The Working Novelist and the Mythmaking Process Author(s): Andrew Lytle Source: Daedalus, Vol. 88, No.

2, Myth and Mythmaking (Spring, 1959), pp. 326-338 Published by: The MIT Press on behalf of American Academy of Arts & Sciences Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20026499 . Accessed: 04/10/2011 07:48
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The Working

Novelist

and

the

Mythmaking
Andrew

Process
Lytle

When

I first began thinking about the book which was to become I was that is, rationally. The Velvet Horn* thinking consciously: I could almost say falsely, except that the creative act uses all the to do a long piece of fiction I I wanted faculties. mind's thought on a society that was dead. At the time I saw the scene as the kind of life which was the Southern version of a life that, discounting east of the had been common everywhere the sectional differences, and east of the mountains. That life seemed to me to be Mississippi as which civilized America, left of the older and more what was

the pattern The Civil inheritance. of its European well retained and habit, manners War had destroyed that life; but memory and mores are slow to die. its ghostly presence, As a boy I had witnessed and yet the people were this presence inhabited substantial which They were enough. ahve in their entire being. They seemed all the more ahve because of this society their culture was stricken. The last active expression seemed to fall somewhere between 1880 and 1910. Those decades the effective seemed which point of the great revolution tiirning was to diminish a Christian The mechanics inheritance. of the change are obvious to all; the most effective was since it the automobile, its attachment to place. In the the family by destroying uprooted was common to all its the one institution South, certainly, family which the parts. There was great variety to the South's homogeneity, There has been no part of false myths about it never understood. this country so afflicted with "galvanized" myths which presumed to interpret it, but it was family as institution which best expressed * The Velvet Horn
Cumberland hill

(New York: McDowell,

country in the nineteenth

Obolensky
century, marked for

Inc., 1957), is set in the

and revolves of round the is

passionate-natured

Cropleigh

family. Besides

its poetic descriptions

its use

and its

to sensitivity speech in rich and metaphor

the novel, rhythms, allusiveness.?Editor.

symbolism,

The Working Novelist

its culture. blood

327

of By family, I mean all the complex interrelationships and kin, the large "connections" which extended to the county lines and by sympathy the states. overlapped as the supreme agency in the destruction I take the automobile of to place, since the railroads did not attachment the commu destroy connected them more readily. Family and place, nities; they merely as I said, go It was the sense of both which set the South together. as in this country, but too much was asked of the apart family one among many institution. It should have been institutional of culture; it was called upon to do more than its form expressions means But the artist works allowed. of such limitations. So it by no intention, no sense of seemed to me as I began. I had dealing with a forever recurs within the human scene. myth which This conscious approach ismerely one way in, or down. The writer a scene, an idea, a character, a mood, a may begin with anything, situation. Whatever sets him going in appears suddenly generally that suspension of attention which is like the aftereffect of shock. It is a condition of the psyche when it finds itself outside time. This condition may be the occasion In the for vision or dream. man Middle remain, but vision Ages any might know it. Dreams are fails us today. We in before the condition commonly helpless which dreams appear; but vision strikes the state of consciousness. This stroke and that mysterious sense of being possessed largely remain for the artist, the he suffers this point being that presumably intrusion when he is conscious. because the aftereffect Presumably, of shock allows for a certain awareness of what is going on around does not respond in action. It is outside, but the consciousness the intuitive and instinctive before action suspended taking place within a fissure, the unconscious the mind. Somehow, through pierces the consciousness, and from below streams the it image, or whatever is, that sets the artist to work. The shock is a true shock. It paralyzes the rational mind It is mysterious. The cause, the momentarily. natural or positive means. source, can in no way be discovered by But the experience is true, and forever denies to mere formula a rendition of the is experience. which knowledge The creative act is, then, both a rational and an intuitive perform ance. What comes up from below this fissure through generally relates to the subject, but for me at least it seems at first to always be the essence of the It can be this, but it subject. rarely is. It must contain the essence, however; and it is here that the conscious use just

