Pictures in the House by Haldor Laxness

Judging by pictures on postcards, one would think that the great musicians had been gods, not men. But now I learned that the world’s greatest composers have been the most wretched outcasts of humanity. Schubert was considered by good-class people in Vienna nothing but an uneducated boy who did not know anything about music; and he revenged himself, indeed, by composing a cheap tune like Ave Maria that even country people in the north know; and died of malnutrition at about the age of thirty. Beethoven did not even get a rudimentary petit-bourgeois education; he could only just use a open, no better than a farm hand; and he wrote a ludicrous letter which he called his Testament. He fell in love with a few countesses, rather like an old hack falling for stud-mare. In the eyes of good-class people in Vienna he was first and foremost just a deaf eccentric, badly dressed and dirty, not fit for decent company. But these two outcasts stood high in society compared with some others of the world’s greatest composers. Many of them were employed by comic-opera kings and were kept to play for them while they were feeding – including Johann Sebastian Bach, who, however, wasted even more years quarrelling with the bourgeois riff-raff of Leipzig. Haydn, the world’s greatest composer of his time, was frequently beaten by the Eesterhazy family, for whom he was a workman for thirty years; he was not even allowed to eat at their table. Mozart, the man who most nearly reached the celestial heights, stood lower in the hierarchy of society than the lap-dogs of kings and bishop-oafs who used him as a drudge. He died of misery and wretchedness in the prime of his life, not a living creature followed his coffin to the grave except for one mongrel; people made the excuse that it had been raining; some said they had influenza . . .


The next day I stood in the middle of the room beside two domestic animals – an electric floor polisher and a vacuum cleaner – and began to study the pictures in the house. I had often looked at these ten or twenty-centimeter mountains which seemed to have been made sometimes of porridge, sometimes of bluish sago pudding, sometimes a mash of curds- sometimes like an upturned bowl with Eiriks Glacier underneath; and I had never been able to understands where I was meant to be placed, because anyone who comes from the north and has lived opposite a mountain cannot understand a mountain in a picture in the south.


In this house there hung, so to speak, mountains and mountains and yet more mountains, mountains with glacial caps, mountains by the sea, ravines in mountains, lava below mountains, birds in front of mountain; and still more mountains; until finally these wastelands had the effect of a total flight from habitation, almost a denial of human life. I would not dream of trying to ague that this was not art, especially since I did not have the faintest idea what art is; but if this is art, it was first and foremost the art of those who had sinned against humanity and fled into the wilderness, the art of outlaws. Quite apart from how debased Nature becomes in a picture, nothing seems to me to express so much contempt for Nature as the painting of Nature. I touched the waterfall but I did not get wet, and there was no sound of cascade; over there was a little white cloud, standing still instead of breaking up; and if I sniffed that mountain slope I bumped my nose against a congealed mass and found only a smell of chemicals, at best a whiff of linseed oil; and where were the birds? And the flies? And the sun, so that one’s eyes are dazzled? Or the mist, so that one only saw a faint glimmer of the nearest willow shrub?. Yes, certainly this was meant to be a farmhouse, but where, pray, was the smell of cow dung? What is the point of making a picture which is meant to be like Nature, when everybody knows that this is the one thing that a picture cannot be and should not be and must not be? Who thought up the theory that Nature is a matter of sight alone? Those who know Nature hear it rather than see it, feel it rather than hear it; smell it, good heavens, yes – but first and foremost eat it. Certainly Nature is in front of us; but most particularly it exists in time, always changing and always passing, never the same; and never in a rectangular frame.


A farmhouse with a turf roof is not what it looks like from a distance some sunshine night in July; nothing is further from being a farmhouse. I had spent all my childhood in a farm opposite a mountain; it would be of no use for anyone who wanted to paint my farm to state from the turf roof, he would have to start from the inside and not the outside, start from the minds of those who lived there.


 

And a bird, I know what a bird is. Oh, those dear divine birds! It may well be that this picture of a bird cost many thousands of kroner, but, may I ask, could any honorable person, or any person who appreciates birds at all, justify to his own conscience painting a bird sitting on a stone for all eternity, motionless as a convicted criminal or a country person posing for the photographer at Krok? For a bird is first and foremost movement; the sky is part of a bird, or rather, the air and the bird are one; a long journey in a straight line into space, that is a bird; and heat, for a bird is warmer than a man and has a quicker heartbeat, and is happier besides, as one can hear from its call – for there is no sound like the chirp of a bird and it is not a bird at all if it does not chirp. The soundless bird on a stone, this picture of no movement, no long journey in a straight line, might have been meant to represent the dead stuffed bird that stood on top of a cabinet in our pastor’s house at home; or the tin birds one could buy at Krok when I was small. But a picture of a dead bird is not that of a bird, but of death; stuffed death; tin death.

