THE FACT IN FICTION
457
American writer, the writer who starts out with promise and
afterwards can only repeat himself or fade away. There
is
nothing puzzling about it; he wrote that first book before he
became a writer, while he was still an ordinary person. The
worst thing, I would say, th3Jt can happen to a writer today
is to become a writer. And it is most fatal of all for the novelist;
the poet can survive it, for he does not need society for his
venle, and poets have always clubbed together with other poets
in exclusive coteries, which is perhaps why Plato wanted them
banned from the Republic.
The isolation of the modern writer is a social fact, and not
just the writer's own willful fault. He cannot help being "book–
ish," which cuts him off from society, since practically the
only people left who read are writers, their wives and
girl
friends, teachers of literature, and students hoping to become
writenl. The writer has "nothing in common" with the busi–
ness man or the worker, and this is almost literally true; there
is no common world left in which they share. The business man
who does not read is just as specialized as the writer who writes.
To throw off this straitjacket is the recurrent dream of the
modern novelist, after the age, say, of thirty or thirty-five;
before that, his dream was the opposite: to come to New York
(or Paris or London) to meet other writers. Various ways out
are tried: moving to the country, travel, "action" (some form
of politics), the resolute cultivation of side-interests- music, art,
sport, gardening; sport is very popular with American men
novelists, who hold on to an interest in baseball or a tennis
racket or a fishing-rod as a relic of the "complete man" or com–
plete boy they once were. But
if
these steps are sufficiently
radical, their effect may be the reverse of what was intended.
This is what seems to have happened to Gide, D. H. Lawrence,
Malraux, Camus, George Orwell. Starting as novelists, they
fled, as it were, in all directions from the tyranny of the novel–
ist's specialization: into politics, diary-keeping, travel and travel–
writing, war, art history, journalism, "engagement." Nor did
