Looking Back at Writing

by SEAN O’FAOLAIN

WHEN I was in my twenties I did not know from Adam what I wanted to say. I had no grasp at all of the real world, of real people. I had met and mingled with them, argued with them, lived with them, shared danger with them. They were mysteries to me. I could only try to convey my astonishment and delight at the strangeness of this bewildering thing called life.

Besides, when I wrote “Fugue,” my first successful story, in 1927, I had come out of an experience which had left me dazed — the revolutionary period in Ireland. Not that it was really an experience as I now understand that word. It was too filled with dreams and ideals and a sense of dedication to be an experience in the sense of things perceived, understood, and remembered. I perceived all right,

I remembered all right, but it had all been far too much to understand; especially the disillusion at the end of it all, for, as few people who are not Irish now remember, that revolutionary period ended in a civil war, and civil war is of all wars the most difficult thing for its participants to understand. Besides, as I found myself yesterday making a character in a story I am writing say: “It’s a terrible and lovely thing to look at the face of Death when you are young, but it unfits a man for the long humiliation of life.”

I suppose that is why those early stories were full of romantic boss-words like dawn. At that time if you said dawn to me, my mouth would begin to dribble. Dawn is not a prose writer’s word. I doubt if it is any longer a decent word for even a poet to use. It is a sounding word, a rhetorical word. Words like that are all right for Frenchmen. They are able to use rhetoric as if it were not rhetoric; we are not. (The other day a producer said to me: “I’m doing a French play. Every time one of the characters makes a speech I want to make him stand with his back to the audience. Otherwise he seems as if he were about to take off in an aeroplane.”)

But those first stories I wrote were all the time trying to take off in an aeroplane. They are, I now see, very romantic, as their weighted style shows.

I have sometimes thought of rewriting them, but I realize that I should have to change their nature if I were to change their style, which is full of romantic words, such as dawn, dew, onwards, youth, world, adamant, or dusk; of metaphors and abstractions; of personalizations and sensations which belong to the author rather than to the characters. The stories also contain many of those most romantic of all words, and and but, which are words that are part of the attempt to carry on and expand the effect after the sense has been given. Writers who put down the essential thing, without any cocoon about it, do not need these ands and buts. The thing is given and there it lies; whereas the writer who luxuriates goes on with the echoes of his first image or idea. His emotions and his thoughts dilate, the style dilates with them, and in the end he is trying to write a kind of verbal music to convey feelings that the mere sense of the words cannot give. He is chasing the inexpressible.

If I were to rewrite those stories, it would be a lie. A story is like a picture, caught in the flick of a camera’s trigger, that comes nearer and nearer to clarity in the bath of hypo which is the writer’s blend of skill and imagination; he trembles over it as the bleach trembles and wavers over the sensitive halides of the film, waiting for the final perfection of his certainty, of his desire. Then the experience, complete or incomplete, is fixed forever. You can rewrite while you are the same man. To rewrite years after is a form of forgery.

My second volume of stories, A Purse of Coppers, appeared after I had more or less come oul of the daze. I came out of it by writing myself out of it in a novel, A Nest of Simple Folk, and a biographical study of a beautiful Irishwoman, a romantic guerrilla, Constance Gore-Booth, later Countess Markievicz. The biography was slight and groping, but it helped me to get all those romantic figures into some sort of perspective, and myself along with them. I could grin a bit at my solemn self and at my solemn countrymen. I hope a certain adjustment and detachment shows itself in the stories that follow “A Broken World.”

Naturally, of course, I still did not know what was happening to me or what I was doing. Writers never do. For instance, a friend suggested to me that “A Broken World” was my unconscious reply to Joyce’s wonderful story, “The Dead.” I certainly did not consciously mean any such thing; but I can agree that what with the snow over Dublin, and the suggestion that Ireland is not dead but sleeping, as against Joyce’s feeling that Ireland is paralyzed by its past, one could, I suppose, say that the stories contrast the attitudes of two different generations. After all, Joyce grew up with a strong distaste for Ireland.

