PARTISAN REVIEW
story should have been thought good propaganda. Evidently a wri–
ter's work begins a life of its own after it leaves his hands.
This brings me back, by a long detour, to the question: why
do I write? I do not write for the reader, for people, for society. I
write for myself, for my own self-regarding pleasure, trying to excel
and always failing of the excellence I desire.
If
no one ever read me,
would I write? Perhaps not; but I would not be able to· stop writing
in my head.
When the inner history of any writer's mind is written, whatever
his degree, we find (I believe) that there is a break at some point in
his life. At some point he splits off from the people who surround
him and he discovers the necessity of talking to himself and not to
them. A monologue begins. The most disturbing and satisfying state–
ment of the writer's condition that I can think of is in Baudelaire's
poem
Benediction;
and many of the opening poems of
Les Fleurs du
Mal
are glosses on the theme. Even the venal muse-about which I
could say a lot-is there. To write is to be naive, and one of the
strange pleasures of the solitary monologue is the discovery that one
has said aloud to oneself what other people are saying silently. With
an unresolved mingling of irony and emotion one utters Baudelaire's
hackneyed words:
((Hypocrite lecteur- mon semblable-mon frere
."
Yes, by means of its writers a society communicates with itself. The
better the writer, the purer the tone of his strange telephone line.
But what a horrible world "society" is. I dislike these abstrac–
tions. I am sorry I have used it. Ought I to have just said "people"?
I'm not sure, because when I say "society" I mean more than people;
I mean people bound together for .an end, who are making a future.
I see that we may have two voices: the voice of the person we are
and the voice of the person we fear or wish to become. On that rather
mysterious note-I mean it is mysterious to me-I come to the end
of this letter. What do you think?
Elizabeth Bowen to V. S. Pritchett
What
do
I think? About the artist, or imaginative writer,
and his or her relation to society. About his, her (your, my) response
to the challenge of the times. Yes, it is probably something that we
should .ask each other. When I am asked by an outside person, a non-
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