#ty for your service token extroverts | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

wintersonbartheswoolf · 5 years

Text

“It has teeth, art, and a way of cutting through to the soft parts untried.” -JEANETTE WINTERSON

WRITER, READER, WORDS 1997

The writer is an instrument of transformation.

To begin with the reader. The ordinary reader is not primarily concerned with questions of structure and style. He or she decides on a book, enjoys it or doesn’t, finishes it or doesn’t, and is, perhaps affected by it. When the fiction or the poem has a powerful effect likely to be lasting, the reader feels personally attached to both the work and the writer. Everyone has their favourite books to be read and re-read. Such things become talismans and love-tokens, even personality indicators, the truly bookish will mate on the strength of a spine. The moderately bookish may be more cautious about splicing together their literary and lubricious endeavours but the passion they feel for certain printed sheets will be as lively as any got between plain. The world of the book is a total world and in a total world we fall in love.

Falling for a book is not the nymph Echo falling for the sound of her own voice nor is it the boy Narcissus falling for his own reflection. Those Greek myths warn us of the dangers of recognising no reality but our own. Art is a way into other realities, other personalities. When I let myself be affected by a book, I let into myself new customs and new desires. The book does not reproduce me, it re-defines me, pushes at my boundaries, shatters the palings that guard my heart. Strong texts work along the borders of our minds and alter what already exists. They could not do this if they merely reflected what already exists. Of course, strong texts tend to become so familiar, even to people who have never read them, that they become part of what exists, at least a distort of them does. It is very strange to read something supposedly familiar, The Gospels, Great Expectations, Jane Eyre, and to find that it is quite unlike our mental version of it. Without exception, the original will be as unsettling, as edgy as it ever was, we have learned a little and sentimental used the rest. The critic Christopher Ricks, in his essay on the Victorian thinkers, Arnold and Pater, points out how often people misquote their favourite texts; the misquote subtly shifting the meaning to one which better reflects the reality of the speaker. On a national level we do this all the time, co-opting works that win favour with our way of life, rejecting those that don’t. Books that will neither co operate nor disappear sooner or later get the Modem Classic treatment, in a bid to familiarise them at the level of challenge.

I do not mean to say that any of this is conscious; mostly it is not, and therein lies a difficulty. Art is conscious and its effect on its audience is to stimulate consciousness. This is sexy, this is exciting, it is also tiring, and even those who welcome art-excitement have an ordinary human longing for sleep. Nothing wrong with that but we cannot use the book as a pillow. The comfort and the rest to be got out of art is not of the passive forgetting kind, it is inner quiet of a high order, and it follows the intensity, the excitement we feel when exposed to something new. Or does it? Only it seems if we are prepared to stay the course, not give up and doze off, not leap from rock to rock after new thrills. Books need to be deeply read as well as widely read which is one reason why it is wise never to trust a paid hack.

Our unconscious attitude to art is complex. We want it and we don’t want it, often simultaneously, and at the same time as a book is working intravenously we are working to immunise ourselves against it. Our best antidote to art as a powerful force independently affecting us is to say that it is only the image of ourselves that is affecting us. The doctrine of Realism saves us from a bad attack of Otherness and it is a doctrine that has been bolstered by the late-twentieth century vogue for literary biography; tying in the writer’s life with the writer’s work so that the work becomes a diary; small, private, explainable and explained away, much as Freud tried to explain art away.

It seems to me that the intersection between a writer’s life and a writer’s work is irrelevant to the reader. The reader is not being offered a chunk of the writer or a direct insight into the writer’s mind, the reader is being offered a separate reality. A reality separate from the actual world of the reader, and just as importantly, separate from the actual world of the writer. The question put to the writer ‘How much of this is based on your own experience?’ is meaningless. All or nothing may be the answer. The fiction, the poem, is not a version of the facts, it is an entirely different way of seeing. When we talk about the artist’s vision we pay lip service to this other way of seeing but we are not very comfortable with it. If it exists, which we doubt, it is some kind of trick and nobody likes to be tricked. If it doesn’t exist then we need not worry about responding to it. We can respond to the lifelikeness of the piece.

