I might have taken any one of several other books, and they would have illustrated my point snugly and more conveniently; but just that right touch of craziness that Nobel had in mind, and that goes with great experiment of spirit—­the chill, Nietzsche-like wildness, that bravado before God and man and before Time, that swinging one’s self out on Eternity, which make Upward a typical man of genius, would have been lacking.  K——­ (whose criticisms of books are the most creative ones I know) said of Upward’s book that he felt very happy and strangely emancipated when he read it, but that it was an uncanny experience, as if he had been made of thin air, had become a kind of aerated being, a psychic effect that genius often has; and K——­ admitted to me confidentially that he felt that possibly he and Upward were being a little crazy and happy together by themselves, breaking out into infinite space so, and he took the book over to W——­, and left it on his desk slinkingly and half-ashamed and without saying anything about it.  He said he was enormously relieved next time he saw W——­, felt as if he had just been pulled out of Bedlam to find that there was at least one other man in the world apparently in his right mind, who valued the book as he did.

This is the precise feeling, it seems to me, that the Nobel Prize was intended to champion and to stand by and temporarily defend in a new author—­the feeling he gives us of being in the presence of unseen forces, of incalculableness.  It was this way Allen Upward has of taking his reader apart or up into a high place (like the Devil), and dizzying him, taking away his breath with Truth, that Nobel had in mind.  He wanted to spend eight thousand pounds a year on providing for the world one more book which would give the ordinary man the personal feeling of being with a genius, cold, lonely, cosmic genius, the sense of a chill wind of All Space Outside blowing through—­a book which is a sort of God’s Wilderness, in which ordinary men with their ordinary plain senses round them move about dazed a little and as trees walking—­a great, gaunt, naked book.

Alfred Nobel was the inventor of an explosive, a rearranger of things assumed and things unbedded, and it was this same expansive, half-terrible, half-sublime power in other men and other men’s books he wanted to endow—­the power to free and mobilize the elements in a world, make it budge over a little toward a new one.  He wanted to spend forty thousand dollars a year on the man in literature who had the pent-up power in him to crash the world’s mind open once more every year like a Seed, and send groping up out of it once more its hidden thought.