Preface and introduction of “Alexander Pope: A life” by Felicity Rosslyn
22.10.2011
I’m not very interested in Pope but I love what Rosslyn has to say about how differently writerly/readerly types see the world. I would have read more of this but it was from the short-term loan collection and I got fed up with renovating it.
Quotes:
ছ ...Chekhov’s opinion of what the literary life does to one’s humanity, expressed by a writer in The Seagull:
It’s such a barbarous life. Here am I talking to you and getting quite excited, yet can’t forget for a second that I ‘ve an unfinished novel waiting for me. Or I see a cloud over there like a grand piano. So I think it must go in a story. “A cloud like a grand piano sailed past.”.... I try to catch every sentence, every word you and I say and quickly lock all these sentences and words away in my literary storehouse because they might come in handy.... I feel I’m taking pollen from my best flowers, tearing them up and stamping on the roots - all to make honey that goes to some vague, distant destination. I’m mad, I must be. PP. 2
It follows from this that a literary life is not like the biography of a normal person. It has less to do with what actually happened to the poet than with what he made out of what happened. He lives in the most radical sense only from poem to poem: “For a poet poems are real experiences”... and “as a man may be changed by a love affair or a bereavement, so a poet may be changed by a work of imagination - somebody else’s or his own”
It follows from this view of the artist’s priorities that he does not so much write to live, as live in order to write..PP. 3
ছ The artist, I’m assuming, is always converting his experience into honey, and even painful, comic or repulsive experience is nectar to him. This makes the experience of being alive radically different for the artist and the Dunce. The artist may, at the human level, show rather less conscience: it is “barbarous”, as Trigorin says, to be collecting cloud-impressions while your interlocutor is falling in love with you; but that is because he needs all the conscience he has for the task of creation, without which nothing of the experience of being alive will remain. PP. 4
ছ This sounds like a version of the artist’s perennial interest in appearance and truth. How can life be nudged into the desired shape, without his apparent interference? How is the appearance of reality created, and how does the mind apprehend it? Living, as the artist does, between two worlds, the one already created and the other requiring to be born, he has a much more elastic sense of “reality” than the rest of us, and understands that “truth” is an honorific term we bestow on something that convinces us. It is not an ethical judgement at all, but a technical one; and his great aim in life is to understand how that triumph was achieved. PP. 5
*author: female, #non-fiction, 2011, 2011: essay in english, +literature, +bookish, #capítulo o fragmento, @read in english, [quotes], [quotes] books/non-fiction, book-2011