' We Must Have Something to Push Against'

V.S. Pritchett writes to Graham Greene: “Of the poet [William] Collins, Dr. Johnson writes that his great fault was his irresolution; and habit and application aggravated it. The ghost of Collins haunts the vain hours of many industrious and irresolute writers.” 

We’ve all heard it before: talent isn’t enough. Good work calls for sitzfleisch and brings to mind the old Edison bromide about ninety percent perspiration, even in air-conditioning. Pritchett refers to a passage from Johnson’s “Life of Collins” in The Lives of the Poets:

 

“He designed many works, but his great fault was irresolution, or the frequent calls of immediate necessity broke his schemes, and suffered him to pursue no settled purpose. A man, doubtful of his dinner, or trembling at a creditor, is not much disposed to abstracted meditation or remote enquiries.”

 

I have to strain a little to read Collins (1721-59), a poet lost in the limbo between Augustans and Romantics, claimed by drink, drifting and madness. I think of his “Ode on the Poetical Character”: “All the shad’wy tribes of Mind, / In braided dance their murmurs joined.” Johnson wrote of his one-time friend: “His disorder was not alienation of mind, but general laxity and feebleness, a deficiency rather of his vital than intellectual powers.”

 

The passage from Pritchett to Greene quoted above is from Why Do I Write?, a slender volume published in 1948 by Percival Marshall of London. It collects an exchange of letters, each a digressive essay, among Elizabeth Bowen, Greene and V.S. Pritchett on the writer’s presumed responsibility to “society,” whatever that means. Bowen suggests in a letter to Pritchett that writers need opposition:

 

“[Y]ou 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.”

 

I find Bowen one of the sanest, most eloquent of writers:

 

“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.”