The Apparent Death of Communism by Doris Lessing

[ The novelist Doris Lessing won the 2007 Nobel Prize in Literature. Moments after the announcement, the literary world embarked on a time-honored post-Nobel tradition: assessing — and sometimes sniffing at — the work of the prizewinner. One of the most pointed criticisms of Ms. Lessing came from Harold Bloom, the Yale professor and literary critic, who told The Associated Press, “Although Ms. Lessing at the beginning of her writing career had a few admirable qualities, I find her work for the past 15 years quite unreadable.” He went on to add that the prize is “pure political correctness.” Interestingly, Ms. Lessing had some strong thoughts about political correctness, thoughts she expressed in this adapted article, which appeared on  June 26, 1992. ]

WHILE we have seen the apparent death of Communism, ways of thinking that were either born under Communism or strengthened by Communism still govern our lives. Not all of them are as immediately evident as a legacy of Communism as political correctness.

The first point: language. It is not a new thought that Communism debased language and, with language, thought. There is a Communist jargon recognizable after a single sentence. Few people in Europe have not joked in their time about “concrete steps,” “contradictions,” “the interpenetration of opposites,” and the rest.

The first time I saw that mind-deadening slogans had the power to take wing and fly far from their origins was in the 1950s when I read an article in The Times of London and saw them in use. “The demo last Saturday was irrefutable proof that the concrete situation...” Words confined to the left as corralled animals had passed into general use and, with them, ideas. One might read whole articles in the conservative and liberal press that were Marxist, but the writers did not know it. But there is an aspect of this heritage that is much harder to see.

Even five, six years ago, Izvestia, Pravda and a thousand other Communist papers were written in a language that seemed designed to fill up as much space as possible without actually saying anything. Because, of course, it was dangerous to take up positions that might have to be defended. Now all these newspapers have rediscovered the use of language. But the heritage of dead and empty language these days is to be found in academia, and particularly in some areas of sociology and psychology.

A young friend of mine from North Yemen saved up every bit of money he could to travel to Britain to study that branch of sociology that teaches how to spread Western expertise to benighted natives. I asked to see his study material and he showed me a thick tome, written so badly and in such ugly, empty jargon it was hard to follow. There were several hundred pages, and the ideas in it could easily have been put in 10 pages.

Yes, I know the obfuscations of academia did not begin with Communism — as Swift, for one, tells us — but the pedantries and verbosity of Communism had their roots in German academia. And now that has become a kind of mildew blighting the whole world.

It is one of the paradoxes of our time that ideas capable of transforming our societies, full of insights about how the human animal actually behaves and thinks, are often presented in unreadable language.

The second point is linked with the first. Powerful ideas affecting our behavior can be visible only in brief sentences, even a phrase — a catch phrase. All writers are asked this question by interviewers: “Do you think a writer should...?” “Ought writers to...?” The question always has to do with a political stance, and note that the assumption behind the words is that all writers should do the same thing, whatever it is. The phrases “Should a writer...?” “Ought writers to...?” have a long history that seems unknown to the people who so casually use them. Another is “commitment,” so much in vogue not long ago. Is so and so a committed writer?

A successor to “commitment” is “raising consciousness.” This is double-edged. The people whose consciousness is being raised may be given information they most desperately lack and need, may be given moral support they need. But the process nearly always means that the pupil gets only the propaganda the instructor approves of. “Raising consciousness,” like “commitment,” like “political correctness,” is a continuation of that old bully, the party line.

A very common way of thinking in literary criticism is not seen as a consequence of Communism, but it is. Every writer has the experience of being told that a novel, a story, is “about” something or other. I wrote a story, “The Fifth Child,” which was at once pigeonholed as being about the Palestinian problem, genetic research, feminism, anti-Semitism and so on.

A journalist from France walked into my living room and before she had even sat down said, “Of course ‘The Fifth Child’ is about AIDS.”

An effective conversation stopper, I assure you. But what is interesting is the habit of mind that has to analyze a literary work like this. If you say, “Had I wanted to write about AIDS or the Palestinian problem I would have written a pamphlet,” you tend to get baffled stares. That a work of the imagination has to be “really” about some problem is, again, an heir of Socialist Realism. To write a story for the sake of storytelling is frivolous, not to say reactionary.

