THE YOUNG WRITER, PRESENT, PAST, AND FUTURE BY STEPHEN SPENDER Reprinted from MICHIGAN ALUMNUS QuARTERLY REVIEW August 8, 1953, Vol. LIX, No. 21 The Writer's Calling Endures, Though the Response A1ay Vary THE YOUNG WRITER, PRESENT, PAST. AND FUTURE By STEPHEN SPENDER N THIS, the occasion of giving the tasting the first fruits-I may as well tell annual Hopwood Awards, a few you that, economically speaking, being a O of you must be thinking about the writer is very like being a gambler. The first step in your career signified by receiv­ story or article that earns you $10 might ing an award. In a rather varied life, one equally well earn you $1,000. Sometimes of the things I have never done is to win you are paid a few pennies for a review, a literary prize. My first duty is to congrat­ sometimes enough to keep you for a month. ulate you on an achievement that fills me And what is true of the economics of the with admiration. Rut I must add a word of thing is also true of reputation. Many warning, which you can attribute to sour writers living today who have great repu­ grapes if you wish. You only have to look tations were hardly known during the long at lists of Nobel Prizes, Pulitzer Prizes, years when they were doing their best work. and the rest to realize how changeable-if Anyone who has lived as a writer for ?ot. £allible-is the judgment of literary twenty years or more knows too that one's Junes. stock goes up and down in what is a In a way of course, this is rather con­ fluctuating market of critical opinions. soling. To those of us-who are always in I mention these things in order to get a democratic majority-who have not won them out of the way. The point really is prizes, it shows that we may be better than that, although writers have to get started you who have. There is even more solid in one way or another with earning money consolation to be derived from reflecting and getting work published, these things that those of us who do not deserve prizes are irrelevant. When I say irrelevant, I may well win them, since the example of don't mean just that they don't matter; I many who have won them shows that in mean that part of the struggle of being a the past there has not always been an writer is to watch and to be on guard that absolutely necessary connection between they don't have relevance. To be a failure prize-winning and desert. can be discouraging. To be a success may Now that I'm on this aspect of the mean something much worse: that you feel literary career-of which you are today surrounded by people who want you to go on being one. Your publisher has sold fifty STEPHEN SPENDER., English poet and critic, whose thousand copies of your last book, and is 1953 Hopwood Lecture is presented here, is a graduate of University College, Oxford. He has published appalled when you bring in a manuscript of some eighteen volumes of essaYll and verse. His honors what may be a better book, but of which include a doctorate in letters from the University of he knows he can sell only two thousand Montpelier and honorary membership in the Harvard chapter of Phi Beta Kappa. He has been lecturing this copies. The more you are known the more year at the University of Cincinnati. you discover that you are in some mysterious 302 THE YOUNG WRITER 3°3 way arousing expectations in all sorts of people and behavior very different from individuals and groups of people who, those expected by the readers of his best­ since they read your work, feel that you selling novels. 1 became excited at his idea have a certain responsibility towards them. and pressed him to start writing this book Shortly before he died, the English which 1 felt sure would be his masterpiece. STEPHEN SPENDER The English poet and critic who delivered the 1953 Hop'wood Lecture novelist, Sir Hugh Walpole, outlined to "No," he said, "I shall never write it." me the idea of a novel he wanted to write. "Why not?" "Because 1 could not write it It was on a subject very close to his heart, in a way which would please my best-selling which he felt he understood better than public. It would have to be produced in a others. From the way he spoke it was clear small edition, for not more than two thou­ that this unwritten book was the one work sand readers. And after selling one hun­ in which he could portray his realest ex­ dred thousand copies of each of my novels, perience of life. However, it would describe 1 could not endure that." THE QUARTERLY REVIEW We can assume, I think, that anyone he found himself in another world, even who simply wants to sell a lot of copies of more real to him, of Shakespeare's A Mid­ his books will-if he knows this already­ Ju'mmer Night's Dream. In another letter, plan his career accordingly. He will not be written when he was nursing his brother, a writer, but a businessman who is dealing he complains that the identity of Tom with words as other people deal with any Keats presses on him unendurably, a pres­ other mass-produced commodity. He will sure he resents not out of selfishness but have no illusions, so he will not suffer at because he felt responsible to his world of the end of his life from the kind of heart­ poetry more even than to his brother. There break which makes Sir Hugh Walpole-if was also something about his love for a failure in his own art-the subject of a Fanny which seemed to him the surrender great biography by Rupert Hart-Davis, of his poetic world to a human one. which has recently been published. The next thing we note about the young Now that the decks have been cleared Keats is that he wanted convivial friends of success and failure, what are the legiti­ who shared his love of poetry, provided mate needs of the young writer? It's bet­ that they did not press on him too much ter, I think, to put the question in a form with their personalities. When he was in which it can be examined by examples. twenty or so, he allowed himself to think \Vhat did the young writer of the past that with Reynolds, Benjamin Robert need, as the pre-conditions necessary to his Haydon, Cowden Clarke, Leigh Hunt and gift? the rest, he had found a circle of enlight­ ened people who recognized the same po­ T ET us consider for instance, John Keats etic values as he did. He wanted to belong L and Ernest Hemingway, two young to a group of friends who correspond very men; one in London at the beginning of much to the group of French writers the nineteenth and the other in Paris at who will frequent the same Parisian cafe. the beginning of this century. Perhaps, in America today, this function What of Keats? Well, first of all, he of literary companionship is being fulfilled wanted to write poetry for no reason ex­ rather self-consciously, and with not cept that he wanted to write poetry. His enough frivolity to accompany the serious­ concept of poetry was formed from reading ness, by the creative writing courses. Spenser, Shakespeare, and, later, Milton. Brandy and coffee ought to be compul­ To him, poetry was the means of entering sory at all the creative writing seminars. the world of other poets and then creating The next thing Keats wanted was to his own poems. Besides being a poet, he was chart his course among the currents of lit­ a medical student, he was devoted to his erature and thought in his time. He dis­ brother Tom (whom he nursed through liked Pope's poetry, which he regarded the consumption that he himself was very as mere versification. He had very clearly soon to die of), to his sister, Fanny Keats, developed ideas of his own about the world and in the last months of his life, to Fanny of pure imagination which poetry should Brawne, with whom he fell so hopelessly create. He found precedents for his con­ in love. cept of poetry in Shakespeare. He was Poetry was for him a separate world critical, though admiring, of Wordsworth. from the real world of his medical studies, He was a not very generous rival of Shel­ his brothers and sisters, even his love. Thus, ley. He came to sneer at Leigh Hunt, in one of his letters he describes an occasion and he grew out of the circle of his Hamp­ when the classroom or laboratory where stead friends into the isolation of genius. he was studying suddenly disappeared, and Although he wrote that he had never THE YOUNG WRITER 30 5 allowed a shadow of public thought to en­ doubtless drive out the china and chippen­ ter his work, Keats was not without opin­ dale, just as much as the world of A Mid­ ions. He was what we would call a liberal. summer Nighrs Dream came dancing He loved freedom (by which he meant down on a beam of sunlight into the room Liberal Freedom) and hated Napoleon where Keats was learning medicine and and the British government of his day.