AUTHORSHIP

Press, Volume LXX, Issue 21288, 6 October 1934, Page 15

AUTHORSHIP

A VIEW (pv.ZCTAI.Lt WRITTEN FOR THE PRESS.; [By M. H. HOLCROI-T.] in. ? The wisdom and depth of writers rile Hardy and Meredith are at the ame time the impulse and the pro- ? ct of their work. There is no do ubt that the development of a talent brings changes and strange results to the author. It is almost inevitable that something of the Id Greek preoccupation with the Mystery of suffering creeps into his thought. His business is the presentation of life in the forms of art. ft may be that he sets out to write |„ a vivid and amusing way; but Soner or later he finds that life is not to be disposed of so easily. The man of the world goes stepping auickly from day to day and learns to ignore as much as possible of the shadow which does not lie directly across his path. He admits that life is difficult and full of trouble, and will be sympathetic when evil days fall upon his neighbour. Death looms upon his friends, and for the moment he is grieved. He may read Shakeroeare's magnificent death-piece in "Measure for Measure" without being more than vaguely moved by the power of the words. If he Basses from Shakespeare to Euripides he may be struck by the resemblance of Claudio's outburst to the following passage in the "Iphigenia in Tauris": This light is very sweet to men to .see. The realm below is naught. He raves who prays To die. 'Tis better to live on m woe Than to die nobly. One could, be tempted here into speculations on the evolution of Claudio's protest against the terrors , of death. Is the germ of it in those : lines of Euripides, austere and | penetrating? And afterwards, as the central idea becomes a nucleus in the mind of Shakespeare, does not the remembered imagery of Dante's Inferno come about it like clouds that roll darkly upon the sun and are transformed thereby into new and wonderful forms? Our man of the world may be aroused by a moment in criticism of this kind, but everything remains vicarious and distant. It is only when the inescapable facts of human history I rise upon his own horizon that he can feel the sudden icy awareness ! of the dark. j An author, however, must consider such things in the course of his work. In writing a novel of any dimensions he takes his characters through the vicissitudes of an average life. They come together in strange meetings; they love and marry; they hate and resist; they suffer and die. The author is not v.. mere spectator of these events; neither does he merely report them, with an anxious concern for the accuracy of detail. Life moves always in the background, and sometimes will flow in upon the story with irresistible power. At such times the author is an instrument. Indeed, I think a good many writers would be prepared to admit that this sense of being an instrument is both the mystery and the reward of their art. They , know, when there comes the in-' vasion of force, that they have \ lifted their work beyond the vicarious and trivial and are being ad- > mitted to a sharing of that grand | movement and rushing of life which I sweeps through the world like a I wind that goes tossing arte" shaking ) the forests in autumn.

Art and Death To all writers this creative joy is a rare and beautiful experience, but to some, as in the case of Katherine Mansfield, it comes only after pain. She was tormented by an art which had its teeming interior life and yet came slowly and through many impediments into expression. And beyond this was the growing fear of death. A surprising number of people can talk of death with calmness, almost with satisfaction, as if it were* a mere transition-time which will consume the lingering evil and set us, released and clean, upon the verge of a new experience. But the artist knows that it is not to be talked away or avoided in the indifference of the healthy; and as it comes nearer in thought or in illness its strange possibilities must be faced and feared. I do not think many artists deny the immortality of the soul; the discipline of spirit which is necessary to creative work opens too large a distance upon us to allow a finality in the moments of death. But the mystery remains, ".might be that the strength of toind and spirit which has uoen spent in years of effort will now oe gathered together and concentrated into some unimaginable freedom; but for one who feels and thinks under the influence of a Work which has drawn upon every phase and fragment of experience, «,is difficult to make the final submission. The equipment has been gained so hardly, and may be lost so easily. And if there is indeed we possibility of cessation (a fear Which cannot be altogether overcome while spirit needs the integument of flesh) it is sadly evident that We have done so little of all that We hoped to do. The unwritten books press forward; the thoughts make yet another movement towards a unity of form as we realise that they must now lall back into utter darkness and nave no brief life of their own upon l f earth. There is something almost y a biological urgency in this U'i£ spa ' r °f disappointed authorshipcan feci it in manv of the in Katherine Mansfield's the acknowledged need for naste adding a pathos to each new But when the hesitation is wer she is able, in her thankfulness, 0 nnd words for the true happiness "| writing. There is one passage I think should be quoted for ; spontaneous use of the overflowram Y e Wmch ad ds something sacWo I * be a bie to exprcio uue Udj iu> Mi wor k—my desire to be a better j Muter-. m y longing to take greatei t p . a ,! ns - And the passion I feel. It p ' ace ot religion—it IS my n„"°! on —of ioeople—l create my f e °We; of life—it TS life. The temp,*"°n is to kneel before it, to adore, i Rostrate myself, to stay too long 0 j ? state of ecstasy before the IDEA toa.V . must be more b:>sy about my Oh 6r > business. sun God: The sk y is rillecl with the »kv ? nc l the sun is like music. The *trea • ] of music. Music comes Wnrf lng dowr > these great beams. The ftaL , tou ches the harp-like trees. W, , ittle J et s °f music—shakes little d om l " e flowers. The shape of J?? Petal is like a sound. My hands hi $ e flve Petals. Praise Him. fctert- : No ' * am overcome; I am ™> U is too much to bear. who has written some'S he believes to be good will

understand the blend of arrogance and humility within the mounting happiness of this passage. And yet happiness may not be the word to describe a state of mind so tumultuous. This emotion of Katherinc Mansfield's is a creative exultation, lifting her to freedom and light. And we know, too, that afterwards she must make the long descent. The germ of weariness is in her joyfulness.

