24008084 the Art of Literature and Commonsense

8/13/2019 24008084 the Art of Literature and Commonsense

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The Art of Literature and Commonsense

Now and then, in the course of events, when the flow of time turns into a muddy torrentand history floods our cellars, earnest people are apt to examine the interrelation between a

writer and the national or universal community; and writers themselves begin to worry

about their obligations. I am speaking of an abstract type of writer. Those whom we canimagine concretely, especially those on elderly side, are too vain of their gifts or too

reconciled with mediocrity to bother about obligations. They see very clearly, in the middle

distance, what fate promises themthe marble nook or the plaster niche. ut let us take awriter who does wonder and worry. !ill he come out of his shell to inspect the sky" !hat

about leadership" !ill he, should he, be a good mixer"

There is a lot to be said for mingling now and then with the crowd, and he must be apretty foolish and shortsighted author who renounces the treasures of observation, humor,

and pity which may be professionally obtained through closer contact with his fellow men.

#ikewise it may be a good cure for certain pu$$led authors, groping for what they hope are

morbid themes, to charm themselves back into the sweet normality of their littlehometowns or to converse in apostrophic dialect with husky men of the soil, if such exist.

ut taken all in all, I should still recommend, not as a writer%s prison but merely as a fixedaddress, the much abused ivory tower, provided of course it has a telephone and an elevator

&ust in case one might like to dash down to buy the evening paper or have a friend come up

for a game of chess, the latter being somehow suggested by the form and texture of one%scarved abode. It is thus a pleasant and cool place with a grand circular view and plenty of

books and lots of useful gadgets. ut before building oneself an ivory tower one must take

the unavoidable trouble of killing 'uite a few elephants. The fine specimen I intend to bag

for the benefit of those who might like to see how it is done happens to be a ratherincredible cross between an elephant and a horse. (is name iscommonsense.

In the fall of )*)) Noah !ebster, working steadily through the +%s, definedcommonsense as good sound ordinary sense- free from emotional bias or intellectual

subtlety- horse sense. This is rather a flattering view of the creature, for the biography of

commonsense makes nasty reading. +ommonsense has trampled down many a gentlegenius whose eyes had delighted in a too early moonbeam of some too early truth;

commonsense has back/kicked dirt at the loveliest of 'ueer paintings because a blue tree

seemed madness to its well/meaning hoof; commonsense has prompted ugly but strong

nations to crush their fair but frail neighbors the moment a gap in history offered a chancethat it would have been ridiculous not to exploit. +ommonsense is fundamentally immoral,

for the natural morals of mankind are as irrational as the magic rites that they evolved since

the immemorial dimness of time. +ommonsense at its worst is sense made common, and soeverything is comfortably cheapened by its touch. +ommonsense is s'uare whereas all the

most essential visions and values of life are beautifully round, as round as the universe or

the eyes of a child at its first circus show.

It is instructive to think that there is not a single person in this room, or for that

matter in any room in the world, who, at some nicely chosen point in historical space/time

would not be put to death there and then, here and now, by a commonsensical ma&ority in

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righteous rage. The color of one%s creed, neckties, eyes, thoughts, manners, speech, is sure

to meet somewhere in time or space with a fatal ob&ection from a mob that hates that

particular tone. 0nd the more brilliant, the more unusual the man, the nearer he is to thestake. Stranger always rhymes with danger. The meek prophet, the enchanter in his cave,

the indignant artist, the nonconforming little schoolboy, all share in the same sacred

danger. 0nd this being so, let us bless them, let us bless the freak; for in the naturalevolution of things, the ape would perhaps never have become man had not a freak

appeared in the family. 0nybody whose mind is proud enough not to breed true, secretly

carries a bomb at the back of his brain; and so I suggest, &ust for the fun of the thing, takingthat private bomb and carefully dropping it upon the model city of commonsense. In the

brilliant light of the ensuing explosion many curious things will appear; our rarer senses

will supplant for a brief spell the dominant vulgarian that s'uee$es 1indbad%s neck in the

catch/as/catch/can match between the adopted self and the inner one. I am triumphantlymixing metaphors because that is exactly what they are intended for when they follow the

course of their secret connectionswhich from a writer%s point of view is the first positive

result of the defeat of commonsense.

