(BEING AN ANSWER TO A LETTER FROM A COLLEGE STUDENT,
ASKING ADVICE AS TO TAKING UP WRITING AS A CAREER)
Your inquiry is congenial, and I feel guilty of selfishness in
answering it in this way. But he must be a poor workman, whether
artisan or artist, who does not welcome an excuse now and then for
shutting out the fascinating and maddening complexity of this
shining world to concentrate his random wits on some honest and
self-stimulating expression of his purpose.
There are exceptions to every rule; but writing, if undertaken as a
trade, is subject to the conditions of all other trades. The
apprentice must begin with task-work; he must please his employers
before he can earn the right to please himself. Not only that, he
must have ingenuity and patience enough to learn _how_ editors are
pleased; but he will be startled, I think, if he studies their
needs, to see how eager they are to meet him half way. This
necessary docility is in the long run, a wholesome physic, because,
if our apprentice has any gallantry of spirit, it will arouse in him
an exhilarating irritation, that indignation which is said to be the
forerunner of creation. It will mean, probably, a period--perhaps
short, perhaps long, perhaps permanent--of rather meagre and stinted
acquaintance with the genial luxuries and amenities of life; but
(such is the optimism of memory) a period that he will always look
back upon as the happiest of all. It is well for our apprentice if,
in this season, he has a taste for cheap tobacco and a tactful
technique in borrowing money.
The deliberate embrace of literature as a career involves very real
dangers. I mean dangers to the spirit over and above those of the
right-hand trouser pocket. For, let it be honestly stated, the
business of writing is solidly founded on a monstrous and perilous
egotism. Himself, his temperament, his powers of observation and
comment, his emotions and sensibilities and ambitions and
idiocies--these are the only monopoly the writer has. This is his
only capital, and with glorious and shameless confidence he proposes
to market it. Let him make the best of it. Continually stooping over
the muddy flux of his racing mind, searching a momentary flash of
clearness in which he can find mirrored some delicate beauty or
truth, he tosses between the alternatives of self-grandeur and
self-disgust. It is a painful matter, this endless self-scrutiny. We
are all familiar with the addled ego of literature--the writer whom
constant self-communion has made vulgar, acid, querulous, and vain.
And yet it is remarkable that of so many who meddle with the
combustible passions of their own minds so few are blown up. The
discipline of living is a fine cooling-jacket for the engine.
It is essential for our apprentice to remember that, though he begin
with the vilest hack-work--writing scoffing paragraphs, or
advertising pamphlets, or freelance snippets for the papers--that
even in hack-work quality shows itself to those competent to judge;
and he need not always subdue his gold to the lead in which he
works. Moreover, conscience and instinct are surprisingly true and
sane. If he follows the suggestions of his own inward, he will
generally be right. Moreover again, no one can help him as much as
he can help himself. There is no job in the writing world that he
cannot have if he really wants it. Writing about something he
intimately knows is a sound principle. Hugh Walpole, that greatly
gifted novelist, taught school after leaving Cambridge, and very
sensibly began by writing about school-teaching. If you care to see
how well he did it, read "The Gods and Mr. Perrin." I would propose
this test to the would-be writer: Does he feel, honestly, that he
could write as convincingly about his own tract of life (whatever it
may be) as Walpole wrote about that boys' school? If so, he has a
true vocation for literature.
The first and most necessary equipment of any writer, be he
reporter, advertising copy-man, poet, or historian, is swift,
lively, accurate observation. And since consciousness is a rapid,
shallow river which we can only rarely dam up deep enough to go
swimming and take our ease, it is his positive need (unless he is a
genius who can afford to let drift away much of his only source of
gold) to keep a note-book handy for the sieving and skimming of this
running stream. Samuel Butler has good advice on this topic. Of
ideas, he says, you must throw salt on their tails or they fly away
and you never see their bright plumage again. Poems, stories,
epigrams, all the happiest freaks of the mind, flit by on wings and
at haphazard instants. They must be caught in air. In this respect
one thinks American writers ought to have an advantage over English,
for American trousers are made with hip-pockets, in which a small
note-book may so comfortably caress the natural curvature of man.
Fancy is engendered in the eyes, said Shakespeare, and is with
gazing fed. By fancy he meant (I suppose) love; but imagination is
also so engendered. Close, constant, vivid, and compassionate gazing
at the ways of mankind is the laboratory manual of literature. But
for most of us we may gaze until our eyeballs twitch with weariness;
unless we seize and hold the flying picture in some steadfast
memorandum, the greater part of our experience dissolves away with
time. If a man has thought sufficiently about the arduous and
variously rewarded profession of literature to propose seriously to
follow it for a living, he will already have said these things to
himself, with more force and pungency. He may have satisfied himself
that he has a necessary desire for "self-expression," which is a
parlous state indeed, and the cause of much literary villainy. The
truly great writer is more likely to write in the hope of expressing
the hearts of others than his own. And there are other desires, too,
most legitimate, that he may feel. An English humorist said recently
in the preface to his book: "I wrote these stories to satisfy an
inward craving--not for artistic expression, but for food and
drink." But I cannot conscientiously advise any man to turn to
writing merely as a means of earning his victual unless he
should, by some cheerful casualty, stumble upon a trick of the
You-know-me-Alfred sort, what one might call the Attabuoyant style.
If all you want is a suggestion as to some honest way of growing
rich, the doughnut industry is not yet overcrowded; and people will
stand in line to pay twenty-two cents for a dab of ice-cream smeared
with a trickle of syrup.
To the man who approaches writing with some decent tincture of
idealism it is well to say that he proposes to use as a trade what
is, at its best and happiest, an art and a recreation. He proposes
to sell his mental reactions to the helpless public, and he proposes
not only to enjoy himself by so doing, but to be handsomely
recompensed withal. He cannot complain that in days when both
honesty and delicacy of mind are none too common we ask him to bring
to his task the humility of the tradesman, the joy of the sportsman,
the conscience of the artist.
And if he does so, he will be in a condition to profit by these
fine words of George Santayana, said of the poet, but applicable to
workers in every branch of literature:
"He labours with his nameless burden of perception, and wastes
himself in aimless impulses of emotion and reverie, until finally
the method of some art offers a vent to his inspiration, or to such
part of it as can survive the test of time and the discipline of
expression.... Wealth of sensation and freedom of fancy, which make
an extraordinary ferment in his ignorant heart, presently bubble
over into some kind of utterance."
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