The demand that stories must be “about” something is from Communist thinking and, further back, from religious thinking, with its desire for self-improvement books as simple-minded as the messages on samplers.

The phrase “political correctness” was born as Communism was collapsing. I do not think this was chance. I am not suggesting that the torch of Communism has been handed on to the political correctors. I am suggesting that habits of mind have been absorbed, often without knowing it.

There is obviously something very attractive about telling other people what to do: I am putting it in this nursery way rather than in more intellectual language because I see it as nursery behavior. Art — the arts generally — are always unpredictable, maverick, and tend to be, at their best, uncomfortable. Literature, in particular, has always inspired the House committees, the Zhdanovs, the fits of moralizing, but, at worst, persecution. It troubles me that political correctness does not seem to know what its exemplars and predecessors are; it troubles me more that it may know and does not care.

Does political correctness have a good side? Yes, it does, for it makes us re-examine attitudes, and that is always useful. The trouble is that, with all popular movements, the lunatic fringe so quickly ceases to be a fringe; the tail begins to wag the dog. For every woman or man who is quietly and sensibly using the idea to examine our assumptions, there are 20 rabble-rousers whose real motive is desire for power over others, no less rabble-rousers because they see themselves as anti-racists or feminists or whatever.

A professor friend describes how when students kept walking out of classes on genetics and boycotting visiting lecturers whose points of view did not coincide with their ideology, he invited them to his study for discussion and for viewing a video of the actual facts. Half a dozen youngsters in their uniform of jeans and T-shirts filed in, sat down, kept silent while he reasoned with them, kept their eyes down while he ran the video and then, as one person, marched out. A demonstration — they might very well have been shocked to hear — which was a mirror of Communist behavior, an acting out, a visual representation of the closed minds of young Communist activists.

Again and again in Britain we see in town councils or in school counselors or headmistresses or headmasters or teachers being hounded by groups and cabals of witch hunters, using the most dirty and often cruel tactics. They claim their victims are racist or in some way reactionary. Again and again an appeal to higher authorities has proved the campaign was unfair.

I am sure that millions of people, the rug of Communism pulled out from under them, are searching frantically, and perhaps not even knowing it, for another dogma.

Trifling Matters by Philip Sydney

No doubt a large part of what we do in this life ends up as quite trifling matters- projects, customs, conventions, habits, ceremonies. For example, we spent years obtaining an education the content of which may be accurately perceived as synonymous with water being poured through an open sieve, and then mark its conclusion with solemn ceremony though, in all practicality, at that point one has barely embarked on a long journey only concluded by our passage to another world.

Forsooth, we swear and pledge, honor to obey along this or that stolid line casting ourselves forward into the infinite seas of the Universe, confident vessels of the "divine wisdom of the gods" though perhaps, in truth, more like a dumb rock. Let us hope we do not inadvertently cast ourselves too far from the shore lest we be lost in the darkness forever!

Well, people are entitled to their trifles. God bless them in all their endeavors, what else is there to do? To each his own. Which brings me to the point. Trifle we must, I am most assuredly no exception to the rule but just let it be the trifle I choose, not one or at least not many undertaken at the command of any other. This will help maintain for each at least a modicum of righteous nobility in all our trifles.

As St. Augustine said: "The center of the Universe is everywhere, the circumference nowhere"

"Thus, great with childe to speak, and helpless in my throwes,

Biting my trewand pen, beating myself for spite,

Fool, said my Muse to me, looke in thy heart and write."

Henry James At Work by Theodora Bosanquet

[Theodora Bosanquet was Henry James' secretary from 1907 until his death in 1916.]



He asked  no questions about my speed on the typewriter or about anything else. The friend to whom he had applied for an amanuensis had told him I was sufficiently the right young woman for his purpose and he relied on her word. He had, at the best, little hope of any young woman beyond docility. We sat in armchairs on either side of a fireless grate while we observed each other. I suppose he found me harmless and I know that I found him overwhelming . He was much more massive than I had expected, much broader and stouter and stronger. I remembered that someone had told me he used to be taken for sea-captain when he wore a beard . . .After the interview I wondered what kind of impression one might have gained from a chance encounter in some such observation cell as a railway carriage. Would it have been possible to fit him into any single category? He had reacted with so much success against the American accent and the English manner that he seemed only doubly Anglo-Saxon. He might perhaps have been some species of disguised cardinal, or even a Roman nobleman amusing himself by playing the part of a Sussex squire. The observer could at least have guessed that any part he chose to assume would be finely conceived and generously played, for his features were all cast in the classical mold of greatness. He might very well have been a merciful Caesar or a benevolent Napoleon. . . .

