’s difficult to imagine what
Eliot would have made of more conventional characters of Middlemarch. But it’s not surprising that George Eliot would never
admit, or rather, she would always deny, having modeled her fictional married
couple on the rector of Lincoln College and his young wife. Writers would far
rather have us believe that they have imagined or invented rather than taken
from life. In Eliot’s case in particular with her heightened sense of moral
responsibility she would have felt vulnerable to charges of having exploited
the Pattisons, who were to a degree her and Lewes’s friends.
“Try to be one of those on
whom nothing is lost.” This famous admonition of Henry James suggests the
nature of James’s own deeply curious, ceaselessly alert, and speculative
personality. His inspirations were myriad and often sprang from social
situations. Typically for one who had dined out virtually every night of his
adult life. The most frequently reported of these is
James’s inspiration for The Turn of the
Screw, which he records in his notebook for January 1895: “Note here the
ghost story told me at Abingdon by the Archbishop of Canterbury, the story of
the young children left to the care of servants at an old country house through
the death presumably of parents, the servants, wicked and depraved, corrupt and
depraved the children. The servants die, the story is vague about the way of
it, and their apparitions’ figures return to haunt the house and the children
to whom they seem to beckon. It is all obscure and imperfect, the picture, the
story, but there is a suggestion of a strangely gruesome effect in it. The story
to be told by an outside spectator, observer.”
The “strangely gruesome
effect” that most intrigued James was the presence of not one but two ghosts
appearing to not one but two innocent children, thus The Turn of the Screw. It can’t have been accidental that the
archbishop’s tale gripped James when by his account in his early fifties he was
severely depressed following the public failure of his play Guy Domville in 1895, for which James
had had great hopes. Is it a surprise to learn that Henry James, the very
avatar of novelistic integrity, the darling of the New Critics, in fact had
wanted badly to become a popular playwright and dared to fantasize success in
the West End. Imagine poor James’s grief when at the opening of the play, that
is at the curtain on the opening night, a section of the audience cruelly
jeered him as he stood onstage. I think they called “Author! Author!” so that
he came out and then they jeered him and laughed at him.
In this state of mind, the
emotionally fragile James was particularly susceptible to the eerie hauntedness
of the archbishop’s story. He let it gestate for more than two years and then
began to write what would be The Turn of
the Screw, in as entertainingly dramatic and suspenseful way as he knew
how, to acquire, as he hoped, a new audience in the United States, where sales
of his books had been languishing. Like so much that seems to spring at us from
an accidental encounter, The Turn of the
Screw had a powerful if perhaps unconscious significance. And the to author,
who claimed in a letter to a friend that while he was correcting proofs of the
story he was “so frightened I was afraid to go upstairs to bed.”
What would have been a
disadvantage for a certain sort of writer for whom the autobiographical is
primary was for James an enormous advantage. Out of the emotional isolation of
his bachelor life—imagined so beautifully by Colm Tóibin in his novel The Master as a life of joyless
restraint and denial—James was free to imagine the intense intimate lives of
others. The fascination of the governess of The
Turn of the Screw for sinister, sexual Peter Quint, for instance, is given
a particular charge by James’s particular imagination. Homoerotic energies so
powerfully repressed they emerge—they erupt as agents of unspeakable evil. In
this elegantly constructed gothic tale, much is ambiguous, but the atmosphere
of yearning, of desperate, humiliating yearning is unmistakable. We feel that
the emotionally starved young governess is a form of the author himself,
helpless in her infatuation with the ghosts of her own imagination and forced
by this imagination to enter the tragic adult world of loss.
6. “Where do you get your
ideas?”
The question is frequently
asked and rarely answered with any degree of conviction or sincerity and rarely
is the answer “a dream.” Written when Katherine
Mansfield was thirty, her short, elliptical story “Sun and Moon” seems to have sprung
virtually complete out of a dream. Lyric and fluid like ice melting, a
shimmering, impressionistic work of fiction, “Sun and Moon” suggests the
haunting evanescence of a dream. In her journal for February 10, 1918, Mansfield
wrote, “I dreamed a short story last night, even down to its name, which was ‘Sun
and Moon.’ It was very light. I dreamed it all, about children. I got up at
6:30 and wrote a note or two because I knew it would fade. I didn’t dream that
I’d read it, no, I was in it, part of it, and it played around invisible me.
