War and Literature

(Ramble No, 2)^*

By R. V. JAGIRDAR, M.A. (Lond.), Dharwar.

Paper is short and war is long. And that, gentle readers, is the moral of the article I intended to write. Intended, please note! for what I might be writing now seems more of an exasperation than an inspiration. Whatever that be, facts would be facts even when there is not enough of paper to publish them.

One such fact is about New Ideas. I believe idealists and historians have great praise and enthusiasm for new ideas. That, however, does not surprise me since neither the idealists nor the historians are sufferers from ideas. It is the poor writers, my tribe (may it not increase), who chance to entertain new ideas and it is they, therefore, that realise all the conveniences and discomforts that go with these ideas. For one thing, a new idea is like a spot with a ‘wet paint’ notice. You cannot sit on it, nor would you feel comfortable to do so near about it. That is why I speak of my tribesmen as poor writers. These are the days when the only thing you can do about new ideas is to sit on them and that is the only thing which a writer can never do.

Fact number two. A writer writes as a woman puts on her finery. No woman would wear all that luxurious plumage just to please herself, less her husband. She has been enough tortured physically and her husband enough tortured financially, for either of them to enjoy the sigh of that dress. That show is meant essentially for others, for the neighbours, for the general public. So is a writer’s writing. If it were a question of just pleasing himself, a writer could have smoked a few more cigarettes and finished with it. But no! he writes so that others, his neighbours, his public are pleased and he be also pleased with himself. That fact is another reason for a writer’s not being able to sit on any of his ideas, much less on new ideas.

I would be doing an injustice to my clan if I were not to clarify the writer’s position a little more. Otherwise a writer would be misunderstood–as himself an irrelevant fact. With a war on, threatening his very existence, could not a writer do a better thing than produce new ideas out of his inkpot? Is it so inevitable? Perhaps not, if one were to speak on principles. But in a world like ours where statesmen find wars inevitable why should not a writer too feel his profession inevitable? It is true that the present war is a total war (does it mean total destruction for an entirely new creation?). But does that total include the small fractions in the form of writers? If it does, then the writer, like the other soldiers, demands his equipment of war, viz., pen and paper. And so I come to where I started from.

Having thus gone round the position, I now proceed straight to my point. That point is that I feel it necessary to complain in the name of my profession. And who would not? Almost every other profession, due to those very war-conditions, has increased its earning potentialities while it is only in ours that the prospects, instead of the markets, are black. Has any writer ever got a black-market price for his writing? If not, why not? That is the question. No, the question is worse than that. The very basis of the profession stands threatened since actually blank paper costs more than when there is something in black written on it!

Black and white! That used to be the figure of,–nay, the flowery–speech to describe writing. But now the paper is white and the market black; with the result that writing, no longer capable of being both black and white, has simply ceased to exist! A writer, if he still must write, will have to think first and then, on second thoughts, will have to keep on thinking. Now he has no choice but to ‘write in’. Thinking is thus mad not only compulsory but continuous for the poor writer. Is not that unfair? It is not even justice when followers of other professions have simply and merely to act. These acts bring them such immediate profits that their authors have not time enough to think.

A writer’s troubles do not end there. Thinking, in itself, would not have been so unwelcome to him since he is used to it all the twenty-four hours of a day for the sake of making both ends viz., pen and paper, meet. But now it is not that kind or that way of thinking at all. Now he has to keep on thinking till such time as materials to write them on would be made available. This is where thinking not only becomes different but difficult. Either he has to keep on to the same thoughts, in which case is compelled to grow stale or consistent; or, he has to adjust his thoughts from time to time, in which case at the actual time of writing them down must be prepared to find nothing definite to write down. And that again would be unfair. In this ever-changing world of ours should we expect only the writer to stagnate in consistency? In these days of equality and democracy should the writer alone be denied equal chances?

What could the poor writer do–one might ask, almost condemning the writer with pity. It is true that writers are really up against Himalayan odds. They have to compete with the nations of the world that might appropriate all available paper to write mutual promissory notes of good-will-to-be and of peace-to-come and all the rest. They have to fight and win a public that prefers to use its ears instead of its eyes and so listens to radio news; a public that finds it more convenient to feel excited than to think and so reads propaganda communiques; a public that thrills and satiates itself on cinema-posters. This fight against the public is most unfair since writers have no better weapon than brain, a heritage of neolithic antiquity, while the public has the benefit of all the modernity that science is capable of, viz., cheapness, smallness, installment-payments, second-hand dealers, mass ugliness etc. And the heaviest odds of all are still to come. These are the politicians and public leaders. Writers have an arduous job in watching these who talk so loud and so continuously that for ages to come nothing grand or eloquent is left for the writers to write. Universal Love, Universal Brotherhood, Universal bickering, universal this, universal that, and everything universal has been thoroughly, finally, and eternally and eloquently dealt with and disposed of. Perhaps if writers could get a seat on this Universal Committee they might reserve a few convenient topics for writing in the post-war planning. That is a future possibility. For the present, the prospects are such as to justify the writer’s pessimism or his campaign of complaint.

Incidentally (and finally), let me say one thing. I do not know what Theories literary critics would like to advance, but I do feel that in view of the fact of the propaganda and the politician exploiting all emotions from love to war, a kind of ‘deterioration’ is bound to set-in in post-war literature. There is no choice. Either we write now or we live just to repeat and to repent. With this note of warning (which I have to sound to awaken my readers!) I end this analysis before it deteriorates into an apology.

^* The first article appeared in the March issue of “Triveni”.