328
of the craft of fiction crucial. between nevertheless

Andrew
comes Without

Lytle
craft is the

lesser part, but its procedure of arranging, finding as well structural parts, and all such matters, relationships or as the tedious search for the be phrase, there would right word no art of as fiction. language sur I am It is curious, but for as long as I have written, always sorrow and trouble to get a afresh, after much story going, prised be related to, not be, the subject. Each that the idea may merely time I have to learn afresh that it is either a segment of a larger idea or an idea too for the action, as it shows itself. The resistance big in the action is enormous, partly because to its dissolution it retains is a of the moment of inspiration. This inspiration the excitement It quickly vision of the whole. sinks into the abyss from momentary it arose, leaving the idea as a kind of clue, the end of the which No matter how firmly the thread which leads into the labyrinth. sense has explored the moment the idea's limitations, the critical artist engages himself, he cannot but take it to mean more than it does. An idea is so inflexible; it tends so easily toward the conceptual. It must turn flesh before it is fiction. Fiction above all should give some one of the the illusion of life, of men and women acting out we all know, not eternal involvements resolving, solving. Only God be the simpler way to solve. A character or a situation would may into the conflict. It is rarely lead more directly It would begin.
my way.

in. The

an idea rather with is suggested by its very advantage in action it becomes arche If the idea is universal, irrefrangibility. to render it describes more nearly a whole action; typal. Therefore, the and the artist must not tell any story but the one story which at this point I would like to distinguish and situation demand. people an and archetypal between representation. opinion about behavior It is never a true idea, because is the vulgarity of taste. Opinion It distorts any action, since it is blind it is either topical or partial. to the fullest complexity of that action. No matter how disguised, to prove a wants something opinion always has "message," it always show itself. Its selection of incidents, instead of making experience This is the failure of the is often obviously therefore, arbitrary. to beginning realistic school of fiction, if school it is. a dead society, it seems to fol to resuscitate To begin by wanting low, involves the writer in a great risk. It gets in the way of bringing

I feel there is an advantage This than a situation or a mood.

The Working

Novelist

329

his people ahve. For the first hundred pages or so he is in danger of creative act; that is, by opinion. He is saved by the being misled comes when life. The moment he is saved by his people showing in the stress of the situation will come "ahve," will make the actors a response that reveals them. In the hght of this response the writer Then he is can go back and rectify, revise, remove the scaffolding. set him going. He to criticize the impulse which able to examine, can do this without the life evoked. He can do it because impairing and the intuitive hfe is there. It is at this point that the conscious for The mechanics of the craft work most easily together. practice Ford taught me this is cleaning up as you go along. Ford Maddox this method. it, but not all. You do the day's stint, Many practice it up, change look at it again. Tighten let it set, and next morning As the action grows, each day's and then proceed. things about, In the beginning work moves closely out of what has gone before. holds the clear which of the threads of complication at last shows it. This is a decisive moment. up Cleaning that is, simulates natural growth most unnaturally: Such a process is artificial. The of all growth, and yet it has about it the mystery common miracle of life is the seasonal It is so common, and change. a we would be too aware of of necessity must be so, else living in it is not always center. strain the amenities. This would So it is miracle. of a craft. But there are moments when the craft in the practice This is overborne by the stroke of life. This is the flash of miracle. is the artist's reward, almost the only lasting reward, for it is an as it should. assurance it was of that the work is moving Perhaps when he said the artist continues the this that Blake was thinking act of God. the strict idea lift. does this bemusement with How gradually at what it became clear again that I do not now remember stage do not write about a society living or dead. You write about you who hve vrithin the constraint of some inherited social agree people are ment. They already involved when you take them up, for there is no natural man. He has never anywhere been seen, certainly not is natural or common to all men has within historic time. But what been changed from birth by manners and mores, all the institutions, conventions and laws of a given society. It is the restraint of decorum, and classes?all such which taste, the limits of estates propriety, the instincts, the unruly distort, repress, guide impulses, passions, demands of the blood toward the multifold kinds of behavior. All state of constant

330
forms of statement, of intercourse but as

Andrew

Lytle
is a platitude it shows itself

This faith and behef. rely upon for the author working knowledge

And this working knowledge was already informing, changing from I was a concept to the movements of life, the idea of a dead society. that is, I was not only not only rationally seeing fuller implications; as action, which had already was composed seeing of what this society it to the cycles a I was comparing taken it out of stage; conceptual for of civihzations, The decline other societies go through. which follows the failure of behef, the cultural forces of necessity example, of traditional in the hardening made manifest gradually withdrawing But out of that is, death. laws and forms, foreshadowing rigidity: to life. Within death is the conclusion death comes life, as appositely in immortahty and the circling spiral of such change hes the behef At some point it came to me that it is the archetypes continuance. it is only the shapes in which forever recur, are immortal, timeless; these appear that seem to harden and die, that is, the manners which and mores that are unique to a given society; and these shapes are the the illusion illusion moving within of reality, the world's appearances view of a shock this was to my partial and emotional time. What of

with the fresh hght of truth.

