On Writing (and Writers): a Miscellany of Advice and Opinions Read online

  It seems to me that in talking of books which are “mere stories”—books, that is, which concern themselves principally with the imagined event and not with character or society—nearly everyone makes the assumption that “excitement” is the only pleasure they ever give or are intended to give. Excitement, in this sense, may be defined as the alternate tension and appeasement of imagined anxiety. This is what I think untrue. In some such books, and for some readers, another factor comes in . . . .

  If to love story is to love excitement, then I ought to be the greatest lover of excitement alive. But the fact is that what is said to be the most “exciting” novel in the world, The Three Musketeers, makes no appeal to me at all. The total lack of atmosphere repels me. There is no country in the book—save as a storehouse of inns and ambushes. There is no weather. When they cross to London there is no feeling that London differs from Paris. There is not a moment’s rest from the “adventures”: one’s nose is kept ruthlessly to the grindstone. It all means nothing to me . . . .

  Shall I be thought whimsical if, in conclusion, I suggest that this internal tension in the heart of every story between the theme and the plot constitutes, after all, its chief resemblance to life? If story fails in that way, does not life commit the same blunder? In real life, as in a story, something must happen. That is just the trouble. We grasp at a state and find only a succession of events in which the state is never quite embodied. The grand idea of finding Atlantis which stirs us in the first chapter of the adventure story is apt to be frittered away in mere excitement when the journey has once been begun. But so, in real life, the idea of adventure fades when the day-to-day details begin to happen. Nor is this merely because actual hardship and danger shoulder it aside. Other grand ideas—homecoming, reunion with a beloved—similarly elude our grasp. Suppose there is no disappointment; even so—well, you are here. But now, something must happen, and after that something else. All that happens may be delightful: but can any such series quite embody the sheer state of being which was what we wanted? If the author’s plot is only a net, and usually an imperfect one, a net of time and event for catching what is not really a process at all, is life much more? I am not sure, on second thoughts, that the slow fading of the magic in The Well at the World’s End is, after all, a blemish. It is an image of the truth. Art, indeed, may be expected to do what life cannot do: but so it has done. The bird has escaped us. But it was at least entangled in the net for several chapters. We saw it close and enjoyed the plumage. How many “real lives” have nets that can do as much?

  In life and art both, as it seems to me, we are always trying to catch in our net of successive moments something that is not successive. Whether in real life there is any doctor who can teach us how to do it, so that at last either the meshes will become fine enough to hold the bird, or we be so changed that we can throw our nets away and follow the bird to its own country, is not a question for this essay. But I think it is sometimes done—or very, very nearly done—in stories. I believe the effort to be well worth making.

  “On Stories,” Of Other Worlds

  REALISTIC DRIVEL IN MODERN FICTION

  It is a strange comment on our age that such a book lies hid in a hideous paper-backed edition, wholly unnoticed by the cognoscenti, while any “realistic” drivel about some neurotic in a London flat—something that needs no real invention at all, something that any educated man could write if he chose—may get seriously reviewed and mentioned in serious books, as if it really mattered. I wonder how long this tyranny will last? Twenty years ago I felt no doubt that I should live to see it all break up and great literature return: but here I am, losing teeth and hair, and still no break in the clouds.

  Letter to Joy Gresham, December 22, 1953 (CL 3)

  SURPRISES MAY FADE, BUT “SURPRISINGNESS” LASTS

  “We do not enjoy a story fully at the first reading. Not till the curiosity, the sheer narrative lust, has been given its sop and laid asleep, are we at leisure to savor the real beauties.”

  An unliterary man may be defined as one who reads books once only. There is hope for a man who has never read Malory or Boswell or Tristram Shandy or Shakespeare’s Sonnets: but what can you do with a man who says he ‘has read’ them, meaning he has read them once, and thinks that this settles the matter? . . . For excitement . . . is just what must disappear from a second reading. You cannot, except at the first reading, be really curious about what happened. If you find that the reader of popular romance—however uneducated a reader, however bad the romances—goes back to his old favorites again and again, then you have pretty good evidence that they are to him a sort of poetry.