The Great Voices The joy of writing, as expressed by Katherine Mansfield, is altogether too personal to be shared or communicated. But although the author seems many times to be isolated in his work and comes therefore to be looke-- 1 upon as someone a little apart from the generality of mankind, there are times when this happiness of achievement is tinged with something that can easily be mistaken for universal influences, but wnich, although it tends towards the universal, is more Mkely to be the surviving glow of all the writing which is now embodied and organic within a nation's literature. In this way we can seem to reach towards a pervading power which once made words Iho vehicle of revelation. There lingers within the write.- an after-warmth of the old prophetic mood which fashioned the, Hebrew scriptures and announced the call to righteousness as the highest mission of the written word. In the days when commotion moved like the broken light of a storm along the highlands of Judea, the man of genius poured out his message in speech. The prophets were talkers and men of action, unafraid of kings and priests, and responding to the hostility of crowds with an added fervour. They come before us on the high places and within the walls of doomed cities and on lonely paths which go down through torrid valleys to the wilderness; we hear their unmistakeable voices in fragments of inspired speech which the editing of disciples and scribes has failed to bury altogether beneath the creeping mesh of law. But these later scribes were literary men to whom we must be grateful for what remains. The energy of prophecy struck like a pulse through all that was_written in the post-exilic generations. And this pulse, magnificently strong, came with the power of new life into the literature of England, working there in the years of change and danger when the Authorised Version came into thousands of homes where formerly no books had been. There were times when men and women read nothing fcn.it the Bible, until its language crept so far into the nation's consciousness that since then it has become a part of the English heritage, and will surprise us sometimes with its return in unexpected places. Origins—

These are movements of the mind a little too vague for system, but bringing a power into moments which come like a purification as we prepare for new work. The times of insight come to be treasured as stages of a long journey; we find, as we look back upon the years of writing, that each new idea absorbed into our philosophy belongs to a particular phase, very often to a particular book. In this way I have come to associate the conception of a novel written a few years ago with a first awareness of the unconscious mind. Like a great many other people, I had been able to speak glibly enough of the unconscious, without having any real or personal view of it. The arrival of an idea for a new book was a mysterious happening, to be welcomed and wondered at. In the normal course of things it went deeply below the surface and waited there to become the nucleus for gathering thought, for wisps and shreds of character to be integrated in composition, and for the shapes and colours of remembered scenes to be built into the substance of background. Everything began rather vaguely and grew, through weeks or months of brooding, towards a clarity sufficient for expression.

On one of those very clear, bright mornings which make October and November such lovely months in Christchurch I was lying in a grassy corner of Hagley, thinking about a book I was writing, and enjoying the quietness of the day. Suddenly, in a curious way, my book began to leave me. The people about whom I had been writing with great enthusiasm during the previous days grew dim and unfamiliar; the South American background lost its full colouring and began to melt away in a mingling of forests and harbours and white, Latin towns —all sliding pellmell into outer darkness. And finally I could feel the loss of something I can only describe as the inner atmosphere of the story, the feel of it. I began to fear that if this innermost basis of the novel were leaving me I should lose consciousness with it, but as I waited I was able to understand that there is a part of us which goes deeper than consciousness, and is able to remain intact and active while the surface life is dulled over and quiet. And into the stillness which remained when all the wisps and fragments of sense material had been emptied away there came, suddenly and clearly, the central situation of a new novel. At no other time, before or since, have I been able to see so much of a planned work in a single, prophetic view. I was amazed and delighted by the newness and the strength of the idea. That, of course, is one of the vaguer delights of authorship. The new plot is always extraordinarily new; the character with which you make an acquaintance mysteriously out of the blue is unique in fiction; the theme of the story is overflowing with nuances of thought and feeling, too fine for actual expression, but available for the sensitive reader in much the way that undeveloped themes live in the overtones and soft whisperings_ of a symphony. In this case I believed that I really had some cause for excitement, but the next day I found that the earlier, expelled story had returned, and was at full tide within my mind. I continued to write it, and was not able to make a start with the new book until six months later. But by that time there were no hpsiations. The '■homo -urns fomnlotp

Vnd Depths Later experience has taught me that the fundamental quietness which became the environment of that new idea was nothing more than the quietness of the inner self. Until then I had lived very thoroughly in the upper world, content to accept all that came from the mysterious places of mind without wanting to enquire too closely into mental phenomena which I believed were quite beyond my understanding. I had felt for some time that, although psychology might be admirable as a method of co-ordin-ating our knowledge of mental states it must of necessity remain in the shallows-. Its function, I believe, tends towards the physiologi- I cal and pathological, and in these!

directions should be of increasing valur to the specialist and educationist. But there is a margin of nervous activity where the physical basis of mind shades off into a darknpss too profound for analysis. It is" here that the poet escapes the psychologist; it is here that the religious mind has the source of its strength; it is here that the mystic finds his way to contemplation. Until the experience described above I had never been more than vaguely aware of that inner, essential self; and for a long time afterwards I failed to give it much thought or make any serious effort '<> recover its quietness. But over -■mber of years there have been ,ner moments, strangely alike in cheir quality of detachment, coming like interludes in the life of mind. For, although most of us associate intellectual activity with quietness and with the life of spirit, it is strangely true that one who gives all his time to writing or scholarship may yet remain on the surface levels of human experience. So much of the writing is derivative; so much of the scholarship is a dependence on the thoughts of other men, until the constant brightness of other minds has become the permanent dullness of our own. It becomes necessary to discover that the real life of mind lies far beneath this surface activity. (To be concluded.)