Free After the Fireworks by Aldous Huxley Page A

particular one. But a rabbit-shooter, perhaps several rabbit-shooters—at one time or another, I’m sure, they genuinely existed. Though never genuinely, of course, for her. For her, it’s obvious, they were just phantoms, like the other inhabitants of her dreamery. Phantoms of flesh and blood, but still phantoms. I see her as a kind of Midas, turning everything she touched into imagination. Even in the embraces of a genuine, solid rabbit-shooter, she was still only indulging in her solitary sultry dream—a dream inspired by Shakespeare, or Mrs. Barclay, or the Chevalier de Nerciat, or D’Annunzio, or whoever her favourite author may have been.”
    â€œMiles Fanning, perhaps,” Dodo mockingly suggested.
    â€œYes, I feared as much.”
    â€œWhat a responsibility!”
    â€œWhich I absolutely refuse to accept. What have I ever written but solemn warnings against the vice of imagination? Sermons against mental licentiousness of every kind—intellectual licentiousness, mystical licentiousness, fantasticamorous licentiousness. No, no. I’ll accept no responsibility. Or at least no special responsibility—only the generic responsibility of being an imaginative author, the original sin of writing in such a way asto influence people. And when I say ‘influence,’ of course I don’t really mean influence. Because a writer can’t influence people, in the sense of making them think and feel and act as he does. He can only influence them to be more, or less, like one of their own selves. In other words, he’s never understood. (Thank goodness! because it would be very humiliating to be really understood by one’s readers.) What readers get out of him is never, finally, his ideas, but theirs. And when they try to imitate him or his creations, all that they can ever do is to act one of their own potential rôles. Take this particular case. Clare read and, I take it, was impressed. She took my warnings against mental licentiousness to heart and proceeded to do—what? Not to become a creature of spontaneous, unvitiated impulses—for the good reason that that wasn’t in her power—but only to imagine that she was such a creature. She imagined herself a woman like the one I put into Endymion and the Moon and acted accordingly—or else didn’t act, only dreamed; it makes very little difference. In a word, she did exactly what all my books told her not to do. Inevitably; it was her nature. I’d influenced her, yes. But she didn’t become more like one of my heroines. She only became more intensely like herself. And then, you must remember, mine weren’t the only books on her shelves. I think we can take it that she’d read Les Liaisons Dangereuses and Casanova and some biography, shall we say, of the Maréchal de Richelieu. So that those spontaneous unvitiated impulses—how ludicrous they are, anyhow, when you talk about them!—became identified in her mind with the most elegant forms of ‘caprice’—wasn’t that the word? She was a child of nature—but with qualifications. The kind of child of nature that lived at Versailles or on the Grand Canal about 1760. Hence those rabbit-shooters and hence also thosesadistic intellectuals, whether real or imaginary—and imaginary even when real. I may have been a favourite author. But I’m not responsible for the rabbit-shooters or the Grand P.’s. Not more responsible than any one else. She’d heard of the existence of love before she’d read me. We’re all equally to blame, from Homer downwards. Plato wouldn’t have any of us in his Republic. He was quite right, I believe. Quite right.”
    â€œAnd what about the daughter?” Dodo asked, after a silence.
    He shrugged his shoulders. “In reaction against the mother, so far as I could judge. In reaction, but also influenced by her, unconsciously. And the influence is