'Write Little; Do It Well'

“I am a student of literature, not an anthropologist, and I have better ways of spending the few years remaining to me.” 

What can we conclude about the person who said this? He is a serious reader who has drawn conclusions about literature that are never casual or driven by fashion. Despite being an academic he is witty, not flippant, and has little interest in flattering writers and readers. He’s probably not teaching today. His species may be extinct. Hearing his voice is like listening to a wax-cylinder recording on a gramophone. We still listen to King Oliver, so why not read Yvor Winters?

 

Today, he is perhaps the least fashionable poet and critic of comparable stature in American writing. Winters published his essay “Problems for the Modern Critic of Literature” in the Autumn 1956 issue of The Hudson Review and collected it, revised and shortened, in The Function of Criticism (1957). Near its conclusion he writes: “[A]s most intelligent critics and even novelists are aware, the novel in our time is almost dead.” That’s Winters being Winters. Readers with long memories will detect an irony here. Frequent post-mortems have been conducted on the novel. A hefty anthology of such death certificates could be assembled. But within five years of Winters’ verdict, before and after, Nabokov published Lolita, Pnin and Pale Fire, and also at work were Ralph Ellison, Bernard Malamud, Saul Bellow, Eudora Welty, Isaac Bashevis Singer and John Cheever, just to name the obvious American exceptions to Winters’ declaration.

 

In his poetry and prose, Winters is often at his best as an agent provocateur. He challenges the complacent assumptions of readers and critics. His “Problems” essay is complicated and addresses many issues I won’t mention, though the final paragraph may be more pertinent today than when it was first published:

 

“The most damnable fact about most novelists, I suppose, is their simple lack of intelligence: the fact that they seem to consider themselves professional writers and hence justified in being amateur intellectuals. They do not find it necessary to think like mature men and women or to study the history of thought; they do not find it necessary to master the art of prose.”

 

Like many others, I’ve stopped caring about contemporary fiction, with few exceptions. Whimsy, pretentiousness, aliteracy, didacticism and poverty of imagination have largely killed storytelling.  I could never have foreseen such a sad reality. When young, I was an omnivorous reader of the day’s novels and stories. Much of it hasn’t worn well but I have no regrets. Winters’ paragraph continues:

 

“And these remarks are equally true, so far as my experience goes, of those novelists who write primarily for profit, and who boast of being able to ‘tell a good story,’ and of those who are fiddling with outmoded experimental procedures in the interests of originality and who are sometimes praised in the quarterlies. In fact the history of the novel is littered with the remains of genius sacrificed to ignorance and haste.”

 

Winters was born on this date, October 17, in 1900, and died in 1968 at age sixty-seven. In “To a Young Writer” he writes:

 

“Write little; do it well.

Your knowledge will be such,

At last, as to dispel

What moves you overmuch.’