No, but seriously, if you wished to be — I do not say original but merely contemporary — you might try a four-card trick in the form of a novel; passing a common axis through four stories, say, and dedicating each to one of the four winds of heaven.
A continuum, forsooth, embodying not a temps retrouve but a temps delivre. The curvature of space itself would give you stereoscopic narrative, while human personality seen across a continuum would perhaps become prismatic? Who can say? I throw the idea out. I can imagine a form which, if satisfied, might raise in human terms the problems of causality or indeterminacy…. And nothing very recherche either. Just an ordinary Girl Meets Boy story. But tackled in this way you would not, like most of your contemporaries, be drowsily cutting along a dotted line!
That is the sort of question which you will one day be forced to ask yourself (‘We will never get to Mecca!’ as the Tchekhov sisters remarked in a play, the title of which I have forgotten.)
Nature he loved, and next to nature nudes, He strove with every woman worth the strife, Warming both cheeks before the fire of life, And fell, doing battle with a million prudes.
Who dares to dream of capturing the fleeting image of truth in all its gruesome multiplicity? (No, no, let us dine cheerfully off scraps of ancient discarded poultice and allow ourselves to be classified by science as wet and dry bobs.)
Whose are the figures I see before me, fishing the brackish reaches of the C. of E.?
One writes, Brother Ass, for the spiritually starving, the castaways of the soul! They will always be a majority even when everyone is a state-owned millionaire. Have courage, for here you will always be master of your audience! Genius which cannot be helped should be politely ignored.
Nor do I mean that it is useless to master and continuously practise your craft. No. A good writer should be able to write anything. But a great writer is the servant of compulsions which are ordained by the very structure of the psyche and cannot be disregarded. Where is he? Where is he?
Come, let us collaborate on a four-or five-decker job, shall we? ‘Why the Curate Slipped’ would be a good title. Quick, they are waiting, those hypnagogic figures among the London minarets, the muezzin of the trade. ‘Does Curate get girl as well as stipend, or only stipend? Read the next thousand pages and find out!’ English life in the raw — like some pious melodrama acted by criminal churchwardens sentenced to a lifetime of sexual misgivings! In this way we can put a tea-cosy over reality to our mutual advantage, writing it all in the plain prose which is only just distinguishable from galvanized iron. In this way we will put a lid on a box with no sides! Brother Ass, let us conciliate a world of listless curmudgeons who read to verify, not their intuitions, but their prejudices!
I remember old Da Capo saying one afternoon: ‘Today I had five girls. I know it will seem excessive to you. I was not trying to prove anything to myself. But if I said that I had merely blended five teas to suit my palate or five tobaccos to suit my pipe, you would not give the matter a second thought. You would, on the contrary, admire my eclecticism, would you not?’ The belly-furbished Kenilworth at the F.O. once told me plaintively that he had ‘just dropped in’ on James Joyce out of curiosity, and was surprised and pained to find him rude, arrogant and short-tempered. ‘But’ I said ‘he was paying for his privacy by giving lessons to niggers at one and six an hour! He might have been entitled to feel safe from ineffables like yourself who imagine that art is something to which a good education automatically entitles you; that it is a part of a social equipment, class aptitude, like painting water-colours was for a Victorian gentlewoman! I can imagine his poor heart sinking as he studied your face, with its expression of wayward condescension — the fathomless self-esteem which one sees occasionally flit across the face of a goldfish with a hereditary title!’ After this we never spoke, which was what I wanted. The art of making necessary enemies! Yet one thing I liked in him: he pronounced the word ‘Civilization’ as if it had an S-bend in it.
(Brother Ass is on symbolism now, and really talking good sense, I must admit.) Symbolism! The abbreviation of language into poem. The heraldic aspect of reality! Symbolism is the great repair-outfit of the psyche, Brother Ass, the fond de pouvoir of the soul. The sphincter-loosening music which copies the ripples of the soul’s progress through human flesh, playing in us like electricity! (Old Parr, when he was drunk, said once: ‘Yes, but it hurts to realize!’) Of course it does. But we know that the history of literature is the history of laughter and pain. The imperatives from which there is no escape are: Laugh till it hurts, and hurt till you laugh!
The greatest thoughts are accessible to the least of men. Why do we have to struggle so? Because understanding is a function not of ratiocination but of the psyche’s stage of growth. There, Brother Ass, is the point at which we are at variance. No amount of explanation can close the gap. Only realization! One day you are going to wake from your sleep shouting with laughter. Ecco!
About Art I always tell myself: while they are watching the firework display, yclept Beauty, you must smuggle the truth into their veins like a filter-passing virus! This is easier said than done. How slowly one learns to embrace the paradox! Even I am not there as yet; nevertheless, like that little party of explorers, ‘Though we were still two days’ march from the falls we suddenly heard their thunder growing up in the distance’! Ah! those who merit it may one day be granted a rebirth-certificate by a kindly Government Department. This will entitle them to receive everything free of charge — a prize reserved for those who want nothing. Celestial economics, about which Lenin is strangely silent! Ah! the gaunt faces of the English muses! Pale distressed gentlewomen in smocks and beads, dispensing tea and dropscones to the unwary!
The foxy faces Of Edwardian Graces Horse-faces full of charm With strings of beads And a packet of seeds And an ape-tuft under each arm!
Society! Let us complicate existence to the point of drudgery so that it acts as a drug against reality. Unfair! Unfair! But, my dear Brother Ass, the sort of book I have in mind will be characterized by the desired quality which will make us rich and famous: it will be characterized by a total lack of codpiece!
When I want to infuriate Balthazar I say: ‘Now if the Jews would only assimilate they would give us a valuable lead in the matter of breaking down puritanism everywhere. For they are the licence-holders and patentees of the closed system, the ethical response! Even our absurd food prohibitions and inhibitions are copied from their melancholy priest-ridden rigmarole about flesh and fowl. Aye! We artists are not interested in policies but in values — this is our field of battle! If once we could loosen up, relax the terrible grip of the so-called Kingdom of Heaven which has made the earth such a blood-soaked place, we might rediscover in sex the key to a metaphysical search which is our raison d’кtre here below! If the closed system and the moral exclusiveness on divine right were relaxed a little what could we not do?’ What indeed? But the good Balthazar smokes his Lakadif gloomily and shakes his shaggy head. I think of the black velvet sighs of Juliet and fall silent. I think of the soft white knosps — unopened flower-shapes — which decorate the tombs of Moslem women!
The slack, soft insipid mansuetude of these females of the mind!