The Writer in the University

by ALFRED KAZIN

1

ONCE, American writers all seemed to be clergymen — just as a time would come when they would all seem to be former clergymen. Then, often as not, they were politicians, and later, printers. Printers like Mark Twain became journalists before they became authors, and almost, it would seem, in order to become authors. In fact, by the end of the nineteenth century the tendency of American writers to begin in journalism, and even to stay in it as part of their creative life as writers, was so well established that this persisted into the 1920s, when reporters like Lardner and Hemingway carried on the tradition of Hearn, Crane, Dreiser, Mencken. The city room was still a legendary place for American writers; and just as every recruit in Napoleon’s army carried a marshal’s baton in his knapsack, so a reporter hid in the drawers of his desk, amid the crumpled pieces of carbon paper and the whiskey bottle that was his excuse to posterity for not finishing it, a chapter of the great American novel.

Nowadays, however, a great many writers tend to be in the universities — and I mean writers, those for whom writing is a personal necessity and who, whatever else they may do, see the world with a writer’s mind. The university today includes not merely critics, who would seem to belong there, but poets, novelists, and dramatists of one kind or another. Many writers are professors in full harness, and there can be very few American poets under fifty who are not wrapped in what has been called the “academic cocoon.”

What we are seeing just now is more than the university’s friendly hospitality to writers; it is an attempt to play the active role of patron: to support the creation of literature, to take writers into the academic community, and thus to show that it regards them as assimilable, harmonious — and necessary.

This represents a very great change. When I was in college in the thirties, it was still well understood that scholars were in one class and writers in quite another. They did not belong to the same order of mind, they seemed quite antithetical in purpose and temperament, and, at the very least, they needed different places to work in. You can no more imagine Hemingway or Fitzgerald in a university than you can picture one of the new critics out of it. In those days it was understood that scholarship was itself a trust, gravely presided over by men and women who were custodians of the best that had been thought and learned. Knowledge was seen historically; it consisted of a tradition, the tradition. It was not always possible to say where this tradition began, but so far as literature was concerned, it ended at the cemetery.

In 1938, a classmate of mine wanted to do his doctor’s thesis on Dreiser, but was told flatly that he would not get permission until Dreiser was dead. This, with its obtuse hostility to a writer whose best work was behind him, nevertheless represented a principle that some of us were bound to respect, precisely because it was not ours. It defined the opposition between tradition and the new generation; it showed us the authority we had to fight. The scholar, on his side, knew what he knew; he knew what his subject was, and it was not to be confused with every confounded and illconsidered literary enthusiasm that came along. Enough time had to elapse for his subject to take its shape, for the evidence to appear. D. H. Lawrence (1885-1930) and James Joyce (1882) were questionable and problematical additions to the canonical history of English literature.

The scholar saw himself in relation to the tradition of which he was an officer, and whether he sat on a board interrogating a candidate at a doctor’s oral, or wrote a paper “establishing” the influence of a major poet on a lesser poet, he knew that he was custodian of the custodians, and so trained those who were to curry on the same work after him. Indeed, the very picture that scholars had, in those days, of certain institutions of democracy proceeding in a straight line from the Anglo-Saxons in the German forests to their descendants on the American frontier, or of English literature evolving somewhat awkwardly but steadily from Beowulf to Thomas Hardy, expressed perfectly, as an image of history generally tends to, the scholar’s conception of his subject and of his own approach to it. All scientists were adding to our knowledge, all scholars were working with the precise impersonality and cautious certitudes of science, and the tradition was so real that it possessed moral authority.

It followed from this that the literary scholar’s attitude toward the contemporary writer was, at best, one of understandable skepticism. For how can you evaluate soundly, how can you judge truly, how can you even know, when the writer is still living, when the arc has not been closed by death, when the pattern may be interrupted or even changed by a masterpiece or a failure? It is easy, now, to laugh at the caution with which departments of English used to look at contemporary American literature, and in these days, when the young are brought up on it and are made to analyze stories by Hemingway and poems by Cummings, we remember with derision the time when Paul Elmer More called a novel by Dos Passes “an explosion in a cesspool,” and when it was well understood, in many a cozy professorial conclave, that The Waste Land and Ulysses were deliberate hoaxes on the public. But the scholar honestly thought that there was a tradition to look after; and even though he tended to be too cautious in adding to it, the writer himself respected him for trying to preserve it.

2

IT WAS only when this idea of a tradition broke down that writers could become part of the university. It was when the professors became “modern” and “creative,” ashamed above all of seeming dull — it was exactly at this point that the writer was welcomed in the university, whose proper study came to seem not the past, in its closed historic shape, but the constant interflow of “life,” of contemporary experience, of every and any phenomenon that could be weighed, measured, and described.

“Aren’t we writers, too?” a distinguished scholar said to me, more puzzled than reproachful, when I made this point at the faculty club. “Do you think that I’m academic?" the most academic man of my acquaintance asked me, using exactly the tone of voice an invalid might use when asking a doctor if the case were hopeless. He lives among professors of literature who are always referring to contemporary literature, or lecturing on contemporary literature, or analyzing it with the I.B.M. machine of modern criticism, or anthologizing contemporary literature — and he feels out of touch. The old order has not, of course, passed entirely; pedants will be pedants, but nowadays they no longer have to be scholars. The real scholars, on the other hand, are no longer sure where they fit into the scheme of things. For it is the authority of culture itself that is going today, and in the world of values there are no longer any parents for the young to rebel against. Parents and children, professors and students, all are young together and want incoherently to remain “young” as long as possible. Scholarship persists as an art; the scholar himself is no longer looked up to as a judge.

