In a book he published in ’48, entitled Organon for a Small Theater, “Brecht rejects his early artistic works as political and didactic. The theater must be a place for aesthetic pleasure and nothing else — though it is also necessary to keep up with the fashions of the age and work scientifically. We need a theater that does not merely make possible the emotions, insights, and impulses allowed by the relevant field of human relationships in which the actions occur. Instead, we need a theater that will exploit and generate ideas, so that they might play a role in changing the world.” Brecht, Ronald Gray.
Must write about Cairo after studying her neighborhood by neighborhood, her classes, her evolution.
“You could say that in my last phrase I’ve joined the new realism. Its characteristic features are not at all the same as those of traditional realism, which is supposed to provide a faithful representation of life. The new realism goes beyond details and rounded characters. This isn’t an advance in style, but a change of content. The basis of traditional realism is life — you paint its picture, show how it works, extract its tendencies and what lessons it might offer. That’s where the story begins and ends: it depends on life and on the living, the way they dress, the details. For the new realism, the motive for writing lies in ideas, in specific passions that make reality into a means for expressing them.” Naguib Mahfouz.
June
John Dos Passos (born 1896), the total, panoramic view. Journalistic spirit. The city itself rather than a particular individual in the USA Trilogy.
Hemingway: A tight frame with three dimensions: Simple character. Simple style. Simple setting. In The Green Hills of Africa, he talks about four-dimensional prose: the kind that hasn’t yet been written, but which is possible. There is a fourth and a fifth dimension (the symbolic?).
Hemingway, The Writer as Artist, Carlos Baker, translated by Dr. Ihsan Abbas.
— On Africa: “You ought to always write it. Write it down, state what you see and hear, without worrying what you might get out of it.”
— “Where we go, if we are any good, there you can go as we have been.” The practical standard is participation. There are other practical standards: the truthfulness of the writing, its vital verisimilitude (in other words, nothing that is in life, whether language, thought, or action, can be wholly excluded without some loss to the vital principle).
— Hemingway’s experience in Africa in the translation of reality. He says in the introduction to Green Hills: “Given a country as interesting as Africa, a month’s hunting there, the determination to tell only the truth, and to make all that into a book — can such a book compete with a work of the imagination?” The answer is that it certainly can, provided the writer is skilled, as well as being committed to both truth and beauty — in other words, the way it was + formal construction. Yet the experiment also proved that the writer who takes no liberties with the events of his experience, who tells things exactly as they were and invents nothing, will place himself at a disadvantage in this competition [the intensity of “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” and “The Life of Francis Macomber”]. This book and the two stories established one aesthetic principle firmly in Hemingway’s mind: The highest art must take liberties, not with the truth but with the modes by which truth is translated.
— Hemingway and politics: “A writer can make himself a nice career while he is alive by espousing a political cause, working for it from the inside, making a profession of believing in it, and if it wins he will be very well placed. But none of this will help him as a writer unless he finds something new to add to human knowledge through his writing.”
— “All bad writers are in love with the epic.”
Eliot to the American poet Donald Hall, in an interview from ’59, published in The Paris Review: “I think that for me it’s been very useful to exercise other activities, such as working in a bank, or publishing even. And I think also that the difficulty of not having as much time as I would like has given me a greater pressure of concentration. I mean it has prevented me from writing too much. The danger, as a rule, of having nothing else to do is that one might write too much rather than concentrating and perfecting smaller amounts.”
July
On the night of July 13, ’63, I came across the text of a letter I intended to send to my sister. I think constantly of writing to her about my real feelings toward her and of describing many things. But my letters to her travel in more than one direction before they arrive. My sense that someone might read them and smile at their naïveté paralyzes me, as does the thought of meeting someone who had read these letters and could be looking at me and laughing to himself without my knowing. Although actually other people don’t care about your sentimentality. The thought that this might be the story of my life.
Is the real problem in art the problem of form? Can we say that the basis of art is form? This doesn’t mean we’re against content. Form without content is meaningless. (The content of abstract painting is found in the sensations experienced by the self when stimulated by a certain arrangement of colors.) The artist at work is not motivated, in the first place, by a strict idea, but rather by forms and styles. It is by virtue of his working through these forms and styles that the content emerges (the opposite might also occur). In backward societies, or one in which art enjoys a mass audience while it is still culturally backward (Russia at the time of the Revolution), a direct style is necessary and valid. When the cultural level is higher, when life has become more complex and intellectual development has progressed, the need for more depth — for new forms and styles, for an increasing variety and profundity of each art’s creative elements — becomes urgent. (In narrative: memory, experience, symbol, style, scientific awareness.)
If I wanted to describe a picture of my sister when she was young and innocent and wide-eyed and full of possibility — a picture of her wearing a pink skirt with a white spot marking the slight swell of her chest, a trace of sweat above her shoulders — can words succeed in describing her, in translating the feeling that digs into my chest? Film can do it better. So another way must be sought, beyond the snapshot, to capture this feeling in words.
August
The mood in the prison has become unbearable. Terrible noise. I can’t sleep at night or in the afternoon. I wish the prisoners were gone. I don’t know how to work; I’m constantly depressed and nothing changes my mood except reading a good story or something about the writer’s craft. I’m confident I know how to write, but what nearly destroys me is not knowing the level of writer I’ll become. Many thoughts run through my head, which I want to express but can’t. I don’t know how to express my thoughts clearly in speech. If I try to write them down, the thoughts run away.
When we express ourselves, we also express the collective. A fence gleaning.***** What is shared by these collectives: boredom, disgust, disillusionment. The romanticism of struggle is over. What remains are the utterly naked facts. The cult of personality and its collapse. Rethinking of everything. The masks are off (the mask of religion, the mask of heroism.).