THE YOUNG WRITER, PRESENT, PAST, AND FUTURE

BY

STEPHEN SPENDER

Reprinted from MICHIGAN ALUMNUS QuARTERLY REVIEWAugust 8, 1953, Vol. LIX, No. 21

STEPHEN SPENDER., English poet and critic, whose1953 Hopwood Lecture is presented here, is a graduateof University College, Oxford. He has publishedsome eighteen volumes of essaYll and verse. His honorsinclude a doctorate in letters from the University ofMontpelier and honorary membership in the Harvardchapter of Phi Beta Kappa. He has been lecturing thisyear at the University of Cincinnati.

ON THIS, the occasion of giving theannual Hopwood Awards, a fewof you must be thinking about the

first step in your career signified by receiv­ing an award. In a rather varied life, oneof the things I have never done is to wina literary prize. My first duty is to congrat­ulate you on an achievement that fills mewith admiration. Rut I must add a word ofwarning, which you can attribute to sourgrapes if you wish. You only have to lookat lists of Nobel Prizes, Pulitzer Prizes,and the rest to realize how changeable-if?ot. £allible-is the judgment of literaryJunes.

In a way of course, this is rather con­soling. To those of us-who are always ina democratic majority-who have not wonprizes, it shows that we may be better thanyou who have. There is even more solidconsolation to be derived from reflectingthat those of us who do not deserve prizesmay well win them, since the example ofmany who have won them shows that inthe past there has not always been anabsolutely necessary connection betweenprize-winning and desert.

Now that I'm on this aspect of theliterary career-of which you are today

The Writer's Calling Endures,Though the Response A1ay Vary

THE YOUNG WRITER, PRESENT,PAST. AND FUTURE

By STEPHEN SPENDER

tasting the first fruits-I may as well tellyou that, economically speaking, being awriter is very like being a gambler. Thestory or article that earns you $10 mightequally well earn you $1,000. Sometimesyou are paid a few pennies for a review,sometimes enough to keep you for a month.And what is true of the economics of thething is also true of reputation. Manywriters living today who have great repu­tations were hardly known during the longyears when they were doing their best work.Anyone who has lived as a writer fortwenty years or more knows too that one'sstock goes up and down in what is afluctuating market of critical opinions.

I mention these things in order to getthem out of the way. The point really isthat, although writers have to get startedin one way or another with earning moneyand getting work published, these thingsare irrelevant. When I say irrelevant, Idon't mean just that they don't matter; Imean that part of the struggle of being awriter is to watch and to be on guard thatthey don't have relevance. To be a failurecan be discouraging. To be a success maymean something much worse: that you feelsurrounded by people who want you to goon being one. Your publisher has sold fiftythousand copies of your last book, and isappalled when you bring in a manuscript ofwhat may be a better book, but of whichhe knows he can sell only two thousandcopies. The more you are known the moreyou discover that you are in some mysterious

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THE YOUNG WRITER 3°3

way arousing expectations in all sorts ofindividuals and groups of people who,since they read your work, feel that youhave a certain responsibility towards them.

Shortly before he died, the English

people and behavior very different fromthose expected by the readers of his best­selling novels. 1 became excited at his ideaand pressed him to start writing this bookwhich 1 felt sure would be his masterpiece.

STEPHEN SPENDER

The English poet and critic who delivered the 1953Hop'wood Lecture

novelist, Sir Hugh Walpole, outlined tome the idea of a novel he wanted to write.It was on a subject very close to his heart,which he felt he understood better thanothers. From the way he spoke it was clearthat this unwritten book was the one workin which he could portray his realest ex­perience of life. However, it would describe

"No," he said, "I shall never write it.""Why not?" "Because 1 could not write itin a way which would please my best-sellingpublic. It would have to be produced in asmall edition, for not more than two thou­sand readers. And after selling one hun­dred thousand copies of each of my novels,1 could not endure that."

