The Excitement of Writing

THE CONTRIBUTORS’ CLUB

I HAVE just read ‘The Excitement of Friendship’ in the December Atlantic. Most of it makes me nod my head and say, as one is always pleased to do, ‘Yes! That is the way. So friends are known and kept and lost.’ I like that essay! Those are my own vague thoughts crystallized and sharpened.

But there is one paragraph that moves me to challenge the generalization which it assumes. It is only a side-issue, to be sure. Mr. Bourne complains of the ‘hopeless labor of writing,’ — of t he coldness and grayness of the mind, when one tries heavily to blow upon the hearth of memory those embers languishing when the hot fire of friendly stimulating intercourse is burned out. ‘The blood runs sluggish,’ he says, ‘when one sits down to write.’

I cannot help defending my own writing mood; and what I am sure must be the mood of many of the Tribe, great or small. My blood does not run sluggish as I sit down to write. No matter whether what I produce has any merit or not, I only know that to write — to feel the pen in my fingers and the words leaping from my head or my heart, or wherever they abide, out upon the paper — is a joy to me almost as thrilling as the joy of great friendly talk and silence. I suppose this argues a smallness, a coldness, in me; but it is true.

There is something half physical about it, like the tingling glory of standing on an autumn hill-top or at the prow of a swift sea-going ship. It is a breathless speed and wonder. It does not feel like any slow deliberate process of heavy thought, or even of cunning, happy craftsmanship. There is freedom in it, like the freedom of sea-gulls, and of youth: abandon, audacity, shudderings and horror, splendors and mirth. I feel, when a good spirit of writing is upon me, expanded, powerful, infinitely alive. As Whitman has it, —

I draw deep breath, and am free to run where I will, over hill and dale, sea and city, dead ice-fields and lush, lazy tropics. I become a dweller in Eternity, and am not at all afraid to die.

And yet, when I am not writing, none of this swift wonder is with me. I have no winds and flames. Even with my friends, I am aware often that my freest self is dumb. There is no loss to them in that, perhaps, for they might not like my winds and flames at all. But it makes me sad that I cannot share with them what seems, at least, to be the happiest of me.

And then it. makes me sad — but whimsically, and I hope philosophically — when, the flying windy wonder passed and my feet again on the solid roads, I know that, after all, my ecstasy and urge of seeming creation is to so small an end. For what have I said, when all is reckoned up? I have chirped like a cricket, and mourned like a dove, and laughed like a silly parrot; and there is nothing truly memorable and worthy in such chirping and mourning and laughter. I, too, shall go out into Silence, and what I have tried to sing and say shall not stand by me then.

None the less I cannot let it go unchallenged, — that passing accusation of the writing mood. For when I write, my blood is not sluggish; it dances round my heart and throbs in my throat, and for one deluded hour I dream that my words are immortal. My feet run East of the Sun and West of the Moon; and the gates of Heaven and Hell have no proud locks for me.