As I Please

I came to the shore with my arms full of goods. Mine were fine, as good as any other sailor's loaded on the dock. They would bring such joy on the far shore and best, I would deliver them!

Ships went.

Eager, I awaited my own crossing. But soon I saw I had no craft to carry me.

Where should I find one?

I studied the other vessels. I found old timbers on the beach and tied them together. I made a few wee barges float. I got out on the waves and trollied around near shore. Good creations, but none would carry me across the vast gulf--and I had to fit all those precious things beside.

I tried to craft a grander ferry. Scale made my handiwork sloppy. I tried adding boards one by one and never built much of a hull. I tried to make a frame and fill it but it was always full of holes.

Nights, I could not avoid gathering more and more wonderful items for the voyage, till I had a heap. They would mean so much if they reached across. Of course I needed an even greater craft to stow them all, yet I had none.

I tried begging an able seaman to carry my things on his boat. But I wanted to arrive behind my own helm and no one would help me anyway, nor show me how it was done.

As time went on some of my delicate things perished, spoiled. Worse, I began seeing others loading into their ships the very things I expected to supply. Still I had no craft!

I cried for want of a worthy craft. I cried for suffering my goods might ease on the other side. The sky opened, wept with me.

In the fit of storm, I lashed my cargo along with masts and deck strewn about from my failures. I gummed the gaps with pitch and shoved off riding the heap by itself. First the winds and swells tossed this load and I out to sea. In the calm its buoyless weight pulled me under.

Alone, lacking craft, I sunk. +

I begin tonight with a vignette I wrote for a little baby who's being born. An idea of it was: Here is something that will be in this world for the kid, an attempt at issuing a craft--like a container, say an amphora--which will be there when he arrives.

Mr. Pound instructs...

Mr. Naipaul stretches... (oh register-- it's free)

Mr. Wolfe tawdles... (don't bother paying, but you know it's there)

Fiction writers are eager to joust for the novel just as reporters try to explain the importance of print newspapers. Defending your craft is like defending your farm--in fact it's exactly the same.

But, like Democrats, writers are lately persuaded into talking about the wrong things because they cannot identify the issues. There was the famous book about the autistic british boy and the dog and the nearly as famous passage where the boy, thinking awfully like a machine, cannot understand why people enjoy fiction because who likes lies? The big joke is naturally that all of it's a made-up story and after all, dear reader, you must not think that way because you picked up the book.

This is an attempt at postmodernism. In essence it's a try to tip the hat to the reader. It's a chance to say: I'm here, you're there, and we both know this is all fake. But this is like turning literature into photography. What it really is, no matter that it parodies the debate, is a novel's embarrassment about being a novel. It's a stab at being real, cutting through the fiction, because it is not comfortable swimming out where it cannot touch a toe to the dock of truth. Because if you're not trying to fool anyone, it can't be a lie, right?

Two years ago I witnessed Heidi Julavits and two other panelists--the whole panel, all writers who have fictionalized terrorism since September 11, 2001--tell an audience of, well, silent readers, that fiction might not be the best way to interrogate the contemporary global ouroboros. There was something queasy, they seemed to say, about deliberately telling lies. There's that word again--as if dreams too were lies! This was an analytical complaint; we must be informed rather than fooled.

But it's really a faithful complaint. How can we be righteous and consume something false? Let alone produce it? When people worry if fiction is "adequate" for dealing with this world, they are really wondering if it is appropriate. Is it respectful of the dead to make whimsy? Oughtn't we deal with this thing instead of fantasizing?

Once upon a time, the discovery of gravity actually provided people the tools to take flight.

The novel is a chicken. A flightless bird, reared in restrictive cages, whose eggs are harvested endlessly for the grill. The chicken and egg are also notorious paradox--where postmodernism meets evolution.

Nevermind that novels evolved at first under the guise of testimonials, travelogues and correspondence. We know what we mean, don't we? Imaginary bound stories.

Novels have been called endangered almost since they were identified as a species, but that was a judgment of art--not propriety. Novels have, I think, exhausted their artistic virtue. Infinitely many more wonderful novels will be written and printed, just as the baseball records will continue to fall. But the golden bough, whether you say it was Joyce, Miller, Fitzgerald, Pynchon, or someone who doesn't write English, is long snatched from the branch. Novels, like chickens, are extinct except as a commodity.

The question Shall there be novels? is not a question of art. Nor is the question What is the next kind of novel? The question is What is the next new thing such as a novel?

But the faith question, the Shall question, still lingers. Not about the novels. (Who cares? Shall we have violins?) But the fiction question is a trial of art. Are we allowed to compare, or must we always represent?

I do not believe Naipaul really said fiction was not useful. He is finished with the novel is all. A true postcolonial, he thinks cinema peers over the horizon. The only thing that captured his awe the way novels must have awed the Victorians. Maybe he realizes his generation, too, is past, and probably too the envelope of the movies. He knows he cannot do films, so he uses his tools to do journalism and criticism.

Mailer is still waiting for the novel that can bottle America. He has waited for the immigrants to do it and waited for the Americans to do it and he has tried maybe to do it himself, though it does not seem that way. Mailer's own fiction is lately thoroughly drenched in research, but he still relies more in the magic of words than their fidelity to the world. They let us peek at the inconceivable--the will.

