Page:The Modern Writer.pdf/34

 died or his temporary vogue has passed.

I hope you understand, however, that all this has nothing at all to do with the art of writing, that is to say in any sense in which real writers of the world, men who have cared something about their craft have always thought of it. These men have no more to do with the art of writing than the average American movie star has to do with the art of acting or the men who make the girls' heads you see on the covers of our American magazines have to do with the art of painting. It is all a kind of special thing. You live in San Francisco and write dialect stories concerning an imaginary kind of people who live in a Dutch settlement in the Pennsylvania hills, or you live in a New York hotel and write stories about cowboys or heroic lumberjacks. It is totally unnecessary to know life, and in fact it will be better for you to let life alone. Life, you see, is a complex delicate