'It Is Simply Not Helpful'

Why Do I Write? is a slender volume published in 1948 by Percival Marshall of London. It collects an exchange of letters, each a digressive essay, among Elizabeth Bowen, Graham Greene and V.S. Pritchett, on the writer’s presumed responsibility to “society,” whatever that means. As Pritchett writes in his preface, “What a horrible word ‘society’ is.” Though written seventy years ago, Pritchett’s words, in one of his letters to Bowen, seem particularly pertinent:

“I do not write for the reader, for people, for society. I write for myself, for my own self-regarding pleasure, trying to excel and always failing of the excellence I desire. If no one ever read me, would I write? Perhaps not; but I would not be able to stop writing in my head.”

Pritchett speaks for every honest writer. High-mindedness doesn’t suit us. Watch your back (and your wallet) when a writer proclaims his dedication to the cause du jour. We pride ourselves on independence of thought, but most of us are as free-thinking as a nest of fire ants. Writers ought to be no more engagé than pipefitters, who probably know more about politics anyway. Pritchett begins his preface like this:

“If we are asked what, from the social point of view, writers are for, one answer seems to be that they exist to show the inconvenience of human nature; just as from the private point of view, they enlarge human nature's knowledge of itself. But do we ask more of writers in a time like the present? Ought they not, perhaps, be putting their shoulders to some wheel or other? And which one? After all (the cliché runs) ‘this is a time of crisis, this is an age of revolution, transition, despair.’ . . . The cliché is not necessarily untrue because it is conventional; it is simply not helpful.”