CERTAIN motives, I said, after a while get written out, and must be sent like coins for renewal to the mint. And so of a particular technique, of certain ways of narrative, the chronicle novel for example. In 1911 everyone was telling the story of a generation’s passage through youth to middle age; it had become the fashionable medium for social satire; it seemed the destined channel for the main stream of early twentieth-century narrative. But already a dam has been placed across its path, the dam of the years 1914-1918.

The novel reader, I suppose, knows no greater weariness, no sensation of more profound misgiving than that which comes over him when he realises on page 173 that the action of the story is about to land him in the year 1913. He loses interest immediately. What does it matter, he asks himself, whether Jane becomes engaged to that rascal Harry, or Arthur elopes with the designing Marjorie? August 1914 is coming, and from whatever manner of fix into which, between now and then, they may contrive to place themselves the author will have no difficulty in extricating them. The reader feels that he has been deceived. He has no use for the deus ex machinÂ. He feels as the small boy did who flung the Iliad in disgust across the room, and exclaimed: “Rotten! they never had a fair fight once. There was always a god on one side or another.”

The war, in the average novel, is an effect without a cause. It is unquestionable that a great many homes were absolutely turned inside out by “the great interruption.” There is no doubt that a great many difficulties were removed by this heaven-sent intervention, even as a great many simple situations were made interminably complex. All over the world there was effect without a cause, but in the novel, which is an essentially artificial thing, a thing that one makes with one’s own hands, there can be no effect without cause. And the conscientious novelist gazes in dismay at this tear across the fabric of life. He can, of course, start his story earlier; but there can be no real conclusion to a chronicle novel that ends in 1910. The reader knows that, in four years’ time, the happy home on which the curtain has so tenderly descended will be in chaos and that the hero will have to set out again on his travels. He can hardly begin it in December 1918 with the picture of a young man walking out of his tailor’s, in a grey tweed suit. A chronicle novel can barely get started in five years. And it is equally difficult for a writer to take the war in his stride. There have been one or two attempts; but, with the exception of “The Forsyte Saga,” they have been failures. For that type of novel one wants a clear ten years on either side.

Or it may be that the generating force of the movement is already spent; it may be that the reader has grown indifferent through repetition to the fortunes of the shy, sensitive young man who retired into a corner and read Keats while his companions were playing football, and to whom one of the masters would deliver himself of some such portentous prophecy as: “You are not for the middle way. You will rise or you will sink. The stars for you, or the depths.” And there was certainly a singular similarity about that young man’s early amatory adventures; the wanton with the heart of gold; the pure girl and the unhappy marriage; the splendid heroism of infidelity. It seemed very daring and original in 1912 to end a novel with a divorce instead of with a marriage. But was such an end any more conclusive than the Victorian wedding bells? In the Victorian novel the young man gets engaged to the wrong girl, but meets the right girl in time to marry her. In the Georgian novel the marriage to the right girl is preceded by a divorce, instead of a broken engagement.

Fashions pass quickly nowadays, there are so many novels and so many novelists. One man starts a movement; a whole host of lesser writers follow him, prejudicing him with their imitations. This romantic movement of Michael Sadleir’s: ten years at the most I give it. “Desolate Splendour” is a good book, but it is the forerunner inevitably of a positive cavalcade of melodramatic barons and pornographic duchesses. As a publisher’s reader I shiver to think of the fare with which these next few summers will provision me.

We have too many books: that is the whole trouble. And it is not from the commercial point of view that I am complaining. I am not saying the supply is greater than the demand. It isn’t. The number of novelists has increased, but so has the reading public. Commercially the writer has a pretty good time of it nowadays. The big men, Wells and Galsworthy and Bennett, must have made more money out of writing than Dickens and Thackeray ever did: and we others, life is materially easier for us than it was probably for our brothers of the 1820’s. At any rate, I know no other profession in which a man of twenty-five can afford to play cricket three whole days of a working week. It is not on the commercial side I am grumbling. What I am trying to say is this: that it is harder to-day for a writer to produce good work now than it has ever been before.

