Silences (32 page)

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SILENCES, P
. 9

*
A “found poem.” It comes from Margaret Randall’s
Part of the Solution,
where it serves as a biographical introduction to Randall’s translations of revolutionary Latin American poets, and was arranged as a poem by Lillian Robinson: “I have made no changes except to set Randall’s words as verse, and to repeat the last phrase.”

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SILENCES P
. 9

*
Robert Bone.
The Negro Novel in America,
1958.

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SILENCES, P
. 9

*
I see: one out of twelve.

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SILENCES, P
. 10

*
Gail Godwin writes of one such professional, her mother, who wrote true confessions and women’s fiction to support her children and herself. She made her stories “true to life” problems, fought (unsuccessfully) for true endings, wrote the best she dared (sometimes
borrowing a phrase from Katherine Mansfield or Woolf). (In an essay deploring the lack of strong female models in fiction, Godwin did not realize she had just described one—in life.) What the mother was not free to accomplish, the daughter is.

**
No, Wilde was not referring to homosexuality, but a disordered, narcissistic, insulated way of life.

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SILENCES, PP
. 9–10

*
He was
also not capable of—and therefore more vulnerable to damage from—“the need to wrest from his art means of carrying on his daily life.”—Enid Starkie, in the biography of Baudelaire.

**
Excerpts from
My Heart Laid Bare
appear on
pages 287
–
289
.

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SILENCES, P
. 10

*
Olive Schreiner,
From Man to Man,
1883. (An unnoted ancestor of Virginia Woolf’s classic imagining—in
A Room of One’s
Own
—of what Shakespeare’s life would have been, had he been born into a female body.)

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SILENCES, P
. 10

THE WORK OF CREATION AND THE CIRCUMSTANCES IT DEMANDS FOR FULL FUNCTIONING

                  
In placid hours well-pleased we dream

                  
Of many a brave unbodied scheme.

                  
But form to lend, pulsed life create,

                  
What unlike things must meet and mate:

                  
A flame to melt—a wind to freeze;

                  
Sad patience—joyous energies;

                  
Humility—yet pride and scorn;

                  
Instinct and study; love and hate;

                  
Audacity—reverence. These must mate,

                  
And fuse with Jacob’s mystic heart,

                  
To wrestle with the angel—Art.

—Herman Melville

THE WORK OF CREATION AND THE CIRCUMSTANCES IT DEMANDS FOR FULL FUNCTIONING
^▴

Among journals,
accounts, letters of “the practitioners themselves.”
(A personal selection):
^▴

Virginia Woolf:
A Writer’s Diary.
(We are now beginning to have the letters as well.)

Anton Chekhov: certain letters; his
Notebooks.

Katherine Mansfield:
Journal, Letters.

Franz Kafka:
Diaries,
all letters (
Letters to Milena,
etc.).

Albert Camus:
Notebooks (Actuelles).

Joseph Conrad on Fiction;
the prefaces; certain of his letters.

Herman Melville: passages in
Pierre;
certain letters and marginalia.

André Gide:
Journals.

Rainer Maria Rilke: letters; passages in
Malte Laurids Brigge
and in the poems.

Henry James:
Notebooks;
the prefaces.

Scott Fitzgerald:
The Crack-Up.

Gustave Flaubert: many of the letters.

Cesare Pavese:
The Burning Brand.

Jessamyn West:
Hide and Seek.

Also
invaluable: Thoreau’s
Journals;
Van Gogh’s
Letters
(
Dear Theo
remains the best collection if the three volume
Collected Letters
is unavailable). Many collections of letters of writers: Sherwood Anderson’s; those by the younger D.H. Lawrence; Malcolm Lowry’s letters to his publisher about
Under the Volcano
in
The Letters;
Louise Bogan’s. Reading the Dostoyevsky
Notebooks for
The Idiot,
or
Notebooks
for Crime and Punishment
or Gide’s for
The Counterfeiters,
along with the books themselves, is fascinating and suggestive.