But the hero was not more than five. In my dream I saw a supper table with the
eyes of five. It was awfully queer, especially a plate of half-melted ice
cream.”
Mansfield’s story, for all
its delicate filigree, is a chilly prophecy of the destruction of childhood
innocence. The “plate of half-melted ice cream” is a little ice cream house
that has melted away among the ruins of an adults’ coarse party from which
children are excluded. That is such a beautiful story, I recommend you all to
read it if you don’t know it, and that it sprang almost complete from a dream I
just think is really amazing. This actually is so rare. It virtually never
happens that one has a dream and transcribes it and so beautifully.
But my subject in this
section is dreams.
The challenge was to write
a ghost story, so Lord Byron had suggested to his friends with whom he was
traveling in Italy at the summer of 1816, and so Mary Wollstonecraft
Godwin Shelley, eighteen at the time, recounts a nightmare she had that very
night. “I saw the pale student of unhallowed arts
kneeling beside the thing he had put together. I saw the hideous phantasm of a
man stretched out and then on the working of some powerful engine show signs of
life. His success would terrify the artist. He would rush away hoping this
thing would subside into dead matter. He sleeps but he is awakened. He opens
his eyes. Behold! The horrid thing stands at his bedside, opening his curtains.”
Here is a dream vision of
singular vividness and strangeness. It would seem almost by the young writer’s
account that the allegorical horror story, more a parable, had not been
imagined into being by the author herself. Rather, Mary Shelley is the passive
observer. The vision seems to come from a source not herself. Yet, we are led
to think, knowing something of the biographical context of the creation of Frankenstein, it can hardly have been an
accident that a tale of a monstrous birth was written by a very young woman who
had had two babies with her mercurial and unpredictable poet lover Percy
Shelley, one of whom had died, and she was at this time very much pregnant
again and they were not yet married.
Following the dream, Mary
Shelley spoke of being possessed by her subject. At first she thought her lurid
gothic tale would be just a short story, but the manuscript evolved, with some
help, collaboration from Shelley. The work became a curious, heavily Miltonic
allegorical romance. Ultimately it was rejected by both
Shelley’s and Byron’s publishers, who knew that the author was a young woman.
But it was finally published anonymously in 1818 when the author was
twenty-one. Since then, Frankenstein
has never been out of print and is surely the most extraordinary novel ever
written by an eighteen-year-old girl in thrall to a brilliant but doomed Romantic
poet. Today Frankenstein isn’t identified as
the doctor creator of the monster but the monster himself. And Mary
Shelley’s brilliantly deformed creation has been detached from the author, an
iconic figure seemingly self-generated, one of the great, potent symbols of humankind’s
predilection for self-destruction, as significant in our time as in 1818.
7. Social injustice as
inspiration
The wish to bear witness to
those unable to speak for themselves as a consequence of poverty or illness or
political circumstance, which includes gender and ethnic identity, the wish to
conjoin narrative fiction with the didactic and the preacherly, above all the
wish to move others to a course of action, the basis of political propaganda
art. Here we have such works as Harriet Beecher
Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Charles
Dickens’s Hard Times, Stephen Crane’s
Maggie: A Girl of the Streets, Upton
Sinclair’s The Jungle.
I say parenthetically, Sinclair, an avid lifelong socialist, wrote nearly one
hundred books of which the majority are novels involving politics and social
conditions in the United States. Among these are Oil!, from which the acclaimed 2007 There Will Be Blood was adapted and Lanny Budd series of eleven
novels, each a bestseller when it appeared, and his novel Dragon’s Teeth was awarded a 1943 Pulitzer Prize.
Frank Norris’s
McTeague and The Octopus are savage critiques of rapacious American capitalism.
