Walking on Water (4 page)

We live by revelation, as Christians, as artists, which means that we must be careful never to get set into rigid molds. The minute we begin to think we know all the answers, we forget the questions, and we become smug like the Pharisee who listed all his considerable virtues and thanked God that he was not like other men.

Unamuno might be describing the artist as well as the Christian as he writes, “Those who believe they believe in God, but without passion in the heart, without anguish of mind, without uncertainty, without doubt, and even at times without despair, believe only in the idea of God, and not in God himself.”

When I was in college I knew that I wanted to be a writer. And to be a writer means, as everyone knows, to be published.

And I copied in my journal from Chekov's letters: “You must once and for all give up being worried about successes and failures. Don't let that concern you. It's your duty to go on working steadily day by day, quite quietly, to be prepared for mistakes, which are inevitable, and for failures.”

I believed those words then, and I believe them now, though in the intervening years my faith in them has often been tested. After the success of my first novels I was
not
prepared for rejections, for the long years of failure. Again I turned to Chekov: “The thought that I must, that I ought to, write, never leaves me for an instant.” Alas, it
did
leave me, when I had attacks of false guilt because I was spending so much time at the typewriter and in no way pulling my own weight financially. But it never left me for long.

I've written about that decade of failure in
A Circle of Quiet.
I learned a lot of valuable lessons during that time, but there's no doubt that they were bitter. This past winter I wrote in my journal, “If I'd read these words of Rilke's during the long years of rejection they might have helped, because I could have answered the question in the affirmative”:

You are looking outward, and that above all you should not do now. Nobody can counsel and help you, nobody. There is only one single way. Go into yourself. Search for the reason that bids you to write; find out whether it is spreading out its roots in the deepest places of your heart, acknowledge to yourself whether you would have to die if it were denied you to write. This above all—ask yourself in the stillest hour of your night:
Must
I write? Delve into yourself for a deep answer. And if this should be affirmative, if you may meet this earnest question with a strong and simple “I must,” then build your life according to this necessity; your life even into its most indifferent and slightest hour must be a sign of this urge and testimony to it.

That is from
Letters to a Young Poet,
and surely Rilke speaks to all of us who struggle with a vocation of words.

The writer does want to be published; the painter urgently hopes that someone will see the finished canvas (van Gogh was denied the satisfaction of having his work bought and appreciated during his lifetime; no wonder the pain was more than he could bear); the composer needs his music to be heard. Art is communication, and if there is no communication it is as though the work had been stillborn.

The reader, viewer, listener, usually grossly underestimates his importance. If a reader cannot create a book along with the writer, the book will never come to life. Creative involvement: that's the basic difference between reading a book and watching TV. In watching TV we are passive; sponges; we
do
nothing. In reading we must become creators. Once the child has learned to read alone and can pick up a book without illustrations, he must become a creator, imagining the setting of the story, visualizing the characters, seeing facial expressions, hearing the inflection of voices. The author and the reader “know” each other; they meet on the bridge of words.

So there is no evading the fact that the artist yearns for success, because that means that there has been a communication of the vision: that all the struggle has not been invalid.

Yet with each book I write I am weighted with a deep longing for anonymity, a feeling that books should not be signed, reviews should not be read. But I sign the books; I read the reviews.

Two writers I admire express the two sides of this paradox. They seem to disagree with each other completely, and yet I believe that each is right.

E. M. Forster writes,

All literature tends towards a condition of anonymity, and that, so far as words are creative, a signature merely distracts from their true significance.

I do not say that literature “ought” not to be signed…because literature is alive, and consequently “ought” is the wrong word. It wants not to be signed. That is my point. It is always tugging in that direction…saying, in effect, “I, not the author, really exist.”

The poet wrote the poem, no doubt. But he forgot himself while he wrote it, and we forget him while we read….We forget, for ten minutes, his name and our own, and I contend that this temporary forgetfulness, this momentary and mutual anonymity, is sure evidence of good stuff.

Modern education promotes the unmitigated study of literature, and concentrates our attention on the relation between a writer's life—his surface life—and his work. That is the reason it is such a curse.

Literature wants not to be signed.

And yet I know whom I am quoting, for Forster signed his work.

W. H. Auden writes:

Our judgment of an established author is never simply an aesthetic judgment. In addition to any literary merit it may have, a new book by him has a historic interest for us as the act of a person in whom we have long been interested. He is not only a poet or a novelist; he is also a character in our biography.

We cannot seem to escape paradox; I do not think I want to.

Forster refers to “
his
surface life and
his
work”; Auden says, “
He
is not only a poet or a novelist;
he
is also a character in our biography.” That
his
and that
he
refer as much to Jane Austen and George Sand as to Flaubert and Hemingway. They are generic
his
and
he,
and not exclusively masculine.

I am a female of the species man. Genesis is very explicit that it takes both male and female to make the image of God, and that the generic word
man
includes both.

God created man in his own image, male and female.

That is Scripture, therefore I refuse to be timid about being part of
man
kind. We of the female sex are half of mankind, and it is pusillanimous to resort to he/she, him/her, or even worse, android words. I have a hunch that those who would do so have forgotten their rightful heritage.

I know that I am fortunate in having grown up in a household where no sexist roles were imposed on me. I lived in an atmosphere which assumed equality with all its differences. When mankind was referred to it never occurred to me that I was not part of it or that I was in some way being excluded. My great-great-grandmother, growing up on the St. John's River in times of violence and hardship, had seven homes burned down; nevertheless she spoke casually in seven languages. Her daughter-in-law ran a military hospital, having been brought up at the court of Spain, where she was her ambassador father's hostess; her closest friend was the princess Eugenie, soon to be empress, and the two young women rode and competed with the princess's brothers in all sports; to prove their bravery, each drove a sharp knife into the flesh of the forearm without whimper. Others of my female forebears crossed the country in covered wagons and knew how to handle a gun as well as any man.

