What Are You Going to Call It?

Abstract

So, it is late. It always is. Some years ago, I wanted to leave her house ten minutes after having entered it. The darkness thus always falling, even then, central-heating making a nonsense of the silence. And now I have my own central-heating to come to terms with. This is more fact than parable. ‘At the moment the writer realises he has no ideas he has become an artist. From this point he goes on — or he does not go on.’ That is, in my own gloss, if the writer is too honest to manufacture his own verbal substitute for significance, he is an artist, an artists’ artist. Often of course there is a flirtation with criticism — structure, form, ideas, justification, references to the wider tribunal. What prevents a full-scale love affair is the observation — one cannot avoid noticing — that the most immaculate and stimulating critics permit themselves to create third-rate art. Always, darkness is falling. Be careful what he’s and she’s you call into being. At the outbreak of war the General Staff clammers for the advice of third-rate novelists. There is probably a sound logic behind it. Reluctantly, I become disillusioned with the General Staff. And the second greatest soldier of our race now simpers from our obscenely debased currency.