AN EXCHANGE OF
LETTERS
Perhaps one emotional reason why one may write is the need
to work off, out of the system, the sense of being solitary and farouche.
Solitary and farouche people don't have relationships: they are quite
unrelatable.
If
you and I were capable of being altogether house–
trained and made jolly, we should be nicer people, but not writers.
If
I feel irked and uneasy when asked about the nature of my (as a
writer) relation to society, this is because I am being asked about
the nature of something that does not, as far as
I
know, exist. May
writing, I am prepared to think, may be a substitute for something I
have been born without- a so-called normal relation to society. My
books
are
my relation to society. Why should people come and ask
me what the nature of this relation is? It seems to me that it is the
other people, the readers, who should know.
You, I see, say in better words what amounts to the same thing.
Or, do you? "At some point, he (the writer) splits off from the
people who surround him and he discovers the necessity of talking
to himself and not to them. A monologue begins.... 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." But, of course, your monologue isn't simply a thought–
stream; you touch a starter; you set in motion something that never
stops (that will never stop so long as a single copy of the story or
novel you have written exists) by your "invention" of people who
feel, speak, act. You make a society each time you write a story. In
fact, you are in closer relation to the characters in the story than you
will ever be to anyone in real life. It is this ideal relationship of in–
timacy and power which is to fascinate those who read. Fascinate, and
delude. They expect this capacity for relationship to be extended
outside the written page, to them. To, as they put it, society as a
whole.
Actually, isn't it a directive that you seem to give? That you
give in writing? And, also, shape. Shape is possibly
the
important
thing. Obsessed by shape in art, you and I may forget the importance
of shape in life. It could be that your and my non-writing lives
are simply margins around the non-stop story, that we are focused
internally on writing. But I shouldn't wonder if it were the shape,
essentially, that the reader, the mass, the public goes to the story for.
The idea of the possibility of shape is not only magnetic, it's salutary.
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