Katherine Anne Porter (101 page)

You will discover after a great while that you are probably a writer. You may even make some money at it.

One word more: I have heard it said, boldly and with complete sincerity by persons who should know better, that the only authors who do not write for the high-paying magazines are those who have not been able to make the grade; that any author who professes to despise or even disapprove of such writing and such magazines is a hypocrite; that he would be too happy to appear in those pages if only he were invited.

To such effrontery I have only one answer, based on experience and certain knowledge. It is simply not true.

1942

In full summer, eighteen years ago, during a short return from Paris, where I was then living, I stood up before my first group of student writers at a Writers’ Conference in a small midwestern college, Olivet College, Olivet, Michigan, 1936. The students, a mixed audience of all ages and sorts of persons, gazed at me with what I took to be challenging if not hostile expectancy; I gazed back, stricken. The full rather awful meaning of our gathering there, confronting each other, had just dawned upon me for I confess I had not taken the invitation to speak there to beginning writers very seriously. I still took it for granted that any writer worth taking seriously would naturally be at home where he belonged doing his work by himself under his own power. Why in this world should he be asking advice from me or any other writer, and what could he get from talk that he could not better find in the published books
of those he wished to study? Yet, I told myself, it cannot possibly harm anyone to spend two weeks in a year reading and talking about great literature, even trying his hand at putting words and phrases together to discover what the work really is; at least it will help to do away with careless reading, as the study of music makes for good listening; whoever tries to paint never just glances carelessly at a canvas or a statue again. Or so I wish to believe. Lightheartedly I had come there, happy at the chance to see some of my old friends who were writers, to enjoy the human sociability, and to talk a little about writing, which I then liked to do. I don’t anymore, and it is the Writers’ Conferences which have cured me.

So I stood there frozen under the weight of a responsibility I had assumed so easily it seems now, remembering, almost to have been frivolity on my part. These people sitting there were expecting something from me that I had been engaged to deliver without knowing what I had promised. They had come, many of them, from teaching jobs, from offices, from work of all kinds, using their vacation time and their savings and their few days of freedom for the whole year; and for this price and the price of their attention and hard trying, they expected to be taught how to write.

Whatever my carefully prepared opening line was to be, it disappeared. I said: “If you came here hoping for a miracle, there can be none. If you believe that you have paid to receive here a magic formula, a secret you may use at will, you have done no such thing. Writing, in any sense that matters, cannot be taught. It can only be learned, and learned by each separate one of us in his own way, by the use of his own powers of imagination and perception, the ability to learn the lessons he has set for himself. That is, if your intention is to try yourself out, to find whether or not you have the makings of an artist. If you have come to make this test on yourself, then this place might be a very good trial field for you—or better, a workshop, like a silversmith’s or a cabinetmaker’s. I mention these two because they are two of many fine crafts in which trickiness, dishonesty or just poor sense of form cannot be disguised, any more than they can be in writing; and you may properly expect here professional instruction in the working of what Henry James calls your ‘soluble stuff.’ The good artist is
first a good workman, and yet you may become a very good workman without ever becoming a master. Nothing else is worth aspiring to, and we all run the risk of never arriving at it. If you have the vocation, it is very well worth spending a lifetime at it by living in the love of your work, you cannot be wasted. After all it is a lovely thing to live in the light and the presence of the great arts, and by this light and this presence to practice your own to the farthest reach of your own gift. So I am here to read your manuscripts and talk to you about them, so that in talking to me you may perhaps be able better to clear up your own doubts and difficulties. A working artist myself trying hopefully to do better someday, I shall show you as well as I can such technical devices as may have worked for me—eventually you must find your own. It is a good thing to know all the rules, but remember they are not the wings of Pegasus, but mere step-ladders, stilts, or even crutches, if you rely on them as such. The great works of literature come first, remember, and all rules, devices, techniques, forms, are founded on them, made out of their tissues, and every true genius creates new ones, or gives us imaginative (and workable) variations on the old. The familiar knowledge of this continuous, changing, bountiful life of the human imagination is something not to be missed, should be valued for its own sake, even if no one in this room ever writes another line.”

Since then, the Writers’ Conference has become a thriving domestic industry: sure enough, there have been no miracles. The effect has been to increase by the thousand the number of those who write, and there is almost no writer so bad (or so good!) that he cannot find a publisher. What the family magazines, regular publishers, literary reviews, cannot absorb, the paperback books and the anthologies can, and do. Processions of publishers’ scouts visit the “creative writing” courses in hundreds of universities and colleges. Strolling bands of older critics, poets, novelists yearly ride circuit on writers’ conferences in dozens of colleges and universities. I dare say prizes, grants, fellowships for every kind of writing there is number yearly into the hundreds. A brilliant young writer, William Styron, recently remarked in effect that this is not the Lost Generation, but the subsidized one. (There never was a lost generation of artists—that is only a cheerful myth, by the way.)
I am happy to see four hundred and ninety-nine promising young writers comfortably provided for while they reach their level, for the sake of that one indispensable first-rater, even maybe a genius, we all look for and hope for. And don’t worry, he will come, he always does. Usually only one or two in a century, now and then in a cluster or galaxy, in a well spring of richness, but he does not fail. In the present fevered rush to publish just anything and anybody, and all the critics hailing all writing on his own level of understanding as great, with books and poets of the year, of the month, of the hour, of the minute, we can get a little confused. Be calm. The real poet, the real novelist, will emerge out of the uproar. He will be here, he is even now on his way.

