PARTISAN REVIEW
B:
I'll tell all, if you'll let me drop this scientific jargon and get
back to plain old-fashioned jargon. I don't think literary experiment
is a fraud unless it's cultivated, and I think we do far too much to
cultivate
it.
Real experimenters aren't "different" because they want to
be. A genuinely original writer is full of ideas and feelings and
Gestalten
that want desperately to come out pure, to be as intelligible to others
as they are to
him
before he sits down to write. In the struggle to be
both pure and intelligible he may even begin his career as a "conserva–
tive traditionalist," let alone the "middle road." Have you ever read
anything more conventional than
Stephen Hero?
An original writer
can exhaust the possibilities of a manner or an influence in the time it
takes a lesser writer to absorb one. Then he. may continue to work in
that manner, with personal variations, or he may develop a new manner.
But he won't try to "alter the basic nature of the forms," because he
isn't interested in forms as such. He may be trying to alter the basic
nature of people, but that's another story. Anyway, whether he "ex- •
periments" or not, he will end by establishing himself as a voice with
an unmistakable timbre. Not unheard-of, but unmistakable once you
have thoroughly heard it. Listen. "A bud forever green,
I
tight-curled
upon the pavement, perfect
I
in juice and substance, but divorced,
divorced
I
from its fellows, fallen low"-Who wrote that?
S: By elimination among your four favorites, hm ... Williams?
B:
If
you read more, you could eliminate faster. Well, here's
one you could tell by hearsay. "A light moves on the north sky line;
I
where the young boys prod stones for shrimp. / In seventeen hundred
came Tsing to these hill lakes.
I
A light moves on the south sky line."
S: Hold, enough! Aren't you simply saying that a writer is original
if
h~
original?
If
it's just a matter of recognizing his style, what's the
difference between criticism and a quiz program?
B:
Recognized, that's the word! Recognized with joy! Recognized
so that you say, involuntarily, "That's it!" Oh, exquisitely put, my
friend. Have you been reading Plato on reminiscence ?-But your ob–
jection is sustained. Of course an unmistakable style is not a sure sign
of originality. But that's what I'm trying to say! You advance literature
by adding to it, not by trying
to
improve it. Literature doesn't grow;
it increases. And what increases it? Originality, which is less obvious
than experimentation, but much more visible. Well, enough of this
groping for principles. It will never get us anywhere. That's one thing
our two generations agree on, isn't it?
S: I'm not sure.
It
might get us nowhere, but out.
Omnia exeunt
in mysterium.
350
