Читать книгу Wickford Point онлайн

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"It can't always be what you want to hear," I said, "or it wouldn't be intelligent."

Allen lighted his pipe and began weaving his way about the room, now fingering a book, now looking out the window where the lights of the cars moved along Memorial Drive in endless progress, now picking up a piece of pewter and examining the marks. Occasionally I saw him from the corner of my eye, and I knew he was cursing the impulse which had made him put his pride into my keeping. While I turned the pages, Allen's self-confidence was leaving him; he was suffering the tortures of the damned.

"How's it going?" he said again.

"It's going fine," I said. In a sense that manuscript showed care, but from a practical aspect it was an egregious exhibition.

Not so many years ago a teacher of the art of writing began the advertisement of his services with the announcement that millions of people can write fiction without knowing it. He would have been safer had he said that millions of people are certain that they can write fiction a great deal better than those engaged in the profession. Even so, it is my belief that the consistent craftsman of fiction is very rare. His talent, which is in no sense admirable, is intuitive. In spite of the dictum of Stevenson on playing the sedulous ape to the great masters, it has never been my observation that education helps this talent. On the contrary, undue familiarity with other writers is too apt to sap the courage and to destroy essential self-belief, through the realization of personal inadequacy. It encourages a care and a style that confuse the subject, and the net result is nothing.