THE DEAD WRITERS
403
If
he had been false, it was because he had built too extravag.ant–
lyon the words.
To comprehend this was to give way to a notion which had
quickly made much of itself as he sat at the desk with the newspaper
before him. The notion importuned
him
at this moment to admit that
he had lived his life not by cold philosophy but by casual remarks
of his own, offerings lax and flaccid which nevertheless wound
themselves rune-tight in the consciousness and finally bewitched
him
out of sense. He desired not to give way; he desired to war upon
the notion, as Flint would have wished
him
to. Flint would have had
him
lacerate his own being for permitting the notion to become
relevant to it. Douglas managed obeisance--in whirling words. From
his desk to the opposite empty wall he cast speech of extravagant
awkwardness yet, curiously, he, the flagellant, knew no pain:
"Words are bricks for the construction of the self. I have built
on words mainly. Monosyllabic bricks in the wall at thG edge of
things-
"And
if
the truth be
in
words, yet why fear ye?
"Flint
in
the forest of the sick-cold years, alone in his knowledge:
nothing ends at the fact. All dominated except Flinty. Upon the
desk the generation of new facts: never another Flinty: no hope for
witness of the coldness in the cold."
It was true that when he read the bits of paper which the
season scattered across his desk-"an incident out of your own life,
spend no
time
on it"-he was Tiresias, knowing ends and beginnings,
process and the poles, what words would answer to and when they
could not hear. Knock with the fact and they make answer; come
with the soul. . . .
He rarely brought the soul. Having come with Flint into the
late years of his age, everyman the poet commenced teach. Sit in the
office of dead men, occupy the "noble old chair," display the reflec–
tive being to the clod: confer. Counsel out of Joyce for one bringing
1500 words and nine names and no density of time or of place:
"Look again at the beginning of his big book-no, not that one, of
course. But look at the one we can read-even he, you must see, had
to come gently into his new way." Counsel from Tiresias himself-I,
Douglas Calder-for one who had thought a narrative poem but who
had gone to prose because he could find no line: "I don't know that
