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 Salvador Dali had allegedly once lectured to a similar gathering with a loaf of bread on his head.  Here one has a metaphor for the victory of free will over natural determinism, and Costello was not slow to apply it to his own literary creations, which now rank among the most artificial, and hence supernatural, of our time.

      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 Hesse, in the individual but only in the species, the collective.  And for this reason his writings, as already noted, were more public than private.  For this reason, too, they were collectivistic rather than individualistic.  He was the first of the major proletarian artists.