Free Silences by Shelly Fisher Fishkin

notes, of the practitioners themselves: Henry James, Katherine Mansfield, André Gide, Virginia Woolf; the letters of Flaubert,Rilke, Joseph Conrad; Thomas Wolfe’s Story of a Novel, Valéry’s Course in Poetics. What do theyexplain of the silences?
    “Constant toil is the law of art, as it is of life,” says (and demonstrated) Balzac:
                 To pass from conception to execution, to produce, to bring the idea to birth, to raise the child laboriously from infancy, to put it nightly to sleep surfeited, to kiss it in the mornings with the hungry heart of a mother, to clean it, to clothe it fifty times over in newgarments which it tears and casts away, and yet not revolt against the trials of this agitated life—this unwearying maternal love, this habit of creation—this is execution and its toils.
    “Without duties, almost without external communication,” Rilke specifies, “unconfined solitude which takes every day like a life, a spaciousness which puts no limit to vision and in the midst of which infinitiessurround.”
    Unconfined solitude as Joseph Conrad experienced it:
    For twenty months I wrestled with the Lord for my creation . . . mind and will and conscience engaged to the full, hour after hour, day after day . . . a lonely struggle in a great isolation from the world. I suppose I slept and ate the food put before me and talked connectedly on suitable occasions, but I was never aware of theeven flow of daily life, made easy and noiseless for me by a silent, watchful, tireless affection.
    So there is a homely underpinning for it all, the even flow of daily life made easy and noiseless.
    “The terrible law of the artist”—says Henry James—”the law of fructification, of fertilization. The old, old lesson of the art of meditation. To woo combinations and inspirations into being by a depthand continuity of attention and meditation.”
    “That load, that weight, that gnawing conscience,” writes Thomas Mann—
                 That sea which to drink up, that frightful task . . . The will, the discipline and self-control to shape a sentence or follow out a hard train of thought. From the first rhythmical urge of the inwardcreative force towards the material, towards casting in shape andform, from that to the thought, the image, the word, the line, what a struggle, what Gethsemane.
    Does it become very clear what Melville’s Pierre so bitterly remarked on, and what literary history bears out—why most of the great works of humanity have come from lives (able to be) wholly surrendered and dedicated? How else sustain the constant toil, the frightful task, the terrible law, the continuity?Full self: this means full time as and when needed for the work. (That time for which Emily Dickinson withdrew from the world.)
    But what if there is not that fullness of time, let alone totality of self? What if the writers, as in some of these silences, must work regularly at something besides their own work—as do nearly all in the arts in the United States today.
    I know the theory (kin to“starving in the garret makes great art”) that it is this very circumstance which feeds creativity. I know, too, that for the beginning young, for some who have such need, the job can be valuable access to life they would not otherwise know. A few (I think of the doctors, the incomparables: Chekhov and William Carlos Williams) for special reasons sometimes manage both. But the actuality testifies:substantial creative work demands time, and with rare exceptions only full-time workers have achieved it. Where the claims of creation cannot be primary, the results are atrophy; unfinished work; minor effort and accomplishment; silences. (Desperation which accounts for the mountains of applications to the foundations for grants—undivided time—in the strange bread-line system we have worked out forour artists.)
    Twenty years went by on the writing of Ship of Fools, while Katherine Anne Porter, who needed only