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Page 16
The Club thinks that the life of this city, brutally intense and
bewildering, has yet a beauty and glamour and a secret word to the
mind, so subtle that it cannot be closely phrased, but so important
that to miss it is to miss life itself. And to forfeit an attempt to
see, understand, and mutually communicate this loveliness is to
forfeit that burning spark that makes men's spirits worth while. To
such halting meditations the Club devotes its aspirations
undistressed by humorous protest. If this be treason...!
[Illustration]
A PREFACE TO THE PROFESSION OF JOURNALISM
(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.
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