“Well, it was autobiographical—you can’t deny it.”
“But not ‘too autobiographical’,” George went on earnestly. “If the critics had just crossed those words out and written in their place ‘not autobiographical enough’, they’d have hit it squarely. That’s where I failed. That’s where the real fault was.” There was no question that he meant it, for his face was twisted suddenly with a grimace, the scar of his defeat and shame. “My young hero was a stick, a fool, a prig, a snob, as Dedalus was—as in my own presentment of the book I was. There was the weakness. Oh, I know—there were lots of autobiographical spots in the book, and where it was true I’m not ashamed of it, but the hitching-post I tied the horses to wasn’t good enough. It wasn’t true autobiography. I’ve learned that now, and learned why. The failure comes from the false personal. There’s the guilt. That’s where the young genius business gets in—the young artist business, what you called a while ago the wounded faun business. It gets in and it twists the vision. The vision may be shrewd, subtle, piercing, within a thousand special frames accurate and Joycean—but within the larger one, false, mannered, and untrue. And the large one is the one that matters.”
He meant it now, and he was down to solid rock. Randy saw the measure of his suffering. And yet, now as before, he seemed to be going to extremes and taking it too hard. In some such measure all men fail, and Randy said:
“But was anything ever as good as it could be? Who succeeded anyway?”
“Oh, plenty did!” he said impatiently. “Tolstoy when he wrote War and Peace. Shakespeare when he wrote King Lear. Mark Twain in the first part of Life on the Mississippi. Of course they’re not as good as they might have been—nothing ever is. Only, they missed in the right way: they might have put the shot a little further—but they were not hamstrung by their vanity, shackled by their damned self-consciousness. That’s what makes for failure. That’s where I failed.”
“Then what’s the remedy?”
“To use myself to the top of my bent. To use everything I have. To milk the udder dry, squeeze out the last drop, until there is nothing left. And if I use myself as a character, to withhold nothing, to try to see and paint myself as I am—the bad along with the good, the shoddy alongside of the true—just as I must try to see and draw every other character. No more false personal, no more false pride, no more pettiness and injured feelings. In short, to kill the wounded faun.”
Randy nodded: “Yes. And what now? What comes next?”
“I don’t know,” he answered frankly. His eyes showed his perplexity. “That’s the thing that’s got me stumped. It’s not that I don’t know what to write about.—God!” he laughed suddenly. “You hear about these fellows who write one book and then can’t do another because they haven’t got anything else to write about!”
“You’re not worried about that?”
“Lord, no! My trouble’s all the other way round! I’ve got too much material. It keeps backing up on me”—he gestured round him at the tottering piles of manuscript that were everywhere about the room—“until sometimes I wonder what in the name of God I’m going to do with it all—how I’m going to find a frame for it, a pattern, a channel, a way to make it flow!” He brought his fist down sharply on his knee and there was a note of desperation in his voice. “Sometimes it actually occurs to me that a man may be able to write no more because he gets drowned in his own secretions!”
“So you’re not afraid of ever running dry?”
He laughed loudly. “At times I almost hope I will,” he said. “There’d be a kind of comfort in the thought that some day—maybe after I’m forty—I would dry up and become like a camel, living on my hump. Of course, I don’t really mean that either. It’s not good to dry up—it’s a form of death…No, that’s not what bothers me. The thing I’ve got to find out is the way!” He was silent a moment, staring at Randy, then he struck his fist upon his knee again and cried: “The way! The way! Do you understand?”
“Yes,” said Randy, “I think I do. But how?”
George’s face was full of perplexity.. He was silent, trying to phrase his problem.
“I’m looking for a way,” he said at last. “I think it may be something like what people vaguely mean when they speak of fiction. A kind of legend, perhaps. Something—a story—composed of all the knowledge I have, of all the living I’ve seen. Not the facts, you understand—not just the record of my life—but something truer than the facts—something distilled out of my experience and transmitted into a form of universal application. That’s what the best fiction is, isn’t it?”
Randy smiled and nodded encouragement. George was all right. He needn’t have worried about him. He would work his way out of the morass. So Randy said cheerfully: