“CREATIVE NATURE AND Communication” is the subject you gave me. By coincidence, last night I finished typing the novel I have been writing since December 1965. It is called Red Shift, is about fifty thousand words long, and the last twenty thousand words have come in the last twenty days. Therefore, I am not sure which is real, the book or this afternoon.1
In case any of us have met before, I apologise, since I have learned, from experience, that my participation in conferences does not work. It has become personally so distressing, a useless exercise for me, and, I suspect, for the audience, that I should not waste the time and the energy.
Before I made that decision, I was able to gauge that, within ten minutes of my beginning, abuse would start to flow towards me. The only people who ever just sat, and looked, and knew, and sometimes nodded when other people were behaving quite hysterically, were ladies in black. So I have been decoyed into thinking that I am fairly safe here.
I shall address myself to a theme, then it will be your turn to come back at me; and there will be no gain for us unless we are direct, since we are in a unique gathering at a unique moment. We have not been together before: we shall not be together again. So if I say anything that seems to be too dogmatic, I may be saying it in order to clarify the question in my own mind: and you must be equally strong in your response.
It will not be the personal abuse I mentioned: the sickening, saddening kind. An example of that would be the time when a teacher of teachers accused me of having written in one of my books, Elidor, a vitriolic attack on the British working class. A German publisher, by the bye, turned down the same book because, he wrote, it contained a philosophy from which Germany had suffered too much already this century. Perhaps I ought to read the book again some time.
I shall talk about the demands of creative energy first. It is a dangerous thing to do, rather like performing my own appendectomy, and I shall not probe very deeply. I must be careful here with the word “creative”, because I think that what it is for me is not necessarily what it is for you; and, from the failure to recognise the difference, comes a lot of the distress that teachers and I experience when we have to endure what appear to be our respective stupidities.
Now, from my point of view, the creator with a small “c”, I work not because I want to, but because I cannot, beyond a certain stage, resist the internal pressure to write a book. I do not know what that pressure is. Some of it is connected with the period of my life between the ages of fourteen and nineteen; and that is a common element in creativity. Dylan Thomas said that everything in his work happened to him between seventeen and nineteen. And we should all remember that within us there is an adolescent who is still there, still remembering, still laughing, still crying. I speak only for myself when I say that the kind of activity I find worth the price, in writing, exists at the end of my ability to cope. There are people who work on a slacker rein, and those people I do not wish to know about. There is a man whom as a man I like, and whom as a writer I cannot evaluate since I have not read his books. But, as a writer, I consider him a blasphemer when he tells me that he will give only a calculated amount of time to a novel, and at the end of that time even though he can see the faults and how to put them right, he will not do so. That, to me, is an abuse of any ability he may possess.
Throughout our discussion I shall tend towards a religious imagery, mainly because I think it is apt for the subject, but also because we must try to communicate with each other, and communion is hard.
I had better say that I am not a Christian. I find that the quest is as valid a theological experience as the attainment. I should like, on my death bed, to be able to write, “I see”, and to have just the energy left to put a full stop, not to whatever I may be in the cosmos, but to that part of it that can go no further.
In day-to-day terms it is not a problem. If I go through life accepting that there may be a black door with no handle and that I am going to pass through it to instant oblivion, then I must work twenty-seven hours a day, because the moment I have now may be the only moment I shall ever have. If, on the other hand, there is an infinite mind, there is an infinite spirit, an infinite power, an infinite wisdom, then, by definition, I am a part of it. I am a part of its experience, its manifestation, and it would be blasphemous of me not to work twenty-seven hours a day to fulfil that greater power, that greater talent, that greater energy. So I must continually put myself at risk; and if you see in my work things that are dangerous, they may well be there. Books are the most powerful means I know for the expression of truth and of lie, the most constructive, and the most destructive, product of the human mind.
That is what I see, roughly, to be the creative role as far as it relates to me. To go out every day and to risk everything. Anything less is wrong, anything less a denial. If you do not understand, I cannot explain it further; and, if I have said it properly, there is no need for me to say more. But we must make a clear definition and distinction here. I have spoken about creation, creativity, creativeness as a possibly pathological activity that may benefit others. As teachers, you may bring your own form of creativity into the classroom, but you must not ask a child to undergo that degree of exposure; you must not.
In the classroom, creation should go back to its root source, just as education should. The Latin “educere”, to lead out, to draw out, should be applied, not to the adult’s gratification or career: not in your terms, but in the terms of the human soul you should be enlightening but may be darkening.