The pace is too fast for one thing. A novel a year. “You must keep your name before a public.” That is what agent and publisher are continually dinning into the author’s mind, and it is true, of course. That is the commercial line. Spring and autumn fashions. And only a few can last. A novel a year would be no hardship to a man endowed with the ebullient vitality of a Dickens or a Balzac; but there are not many such. In five novels and a few short stories Flaubert said all he had to say. Fielding, Smollett, Sterne, and Richardson together, they do little more than reach double figures. Maupassant had written himself out at forty-three.

And then because there are so many novelists, each writer is expected to cultivate a particular province. His name on a book is like the label on a bottle of wine. “Ah, yes,” says the library subscriber, “Compton Mackenzie, a story of sound and colour; a little naughty: many alluring ladies; a smooth, ornate, sentimental style.” Should he discover instead a grey, political study of the effect of Trade Unionism on the commercial prosperity of the Tynemouth, he would be as disappointed, and would consider himself as ill-used, as Professor Saintsbury would if the Chateau Margaux he was offering his guests should reveal itself as Clos de Vougeot. An admirable Burgundy, but he had ordered claret. The novelist is not encouraged to make experiments. He is asked to rewrite one book indefinitely, till the material is watered down and a new entertainer has appeared.

And there have been so many novels. Every obvious situation has been used. The simple themes of love, jealousy, parenthood have been exploited till there is little new to say. The broad field has been ploughed so often. There are only a few dark spots by the hedge, under the shadow of the trees, where there is little sunshine and plants grow weakly, crookedly, different from their fellows, dank places where the few may specialise. “This, at least,” they say, “we can make our own.”

And whatever else may be urged against Ulysses no one could deny it is James Joyce’s own. An amazing work. A book without grammar and without coherence; like a boat that is launched from an aeroplane in mid-ocean, without oars, without rudder, and without sails. Sometimes I see Ulysses as a literary Thermopylae, a desperate stand against insuperable odds. “I will transcribe life,” he said, “as it is. I will omit nothing. Everything that passes through the mind shall be set on record. By setting everything down I shall achieve proportion.” Ulysses is, perhaps, the most splendid failure in literature. But it is a failure. And when I hear ecstatic praise of it, I remember the five weeks or so during which I was the slave of jigsaw puzzles. For six hours a day I worked at them. I assorted and reassorted ridiculous pieces of coloured wood; I acquired a second sight for the dimensions of lozenge shapes. Gradually, bit by bit, there emerged from the discordant masses of detail on the table, a scheme, a pattern. Gradually, what I had taken for a turnip was revealed to me as a cockatoo, and what I had thought to be a beetroot became a face. Till, at last, the final piece was fitted, and there stared up at me from the table the sort of picture that I used to paint with water-colours in the nursery: a young girl feeding a rabbit with a lettuce; an old man filling a pipe before a fire; a dog crying for its master in the snow. But I had no eyes for the thing’s futility. Out of chaos had I achieved this symmetry. “Wonderful,” I said, “simply wonderful.” It was the picture that I so apostrophised. But it was myself that I was really praising. How wonderful of me, it was, I felt to have produced this thing. And in the same way when, after an hour’s battle, we have restored to sense and English a passage of Joyce’s shorthand, we have not the heart to consider the intrinsic value of the thing restored. We are so delighted with ourselves for having done it. “Wonderful,” we say, “wonderful,” and actually believe it is.

I rather suspect that the year 1922 will be a landmark for the literary historian of our day. Ulysses is a sign-post. It will he hardly possible for the two styles of writing, the analytical shorthand and the narrative any longer to imagine that they are hunting together. James Joyce has worked out on the blackboard the piece of algebra over which his pupils have been so long puzzling. Ulysses is the answer.

“Life with a big ‘L.’” Every generation has its own pet hobby-horse to ride to death, and that’s been ours: still is, I think. We are all in search, each of us in our own way, of this strange quality of living that our own existence lacks.

The young poet walks down the steps of the stately mansion where he has been reading his poems aloud to bright-eyed admiration in a softly-lighted, softly-cushioned drawing-room. He hails a taxi, and as he sinks back into the padded seat he ponders the arid monotony of his existence; one day is so like another. Where is the thrill, the mystery of life? He will return to his flat. His clothes will be laid out ready for him. His man will ask him if he will have his bath at once. He will nod. He will undress slowly, will finish reading that review book in his bath; he will linger over his dressing. He is dining with Mrs Spurway. Just such another dinner-party as yesterday’s was and to-morrow’s will be. Lady Mary will be there and he will have to find occasion to whisper that he loves her as desperately as ever, though he knows too well how rapidly his ardour is cooling. She is like all the rest. And through the window he contemplates the firm, resolute back of the taxi-driver. How he envies him. That is life. He is not tied to a circle of social obligations. He lives outside the conventions. He is free.

