A Writer's Notebook (75 page)

Martinique. In 1902 Mt. Pelée erupted and overwhelmed the town of St. Pierre. Forty thousand people lost their lives.
There had been some volcanic activity shortly before and an eruption north of St. Pierre in which a number of people were killed. Then a few days later without warning a mass of fire, like a flaming whirlpool, swept over St. Pierre and destroyed the ships in the harbour. A fall of molten lava and ashes followed the flames, accompanied by dense gases which asphyxiated those who had so far escaped. All who could fled from the town, whole families together, and strangely enough the gases swept over them irregularly so that a group in front escaped and a group behind, whereas a group between them was overcome and perished.

I asked my friends what effect the catastrophe had on those who were saved. I wanted to know whether the fearful danger and the miraculous escape had had a spiritual or a moral effect on them, whether it changed their lives afterwards, whether their faith was strengthened or weakened, whether they became better men or worse. Everyone gave me the same answer. It had no effect on them at all. Most of them were ruined, but after they had recovered from the shock they took up their lives as best they could and as though nothing had happened. They were neither more nor less devout, neither better nor worse. I suppose it is because there is a resilience in man, a power of forgetfulness, or perhaps merely an obtuseness, that he has been able to survive the countless horrors that have encompassed him since first he came into existence.

West Indies. A girl came out as governess to the children of some English people settled on the island, and after a while she was asked in marriage by a planter. On the face of it, it was a good match for her; he was well-off, a very good fellow and well-liked. He was slightly coloured, and on this account was not a member of the club; but in his outlook, his habits, his manner he was as white as any white man. The girl was as much in love with him as he was with her, but her employers urged her not to be in a hurry and persuaded her to go home
to England for six months so that she might make certain of her own mind. She came back at the end of this period and the pair were married, but on the understanding that they should have no children. The planter was a good husband, a passionate lover and a pleasant companion, and she was completely happy. Then he contracted typhoid. He was very ill, and the girl nursed him with the help of his old black nannie. She had a queer feeling that something was happening to him that she couldn't account for; he seemed to collapse morally rather than physically. He seemed to be infected with the superstitions which she knew prevailed among the coloured people. One day he refused to see the English doctor. “The only one who can cure me is old nannie,” he said irritably. When she expostulated he told her roughly to shut up. “You don't know what you're talking about.” That night they turned her out of the room and the nurse went in with three old men, all black, and one of them carried a white cock under his arm. She stood outside the door and heard strange incantations, and then a sort of flutter, it might have been of wings, and she realised that they were killing the white cock. When the coloured people came out of the room and she could go in again she saw that the sick man's forehead and cheeks and chin, his breast, hands and feet had been smeared with blood. She knew then that for all his clear honey-coloured skin, his wavy red hair, at heart her husband was a negro. Two or three davs later she discovered she was pregnant.

Sincerity in literary judgments is terribly hard to achieve. It is almost impossible to form one's own opinion of a work without being to some small extent at least influenced by critical or common opinion. What adds to the difficulty is that with regard to works of acknowledged greatness common opinion
has given them some part of their greatness. To try to read a poem with the eyes of the first reader who read it is like trying to see a landscape without the atmosphere that clothes it.

Much of Henry James is what the French, whom he so extravagantly admired, dismiss with a shrug of the shoulders as
littérature
. He did not live, he observed life from a window, and too often was inclined to content himself with no more than what his friends told him they saw when
they
looked out of a window. But what can you know of life unless you have lived it? Something escapes you unless you have been an actor in the tragi-comedy. In the end the point of Henry James is neither his artistry nor his seriousness, but his personality, and this was curious and charming and a trifle absurd.

Would anyone think he could get a useful knowledge of motor-cars by reading a novel of which the scene was a motor works and the characters car-manufacturers; and do you think the soul of man is less complicated than the engine of a car?

Poe supposed he could obtain novelty and originality by taking thought. He was wrong. The only way to be new is constantly to change yourself, and the only way to be original is to increase, enlarge, deepen your own personality.

Give us this day our daily bread, the devout pray. One would have thought it was an insult to a benign and omnipotent being to beg him for the bare necessities of life. When we treat our neighbour with common civility it is no favour we grant him; it is his right.

Truth is not only stranger than fiction, it is more telling. To know that a thing actually happened gives it a poignancy, touches a chord, which a piece of acknowledged fiction misses. It is to touch this chord that some authors have done everything they could to give you the impression that they are telling the plain truth.

There are books that are at once excellent and boring. Those that at once leap to the mind are Thoreau's
Walden
, Emerson's
Essays
, George Eliot's
Adam Bede
and Landor's
Dialogues
. Is it a chance that they belong very much to the same period?

The writer should have a distinguished and varied culture, but he probably errs when he puts its elements into his work. It is a sign of naïveté to put into a novel your views on evolution, the sonatas of Beethoven, or Karl Marx's
Das Kapital
.