Class warfare might be identified of the groundwork of the great novels of
Theodore Dreiser, Sister Carrie and An American Tragedy, and John Dos Passos’s
hugely influential USA. In
the era of Dreiser and Dos Passos there were few women writing of life in urban
ghettos with the intelligence and emotional power of Anzia Yezierska, whose Bread Givers, Hungry Hearts, and How I
Found America chronicle the lives of Jewish immigrants of New York City’s
Lower East Side with unflinching candor.
This is the sort
of socially conscious, realistic fiction that Nabokov scorned as vulgar— “Mediocrity
thrives on ideas,” said Nabokov—and of which Oscar Wilde would have said with a
sneer, “No artist has
ethical sympathies. All art is quite useless.” Still, mainstream American literature with its predilection for
liberal sympathies with the disenfranchised and impoverished, the great effort
of the nineteenth- and twentieth-century novel to draw attention to social
injustice and inequality remains the most attractive of literary traditions even in
our self-consciously postmodernist era. In Toni
Morrison’s Beloved, for
instance, slave narrative sources have been appropriated and refashioned into
an exquisitely wrought art that is both morally focused and aesthetically
ambitious. E. L. Doctorow’s great subject has been the volatile issues of class
and race in America from his early novel The
Book of Daniel, which imagined the—reconstructs the lives of the atom bomb
spies Ethel and Julius Rosenberg through Ragtime,
Loon Lake, World’s Fair, and The March.
Doctorow’s more recent novels have been shaped also by the tradition of oral
histories. As Doctorow has said, “Every writer speaks for a community.”
No one has more explicitly
acknowledged his political moral intention in writing a work of fiction than
Russell Banks in his envoi to the novel Continental
Drift, which concerns itself, like most of Banks’s fiction, with
working-class and disenfranchised Americans caught up in the malaise of a
rapacious capitalist economy. This is the very end of the novel. “And so ends
the story of Robert Raymond DuBois. A decent man, but in all the important ways
an ordinary man. One could say a common man. Even so, his bright particularity,
having been delivered over to the obscurity of death, meant something larger
than itself. Knowledge of the facts of Bob’s life and death changes nothing in
the world. Us celebrating his life and grieving over his death however will.
Sabotage and subversion then, are this book’s intentions. Go, my book, and
destroy the world as it is.”
8. James
Joyce once remarked that Ulysses
was for him essentially a way of “capturing the speech of my father and my
father’s friends.” An astonishing statement when you consider the complexity of
Ulysses, but one which any writer can
understand. So much of literature springs from a wish
to assuage homesickness, a desire to commemorate places, people, childhoods,
families, and tribal rituals, ways of life, purely the primal inspiration of
all. The wish in some artists, clearly the necessity, to capture in the
quasi-permanence of art that which is perishable in life. Though the great
modernists—Joyce, Proust, Yeats, Lawrence, Woolf, Faulkner—were revolutionaries
in technique, their subjects were intimately bound up with their own lives and
their own regions. The modernist is one who is likely to use his intimate life as
material for his art, shaping the ordinary into the extraordinary. The
confessional poets—Robert Lowell, John Berryman, W. D. Snodgrass, Anne Sexton,
Sylvia Plath, and to a degree Elizabeth Bishop—rendered their lives as art as
if self-hypnotized. Of our contemporaries, writers as seemingly diverse as Saul
Bellow, Philip Roth, and John Updike created distinguished careers out of their
own lives, often returned to familiar subjects, lovingly and tirelessly
reimagining their own pasts as if mesmerized by the wonder of self. In his
last, most obsessively self-reflective work, Ada or Ardor:
A Family Chronicle, Vladimir Nabokov invokes
the intense claustrophobia of a “superimperial couple” who not only inhabit the
same psychic realm but boldly and audaciously are intimately related, sister
and brother. Set in a whimsical counterworld called Antiterra, Nabokov’s commemoration
of self is fondly and literally incestuous. And again by one of those amazing
coincidences, I was just looking at some of the work cards of Ada or Ardor in the Berg Collection. I
looked at the very first paragraph, which is very famous, where he sort of
turns Tolstoy on his head, “Happy families are dissimilar; it’s unhappy
families that are all alike.” And Nabokov, as you know, wrote, he wrote in
wonderful clear handwriting on these little notecards, it’s quite amazing. No
writer has been more mesmerized by the circumstances of his own exceptional
life than our greatest Transcendentalist poet, Henry David
Thoreau, who wrote exclusively and obsessively of himself as an
adventurer in a circumscribed world, “I have traveled much in Concord,” as
Hawthorne famously said. Walden is
the publicly revered text which we all know and some of us have taught many
times, but it’s actually Thoreau’s journal, in which he wrote daily from 1837
to 1861, eventually accumulating some seven thousand pages, that is the more
remarkable document, as the Thoreau is the most acute of observers of nature
and of human nature. The analyst of self in the Whitmanesque sense, the self
that is all selves. Here is the essential Thoreau: “I stand in awe of my body.
