Certain motives, I said, after a while get written out, and must be sent
like coins for renewal to the mint. And so of a particular technique, of
certain ways of narrative, the chronicle novel for example. In 1911
everyone was telling the story of a generation’s passage through youth
to middle age; it had become the fashionable medium for social satire;
it seemed the destined channel for the main stream of early
twentieth-century narrative. But already a dam has been placed across
its path, the dam of the years 1914-1918.
The novel reader, I suppose, knows no greater weariness, no sensation of
more profound misgiving than that which comes over him when he realises
on page 173 that the action of the story is about to land him in the
year 1913. He loses interest immediately. What does it matter, he asks
himself, whether Jane becomes engaged to that rascal Harry, or Arthur
elopes with the designing Marjorie? August 1914 is coming, and from
whatever manner of fix into which, between now and then, they may
contrive to place themselves the author will have no difficulty in
extricating them. The reader feels that he has been deceived. He has no
use for the _deus ex machinâ_. He feels as the small boy did who flung
the _Iliad_ in disgust across the room, and exclaimed: “Rotten! they
never had a fair fight once. There was always a god on one side or
another.”
The war, in the average novel, is an effect without a cause. It is
unquestionable that a great many homes were absolutely turned inside out
by “the great interruption.” There is no doubt that a great many
difficulties were removed by this heaven-sent intervention, even as a
great many simple situations were made interminably complex. All over
the world there was effect without a cause, but in the novel, which is
an essentially artificial thing, a thing that one makes with one’s own
hands, there can be no effect without cause. And the conscientious
novelist gazes in dismay at this tear across the fabric of life. He can,
of course, start his story earlier; but there can be no real conclusion
to a chronicle novel that ends in 1910. The reader knows that, in four
years’ time, the happy home on which the curtain has so tenderly
descended will be in chaos and that the hero will have to set out again
on his travels. He can hardly begin it in December 1918 with the picture
of a young man walking out of his tailor’s, in a grey tweed suit. A
chronicle novel can barely get started in five years. And it is equally
difficult for a writer to take the war in his stride. There have been
one or two attempts; but, with the exception of “The Forsyte Saga,” they
have been failures. For that type of novel one wants a clear ten years
on either side.
Or it may be that the generating force of the movement is already spent;
it may be that the reader has grown indifferent through repetition to
the fortunes of the shy, sensitive young man who retired into a corner
and read Keats while his companions were playing football, and to whom
one of the masters would deliver himself of some such portentous
prophecy as: “You are not for the middle way. You will rise or you will
sink. The stars for you, or the depths.” And there was certainly a
singular similarity about that young man’s early amatory adventures; the
wanton with the heart of gold; the pure girl and the unhappy marriage;
the splendid heroism of infidelity. It seemed very daring and original
in 1912 to end a novel with a divorce instead of with a marriage. But
was such an end any more conclusive than the Victorian wedding bells? In
the Victorian novel the young man gets engaged to the wrong girl, but
meets the right girl in time to marry her. In the Georgian novel the
marriage to the right girl is preceded by a divorce, instead of a broken
engagement.
Fashions pass quickly nowadays, there are so many novels and so many
novelists. One man starts a movement; a whole host of lesser writers
follow him, prejudicing him with their imitations. This romantic
movement of Michael Sadleir’s: ten years at the most I give it.
“Desolate Splendour” is a good book, but it is the forerunner inevitably
of a positive cavalcade of melodramatic barons and pornographic
duchesses. As a publisher’s reader I shiver to think of the fare with
which these next few summers will provision me.
We have too many books: that is the whole trouble. And it is not from
the commercial point of view that I am complaining. I am not saying the
supply is greater than the demand. It isn’t. The number of novelists has
increased, but so has the reading public. Commercially the writer has a
pretty good time of it nowadays. The big men, Wells and Galsworthy and
Bennett, must have made more money out of writing than Dickens and
Thackeray ever did: and we others, life is materially easier for us than
it was probably for our brothers of the 1820’s. At any rate, I know no
other profession in which a man of twenty-five can afford to play
cricket three whole days of a working week. It is not on the commercial
side I am grumbling. What I am trying to say is this: that it is harder
to-day for a writer to produce good work now than it has ever been
before.
The pace is too fast for one thing. A novel a year. “You must keep your
name before a public.” That is what agent and publisher are continually
dinning into the author’s mind, and it is true, of course. That is the
commercial line. Spring and autumn fashions. And only a few can last. A
novel a year would be no hardship to a man endowed with the ebullient
vitality of a Dickens or a Balzac; but there are not many such. In five
novels and a few short stories Flaubert said all he had to say.
