T. S. Eliot: The Art of Poetry (The Paris Review Interviews, Vol. 1)
T. S. Eliot
"I think it's awfully dangerous to give general advice. I think the best one can do for a young poet it to criticize in detail a particular poem of his. Argue it with him if necessary; give him your opinion, and if there are any generalizations to be made, let him do them himself. I've found that different people have different ways of working and things come to them in different ways. You're never sure when you're uttering a statement that's generally valid for all poets or when it's something that only applies to yourself. I think nothing is worse that to try to form people in your own image."
--T. S. Eliot
It's not surprising that the interviewer, hearing this from T. S. Eliot, asks about teaching. "Do you think there's any possible generalization to be made about the fact that all the better poets now, younger than you, seem to be teachers?" This topic of writer-teachers is a common one in The Paris Review interviews.
A few writers in the Interviews do not believe that writing can be taught. A few declare something along the line that teaching is dangerous because dealing with student writing can affect one's personal efforts.
Most authors, however, address the question in very practical terms. How else are writers to make a living wage? They turn the question of teaching into a discussion of the writing life -- and this writing life is often undertaken in harsh economic circumstances. Here is Eliot's response:
I don't know. I think the only generalization that can be made of any value will be one which will be made a generation later. All you can say at this point is that at different times there are different possibilities of making a living, or different limitations on making a living. Obviously a poet has got to find a way of making a living apart from his poetry. After all, artists do a great deal of teaching, and musicians too.
Does this mean that the ideal is no job? For Eliot, no.
I feel quite sure that if I'd started by having independent means, if I hadn't had to bother about earning a living and could have given all my time to poetry, it would have had a deadening effect on me.
This, too, is a favorite question in the Interviews. Isn't it best for creativity to devote oneself full-time to writing? Of all the responses to this question -- and they are almost always no, life experience is good -- Kurt Vonnegut's is most specific:
That's romance -- that work of that sort damages a writer's soul. At Iowa, Dick Yates and I used to give a lecture each year of the writer and the free-enterprise system. The students hated it. We would talk about all the hack jobs writers could take in case they found themselves starving to death, or in case they wanted to accumulate enough capital to finance the writing of a book. Since publishers aren't putting money into first novels anymore, and since the magazines have died, and since television isn't buying from young freelancers anymore, and since the foundations give grants only to old poops like me, young writers are going to have to support themselves as shameless hacks. Otherwise, we are soon going to find ourselves without a contemporary literature. There is only one genuinely ghastly thing hack jobs do to writers, and that is to waste their precious time.
Vonnegut cuts through the pretty illusions. Making it as a writer means, in addition to getting published, finding out how to eat and bathe while banging out pages no one wants to read.
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