Silences (33 page)

“Constant toil is the law of art, as it is of life”
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If an artist does not spring to his work as a soldier to the breach, if once within the crater he does not labor as a miner buried in the earth, if he contemplates his difficulties instead
of conquering them one by one, the work remains unachieved, production becomes impossible, and the artist assists the suicide of his own talent. . . . The solution of the problem can be found only through incessant and sustained work . . . true artists, true poets, generate and give birth today, tomorrow, ever. From this habit of labor results a ceaseless comprehension of difficulties which keep
them in communion with the muse and her creative forces.

—Balzac,
Cousin Bette

Unconfined Solitude
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I doubt I shall succeed in writing here, I have not the sense of perfect seclusion which has always been essential to my power of producing anything.

—Nathaniel Hawthorne at Brook Farm

The Homely Underpinning for It All
(
to Add to the Conrad Truth
)
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You know how much I used to love Plato. Now I realize he lied. The things of this world are not a reflection of the ideal, but the product of human blood and hard labour. It is we who built the pyramids, hewed the marble for the temples and statues, we who pulled the oars in the galleys and dragged wooden ploughs for their food, while they wrote dialogues and dramas. . . . We were
filthy,
and died early deaths. They were aesthetic, and carried on subtle debates, and made art.

—“Letter from Auschwitz” (a young poet to two poet friends) in Tadeusz Borowski,
This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen
*

The Constant Toil; The Terrible Law; The Frightful Task

                  
From eight o’clock in the morning till half-past four in the evening, Pierre sits there in his room;—eight
hours and a half!

                  
In the midst of the merriments of the mutations of Time, Pierre hath ringed himself in with the grief of Eternity. Pierre is a peak inflexible in the heart of Time.

                  
He will not be called to; he will not be stirred. . . .

                  
Is there then all this work to one book, which shall be read in a very few hours; and, far more frequently,
utterly skipped in one second; and which, in the end, whatever it be, must undoubtedly go to the worms?

                  
Not so; that which now absorbs the time and the life of Pierre, is not the book, but the primitive elementalising of the strange stuff, which in the act of attempting that book has upheaved and up-gushed in his soul. Two books are being writ; of which the world shall only
see one, and that the bungled one. The larger book, and the infinitely better, is for Pierre’s own private shelf. That it is, whose unfathomable cravings drink his blood; the other only demands his ink.

                  
Who shall tell all the thoughts and feelings of Pierre in that desolate and shivering room when at last the idea obtruded, that the wiser and profounder he should grow, the more
and more he lessened the chances for bread. . . .

                  
But his is the famishing which loathes all food. He cannot eat but by force. He has assassinated the natural day; how then can he eat with an appetite? He cannot sleep, he has waked the infinite wakefulness in him, then how can he slumber? Still his book, like a vast
lumbering planet, revolves in his aching head. He cannot command
the thing out of his orbit; fain would he behead himself, to gain one night’s respose. At last the heavy hours move on, and sheer exhaustion overtakes him, and he lies still—not asleep as children and day laborers sleep—but lies still from his throbbing and for that interval holdingly sheathes the beak of the vulture in his hand, and lets it not enter his heart. Morning comes; again the dropt
sash, the icy water, the flesh brush, the breakfast, the hot brick, the ink, the pen, the from eight o’clock to half-past five, and the whole general inclusive hell of the same departed day.

                  
Ah shivering thus day after day in his wrappers and cloak, is this the warm lad that once sang to the world the Tropical Summer?

—Herman Melville

            
I sit down religiously every
morning, I sit down for eight hours, and the sitting down is all. In the course of that working day of eight hours I write three sentences which I erase before leaving the table in despair. Sometimes it takes all my resolution and power of self control to refrain from butting my head against the wall. After such crises of despair I doze for hours, still held conscious that there is that story that
I am unable to write. Then I wake up, try again, and at last go to bed completely done up. So the days pass and nothing is done. At night I sleep. In the morning I get up with that horror of that powerlessness I must face through a day of vain efforts. . . .

                  
I seem to have lost all sense of style and yet I am haunted by the necessity of style. And that story I cant write weaves
itself into all I see, into all I speak, into all I think, into the lines of every book I try to read . . . I feel my brain. I am distinctly conscious of the contents of my head. My story is there in a fluid—in an evading shape. I cant get hold of it. It is all there—to bursting, yet I cant get hold of it any more than you can grasp a handful of water. . . .

                  
I never mean to
be slow. The stuff comes out at its own rate. I am always ready to put it down . . . the trouble is that too often, alas, I’ve to wait for the sentence, for the word. . . . The worst is that while I’m thus powerless to produce, my imagination is extremely active; whole paragraphs, whole pages, whole chapters pass through my mind. Everything is there: descriptions, dialogue, reflection, everything,
everything but the belief, the conviction, the only thing needed to make me put pen to paper. I’ve thought out a volume a day till I felt sick in mind and heart and gone to bed, completely done up, without having written a line. The effort I put
out should give birth to Masterpieces as big as mountains, and it brings forth a ridiculous mouse now and then. . . .

                  
They [the ideas
and words] creep about in my head and have got to be caught and tortured into some kind of shape.

—from Letters of Joseph Conrad

This Incomprehensible Master: Work

            
As regards work, he [Cezanne] says that up to his fortieth year he had lived as a Bohemian. Only then, in his friendship with Pissarro, did work dawn on him—to such an extent that he did nothing but work for the last
30 years of his life. Without real pleasure it seems, in continual rage, ever at odds with his every endeavour, none of which appeared to him to achieve what he regarded as the ultimate desirable. . . .

                  
Old, ill, wearied every evening to the point of unconsciousness by the regularity of his daily work (so much so that he often went to bed at six o’clock as soon as it became
dark after a supper mindlessly eaten) surly, mistrustful . . . he hoped from day to day still to attain that triumph . . . and does not know whether he has really succeeded. And sits in the garden like an old dog, the dog of this work which calls him again and again and beats him and lets him go hungry. And still he clings with all his strength to this incomprehensible master.

—Rainer Maria Rilke

Subterranean Forces
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Before subterranean forces will feed the creator back, they must be fed, passionately fed, what needs to be worked on. . . . A receptive waiting that means, not demands which prevent “an undistracted center of being.” And when the response comes, availability to work must be immediate. If not used at once, all may vanish as a dream; worse, future creation
be endangered, for only the removal and development of the material frees the forces for further work.

               
Something probably lurks in it, something that I have only to woo forth. Let me live with it a while, let me woo it, even if I
sit here in mere divine leisure every patient morning for a week or two.

—Henry James

            
These poems are the fruit of long labor: trials, repetitions,
rejections, choices—months, even years of reflection.

—Paul Valéry

            
Your work is unbeautiful, alright let it be unbeautiful. It will grieve you, but it must not discourage you. Nature demands a certain devotion, and she demands a period of struggling with her. . . . It is the experience and hard work of every day which alone will ripen in the long run and allow one to do something
truer and more complete. . . . You will not always do well, but the days you least expect it, you will do that which holds its own with the work of those that have gone before.

—Vincent Van Gogh

            
Look sharply after your thoughts. They come unlooked for like a bird seen on your trees, and if you turn to your usual task, disappear, and you shall never find that perception again. Never,
I say, but for years perhaps, and I know not what events and worlds may lie between you and its return.

—Emerson

            
One sentence follows another, is born of the other, and I feel as I see it being born and growing within me an almost physical rapture. This artesian welling up is the result of my long subconscious preparation.