Transcriber’s note
Variable spelling and hyphenation have been retained. Minor punctuation
inconsistencies have been silently repaired. A list of the changes made
can be found at the end of the book.
SHORT STORY WRITING:
An Art or a Trade?
SHORT STORY-WRITING
An Art or a Trade?
by
N. BRYLLION FAGIN
Dean of the School of Literary Arts, Research University,
Washington, D. C., and instructor in Short
Story Writing, University of Maryland.
NEW YORK
THOMAS SELTZER, INC.
1923
Copyright, 1923, by
THOMAS SELTZER, INC.
All Rights Reserved
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
CONTENTS
| CHAPTER | |
PAGE |
| I | Overture |
1 |
| II | Action |
12 |
| III | “O. Henryism” |
29 |
| IV | The Moving Pictures |
48 |
| V | Verboten |
67 |
| VI | The Artificial Ending |
101 |
| VII | Form and Substance |
114 |
| VIII | Finale |
125 |
| IX | Effect |
132 |
| Index |
137 |
SHORT STORY WRITING:
An Art or a Trade?
Moods may be uncomfortable, and sad, and painfully
disturbing, but, on the other hand, they make
pleasant music occasionally. Here I sit in the dusk,
looking out into the street that is ordinarily so
familiar to me, but has suddenly become blurred and
weirdly mysterious in the gathering murk. A veil
is over my eyes, which see the familiar houses across
the street, the young poplars in front of them, the
few passers-by. But my mind does not discern
these objects; it sees far subtler things—floating,
flimsy, evanescent. The dusk is in my mind, evoking
thoughts, illusions, pictures—and speaking,
questioning, singing. The dusk is an overture to
the things I have set out to say, playing innumerable
variations of my theme, whispering in every
note: “Stories, Stories, Stories!”
There are so many stories afloat in the world!
Every door and window and curtain and shade has
a story to tell; every clod and tree and leaf; and
every pebble of a human being washed by the waves
of life. And how many of these stories have I
helped to be told? And how many have I helped[2]
to be maimed, mutilated of soul? Yes, and how
many have I helped to kill?
For I have been teaching, for a number of years,
the “Technique of Short Story-Writing,” and my
guidance and judgment have meant life and death
to countless stories born in the breasts and minds
of trustful people. I have been the great discourager
and encourager of genius and quasi-genius,
and I know my hands are not without stain of literary
blood.
I am not reproaching myself. Among the many
hundreds of men and women who derive their
daily bread and clothes and gasoline by directing
the story-fancy of the country’s million or more
literary aspirants, I class myself among the most
conscientious and least harmful. The share of injury
I may have contributed has simply been the
unavoidable accompaniment of being engaged in a
profession grounded upon the popular belief that
literature is a trade, like plumbing, or tailoring, or
hod-carrying, and requires but an understanding of
the stupendous emoluments involved and a will to
learn. That it is in the interests of the profession
to foster and perpetuate this popular belief needs
no elaborate substantiation. But that the belief
itself should be based on a measure of solid truth
is a sardonic phenomenon calling for enlightening
discussion.
Professor Arlo Bates in one of his talks on[3]
writing English once said: “Given a reasonable
intelligence and sufficient patience, any man with
the smallest gifts may learn to write at least marketable
stuff, and may earn an honest livelihood,
if he studies the taste of the least exacting portion
of the public, and accommodates himself to the
whim of the time.” It is the business of my profession
to dedicate its services to the promotion of
the production of this “marketable stuff,” and to
elevate its own calling it has blatantly labeled this
product as “literature.” With this end in view
numerous textbooks have been written, thousands
of magazine articles have been published, and millions
of copies of pamphlets and other advertising
matter distributed broadcast over the country.
The magic slogan is “Writers are made—not
born!” Then follows a “heart-to-heart” talk on
the advantages of a literary career, and the flourishing
of some dozen notable successes, measured
in formidable numbers of dollars received, usually
headed by Jack London and ending with Fannie
Hurst or some still more recent “arrival,” and
finally concluding with the weighty query, explicitly
propounded or subtly implied: “Why aren’t you
a story writer?”
The young man or young woman just out of the
gray portals of some fresh-water college and not
knowing what to turn to next, or the insipid clerk
dreaming over his ledger, or her typewriter, of[4]
some Tyltyl cap thus suddenly comes into possession
of a startling idea. Why not be a story writer?
The work does not seem hard; compensation is said
to be good; and one is master of one’s own time
and destiny. The would-be casts his lot on the side
of practical reasoning, pays in a sum of money to
a school of fiction-writing or enrolls for a course
with one of our universities, buys a typewriter on
the installment plan, and begins to collect editorial
rejection slips. When the course is completed another
one is taken up, perhaps with another school,
thus crediting all lack of achievement to the insufficiency
or inefficiency of the instruction received so
far, and the typewriter continues to click and the
periodic comings of the postman are again awaited
eagerly; for hadn’t a major part of the instruction
been devoted to the inculcation of the conviction that
the world is exceedingly tardy in extending its
acknowledgment of genius? Why, think of Jack
London; read his “Martin Eden”—biographical,
you know. Then, Masefield, dishwashing in New
York, and returning to England to become the foremost
poet of the day; and Maupassant working
away at his little masterpieces for seven long years
before even venturing to bring them before the cold
light of the unappreciative world; and Kipling,
knocking about the streets of New York with his
wonderful Indian stories in his pockets and no
editor or publisher willing to look at them; and[5]
Knut Hamsun, working as a common farm hand in
North Dakota, and later as a common conductor
collecting fares on a Chicago street-car line, finally
returning to his native Norway to fame and fortune
and, ultimately, to a Nobel prize in literature.
Then think of our own more recent story writers—Hergesheimer,
writing away in obscurity for fourteen
years; Fannie Hurst, submitting thirty-five
stories to one periodical and succeeding with the
thirty-sixth—and now receiving $1800 for every
short story she writes, you know—etc., etc.
Fully ninety per cent. never do succeed and
finally become discouraged and drop out of the
ranks. Of the other ten per cent. many live to see
their names in print over a story or poem or article
in some obscure periodical, while a few ultimately
become our best sellers and their names adorn the
conspicuous pages in our most popular fiction periodicals.
Among the ninety per cent. are the hopelessly
incompetent, with a sprinkling of artistic
idealists who utterly fail to accommodate themselves
to the taste of the public and the whim of
the time. Among the ten per cent. are the keen,
shrewd, practical craftsmen who are able to get at
the spirit of the literary mart. To the chosen ones
among these comes the adulation of the populace
and the golden shekels blazing a glittering path
across the pages of special feature articles in our
Sunday newspapers. And these are the writers[6]
who justify my profession in spreading the gospel
that one needs but a will to learn to achieve a successful
literary career.
If, with some such unpopular fellow as Nietzsche,
we should rise to a sublime pinnacle of contemptuous
detachment, we might say that the ninety per
cent. of failures do not deserve our pity. It is best
for a fighting, competitive world that weaklings
and incompetents are failures. We might even say
that the few artistic idealists among them deserve
no better. Life is a process of adaptation and compromise
and, among men, a pair of sturdy legs are
of greater utility than a pair of feeble wings.
Perhaps there is a stern justice in the fate of a
Chatterton or, say, a François Villon. But is it
not equally possible that by the grim, whimsical
jugglings of the gods a mist may sometimes envelop
the battlefield of men, such let us say, as
brought confusion to the last hordes of the noble
Arthur, when
“... friend and foe were shadows in the mist,
And friend slew friend not knowing whom he slew;
... and in the mist
Was many a noble deed, many a base,
And chance and craft...”?
Verily, such a “death-white” mist does envelop
our literary battlefield, and, in the confusion, my
profession, supported by the vast majority of
editors and professional critics, is aiding the weak
to conquer the strong. Blinded by the mist, we aid[7]
aspirants to rise to power by craft and cunning, and
when they emerge to reign for a single day we
crown them, thus contributing to the future nothing
but the dust of our petty kings. Those who would
reign for centuries are jeered at, discouraged, vanquished.
A dozen names leap to mind—pathetic examples
of great talent forced to decay, of great sincerity
diluted and polluted, of noble fires extinguished.
But of all these names the two most pregnant with
tragedy are those of Mark Twain and Jack London.
The author of “Huckleberry Finn” and “Tom
Sawyer,” deep, penetrating, cynical, was obliged to
play the amusing clown until the end. The author
of “The Call of the Wild” and “Martin Eden”
until his dying breath continued to fill his lucrative
contracts with popular claptrap. If no one in
particular can be blamed, the sickly light shining
upon our literary firmament must take responsibility.
There are formative years when a writer’s
talent matures, mellows, is molded. The attitude
of the populace and, above all, of the oracles
on the mountains and in the temples is eagerly
watched and heeded. In the case of Jack London
the influence of this attitude as a determining factor
in the evolution of his career is a matter of record.
One of the editors of The Seven Arts, a monthly
magazine that was too lofty of purpose and too
pure of policy to continue existence, once invited[8]
Jack London to submit any stories he might have
that had failed of acceptance with the popular magazines
because of lack of adaptation. London’s
reply was that no such stories existed, and concluded
with a statement that explains very ingenuously the
melancholy disillusionment that pervades the best
of his work. “I don’t mind telling you,” he wrote,
“that had the United States been as kindly toward
the short story writer as France has always been
kindly, from the beginning of my writing career I
would have written many a score of short stories
quite different from the ones I have written.”[1]
It is clear, of course, to what particular brand of
kindliness London had reference. For the United
States is kindly toward the short story writer, very
kindly indeed. It was kindly toward Jack London—but
not in the way of helping him to bring forth
the best that was in him. And this was his tragedy—and
therein lies the unkindliness of the United
States toward all its short story writers. It wanted
none of the work of Jack London the man with a
soul and genuine emotions which burned for expression;
it remunerated lavishly Jack London the
writer chap for his artificial concoctions that he despised.
It made Joseph Hergesheimer wait fourteen
years for the most moderate recognition while
giving such a writer as H. C. Witwer almost instantaneous
acclaim. It calls Ellis Parker Butler[9]
a great humorist and George Ade a mere fable
writer. It proclaims O. Henry a prince of story
writers and doesn’t even know that the unfortunate
Ambrose Bierce once lived among us. And the
vast majority of priests and oracles in my profession
persist in justifying and perpetuating this kind unkindliness
and in instructing the new generation
according to its tenets. Example par excellence:
Speaks an instructor in story writing in one of our
leading universities, in a critical and biographical
survey of our short story writers, of “Robert W.
Chambers, imaginative artist,” and of Jack London,
“at best a third-rate writer.”[2]
The sum and substance of all we preach may be
summarized in the one commandment we zealously
enforce above all others: “Thou shalt not write
anything an editor won’t buy.” Then we analyze
what editors do buy, arriving, by the process of induction,
at rules and regulations, which we promptly
proceed to incorporate into textbooks for the unlettered.
Some of our rules are flexible, others are
not, depending solely upon the attitude of their
compiler. An editor of a prominent periodical
once outlined the qualifications that recommended
a literary offering to him. He had set up before
him an ideal reader, an imaginary lady with a
family of daughters up in Vermont, and any manuscript
submitted to him had to answer satisfactorily[10]
this mighty query: “Would the old lady want her
daughters to read this?” If this editor happened
to write a textbook for the instruction of the would-be
story writer, the old-lady-and-daughters question
would undoubtedly figure quite prominently therein.
I am not aware of any textbook on the subject by
this gentleman, but other writers have had this
question, or similar ones, in mind in evolving laws
for the would-be successful.
I admit that I have taught people to answer these
mighty queries, before permitting them to entrust
their precious wares to the Post Office. For most
editors have a question of some sort— Will it
please some imaginary old man, or country girl, or
young parson, or the editor’s own blue-eyed little
girl, or, especially, his advertisers; and when a man
or a woman pays hard-earned dollars for the information
of how to “get by” the unfriendly editor,
my professional ethics demand that I supply this
information to the limits of my knowledge. Moreover,
when a man or a woman hands in a story
which has no earthly chance of being accepted by
any magazine because it is burdened with a soul
which violates every tradition and rule and policy
by which magazines are governed, it becomes my
duty to enlighten this student that his is not the way
to “get by.” For even such a student—an exception,
to be sure—has read our advertising literature,
has studied the popular psychology of success, and[11]
often, like the other plodders, sincerely believes that
a published story is a masterpiece, a rejected one
worthless. If a story brings five dollars it is a poor
one; if it brings fifty it is a good one; if it brings
five hundred it is a work of art. Getting-by, then,
becomes the supreme problem, and getting-by means
having in mind the old lady with her daughters or
the old man with the gout. And who can answer
what becomes of poor Lafcadio Hearn’s queer idea
that
“Literary success of any enduring kind is made only by refusing
to do what publishers want, by refusing to write what the
public want, by refusing to accept any popular standard, by refusing
to write anything to order”?
Poor, poor indeed!
The very first rule our textbooks endeavor to
impress upon the would-be story writer is that
action must dominate his story. Whole chapters
are devoted to the importance of this ingredient,
bringing quotations from sundry editors proving
beyond the merest suspicion of a doubt that action
is the life and health of a story, the “punch” and
“pep” and “pull” of it. Then follow chapters on
how to capture action; on how to introduce it into
one’s own stories; on how to govern its course to
the greatest advantage.
The editors quoted are, of course, all of the adventure
and action type magazines. One is reputed
to have stated his ideal beginning of a story to be
something like this: “He got up and looked at
his watch. It was twelve o’clock. He went up
into the garret and hanged himself.” Another is
said to like a more mystifying beginning, something
like this: “Who was the lady in 43? Was she the
blond man’s wife, sister or sweetheart? John
couldn’t sleep nights trying to find out.” And still
another gives his preferences, in the form of an[13]
announcement of a contest widely advertised in professional
magazines, for stories of “plot, of action,
of interesting complication. Spend the sweat of
your brow on deeds, not on acute character analysis;
on big situations, on suspense and appeal, not in
tedious description and fine writing.”
The few editors who express preferences that
conflict with this cry for action are not quoted.
Here is one, for instance, who likes “realistic and
psychological stories from writers who want to do
for American life what Chekhov did for Russian
life. ‘Plot’ fiction of the type desired by popular
magazines is not wanted.” But, then, there is the
implication that his is not a popular magazine, and
besides, he goes on to say that “our rates for fiction
are very modest.” And here is another editor
who wants stories “that are characterized more by
feeling and artistry than by ‘punch.’” But who is
she, for it is a she in this instance, to tell us what
is wanted! Why, the circulation of her little periodical
is so insignificant that she is hardly justified
in having any wants at all! The fact that this little
publication publishes some of the most distinctive
stories written in America today does not count, of
course. It is not a widely-read magazine; it does not
pay for contributions;—it deserves no attention.
Plainly, our duty as instructors and moulders of
the new generation of story writers is to base our
instruction on the needs and preferences of the fiction[14]
periodicals having the largest circulations and
able to pay well for material used. The inculcation
of literary ideals, the stimulation of original talent
and the enriching of our national letters are all
excellent themes for papers to be read before high-brow
clubs and respectable societies, but as practical
propositions, in a practical world, they do not
lead anywhere. Any one who joins a class to take
up story-writing as a profession wants to sell—and
as quickly as possible. And the story that sells
today the quickest and brings the fattest check is
the story of action. Hence our first rule: “Spend
the sweat of your brow on deeds!”
It is true that there do creep up some unpleasant
contradictions in our methods. After laying down
the law of action we refer students to Edgar Allan
Poe or Robert Louis Stevenson or Maupassant for
perfect short-story models, and they come back to
us in a state of perplexity. They have picked up
Poe and some garrulous old critic, in a superfluous
introduction, had pronounced “The Fall of the
House of Usher” to be Poe’s best tale. They have
picked up Stevenson, and some equally old-fashioned
pedant had classed “Markheim” as a masterpiece.
They have picked up Maupassant, and, again, some
ancient scholar had lifted “Solitude” to a pre-eminent
position. Yet not one of these three stories
is particularly conspicuous for action. Poe seems
to have spent the sweat of his brow in creating an[15]
atmosphere of extreme morbidity (oh, terror-striking
word in our optimistic texts!); Stevenson, on
acute character analysis; and the insane Frenchman
on some irrelevant prattlings about solitude and the
whys and wherefores of this queer life of ours.
Occasionally some student with sufficient courage
to voice his perplexity timidly inquires: “Would any
magazine accept such stories today? There is so
little action and still less optimism in them!” I
think of all the stories I have read in recent periodicals
that I can remember and am obliged to admit
that few present-day magazines would be tempted to
accept a story of the type on which the masters
chose to lavish their best work. I think this estimate
conservative, but soon the various anthologies
of the best short stories that have appeared in our
magazines in the last half dozen years leap into my
mind and protest against my harsh verdict. Some
sort of a change really has come over our fiction
recently. Fully twenty-five per cent. of the stories
in Mr. O’Brien’s yearly collection, for instance, are
decidedly not of the “rapid action” type, and more
than seventy-five per cent. of the stories in such an
anthology as that compiled by the late William Dean
Howells would not stand the “action” test, although
the latter anthology is not a very exact reflector
of modern tendencies since but few living writers
are represented.
So it becomes necessary to explain the discrepancy[16]
between the type of story we teach our students to
produce and the type of story we refer them to
for study purposes. It becomes necessary to emphasize
the fact that such periodicals as “The Little
Review,” “Midland,” “The Pagan” (discontinued),
“The Stratford Journal” (temporarily suspended),
“The Wave,” and a few others of the “unpopular”
group do not pay for contributions and that the
few “leaders” or “giants” in the group pay but little,
and that, therefore, few “respectable” writers contribute
to them. Of the youngsters that do make
their way to the top, once in a great while, through
the medium of these high-brow little magazines one
or two may ever hope to get into the “Big Four”
or similar high-prestiged and well-paying periodicals.
So that while it may be flattering to receive
the pale encomiums of a few snobbish critics, the
safest way is to write “real” stories full of red-blooded
action and reap a golden harvest. Let
those who do not care for the riches of a material
world be satisfied with the deluge of praise poured
upon a Sherwood Anderson; as for most, Holworthy
Hall or Octavus Roy Cohen seems a more
inviting model.
And if this does not really explain the uncanny
discrepancy in our texts and they still seem somewhat
confused and more than a bit contradictory,
we can, as a last resort, have recourse to that eloquent
dictum: Laws should be studied to be broken![17]
And we suddenly acquire the becoming halo of
iconoclasts and have at last a satisfactory explanation
of why our students should read Poe and
Maupassant and Stevenson, yet not model their
own work along the best of these masters; why
they should study our anthologies full of such
“anemic” stories as those of Dreiser, Anderson,
Cabell, Waldo Frank, Ben Hecht, Djuna Barnes,
and even those of Susan Glaspell and Alice Brown,
yet not write in similar vein but should emulate
rather writers whose names never appear in anthologies.
Having thus explained the validity of our first
rule and having insisted on strict compliance therewith,
we proceed to evolve methods for a satisfactory
meeting of our rule. If action must dominate
a story there should be some system of capturing
this indispensable ingredient, of imprisoning it within
our brief literary form, of whipping it into marketable
shape. We find this system and reduce it
to terse understandable terms. We dig down into
our bag of story-lore and lo! we flourish before the
weak eyes of the uninitiate another magic commandment:
Complicate! Complicate if you would
have Action in your stories. Complicate if you
would have Suspense. Complicate if you would
exchange rejection slips for checks!
It is true that we are careful to explain our
schemes of complication, lest they be taken too[18]
literally. Accompanying our commandments are
various precautionary remarks about Logic and
Plausibility and numerous other qualifying statements.