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We can assume, I think, that anyonewho simply wants to sell a lot of copies ofhis books will-if he knows this already­plan his career accordingly. He will not bea writer, but a businessman who is dealingwith words as other people deal with anyother mass-produced commodity. He willhave no illusions, so he will not suffer atthe end of his life from the kind of heart­break which makes Sir Hugh Walpole-ifa failure in his own art-the subject of agreat biography by Rupert Hart-Davis,which has recently been published.

Now that the decks have been clearedof success and failure, what are the legiti­mate needs of the young writer? It's bet­ter, I think, to put the question in a formin which it can be examined by examples.\Vhat did the young writer of the pastneed, as the pre-conditions necessary to hisgift?

T ET us consider for instance, John KeatsL and Ernest Hemingway, two youngmen; one in London at the beginning ofthe nineteenth and the other in Paris atthe beginning of this century.

What of Keats? Well, first of all, hewanted to write poetry for no reason ex­cept that he wanted to write poetry. Hisconcept of poetry was formed from readingSpenser, Shakespeare, and, later, Milton.To him, poetry was the means of enteringthe world of other poets and then creatinghis own poems. Besides being a poet, he wasa medical student, he was devoted to hisbrother Tom (whom he nursed throughthe consumption that he himself was verysoon to die of), to his sister, Fanny Keats,and in the last months of his life, to FannyBrawne, with whom he fell so hopelesslyin love.

Poetry was for him a separate worldfrom the real world of his medical studies,his brothers and sisters, even his love. Thus,in one of his letters he describes an occasionwhen the classroom or laboratory wherehe was studying suddenly disappeared, and

he found himself in another world, evenmore real to him, of Shakespeare's A Mid­Ju'mmer Night's Dream. In another letter,written when he was nursing his brother,he complains that the identity of TomKeats presses on him unendurably, a pres­sure he resents not out of selfishness butbecause he felt responsible to his world ofpoetry more even than to his brother. Therewas also something about his love forFanny which seemed to him the surrenderof his poetic world to a human one.

The next thing we note about the youngKeats is that he wanted convivial friendswho shared his love of poetry, providedthat they did not press on him too muchwith their personalities. When he wastwenty or so, he allowed himself to thinkthat with Reynolds, Benjamin RobertHaydon, Cowden Clarke, Leigh Hunt andthe rest, he had found a circle of enlight­ened people who recognized the same po­etic values as he did. He wanted to belongto a group of friends who correspond verymuch to the group of French writerswho will frequent the same Parisian cafe.Perhaps, in America today, this functionof literary companionship is being fulfilledrather self-consciously, and with notenough frivolity to accompany the serious­ness, by the creative writing courses.Brandy and coffee ought to be compul­sory at all the creative writing seminars.

The next thing Keats wanted was tochart his course among the currents of lit­erature and thought in his time. He dis­liked Pope's poetry, which he regardedas mere versification. He had very clearlydeveloped ideas of his own about the worldof pure imagination which poetry shouldcreate. He found precedents for his con­cept of poetry in Shakespeare. He wascritical, though admiring, of Wordsworth.He was a not very generous rival of Shel­ley. He came to sneer at Leigh Hunt,and he grew out of the circle of his Hamp­stead friends into the isolation of genius.

Although he wrote that he had never

THE YOUNG WRITER 30 5

allowed a shadow of public thought to en­ter his work, Keats was not without opin­ions. He was what we would call a liberal.He loved freedom (by which he meantLiberal Freedom) and hated Napoleonand the British government of his day.

Now let us turn to the young Heming­way in Paris a hundred years later. Hisattitudes are less literary than those ofKeats. He would deny, I think, havingread much of anything, though he wouldadmit to a great admiration for Stendhal.But don't let us be put off by his anti-liter­ary pose without examining it more closely.He is not bookish, but he cares immenselyabout writing well, and takes a consciouspride in his use of words. Despite his pride,he goes humbly to Gertrude Stein andlearns all he can from her about addingword to word with as much thought as ifone were making a mosaic, and each worda separate stone.

