WRITERS AND MADNESS
19
seller in four weeks and made $400,000 out of it-$100,000 a week,
almost as good pay as a movie star.
If
books could be written from
the top of one's mind merely (even books of this kind), it is naive to
think a major writer would not do it: after four weeks of absence
he returns to support himself for many years in the prosecution of
his own unremunerative and serious tasks. But it seems impossible
to write a best-seller in complete parody, one has to believe in one's
material even there, and it is impossible to fake unless one is a fake.
Joyce has written in
Ulysses
a superb parody of the sentimental ro–
mance for schoolgirls, but it is quite obvious from that chapter that
Joyce could not have turned out a novel in this genre for money: his
irony and self-consciousness would have got in the way, and the book
would not have attracted its readers but in the end only Joyce's
readers. The writer writes what he can, and if he decides to sell out
it is by corrupting and cheapening his own level, or perhaps slipping
down a step below it; but writing is not so uncommitted an intellectual
effort that he can drop down facilely to a very much lower level anrl
operate with enough skill there to convince that kind of reader. Joy€e
did not write
Finnegans Wake
out of a free decision taken in the void,
but because his experience of life and Western culture was what it
was, and he had to write that book if he was to write anything.
It is perhaps not a very pleasant thought, but it seems inescapable,
that even the commonest best-seller
is
the product of the personal
being of the author and demands its own kind of authenticity. Life
also imprisons us in its rewards; and we may draw some satisfaction
from the thought that these gay reapers of prestige and money, if
they are to keep on terms with their audience, can have in the end
only lives adequate to their books:
On ecrit le livre qu'on merite.
Our satisfaction might be greater if we were not on the other hand
also painfully acquainted with the opposite phenomenon: the gifted
people who find it difficult to produce precisely because they are too
intelligent and sensitive to tailor their writing to the reigning market.
The very awareness of standards inhibits them from writing, and,
not being geniuses, they are unable to break through and produce
anything adequate to those standards. The literary future in America,
and perhaps the West generally, seems to be leading to this final and
lamentable split: on the one hand, an enormous body of run-of-the–
mill writing (machine-made, as it were), becoming ever more slick
as it becomes more technically adequate through abundant compe–
tition and appropriation of the tricks of previous serious writing, and
in the end generating its own types of pseudo authenticity, like Stein-
