`Solitary and Farouche'

In my university library I found a slender volume with a candy-stripe cover titled Why Do I Write? published in 1948 by Percival Marshall of London. Those were drably austere days in England, Orwell’s life-model for Nineteen Eighty-Four, and it must have been pleasant to visit a shop and hold a book that resembled a box of candy. It collects an exchange of letters among Elizabeth Bowen, Graham Greene and V.S. Pritchett, on the writer’s presumed responsibility to “society,” whatever that might mean. I was born missing the gene that permits one to enjoy the work of Graham Greene, so his books to me always read like potboilers with pretensions, though I know some fine human beings who admire them. Pritchett, as story writer and essayist, was unmatched, a Dickens with a better mind and better editing. Bowen is Henry James. She warms the most to her subject because she ignores it and writes about what she pleases. To Pritchett she says:

“Perhaps one emotional reason why one may write is the need to work off, out of the system, the sense of being solitary and farouche. Solitary and farouche people don’t have relationships: they are quite unrelatable. If you and I were capable of being altogether house-trained and made jolly, we should be nice people, but not writers. If I feel irked and uneasy when asked about the nature of my (as a writer) relation to society, this is because I am being asked about the nature of something that does not, as far as I know, exist. My writing, I am prepared to think, may be a substitute for something I have been born without – a so-called normal relation to society. My books are my relation to society. Why should people come and ask me what the nature of this relation is? It seems to me that it is the other people, the readers, who should know.”

Have contrariness and independence of thought ever been expressed so elegantly? She reminds me of that Marianne Moore poem that ends “your thorns are the best part of you.” No one, fortunately, even in the United States, is obligated to be happy. One remains suspicious of happiness. It implies a certain slightness of character, a definite lack, and among writers it can prove crippling, like diabetes.

In addition, you won’t hear “farouche” at the bowling alley. The Oxford English Dictionary defines it as “Sullen, shy and repellent in manner,” and cites its use by Lord Byron in 1814: “It is too farouche; but . . . my satires are not very playful.”

Another gem from Bowen, one page earlier in the same letter, on the sort of environment best for writers:

“…you don’t think it possible that things these days might almost be too propitious? And that to let this propitiousness invade us mayn’t make for a lowering of internal pressure? We must have something to push against. Oh well, one need not worry: we always shall have.”

So much for public funding of the arts.