The second result is that the irrational belief in the goodness of man 2to which those

farcical and fraudulent characters called 3acts are so solemnly opposed4 becomessomething much more than the wobbly basis of idealistic philosophies. It becomes a solid

and iridescent truth. This means that goodness becomes a central and tangible part of one%s

world, which world at first sight seems hard to identify with the modern one of newspapereditors and other bright pessimists, who will tell you that it is, mildly speaking, illogical to

applaud the supremacy of good at a time when something called the police state, or

communism, is trying to turn the globe into five million s'uare miles of terror, stupidity,

and barbed wire. 0nd they may add that it is one thing to beam at one%s private universe inthe snuggest nook of an unshelled and well/fed country and 'uite another to try and keep

sane among crashing buildings in the roaring and whining night. ut within the

emphatically and unshakably illogical world which I am advertising as a home for thespirit, war gods are unreal not because they are conveniently remote in physical space from

the reality of a reading lamp and the solidity of a fountain pen, but because I cannot

imagine 2and that is saying a good deal4 such circumstances as might impinge upon thelovely and lovable world which 'uietly persists, whereas I can very well imagine that my

fellow dreamers, thousands of whom roam the earth, keep to these same irrational and

divine standards during the darkest and most da$$ling hours of physical danger, pain, dust,

death.

!hat exactly do these irrational standards mean" They mean the supremacy of the

detail over the general, of the part that is more alive than the whole, of the little thing whicha man observes and greets with a friendly nod of the spirit while the crowd around him is

being driven by some common impulse to some common goal. I take my hat off to the hero

who dashes into a burning house and saves his neighbor%s child; but I shake his hand if hehas risked s'uandering a precious five seconds to find and save, together with the child, its

favorite toy. I remember a cartoon depicting a chimney sweep falling from the roof of a tall

building and noticing on the way that a sign/board had one word spelled wrong, and

wondering in his headlong flight why nobody had thought of correcting it. In a sense, we

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all are crashing to our death from the top story of our birth to the flat stones of the

churchyard and wondering with an immortal 0lice in !onderland at the patterns of the

passing wall. This capacity to wonder at triflesno matter the imminent periltheseasides of the spirit, these footnotes in the volume of life are the highest forms of

consciousness, and it is in this childishly speculative state of mind, so different from

commonsense and its logic, that we know the world to be good.

In this divinely absurd world of the mind, mathematical symbols do not thrive.

Their interplay, no matter how smoothly it works, no matter how dutifully it mimics theconvolutions of our dreams and the 'uantums of our mental associations, can never really

express what is utterly foreign to their nature, considering that the main delight of the

creative mind is the sway accorded to a seemingly incongruous detail over a seemingly

dominant generali$ation. !hen commonsense is e&ected together with its calculatingmachine, numbers cease to trouble the mind. 1tatistics pluck up their skirts and sweep out

in a huff. Two and two no longer make four, because it is no longer necessary for them to

make four. If they had done so in the artificial logical world which we have left, it had been

merely a matter of habit6 two and two used to make four in the same way as guests invitedto dinner expect to make an even number. ut I invite my numbers to a giddy picnic and

then nobody minds whether two and two make five or five minus some 'uaint fraction.7an at a certain stage of his development invented arithmetic for the purely practical

purpose of obtaining some kind of human order in a world which he knew to be ruled by

gods whom he could not prevent from playing havoc with his sums whenever they felt soinclined. (e accepted that inevitable indeterminism which they now and then introduced,

called it magic, and calmly proceeded to count the skins he had bartered by chalking bars

on the wall of his cave. The gods might intrude, but he at least was resolved to follow a

system that he had invented for the express purpose of following it.

