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CHAPTER 3 Prints on the Landscpe 1945-1950
- Cork University Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
Post script to the US edition of The Demon Lover and Other Stories, 1945 The stories in the collection entitled The Demon Lover were written in wartime London – between the spring of 1941 and the late autumn of 1944. They were written for the magazines or papers in which they originally appeared. During these last years, I did not always write a story when I was asked for one; but I did not write any story that I was not asked for. For at the same time I have been writing a novel; and sometimes I did not want to imperil its continuity. Does this suggest that these Demon Lover stories have been in any way forced or unwilling work? If so, that is quite untrue. Actually, the stimulus of being asked for a story, and the compulsion created by having promised to write one were both good – I mean, they acted as releases. Each time I sat down to write a story I opened a door; and the pressure against the other side of that door must have been very great, for things – ideas, images, emotions – came through with force and rapidity, sometimes violence. I do not say that these stories wrote themselves – aesthetically or intellectually speaking, I found the writing of some of them very difficult – but I was never in a moment’s doubt as to what I was to write. The stories had their own momentum, which I had to control. The acts in them had an authority which I could not question. Odd enough in their way – and now some seem very odd – they were flying particles of something enormous and inchoate that had been going on. They were sparks from experience – an experience not necessarily my own. During the war I lived, both as a civilian and as a writer, with every pore open; I lived so many lives, and, still more, lived among the packed repercussions of so many thousands of other lives, all under stress, that I see now it would have been impossible to have been writing only one book. I want my novel, which deals with this same time, to be enormously comprehensive. But a novel must have form; 121 CHAPTER 3 Prints on the Landscape 1945–1950 122 CHAPTER THREE and, for the form’s sake, one is always having to make relentless exclusions . Had it not been for my from-time-to-time promises to write stories, much that had been pressing against the door might have remained pressing against it in vain. I do not feel I ‘invented’ anything I wrote. It seems to me that during the war the overcharged subconsciousnesses of everybody overflowed and merged. It is because the general subconsciousness saturates these stories that they have an authority nothing to do with me. These are all wartime, none of them war, stories. There are no accounts of war action even as I knew it – for instance, air raids. Only one character – in ‘Mysterious Kôr’ – is a soldier; and he only appears as a homeless wanderer round a city. These are, more, studies of climate, war-climate, and of the strange growths it raised. I see war (or should I say feel war?) more as a territory than as a page of history: of its impersonal active historic side I have, I find, not written. Arguably, writers are always slightly abnormal people: certainly, in so-called ‘normal’ times my sense of the abnormal has been very acute. In war, this feeling of slight differentiation was suspended: I felt one with, and just like, everyone else. Sometimes I hardly knew where I stopped and somebody else began. The violent destruction of solid things, the explosion of the illusion that prestige, power and permanence attach to bulk and weight, left all of us, equally, heady and disembodied. Walls went down; and we felt, if not knew, each other. We all lived in a state of lucid abnormality. Till the proofs came, I had not re-read my stories since they were, singly, written. When I read them straight through as a collection, I was most struck by what they have in common. This integrates them and gives them a cumulative and collective meaning that no one, taken singly, has by itself. The Demon Lover is an organic whole: not merely a collection, but somehow – for better or worse – a book. Also, the order in which the stories stand – an order come at, I may say, casually...