The Creators: A History of Heroes of the Imagination (133 page)
Read The Creators: A History of Heroes of the Imagination Online
Authors: Daniel J. Boorstin
Look within and life, it seems, is very far from being “like this.” Examine for a moment an ordinary mind on an ordinary day. The mind receives a myriad impressions—trivial, fantastic, evanescent, or engraved with the sharpness of steel. From all sides they come, an incessant shower of innumerable atoms … so that if a writer … could write what he chose, not what he must … there would be no plot, no comedy, no tragedy, no love interest or catastrophe in the accepted style, and perhaps not a single button sewn on as the Bond Street Tailors would have it. Life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged; but a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end. Is it not the task of the novelist to convey this varying, this unknown and uncircumscribed spirit, whatever aberration or complexity it may display, with as little mixture of the alien and external as possible?
James Joyce and T. S. Eliot were on a new track, but they had “no code of manners.” “Their sincerity is desperate, and their courage tremendous; it is only that they do not know which to use, a fork or their fingers. Thus if you read Mr. Joyce and Mr. Eliot you will be struck by the indecency of the one, and the obscurity of the other.”
After two early novels in conventional style, she began her own experiments with
Jacob’s Room
(1922), about a young man killed in the World War. T. S. Eliot applauded, “you have freed yourself from any compromise between the traditional novel and your original gift.” Others objected that
the book had no plot. In
Mrs. Dalloway
(1925), her first accomplished novel in the style she would bring to life, nothing momentous “happened.” Its opening pages, like Molly Bloom’s reflections at the end of
Ulysses
, would become a classic of “stream of consciousness.” For a single day we share the consciousness of the fashionable wife of a member of Parliament as she is planning and hosting a party.
Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself.
For Lucy had her work cut out for her. The doors would be taken off their hinges; Rumpelmayer’s men were coming. And then, thought Clarissa Dalloway, what a morning—fresh as if issued to children on a beach.
What a lark! What a plunge! For so it had always seemed to her when, with a little squeak of the hinges, which she could hear now, she had burst open the French windows and plunged at Bourton into the open air. How fresh, how calm, stiller than this of course, the air was in the early morning; like the flap of a wave; the kiss of a wave.…
We follow her thoughts and feelings through all that June day’s trivia, from her shopping for flowers to greeting the guests at the party, which ends the book.
Mrs. Dalloway’s reminiscent experience recalls her encounters with a former suitor who for the last five years has been in India, flavored with gratification and regret at her chosen life. The specter of death interrupts her party with news of the suicide of a young man, a victim of wartime shell shock, who had seen “the insane truth” and hurled himself from a window. We are not led down a narrative path but only share staccato “moments of being.” Constantly reminded of the mystery of time, even on a single day, we are reminded too of the elusiveness of “our self, who fish-like inhabits deep seas and plies among obscurities threading her way between the boles of giant weeds, over sun-flickered spaces and on and on into gloom, cold, deep inscrutable; suddenly she shoots to the surface and sports on the wind-wrinkled waves; that is, has a positive need to brush, scrape, kindle herself, gossiping.”
To the Lighthouse
(1927), reflections of quiet family holidays on an island in the Hebrides, is often considered her best work. We follow the interrelations of the consciousness of the central figure, the charming, managing Mrs. Ramsay, wife of an egocentric professor of philosophy, their eight children, and miscellaneous guests, who include a woman painter and a mawkish young academic. The first section, “The Window,” fills more than half the book with “moments of being” on one summer day. The second, “Time Passes,” admits the outer world by noting the death of Mrs. Ramsay and a son killed in the war, revealed in the sad abandonment of the once-cheerful holiday house.
So with the lamps all put out, the moon sunk, and a thin rain drumming on the roof a downpouring of immense darkness began. Nothing, it seemed, could survive the flood, the profusion of darkness which, creeping in at keyholes and crevices, stole round window blinds, came into bedrooms, swallowed up here a jug and basin, there a bowl of red and yellow dahlias, there the sharp edges and firm bulk of a chest of drawers. Not only was furniture confounded; there was scarcely anything left of body or mind by which one could say, “This is he” or “This is she.” Sometimes a hand was raised as if to clutch something or ward off something, or somebody groaned, or somebody laughed aloud as if sharing a joke with nothingness.
