4.
When I was about sixteen I suddenly discovered the joy
of mere words, i. e. the sounds and associations of
words. The lines from Paradise Lost –
"So hee with difficulty and labour hard
Moved on: with difficulty and labour hee,"
which do not now seem to me so very wonderful,  sent
shivers down my backbone;
and the spelling "hee" for "he"
was an added pleasure. As for the need to describe things,
I knew all about it already. So it is clear what kind
of books I wanted to write, in so far as I could be
said to want to write books at that time. I wanted to
write enormous naturalistic
novels with unhappy endings, full of detailed descriptions
and
arresting similes, and also full of purple passages
in which words were used partly for the sake of their
sound. And in fact my first completed novel, Burmese
Days, which I wrote when I was thirty but projected
much earlier, is rather that kind of book.
5.
I give all this background information because I do
not think one can
assess
a writer's motives without knowing something of his
early development. His
subject matter will be determined by the age he lives
in -- at least this is true in tumultuous,
revolutionary ages like our own -- but before
he ever begins to write he will have acquired an emotional
attitude from which he will never completely escape.
It
is his job, no doubt, to discipline
his temperament
and avoid getting stuck at some immature stage, or in
some perverse
mood: but if he escapes from his early influences altogether,
he will have killed his impulse
to write. Putting aside the need to earn a living, I
think there are four great motives for writing, at any
rate for writing prose. They exist in different degrees
in every writer, and in any one writer the proportions
will vary from time to time, according to the atmosphere
in which he is living. They are:
6.
(1) Sheer egoism.
Desire to seem clever, to be talked about, to be remembered
after death, to get your own back on grown-ups who snubbed
you in childhood, etc., etc. It is
humbug to pretend that this is not a motive, and
a strong one. Writers share this characteristic with
scientists, artists, politicians, lawyers, soldiers,
successful businessmen -- in short, with the whole top
crust
of humanity. The great mass of human beings are
not acutely
selfish. After the age of about thirty they abandon
individual ambition -- in many cases, indeed, they almost
abandon the sense of being individuals at all -- and
live chiefly for others, or are simply smothered
under drudgery.
But there is also the minority of gifted, wilful people
who are determined to live their own lives to the end,
and writers belong in this class. Serious writers, I
should say, are on the whole more vain
and self-centered than journalists, though less interested
in money. 
|