But in the main Action and Complication
are held forth as the two most important principles
of sound story-writing. First of all, then, our
students are urged to plot and complicate so that
there be not a tedious moment in their product.
Let every sentence move forward the action. Let
new developments, startling in their unusualness
and unexpectedness, crop up all the time. And
don’t forget to keep in reserve the grandest development
of all, the most surprising, for the very
end. The Dénouement is the thing! Charming
word—French, you know.
I remember a young girl who attended my classes
but a short time. “My weakness seems to be a lack
of inventiveness,” she confided to me. “My plots
are too quiet.” She handed in a story and I agreed
with her. Her plots were quiet, but it was the
quiet of Spoon River and Winesburg and Gopher
Prairie. She knew intimately the little old Southern
town she hailed from, and she had the gift of making
me know it. I knew it in its past and present
and future, which was all of one tone and texture;
I knew its proud inhabitants, patrician and plebeian;
I felt its pulse. I told the girl not to attempt to
infuse plot into her story and suggested a number of
magazines that might accept it as it was.
[19]
“But I don’t want to write for these small publications!”
she objected. “Nobody has ever heard
of them. I want to get into the ‘Saturday Evening
Post,’ the ‘Cosmopolitan,’ and the ‘Red Book.’
And they want more plot than I manage to put into
my stories; that’s what—told me.” And she named
a much advertised commercial critic.
Evidently I proved incapable of generating within
her the coveted element of inventiveness, for the
girl dropped out after an exceedingly brief stay
and I have heard nothing from or of her since. Her
name has not yet appeared in the Saturday Evening
Post, nor in the Cosmopolitan, nor in the Red Book—nor,
to my knowledge, in any other magazine.
The eminent critic had done his work very well
indeed. His teachings that every story must have
an ingenious plot had seemingly struck root, and
the girl with her plotless little town and its plotless
little lives has probably decided, in utter despair,
that her mind is hopelessly devoid of the one
essential for successful story-writing—inventiveness.
Of course, she could have been made to stay and
persevere a little longer, and perhaps she might
have yet attained her modicum of success. If to
her quiet little story a few entanglement tricks had
been dexterously applied the girl would have been
satisfied and probably also some editor or another
of the more remunerative magazines to which she
aspired. The aspect of her sleepy Southern town[20]
would have undergone a strange metamorphosis,
and her lethargic hero and heroine would have been
changed into inhabitants of some hectic metropolis,
but that, of course, would have merely proved the
magic of sound technique.
One of the surest of these tricks of ours is the
introduction of a second or third line of interest.
Where a story is thin and uninteresting an entirely
different story can be brought in and the two skillfully
connected, related and correlated. Our texts
abound in geometric diagrams of lines and curves
and circles, bisected and intersected, zig-zagging,
up and down, rising to various points of crises and
climaxes and catastrophes, and falling again with
the inevitable dénouement. These diagrams look
like sacred hieroglyphics to the credulous student
who approaches their cryptic meaning with a reverent
awe. Given a story that reads too “narrative”-like,
that lacks interest because too few crises are
arrived at, and its weakness can usually be traced
to its single line of interest which is not thick
enough to generate the necessary amount of suspense.
The introduction of another line brightens
it up, adds suspense, complication—Interest.
The process really is a simple one. The moving
pictures employ it, invariably, with greatest effect.
A young man is leading the confident life of a freshman
in some Middle-Western town. The first line
is started. The young man’s environment is pictured,[21]
his habits and likes and dislikes and his towering
ambitions. He is a marked man. But here his
line breaks. The continuity writer has become busy
introducing an entirely different line of interest.
Beautiful Lady Psyche has left her shire castle and
is sailing for America on the Mammoth liner. The
orchestra is playing, and the Lady is standing on
the upper deck, her delicate white hands grasping
the railing. Her eyes are deep and wistful and
hopeful. We know, of course, even at this time,
that she will in some fateful way meet our unsuspecting
freshman. It is only a question of time.
Her career and his will become entangled and
merged into one. In the meantime we are watching
and waiting. But at this point the continuity
writer again breaks the line and begins an entirely
new one. On the liner is “Taffy” Slim and he is
scheming to rob Lady Psyche of her famous jewels.
Now we are watching Taffy’s career. He succeeds
and makes his get-away, but Lady Psyche’s jewels
are known the world over, having been photographed
on numerous occasions for the rotogravure
supplements of our Sunday newspapers, and Taffy
finds himself unable to dispose of them. He wanders
through the length and breadth of our land
starving, with a fortune’s worth of jewels in his
pocket, until finally, he comes to our Mid-Western
college town and meets our freshman. This clever
hero buys the jewels for a bun and—oh, gallantry of[22]
gallantries!—undertakes to return them to their
beautiful heart-broken owner. Now we see how
these three lines have been crossed and recrossed
and why! We don’t know yet what the gallant’s
reward will consist of but we hope it will be a proposal
of matrimony; in fact, we are not willing to
accept anything less for our hero.
In the short story this double-or multiple-line-of-interest
method was employed most successfully by
O. Henry and is clung to by most of his followers.
Its skillful manipulation undoubtedly results in a
more marketable product. It insures a thrilling
sequence of events, if not always a logical one. It
is one of our most venerated tricks. We underline
it in our texts. We point out its potency in unmistakable
terms. We hold it up as a shining revelation
to a gasping novitiate, and for revelations the
timeworn practice is to demand blind, absolute
acceptance.
One result of our attitude has just been traced in
the experience of the girl with her sleepy little
Southern town story. The incompetent who cannot
think in terms of criss-cross lines is eliminated.
Artificiality is not only encouraged but placed at a
premium. Sincerity and that highest of artistic
qualities, simplicity, are held up as baneful stumbling
blocks in the way of successful authorship. We
may have read Joseph Hergesheimer but we have
never heard of his philosophic Chwang-Tze whose[23]
pithy sentence prefaces “Java Head,” a sentence
full of illuminating words: “It is only the path of
pure simplicity which guards and preserves the
spirit.” By undermining the young story-teller’s
faith in the path of pure simplicity we undermine
his spirit; we maim it; often destroy it completely.
Aside from the effect upon our story writers, this
doctrine of constant action and complication and
entanglement has also been one of the causes that
have kept American fiction until very recently
almost entirely in the cheaply Romantic school of
the long-forgotten past. It has become strongly
rooted in our readers through a perpetual diet of
fiction that embodies these “vital” ingredients, and
consequently also in our editors who must alertly
watch the demand to engage successfully in its
supply. As far as we are concerned it would seem
that the great realists and naturalists have lived
and died in vain. We are still writing largely fairy
tales, American in color and setting to be sure, about
bizarre adventures and quixotic adventurers. And
in our institutions of learning we are still preaching
that stories must be full of thrilling incidents and
brave dénouements to be interesting and meritorious.
We are still living in the fantastic land of improbable
plots where men bound and rebound according
to specific orders of the author. That “the value
of a dramatic action has nothing to do with novelty
of incident or the tingle of physical suspense”; that[24]
“Character, motive and fatality, man and the earth
and the gods—such are the elements of dramatic
action,”[3] has, as yet, occurred to few of us.
An admission must be made: It is becoming
increasingly difficult to find plot material that hasn’t
been worn threadbare by immoderate use. The
South Seas and the Pacific Islands have been pretty
well covered. Alaska and Hudson Bay are no
longer inviting. The cow-boy story, though not
yet entirely extinct, is fast becoming so. The crook
story, though still popular with a particular type of
magazine and magazine purchaser, requires a
greater measure of ingenuity to be attractive. Baseball
and football heroism is still going strong but
the market is limited. The Country-Boy-who-becomes-a-Wall-Street-magnate
story will probably
continue as long as the large business fiction magazines
will retain their million-and-more circulation
marks, but it is beginning to tax the writer’s inventive
capacity for brilliant deals for the hero to get
to that crowded narrow thoroughfare below Brooklyn
bridge. The rash-things-that-pretty-girls-do
story is just now having its vogue, but will blow over
like a Bill Hart or Douglas Fairbanks fame. The
situation is gloomy indeed, even critical—if we wish
to look at it that way. Many old writers as well as
young ones admit it.
[25]
But we don’t. We are optimists. When cornered
we say: “Yes, the present market does have
some such aspect, but it simply proves one thing—the
necessity for the greater mastery of technique,
for more originality.” Then we proceed to elucidate.
We define originality. It isn’t concerned
with theme but with the handling of theme. There
are no new themes under the sun; never were. A
novel twist applied to a threadbare theme is originality.
These twists can be learned—that’s what we,
teachers of technique, are here for: to show how.
The secret lies not only in plenty of action and complication
but in the spectacular handling of these
elements. There are many ways of doing it effectively;
plot order, for instance.
The common fault of the inexpert literary mechanician
is that he usually tells his story in the
chronological order. Assuming that his story presents
a series of twenty steps, composed of incidents
and episodes of varying intensity, he presents them
all in the order of time of occurrence, thus obtaining
a quiet narrative lacking in either suspense or
“punch.” But it is possible to juggle these steps in
different ways so as to get them to unfold in a most
dramatic sequence. It is possible to reverse this
chronological order and begin with incident number
twenty and work back to number one. That is,
instead of narrating the crimes of our picaresque
hero, which finally get him into jail, in the order of[26]
commission, we begin with the man already safely
tucked away behind the bars—it is nearly always a
man; women get into jails but rarely in our fiction,
except for the heart-rending scene of meeting their
husbands or sweethearts—and then work back to
his crimes and the day when evil was not yet in his
heart and he was still attending the Y. M. C. A.
We may then use this “logical” method of plot
order or we may use a mixed method or we may
use any one of a number of variants of these
methods. We may, for example, begin with step
number five and run up to step number ten, then
work in steps one to five and proceed with step number
eleven. Or we may begin with step one, then
skip number two, withholding it as a missing link
in the chain for the sole purpose of intriguing the
reader, and spring it after step nineteen. All we
need to know is how to do these jugglings with the
greatest possible skill—and this is where originality
comes to the fore: in the play of craftsmanship.
This jugglery we can teach with an absolutely
clear conscience. We can cite any number of great
masters who have at various times employed these
several schemes of plot development. Maupassant
and Kipling and Stevenson and Poe and O. Henry
and even the quiet Chekhov have all placed their
stamp of approval upon these methods by employing
them in their own celebrated little masterpieces.
There is really no necessity to question whether[27]
they came upon these methods consciously or intuitively,
from within or without. This would raise
the uncomfortable problem of synthetic and analytic
processes, which would merely confuse the student
and lead nowhere. There may be a distinction
between incidents marshalling themselves in some
inevitable sequence of which the author may not
even be aware and incidents juggled about artificially
by a writer who has had it impressed upon him
that method A is more dramatic than method B.
There may be a distinction; but for our purposes
it is best not to consider it. Suffice us merely to
point out that our story-construction lore is justified
by the masters. The deductions are simple enough:
Learn the tricks of the masters and be a master
yourself.
I said we can teach plot legerdemain with a clear
conscience. As for me, however, I have often
shuddered to think what a zealous graduate might
have done to such a story as Conrad’s “Youth.” In
his or her deft hand it certainly would not have
remained a mere “Narrative,” told in the colorless
chronological order; it would have become a finished
short-story. Assuredly finished.
And yet it must be admitted that a skillful manipulation
of our tricks is, after all, not so easily
acquired. There is a brain and a temperament
which is especially adaptable to them, but to the
majority they remain an occult science forever[28]
beyond their ken. These unhappy toilers cannot
apply them to their labors. For most students are
unable to construct the slightest kind of plot.
There’s a certain knack that must be acquired. The
young, inexperienced mind must be disciplined along
certain grooves. Most students seem to be unable
to concentrate unless driven to do so. I experiment
with my class. Unexpectedly I announce a theme
and request the class to construct an incident. Like
children bent upon solving a puzzle, they go to
work and I am left to examine the result. Fully
fifty per cent. have used the same situation and
dénouement, as if by agreement; forty-nine per cent.
have striven to inject a novel twist or “O. Henryism”
at the end. But the one per cent! Why here
is but a thin bit of paper, with just a few lines
scribbled on it. If this is an incident, it is a very
short incident, indeed. It reads: “I have never
been able to write under pressure. I must find myself
in a proper mood. I suppose I shall never make
a story writer.” I smile. I have a vivid picture of
young Tommy Sandys losing his scholarship because
one elusive word had refused to respond to his
bidding.
[29]
CHAPTER III
“O. Henryism”
The mottoes of most of our fiction periodicals are
told on their covers: “A magazine of clever fiction,”
“A magazine of bright fiction,” “A magazine
of entertaining fiction,” “A magazine of frisky fiction.”
But with all the available supply of novel
plot material exhausted by writers who had the good
fortune of being here before our generation had an
opportunity, what is left to us is neither clever,
bright, nor entertaining. However, O. Henry
proved that it was possible to take the same age-old
material and brighten it up with a coat of sparkling
cleverness. He had but to juggle his incidents in
such a way as to make them follow one another in
a most spectacular sequence. He had but to play
upon the credulity of his reader. Like the stage
magician, he said to his audience: “Observe that
there is a tree here and a fountain there, and without
moving a finger I shall reverse their positions.
Now watch, presto! Here they are!” And the
audience applauded, wondering how he did it, and
crowned him king of the wizards.
The king of the wizards, then, occupies a most[30]
honorable position in our textbooks. Stories written
in the vein of O. Henry sell more readily than
stories written in the vein of any other master.
There is a brightness, a snappiness, a cheerfulness
of style about them that draws the artistic sensibilities
of editors. And yet our insistence upon the
emulation of O. Henry has not produced many other
O. Henrys. Perhaps it is because O. Henry went
to the highways and byways of North and Central
America for his plot material which he then juggled
to his heart’s content, while our students go to O.
Henry for their plot material. Perhaps also it is
because O. Henryism was as much a part of William
Sidney Porter as was his speaking voice which is
buried with him.
A very young student once lodged a complaint
against her own unruly self. “It is absolutely impossible
for me to write a single sentence in the O.
Henry way,” she said. “My stuff somehow doesn’t
have that swing—it’s dead. I don’t believe I shall
ever learn. I am too sad of disposition, I suppose.”
That was one time I did not smile. “Why should
you want to write like O. Henry?” I asked. “Why
don’t you try to wear the shape of shoes or the
color of clothes he wore, or drink the kind of ginger-ale
he preferred?” But I was sorry later for my
unguarded outburst, for I realize that that was not
the way to make story writers, not the kind that
sell, at any rate.
[31]
After all, O. Henry’s technique consisted mainly
of a series of clever tricks, and tricks can be taught,
even though not perhaps his dexterity in performing
them. His was truly a gift of the Magi and not
really a gift of the gods. Admitting that through
his superficial cleverness there occasionally glimmers
an uncommon understanding of and a sympathy for
the people whose destinies he juggles, the fact
remains that his example is that of clever execution
rather than artistic conception. It remains needless,
then, for us to point to anything else in his makeup
save his successful technique. We read a dozen of
his stories, call attention to their brilliant mannerisms
and surprising twists at the end, and exhort
our students to go and do likewise. Sometimes we
go a little further and discuss the underlying psychology
upon which O. Henry based his loops and
twists—his belief that our modern reader was so
well-nourished on stereotyped fiction as to guess the
conclusion of a story by its beginning, and, consequently,
O. Henry led him on to believe that his
guess was being borne out until the very end, when
a pleasantly startling disappointment was sprung
upon him.
To substantiate our eulogies of the wizard and
to impress upon the would-be writer the importance
of studying and emulating O. Henry, we quote copiously
from Stephen Leacock, Prof. C. Alphonso
Smith, and numerous other O. Henry friends. We[32]
seldom, if ever, quote opinions of critics and editors
who are hostile to O. Henry and his cult. Here is
one editor, for instance, who actually believes that
“the effects of such mannerism, trickery, shallowness,
and artifice as distinguished O. Henry’s
work, are baleful on all literary students who do
not despise them.”[4] We know that this editor’s
opinion must not be credited with importance. His
is only a small Greenwich Village publication. The
checks that writers receive come from editors who
do like O. Henry’s ways; in fact, prefer O. Henryesque
stories almost to the exclusion of any other
type. Hence we examine the work of our students
with a feeling of satisfaction. By far the greater
number have imbibed our teachings. Their work
shows a striving after cleverness, witty flippancy,
grotesque slang, and an attempt to cap the dénouement
with a novel twist, a perfectly surprising turn.
Thus we know that our work is not in vain; at
least some of our students are on the way to success.
Again, this is not a plea on behalf of those incompetents
who are not O. Henryesquely gifted and are
therefore not on the way to success. It is merely
a dispassionate consideration of the profession of
teaching story-writing and its existing standards and
ethics. Since the O. Henry story is held up as the
supreme model, it is only fair to inquire into the
[33]results thus produced. We have been so eloquent
with pride on the progress of our short story. Since
Professor Brander Matthews first expounded its
philosophy, away back in 1884, and connected the
two little words by a hyphen to distinguish this form
beginning with an Initial Impulse and running up to
a Climax and falling down to a Dénouement from
the story which is merely short, it has become our
prevailing form of literature. The quantity turned
out annually is beyond the dreams of such a pioneer
as Poe. But the quality—ah, that is another story!
What proportion of this wholesale output can be
candidly, suppressing for the moment our desire to
experience flattering sensations, added to our
national literary treasury? How many memorable
stories come to mind to waylay us with their poignant
spell of subtlety and beauty—such, let us say,
as Kipling’s “Without Benefit of Clergy,” or Chekhov’s
“Ward No. 6,” or Maupassant’s “In the
Moonlight”? Few, isn’t it? And peculiar, is it
not, that though we have been heaping the warmest
of praise upon Richard Harding Davis and Clarence
Budington Kelland and George Randolph
Chester and Richard Washburn Child and Mary
Roberts Rinehart and a score or more of our other
popular writers, the few memorable stories that do
come to mind were not written by these favorites.
How much of the O. Henryesque is to be found in
Mary E. Wilkins Freeman’s “Revolt of Mother,”[34]
or in Theodore Dreiser’s “The Lost Phoebe,”[5] or,
to take a more recent example, in Anzia Yezierska’s
“Hungry Hearts”?[6] These stories are everything
that the wizard’s stories are not. They are neither
breezy, nor flippant, nor surprising; nor “refreshing.”
Judged by our standards they are anomalies.
I am sufficiently steeped in our inspirational literature
to be aware of the dangers of pessimism.
The Doctors Crane and Orison Swett Marden and
Walt Mason have left their effect upon my disposition.
But it is only logical to deduct that if all the
O. Henry standards that we have so triumphantly
established and extolled for the guidance of our
story writers have failed to produce a single great
story to compare with the best that other countries
which do not preach and practice O. Henryism have
produced, there is something wrong with our standards.
These are unusual times we are living in.
Everything that has seemed to us wise and sound
and sublime is coming in for a share of skepticism
and revaluation. Unquestionable things are being
questioned. Is it not a propitious time to attempt
a revaluation of our short-story dogmas? What
is the contribution of O. Henryism to our national
letters and to the short story as a form of literary
expression? How great an artist really was William
[35]Sidney Porter, the founder of the Cult? Is it
sacrilege to attempt to answer these questions?
O. Henry left us more than two hundred and fifty
stories. In the decade before his death he turned
out an average of twenty-five stories a year. Mr.