Perhaps it is this background which has made me assume casually that of course I am not excluded when anyone refers to a novelist—or anyone else—as
he
or
him.
My closest woman friend is a physician, and so is my daughter-in-law. Not all women have been as fortunate as I have been. When my books were being rejected during the fifties it was not because of my sex, it was because the editors did not like what I was writing. My words were being rejected, not my femaleness.

Because I am a storyteller I live by words. Perhaps music is a purer art form. It may be that when we communicate with life on another planet, it will be through music, not through language or words.

But I am a storyteller, and that involves language, for me the English language, that wonderfully rich, complex, and ofttimes confusing tongue. When language is limited, I am thereby diminished, too.

In time of war language always dwindles, vocabulary is lost; and we live in a century of war. When I took my elder daughter's tenth-grade vocabulary cards up to the school from which she had graduated, less than a decade after she had left, the present tenth-grade students knew almost none of them. It was far easier for my daughter to read Shakespeare in high school than it was for students coming along just a few years after her.

This diminution is worldwide. In Japan, after the Second World War, so many written characters were lost that it is difficult, if not impossible, for the present-day college student to read the works of the great classical masters. In the USSR, even if Solzhenitsyn had been allowed to be read freely, it would not have been easy for the average student to read his novels, for again, after revolution and war, vocabulary fell away. In one of Solzhenitsyn's books his hero spends hours at night reading the great Russian dictionary which came out in the late nineteenth century, and Solzhenitsyn himself draws on this work, and in his writing he is redeeming language, using the words of Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky, using the words of the people of the street, bringing language back to life as he writes.

So it has always been. Dante, writing in exile when dukedoms and principalities were embroiled in wars, was forging language as he wrote his great science-fiction fantasies.

We think because we have words, not the other way around. The more words we have, the better able we are to think conceptually. Yet another reason why
Wrinkle
was so often rejected is that there are many words in it which would never be found on a controlled vocabulary list for the age-group of the ten-to-fourteen-year-old.
Tesseract,
for instance. It's a real word, and one essential for the story.

As a child, when I came across a word I didn't know, I didn't stop reading the story to look it up, I just went on reading. And after I had come across the word in several books, I knew what it meant; it had been added to my vocabulary. This still happens. When I started to read Teilhard de Chardin's
The Phenomenon of Man,
I was determined to understand it. I read intelligently, with a dictionary beside me, stopping to look up the scientific words which were not familiar to me. And I bogged down. So I put aside the dictionary and read as though I were reading a story, and quickly I got drawn into the book, fascinated by his loving theology, and understood it far better, at a deeper level, than if I had stuck with the dictionary.

Is this contradiction? I don't think so. We played with my daughter's vocabulary words during dinner. We kept a dictionary by the table, just for fun. But when we read, we read. We were capable of absorbing far more vocabulary when we read straight on than when we stopped to look up every word. Sometimes I will jot down words to be looked up later. But we learn words in many ways, and much of my vocabulary has been absorbed by my subconscious mind, which then kindly blips it up to my conscious mind when it is needed.

We cannot Name or be Named without language. If our vocabulary dwindles to a few shopworn words, we are setting ourselves up for takeover by a dictator. When language becomes exhausted, our freedom dwindles—we cannot think; we do not recognize danger; injustice strikes us as no more than “the way things are.”

Some of the Ayia Napa delegates came from countries ruled by dictators, either from the right or the left. In both cases, teachers are suspect; writers are suspect because people who use words are able to work out complex ideas, to see injustice, and perhaps even to try to do something about it. Simply being able to read the Bible in their own language made some of the delegates suspect.

I might even go to the extreme of declaring that the deliberate diminution of vocabulary by a dictator, or an advertising copywriter, is anti-Christian.

One cannot have been brought up on the
Book of Common Prayer,
as I was, and not have a feeling for language, willy-nilly. In my first boarding school we had mandatory Morning and Evening Prayer, through which we sat, bored, looking for divertissement, ready to snicker if someone broke wind or belched. But the language of Cranmer and Coverdale could not but seep through the interstices. Ready and willing or not, we were enriched.

It is not surprising that there has been considerable discussion about the
New Episcopal Book of Common Prayer,
in church circles, Protestant and Roman Catholic, and by Everyman as well. The language of the
Book of Common Prayer
is part of our literary heritage, as is the language of the King James translation of the Bible. Writers throughout centuries of literature have drawn from the
Prayer Book
as well as the Bible—how many titles come from the Psalms! Novels often contain sentences from Scripture without identification, because it is part of our common heritage; there is no need for footnoting.

There was much in the 1928
Book of Common Prayer
which needed changing; indeed, revision was first talked about in the year of publication. So it is not that all the critics of the new translations are against change (though some are), but against shabby language, against settling for the mediocre and the flabbily permissive. Where language is weak, theology is weakened.

I do not want to go back to the 1928
Prayer Book.
We can't “go home again.” On the whole, the new
Prayer Book
is a vast improvement over the '28. But I do want us to be aware that not only the '28
Prayer Book
had flaws. What has been gained in strength of structure has been lost in poverty of language. Some of the translations of Cranmer's Collects (those magnificent, one-sentence petitions) or Coverdale's psalms remind me of what Bowdler did to Shakespeare. Well, Bowdler had his way for a while, but we went back to the richness of Shakespeare.