Fielding, Smollett, Sterne, and Richardson together, they do little more
than reach double figures. Maupassant had written himself out at
forty-three.
And then because there are so many novelists, each writer is expected to
cultivate a particular province. His name on a book is like the label on
a bottle of wine. “Ah, yes,” says the library subscriber, “Compton
Mackenzie, a story of sound and colour; a little naughty: many alluring
ladies; a smooth, ornate, sentimental style.” Should he discover instead
a grey, political study of the effect of Trade Unionism on the
commercial prosperity of the Tynemouth, he would be as disappointed, and
would consider himself as ill-used, as Professor Saintsbury would if the
Chateau Margaux he was offering his guests should reveal itself as Clos
de Vougeot. An admirable Burgundy, but he had ordered claret. The
novelist is not encouraged to make experiments. He is asked to rewrite
one book indefinitely, till the material is watered down and a new
entertainer has appeared.
And there have been so many novels. Every obvious situation has been
used. The simple themes of love, jealousy, parenthood have been
exploited till there is little new to say. The broad field has been
ploughed so often. There are only a few dark spots by the hedge, under
the shadow of the trees, where there is little sunshine and plants grow
weakly, crookedly, different from their fellows, dank places where the
few may specialise. “This, at least,” they say, “we can make our own.”
And whatever else may be urged against _Ulysses_ no one could deny it is
James Joyce’s own. An amazing work. A book without grammar and without
coherence; like a boat that is launched from an aeroplane in mid-ocean,
without oars, without rudder, and without sails. Sometimes I see
_Ulysses_ as a literary Thermopylae, a desperate stand against
insuperable odds. “I will transcribe life,” he said, “as it is. I will
omit nothing. Everything that passes through the mind shall be set on
record. By setting everything down I shall achieve proportion.”
_Ulysses_ is, perhaps, the most splendid failure in literature. But it
is a failure. And when I hear ecstatic praise of it, I remember the five
weeks or so during which I was the slave of jigsaw puzzles. For six
hours a day I worked at them. I assorted and reassorted ridiculous
pieces of coloured wood; I acquired a second sight for the dimensions of
lozenge shapes. Gradually, bit by bit, there emerged from the discordant
masses of detail on the table, a scheme, a pattern. Gradually, what I
had taken for a turnip was revealed to me as a cockatoo, and what I had
thought to be a beetroot became a face. Till, at last, the final piece
was fitted, and there stared up at me from the table the sort of picture
that I used to paint with water-colours in the nursery: a young girl
feeding a rabbit with a lettuce; an old man filling a pipe before a
fire; a dog crying for its master in the snow. But I had no eyes for the
thing’s futility. Out of chaos had I achieved this symmetry.
“Wonderful,” I said, “simply wonderful.” It was the picture that I so
apostrophised. But it was myself that I was really praising. How
wonderful of me, it was, I felt to have produced this thing. And in the
same way when, after an hour’s battle, we have restored to sense and
English a passage of Joyce’s shorthand, we have not the heart to
consider the intrinsic value of the thing restored. We are so delighted
with ourselves for having done it. “Wonderful,” we say, “wonderful,” and
actually believe it is.
I rather suspect that the year 1922 will be a landmark for the literary
historian of our day. _Ulysses_ is a sign-post. It will he hardly
possible for the two styles of writing, the analytical shorthand and the
narrative any longer to imagine that they are hunting together. James
Joyce has worked out on the blackboard the piece of algebra over which
his pupils have been so long puzzling. _Ulysses_ is the answer.
“Life with a big ‘L.’” Every generation has its own pet hobby-horse to
ride to death, and that’s been ours: still is, I think. We are all in
search, each of us in our own way, of this strange quality of living
that our own existence lacks.
The young poet walks down the steps of the stately mansion where he has
been reading his poems aloud to bright-eyed admiration in a
softly-lighted, softly-cushioned drawing-room. He hails a taxi, and as
he sinks back into the padded seat he ponders the arid monotony of his
existence; one day is so like another. Where is the thrill, the mystery
of life? He will return to his flat. His clothes will be laid out ready
for him. His man will ask him if he will have his bath at once. He will
nod. He will undress slowly, will finish reading that review book in his
bath; he will linger over his dressing. He is dining with Mrs Spurway.