  The re-reader is looking not for actual surprises (which can come only once) but for a certain surprisingness. The point has often been misunderstood . . . . We do not enjoy a story fully at the first reading. Not till the curiosity, the sheer narrative lust, has been given its sop and laid asleep, are we at leisure to savor the real beauties. Till then, it is like wasting great wine on a ravenous natural thirst which merely wants cold wetness. The children understand this well when they ask for the same story over and over again, and in the same words. They want to have again the ‘surprise’ of discovering that what seemed Little-Red-Riding-Hood’s grandmother is really the wolf. It is better when you know it is coming: free from the shock of actual surprise you can attend better to the intrinsic surprisingness of the peripeteia.

  Note: Peripeteia: plot structure

  “On Stories,” Of Other Worlds

  On Writing Poetry

  Great subjects do not make great poems; usually, indeed, the reverse.

  —English Literature in the Sixteenth Century (Excluding Drama)

  A THRILL LIKE MUSIC

  Isn’t it funny the way some combinations of words can give you—almost apart from their meaning—a thrill like music?

  Letter to Arthur Greeves, March 21, 1916 (CL 1)

  THE METER AND THE MAGIC OF POETIC LANGUAGE

  You are quite right when you talk about thinking more of the matter than of the form. All I meant when I talked about the importance of form was to carry a little further what you already feel in prose—that is how some phrases such as “the wall of the world,” or “at the back of the north wind” affect you, partly by sound, partly by association, more than the same meaning would if otherwise expressed. The only difference is that poetry makes use of that sort of feeling much more than prose and produces those effects by meter as well as by phrase. In fact, the meter and the magic of the words should be like the orchestration of a Wagnerian opera—should sort of fill the matter by expressing things that can’t be directly told—that is, it expresses feeling while the matter expresses thought.

  Letter to Arthur Greeves, July 11, 1916 (CL 1)

  POETRY FOR THE LIPS AS WELL AS THE EYES

  By the way, I most fully agree with you about “the lips being invited to share the banquet” in poetry, and always “mouth” it while I read, though not in a way that would be audible to other people in the room. (Hence the excellent habit which I once formed, but have since lost, of not smoking while reading a poem.) I look upon this “mouthing” as an infallible mark of those who really like poetry. Depend upon it, the man who reads verses in any other way, is after “noble thoughts” or “philosophy” (in the revolting sense given to that word by Browning societies and Aunt Lily) or social history, or something of the kind, not poetry.

  Letter to his brother, Warren Lewis, April 8, 1932 (CL 2)

  JOHN SKELTON’S PERFECTION IN LIGHT POETRY

  [Skelton’s] “Philip Sparrow” is our first great poem of childhood . . . . It is indeed the lightest—the most like a bubble—of all the poems I know. It would break at a touch: but hold your breath, watch it, and it is almost perfect. The Skeltonics are essential to its perfection. Their prattling and hopping and their inconsequence, so birdlike and so childlike, are the best possible embodiment of the theme. We should not, I think, refuse to call this poem great; perfection in light poetry, perfect smallness, is among the rarest of literary achievements.

  English Literature in the Sixteenth Century (Excluding Drama)

  POETRY AS AN INCARNATION OF THOUGHT

  It seems to me appropriate, almost inevitable, that when that great Imagination which in the beginning, for Its own delight and for the delight of men and angels and (in their proper mode) of beasts, had invented and formed the whole world of Nature, submitted to express Itself in human speech, that speech should sometimes be poetry. For poetry too is a little incarnation, giving body to what had been before invisible and inaudible.

  Reflections on the Psalms

  POETRY AS A MODE OF WRITING

  When what the poet is saying is religious, poetry is simply a part of religion. When what he says is simply entertaining, poetry is a form of entertainment. When what he says is wicked, poetry is simply a form of sin. Whenever one is talking, if one begins to utilize rhythm, metaphor, association, etc., one is beginning to use “poetry”: but the whole place of that poetry in the scheme of things depends on what you are talking about. In fact, in a sense there is no such thing as poetry. It is not an element but a mode.

