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Auden on Writing, Originality, Self-Criticism,
and How to Be a Good Reader
Text reprinted with permission
from Brain Pickings Newsletter,
<https://www.brainpickings.org/newsletter/> August 14, 2016
*“Before writers are writers they are readers, living in books,
through books, in the lives of others that are also the heads of
others, in that act that is so intimate and yet so alone, *“Rebecca
Solnit observed in her beautiful. *“At the hour when our imagination
and our ability to associate are at their height,”* Hermann Hesse
asserted in contemplating the three styles of reading
<http://brainpickings.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=09f6f2de28&e=9bf5ccfaaa>,
*“we really no longer read what is printed on the paper but swim in a
stream of impulses and inspirations that reach us from what we are
reading.”* Both reader and writer hold this transcendent communion on
the page as the highest hope for their respective reward, but it is a
reward each can attain only with the utmost skill and
dedication.
The separate but symbiotic rewards of reading and writing, and the
skills required for each, are what *W.H. Auden*(February 21,
1907–September 29, 1973) examines in *The Dyer’s Hand and Other
Essays*
<http://brainpickings.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=2e8270d2a5&e=9bf5ccfaaa>
(*public library*
<http://brainpickings.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=2e08549f62&e=9bf5ccfaaa>).
Although he remains one of the most celebrated, beloved, and
influential poets
of the past century, it is in this posthumously collected aphoristic
prose that Auden speaks most directly to his values, his ideas about
literature and art,
and his creative process.
In a sentiment of even sterner conviction than Nabokov’s ten, Auden
considers reading as an art unto itself:
The interests of a writer and the interests of his*
<http://brainpickings.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=48bc6b2dbb&e=9bf5ccfaaa>
readers
are never the same and if, on occasion, they happen to coincide, this is a
lucky accident.
[…]
To read is to translate, for no two persons’ experiences are the same.
A bad reader is like a bad translator: he interprets literally when he
ought to paraphrase and paraphrases when he ought to interpret
literally. In learning to read well, scholarship, valuable as it is,
is less important than instinct; some great scholars have been poor
translators.
Rendering Tolstoy’s prescriptive reading list for every stage of life
<http://brainpickings.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=db45ee7dd7&e=9bf5ccfaaa>
moot, Auden considers the organic evolution of our taste in reading
over a lifetime:
Good taste is much more a matter of
discrimination than of exclusion, and when good taste feels compelled to
exclude, it is with regret, not with pleasure.
[…]
Between the ages of twenty and forty
we are engaged in the process of discovering who we are, which involves
learning the difference between accidental limitations which it is our study to
outgrow and the necessary limitations of our nature beyond which we cannot
trespass with impunity. Few of us can learn this without making mistakes,
without trying to become a little more of a universal man than we are permitted
to be. It is during this period that a writer can most easily be led astray by
another writer or by some ideology When someone between twenty and forty says,
apropos of a work of art, “I know what I like,” he is really saying “I have no
taste of my own but accept the taste of my cultural milieu,” because
between twenty
and forty, the surest sign that a man has genuine taste of his own is that he
is uncertain of it. After forty, if we have not lost our authentic selves
altogether, pleasure can again become what it was when we were children, the
proper guide to what *we* should read.
*Art by Maurice Sendak for The Big Green Book
<http://brainpickings.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=764ebc806a&e=9bf5ccfaaa>
by Robert Graves*
The challenges of being a reader in
many ways parallel those of being a writer, particularly when it comes to these
tyrannical shoulds — nowhere more so than in the perennially asked, perennially
answered with ire question of why a writer writes and for whom. Auden offers
the most beautiful answer I have yet encountered, at once utterly grounding and
utterly elevating:
A writer … is always being asked by
people who should know better: “Whom do you write for?” The question is, of
course, a silly one, but I can give it a silly answer. Occasionally I come
across a book which I feel has been written especially for me and for me only.
Like a jealous lover, I don’t want anybody else to hear of it. To have a
million such readers, unaware of each other’s existence, to be read with
passion and never talked about, is the daydream, surely, of every author.
In another essay from the volume, he
revisits the same subject from a different angle. Considering the extrinsic
misconceptions and intrinsic self-delusions about why writers write — a
question that has garnered some memorable answers from Pablo Neruda
<http://brainpickings.us2.list-manage1.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=0265ac3957&e=9bf5ccfaaa>,
Joan Didion
<http://brainpickings.us2.list-manage1.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=5a50bb9068&e=9bf5ccfaaa>,
David Foster Wallace
<http://brainpickings.us2.list-manage2.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=70da470222&e=9bf5ccfaaa>,
Italo Calvino
<http://brainpickings.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=cb7662b8f0&e=9bf5ccfaaa>,
and William Faulkner
<http://brainpickings.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=915426773d&e=9bf5ccfaaa>
— Auden offers:
Just as a good man forgets his deed
the moment he has done it, a genuine writer forgets a work as soon as he has
completed it and starts to think about the next one; if he thinks about his
past work at all, he is more likely to remember its faults than its virtues.
