Fashions pass quickly nowadays, there are so many novels and so many novelists. One man starts a movement; a whole host of lesser writers follow him, prejudicing him with their imitations. This romantic movement of Michael Sadleir’s: ten years at the most I give it. “Desolate Splendour” is a good book, but it is the forerunner inevitably of a positive cavalcade of melodramatic barons and pornographic duchesses. As a publisher’s reader I shiver to think of the fare with which these next few summers will provision me.
We have too many books: that is the whole trouble. And it is not from the commercial point of view that I am complaining. I am not saying the supply is greater than the demand. It isn’t. The number of novelists has increased, but so has the reading public. Commercially the writer has a pretty good time of it nowadays. The big men, Wells and Galsworthy and Bennett, must have made more money out of writing than Dickens and Thackeray ever did: and we others, life is materially easier for us than it was probably for our brothers of the 1820’s. At any rate, I know no other profession in which a man of twenty-five can afford to play cricket three whole days of a working week. It is not on the commercial side I am grumbling. What I am trying to say is this: that it is harder to-day for a writer to produce good work now than it has ever been before.
The pace is too fast for one thing. A novel a year. “You must keep your name before a public.” That is what agent and publisher are continually dinning into the author’s mind, and it is true, of course. That is the commercial line. Spring and autumn fashions. And only a few can last. A novel a year would be no hardship to a man endowed with the ebullient vitality of a Dickens or a Balzac; but there are not many such. In five novels and a few short stories Flaubert said all he had to say. Fielding, Smollett, Sterne, and Richardson together, they do little more than reach double figures. Maupassant had written himself out at forty-three.
And then because there are so many novelists, each writer is expected to cultivate a particular province. His name on a book is like the label on a bottle of wine. “Ah, yes,” says the library subscriber, “Compton Mackenzie, a story of sound and colour; a little naughty: many alluring ladies; a smooth, ornate, sentimental style.” Should he discover instead a grey, political study of the effect of Trade Unionism on the commercial prosperity of the Tynemouth, he would be as disappointed, and would consider himself as ill-used, as Professor Saintsbury would if the Chateau Margaux he was offering his guests should reveal itself as Clos de Vougeot. An admirable Burgundy, but he had ordered claret. The novelist is not encouraged to make experiments. He is asked to rewrite one book indefinitely, till the material is watered down and a new entertainer has appeared.
And there have been so many novels. Every obvious situation has been used. The simple themes of love, jealousy, parenthood have been exploited till there is little new to say. The broad field has been ploughed so often. There are only a few dark spots by the hedge, under the shadow of the trees, where there is little sunshine and plants grow weakly, crookedly, different from their fellows, dank places where the few may specialise. “This, at least,” they say, “we can make our own.”
And whatever else may be urged against Ulysses no one could deny it is James Joyce’s own. An amazing work. A book without grammar and without coherence; like a boat that is launched from an aeroplane in mid-ocean, without oars, without rudder, and without sails. Sometimes I see Ulysses as a literary Thermopylae, a desperate stand against insuperable odds. “I will transcribe life,” he said, “as it is. I will omit nothing. Everything that passes through the mind shall be set on record. By setting everything down I shall achieve proportion.” Ulysses is, perhaps, the most splendid failure in literature. But it is a failure. And when I hear ecstatic praise of it, I remember the five weeks or so during which I was the slave of jigsaw puzzles. For six hours a day I worked at them. I assorted and reassorted ridiculous pieces of coloured wood; I acquired a second sight for the dimensions of lozenge shapes. Gradually, bit by bit, there emerged from the discordant masses of detail on the table, a scheme, a pattern. Gradually, what I had taken for a turnip was revealed to me as a cockatoo, and what I had thought to be a beetroot became a face. Till, at last, the final piece was fitted, and there stared up at me from the table the sort of picture that I used to paint with water-colours in the nursery: a young girl feeding a rabbit with a lettuce; an old man filling a pipe before a fire; a dog crying for its master in the snow. But I had no eyes for the thing’s futility. Out of chaos had I achieved this symmetry. “Wonderful,” I said, “simply wonderful.” It was the picture that I so apostrophised. But it was myself that I was really praising. How wonderful of me, it was, I felt to have produced this thing. And in the same way when, after an hour’s battle, we have restored to sense and English a passage of Joyce’s shorthand, we have not the heart to consider the intrinsic value of the thing restored. We are so delighted with ourselves for having done it. “Wonderful,” we say, “wonderful,” and actually believe it is.
I rather suspect that the year 1922 will be a landmark for the literary historian of our day. Ulysses is a sign-post. It will he hardly possible for the two styles of writing, the analytical shorthand and the narrative any longer to imagine that they are hunting together. James Joyce has worked out on the blackboard the piece of algebra over which his pupils have been so long puzzling. Ulysses is the answer.
“Life with a big ‘L.’” Every generation has its own pet hobby-horse to ride to death, and that’s been ours: still is, I think. We are all in search, each of us in our own way, of this strange quality of living that our own existence lacks.
The young poet walks down the steps of the stately mansion where he has been reading his poems aloud to bright-eyed admiration in a softly-lighted, softly-cushioned drawing-room. He hails a taxi, and as he sinks back into the padded seat he ponders the arid monotony of his existence; one day is so like another. Where is the thrill, the mystery of life? He will return to his flat. His clothes will be laid out ready for him. His man will ask him if he will have his bath at once. He will nod. He will undress slowly, will finish reading that review book in his bath; he will linger over his dressing. He is dining with Mrs Spurway. Just such another dinner-party as yesterday’s was and to-morrow’s will be. Lady Mary will be there and he will have to find occasion to whisper that he loves her as desperately as ever, though he knows too well how rapidly his ardour is cooling. She is like all the rest. And through the window he contemplates the firm, resolute back of the taxi-driver. How he envies him. That is life. He is not tied to a circle of social obligations. He lives outside the conventions. He is free.
The thoughts of the taxi-driver are not dissimilar. He, too, is pondering the monotony of his existence. How the London streets resemble one another. He has promised to take Mary Gubbins to the pictures that evening; and he remembers that he is getting rather tired of Mary Gubbins; she is like all the rest. He envies the gilded persons whom he bears all day long from one scene of revel to another. It is human to envy the conditions of another’s life. The young girl who looks from her bedroom window on to the street below is wooed by its sense of mystery and adventure, and the inspector of omnibus tickets pauses on the top deck to gaze wistfully at the lighted window. It is the hunger for experience, for variety, for a fuller life. We should all like to live a hundred lives, to enter into the heart of every mystery, to feel every human emotion of happiness and sorrow. That is a natural instinct. But its present manifestation is unfortunate. There is a deep-rooted conviction that life is only intense when it is bitter, that waitresses and dustmen and crossing-sweepers have seen deeper into the human heart than bank clerks and school-mistresses and lawyers, that life is only real when it is raw.