It was the Victorians who introduced an entirely new criterion into their study of the arts; to what extent does the work correspond· to actual life? This revolution in taste should not be underestimated and although it began to stir itself before Victoria acceded the throne in 1837, Realism (not the Greek theory of Mimesis) is an idea that belongs with her as surely as the fantasy of Empire.To fix the date is difficult but I do not think it far fetched to say that the gap between the death of the last Romantic (Byron) in 1824 and the heyday of Oscar Wilde in the 1890s, is the gap where Realism, as we understand it, was birthed and matured.

It is instructive to look at how dress codes alter between, say, 1825 and 1845. The eighteenth-century dandy is out, the sober Victorian so beloved of costume drama, is in. No more embroidered waistcoats, lurid colours, topiary wigs, dashing cravats, pan-stick faces and ridiculous buckles and heels. For men, the change is immense and as men are stripped of all their finery, women are loaded down with theirs. There is a marked polarisation of the sexes, and whereas Byron could cheerfully wear jewels and make-up without compromising his masculinity any man who tried to do so throughout the sixty glorious years might pay for his display with his liberty. The new foppishness of Oscar Wilde and the Decadents in the 1890s was as much a strike back into what had been allowed to men, as a move forward into what might be. As the eighteenth century disappeared (and centuries take a while to disappear) it took with it, play, pose and experiment. And I am not only thinking about dress. Can anyone imagine Tristram Shandy as a nineteenth-century novel?

The reaction against Romanticism was a very serious one, and if the Romantics were emotional, introspective, visionary and “very conscious of themselves as artists, then the move against them and their work was bound to be in opposition; to be rational, extrovert, didactic, the writer as social worker or sage. The novels of the 1860s, the novel form we still assume to be the perfect, perhaps even the only model, were at that time a strange hybrid of the loose epic poem and the pamphlet. It was not the inheritor of the play, pose and experiment of Smollett and Sterne. The dreary list of Braddon, Oliphant, Trollope, Wood, need not bother us here, although I think that the eagerness with which the sentimental and the sensational was mopped up by novel readers, was in itself a backlash against the intensity demanded by the Romantic vision. Even Byron at his most rollicking and least controlled is an intense poet. Intensity was not a Victorian virtue. Or was it?

It was women poets who benefited from the collapse of the Romantic sensibility. Whilst the male poet suddenly found himself at odds with his poetic tradition; he should not be dreamy, contemplative, a little mystical, a little delicate, a woman had no such struggle. If the sensibility of the Romantics looked ‘unmasculine’ to a fast developing action culture, it could certainly be feminine. We think about women novelists as being a nineteenth-century product but the rise and the popularity of the woman poet is just as extraordinary. The woman poet, unlike the majority of the women novelists, accepted her mantle of Otherness gracefully. She would lead the mind to higher things. She would redirect material energies towards emotional and spiritual contemplation. LEL (Letitia Elizabeth Landon), Felicia Hemans, Christina Rossetti, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, each accepted the distinction of the poet as poet. The particular struggle of Tennyson, how to be sensitive in an age that disliked sensitivity in men, was clearly not a problem for a woman. I do not want to suggest that women writers, and in particular women poets, found themselves in a blessed century, but I do think that the perceived alliance between the qualities peculiar to poetry and the qualities peculiar to women gave women a freedom to work their own form within the authority of tradition. It was this freedom, I think, which cleared the ground for the significant contribution of women to Modernism. Like Romanticism, Modernism was a poet’s revolution, the virtues of a poetic sensibility are uppermost (imagination, invention, density of language, wit, intensity, great delicacy) and what returns is play, pose and experiment. What departs is Realism.

That should be unsurprising. Realism is not a Movement or a Revolution, in its original incarnation it was a response to a movement, and as a response it was essentially anti-art. The mainspring of tension in the best Victorian writers is not religious or sexual, it is between the dead weight of an exaggeratedly masculine culture valuing experience over imagination and action above contemplation and the strange authority of the English poetic tradition. Who should the poet serve? Society or the Muse? This was brand new question and not a happy one.

