The Dyers Hand and Other Essays

Sir, if you made verse, you would doubt symbols. I am afraid of the little loosed dragons. When the means are autonomous, they are deadly; when words

escape from verse they hurry to rape souls; when sensation slips from intellect, expect the tyrant; the brood of carriers levels the good they carry. We have taught our images to be free; are ye glad? are we glad to have brought convenient heresy to Logres?"

The Archbishop answered the lords; his words went up through a slope of calm air: "Might may take symbols and folly make treasure, and greed bid God, who hides himself for man's pleasure by occasion, hide himself essentially: this abides— that the everlasting house the soul discovers is always another's; we must lose our own ends; we must always live in the habitation of our lovers, my friend's shelter for me, mine for him. This is the way of this world in the day of that other's; make yourselves friends by means of the riches of iniquity,

for the wealth of the self is the health of the self ex­changed.

What saith Heraclitus?—and what is the City's breath?— dying each other's life, living each other's death. Money is a medium of exchange."

(chabxes Williams, Taliessin through Logres

INTERLUDE: WEST'S DISEASE

Nathanael West is not, strictly speaking, a novelist; that is to say, he does not attempt an accurate description either of the social scene or of the subjective life of the mind. For his first book, he adopted the dream convention, but neither the incidents nor the language are credible as a transcription of a real dream. For his other three, he adopted the convention of a social narrative; his characters need real food, drink and money, and live in recognizable places like New York or Hollywood, but, taken as feigned history, they are absurd. Newspapers do, certainly, have Miss Lonelyhearts columns; but in real life these are written by sensible, not very sensitive, people who conscientiously give the best advice they can, but do not take the woes of their correspondents home with them from the office, people, in fact, like Betty of whom Mr. West's hero says scornfully:

Her world was not the world and could never include the readers of his column. Her sureness was based on the power to limit experience arbitrarily. Moreover, his con­fusion was significant, while her order was not.

On Mr. West's paper, the column is entrusted to a man the walls of whose room

were bare except for an ivory Christ that hung opposite the foot of the bed. He had removed the figure from the cross to which it had been fastened and had nailed it to the walls with large spikes.... As a boy in his father's church, he had discovered that something stirred in him when he shouted the name of Christ, something secret and enormously powerful. He had played with this thing, but had never allowed it to come alive. He knew now what this thing was—hysteria, a snake whose scales were tiny mirrors in which the dead world takes on a semblance of life, and how dead the world is ... a world of doorknobs.

It is impossible to believe that such a character would ever apply for a Miss Lonelyhearts job (in the hope, apparently, of using it as a stepping-stone to a gossip column), or that, if by freak chance he did, any editor would hire him.

Again, the occupational vice of the editors one meets is an overestimation of the social and moral value of what a newspaper does. Mr. West's editor, Shrike, is a Mephisto who spends all his time exposing to his employees the meaning- lessness of journalism:

Miss Lonelyhearts, my friend, I advise you to give your readers stones. When they ask for bread don't give them crackers as does the Church, and don't, like the State, tell them to eat cake. Explain that man cannot live by bread alone and give them stones. Teach them to pray each morning: 'Give us this day our daily stone.'

Such a man, surely, would not be a Feature Editor long.

A writer may concern himself with a very limited area of life and still convince us that he is describing the real world, but one becomes suspicious when, as in West's case, whatever world he claims to be describing, the dream life of a highbrow, lowbrow existence in Hollywood, or the Amer­ican political scene, all these worlds share the same peculiar traits—no married couples have children, no child has more than one parent, a high percentage of the inhabitants are cripples, and the only kind of personal relation is the sado­masochistic.

There is, too, a curious resemblance among the endings of his four books.