Literature and Life

...The great poet after whom I have been named followed in the tradition of his master Plato when he distinguished between what he called "liberty" and "license...

...Literature, if it is not "the contrary of reality" (as someone has put it), is certainly only obliquely related to reality...

...Instead, that is, of going into action directly...

...A fact that has forced itself on my attention as a teacher is that the distance which separates literature from life is apparently not the same for all readers...

...But it seems equally obvious that you are in much greater danger if the threat is spoken to your face than if it is written down...

...The scatological passages in Swift's Gulliver s Travels may perhaps not delight every reader equally—they are often bowdlerized completely—but they delight me...

...This does not mean that I would defend everything indiscriminately and thoughtlessly...

...It is life at only one remove...

...upon which side they lay in bed...

...To take the trouble of writing is to count ten many times over...

...Auden wrote a good quatrain on this theme occasioned by the death of the poet Yeats: "Time that is intolerant Of the brave and innocent Worships language and forgives Everyone by whom it lives...

...It becomes a question of another world entirely...

...Only the most frenzied will not have had time to cool off during such an interval...

...The spoken word is too intimately connected with life, in my opinion, to attract me to its defense...

...might be taken to mean, in addition to the obvious interpretation (namely, that we wish our opponent had laid open his weaknesses to our counterattack) : "Oh that my enemy had written a book instead...

...The facts may be hard to live with, but we'd damn well better learn to live with them, for to live without them may be to cut ourselves off from appreciation of a good portion of the contemporary genius of mankind...

...The separation of literature from life exists for everybody, I think, but it appears in a marked degree for some people...

...to take a strict view of their excrements, and, from the colour, the odour, the taste, the consistence, the crudeness or maturity of digestion, form a judgment of their thoughts and designs...

...but Pound probably had no notion that he was dealing with any reality other than words, and it is not as if he had gone out personally and killed them all...

...The well-known expression: "Oh that my enemy had written a book...

...for in such conjunctures, when he used merely as a trial to consider which was the best way of murdering the king, his ordure would have a tincture of green, but quite different when he thought only of raising an insurrection or burning the metropolis...

...All professional writers are prone to this abuse...

...If someone writes you a threatening note, or even tells you point-blank that he is going to kill you, that is obviously not the same thing as if he actually did it...

...In literature, on the other hand, few things delight me more...

...that would be entirely too easy...

...For between the written word and the deed "falls the shadow...

...On the other side there is Theodore Dreiser, who did not cease being one of the most gifted American novelists when he took out a Communist-party card...

...No use talking of satire to them...

...It is especially marked in me, for example—that is why I have always interested myself so deeply in the subject...

...This is a chapter of my reply —one more chapter added to those found in my writings of the past dozen years and especially in my book The Crippled Giant...

...WRITERS and WRITING Literature and Life By Milton Hindus My mother, with the faith and cultural ambition characteristic of an immigrant, named me in honor of the author of the Areopagi-tica, and fate ever since has conspired to make me a defender of the freedom of the written word...

...That seeins an evasion and rationalization of the most sadistic cruelty, for they can already behold in their mind's eye the poor innocents being slaughtered in exactly the manner which Swift facetiously suggests...

...But consider that Whitman (who seems in the least danger of being accused of underestimating the importance of reality) once referred to his Leaves of Grass as "a language experiment...

...Anti-Semitism, Communism, indecency—to reduce a thought or impulse to print is to reduce it indeed...

...of these armpits" as "aroma finer than prayer...

...Pound, in an early poem, foretold his own "final exclusion from the world of letters...

...the sight or smell or even the too-vivid thought of them has the power of making me nauseous when they present themselves to me as a part of life...

...Literature seems to be something of an ultimate form of democracy in which alone the saint, like Augustine, and the sinner, like Francois Villon, may meet on absolutely equal terms with no questions asked except about talent...

...What may be justified liberty in one field may be rejected as unbridled licentiousness when carried across the line into the realm of reality...

...The writings of Sigmund Freud are far from having the force of Scripture for me which they seem to have for some others, but I find a passage (Collected Papers, Vol...

...It is as if we envied them their power of retaining a blissful state of mind —an unassailable libido-position which we ourselves have since abandoned...

...That is the innermost spirit of the line as it comes through to me—not in conflict with its letter but going 'way beyond it...

...The more Rabelaisian, the better I like it...

...Note that I say written word...

...The spoken word trembles on the very edge of life itself...

...I take it to be the impassioned expression of a lover of the human body and all its manifestations, a lover so passionate that his vision transforms the basest physical facts into spiritual significances...

...These waste products turn my stomach...

...Of course, all words, whether spoken or written, may be differentiated from something which is much more real...

...But that may be precisely the reason he found it so pleasurable to write about the subject...