If the woman poet could avoid it, the male poet and the prose writers of either sex could not. Of the great writers, Emily Bronte chose well. Charlotte Bronte and George Eliot continually equivocate and the equivocation helps to. explain the uneven power of their work. Dickens is to me the most interesting example of a great Victorian writer, who by sleight of hand convinces his audience that he is what he is not; a realist. I admit that there are tracts of Dickens that walk where they should fly but no writer can escape the spirit of the age and his was an age suspicious of the more elevated forms of transport. What is remarkable is how much of his work is winged; winged as poems are through the ariel power of words.

The Victorian denial of art as art (separate, Other, self- contained) was unsustainable, and like many a Victorian neurosis began to collapse under its own image. That art should not be art but a version of everyday life was absurd and men like Wilde, Swinburne and Yeats were proving it. The Muse was fighting back, cross-dressed as a pretty young· man or dressed in robes of Celtic Twilight. It began to look as though dowdy Realism was dead.

How dead? Phases in literature do not suddenly begin and just as quickly end, there is a scuffle, an adjustment, and usually a longish period where what is gone and what is coming make their way together. Only by looking backwards do we see the obvious signs of change. The effort to renew in language its poetry, the effort we call Modernism, was not an effort that could cancel out the longueurs of the New Georgians and their fakey pastorals or the high detail of the ageing Victorian novel. The novel was popular and during its determined reign literacy in England had increased measurably. The measure was a vast and newly created reading public who wanted to use a book as we now use television. Sentimental poetry and easy prose were perfect. Realism might be plain but the plain man would pay for it. Against this, it was inevitable that Modernism would be seen as a highbrow, intellectual snob movement cut off from the tastes of the people. The fact is that the tastes of the people were cut off from literature. How could they not be? Mass literacy was not a campaign to improve the culture and sensibility of the nation, it was designed to make the masses more useful. The writer faced another new problem: his public were no longer his educated equals.

Why should that matter? Comparative to the population, art always has been practised by a few and seriously appreciated by a few, usually the ones paying for it, commissioning it, supporting it. During the nineteenth century the most significant social change in Britain was the change from a controlling aristocracy to a controlling plutocracy. We all know the stereotype of New Money puffing on a cigar and ordering in books and pictures by the yard. The trouble is that books and pictures cannot be made by the yard and nothing is so contradictory to a money culture as art. I am not suggesting that the old system of patronage by Church or Peer was a perfect system or that we should try and return to it. But faced with big business and the average buyer all the arts find that they are being asked to explain themselves in a way that is anathema to their own processes. To support the arts honestly you must either b serious or disinterested. If you are serious you will tolerate and even encourage the necessary experiments and innovations (and failures) that keep art alive. If you are disinterested, recognising that the arts are important even if they move you very little, you will pay the money and leave others to be the judge of your munificence. Roughly speaking, that is how patronage worked until the Industrial Revolution.

What should the poet do? The richest man he knows is Mr Belch who owns the Blacking Factory. Belch’s Blacking is a quality product and as everybody knows, quality sells. Belch thinks he would like to support the arts and he fancies having a book of poetry dedicated to him because he thinks that poetry is the ultimate useless commodity and it is a measure of his wealth that he can afford it. He has a look at. the poems and judges them pretty awful stuff but he gives the poet money and attaches no conditions to the offer, except an advert in the back and 50 percent of sales.

The poems do not sell and they are unfavourably reviewed. Belch is furious. Quality Sells. It says so over the gates of his own factory and he has made millions out of it. The poet can’t even cover his printing costs. Belch declines to support the poet’s next volume and instead finds a pretty painter whose flowers sell by the roll of canvas.