William Johnston, an editor of the New York
World relates[7] the struggles of O. Henry in trying
to live up to a three-year contract he had with that
paper calling for a story a week. There were weeks
when O. Henry would haunt the hotels and cafés
of New York in a frantic search of material, and
there were times when the stories could not be produced
on time and O. Henry would sit down and
write the most ingenious excuses. Needless to state
that O. Henry’s stories bear all the marks of this
haste and anxiety. Nearly all of them are sketchy,
reportorial, superficial, his gift of felicitous expression
“camouflaging” the poverty of theme and character.
The best of them lack depth and roundness,
often disclosing a glint of a sharp idea unworked,
untransmuted by thought and emotion.
Of his many volumes of stories, “The Four
Million” is without doubt the one which is most
widely known. It was his bold challenge to the
world that he was the discoverer—even though he
gave the census taker due credit—of four million
people instead of four hundred in America’s metropolis
that first attracted attention and admiration.
[36]The implication was that he was imbued with the
purpose of unbaring the lives of these four million
and especially of the neglected lower classes. A
truly admirable and ambitious self-assignment. And
so we have “The Four Million.” But to what
extent was he successful in carrying out his assignment.
How much of the surging, shifting, pale,
rich, orderly, chaotic, and wholly incongruous life
of New York is actually pulsating in the twenty-five
little stories collected in the volume?
What is the first one, “Tobin’s Palm,” if not a
mere long-drawn-out jest? Is it anything more than
an anecdote exploiting palmistry as a “trait”—to
use another technical term—or point? It isn’t New
York, nor Tobin, nor any other character, that
makes this story interesting. It is O. Henry’s trick
at the end. The prophecy is fulfilled, after all, in
such an unexpected way, and we are such satisfied
children!
What is the second story, the famous “Gift of
the Magi”? We have discussed it and analyzed it
in our texts and lauded it everywhere. How much
of the life of the four million does it hold up to us?
It is better than the first story; yes, much better.
But why is it a masterpiece? Not because it tries
to take us into the home of a married couple
attempting to exist in our largest city on the husband’s
income of $20 per week. No, that wouldn’t
make it famous. Much better stories of poverty[37]
have been written, much more faithful and poignant,
and the great appreciative public does not
even remember them. It is the wizard’s mechanics,
his stunning invention—that’s the thing! Della
sells her hair and buys a fob for hubby’s watch;
while at the same time hubby sells his watch and
buys her a comb. But you don’t know all this until
they get together for the presentation of the gifts,
and then you gasp. We call this working criss-cross,
a plot of cross purposes. In this story we usually
overlook entirely one little thing—the last paragraph.
It really is superfluous and therefore constitutes
a breech of technique. We preach against
preaching. Tell your story, we say, and stop.
“Story” is synonymous with action. O. Henry
didn’t stop—so that even he was sometimes a
breaker of laws. But this uncomfortable thought
doesn’t really have to be noted!
“A Cosmopolite in a Café” is a little skit proving
that “since Adam no true citizen of the world has
existed.” It is the type of writing that is termed
“short story” by our humorous weeklies.
“Between Rounds” is the first story in the volume
that really displays O. Henry’s gift of mature satire.
Here underneath his superficial jesting lurks reality.
The pathos in the lives of the McCaskeys and the
Murphys is touched upon, lightly to be sure, but
sufficiently to indicate that O. Henry saw it.
The plotted happy ending with plenty of “punch”[38]
is best exemplified by “The Skylight Room.” The
gullible reader must have really thought that Billy
Jackson was little Miss Leeson’s name of some star.
But not so, ha-ha! It really was the name of the
ambulance doctor who came to take her to the hospital.
“Fishy,” you say? Not any more than “A
Service of Love.” Not that the young couple in
this latter story might not have both worked and
concealed the fact from each other. But why both
in a laundry and in the same laundry? Coincidence
of course! Incidentally, can you recognize the
“Gift of the Magi” here? Shakespeare may have
never repeated, but O. Henry did, very frequently
too. Here we have again the poor loving couple
trying to get along on next to nothing a week. A
slightly different twist but the formula is the same.
Even the names of the principals are almost the
same. In “The Gift of the Magi” we had Della
and Jim, in “A Service of Love” we have Delia and
Joe.
In “The Coming-out of Maggie” O. Henry again
brushes real life and real romance. In the hands of
a sincere artist this material could have been worked
into an immortal story. As a matter of fact, the
same basic theme—the heart-hunger of a neglected
girl—has been treated by Gorki in his “Her
Lover.”[8] And the difference between the two
stories is the difference between tinsel and diamond.
[39]
“Man About Town,” “The Cop and the Anthem”
and “An Adjustment of Nature” are trivial things—expanded
anecdotes at best. “Memories of a Yellow
Dog” presents O. Henry at his happiest. It is a
fine bit of satire—a field in which lay his strength.
In “The Love-Philtre of Ikey Schoenstein” the
wizard again displays his bag of theatrical tricks.
And so he does in “Mammon and the Archer,”
with its needless anti-climax—again breaking the
law: “Thou shalt stop when through.” “Springtime
à la Carte” is a long-drawn-out joke. So is
“From a Cabby’s Seat.” In “The Green Room” O.
Henry once more had a cursory glimpse of his
“four million.”
Now we reach “An Unfinished Story.” Thanks
to the good imps that may have influenced him to
leave this story unfinished. It is the only one in the
volume that shows O. Henry was capable of genuine
emotion and had a sense of artistic truth. Dr.
Blanche Colton Williams would not include it among
O. Henry’s best because “It is just what the author
called it—unfinished.”[9] Yes, admittedly, it is unfinished—in
a technical sense. The $5 a week shop-girl
has nothing to wear and does not go to the
dance with Piggy. And that’s all that happens,
except a little sermon at the end in which O. Henry
intimates that the fellow that sets fire to an orphan
asylum, and murders a blind man for his pennies,
[40]has a cleaner conscience than the prosperous-looking
gentleman who hires working girls and pays
them five or six dollars a week to live on in the city
of New York. To “finish” this story would have
necessitated the distortion of truth, the blurring of
the drab little picture. That Sidney Porter refused
to do it indicates to what extent he was above the
practical standards of his admiring disciples and
interpreters.
“The Caliph, Cupid and The Clock” is a bit of
romantic clap-trap. So is “Sisters of the Golden
Circle.” “The Romance of a Busy Broker” is
the old absent-minded-professor-who-forgot-he-was-married
joke belabored to the dignity of a story.
“After Twenty Years” is another bit of writing
that has been burdened with unqualified encomiums
by the O. Henry clergy. The ingenuity of the plot
and the strong “kick” at the end fill them with a
halleluiah ecstacy. An empty little crook story,
sketchy, anecdotal, is hailed as a masterpiece.
In “Lost on Dress Parade” you can again recognize
the same old formula underlying the construction
of “The Gift of the Magi” and “A Service of
Love.” Another example of criss-cross plotting.
“By Courier” is a typical syndicate story. The woman
the doctor had held in his arms was only a
patient who had fainted. It was all a mistake. The
Best Girl forgives and forgets. Nevertheless it
represents an improvement over the old type of[41]
similar story. The fair suspect was after all a
patient and not the hero’s sister.
“The Furnished Room” is another indication that
O. Henry was capable of feeling the pulse of his
four million when he was so attuned, and “The
Brief Debút of Tilly,” though in smaller measure,
corroborates it.
Thus an examination of O. Henry’s work by any
one not blinded by hero-worship and popular esteem,
discloses at best an occasional brave peep at life,
hasty, superficial and dazzlingly flippant; an idea,
raw, unassimilated, timidly works its way to the
surface only to be promptly suppressed by a hand
skilled in producing sensational effects. At its
worst, his work is no more than a series of cheap
jokes renovated and expanded. But over all there
is the unmistakable charm of a master trickster, of
a facile player with incidents and words.
That William Sidney Porter was himself greatly
displeased with his accomplishment, that he even
held it in contempt is attested by his prevailing
cynical tone. He knew he was not creating art, that
he was not giving the best there was in him. There
was not time for that and editors did not want it,
and with a bitterness that Mark Twain and Jack
London shared to their dying day he continued to
perform tricks. Mr. William Johnston in his article
in the Bookman, referred to above, states that after
reading one of his, Mr. Johnston’s, stories, in some[42]
obscure Southern periodical, O. Henry wrote to
him: “I wish I’d written that story.” The story
was probably not remarkable in any particular way.
Mr. Johnston is not known as a great story writer.
But O. Henry must have felt that it was written
sincerely and his own artifice weighed upon him.
This is the lesson that an honest teaching profession
with any critical vision at all, undertaking to
mold a generation of fiction writers, ought to point
out. Instead of worshipping him blindly, calling
him the “American Maupassant,” and quoting
from his biographies painstaking proof that he
was innocent of the crime of embezzlement for
which he served a prison sentence, we might at least
mention the danger of following his methods too
slavishly. The puritanic impulse which inhibits
any praise of a man’s work unless it can first establish
his “sterling” character is excruciatingly
laughable if not downright pathetic. Thus attempts
have been made by meticulous biographers to establish
the fact that Edgar Allan Poe never tasted any
sinful beverage. And only then, having vindicated
his character, does the conscience of these brave biographers
permit them to accept Poe as a great
writer and the pride of America. Whether O.
Henry was guilty or not does not change his standing
as a story writer, nor his influence on other
writers, and it is only as such that the student and
critic is interested in him.
[43]
In our attitude toward O. Henry and O. Henryism
lies one explanation of the prevailing mediocrity
of the contemporary American short story.
The conventional editor, teacher, student, and
reader look upon the short story as upon some interesting
puzzle, the key to which is cleverly concealed
until the befuddled reader is ready to “give
up.” Our would-be writers seeking guidance from
my profession are never disabused of this conception
but deliberately encouraged to retain it. We
overwhelm them with our analyses of the work of
the Master, with our glowing tributes to his art and
charm and genius, his purity of thought and his
philosophy. An article on O. Henry, containing
essentially the same material presented in this
chapter, was rejected by a magazine circulating
among young writers for the reason that “the
editor does not hold your views with regard to O.
Henry’s contribution to the American short story.
He is our supreme short-story master....” In not
a single textbook on story-writing, of the many that
have come to my attention, have I found such a
simple estimate of O. Henry as this: “His weakness
lay in the very nature of his art. He was an
entertainer bent only on amusing and surprising his
reader. Everywhere brilliancy, but too often it is
joined to cheapness; art, yet art merging swiftly
into caricature. Like Harte, he cannot be trusted.
Both writers on the whole may be said to have[44]
lowered the standards of American literature, since
both worked in the surface of life with theatric
intent.... O. Henry moves, but he never lifts.
All is fortissimo; he slaps the reader on the back
and laughs loudly as if he were in a bar-room. His
characters, with few exceptions, are extremes, caricatures.
Even his shop girls, in the limning of
whom he did his best work, are not really individuals;
rather are they types, symbols. His work
was literary vaudeville, brilliant, highly amusing,
and yet vaudeville.”[10]
This estimate, coming as it does from a standard
source, cannot be discounted by attributing it to
radical or ultra-advanced tendencies. The fact is
that the case of O. Henry is so simple that even
standard critics and historians, if they but choose
to be open-minded, can see through it. When in
1916 Mrs. Katharine Fullerton Gerould in an interview
with the late Joyce Kilmer called O. Henry
“a pernicious literary influence,” even the New
York Times, though hastening to the defense of the
wizard, admitted that there might be something in
this outburst of depreciation of O. Henryism. “I
hear that O. Henry is held up as a model by critics
and professors of English,” said Mrs. Gerould.
“The effect of this must be pernicious. It cannot
but be pernicious to spread the idea that he is a[45]
master of the short story.” And the Times, in an
editorial, although taking issue with Mrs. Gerould,
was obliged to conclude:
“Maybe some day we shall get away from writing
with a set of rules before us, and then we shall
have literature instead of best sellers. Maybe the
trouble with our writing is that we have developed
technique to such a point that Tom, Dick and
Harry are masters of technique and anybody who
can get the hang of it can write a publishable story.
Maybe our fiction has been whetted to a razor edge,
until it is technique and nothing else. Maybe the
story has been perfected until now we can tell perfectly
a story that is not worth telling, but have not
even thought of learning what stories are worth
telling. Maybe, if we did that, and told them
without thinking of technique and without knowing
that there were any rules whatever, we might write
stories that would be remembered, say, ten years
hence. Maybe there is, after all, only one rule
for telling a story—to have one worth telling and
then to tell it as well as you can. Maybe that is
what is the matter with the American drama as
well as with American fiction. If we could unlearn
some of the rules and forget technique we might
not produce best sellers; and maybe if we told, as
clumsily as our ignorance of the rules compelled us,
stories that were worth telling, there might be no
more best sellers, only stories that would live as[46]
long as the clumsy plots of Dickens and the inartistic
anecdotes of O. Henry.”
Just how long O. Henry’s stories will live and
his influence predominate is a prediction no one can
safely undertake to venture at this time. It depends
upon how long we will permit his influence
to predominate. The great mass of our reading
public will continue to venerate any writer as long
as our official censors continue to write panegyrics
of him, and our colleges to hold him up as a model.
The literary aspirants coming to us for instruction
are recruited largely from among this indiscriminating
public. Sooner or later, however, we must
realize that the American Maupassant has not yet
come and that those who foisted the misnomer upon
William Sidney Porter have done the American
short story a great injury. Before this most popular
of our literary forms can come into its own the
O. Henry cult must be demolished. O. Henry himself
must be assigned his rightful position—among
the tragic figures of America’s potential artists
whose genius was distorted and stifled by our prevailing
commercial and infantile conception of literary
values. Our short story itself must be cleansed;
its paint and powder removed; its fluffy curls shorn—so
that our complacent reader may be left to contemplate
its “rag and a bone and a hank of hair.”
When the great American short-story master
finally does come, no titles borrowed from the[47]
French or any other nationality will be necessary
and adequate. His own worth will forge his
crown, and his worth will not be measured in tricks
and stunts and puzzles and cleverness. His sole
object will not be to spring effects upon his unwary
reader. His will be sincere honest art—with due
apologies for this obvious contradiction in terms,
for art can be nothing but sincere!—a result of
deep, genuine emotions and an overflowing imagination.
His very soul will be imbued with the simple
truth, so succinctly put by Mr. H. L. Mencken, that
“the way to sure and tremendous effects is by the
route of simplicity, naturalness, ingenuousness.”[11]
[48]
CHAPTER IV
The Moving Pictures
An assignment once given my class called for a
story based on this simple germ: “A servant kills
his master.” To my great astonishment I found
that fully seventy-five per cent. of the class had
decided, as if by agreement, that the servant must
be either a Japanese or a Chinaman. Why? The
students themselves could not explain it, but I could.
I had observed this unison of plot conception many
times before. They had all drawn their inspiration
from the same inexhaustible source—the moving
pictures. In all probability not a single student
had ever employed or seen his or her friends
employ a Japanese or Chinese servant. If they had
ever employed a servant at all, it was most likely
some negro girl, and yet their fancy had taken them
to the Asiatics. For every one has surely noticed
that in the moving pictures the lowly individual
who carries the master’s suitcase is always an
Asiatic valet. It is fashionable and ethical. The
laborer, the servant, is nearly always a foreigner,
the American is the “boss,” the domineering chap
who wears the full-dress suit and faces the camera[49]
with a compelling, clean-shaven chin. The drowsy
members of our A. F. of L. and the weak-eyed
bookkeepers and typists filling the galleries of our
motion-picture houses must feel highly flattered as
they applaud the shadows of their dreams projected
on the screen. What has plausibility to do with
the “Eighth Art”? And who is naïve enough to
expect to find it there?
Yet to the student of the modern American short
story, and novel as well, the moving pictures must
come in for a great share of consideration. This
institution exerts a tremendous influence on the
trend of our fiction, determining both its form and
substance. It is no longer a secret that most of
our prominent fiction-writers who still are unattached
to some studio are writing stories for the
magazines with a view to their ultimate adaptation
for the screen. A number of magazine publishers
maintain brokerage departments where the stories
appearing in their publications are sold to film
manufacturers and the profits thus realized divided
with the authors or quietly deposited to their own
accounts. The editors of these magazines are instructed
to keep an eye on moving-picture possibilities
of manuscripts submitted to them. The
remuneration involved is so alluring that even
the best writers with high literary traditions behind
them are fast succumbing. But whereas
these old writers for the most part have already[50]
done their best work and have spent themselves,
so that their loss to American letters is
not very serious, the effect of the moving-pictures
urge upon the young author is truly disastrous.
To write for the screen as it is at present managed
requires neither art nor knowledge. Writers
with any literary compunctions cannot hope to
succeed in a field which demands a complete distortion
of all values. What is required is the ability
to supply some acrobatically inclined matinée idols
and curly-haired ingénues with fast-moving vehicles
to display their “stunts.” It presupposes an intimate
acquaintance with the peculiar talents of each
star. If a star can swim and dive and ride horse-back
and jump off a running train and dance gracefully
opportunities must be provided in the scenario
for the parading of these talents. If another can
wear pretty clothes daintily or has pretty dimples
on her knees or looks particularly charming in the
uniform of a maid or a governess the scenario
writer must be governed accordingly in constructing
his story. It is precisely because no one outside of
a studio can have such an intimate knowledge of the
abilities of the various stars featured by a producing
company that staffs are employed to rewrite
and prepare for production every script purchased
from an outsider.
The moving-picture industry is almost entirely[51]
dominated by investors who are as far from literature
as the average would-be story writer is from
being featured in the pages of the Cosmopolitan.
Their concern is solely with the box-office. They
will purvey anything that will yield the desired dividends.
Manifestly to apply the word “art” to an
industry with such mercenaries at its helm is to
cover the word with mud, unless we stretch the
term to include the art of making money. As
Channing Pollock, in a “Plain Talk About the
Movies,”[12] once said: “One of the troubles with the
regular theatre is its conviction that the possession
of a hundred thousand dollars turns a laundryman
into a littérateur.” The remark is still more pungently
apposite to the cinema theatre. The ignorance
of the rich investors controlling the destinies
of the moving-picture industry is truly stupendous.
An anecdote current among scenario editors and
vouched for by one of them as an actual happening
throws a pitiless light on this prevailing trait.
When several years ago the craze of adapting
Dickens’ novels for the screen was on, the president
of a large film corporation one day stormed into
his scenario editor’s office and demanded to know
why Dickens’ work had been permitted to go to a
rival company. The editor defended himself by
saying that some of Dickens’ work could still be got.
“See to it, then,” the great man ordered. “Wire
[52]Mr. Dickens that hereafter we want his entire
output!”
And these intellectual giants are influencing the
output of our Dickenses! The singularly few exceptions
in the industry are powerless to change the
state of affairs. They are either smothered by the
great ones or are tolerated because they are so insignificant.
And these great ones have decreed that
adaptations of stage successes, old classics, best
sellers, and magazine stories are more desirable
wares than original stories written especially for
the screen. The governing factor, of course, is the
previous advertising that these adapted stories have
had without cost to the film producers. Story
values are the least consideration. Our public is
so amusement-hungry and so well-trained that it will
consume anything. Besides, the star is ninety per
cent. of the show anyhow—people go to see the
celebrated So-and-so rather than the vehicle in
which So-and-so appears—otherwise the magnates
would not pay five hundred dollars for a story
and fifty thousand dollars for a star’s performance
in it.
The fact, however, that moving-picture producers
are not purchasing original scenarios does not deter
the numerous literary schools of the country from
offering instruction in photoplay writing. The advertising
matter of these schools is as optimistic as
ever. “Makes $50,000 a year by writing for the[53]
screen,” reads one headline. “Moving-picture
stories in demand everywhere!” reads another.
