BOOKS
125
force that the present need is to shrink back from the pole of "myth"
towards the pole of "journalism;" to avoid short-circuiting reality and
personality by too easy a recourse to myth and falsifying "form." Miss
McCarthy, writing in the same year as these critics and others in
England, says something similar in her own way.
Her concern, as ever, is with the truth. In one brilliantly enter–
taining piece, called "Settling the Colonel's Hash," she begins by ex–
posing a creative writing instructor who went through a pupil's work
to "put in the symbols," and goes on to explain that her own story about
the club car colonel had attracted a variety of symbolical interpretations.
But the story was
true;
Miss McCarthy's dress really was in two shades
of green, the colonel did eat hash, and the green is green, the hash hash,
not "Eucharistic mincemeat." To have made them mean such things
would have been to destroy the truth of the account; in fact, para–
doxically, a concern with such symbolism seems to have destroyed our
power to handle the "natural symbols" which, in fiction as in life, lead
towards and not away from reality. The trains in
Anna Karenina
are
natural
symbols; Miss McCarthy would not like to think of Tolstoy as
putting them in artificially; it would be "a sort of fraud." She herself
would use only that kind; "the tree of life is greener than the tree of
thought," and in going in for "souped-up novels" we show that we
have lost our sense of reality, of factuality.
So, her flag flying against the wind, Miss McCarthy, like her
English counterparts, rejects what may be loosely called the sacra–
mental view of things
in
favor of an acceptance of things as they are;
a drab sentiment, said Wilde, and eighty years of symbolic writing echo
him. This is a good contrariness; but once more it blurs useful distinc–
tions. For instance, it should be possible to condemn the creative writing
instructor without lumping him together with a serious artist like David
Jones, for whom all things have truth and value in so far as they are
anathemata,
signs of absolute reality; he would say that Miss McCarthy
was incapable of the act of
anamnesis
required to see things as they are,
and that her "natural symbols" were stupefyingly tautological.
If
you
put in a piece of wood, or the colonel's hash, you do so not because it
was in some trivial sense true, but because it induces an
anamnesis
of
the Cross, or, by opposition (see 1
Cor. x)
of the Eucharist. That both
Miss McCarthy and tht colonel were lapsed Catholics would seem to
him the important clue, explaining the determined attempt to warp
the rest by being "natural." I am not, need I say, a Jones man, but he
should not be confounded with that instructor. Nor am I arguing
mertly that honourable exceptions ought to be made. I think Miss
