August 1960
This book is a study of the art of writing and an inquiry into the nature of the artist, and Mr. Quennell is one of the few people writing today able to expand upon these subjects without ever being boring (by which I mean irritating and incomprehensible to those of his readers who do not write). It is excellent company throughout, and one of its most striking features is the remarkable and right balance which the author has achieved between his personal and direct experience of writing and his general conclusions - based upon his recollections in life or in the work of other writers. These changes of focus are so skilfully arranged that they constantly refresh one’s attention - which might otherwise be lulled into sheer sensuous pleasure by the unobtrusive, beautiful ease of the writing.
Well - what exactly does he write about? How does one discuss the vast problems of creative art in the specific terms of literature? He begins by describing his own poetic adventures and his retreat from them as ‘the need to compose poems imperceptibly diminished in me’, pointing out that there is likely to be a revealing similarity between the methods and impulses of the poet who succeeds and the poet who fails. In this season of his life he reached the tropics of Bayswater, where on a top floor he found Edith Sitwell fatefully gilded with feathers and brocade and Ada Leverson quivering in quantities of black velvet upon a sofa: they had a lunatic to tea who was in full spate of his macabre and utilitarian anxieties. There is a fascinating chapter upon style with illustrations of its necessity as a natural growth, its parasitic or obsessional tendency (with a touching account of George Moore), it being treated as an unsightly creeper interfering with great slabs of social concrete, as in the case of Wells, and finally the oblique and dreary influence that Samuel Butler has had upon present day writing.
The author remarks early in his book that ‘between the writers who have helped to change the world and writers who have set out to change it, there exists a very sharp distinction’, and that ‘the artist is essentially a secret agent, who wears numerous disguises and whose influence remains clandestine’. Later, he gives an illuminating derivation of a much misused word. In the Etruscans’ brilliant pictures that decorated their tombs two demonic presences were often depicted; one, a hideous spirit known as Phersu, who wore a mask, and was an ‘enemy of pride and strength and grace’. When the Romans overwhelmed Etruria, they adapted the ominous demon’s name which in Latin became ‘persona’ - the word used to designate the mask worn by their actors. Jung, as we know, considered and explored the persona and a contemporary has found that ‘it is not … the same as character…’ … ‘insofar as the individual regards himself as identical with the persona his understanding of himself must be considered minimal’. Mr. Quennell continues: ‘Self-expression is something assumed to be one of the creative writer’s chief objects; but, when he exhibits personality, he should bear in mind the antique origin of the word and remember its former association with the idea of deliberate deception and disguise … Yet, so extraordinary is the effect of literary genius - the mask with which a writer hides his fate often represents an aspect of his nature that the face beneath it is endeavouring to conceal.’ This seems to have some connection with the author’s epilogue in which he says that in his early youth he would have agreed with Cyril Connolly’s stern dictum ‘that the true function of the writer’ is simply ‘ to produce a masterpiece’, but that he has begun ‘to think of art as a quality that may illumine the most trivial objects …’ Earlier in this book he has described the Jamaican long-tailed Humming Bird with a kind of attention which reminded me of the part in a D. H. Lawrence essay about the red of an anemone: ‘trivial objects’ so illumined lose their triviality as they become irradiated with their essential truth. If one adapted Norman Douglas’s remark to ‘everything is worth writing about’, then surely the masterpiece depends upon that kind of writing. Finally, as Mr. Quennell says, the great artist never loses his capacity for astonishment and the feelings of awe that accompany it. If one takes awe to mean ‘reverential fear or wonder’, it does seem as though this author suffers unduly and unprofitably from the first: fear is not a dynamic emotion - it would not even get one to the truth about humming birds.