Then the information is generously volunteered
that a certain scenario writer in a California studio
is earning fifty thousand dollars a year; another
twenty-five thousand; and countless others between
five and ten thousand. Convincing proof is presented
that no education or previous experience is
necessary; that one farmer in the backwoods of
Washington or Oregon or on the prairies of Illinois
has sold a scenario for eighteen hundred and fifty
dollars; that one woman who was never graduated
from a public school has written a masterpiece in
her spare time between cooking her victuals and
tending to her seven children and an invalid husband,
and that as a result of her exploit she has now
paid off the mortgage on her house and is experimenting
with the mechanism of a Dodge car.
This alluring prospect of becoming affluent via
a course in photoplay writing is held out not only
by the average correspondence school but also by
not a few of our dignified institutions of learning.
There is no excuse for offering any instruction in an
art that is on such a low plane of development, except,
perhaps, that of elevating it, which is not an
aim avowed by any of these institutions; and,
besides, mere honesty alone ought to compel even
the most enterprising trustee or administrator to
reach the simple conclusion that since the demand[54]
for original photoplays is practically non-existent,
as far as the novice is concerned, it is useless to
manufacture photoplaywrights. The refusal to
accept such a logical conclusion results in disappointments
and heartaches and the upsetting of normal
useful careers. A glimpse at the record of original
scenarios purchased by some of our leading producers
even as far back as 1918, when the policy of
using adaptations only was not yet rigidly adhered
to, proves conclusively the extent of the market.
The American Film Company purchased only fifteen
scenarios during the entire year. The National
Studios—twelve. William S. Hart—eight.
The Fairbanks Studio—six. The Dorothy Gish
Company—four. Mary Pickford—one. The
Chaplin Studio—one.[13]
When it is considered that some of our ablest
fictionists and dramatists have been writing photoplays
and that some of these accepted scenarios
were written for particular stars and often sent
direct to them or to their directors, the chances of
the obscure novice, even the most meritorious one,
are far from glorious indeed. And since 1918 the
policy of adaptations only has been enforced more
stringently—almost to the complete exclusion of
the original script submitted by the outsider. A
few producing companies have frankly admitted,
in the various writers’ magazines, that they do not
[55]even read manuscripts submitted by unknown outsiders.
But while the great mass of aspirants may not be
aware of the true state of conditions our more or
less successful writers know it full well. The
Authors’ League and the Pen Women’s League
and the various Writers’ Clubs throughout the
country have all discussed and analyzed the moving-pictures
market, and their members are taking
means to meet its eccentric exactions. Why write
a story in photoplay continuity or even detailed
synopsis form only to have it returned from the
Coast most likely unread, when the same material
can be written up in a short story or a novelette, its
serial rights sold to a magazine and its photoplay
rights reserved and offered to a film company which
is then sure to accord it a friendly reading? As a
matter of record the price paid for photoplay rights
to a magazine story is usually twice and sometimes
tenfold the price paid for an original story written
especially for the screen. Part of this extra compensation
is probably for the advertising value of
the story, and part for the judgment of the magazine
editor which the film magnates are more inclined
to accept than that of their own hired editors.
That fiction writers are taking advantage of this
unusual opportunity to sell their work twice is an
absolute certainty. “In fact, as several writers
remarked at the Writers’ Club dinner, a large percentage[56]
of the present-day magazine stories are
written—planned and plotted—with the screen
directly in mind.... It is well known, on the inside
of the game, that successful fictionists plan
every situation and bit of dialogue in certain stories,
visualizing, as they write, the way those situations
will, as they hope, work out on the screen.”[14] And
again: “Today, among the more successful writers
of action-stories for the magazines, there exists the
feeling that it is a criminal waste of time to write
originals for the screen. Their method is deliberately
to plan their fiction ... so that it will actually
contain abundant photoplay material, while yet
being properly balanced up with the necessary word-painting
and dialogue which good fiction demands.
In other words, they systematically plan their fiction
to make its picture possibilities ‘hit the producer in
the eye’ the first time he—or his scenario editor—reads
it.... Almost nine-tenths of the pictures
shown today are adaptations of successful fiction
stories or stage plays. If you doubt that, watch
the productions in your theatres and note their
origin.”[15]
What this “systematic planning” results in is
self-evident. The moving-picture story and the
fiction story are two different products. Their
technique is different. The photoplay is pantomime
[57]pure and simple. Ideas and emotions can
only be expressed by means of gestures and facial
contortions, with the aid of a schoolboy subtitle
flashed on the screen. Literary style, psychologic
delineation, and nice subtleties of thought and
emotion cannot be transmitted. The plot must unfold
rapidly and teem with surprising and tense
situations. The actors must have something to do
every second. To write a fiction story with photoplay
possibilities requires a careful selection of
theme and plot. Unlike the magazines, which run
in types, each catering to a particular group of temperamental
and intellectual stratum of our people,
the moving pictures depend for success upon the
approval of the Ladies’ Auxiliary Society and the
Chew Tobacco Club of Dead Hollow as well as
upon Greenwich Village and the bourgeois Philistines
of our metropolises. No theme must be used
that might give offense to any of these patrons; all
must be kept satisfied so that a continuance of their
patronage may be insured. It is also apparent that
the pale, quiet story which does not depend upon
action for its “punch” must be entirely sacrificed,
since it cannot possibly have any moving-picture
adaptability. Only the swift-moving, red-blooded
plot can be utilized.
Needless to suggest that our story writers are
well aware of these limitations. The fact that
their work is adapted almost wholesale into photoplays[58]
speaks eloquently for their knowledge on this
score. Needless to suggest, also, that they have
become expert mechanics in the way of constructing
a fiction story so that it will be certain to “hit the
producer in the eye.” They have learned that “the
photoplaywright depends upon his ability to think
and write in action.”[16] And they have learned to
think and write in action. They have also taken
to heart the dictum regarding theme. “In selecting
your theme, ask yourself if either dialogue or description
may not be really required to bring out
the theme satisfactorily. If such is the case,
abandon the theme. The few inserts permitted
cannot be relied upon to give much aid—the chief
reliance must be pantomime.”[17] It is only natural,
then, for our writers to eschew the unadaptable
theme altogether.
That the bulk of our magazine fiction is, therefore,
not magazine fiction at all, but merely disguised
moving-picture stories is a fact that has
found entirely too little general publicity. A moving-picture
story differs from a fiction story not
only in matter of technique and theme barred by
limitations of technique but also in many other
respects. As we have seen, because of the general
appeal of the moving pictures certain themes that
might offend any part of the great public must be
[59]avoided. Obviously this results in the humiliating
condition of degenerating to the standard of the
lowest patron, of courting his approval as the final
goal of successful authorship. But should, perchance,
an author with a virile conscience bolt the
ranks of the meek conformists and yet, by dint of
extraordinarily fortunate circumstances, break
through with his product, the power of the various
Boards of Censorship must be reckoned with.
There are, of course, official, semi-official and
unofficial censors presiding over the production of
our magazine fiction, too. But while a revolting
author may take his work to some less respectable
magazine and thus save his soul, no such outlet
exists for the photoplaywright. His work must be
so harmless that it will pass not only the National
Board of Censorship but also the various State and
city boards, otherwise no enterprising producer will
risk his money producing it. The experienced
photoplaywright, then, studies the proscriptions of
the various boards and keeps himself informed of
all their decisions. He knows, for instance, that
crime must be treated cautiously, and it must always
be punished in the end; that the National Board will
not pass a picture in which there is a suicide, that
burglary may be shown, but not by what means it
is committed; that flirtations with women of easy
virtue are banned; that lynching scenes are permissible
only when the picture is laid in places[60]
where no other law exists; that scenes showing kidnapping
do not always “get by”; that elopements
must be handled delicately; that, in short, the effect
of the picture on the young, the evil-minded, and
the weak-minded must always be carefully gaged.
The experienced photoplaywright also knows of
all important precedents established by the censors.
He knows that Shakespeare’s plays have not gotten
by unscathed; that “Macbeth” was deemed too full
of crime and “Romeo and Juliet” too full of love;
that a kiss between the two youngsters in the latter
play was limited to three feet; that Eugene Walter’s
“Easiest Way” could not be exhibited in the sovereign
State of Pennsylvania because the Board of
Censors of that State had condemned it “in accordance
with Section 6 of the Act.... Because it
deals with prostitution”; that in O. Henry’s “Past
One at Rooney’s” such sub-titles as “At one end
was a human pianola with drugged eyes,” and “I
know how bad it looked—me smokin’ and comin’
in here. But I’ll promise you, Eddie—I’ll give
up cigarettes and stay home every night if you want
me to” were deleted; etc., etc. And above all he
knows that religious and political views must never
be expressed. Furthermore, that if he breaks the
last law and does essay to express any views at all,
they must be the worn-out popular views that even
the humblest deacon or the mistress of the little red
schoolhouse back home might be gladdened with,[61]
because they have been cherishing them as an heritage
from their ancient forbears.
Thus the influence of the moving pictures on the
bulk of our magazine and even book fiction. It is
a moving-picture fiction, “strong,” fast-moving,
startling, full of cheap ideas and a gushy hackneyed
idealism, written largely by photoplaywrights who
use the fiction medium simply because it enables
them to exact a higher price for their product, and
catering to a photoplay public. For this moving-picture
influence extends not only to the makers of
stories but to the general reading public as well. It
tames it, if indeed it need any taming, molds it,
forms it into a hardened cast with a definite æstheticism
which it carries from the cinema house to
Happy Stories and Virile Stories and Goody Stories
and back again. There are traditional themes,
traditional views and a traditional treatment, in
spite of the loud cry for novelty, and any theme,
view or treatment violating the tradition, should it
succeed to get by the vigilantes higher up, has to
brave a combat with this traditional moving-picture
taste.
The young story writer, like his more mature
brother or sister, is infected with this influence and
from the very beginning of his career looks askance
at any doctrine that conflicts with his proud æstheticism.
But in our profession it is seldom that he is
required to be false to the culture of the screen.[62]
Our textbooks and the bombastic dogmas they
largely exploit are themselves for the most part a
product of the same culture. He is told to think
in terms of action rather than in terms of idea and
character. He is trained in the construction and
management of situation and incident until, although
not consciously intending to, he is able, like
his more successful colleagues, to turn out passable
photoplay material. Small wonder that most of
our short stories abound in wooden characters,
clumsily moving about on well-oiled springs, thinking
stereotyped thoughts and talking wooden dialogue.
The atmosphere fanning upon them has
the hot fetid tang of the darkened-theatre air.
When told to write a story the student almost
without hesitation betakes himself to his supreme
source for plot material. It matters little that this
material itself merely represents the adaptation of
some fiction story. The moving pictures today
could be used as another illustration of Emerson’s
theory of circles, or is it merely a modification of
the delightful pastime of see-saw of which we were
so fond in our childhood? The scenario writer
adapts the magazine story and the magazine story
writer adapts the photoplay story, etc., etc., ad infinitum.
Of course the disguising twist often goes
with it, but the material nevertheless basically remains
the same. And, as a matter of fact, from
the point of view of salability the method is not[63]
without merit, everybody involved—the scenario
editor, the producer, the public—recognizes in the
revamped material an old friend, and, if the revamping
has been done dexterously and ingeniously,
glories in its novel familiarity. The failures employing
this method are confined mainly to two
classes of students—those who are temperamentally
entirely out of tune with the moving-picture
traditions, a small minority to be sure, and those
who, though favorably attuned to the spirit of the
silver sheet, fail to acquire the knack of giving their
work the necessary disguising twist which passes for
the much-vaunted novelty.
Admitting that it would be extremely difficult
and perhaps even futile to attempt to wean the
young student-majority away from the well-assimilated
influence of the show house, one cannot avoid
speculation upon what could be made by a serious-minded
critical teaching profession of the open-minded
minority diffidently seeking encouragement
in their desire to follow newer traditions or to give
birth to still newer ones. If for one chapter in
our texts or for one semester in our institutions of
learning the joy of creating for the mere love of it,
for the sheer beauty of it, had been glorified as we
glorify popularity and commercial success, what a
buoyancy of spirit we could have engendered, what
a fluttering of young wings!
For two years in succession a young woman came[64]
to my classes and each year she dropped out before
the expiration of the term sending me a note of
despair. She had traveled extensively through
Europe and the Orient as well as through North
and South America and she had accumulated a fund
of experience to draw on for material. She tried
hard to imprison it in story form but the finished
product lacked thrill and suspense and airiness.
She received nothing but the cold platitudes of
printed rejection slips, while other students—as
innocent of any knowledge of life as a fluffy ingénue
capering through five reels of silent drama—who
modeled their work along the lines of Popular
Stories and the Jolly Book Magazine and the latest
releases, and seasoned it with a generous dash of
O. Henryism, occasionally displayed fair-sized
checks. She worked away despondently and each
succeeding story tended to prove that the text we
were using and the current magazines we were
studying were helping her but little. There was a
heaviness, almost an eeriness, permeating her work,
and yet it was a heaviness somewhat akin to that
which permeates the work of Thomas Hardy. She
admitted that most of the magazines we were studying
bored her, that she preferred “Beyond the
Horizon” and “John Ferguson” to “Irene” and
“The Passing Show.” I advised her to write sombre
tragedy, yes, morbid stuff. She produced a
passably good story. It was rejected by the first[65]
magazine she sent it to with a personal letter expressing
the editors’ regrets at their inability to accept
such an interesting story, but they never purchased
“depressing” material. Wouldn’t she be kind
enough to let them see something else of her work,
something in much lighter vein? She refused to
try another market, insisting that she had known all
along that she could not write. All the writers’
magazines she had read and even our own textbook
declared most emphatically that “morbid” stories
were not wanted. She discontinued her studies.
The next year she came back. “I can’t help
writing,” she apologized. “I simply can’t resist
the impulse to write. I don’t care if I don’t sell,
I am going to write just for myself—whatever I
like. I merely want you to see what I am doing.”
A few months later she sold a tragic little tale to
an unpopular little periodical. But she did not take
advantage of this, her first success. Soon her work
began to show labored flippancy and attempted ingenuity,
and it looked ludicrously pathetic—a Hawthorne
austerity with an H. C. Witwer lightness;
the combination was irritably grotesque. Before
the end of the year she dropped out again. And
now she is back once more. Whether she will ever
be able to cut away entirely from the cords of a
moving-picture impulse only time can tell.
This case is a mild example of the struggle now
waged with a sinister environment alien to all literary[66]
aspiration except for immediate gain by many
lonely souls. Their resistance could be materially
strengthened by sympathetic guidance. Contrary
to the proverbial jibes of the cynics the literary
aspirant is far from possessing an over-abundance
of confidence. Intelligent persistence is a rare quality,
not to be found among too many. The mediocre
aspirant either soon deserts the ranks or begins
to turn out salable wares. And the person with a
genuine case of divine afflatus also either leaves the
ranks with a curse in his heart or finally learns to
turn out regulation material and becomes a cynic
for life. Cynicism may be a much more admirable
attitude than open-mouthed subservience, but it is
not always conducive to sturdy accomplishment.
Often it is a sense of surrender. And since missions
seem to be such a popular necessity among our
pedagogues and literary clergy, what could be a
more worthy one than the saving of these lonely
strugglers from life-long cynicism? But that requires,
first of all, an intelligent and fearless weighing
of the forces on either side and the rolling up of
greater support on the side of the weaker. Truth
and spontaneity are struggling against stifling commercialism
and artifice; against a hostile environment
resting complacently on old dilapidated dogmas,
and chuckling contentedly with its moving-picture
standards of life, art, and literature,—its moving-picture
civilization.
The field of the short story is first of all the field
of the magazine. To be a successful story writer
requires a comprehensive knowledge of the policies
and preferences of the various periodicals that buy
stories. It is natural to assume that literary agents,
commercial critics, and teachers should be well
aware of these editorial policies and preferences,
and should make every effort to inspire the amateur
with the respect and deference due such essential
knowledge. We use this knowledge to stem any
inclination to mischief. We hold it aloft, over the
heads of the unmanageable ones, threatening them
with failure, unless they become manageable. Thus
we preserve the dignity of the profession and help
stragglers on their weary pilgrimage to the golden
calf.
For us the task is after all an easy one. It is but
necessary to tabulate the good old taboos as to the
content of our stories and then be-write and be-lecture
them to make our words impressive. We do
that in our teaching of photoplaywriting; we do it in
the teaching of fiction-writing. But no one has ever[68]
seriously labeled the photoplay as it is finally produced
on the screen as a form of literature, while
our fiction undeniably is a form, if not the form, of
our national literature. It behooves us, therefore,
to bring forward all the pomp and pride and glory
we are capable of and point out the peculiar characteristics
that distinguish our fiction as a national
product from the fiction of other nations. And we
usually find it more advisable to do it by the negative
method of pointing out what our fiction is not
rather than by the positive method of pointing out
what it is. Crystallizing the more-important undesirable
and therefore absent elements in our fiction
into single words, we can say that it is not
pessimistic; that it is not lewd; that it is not
irreverent; that it is not “red”; that it is not
un-American.
This does not mean that our literature abstains
from all discussion of the topics of pessimism, sex,
religion, politics and economics, and Americanism.
It is merely the extent to which they are discussed
and the angle of discussion that elevate our fiction
to a position of what passes for national expression.
Like the vicious circle that governs photoplay
scripts—adaptation of fiction stories being adapted
in turn from the screen and re-adapted back again
into scripts—our opinions on the phenomena of
life are adaptations of the opinions imprisoned
within covers of best sellers and our million-and-more-circulation[69]
magazines, only the circle is somewhat
more complicated. Scripts are written to
meet the prejudices of all moving-picture patrons;
stories, to meet the needs of a particular type of
reader. And this much must be said for our magazines:
The variety of types has made possible
whatever untrammelled literature we have. For
after all there is a wide difference between the moral
tone of Harper’s and the arch-sophistication of the
Smart Set, or between the big-business glorification
of the Saturday Evening Post and the New Success
and the artistic quiet and rebelliousness of the Dial
and the Little Review.
Whatever untrammelled literature we have, however,
is little enough. The tone-givers, the guides,
the molders are the magazines of power with public
opinion and millions of dollars behind them,
with unbreakable traditional prejudices and taboos.
And so long as the humblest critic and the highest-paid
institutional authority unite in upholding these
traditional taboos as glittering marks of Americanism,
public opinion will continue to demand a literature
that is for the most part infantile, insipid and
lifeless. The generations that rise to pound the
typewriter keys in the production of stories are for
the most part imbued with this negative conception
of our literature and unquestionably the most dangerous
instrument for the perpetuation of this
degrading conception is the literary teaching profession.[70]
Again, in not a single textbook on story-writing
have I been able to find an intelligent, fearless
analysis of our national taboos and their effect
of sterility upon our literature. I have found
warnings and admonitions and scarecrows. “Thou
shalt not!” is the sum and substance of our learned
attitude on these mummifying influences. The vacillating
feet of the aspirant are directed toward
the proper, well-trodden roads at the very outset,
and the punishment for straying is stressed to the
point where it requires a superhuman courage to
brave it.
1. Optimism
Our first dictate is “Thou shalt not be morbid!”
Depressing stuff may be characteristic of the Russians,
the Germans, the French, the Italians, the
Scandinavians, but not of the Americans. Ours is
a young country, a free country, a happy country,
full of the joy of existence. Ours is a hopeful people,
cheerful and gay and proud; glad to be alive.
“People have all the gloom they want,” says the
editor of The American Magazine in his “Fourteen
Points” to contributors. “They manufacture it on
their own premises. You cannot sell them gloom.
What they want to buy is a cure for their gloom.
They don’t want to buy more gloom.” And Dr.