Thus, the difference between the literaryconscience of Hemingway and that of Keatsmay be the difference between romanticpoet and modern novelist rather than thatbetween man of literature and hairy­chested philistine. Hemingway knows thatthe roots of the novel are not in literaturebut in life. Although he can learn how tomake sentences from Miss Stein and howto write about a battle from the descriptionof Fabrice on the battlefield of Waterloowith which The Charterhouse of Parmaopens-he sees that beyond learning howto write his own novels from other writerssuch a novelist must avoid literature likethe plague. His source-books are the con­versations of soldiers and drunks, the lonelythoughts of fishermen and hunters.

Just as much as Keats, Hemingway hadthen his special vision of a world of hisimagination, a world in which love anddrinks and fights and scenery were morereal than, say, intellectual conversation,journalism, money, and stuffed shirts. Ina drawing room his picture of prize fights,hunting in Africa, and war in Spain would

doubtless drive out the china and chippen­dale, just as much as the world of A Mid­summer Nighrs Dream came dancingdown on a beam of sunlight into the roomwhere Keats was learning medicine andmade him forget the lecture.

Given the fact that he was trying to makenovels out of life and not out of othernovels, Hemingway also had his circle.Just as Keats, without very much success,looked in Hampstead for friends whoshared his passion for the arts, Hemingwaywas looking for people who shared hispassion for- the real-which was the qualityhe wanted to put into his novels. Theyturned out to be bull-fighters, soldiers atCaporetto and in the front line at Madrid,and Americans in Paris. But the real Hem­ingway no more belongs to his tough circlethan Keats to his Hampstead literati. Theultimate image we have of Hemingwayis of the old man left fighting the fish ofhis art alone.

This is, indeed always, the situation ofthe artist with his vocation, pursuing hisvision. All the same, he probably needs tostart off from the fertilizing group of hisfriends who--perhaps only because theyare generous and young, and do not them­selves know as yet what they really want­form a magic circle round his youth.

Hemingway, like Keats, fought his battleamong the ideas of his time. When he waslion-hunting in Africa he was also carryingon a polemic against Aldous Huxley, whohad reproached him with being anti-intel­lectual. He showed pretty well, I think,that the intellect is a matter of passion andnot of books. A few asides on his work aboutGoya and E1 Greco are impressive enoughto make the reader realize that a writerwith an understanding of painting doesnot need to show it all the time. Then,just as Keats without ever being what iscalled "political" wrote his sonnet to saluteLeigh Hunt when he had been imprisonedfor defamation by the British Governmentof that time, Hemingway took up the

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attitudes of an unpolitical man who lovedfreedom to the politics of the 1930's. ForWhom the Bell Tolls corresponds in hiswork to Keats's sonnet celebrating LeighHunt when he was sent to prison. Andall through his work there is a preoccupa­tion with the relationship of those charac­ters who are felt to be real because theyhave done real things--or because theyhave lived close to the values of nature­with the unreality of the politicians whodirect the soldiers, the businessmen whohave more power than the artists and thefishermen. For him freedom is the struggleof real life to assert itself against meddlingand self-interested authority.

I COULD go on multiplying examples toillustrate that the young writer is some­

one with a mysterious sense of his own vo­cation, and a vision of reality which hewishes to communicate: to show, too, that inhis youth he can benefit by the magic circleof those who are touched to sympathy byhim, perhaps more for what he is than forwhat he does. His friends believe in himand they take his work on trust. Later onthey become interested in other things­they cannot share his vocation-and helearns to be alone. But his youth has beenwatered by their sympathy.

He must certainly care for his craft asa writer. He must choose other writers whoare guardian angels from the past whoseworks seem to be fighting on the side ofhis unborn poems or novels. What I verymuch doubt, though, is whether he shouldknow more than this. One of the things thatmany modern writers perhaps suffer fromis intellectual indigestion. Weare told thatShakespeare had small Latin and lessGreek, and the number of works he is sup­posed by scholars to have read would cer­tainly not have filled even a small library.What he knew is so perfectly absorbedwithin his own genius that we are scarcelyaware of his knowing it.