  Letter to Dom Bede Griffiths, July 28, 1936 (CL 2)

  ON POLITICAL POETRY

  The real parallel to much modern political poetry is not religious poetry concerned with God or the Passion or Heaven but merely pious poetry concerned with (ugh!) “religion.” The religion of politics is a religion without sacraments: for the human sacrifices which it practices are mere murder, not even ritual murder. Wordsworth compensated for the (poetically) ghostlike nature of politics by using a strict form, the sonnet. But that matter, with vers libre [free verse] as the form, is to me quite unpardonable: a noisy vacuity.

  L
etter to Chad Walsh, October 20, 1950 (CL 3)

  On Writing for Children

  “I am almost inclined to set it up as a canon that a children’s story which is enjoyed only by children is a bad children’s story. The good ones last. A waltz which you can like only when you are waltzing is a bad waltz.”

  I think there are three ways in which those who write for children may approach their work: two good ways and one that is generally a bad way.

  I came to know of the bad way quite recently and from two unconscious witnesses. One was a lady who sent me the manuscript of a story she had written in which a fairy placed at a child’s disposal a wonderful gadget. I say “gadget” because it was not a magic ring or hat or cloak or any such traditional matter. It was a machine, a thing of taps and handles and buttons you could press. You could press one and get an ice cream, another and get a live puppy, and so forth. I had to tell the author honestly that I didn’t much care for that sort of thing. She replied, “No more do I, it bores me to distraction. But it is what the modern child wants.” My other bit of evidence was this. In my own first story I had described at length what I thought a rather fine high tea given by a hospitable faun to the little girl who was my heroine. A man, who has children of his own, said, “Ah, I see how you got to that. If you want to please grown-up readers you give them sex, so you thought to yourself, ‘That won’t do for children, what shall I give them instead? I know! The little blighters like plenty of good eating.’” In reality, however, I myself like eating and drinking. I put in what I would have liked to read when I was a child and what I still like reading now that I am in my fifties.

  The lady in my first example, and the married man in my second, both conceived writing for children as a special department of “giving the public what it wants.” Children are, of course, a special public and you find out what they want and give them that, however little you like it yourself.

  The next way may seem at first to be very much the same, but I think the resemblance is superficial. This is the way of Lewis Carroll, Kenneth Grahame, and Tolkien. The printed story grows out of a story told to a particular child with the living voice and perhaps extempore. It resembles the first way because you are certainly trying to give that child what it wants. But then you are dealing with a concrete person; this child who, of course, differs from all other children. There is no question of “children” conceived as a strange species whose habits you have “made up” like an anthropologist or a commercial traveler. Nor, I suspect, would it be possible, thus face to face, to regale the child with things calculated to please it but regarded by yourself with indifference or contempt. The child, I am certain, would see through that. In any personal relation, the two participants modify each other. You would become slightly different because you were talking to a child and the child would become slightly different because it was being talked to by an adult. A community, a composite personality, is created and of that the story grows.

  The third way, which is the only one I could ever use myself, consists in writing a children’s story because a children’s story is the best art form for something you have to say: just as a composer might write a dead march not because there was a public funeral in view but because certain musical ideas that had occurred to him went best into that form. This method could apply to other kinds of children’s literature besides stories. I have been told that Arthur Mee never met a child and never wished to: it was, from his point of view, a bit of luck that boys liked reading what he liked writing. This anecdote may be untrue in fact but it illustrates my meaning.