Frank Crane in his ever-buoyant style exclaims:[71]
“The Saturday Evening Post and The American
Magazine have what I call ‘good literature.’”[18]
Since salability is the only criterion of worth, any
story that violates our fundamental optimistic tone
is at once intercepted, revamped, “improved” or
pronounced hopeless and condemned to extinction.
“Not salable,” is a phrase as ominous as a jury’s
“Guilty!” on a charge of murder in the first degree,
and the only appeal possible is for the defendant
to plead a sudden seizure of passionate desire to
“pack up his troubles in his old kit bag and smile,
smile, smile!” And so the law of supply and demand
operates once more. The “calamity howler” is
eliminated and the man or woman with the “smile
that won’t come off” gets to the top. American
literature becomes enriched by the advent of another
“genius” imbued with the gospel that “life is great
fun, after all!”
That no literature can thrive on such a barren
optimism seems to be a statement so obvious as to
challenge even the mere ordinary intelligence offering
it. Yet pedants carry forward this optimism-tradition
and preach, and lecture, and prate about
the spirit of America, and threaten and punish
and outlaw the few unfortunate rebels. What
literature can a country produce which refuses to
take even the most timid peep at life as it is, which
[72]shuts its eyes in very horror at the most fundamental
problems of the land, which does not brood, contemplate
or inquire, which does not know the benediction
of a tear or the relief of a sigh? Can a
steady diet of sugar produce anything more invigorating
than diabetes? And literary sugar is what we
think and preach and worship. All heroines are
pretty; all heroes succeed; all complications are
solved; wedding bells ring; promotions are given
out; only bad people die young; the good live to a
mellow age of four score and ten; life is a fairy-tale
in which all the fairies are sweet young things
waving magic wands over honest young brokers of
their choice; the world, and America especially, is
a Vale of Tempe where limousines are passed out
as the reward of virtue and endeavor and where
successful matches are consummated.
Our writers must be either inanimate machines
or sorry human beings trained to suppress their
instincts and moods. They must be on their guard
not to succumb to the “blues”; quick to inhibit any
sad reflection or discouraging thought. “If you
can’t see the sun is shining,” wrote one editor very
bluntly, rejecting a “depressing” story, “take Epsom
salts and sleep it over.” And whether they are
drowsy or not, sleep it over our writers must. Those
who suffer with insomnia find their good neighbors
either snoring peacefully or stamping about in
infuriated protest. Our writers must sift their[73]
experience; if it is tragic or insufficiently uplifting
they must dispatch it to oblivion. It is really most
advisable not to draw upon experience at all. Not
of such stuff can optimistic fiction be made. For
is there life without tears and heartache and doubt;
without innumerable deaths of precious fragile
dreams; without graying of heads; without perplexity?
Hence arises what Van Wyck Brooks calls
“the doctrine of the fear of experience.... It
assumes that experience is not the stuff of life but
something essentially meaningless; and not merely
meaningless but an obstruction which retards and
complicates our real business of getting on in the
world and getting up in the world, and which must,
therefore, be ignored and forgotten and evaded
and beaten down by every means in our power.”[19]
Here again the inconsistency in our theory of
optimistic fiction is glaring. We shriek anathemas
at any native product that repudiates it, yet we bow
with respect to importations. We acclaim all the
morbid geniuses of Europe; we accord their works
places of special privilege in our curricula; we consider
it a mark of culture to mention the titles of at
least a half-dozen depressing books. Even our
most respectable magazines are proud on occasion
to publish a story by an eminent European author
with the flamboyant legend placed upon it or boxed
in the center of its first page by the editor: “No
[74]one but Gorki (or Maeterlink, or D’Annunzio, or
D. H. Lawrence, or whoever else it might be) would
have the courage to write a story such as this, and
no magazine in America but The—— would
have the courage to publish it.” The same legend
is placed sometimes upon the work of a native
writer, but after reading the story one finds that
either the writer did not dare, after all, or that the
editor of the brave magazine edited the contribution;
that both the writer and the worthy editor had
been so frightened at the mere flap of a wing that
they had to offer an apology for attempting to soar.
This inconsistency is particularly reflected in our
current criticism and literary textbooks. With the
same breath a reviewer will praise Dostoyevski and
chastise some native youngster for his horrible
morbidity. In the same chapter the text will refer
to Chekhov and Maupassant and Zola and Poe with
almost cringing reverence and eloquently preach
the gospel of cheap optimism as the supreme
message of the story writer. And the young would-be
procures copies of the great masters, reads them,
and comes back perplexed. “Why do they write
about such horrid things?” asks one young student.
I look into her large, innocent eyes and smile. The
Great Creator must have been in a diplomatic mood
when he invented a smile. I glance down at my
copy of The Literary News, lying on my desk and
note that an editor of a prominent and liberally-paying[75]
magazine is in the market for “stories of
rapid action—cheery short stories, encouraging,
helpful—the kind that makes the world better,” and
I proceed to discuss how this kind of story is
written....
2. Sex
Of all our taboos none has contributed so large
a share in keeping our literature swathed in baby
blankets as that on sex. In its essence it is merely
a direct irradiation of taboo No. 1 on optimism.
If everything in the universe is good and beautiful
and holy and the writer’s business is to chant incessant
halleluiahs, then sex is all of these and must
be treated reverently. Its unsavory aspects as well
as those leading to unhappiness must be passed by,
and since in the muddled world we are living in sex
has felt most severely the combined forces of bigotry,
suppression and inhibition, of pathologic social
and moral conditions, its aspects are most frequently
unsavory and unhappy and therefore must be either
ignored entirely or made savory and happy. We
have a hoary phrase perpetually playing upon our
glib lips—it is to the effect that we are a “clean-living,
moral people.” The phrase itself has long
lost its meaning, even to the most uninformed of
citizens, but it has remained a sacred fetish forever,
it seems.
Again it is not in the total abstaining from any[76]
treatment of sex that our taboo is expressed, but in
our peculiar angle of treatment. Total abstaining
were indeed impossible, for any literature, and
least of all for our literature. The truth is that ours
is, in the main, essentially a sex-literature—largely
because of our “reverent” attitude. Strong elemental
forces long suppressed erupt in irrepressible,
if furtive, curiosity. No country on earth can
boast of as many periodicals specializing in the
risque, the sexually-sensational, the cheaply suggestive,
as the land of the “clean-living.” The fact is
incontrovertible. Where there is a continued supply
there must be a continued demand. Our publishers
know their market. Even the titles of a host of
our periodicals exploit, not too artistically, this
crude reaction of a sex-conscious people. “Saucy
Stories,” “Breezy Stories,” “Snappy Stories,” “Live
Stories,” “Droll Stories,” “The Parisienne,” “True
Stories,” “The Follies,” “Telling Tales,” “Secrets,”
“I Confess,” “True Confessions,” “High Life,”
“Hot Dog,”—these are some of the titles that wink
mischievously at the purchaser timid with guilt.
But the purchaser is rarely pleased with his dissipation.
He finds the wine exceedingly mild. Most
of the stories under the suggestive cover bearing the
inviting title and a still more inviting pretty girl,
usually attired in very becoming négligé, are, after
all, “clean.”
And this “cleanness” is the characteristic blight[77]
of nine-tenths of our entire literature. It is vulgar
with the lowest kind of sex-consciousness but it
doesn’t go “too far.” It is the “cleanness” of our
moving pictures. Is there any reason why a production
entitled “Du Barry” in Europe should be
rechristened to read “Passion” for American exhibition?
Is there any reason why Barrie’s “Admirable
Crichton” should become “Male and Female” as
a photoplay? Is there any reason for such titles
as “Sex,” “The Restless Sex,” “His Wedded Wife,”
“The First Night,” “The She Woman,” “The Leopard
Woman,” “Wedded Husbands,” “Why Wives
Go Wrong,” “Forbidden Fruit,” “The Primrose
Path,” “What Happened to Rosa,” “Why Change
Your Wife?” “The Woman Untamed,” etc., etc?
It surely does not require an erudite psychoanalyst
to find the reason for this avalanche of suggestiveness.
Perhaps, if they deemed it wise to speak, our
motion-picture producers could shed some light on
the subject. Seemingly their opinion of our “clean-living,
moral people” is not very flattering. And
their judgment is substantially founded upon the
generous reports they receive from the distributing
exchanges.
Here, too, carefully as the titles are selected the
pictures themselves are “clean.” If they were not,
the various Boards of Censorship would have seen
to it that they become so. At most a director will[78]
manage to show the heroine plunging into her
morning’s rose-water bath, as in “Male and
Female,” for instance, or an exotic harem partially
disrobing for a cold dip into the perfumed waters of
the Rajah’s pool, as in “Kismet.” Whether the
scenes are vitally necessary to the unfolding of the
plot is immaterial. They constitute an irresistible
attraction in themselves, and must be smuggled in,
if possible. A couple of feet of nakedness results
in thousands of dollars’ worth of advertising.
What is true of the moving pictures is equally
true of our spoken stage. Think of “Twin Beds”
and “Up in Mabel’s Room” and “Parlor, Bedroom
and Bath” and “Mary’s Ankle” and “Nighty,
Nighty” and “Scrambled Wives” and “Ladies’
Night in a Turkish Bath” and “Getting Gertie’s
Garter” and the various “Follies” and “Scandals”
and a hundred-and-one other titles which were surely
chosen for a purpose—the same purpose which
impelled some years ago the manager of the old
Academy of Music in New York to advertise a stock
company production of Daudet’s “Sapho” as the
“greatest immoral play ever written.” And again
the plays themselves are not remotely as licentious
as the titles would intimate.
What, then, is this “cleanness” of ours? What
are its impositions and how far can they be
stretched? The answer is simple and more than a
trifle sad. Our “cleanness” excludes serious[79]
thought. “Something audacious suits us, but nothing
salacious,” writes one editor of a well-known
publication of the frothy type. “Salacious” stands
for thought, reflection, analysis. A little suggestiveness,
a hint, a double-edged joke, a farcical situation,
a vulgar thrust, will do. But a deep, sincere
analysis, a fearless uncovering of a cowering conscience—that
is salacious, immoral, lewd, unclean.
That accounts for the free and open dissemination
of so much debasing, lurid stuff and the hypocritical
suppression of Dreiser and Cabell. That accounts
for the popularity of Bertha M. Clay et al. and the
unpopularity of Sherwood Anderson et al. Sex is a
fit subject to jest about, to inject breezily as a gently-naughty
stimulant. Sex as an elemental force which
shapes the lives of men and women, which actuates
their struggles in this terrestrial sphere of ours,
making for success or failure, for happiness or despair,
for sinner or saint, is vile, lascivious, and
therefore taboo.
The literary teaching profession has not passed
this degrading scene unnoticed. It has broken up in
two camps. The great mass of instructors have
simply adopted the position that a writer must give
whatever is demanded of him. Would a tailor refuse
to accept an order calling for a fabric he personally
does not approve of and a fashion he
detests? Granted that this is not a particularly
lofty conception of literary art, it is still less pernicious[80]
than the conception held by the smaller group
of so-called idealists in the profession. To these
the sex aspect of our literature calls for stormy denunciation.
They would impress upon the future
writer the sanctity of his mission. The pen must
not be polluted. Sex must be left alone entirely.
The moral tone must be preserved in all productions.
Laws for the ruthless suppression of the unclean
must be fought for and their enactment obtained.
What these honest Puritans cannot understand
is that the entire class of bawdy, sex-reeking literature
is a product of the very laws they have been
fortunate enough to have enacted; that the complete
abolition of these laws and the absolute cessation
from persecution in the interests of morality of
any expression of sex would purge our literature of
the curse as nothing else. If any one could purchase
a mature, intelligent literary expression of
the mysterious passion that animates nature and
moves the world, the profane effusions of shriveled
minds would appear shocking and abhorrent by comparison.
All literature that has ever been written
has dealt directly or indirectly with the relation of
men and women—for the very trite reason that all
life that has ever been lived has been the life of this
relation of men and women. To place the yellow
ticket of evil upon this relation as a literary subject
is to degrade it beyond words of contempt.
The prevailing spectacle of our literary sewage is[81]
perfectly natural: the thought of uncleanness
wrapped around the stuff of life is bound to pollute
it.
But the pernicious influence of this immoral taboo
goes beyond its direct inhibition of the most legitimate
of themes. It perpetuates an æsthetic literary
tenet which is a relic of the Age of Darkness.
It is to the effect that the morality or unmorality of
its contents determines the value of a literary production.
“It is a shame that such splendid writing
should be wasted on such an atrocious theme,” said
a sweet little lady student apropos Sherwood Anderson’s
“The Other Woman.”[20] The remark at
once characterized her as a member of the Second-Grade
Bigots. The First-Grade Bigots would not
permit themselves to see any excellences in a work
so pronouncedly unorthodox. When cornered, the
little lady admitted that there might be sound psychology
in Anderson’s story—and a large measure
of unsavory truth. “But why choose such horrid
themes when there are so many nice, clean ones?”
It is the cry of all Pollyanna-nurtured readers. It’s
the cry of the author of “Pollyanna” herself. “Is
there, then, no human experience that deals with the
good, the happy, the beautiful?” she asks, in a circular
issued by her publishers. “Are joy, faith and
purity utterly illogical? Is only the thunder-cloud
[82]real?—the sunshine a sham?” In such cases argument
is impossible. The criterion of moral and
optimistic content is deep-rooted and well-nourished
by authority. Is it not largely this same criterion
that for more than a half century prevented the
acceptance by the Judges of Walt Whitman as a
poet, and that is excluding the name of Theodore
Dreiser from its rightful place in our scholarly
histories of the modern American novel?
To counteract this blind perpetuation of a fallacious
doctrine demands a complete severance with
old school criticism and old-age pedagogy. Not
until authority-worship is mightily shaken can this
be accomplished. But that would be a hopeless task
to undertake. The great mass must have and will
have its Great Authorities to bow to. It is easier
than to depend upon one’s own critical faculties.
Besides, habit has become second nature. We have
always been taught that knowledge is merely to
know where to find what we want to know. No,
we must be merciful; our literary apostles must
remain. But among them there are those that are
blind with senility and those that are glowing with
fresh vision. Let us follow the more musical of the
new criers until they, in their turn, reach their dotage
and truth turns to ashes in their toothless
mouths. In no other way can we hope to uproot
the puerile beliefs that art can be judged by its
optimistic or uplifting message, by its morality, or[83]
by any other of, what Joel Elias Spingarn terms, the
“Seven confusions.” We have not yet reached the
stage where the relativity of the term “morality”
can be discussed with impunity and to any considerable
advantage. But we can bring to bear upon a
rising generation of readers and writers all the force
of our warm logic to combat the notion that any
standard of morality, no matter how sublime, has
any determining value in art. We can insist that a
story might be entirely devoid of any moral significance
and yet be an immortal masterpiece; that the
whole notion is merely another one of the confusions
we have inherited from an age which was too busy
developing the raw resources of a vast young continent—a
task which necessitated the invocation of
Providential aid—to pay attention to literature.
“To say that poetry (or any other art) is moral
or immoral is as meaningless as to say that an
equilateral triangle is moral and an isosceles triangle
immoral. Surely we must realize the absurdity of
testing anything by a standard which does not belong
to it or a purpose for which it was not intended.
Imagine these whiffs of conversation at a dinner
table: ‘This cauliflower would be excellent if it
had only been prepared in accordance with international
law.’ ‘Do you know why my cook’s pastry is
so good? He has never told a lie or seduced a
woman.’ But why multiply obvious examples?
We do not concern ourselves with morals when we[84]
test the engineer’s bridge or the scientist’s researches;
indeed we go farther, and say that it is
the moral duty of the scientist to disregard morals
in his search for truth. As a man he may be judged
by moral standards, but the truth of his conclusions
can only be judged by the standard of science....
Art is expression, and poets succeed or fail by their
success or failure in completely and perfectly
expressing themselves. If the ideals they express
are not the ideals we admire most, we must blame
not the poets but ourselves; in the world where
morals count we have failed to give them the
proper material out of which to rear a nobler edifice.
To separate art and morality is not to destroy
moral values but to augment them—to give them
increased powers and a new freedom in the realm
in which they have the right to reign.”[21]
3. Religion
It is literally true that American literature is not
irreverent. The penalty for meddling with religion
in any unconventional way is contemptuous obscurity.
But meddling with religion in a way that
brings out its blessings to humanity is praiseworthy
and leads to opulence and glory. For that reason
nine-tenths of our literature has a strain of religious
righteousness running through it. In the main[85]
the specters of Cotton Mather and Jonathan
Edwards still hover over our literary output, imparting
to it a theological tint. Our fictionists are still
obsessed with the idea that a story or a novel must
preach, must instill the right kind of ideals, must
exert a redeeming influence upon its reader. To be
sure, the experienced ones among them are fully
aware of the dangers of obvious moralizing, but
they have mastered the devious ways of preaching
without arousing the reader’s suspicion that he
is being preached to.
It is this last point—the devious ways of unsuspected
preaching—that my profession is concerned
with. Either we are altogether silent on the subject
of religion in literature, deeming it too ticklish
a subject upon which to commit ourselves, or we
are zealous in our efforts to perpetuate the tradition
that literature must complement the work of the
church, only in a less outspoken way. Perhaps we
do not do it consciously but the results obtained
are the same. We merely advise students as to
what subjects may be exploited and what subjects
may not. Surely a subject bordering on the atheistic
could never be made salable; not more than two
or three periodicals would be open to such a story—and
these of the obscure, “freaky” kind. Without
a doubt even such a mild story as Balzac’s “An
Atheist’s Mass” could never have seen the light of
publication in an American periodical. The fact[86]
that the hero remains unconverted to the end would
be fatal. We may write a story about an atheist,
and have written such, but in our story, when the
dénouement comes, the hero must exclaim to the
assembled multitude, that he had tried to live without
God and had found it unprofitable. The fact
that there might be some poor wretch of a hero in
this queer wide world who would not issue such a
proclamation does not detract from the urgency of
such a dénouement. It is one of our devious ways;
without it the story can hope to travel no farther
than the return-to-author basket. The characters
we create must ultimately come to know God and
the church—or they never come to know the reader.
It is doubtful if an American Flaubert could hope
for as cordial a reception of an atheistic character
of his as the French have accorded the mediocre
M. Homais of “Madame Bovary” fame.
It is far from my purpose to leave the implication
that literature should preach atheism; but neither
should it preach religion, theology, or anything else,
for that matter, except in so far as life itself is a
sermon to whomever it pleases to view it as such.
“As a rule we may say that nothing in the world
improves one less than sermonizing books and conversations;
nothing is more wearisome, quite apart
from the fact that nothing is more inartistic....
We do not demand of an author that he should
work to make us better.... All that we[87]
can demand of him is that he work conscientiously.”[22]
The moment an author stoops to uplift
us he loses his balance as an artistic observer,
recorder, and interpreter.
The attitude of our literature toward religion is
based on a churchy interpretation of life and character
which was unconsciously but none the less comprehensively
expressed in a magazine article by Dr.
