Quite a discipline, to get words to trickle without fanning them with a feather or stirring them with a silver spoon. To learn to wait, wait patiently, like a bird of prey, even though the flies were biting like mad and the birds chirping insanely. Before Abraham was ... Yes, before the Olympian Goethe, before the great Shakespeare, before the divine Dante or the immortal Homer, there was the Voice and the Voice was with every man. Man has never lacked for words. The difficulty arose only when man forced the words to do his bidding. Be still, and wait the coming of the Lord! Erase all thought, observe the still movement of the heavens! All is flow and movement, light and shadow. What is more still than a mirror, the frozen glassiness of glass—yet what frenzy, what fury, its still surface can yield!
I wish that you would kindly have the men of the Park Department prune, trim and pare off all the dead wood, twigs, sprigs, stumps, stickers, shooters, sucker-pieces, dirty and shaggy pieces, low, extra low and overhanging boughs and branches from the good trees and to prune them extra close to the bark and to have all the good trees thoroughly and properly sprayed from the base to the very top parts and all through along by all parts of each street, avenue, place, court, lane, boulevard and so on ... and thereby give a great deal more light, more natural light, more air, more beauty to all the surrounding areas.
That was the sort of message I should like to have dispatched at intervals to the god of the literary realm so that I might be delivered from confusion, rescued from chaos, freed of obsessive admiration for authors living and dead whose words, phrases, images barricaded my way.
And what was it prevented my own unique thoughts from breaking out and flooding the page? For many a year now I had been scurrying to and fro like a pack-rat, borrowing this and that from the beloved masters, hiding them away, my treasures, forgetting where I had stored them, and always searching for more, more, more. In some deep, forgotten pit were buried all the thoughts and experiences which I might properly call my own, and which were certainly unique, but which I lacked the courage to resuscitate. Had some one cast a spell over me that I should labor with arthritic stumps instead of two bold fists? Had some one stood over me in my sleep and whispered: You will never do it, never do it! (Not Stanley certainly, for he would disdain to whisper. Could he not hiss like a snake?) Who then? Or was it that I was still in the cocoon stage, a worm not yet sufficiently intoxicated with the splendor and magnificence of life?
How does one know that one day he will take wing, that like the humming bird he will quiver in mid-air and dazzle with iridescent sheen? One doesn't. One hopes and prays and bashes his head against the wall. But it knows. It can bide its time. It knows that all the errors, all the detours, all the failures and frustrations will be turned to account. To be born an eagle one must get accustomed to high places; to be born a writer one must learn to like privation, suffering, humiliation. Above all, one must learn to live apart. Like the sloth, the writer clings to his limb while beneath him life surges by steady, persistent, tumultuous. When ready plop! he falls into the stream and battles for life. Is it not something like that? Or is there a fair, smiling land where at an early age the budding writer is taken aside, instructed in his art, guided by loving masters and, instead of falling thwack into mid-stream he glides like an eel through sludge, mire and ooze?
I had time unending for such vagaries in the course of my daily routine; like poplars they sprang up beside me as I labored in thought, as I walked the streets for inspiration, or as I put my head on the pillow to drown myself in sleep. What a wonderful life, the literary life! I would sometimes say to myself. Meaning this in-between realm crowded with interlacing, intertwining boughs, branches, leaves, stickers, suckers and what not. The mild activity associated with my work not only failed to drain my energy but stimulated it. I was forever buzzing, buzzing. If now and then I complained of exhaustion it was from not being able to write, never from writing too much. Did I fear, unconsciously, that if I succeeded in letting myself go I would be speaking with my own voice? Did I fear that once I found that buried treasure which I had hidden away I would never again know peace, never know surcease from toil?
The very thought of creation—how absolutely unapproachable it is! Or its opposite, chaos. Impossible ever to posit such a thing as the un-created. The more deeply we gaze the more we discover of order in disorder, the more of law in lawlessness, the more of light in darkness. Negation—the absence of things—is unthinkable; it is the ghost of a thought. Everything is humming, pushing, waxing, waning, changing—has been so since eternity. And all according to inscrutable urges, forces, which, when we recognize them, we call laws. Chaos! We know nothing of chaos. Silence! Only the dead know it. Nothingness! Blow as hard as you like, something always remains.
When and where does creation cease? And what can a mere writer create that has not already been created? Nothing. The writer rearranges the gray matter in his noodle. Ho makes a beginning and an end—the very opposite of creation!—and in between, where he shuffles around, or more properly is shuffled around, there is born the imitation of reality: a book. Some books have altered the face of the world. Re-arrangement, nothing more. The problems of life remain. A face may be lifted, but one's age is indelible. Books have no effect. Authors have no effect. The effect was given in the first Cause. Where wert thou, when I created the world? Answer that and you have solved the riddle of creation!
We write, knowing we are licked before we start. Every day we beg for fresh torment. The more we itch and scratch the better we feel. And when our readers also begin to itch and scratch we feel sublime. Let no one die of inanition! The airs must ever swarm with arrows of thought delivered by les homines de lettres. Letters, mind you. How well put! Letters strung together with invisible wires charged with imponderable magnetic currents. All this travail forced upon a brain that was intended to work like a charm, to work without working. Is it a person coming toward you or a mind? A mind divided into books, pages, sentences replete with commas, periods, semicolons, dashes and asterisks. One author receives a prize or a seat in the Academy for his efforts, another a worm-eaten bone. The names of some are lent to streets and boulevards, of others to gallows and almshouses. And when all these creations have been finally read and digested men will still be buggering one another. No author, not even the greatest, has been able to get round that hard, cold fact.
A grand life just the same. The literary life, I mean. Who wants to alter the world? (Let it rot, let it die, let it fade away!) Tetrazzini practising her trills, Caruso shattering the chandeliers, Cortot waltzing like a blind mouse, the great Vladimir horrorizing the keyboard—was it of creation or salvation they were thinking? Perhaps not even of constipation ... The road smokes under your horses’ hooves, the bridges rumble, the heavens fall backwards. What is the meaning of it all? The air, torn to shreds, rushes by. Everything is flying by, bells, collar buttons, moustachios, pomegranates, hand grenades. We draw aside to make way for you, you fiery steeds. And for you, dear Jascha Heifetz, dear Joseph Szigeti, dear Yehudi Menuhin. We draw aside, humbly—do you hear? No answer. Only the sound of their collar bells.
Nights when everything is going whish whoosh! when all the unearthed characters slink out of their hiding places to perform on the roof-top of my brain, arguing, screaming, yodeling, cart-wheeling, whinnying too—what horses I—I know that this is the only life, this life of the writer, and the world may stay put, get worse, sicken and die, all one, because I no longer belong to the world, a world that sickens and dies, that stabs itself over and over, that wobbles like an amputated crab ... I have my own world, a Graben of a world, cluttered with Vespasiennes, Miros and Heideggers, bidets, a lone Yeshiva Bocher, cantors who sing like clarinets, divas who swim in their own fat, bugle busters and troikas that rush like the wind ... Napoleon has no place here, nor Goethe, nor even those gentle souls with power over birds, such as St. Francis, Milosz the Lithuanian, and Wittgenstein. Even lying on my back, pinned down by dwarves and gremlins, my power is vast and unyielding. My minions obey me; they pop like corn on the griddle, they whirl into line to form sentences, paragraphs, pages. And in some far off place, in some heavenly day to come, others geared to the music of words will respond to the message and storm heaven itself to spread unbounded delirium. Who knows why these things should be, or why cantatas and oratorios? We know only that their magic is law, and that by observing them, heeding them, reverencing them, we add joy to joy, misery to misery, death to death.