the South!
Now the South was a mixed society, and it was a defeated society; are self-conscious. and the defeated They hold to the traditional are but tell them ways, since these ways not only tell them what they can do this. It is this with a fresh sense of themselves. Only defeat which makes for the sharpened contemplation very self-consciousness to euphoria. The sudden iUumination made of self. It is comparable life tragic. But it stopped action. life fuller and keener, as it made made for a sudden with of self-awareness The very heightening in the surface drawal of the life force. What was left of it remained forms. The forms were shattered, but because of this force they held shines with for a while life, but shape briefly. The shed skin I did not know the force of life is already on its night sea journey. as I felt the how to define this force at the time; I only felt it vaguely, I was slow vacuum of chaos. is the atmosphere which beneath, thrust out of chaos to connect this basic energy with the repetitive into the surrounding void, but I felt I knew that chaos is the under it was the state or the family lying condition of any artifice, whether it so far only did I read the myth, or a work of art. Mythically, for in after Eve had state Adam and Eve found themselves seemed the their

The Working Novelist

331

been taken from Adam's side. Their expulsion from the earthly para dise seemed to put them into the disorder of chaos. Actually, they a natural order which was a were confronted of the by multiplicity conflicts of opposites. This is not chaos but life as we suffer it, and we fall into it as the child falls into the world. Continuance depended the crafts, not only to upon the exercise of the will and especially survive but to try to restore, to bring together the two halves which man and woman serve as the basic make a whole. symbol Together, old is the sentence we hear every day, for the life drama. How 'This is my better half." on the as It was some years after I had been working yet unnamed The Velvet Horn I was treating an aspect of this that I realized ancient drama. The brothers and sister, under the guidance of the withdrew from the stresses of formal society in an effort to eldest, return to the of innocence and wholeness. prenatural equihbrium This is an habitual the refusal to engage in the cooperating impulse, that make life. It is also as illusory as any Golden Age, opposites and forbidden by divine and human law. Therefore, it is the grounds for one of the oldest forms of search and conflict The symbol for this is incest a hteral It need not be fact; but it is symbol, also one having one instance in the as fact as welL in counterpart; story it happened For many years it has seemed to me that incest was a constant scene. There was evi upon the Southern plenty of circumstantial dence. The boys' and girls* rooms seemed too obviously separated. I remember in old houses the back stairs with sohd to hide paneling ankles and lower legs as the girls came down. Call it prudery, but what is prudery? The fear of incest, if incest it was, was perhaps not too many of the overt, but I knew of whore houses where girls had been ravished by fathers and brothers. Even if these were extreme instances?I had no way to know how general they may have been were indicative. ?still But the actual union between close kin they was not my interest. It was the incest of the spirit which seemed a condition which inhered within the family my subject, spiritual itself. I did not have to look very far, no farther than both sides of my own house, to know this. It was clearest in the county family, an the partial where isolation meant and constancy of intimacy in work association and play which induced excessive jealousy for one against intrusion from the outside. Often enough a partiality child went the needs of parental about all care, bringing beyond kinds of internal stresses within the family circle. This jealousy, this

332

Andrew

Lytle
a possessiveness objects with that today will engage family over whether a field has been

to the land and to natural love, extended even I know of a generations. lasting on end ritualized in quarrels for hours the guests let grow up in sprouts, while love quarrels, and the land is as much But to return: once I had got well that novel, I had completely forgotten

society to life. What part the edge of my attention. a world, making peopling would be guided by his uncle. The surface action seemed to Lucius, in his first sexual experience, be the initiation of the boy, culminating this was by no means his only adventure. The world he although was entering, I felt, must seem out of the world, withdrawn, mysteri since in chmbing the ous, of a strange look to him and refreshing, a and sterile place, burning under Peaks of Laurel, he left behind dry excessive drought. Of course he was into his entanglement chmbing his fathers with suicide would The seeming life, which rebegin. reason for the climb was to witch a well: It accidental find water. bore a hteral as well as symbolical meaning. aware of the need for this double usage as I became Gradually The symbol should always have its hteral far as fiction is concerned. or natural counterpart. It should never rely upon the Platonic ideal this is a concept. Since fiction is an action in which nothing image; must be left inert, a concept of perfection, say, cannot be known can out of Perfection be sought out of imperfection, actively. only the fallen state of man represented the cooperating forces of good by as of myth by such people and evil. The reinterpretation Jung and Zimmer has done much to make this clear, but I think it has always It was been known by a certain kind of artist, if only intuitively. the yeast which worked the dough. An image seemed, then, not an reflection of perfection, but an action derived from the imperfect in all of a whole into parts, which of origin begins shattering myths be a reunion of the parts the world drama. The end of this would never into a whole, but a whole no longer innocent. But this reunion was the in the world, takes place else the drama would end. Here I in no way saw it. clue to the end of my novel, however, although to inform me. The action had not moved sufficiently of the archetypal the action itself must be symbolic Anyway, I consider, was the most This, experience. important thing The