Frank Crane. “Church people,” he wrote, “as a
rule, pay their debts, observe the decencies of life,
are clean of mind and body, cultivate those qualities
that make for a successful and contented life, and
get along together peacefully. And, as a rule, the
embezzlers, thugs, drunkards, harlots, rascals, adulterers,
gamblers, and swindlers do not cultivate
church-going to any great extent.”[23]
This is a safe and sane doctrine to embrace when
writing fiction for the popular magazines. Our
editors, almost universally, have embraced it, and
even though the Reverend Doctor specifically states
that he speaks of people “as a rule,” which would
permit of exceptions, editors at large will not recognize
the existence of such exceptions. Truth does
not count and experience is an illusion. If a writer
has in his life had the misfortune of coming across
a man or woman who was kind, charitable, gentle,
moral, and noble and yet instead of being affiliated[88]
with a church was a member of the Secular League
and a subscriber to the Truth Seeker he would best
suppress the latter two points. If a writer has read
statistics of extra-generous donations made to various
church funds and has found among the names
of donors not a few of universally notorious embezzlers,
he must ignore the fact, if only in the interests
of his career. His motto must be: Never write
anything about church that could not be turned into
an advertisement of the institution. If the motto
conflicts with life, scratch life.
And yet religion, like sex, is one of the basic
forces of life; it has helped to shape the course of
human history and civilization. To deny the artist
the prerogative to touch upon it unless it be in
praise is to deny him the means to probe the human
soul. To compel him to accept any institution as
infallible and therefore beyond question of imperfection
is to fetter his spirit. That a man who is a
respected member of a respected church cannot be
a thief in his business life or a brute at home is a
more prostituting doctrine, the more so if not actually
believed in but adopted for commercial purposes
only, than any harlot was ever guided by,
because it is so flagrantly contrary to truth. That
the call of sex can never prove stronger than the
holiest of religious precepts is a malicious canon of
hypocritical dogmatism. This is the natural stuff
of literature—the dramatic conflicts and seeming[89]
paradoxes, physical, psychic and intellectual, the
eternal clash of nature and dogma, of passion and
idea, of man and the world.
Puny fledgelings come to us for instruction in
aerial literary navigation and we look in the tome
of Thou Shalt Nots and clip their weak little wings.
“Never dare to lift yourself more than a yard above
the earth,” we admonish; “and you’ll find it easier
if you use this trick and that,” we add. If, perchance,
one of them after awhile finds the fawning
breath of the earth too close and spreads its wings
and begins to soar up into the clear ether we shrug
our shoulders compassionately and say to the rest:
“Another young bird gone wrong.” It has broken
the limits of our taboos; it has tasted the wine of
pure ozone; it has heard the call of exploration; it
has turned irreverent. Should it succeed in growing
a few dazzling feathers by the time it comes
back in sight we may meet it with music and shout to
it the hospitality of our gardens—as a mark of our
ability to appreciate fine feathers; but more frequently
we let it starve to death and keep the music
for a touching funeral. During their lifetime we
have nothing to do with the irreverent....
4. Social and Political Problems
No literature is more afraid of a courageous presentation
of the social welter which America, in
common with all the rest of the world, is undergoing[90]
in this age of reconstruction, than American literature.
Not that it entirely fails to touch upon the
mighty problems that have shaken our national life,
but it still clings to an ancient sense of delicacy and
an orthodox point of view which determines what
may and may not be said. Whether a writer really
subscribes to the point of view which colors nearly
all of our efforts is immaterial; in order to sell his
product he must adopt it, irrespective of any protesting
personal scruples he might feel. Thus we
find our literature, with the exception of a small and
highly unprofitable part, expressing no more advanced
views on the social phenomena of the day
than our forefathers held, and most frequently less
advanced.
The editor of The Coming Nation, discussing the
kind of stories that are not wanted by film companies,
mentions, among others, stories “where the
hero arises and makes a soap-box speech on Socialism
converting all by-standers.”[24] This statement
applies with equal force to our magazine fiction as
well. That no respectable editor of a fiction periodical
will take such stories is a fact universally
known among people acquainted with prevailing
policies of our magazines. There would be nothing
sinister in this policy, it would even be highly laudable,
were it based on the logical assumption that
men’s minds are not so easily swayed and that therefore
[91]no audience of by-standers can be converted by
a single speech. But it is based on no such reasoning.
The fact is that the story depicting a
speaker converting by a few eloquent phrases,
let us say, a body of strikers, to the employer’s
point of view, impelling them to forsake their
scheming leaders, tainted by European gold,
of course, and return to work will and does find
a ready market. Even the lack of story values
are frequently overlooked where such a fictive incident
occurs. The greatest of our national weeklies
and monthlies will open their columns to the padded
dissertation in story disguise on the unreasonableness
of workingmen, or the inefficiency of government
control of industries, or the blessings of a Big
Business Administration.
What really determines the policy of exclusion of
certain topics or angles of presentation is the safe-guarding
of the interests of the big advertisers and
the personal prejudices of the publishers. Our
experienced writers, as well as the instructors of
student-writers who know their business, know these
prejudices perfectly. They know that popular views
“get by” even if the artistry is not so very obstrusive.
They know that unless one can fall in with
the established views of the great majority it is
best to leave social and political problems alone
and to write about the South Seas, or Alaska, or the
romantic story of John Jones, Jr., a son of a village[92]
blacksmith, who, after many thrilling hardships
finally married Ivy Van Schyler, the pampered heiress
of noble lineage and a huge block of sound railroad
stock. They even know such small details as
that if a hero uses soap, it is best not to mention it
by an existing brand, for it may offend advertisers
trying to fasten upon the public rival brands; that
“talking machine” is safer than “Victrola” or “Grafonola”
or any other patented name; that, in a
word, no free advertising be given any company,
thus causing other advertisers to complain. They
know that it is dangerous to make a character intimate
that his health has been impaired as a result
of drinking too much ginger-ale, or taking headache
powders, or yeast, or tobacco, or anything else, for
that matter, that advertisers sell. It makes no
difference whether a writer has accumulated a fund
of personal observation to corroborate his statement.
There are people who are trying to sell
these products and will surely lodge a protest with
the advertising manager of the publication in which
such a story appears. In fact, numerous cases
where such inadvertent remarks have resulted in
diminished advertising space are on record.
It is to the interest of these same all-powerful
advertisers to see that no aspersions be cast in our
magazine fiction upon the inalienable rights and
dignities of Business and that no dangerous views
be expressed which might sway a vigilantly guarded[93]
public mind in undesirable directions. Existing
social and political institutions may be defended in
our fiction but not attacked or criticized; their
merits may be extolled, but their demerits must not
be betrayed to an innocent world. Private property
is sacred; the State is always right—except
when it attempts to interfere with Property; then a
thinly veiled story decrying this interference as
autocratic, tyrannous and un-American might get by
and bring a fair price. Progress is a generality
that affects us but little; the laws of change are suspended
when applied to our literary reactions to
our social life. Other nations may develop new
schools of fictionists, young, virile, boldly speaking
their minds on the moot problems of the day. We
have no room for such impudence. Our literature
is “pure,” level-headed, conservative. Some isolated
muck-rakers appear here and there, but we
give them no outlet for their muck-raking, and they
must either reform or perish or, at best, when we
are helpless to prevent it, get a measure of barren
notoriety.
An army officer, an advanced student, once
handed in a splendidly written story of army life,
in which he gave a graphic portrayal of court-martial
proceedings. The apathy and criminal nonchalance
with which helpless boys were sentenced to
long-term imprisonment, in the name of discipline,
was so artistically woven into a thrilling plot that[94]
it made interesting reading even to the most avid
fiction devotees. Yet the story had gone the rounds
of nearly all the paying magazines without finding
a market. A few friendly editors wrote the author
personal letters, one editor going so far as to express
his appreciation of the work, but admitting
that the story was deemed “unavailable because it
does not meet with the policy of this publication.”
I supplied the discouraged author with a list of unconventional
publications—for fortunately we do
have a fighting number of them with us—that might
welcome his story but could afford to pay either
very little or not at all. He refused to waste his
work on the “freaks,” and wanted to know if he
could not revise the story to make it salable to a
standard magazine. I told him that elimination of
all incidents reflecting unfavorably upon the administration
of law in our army would undoubtedly
help. He protested that the incidents had been
taken from life and held out for a while, but finally
he succumbed to his intense desire to “get in.”
The story was revised and made perfectly harmless—“sweet”
and happy; it sold on its first trip. The
officer has never again attempted to use life as a
basis for fiction—indiscriminately. It was his first
altercation with policies—and probably his last.
It requires greater powers than he was blessed with
to put up a more valiant resistance.
It is a sad comment on education that under existing[95]
circumstances, instructors of writers are obliged
to help undermine this natural resistance a few rebellious
spirits occasionally display. One whose
entire stock in trade is a knowledge of markets and
policies and an ability to expound existing standards
is not in a very advantageous position to encourage
disregard of immutable taboos. We must say, on
reading a story which is off-standard, that it won’t
sell, and why. We must formulate and enforce
the rules that make for “success” in fiction writing.
We must be vestals of the sacred fires. I am aware
that “vestals” is not exactly the right word one
should use in this connection; perhaps another word
connoting less virtue would be more apt. But,
after all, most of us are honest, and zealously believe
that the fires are sacred and must not be allowed
to go out or be polluted. Vision? Well,—aren’t
the blind happy?
5. Americanism
As applied to our literature the term American
has come to mean everything and anything. It
compliments the mediocre twaddle of mediocre
minds. To earn the compliment a story must be
neither sad nor “fresh” nor irreverent nor “red.”
It must not be burdened with too much thought or
sincere emotion. It must have no glimmer of an
original idea. It must “kiss the hand that feeds
it,”—which means in this case that it must breathe[96]
a sweet humility to all our institutions, from the
First Law of the land to the American Legion and
Babe Ruth. It must be “glad to be alive and carry
on”—everything that is old and respectable and
decrepit and green with mold.
Let a piece of literary art reflect an unhackneyed
thought, let it break any one of our ancient taboos,
let it dare to belittle any one of our glorified generalities
and dogmas—and it is promptly howled
down as un-American. The literature of every
other country on earth affords an interpretative and
critical view of the psychology of the national mind
it reflects, while American literature is least reflective
of the American national mind, except in one
particular: its cringing fear of the truth. Were it
not for this fear to face the truth, and the inability
of the average American to stand criticism, the
great bulk of our “literature” would find no buyers
and its content would undergo a radical change.
It is this national trait that has given rise to the sublime
injunction, “Don’t knock!” We may have
heard of Matthew Arnold, but surely never of his
heretic doctrine that literature is a criticism of life.
To us literature is largely a matter of so many
words at so much per word, or so many hugs and
kisses and careers attained per magazine page.
Is it to be wondered at that with us we have the
interminable problem: What shall we write about?
With one of the largest countries in the world in[97]
which to live; with over one hundred millions of
people living and working and battling and dreaming
all about us; with a multitude of perplexing
problems, international, national, municipal, class,
clan, and individual, clamoring for solution; with a
rich, ever-shifting panorama of a young, virile,
national existence before us; with a million comedies
and a million tragedies avidly looking at our typewriter
keys—with all this to be had for the taking,
isn’t it pathetically absurd that we must voyage the
seven seas and scour all the corners of the earth in
search of material? Open any magazine any
month and note the proportion of stories located
in far, out-of-the-way places. Even our best writers
are following this romantic bent. Twenty-five per
cent. of the stories contained in O’Brien’s “Year-book”
for 1919 had a foreign setting; his “Year-book”
for 1920 contained over thirty per cent. of
stories with foreign settings—mostly exotic and
bizarre. No serious objections could be taken to
transcribing the life of foreign places, if we had
first become aware of our own. But we have not.
We hunt for foreign material simply because we are
afraid to sift our own. We are only now beginning
to realize that our young continent—this huge,
crude meltingpot—is filled with brass and copper
and gold, and that these metals are melting and
fusing into some homogeneous substance, which we
vaguely term America. We want this burst of consciousness[98]
to grow and sweep us along to great
revelations, but a false pride and obsolete traditions
and hypocritical dogmas are blocking the way.
Parrot-like we shout from pulpit and rostrum and
cathedra the old banality: “Boost! All the world
loves a booster!” And because we like to be loved
we dare not touch upon the wounds of life—the hunger,
the passions, the buffets, the defeats that purge
its sordidness, gild its drabness, and actuate us to
nobler aspirations.
We pride ourselves that we have developed the
short story to perfection. It has become our
national form of literary expression. It has
reached an unparalleled vogue. But, in truth, if we
are entitled to pride, it is on account of our remarkable
achievement of an ability to tell an entertaining
tale without telling anything worth while.
Paradoxically, we squeeze amusement out of
nothing. We have attained an excellence of workmanship
without the least depth of substance. But
I am anticipating. This phase of the subject is so
important that it deserves a chapter for itself, which
it will receive later on. The real perfection of our
short story is yet to come. The signs are that it is
having its birth pangs at this time. Writers of
rich promise have come to the fore recently—and
here and there a magazine, either new or an old
one with a new policy, to receive their product.
Our perfected short story will be bold, fearless,[99]
vital; beating with the vigorous pulse of a giant
nation stretching its limbs. It will be truly American—optimistic,
with the rugged optimism of a
Walt Whitman; brave, with the courage of an impetuous
youth; rich, with the colors of a fertile soil
and a blending humanity. Perhaps our short story
is to fulfill the hopes H. G. Wells once had for the
novel:
“The novel,” he wrote in An Englishman Looks
at the World, “is to be the social mediator, the
vehicle of understanding ... the criticism of
laws and institutions and of social dogmas and
ideas.... We are going to write ...
about the whole of human life. We are going to
deal with political questions and religious questions
and social questions ... until a thousand pretenses
and ten thousand impostures shrivel in the
cold clear air of our elucidations.... Before
we have done we will have all life within the scope
of the novel.”
A lofty assignment, this, for a form of literature
that is rooted, as our short story always has been,
in the precept that to be interesting it must eschew
reality. But we can carry it out—and will. Our
pioneers are already on the trail—weak as yet, not
a full-grown Chekhov among them—but gaining in
hardihood, and singing. The hordes behind them
are waiting in safety; let the trail become a bit
smoother, the hardships lessened, and they will[100]
follow. In the meantime who that is filled with that
eternally human envious admiration for pluck can
keep back his “Good cheer!” and “Godspeed!”?
[101]
CHAPTER VI
The Artificial Ending
One of the surest tags of the American short
story has been its happy ending. No matter what
vicissitudes the hero or heroine may have undergone,
what problems and tragedies may have overtaken
them, what unmendable exploits of circumstance or
fate they may have been subjected to, in the end
all must be well with them. The happy ending is a
direct result of our uplift optimism, of our Pollyanna
philosophy of life, of our fear of reality. We
have always justified it on the ground of our national
psychology, which, we claim, is buoyant and aggressive
and won’t accept defeat. We have insisted
that the American always “gets what he wants
when he wants it.” And even the cynics among us
did not dispute our last claim; they pointed to the
happy ending.
It is true that of late, since it has become the
fashion to question everything, the happy ending
has come in for its share of blasphemous discussion.
Here and there views have been expressed that a
happy ending is not absolutely necessary to make a
story readable; some of these views are so decidedly[102]
antagonistic as to maintain that a happy ending
is invariably inartistic, which simply proves, again,
that rebound is directed with equal force but in
opposite direction as the original bound. Even
aspiring story writers come in occasionally inoculated
with doubt of the very propriety of the happy
ending. To such, we the votaries of the perfect
short story, having exhausted all our erudite arguments
in a vain attempt at reconversion, finally
apply the one unfailing argument—the threat of
the editorial rejection slip. The happy ending, we
admit, may not always be artistic, and it may not
always bring an acceptance, but the unhappy ending
almost invariably brings a rejection.
The fallacy of the happy ending clearly illustrates
the lack of any sound system of thought or reasoning
underlying the exposition and production of
American fiction. We have the support of venerable
theories and formulas and high-sounding
abstractions, but not of facts and logic. It is as if
we dared not examine the result of the application
of our theories and the filling of our formulas.
Glibly we state the psychology of the average American
reader, which we profess to know so well, but
do not care to assure ourselves whether our deductions,
and even our major premises are correct. For
if it were true that the average reader always
demands a happy ending, we would have no explanation
of the popularity of most of the works of Poe,[103]
Bret Harte, Jack London, Kipling, Conrad, Maupassant,
and even the gray Russians. Doubtless
there are individual characteristics in the writings
of these gentlemen that have appealed to our happily
disposed readers, but how much of the appeal has
been due to a vogue created by official O. K.’ers?
The inchoate reversion to an insistence on the
unhappy ending, which is becoming apparent among
some layers of our reading public, tends to confirm
this suggestion. For it is not probable that
the same people who have never been able to enjoy
a story unless it ended happily should suddenly
have been seized with a passionate amour for the
“morbid” ending; and, from any rational point of
view, it is just as fallacious to accept the unhappy
ending as an invariable rule as it is to accept the
happy ending. One may be as artificial as the other.
Manifestly there are kinks in the average reader’s
psychology of which we have not been aware, or
if we have, have paid little attention to. This psychology
which we have taken for granted and
builded upon is not after all so solid as we have
supposed it to be. It can be and is being molded.
It appears that the present-day average reader fears
nothing so much as the imputation of being average.
Here and there a brave soul may vociferously boast
of being a “low-brow,” thus betraying a troubled
consciousness of mediocrity, but on the whole the
tendency is to deplore the tastes of the average,[104]
thereby imputing to one’s self, by implication of
contrast, the possession of tastes above those of
the average. Hence the sudden ability to enjoy an
unhappy ending. Hence also the distrust of the
average editor of this sudden growth in taste. He
knows its make-believe nature: the average reader
may learn to pretend a dislike for the good old
happy ending, but in truth he enjoys it as much as
he ever did. Hence the continued demand for
stories with happy endings.
This may not be such a cheering view of the
average reader’s psychology, but neither is it
entirely cheerless. By exploiting its hypocritical
vein of pretended admiration for good literature,
we may hope ultimately to develop a genuine
admiration. People of habitual coarse tastes, for
beverages, delicacies, clothes or arts, usually begin
the refining process by affecting the tastes of those
whom they think their betters. The process itself
is rather long and tedious and often disheartening.
But the aping instinct helps measurably. We cannot
hope to have a discriminating reading public in a
day. Too long have we impressed upon our public
the blessings of a happy disposition and the artistry
of reflecting it in our literature. Too long have we
brazened about our pride in Pollyanna, Wallingford,
Torchy, and a hundred other fictive chasers of
the blues, who won’t take defeat but go on singing
on their way. The happy story, with its breezy[105]
style, its giggling climax, and its smacking dénouement
has become a fixed type from which our
readers’ affection cannot be so quickly alienated.
D. W. Griffith, one of the ablest producers of
moving pictures, is reported to have made the statement
that the average spectator of cinema drama
has the intelligence of a nine-year-old child.[25] That
Mr. Griffith is justified in his statement may be
assumed from the huge success he has had in purveying
cinema entertainment. He has made millions
where others have made scanty half-millions.
Verily, he knows his public and is in a position to
estimate its mental powers with some measure of
accuracy. His contempt of its intelligence does him
credit....
One of his greatest successes has been his production
of “Way Down East,” a spectacular melodrama
of the old angel-girl-Satan-man variety,
with a resulting illegitimate baby which happily
sees fit to die, leaving the little mother to find work
with a good Christian family. But her past is
against her and she is finally driven out into a
terrible snow-storm by a man who quotes the Bible
by the yard, and the women in the audience wet
their little handkerchiefs, and the men hawk and
cough and blow their noses. The big scene of the
picture, and which is probably responsible for
seventy-five per cent. of the picture’s phenomenal[106]
success, shows a whole river of ice floating down
toward a furiously-dashing waterfall. The poor
little heroine is on one of the huge cakes of ice fast
nearing the watery precipice, while the good boy
who loves her honestly is jumping like an acrobat
after her in the teeth of a raging storm.