Shakespeare probably understood just so

much of what he read as he required forthe purpose of his writing. This is all awriter needs and it may be very little or itmay be a great deal. With Dante and Mil­ton it was a lot. A writer should think ofevery experience (and this includes thebooks he reads and the paintings he sees)in terms of the life which he is going toput into his work. He should be as muchon guard against the corruption whichcomes from excessive sophistication and atoo great load of learning as he is againstany debasement of his gifts. Rimbaud ad­vised writers to throwaway dictionaries andreinvent words, and Blake thought thatthe forms in which past poets wrote be­came the shackles of new poetry. D. H.Lawrence, who was probably the most pro­found critic of modern values in this cen­tury, was utterly opposed to all the intel­lectual tendencies of our time, read littleof his esteemed contemporaries, and notvery selectively from the past.

None of these writers was an ignoramus,but all saw the necessity of approachingknowledge and theories about literaturewith the same lively precaution as youwould enter a forest full of poison ivy andsnares. They saw that intellectual life is nota passive process like hypnosis which yousubmit to, hoping that you will be entrancedinto doing something beyond your naturalpowers. You have to meet the intellectualwork of others with your own powers, ac­cording to your capacity to cope with it,and not be overpowered by it. Intellectuallife for a writer should be a struggle of allthe forces of his life with other mindswhich he can meet on equal terms.

So here we have that timeless creature,the young writer, with his vocation, hisvision of what is real to him, his magiccircle of friends, the struggle of his wholeexistence within the ideas, the movementsand the history of his time. He is timeless,and yet he is a kind of animal who triesto find the place within his time where hecan best fulfill his gifts. He struggles to

THE YOUNG WRITER

be received into the court of Queen Eliza­beth Or Louis XIV, or to be patronized bysome great aristocrat of the eighteenth cen­tury, or to achieve the independence of abourgeois living and working for himselfin the nineteenth. He is a parasite, andoften rather an ungrateful one. In hernovel Orlando, Virginia Woolf describes thepoet who comes to stay at Orlando's resi­dence, where he charms everyone, and thengoes away to write a perfidious lampoonon Orlando and his friends. When heclaims his right to middle-class inde­pendence, as poets did in the nineteenthcentury, it is in order to spit on the bour­geois. He arrives as Rimbaud arrived inParis in 1870, puts his feet up on the tableof Madame Verlaine's clean dining room,takes out his pipe, smoking it upside downso that the hot ash falls onto her table­cloth, and shoos away her lap-dog, withthe expletive comment: "Les chiens sontles liberaux."

But the position of the young writerdiffers according to the time in which helives. His impossible behavior takes dif­ferent forms according to whether heemerges from the cocoon of his family in1450, 1550, 1650, 1750, 1850, or 1950,or whatever day of whatever year betweenthese dates. In 1800 he is a revolutionarypatriot, wild-eyed, unshaven, and influ­enced by the self-dramatizing self-pity andpassion for freedom of Byron's Prisoner ofChillon. In 1900 he holds a lily in his hand,is languid, tired, dissipated, and infinitelysuperior to the universe. In 1914 hemarches onto the battlefields of Europeand with a song on his lips proclaims thatthe world is about to be purified of ignoblequalities. In 1916 he is the voice of theyouthful dead of both sides which hold nohatred for one another. By 1920 he hastaken to alcohol and various other excesses,and he represents the naked, almost brutalassertion of his survival against a back­ground of recently past death. He swearsthat whatever else happens, he will never

be responsible towards anyone or anythingagain and he spits into the faces of the oldergeneration. Under all these attitudes, hemaintains the sense of his vocation. Whatin our time can the writer do, is the questionhe is asking, but by Hdoing" he means,how can he write his novels or poems. Theanswers are always changing, and as thetime-process of our civilization speeds upthey change from year to year with ever­increasing rapidity.

