What are a writer’s obligations to his readers? Intelligibility seems uppermost, but some readers, baffled even by the elegance of subject-verb-object, would lose their way in denser thickets – in late James, for instance, or John Ruskin. Intelligibility and obscurity are relative qualities. Simple prose can be helpful or crashingly dull, depending on the reader – and the writer – just as complex prose can be a sublime pleasure or a bafflement.
The best writing communicates while offering both parties – writer, reader -- a measure of pleasure. In his review of Soame Jenyns’ Free Enquiry into the Nature of the Origin of Good and Evil, Samuel Johnson wrote: “The only end of writing is to enable the readers better to enjoy life, or better to endure it.” This makes sense. Johnson assumes something is communicated in good writing, and the contents of that communication are, to use Kenneth Burke’s description of literature, “equipment for living” -- enjoyment and endurance. The danger, of course, is moralizing, presuming to write prescriptions for the lives of others. Consider these curious lines from Berryman’s Dream Song No. 366:
“These Songs are not meant to be understood, you understand.
They are only meant to terrify & comfort.”
What about the writer’s obligations to himself? This is infinitely trickier, because the inward landscape is cunningly booby-trapped with vanity. Part of the solution may be found in Section 23 of The Orchards of Syon, in which Geoffrey Hill writes “I write/to astonish myself.” How astonishing this sounds. Astonishment implies surprise and openness, even vulnerability, not a hip knowingness. The hip are never surprised. The Latin root of "astonishment," tonare, means “to thunder,” and we still speak of being thunderstruck. To write well and occasionally better than well, to be gifted with surprising returns for one’s efforts, to sometimes not recognize one’s achievement, is astonishing and leaves one humble and pleased.
In 1984, the novelist Paul West suffered the first of several strokes. Eleven years later he published A Stroke of Genius about the experience. For a sensibility like West’s, even the suffering and inconvenience of severe illness are cause for study and celebration, so long as they can be rendered into language. For West, everything is worthy of attention:
“Back in the world of air conditioners, postage scales, shortwave radios, typewriters, and Touch-Tone phones, I gave thanks to nature for red things, elastic things, things that sparked and funneled; for juices, slops, pastes. I learned the discipline of pill taking and, one morning, after too much Inderal prescribed, fell over sideways, lucky not to crack my head. In warm pool water I felt overcome. If I craned my head backward, I almost fainted. I had a permanently dry mouth, numb fingers, cold toes, and a slight distortion in my speech, a Lilliputian twitch in my lower right lip. These were my secrets, between me and the Furies. I murmured my praises of all things bright and beautiful, certain that a tiny slur in enunciation from someone less than human would only earn me tolerance in the swarming yard of summer. The mood was pure Delius.”
In its blithely secular way, this echoes Hopkins. We enjoy it, it helps us endure, and it astonishes.
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William Faulkner on the stuff of writing. His Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech:
I feel that this award was not made to me as a man, but to my work--a life's work in the agony and sweat of the human spirit, not for glory and least of all for profit, but to create out of the materials of the human spirit something which did not exist before. So this award is only mine in trust. It will not be difficult to find a dedication for the money part of it commensurate with the purpose and significance of its origin. But I would like to do the same with the acclaim too, by using this moment as a pinnacle from which I might be listened to by the young men and women already dedicated to the same anguish and travail, among whom is already that one who will some day stand where I am standing.
Our tragedy today is a general and universal physical fear so long sustained by now that we can even bear it. There are no longer problems of the spirit. There is only one question: When will I be blown up? Because of this, the young man or woman writing today has forgotten the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself which alone can make good writing because only that is worth writing about, worth the agony and the sweat. He must learn them again. He must teach himself that the basest of all things is to be afraid: and, teaching himself that, forget it forever, leaving no room in his workshop for anything but the old verities and truths of the heart, the universal truths lacking which any story is ephemeral and doomed--love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice. Until he does so, he labors under a curse. He writes not of love but of lust, of defeats in which nobody loses anything of value, and victories without hope and worst of all, without pity or compassion. His griefs grieve on no universal bones, leaving no scars. He writes not of the heart but of the glands.
Until he learns these things, he will write as though he stood among and watched the end of man. I decline to accept the end of man. It is easy enough to say that man is immortal because he will endure: that when the last ding-dong of doom has clanged and faded from the last worthless rock hanging tideless in the last red and dying evening, that even then there will still be one more sound: that of his puny inexhaustible voice, still talking. I refuse to accept this. I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance. The poet's, the writer's, duty is to write about these things. It is his privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart, by reminding him of the courage and honor and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice which have been the glory of his past. The poet's voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail.
The world needs art. It's up to the writer to prove that the world needs his or her art. Of course, as in the case of people like Emily Dickinson, the art can sometimes plead its own case without any help from the author.
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