...If either of these assumptions had been true, I could not have liked the line as much as I do...

...When a man is in a fit of passion, we caution him to "count ten" before he does anything rash...

...He may be ex-eluded from society (in fact he is locked up in a lunatic asylum at this very moment, and the alternative after the war was execution as a traitor), but his admittance into the field of literature, whether we like it or not, has been assured by his God-given talent...

...In some (those students whom I suspect of having the least specific sensitivity for literature), there is an actual confusion of the two things, so that whatever pleases them in reality pleases them in literature, and so on...

...It must not be thought, from the frequency of such passages in his work, that Swift's reactions to the phenomena listed here in such loving detail were less violent than the reader's...

...I need not cite the art-for-art's-sake movement in this connection...

...Nothing disgusts me in actuality more than the results of the bodily functions—excrement, sweat, etc...

...with which hand they wiped their posteriors...

...When he refers in one of the Cantos to Russians killed in battle as "fresh meat on the Steppes,' we may sympathize with the indignation of Peter Viereck...

...The line between the two...

...yet, I must recognize in fairness that it was a sentiment similar to Whitman's which prompted the French writer Celine to describe his anti-Semitic pamphlet Bagatelles pour un Massacre as "an exercise...

...Therefore, the most extraordinary vagaries may legitimately be permitted on paper, which would be tolerated in no other form...

...These words, I assume from everything I know of Whitman and from the context of the poem, were not intended as an insult to religion, nor were they calculated to call up in our minds the scent of underarm perspiration...

...It is not life straight, you see (in spite of all his assurances that "who touches this book, touches a man"), but life refracted though the medium of words—which makes all the difference...

...Freedom of speech is an excellent thing and is guaranteed by the American Constitution, but it must have other defenders than myself...

...Prayer is fine, the soul is all very well, faith is of an unparalleled greatness—he seems to be saying to me here as everywhere in his work?but the physical attributes of humanity, which the Puritans had repressed appreciation of for so long, are not to be despised either...

...Such perversion has been especially attractive, it seems, to some of our modern writers, of whom the enormously gifted Ezra Pound is an excellent example...

...Because men are never so serious, thoughtful and intent, as when they are at stool, which he found by frequent experiment...

...As a Jew living in a generation which has witnessed the extinction of a third of my people in circumstances of cruelty which put Swift's Modest Proposal in the shade, I am hardly in a mood for trifling on the subject of anti-Semitism...

...The late Alexander Alekhine, chess champion of the world, did not lose any of his talent for the game when he embraced the doctrines of the Nazis...

...Puffs of sound are not blows of the fist, nor are inky shapes the same as tracks of blood...

...Let me give another example from the poetry of Whitman...

...I wish to protest against the injustice of this or even its feasibility...

...I find that a rhyme still survives in childish lore today which I remember from my own childhood: "Sticks and stones may break my bones, but names can never hurt me...

...I suggest, corresponds to the difference that exists between literature and life...

...And it is a much more palpable shadow that falls between the written word and the acts of life than between the spoken word and the same acts...

...He advised great statesmen to examine into the diet of all suspected persons...

...The written word, however, is life at two removes...

...Here is a passage describing the Experimental Academy on the Flying Island of Laputa: "Another professor showed me a large paper of instructions for discovering plots and conspiracies against the government...

...Carried to this extreme, the separation of literature from life ends in complete divorce and perversion...

...Recently, after I had published a reasonably easygoing review of Celine's newly translated novel Guignol's Band in the New York Times, an answer appeared in the Yiddish-language paper the Day which invited me to explain my motivations in writing the article...

...their times of eating...

...IV, Chapter 3) which throws light on the problem: "In literature, indeed, even the great criminal and the humorist compel our interest by the narcissistic self-importance with which they manage to keep at arm's length everything that would diminish the importance of their egos...

...Nothing is intolerable so long as it is confined to the printed page...

...A very fine line in Song of Myself is the one in which the poet speaks of "the odor Milton Hindus, who teaches English literature at Brandeis University, is author of The Crippled Giant...

...Literature might even be considered a sort of safety valve for feelings which, without its release, might build up to an intensity which spilled over into something much more serious...

...On the other hand, the distance between literature and life for some other people may be entirely too large...

...And I need hardly mention Picasso or Sartre or Rivera...

...Let me give a few concrete examples...

...It requires the kind of effort on the part of reader and writer which is a form of insurance against immediate violence...

...Literature is literature is not life —as Gertrude Stein (for whom the divorce between the two became notorious) might have said...

...These are the unanalytical freshmen who are so outraged by Swift's Modest Proposal to use the flesh of the children of the poor in Ireland as a tasty morsel for the tables of the rich...

...That something we call action...

...Nor did the novelist Knut Hamsun when he did likewise...