Our very conception of time has changed. The past is no longer all that came before us, all that asks to be learned — it is something which we select as a fashion to imitate; and which past it is to be, current literature now dictates. Time past is that which serves time present, so that people study Donne because of Eliot and know Homer only through Joyce. And the American scholar has become a slightly synthetic personality — always “liberal” and a regular fellow, as much the product of mass culture as his students, usually a journalist and mostly a rewrite man.

It is in this new atmosphere that the writer has come into the university — an atmosphere in which values are in confusion and in which many fields run into each other; in which the constant search is for a philosophy, a perspective, a slant by which to leaven the great mass of facts which American scholarship piles up every year. Many scholars now give the appearance of living intellectually from hand to mouth, and it is this that explains the unbelievable influence of the critics who, in a culture that has forgotten religion and has never known philosophy, act as “idea men.” We live in a culture so materially rich, so powerful, so well able to support experiment and so eager to develop itself, that the writer is urged, almost in desperation, to contribute to the discussion and it is sometimes looked on as a miracle if he comes up with an idea.

The creative writer serves all sorts of purposes in our new culture. He is something of a dancing teacher to the children of the new rich; only, instead of teaching them the art of the dance, he can show them how to analyze down to the bone what others have written. This prosperous, aspiring, parvenu side of American life explains a great deal about the writer’s presence in the university. There is money around, and some of the money can be used to hire well-known writers, whose names lend prestige to the university and whose antics will supply the faculty club with gossip all winter. The writer becomes an attraction, able not only to bring in the summer session crowd and the extension division crowd, but to make the university officials advance the claim that they are taking learning straight to the people. He serves directly in those fields, like creative writing and literary criticism of the more practical sort, which seem to have become the domain of visiting writers. And what the university does for the writer is equally obvious. It gives him, what writing can never give, a measure of financial security; and what is of extreme importance to anyone who knows what a lonely trade writing can be, it provides him with an intellectual community of a kind which simply does not exist elsewhere. It gives him a sense of belonging, and encourages his writing in many graceful and grateful ways, just as it obviously limits it in others.

Still, the relationship of the writer to the university is basically an unreal one; and while the university needs writers and some writers need the university, it would be well to realize the fundamental differences between them and not to minimize them. The scholar thinks of his field, still, as a body of knowledge to which facts are added and in which clarifications are constantly being made. But to the writer reality is something to be transformed — and not by the patient discussion and analysis of impersonal items, but by a creative act. The virtues of scholarship at its best — patience and humility and disinterestedness — are not necessarily the writer’s virtues, except that he needs the patience to realize his hunch, the humility to allow his work to have its way with him, and enough steadiness to bring his work to a successful conclusion. It is an illusion that people interested in the same subject necessarily share the same attitude toward it; in truth, it is the essentially personal attitude that we have, the innermost point of view that we bring to anything from our very souls, and not the subject itself, that brings minds together.

Above all, the writer does not work with anyone; he is not a collaborator, he is not coöperative, and it can be to his very peril as a waiter if he sacrifices the excruciating precision of his vision and his unrelenting impatience of mediocrity in order to please, to accommodate himself, to fit in. Academic life, though it may exercise no control over his writing, only over his teaching, can in all sorts of small ways exert pressure and influence on his writing. We live in a culture where the highest aim is not to live in the spirit, but to be comfortable; not to give offense or to take it, but to get along, to be happy. But no one in his senses would choose writing in order to become happy. The writer, the artist, is a man plagued by homesickness, and in furious resistance to the most commonplace treacheries, and forever in love with Him who is not the God of this world. “I put a piece of paper and a pencil under my pillow,” said Thoreau, “and when I could not sleep I wrote in the dark.”

Academic life thrives on coöperative specialization, on a body of scholars who not only respond to one another but who all need each other. It thrives on promotions, honors, acceptance — and on publication at any price. In the same spirit of utter will it offers the writer promotions, too, and recognition and acceptance. But these do not help the writer in his lonely work. They may be actually harmful, for they can distract and deceive and soften him up.

But these differences and distinctions apart, it is obvious that the writer will remain part of the university and that more and more universities are likely to want writers. The writers will welcome this. Quite apart from the fact that it is becoming increasingly difficult for a serious writer to live by his writing, the money in publishing these days is in secondary media, like television and soft-cover books. Newspapers are more than ever just now, by reason of their timidity and standardization, poor training grounds for the free creative spirit, and a Mr. Dooley, a Broun, a Thurber, have yielded to a world of Timestyle, of the syndicated review, and to the columnist who is more likely to be a Westbrook Pegler than a Walter Lippmann.

Basically, the writer is in the university because of what has happened to America in the last few years — the new thoughtfulness of wealth, the amazing breakup of the conservative tradition, the open competition of the university with other intellectual agencies. The university has become one of the real movers of American life, as witness Congressman Reece’s indignant charge that the Rockefeller Foundation and the Encyclopedia of Social Sciences had virtually brought socialism to America. The presence of so many writers in the university is really a chapter in the still undescribed revolution of America since the war. But what needs finally to be said, on the writer’s part, is that he is in the university because he wants to be there. It enables him to play a role — as moralist, as philosopher, as literary guide and teacher to his tribe — which American writers have always loved to play, which the country has wanted them to play, and which, in a culture so devoted to selfimprovement as ours, the university best enables them to play.

What all this has done to American writing is another story; but who knows whether to blame our new writers on the academy or to admit that so many of them flock to the university because that is the natural center of their interests just now? However one may lament what has happened to our writing ever since it entered the university, there should be no doubt that from the writer’s own point of view, his choice is made in the deepest freedom. It is all his own doing, his talent, his fate — and always his task to bear. That, in fact, is what it means to be a writer, and it is because of this intense act of will, of choice, of freedom, that only the writer can say what, being in the university means to him, and what he gets out of it.