1964

1.
Are you conscious, in your own writing, of the existence of a “usable past”? Is this mostly American? What figures would you designate as elements in it? Would you say, for example, that Henry James’s work is more relevant to the present and future of American writing than Walt Whitman’s?

All my past is “usable,” in the sense that my material consists of memory, legend, personal experience, and acquired knowledge. They combine in a constant process of re-creation. I am quite unable to separate the influence of literature or the history of literary figures from influences of background, upbringing, ancestry; or to say just what is American and what is not. On one level of experience and a very important one, I could write an autobiography based on my reading until I was twenty-five.

Henry James and Walt Whitman are relevant to the past and present of American literature or of any other literature. They are world figures, they are both artists, it is better not to mortgage the future by excluding either. Be certain that if the present forces and influences bury either of them, the future will dig him up again. The James-minded and the Whitman-minded people have both the right to their own kind of nourishment.

For myself I choose James, holding as I do with the conscious, disciplined artist, the serious expert against the expansive, indiscriminately “cosmic” sort. James, I believe, was the better workman, the more advanced craftsman, a better thinker, a man with a heavier load to carry than Whitman. His feelings are deeper and more complex than Whitman’s; he had more confusing choices to make, he faced and labored over harder problems. I am always thrown off by arm-waving and shouting, I am never convinced by breast-beating or huge shapeless statements of generalized emotion. In particular, I think the influence of Whitman on certain American writers has been
disastrous, for he encourages them in the vices or self-love (often disguised as love of humanity, or the working classes, or God), the assumption of prophetic powers, of romantic superiority to the limitations of craftsmanship, inflated feeling and slovenly expression.

Neither James nor Whitman is more relevant to the present and future of American literature than, say, Hawthorne or Melville, Stephen Crane or Emily Dickinson; or for that matter, any other first-rank poet or novelist or critic of any time or country. James or Whitman? The young writer will only confuse himself, neglect the natural sources of his education as artist, cramp the growth of his sympathies, by lining up in such a scrimmage. American literature belongs to the great body of world literature, it should be varied and free to flow into what channels the future shall open; all attempts to limit and exclude at this early day would be stupid, and I sincerely hope, futile. If a young artist must choose a master to admire and emulate, that choice should be made according to his own needs from the widest possible field and after a varied experience of study. By then perhaps he shall have seen the folly of choosing a master. One suggestion: artists are not political candidates; and art is not an arena for gladiatorial contests.

2.
Do you think of yourself as writing for a definite audience? If so, how would you describe this audience? Would you say that the audience for serious American writing has grown or contracted in the last ten years?

In the beginning I was not writing for any audience, but spent a great while secretly and with great absorption trying to master a craft, to find a medium; my respect for this medium and the masters of it—no two of them alike—is very great. My search was all for the clearest and most arresting way to tell the things I wished to tell. I still do not write for any definite audience, though perhaps I have in mind a kind of composite reader.

It appears to me that the audience for serious American writing has grown in the past ten years. This opinion is based on my own observation of an extended reputation, a widening sphere of influence, an increasing number of readers, among poets, novelists, and critics of our first rank.

It is true that I place great value on certain kinds of perceptive criticism but neither praise nor blame affects my actual work, for I am under a compulsion to write as I do; when I am working I forget who approved and who dispraised, and why. The worker in an art is dyed in his own color, it is useless to ask him to change his faults or his virtues; he must, rather more literally than most men, work out his own salvation. No novelist or poet could possibly ask himself, while working: “What will a certain critic think of this? Will this be acceptable to my publisher? Will this do for a certain magazine? Will my family and friends approve of this?” Imagine what that would lead to. . . . And how much worse, if he must be thinking, “What will my political cell or block think of this? Am I hewing to the party line? Do I stand to lose my job, or head, on this?” This is really the road by which the artist perishes.

3.
Do you place much value on the criticism your work has received? Would you agree that the corruption of the literary supplements by advertising—in the case of the newspapers—and political pressures—in the case of the liberal weeklies—has made serious literary criticism an isolated cult?

As to criticism being an isolated cult, for the causes you suggest or any other, serious literary criticism was never a crowded field; it cannot be produced by a formula or in bulk any more than can good poetry or fiction. It is not, any more than it ever was, the impassioned concern of a huge public. Proportionately to number, both of readers and publishers, there are as many good critics who have a normal audience as ever. We are discussing the art of literature and the art of criticism, and this has nothing to do with the vast industry of copious publishing, and hasty reviewing, under pressure from the advertising departments, or political pressure. It is a pernicious system: but I surmise the same kind of threat to freedom in a recently organized group of revolutionary artists who are out to fight and suppress if they can, all “reactionary” artists—that is, all artists who do not subscribe to their particular political faith.

4.
Have you found it possible to make a living by writing the sort of thing you want to, and without the aid of such crutches as
teaching and editorial work? Do you think there is any place in our present economic system for literature as a profession?

No, there has not been a living in it, so far. The history of literature, musical composition, painting shows there has never been a living in art, except by flukes of fortune; by weight of long, cumulative reputation, or generosity of a patron; a prize, a subsidy, a commission of some kind; or (in the American style) anonymous and shamefaced hackwork; in the English style, a tradition of hackwork, openly acknowledged if deplored. The grand old English hack is a melancholy spectacle perhaps, but a figure not without dignity. He is a man who sticks by his trade, does the best he can with it on its own terms, and abides by the consequences of his choice, with a kind of confidence in his way of life that has some merit, certainly.