The germ
of writing
fictional
and fiction

1.The idea of raising a child can apply it towards a profession is unhealthy. The idea of raising a child is allocated to the artist unhealthy and pathetic. As there are parents who want to - they want very strongly - that his son, redeeming God knows that about themselves and their own history, to become an engineer, so there are - the more rare, in agreement - the parents they want - they want very strongly - his son, which sit in the heat is guaranteed for twelve generations to come, become an artist. It raises a musician, so - and the thought goes to the poor Mozart - is breeding a painter, a writer is bred. Which contradicts with the freedom of any content - I'm not saying even revolt, freedom to simply say - the work of art and at the same time, it undermines the foundations of human coexistence with the explosive social privilege.
Let me give an example that happens to all those in that particular debate - those who think they speak only of others - also speaks of himself.

2. On the evening of January 29, 1882, the writer Henry James receives a telegram: "Your mother is in critical condition. Come immediately. " He is in Washington, immediately leaves for New York, we arrived at five in the morning.

3.In his notebooks, Henry James noted the theory of a writer who just died in that same 1882, Anthony Trollope (1815-1882), "by which they could educate a boy to become a novelist like any other job." Trollope does not theorize on hearsay, but from personal experience. He tried: he did everything to make his son become a writer, but, to its knowledge to James, the educational project, so to speak, must have some flaw, because the boy, in spite of his father, was over in Australia to the sheep farmer.
This contrast between ambition and outcome paternal branch in James gets a lot of satisfaction because Trollope is for him at the same time, a writer who dislikes and a famous writer. A short, in whose place he would be there.

4. In his notebooks, is reaping what Henry James who, from his point of view of a professional writer, should come in handy for his job. Stories and gossip intercepted a cup of tea and the other, not so much scenes from life of others, but rather episodes of lives told by others, captured on the fly phrases, names, lists of names, surnames, place names. For him it is "germs", "seeds of stories," "particles in the flow of conversations, suggestions accidental, everything picks up is the seed from which - rather than a disease - can be derived from the journals of half a disputed story world or the great novel that would make him famous and immortal. On one condition, of course: that is to breed the germ him because, he says, "if the gesture is made on purpose you can be sure that you have received too much." The "subject" - the subject of the story or the novel, the plot correctly - would be only "the lowest grain, in the atom of truth, beauty, reality," which, of course, is "almost imperceptible to the eye common ". By James defends the privilege of the writer - not his bank account, an account of the family, which allows him to roam the living room into the living room, city to city and from country to country, not having to do anything to maintain and to devote himself body and soul to literary glory, not the bank account, but an alleged special ability in grasping, always knowing how to find the pearl in the muck to do your others.

5.From the Notebooks of James clear his literary technique and the cynicism of this technique is referred to the service. Write down a sentence, the premise: "In a story someone says." He likes the phrase, then use somewhere. The talk about a human cartoon imbroglio and melodramatic, and he readily notes: "treated with a sure hand, it seems to me that it will be extremely accurate, effective and moving." If, however, tell him about a girl who, after many vicissitudes, he chooses to go into a convent, notes that there would be the case for action, changing the story, because, now, he says, that the monastery is "an argument that shows the rope. " He claims to be able to start writing a story that is starting from a character, but fears that if it departed from the novel may be "too exclusively psychological - as if a character could deprive of a story and a story of people that originated it, as if they were not inextricably linked.
As often happens to writers who have nothing better to do, his attention, then, is focused on the malleability of the material according to its success. The original contexts of his seeds, his eye not common, do not count: in his view the whole mechanics of literature can all be disassembled and reassembled at will, according to the whim of the moment.

6. He arrived in New York at five in the morning and the cousin said that when they sent the telegram, in fact, his mother was already dead.
Its literature - his? literature in general - is bogus as well as the telegram he received. It is a conventional lie: his mother died, but it is written that is very serious. It is used as the assumption that, vis à vis, they are easier words to say, knowing full well that later, when one is, there are no appropriate words ever. It is used as the presumption of never having to give rise to strong emotional states without the guarantee to keep them under its control. Use it this way - also - in the presumption that, explicitly naming the dead, the telegram - a very particular genre but not devoid of hypocrisy specific literary - can not obtain the success it deserves. A success that, first, is decreed by the reader to the extent that - do not disturb it too much - a little 'reassures him, a bit' consoles him and, above all, leave a bit 'of hope.

Felice Accame

Nota
Manicured by Ottavio Fatica, I taccuini di Henry James have been published by theory, in Rome in 1996. For Trollope's theory, cf. p. 34.