308
PARTISAN REVIEW
about this as about other things. Partly, because every serious creative
writer is really in his heart concerned with reputation and not with
success (the most successful writer I have known, Sir Hugh Walpole,
was far and away the ·most unhappy about his reputation, because
the 'highbrows' did not like him). Again, I suspect that every writer
is secretly writing for
someone,
probably for a parent or teacher who
did not believe in him in childhood. The critic who refuses to 'under–
stand' immediately becomes identified with this person, and the under–
standing of many admirers only adds to the writer's secret bitterness
if thi'> one refusal persists.
Gradually one realizes that there is always this someone who will
not like one's work. Then, perhaps, literature becomes a humble
exercise of faith in being all that one can be in one's art, of being
more than oneself, expecting little, but with a faith in the mystery of
poetry which gradually expands into a faith in the mysterious service
of truth.
Yet what failures there are! And how much mud sticks to one;
mud not thrown by other people but acquired in the course of earning
one's living,
an~wering
or not answering the letters which one re–
ceives, supporting or not supporting public causes. All one can hope
is that this mud is composed of little grains of sand which will produce
pearls.
