When writing a novel a writer
should create living people; people not characters. A character is a
caricature. If a writer can make people live there may be no great characters
in his book, but it is possible that his book will remain as a whole; as an
entity; as a novel. If the people the writer is making talk of old masters; of
music; of modern painting; of letters; or of science then they should talk of
those subjects in the novel. If they do not talk of these subjects and the
writer makes them talk of them he is a faker, and if he talks about them
himself to show how much he knows then he is showing off. No matter how good a
phrase or a simile he may have if he puts it in where it is not absolutely
necessary and irreplaceable he is spoiling his work for egotism.
Prose is architecture, not
interior decoration, and the Baroque is over. For a writer to put his own
intellectual musings, which he might sell for a low price as essays, into the
mouths of artificially constructed characters which are more remunerative when
issued as people in a novel is good economics, perhaps, but does not make
literature. People in a novel, not skillfully constructed characters, must be
projected from the writer’s assimilated experience, from his knowledge, from
his head, from his heart and from all there is of him. If he ever has luck as
well as seriousness and gets them out entire they will have more than one
dimension and they will last a long time. A good writer should know as near
everything as possible. Naturally he will not. A great enough writer seems to
be born with knowledge. But he really is not; he has only been born with the
ability to learn in a quicker ratio to the passage of time than other men and
without conscious application, and with an intelligence to accept or reject
what is already presented as knowledge.
There are some things which
cannot be learned quickly and time, which is all we have, must be paid heavily
for their acquiring. They are the very simplest things and because it takes a
man’s life to know them the little new that each man gets from life is very
costly and the only heritage he has to leave. Every novel which is truly
written contributes to the total of knowledge which is there at the disposal of
the next writer who comes, but the next writer must pay, always, a certain
nominal percentage in experience to be able to understand and assimilate what
is available as his birthright and what he must, in turn, take his departure
from. If a writer of prose knows enough about what he is writing about he may
omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly
enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer
had stated them. The dignity of movement of an ice-berg is due to only
one-eighth of it being above water.
A writer who omits things because
he does not know them only makes hollow places in his writing. A writer who
appreciates the seriousness of writing so little that he is anxious to make
people see he is formally educated, cultured or well-bred is merely a popinjay.
And this too remember; a serious writer is not to be confounded with a solemn
writer. A serious writer may be a hawk or a buzzard or even a popinjay, but a
solemn writer is always a bloody owl.