A PUBLIC WRITER
There are
writers who keep most of their thoughts and beliefs to themselves, but Sean
Costello was never one of them. He was
much the most outspoken writer of his generation, having the courage to commit
most of himself to paper regardless of what other
people would think of him. He thus
exposed his inner life to public scrutiny and allowed people to learn about his
social history. This he considered a
duty of the modern writer. For to
withhold oneself from the reader was bourgeois, to be in favour of private
thoughts, and, somehow, private thoughts and a refusal to reveal one's past
were incompatible, in Costello's eyes, with literary progress!
"The writer who keeps most of his self
to himself is on the wrong side of history," he once said, and few
left-wing people would disagree with him there!
Another writer, belonging to an older generation, had said: "The
higher the artist ... the more distance he will put between himself and his
work." This meant that the pure or
great writer would never put himself into his work but would stand back from
it, letting it speak on its own fictitious or illusory terms. Sean Costello, however, absolutely rejected
this objective viewpoint, deeming it only relevant to a bourgeois stage of
literary evolution. The man who hid
behind his work, in his opinion, was not on the right side of history but an
enemy of progress. T.S. Eliot may have
been such a man, but, in Costello's estimation, Henry Miller certainly
wasn't. For Miller had exposed his inner
life and social past to the public eye with a consistency and depth surpassing
any of his contemporaries, thereby proving that he was in favour of making the
private self public.
Sartre, too, was in favour of making all
things public or, at any rate, such things as would prove of interest to
others, and can therefore be identified, in large measure, with his work. "When the work and the man are the
same," Costello had written, "one is in the highest domain of
literature - the socialist literature of the age of the public spirit."
Costello would never have agreed with that
man who criticized a conversational passage in one of D.H. Lawrence's novels
for being implausible, since according to him - a fellow writer - no two people
would ever have spoken to each other in such fashion in reality. No, the little Irishman particularly revelled
in passages, conversational or otherwise, that seemed implausible from a
naturalistic or a realistic standpoint.
"It's not our duty, as modern artists, to mirror the world around
us in the interests of bourgeois realism," he said to me one day,
"but to create a higher, artificial level of thought which transcends the
philistine dictates of the natural-world-order." By this he meant that the modern writer
should aim to contrive a supernatural level of conversation rather than remain
enslaved to conversational levels which could well take place in reality, and
on the lowest and most commercially-oriented levels of reality to boot, as
though between two stockbrokers or estate agents! The fact that no two people would have spoken
to each other in quite the way the characters did, in the novel the bourgeois
writer chose to criticize, was a credit, in Costello's opinion, to D.H.
Lawrence's style of writing, since the primary duty of all higher art was to
transcend nature, not remain its philistine victim in wilful objectivity!
Yes, I agree with Costello, and so, too,
does my wife, Jayshree, who reminded me, the other day, of that character in
Costello's first novel, 'Starbreak', who lectures to a gathering of students
with a saucepan tied to his head - much as
Take, for example, this descriptive passage
from his second novel: "She stood before me dressed in her most artificial
clothing, her high heels reflecting the glare of the lighting apparatus
overhead. I asked her to raise her
miniskirt in order to expose her suspenders, and this she duly did, holding a
fraction of its nylon material between the forefinger and thumb of each
hand. Then I knelt down before her and
smacked a gentle kiss on the front of her pale pink panties, whose nylon
cloaked a dark mound of pubic hair beneath."
This brief extract reveals the artificial
nature of the sexual foreplay which takes place between the novel's male
protagonist and his sexual antagonist.
For rather than bestowing a kiss upon the young woman's flesh, as most
ordinary real-life men would probably have done in the circumstances, our
literary lover selects a part of her panties upon which to bestow one. Later on, as the foreplay is superseded by
the main course, as it were, of the protagonist's loving, we find this even
more artificial passage: "I was now squatting between her legs and able to
apply a pair of scissors to the nylon material of her panties, while she continued
to hold her miniskirt up as before. In
this way I slowly cut open her panties along the groove of her sex, exposing,
in the process, her now-naked treasure to my inquisitive eyes. After I had looked at it and sniffed the
musky aroma which emanated from the inviting gap between her legs, I delved
into my jacket pocket for the vibrator I had bought her as a special birthday
present and which I knew she would appreciate.
Turning it on, I gently placed its buzzing tip between the eager lips of
her labial crack and steadied myself for the final push. This came when I thrust the delightful
substitute up into her soft flesh, causing her to giggle aloud and squirm
slightly in the process. I placed a
finger against its base and waited patiently for it to do my pleasure-arousing
job."
Such a passage, it need hardly be
emphasized, could only have been written by a man whose mind scorned
naturalistic criteria in the interests of a superior literature. Only in adherence to writings of this kind
... does the artist redeem himself as a spiritual leader. The more he extends the domain of creative
freedom over natural determinism, the greater he becomes. Sean Costello was undoubtedly one of the
greatest!
But there was another side to his writings
which should not be forgotten in any attempt to evaluate his status, and we may
describe it, in Barthe's famous distinction, as the 'writer' as opposed to
'author' side. In other words, the
philosopher in him could not be ignored in deference to the artist, and it was
as a philosopher, or 'writer', that he most liked to be known. "I often feel that literature,
considered in any strictly fictional sense, is mostly a waste of time and also,
from the publisher's viewpoint, a waste of money. The amount of time and money wasted on the
production of inconsequential novels ... would stagger anyone foolish enough to
make an attempt at ascertaining the sum total!
In an age beset by the twin evils of inflation and recession, one ought
only to offer for publication those works which are dedicated to Truth. All others are comparatively frivolous."
There are times, certainly, when one can
sympathize with the sentiments expressed in that utterance, but I rather doubt
that Costello really meant what he said.
After all, he knew the value of literature, considered from an
artificial angle, as well as anyone, even though he preferred the
responsibilities of a truthful 'writer' to those of a fictional 'author'. His philosophical writings, however, are
easily as voluminous (though this is hardly the most apt choice of
terminology!) as his literary ones, and will doubtless rank higher in the
estimation of posterity. Like Huxley and
a number of other twentieth-century 'authors/writers', he took greater pride in
the philosophical side of his work, and always put more effort into writings
intended to enlighten than into those intended, in part at any rate, merely to
entertain. But he was never a bourgeois
writer, like Huxley, and made a point of emphasizing his commitment to abstract
generalities over concrete particularities.
He wasn't interested, like
