What do I care for first or last editions?
Some writers think that publication is the be-all and end-all. Others, like D. H. Lawrence, claim not to care about publication and having a readership:
"To me, no book has a date, no book has a binding. [...] One writes [...] to some mysterious presence in the air. If that presence were not there, and one thought of even a single solitary actual reader, the paper would remain forever white." [75-76]
Later, in the same introductory essay he adds:
"One submits to the process of publication as to a necessary evil: as souls are said to submit to the necessary evil of being born into the flesh." [78]
For Lawrence, what really counts is the creative process; a writer struggling with their own δαίμων in order to bring something into being that is beautiful - but passing - like a flower. The finished product, i.e., the published book, that people place upon their shelves and assemble into libraries, is, in a sense, just a husk.
And perhaps the greatest novels and poems are ones that remain unwritten; "voices in the air, that do not disturb the haze of autumn, and visions that don't blot out the sunflowers" [75].
Notes
D. H. Lawrence, 'The Bad Side of Books', Introductions and Reviews, ed. John Worthen, (Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 73-78. Page numbers given in the text refer to this edition.
Lawrence's (implictly endorsed?) neo-Romantic aerial mysticism is a fascinating trope in the context of a supposedly materialist/ atheistic 'Nietzschean' blog - one to which (not tied down as we are to the dreary prejudice that only what can be seen and/or scientifically measured is real) we readily subscribe, especially if one writes as much for the dead as the living.
ReplyDeleteThe idea of a book as a 'husk' seems to us really just a bibliographic extension of Nietzsche's idea that 'that for which we find words is something already dead in our hearts', albeit he was there referring to speaking rather than writing. Words always seem to come too late, however finely fashioned.
From a psychological - or rather mythological - viewpoint (since every writer is in thrall to some myth or other of his/her art), its the 'puer' (aeternus) in Lawrence, a kind of Peter Panism of the soul, that persuades him a work's material embodiment is a falling-away or compromise, rather than its lovely incarnation in the world of things. (It's 'necessary' for sure, but 'evil' may be over-egging the publishing pudding.)
Doesn't the title of Lawrence's article also imply that books have their 'good side' too (and hence his piece is implicitly a one-sided provocation)? The fact that the first part of the citation also refers to a wager on a book's out-of-timeliness (his 'no date' fantasy) also makes us feel Lawrence was talking about the problem of finitude. How can one write for 'all time' and yet accept one's words bound in time? It's an issue that was resonant for Blake's poetics and Shakespeare's sonnets, of course, so he's in good company . . .
PS The word 'claim' at the top of the post also seems telling here - just because a writer says (or writes) something about what they do hardly makes it 'true'! As Adam Phillips puts it, 'trust (or here, taking men of literature literally) is a word we have put too much trust in . . .'