Picked-Up Pieces Read Online Free PDF

cover the case; what is needed is a habit of honesty on the part of the writer. He must, rather athletically, instill his wrists with the refusal to write whatever is lazily assumed, or hastily perceived, or piously hoped. Fiction is a tissue of literal lies that refreshes and informs our sense of actuality. Reality is—chemically, atomically, biologically—a fabric of microscopic accuracies. Language approximates phenomena through a series of hesitations and qualifications; I miss, in much contemporary writing, this sense of self-qualification, the kind of timid reverence toward what exists that Cézanne shows when he grapples for the shape and shade of a fruit through a mist of delicate stabs. The intensity of the grapple is the surest pleasure a writer receives. Though our first and final impression of Creation is not that it was achieved by taking pains, perhaps we should proceed in the humble faith that, by taking pains, word by word, to be accurate, we put ourselves on the way toward making something useful and beautiful and, in a word, good.
The Future of the Novel
†
    F IRST , let us ask, to what extent is The Future of the Novel a non-question, a non-issue repeatedly raised by literary journalists about anon-thing, the Novel? Do we worry ourselves with the future of the Poem? Surprisingly, not. Yet verse, compared to narrative prose, would seem to be the more fragile device, far more vulnerable to the clamorous counterclaims of television, the cinema, and traffic noise, far less likely to survive into an age of McLuhanism, Computerization, and whatever other polysyllables would dull our sensibilities and eclipse our humanistic heritage. In fact, poetry has survived. Great poets appear, do their work, and die. Waves of excitement and revolution occur, and are followed by lulls of consolidation and repose. An Ezra Pound or an Allen Ginsberg issues proclamations and generates apostles; relatively isolated and soft-spoken figures such as our Wallace Stevens and your Philip Larkin also meditate, and create. No doubt some decades are more fruitful of enduring verse than others; but each generation seems to supply its quota of poets and, odder still, of poetry readers. A certain slender ardent audience for poetry persists, and indeed in the United States seems to be widening; and if we include as “poets” (and why not?) the ubiquitous pop lyricists in the style of Bob Dylan and the Beatles, the audience is very wide indeed. The appetite for song—for things singingly said—would seem to be so fundamental to human nature that no foreseeable turn of technology or history could soon root it out.
    Now, might we not assume the same of prose narrative? Perhaps; but the impression does linger that the Novel is not quite a category of human expression as eternal as Poetry, or the Dance, or the Joke, but is instead, like the Verse Epic, like the dramatic form called Tragedy, a genre with a life cycle and a death—a death, indeed, that may have already occurred.
    Dr. Johnson, in his Dictionary, defined the word “novel” as “a small tale, generally of love.” What he had in mind, of course, were the Italian
novelle
, written in great quantity from the 14th century to the 17th, of which Boccaccio’s were the most famous, and from which Shakespeare derived the plots of, among other plays,
Romeo and Juliet
and
Othello
. The novel form in England was greatly enriched and broadened: Richardson brought to it the imitation of the epistle and Defoe the imitation of the journal; with Fielding and Jane Austen it becomes an inhabitable microcosm of society; and with Dickens the many-chambered Novel is expanded to include a courtroom for the indictment of social abuse. In the 19th century, length—physical bulk, the rendering of the sonorousmusic of passing time—becomes so intrinsic to the idea of the once-modest
novella
that Tennyson speaks of the ideal novel as one that will just “go on and on and never end.” Throughout,