If the interview was overwhelming, it had none of the usual awkwardness of such curious conversations. Instead of critical angles and disconcerting silences, there were only benign curves and ample reassurances. There was encouraging  gaiety in an expanse of bright check waistcoat. He invited me to ask any question I liked, but I had none to ask. I wanted nothing but to be allowed to go to Rye and work his typewriter. He was prepared, however, with his statements and, once I was seated opposite him, the strong, slow stream of his deliberate speech played over me without ceasing. He had it on his mind to tell me the conditions of life and labor at Rye, and he unburdened himself fully, with number less amplifications and qualifications without any real break . . .


On summer days Henry James like to work in the  large ‘garden room’ at Lamb House. I gave him a longer stretch for perambulation and a window overlooking the cobbled street that curved up a hill past his door. He liked to be able to relieve the tension of a difficult sentence by a glance down the street; he enjoyed hailing a passing friend or watching a motor-car pant up the sharp little slope. The sight of one of these vehicles could be counted on to draw from him a vigorous outburst of amazement, admiration, or horror for the complications of an age that produced such efficient monsters for gobbling protective distance..  .  .

His practice of dictation was begun in the nineties. By 1907  it was a confirmed habit, its effects being easily recognizable in his style, which became more and more like free, involved, unanswered talk. ‘I know, he once said to me, ‘that I am too diffuse when I’m dictating.’ But he found dictation not only an easier and more inspiring method of composing than writing with his own hand, and he considered that the gain in expression more than compensated for any loss of concision. The spelling out of words, the indication of commas, were scarcely felt as a drag on the movement of his thought. ‘It all seems,’ he once explained, ‘to be much more effectively pulled out of me in speech  than in writing.’ Indeed , at the time when I began to work for him, he had reached a stage at which the click of a Remington machine acted as a positive spur. He found it more difficult to compose to the music of any other make. During a fortnight when the Remington was out of order he dictated to an Oliver typewriter with evident discomfort, and he found it almost impossibly disconcerting to speak to something that made no sound at all. . .

Once or twice when he was ill and in bed I took down a note or to by hand, but as a rule he liked to have the typewriter moved into the bedroom for even the shortest letters. Yet there were to the end certain kinds of work which he was obliged to do with a pen. Plays, if they were to be kept within the limits of possible performance, and short stories, if they were to remain within the bounds of publication in a monthly magazine, must be written by hand. . .to resist the temptation of dictation and embroidery. With the short stories he allowed himself a little more freedom, dictating them from his written draft and expanding them as he went which inevitably defeated his original purpose . . .


The method adopted for full-length novels was very different. With a clear run of 100,000 words or more before him, Henry James always cherished the elusive expectation of being able to fit his theme quite easily between the covers of a volume. It was not until he was  more than half-way through that the problem of space became embarrassing. At the beginning he had no question of compression to attend to, and he ‘broke ground’, as he said, by talking to himself day by day about the characters and construction until the persons and their actions were vividly present to his inward eye. This soliloquy was of course recorded on the typewriter. He had from far back tended to dramatize all the material that life gave him and he more and more prefigured his novels as staged performances, arranged in acts and scenes, with the characters making their observed entrances and exits. These scenes he worked out until he felt him so thoroughly possessed of the action that he could begin the dictation of the book itself . . . the scenario dictated in advance containing practically  none of the phrases used in the final work. The original draft was a framework set up for imagination to clothe with the spun web of life. But they were not a bare framework. They were elaborate and abundant. . .


For the volume of memories, A Small Boy and Others, Notes on a Son and Brother, and the uncompleted Middle Years, no preliminary work was needed . . .it was extraordinarily easy for him to recover the past. All he had to do was to render his sense of those records as adequately as he could. Each morning, after reading the pages written the day before, he would settle down in a chair for an hour or so of conscious effort. Then, lifted on a rising tide of inspiration, he would get up and pace up and down the room, sounding out the periods in tones of resonant assurance. At such times he was beyond reach of irrelevant sounds or sights. Hosts of cats – a tribe he usually routed with shouts of execration – might wail outside the window, phalanxes of motor-cars  bearing dreaded visitors might hoot at the door. He heard nothing of them. The only thing that could arrest his progress was the escape of the word he wanted to use. When that had vanished he broke off the rhythmic pacing and made is way to a chimney-piece or book-case tall enough to support his elbows while her rested his head in his hands and audibly pursued the  fugitive . . .


