the world. I suppose I slept and ate the food put
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before me and talked connectedly on suitable occasions, but I was never aware of the even flow of daily life, made easy and noiseless for me by a silent, watchful, tireless affection.
So there is a homely underpinning for it all, the even flow of daily life made easy and noiseless.
''The terrible law of the artist"says Henry James"the law of fructification, of fertilization. The old, old lesson of the art of meditation. To woo combinations and inspirations into being by a depth and continuity of attention and meditation."
"That load, that weight, that gnawing conscience," writes Thomas Mann
That sea which to drink up, that frightful task ... The will, the discipline and self-control to shape a sentence or follow out a hard train of thought. From the first rhythmical urge of the inward creative force towards the material, towards casting in shape and form, from that to the thought, the image, the word, the line, what a struggle, what Gethsemane.
Does it become very clear what Melville's Pierre so bitterly remarked on, and what literary history bears outwhy most of the great works of humanity have come from lives (able to be) wholly surrendered and dedicated? How else sustain the constant toil, the frightful task, the terrible law, the continuity? Full self: this means full time as and when needed for the work. (That time for which Emily Dickinson withdrew from the world.)
But what if there is not that fullness of time, let alone totality of self? What if the writers, as in some of these silences, must work regularly at something besides their own workas do nearly all in the arts in the United States today.
I know the theory (kin to "starving in the garret makes great art") that it is this very circumstance which feeds creativity. I know, too, that for the beginning young, for some who have such need, the job can be valuable access to life they would not otherwise know. A few (I think of the doctors, the incomparables: Chekhov and William Carlos Williams) for special reasons sometimes manage both. But the actuality
Page 95
testifies: substantial creative work demands time, and with rare exceptions only full-time workers have achieved it. * Where the claims of creation cannot be primary, the results are atrophy; unfinished work; minor effort and accomplishments; silences. (Desperation which accounts for the mountains of applications to the foundations for grantsundivided timein the strange bread-line system we have worked out for our artists.)
Twenty years went by on the writing of Ship of Fools, while Katherine Anne Porter, who needed only two, was ''trying to get to that table, to that typewriter, away from my jobs of teaching and trooping this country and of keeping house." "Your subconscious needed that time to grow the layers of pearl," she was told. Perhaps, perhaps, but I doubt it. Subterranean forces can make you wait, but they are very finicky about the kind of waiting it has to be. Before they will feed the creator back, they must be fed, passionately fed, what needs to be worked on. "We hold up our desire as one places a magnet over a composite dust from which the particle of iron will suddenly jump up," says Paul Valéry. A receptive waiting, that means, not demands which prevent "an undistracted center of being." And when the response comes, availability to work must be immediate. If not used at once, all may vanish as a dream; worse, future creation be endangeredfor only the removal and development of the material frees the forces for further work.
There is a life in which all this is documented: Franz Kafka's. For every one entry from his diaries here, there are fifty others
*This does not mean that these full-time writers were hermetic or denied themselves social or personal life (think of James, Turgenev, Tolstoy, Balzac, Joyce, Gide, Colette, Yeats, Woolf, etc. etc.); nor did they, except perhaps at the flood, put in as many hours daily as those
Page 94
before me and talked connectedly on suitable occasions, but I was never aware of the even flow of daily life, made easy and noiseless for me by a silent, watchful, tireless affection.
So there is a homely underpinning for it all, the even flow of daily life made easy and noiseless.
''The terrible law of the artist"says Henry James"the law of fructification, of fertilization. The old, old lesson of the art of meditation. To woo combinations and inspirations into being by a depth and continuity of attention and meditation."
"That load, that weight, that gnawing conscience," writes Thomas Mann
That sea which to drink up, that frightful task ... The will, the discipline and self-control to shape a sentence or follow out a hard train of thought. From the first rhythmical urge of the inward creative force towards the material, towards casting in shape and form, from that to the thought, the image, the word, the line, what a struggle, what Gethsemane.
Does it become very clear what Melville's Pierre so bitterly remarked on, and what literary history bears outwhy most of the great works of humanity have come from lives (able to be) wholly surrendered and dedicated? How else sustain the constant toil, the frightful task, the terrible law, the continuity? Full self: this means full time as and when needed for the work. (That time for which Emily Dickinson withdrew from the world.)
But what if there is not that fullness of time, let alone totality of self? What if the writers, as in some of these silences, must work regularly at something besides their own workas do nearly all in the arts in the United States today.
I know the theory (kin to "starving in the garret makes great art") that it is this very circumstance which feeds creativity. I know, too, that for the beginning young, for some who have such need, the job can be valuable access to life they would not otherwise know. A few (I think of the doctors, the incomparables: Chekhov and William Carlos Williams) for special reasons sometimes manage both. But the actuality
Page 95
testifies: substantial creative work demands time, and with rare exceptions only full-time workers have achieved it. * Where the claims of creation cannot be primary, the results are atrophy; unfinished work; minor effort and accomplishments; silences. (Desperation which accounts for the mountains of applications to the foundations for grantsundivided timein the strange bread-line system we have worked out for our artists.)
Twenty years went by on the writing of Ship of Fools, while Katherine Anne Porter, who needed only two, was ''trying to get to that table, to that typewriter, away from my jobs of teaching and trooping this country and of keeping house." "Your subconscious needed that time to grow the layers of pearl," she was told. Perhaps, perhaps, but I doubt it. Subterranean forces can make you wait, but they are very finicky about the kind of waiting it has to be. Before they will feed the creator back, they must be fed, passionately fed, what needs to be worked on. "We hold up our desire as one places a magnet over a composite dust from which the particle of iron will suddenly jump up," says Paul Valéry. A receptive waiting, that means, not demands which prevent "an undistracted center of being." And when the response comes, availability to work must be immediate. If not used at once, all may vanish as a dream; worse, future creation be endangeredfor only the removal and development of the material frees the forces for further work.
There is a life in which all this is documented: Franz Kafka's. For every one entry from his diaries here, there are fifty others
*This does not mean that these full-time writers were hermetic or denied themselves social or personal life (think of James, Turgenev, Tolstoy, Balzac, Joyce, Gide, Colette, Yeats, Woolf, etc. etc.); nor did they, except perhaps at the flood, put in as many hours daily as those
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