I try to feel myself literarily a poet--finer-made than a god. But I
fail as a poet-litterateur as I fail as a poet-person. A poet flies
always on wings of fiery gold though it might be waywardly. But often
I walk with my feet in odd gutters, and have some plaisance in them,
and analyze their gutteriness absorbedly and own them as part of my
portion.
--poet or no poet, it is best to be myself. In heights and murks and
widths and trivial horrors, _myself_--
But as an Artist I am in the true. As a painter of words and maker of
paragraphs which picture my phases and emotions, and in my conscious
feeling anent it, I realize the artist _flair_, the artist temper. It
is not a literary but a personal art.
I have what goes with all artist-matter--long periods of dry-rot when
having nothing ripe to write I write nothing. My Artist-spirit proves
itself, justifies itself in my times of stagnation and reaction. Out
of it something human and sad and lustrous grows in me, something
which is half worldly but awaits its ripe time of expression with
someway-divine scorn.
I once thought me destined to be a ‘writer’ in the ordinary sense.
And many good people visioned a writing career for me. It has a vapid
taste, just to recall it. My flawed life has that to felicitate
upon--that I have not spent it in fat lumps of writing, magazine
tales and sex-novels. In the days, and later, when my demi-vierge
book made its success I was besought by publishers to write
others--to go on, to reap and garner. I pushed all that away with a
preoccupied hand, not as part and parcel of my wastrel living but in
my assured Artist-temper. I should feel more true-to-form to earn
my living by making linen roses in a shop, along with rows of pale
women, than by my writing.
My writing is to me a precious thing--and a rare bird--and a
Babylonish jade. It demands gold in exchange for itself. But though
it is my talent it is not my living. It is too myself, like my
earlobes and my throat, to commercialize by the day.
But I can not think of me as an Artist without thinking of me as a
Liar. The two are someway related. I am an appalling, an encompassing
Liar. I am a Liar by the clock. My life ticks out silent lies as my
little clock ticks out seconds. It is a phase hard to put my finger
on. I feel it on me the way I feel a headache. I write this book
with seriousness and earnestness. It is all a mood of sincerity and
despair. But except I give it some backgrounding of lies, though
each thing in it is fair fact, I fail as an Artist.
It is strange about lies--any lies, all lies. They are muscularly
stronger than truths. They come more readily to human tongues. They
fit more easily into the games of this life. And in me they seem
needful to my Artist mind.