Those who know him only through the Life of Johnson may not appreciate that Boswell’s collected writings will run to maybe forty volumes when the mighty Yale edition is completed. True, Boswell was exceptional and would be exceptional in any period. I cite him because of the role writing played in his life.

It wasn’t what he did for a living and it wasn’t what he did for fun. For most of his adult life he alternated between playing the laird at his estate (a role he took seriously), practising law in Edinburgh and going on sprees to London. There he put in his time drinking, socialising and whoring. Yet he found time to fill those forty volumes.

No doubt he was gifted. No doubt it helps not to have to make your own bed. Do the sums, however, and you realise that he must have written that unfailingly lucid prose just as fast as his pen could splutter across the paper. He could do this because he practised.

In Boswell in Holland, the second in Yale’s thirteen volumes of the private papers (the ‘trade’ edition) we find him in Utrecht studying law. He writes every day: his journal, a memorandum book, lengthy letters, dialogues recalled verbatim from the previous night, five French couplets ( to improve his French) and a short essay in Dutch (to improve his Dutch). The lectures he attends, by the way are in Latin and when necessary he speaks that language. Much of this multi-lingual activity involved translation, a superb discipline for someone learning to write.

Alexander Pope did not arrive at the perfection of his couplets by accident, or overnight. Couplets were almost the only verse-form he used, and the world was material to be turned into them.

From his attention to poetry he was never diverted. If conversation offered anything that could be improved, he committed it to paper; if a thought, or perhaps an expression more happy than was common, rose to his mind, he was careful to write it; an independent distich was preserved for an opportunity of insertion and some little fragments have been found containing lines, or parts of lines, to be wrought upon at some other time.

He was one of those few whose labour is their pleasure: he was never elevated to negligence, nor wearied to impatience; he never passed a fault unamended by indifference, nor quitted it by despair. He laboured his works, first to gain reputation, and afterwards to keep it.

_ Johnson, Life of Pope.

Athletes of the pen.

There is a link now available to download the 125-page transcript (in the form of a .pdf document) of the original 1978 story conference between Steven Spielberg, George Lucas, and Lawrence Kasdan for a little film called Raiders of the Lost Ark.

Mystery Man in Film provides a ten point summary of what screen writers can learn from the great men. Here’s my three point summary:

• have a bunch of lurid ideas straight out of cheap fiction
• take them seriously
• add magic so that anyone of any age can enjoy the movie

Simple, huh? Now go make your fortune, little pig.

? I, for one, have never in my lifetime seen the situation of poetry in this country more dire or desperate. Nor is the future promising. Cultural and economic forces only suggest further devastation of any sort of vital literary culture, along with the prospects of the very, very few?it is always only a very few?poets who will matter down the road. What little of real originality is out there is drowning in the waste products spewing from graduate writing programs like the hog farm waste that recently overflowed its holding tanks in the wake of Hurricane Isabel, fouling the Carolina countryside and poisoning everything in its path.

Let me put it starkly: the better animals in the jungle aren?t drawn to poetry anymore ? Just as the new genre of the novel drew off most of the brilliant young writers of the nineteenth century, movies, television, MTV, advertising, rock ?n? roll, and the internet have taken the best among the recent crop of young talent. Do you suppose for a moment that a spirited youngster with a brilliant, original mind and gifted up the yin-yang is going to sit still for two years of creative writing poetry workshops presided over by a dispirited, compromised mediocrity, all the while critiquing and being critiqued by younger versions of the same?

Unless compelled, the students will not read. According to Michael Wilding, who introduced creative writing at Sydney University:

Most of the people studying it and teaching it are deeply committed to writing, but many have little or no interest in books by other people. They all want to write, but have little interest in reading.? ? _ [Weekend Australian, Feb 9-10, 13]

An honorable exception, Alan Wearne at Newcastle University, will have none of that: he makes them read and what’s more limits the intake to 35. To get in there you need demonstrated talent. Elsewhere, the enrolment figures are in the hundreds, and the reading requirements slight or non-existent.

A surefire way of reducing the anxiety of influence, of course. It seems the creative writing people are adopting the educational approach favoured by our art schools from about 1970 on, with results now familiar.

For making detours and going by sideroads, nothing is more convenient than the essay form. One can take off in almost any direction, certain that if the thing does not work out one can turn back and start over in some other with only moderate cost in time and disappointment. Midcourse corrections are rather easy, for one does not have a hundred pages of previous argument to sustain, as one does in a monograph or treatise. Wanderings into yet smaller sideroads and wider detours do little harm, for progress is not expected to be relentlessly forward anyway, but winding and improvisational, coming out where it comes out. And when there is nothing more to say on the subject, or perhaps altogether, the matter can simply be dropped. “Works are not finished” as Val