Psychology and Other Stories Read Free Page A

instead.
    â€œWell yes, Strachey’s all right all right,” Archie began his prepared statement with heavy if undirected irony, “though I do find at times that his prose can be a bit what you might call flowery in spots.” (Twelve hours later, lying in bed and replaying this conversation in his head, he was wracked by remorse that he had not said “florid.”)
    Clayton Fishpool pushed his chair back and narrowed his eyes at Archie. “You say that like it’s a bad thing, Archer old cock.”
    â€œWell, I suppose,” Archie drawled, becoming defensively more languorous the more fretful he felt, “it’s just that I feel sometimes that he’s a bit, well, pleonastic.” He fairly vibrated with tension as he waited for this bomb to drop; he had never said or heard the word spoken aloud and had no idea if he was pronouncing it correctly.
    Fishpool threw back his shoulders. Archie would soon come to recognize this gesture as characteristic: it always preceded a diatribe. As Fishpool spoke, his shoulders would slowly roll forward again; periodically he would throw them back again, as if winding a clock.
    Archie listened to him talk, his attention cutting in and out at random, as if by some mysterious physiological process. On a conscious level, he found Fishpool’s apparently impromptu speech on the role of language in literature clever and thought-provoking. But on an unconscious level? Perhaps he was only flattered to have someone talking to him at all—and someone who knew his name, no less.
    A week later, Fishpool found Archie in the dining hall dutifully reading Valmouth (and holding it up rather conspicuously, for by this time he had also read, but without being discovered doing so, two other Firbanks—working his way chronologically backwards on the assumption that, like wine, writers improved with age).
    â€œTell me what you think,” said Fishpool expansively, as if Archie’s opinion of the book were only one of many things he wished to know.
    â€œI find it to be,” he said, taking care to make this sound not like a criticism but a dispassionate appraisal, “a bit, shall we say, thin on the ground insofar as plot is concerned.”
    â€œThat is of course the point , cock. What makes Firbank so brilliant is that he has tossed out plot, story, action, chronological progression—all that dreadful muck. Plot is dead—and Firbank, before even the Moderns, helped kill it.” Fishpool threw back his shoulders. “Literature,” he said, “is not about story but about character—and by character one means the intricate machinations of the individual psychology. Say what you will about the sins and excesses of Joyce”—and here he paused gallantly, as if to allow Archie to say what he wouldabout the sins and excesses of Joyce—“he did at least do one important thing for literature: he moved the stage into the mind where it belongs; he brought thought into his characters’ heads …”
    Several minutes later, Archie’s face felt like it had cramped permanently into an expression of engaged receptivity, like that of a wise judge listening with a painstaking suppression of bias to a sympathetic witness.
    Fishpool was saying, “Firbank of course works the same ground but from the opposite direction. His characters, or quote characters unquote, are all surface, all gorgeous glittering sound and light—‘The play of shine and shade on the trees as the supple boughs wag.’ We enter not at all into their thoughts. That is the clue, of course, the key: they are but the thoughts, the psyche incarnate, of Firbank himself. You see, Archer, you have to read Firbank’s characters as an expression of Firbank’s character. And that is just what literature must aim to be, if it is to be literature at all: an expression of, a monument to, its creator’s individuality. Or don’t