BOOKS
265
imposed difficulties. They thread their meanings through the ego's eye
with such ascetic devotion that not even their best friends can read the
symbols on their signposts. Like other methods, which all have their
counterparts in ways of life, perfectionism also has its virtues. At best it
is
so serious on the personal plane that it is quite likely to be serious on
the artistic plane. But I do suggest that a novelist must see others in their
own right as different from himself, and that for him perfectionism is
most dangerous.
The author endeavors to trace a biographer's progress in search of
the real life of his subject. This main or omnibus theme contains numer·
ous passenger themes, and gives the book what integrity it has. The sub–
ject
is a writer, Sebastian Knight (Saint Sebastian; the black knight in
chess), who was born, parenthetically enou;;h, on December 31, 1899
(click), on a cold windless day (no click); who wrote novels in a style of
"terrific vigor" that received both ·good and bad notices; and died young.
The pilgrim-narrator-biographer is Sebastian's half-brother. The recol–
lections of Sebastian's friends and married sweethearts, and the biography
of Sebastian written by his agent and secretary, one Goodman, represent
the false conception of the writer's life. There are, of course, Sebastian's
novels, or at any rate sufficiently long quotations and descriptions from
their "heroes," as their themes are called. . The heroes include "methods of
composition," "methods of human fate," and by comparison, a strangely
lifelike hero, a dying man. The heroes are themselves subjects for research,
so that what we seem to have is a grand research for the one principle
that will at least define the writer's pattern of reality, and reveal
so~e-
thing of his inner life.
~
In this carefully constructed maze of meanings tricked out with the
sliding panels and secret doors of identities, equivocations, and false clues,
the author's intention is inextricable. It bobs up now and then, however,
as part of the total confusion. What is intended is to make the meaning
of the book identical with reality, therefore open to all meaning, as a
person's life can be subjected to all interpretation-my book is an open
life. Whatever is written must inevitably take on meaning, all meaning, at
one and the same time. This is known as the horizontal or supine school
of writing, characterized by an amorphous intention which relieves the
writer of all responsibility for making up his mind and saying what he
means. The world outside the ego does not exist, and does not, therefore,
make sense. It is a game of chance. And so the search for Sebastian's life
i!!
told in terms of a game of chess, in a series of moves ending in a check–
mate. One move determines the next, but what determines all is the chess–
board of the so alien world. The chess game provides the book with what–
ever frame it has, and is a key to the treatment of time and space, and to
a curious kind of luck-is-ail-good philosophy based on the mystery of
chance. It doesn't matter then, that the dying man the narrator has come
to see turns out not to be Sebastian. The emotion the narrator feels in the
presence of the dying man he believes to be Sebastian, is all that matters.