The last section, “The Lighthouse,” reports the painter Lily Briscoe’s final success in a painting, “making of the moment something permanent.” “In the midst of chaos there was shape; this eternal passing and flowing (she looked at the clouds going and the leaves shaking) was struck into stability. Life stands still here.” Fulfilling Mrs. Ramsay’s promise, after petty squabbles and despite Mr. Ramsay’s misgivings, the remnants of the family finally reach the Lighthouse.
Having admitted time to interrupt the inward life of the Ramsay family, Virginia Woolf then plays with time as the interrupter of consciousness in
Orlando
(1928). In October 1927 she was suddenly taken by the idea, which first interested her as a dinner-table joke, of tracing the literary ancestors of her lover Vita Sackville-West. The product was “a biography beginning in the year 1500 and continuing to the present day called Orlando: Vita; only with a change about from one sex to another. I think, for a treat, I shall let myself dash this in for a week.” And she explained to Vita how the idea had captured her—“my body was flooded with rapture and my brain with ideas.… But listen; suppose Orlando turns out to be Vita.” She could think of nothing else, and wrote rapidly.
Just as
To the Lighthouse
had been fashioned of her own youth,
Orlando
, from items already noted in Virginia’s diary, turned out to be an adventure in consciousness through time. A beautiful aristocratic youth from the Elizabethan court lives on until October 11, 1928, through various incarnations. As King Charles’s emissary to the Court of the Sultan in Constantinople, suddenly and unaccountably—
The sound of the trumpets died away and Orlando stood stark naked. No human being, since the world began, has ever looked more ravishing. His form combined in one the strength of a man and a woman’s grace.… Orlando had become a woman—there’s no denying it. But in every other respect, Orlando remained precisely as he had been. The change of sex, though it altered their future, did nothing whatever to alter their identity.… Orlando herself showed no surprise at it. Many people … have been at great pains to prove (1) that Orlando had always been a woman. (2) that Orlando is at this moment a man. Let biologists
and psychologists determine. It is enough for us to state the simple fact; Orlando was a man till the age of thirty; when he became a woman and has remained so ever since.
But let other pens treat of sex and sexuality; we quit such odious subjects as soon as we can.
On finishing the book she had her usual spell of doubts, and thought that it too was not worth publishing.
To the Lighthouse
had made her a writer whom the literati had to know, and now
Orlando
, a simple fantasy, could reach others. While the earlier book had sold less than four thousand copies in its first year,
Orlando
sold more than eight thousand in its first six months. Leonard called
Orlando
the turning point in her career, for Virginia Woolf could now support herself as a novelist.
Though tempted to write another
Orlando
, she did not take the easy path. She continued to experiment, sometimes cryptically, with streams of consciousness.
The Waves
(1931), which some call her masterpiece, is a contrived interweaving of selves—six not very extraordinary people from childhood through middle age, telling their own thoughts about themselves and others. Self-revelations are divided by passages of lyrical prose on how the rising and declining sun transforms the landscape and the waves. Again there is a haunting interruption at word of the death of a young friend in India.
She deferred to the
Orlando
audience again with
Flush
(1933), which purported to enter the animal consciousness in a biography of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s spaniel. Virginia Woolf was not a dog lover, but she liked to imagine herself as an animal—a goat, a monkey, a bird, and now a dog, and then wonder what this would have done to her self.
Her impatience with any one way of viewing the self prevented her writing a monumental book. Never so confident of the mainstream of consciousness as was Proust or Joyce, she sought the many possible streams.
