(I could see, watching them out of the corner of my eye, that Cynthia and the fair-haired girl were turning, hesitating, there at the top of the companionway, as if at a loss. Should they come down, approach me? Try in some way to catch my eye?… They wavered, Cynthia was biting her lip — they vacillated, waiting perhaps for some sign from me — and then, receiving none, departed slowly forward and did not return. I believe that Cynthia knew that I had seen her. Yes. She knew; knew from the stiff unseeing way in which I stood and stared, staring meaninglessly, with awkward profile, at the wholly uninteresting sea. Good God. My folly and weakness are abysmal. Why must I behave in this extraordinary fashion? Ask dad, he knows! Ask Clara, the Negro nurse! Ask Mr. Greenbaum, the Latin teacher, who watched me through the crack of the door to see if I was cribbing! Ask that slattern under the arc light, in November, 1909, who caroled at me “Does your mother know you’re out?” Ask the burly Italian in the Apennine train, who said, when I had dismally failed to shut that infernal broken window (and the smoke was pouring in) “Poco bravo!” Ask that detestable red-faced redheaded vulgar master (tuberculous, too) who superintended when I was given the water cure, aged seventeen! And the God-impersonating baseball coach who would never trust me with a chance on the first nine!.. Ask them all. And ask my dipsomaniac great-grandfather, my charming imaginative fibbing mother, my sensual analytic father, and the delirious wallpaper pattern on my nursery wall. Behavior is a function of environment. Selah! I wash my hands of it. But I don’t want to behave like this? Or do I? Is it metaphysically — or physiologically — possible to will the good and achieve the evil? to desire, and not to accomplish? and thus to become something which one had not willed? Cynthia’s conception of Demarest is not Demarest’s conception—)
“Well!”
“Well!”
“Now I should like to ask you a whole lot of questions.”
“Ask, and it shall be given unto you.”
“May I inquire what it is you write?”
“Plays. Also an unfinished novel or two. And a few poems.”
“Have any of them been produced?”
“Published, but not produced. That’s the difficulty. Or rather—”
“I dare say you’re too highbrow. Is that it?”
“No. The trouble is deeper than that. In fact, so deep that it’s hard to analyze. I’ve often made the attempt, never with much satisfaction. Not that it matters very much. Ha ha! I always say that, at this point, and of course it’s precisely that that matters … the fact that I say, and do often believe, that it doesn’t matter, I mean.”
“Not enough faith in yourself, perhaps.”
“No, not exactly that — though that’s a part of it. It’s more general — a sneaking feeling that the whole thing is a snare and a delusion.”
“I don’t get you. You mean the world in general?”
“No — though I often suspect that too; but that’s not just what I mean. No, the sneaking feeling I refer to is a feeling that the arts — and perhaps especially the literary arts — are a childish preoccupation which belongs properly to the infancy of the race, and which, although the race as a whole has not outgrown, the civilized individual ought to outgrow.”
“Hm. I see. Or I don’t see!”
“No reasonable person any longer believes in magic — but many of the ideas and words and fetishes, which we inherit from the age of magic, still survive in debased forms: mascots, lucky pennies, charms, lucky numbers, fortunetelling, and so on. Well, when we begin as children to use language, we use it as a form of magic power to produce results. We learn to say ‘more’ because when pronounced it will actually get us more. And, we never wholly lose this early conviction (though it becomes overlaid and unconscious) that some sort of virtue or power resides in language. When we like a passage in a poem or tale we refer to it as ‘magical.’ We thus indicate unconsciously the primitive origin and nature of the arts. Art is merely the least primitive form of magic … But all this relates chiefly to the linguistic side of the literary art. There is also the other side, that part of it which it has in common with the other arts — the psychological content, the affective and emotional necessity out of which it springs. You know Freud’s theory that the ordinary dream is a disguised wish-fulfilment or nexus of them? Well, the work of art performs exactly the same function. Some of these esthetic critics say that content, so to speak, doesn’t matter at all; they talk of the ideal work of art as one in which everything has become form, and of the ideal critic as one in whom there is no confusion of the emotions aroused in himself (by the work of art) with the work of art itself. That error seems to me perfectly extraordinary! And yet it is a very common one. For of course this pure form, and pure contemplation, are both chimeras; there ain’t no sich animals. What is the pure form of a potato? The minute you leave out its potatoishness you leave out everything. Form is only an aspect of matter, and cannot be discussed apart from it. You can isolate the feelings and emotions which give rise to a play, but you cannot entirely isolate its form, for its form responds to these. Can you conceive of a play which would be entirely meaningless, one which was not only unintelligible, but which also aroused no feelings? Impossible. Language is reference. And its reference is duaclass="underline" it refers to facts — as the word potato refers to a tuber — but also it refers to feelings; for every individual will have, as the result of his own particular experiences, his own particular cluster of feelings about the potato. Do I make myself clear?”
“Not at all. But go on, brother. I may catch up with you at the finish.”
“I’m determined to make you suffer … Let’s assume that I like a certain poem. Why do I like it? The esthetic critic would say that I like it because it’s beautiful, because, in other words, it’s a ‘perfect expression of something’; the something you see, doesn’t matter very much, so long as it has been ‘esthetically’ experienced! But this is based on the assumption that all ‘somethings,’ or experiences, are of like value. We know this isn’t true. It would be impossible to make an Iliad out of the buttering of a potato, or a Hamlet out of the paring of one’s nails. These experiences are universal — and could involve no confusion of reference; but they are not of very great interest, or significance, or desirability, emotionally. We are all, in a sense, frustrated — we are all of us, each in his particular way, starved for love, or praise, or power, and our entire characters are molded by these thwarted longings. I won’t go into the details of that mechanism, for I don’t know too much about it, probably no more than you do; the point I’m making for is this, that art’s prime function is the gratification of these longings. We can see this, if we like, as a kind of cowardice. We don’t like to grow up; we don’t like to face the bare or ugly facts of life, its privations, its miseries, its failures, its uncertainty, its brevity; we don’t like to see ourselves as mere automata, whose behavior is ‘merely a function of environment’; we don’t like to admit our ignorance as to our origin and destiny, or our impotence in the face of the laws that control us; and so we seek refuge and consolation in that form of daydream which we call art. Reading a novel, we become the hero, and assume his importance as the center of the action—if he succeeds, then we too succeed; if he fails, then we can be sure it is against overwhelming odds, against the backdrop of the colossal and unpitying infinite, so that in failure he seems to us a figure of grandeur; and we can see ourselves thus with a profound narcissistic compassion, ourselves godlike in stature and power, going down to a defeat which lends us an added glory … Art is therefore functionally exaggerative. When we find our response to things becoming jaded, when the bare bones of reality begin to show, then we clutch at the cobweb of the fairy tale. Think only of the world of love which literature opens to us! Solomon in all his glory of a thousand wives cannot rival us. We can range from Helen of Troy, or Lesbia, to Imogen with the cinque-spotted mole on her breast; from Isolde to tuberculous Milly Theale; from Cleopatra to Emma Bovary or Raskolnikov’s Sonia; or even to the bawdy ballad of sister Mary, who was bilious!”