The Sun and The Rainbow

The Heart and Art of these Stories

A LETTER TO A CRITICAL FRIEND

What you say about my two short stories may very well be right. They certainly cannot be as good as my poetry — for the simple reason that poetry is almost my life-breath while fiction is not. Your remarks — "They lack point of concentration, a quality so essential in a short story; then, the background is too philosophical and the final effect always presenting an ethical problem" — are very interesting indeed. You have read with care enough to see things in a certain focus and even if I were to disagree with your pronouncement I would feel flattered at finding that you have given my work sufficient attention.

But do I disagree? Well, it is difficult to speak with confidence when I am so little of a short-story writer; but if you are prepared to take my own self-valuation for what it may be worth and with a faith in my assurance that I am trying to speak with as much impartiality and impersonality as possible, I'll tell you what I think.

The philosophical background is there: I doubt, however, if it is too philosophical. In A Mere Manuscript the issue is left sufficiently to the imagination not to be considered too philosophically suggested: the point of the story is not only that a poet has saved a fellow-poet's masterpiece at the sacrifice of his own mother's life though not necessarily as a deliberate act of callousness towards her — the point is also that the masterpiece saved is the Divina Commedia of Dante. If you enter imaginatively into the importance felt of this poem by

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all who read poetry with their deepest soul as well as with their living entrails and if you share their burning conviction that such a work of genius is no mere human achievement but something miraculous and superhuman, something of the nature of a revelation, you will understand the tense vibrating core of imagination and emotion from which the brief incident of the story is drawn. Whatever philosophy there may be is submerged in or fused with that white heat — and the limited ethical question is transcended. It is doubtful whether the solution can be called ethical when it is so contrary to ordinary ethical instincts. There would have been a strain of didacticism if I had made the story the illustration of a normally noble or virtuous action. But here you have a transcendence — and the mere emphasis or intensity of it need not be a fault — of ethical values by the divinations and the verities of the art-consciousness.

The Hew belongs to the same plane: both the tales are for artists and can bring to them most acutely a "point of concentration". The "average reader" is bound to feel that the case is not strongly made out — that an unnatural over-stress is there on a certain side which is not part of his flesh and blood. All the same, there is here no plea of art for art's sake: the self-satisfied shallow aestheticism which is usually the meaning of art for art's sake is entirely absent. What is at work is an imaginative passion, a life-thrill coloured or touched by a veiled mystic vision of art. In The Hero I present an artist deluded in spite of his instinct; in A Mere Manuscript, an artist triumphant in face of the most powerful temptation. The closing speech of the old maestro in which he rails at Andre Chau-danson is no cheap intellectual tag: it has its roots in the heartthrobs of the old man, in the soul-sight a true artist is gifted with. And what saves the speech from being a slick conclusion even as an expression of such a heart-throb or soul-sight is that it comes with an unexpected shock, a flash which reveals the hitherto white as black and vice versa, a sudden yet self-justifying anti-climax. Because the turn is so unexpected and

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sudden, you feel that the point of concentration, the final crystallisation, is not there but if you look back and see how the call of art comes like a divine voice while Andre's wrestling with his conscience is a poor human, tragedy compounded of the man's response to conventional morality and to his pseudo-manly amour propre, you will trace the undertones and the overtones which emerge and precipitate themselves in an articulate intensity in the outburst of the Master which ends the story. And the action in both the pieces seems too little because the drama is more psychologically than physically stressed: much is left to suggestion — the descriptions are compressed, the movement given a track inward rather than outward without being taken clean off the material plane into an abstract philosophy of art: the living quivering fibre of emotion is touched and the action is felt there and not principally in the physical sphere, though the one story deals with a battle and the other with a fire.

So that's that. I hope I don't seem too biased in favour of my brain-children: if you knew the amount of rejection I do, the vast quantities of written matter 1 put aside in my effort to reach the utmost poise and passion of self-expression, you would surely feel that so rigorous a discipline of self-criticism might leave one not especially a philoprogenitive old dodderer. Of course I don't pretend that the stories I have written are the quintessence of me as my poems are, but I am afraid you have applied to them a criterion not exactly arising from the type of work they attempt. There are various genres of the short story and each genre requires a special consideration, just as each class of poetry does. Still, your criticism is very welcome and when I attempt a short story again. I'll try to make the qualities which appear to you missing more explicit in order to gain a wider range of effectivity.

P.S. In the meantime, may I show you the comments of Sri Aurobindo on the two pieces — comments which naturally bucked me up no end? They are enclosed with this letter.

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