STATE
OF AMERICAN WRITING
the whole mind and wants one's whole time; a university is the
perfect place not to write. The irritation is seldom mentioned in
print, but matters. Many professors of English cherish (I can't imagine
why) unsatisfied literary ambitions-just as most writers do. And
then they think writers queer and arrogant, and many writers .are.
Trouble from all this. And a teacher's audience
is
always there, and
is
so
responsive. Repetition of books and courses numbs. For poets
and fiction writers, as for critics, it might be claimed that teaching
is valuable because in a seat of learning one keeps on learning. I have
no faith in the claim. Writers of any sort certainly ought to know
more than they do and as much as possible, but the writers I know
outside universities read more, on the whole, more that counts, than
those inside. I have no faith in the claim even for critics; and
it
is
not widely enough understood that literary criticism is an activity
which bears no necessary relation whatever to good teaching. But
the energy used by good teaching is very much the energy required
for writing. Finally, the substantial repetition of
experience
involved
in teaching, after two or three years, constitutes, for a fiction writer
at any rate, the most unsatisfactory life conceivable short of imprison–
ment. Something can certainly be said for a writer's teaching, but
something has, by Blackmur, Stegner, and others: teaching is one
way of keeping alive.
The effects of these difficulties are very clear in American writing
of the decade, especially of course in recent criticism, which is almost
as interesting as fourteen classrooms in one building, all carefully
constructed, all empty. It is specially unfortunate, because criticism
has in front of it just now a delicate task, namely the exploration of
the matter broached in Question 4. The nature of
experiment
in writ–
ing wants re-stating, and the return-to-form
in
poetry during the
last ten years wants general study. Now the inevitable bias, in an
academic criticism, against "experiment" and in favor of "form,"
is wretched equipment for this task. In poetry, too, the process of
steadying has been assisted-not to its gain-by wide academic
instruction in the hands of writers, and the whole transitional period
which I think is now corning to an end, perhaps hastened. But I
can't enter on these things here.
3. The revivals are "an annoying relief" (as Erich Kahler des–
cribed to me the telephone strike).
It
is good to see the authors come
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