Little or Nothing
WE ARE informed that a serious-looking young woman sat in the office of the dean of one of America's innumerable summer-schools, waiting to register for those courses which would promptly...
...Its models are the habit of long inner compression of an idea, which results finally in the compact and exquisitely polished proverb...
...And our young woman's mind was made up that if composition and criticism, literary history and a study of the market, could "do the trick," she would stay up all night with every one of them...
...To some such conclusions—difficult to phrase concretely— one arrives after reading such a charming little book as Henri Pourrat's La Fontaine au Bois Dormant...
...and a wise distrust of rationalism, which is never more than a snapshot and often merely a blur...
...In her pocket there was a letter from a predecessor, already famous as a writer of stories with a punch...
...Why not set out on a voyage of cultural discovery, with the purpose of accumulating the "somethings to write about" which exist in the United States...
...He had put in a hard afternoon's work registering dozens of aspiring authors (they come by the dozen nowadays) and he viewed the waiting client with unusual benevolence because she happened to be the last...
...One cannot blame the schools for acceding to the demand and giving what is so earnestly wanted...
...Alas, it is conceivable that a day will arrive when one shall have to flee to the Esquimaux in order to avoid the crowds who have learned to begin their stories with a bit of "peppy dialogue," and who, by dint of exhausting labor, have become most impeccable paragraphers 1 Goethe said something to the effect...
...Why, then, doesn't somebody start a movement the other way...
...But one is quite sure that the phenomenon itself demonstrates a wide-spread public misunderstanding of both literature and education...
...Then the dean appeared and smiled in his weary way...
...If our future literature is to have any substance, it must derive from something more sturdy and less circumscribed than the class in composition...
...As a result he gave her advice which we shall not record, but which can, perhaps, be inferred from the circumstance that she married happily a short time afterward...
...Popular art" as opposed to the sophisticated conventions of the journalistic confraternity is the goal —an art which appears "when the gift for it has been given, not when there is an obligation to produce...
...the slumbering, unforced vitality of natural imagination, which flings its eerie shadow with all the deliberation of a tree that waits patiently both for its own branches to expand and for the inimitable caress of twilight...
...WE ARE informed that a serious-looking young woman sat in the office of the dean of one of America's innumerable summer-schools, waiting to register for those courses which would promptly bustle her off toward literary success...
...Yes, if one could learn to write in such a spirit, no expenditure of time or energy would be too great...
...Training-schools can supply neither of these things...
...It must be an art which has the form of our art of living...
...One can imagine dozens of brave young people bustling about, forcing the American spirit out of its hidingplaces, gathering tradition and experience, and learning to know rhythm because they have seen it revealed in life...
...But how many will, even if the "institutes for creative writing" multiply beyond number...
...That does not wholly eliminate the term "genius," but it suggests that genius is by no means the detached thing which seems to be believed in at present...
...Writing is, after all, a matter of having something to say and of growing into a habit of saying it in one's own manner...
...It must also do more than merely "record" the caprices of human nature, or apply a definite literary form to existing material...
...Pourrat is one of the best of those who have tried to recover the "regionalistic" attitude for French letters...
...The descent of literary ambition upon trainingschools established to give instruction in the various forms of writing is extraordinary...
...They can give valuable criticism, but there is ultimately no such thing as "constructive" criticism—that is, criticism which can create what does not exist in the product to which it is applied...
...that all great creative work is the outgrowth of circumstance...
Vol. 6 • July 1927 • No. 11