Now, all the moving-picture patrons in the country,
from the past experience of having witnessed
one thousand pictures and read ten thousand magazine
stories, ought to know that there is not one
chance in a million that the plucky lover will not
arrive in time to rescue his sweetheart—such things
have not happened and do not happen (in our
stories, of course!), yet they become wide-eyed and
panting with excitement, as if they were in doubt
about the outcome. Griffith uses the “cut-back”
every ten or twenty feet, showing the thundering
falls, the crashing ice with the limp figure of the
girl upon it, the boy precariously maintaining his
balance, then back again to the falls; thus prolonging
the agony until he thinks the public has got its
money’s worth; then the boy arrives, clasps the girl
in his arms, his erring Christian father asks her
forgiveness and welcomes her as a prospective
daughter-in-law, and the public file out in the lobby,
exclaiming ecstatically to one another: “What a
masterpiece!” Verily, this Mr. Griffith knew
whereof he spoke.
Our public is still thrilled with a climax of whose[107]
outcome there ought to be not the slightest doubt.
Which merely proves that if our fiction still has a
measure of suspense it is not due to our clever technique
but to the almost fabulous stupidity of the
large mass of readers. We have evolved our tricks
of technique for the prime purpose of maintaining
a keen suspense, of keeping the outcome of the conflict
which every story must have in the balance, of
heightening the reader’s curiosity to follow the destiny
of the hero or heroine in whose behalf his
sympathies have been enlisted to a satisfactory end.
But if after, let us say, twenty years of reading
fiction, there should suddenly dawn upon our average
reader’s mind the idea that as the hero or heroine
of a story is always immortal and unconquerable
in the end, no matter how circumstances may
appear to be against him or her for the moment,
would not our skillfully woven suspense suffer a
severe jolt? Of what use would it be to fear for the
safety of the trapped little girl when a dogged confidence,
gained by profitable experience in reading,
would suggest that she is due at the altar on page
five and would inevitably keep her appointment? Of
what use would be taking seriously the pugilistic
encounters of the Man-Who-Can’t-Be-Knocked-Out?
Why thrill with anxiety over an overturned
automobile when it is certain that the hero pinned
underneath it will have sustained nothing more
serious than a few scratches that must heal before[108]
the final sentence is completed? What would
become of all our tricks and ingenuity and inventiveness?
Would not this one convention of the invariably
happy ending then defeat all our efforts at
creating suspense? And if that happened would it
not be the direst calamity to all we have worked for,
to the entire mechanism of our “perfect” story?
The preceding paragraph is prophetic of what
ultimately must happen. As yet that day may be
far off in the hazy distance, but when it comes the
philosophy of our short story must undergo a complete
metamorphosis. Its own glaring contradictions,
if not external influences, must ultimately bring
that about. To preach Suspense as the highest law,
then kill it at its very inception by another law of
the happy ending is an absurdity that cannot long
remain unapparent even to a nine-year-old intelligence.
Meantime the reaction noted in some quarters
toward the invariably unhappy ending is just as
sinister an influence toward the rise of another
absurdity. Whether this reaction be sincere—as in
the case of those who have been fed with glucose
fiction ad nauseam—or merely fashionable—as in
the case of most of the Left Wing of our present-day
average reading public—if crystallized and perpetuated
as a dogma it is bound to constitute a
serious hindrance in the evolution of the short story.
Once and for all we must come to an acceptance of[109]
the truth that there can be but one kind of an ending
to a story—whether happy or unhappy—and that
is the logical one, an ending which is a direct inevitable
outgrowth of the story itself. No law can be
made that would apply to all stories; each story
generates its own laws. The question of repugnance
or preferences of the reader does not enter here at
all. The question of cause and effect, of intelligent
probability gaged by a keen observation of the laws
or lack-of-laws of reality—this question alone must
become paramount and decisive.
It is true that the noblest literary works, from the
dramas of Æschylus to the present day, have all
been tinged with sadness—Maupassant’s definition
of literature as being a mirror of life, proving a true
one. Also that other one—is it by Goethe?—that
literature is the conscience of the human race. In
the world of men, with the dark mystery of death
as an ever-present certainty, thus sowing a sense of
the futility of all human aspirations and achievement
in the hearts of even the most aggressive of
us; with a lurking consciousness of insurmountable
limitations besetting our fondest dreams; with a still
more pronounced consciousness that the maturing
of dreams frequently marks their decay, and almost
always marks the thawing of their dewy glitter—in
such a world, literature, welling up from the depths
of inner consciousness, cannot help being tinged with
sadness. In fact, the vast bulk of the world’s literary[110]
masterpieces consists of tragedies. The sooner
this fundamental fact is woven into the fiber of
American fiction the sooner will American fiction
become the mirror of American life and the conscience
of the American people.
But this solemn historic consideration does not
justify the adoption of a rigid rule that an unhappy
ending of a story is artistic and that a happy one is
always inartistic. Least of all could it be justified
in its application to the short story, which frequently
deals with but a single incident in the life of a character
rather than with a complete history. There
are infinitely more probabilities of ultimate defeat
in a complete history than in a single experience.
Death is not always the price of an adventure, nor
disillusionment that of an undertaking. Conrad’s
“Youth,” melancholy as it is with the breath of
finiteness of all our glorious epochs, has no tragic
ending. The young commander has dared through
stress and storm and adversity, has pitted the
strength of his youth against that of the sea and has
come out victorious, glowing with the symbolic message:
“Do or Die!” And though, when he recounts
the narrative of that first command of his,
youth is far behind him, he is filled with lyric memories
of it far sweeter than his distant exploit itself.
Mary E. Wilkins Freeman’s “Revolt of Mother”
ends happily and yet logically and artistically. Perhaps
in her next encounter with her hard-hearted[111]
and hard-headed husband Mother won’t be as successful,
but in this one which Mrs. Freeman had
chosen to relate, she carries the day. Maupassant’s
“Moonlight” ends well. The old Abbé realizes
that “God perhaps has made such nights as this to
clothe with his ideals the loves of men,” and
the young couple can henceforth love unmolested.
James Branch Cabell’s “Wedding Jest” ends happily,
although satirically—the point of the story—not
a happy one by any means—being contained particularly
in the ending. An enumeration of all the
great short stories that have happy endings would
make a paragraph of considerable length.
From any technical point of view the unhappy
ending, when canonized into a convention, will
defeat any skill and ingenuity or even natural artistry
in the maintenance of suspense. After a while
readers will learn that every story must end unhappily
and will be on their guard. Already the few
periodicals that have made a convention of the unconventional
ending are suffering a depressing monotony.
There really is no reason for following the
love illusions of the unsophisticated heroine when it
is certain that disillusionment awaits her in the end.
Nor is there reason for feeling elated over the success
of our hero when we know that it is temporary,
that it is only a matter of paragraphs or pages
before this success will be turned into defeat.
If then we arrive at the conclusion that neither[112]
the happy ending nor the tragic ending is in itself
an indication of artistry, but must be considered in
its relation to the story it ends, we arrive at a
view which is at once rational and simple—so
simple, in fact, that it seems banal to emphasize it.
In the matter of endings we have been thinking in
terms of producing the greatest effect, totally ignoring
their inevitability as culminating points of given
sets of plot influences. We know that the end of
a story marks an emphatic place which leaves the
greatest impression upon the reader’s mind; it is,
rhetorically, a strategic point, and therefore we concentrate
all our surprises, our jugglery, our uplift
message and our disposition upon this point. We
want the reader to go away smiling, or pleasantly
startled, or, if we write for the conventionally unconventional
publication, unpleasantly satisfied.
The fact that a writer after having set his characters
in motion and allowing them to act and react
upon the various forces of the plot, to mold and be
molded, has no power over the ending other than
that of guiding the threads of his story—characters,
motives and circumstances—to the end they are
logically bound for, is as yet obscure among us. We
are associating the ending with its impressions upon
the reader, with its gallery value—rather than with
the soul of the story. As Mr. Carl Van Doren,
former literary editor of The Nation and now of
The Century has expressed it: “According to all[113]
the codes of the more serious kinds of fiction, the
unwillingness—or the inability—to conduct a plot to
its legitimate ending implies some weakness in the
artistic character.”[26]
This weakness that Mr. Van Doren refers to in
reality arises from our very conception of the function
of fiction and the motives that govern its
birth. In a majority of cases the prime motive for
writing a story is to obtain a check from a publisher;
the dazzling figures cited in our newspapers and
writers’ magazines as the incomes of some fictionists
exert an irresistible appeal. The constant hammering
upon literature as a commodity which can be
and is being produced as any other commodity at
such and such a price, the size being determined
upon its ability to perform the clownish function of
supplying a laugh or a thrill to the largest number
of T. B. M.’s or T. B. W.’s, is another influence
responsible for this weakness. That fiction is a
medium for the expression of a writer’s reactions
to his business of living is a view that mighty few
of our writers, editors, and literary savants seem
to hold. So that the fallacy of the happy ending,
and of the unhappy ending as well, is inevitably
bound up with the larger fallacy of mistaking the
manufacture of stories for the function of literature.
[114]
CHAPTER VII
Form and Substance
Jack London in his confessions of his struggle for
recognition as a writer gives this formula for success
in literature: Health, Work, and a Philosophy of
Life. Health is necessary, of course, in order to
do any hard work, and in a world against which old
Malthus railed, nothing can be attained without
hard work. But it is the value of the third ingredient
which is most often overlooked and the absence
of which is responsible for the failure of most of
our literary output to rise above the level of mediocrity.
We have noted, in another place, that Jack
London himself, in the bulk of his production, failed
to strike more than an occasional deep and sincere
chord, but it was not because his ear was faulty;
it was simply because his audience rejected precisely
the deep chord.
Let it be understood that by a philosophy of life
Jack London did not refer to any definite view on
economic reform or social regeneration. Narrow,
limited, prejudiced views have but little place in
literature; if presented by the hand of an artist,
they may appeal for a short time, but never for very[115]
long. Great writers there have been who were not
as actively engaged in the squabbles of the world as
Jack London was and who did not take definite
sides in the skirmishes of any generation but they
have all had a philosophy of life none the less, in
that they have all had a broad, philosophic comprehension
of the basic laws which govern human life
and actions; of causes and effects conducive to
human suffering and happiness; and of the reactions
of these basic laws upon the author himself so that
he is able to present them from a definite angle—his
angle.
It is the possession of this individual angle upon
the everlasting panorama of life and death which
distinguishes the vital master from the flabby
mechanic. We might call it philosophy of life,
independence of mind, originality, idealism, or what
not, in all cases it makes for substance—the thing
by which a work of art lives.
No slight is intended on the value of form in
literature. If the appropriate masterful form
clothes this vital substance, so much the better, of
course, but it is the substance that is the protoplasm.
Form follows fads and fashions, and is decidedly
mortal; substance alone illustrates the immutable
law of the indestructibility of matter. With all
their beautiful rhetoric and genial humor, the Spectator
and Tatler papers of Addison and Steele are
mildly entertaining dead matter today, but the tragedies[116]
and comedies of the Bard of Avon are as
appealing today as three centuries ago, even though
handicapped by a form no longer in vogue. Dostoyevsky’s
novels, to take a more modern example,
were written in a style as clumsy and uncouth as
ever novels could be written in, but their burning
pages sear the souls of men who read them. The
gift of substance is in them—a fiery miracle, an
Apocalypse.
The one supremely outstanding feature in our
American fiction is its lack of substance. Some of
us have the O. Henry style and some of us have the
Henry James style and still others have the Washington
Irving or the Poe style; some of us can plot
and others can end a story with a flourish; some
possess a dazzling vocabulary and others are genii
of rhetoric—but how many have something sustaining
to impart to a world drowning in platitudes?
How much of worth has our fiction added to the
world’s sum of comprehension of beauty, of truth?
We have developed schools and systems of teaching
and learning how to say things; we have bent every
effort toward the evolving of a science of expression
only to find that we have been too busy expressing
to acquire what to express. American ethics has
always been a point of national pride, but we have
never applied it to the art of talking brilliantly when
one has nothing to say. As George Macdonald
once put it: “... If a man has nothing to[117]
communicate, there is no reason why he should have
a good style, any more than why he should have a
good purse without any money, or a good scabbard
without any sword.”
Again, the acquisition of nobility of form is not
to be discouraged, but the possession of something
to tell the world is the sublimest of gifts, and gains
the world’s everlasting gratitude; and the greatest
seeming anomaly in the conditions under which
American literature is produced is that this gift is
not only rated at a discount but fought, vilified,
grappled with. The only way the gift can be
acquired, if it can, is through an insatiable interest
in the stuff and forms of life; but such interest leads
to inquiry and inquiry leads to heresy; venerable
taboos are broken. The anomaly becomes a normal
result of an inferior conception of the rights and
functions of literature. Prejudices are placed above
art; policies above truth; words above meanings.
Once, at a suffrage gathering, a young writer was
introduced by a friend to a famous writer whose
encouragement the beginner desired. At the end of
the evening the friend asked the famous writer for
his impressions of the budding genius. “I have not
read any of his work,” the famous writer answered,
“but I am afraid he has not the makings of a genius.
The way he snubbed the poor girl I introduced him
to merely because she is a salesgirl indicates that
he lacks the voracious interest in the human element[118]
which marks the true artist. How is he ever going
to talk Man when he doesn’t know Man?”
Voracious interest—that’s the path that leads to
the gift of substance, to the “philosophy of life,”
the original angle! Cæsar saw before he conquered.
And he had to come a long way before
he could see. But he wanted to see. And it is
wanting to see that is the whip of genius. Dickens
walked the streets of London for hours, through
rain and fog and slush and shine, because he wanted
to see it, all of it, every nook and corner of it. Balzac
tramped the length and breadth of Paris,
haunted parks and shops and drawing-rooms, because
the human comedy appealed to him. The
Russian Kuprin dressed himself in a diver’s suit
and had himself lowered many fathoms into the
Black Sea because he wanted to experience the
sensations of a diver. And Jack London
circled the globe because he wanted to see what
it is like.
A little class-room episode comes to mind. In
the poetry class Carl Sandburg came up for discussion.
A few of his Chicago poems were read
when a fair would-be poet spoke up in protest. “I
have lived in Chicago all my life,” she said, “and
have never seen the things Sandburg sees!” But
there was another student in the room, a very unobtrusive
little girl sitting somewhere in the back of
the room, and she suddenly came to her instructor’s[119]
rescue. “That’s why you are not Sandburg!”
she exclaimed....
The true artist is the perpetual explorer. He
cannot invent the substance of his work, but he can
discover it in the life of nature and his fellow-men.
And the more he sees the more he learns to see, for
to be able to see the new and unexplored in the old
and elemental is the highest art in itself. A hunchback
to a child in the streets is an object to throw
stones at, to a Victor Hugo he is a grand, heroic figure,
fierce and glorious in his pathetic grandeur. A
typhoon to a Chinese fisherman represents the wrath
of his god for the omission of a prayer or a sacrifice;
to Joseph Conrad it symbolizes the majestic resentment
of the Sea itself against man’s desecration of
its peace and beauty and mystery. Only the American
artist knows no symbols and is warned against
attempting to know.
Our great cry has always been: “Acquire form!”
Grammar, rhetoric, metrics, technique—these have
been the indispensable tools of our writers. They
still are. But having acquired them our writers
find they can fashion nothing beautiful, nothing
lasting, nothing that will weather the storms of time.
For no tools, no matter how sharp or perfect, can
accomplish the feat of fashioning something out of
vacuum. The American story always has laid
claims to style—but it hasn’t lived. Writers have
come and had their vogue and gone. Even years[120]
back when style was more leisurely and rounded,
when the badge of haste was not upon it, Charles
Dudley Warner remarked: “We may be sure that
any piece of literature which attracts only by some
trick of style, however it may blaze up for a day and
startle the world with its flash, lacks the element of
endurance. We do not need much experience to
tell us the difference between a lamp and a Roman
candle.”
This remark can be elaborated on, explained,
complemented. The truth is that there can be no
style without substance. These elements are not
separate entities; only superficially do they seem to
be. How much sweetness can a “sweet nothing”
contain? How much beauty can a work of “art”
contain which has emptiness of thought and ugliness
of conception? How much truth can be embedded in
a fundamental falsehood? Every great poet has
found the soul of his poem determining its form.
Great style grows from within—it is an off-shoot of
great substance. To the American writer this relationship
has never been apparent; and most of our
critics, professing a lofty æstheticism from the
shadows of their academies, have never paid attention
to it. Our literature cannot boast the possession
of a single lucid outline of this vital relationship
between form and substance such as the following
from Remy de Gourmont’s “Le Probleme du Style.”
I wonder how many authors of textbooks exhorting[121]
American would-be authors to learn the cabalistic
lore of expression have ever read this:
“A new fact or a new idea is worth more than
a fine phrase. A lovely phrase is a lovely thing and
so is a lovely flower. But their duration is almost
the same—a day, a century. Nothing dies more
swiftly than a style which does not rest upon the
solidity of vigorous thinking. Such a style shrivels
like a stretched skin; it falls in a heap as ivy
does from the rotten tree that once gave it
support....
“It is probably an error to attempt to distinguish
between form and substance.... There is no
such thing as amorphous matter; all thought has
a limit, hence a form, since it is a partial representation
of true or possible, real or imaginary life. Substance
engenders form exactly as the tortoise and
the oyster do the materials of their respective
shells....
“Form without a foundation, style without
thought—what a poor thing it is!...
“If nothing lives in literature except by its style,
that is because works well thought out are invariably
well written. But the converse is not true.
Style alone is nothing....
“The sign of the man in any intellectual work is
the thought. The thought is the man. And style
and thought are one.”[27]
[122]
If we were candid enough the proper answer to
make to this brilliant Frenchman would be: “Who
told you that literature is an ‘intellectual work’?”
But we are not candid enough. Only in our strictly
professional journals do we dare liken literature to
cobbling or tin-smithing or hod-carrying; in the
official world, in our lectures and book-reviews, we
consider it an art and talk of Muses and Pegasus
and all the artistic divinities of Mount Olympus
and Chillicothe.
A simple confession will not be amiss here. This
discussion has been largely a plea for the man and
woman who would find in literature, and in the
short story specifically, the relief of a burdened
soul. The influences that would withhold this relief
are multitudinous and powerful. The struggle is
unequal and pathetic. But of the hundreds of
literary aspirants that have come to my personal
notice only an isolated individual here and there was
blessed with any kind of a burden. The vast multitude
of souls were cheerfully lightweight and unencumbered.
These aspirants came to study technique
so that they might learn how to write salable stories,
but they had no stories to tell. Some of them believed
they could become great story writers because
when at school they had received excellent marks in
composition; others claimed on more general
grounds a gift of expression and they wished to put
it to practical use. That it was necessary to have[123]
lived in order to write of life was a thought that had
never occurred to them. They were blissfully unaware
of such a necessity. They needed form, nothing
else, and applied themselves conscientiously toward
its acquisition. The irony of the whole matter
is that they actually estimated their deficiency accurately:
form was what they wanted, and nothing
else. After a while they began to sell. In all cases
the unhappy aspirants who were plagued with
thoughts and emotions have found it harder to sell,
no matter how much excellence of form they succeeded
in acquiring. In the field of the American
short story, the “lightweights” have it, so far.
It is true, of course, that even a lightweight must
have something to clothe with his all-potent form—be
it a skeleton ever so rattling. But that has been
answered in Chapter IV on the Moving Pictures.
There are themes a-plenty, airy, optimistic, harmless
themes that no respectable editor, reader, or Board
of Censorship can object to. They can be adapted
and readapted an infinity of times, provided each
time a new twist or a “different” trick is introduced.
