Que no se pierda. Eso es lo que pretendo con esta página. Que no se pierda, de lo bueno que se hace, lo poco que yo encuentro.
NEW 31-May-2000
A la edad de setenta y cinco, William Somerset Maugham (1874-1965) decidió publicar las notas que había ido apuntando, en cuadernos o servilletas de papel, desde los dieciocho años de edad. No se trata de un dietario, sino de un recurso de trabajo –un instrumento de creación literaria:
I forget who it was who said that every author should keep a notebook, but should take care never to refer to it. If you understand this properly, I think there is truth in it. By making a note of something that strikes you, you separate it from the incessant stream of impressions that crowd across the mental eye, and perhaps fix it in your memory. All of us have had good ideas or vivid sensations that we thought would one day come in useful, but which, because we were too lazy to write them down, have entirely escaped us. When you know you are going to make a note of something, you look at it more attentively than you otherwise would, and in the process of doing so the words are borne in upon you that will give it its private place in reality.
Y aunque Maugham era consciente de sus riesgos...
The danger of using notes is that if you find yourself inclined to rely on them, and so lose the even and natural flow of your writing which comes from allowing the unconscious that full activity which is somewhat pompously known as inspiration. You are also inclined to drag in your jottings whether they fit in or not.
...no obstante se declara convencido de su utilidad:
I think to keep copious notes is an excellent practice, and I can only regret that a natural indolence has prevented me from exercising it more diligently. They cannot fail to be of service if they are used with intelligence and discretion.
Más allá del interés de las notas en sí mismas, esta colección de apuntes privilegia al lector al ofrecerle una vía de acceso, del todo inusual, al proceso mismo de gestación literaria. Es curioso, instructivo y no siempre gratificante encontrar en esas notas las impresiones, las experiencias o los incidentes que han inspirado una novela o que han intervenido en su realización. Es la revelación de lo que normalmente el lector nunca conoce lo que hace tentadora la lectura de este libro. El prefacio (hacer click aquí para leerlo), además, abunda en reflexiones agudas sobre otros aspectos de la creación literaria; por ejemplo, el de cómo la cultura literaria característica de sus sociedades respectivas influencia grandemente la relación que los escritores establecen entre ellos. Maugham se vale de la obra de un escritor francés, Jules Renard, del que afirma que:
Jules Renard's other novels are of no great consequence. They are either fragments of autobiography or are compiled from the careful notes he took of people with whom he was thrown into close contact, and can hardly be counted as novels at all. He was so devoid of the creative power that one wonders why he ever became a writer. He had no invention to heighten the point of an incident or even to give a pattern to his acute observations. He collected facts; but a novel cannot be made of facts alone; in themselves they are dead things. Their use is to develop an idea or illustrate a theme, and the novelist not only has the right to change them to suit his purpose, to stress them or leave them in shadow, but is under the necessity of doing so.
Curiosamente, la esencia de lo que Maugham afirma de Renard, Josep Pla (1897-1981) lo dice de Pío Baroja (1872-1956):
Baroja és un immens escriptor. Però s'equivocà de tècnica. Escriví novel.les. Com a novel.les, les seves novel.les són ridícules. No conegué els trucs, ni les astúcies, ni la manera escandalosa que tenen els novel.listes de compondre les seues novel.les.
Maugham afirma que Renard era consciente de ello, y que lo justificó invocando a la teoría literaria. Vale la pena resaltar el comentario:
It is true that Jules Renard had his theories; he asserted that his object was merely to state, leaving the reader to write his own novel, as it were, on the data presented to him, and that to attempt to do anything else was literary fudge. But I am always suspicious of a novelist's theories; I have never known them to be anything other than a justification of his own shortcomings. So a writer who has no gift for the contrivance of a plausible story will tell you that story-telling is the least important part of the novelist's equipment, and if he is devoid of humour he will moan that humour is the death of fiction.