  Within the species “children’s story” the subspecies which happened to suit me is the fantasy or (in a loose sense of that word) the fairy tale. There are, of course, other subspecies. E. Nesbit’s trilogy about the Bastable family is a very good specimen of another kind. It is a “children’s story” in the sense that children can and do read it: but it is also the only form in which E. Nesbit could have given us so much of the humors of childhood. It is true that the Bastable children appear, successfully treated from the adult point of view, in one of her grown-up novels, but they appear only for a moment. I do not think she would have kept it up. Sentimentality is so apt to creep in if we write at length about children as seen by their elders. And the reality of childhood, as we all experienced it, creeps out. For we all remember that our childhood, as lived, was immeasurably different from what our elders saw. Hence Sir Michael Sadler, when I asked his opinion about a certain new experimental school, replied, “I never give an opinion on any of those experiments till the children have grown up and can tell us what really happened.” Thus the Bastable trilogy, however improbable many of its episodes may be, provides even adults, in one sense, with more realistic reading about children than they could find in most books addressed to adults. But also, conversely, it enables the children who read it to do something much more mature than they realize. For the whole book is a character study of Oswald, an unconsciously satiric self-portrait, which every intelligent child can fully appreciate: but no child would sit down to read a character study in any other form. There is another way in which children’s stories mediate this psychological interest, but I will reserve that for later treatment.

  In this short glance at the Bastable trilogy I think we have stumbled on a principle. Where the children’s story is simply the right form for what the author has to say, then of course readers who want to hear that, will read the story or reread it, at any age. I never met The Wind in the Willows or the Bastable books till I was in my late twenties, and I do not think I have enjoyed them any the less on that account. I am almost inclined to set it up as a canon that a children’s story which is enjoyed only by children is a bad children’s story. The good ones last. A waltz which you can like only when you are waltzing is a bad waltz.

  This canon seems to me most obviously true of that particular type of children’s story which is dearest to my own taste, the fantasy or fairy tale. Now the modern critical world uses adult as a term of approval. It is hostile to what it calls nostalgia and contemptuous of what it calls Peter Pantheism. Hence a man who admits that dwarfs and giants and talking beasts and witches are still dear to him in his fifty-third year is now less likely to be praised for his perennial youth than scorned and pitied for arrested development. If I spend some little time defending myself against these charges, this is not so much because it matters greatly whether I am scorned and pitied as because the defense is germane to my whole view of the fairy tale and even of literature in general. My defense consists of three propositions.

  1. I reply with a tu quoque [“you also,” i.e. you have the same problem]. Critics who treat adult as a term of approval, instead of as a merely descriptive term, cannot be adult themselves. To be concerned about being grown up, to admire the grown-up because it is grown up, to blush at the suspicion of being childish: these things are the marks of childhood and adolescence. And in childhood and adolescence they are, in moderation, healthy symptoms. Young things ought to want to grow. But to carry on into middle life or even into early manhood this concern about being adult is a mark of really arrested development. When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty I read them openly. When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.

  2. The modern view seems to me to involve a false conception of growth. They accuse us of arrested development because we have not lost a taste we had in childhood. But surely arrested development consists not in refusing to lose old things but in failing to add new things? I now like hock [white wine], which I am sure I should not have liked as a child. But I still like lemon squash. I call this growth or development because I have been enriched: where I formerly had only one pleasure, I now have two. But if I had to lose the taste for lemon squash before I acquired the taste for hock, that would not be growth but simple change. I now enjoy Tolstoy and Jane Austen and Trollope as well as fairy tales and I call that growth: if I had had to lose the fairy tales in order to acquire the novelists, I would not say that I had grown but only that I had changed. A tree grows because it adds rings: a train doesn’t grow by leaving one station behind and puffing on to the next. In reality, the case is stronger and more complicated than this. I think my growth is just as apparent when I now read the fairy tales as when I read the novelists, for I now enjoy the fairy tales better than I did in childhood: being now able to put more in, of course I get more out. But I do not here stress that point. Even if it were merely a taste for grown-up literature added to an unchanged taste for children’s literature, addition would still be entitled to the name “growth,” and the process of merely dropping one parcel when you pick up another would not. It is, of course, true that the process of growing does, incidentally and unfortunately, involve some more losses. But that is not the essence of growth, certainly not what makes growth admirable or desirable. If it were, if to drop parcels and to leave stations behind were the essence and virtue of growth, why should we stop at the adult? Why should not senile be equally a term of approval? Why are we not to be congratulated on losing our teeth and hair? Some critics seem to confuse growth with the cost of growth and also to wish to make that cost far higher than, in nature, it need be.