This matter to which I am bound, it becomes so strange to me. I fear not
spirits, ghosts of which I am one, but I fear bodies. Talk of mysteries! Think
of our life in nature. Daily to be shown matter, to come into contact with it.
Rocks, trees, wind on our cheeks, the solid earth, the actual world, the
commonsense contact. Who are we, where are we?”
9. This is almost the end.
The early Surrealists considered
the world a vast forest of signs to be interpreted by the individual artist.
Beneath its apparent disorder, the visual world contains messages and symbols.
Like a dream? Is the world a collective dream? Not the hypnotic spell of the
individual artist’s childhood, family, or regional life, as in the inspiration
of commemoration, but rather in its antithesis, the impersonal, the chance, the
found.
The Surrealist
photographer Man Ray wandered Parisian streets with his camera, anticipating
nothing and leaving himself open to availability or chance. The most striking
Surrealist images were ordinary images made strange by being decontextualized. “Beautiful
as a chance encounter of a sewing machine and an umbrella on a dissection
table.” When photography began to be an art that didn’t depend upon careful
staging in a studio or even outdoors, it was ideally suited to the caprices of
opportunity: the artist wanders into the world armed with just his camera,
freed from the confines of the predictable and controlled, as in the work of Cartier-Bresson, Weegee, Bruce Davidson, Garry
Winogrand, the newly discovered Vivian Maier, Diane Arbus, whose
strategy was to “go where I’ve never been,” among others.
Literature is not a medium
that leads itself well to the surrealist adventure of availability or chance.
Even radically experimental fiction needs to be fueled by some strategy of
causation, otherwise readers won’t trouble to turn pages. Unlike most visual
art, which can be experienced in a single gaze, fiction is a matter of
subsequent and successive gazes, mimicking chronological time.
There is a minor tradition
of found poems discovered in unpoetic places, like newspapers, magazines,
advertisements, and graffiti. Sometimes instruction manuals and brochures.
Language appropriated and refashioned into a recognizable poetic form.
Virtually all poets have experimented with found poems at some point in their
career, sometimes appropriating entire passages of prose and more often
appropriating a few lines and constructing a poem around these lines, as in
work by Howard Nemerov, Charles Olsen, Charles Reznikoff, Annie Dillard, and
some others. Found poetry is usually meant to be witty or satirical or
mordantly ironic as Hart Seely’s appropriated material titled Pieces of Intelligence: The Existential Poetry of
Donald H. Rumsfeld, 2003. Here’s a complete poem by Rumsfeld/Seely:
“The Unknown”
As we know,
There are known knowns.
There are things we know we
know.
We also know
There are known unknowns.
That is to say,
We know there are some
things
We do not know.
But there are also unknown unknowns,
The ones we don’t know
We don’t know.”
(laughter) It’s actually
quite profound.
So this is my conclusion.
If inspiration is many-faceted, out of what human need or hunger does
inspiration spring? That is to say, what is the motive for metaphor? It seems
clear that Homo sapiens is the only species to have anything like human
language and certainly the only species to have written languages or histories.
