Blacksmithery was a deified trade, honoured by Vulcan and Tubal-Cain. When he made sparks fly a blacksmith was said to be in touch with the underworld, risking his soul by working in iron and having traffic with the Devil. Thus the blacksmith can be related to poets, who are also in thrall to moon, earth, and underworld, and consume themselves utterly by the medium of their work.
The horseshoe on my desk is a well-made artefact of seven holes for seven nails, and my consciousness tames the wild horse that the junction of the two disparate psyches lets loose in me. Seventy years later the horseshoe Burton made lies heavy and cold, its perfect form pressing down the phrenetic scrapings from the back of a brain that Burton would never have connected himself with — aphorisms, observances, slick clippings, stray poems, and fragments that could not have come anywhere but out of a Burton.
Passed on to me, the horseshoe of his spirit is as misshapen as the map of Deception Island pinned to my wall.
64
Burton’s horseshoe holds down the notes and mulch-thoughts that come to me at midnight and after. One says that a writer is an old man who picks up a pen instead of garrulously speaking his words into thin air. If in need of a certain sort of painkiller he bites on words instead of bullets. I was a premature old man as a child, which is one reason why Burton and I hit it off so well together. A writer has no age but old age, though he only becomes senile if he stops writing, and when that happens he usually finds some way to die, not matter how old he is.
Vanity inscribes such secret thoughts, but they are a way of formulating the frequent question as to why one became a writer. The pile of papers underneath the horseshoe may provide a clue to this elusive puzzle: I can see it as a grand travelling trunk of raw material, and me lifting the lid occasionally to make a lucky dip or pick a winning number out of the raffle-bag.
No writer should take drugs, it says, or drink too much, or get psychoanalysed. Such things are for the others. If he feels himself going mad it is only part of the creative process — the soul rebelling at some offence against the sacred code, or showing a new direction for his talent. Madness is to be welcomed, and shared with no one.
A writer’s reality is other people. His hell is himself, whom he is continually trying to get away from, or explain into extinction. But he cannot escape, because the long exploration which lasts all his life, from alef to tav, takes him deeper into that skin-enclosed world of visionary shade and colour, badger-runs of memory, and all inventions of the soul. He goes to find out what is there, and organize it into any sense he can. From such material he creates his golems and sends them on to the sidewalks.
Close to heaven and hell, the writer paces a narrow lane between the frontiers of both, with a passport for neither place. To sidestep his own demon by choosing one or the other means death. A writer is a born and sometimes eloquent loser — a person who cannot win. He is never satisfied with what he does because he is always trying for the impossible, to remake himself according to a dream of perfection that he felt close to since birth, and to keep himself as alive as the language which surrounds him. He is attacked continually by his basic self, and so is forced into a never-ending quest for the truth by which he can be remoulded into the ideal man — meaning the most ordinary of men.
The impulse behind his endeavour is one of gnawing uncertainty, which would not leave him alone even if by a miracle he finished his task. So he compromises, tries to delineate an emotion or experience beyond the limits of what he had done before, to make reality out of a dream, to turn a vision into ordinary experience, to think complicated and write plain, to refabricate life and construct people because he cannot take himself to pieces like a clock, and find out what makes the world go.
He became a writer because there was no other way out of the dilemma, which in any case was insoluble. There is no single explanation. The feeling of being a born loser turned him into the only endless direction that was open, so he began to write and accepted the role of scapegoat and sacrifice, fate’s potlatch, doomed never to tackle the fundamental problems of his life or finally explain them.
To make his existence supportable he finds it easier to tackle the despair of others than mend his own disabilities. This binds him tightly to humanity. His attempts to write instead of perish help to keep him and the world sane, give people something to live for, provide them with a fragment of hope in a desperate planet when they might otherwise think that universal extinction is the answer.
Too many occurrences of actual life rob him of time which would be better spent writing, though to use this as an ideal merely brings down the troubles he hopes to avoid. There is no way out of that one, but the argument that experience widens his spirit is false. In the beginning his spirit is a door, which opens more and more of its own accord as he gets older. A writer has to go further back than that. He should match the suffering of others with his fresh imagination, mix in with his tribulations, and illuminate the fused result with that third and holy eye which not only guards the past as he goes forward but watches for treachery from it, keeping it clear and well-balanced in his own iron-wrought truth.
65
Being a writer is the one great fact, my only love, a love which I had to feel before I could fall in love with anything or anyone else. It had to be there even before I could fall in love with myself.
I can only write about people I love, even if they are crooks, cowards, scoundrels, weaklings, and renegades whom the rest of society abominates. The evil and the cynical in me also has its favourite characters which it likes showing to others. One falls in love with that which can either destroy or save, knowing that in the end there will be no difference between either state of the brain or backbone.
At the beginning I felt an air of mystery and importance at being a writer — of hardly caring whether I was a writer or not, because an inner fire that I hadn’t yet uncovered but which kept me faithful to it knew that I was and would be, no matter what happened. It was pure and naïve enthusiasm, a feeling of youthful love that did not come and go in a month or year but went on like real love till it turned underground in order to survive. Like real love it is still there, and always will be, but I can never forget the time when it made me happy, in spite of all adversities and turmoil, just to tell myself that I was a writer, even though ten years were to go by before anything was printed. If any other person detected it they might have thought it was because I was in love.
To lose one’s naïvety is to say goodbye to part of one’s soul. Youth has vanished, leaving an ashen disaster. If enthusiasm in its first rush is cut down by the sword of cynicism, or by reality, or common sense, or critical praise, or reviewers’ dislike, or an acceptance of any truth, it is a great misfortune, and wrong indeed to allow it. A writer is open, vulnerable, a prey to derision, and it is good for him that he stays so, otherwise he will never get respect from those who matter to him, nor any from himself. Those who clamour for nothing but the truth, who demand easy and unconsidered opinions as well as form and style and deadly academic care, only want to spread his guts out in the sun to see what he is made of. They scatter sawdust over his remains with gestures of disgust when they see that he is built the same as everyone else except them.
The great poet David had a verse for it, when he realized the true nature of man’s most sacred possession: ‘Let them be ashamed and confounded that seek after my souclass="underline" let them be turned backward, and put to confusion, that desire my hurt.’