THE SECRET MIND
I had never wanted to go to Ireland in my life. Yet here was John Huston on the telephone asking me to his hotel for a drink. Later that afternoon, drinks in hand, Huston eyed me carefully and said, 'How would you like to live in Ireland and write
And suddenly we were off after the White Whale; myself, the wife, and two daughters.
It took me seven months to track, catch, and throw the Whale flukes out.
From October to April I lived in a country where I did not want to be.
I thought that I saw nothing, heard nothing, felt nothing of Ireland. The Church was deplorable. The weather was dreadful. The poverty was inadmissible. I would have none of it. Besides, there was this Big Fish…
I did not count on my subconscious tripping me up. In the middle of all the threadbare dampness, while trying to beach Leviathan with my typewriter, my antennae were noticing the people. Not that my wide-awake self, conscious and afoot, did not notice them, like and admire and have some for friends, and see them often, no. But the overall thing, pervasive, was the poorness and the rain and feeling sorry for myself in a sorry land.
With the Beast rendered down into oil and delivered to the cameras, I fled Ireland, positive I had learned naught save how to dread storms, fogs, and the penny-beggar streets of Dublin and Kilcock.
But the subliminal eye is shrewd. While I lamented my hard work and my inability, every other day, to feel as much like Herman Melville as I wished, my interior self kept alert, snuffed deep, listened long, watched close, and filed Ireland and its people for other times when I might relax and let them teem forth to my own surprise.
I came home via Sicily and Italy where I had baked myself free of the Irish winter, assuring one and all, 'I'll write nothing ever about the Connemara Lightfoots and the Donnybrook Gazelles.'
I should have remembered my experience with Mexico, many years before, where I had encountered not rain and poverty, but sun and poverty, and come away panicked by a weather of mortality and the terrible sweet smell when the Mexicans exhaled death. I had at last written some fine nightmares out of that.
Even so, I insisted, Eire was dead, the wake over, her people would never haunt me.
Several years passed.
Then one rainy afternoon Mike (whose real name is Nick), the taxi-driver, came to sit just out of sight in my mind. He nudged me gently and dared to remind me of our journeys together across the bogs, along the Liffey, and him talking and wheeling his old iron car slow through the mist night after night, driving me home to the Royal Hibernian Hotel, the one man I knew best in all the wild green country, from dozens of scores of Dark Journeys.
'Tell the truth about me,' Mike said. 'Just put it down the way it was.'
And suddenly I had a short story and a play. And the story is true and the play is true. It happened like that. It could have happened no other way.
Well, the story we understand, but why, after all these years, did I turn to the stage? It was not a turn, but a return.
I acted on the amateur stage, and radio, as a boy. I wrote plays as a young man. These plays, unproduced, were so bad that I promised myself never to write again for the stage until late in life, after I'd learned to write all the other ways first and best. Simultaneously, I gave up acting because I dreaded the competitive politics actors must play in order to work. Besides: the short story, the novel, called. I answered. I plunged into writing. Years passed. I went to hundreds of plays. I loved them. But still I held off from ever writing Act I, Scene I, again. Then came Moby Dick, a while to brood over it, and suddenly here was Mike, my taxi-driver, rummaging my soul, lifting up tidbits of adventure from a few years before near the Hill of Tara or inland at the autumn changing of leaves in Killeshandra. My old love of the theater with a final shove pushed me over.
But, also pushing and shoving with free and unexpected gifts, came a mob of letter-writing strangers. Some eight or nine years back I began receiving notes that ran as follows:
Sir: Last night, in bed, I told your story 'The Fog Horn,' to my wife.
Or:
Sir: I am fifteen years old and won the Annual Recitation Prize at Gurnee Illinois High, having memorized and declaimed your tale, 'A Sound of Thunder.'
Or:
Dear Mr. B.: We are pleased to report our seven-man semistaged reading of your novel Fahrenheit 451 was greeted warmly by 2,000 English teachers at our conference last night.
In a seven-year period, dozens of my stories were read, declaimed, recited and dramatized by grade school, high school and college amateurs all across the country. The letters piled up. Finally, they toppled and fell on me. I turned to my wife and said, 'Everyone except me is having fun adapting me! How come?!'
It was, then, the reverse of the old tale. Instead of crying out that the emperor is naked, these people were saying, unmistakably, that an English flunk-out from Los Angeles High School was fully clothed, and too thick to see it!
I began, then, to write plays.
One final thing jolted me back toward the stage. In the last five years I have borrowed or bought a good many European and American Idea Plays to read; I have watched the Absurd and the More-Than-Absurd Theater. In the aggregate I could not help but judge the plays as frail exercises, more often than not halfwitted, but above all lacking in the prime requisites of imagination and ability.
It is only fair, given this flat opinion, I should now put my own head on the chopping-block. You may, if you wish, be my executioners.
This is not so unusual. Literary history is filled with writers who, rightly or wrongly, felt they could tidy up, improve upon, or revolutionize a given field. So, many of us plunge forward where angels leave no dustprint.
Having dared once, exuberant, I dared again. When Mike vaulted from my machine, others unbidden followed.
And the more that swarmed, the more jostled to fill the spaces.
I suddenly saw that I knew more of the minglings and commotions of the Irish than I could disentangle in a month or a year of writing and unraveling them forth. Inadvertently, I found myself blessing the secret mind, and winnowing a vast interior postoffice, calling nights, towns, weathers, beasts, bicycles, churches, cinemas, and ritual marches and flights by name.
Mike had started me at an amble; I broke into a trot, which was before long a full sprint.
The stories, the plays, were born in a yelping litter. I had but to get out of their way.
Now done, and busy with other plays about science-fiction machineries, do I have an after-the-fact theory to fit playwriting?
Yes.
For only after, can one nail down, examine, explain.
To try to know beforehand is to freeze and kill.
Self-consciousness is the enemy of all art, be it acting, writing, painting, or living itself, which is the greatest art of all.
Here's how my theory goes. We writers are up to the following:
We build tensions toward laughter, then give permission, and laughter comes.
We build tensions toward sorrow, and at last say cry, and hope to see our audience in tears.
We build tensions toward violence, light the fuse, and run.
We build the strange tensions of love, where so many of the other tensions mix to be modified and transcended, and allow that fruition in the mind of the audience.
We build tensions, especially today, toward sickness and then, if we are good enough, talented enough, observant enough, allow our audiences to be sick.
Each tension seeks its own proper end, release, and relaxation.