Our sense of ourselves is based upon linguistic constructs inherited or
remembered and regarded as precious or at least valuable. Our sacred texts are
presumed to have been dictated by gods. And sometimes we are fired with
murderous rage if the texts are challenged or mocked, or if our creator’s name
is uttered in the wrong way or by the wrong lips.
Perhaps literature in its
broader sense, incorporating centuries, millennia, is a consequence of myriad
individual inspirations across myriad cultures, relates to us as that part of
the human brain called the hippocampus relates to memory. The hippocampus is a
small, seahorse-shaped part of the brain necessary for long-term storage of
factual and experiential memory, though it’s not the site of such storage.
Short-term memory is transient. Long-term memory can prevail for many decades.
The last thing you will able to retrieve in your memory may very well be the
first thing that came to reside there, a glimpse of your young mother’s face, a
confused blur of a childhood room, a lullaby, a caressing voice. If the
hippocampus is injured or atrophied, there will be no further storage of memory
in the brain, there will be no new memory.
I have come to think that
art is the formal commemoration of life in its variety. The novel for instance
is “historic” in its embodiment in a specific place and time and its suggestion
that there is meaning to our actions. It is virtually impossible to create a
work of art without an inherent meaning, even if the meaning is presented as
mysterious and unknowable. Without the stillness, thoughtfulness, and depth of
art and without the ceaseless moral rigors of art, we would have no shared
culture, no collective memory, as if memory is destroyed in the human brain,
our identities corrode, and we are no one. We’ve become merely a shifting
succession of impressions attached to no fixed source. As it is, in
contemporary societies where so much concentration is focused on social media,
insatiable in its fleeting interest, the stillness and thoughtfulness of a more
permanent art feels threatened.
As human beings, we crave
meaning, which only art can provide. But the social media provide no meaning,
only the succession of fleeting impression whose underlying principle may
simply be to urge us to consume products. The motive for a metaphor then is a
motive for survival as a species and as a culture and as individuals. Thank
you.
(applause)
I thank you very much. So I’m
very happy to try to answer any questions you might have. This is the most
exciting part of the evening for me.
Q: Hello. Thank you. Early
on, you quoted Plato saying that the only poem the poet can write is the one
that the muse pushes them to. And I perhaps simply misheard, perhaps I was
primed for puns per the opening, but I heard “the only poem is the one that the
news pushes him to write,” and I laughed to myself and then I thought you’re
very active on Twitter, and you’re very engaged with the news, which I think
have, what your beautiful phrase, “humankind’s predilection for
self-destruction,” there’s so much of it and I just wonder what role the news
plays in your muse.
Oates: Well, it’s—you mean
news?
Q: Yup, like CNN, Buzzfeed,
politics.
Oates: Well, I think of
art, I think of particularly something like the novel, that is really sort of
the consequence of a lot of strategy and thinking. I think of art as
quasi-permanent, obviously it’s not going to be completely permanent, and the
other is sort of social conversation that you might have. Maybe we used to have
these conversations over the telephone or maybe we wrote letters and now the
social media do that, but I don’t really think—that’s sort of a fleeting, it’s
sort of like something that’s always moving, whereas a novel is something much
more solid, so I’m not really sure that there’s any connection between the two.
People often ask me what the relationship is between my teaching and my
writing, because I’ve been teaching for many years. And the teaching to me is a
social and sort of stimulating experience that opens me to do new ideas and new
people and personalities and so forth, but I wouldn’t say that it has any
direct effect on the actual writing. The writing takes place in some solitary
place in the soul. But I thought that the whole Platonic—the admonition that
the poet has to be—so much noise in the room. It’s all these little things.
Q: We’re very social.
Oates: Maybe it’s just in
my ears that I’m hearing all the sounds. The idea that the poet has to be
banished from the Republic, that’s just so outrageous I think and
unconscionable, but absolutely understandable because tyrants, and people who
are not even tyrants, want to censor, they send into exile, they would put in
prison, they would probably execute or torture people who disagreed with them. And
we have that today even in the liberal democracies, this yearning to censor a
dissident voice and it’s so clearly set forth in Plato. Thank you.
