You

( Originally Published 1944 )

Received by all men and by all rejected.

NOW THAT we are nearing a close you may reflect back to the fact that I have within these pages more than once addressed you. (Not always with entire sympathy or respect.)

However, my lack of sympathy is not real. I have much too much sympathy for the beginning writer. A lot of them should be rudely discouraged at the outset. Those who can be discouraged by anything will save themselves a lot of trouble through falling by the wayside at the beginning. Nothing can possibly discourage the writer who is destined to crack through the various air-tight compartments separating the beginning writer from the multiplicity of editorial sanctums. As you start out you will feel that every man's hand is against you. In a sense this is true; but it is equally true that nearly every writer functioning today went through that period. I say nearly everyone because there are a few who through relationship, financial or political influence, or dalliance with the right guy or gal, got there without going through the paces. Fortunately this is less true of authorship than of the other professions. Think of the political profession, for instance! I think that perhaps the worst hazard you have to hurdle, if you are determined to make the grade is "You!" I do not think that anyone but You, in the end, can stop you.

One of the things you have been subject to all your life is discipline. When you were young the Old Man and the Old Lady subjected you to routine. Along a bit further and extensions of your father and your mother, called teachers, had at you hip and thigh. When you had escaped from teachers and professors, then coppers, lawyers, and other such flora and fauna kept you in line, to say nothing of the Boss. What's going to yank you into a day's work when there is no longer some dismal martinet to dock you if you are late, or fire you if you are lazy? At least if you become a writer, you are in a sense "free" from the hateful hegemony of others. But you are not really Free. You merely escape from multiple bossing into a single bossing. You climb the barbed wire fence around the Dollar Democracy Concentration Camp and find yourself suddenly promoted from the rank of Private to that of General. And there you are a General with nobody to give orders to, or give them at all, but yourself. I am always amused by these "orders" that the new writer gives to himself. He writes them out, usually, and sticks them up all over his bedroom. He hopes that they will have some effect upon him. They seldom do. The only thing that affects him is his Will. If his will is strong you soon hear of him, in the pulps, the slicks, novel form; movies. I know of dozens of young writers who saved up a bit of dough, bought themselves a year's freedom, and went to work. They didn't have to stick up typewritten signs to drive them. They, unlike the ones you never heard of subsequently to their Noble Experiment in Freedom, drove themselves as no parent, teacher, cop or boss ever drove them. They were acutely aware of the danger of Freedom. It worried them for the first few years far more, perhaps, than it should. They were strong-willed men and women. They were the sort who usually had succeeded at what they had previously been doing. They were the sort who realized that their new venture was a task far beyond anything they had ever before attempted. Almost invariably they worked more hours than they ever had before. Almost in-variably they were far more brutal upon themselves than any boss would ever dare to be, even under the most extreme circumstances. They usually went through a period of absolute hell, transferring their status from an exteriorly controlled hegemony to an interiorly controlled one. Often, when I heard newly inducted soldiers tell of what is in the army called "Boot Camp" I felt the great psychological similarity.

In Boot Camp, as I understand it, tough sergeants deliberately try to break the morale of inducted men. Those who break they send back to civilian life, or to some more or less ignominious chore in army life. There are two or three hundred thousand "writers" who "write at" writing in this country. Ninety per cent of them make next to nothing. The few who do get by are those who were not "broken" in the "Boot Camp" of their own wills, or lack of same.

Another one of my soldier friends wrote me from abroad saying that he was "constantly amazed at what the human frame could go through and survive." He was a writer before he got into the army. He did all right. He lived a soft, luxurious life. Then, as a PFC, he slept in pup tents on the ground and grew stronger every day. He had an apartment here in Hollywood before he got drafted that must have cost him a couple of hundred a month at least . . . maid service, every softness to which the human frame could succumb. Yet as a soldier he found new and amazing potentialities in his own body which surprised him. He rather liked it, I gathered.

The new writer must go through this same process. He must find new hardness in his own mind. He must, when he starts to free-lance, go beyond what seems normal and find these new possibilities of self-government, because the estate of Free Lance writer is the most beguiling and the most dangerous upon the human will of any condition in life I know.

In other professions there are human checks upon laziness and slothfulness. A doctor is chased around by his patients; a lawyer has to be on the end of a telephone when his clients get pinched. Musicians must be at a certain place at a certain time. But the writer is not called upon the telephone by someone who wants him to appear at a certain place at a given time.

The writer incepts his own labor. He sets the time for it. In most cases the Free Lance writer sets his own deadlines. Therefore, he must at the outset give himself the most awful Boot Camp licking known to the whole realm of human endeavor. If he can't take it he should give himself a mental discharge and go back to ordinary commercial life because, if he does not, his landlord and grocer will see to it later on that he does!