Conversations With Mr. Prain by Joan Taylor Read Free Book Online Page A

entertaining, but it enables people to reconcile themselves to injustice and confirms apathy. True prophecy always preaches some kind of revolution.”
    “Ah, so fiction as pure entertainment is irredeemable to you, then, even though you claim people like detective stories for rather profound reasons.”
    A chorus of voices shouting, Stop! did not deter me. “The people who entertain, purely, well, let them do it,” I continued. “They offer a panacea—all those rags to riches flummeries and action adventures which snare the dreams of people who cannot or dare not change their own lives. True prophecy, wherever it occurs, in art or outside it, does not offer us alter egos through which we can
escape
the drudgery of our own lives. It confronts us with the real world. Why should people want to read something thatmakes us uncomfortable with the way we live? Writers have to sugar-coat their themes with tasty plots if ever they want to say anything meaningful. Publishing is just another entertainment industry nowadays.”
    Mr. Prain smiled wryly. “There was always a market for romances, thrillers … consider the hack writers of Grub Street, or the
Author’s Farce
by Henry Fielding. I don’t think publishing has been so very ideologically sound in the past. It isn’t as if anything has suddenly changed.”
    “Oh yes, and there’s always been a temptation for a writer to produce complete
bullshit.”
    This last word jarred badly in the circumstances. The voices whose pleas for the immediate cessation of my tirade had gone unheeded moaned and lamented. I should have said “nonsense,” “trash,” anything but “bullshit,” so very loudly, in Mr. Prain’s company. With him, one did not use such words. It burst out as something I wanted to say to him, but somehow it rested like a judgment on everything I had been saying. Did I write always for high ideals? I wanted to explore truth, truths. But I also wanted to spin a yarn. I couldn’t help it! What were my 25 folk-tales about? Truth, or just a good story? It was true I wanted to awaken people to the truth about western society’s responsibility for global exploitation, environmental pollution and Third World disasters, but much more than that my written work was a processing of countless dreams: great caverns of fantasy that I would fall into and ascend from slowly, which often seemed to have no rhymeor reason, no moral, no ecological or political perspective at all. I had to make something out of all these imaginings that possessed me. The truth was that for most of the time I did not know why I wrote. Self-expression. My imagination just happened, and the writing followed. Wasn’t that the truth? Very often, I would understand the true purpose of stories and poems years later. With Mr. Prain, I felt I had to sound as if I was in control, that I approached writing seriously with a recognised, rational plan, or else I feared he would dismiss me as just what I knew I seemed to him: too “colourful” to be serious. The theory that a lightweight mind accompanied my blonde curly hair was not a new preconception about me. In this story of Goldielocks, there was just one bear, who had lured the girl into his house, to sit on his big chair.
    I had fallen into a snare. He had glanced away at my word. Silence for a moment. I looked up at the misericord, and when I looked back at him I realised that instead of looking prim and offended at my language he wore an amused expression, an expression which displayed some definite satisfaction. He had wanted to excite me, provoke me into animation, so I would forget to be serious and controlled. He would induce too much emotion in me, and I would forget my genteel politeness. He would trick the Eliza Doolittle to make a slip, to remind me that I was not a respectable English lady, but something altogether inferior. I felt I had to say something else quickly to cover up this mistake.
    “Writers can never be sure of their own