SURGERY FOR THE NOVEL-OR A BOMB

You talk about the future of the baby, little cherub, when he’s in the cradle cooing; and it’s a romantic, glamorous subject. You also talk, with the parson, about the future of the wicked old grandfather who is at last lying on his death-bed. And there again you have a subject for much vague emotion, chiefly of fear this time.

How do we feel about the novel? Do we bounce with joy thinking of the wonderful novelistic days ahead? Or do we grimly shake our heads and hope the wicked creature will be spared a little longer? Is the novel on his death-bed, old sinner? Or is he just toddling round his cradle, sweet little thing? Let us have another look at him before we decide this rather serious case.

There he is, the monster with many faces, many branches to him, like a tree: the modern novel. And he is almost dual, like Siamese twins. On the one hand, the pale-faced, high-browed, earnest novel, which you have to take seriously; on the other, that smirking, rather plausible hussy, the popular novel.

Let us just for the moment feel the pulses of Ulysses and of Miss Dorothy Richardson and M. Marcel Proust, on the earnest side of Briareus; on the other, the throb of The Sheik and Mr. Zane Grey, and, if you will, Mr. Robert Chambers and the rest. Is Ulysses in his cradle? Oh, dear! What a grey face! And Pointed Roofs, are they a gay little toy for nice little girls? And M. Proust? Alas! You can hear the death-rattle in their throats. They can hear it themselves. They are listening to it with acute interest, trying to discover whether the intervals are minor thirds or major fourths. Which is rather infantile, really.

So there you have the “serious” novel, dying in a very long-drawn- out fourteen-volume death-agony, and absorbedly, childishly interested in the phenomenon. “Did I feel a twinge in my little toe, or didn’t I?” asks every character of Mr. Joyce or of Miss Richardson or M. Proust. Is my aura a blend of frankincense and orange pekoe and boot-blacking, or is it myrrh and bacon-fat and Shetland tweed? The audience round the death-bed gapes for the answer. And when, in a sepulchral tone, the answer comes at length, after hundreds of pages: “It is none of these, it is abysmal chloro-coryambasis,” the audience quivers all over, and murmurs: “That’s just how I feel myself.”

Which is the dismal, long-drawn-out comedy of the death-bed of the serious novel. It is self-consciousness picked into such fine bits that the bits are most of them invisible, and you have to go by smell. Through thousands and thousands of pages Mr. Joyce and Miss Richardson tear themselves to pieces, strip their smallest emotions to the finest threads, till you feel you are sewed inside a wool mattress that is being slowly shaken up, and you are turning to wool along with the rest of the woolliness.

It’s awful. And it’s childish. It really is childish, after a certain age, to be absorbedly self-conscious. One has to be self-conscious at seventeen: still a little self-conscious at twenty-seven; but if we are going it strong at thirty-seven, then it is a sign of arrested development, nothing else. And if it is still continuing at forty-seven, it is obvious senile precocity.

And there’s the serious novel: senile-precocious. Absorbedly, childishly concerned with what I am. “I am this, I am that, I am the other. My reactions are such, and such, and such. And, oh, Lord, if I liked to watch myself closely enough, if I liked to analyse my feelings minutely, as I unbutton my gloves, instead of saying crudely I unbuttoned them, then I could go on to a million pages instead of a thousand. In fact, the more I come to think of it, it is gross, it is uncivilized bluntly to say: I unbuttoned my gloves. After all, the absorbing adventure of it! Which button did I begin with?” etc.

The people in the serious novels are so absorbedly concerned with themselves and what they feel and don’t feel, and how they react to every mortal button; and their audience as frenziedly absorbed in the application of the author’s discoveries to their own reactions: “That’s me! That’s exactly it! I’m just finding myself in this book!” Why, this is more than death-bed, it is almost post-mortem behaviour.

Some convulsion or cataclysm will have to get this serious novel out of its self-consciousness. The last great war made it worse. What’s to be done? Because, poor thing, it’s really young yet. The novel has never become fully adult. It has never quite grown to years of discretion. It has always youthfully hoped for the best, and felt rather sorry for itself on the last page. Which is just childish. The childishness has become very long-drawn-out. So very many adolescents who drag their adolescence on into their forties and their fifties and their sixties! There needs some sort of surgical operation, somewhere.

