(Not sent.)
TWO
MY DEAR MISS BATTILORO:
You will be surprised to learn that this is the second letter which I have written to you today — and that to the writing of the first (which I have decided not to send to you, and which I am not sure I ever intended to send) I devoted several hours. This behavior must seem to you very peculiar. Indeed, it seems peculiar to me, though I am (if anybody is!) in a position to understand it. Why should I be writing you letters at all? Why on earth? It is easy for me to put myself in your place (bad dramatist though I am) and I can therefore without the least difficulty imagine the mixture of bewilderment, curiosity, contempt, and annoyance, or even shame, shame for me, with which you will receive this last of my underbred antics. Why in God’s name should this upstart young man (not so young either), this mere ship’s acquaintance, this New Englander with intermittent manners, presume to write to you? you who so habitually and unquestioningly regard yourself as one of the world’s chosen few? And how entirely characteristic of him that instead of coming to see you he should write—send you, merely from one end of a ship to another, a morbidly and mawkishly self-conscious letter!.. All of which is perfectly just, as far at it goes; and I doubt whether I can find any very adequate defense. You have, of course, an entire right to drop me without advancing reasons. Who among us has not exercised that privilege of selection? If the manner in which you have administered the “cut” seems to me extraordinarily ill-bred and uncharitable, who am I that I should rebuke you for a want of courtesy? I have been rude myself. I have even, occasionally, to rid myself of a bore, been inexcusably cruel. One must, at times, defend oneself at all costs, and I recognize perfectly that this has seemed to you an occasion for the exercise of that right. Ah! (you will say) but if you admit all this, why talk about it? Why not take your medicine in silence, like a gentleman?… Well, I could reply that as I seem to have lost in your eyes the privileges of a gentleman, I have therefore lost also the gentleman’s obligations; and as you have put me in the position of an outcast, I might as well make a virtue of necessity, and, as a final gesture of pride, haul up the Jolly Roger.
But no — that’s not exactly what I mean. Why is it that I seem always, in trying to say the simplest things, to embroil myself in complications and side issues, in references and tangents, in qualifications and relativities? It is my weakness as an author (so the critics have always said) that I appear incapable of presenting a theme energetically and simply. I must always wrap it up in tissue upon tissue of proviso and aspect; see it from a hundred angles; turn laboriously each side to the light; producing in the end not so much a unitary work of art as a melancholy cauchemar of ghosts and voices, a phantasmagoric world of disordered colors and sounds; a world without design or purpose; and perceptible only in terms of the prolix and the fragmentary. The criticism is deserved, of course: but I have often wished that the critics would do me the justice to perceive that I have deliberately aimed at this effect, in the belief that the old unities and simplicities will no longer serve. No longer serve, I mean, if one is trying to translate, in any form of literary art, the consciousness of modern man. And this is what I have tried to do. I am no longer foolish enough to think that I have succeeded — I am in process of adjustment to the certainty that I am going to be a failure. I take what refuge I can in a strictly psychological scrutiny of my failure, and endeavor to make out how much this is due to (1) a simple lack of literary power, or genius, or the neurosis that we give that name, and how much to (2) a mistaken assumption as to the necessity for this new literary method. What if — for example — in choosing this literary method, this deliberate indulgence in the prolix and fragmentary, I merely show myself at the mercy of a personal weakness which is not universal, or ever likely to be, but highly idiosyncratic? That is perfectly possible; and it brings me back to my starting point. I am like that — I do think and feel in this confused and fluctuating way — I frequently suspect that I am nothing on earth but a case of dementia praecox, manqué, or arrested. Isn’t all this passion for aspects and qualifications and relativities a clear enough symptom of schizophrenia? It is as a result of my uncertain and divided attitude toward you that you now finally wash your hands of me; the conflict in me between the declared and the undeclared produced that callow and caddish ambiguity of behavior which offended you. And now, in this letter, I continue the offense! I mumble and murmur and beat round the bush — and succeed in saying nothing. Why is it that I don’t simply say that the whole trouble has been that, from the moment when I first saw you coming up the gangway to the Silurian, last year, I adored you and was terrified by you? Yes, you terrified me. But what use is there in analyzing this? None. The important thing is merely to say that I have loved you, that I love you, and that I must, now that you have dropped me, take any available way of telling you this, no matter how much the method may offend you.