Part Two
3
From Why Do I Write?, 1948 (pp. 47–8, 49):
Loyalty confines us to accepted opinions: loyalty forbids us to comprehend sympathetically our dissident fellows; but disloyalty encourages us to roam experimentally through any human mind; it gives to the novelist the extra dimension of sympathy…..
Propaganda is only concerned to elicit sympathy for the innocent, or those whom the propagandist likes to regard as innocent, and this he does at the expense of the guilty: he too poisons the wells. But the novelist’s task is to draw his own likeness to any human being, the guilty as much as the innocent. Isn’t our attitude to all our characters more or less – There, and may God forgive me, goes myself?…..[T]hat is a genuine duty we owe society, to be a piece of grit in the State machinery…..[I]sn’t disloyalty as much the writer’s virtue as loyalty is the soldier’s?
From ‘The Virtue of Disloyalty’, 1969 (R, pp. 268–9, 270):
Isn’t it the story-teller’s task to act as the devil’s advocate…..? The writer is driven by his own vocation to be a Protestant in a Catholic society, a Catholic in a Protestant one, to see the virtues of the Capitalist in a Communist society, of the Communist in a Capitalist state…..He stands for the victims, and the victims change.
Perhaps the deepest tragedy Shakespeare lived was his own: the blind eye exchanged for the coat of arms, the prudent tongue for the friendships at Court and the great house at Stratford.
From A Sort of Life, 1971 (pp. 63, 115, 141):
[P]erhaps it is only desperation which keeps me writing, like someone who clings to an unhappy marriage for fear of solitude…..
[I]f I were to choose an epigraph for all the novels I have written, it would be from ‘Bishop Blougram’s Apology’:
Our interest’s on the dangerous edge of things.
The honest thief, the tender murderer,
The superstitious atheist, demi-rep
That loves and saves her soul in new French books -
We watch while these in equilibrium keep
The giddy line midway.
I suppose…..that every novelist has something in common with a spy: he watches, he overhears, he seeks motives and analyses character, and in his attempt to serve literature he is unscrupulous.
From The Other Man, 1983 (pp. 18, 37, 125–6, 130–1, 136–7, 161, 186):
My subject is rootlessness – but then my subject matter is my life, so there’s no paradox.
My marked inclination towards melodrama stems from….. adolescent reading.
I pay attention to the ‘point of view’…..and I re-read aloud what I have written, making a good number of corrections for the sake of euphony…..In all my novels I’m content to have blank spaces which I don’t know in advance how to fill. The characters are thus able to follow their bent more freely…..
My first books were very bad, full of metaphors which I chose for their extravagance, influenced as I was by my readings in the ’twenties, when I was very attached to the English Metaphysical poets of the seventeenth century, who devoted themselves to highly complex rhetorical exercises. Today my early novels horrify me, they’re so absurd. There’s nothing worse than poetic prose.
[U] ntil one reaches a certain point one has to work very hard and with complete lucidity. Then something happens which is rather like an aeroplane taking off…..One may have to stay at the controls, but the worst is over.
[A] writer is even more like a double agent than he is like God: he condemns and sustains his characters by turns.
I’m a good enough writer. Better than many. I’m not proud but realistic. I’m not modest, either. But I can’t place myself among the giants.