A Letter to a Young Scholar
Want the work, not the reputation; only the first was ever yours
My dear Thomas, your letter reached me on a slow grey afternoon, and reading it was the best hour I have spent in a fortnight.
So you are . Good. I mean that without cruelty, and I shall try, in what follows, to explain why.
The discouragement you describe, the sense that everything worth saying has already been said, and said better, is not a symptom of failure but the first reliable sign that you have begun to read seriously.
The undergraduate is confident because he has not yet met the giants; the scholar is because he has met them, and measured himself against them, and somehow lived.
What you are feeling is not the end of your promise but the beginning of your education, and it will, I am sorry to say, recur for the rest of your life.
You ask whether you are clever enough for this work, and I shall answer instead the question you did not quite dare to ask.
No, you are probably not the cleverest, and neither, dear boy, am I, and it has never once mattered.
Cleverness is common and cheap; the university is full of clever people who have never finished anything, whose brilliance curdled into commentary because they could not bear to be wrong in public.
What is genuinely rare is , the willingness to sit with a difficult page until it yields, to be on Tuesday and only slightly less by Thursday.
Guard your more jealously than your intelligence, for the one is a resource you can patiently grow and the other merely a gift you happened to be handed.
You worry, too, about your prose, which you call clumsy, and here let me tell you a secret the profession works quite hard to keep.
Clumsy prose that means something is worth more than elegant prose that means nothing, and the second, alas, is far the more common of the two.
Write badly, at first, but write truly; the elegance can be added later, in the cold morning of revision, whereas honesty, once absent, can never be put back.
I have read papers of polish that said, on inspection, precisely nothing, and I have learned to fear such polish as a sailor learns to fear an unnaturally calm sea.
There is a joy in this work that no one will ever quite describe to you, because it sounds absurd when spoken aloud, and I shall risk the absurdity now.
It is the joy of the moment when a thing you have wrestled with for weeks suddenly opens, and the whole room seems, briefly and privately, brighter than before.
That moment cannot be bought, or hurried, or counterfeited, and it is worth every week that had to precede it.
You will have, perhaps, a dozen such moments in an entire career, and they will quietly justify the thousands of hours that yielded nothing at all.
Do not measure your life by the hours; measure it by the dozen, and, in time, by the students to whom you will hand them on.
And you will hand them on, Thomas, a great deal sooner than you now think, and when you do it will you.
A word, while I am at it, about ambition, of which you have rather too much, in exactly the way I once had too much of it myself.
Want the work, and not the reputation; the two are endlessly confused, and they lead, in the end, in opposite directions.
The reputation is what other people decide you are; the work is what you actually do at the desk when no one at all is watching, and only the second of these was ever yours.
Chase the first and you will write to be admired; attend to the second and you may, on a good day, write something true.
I am old enough now to tell you, with some authority, that the admiration, when at last it arrives, tastes of remarkably little, and the truth, when it arrives, of very nearly everything.
Forgive an old man his few certainties; I have earned distressingly few of them, and I hand these on to you as freely as they were once handed on to me.
Come and see me when the term ends; bring the clumsy pages, all of them, and we shall read them together, and they will be less clumsy by evening, and you will not quite be able to say why.
That not-quite-being-able-to-say-why is the whole secret of teaching, and one day, sooner than you fear, it will be yours to give away.
Remember, when the discouragement returns, as it will by Michaelmas, that every honest sentence is a decision about how much of the truth you are prepared to be answerable for.
You are more prepared than you fear, and less alone than you feel. Write to me soon. Your friend and teacher, J. A.