BY JOHN HAMPSON
JOHN HAMPSON, distinguished British novelist and
literary critic, visited Madras early this year, on the invitation of the
Provincial Government, in connection with the study of juvenile delinquency–a
subject on which it is envisaging a new Act: Madras Childrens’ Act. Mr. Hampson
is the author of a famous first novel, Saturday Night at the Greyhound which
has run into several editions since its publication in 1931. His other works
include: O Providence, Strip Jack Naked, Family Curse, and Care of The Grand.
His characters are recognizable human beings–they are drawn with great vigour
and clarity; he treats of the man in the street as he is, and not as
wish-dreaming would like to make him; and he is in the direct tradition of
Defoe, long obscured in English literature. In the talk reproduced below, by
courtesy of All India Radio, Madras, Mr. Hampson’s suggestions to Indian
writers have a touching sensibility and bear the impress of a deep earnestness
and integrity concerning the profession of authorship.–Editor, Triveni.
WHEN you come to the end of a book and having laid
it aside, do you ever give a thought to the man, or woman who wrote what you
have just read, or are you content with a few moments reverie, in consideration
of the book’s final phase? Some readers do not bother about even this tribute,
they merely stretch out a languid hand for another book from the array on the
table, usually selecting one with a jacket they consider attractive. This type
of reader has, as a rule, a weakness for novels. Being a novelist myself I
resent such treatment, but I console myself in knowing that my work, whatever
flaws or merits it may have, has been written for an audience who will pay it
serious attention; for the author, whatever his aims and limitations, works
with the definite idea of finding a public for what he has written. And it is
you, dear listener, you, you, you and you, who may be the beings for whom the
author writes, because you have the sympathy, intelligence, and imagination to
fulfil some of the demands made on you by his book. You have understood what he
is trying to do, not fully perhaps, but with a conscious recognition of his
integrity and skill.
When you discuss a recently read book with a
friend, what are the points you try and make? Do you praise the author for good
reasons, or for bad ones? What are your own values? Have you sound standards by
which you judge an author’s merits, or are you content to pass on a second-hand
verdict about his book? Can you detect an author who cheats, one who attempts
to make you believe in false ideas of noble behaviour, one who consciously
flatters you, in order to gain your credulity? Does your taste improve, do you
grow more exacting, more critical, more selective? Answer these questions and
judge yourself, as well as the books you read, and in this way your literary
taste will develop, and the great writers will increasingly reward you for your
efforts, by enriching your mind.
What is it that the writer attempts? Here are the
views of Trollope, an author much read in England during recent years: as you
may expect if you know his novels, they contain much sound commonsense. “When
we were young we used to be told, in our house at home, that ‘elbow grease’ was
the one essential necessary to getting a tough piece of work well
done….Forethought is the elbow-grease which a novelist, a Poet, or a dramatist,
requires. It is not only his plot that has to be turned and returned in his
mind, not his plot chiefly, but he has to make himself sure of his situations,
of his characters, of his effects, so that when the time comes for hitting the
nail he may know where to hit it on the head…..It is from want of this special
labour more frequently than from intellectual deficiency, that the tellers of
stories fail so often to hit their nails on the head. To think of a story is
much harder work than to write it. The author can sit down with the pen in his
hand for a given time, and produce a certain number of words. That is
comparatively easy, and if he have a conscience in regard to his task, work
will be done regularly. But to think it over as you lie in bed, or walk about,
or sit cosily over your fire, to turn it all in your thoughts and make things
fit, that requires elbow-grease of the mind. The arrangement of words is as
though you were walking simply along a road. The arrangement of your story is
as though you were carrying a sack of flour while you walked.”
I have chosen that passage because it has a
matter-of-fact quality, its analogy explains simply how the writers task is
done. To be a novelist one must be interested in life, rather than in fiction,
and this is the only justification a writer needs for adding to the millions of
books already in existence. A good novelist has a strong sense of his vocation.
Here is what Joseph Conrad has to say: “You must give yourself up to emotions.
(No easy task). You must squeeze out of yourself every sensation, every
thought, every image,–mercilessly, without reserve and without remorse. You must
search the darkest corners of your heart, the most remote recesses of your
brain,–you must search them for the image, for the glamour, for the right
expression. And you must do it sincerely, at any cost: you must do it so that
at the end of your day’s work you should feel exhausted, emptied of every
sensation and every thought, with a blank mind and an aching heart, with the
notion that there is nothing left in you. To me it seems that it is the only
way to achieve true distinction–even to go someway towards it.” Joseph Conrad’s
views have an added interest. I feel, because he was a Pole, who in middle age
began to write, and chose English rather than his mother tongue, for his
medium. His mastery of a foreign language was brilliant and impressive, his work
has to be judged by the highest standard.
