place
not
give? Theme. It can present theme, show it to the last detail—but place is forever illustrative: it is a picture of what man has done and imagined, it is his visible past, result. Human life is fiction’s only theme.
—
Should the writer, then, write about home? It is both natural and sensible that the place where we have our roots should become the setting, the first and primary proving ground, of our fiction. Location, however, is not simply to be used by the writer—it is to be discovered, as each novel itself, in the act of writing, is discovery. Discovery does not imply that the place is new, only that we are. Place is as old as the hills. Kilroy at least has been there, and left his name. Discovery, not being a matter of writing our name on a wall, but of seeing what that wall is, and what is over it, is a matter of vision.
One can no more say, “To write stay home,” than one can say, “To write leave home.” It is the writing that makes its own rules and conditions for each person. And though place is home, it is for the writer writing simply
locus
. It is where the particular story he writes can be pinned down, the circle it can spin through and keep the state of grace, so that for the story’s duration the rest of the world suspends its claim upon it and lies low as the story in peaceful extension, the
locus
fading off into the blue.
Naturally, it is the very breath of life, whether one writes a word of fiction or not, to go out and see what is to be seen of the world. For the artist to be unwilling to move, mentally or spiritually or physically, out of the familiar is a sign that spiritual timidity or poverty or decay has come upon him; for what is familiar will then have turned into all that is tyrannical.
One can only say: writers must always write best of what they know, and sometimes they do it by staying where they know it. But not for safety’s sake. Although it is in the words of a witch—or all the more because of that—acomment of Hecate’s in
Macbeth
is worth our heed: “Security/Is mortal’s chiefest enemy.” In fact, when we think in terms of the spirit, which are the terms of writing, is there a conception more stupefying than that of security? Yet writing of what you know has nothing to do with security: what is more dangerous? How can you go out on a limb if you do not know your own tree? No art ever came out of not risking your neck. And risk—experiment—is a considerable part of the joy of doing, which is the lone, simple reason all writers of serious fiction are willing to work as hard as they do.
The open mind and the receptive heart—which are at last and with fortune’s smile the informed mind and the experienced heart—are to be gained anywhere, any time, without necessarily moving an inch from any present address. There must surely be as many ways of seeing a place as there are pairs of eyes to see it. The impact happens in so many different ways.
It may be the stranger within the gates whose eye is smitten by the crucial thing, the essence of life, the moment or act in our long-familiar midst that will forever define it. The inhabitant who has taken his fill of a place and gone away may look back and see it for good, from afar, still there in his mind’s eye like a city over the hill. It was in the New Zealand stories, written eleven thousand miles from home and out of homesickness, that Katherine Mansfield came into her own. Joyce transplanted not his subject but himself while writing about it, and it was as though he had never left it at all: there it was, still in his eye, exactly the way he had last seen it. From the Continent he wrote the life of Dublin as it was then into a book of the future, for he went translating his own language of it on and on into acountry of its own, where it set up a kingdom as renowned as Prester John’s. Sometimes two places, two countries, are brought to bear on each other, as in E. M. Forster’s work, and the heart
not
give? Theme. It can present theme, show it to the last detail—but place is forever illustrative: it is a picture of what man has done and imagined, it is his visible past, result. Human life is fiction’s only theme.
—
Should the writer, then, write about home? It is both natural and sensible that the place where we have our roots should become the setting, the first and primary proving ground, of our fiction. Location, however, is not simply to be used by the writer—it is to be discovered, as each novel itself, in the act of writing, is discovery. Discovery does not imply that the place is new, only that we are. Place is as old as the hills. Kilroy at least has been there, and left his name. Discovery, not being a matter of writing our name on a wall, but of seeing what that wall is, and what is over it, is a matter of vision.
One can no more say, “To write stay home,” than one can say, “To write leave home.” It is the writing that makes its own rules and conditions for each person. And though place is home, it is for the writer writing simply
locus
. It is where the particular story he writes can be pinned down, the circle it can spin through and keep the state of grace, so that for the story’s duration the rest of the world suspends its claim upon it and lies low as the story in peaceful extension, the
locus
fading off into the blue.
Naturally, it is the very breath of life, whether one writes a word of fiction or not, to go out and see what is to be seen of the world. For the artist to be unwilling to move, mentally or spiritually or physically, out of the familiar is a sign that spiritual timidity or poverty or decay has come upon him; for what is familiar will then have turned into all that is tyrannical.
One can only say: writers must always write best of what they know, and sometimes they do it by staying where they know it. But not for safety’s sake. Although it is in the words of a witch—or all the more because of that—acomment of Hecate’s in
Macbeth
is worth our heed: “Security/Is mortal’s chiefest enemy.” In fact, when we think in terms of the spirit, which are the terms of writing, is there a conception more stupefying than that of security? Yet writing of what you know has nothing to do with security: what is more dangerous? How can you go out on a limb if you do not know your own tree? No art ever came out of not risking your neck. And risk—experiment—is a considerable part of the joy of doing, which is the lone, simple reason all writers of serious fiction are willing to work as hard as they do.
The open mind and the receptive heart—which are at last and with fortune’s smile the informed mind and the experienced heart—are to be gained anywhere, any time, without necessarily moving an inch from any present address. There must surely be as many ways of seeing a place as there are pairs of eyes to see it. The impact happens in so many different ways.
It may be the stranger within the gates whose eye is smitten by the crucial thing, the essence of life, the moment or act in our long-familiar midst that will forever define it. The inhabitant who has taken his fill of a place and gone away may look back and see it for good, from afar, still there in his mind’s eye like a city over the hill. It was in the New Zealand stories, written eleven thousand miles from home and out of homesickness, that Katherine Mansfield came into her own. Joyce transplanted not his subject but himself while writing about it, and it was as though he had never left it at all: there it was, still in his eye, exactly the way he had last seen it. From the Continent he wrote the life of Dublin as it was then into a book of the future, for he went translating his own language of it on and on into acountry of its own, where it set up a kingdom as renowned as Prester John’s. Sometimes two places, two countries, are brought to bear on each other, as in E. M. Forster’s work, and the heart
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