MY FIRST attempts at writing fiction were made in response to an exotic stimulus, and I have often wondered since whether this was right. I was living in Malaya in 1955, working for the Government and, in my spare time, carrying on with what I thought was my true artistic vocation – the composing of music. One morning I woke to hear the muezzin calling – ‘There is no God but Allah’ – and, as often happens when one first wakes, to find the names of my creditors parading through my mind, together with what I owed them. Something like this:
La ilaha illa’la
Lim Kean Swee $395
Chee Sin Hye $120
Tan Meng Kwang $250
La ilaha illa’la
And so on. Here obviously was the beginning of a novel: a man lying in bed in the Malayan dawn, listening to the muezzin calling, worrying about his debts. So, out of this little collage, I began to write, with suspicious ease, my first published work of fiction.
The collage started things off; it helped to establish a rhythm and also a technique of juxtaposition. I found a line from Clough which pleased me: ‘Allah is great, no doubt, and juxtaposition his prophet’. Juxtaposition of races and cultures was the underground stimulus, the thing that wanted to be expressed. I really wrote this novel, and the two that followed, because I wanted to record Malaya. In other words, my motive for starting to write fiction was an impure one. One should always be inspired by an aesthetic impulse and not by subject-matter which is intrinsically strange, fresh, and glamorous.
It is significant that the novels I wrote about the East and Africa sold far better than anything I wrote about England in the past, present, or future. The novel of impure motive always sells best – the book that pretends to be didactic about sex or violence but is really pornographic; the book that is really didactic when it pretends to be merely entertaining; the book that tells of something strange instead of doing something strange. People want to be moved or instructed; they rarely want that static thing that is art.
The exotic, then, is a dangerous and corrupting thing for the novelist to write about. Bemused by its glamour, he will too often think he is writing better than he is. If it is one of the novelist’s tasks to glorify the commonplace, in the exotic novel the commonplace is already half-glorified for him; he gains credit from his reader’s ignorance. A novel may open like this: ‘I was drinking a bottle of flat and gassy light ale in a dingy little pub off Cross Street, Manchester. The rain was pelting down outside’. Any self-respecting novelist would want to regard that as a mere first draft; he would want to work some strangeness into it, to infuse that bit of shock which is essential to art. But supposing the novel opens like this: ‘I was drinking a bottle of samsu in a kedai off Jalan Sultan in Kuala Kangsar. The Sun’ – or, if you like, the monsoon – ‘was raging down outside’. Any attempt at rewriting would be regarded as supererogatory; the shock of glamour and strangeness resides in the subject-matter itself. This is dangerous and corrupting.
One wonders sometimes about the ‘exotic’ novels of the great established novelists. My favourite book of D.H. Lawrence used to be Kangaroo, but I am pretty sure I liked it for the wrong reasons. First, the tour de force: Lawrence seems to have created a whole continent out of a few scraps of Australiana picked up on a two-day visit to Sydney. One admires the magic, but the magic is irrelevant to the book – the artist’s, or his biographer’s, affair. Second, the fascination of juxtaposition: blue-eyed cockneys in a world of marsupials. Yet as a book it is a mess: ill-written, full of interpolated matter from newspapers, the endless Lawrence-Frieda struggle, a political gestation flown over from Fascist Italy, all mixed up anyhow. The setting saves it: Australia is doing most of Lawrence’s work for him. The Plumed Serpent is similarly saved by Mexico and that eponymous Quetzlcoatl. I do not think many would doubt that Lawrence’s best novel is Sons and Lovers, where the writer, or his daemon, has to work hard, infusing the magic of myth into the commonplace. His later, sicker work leans too hard on exotic props.
For lesser writers like myself, the most dangerous temptation of all when writing about the exotic is to trade on the reader’s ignorance and to falsify. Everything one observes – the Tamil workers drinking toddy, the snakes among the canna leaves, the jungle orchids – is unknown to the average sweet-stay-at-home reader. One is taking a faithful photograph for his benefit. No, not a photograph: that is the job of the travel-book writer. One is painting a faithful picture in full colour. Why, if the reader is so ignorant, should not one go a stage further than faithful reproduction, introduce imaginary colours? The next stage is the introduction of imaginary flora and fauna and imaginary tribal customs. It becomes easier sometimes to invent than to copy. Transfiguration leads to lies.
