“‘The integrity of the artist,’ you may say.
“Ah, yes—if I could only soothe my conscience with that solacement! For what integrity is there that is not tainted with human frailty? If only I could tell myself that every word and phrase and incident in the book had been created at the top of my bent and with the impartial judgment of unrancorous detachment! But I know it is not true. So many words come back to me, so many whip-lash phrases, that must have been written in a spirit that had nothing to do with art or my integrity. We are such stuff as dust is made of, and where we fail—we fail! Is there, then, no such thing as a pure spirit in creation?
“In all the whole wretched experience there is also a grim and horrible humour. It is insanely comical to find in almost all these letters that I am being cursed for doing things I did not do and for saying things I did not say. It is even more ludicrous to hear myself grudgingly praised for having the one thing that I have not got. Few of these letters—even those which threaten hanging, and those which deny me the remotest scrap of talent (except a genius for obscenity)—fail to commend me for what their writers call ‘my memory’. Some of them accuse me of sneaking round as a little boy of eight with my pockets stuffed with notebooks, my ears fairly sprouting from my head and my eyes popping out, in my effort to spy upon and snatch up every word and act and phrase among my virtuous and unsuspecting fellow-townsmen.
“‘It’s the dirtiest book I ever read,’ one citizen cogently remarks, ‘but I’ll have to give you credit for one thing—you’ve got a wonderful memory.’
“And that is just exactly what I have not got. I have to see a thing a thousand times before I see it once. This thing they call my memory, this thing they think they can themselves remember, is nothing that they ever saw. It is rather something that I saw after looking at the thing a thousand times, and this is what they think they can remember.”
Randy paused in his reading of the letter, for he suddenly realised that what George said was literally true. In the weeks since the book was published, he himself had seen it proved over and over again.
He knew that there was scarcely a detail in George’s book that was precisely true to fact, that there was hardly a page in which everything had not been transmuted and transformed by the combining powers of George’s imagination; yet readers got from it such an instant sense of reality that many of them were willing to swear that the thing described had been not only “drawn from life”, but was the actual and recorded fact. And that was precisely what had made the outcry and denunciation so furious.
But not only that. It was funny enough to hear people talking and arguing with each other out of a savage conviction that scenes and incidents in the book were literally true because they may have had some basis in remembered fact. It was even more grotesque to hear them testify, as some of them now did, that they had been witnesses to events which he knew to be utter fabrications of the author’s imagination.
“Why,” they cried, when final proof of anything was wanted, “he’s got it all in! He’s written it all down, just the way it happened! Nothing’s changed a bit! Look at the Square!”
They always came back to the Square, for the Square had occupied a prominent place in Home to Our Mountains. George had pictured it with such intensity of vision that almost every brick and windowpane and cobblestone became imprinted on the reader’s mind. But what was this Square? Was it the town Square of Libya Hill? Everybody said it was. Hadn’t the local newspaper set it down in black and white that “our native chronicler has described the Square with a photographic eye”? Then people had read the book for themselves and had agreed.
So it was useless to argue with them—useless to point out to them how Webber’s Square differed from their own, unless to mention a hundred items of variation. They had been pitiful in their anger when t hey first discovered that art had imitated life; now they were ludicrous in their ignorance that life was also imitating art.
With a smile and a shake of the head, Randy turned back to the letter:
“In God’s name, what have I done?” George concluded. “Have I really acted according to some inner truth and real necessity, or did my unhappy mother conceive and give birth to a perverse monster who has defiled the dead and betrayed his family, kinsmen, neighbours, and the human race? What should I have done? What ought I to do now? If there is any help or answer in you, for Christ’s sake let me have it. I feel like a dead leaf in a hurricane. I don’t know where to turn. You alone can help me. Stay with me—write me—tell me what you think.
“Yours ever,