PARTISAN REVIEW
25
It.
is a self-perpetuating system. Those of you who are more robust
and individual than others, will be encouraged to leave and find
ways of educating yourself - educating your own judgment. Those
that stay must remember, always and all the time, that they are be–
ing molded and patterned to fit into the narrow and particular needs
of this particular society."
Like every other writer, I get letters all the time from young
people who are about to write theses and essays about my books in
various countries - but particularly in the United States. They all
say: "Please give me a list of the articles about your work, the critics
who have written about you, the authorities." They also ask for a
thousand details of total irrelevance, but which they have been taught
to consider important, amounting to a dossier, like an immigration
department's.
These requests
I
answer as follows: "Dear Student. You are
mad. Why spend months and years writing thousands of words
about one book, or even one writer, when there are hundreds of
books waiting to be read. You don't see that you are the victim of
a pernicious system. And if you have yourself chosen my work as
your subject, and if you do have to write a thesis - and believe me
I
am very grateful that what I've written is being found useful by
you - then why don't you read what
I
have written and make up
your own mind about what you think, testing it against your own
life, your own experience. Never mind about Professors White and
Black."
"Dear Writer," they reply, "but
I
have to know what the au–
thorities say, because if
I
don't quote them, my professor won't give
me any marks."
This is an international system, absolutely identical from the
Urals to Yugoslavia, from Minnesota to Manchester.
The point is, we are all so used to it) we no longer see how bad
it
is.
I am not used to it, because I left school when I was fourteen.
There was a time I was sorry about this, and believed I had missed
out on something valuable. Now I am grateful for a lucky escape.
After the publication of
The Golden Notebook,
I made it my busi–
Dess
to find out something about the literary machinery, to examine
the process which made a critic, or a reviewer. I looked at innum-