The thoughts of the taxi-driver are not dissimilar. He, too, is pondering the monotony of his existence. How the London streets resemble one another. He has promised to take Mary Gubbins to the pictures that evening; and he remembers that he is getting rather tired of Mary Gubbins; she is like all the rest. He envies the gilded persons whom he bears all day long from one scene of revel to another. It is human to envy the conditions of another’s life. The young girl who looks from her bedroom window on to the street below is wooed by its sense of mystery and adventure, and the inspector of omnibus tickets pauses on the top deck to gaze wistfully at the lighted window. It is the hunger for experience, for variety, for a fuller life. We should all like to live a hundred lives, to enter into the heart of every mystery, to feel every human emotion of happiness and sorrow. That is a natural instinct. But its present manifestation is unfortunate. There is a deep-rooted conviction that life is only intense when it is bitter, that waitresses and dustmen and crossing-sweepers have seen deeper into the human heart than bank clerks and school-mistresses and lawyers, that life is only real when it is raw.

Some years ago a mixed vermouth at the CafÉ Royal resulted in my inclusion in a general invitation to a studio party. An obscure musician was celebrating his wife’s elopement. There were prodigal promises of gin and whisky. Everyone would be there, I was informed. I had nothing to do that evening. I went, in search of life.

It was a surprise. We all have our illusion of Bohemia; all of us, that is to say, who study modern fiction and frequent the cinema. At the back of our mind there is a vivid picture of Bohemia as we would have it; an affair of half-lights and perfumes, and cushions and clinging draperies. Perhaps such a Bohemia exists somewhere. It may do; certainly it ought to. But it had no counterpart in that studio party.

By the time I arrived the party had been in progress a couple of hours. The atmosphere was thick. The floor was covered with cigarette ends and the splinters of broken glass. In various corners of the room partially inebriated couples were lost to the world in amorous abandon. An unwashed, unshaved Italian was strumming on a fiddle. There was a little dancing. A number of loose collared Americans were talking in art jargon at the tops of their voices. In a deep armchair, his nose broken, his forehead and eyebrows cut and swollen, a man slept. Whether he had disputed a brother artist’s claim to some lady’s favours, or whether his legs had been unequal to their task and he had collapsed upon a broken bottle, I was unable to discover. At any rate, he slept. He was a loathsome sight; and, for that matter, the whole party was a pretty loathsome sight. But I was impressed. I was just free from the shackles of military discipline and etiquette. Here, I thought, was life. Here was a society that had won to freedom, that was divorced from all preconceived opinions, from every super-imposed tradition of taste and conduct. It was, indeed, somewhat of a shock to me that the only man in the room who appeared to possess a razor should say in a dry voice, “What a show. Look at all these idiots pretending to be Dostoieffskies.” He was right, of course. London is full of people trying to be Dostoieffsky, nursing secretly the grief that they are not epileptic. Dostoieffsky preached the gospel of suffering, and because he spent his life in poverty, the modern idea would appear to be that the only real suffering is material privation, that the man has not lived who has not starved. It is the new snobbery. Once everyone was anxious to establish his descent from a baron. Now everyone is grieved if his pedigree does not contain a dustman.

James Joyce is like that, I fancy: or rather I should say the stuff he writes is. And he could have been so great a writer if he had not been led astray by that reckless heroism of his, that determination at all costs to transcribe life. Perhaps, though, Ulysses is more than Journey’s End for a certain type of fiction: it may be that it is Journey’s End for the novel as a vehicle for narrative; it may be that the novel is played out.

Since the beginning of time the world has had stories told to it. But always in a different form. There was the epic, and that has gone; the ballad, and that has gone; the drama, and that is passing; the novel, and who knows but that the novel as a medium of story-telling has served its turn, that it is through the cinema that the twentieth century will elect to have its stories told, and that the novel will become a weapon of dialectic, a glorified form of journalism, or purely a medium of psychological investigation.