If business is not interested in the arts, and it isn’t, except for tax purposes, advertising lines and conspicuous decoration, then how will the artist support herself if she has no private funds? Sell her work is the obvious answer, but that is not an easy answer when there is often no common ground between purchaser and producer. I do not mean that the writer and the reader should be computer-dating compatible. Some of my favourite books are written by people with whom I doubt that I could spend one hour. In print I can live with them forever because the strong line connecting us is love of language. The connection need not be so esoteric; I am a writer so I will be looking for connections that are not likely to interest the general reader so much. The general reader need not sit down and ponder the runes behind the words, but if he or she wants the pleasure out of a book that cannot be got out of anything else, that reader has forged a link with the writer. A link of commitment to pursue language, the one writing it, the one reading it,a shared belief in a serious endeavour.

It is difficult when the writer is serious and the reader is not. Again, that is a newish problem, reading having become a leisure toy and not a cultural occupation. Of course we read for pleasure, but the enjoyment got out of literature is not the enjoyment to be had from a ball game or a video. I do not want to make a hierarchy among ball games and books; I know that they are pleasures of a different order, I wish that the huge body of readers and sports fans did. Art has been bundled away along with sport and entertainment and sometimes even charity, but it belongs by itself, a separate reality, a world apart. Readers who don’t like books that are not printed television, fast on thrills and feeling, soft on the brain, are not criticising literature, they are missing it altogether. A work of fiction, a poem, that is literature, that is art, can only be itself, it can never substitute for anything else. Nor can anything else substitute for it. The serious writer cannot be in competition for sales and attention with the bewildering range of products from the ever expanding leisure industry. She can only offer what she has ever offered; an exceptional sensibility combined with an exceptional control over words.

How many people want that? Proportionally as few as ever but art is not for the few, it is for many, and I include those who would never pick up a serious fiction or poem and who are uninterested in writing. I believe that art puts down its roots into the deepest hiding places of bur nature and that its action is akin to the action of certain delving plants, comfrey for instance, whose roots can penetrate far into the subsoil and unlock nutrients that would otherwise lie out of the reach of shallower bedded plants. In the haste of life and the press of action it is difficult for us to examine our feelings, to express them coherently, to express them poetically, and yet the impulse to poetry which is an impulse parallel to civilisation, is a force towards that range and depth of expression. We do not want language as a list of basic . commands and exchanges, we want it to handle matter far more subtle. When we say ‘I haven’t got the words’, the lack is not in the language nor in our emotional state, it is in the breakdown between the two. The poet heals that break down and not only for those who read poetry. If we want a living language, a language capable of expressing all that it is called upon to express in a vastly changing world, then we need men and women whose whole self is bound up in that work with words.

For the writer, serving the much maligned Muse seems to be the best way of serving society. When we think about those writers who have most contributed to the language, we find that this is so.

That kind of work will never be popular, that is, it will not please most of the people most of the time. This need not matter, provided that there are a sufficient number of people concerned enough for serious work to keep the writer read and fed. The relationship between the reader and the writer’s work has to be one of trust, for even the most convinced of readers will not be always convinced. We come back to those favourite books, inevitably parts of a writer’s work will find more favour than others. To trust is to submit to the experiment, to stay the course, to sit up late and wait. Mistakes will be made. No writer is free from failure and we cannot judge a writer’s work until the whole body of it has appeared, and perhaps we have to wait longer still. Our own age is very quick to judge and even to pre judge, perhaps as part of a determined effort to make sure that art never opens its own mouth.

It has teeth, art, and a way of cutting through to the soft parts untried.

Did the Modernists too far strain the relationship between reader and writer? I think not. The Romantics had been subjected to invective no less fierce than that aimed at Eliot, Pound,Joyce, Woolf, Stein, HD and company. Revolution upsets order and most of us prefer a quiet life. The revolt against Realism was really a revolt of tradition. The Modernists were trying to ,return to an idea of art as a conscious place (their critics would say a self-conscious place), a place outside of both rhetoric and cliche. This was a normal enough revolt, and one that had been carried out something over a hundred years earlier by Wordsworth and the Lake poets, and a hundred years before that by Dryden. Periodic refinements in the language poets use have to come at a time when what should be said simply is being said elaborately and when what should be subtle and complex is being too crudely treated. Spoken language alters and poetry, if it is to be living, must move with those changes in language but also stretch them, refine them, so that the thoughts and sensibilities of a people, as reflected in their speech, are kept taut. Poetry, poetic fiction, is not artificial language (or at least when it is, it ceases to be poetry), but it is a heightened language. It is recognisably the language we all use but at a pitch beyond the everyday capacities of speech.