Fame often makes a writer vain, but seldom makes him proud.
[…]
Every writer would rather be rich
than poor, but no genuine writer cares about popularity as such. He needs
approval of his work by others in order to be reassured that the vision of life
he believes he has had is a true vision and not a self-delusion, but he can
only be reassured by those whose judgment he respects. It would only be
necessary for a writer to secure universal popularity if imagination and
intelligence were equally distributed among all men.
He then turns to the inner workings
of the creative process and the mystique of inspiration. Unlike Tchaikovsky, who
drew, Auden argues that all creative work is in a sense commissioned — not by a
client but by the Muse, or by what Ursula K. Le Guin so poetically
called “acts He writes:
All works of art are commissioned in
the sense that no artist can create one by a simple act of will but must wait
until what he believes to be a good idea for a work “comes” to him.
And yet what the Muse commissions is
vulnerable to the basic flaw of all human intuition. *“The
confidence people have in their beliefs is not a measure of the quality of
evidence but of the coherence of the story that the mind has managed to
construct,”* Nobel-winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman wrote in
exploring how our minds mislead us
<http://brainpickings.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=a90d5416ab&e=9bf5ccfaaa>.
By the same token, the degree by which our inspiration invigorates us
need not be indicative of the merit of the art it produces. Auden
articulates this with elegant wit:
The degree of excitement which a
writer feels during the process of composition is as much an indication of the
value of the final result as the excitement felt by a worshiper is an
indication of the value of his devotions, that is to say, very little
indication.
But the task of assessing the merits
of one’s own work is a Herculean one. In a passage that calls to mind Susan
Sontag’s ideas about the four people a writer must be
<http://brainpickings.us2.list-manage2.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=e4a92db171&e=9bf5ccfaaa>
and Adam Phillips’s insight into the paradoxical nature of
self-criticism
<http://brainpickings.us2.list-manage1.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=6980fe45cc&e=9bf5ccfaaa>,
Auden offers his formula for effective creative critique of oneself:
To keep his errors down to a
minimum, the internal Censor to whom a poet submits his work in progress should
be a Censorate. It should include, for instance, a sensitive only child, a
practical housewife, a logician, a monk, an irreverent buffoon and
even, perhaps,
hated by all the others and returning their dislike, a brutal, foul-mouthed
drill sergeant who considers all poetry rubbish.
An ability to submit to this Censorate, of course, requires a high
degree of sincerity — something with which Nobel laureate André Gide
had memorably tussled
<http://brainpickings.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=d17b4793b6&e=9bf5ccfaaa>
a century earlier and which Aldous Huxley believed was the cause of a
supreme artistic anxiety
<http://brainpickings.us2.list-manage2.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=7edb44614a&e=9bf5ccfaaa>.
Auden quips, then turns sincere:
Sincerity is like sleep. Normally,
one should assume that, of course, one will be sincere, and not give the
question a second thought. Most writers, however, suffer occasionally from
bouts of insincerity as men do from bouts of insomnia. The remedy in both cases
is often quite simple: in the case of the latter, to change one’s diet, in the
case of the former, to change one’s company.
[…]
Sincerity in the proper sense of the
word, meaning authenticity, is, however, or ought to be, a writer’s chief
preoccupation. No writer can ever judge exactly how good or bad a work of his
may be, but he can always know, not immediately perhaps, but certainly in a
short while, whether something he has written is authentic — in his handwriting
— or a forgery.
Echoing Montaigne’s admonition against the cult of originality
<http://brainpickings.us2.list-manage2.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=d6c85e7e8d&e=9bf5ccfaaa>,
Auden adds:
Some writers confuse authenticity,
which they ought always to aim at, with originality, which they should never
bother about.
========================================
*“ABOUT PEACE AND PEACEMAKING” by MARIA CRISTINA AZCONA and OTHERS*
Humanity´s existence is on peril. Its worst enemy is not only
violence, war or terrorism, but also a profound lack of love,
sensibility and empathy. A complete change for all of us is possible,
but only will arrive from an innovative thought and a serious research
on the possible ways out.
The solution to our problem hides in this book…Let us find the cure to
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http://www.lulu.com/shop/maria-cristina-azcona-ed/about-peace-and-peacemaking/paperback/product-21474672.html";
========================================
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Publishing Emerging Writers
November 2016 (No. 1711)
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