Q: Thank you.
Q: Hi. First of all, I
loved to hear your coverage of so many literary topics and writers and it’s
just wonderful an English student, but I was wondering about your thoughts on,
I guess for lack of a better word, uninspiration. Kind of the moments when
inspiration is lacking and if that kind of makes the inspiration more, I guess
in your own personal experience and maybe in some of your research if that
makes this inspiration so valuable is that kind of lacking of inspiration.
Oates: Well, Virginia Woolf
has this wonderful part of—I think it’s in her diary. Where she talks about
moments of being in contrast to ordinary times. Because most of our life is
just sort of the ordinary life that we have to life. You know, you’re making
dinner or you’re doing something that’s mundane, but once in a while there’s
this illumination, a moment of being where you sort of see something, or you’re
taken by surprise, or you hear something. James Joyce spoke of “the epiphany.”
I think that these moments of inspiration are not that common. You know, they’re
really not that common. How many times would Henry James have heard a story as
powerful as the story that would turn into The
Turn of the Screw? I mean, for some people, it’s like lightning striking. And
it’s not very frequent, but you can go out and look for it.
Because one of the topics
of inspiration is the Surrealist idea of going out into the world to find
something bizarre or unpredictable where you decide that you’re just going to
go out in the world, they had their camera, but one could just have a notebook.
James Joyce did something of that with his notebook and his wandering around
Dublin. It necessitated going into many pubs, for Joyce, (laughter) and he
would be drinking of course, but he’d be sort of listening to the voices, you
know the whole of the music of Ulysses
had a lot of the pubs and the lilting Irish accents, and the voices are somehow
not exactly discernible but you hear the music. So if you’re feeling
uninspired, probably the best thing to do is sort of shake yourself up and to
go out and look for something that will enter you like a lightning bolt.
Q: Thank you.
Q: When you write, how do
you manage your self-criticism and reach the state of unconsciousness where you’re
able to write in the freest form?
Oates: Well, I have to say,
despite what some critics have said, I’ve never written in an unconscious
state. (laughter) It would be really so exciting and wonderful to kind of wake
up from a blackout. Well, it’s a good question and I think the more you outline
and the more you think about what you’re doing. I like to go for long walks, I
like to run, and I sort of show myself a kind of cinematic working out of the
chapter like a little movie. I think the more you do of that and the more it
becomes part of your memory, when you come back to work, you can write quickly.
But if you’re sitting at your computer and trying to write, that’s the hardest
of all, it’s most dispiriting and paralyzing, I think it’s not a good idea.
However, as I said, if you go out meditating and think through what you’re
going to write, when you come back you can write kind of quickly. It’s not
unconsciously but it’s quickly.
Q: Yes, thank you.
Q: You talked about memory
being attached to the self and as more and more of our experiences are through
screens basically where people are offloading their memory to their digital
beings, what do you think it means to the self?
Oates: That’s a very
profound question. I have no idea how to answer that. I think it’s absolutely
fascinating. You know, I was reading Nabokov recently, the idea of memory,
people inhabiting time and the most—the greatest adventure for the writer is to
be as I suggested a kind of time traveler, where you go back in time to an
earlier stage of your own life, perhaps when you were a child, you have the
child’s perspective, but now you have the adult perspective, so the kind of
two, a double perspective there that gives you some detachment, but apart from
that, I don’t really know, it would be a very interesting subject to talk about
at length. Thank you. Maybe one more question.
Q: Hi. I was wondering if
you could share how often you get that lightning bolt, (laughter) and also if
you could perhaps share the last time it occurred.
Oates: Oh, well, that’s—I
should have brought in one—I do have a found poem, I don’t have it with me
actually. I did once find a poem, a found poetry is a strange sort of minor
tradition in poetry where you’re not looking for anything but you see something
that could be rendered into poetry. And I did have that experience. Well, I can
only remember a few times in my life. I do a lot of thinking and working with
an image, but I wouldn’t say that it was instantaneous. It’s more like I get an
image in my mind and then I meditate upon it, and I think about a place. To me,
the setting is very important. I can’t write anything without knowing where it
takes place. And my long novels are all set in very, very vividly described
places, often in Upstate New York, because to me I have to remake the world in
the prose and then the story takes place in there, and so somehow between that
and creating the characters is a sort of time of gestation, I think.