Just such another dinner-party as yesterday’s was and to-morrow’s will
be. Lady Mary will be there and he will have to find occasion to whisper
that he loves her as desperately as ever, though he knows too well how
rapidly his ardour is cooling. She is like all the rest. And through
the window he contemplates the firm, resolute back of the taxi-driver.
How he envies him. That is life. He is not tied to a circle of social
obligations. He lives outside the conventions. He is free.
The thoughts of the taxi-driver are not dissimilar. He, too, is
pondering the monotony of his existence. How the London streets resemble
one another. He has promised to take Mary Gubbins to the pictures that
evening; and he remembers that he is getting rather tired of Mary
Gubbins; she is like all the rest. He envies the gilded persons whom he
bears all day long from one scene of revel to another. It is human to
envy the conditions of another’s life. The young girl who looks from her
bedroom window on to the street below is wooed by its sense of mystery
and adventure, and the inspector of omnibus tickets pauses on the top
deck to gaze wistfully at the lighted window. It is the hunger for
experience, for variety, for a fuller life. We should all like to live a
hundred lives, to enter into the heart of every mystery, to feel every
human emotion of happiness and sorrow. That is a natural instinct. But
its present manifestation is unfortunate. There is a deep-rooted
conviction that life is only intense when it is bitter, that waitresses
and dustmen and crossing-sweepers have seen deeper into the human heart
than bank clerks and school-mistresses and lawyers, that life is only
real when it is raw.
Some years ago a mixed vermouth at the Café Royal resulted in my
inclusion in a general invitation to a studio party. An obscure musician
was celebrating his wife’s elopement. There were prodigal promises of
gin and whisky. Everyone would be there, I was informed. I had nothing
to do that evening. I went, in search of life.
It was a surprise. We all have our illusion of Bohemia; all of us, that
is to say, who study modern fiction and frequent the cinema. At the back
of our mind there is a vivid picture of Bohemia as we would have it; an
affair of half-lights and perfumes, and cushions and clinging draperies.
Perhaps such a Bohemia exists somewhere. It may do; certainly it ought
to. But it had no counterpart in that studio party.
By the time I arrived the party had been in progress a couple of hours.
The atmosphere was thick. The floor was covered with cigarette ends and
the splinters of broken glass. In various corners of the room partially
inebriated couples were lost to the world in amorous abandon. An
unwashed, unshaved Italian was strumming on a fiddle. There was a little
dancing. A number of loose collared Americans were talking in art jargon
at the tops of their voices. In a deep armchair, his nose broken, his
forehead and eyebrows cut and swollen, a man slept. Whether he had
disputed a brother artist’s claim to some lady’s favours, or whether his
legs had been unequal to their task and he had collapsed upon a broken
bottle, I was unable to discover. At any rate, he slept. He was a
loathsome sight; and, for that matter, the whole party was a pretty
loathsome sight. But I was impressed. I was just free from the shackles
of military discipline and etiquette. Here, I thought, was life. Here
was a society that had won to freedom, that was divorced from all
preconceived opinions, from every super-imposed tradition of taste and
conduct. It was, indeed, somewhat of a shock to me that the only man in
the room who appeared to possess a razor should say in a dry voice,
“What a show. Look at all these idiots pretending to be Dostoieffskies.”
He was right, of course. London is full of people trying to be
Dostoieffsky, nursing secretly the grief that they are not epileptic.
Dostoieffsky preached the gospel of suffering, and because he spent his
life in poverty, the modern idea would appear to be that the only real
suffering is material privation, that the man has not lived who has not
starved. It is the new snobbery. Once everyone was anxious to establish
his descent from a baron. Now everyone is grieved if his pedigree does
not contain a dustman.
James Joyce is like that, I fancy: or rather I should say the stuff he
writes is. And he could have been so great a writer if he had not been
led astray by that reckless heroism of his, that determination at all
costs to transcribe life. Perhaps, though, _Ulysses_ is more than
Journey’s End for a certain type of fiction: it may be that it is
Journey’s End for the novel as a vehicle for narrative; it may be that
the novel is played out.
Since the beginning of time the world has had stories told to it. But
always in a different form. There was the epic, and that has gone; the
ballad, and that has gone; the drama, and that is passing; the novel,
and who knows but that the novel as a medium of story-telling has
served its turn, that it is through the cinema that the twentieth
century will elect to have its stories told, and that the novel will
become a weapon of dialectic, a glorified form of journalism, or purely
a medium of psychological investigation.