Then the popular novels — the Sheiks and Babbitts and Zane Grey novels. They are just as self-conscious, only they do have more illusions about themselves. The heroines do think they are lovelier, and more fascinating, and purer. The heroes do see themselves more heroic, braver, more chivalrous, more fetching. The mass of the populace “find themselves” in the popular novels. But nowadays it’s a funny sort of self they find. A Sheik with a whip up his sleeve, and a heroine with weals on her back, but adored in the end, adored, the whip out of sight, but the weals still faintly visible.

It’s a funny sort of self they discover in the popular novels. And the essential moral of If Winter Comes, for example, is so shaky. “The gooder you are, the worse it is for you, poor you, oh, poor you. Don’t you be so blimey good, it’s not good enough.” Or Babbitt: “Go on, you make your pile, and then pretend you’re too good for it. Put it over the rest of the grabbers that way. They’re only pleased with themselves when they’ve made their pile. You go one better.”

Always the same sort of baking-powder gas to make you rise: the soda counteracting the cream of tartar, and the tartar counteracted by the soda. Sheik heroines, duly whipped, wildly adored. Babbitts with solid fortunes, weeping from self-pity. Winter-Comes heroes as good as pie, hauled off to jail. Moral: Don’t be too good, because you’ll go to jail for it. Moral: Don’t feel sorry for yourself till you’ve made your pile and don’t need to feel sorry for yourself. Moral: Don’t let him adore you till he’s whipped you into it. Then you’ll be partners in mild crime as well as in holy matrimony.

Which again is childish. Adolescence which can’t grow up. Got into the self-conscious rut and going crazy, quite crazy in it. Carrying on their adolescence into middle age and old age, like the looney Cleopatra in Dombey and Son, murmuring “Rose-coloured curtains” with her dying breath.

The future of the novel? Poor old novel, it’s in a rather dirty, messy tight corner. And it’s either got to get over the wall or knock a hole through it. In other words, it’s got to grow up. Put away childish things like: “Do I love the girl, or don’t I?” — ”Am I pure and sweet, or am I not?” — ”Do I unbutton my right glove first, or my left?” — ”Did my mother ruin my life by refusing to drink the cocoa which my bride had boiled for her?” These questions and their answers don’t really interest me any more, though the world still goes sawing them over. I simply don’t care for any of these things now, though I used to. The purely emotional and self-analytical stunts are played out in me. I’m finished. I’m deaf to the whole band. But I’m neither blase nor cynical, for all that. I’m just interested in something else.

Supposing a bomb were put under the whole scheme of things, what would we be after? What feelings do we want to carry through into the next epoch? What feelings will carry us through? What is the underlying impulse in us that will provide the motive power for a new state of things, when this democratic-industrial-lovey- dovey-darling-take-me-to-mamma state of things is bust?

What next? That’s what interests me. “What now?” is no fun any more.

If you wish to look into the past for what-next books, you can go back to the Greek philosophers. Plato’s Dialogues are queer little novels. It seems to me it was the greatest pity in the world, when philosophy and fiction got split. They used to be one, right from the days of myth. Then they went and parted, like a nagging married couple, with Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas and that beastly Kant. So the novel went sloppy, and philosophy went abstract-dry. The two should come together again — in the novel.

You’ve got to find a new impulse for new things in mankind, and it’s really fatal to find it through abstraction. No, no; philosophy and religion, they’ve both gone too far on the algebraical tack: Let X stand for sheep and Y for goats: then X minus Y equals Heaven, and X plus Y equals Earth, and Y minus X equals Hell. Thank you! But what coloured shirt does X have on?

The novel has a future. It’s got to have the courage to tackle new propositions without using abstractions; it’s got to present us with new, really new feelings, a whole line of new emotion, which will get us out of the emotional rut. Instead of snivelling about what is and has been, or inventing new sensations in the old line, it’s got to break a way through, like a hole in the wall. And the public will scream and say it is sacrilege: because, of course, when you’ve been jammed for a long time in a tight corner, and you get really used to its stuffiness and its tightness, till you find it suffocatingly cozy; then, of course, you’re horrified when you see a new glaring hole in what was your cosy wall. You’re horrified. You back away from the cold stream of fresh air as if it were killing you. But gradually, first one and then another of the sheep filters through the gap, and finds a new world outside.