The Professionals
But the teaching of writing courses cannot be justified by the production of successful writers. A writing course will on occasion produce good writing. In recent years MacLeish's English S has turned out C. B. Flood's Love is a Bridge (a bestseller), Ilona Carmel's Stephannia, Edward Hoagland's Cat Man, and William Alfred's Agamemnon. Professors Morrison and Guerard have also had considerable success in eliciting work which meets professional standards.
Over the years Harvard has turned out far more than its share of a nation's major literary figures, in both critical and imaginative writing. In this century the University has left its mark on Conrad Aiken, Robert Benchley, e.e.cummings, John Dos Passos, T. S. Eliot, Robert Frost, John Marquand, Eugene O'Neill, Edward Arlington Robinson, Robert Sherwood, Wallace Stevens, and Thomas Wolfe, to name an even dozen. While this may be due to the undeniable attraction of a Harvard diploma for the talented, an examination of specific cases indicates that the University did not pass these men by.
Frost and Robinson never took degrees, Dos Passos admits that he learned about transitions from Copeland's writing course (one might question the value of the course if this is an illustration of its effect), but says his most valuable course was in the Hisory of Science. Some, like O'Neill, were here only to study writing with George Pierce Baker. Others, like Wolfe, rebelled against the academics. Some, like T. S. Eliot, (perhaps unwilling) became spokesmen for both Harvard education and Harvard outlook.
The Non-Professional Emphasis
But despite all of these men and all of their influence on American letters, despite the fact that Harvard continues to educate more and better writers than any other institution in the country, the major justification for all our writing courses cannot be the training of professional authors. The University employs people to spend all their time teaching undergraduates about writing, and several others spend at least part of their day this way.
On the contrary, the major purpose of these courses must be, as John Hawkes put it, to help the student to "find a voice." Most of the words written by erstwhile authors are words in search of a vision, a kind of therapy for students trying to resolve themselves onto a page.
But this puts the effort to teach writing on a very shaky basis indeed, for the student who has taken a writing course has very little to show for his trouble. There is absolutely nothing quite so bad objectively as bad imaginative writing. The problem is that a large group of people feel that writing badly may be good for the student.