All our themes seem to have divided themselves
into two grand classes: Stereotyped themes out of
which stories are made, and Life themes out of
which literature is made. The first class contains
an abundance of material that any one might have
for the taking, but which to make salable requires all
the tricks of form that we have so flamboyantly[124]
evolved to disguise its hackneyed origin. The
second class contains all the substances of existence
that only those that feel their kinship thereto can
transmute into literature. All the style and form
that the science of writing can teach cannot hope
to produce one breathing story unless the theme is
eloquent with this kinship. Such is the story of
genius—the story that lives and endures. Such a
story may or may not have mechanical values; it
will captivate and thrill; ruffle and soothe; make
and destroy. Such a story will be found to have a
theme not chosen with an eye for gallery approval;
not even because the writer himself approves of it.
One cannot approve or disapprove of the stuff he
is made of. One merely accepts it. After all there
is only one theme—inexhaustible—out of which genuine
literature has always been and always will be
made, perhaps it is the simple theme of Tagore’s
court poet: “The theme of Krishna, the lover god,
and Radha, the beloved, the Eternal Man and the
Eternal Woman, the sorrow that comes from the
beginning of time, and the joy without end.”[28]
[125]
CHAPTER VIII
Finale
There is more than a modicum of depression,
then, in a contemplative sweep of the literary product
we are instrumental in creating. Even the
most complacent members in my profession must
find it so. For one thing, the very lack of variety
in the finished product we so painstakingly cultivate
must occasionally become irksome, if nothing more
serious. Analyzing stories by a hundred different
writers, both successful and would-be, and all of
these stories with one puny soul must in the end
become a very tiresome routine indeed.
It is true that we are not masters of the situation.
Who are we to set up standards and direct the footsteps
of the young toward them? We are but the
interpreters of existing standards and the formulators
and expositors of ways that lead to the meeting
of the exaction imposed by them. But if an
uneasy thought sometimes, at dusk, buzzes into our
incautious ear that the existing standards lead to
unregenerate mediocrity, should we not pause and
ask if perpetuating these standards is for the good
of our souls or even for the work we love (and a[126]
great many of us really do love our work!)? Perhaps
a revision of our texts—if not a bonfire—might
result in fewer stories but more inspiring ones.
Perhaps the demolition of magazine standards
might result in the birth of literary standards. As
it is, should we not face the truth that all the masters
that have ever manipulated pen or typewriter
have disregarded our standards and set up new ones
of their own? They may not have gone to the
extent of a Kipling who wrote to a beginner that
“No man’s advice is the least benefit in our business,
and I am a very busy man. Keep on trying until
you either fail or succeed.” They all have looked
for and accepted intelligent advice of one kind or
another—from eminent contemporaries and from
those that had preceded them. But they have not
slavishly copied and imitated. They have not felt
that any advice had the power of divine commandment.
No real artist could be expected to create
anything in the environment of the rubrics and inhibitions
with which we have surrounded him.
All the blame that can be heaped upon the public
and our magazine editors does not absolve the literary
clergy from the share of harm they have contributed
to the existing state of the American short
story. The cheapest form of advertising and the
most erudite and conscientious of our textbooks
combine in the creation of a peculiar psychology that
a story is some concoction that any one might learn[127]
to make up by mere exertion. Here is a typical
advertisement appearing on the back page of a current
magazine:
HOW I MADE $350.00 ON ONE SHORT STORY
And How I Learned To Write, In Only a Few
Evenings, Stories That Actually Sell Themselves.
Then follows a full-page testimony of some one who
has made a great success of story-writing by spending
the small sum of $5 on the course advertised.
The course itself was prepared by a leading professor
in a leading eastern university and whose
name is well-known in the literary world. And
almost every important textbook on the subject
abounds in statements such as the following taken
from one of the most intelligent works: “the events
which go to make up a fictional plot are artificially
arranged so as to bring about a particular result,”[29]
besprinkled with numerous analogies to the various
trades and professions and how long it takes for
the average apprentice to become an accomplished
artizan. The psychology of tricks and twists and
points is foisted upon the writer, the reader, the
editor. By constant repetition we ourselves begin
to acquire it, if we had it not when we started....
And yet this short volume is not wholly pessimistic.
I would not want to leave that impression.
For as already stated there have always been writers
with a real touch of divine afflatus who have never[128]
paid any attention either to our psychology or to
our tricks, or to our inhibitions. “Every fine artist
in American fiction will be seen to have discarded
both the technical and moral pattern of the magazine
tradition and to have developed one of his
own.”[30] And the number of these heretics is growing—much
faster than some of us are aware.
They suffer obscurity and often poverty as all great
heretics always have suffered, but they have the fortitude
of their calling. Let us listen to the confession
of one of them:
“... However, you know that the short-story form has become
among us very much what I call corrupt. Publishers of short
stories sought what they called the story with a kick in it. Plots
for short stories were found and about these plots our writers
sought to hang a semblance of reality to life. The plot, however,
being uppermost in the writers’ minds, what we got was a
snappy, entertaining, artificial thing, forgotten completely an
hour after it was read.
“Perhaps because of a native laziness, I found myself unable
to think up plots. To try to do so bored me unspeakably. On
the other hand, there were all about me human beings living
their lives and in the process of doing so creating drama....
“I have tried to clutch at it and reproduce in writing some of
that drama....”[31]
When the problem involved is what to tell, the
sharpening of the faculty of seeing what is worth
while, the problem of how to tell becomes of secondary
importance. In fact the same literary heretic
believes that “An impulse needs but be strong
enough to break through the lack of technical training
[129]... technical training might well destroy the
impulse....”[32]
Along with the author of “Winesburg, Ohio,”
and “The Triumph of the Egg,” there are a host of
other writers freshly reacting to life and honestly
striving to embody their reactions into stories. It is
strange to us, accustomed as we are to clever artificiality,
it is even grotesque—this simplicity, naturalness,
and daring, but it marks the birth of the American
short story—that colorful short form which is
destined to become the most perfect artistic expression
of our national life. After all, to the true artist
the public is no problem, it being composed primarily
of himself alone. As Sherwood Anderson expressed
it in another passage of the interview quoted above:
“I would like a little to understand myself in this
mixup, and I am writing with that end in view.”
The curse of catering to the public has been a fallacy
as great as that of our technique; we have
assumed that fiction is made to order for a public,
just as we have taught that technique comes first
and story substance next. The great writers have
all come before their public and have had to wait
for the public to catch up with them, but if they
hadn’t come first the public would never have caught
up. We in America have always striven to give the
public what it has wanted, but even in America the[130]
time is fast coming when the gracious public will
be inquiring what stories our potent writers have to
tell. But not until our writers realize fully that
“The public is composed of numerous groups crying
out: Console me, amuse me, sadden me, touch
me, make me dream, laugh, shudder, weep, think.
But the fine spirit says to the artist: Make something
beautiful in the form that suits you, according
to your personal temperament.”[33] This fine spirit
is now becoming evident; it is working its way to
the surface.
In this period of awakening, of the real birth of
American literature, the genuine educator, always
an open-minded student, can do no better than revaluate
all his acceptances, all his hardened dogmas,
all his hereditary literary and educational
truths. If he is to help the confused multitude,
baffled by a sudden consciousness of the phenomena
of existence, to literary self-expression, he must first
realize that no formulas are of any avail in the
crises of life and therefore are of no avail in literature,
the artistic emanation or transmutation of life.
He must stimulate thought and independence of
thought—even to the point of experimentation—for
in such ways have all great contributions to the
world’s cultural treasury been made. He must
cultivate a genuine love of literature rather than of
its usual incentive, the emoluments involved, whatever
[131] they be, and a critical appreciation of literary
values. Thus he may become a positive force in
the chariot of our literary progress—a leader, a
driver, a discoverer.
Self-flattery is indigenous to man. We like to
flatter ourselves that our musings produce a desirable
effect but we do not often know the complexion
of this effect. What, for instance, shall it be in the
case of serious-minded men and women interested
in creating short stories and in the aspect of our literary
field generally who have read sympathetically
the preceding pages? If books are stimuli what
shall this particular reaction be?
A few suggestions may not be amiss. They are
in a measure a recapitulation of the thoughts expressed,
but I like to think of them as formulated
by my ideal reader as his more or less conscious
artistic credo:
1. I believe that the short story is first of all a
form of literature, not merely an article of manufacture.
2. Literature is a form of self-expression. I
am a living entity, sensitive to the play and interplay
of forces in and all about me. Life in the form of
man, of institutions, of passions and ideas affects
me and I would reproduce and interpret it. I[133]
would clarify it to myself; I would create for the
love of creating, for the beauty of it, for the gratification
of the creative urge within me.
3. I recognize no plots that are not derived
from the life which I know, which is in and about
me; nor any characters which are not derived from
and tested by that life.
4. In all my work I have a desire to be truthful,
rather than merely clever; simple rather than
pretentious; natural rather than surprising. I
would voice no thought nor emotion which is alien
to my mind and temperament.
5. The genuineness of a view or an emotion is
its justification. Truth and spontaneity are more
to me than commercial artifice and success. There
is no shame in failure except in so far as it implies
a departure from standards of artistic honesty.
6. I recognize no taboos. Every phase of life
is a worthy theme; every experience known to man
is a worthy plot. Things which have interested me
have interested other people and I seek to communicate
my personal vision to the world. I recognize
no valid reason for withholding any part of
my vision merely because it may prove unpleasant,
uncustomary or unprofitable to some reader. I do
not force him to read my work.
7. Nor do I recognize that I have any right,
for any reason whatsoever, to color the stuff of life,
the reality of which I write. The measure of my[134]
success is the measure in which I can make my reality
the reality of those who would read me.
8. The standard of my opinions and emotions
is contained within me. I refuse to modify them,
to render them less objectionable, or more innocuous,
or more in conformity with the standard of the
moving pictures or the specifications of any editor,
critic, teacher or good friend.
9. I recognize no subject which is rooted in life
as either moral or immoral. Every phase of existence
is a legitimate theme for the artist, and its
morality or immorality is a matter of the reader’s
own interpretation.
10. I am not afraid of being either pessimistic or
optimistic. My moods and ideas are my own and
will not be changed to suit the buyer.
11. I am not afraid of being either radical or
conservative, depressive or “exhilarating,” religious
or agnostic, constructive or destructive. The fearless
presentation of one’s honest views is a virtue
in itself.
12. I have no fear of displeasing any one, of displeasing
even a majority of readers, editors, critics,
citizens. I have faith that there is always a fearless
minority willing to hear an honest word; that
there are always some avenues for the transmission
of the independent vision. Frequently this minority
in time grows to a majority—and another
rebellious minority takes its place.
[135]
13. I believe that all technique is but a means
toward effective expression. No tricks are of any
value in themselves. No puzzles or jugglings with
life’s experiences are of any avail, and no technique
is worthy of art except in so far as it furthers clarification
and artistic presentation of my message.
14. I believe that all the instruction I can get
can only be in the way of developing facility of expression.
No teacher or textbook can teach me the
stuff out of which literature is made.
15. I believe that style is “of the man himself,”
that it comes from within, that no amount of imitation
of O. Henry can give me O. Henry’s cleverness,
and that no amount of style, even my own,
can cover a lack of substance.
16. There is only one ending that my story can
have. It may be happy or unhappy or merely
logical. Every problem imposes its own solution.
I can dictate no dénouement, for the characters involved
work out their own destiny acceptable to
them or to the inevitability of their problem.
17. I believe that if I am myself I am original.
My life is different from the life of any one else.
Manufacturing startling or spectacular originality is
impossible. There is only one theme at bottom of
all stories and that is Life. It is only the way I
look at it which you do not know.
18. Finally I believe that each artist after all
works in his own way. My way may be as good[136]
as the ways of other writers and will surely suit
my moods and my thoughts better. Each of us in
his own way merely tries to state and to clarify the
tragedy and comedy, the ugliness and the beauty of
the things he knows and lives and feels.
19. The short story is but another medium for
the expression of my reaction to the business of living.
I refuse to be a clown entertaining the gallery.
20. If I depart from this credo and write what
commercial policy may dictate rather than my artistic
self I shall not be afraid to acknowledge the inferior
character of the product rather than label it
as literature. My conscience is no coward, even in
defeat.
The End
[137]
INDEX
- Addison, Joseph, 115.
- Ade, George, 9.
- Admirable Crichton, The, 77.
- Aeschylus, 109.
- American Magazine, The, 70, 71.
- Anderson, Sherwood, 16, 17,
79, 81, 128, 129;
The Other Woman, 81.
- Atheist’s Mass, An, 85, 86.
- Balzac, Honoré, de, 85, 86, 118;
An Atheist’s Mass, 85, 86.
- Barnes, Djuna, 17.
- Barrie, J. M., 77.
- Bates, Arlo, 2.
- Beyond the Horizon, 64.
- Bierce, Ambrose, 9.
- Brandes, Georg, 87.
- Brooks, Van Wyck, 73.
- Brown, Alice, 17.
- Butler, Ellis Parker, 8.
- Cabell, James Branch, 17, 79;
The Wedding Jest, 111.
- Clay, Bertha M., 79.
- Chambers, Robert W., 9.
- Chatterton, Thomas, 6.
- Chekhov, Anton, 13, 26, 74, 99;
Ward No. 6, 33.
- Chester, George Randolph, 33.
- Chwang-Tse, 22, 23.
- Cohen, Octavus Roy, 16.
- Conrad, Joseph, 27, 103, 119;
Youth, 27, 110.
- Crane, Frank, 34, 71, 87.
- D’Annunzio, Gabrielle, 74.
- Davis, Richard Harding, 33.
- Daudet, Alphonse, 78.
- Dial, The, 69.
- Dickens, Charles, 51, 118.
- Dostoyevski, Fyodor, 74, 116.
- Dreiser, Theodore, 17, 34, 79, 82;
The Lost Phoebe, 34.
- Edwards, Jonathan, 85.
- Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 62.
- Esenwein, J. Berg, 127;
Writing the Photoplay, 58, 90;
Writing the Short Story, 127.
- Fall of the House of Usher, The, 14, 15.
- Flaubert, Gustave, 86;
Madame Bovary, 86.
- Four Million, The, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40.
- Frank, Waldo, 8, 17.
- Freeman, Mary E. Wilkins, 33, 110;
The Revolt of Mother, 33, 110, 111.
- Gerould, Katharine Fullerton, 44.
- Glaspell, Susan, 17.
- Gorki, Maxim, 38, 74;
Her Lover, 38.
- Gourmont, Remy de, 120, 121;
Le Probleme du Style, 120, 121.[138]
- Griffith, David Wark, 105, 106.
- Hall, Holworthy, 16.
- Hamsun, Knut, 5.
- Hardy, Thomas, 64.
- Harper’s Magazine, 69.
- Harte, Bret, 103.
- Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 65.
- Hearn, Lafcadio, 11.
- Hecht, Ben, 17.
- Her Lover, 38.
- Hergesheimer, Joseph, 5, 8;
Java Head, 23.
- Howells, William Dean, 15;
Great Modern American Stories, 34.
- Hugo, Victor, 119.
- Hungry Hearts, 34.
- Hurst, Fannie, 5.
- In the Moonlight, 33, 111.
- Irving, Washington, 116.
- James, Henry, 116.
- Java Head, 23.
- Jessup, Alexander, 44.
- John Ferguson, 64.
- Johnston, William, 35, 41, 42.
- Kelland, Clarence Budington, 33.
- Kipling, Rudyard, 4, 26, 103, 126;
Without Benefit of Clergy, 33.
- Kling, Joseph, 32.
- Kuprin, Ivan, 118.
- Lawrence, D. H., 74.
- Leeds, Arthur, 56.
- Lewisohn, Ludwig, 23, 24.
- Literary Digest, The, 105.
- Little Review, The, 16, 69, 81.
- London, Jack, 4, 7, 8, 9, 41, 103, 114, 115, 118;
Martin Eden, 4.
- Lost Phoebe, The, 34.
- McCardell, Roy L., 55.
- Macdonald, George, 116.
- Madame Bovary, 86.
- Maeterlink, Maurice, 74.
- Malthus, 114.
- Marden, Orison Swett, 34.
- Markheim, 14, 15.
- Martin Eden, 4.
- Masefield, John, 4.
- Mason, Walt, 34.
- Mather, Cotton, 85.
- Matthews, Brander, 33.
- Maupassant, Guy de, 14, 15, 26, 33, 103, 109, 111, 130;
Solitude, 14, 15;
In the Moonlight, 33, 111.
- Mencken, H. L., 47.
- Nation, The, 24, 112, 113, 128.
- New Success, The, 69.
- O’Brien, Edward J., 15;
Best Short Stories of 1920, 81, 97;
Best Short Stories of 1919, 97.
- O. Henry, 9, 22, 26, 29, 30, 31, 32, 35, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46, 60, 116, 135;
The Four Million, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40.
- Our America, 8.
- Our Short Story Writers, 9, 39.
- Pagan, The, 16, 32.
- Passing of King Arthur, The, 6.
- Patee, Fred Lewis, 44.
- People’s Favorite Magazine, 87.
- Poe, Edgar Allan, 14, 15, 26, 42, 74, 102, 116;
The Fall of the House of Usher, 14, 15.
- Pollock, Channing, 51.
- Porter, William Sidney (See “O. Henry”).
- Probleme du Style, Le, 121.[139]
- Revolt of Mother, The, 33, 110, 111.
- Rinehart, Mary Roberts, 33.
- Robbins, E. M., 54.
- Sandburg, Carl, 118.
- Sapho, 78.
- Saturday Evening Post, The, 69, 71.
- Seven Arts, The, 7, 84.
- Shakespeare, 60, 116.
- Smart Set, The, 69.
- Solitude, 14, 15.
- Spingarn, Joel Elias, 83.
- Steele, Richard, 115.
- Stevenson, Robert Louis, 14, 26;
Markheim, 14, 15.
- Tagore, Rabindranath, 124.
- Tatler, The, 115.
- Times, The New York, 45.
- Triumph of the Egg, The, 129.
- Twain, Mark, 7, 41.
- Van Doren, Carl, 112, 113.
- Villon, François, 6.
- Walter, Eugene, 60.
- Ward No. 6, 33.
- Warner, Charles Dudley, 120.
- Wedding Jest, The, 111.
- Wells, H. G., 99.
- Whitman, Walt, 82, 99.
- Williams, Blanche Colton, 9, 39.
- Winesburg, Ohio, 129.
- Without Benefit of Clergy, 33.
- Witwer, H. C., 8, 65.
- Writer’s Monthly, The, 56, 71.
- Writing the Photoplay, 58, 90.
- Writing the Short Story, 127.
- Yezierska, Anzia, 34;
Hungry Hearts, 34.
- Youth, 27, 110.
- Zola, Emile, 74.
Corrections
The first line indicates the original, the second the correction.
p. 1
- There as so many stories afloat
- There are so many stories afloat
p. 105
- where others have made scanty half-millons
- where others have made scanty half-millions
p. 124
- it
will captivate and thrill; ruffle annd soothe;
- it
will captivate and thrill; ruffle and soothe;
p. 126
- and accepted intelligent advice of one kind or
another—from eniment
- and accepted intelligent advice of one kind or
another—from eminent
p. 133
- Truth and spontaniety are more to me than commercial artifice and success.
- Truth and spontaneity are more to me than commercial artifice and success.
p. 134
- I have no fear of displeasing ony one,
- I have no fear of displeasing any one,
.jpg "The Beast in the Cave by H. P. Lovecraft")
.jpg "Howard Phillips Lovecraft")
.jpg "Short Story-Writing: An Art or a Trade? by N. Bryllion Fagin")