sit as at a play. These are all as subject object. into the first section of the a dead I had wanted to bring incest would play had, as well, moved to in the first pressures I was of involved into which the young nephew, this world

The Working Novelist

Velvet

333

more me. The than an inert Horn symbol must be taught or emblem. Where there will be one to sign symbols appear?and contain them all in their relationships?they represent the entire action into a sharp image or succession of images the essence by compressing in animal nature, the horn stands for both For example, of meaning. and feminine parts of being, the two aspects of the the masculine the two in one contained by a single which make a whole: apposites form. Add the velvet to this and you posit the state of innocence, that suspension before the act which continues the cycle of creation. of instinct, rubs At a certain moment the buck, out of the mystery the velvet off against the tree, and then he is ready for the rutting season. The velvet grows about the feminine end of the horn, and it bleeds as it is rubbed away. The blood is real, but the act sym bolizes what horn's the other end of the horn will would be do. In human nature the and counterpart Eve contained within separation, Aphrodite taken from Adam's side, at another level continues the cycle of crea tion. Both forms exist vrfthin the constancy of the seasonal turn of nature. The entire range of imagery relates to these. So used, the image as symbol becomes the clue to reading, the are related to the structure. means It is not which all the parts by inert but active, being both root and crown of a particular living This is technically the controlling called experience. image; and once discovered, it allows the reader to read, not read into a book and preoccupations. It also guides the preconceptions as it an action eschews the rendition. When the analyzes judgment or it is always symbolic, that is archetypal, whether partial topical, the author knows it or not. To see a fiction either as so-called realism or is to commit or the literal error, either as writing symbolism Reahsm distorts or diminishes the full action by plotting reading. a can this be done beforehand and end. How middle, beginning, without the creative act? How can a writer know before inhibiting hand what his people will do, until he has put them into action and so let the kind of thing they do show them for what they are; and this ground proceed partly creatively and partly deliberately? upon I rather imagine that when such fiction is successful, the author allows sense to abandon his creative or the parts of it the rigid plotting which get in the way. On the other hand you find the symbol misused as as sign. Sign symbol will be inserted in place of the concretion, It will be made to stand for the action instead the motion of action. his own the hermaphrodite, the one form. Their Hermes

334
of the actors Cross

Andrew

Lytle

in conflict showing it. To let the bare boards of the is one thing; the Cross as image stand for the Crucifixion in the mind is the and heart the action of the Passion releasing

the fictive way. the out of some form of myth will accept writer working as nature. He does not take the world operating within supernatural as the end in itself. His form will be some form of Myth: myth. other, The structure: the conflict of the the image: archetype?the symbol: ever recurring human experience. In the Garden of Eden section of there are three parts that The Velvet Horn ("The Water Witch") drama. the three stages of Eden as symbol of the world represent is the entire creature isolated within Adam alone, the hermaphrodite, is the beginning of the loss of which the stasis of innocence, himself, not is taken out of his side (symbolic: the woman action. When as we know the to nature it), the separation begins according Incest is the symbol for this next stage. The third conflict. perpetual action of the drama, the effort to fuse the parts into is the continuing a wholeness is complete The symbol for this is which knowledge. the serpent, the old intruder. But there is another symbol for whole the serpent eating its tail, lying about the waters ness, the uroboros, is one of the oldest symbols, and out of it comes the of chaos. This You will find it all over the world. only perfect figure, the circle. our hemisphere it encircles the Mexican calendar stone. To shift In the uroboros, both the his form contains the image, Adam within the feminine in Adam and feminine parts. Once separated, masculine the Serpent. All the goods and evils becomes Eve, the masculine and one of the images of it is the grow out of this separation, the two serpents entwining sickness and health. There caduceus, are numerous forms of the separation, the where destruc dragon fight, the human tive nature takes its fhe-breathing, scaly shape without or Moses' staff. This, I should think, is creature; or the Medusa; in myth. repeated endlessly but I read not as Of course reading has helped me tremendously, a scholar but as an artist. The wonder nature. of it is its accidental to be I happened I did not look to books for help. reading certain even before I began, Frazer authors at the time of writing?some and years ago, more recently Zimmer, Jung, particularly Psychology and History Consciousness. and Neumann's This of Origin Alchemy, comes close to mystery, the first real but anyway accidental reading came out of it. The and awareness direction of conscious surge