But if you take an image
from a dream and meditate on it, something will come of that because it has
some emotional resonance that nobody else would understand but you would understand.
Our dreams are filled with these strange images and strange things, but mostly
we let them fade away, but if you seize one of them that was really mysterious
and disturbing and just thought about it, obviously you could construct a story
around that, you could construct a work of art around that because it has meaning
to you but most people can’t do that or they don’t want to do that, or it’s
actually it’s an effort—
Q: Why do most people feel
like they can’t do that?
Oates: Well, I did once
write a whole novel constructed around a dream and it was very, very difficult,
because the image that comes to you is mysterious and you can’t—you can’t
really figure out what it is. It’s like getting a strange mineral that’s
glowing, you know, that sort of fell down, and it’s Kryptonite or something,
you’re sort of walking and you’re sort of looking at this strange thing. You
know it has meaning, but you don’t know what it is exactly. So you’re kind of
frustrated by it, but you don’t want to throw it away because you know it’s
valuable.
So I wrote a whole novel
called Mudwoman out of a dream that I
had, it was so vivid, so much more real to me than most of my life. Because
these dreams that we have sometimes are really vivid, and they stand out in a
numinous way, more than most of our lives, as Virginia Woolf said about moments
of being, but I was haunted by that for years, and finally when I constructed a
whole novel around it, it takes place like on page 300. You know, it wasn’t the
beginning of the novel, I had to construct a whole world around it that would
then present that in a coherent way, and it was really—it was a great effort,
you know.
It’s much easier I think to
start off with a story and with characters and have an outline for a novel,
rather than begin with the images, but when you look at a great painter like
van Gogh and see how he’s working with images and how passionate the paint is
on his canvases, you understand that another artist seeing the same scene would
paint something very flat and pretty, or, you know, attractive, but van Gogh
brings to it this intense passion, almost the passion of madness, and the paint’s
thick, you know, those are very, very powerful, so obviously he was terribly
haunted by some of these images, and that I would suppose is what makes him a
great artist and somebody else is just painting pretty little watercolors and
things like that, but to take to the image to some extreme.
I can give you one example,
though it’s getting a little late and many of you might know this. When William
Faulkner was quite young, in his late twenties, he was haunted by a dream of
looking through a window into a room where there was a coffin. He imagined a
little girl climbing a tree and the little girl looks in the window, she’s not
supposed to look, it’s like the forbidden fact of death for children. That was
the haunting image that began The Sound
and the Fury, and when you read The
Sound and the Fury, the little girl, Caddy, is the one who climbs up the
tree, and Quentin is on the ground, you know, he doesn’t want her to go up, it’s
one of the key scenes.
But that was generated, the
whole novel was generated by that dream. It’s so touching when you learn that
Faulkner’s little girl, little daughter had died, a couple of years before, I
think, so you can see how the personal, deeply wounded personal history went
into that dream, and then the dream goes into the novel. But the novel The Sound and the Fury, as some of you might
know, was written over a period of time, it was a difficult novel, and it’s a
brilliant novel, it’s probably one of the very great novels in the English
language, but it came out of that dream, so if Faulkner hadn’t had the dream, I
mean, I hate to say it, but maybe if his daughter hadn’t died, you know, he
might not have written that novel.
The other day I was
teaching Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried, remember
that great story, it’s a novel and it’s a short story, I was teaching it at
Princeton, and all the students are so admiring of it, that’s a great short
story, set in the—during the Vietnam War, and I said to the students, “Would
you like to have written that story?” And they said, “Yes, yes,” they all
would. And I said, “Would you like to have lived the experience that would
allow you to write this story?” And they all were completely, they wouldn’t
want to do that, and you can’t blame them.
Q: Thank you.
(applause)
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