WRITERS AND MADNESS
17
ordinary incidents of daily life become complicated and almost unex–
pressible to Aytre struggling to keep his journal. Paulhan is after other
game in this tale, where we need not follow him; enough for us that
we can take this journey of Aytre for a symbol of the march of
writers in history as they progress toward subjects ever more complex,
driven by the compulsion to "make it new." From this point of view
Paulhan's title
i~elf
bocomes something of a misnomer:
Aytre'~
trouble is not that he has lost the knack-quite the contrary, he now
has altogether too much of it. Become infinitely complicated, all–
absorbing, possessive, now the knack
has him.
Aytre, in short, has
become a modern writer. He had begun as the simple scribe of the
clan.
"Make it new," Pound cried, and Eliot further explicated:
Modern poetry must be complicated because modern life is compli–
cated. Both have passed into famous slogans
~n
defense of modernism;
but both abbreviate what is a much more complicated process, and
have to be expanded in the light or darkness of Aytre's painful jour-
fantasy-then I think we must expect that more and more only a certain
psychic type will be at once capable of this, and also driven to embrace it as
his own painful profession. We have suggested (speculatively) that the individual
who is driven to exhibit such large slices of his psyche to the world is compelled
by an excessive need for the winning of love. Whether or not this hypothesis be
verified by literary and biographical evidence, it should not surprise us, at any
rate, that the modern writer (capable of satisfying our severe demands) has
become, by and large, a neurotic type.
The third element of my view, however, attempts to separate the neurosis
of the writer from that of other men. The writer's neurosis, through displacement
and appropriation, attempts to square itself with reality-but only in the work.
Here I reach some agreement with Mr. Trilling-but not completely or fun–
damentally. When he speaks of the writer's ability to "shape" the neurotic
material, he seems to suggest that this latter may be some kind of clay external
to the writer, and that there is some portion of the mind which remains com–
pletely outside the neurosis. This notion of control seems also to imply that the
writer attains, through the work, health and wholeness in his life too.
This strikes me as quite unguarded from an analytic point of view. The great
counterexample that comes immediately to mind is one from painting: the case
of Van Gogh (recently discussed by Mr. Meyer Shapiro), who, a few days after
painting "Crows in the Wheatfield'' and writing to his brother that the country
was "healthful and strengthening," committed suicide! The triumph of the ego,
in short, is in the work and not the life. It is, as I have said, an "as if" triumph.
Swift did not heal himself by writing
Gulliver's Travels.
The source of the catharsis, by the way, that Van Gogh obtained from that
particular painting has to be analyzed in terms of this essay: the momentary
triumph of the ego is that it has now appropriated elements from reality cor–
responding to its own torments, and depicted a scene to which these torments
seem an adequate response, and so has the illusion that its own reality principle
has been restored and safeguarded.