The Working Novelist

curious

335

over what part is that, as I looked back already had been I found httle to change. The action was doing its own work. done, or not I cannot it would have continued Whether say. Of course was intrusion from the depths, where but the there rearrangement

the subject lay, had already painfully and haltingly been moving in

its own autonomous way. The conscious its own direction, help from me was I thought I was helping another land of story; ambiguous. I took hold then at a certain moment The invisible form consciously. showed only streaks of substance, but I was able to feel the subject shaping its form. And I had my controlling image well fixed in the of my head: incest, the act symbolic of wholeness, not the top part wholeness of innocence but the strain toward a return to this state of being. Was not the brotherhood of man most supremely defined the love of brother and sister, at least in symbolic terms? If by they the two parts of the whole of experience, the effort to represented become one again must contain every kind of love which the separa tion had scattered the world as man struggled to escape throughout his fallen condition. act of will he could love and the Through The escape it, but only temporarily as far as the flesh was concerned. lay just here. It is most surely known in and spirit surcharge each other, in that brief annihilation of every separate faculty, the annihilation being the act of fusion, the disembodiment within the body, which was the in chaos before the fall. The moment in which this could suspension of eternity which under-stands, that is stands under or outside time, the brief insight into the unmoving Mover. I now saw my two the moving parts of the structure: working tense which is the world's and the eternal present illusion, present tense which knows or future but nothing of past always is. We know it best in the images of dreams. But the myth and fairy tale all and represent this sense of the eternal. Once operate through upon a their tone time; Long, long ago in a far kingdom?these beginnings by and meaning speak of no time, no country. They are outside time; are they always and forever about what is constant in human experi ence. The of the seeming tone of the far past is the announcement timeless held vvithin the point of a moment. To emphasize this, there is httle or no natural no cities, in myth or landscape, recognizable tale. This is a crucial feature between myth and fairy distinguishing fiction which deals with in common, myth. They have the archetypes irony of the central conflict the act of love, when flesh

be felt had nothing to do with time, but with its opposite, the knowing

336
but

Andrew

Lytle

in fiction the action must be put in a recognizable place and I say this, Kafka appears. The moment for the in society. Except trusion of his moral rage, he more nearly approaches the ideal form as we know it has httle to do with of myth. But morahty myth. As soon as I to feel the right limits of the structure, I could began its formalities. Within deal with the various levels and distinctions it oscillates of the mind, where conscious and between especially I could put the sense of eternity, the images of the unconscious, are not past but forever with past which quivering immediacy. to this, the mind and letting the action take place by closing Opposed as upon a stage, I could use the moving present tense, the action in time. But this last was not to proceed in a continuous movement of and end. Each of the five sections was surface beginning, middle, to be nearly itself, the tensions of the action evoked complete within The move by eternal knowledge acting against time's knowledge. ment in time would allow the sections to be connected, dramatically each showing a whole but differently, I hoped, the fullest involving, of the central image: incest. Not until the end of the possibihties connect all the parts and the action the shock of meaning book would be complete. There would be no way to turn to the end of the book and find out what had happened. This puts a handicap upon reading, and accumulation this juxtaposition rather than the steady advance of a conflict, which is the way of naturalism and the oldest form of all, the simple art of narrative. now I also had a firm grasp upon the By point of view, and I knew was the hero and heroine, but who the protagonist was. Everybody the brother and uncle, could represent them, only Jack Cropleigh, for Jack, the spiritual hermaphrodite, contained them all in his mind. He alone could suffer the entire myth. The point of view would therefore be that of the Roving Narrator, where the variety of the action might he within as it met the the levels of his consciousness time and eternity. set him apart with no life Having of his own, other than his entanglement with all hfe viewed by family and community, he was best suited to control as central intelligence, and his office as victim-savior could bring it all to a focus by his I intended, or death. The irony it happened, recognized when lay in how httle his victimage could offer. He could save nobody, not even his beloved nephew, by proxy. He could only save his nephew from running away from life. AU he could tell him was that no matter how far you run you are always there. As archetype of victim-savior, unconscious:

