AN EXCHANGE ·OF
LETTERS
to be that writers are saved by what can only be called the sacred
instinct of party disloyalty.
Why do I write? That seems to me a fundamental question
when I think of what I have been saying in these letters. Many years
ago I wrote a story about the X-ray department of a hospital. Lately,
a nurse wrote to me and praised me for exposing in this story one
of the glaring evils of hospital life and the nursing profession. She
said I had done a great public service, etc., etc. I have often been
criticized for writing about unworthy people and even unworthy
subjects--one of the stock arguments used against story tellers: it
was made, of course, against ladies as respectable as the Brontes-so
this sudden praise was startling. To be called a reformer, a public
benefactor, was delightful. The rewards of middle age! I felt like
one who has left a drinking trough in granite to his native town.
I lined up beside Charles Dickens, Charles Reade, Thomas Hardy;
indeed, when you come to think of it, behind all the English novelists
except Jane Austen. I lined up, I say, but with the disquieting sensa–
tion that I had no right to be in this particular queue. My corre–
spondent was not wrong: I had undoubtedly exposed an evil; but I
had no idea when I wrote that I was doing so; it was not my motive.
I recall that all my labor and indeed all my conscience was in the
choice of the best words, the best images, the best design for what
was in my imagination. It still gives me great pain that the second
paragraph of the story contains a bad grammatical error.
If
any
social passion entered into the story, it was of a diffused and personal
kind. I have always disliked the way the State and the great institu–
tions house themselves. I dislike the light glossy varnish, the tiles that
so often line the walls of the corridors as if the places were some
official urinal. I dislike the official disinfectants, the cold dreary frac–
tious voices of the little martinets with a pension and the timeless
complacency that goes with it. I pray that I may not die in a Post
Office and often fear that I will. All these personal idiosyncrasies
derive from the fact that I went to a dozen different elementary
schools in my childhood. To me the public libraries, the town halls,
the hospitals, the court rooms are the elementary school over again.
Mean, bleak, monotonous they were, in my day. In that story, I was
writing out of the imaginative deposit left by these things in me by
my experience. How strange (and instructive) that my non-purposeful
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