11
Perhaps the most serious consequence of writing a novel is the revelation of yourself it inevitably entails.
We are not thinking, principally, of the discovery you will make of the size of your own soul. We have in mind the laying bare of yourself to others.
Of course you do reveal yourself to yourself when you write a book to reveal others to others. It has been supposed that a man cannot say or do a thing which does not expose his nature. This is nonsense; you do not expose your nature every time you take the subway, though a trip therein may very well be an index to your manners. The fact remains that no man ever made a book or a play or a song or a poem, with any command of the technique of his work, without in some measure giving himself away. Where this is not enough of an inducement some other, such as a tin whistle with every bound copy, is offered; no small addition as it enables the reviewer to declare, hand on heart, that “this story is not to be whistled down the wind.” Some have doubted Bernard Shaw’s Irishism, which seems the queerer as nearly everything he has written has carried a shillelagh concealed between the covers. Recently Frank K. Reilly of Chicago gave away one-cent pieces to advertise a book called Penny of Top Hill Trail. He might be said, and in fact he hereby is said, thus to have coppered his risk in publishing it.... All of which is likely to be mistaken for jesting. Let us therefore jest that we may be taken with utmost seriousness.
The revelation of yourself to yourself, which the mere act of writing a novel brings to pass, may naturally be either pleasant or unpleasant. Very likely it is unpleasant in a majority of instances, a condition which need not necessarily reflect upon our poor human nature. If we did not aspire so high for ourselves we should not suffer such awful disappointments on finding out where we actually get off. The only moral, if there is one, lies in our ridiculous aim. Imagine the sickening of heart with which Oscar Wilde contemplated himself after completing The Picture of Dorian Grey! And imagine the lift it must have given him to look within himself as he worked at The Ballad of Reading Gaol! The circumstances of life and even the actual conduct of a man are not necessarily here or there—or anywhere at all—in this intimate contemplation. There is one mirror before which we never pose. God made man in His own image. God made His own image and put it in every man.
It is there! Nothing in life transcends the wonder of the moment when, each for himself, we make this discovery. Then comes the struggle to remold ourselves nearer to our heart’s desire. It succeeds or it doesn’t; perhaps it succeeds only slightly; anyway we try for it. The sleeper, twisting and turning, dreaming and struggling, is the perfect likeness of ourselves in the waking hours of our whole earthly existence. Because they have seen this some have thought life no better than a nightmare. Voltaire suggested that the earth and all that dwelt thereon was only the bad dream of a god on some other planet. We would point out the bright side of this possibility: It presupposes the existence somewhere of a mince pie so delicious and so powerful as to evoke the likenesses of Cæsar and Samuel Gompers, giraffes, Mr. Taft, violets, Mr. Roosevelt, Piotr Ilitch Tchaikovski, Billy Sunday, Wu-Ting Fang, Helen of Troy and Mother Jones, groundhogs, H. G. Wells; perhaps Bolshevism is the last writhe. Mince pie, unwisely eaten instead of the dietetic nectar and ambrosia, may well explain the whole confused universe. And you and I—we can create another universe, equally exciting, by eating mince pie to-night!... You see there is a bright side to everything, for the mince pie is undoubtedly of a heavenly flavor.
We were saying, when sidetracked by the necessity of explaining the universe, that the self-revelation which writing a book entails is in most cases depressing, but not by any means always so. Boswell was not much of a man judged by the standards of his own day or ours, either one, yet Boswell knew himself better than he knew Dr. Johnson by the time he had finished his life of the Doctor. It must have bucked him up immensely to know that he was at least big enough himself to measure a bigger man up and down, in and out, criss-cross and sideways, setting down the complicated result without any error that the human intelligence can detect. It must have appeased the ironical soul of Henry Adams to realise that he was one of the very few men who had never fooled himself about himself, and that evidence of his phenomenal achievement in the shape of the book The Education of Henry Adams, would survive him after his death—or at least, after the difficulties of communicating with those on earth had noticeably increased (we make this wise modification lest someone match Sir Oliver Lodge’s Raymond, or Life After Death with a volume called Henry, or Re-Education After Death).
It must have sent a thrill of pleasure through the by no means insensitive frame of Joseph Conrad when he discovered, on completing Nostromo, that he had a profounder insight into the economic bases of modern social and political affairs than nine-tenths of the professional economists and sociologists—plus a knowledge of the human heart that they have never dreamed worth while. For Conrad saw clearly, and so saw simply; the “silver of the mine” of this, his greatest story, was, it is true, an incorruptible metal, but it could and did alter the corruptible nature of man—and would continue to do so through generation after generation long after his Mediterranean sailor-hero had become dust.
Even in the case of the humble and unknown writer whose completed manuscript, after many tedious journeys, comes home to him at last, to be re-read regretfully but with an undying belief not so much in the work itself as in what it was meant to express and so evidently failed to—even in his case the great consolation is the attestation of a creed. Very bad men have died, as does the artist in Shaw’s The Doctor’s Dilemma, voicing with clarity and beauty the belief in which they think they have lived or ought to have lived; but a piece of work is always an actual living of some part of the creed that is in you. It may be a failure but it has, with all its faults, a gallant quality, the quality of the deed done, which men have always admired, and because of which they have invented those things we call words to embody their praise.
But what of the consequences of revealing yourself to others? Writing a novel will surely mean that you will incur them. We must speak of them briefly; and then we may get on to the thing for which you are doubtless waiting with terrible patience—the way to write the novel itself. Never fear! If you will but endure steadfastly you shall Know All.