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.Man began to disintegrate under the microscope of analysis, carried to its ultimate perfection by Proust.Man dissolved in the undifferentiated flow of unconscious monologue found in Joyce.But neither of these processes needed to prove fatal to man, any more than the splitting of the atom needed to destroy energy.On the contrary, it released more energy.Analysis of man could release more energy and create a more sincere synthesis.This new dimension, discovered and explored, could well be an instrument to make men more potent and whole.Some writers expect to know what form to adopt before they begin to write.I feel that form is not a matter of préfabrication, but that it is created by the meaning, the content of the book, by its theme.For me it is an inner eruption, very similar to that created by the earth itself in its perpetual evolutions.They happen according to inner tensions, inner pressures, inner accidents of climate, and it is the accumulation of such inner organic incidents which created mountains and oceans.To discover my own form I have first to dig very deeply into this natural source of creation.And the sources of creation, as in geology, lie very deep at the center of the being, as they do at the center of the earth.Once I have been willing to travel in darkness, to the center of the earth, I find precious coals, metals, stones, and all the elements necessary to life.I also find fire, and without fire no creation is possible, for fire makes coalescence.Fire, earth, and water are all parts of creation, passion, experience, flow.Once I have tapped those sources, writing becomes as natural as singing.When writing comes with difficulty, it simply means that, like the ancient sourcier, I have not yet found the sources of water.Too great an emphasis on technique arrests naturalness.The material from which I will create comes from living, from the personality, from experience, adventures, voyages.This natural flow of riches comes first.The technique is merely a way to organize the flow, to chisel, shape; but without the original flow from deep inner riches of material, everything withers.America has suffered from a cult of craft and techniques.Every technique is a craft which is adopted from without, not from inner necessity, or inner vision.It can only photograph and register: nothing else.It cannot impart life.I look at writing as a natural, spontaneous thing, like a torrent.When I see a very meager stream, hesitations, difficulties, premeditations, preparations, and much talk, I know the source is poor.The theme of the diary is always the personal, but it does not mean only a personal story: it means a personal relation to all things and people.The personal, if it is deep enough, becomes universal, mythical, symbolic; I never generalize, intellectualize.I see, I hear, I feel.These are my primitive instruments of discovery.These discoveries coincided with the discoveries of psychology and science (or rather were influenced and developed by them).Being true to my own experience, I discovered the basic theme of modem literature: man dismembered by analysis, by modern life, by modern technology, achieving a state of nonfeeling dangerous to his sanity and his life.The primitive and the poet never parted company.When Picasso reached a certain plateau in his creativity, he reached for African inspiration to renew himself.Intellectual knowledge is not enough.Music, the dance, poetry and painting are the channels for emotion.It is through them that experience penetrates our blood stream.Ideas do not.Much writing in America has confused banality with simplicity, and the cliché with universal sincerity.There is a puritanical suspicion of what may seduce and charm the senses.There is a prejudice against subjectivity, because it is believed subjectivity is a narrowing of the vision.But this is no more true than to say objectivity leads to a larger form of life.Nothing leads to a vaster form of life but the capacity to move deeply inward as well as outward.What is important is neither subjectivity nor objectivity but mobility, aliveness, the interrelation between them and between all relationships.A man who lives unrelated to other human beings dies.But a man who lives unrelated to himself also dies.The most important problem for the novelist is that each generation must create its own reality and its own language, its own images.Each one of us must re-create the world.There is a new dimension in character, and I am seeking a way to seize it.The old single point of view is too rigid.Man's life is in great part dreamed.This part must be exposed and tracked down.It is part of our reality, our emotional reality.I work by flashes of intuition, a succession of illuminations.Far more is revealed in a selected moment than in a huge construction of details.The world around the character is described as the character sees it; an emotional landscape.The sewing of a button reveals the carelessness of one man in his relationship to the woman who is sewing.Moving back and forth in time, because the past interferes in and often takes over the present.It was Henry James himself who said that if you describe a house too completely, too concretely, objectively, solidly, in every detail, then it becomes impossible for the imagination to conceive of what might happen there.The character of the house overshadows events, creates its own associations with peripheral atmospheres (time, place, history, architecture).The reality of the house swallows the canvas and the storyteller.I go in the opposite direction.I want the least trappings and decor possible.[Summer, 1946]When Maya asked us to act in her film, we all confessed our individual fears.Frank Westbrook's skin was marked by smallpox and he was sensitive about it.Sasha promised he would bear that in mind.I confessed I was the oldest and feared close-ups.Each one of us had a defect, a flaw, a minor weakness.A heavy leg, or a heavy neck.Sasha and Maya assured everyone that the editing would respect that [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]