The Desolate Cycle

A Formula by Which the Man on the Street May Live the Literary Life

DAVID CORT

EDITOR'S NOTE: The inner machinery of the writer's mind has for long been an uncharted country. That this should be so is a blot on the understanding of the people. The secret of the "literary fellow'' lies in a very simple, mechanical formula. By mastering this, any man on the street may, with energy, induce the "literary approach." The value of the notes below should not be—indeed, cannot be —underestimated, for it was only after a severe struggle with his artistic conscience that the writer was free to reveal a secret that has been so jealously guarded through the years. The struggle was made the more difficult by the fact that the writer has, by confession, no artistic conscience to struggle with.

THE room confounded frivolous thinking. It seemed small and yet suggestive of height, of space, of light, of the reflections of the best and most impoverished literary fellows. A sofa was piled in irregular sierras with books, moraines of scattered papers, pillows, a typewriter cover. The papers had a common sorrow: they were every one defaced with a scribbling that ran diagonally without any economy of space from corner to corner. First of all— there were books! Then a wash-basin, a bureau with a mirror, a deal table: these did not conflict with the impression of autumnal repose which the drifted papers, like fallen leaves, conveyed. Only in one corner, beneath the washbasin, gathered a nervous confusion of cigarette ends and papers crumpled with the clenching of a hand. They seemed symbolically the skeletons of forgotten tragedies, the wraiths of old melancholics, the madnesses of other nights. From each one came an odour, the fragrance of an especial mood, a particular despair.

To desert the objective, and look into the mind of the man, the solitary, who leaned against the wall smoking a cigarette, is unprofitable enough, for there was nothing but whorlcd smoke and fatuous reverie there. The thoughts hung low in his brain, like smoke on a wet day: "Good God! This will soon be insanity. Here have I stood and sat and stood and smoked and wiped my eyes with water and moved my tongue around in my mouth and I have not written a line, a word, in four days. Not even a word to throw away. I do not think I have even thought a thought to throw away. God or Beelzebub, it is all one to me, give me a word of succour. Send me a light; send me even darkness, it is so much the better—the gloomy is paying better this year. But not this half-light, this anything that is not even nothing ..."

He did not cry aloud. It would have committed him to the ranks of the baroque writers. The movement of his cigarette to his mouth was not a stark gesture of tragedy, for he believed in the aesthetic integrity of the new natural school of acting. He gave no sign by any attitude that he had prayed, for, indeed, he did not know that he had prayed. The supplication of the man to the black or the whiteDivinity was unspoken; it was even unrealized. It is out of such moods that prayers arc made. It is out of such prayers that gods arc made. And these gods arc the gods who make geniuses and idiots, sonnets and advertising blurbs, the just and precise word and the stevedore's oath, minds in garrets and fools in limousines. Thcy may be found only in humility.

The man dropped his unfinished cigarette on the floor, for his mouth was now as parched as his mind. Idly he stepped on the cigarette. He drew water from the faucet of the washbasin into a glass and poured it, icyvoluptuously gurgling, down his throat. Since there was nothing left to do, he lit another cigarette. The dry, gray taste of it was not satisfying. Again the lining of his mouth seemed to buckle in a thousand arid eruptions. Again he threw the cigarette on the floor.

In spite of the theologians, there is a bottom to vacuity. A voice came then to the man:

"Vain man. You hope to think of the moment, when you arc weighted with the old sediment, the refuse of all your past moments. On the bed is the profit of all you have thought and written before. It is good, but it is too good. You are impressed, by it. You must, sacrifice what you have done heretofore; or what you will do hereafter. You cannot retain both. It is impossible to unthink all that is scribbled across those pages. There is, however, a way. Burn them. You will find that the forgotten fire will return to you. You will write again with a facility that you have not known for four days. Such is the judgment."

A God had spoken. A revelation had come to the young man. Frantic with the inarticulateness of four days, he caught up the piles of papers. Sheet by sheet, manuscript by manuscript, he touched them to a match, let them burn to a charred corner, and dropped them under the wash-basin.

At length the sofa where his folios had lain was a tabula rasa. His mind, as he conceived, was now ready for fresh triumphs. He sat down at his table, put a sheet of foolscap before him and waited. Suddenly he felt the beginnings of a singular and unexplained elation. The center of this disturbance seemed to be in his lower intestines. You and I know that the agitation came from a germ that is sometimes known as Physical Satisfaction or Self-Love . . . but that it is neither of these: it is Genius. Well, this eruption remained constant for a moment so that the young man was able to look upon it and find it good. He looked then in the mirror. Therc was an angle of sensitive precocity in his face which at that moment enchanted him. The germ began now to whirl slowly and expand in its dimensions, at the same time that its axis moved gradually upwards. This whirling and expansion, this ascension, was accelerated in a deliberate crescendo. A line that he had once written came to his mind. It struck him—he could not say just how—but there was a je ne sais quo't there—there was a style—he was sure of it. Now the original germ had assumed considerable substance and was whirling at a monstrous rate and had risen to the level of his cardiac valves. His blood began to beat in his arteries with a racking fever. His eyes were bright with an almost demented brightness. His mouth was drawn into a line of fascinated introspection, as though he were afraid to look upon what he found in his imagination. At the last, the revolving flood mounted to his brain. There was a burst of something much like flame . . .

He was now ready to begin writing.

For a month this lasted. He wrote, indeed, with the old force. Magically, the sofa became littered with sheaves of manuscript. But there came a day when he could write nothing; it was followed by another precisely like it; another; and yet another. Though if you had been watching, you would have seen no outward sign that he had appealed to any god that would offer, you might have told that a voice had come to him by his subsequent act.

He caught up the piles of papers. Sheet by sheet, manuscript by manuscript, he touched them to a match, let them burn to a charred corner, and dropped them under the washbasin. He sat down at the table, put a sheet of foolscap before him, and waited. Suddenly he felt the beginnings of a singular elation . . .