The engineering school was supposed to be my catapult to fame and fortune. My father had wanted me to be an engineer. My mother thought it was a sound profession, although both of them have, at one time and another, written and sold newspaper stories. I stuck to engineering for two years and college doors have closed no more upon me.
My profession, as I knew it would be from the first, is that of a writer. At present I am writing for the pulps—which is not a shameful or degrading thing as many people hint. I am giving the best that is in me for the purpose of entertainment and I find that many, many great writers first served their apprenticeship to blood and thunder. It is something to be a big frog in even a pulp paper puddle, to make excellent money, to be able to keep your own hours, and to shift whenever the scene grows monotonous, to be able to use a packing case in Nicaragua or a mahogany desk in New York at will. I am smugly satisfied that I have just started, and I am conceited enough to say that I write for the best of the pulps (Adventure, Detective Fiction Weekly) as well as the worst.
When I wrote that theme for you (I wish I had it now) I was not referring to rhetoric, but to the rest of the university. Besides yourself, no other man there had anything to say other than dry, textbook things. That was not education to me. I wanted the contact of culture, perhaps, or maybe I wanted a chance to think. You were the only man there who would let a chap think. Walking into your classes or walking with you back to your office after a class was quite like stepping out of a hydraulic press into a spring day. You wanted a man to figure things out for himself and you respected your students. You were one bright spot in an otherwise zero-zero world.
This is not flattery, but something I have honestly wanted to tell you for some time. When I asked after you a year or so ago I was presented with a sight I shall not forget within my lifetime. I felt as though they had shown me something grisly when they pointed to the stack of books on Professor so-and-so’s desk. They were nice, thick books, capable of breaking any student’s arm. They were blue books and brown books, and they contained, the lot of them, thousands of stiff pages like starched collars—immensely respectable and utterly useless. These were the books, they told me, they were using now. These were the books which had taken the place of that stately little rhetoric manual—which somehow reminded me of a very scholarly little man with a taste for oddities, solemnity and vast kindness. I noticed they used books, not a book.
|Related Sites |