It is easy to see why, compared with Kipling, Housman, Bridges, and most of the First World War poets (not Owen), T. S. Eliot’s ‘Prufrock’ (1917) and The Waste Land (1922) looked prosy, and were attacked for failing to be poetry. Wordsworth’s Lyrical Ballads (1798) had been attacked for the same reason. What Eliot was doing was consciously re linking verse language with street language but refusing to talk down. The language he creates is one flexible enough to stretch around new and difficult ideas and fixed enough within a poetic tradition not to degenerate into a merely private response (always a problem with lesser Modems, such as Richard Aldington). Whatever it was, it had not been seen before, although it had been anticipated by Robert Browning. Whatever has not been seen before causes trouble. For the ordinary reader, the Modernist writer looked desperately difficult (Eliot) desperately dirty (Joyce) desperately dull (Woolf). Novels were meant to be novels (stories), and poems were meant to be poetic (pastorals, ballads, and during the war, protests). Amongst its other crimes, Modernism was questioning the boundaries between the two. Some very good writers, including Robert Graves, thought this blurring particularly wicked.

If it strikes us as strange that a group of people working towards returning literature to its roots in speech (which is not the same thing as forcing literature down to speech), should be regarded as remote and disconnected, it is worth remembering two things: 1) That we judge new work by a template of the past from which it has already escaped. 2) That the popular novelists and popular poets seemed to be the rightful inheritors of literary tradition because they were perpetuating what had been done well enough and often enough to be familiar. The fact that familiarity usually means something we no longer question, something we no longer see, is a point in its favour. As creatures of habit, the more we can remove from our immediate consciousness the better. To read something that gives us a certain satisfaction and a certain pleasure, even if its manner and its method is exhausted, is more acceptable than grappling with the new.

Good writers, of any period, write a living language. As their innovations and experiments become commonplace, lesser writers copy them, and in their hands the language is no longer living, it becomes inert. Men like Galsworthy, Bennett and Wells, borrowed from the great Victorian novelists a prose style they and their contemporaries had had no part in forging, and although they borrowed it well, there was nothing of any note that they could add. Even as they were working, speech patterns, and therefore thought patterns and patterns of feeling were rapidly changing. Ours has been a century of rapid change, and if literature is to have any meaning beyond the museum, it must keep developing. To compare the prose style of Woolf ’s Jacob’s Room (1922) with Bennett’s Riceyman Steps (1923) is an exercise in astonishment. Looking now, with hindsight, we can see at once which book is modem, that is to say which style proved the right equipment to put into words that which was only just bubbling into collective consciousness.

That is what I mean when I talk about exceptional sensibility. The true artist does have a kind of early warning system, an immanence that allows him or her to recognise and make articulate the emotional perplexities of his age. Writers who seem to sum up their time are writers who have this prescience. It is not that they make better documentaries than the rest, this is where the realists miss the point, it is that they make better poems. The emotional and psychic resonance of a particular people at a particular time is not a series of snapshots that can be stuck together to make a montage, it is a living, breathing, winding movement that flows out of the past and into the future while making its unique present. This fixity and flux is never clear until we are beyond it, into a further fixity and flux, and yet when we read our great literature, it seems that it was clear, at least to one group of people, a few out of millions, who come to be absolutely identified with their day; the artists.

Art does not imitate life. Art anticipates life.

Although the major Modernists soon made unblockable inroads into the literary tradition it was inevitable that their purity of purpose would be questioned. The Bloomsbury Group attracted a vengeful type of pseudo-criticism that confused the writer with the work and caricatured both. Art for Art’s sake, which was really the chant of Marinetti and the Futurists, stuck to those writers and other artists who seemed stubbornly determined to put the Muse first. The young men (and I do mean men) who were the younger generation in the 1930s, Auden, Isherwood, Spender, Day Lewis, MacNeice, were either Communists or Socialists who passionately believed in a truly popular art. The ivory tower was under siege.