Then, as the thousands of centuries trickled by, and the gods retired on a more or

less ade'uate pension, and human calculations grew more and more acrobatic, mathematicstranscended their initial condition and became as it were a natural part of the world to

which they had been merely applied. Instead of having numbers based on certain

phenomena that they happened to fit because we ourselves happened to fit into the patternwe apprehended, the whole world gradually turned out to be based on numbers, and

nobody seems to have been surprised at the 'ueer fact of the outer network becoming an

inner skeleton. Indeed, by digging a little deeper somewhere near the waistline of 1outh

0merica a lucky geologist may one day discover, as his spade rings against metal, the solidbarrel hoop of the e'uator. There is a species of butterfly on the hind wing of which a large

eyespot imitates a drop of li'uid with such uncanny perfection that a line which crosses the

wing is slightly displaced at the exact stretch where it passes throughor better say underthe spot6 this part of the line seems shifted by refraction, as it would if a real globular

drop had been there and we were looking through it at the pattern of the wing. In the light

of the strange metamorphosis undergone by exact science from ob&ective to sub&ective,what can prevent us from supposing that one day a real drop had fallen and had somehow

been phylogenetically retained as a spot" ut perhaps the funniest conse'uence of our

extravagant belief in the organic being of mathematics was demonstrated some years ago

when an enterprising and ingenious astronomer thought of attracting the attention of the

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inhabitants of 7ars, if any, by having huge lines of light several miles long form some

simple geometrical demonstration, the idea being that if they could perceive that we knew

when our triangles behaved, and when they did not, the 7artians would &ump to theconclusion that it might be possible to establish contact with those oh so intelligent

Tellurians.

0t this point commonsense sneaks back and says in a hoarse whisper that whether I

like it or not, one planet plus another does form two planets, and a hundred dollars is more

that fifty. If I retort that the other planet may &ust as well turn out to be a double one for allwe know, or that a thing called inflation has been known to make a hundred less than ten in

the course of one night, commonsense will accuse me of subsisting the concrete for the

abstract. ut this again is one of the essential phenomena in the kind of world I am inviting

you to inspect.

This world I said was goodand goodness is something that is irrationally

concrete. 3rom the commonsensical point of view the goodness, say, of some food is &ust

as abstract as its badness, both being 'ualities that cannot be perceived by the sane&udgment as tangible and complete ob&ects. ut when we perform that necessary mental

twist which is like learning to swim or to make a ball break, we reali$e that goodness issomething round and creamy, and beautifully flushed, something in a clean apron with

warm bare arms that have nursed and comforted us, something in a word &ust as real as the

bread or the fruit to which the advertisement alludes; and the best advertisements arecomposed by sly people who know ho to touch off the rockets of individual imaginations,

which knowledge is the commonsense of trade using the instruments of irrational

perception for its own perfectly rational ends.

Now badness is a stranger to our inner world; it eludes our grasp; badness is in

fact the lack of something rather than a noxious presence; and thus being abstract and

bodiless it occupies no real space in our inner world. +riminals are usually people lackingimagination, for its development even on the poor lines of commonsense would have

prevented them from doing evil by disclosing to their mental eye a woodcut depicting

handcuffs; and creative imagination in its turn would have led them to seek an outlet infiction and make the characters in their books do more thoroughly what they might

themselves have bungled in real life. #acking real imagination, they content themselves

with such half/witted banalities as seeing themselves gloriously driving into #os 0ngeles in

that swell stolen car with that swell golden girl who had helped to butcher its owner. True,this may become art when the writer%s pen connects the necessary currents, but, in itself,

crime is the very triumph of triteness, and the more successful it is, the more idiotic it

looks. I never could admit that a writer%s &ob was to improve the morals of his country, andpoint out lofty ideals from the tremendous height of a soapbox, and administer first aid by

dashing off second/rate books. The writer%s pulpit is dangerously close to the pulp

romance, and what reviewers call a strong novel is generally a precarious heap of platitudesor a sand castle on a populated beach, and there are few things sadder than to see its muddy

moat dissolve when the holiday makers are gone and the cold mousy waves are nibbling at

the solitary sands.

