Silences (31 page)

Scott Fitzgerald: “But one hundred and twenty stories”:

                  
The roller skates rain down the streets.

                  
The black cars shine between the leaves.

                  
Your voice, far away . . .

 
                 
I have asked a lot of my emotions—one hundred and twenty stories. The price was high, right up with Kipling, because there was one little drop of something—not blood, not a tear, not my seed, but me more intimately than these, in every story. It was the extra I had. Now it has gone and I am just like you now.

                  
Once the phial was full—here is the bottle it came
in.

                  
Hold on, there’s a drop left there. . . . No, it was just the way the light fell.

                  
. . . If I hadn’t abused words so, what you said might have meant something. But one hundred and twenty stories. . . .

                  
April evening spreads over everything the purple blur left by a child who has used the whole paint box.

—“An April Letter” in
The Crack-Up.

Absences That Are a Kind of Silence
(“But one hundred and twenty stories. . . .”)

“A professional makes the pot boil,” said Henry James who certainly did. “It’s the only basis of sanity and freedom.”

Some writers, happily, are able to do so—and by writing their best (sometimes
the
best) work. (Think of, in our time, Ernest Hemingway, Thornton Wilder, Robert Penn Warren, John Hersey, Saul Bellow,
John Cheever, Bernard Malamud, Nabokov, Salinger, Joyce Carol Oates, John Updike, E.L. Doctorow, bestsellers all.)
*

There is another kind of professional who, also beginning with aspiration and capacity, ends up making the pot boil—but by Fitzgerald’s “sacrifice of talent, in pieces, to preserve its essential value.”

Easily distinguishable from the meretricious, the sleazy (along with the conscientious,
capable free lancer), they are the producers of the good in the daily stream of publishing: the made-to-order, the topical, the popular, the entertainment, the ghost writing—the current staples. Like Rebecca Harding Davis, they remain serious writers—committed to substance, respecting language and craftsmanship. If they cannot make each piece art, they make it as readable, believable,
and rewarding as possible. Sometimes—notably with science fiction, Gothic, detective, mystery—their work is so distinguished, they establish a new form in literature.

Able to reach and touch people, they often directly affect their time as few “quality” writers are able to. But many are a Silence—that is, an
Absence
from deeper, more lasting literature.
*

Virulent Destroyers: Premature Silencers
^▴

                      
But o! each visitation

              
Suspends what nature gave me at my birth,

              
My shaping spirit of Imagination.

                      
—Coleridge in his “wilder’d and dark,”

                      
“my head is cloudy, mazy” time . . .

              
Morality and its philistine judgments have nought

              
to do with me. . . .
But I have learned this:

              
it is not what one does that is wrong, but what one

              
becomes as a consequence of it.
**

                      
—Oscar Wilde,
De Profundis

Malign mystique surrounds and protects those virulent destroyers of capacity, those premature Silencers: alcoholism, drug use to dependency, suicide. Contrary to the actual lives of most writers of achievement,
these are not intrinsic to the artist being—though certain “savage god” humans batten on the belief that it is so.

The Seasons in Hell of Coleridge, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Artaud—their agony over “what one becomes as a consequence” (evidenced in their own testimony and in that of their lives, deaths, yes, and in the lives, deaths of too many other writers—Dylan Thomas, John Berryman—living others
I will not name)—are obscured. It is not new forms, intensities, enhanced visionary sense, that comes: it is the ravaging and obliteration of the capacity for them; loss of power for work, impairment of critical judgment, logorrhea, blurredness, or aridity; premature death; suicide.

“I am suffering from a frightful malady of the mind,” writes Antonin Artaud when coherence was still possible for
him:

            
. . . a kind of erosion. My thoughts evade me in every way possible. There is something that is destroying my thinking, something that does not prevent me from being what I might be, but which leaves me in abeyance; a something furtive which takes away the words I have found, which step by step destroys in its substance my thinking as it evolves, which diminishes my intensity,
which takes away from me even the memory of the devices and figures of speech by which one expresses oneself. What will restore to me the concentration of my forces, the cohesion that my mind lacks, the constancy of its tension, the consistency of its own substance?

And again Rimbaud:

            
Had I not once a youth pleasant, heroic, fabulous enough to write on leaves of gold; too much luck.
Through what crime, what error have I earned my present weakness? You who maintain that some animals sob sorrowfully, that the dead have dreams, try to tell the story of my downfall and my slumber . . . I no longer know how to speak.

I no longer know how to speak.

Baudelaire’s own account is required reading. Capacity for sustained work was essential to him.

            
I’ve never possessed
either facility in conception or in expression. It should be self-evident that the small amount of work I’ve produced has been the result of long and painful labour . . . labour by which a revery becomes a work of art.

But sustained work became more and more impossible,
*

            
When the nerves of a man are strained by an infinite amount of anxiety and suffering, the devil, in spite of all
the good resolutions, slips every morning into his brain in shapes like: why not enjoy or rest one day more in oblivion of these things? Tonight at one fell swoop I’ll accomplish them. And then night comes and the mind reels at the thought of the number of things left undone again, overwhelming melancholy induces sterility, and next day there is the same old comic-tragedy, the same resolution,
honesty, confidence.

There began endless timetables of work to be accomplished; then the revenant desolation of
My Heart Laid Bare,
when—added to the harm of years—even the physical basis for carrying through will or work was gone. The humiliating litany of “Hygiene. Morality. Conduct. Method.” could not avail. “Too Late!”
**

Foreground Silences
^▴

The Emerson letter to Whitman
(from which my phrase comes), July 1855:

            
I am not blind to the worth of the wonderful gift of
Leaves of Grass.
I find it the most extraordinary piece of wit and wisdom that America has yet contributed. I am very happy in reading it, as great power makes us happy. It meets the demand I am always making of what seemed the sterile and stingy nature, as if too much handiwork, or too much
lymph in temperament, were making our western
wits fat and mean. I give you joy of free and brave thought. I have great joy in it. I find incomparable things said incomparably well, as they must be. I find the courage of treatment which so delights us, and which large perception only can inspire. . . .

                  
I greet you at the beginning of a great career, which yet must have had a
long foreground somewhere for such a start. . . . It has the best merits, namely, of fortifying and encouraging.

Silences Where the Lives Never Come to Writing
^▴

            
What has humanity not lost by suppression and subjection? We have a Shakespeare; but what of the possible Shakespeares we might have had who passed their life from youth upward brewing currant wine and
making pastries for fat country squires to eat, with no glimpse of the freedom of life and action necessary even to poach on deer in the green forests; stifled out without one line written, simply because being of the weaker sex, life gave no room for action and grasp on life? Here and there, where queens have been born as rulers, the vast powers for governance and the keen insight have been shown;
but what of the millions of the race in all ages whose vast powers of intellect and insight and creation have been lost to us because . . . their line of life was rigidly apportioned to them. What statesmen, what leaders, what creative intelligence have been lost to humanity because there has been no free trade in the powers and gifts.
*

▴
SILENCES, P
. 9