I’ve had a letter from Merritt—he “has read the book with much interest and would be glad if I could find time to call and discuss it with him at my convenience.” First time anybody’s even offered to discuss it. I suppose that if I will consent to cut out all the “advanced” passages, and “brighten” the style and give it a more “satisfactory” ending, he will consider doing something with it. Well, he won’t get the chance, that’s all.
Thank Heaven, the Life is practically finished with. I’m thankful to get rid of it. It has led me into reading a lot of scientific and metaphysical tripe which is of no use to anybody, and least of all to a creative writer (a fact I have taken delight in rubbing in, in the course of the work!). And the further you go with it, the worse it gets. Lucretius could make great poetry out of science, and Bacon got some good work in on it—and even Tennyson could screw some fine lines out of an unsound theory of evolution and perfectibility and all the rest of it. But now, oh, heavens! after the biochemist, the mathematician. What can you make out of the action of the glands of internal secretion upon metabolism, or Pi and the square root of minus one? Despair and a kind of gloomy grubbiness, that’s all. I’d rather have a Miltonian theology to make poetry of than all this business of liver and gonads and the velocity of light. Perry the parson gets out of it by pretending that the Catholic Church knew all about it from the beginning, and that inaccurate theological metaphors can be interpreted as pseudo-scientific formulae, which is a lie. The origin of life is our great stamping-ground for discussion. You can’t make life synthetically in a laboratory—therefore he deduces that it came by divine interference! Rather an assumption! But, after all, he is little worse than the man of science. “In some way or other, life came,” they say. “Sometime, somehow, we may learn how to make it.” But even if one could learn to make it, that doesn’t account for its having arrived spontaneously in the first place. The biologist can push it back to the original protist, and the chemist can push it back to the crystal, but none of them touch the real question of why or how the thing began at all.