In the autumn of 1907, when I began to tap the Remington at Henry’s dictation, he was engaged in the arduous task of preparing his Novels and Tales for the definitive New York edition, published in 1909. Since it was only between breakfast and luncheon that he undertook what he called ’inventive’  work, he gave the hours from half-past ten to half-past one to the composition of the prefaces which are so interesting a feature of the edition. In the evenings he read over again the work of former years, treating the printed pages like so many proof-sheets of extremely corrupt text. The revision was a task he had seen in advance as formidable. He had cultivated the habit of forgetting past achievements almost to the pitch of a sincere conviction that nothing he had written before about 1890 could come with any credit through the ordeal of critical inspection . . .


From the moment he began to read over the earlier tales, he found himself involve in a highly practical examination of the scope and limits of possible revision. Poets, as he pointed out, have often revised their verse to good effect. Why should the novelist not have equal license? The only sound reason for not altering anything is a conviction that it could not be improved. It was Henry James’ profound conviction that he could improve his early writing in nearly every sentence. Not to  revise would have been to confess to a loss of faith in himself, and it was not likely that the writer who had fasted for forty years in the wilderness of British and Americans misconceptions without yielding a scrap of intellectual integrity to editorial or publishing tempers should have lost faith in himself. . . .


Henry James’ familiar correspondence  show him as unusually impervious to everything which is not an impression of visual images or a sense of a human situation. He was very little troubled by a number of ideas which press with an increasing weight  upon the minds of he most educated persons. Not until the outbreak of the Great War was he moved to utter forcible ‘opinion’ about affairs outside his personal range. He’s delightedly free from the common delusion that by grouping individuals in arbitrary classes and by twisting harmless adjectives into abstract nouns it is possible for us to think of more than one thing at a time and to conceive of qualities apart from their manifestations. What he saw he possessed; what he understood he criticized, but he never reckoned it to be any part of his business to sit in judgment on the deeds of men working in alien material for inartistic ends, or to speculate about the nature of the universe or the conflict or to reconciliation of science with religion. . . .

To-day, with the complete record before us – the novels, criticisms, biographies, plays and letters – we can understands how little those international relations that engaged Henry James’ attention mattered to his genius. Wherever he might have lived and whatever human interactions he might have observed, he would in all probability have reached much the same conclusion that he arrived at by way of America, France, and England. When he walked out of the refuge of his study into the world and looked about him, he saw a place of torment, where creatures of prey perpetually thrust their claws into the quivering flesh of the doomed, defenseless children of light. He had an abiding comfort of an inner certainty (and perhaps he did bring that from New England) that the children of light had an eternal advantage; he was aware to the finest fiber of his being that the ‘poor sensitive gentleman’; he so numerously treated possessed a treasure that would outlast all the glittering paste of the world and the flesh; he knew that nothing in life mattered compared with spiritual decency.


We may conclude that the nationalities of his betrayed and triumphant victims are not an important factor. They may equally well be innocent Americans maltreated by odious Europeans, refined Europeans fleeced by unscrupulous Americans, or young children of any race exposed to evil influences. The essential fact is that wherever he looked Henry James saw fineness apparently sacrificed to grossness, beauty to avarice, truth to a bold front. He realized how constantly the tenderness of growing life is at the mercy of personal tyranny and he hated the tyranny of person overreach other. His novels are repeated exposure of this wickedness, a reiterated and passionate plea for the fullest freedom of development, unimperilled by reckless and barbarous stupidity.


He was himself scrupulously careful not to exercise any tyrannical power over other people. The only advice he ever permitted himself to offer a friend was a recommendation to ‘let your soul live.’ Towards the end of his days his horror of interfering, or seeming to interfere, with the freedom of others became so overpowering that it was a misery for him to suspect that the plans of his friends might be made with reference to himself. Much as he enjoyed seeing them, he so disliked to think that they were undergoing the discomfort of voyages and railway journeys in order to be near him that he would have gladly prevented their start if he could. His Utopia was an anarchy where nobody would be responsible for any other human being but only for his own civilized character. His circle of friends will easily recall how finely Henry James had fitted himself to be a citizen of this commonwealth.