So the differences are less confusing whenwe recollect that the writer adopts attitudesfor the sake of his writing. An attitude--or,for that matter, a literary movement-isthe simplified statement of the relationshipto his time which he adopts in order thathe may best write his best work. Thus theyoung writers at the beginning of theFrench Revolution had to relate themselvesto two things in contemporary history,which became one thing within their work.One was the changed attitude toward val­ues which had been brought about by theFrench Revolution, the other was the factthat their immediate predecessors werewriting in a style which could not possiblybe the vehicle for the altered sensibility re­sulting from the change from aristocraticvalues to democratic ones. These two thingsbecame one imaginative life within thecolloquial manner of writing of Words­worth, the romanticism of Keats.

W HAT is the writer's vision, though?With the poet it is his significant ex­

perience expressed in a poetic idiom whichresponds or is sensitive to the circumstancesof his time. The poet's ideas of what is mostvaluable, because most living is experience,confront the world with his idiom of thecontemporary human situation. The novel­ist illustrates, in his depiction of character,the struggle of individual human existencewithin the circumstances of a particularhistoric period. The young man T olstoishows us a whole panorama of the circum­stances of individuals living through the

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Napoleonic wars. Although lVar and Peaceis all, in a sense, a depiction of life, thevalues of living are only realized at theirmost intense in moments of the lives ofparticular characters. Moments of Natasha'svivid childhood, of Pierre Bezukhov'schanges of heart-most of all perhaps themoment when Prince Andrew lies woundedon the battlefield. The novel portrays thestruggle for the realization of life withinthe circumstances of living. If the condi­tioning circumstances are not truly imag­ined and portrayed within the work, thenthe life in the novel seems false; and if thecircumstances are realized, then the workbecomes a depressing exercise in what iscalled realism.

There is no way in which a writer cancheat himself into having a greater aware­ness of life than his genius has given him.There are, however, circumstances and con­ditions which can cheat him out of the possi­bility of realizing his gifts. It is more diffi­cult to be a young writer at some periodsthan at others. There are some decadeswhen the mood of the time seems to permitof a much wider realization of the valuesof living than others. In England theElizabethan age was certainly such a time.There are others when a great many writ­ers work under circumstances where lifeitself seems weighed down and oppressed,and yet the material development of so­ciety is so expansive and confident thatmasterpieces are written. The Victorian Agewas such a period. But although nineteenthcentury England was ebullient and expan­sive, yet it is really the literature of Francein this period which tells us more of whatwas happening to the spirit of man.

"What is the position of the young writertoday?" That is the question at the back ofmy mind all the time that I have been talk­ing. For it seems to me that in certain waysthis question is more difficult to answer thanit has been for a great many years.

The reason it is difficult to answer isthat the one thing that previously was clear

about the position of the writer has sud­denly become amorphous. What has beenclear for so long was his extreme individ­uality. The writer has for a hundred andfifty years regarded himself and been re­garded as an independent creator or criticwithin society who brought to it his ownvision or who attacked it from the pointof view of a detached observer. For in­stance, we think of Keats and the other ro­mantics as being outside the materialismof the industrial revolution. Perhaps theyopposed the materialism of the nineteenthcentury, or perhaps they added somethingto life which made circumstances tolerableand even justified modern civilization.Whichever it was they did, rightly orwrongly, we think of them as outside theirsociety. The French poets, like Baudelaire,Verlaine, and Rimbaud, we think of asstill more savagely isolated individualists,who were antagonistic to all contemporaryvalues. We think, too, of the novelistseither as being critics of Victorianism whojudged their age from a disinterested pointof view or as truthful observers of char­acter, who were able to indicate the pointsat which life acquires the greatest signifi­cance. Flaubert's The Sentimental Educa­tion, for example, is a scrupulous and exactstudy of the lives of a group of individualsagainst a background of history, and at theend we are able to measure the extent towhich Frederic Moreau and the other char­acters have lived their lives, attained happi­ness, suffered to some purpose, createdbeauty, or loved.

