To Jane:
Your letter this morning after a long, wonderful run of work. This is really the highest day I've had—real rugged work—bronze moving pictures before me—faces—open shirts on sunburnt breasts—and, of course, the eternal sea. Your letter came like a sudden bag of sunlight emptied into a mist. The water became blue and the promontories sharp like ink lines.
And about Steve. I understand all. The draft explains his not writing. And this war—it's like a maelstrom rising higher and higher. Next summer for certain, possibly this Christmas, it means I go. But rather than go as a private I'm going to enlist voluntarily in the aviation corps. Flying only would have as much thrill as doing the climax of a story. That's like the sea. And I'm not panicky or worried about it. I feel in some unconscious way that the balance of the cosmos demands it. God, nobody should drag now! It's just like a marshfire that grows and grows to let the new green shoots come under in spring. It's like a big song. I would not go to fight Germany, or France or England or America. I'd go because it's a cleanser. One must play with the song of many feet and express with the original song. One must flash pictures to the many eyes of their own being. Oh—it's a song, the whole thing! And I'm looking forward to it.
Only the ones such as John and Tom shall escape. Don't you see the joy, the peace, the grandeur in owning a scar, in being bled white? The first year of the war, England was black with mourning. Now, she is white.... The work is on me with talons.
I am looking only at the impossible heights—of a portrayal of life—the rugged life in endless volumes. I have made an oath silently with myself that in three years I shall do a book.... The work comes now just as if I were to sit down before a fire-place with shadows and light around stones, and were to grow interested, with stars low on the horizon like live sparks.
And friends? A foolish question! I mean that I must be alone in the formative thrall of work. I did want your letter. But forget pity. That is a thing that stifles soul. I do not ask, by all the stars, I do not ask for anything. The highest of all things to you all.
And Steve? He has too much of the Song to be trodden or be lost or be ground in mud. You are all friends—but I must be alone now. The work is rising....
To John:
There ain't no sun beatin' in my doorway, and there ain't none of your sacred seas and canyons around; but there is a socialist's riot in the street below—kerosene torches a-going—one shaggy haired enthusiast is standing on a soap box and is wagging his jaw in an athletic way.... How's the fire burning under your type-mill? What's the brand of smoke it gives up—poetry, action, lumps of granite or ladles of ocean? I'm all lit up in this place here—because things are moving—real issues are gathering—and the pulse of living is so close that I can almost feel it occasionally. Last Saturday, went to a place called Rockaway—and oh man—rocks—rugged grey and eroded—surf bitten—gnarled, twisted—and they tossed the sea's white jaws about like bits of cotton. Real sea coast it was—with a little smack in the purple way, her sails bellied, her mouth lapping the brine—an old fisherman browsing around the shores for clams while his wife hauled up the nets, basketed the cod and upturned their boat.
Put an extra stick under the machine and line a few of your aphorisms.
14
THE ARTIST UNLEASHED
The young workmen here do essays well, earlier than short stories. Longer training is required for fiction. The reason is obvious. Fiction work takes brain. The Stonestudy idea is to set free the greater Artist within. Essays and ethical works are the natural fruits of the inner life of the ages; story-production requires facility and development of the every-day working consciousness. Straight brain is needed to arrange settings, keen development of actual tissue to note and arrange and remember. Also a big working surface of self-criticism must be prepared.
There is a quality of fiction that seems to set free a larger consciousness and to bring with it settings and atmospheres of another age. This sort of phenomenon encourages the idea of the continuity of consciousness—before and after the three-score-and-ten. It may be that the greater the Artist, the more of these veins of syntheticated experience are open to his every-day working mind. That may really be what sumptuous artistic equipment is—the capacity to open up the old loves and scenes and adventures of the long road. Intuition is explained as the use of the result of massed experiences, intellect the coping with one at a time; intuition, a light that flashes from peak to peak, intellect as a running fire up and down from height and vale.