Tras la muerte de Renard se publicó el diario que había mantenido durante más de veinte años. Su publicación causó un gran revuelo en el mundillo literario francés:
His fellow writers were indignant when the work was issued and they discovered with what acrimony he had written of them. The picture he paints of the literary life of his day is savage. They say dog does not bite dog. That is not true of men of letters in France.
Maugham, que nació en París de padres ingleses y que alternó su residencia entre Inglaterra y Francia, era un buen conocedor de ambas comunidades literarias. Respecto a la inglesa, afirma:
In England, I think, men of letters bother but little with one another. They do not live in one another's pockets as French authors do; they meet, indeed, infrequently, and then as likely as not by chance. I remember one author saying to me years ago: 'I prefer to live with my raw material.' They do not even read one another very much.[...] English writers judge their fellow craftsmen; one they will tell you is pretty good, another they will say is no great shakes, but their enthusiasm for the former seldom reaches fever-heat, and their disesteem for the latter is manifested rather by indifference than by detraction. They do not particularly envy someone else's success, and when it is obviously unmerited, it moves them to laughter rather than to wrath. I think English authors are self-centred. They are, perhaps, as vain as any others, but their vanity is satisfied by the appreciation of a private circle. They are not inordinately affected by adverse criticism, and with one or two exceptions do not go out of their way to ingratiate themselves with the reviewers. They live and let live.
Sin embargo,
Things are very different in France. There the literary life is a merciless conflict in which one gives violent battle to another, in which one clique attacks another clique, in which you must be always on your guard against the gins and snares of your enemies, and in which, indeed, you can never be quite sure that a friend will not knife you in the back. It is all against all, and, as in some forms of wrestling, anything is allowed. It is a life of bitterness, envy and treachery,of malice and hatred. I think there are reasons for this.
Y las empieza a detallar:
One, of course, is that the French take literature much more seriously than we do, a book matters to them as it never matters to us, and they are prepared to wrangle over general principles with a vehemence that leaves us amazed –and tickled, for we cannot get it out of our heads that there is something comic in taking art so seriously. Then, political and religious matters have a way of getting themselves entangled with literature in France, and an author will see his book furiously assailed, not because it is a bad book, but because he is a Protestant, a nationalist, a communist or what not.
Podría parecer un juicio prejuiciado, pero Maugham afirma (eso sí, no sé si con un punto de ironía):
Much of this is praiseworthy. It is well that a writer should think not only that the book he himself is writing is important, but that the books other people are writing are important too. It is well that authors, at least, should think that books really mean something, and that their influence is salutary, in which case they must be defended, or harmful, in which case they must be attacked. Books can't matter much if their authors themselves don't think they matter. It is because in France they think they matter so much that they take sides so fiercely.
Tampoco hay que olvidar factores un tanto más materiales:
There is another reason why the antagonisms of authors in France are more envenomed than in England; their public is too small to support their great number: we have a public of two hundred millions; they have one of forty. There is plenty of room for every English writer; you may never have heard of him, but if he has any gift at all, in any direction, he can earn an adequate income. He is not very rich, but then he would never have adopted the profession of letters if riches had been his object. He acquires in time his body of faithful readers, and since in order to get the publishers' advertisements the papers are obliged to give a good deal of space to reviews, he is accorded a sufficient amount of attention in the public Press. He can afford to look upon other writers without envy. But in France few writers can make a living by writing novels; unless they have private means or some other occupation that enables them to provide for their needs, they are forced to resort to journalism. There are not enough book-buyers to go round, and the success of one author can greatly attenuate the success of another. It is a struggle to get known; it is a struggle to hold one's place in the public esteem. This results in frantic efforts to attract the benevolent attention of critics, and it is to the effect their reviews may have that must be ascribed the anxiety felt even by authors of reputation when they know that a notice is to appear in such and such a paper, and their fury when it is not a good one. It is true that criticism carries greater weight in France than it does in England. Certain critics are so influential that they can make or mar a book.