Creativity in teaching is not to try to turn a random block of individuals into musicians, painters, authors, because any of them who are going to be these things will become them despite you, certainly not because of you. That creativity cannot be imposed. Let your creativity mean achieving the awareness in the child of the child’s own potential, whatever that may be. Here you are the light that illumines. Show to the child, and those of you who are nuns can show it best, that there is no compromise. There must be no compromise, because, if there is, the best we can hope for is to stay where we are; and, if we stay where we are, we shall not survive.
My creativity is not always that of the classroom. The creativity of the classroom should be the creativity by the child of its own nature. That is: a coming into self-knowledge. I seek self-knowledge, too, but as an adult, alone (as far as I am aware). The child needs visible, tangible, assurance of support to take the step towards himself.
I can imagine what it is to teach where you have fifty children in a class. I know it is enough to destroy you. But it is your choice to teach, and, at the price of your destruction, you must not pull back from it, any more than I must pull back from facing the logic of the work I undertake.
Seven years is a long time. I do not want praise, but I do want you to know that three years ago it became extremely difficult to carry on, looking at the same blank paper, the same wall, waiting, a cat before a mouse hole, because, when that mouse comes out it will move quickly, and, if the cat is not ready, the waiting will have been useless; and this man-cat sat for seven years. I happen be a slow worker: others are faster. Whether they are better is immaterial.
Now I am faced with a hard question. Should my creativity be used by your creativity to elicit that other creativity of the child? At its crudest, should you use me as fodder? It is a matter of fodder. My anger with much of the teaching profession is that books are, too often, seen as no more than a medium for examination.
It really does seem that many teachers have never asked themselves why another human being should willingly try to make fifty thousand words cohere. The reason why I have stopped putting myself on public display is that I am not normally allowed to talk as freely as I am doing today. Normally I am interrupted, told that I am impertinent, which I may well be, and instructed what to write.
I am not criticising literary criticism. Tom Stoppard has recently dealt with this very well. He says that literary criticism (of plays, in his case) has nothing to do with the writer, the actor or the audience. Literary criticism is a perfectly valid activity for adults with academic interests, but it does not influence the work or the worker, nor should it. We do not expect a philatelist to be a postman. That is the distinction I would ask you to make.
Do not ask a child to be primarily someone who goes to a text to examine it and to explore it as a mechanism or a piece of language. Let the child get the more important aspect first: the emotion.
You know yourselves how that which is most necessary is beyond words. It is my job to use words to express that which is most necessary, to speak the ineffable, and I cannot do it directly. It can be only hinted at: it can be only hinted at elliptically, by using the words as a lift-off; that slow lift-off of the rocket, the first stage of which takes the energy, but is quickly abandoned, and the important part goes into orbit, and then into space, and so discoveries are made. Left alone, the child, in my experience, will climb into the astronaut’s seat; but the teacher, too often, is yelling at him to come down and concentrate on the scrap iron.
I agree that a child’s mind needs to be taught an analytic discipline. But are books to be destroyed on that altar along with the potential love of future reading?
My thesis may be summarised in many ways, but rather than repeat statements, I shall suggest a lead: art is essential because art is more real than the furniture of this room. You know it is true. Salesmen know it is true. Sell the sizzle, not the steak. The steak, once smelt, will need no proselytisation.
I am here only to show you what I try to be. If I ever succeed, I shall stop; which is why there is always a gap between the thing seen and the written word. What I can say is that last night I finished the best book, the best thing I have yet written. I have to define “good” first. “Good” is that gap made small; and what I saw I nearly achieved. The relentless self-criticism will come shortly.
There is another word I feel I can dare today.
As a result of writing this book, above all others, there are certain things I can relate to you and you can relate to your spiritual lives and your teaching. That is: I know something of what crucifixion is, because I know what Christ meant in part.
The words that He spoke have always puzzled me, and in the Greek the subtlety is marked. Usually the translation is given as “It is finished”. The Greek word is Tetelestai. Implicit in the subtlety of the language is a sense, too, of “Now I can begin”. “Eloi, Eloi, lama sabacthani” came first. “I’m drained. There’s no more of me.” Then, finally, after letting go of His resistence, “Tetelestai,” “I’ve made it”. He soared from the cross. “Tetelestai”, “We have lift-off”. And, because of last night, if you will forgive, and accept, me, “Tetelestai”. I see the next book.
1 This lecture was delivered to the Sisters of the Cross and the Passion, Mount Saint Joseph’s Grammar School, Bolton, on 21 October 1972.