Hours of insanity and escape… in which I write inadequate verse, read, rage… record anecdotes which fade into the page like stains… beat time with my pencil’s business end… nip at the loose skin on the side of my hand with my teeth… cast schemes and tropes like horoscopes… practice catachresis as though it were croquet… grrrowl… kick wastebaskets into corners… realize that when I picture my methods of construction all the images are architectural, but when I dream of the ultimate fiction — that animal entity, the made-up syllabic self — I am trying to energize old, used-up, stolen organs like Dr. Frankenstein… grrrind… throw wet wads of Kleenex from a spring or winter cold into the corner where they mainly miss the basket… O… Ohio: I hear howling from both Os… play ring agroan the rosie… pace… put an angry erection back in my pants… rhyme…
Then occasionally perceive beneath me on the page a few lines which… while I was elsewhere must have… yes, a few lines which have… which have the sound… the true whistle of the spirit. Wait’ll they read that, I say, perhaps even aloud, over the water running in the kitchen sink, over the noise of my writing lamp, coffee growing cold in the cup, the grrowl of my belly. Yet when I raise my right palm from the paper where, in oath, I’ve put it, the whistle in those words is gone, and only the lamp sings. Till I pull its chain like a john.
Thus the idea of an audience returns like an itch between the toes, because now we have words watching words — not surprising: what should Berkeley’s trees do, hidden in their forest, if they learned, if they believed, if they knew that unnoticed they were likely to be nothing? encourage birds? grow eyes and ears and rub remaining leaves like foreign money?
When Henry James, bruised by his failure in the theater, returned to the novel with The Awkward Age, he wrote in the scenery himself; he created his actors and gave them their speeches and gestures. More than that, he filled the spaces around them with sensibility — other observations — the perfect vessel of appreciation — himself, or rather, his roundabout writing. His method has become a model. Now, on the page, though the stage is full, the theater is dark and empty. Red bulbs burn above the exits. And when the theater is empty, and the actors continue to speak into the wings and walk from cupboard to sofa as if in the midst of emotion, to whom are they speaking but to themselves? Suddenly the action is all there is; the made-up words are real; the actors are the parts they play; questions are no longer cues; replies are real replies; there’s no more drama; the conditions of rehearsal have become the conditions of reality, and the light which streams like colored paper from the spots is all there’ll ever be of day.
1. Continue work…
2. Study the masters…
3. Do deliberate exercises…
4. Regularly enter notes… sharpen that peculiar and forgetful eye…
5. Take to sketching… details… exactitude…
6. Become steeped in history…
7… the better word… the better word… the better word…
8. Figure it will be five years before any…
9. Wait…
A former student, who had reached the lower slopes of a national magazine, charitably wrote to ask if I would do a piece on what it was like to live in the Midwest. Without quite knowing whether my answer would be yes or no, I nevertheless began to gather data on that subject, although it became plain soon enough that the magazine was not interested in the logarithmical disorders of my lyricisms. I had always avoided the autobiographical in my work, reasoning that it was one beginner’s trap I’d not fall into (more witless wisdom), and by now I had become suspicious of my own detachment. Could I write close to myself, or would the letter B, which my narrator said he’d sailed to, stand for bathos?
I was living in Brookston, Indiana, then, but I called it B because that’s how people and places were sometimes represented in the old days. Pamela is always pulling Mr. B’s paw out of her bosom. Turgenev’s characters occasionally wait on a low small porch which is fastened like a belt around an inn or posting station, rising like a fresh bump on the road — say — to S, though nothing is in sight yet when we encounter them. Like the reader, they are waiting for the book to begin. (On the other hand, Beckett’s roads are letterless, and his figures are waiting for the text to terminate.) Not only has the narrator come to B in a pun (a poor place), with the initial I also wanted to invoke the golden boughs and singing birds of Yeats’s Byzantium. Further more, I knew that when I’d finished, it wouldn’t be Brookston, Indiana, anymore, but a place as full of dream and fabrication as that fabled city itself. Inside my cautious sentences, as against Yeats’s monumental poetry, B would become an inverted emblem for man’s imagination.
I certainly didn’t resort to the letter out of shyness or some belated sense of discretion; but as I got my ‘facts’ straight (clubs, crops, products, prospects, townshape, bar- and barn-size), I remembered how eagerly I’d come to the community, how much I’d needed to feel my mind — just once — run free and openly in peace, in wholesome and unworried amplitude, the way my legs before in Larimore, N.D., had carried me through streets scaled perfectly for childhood; and I slowly realized, while I drew up my lists (jobs, shops, climate), marking social strata like a kid counts layers in a cake, that I was taking down the town in notes so far from sounding anything significant that they would not even let me find a cow; yet I figured my estimates anyway (population changes, transportation, education, housing, love), and I took my polls (of churches and their clientele, of diets and diseases); I made my guesses about the townspeople’s privacy (fun, games, hankie-pankies, high or low finance: pitch or catch, cadge, swap or auction), just as any geographer would, impressed by the seriousness of habit, too, of simple talk or an idle spit or prolonged squat — a reflective shit in a distant field; and as I started to distribute my data gingerly across my manuscript, a steady dissolution of the real began; because the more precisely one walks down a verbal street; indeed, the more precisely trash heap and vagrant shadow, weed stand and wind-feel and walkcrack are rendered; when, in fact, all that can conceivably enter consciousness — like snowlight and horse harness, grain spill and oil odor, hedge and grass growth, the cool tin taste of well-water in a bent tin cup — enters like the member of an orchestra, armed with an instrument (the bee’s hum and the fly’s death, for instance); the more completely, in short, we observe rather than merely note, contemplate rather than perceive, imagine rather than simply ponder; then the more fully, too, must the reader and writer realize, as their sentences foot the page, that they are now in the graciously menacing presence of the Angel of Inwardness, that radiant guardian of Ideas of whom Plato and Rilke spoke so ardently, and Mallarmé and Valéry invoked; since a sense of resonant universality arises in literature whenever some mute and otherwise trivial, though unique, superfluity is experienced with an intensely passionate exactness: through a ring of likeness which defines for each object its land of unlikeness, too (though who says so aside from Schopenhauer, who was also wrong about the world?); and consequently the heart of the country became the heart of the heart with a suddenness which left me uncomforted, in B and not Byzantium, not Brookston, far from the self I thought I might expose, nowhere near a childhood, and with thoughts I kept in paragraphs like small animals caged.