I return to that word ‘juxtaposition’. One of the most difficult problems that faces the artist in any medium is the problem of presenting transition. A character is good and becomes bad; a character is ignorant and becomes enlightened. When does the change take place, where does the watershed start? It is rarely possible to point to the moment of initial transformation in real life, and art should, in this connection, imitate life. St Paul’s sudden conversion, when he sees that he may no longer kick against the pricks, is miraculous or traumatic – a stroke, a fit. It is apt for religious, but not for secular, drama. God may do these things but an artist not. But a writer on life in the tropics is apt to bring about godlike transformations. He will pretend that Malays or Chinese or Indians are different from Anglo-Saxons and are capable of sudden changes of personality. He will juxtapose a ‘before’ state and an ‘after’ state; he will justify his unwillingness or incompetence to present subtle transition by saying, in effect, that there is a great gap between the Eastern and Western psyches. We are back to Elizabethan travel-tales and men who have three heads and a foot as big as a tea-tray. Allah is great and juxtaposition his prophet.
The Russians, as well as the peoples of the Far East, are a godsend to the novelist who is poor on psychological transition. For the Russians are well-known to be all manic-depressives – up one minute and down the next. It is delightfully easy to portray Russian characters: knives followed by kisses; sudden drunkenness, sudden sobriety; war and peace. But serious English readers of English novelists writing about Russians have a vast Russian literature available for checking-up purposes. The Russians are, alas, not quite exotic enough. It is best to stick to Eastern peoples, who have attempted few self-portraits. They will not betray the British novelists whose inability to present consistency in character or probability of motivation or action is blandly explained away by the magic words ‘a different world’; ‘an exotic world’.
For the honest writer about this world, however, there are definite problems of communication. How much should one explain, how much dare one take for granted, when writing about Malaya or Africa for a home-keeping audience? Should one explain that Sikhs do not smoke, that Chinese women get together in lesbian sororities, that Malays regard the head as sacred? I think not. It is the job of the travel-book to explain; it is the job of the novelist to take what he is given and use it honestly and without apology or surprise. You do not want footnotes in a novel. But I have been hurt at the incredulity of critics, especially when I have been recording fact or personal experience in an exotic novel. In my first book, Time for a Tiger, I made my four main characters, one of them a woman, go on a pleasure trip through country infested with communist terrorists. At the time when the novel was set, one did this sort of thing often. It was perhaps foolish, but one had to take the chance. One went on an amateur anthropological excursion or to the cinema in a town fifty miles away, and if one were sniped at or found an ambushing log laid on the road, it was fate; one could not live for ever. Some critics said that nobody would ever do this, that this sort of improbability marred the novel. On the other hand, I was taken to task for pretending that Muslims drink brandy. This, I was told, was never done. Reviewers are good at ignorance and half-knowledge. They are also good at confusing the improbable with the inadvisable. I am a reviewer myself.
The subject-matter of all novels is people, and how they affect other people. The mise en scène is a matter of indifference; travel and residence abroad persuade me that people are not very different from each other. A novelist who sets his novel in foreign parts ought, I think, to write the sort of novel that – all things being equal – a native novelist of those parts might write, at least as far as the background is concerned. There should be no such thing as an ‘exotic novel’. If the content of the novel about Egypt or Malaya seems strange to the British reader, then let it remain strange until that reader is able to verify it for himself. One of the jobs of art is to deep-freeze emotions against the time of their being needed. The impact of the exotic, the initial shock that ends Conrad’s Youth, is properly not a part of the exotic novel at all, but of the home-based novel: it does not come into this context. One only really smells a foreign country on one’s first day in it – Singapore, for instance, with its hot wet dish-rags, cat-piss and turmeric. The first day abroad is the last day at home. With it you can end a home-based novel or begin a novel about readjustment to the exotic. But you will not write Malaisie or A Passage to India.
The more I read British novels, which is another way of saying ‘the older I get’, the more I become convinced that the British novelist’s job is to write about here and now. This was not always my view. I used to believe that the area of available subject-matter should be as wide as possible – covering the whole of geography and those imaginary countries conjured by drugs. One may term this the heresy of width. It is a truism to say that depth is the important thing, but we tend to forget what is meant by depth. If, as with the Greek tragedians, the subject-matter is myth, then depth means mining under the myth till the individual consciousness is reached. If, as with most of us, the subject-matter is the individual consciousness, then depth means digging for the mythical.