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of the Mass. His death implies Jack, Im afraid, denies the efficacy that for heroes, at any rate, the sacrifice must be forever repeated, as well as symbolically. is theological This perhaps heresy actually truth. The feeling and but mythical truth, and certainly fictional he suffers throughout pass progressively through the three knowledge the of the Garden's drama, renewing through the nephew, phases inheritor, the same perpetual cycle. the bastard child of incest, is in a sense then The nephew Lucius, of Jack, or if you like of all his uncles and the youthful counterpart I think this was the reason I was so long in finding the mother. so the tale opens out of his I had begun with Lucius protagonist. over in the next section, and the view eyes and mind. Jack takes remains with him throughout for the reasons given, in spite of the the old fact that it roves again to Lucius and even to Pete Legrand, I feel, for In the roving point of view it is only necessary, to dominate the story, so that no matter where throughout seem to to one central the view shifts, it might belong intelhgence, and sensibility alone equal to the fullest knowledge. that intelligence The success of this depends upon how you write it, and especially (The roving is no good upon the transitions from section to section. in chapters. ) For example, written although ?ie view is with Lucius so fills the pages, at the beginning, toward the end, that Jack especially when he takes over in the next section the reader should feel no jar and without follow, as he was now entering a fuller com question of the complication. If he did not feel that what had gone plexity in Jack's mind, he could feel that it before was actually might have I know, but if it could be made This was been. to go tricky, then what follows could also seem an extension of the smoothly, as every mind is equal to the total central intelhgence, experience, the difference that only one can know the fullest meaning in being success for all. Anyway, this is how it worked out?how suffering fully, it is not the author's place to say. I can only feel that it comes off. My pace of writing is generally with constant cleaning up and structural revisions. Too very slow, a often I will spend a day on a paragraph; is a work. page good day's or so, the artifice But as I drew toward the end, the last thirty pages It possessed me. There is no other usurped my mind. completely word for it, and I've never quite felt it before. I became an merely instrument. I wrote three or four pages a a day, scarcely changing word. It was as if I had divided myself into two persons, one watching intruder. one mind

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and one

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Lytle

a shadow. The physical seemed I felt presence doing. and appetite had lost its savor. My for its demands, disgust impulse was to remain at the and not get up until the book was typewriter be too long for my strength. Food and sleep done, but this would were necessary, and the tactical considerations of how much changed from day to day. I could not bear to be touched or noticed. My nerves had drawn into the tissue of the skin. I forced to eat myself as in a dream. I would go to bed at seven or eight o'clock and rise each morning earlier, until I was getting up at two. In a kind of I knew that I had to watch this expense of energy, half-awareness or I would out before the end. I sensed that if I did, I would give lose it, that once this possession of me by the actors was broken, it would never return. It was as if there were only so many words left, and each had its place, if I could hold out to receive them. The last was all in the front part of my mouth, and each word day my breath in the final hour or so they to fade, the had weight. Then began When it was all done, the of meaning substance growing hghter. I leaned back in the final period made a final expulsion of breath. chair. I felt that all that had gone before was right, or the illusion not have seized me. of the last acts being not fiction but life would This is the way it was done, to the best of my recollection. There is such cunning in the way the creative part uses the conscious craft that it is hard to follow the twisted windings of the journey. It seems as if it is real, and just that. You must act yet know you are it is sustained over so acting; but the acting is lost in the act. How a time, in this instance over nine years, is a and a cause long mystery as is the seems to be the for shame, setting down of what procedure. This fresh interest in myth derives, perhaps, from a of weakening the formal authority of the Church. the Satanic accept Everywhere ance of matter as the only value, the only fulfillment, has been shaken. We sense again that people cannot hve, except in some belief outside seem to show that when behef themselves. The cycles of cultures hardens into formalism, the center dry and hollow, it is a leaving of the veil of the time, as Yeats says, of the trembling temple. But some new faith breaks before there is a withdrawal into through, to be the the source. This I beheve conflicts of myth archetypal which the formalized rituals and dogmas of institutional precede an artist can make. This is a statement And he can rehgion. only make it only vaguely, as it affects his work, for the artist is a cannibal of Gargantuan if he is lucky. appetite who does not exclude himself,