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There is, however, one improvement that 'uite unwittingly a real writer does bring

to the world around him. Things that commonsense would dismiss as pointless trifles or

grotes'ue exaggerations in an irrelevant direction are used by the creative mind in such afashion as to make ini'uity absurd. The turning of the villain into a buffoon is not a set

purpose with your authentic writer6 crime is a sorry farce no matter whether the stressing of

this may help the community or not; it generally does, but that is not the author%s directpurpose or duty. The twinkle in the author%s eye as he notes the imbecile drooping of a

murderer%s underlip, or watches the stumpy forefinger of a professional tyrant exploring a

profitable nostril in the solitude of his sumptuous bedroom, this twinkle is what punishesyour man more surely than the pistol of a tiptoeing conspirator. 0nd inversely, there is

nothing dictators hate so much as that unassailable, eternally elusive, eternally provoking

gleam. :ne of the main reasons why the very gallant ussian poet


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which in its turn, and simultaneously, recalls a combination of damp green leaves and

excited birds in some old garden, and the old friend, long dead, suddenly steps out of the

past, smiling and closing his dripping umbrella. The whole thing lasts one radiant secondand the motion of impressions and images is so swift that you cannot check the exact laws

which attend their recognition, formation, and fusionwhy this pool and not any pool,

why this sound and not anotherand how exactly are all those parts correlated; it is like a&igsaw pu$$le that instantly comes together in our brain with the brain itself unable to

observe how and why the pieces fit, and you experience a shuddering sensation of wild

magic, of some inner resurrection, as if a dead man were revived by a sparkling drug whichhas been rapidly mixed in our presence. This feeling is at the base of what is called

inspirationa state of affairs that commonsense must condemn. 3or commonsense will

point out that life on earth, from the barnacle to the goose, and from the humblest worm to

the loveliest woman, arose from a colloidal carbonaceous slime activated by ferments whilethe earth was obligingly cooling down. lood may well be the 1ilurian sea in our veins,

and we are all ready to accept evolution at least as a modal formula. Brofessor Bavlov%s

bell/hopping mice and Cr.


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faced child; but the combination is so simple, the threefold symbol so obvious, the bridge

between the images so well/worn by the feet of literary pilgrims and by cartloads of

standard ideas, and the world deduced so very like the average one, that the work of fictionset into motion will be necessarily of modest worth. :n the other hand, I would not like to

suggest the initial urge with great writing is always the product of something seen or heard

or smelt or tasted or touched during a long/haired art/for/artist%s aimless rambles. 0lthoughto develop in one%s self the art of forming sudden harmonious patterns out of widely

separate threads is never to be despised, and although, as in 7arcel Broust%s case, the actual

idea of a novel may spring from such actual sensations as the melting of a biscuit on thetongue or the roughness of a pavement underfoot, it would be rash to conclude that the

creation of all novels ought to be based on a kind of glorified physical experience. The

initial urge may disclose as many aspects as there are temperaments and talents; it may be

the accumulated series of several practically unconscious shocks or it may be an inspiredcombination of several abstract ideas without a definite physical background. ut in one

way or another process may still be reduced to the most natural form of creative thrilla

sudden live image constructed in a flash out of dissimilar units which are apprehended all

at once in a stellar explosion of the mind.

!hen the writer settles down to his reconstructive work, creative experience tellshim what to avoid at certain moments of blindness which overcome now and then even the

greatest, when the warty fat goblins of convention or the slick imps called gap/fillers

attempt to crawl up the legs of his desk. 3iery vostorg has accomplished his task and cool

vdokhnovenie puts on her glasses. The pages are still blank, but there is a miraculous

feeling of the words all being there, written in invisible ink and clamoring to become

visible. Eou might if you choose develop any part of the picture, for the idea of se'uence

does not really exist as far as the author is concerned. 1e'uence arises only because wordshave to be written one after the other on consecutive pages, &ust as the reader%s mind must

have time to go through the book, at least the first time he reads it. Time and se'uence

cannot exist in the author%s mind because no time element and no space element had ruledthe initial vision. If the mind were constructed on optional lines and if a book could be read

in the same way as a painting is taken in by the eye, that is without the bother of working

from left to right and without the absurdity of beginnings and ends, this would be the idealway of appreciating a novel, for thus the author saw it at the moment of its conception.

1o now he is ready to write it. (e is fully e'uipped. (is fountain pen is comfortably

full, the house is 'uiet, the tobacco and the matches are together, the night is young- andwe shall leave him in this pleasurable situation and gently steal out, and close the door, and

firmly push out of the house, as we go, the monster of grim commonsense that is lumbering

up the steps to whine that the book is not for the general public, that the book will nevernever0nd right then, &ust before it blurts out the word s, e, double-l, false

commonsense must be shot dead.

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24008084 the Art of Literature and Commonsense