The enchanted life of Dan Brown

[Russell Nash]

From “The Failure” (Un Uomo Finito), by Giovanni Papini
Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1924
Chapter 40: The Clown (pages 266-270)

Rather than die of hunger and cold like an alley cat, I will take up any trade. I will pick rags in the streets with a pack on my back. I will stand in front of churches and restaurants begging pennies in the name of God. I will be a cleaner in a public latrine. I will lead a dancing bear through country towns. If, really, I can find nothing else to do I will become a lawyer.

But there is one trade I will never follow—no, not even if I am ordered to; with a revolver at my back. I will never be a literary buffoon. I will never be a "clown author". I will never be the man who writes to amuse people, to pass time pleasantly for the bored and the lazy. I will never be a contemptible wretch who from January 1st to January 1st invents stories, manufactures plots, thinks up adventures, rehashes his­tories, works out novels, writes short stories, rigs up plays to make people who pay and applaud him laugh or cry.

These public mountebanks may prate of beauty, pre­tend to turn up their noses at the public, hide in their vest pockets the money they get for the fun they provide. It does them no good. They may like it or lump it; but they are prostitutes serving the Sov­ereign Mob that would forget its shameless day in an evening of pleasure. They are the hired clowns of the People; jesters and fools to drummers and salesmen who would snuff a book between puffs of cigar smoke. A peddler of fiction is a bootblack of the idle rich He is a panderer offering the sham life of others to people who have no life of their own. What is the difference, in effect, between a cigar and a story, a drama and a bottle of wine? Smoking and reading you pass time more easily. A play, like a good drunk, takes you off into another world where you see things and dream things that do not exist.

There is, to be sure, one difference: Art. You can, I grant you, say many beautiful things this way, and there are books of this kind that may live long in the hearts of men. But underlying them all is the notion that men, above everything else, must be amused and made to laugh—that a good story will keep them awake, and quicken their breathing, till you can reach their minds with a good idea and fool them into swallowing a great truth.

Why should I care whether they are amused or not? I refuse to play buffoon to any one! I assert that all writers of novels and stories and plays have been buf­foons, paid to tickle the imaginations of men, as fid­dlers tickle their ears and women the rest of them.

Most men are children, even at sixty, and they need these time-killers; they need fiction and adventure; even though not quite children themselves have been ready to fill, getting down on all fours on the floor, blowing a tin horn, and straddling a broom-stick. I am sorry to say that among them have been men I admire considerably: Homer and Cervantes, Shake­speare and Dostoievski. They, like other buffoons, have asked: "What can I do for you to-day?" When I read them myself and enjoy them, I too am a cap­tious child always eager to hear a story from mama!

I realize that I am hard to please—a bore and a Puritan. These men have brightened our childhood. Their people have walked with us and talked to us on many an evening of sadness and lust in our boy­hood years. Who would have believed that they were just buffoons? Even I, when not obsessed with wrath that makes me vomit upon them, doubt my own words and almost believe I must be out of my mind, unjust, unkind.

But no, I am right. What is a clown? A clown is a man who amuses men. And how does he amuse them? Often by making them laugh at the misery of others; but at any rate, by using their unhappiness and their misfortunes as a means of arousing not compassion and horror, but mere curiosity. The sad case of two lovers who die before marrying is sure to keep off ten yawns an hour. The desperation of a mother, the infidelity of a wife, the vengefulness of a murderer, the despondency of a failure, the gener­osity of a martyr, the disaster of an innocent—is there anything in the world that is not seized upon by the professional story-teller and made his own, to be ex­posed at one-fifty a peep to the eyes of boys and girls who have more vital energy than they can find opportunity to use, and to papas and mamas who would enjoy a laugh at Don Quixote's expense and a tear or two over poor King Lear?

The object of all their art—and sometimes it is a great art—is to interest indolent readers or spectators, transport them outside their petty, narrow, personal lives, unenlightened, trivial, humiliating, burdensome. Give the word buffoon its highest, noblest, most heroic meaning, if you will! But let me apply it to those who seek some recompense for amusing by writing, though their reward be a dead branch of laurel, an epigraph on a tombstone, a round of applause in a theater, or ten thousand dollars cash.

Do you think such things befit men conscious of their place in this mysterious and awe-inspiring uni­verse? Do you think that the few of us who can see four spans farther than these children and know the end awaiting us if we do not courageously conquer destiny—upbuilding a purer life against the menace of ultimate Nothingness—do you think, I ask, that we should encourage such childishness and fatuity in men, stopping them in front of cardboard theaters to watch the antics of dreamland puppets, and listen to the joys and woes of silly phantoms?

Why all this misplaced compassion? Why waste so much genius in amusing and soothing men? How much finer, how much more dangerous it would be to startle them from their slumbers, bring them face to face with the darkness about us, dangle them head down into the Abyss of Nothing, forcing them to rouse themselves, know themselves, become sadder but nobler in the face of a universe which now barely con­cedes them life!

Away with novels, stories, legends, tragedies! If you're bored, there's bridge! Or try a bath in the salt sea! Let genius no longer be used to furnish enter­tainment for idlers, to reanimate people who have once been or will never be—but rather to proclaim new, and better lives, to prepare an earth that will know no sorrow save the sorrows of the spirit, and bring forth men bent not on forgetting, but on remembering and promising!