Letter to a Young Assistant Accounts Payable Clerk

Dr. X posts this from the Robert Hass Gate at Stanford University, which they built to honor him after he became Poet Laureate, even though he never gave the university a lot of money. Ha ha, I never get tired of that gag. Dr. X posts this from the Paul G. Allen Center for Integrated Systems Building:

"The First Sea Lord's quotation of Rilke is apt. We live in a time where there are too many pharmaceutical representatives and not enough poets. There is a fundamental imbalance. In this, I am sure Hass would note, it resembles all other times. Back in the old days the Greeks had too many Hoplites and not enough poets, although they made a brave attempt to compensate with quality. In Elizabethan England they had too many murderous courtiers and not enough poets, with the unfortunate Marlowe's intrigues worsening the score for the poets.

"The problem is, there just aren't enough good poets. Not that we haven't tried. In the 1950s and 1960s America was awash in bright well-intentioned young manic-depressives hoping to repeat the successes of Lowell and Plath, and inscribe the tortures of their souls onto the fresh, virginal tabula rasa that was the American cultural imagination. Rilke's Letters to a Young Poet was their Baedecker.

"Whatever you think of Rilke as a poet (I am mostly left cold, but see Hass's superb essay on him in his brilliant 20th Century Pleasures), he must regarded as a titan by the publishing world, the founder of an entire genre of books of advice to young people.

"My rudimentary searches turn up the following tomes, all, no doubt thoughtful, sensitive, and irreplaceable:

"Christopher Hitchens, Letters to a Young Contrarian
"Anna Deavere Smith, Letters to a Young Artist
"Samuel Freedman, Letters to a Young Journalist
"George Weigel, Letters to a Young Catholic
"Alan Dershowitz, Letters to a Young Lawyer
"Ian Stewart, Letters to a Young Mathematician
"Nadia Comaneci, Letters to a Young Gymnast
"Phyllis Chesler, Letters to a Young Feminist
"Bob Duvall, Letters to a Young Golfer
"Dinesh D'Souza, Letters to a Young Conservative

"An encyclopedic review is impossible, but here are few more, to give you a sense of the genre: Letters to a Young Doctor, Letters to a Young Activist, Letters to a Young Therapist, Letters to a Young Victim, etc. There is no end to it. The genre is to cliche as Hurrican Katrina was to water damage.

"But what I find most striking about Rilke's letter is its extraordinarly restraint, its deliberate refusal to meddle. The strong admonition that "you couldn't disturb [your development] any more violently than by looking outside and waiting for outside answers to questions that only your innermost feeling, in your quietest hour, can perhaps answer" is stunningly admirable, and I'm sure never again repeated in the series.

"Rilke is especially easy on the point about the work not being particularly distinguished. Not all gifted authors are so kind, nor should they be (although I in no way endorse the fetish of abuse that gripped much of Vassar English Department during the early 1980s). I once attended a reading by Robertson Davies at Harvard and someone asked for writing advice. "Oh God," he said, looking skyward.

"He dispatched the question with a bit of genial but pointed banter. But it was a deep question for him, and I cannot recommend this little book on reading and writing (an anthology compiled by his wife and daughter) highly enough.

"You see, we suffer from not only a Type 1 error (not enough poets) but also a Type 2 error (too many people who should not be poets trying to be poets). It is sad, but true, that some people should stop trying to write and become paralegals, journalists, or investment managers. The sooner they understand this, the better.

"We mock Hollywood for its superficiality (at least I do), but one must admire the utter ruthlessness and honesty that marked the beginning Paula Wagner's career as an executive. We can only imagine how many gifted divorce lawyers, attack ad copywriters, and Brookings Institution policy analysts are trap in unfulfilling artistic pursuits, unable to recognize the futility of their labors.

"Perhaps in our universities we have not properly put to our poets the challenge of Robert Graves in The White Goddess:

" 'Who am I, you will ask, to warn you that she demands either whole-time service or none at all? And do I suggest you should resign your jobs and for want of sufficient capital to set up as small-holders, turn romantic shepherds-as Don Quixote did after his failure to come to terms with the modern world-in remote unmechanized farms? No, my brushlessness debars me from offering any practical suggestion. I dare attempt only a historical statement of the problem; how you come to terms with the Goddess is no concern of mine. I do not even know that you are serious in your poetic profession.'

"But shooting such fish in a barrel, though tempting, is riskier than one might imagine. Ezra Pound was fond of putting the kiddies in their place, hurling personal insults and invective at every bright young thing he came across. Once he met a new kid and said 'and what little Iliad are you writing?'

"It was the young Samuel Beckett."