But I do not think I had adjusted myself properly until my next volume of stories, The Man Who Invented Sin — if even then. Anyway, by the time I had more or less adjusted myself to the life about me, it suddenly broke in on me that Ireland had not adjusted herself to the life about her in the least little bit. Irishmen in general were still thinking about themselves, or rather in their usual way double-thinking or squint-thinking about themselves, in terms of dawns, and ands, and buts, and onwards, and dew, and dusk, while at the same time making a lot of good, hard cash to the evocative vocabulary of tariff, tax, protection, quota, levy, duties, or subsidies, meanwhile carefully compiling a third and wholly different literary style (pious, holy, prudent, sterling, gossoons, lassies, maidens, sacred, traditional, forefathers, olden, venerable, mothers, grandmothers, ancestors, deep-rooted, traditions, Gaelic, timeworn, and immemorial) to dodge more awkward social, moral, and political problems than any country might, with considerable courage, hope to solve in a century of ruthless thinking. This ambivalence, if not triplivalence, demanded a totally new approach. I have been trying to define it ever since. For, as long as we were all in a splendidly romantic-idealistic fervor about Ireland, we could all write romantically, or idealistically, about Ireland, as Sean O’Casey did. (He is sometimes called and probably thinks himself a realist, but he is actually the biggest old romantic we ever produced.) Or if we were all being realistic we could write in the realist tradition.

But for any kind of realist to write about people with romantic souls is a most tricky and difficult business, even when he is a Stendhal gifted with a lovely irony, a Chekhov holding on firmly to the stern morality of the doctor, a Turgenev informed by an intelligent humanism, or an E. M. Forster blessed with a talent for quiet raillery. If one has not some such gift the subject is an almost certain pitfall. But when it comes to writing about people who, like the Irish of our day, combine beautiful, palpitating, tea-rose souls with hard, coolly calculating heads, there does not seem to be any way at all of writing about them except satirically or angrily. Once a writer’s eye gets chilly about their beautiful souls he becomes like the only sober man at a drunken party, and the only decent thing for him to do then is either to get blind drunk with the rest of the boys (all singing in chorus “I’ll take you home again, Kathl-ee-een“) or else to go home and scrub himself clean in a raging satire on the whole boiling lot of them.

I have made a few mildly tentative efforts in this direction in some of my later stories. They started out to be satirical: they mostly failed dismally to be satirical; largely, I presume—I observe it to my dismay and I confess it to my shame — because I still have much too soft a corner in my heart for the old land. For all I know I may be still a besotted romantic! Some day I may manage to dislike my countrymen sufficiently to satirize them; but I gravely doubt it —curse them! However, as D. H. Lawrence said, one’s passion is always searching for some form that will express or hold it better, letting none of it leak away. And one is always searching for different forms, since otherwise one’s passion would have the same form from birth to death, which would merely mean that one had got stuck, or given up, or agreed to compromise on some easy formula somewhere along the line; and that would be premature death, since not to change is to die though still apparently alive.

One thing I find very chastening as I look back at my writing: the thought that although I began writing in 1927 — that is really writing, writing well — and have since written lots of other books (far too many of them), all I have to show for all those years by way of short stories — or, at least, all I am content to show — is some thirty titles. One thinks of writers like George Sand pouring out volume after volume while — as Colette observed, enviously, wondering how on earth she managed it—never once neglecting a love affair, never missing one puff of her hookah, never denying herself any experience that came her way.

I think of the time when I wanted to be another Balzac. I saw myself scribbling away madly while the printer’s devil stood by my desk picking up the pages of genius and running off with them to the printing press while the ink was still wet. I must have been very young then. When I got down to the business of writing, I found that half the art of writing is rewriting, and I would be happy if I achieved two hundred words of lapidary prose in a day.

I have learned in my thirty-odd years of serious writing only one sure lesson: stories, like whiskey, must be allowed to mature in the cask. And that takes so much time! Oh, dear! Why do they tell us in our youth that there are twenty-four hours in a day, seven days in a week, and fifty-two weeks in a year? Balzac, indeed! I shall be content if a half dozen, if even three or four, of my stories that have taken thirty years to write are remembered fifty years hence.