The only way to answer the art question, I say, is to stop talking about fiction the way Nancy Pelosi smiles. Fiction includes drama, painting, movies, photography, and soon, biology class. Fiction is criticism. Criticism is journalism. Journalism is illustration. Fiction is illustration. All of this is the craft of understanding the world. If you write, you will deliver your experiences and dreams to the world. You have nothing to lie about. +


I end with another essay, without hyperlink,

by George Orwell
7 July 1944

When the Caliph Omar destroyed the libraries of Alexandria he is supposed to have kept the public baths warm for eighteen days with burning manuscripts, and great numbers of tragedies by Euripides and others are said to have perished, quite irrecoverably. I remember that when I read about this as a boy it simply filled me with enthusiastic approval. It was so many less words to look up in the dictionary--that was how I saw it. For, though I am only forty-one, I am old enough to have been educated at a time when Latin and Greek were only escapable with great difficulty, while "English" was hardly regarded as a school subject at all.

Classical education is going down the drain at last, but even now there must be far more adults who have been flogged through the entire extant works of Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes, Virgil, Horace and various other Latin and Greek authors, than have read the English masterpieces of the eighteenth century. People pay lip service to Fielding and the rest of them, of course, but they don't read them, as you can discover by making a few inquiries among your friends. How many people have even read Tom Jones, for instance? Not so many have even read the later books of Gulliver's Travels. Robinson Crusoe has a sort of popularity in nursery versions, but the book as a whole is so little known that few people are even aware that the second part (the journey through Tartary) exists. Smollett, I imagine, is the least read of all. The central plot of Shaw's play, Pygmalion, is lifted straight out of Peregrine Pickle, and I believe that no one has ever pointed this out in print, which suggests that few people can have read the book. But what is strangest of all is that Smollett, so far as I know, has never been boosted by the Scottish Nationalists, who are so careful to claim Byron for their own. Yet Smollett, besides being one of the best novelists the English-speaking races have produced, was a Scotsman, and proclaimed it openly at a time when being so was anything but helpful to one's career.


Life in the civilised world.
(The family are at tea.)
Zoom-zoom-zoom!
"Is there an alert on?"
"No, it's all clear."
"I thought there was an alert on."
Zoom-zoom-zoom!
"There's another of those things coming!"
"It's all right, it's miles away."
Zoom-zoom-ZOOM!
"Look out, here it comes! Under the table, quick!"
Zoom-zoom-zoom!
"It's all right, it's getting fainter."
Zoom-zoom-ZOOM!
"It's coming back!"
"They seem to kind of circle round and come back again. They've got something on their tails that makes them do it. Like a torpedo."
ZOOM-ZOOM-ZOOM!
"Christ! It's bang overhead!"
Dead silence.
"Now get right underneath. Keep your head well down. What a mercy baby isn't here!"
"Look at the cat! He's frightened too."
"Of course animals know. They can feel the vibrations."
BOOM!
"It's all right, I told you it was miles away."
(Tea continues.)


I see that Lord Winterton, writing in the Evening Standard, speaks of the "remarkable reticence (by no means entirely imposed by rule or regulation) which Parliament and Press alike have displayed in this war to avoid endangering national security" and adds that it has "earned the admiration of the civilised world."

It is not only in war time that the British Press observes this voluntary reticence. One of the most extraordinary things about England is that there is almost no official censorship, and yet nothing that is acutely offensive to the governing class gets into print, at least in any place where large numbers of people are likely to read it. If it is "not done" to mention something or other, it just doesn't get mentioned. The position is summed up in the lines by (I think) Hilaire Belloc:

You cannot hope to bribe or twist
Thank God! the English journalist:
But seeing what the man will do
Unbribed, there is no reason to.

No bribes, no threats, no penalties--just a nod and a wink and the thing is done. A well-known example was the business of the Abdication. Weeks before the scandal officially broke, tens or hundres of thousands of people had heard all about Mrs. Simpson, and yet not a word got into the Press, not even into the Daily Worker, although the American and European papers were having the time of their lives with the story. Yet I believe there was no definite official ban: just an official "request" and a general agreement that to break the news prematurely "would not do." And I can think of other instances of good news stories failing to see the light although there would have been no penalty for printing them.

Nowadays this kind of veiled censorship even extends to books. The M.O.I. does not, of course, dictate a party line or issue an index expurgatorius. It mere "advises." Publishers take manuscripts to the M.O.I., and the M.O.I. "suggests" that this or that is undesirable, or premature, or "would serve no good purpose." And though there is no definite prohibition, no clear statement that this or that must not be printed, official policy is never flouted. Circus dogs jump when the trainer cracks his whip, but the really well-trained dog is the one that turns his somersault when there is no whip. And that is the state we have reached in this country thanks to three hundred years of living together without a civil war.


Here is a little problem sometimes used as an intelligence test.

A man walked four miles due south from his house and shot a bear. He then walked two miles due west, then walked another four miles due north and was back at his home again. What was the colour of the bear?

The interesting point is that--so far as my own observations go--men usually see the answer to this problem and women do not.