Today we suddenly find ourselves livingin a world where it is very difficult tothink of the poet creating a unique visionlike that of Keats, which will so enormouslyenhance the value of living for his readersthat his poetry will seem a system of theimagination where "beauty is truth, truthbeauty," and nothing else need be addedto life. It is equally difficult to think of thenovelist being an independent, detachedcritic of society. We suddenly find that the

THE YOUNG WRITER

individual VISIons, which right up to thetime of the aesthetic movement could addsomething so significant within art to thevalue of life that ordinary life itself seemedscarcely worth living, have shrunk intoprivate fantasies, childhood memories,squibs like Truman Capote's novel aboutsome people who decide to go and live ina tree-or like Henry Miller's books inwhich all his characters indulge themselvesto the utmost in physical sensation and haveno philosophy or purpose beyond suchindulgence.

What has happened is that the idea thatthere are writers and other artists and sen­sitive individuals who in some way can pre­serve an integrity and create beauty outsidethe materialism of society, has suddenlybeen completely shattered. We may notlive in a totalitarian world, but a kind oftotalitarianization of the spirit has over­taken all of us. In a world where within amatter of hours or days the whole of ourcivilization may be destroyed, or where ifthis does not happen we may find ourminds the passive objects of political dic­tatorship, using psychological propaganda,everyone shares with everyone else suchenormous secrets of fear and anxiety thatthe idea of being outside what is happening-as Keats in his way, and Dickens in hisquite different way, were outside it-seemsimpossible. Indeed a writer, like T. S. Eliot,who does retain a certain outsideness, onlymanages to do so by describing a religiousexperience which is outside time and historyaltogether.

We cannot imagine that the youngwriter of genius will today believe himselfto be a unique person in a unique positionbringing to other people a picture of livingvalues which will change the lives of thosewho have eyes to see and ears to hear. In­stead now of an art which will add anotherworld of the imagination to the materialworld, we have literature of young novel­ists which, however eccentric or fantasticit may seem, is really documentary. Some-

one who lives in the deep South had somevery extraordinary and crazy relativeswhom he is going to tell us about. Someoneelse had a very odd relationship with oneof the masters at his preparatory school orat the military academy. A woman whowas frustrated in her desire to becomecultured never got to the Museum ofModern Art, so she became a nympho­maniac, upset her family badly and wasfinally taken away in a van. All these ex­periences can be original and it is possibleto write about them well, but they do notenhance the life "of the reader, and they donot criticize the world in which we areliving. No amount of odd experience andgood writing and all the characters goingmad can really get away from the facttha t they are really just embroidered docu­mentary material.

In these circumstances, the young writeris tempted to abandon his artistic responsi­bility-that is, his responsibility to do whathe knows he alone can do in the way healone can do it. On every side, there arevoices which say: "Don't be responsible toyourself. It is no longer any use. Be re­sponsible to us." In England he is invitedto become an agent for disseminating cul­ture through the British Broadcasting Cor­poration, or the British Council. In theUnited States he is invited to join a uni­versity to become a teacher of creative writ­ing, with a certain real though vaguelydefined responsibility to the academicworld. Meanwhile a tremendous criticalapparatus based on a study of the pastworks of writers, most of whom hated thevery idea of critics and criticism, grows upand rules about technique, influences,myths, and so on are extracted from pastworks, which get very near to supplyingthe young with objective formulae forcreating new ones. There is a great deal oftalk about Freud and lung and the uncon­scious, but the fact that writing should bea process of whose development the writerhimself should be largely unconscious is

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forgotten. At this point it may be well toremind ourselves that Goethe observed toEckermann that it would be impossible inthe future for any poet to attain the statureof Shakespeare. The reason he gave forthis conclusion was that the result of con­temporary criticism would make it impos­sible for any poet to develop, as Shake­speare did, without being self-consciousabout his own development. The true de­velopment of a poet like Shakespeare­Goethe thought-was like that of a manwho walks in his sleep.