… a novelist’s chief desire is to be as unconscious as possible … imagine me writing a novel in a state of trance … a girl sitting with a pen in her hand, which for minutes and indeed for hours, she never dips into the inkpot. The image that comes to mind when I think of this girl is the image of a fisherman lying sunk in dreams on the verge of a deep lake with a rod held out over the water. She was letting her imagination sweep unchecked round every rock and cranny of the world that lies submerged in the depths of our unconscious being. Now came the experience … that I believe to be far commoner with women writers than with men. The line raced through the girl’s fingers. Her imagination had rushed away. It had sought the pools, the depths, the dark places where the largest fish slumber. And then there was a smash. There was an explosion. There was foam and
confusion. The imagination had dashed itself against something hard. The girl was roused from her dream.… Men, her reason
told
her, would be shocked. The consciousness of what men will say of a woman who speaks the truth about her passions had roused her from her artist’s state of unconsciousness.
Vistas from a Restless Self
F
OR
centuries Western vision had been confined by two ways of looking. The first was the Window—the perspective view from a single point, which the artist invited the viewer to share. The second was the ancient ideal of Beauty—the quality that “pleasurably exalts the mind or senses,” and included the pretty, which pleased by grace or delicacy. A modern revolution would free our vision from these conventions.
While many artists played roles in this revolution, the heroic figure was Pablo Picasso (1881–1973), who was peculiarly qualified for such a work of liberation. Like Joyce, he was self-exiled. The son of a teacher of painting in Málaga, he never ceased to be Spanish. “The character, the vision of Picasso is like himself, it is Spanish,” his close friend Gertrude Stein (1874–1946) insisted in her very own prose, “and he does not see reality as all the world sees it, so that he alone amongst the painters did not have the problem of expressing the truths that all the world can see but the truths that he alone can see and that is not the world the world recognizes as the world.” After 1904 Picasso made France his home and divided his life between Paris and the South.
He created his own reasons for believing that he was exempt from the rules that governed artists. The legend that he was a child prodigy in the arts was of his own (and his adoring secretary-biographer Jaime Sabartès’) making. None of the few surviving works of his childhood confirms the legend, and their scarcity even suggests that others may have been destroyed. Perhaps the fact that he was not a child prodigy encouraged him early in habits of hard work. Part of the legend was the story that at fourteen, when he applied to the Barcelona Academy of Fine Arts (La Llotja) he finished on the first day the examination drawings on which other candidates spent a month. But it appears that one day was not unusual for
finishing the required work, and the examiners had allowed only two days. Picasso later boasted that he was so precocious that he could not have taken part in an exhibition of children’s drawings. “When I was their age,” he romanticized, “I could draw like Raphael, but it took me a lifetime to learn to draw like them.” Perhaps such fantasies were ways of saying that he saw painting not as an acquired skill but as an aspect of himself. “In my opinion to search means nothing in painting, to find is the thing.” And, when at seventy-four he was being filmed at work, he admitted that he found his creative powers “
un mystère totale
.”
His father, with a passion for painting pigeons, “would cut off the claws of a dead pigeon and pin them to a board in the position he wanted; then I would have to copy them very carefully until the result satisfied him.” Characteristically, he liked to say that one day in 1894 his father was thoroughly satisfied with Pablo’s work, “so he handed me his paint and his brush and he never painted again.” But this was only another episode in his rich self-serving imagination.
Picasso painted more than enough for them both in unending variety, a rich miscellany. The range of his styles is staccato, full of interruptions, switchbacks, and even repetitions. “I don’t develop,” Picasso protested, “I am.” His works reveal a volatile and restless self in fantastic discontinuity. His career might have shown more coherence and the succession of his styles might have been more intelligible if he had committed himself to please a particular patron, or to affirm a faith, or to sell his product or promote a program, or glorify a nation or city. But none of these was his way.
“The painter,” he observed, “goes through states of fullness and evaluation. That is the whole secret of art. I go for a walk to the forest of Fontainebleau. I get ‘green’ indigestion. I must get rid of this sensation into a picture. Green rules it. A painter paints to unload himself of feelings and visions.” He was a man, as Gertrude Stein observed, “who always has need of emptying himself, of completely emptying himself.” His copious work is a product of this prodigious, unpredictable capacity for continual refilling and emptying.