‘Certainly they,’ which are ‘these things’, which are the rhythms of poetry and prose, ‘are not worked out step by step with conscious artifice; only the final polishing, the removal of lapses, is a conscious process.’
Here Marjorie, in Maytime, in sunshine outdoors, is both correct and entirely off. Where she is inward with how writing happens becomes manifest in the following sentence, but polishing, no – it’s not and never applying wax and buffing, or smearing on Brasso and then removing it with circular finger motions beneath a yellow duster. This would describe typesetting. Final drafts can still change pattern and meaning.
Imagine, say, a very complicated scale model of a cat, with tabby fur, animatronic when switched on. Instead of polishing, the artist might – five minutes before declaring it finished – change the colour of its eyes. or they might begin powerfully to feel the proportions of its rear half needed improvement, and would have to disassemble the legs in order to insert shorter bones. Or a whole new heart, new motor, might be needed, and then everything would be back in bits. And this happening not when any of the skeleton has been miscast or carved from balsa wood; this when, to anyone else, the cat is delightfully ready to be a public cat.
But here’s Marjorie’s next, saving sentence – the inward one: ‘When we try to enquire into these larger problems of the whole nature of artistic creation, the trouble is that the mind of the artist, during this proces, is far too busy with the immediate urge to be watching what happens.’ This suggests fastforward polishing.
As I copied it out, I began to disagree with Marjorie, whose scent today is floral but summery rather than springlike. I think artists do watch, they just watch very efficiently, so as to be able to re-access their trance. ‘That all our knowledge of such processes is fragmentary, a collection of shining scraps.’ Although I respect the polishing and shining, artists’ written accounts of writing are deliberately partial, not scrappy. We hide ourselves.