T HE temptation of the writer of yester­day-W. H. Auden has said-was to

be too individualistic, too proud, too iso­lated. But the temptation of the writer to­day-he went on-is to prostitute himself,to make slight concessions all the wayround: to the academies, to the culturalagencies, to the glossy magazines whichhave decided that they want to publishsomething "better" than they have donebefore, but not too good.

In the present situation it is extremelydifficult to say what is the right course forthe young writer. You can't, as you wouldperhaps do in the past, advise "Find theright patron who will give you the freedomto do your best work which will glorify hisname," nor yet "Create in your work thevision of an inner life of aesthetic valueswhich will enable your readers to escapethe vulgarity and banality of modern liv­ing"; nor "Take sides with the cause whichrepresents greater human freedom and drawstrength from the life and future of thejust cause you support." It is not as easyas that. Nor do I accept the despairing viewof George Orwell in his very interestingessay on Henry Miller, entitled Inside theW hale. Orwell says in words which I para­phrase: "Accept the fact that you can doabsolutely nothing to alter the condition ofthe world today. Make a virtue of necessity,and like Jonah, use your art to get inside thewhale. Don't object, don't rebel, just accept

everything and then make the best of thecircumstances of a Ii fe of private sensationsand experience which is still possible toyou." His own book, 1984, like Camus'novel, The Plague, refutes him. It is stillpossible, by trying to see the largest truthabout the time in which we live, and bysimply stating it, to get outside the whale.

Meanwhile, one can also say that thereare certain things which are wrong, andeven a few which are right. It may be neces­sary to accept the situation of working in amore official capacity-as a teacher, or acultural agent-than before, but it is stillnot necessary to sell your soul. By sellingyour soul I mean not cherishing the distinc­tion between work which one does to satisfyone's own standards and that done to satisfyother people's standards. One's own stand­ards are simply to write about the truthas one experiences it, in the way in whichone can write about it. To discover thesetwo things is already the task of a lifetime,and by simply devoting oneself to themone may solve the problems which I havestated here.

Another positive thing which I can sayis that the young should be an audience forone another. In this the creative writingcourses, of which I feel critical in someways, offer a tremendous opportunity toyoung writers. It may not be that all of youare going to be writers, but there is everyreason why all of you should be interestedin the writing of each one of you. The in­terest that you can give to the writer whois going to be outstanding among you is theequivalent, at this stage of his development,to a blood transfusion. And it is blood whichonly the young can give to others who areyoung, because later on in life everyone istoo preoccupied with his own affairs to giveso generously. No one ever receives in allhis life any praise which is comparable tothat which one receives when one has sentone's first work to a friend who feels it tobe a new and exciting experience in his ownlife.

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The most important thing of all, though,s to have an absolutely sacred sense of thevocation of being a writer. A writer is a)erson who experiences with part of him­;elf the life around him and with some)ther part of himself the life of those pastNriters whose works have filled him withthe desire to be a writer. In his own work herelates his sense of that past with his aware­1ess of this present. In doing so he creates;omething entirely new, and this new thing,if it is worthy, is to write the words which:he past master would write about contem­porary life if he were now living. Throughthe contemporary writer's hand flows theJlood of past writers, and to the

degree that the present writers fulfill theirvocation they are extending into the futurethe life of the old. There remains the prob­lem of relating oneself to the present situa­tion. But the true writer lives in a past anda future situation for which the present isonly a bridge. This reduces the contem­porary problem to its true proportions. Itmeans that although you must be aware ofthe present situation you must see it inthe light of the past and future, pursue yourvocation, write as well as you can and notbetter than you can, provide an audiencefor your contemporaries, and judge lifefrom the center of your artistic conscience,to which you are alone responsible.

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