Respecto al diario de Renard,
Jules Renard was very honest, and he does not draw a pretty picture of himself in his Journal. He was malignant, cold, selfish, narrow, envious and ungrateful. His only redeeming feature was his love for his wife; she is the only person in all these volumes of whom he consistently speaks with kindness. He was immensely susceptible to any fancied affront, and his vanity was outrageous. He had neither charity nor good will. He splashes with his angry contempt everything he doesn't understand, and the possibility never occurs to him that if he doesn't the fault may lie in himself. He was odious, incapable of a generous gesture, and almost incapable of a generous emotion.
La moralidad, sin embargo, es y debe ser residual en la literatura:
But for all that the Journal is wonderfully good reading. It is extremely amusing. It is witty and subtle and often wise. It is a notebook kept for the purposes of his calling by a professional writer who passionately sought truth, purity of style and perfection of language. As a writer no one could have been more conscientious. Jules Renard jotted down neat retorts and clever phrases, epigrams, things seen, the sayings of people and the look of them, descriptions of scenery, effects of sunshine and shadow, everything, in short, that could be of use to him when he sat down to write for publication; and in several cases, as we know, when he had collected sufficient data he strung them together into a more or less connected narrative and made a book of them. To a writer this is the most interesting part of these volumes; you are taken into an author's workshop and shown what materials he thought worth gathering, and how he gathered them. It is not to the point that he lacked the capacity to make better use of them.
Y realmente su lectura por parte de Maugham fue provechosa:
It is because Jules Renard's Journal in this respect so pleasantly engaged my attention that I have ventured to collect my own notes and offer them to the perusal of my fellow writers. I hasten to state that mine are not nearly so interesting as his. They are much more interrupted. There were many years in which I never kept notes at all. They do not pretend to be a journal; I never wrote anything about my meetings with interesting or famous people. I am sorry that I didn't. It would doubtless have made the following pages more amusing if I had recorded my conversations with the many and distinguished writers, painters, actors and politicians I have known more or less intimately. It never occurred to me to do so. I never made a note of anything that I did not think would be useful to me at one time or another in my work, and though, especially in the early notebooks, I jotted down all kinds of thoughts and emotions of a personal nature, it was only with the intention of ascribing them sooner or later to the creatures of my invention. I meant my notebooks to be a storehouse of materials for future use and nothing else.
[...] I have likewise omitted everything I have elsewhere made use of, and if I have left in a phrase or two here and there that a diligent reader of my works recalls, it is not because I am so pleased with it that I want to repeat it, but from inadvertence. On one or two occasions, however, I have deliberately left in the facts that I noted down at the time and that gave me the idea for a story or novel, thinking it might entertain the reader who chanced to remember one or the other, to see on what materials I devised a more elaborate piece. I have never claimed to create anything out of nothing; I have always needed an incident or a character as a starting point, but I have exercised imagination, invention and a sense of the dramatic to make it something of my own.
[...] I publish it because I am interested in the technique of literary production and in the process of creation, and if such a volume as this by some other author came into my hands I should turn to it with avidity. By some happy chance what interests me seems to interest a great many other people; I could never have expected it, and I have never ceased to be surprised at it; but it may be that what has happened so often before will happen again, and some persons may be found who will discover here and there in the following pages something to interest them. I should have looked upon it as an impertinence to publish such a book when I was in the full flow of my literary activity; it would have seemed to claim an importance for myself which would have been offensive to my fellow writers; but now I am an old man, I can be no one's rival, for I have retired from the hurly-burly and ensconced myself not uncomfortably on the shelf. Any ambition I may have had has long since been satisfied. I contend with none not because none is worth my strife, but because I have said my say and I am well pleased to let others occupy my small place in the world of letters. I have done what I wanted to do and now silence becomes me. I am told that in these days you are quickly forgotten if you do not by some new work keep your name before the public, and I have little doubt that it is true. Well, I am prepared for that. When my obituary notice at last appears in The Times, and they say: What, I thought he died years ago,' my ghost will gently chuckle.
[Hacer click aquí para leer el Prefacio]
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