In fact, the stake-out between Ivory Tower and Red Square was no more real than the apparently conflicting claims of Society and the Muse. While avidly reading and· not disputing the innovations of their elders, the new young men wanted to write for the working classes. What they forgot was that the working classes didn’t want to read them. As a member of the proletariat myself, I can confirm that there is nothing drearier than the embrace of a bunch of Oxbridge intellectuals who want to tell you that art (theirs) is for you. The express view of the highbrow Modems was cleaner: take it or leave it. What they knew, and what the eager young men of the Thirties reluctantly came to know was that it is not possible to produce a living literature that includes everyone unless everyone wants to be included. Art leaves nobody out, but it cannot condescend, we have to climb up if we want the extraordinary view.

Ours has not been an easy century for art. At times, to talk about it at all has seemed crass. Two World Wars, the Spanish Civil War, the General Strike of 1926 and the Depression of the 1930s cut short those experiments in language and in thought that human beings perpetually make and perpetually need.

For myself, in the literature of my own language, I can find little to cheer me between the publication of Four Quartets (1944) and Angela Carter’s The Magic Toyshop (1967). Of course I am cheered by Beckett and by Pinter and Orton and Stoppard, but they are dramatists and, with the exception of Beckett, the solid body of their work comes out of the 1960s, as does that of Adrienne Rich.

Robert Graves has·soldiered on, pledging deep allegiance to his lover-Muse and now that he has been dead ten years, we see how right he was to go his silly stubborn way and retire to get on with his work. The social conscience lobbies of the Forties and Fifties, including those Angry Young Men, have not won nearly so well, and it seems that they had not nearly so much to say.

The 1940s and the 1950s seem to me to be a dead time, in my terms because the anti-art response, Realism, bounced back again in a new outfit but wearing the same smug expression. I would hazard that a really good writer, like Muriel Spark, was handicapped by her period. Miss Spark does not want to be a Realist, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie should confirm that, and yet a Realist she has been, and what a pity. Iris Murdoch might have been something else (see The Black Prince), and might yet (The Green Knight) but I do not worry too much about her. I do not worry about Kingsley Amis at all.

I would have thought that the rise and rise of TV and film would have entirely satisfied our ‘mirror of life’ longings. The screen large and small can do perfectly what the ordinary Victorian novel could do, which is why adaptations of same work so well. Adaptations of Dickens do not work well because what gets lost is everything that really matters; language.

As the relationship between reader and writer continues to change, it might be worthwhile to ask what it is that we want from one another. If the reader wants the writer to be an extension of the leisure industry or a product of the media, then the serious writer will be beaten back into an elitism beyond that necessary to maintain certain standards; it will be an elitism of survival and it is happening already. Writers are fighters, they have to be, because to begin with, they are the people who must stand up for their own work, but must they continually be called to defend not only their. own work but the very concept of art? Even to use the word ‘art’ is to provoke a response either quizzical or violent. If there is no such thing, do we mean that there never has been any such thing, that there is no such thing now, or the writer who is fool enough to use the word simply does not understand it?

We seem to have returned to a place where play, pose and experiment are unwelcome and where the idea of art is debased. At the same time, there are a growing number of people (possibly even a representative number of people), who want to find something genuine in the literature of their own time and who are unconvinced by the glories of reproduction furniture.

To those people I ask this: that their relationship with their writers should be a direct one, the agency of the book is their common ground, and the only way into a piece of literature is through the front door - Open it. Once there, if the arrangement of the rooms is unfamiliar and the fabric strange, reflect that at least it is new, and that is what you say you want. It will be too, a world apart, a place where the normal weights and measures of the day have been subtly altered to give a different emphasis and perhaps to slide back the secret panel by the heart. Check that the book is made of language, living and not inert, for a true writer will create a separate reality and her atoms and her gases are words.

0 notes