Father Payne | Page 6

the vocation in all this? This
place, to be brief, is for men who have a real vocation for writing, and
yet never would otherwise have the time or the leisure to train for it.
You see, in England, people think that you needn't train for

writing--that you have just got to begin, and there you are. Very few
people have the money to wait a few years--they have to write, not
what they want to write, but what other people want to read. And so it
comes about that by the time that they have earned the money and the
leisure, the spring is gone, the freshness is gone, there's no invention
and no zest. Writing can't be done in a little corner of life. You have to
give up your life to it--and then that means giving up your life to a
great deal of what looks like pure laziness--loafing about, looking
about, travelling, talking, mooning; that is the only way to learn
proportion; and it is the only way, too, of learning what not to write
about--a great many things that are written about are not really material
for writing at all. And all this can't be done in a drivelling mood--you
must pick your way if you are going to write. That's a long preface; but
I mean this place to be a place to give men the right sort of start. I
happen to be able to teach people, more or less, how to write, if they
have got the stuff in them--and to be frank, I'm not sure that you have!
You think this would be a pleasant sort of experience--so it can be; but
it isn't done on slack and chattering lines. It is just meant to save people
from hanging about at the start, a thing which spoils a lot of good
writers. But it's deadly serious, and it isn't a dilettante life at all. Do you
grasp all that?"
"Yes," I said, "and I believe I can work! I know I have wasted my time,
but it was not because I wanted to waste time, but because the sort of
things I have always had to do--the classics--always seemed to me so
absolutely pointless. No one who taught me ever distinguished between
what was good and what was bad. Whatever it was--a Greek play,
Homer, Livy, Tacitus--it was always supposed to be the best thing of
the kind. I was always sure that much of it was rot, and some of it was
excellent; but I didn't know why, and no one ever told me why."
"You thought all that?" said he. "Well, that's more hopeful! Have you
ever done any essay work?"
"Yes," I said, "and that was the worst of all--no one ever showed me
how to do it in my own way, but always in some one else's way."
He sate a little in silence. Then he said: "But mind you, that's not all! I
don't think writing is the end of life. The real point is to feel the things,
to understand the business, to have ideas about life. I don't want people
to learn how to write interestingly about things in which they are not

interested--but to be interested first, and then to write if they can. I like
to turn out a good writer, who can say what he feels and believes. But
I'm just as pleased when a man tells me that writing is rubbish, and that
he is going away to do something real. The real--that's what I care
about! I don't want men to come and pick up grains of truth and reality,
and work them into their stuff. I have turned out a few men like that,
and those are my worst failures. You have got to care about ideas, if
you come here, and to get the ideas into shape. You have got to learn
what is beautiful and what is not, because the only business of a real
writer is with beauty--not a sickly exotic sort of beauty, but the beauty
of health and strength and generous feeling. I can't have any humbugs
here, though I have sent out some humbugs. It's a hard life this, and a
tiring life; though if you are the right sort of fellow, you will get plenty
of fun out of it. But we don't waste time here; and if a man wastes time,
out he goes."
"I believe I can work as hard as anyone," I said, "though I have shown
no signs of it--and anyhow, I should like to try. And I do really want to
learn how to distinguish between things, how to know what matters. No
one has ever shown me how to do that!"
"That's all right!" he said, "But