An American writer, Julian Green, who chose French
in which to express his creative urge, has gained almost equal recognition and
renown in the country of his adoption. And in recent years numerous refugees have
had the courage to tackle the problem of expression in an alien language in
England and America. Their work is both valid and valuable for our time, even
though nothing seemingly permanent results from such activities. But they have
served us as interpreters. A similar problem is one that faces all Indian
authors who use English as a medium for expression. In the West all too little
is known of the work of contemporary creative Indian writers, at the present
time. But this state of affairs will change and change rapidly, since the world
is watching India’s political progress with sympathetic eyes. Your gifted
writers can interpret the complexities of life in this great country, with all
the varied implications, more soundly and sanely than anyone else. Writers can
win for you consideration and understanding of your problems. They can describe
life as it is lived in the humble and remote villages, or in the teeming
prosperous ports. They can deal with India’s problems and prospects in a way
which will influence the imagination of the West. They can focus the attention
of your own peoples on questions of importance to you all. Your writers of
today have great potentialities but you must provide audiences to encourage and
stimulate them with adequate recognition and applause. What are their aims to
be? Are they to consider only Western audiences, or will they achieve something
finer and more worth while by setting themselves the highest possible
standards? I think for the time being they must consider themselves as
forerunners, writers on whose work, other writers can build. But their work
will only be valid and stimulating if it has integrity. Writers today have many
problems that harass them, there is the general state of world-wide economic
difficulties, there is the shortage of paper, the lowering of editorial and
publishing standards, there is the influx of amateurs into the market. But the
author with genuine gifts will struggle on, trying to preserve his integrity.
He has to guard himself against self-pity and bitterness, to survive neglect
and indifference, to rely on himself rather than on the critics who are all too
often either academic, or fashionable. But in spite of all the handicaps the
writer, like all those who follow creative pursuits, is a fortunate individual,
since he is doing work which he loves. And those of us who are able to do the
work we really want to do, are all too rare in the world today. But the task is
not an easy one, do not be listed by a limpid style; into thinking that a pad of
paper and a pencil is all that you need to start on the career of a writer. It
is said that every individual could write one book, but this merely means that
each person’s life could provide the material needed. When it comes to the
actual job of putting down of words on paper, the writer quickly exhausts
himself. The writer’s task, like that of any other skilled craftsman, has to be
learned, slowly and arduously. And if the writer is going to emerge from the
ruck, he must have something to say, by that, I mean, he must have an inner
compulsion, a belief in himself, which will override all the difficulties which
he will encounter in his first efforts to gain recognition. He may have to wait
for years before he can get into print, to work without either encouragement or
material reward. Yet if he has a genuine creative gift, he will be prepared to
do this, since his belief in his own talent will effectively sustain him. All
writers, whatever their gifts, have had to follow this hard and lonely road,
and even those to whom public recognition came rapidly, had only their own
belief in themselves in the beginning. But this is enough, really, since the
person who holds this conviction strongly enough will ultimately gain an
audience, for what he wishes to say. My own experience may be of some interest
to those among you who either wish to write, or to know a little about a
writer’s problems. To start with, I had to secure a lively hood, which
permitted me to write in my own spare time. And this was by no means easy. The
next thing proved even harder, and that was to put down my ideas into readable
prose. For a time I despaired, but because the urge was strong enough I at
length produced a story, which I assured myself was worthy of being put into
print. Thus self-encouraged, I persevered, but it was not until I had written
three novels and quite a few short stories, that I succeeded in imposing my own
conviction on someone else. You may imagine the hours of labour, the periods of
resentment, and the stiffening of my own character, which went into these early
years of unrewarded struggle. But I loved writing, and this alone made it
possible for me to persist in my ambition. But the writer needs the stimulus of
recognition if he is to progress, for without this his talent may eventually
become stunted, or precious. If he has the integrity which generally goes with
talent, discriminating praise will encourage and strengthen his gifts, while
empty flattery will leave him unmoved. The good writer is a mixture of pride
and humility, for he is conscious of his limitations as well as of his gifts,
which guards him against complacent self-satisfaction. Today when so many
people write, the competition is naturally much keener, so that authors, who
can produce stuff which is competent, rather than arresting or original, tend
to gain more rapid recognition. The more serious writer finds himself
handicapped by his own gifts, and his work often seems lost in a flood of
mediocrity. But his standards are valid, and only he can make lasting
contributions to literature. Virginia Woolf, in one of her most brilliant
essays on the art of letters, suggests that nothing was ever said about the
writer’s state of mind till the end of the eighteenth century. Rousseau, she
thought, began it. She goes on to say: “Thus, though we do not know what
Shakespeare went through when he wrote Lear, we do know what Carlyle
went through when he wrote the French Revolution; what Flaubert went
through when he wrote Madame Bovary; what Keats was going through when he
tried to write poetry against the coming of death and the indifference of the
world.”
Virginia Woolf herself, and many other considerable writers have given us a great deal of fascinating material about the methods they used to produce their works. But such things as they can tell us, while interesting and stimulating, only touch on the outer secrets of creative art. The heart of the mystery remains even to the writer himself a mystery still. He can tell you of his impulses, of his conceptions even. But if you question him closely, he will have to admit that there are intangibles which he himself cannot explain.