Subject: Re: SLSL; The boy who cried Woolf

[oscar williams]

Subject: Re: SLSL; The boy who cried Woolf

"…the author's judgment is always present, always
evident to anyone who knows how to look for it... We
must never forget that though the author can to some
extent choose his disguises, he can never choose to
disappear." 
Booth, RF

Marlowe: Have you seen your son lately?  

Mom of Shakespeare: He's not my son. He's been 86'd by
his work. 

Marlowe: I can think of worse ways to be 86'd. 



What was Shakespeare's state of mind when he wrote
Lear, Antony, and Cleopatra? Rumor has it that he
wrote those plays under duress and that he was
spending a lot of time drinking with an Irish lunatic,
whose real name I can't remember at the moment.
Shakespeare immortalized him in a tavern scene in one
of the Henry plays as Terrenceteetotaler O'
Tumblewagon.  
See:  Moore, B.S. "Sottishness & Sobriety in
Shakespeare's Historical Plays."  RES, n.s., I (1984),
1-7. In any event, in her "In Search of a Room of
One's Own," Woolf says, 

[It]was certainly the state of mind most favorable to
poetry that has ever existed. However, Shakespeare
himself said nothing about it. We only know casually
and by chance that he "never blotted a line." (Bloom
didn't say that in his Bardology or Genius, Ben
Johnson said that). Nothing indeed was ever said by
the artist himself about his state of mind until the
eighteenth century perhaps. Rousseau perhaps began it
(Confessions, published posthumously). At any rate, by
the nineteenth century self-consciousness had
developed so far that it was the habit of men of
letters to describe their minds in confessions and
autobiographies. Their lives were also written, and
their letters were printed after their deaths. Thus,
though we do not know what Shakespeare went through
when he wrote Lear, we do know what Carlyle whent5
through when he wrote The French Revolution: what
Flaubert went through when he wrote Madam Bovary; what
Keats was going through when he tried to write poetry
against the coming of death and the indifference of
the world. 

And one gathers from this enormous modern literature
of confession and self-analysis that to write a work
of genius is almost always a feat of prodigious
difficulty. Everything is against the likelihood that
it will come from the writer's mind whole and entire.
Generally material circumstances are against it (of
course I can not help but think of Poor Mr. Melville,
blessed was he amongst woman or the librettist Gilbet,
I can just see him at his desk screaming, "Leave me to
work you pestering harpies!") Dogs will bark; people
will interrupt; money must be made; health will break
down. Further, accentuating all these difficulties and
making them harder to bear is the world's notorious
indifference. It does not ask people to write poems
and novels and histories; it does not need them. It
does not care if Flaubert finds the write word or
whether Carlye scrupulously verifies this or that
fact. Naturally, it will not pay for what it does not
want. And so the writer, Keats, Flaubert, Carlye,
sufferes, especially in the creative years of youth,
every form of distraction and discouragement. A curse,
a cry of agony, rises from those books of analysis and
confession. "Mighty poets in their misery dead
(William Wordworth's poem "Resolution and
Independence")-that is the burden of their song.  If
anything comes through in spite of all this, it is a
miracle, and probably no book is born entire and
uncrippled as it was conceived. 

Literature was born not the day when a boy crying wolf
came running out of the Neanderthal valley with a big
gray wolf at his heels: literature was born on a day
when a boy came crying wolf and there was no wolf
behind him. That the poor little fellow because he
lied too often was finally eaten up by a real beast is
quite incidental. But here is what is important.
Between the wolf in the tall grass and the wolf in the
tall story there is a shimmering go-between. That
go-between, that prism, is the art of literature. 
--Nabokov

Next, the elements of strunken white style and Jane
Auten



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