Here I can approach deep waters – the deepest. Shall I take a chance and commit a general statement about the novelist’s real function to a mere parenthesis? I think I will. In the nineteenth century there were few allomorphs of the art of fiction: drama was trivial till Robertson came along; alleged poems like Aurora Leigh and The Princess were only novels or novellas in prosy verse. The novel itself was the only way into fictitious worlds peopled with fictitious people. And novelists like Thackeray, Dickens, Bulwer Lytton, fulfilled not only the novelist’s task but the dramatist’s. More – they were also moral essayists, epic poets, preachers. In our own day we see that two main kinds of fiction function side by side. There is, first, that immediate fiction called drama – a form in which characters and events are presented directly, without the intermediacy of their creator: the author does not get between us and the story, commenting, describing, judging. Then there is the novel itself, in which we expect to meet the author and to sustain the impact of his personality – a personality inevitably stronger than that of any of the personalities he has created.
But the most vital forms of drama today are found not on the stage but on the screen – small or large – and they are capable of a greater plasticity than has ever been possible on any stage after 1642. Film and television have learnt a great deal from the novel: the swift change of scene, the visual or tangible symbol, dream and fantasy, even the interior monologue and the linking narration have been incorporated with ease into the new fluid drama. Devices of which the novelist had the monopoly have been taken over and are exploited with skill by the new race of dramatic writers. What is there left for the novelist to do?
The answer, I would say, lies in the related fields of myth and language. He must either revivify old myths or create new ones. James Joyce slammed old myths on new matter, thus freeing himself from the need to be his own plot-maker, and then used the myth to exploit language. The point about myth is that everybody already knows the story, and hence the movement and interest proper to a film-plot are automatically transferred to what is done with the myth – and what is done is done through language. Dialogue will be less important than those inchoate pre-articulatory levels which can only be treated through experiment in language, and drama, relying on dialogue, cannot reach here. New myths can be achieved through either the cross-fertilisation of old myths or a direct act of creation. But the myth must never be an end in itself. I fear that in William Golding’s Lord of the Flies or Iris Murdoch’s A Severed Head the content is more important than the technique. The content has certainly been neatly filleted out in, respectively, a first-class film and an interesting stage adaptation. Beware of a novel that transfers too easily to another medium. Golding seems to be doing the novelist’s real job in The Inheritors, where language has to suggest a world before language existed. This work is itself, as Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony is itself: no adaptation to another medium seems possible.
What this question of depth amounts to, then, is how far the resources of language can be stretched to clarify the springs of human motivation. I am not advocating a literature of the pre-conscious solely and simply, but in those crepuscular regions of the mind there is at least a field that the other fictional art-forms find it hard to reach. In a moment, if I am not careful, the magic name of Jung will make its appearance, and that I must avoid. We are concerned with art, not science, however poetic the science of the mind seems in the work of Jung and his followers. And we are immediately concerned with this question of the distraction of a highly seasoned subject-matter. Whatever depth means, it cannot be achieved with exotic butterflies distracting the eyes and the purpose.
What I am really trying to say is that subject-matter is not all that important to art. The more banal, commonplace, everyday, the subject-matter of the novel is, the more the novelist is compelled to work hard at his craft. In effect, the novelist can never know whether he is capable of doing a good job until he has stripped his subject-matter of whatever glamour – whether conventional or inverted – it may possess. This may seem a somewhat puritanical view of the novelist’s art, but I do not see why the stringencies that enable us to find the true and the good should not also apply to the search for the beautiful. Impure motives, whether in science, ethics, or art, quietly wreck a civilisation.
All this sounds portentous, but all I mean is that we ought to take the novel seriously and not attribute the excitement or beauty of the subject-matter to the novel itself. I am not advocating an extension of the modern provincial novel which, sadly, is developing its own set of conventions and stock responses indicative of a morbid concern with content more than form. I am suggesting rather that we should just take what we are given – here and now – and spend the resources of our art on it.
Unfortunately, from one point of view, ‘here and now’ is beginning to mean ‘foreign parts’ to some novelists. The exodus to Tangier, Mallorca, Switzerland, the Isles of Greece, goes on, the formation of exiled writers’ colonies, writers caught between the native life of the country and the remembered life of home. These writers know too little of the real ‘here and now’ to write about it with the authority of native authors; they have to fall back on ‘there and then’ – volumes of reminiscences, novels set in the near-present, but full of subtly wrong nuances and overtones, historical novels, thrillers. One wonders how much true devotion to his art form is shown by the novelist who expatriates himself because of income tax, disillusionment with English society, climate, or in search of greater sexual tolerance. It is the novelist’s task to stay here and suffer with the rest of us. He can, through his art, lessen that suffering.
Listener, 26 September 1963