Wil-
* Robert Bone, The Negro Novel in America, 1958.
**Some other foreground silences: Elizabeth (Mrs.) Gaskell, Kate Chopin, Cora Sandel, Cyrus Colter, Hortense Calisher.
Page 92
der, a writer-daughter's insistence that she transmute her storytelling gift onto paper).
Very close to this last grouping are the silences where the lives never came to writing. Among these, the mute inglorious Miltons: those whose waking hours are all struggle for existence; the- barely educated; the illiterate; women. Their silence the silence of centuries as to how life was, is, for most of humanity. Traces of their making, of course, in folk song, lullaby, tales, language itself, jokes, maxims, superstitionsbut we know nothing of the creators or how it was with them. In the fantasy of Shakespeare born in deepest Africa (as at least one Shakespeare must have been), was the ritual, the oral storytelling a fulfillment? Or was there restlessness, indefinable yearning, a sense of restrictions? Was it as Virginia Woolf in A Room of One's Own guessesabout women?
Genius of a sort must have existed among them, as it existed among the working classes, * but certainly it never got itself onto paper. When, however, one reads of a woman possessed by the devils, of a wise woman selling herbs, or even a remarkable man who had a remarkable mother, then I think we are on the track of a lost novelist, a suppressed poet, or some Emily Brontë who dashed her brains out on the moor, crazed with the torture her gift had put her to.
Rebecca Harding Davis whose work sleeps in the forgotten (herself as a woman of a century ago so close to remaining mute), also guessed about the silent in that time of the twelve-hour-a-day, six-day work week. She writes of the illiterate ironworker in Life in the Iron Mills who sculptured great shapes in the slag: ''his fierce thirst for beauty, to know it, to create ii, to be something other than he isa passion of pain"; Margret Howth in the textile mill:
There were things in the world, that like herself, were marred, did not understand, were hungry to know.... Her
* Half of the working classes are women.
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eyes quicker to see than ours, delicate or grand lines in the homeliest things. . . . Everything she saw or touched, nearer, more human than to you or me. These sights and sounds did not come to her common; she never got used to living as other people do.
She never got used to living as other people do. Was that one of the ways it was?
So some of the silences, incomplete listing of the incomplete, where the need and capacity to create were of a high order.
Now, what is the work of creation and the circumstances it demands for full functioningas told in the journals, letters, notes, of the practitioners themselves: Henry James, Katherine Mansfield, André Gide, Virginia Woolf; the letters of Flaubert, Rilke, Joseph Conrad; Thomas Wolfe's Story of a Novel, Valéry's Course in Poetics. What do they explain of the silences?
''Constant toil is the law of art, as it is of life," says (and demonstrated) Balzac:
To pass from conception to execution, to produce, to bring the idea to birth, to raise the child laboriously from infancy, to put it nightly to sleep surfeited, to kiss it in the mornings with the hungry heart of a mother, to clean it, to clothe it fifty times over in new garments which it tears and casts away, and yet not revolt against the trials of this agitated lifethis unwearying maternal love, this habit of creationthis is execution and its toils.
"Without duties, almost without external communication," Rilke specifies, "unconfined solitude which takes every day like a life, a spaciousness which puts no limit to vision and in the midst of which infinities surround."
Unconfined solitude as Joseph Conrad experienced it:
For twenty months I wrestled with the Lord for my creation . . . mind and will and conscience engaged to the full, hour after hour, day after day ... a lonely struggle in a great isolation from
* Robert Bone, The Negro Novel in America, 1958.
**Some other foreground silences: Elizabeth (Mrs.) Gaskell, Kate Chopin, Cora Sandel, Cyrus Colter, Hortense Calisher.
Page 92
der, a writer-daughter's insistence that she transmute her storytelling gift onto paper).
Very close to this last grouping are the silences where the lives never came to writing. Among these, the mute inglorious Miltons: those whose waking hours are all struggle for existence; the- barely educated; the illiterate; women. Their silence the silence of centuries as to how life was, is, for most of humanity. Traces of their making, of course, in folk song, lullaby, tales, language itself, jokes, maxims, superstitionsbut we know nothing of the creators or how it was with them. In the fantasy of Shakespeare born in deepest Africa (as at least one Shakespeare must have been), was the ritual, the oral storytelling a fulfillment? Or was there restlessness, indefinable yearning, a sense of restrictions? Was it as Virginia Woolf in A Room of One's Own guessesabout women?
Genius of a sort must have existed among them, as it existed among the working classes, * but certainly it never got itself onto paper. When, however, one reads of a woman possessed by the devils, of a wise woman selling herbs, or even a remarkable man who had a remarkable mother, then I think we are on the track of a lost novelist, a suppressed poet, or some Emily Brontë who dashed her brains out on the moor, crazed with the torture her gift had put her to.
Rebecca Harding Davis whose work sleeps in the forgotten (herself as a woman of a century ago so close to remaining mute), also guessed about the silent in that time of the twelve-hour-a-day, six-day work week. She writes of the illiterate ironworker in Life in the Iron Mills who sculptured great shapes in the slag: ''his fierce thirst for beauty, to know it, to create ii, to be something other than he isa passion of pain"; Margret Howth in the textile mill:
There were things in the world, that like herself, were marred, did not understand, were hungry to know.... Her
* Half of the working classes are women.
Page 93
eyes quicker to see than ours, delicate or grand lines in the homeliest things. . . . Everything she saw or touched, nearer, more human than to you or me. These sights and sounds did not come to her common; she never got used to living as other people do.
She never got used to living as other people do. Was that one of the ways it was?
So some of the silences, incomplete listing of the incomplete, where the need and capacity to create were of a high order.
Now, what is the work of creation and the circumstances it demands for full functioningas told in the journals, letters, notes, of the practitioners themselves: Henry James, Katherine Mansfield, André Gide, Virginia Woolf; the letters of Flaubert, Rilke, Joseph Conrad; Thomas Wolfe's Story of a Novel, Valéry's Course in Poetics. What do they explain of the silences?
''Constant toil is the law of art, as it is of life," says (and demonstrated) Balzac:
To pass from conception to execution, to produce, to bring the idea to birth, to raise the child laboriously from infancy, to put it nightly to sleep surfeited, to kiss it in the mornings with the hungry heart of a mother, to clean it, to clothe it fifty times over in new garments which it tears and casts away, and yet not revolt against the trials of this agitated lifethis unwearying maternal love, this habit of creationthis is execution and its toils.
"Without duties, almost without external communication," Rilke specifies, "unconfined solitude which takes every day like a life, a spaciousness which puts no limit to vision and in the midst of which infinities surround."
Unconfined solitude as Joseph Conrad experienced it:
For twenty months I wrestled with the Lord for my creation . . . mind and will and conscience engaged to the full, hour after hour, day after day ... a lonely struggle in a great isolation from
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