The Truth of Imagination

178}FROM AN OLD NOTEBOOK

“Never try to be professional, keep it smutty, write with bodily fluids on sandpaper, and damn the men with clipboards in white suits, the literary bean-counters, the prose police.”

How to reconcile these words of mine with becoming a teacher of fiction writing—and with the whole notion of teaching and learning to write? With this book?

Maybe Joseph Campbell’s words can help, or at least provide an antithesis:

The crude notion that energy and strength can be represented or rendered by abandoning and breaking structures is refuted by all that we know about the evolution and structure of life … the mere shattering of form is for human as well as for animal life a disaster.⁶⁴

There’s no one answer; both statements are true. Each of us must strike our own balance between Apollonian impulses (harmonious, measured, ordered) and Dionysian (wild, orgiastic, unbounded), and this balance must develop (and will most likely shift) over time. I don’t want to throw a wet blanket on anyone’s literary orgies; nor do I want to wear the clinical white suit and badge. But then there’s that other impulse, the impulse to say Here’s what you need to do to succeed; here is what you must do to bridge the gap between private self-expression and public communication.

However we do it, somehow we have to find ways to put our own visions into the heads of strangers.

179}FINAL WORDS OF ADVICE

Which leads me to this next, last, and possibly best bit of advice— not mine, but E.M. Forster’s:

Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height. Live in fragments no longer. Only connect, and the beast and the monk, robbed of the isolation that is life to either, will die.

61 I’m reminded of James Thurber, who said, “I never quite know when I’m not writing. Sometimes my wife comes up to me at a party and says, ‘Damn it, Thurber, stop writing.’ She usually catches me in the middle of a paragraph.”

62 Translated as A Void.

63 “Etonnez mois!”

64 From Myths to Live By.