WHY AUTHORS GO WRONG
AND
OTHER EXPLANATIONS
BY
GRANT M. OVERTON
AUTHOR OF “THE WOMEN WHO MAKE OUR NOVELS”
NEW YORK
MOFFAT, YARD & COMPANY
1919
Copyright, 1919,
BY
MOFFAT, YARD & COMPANY
CONTENTS
| CHAPTER | | PAGE |
| I. | Why Authors Go Wrong | 1 |
| II. | A Barbaric Yawp | 25 |
| III. | In the Critical Court | 39 |
| IV. | Book “Reviewing” | 51 |
| V. | Literary Editors, by One of Them | 103 |
| VI. | What Every Publisher Knows | 119 |
| VII. | The Secret of the Best Seller | 145 |
| VIII. | Writing a Novel | 173 |
WHY AUTHORS GO WRONG
AND
OTHER EXPLANATIONS
[1]
WHY AUTHORS GO
WRONG
AND OTHER EXPLANATIONS
I
WHY AUTHORS GO WRONG
THE subject of Why Authors Go Wrong is one
to answering which a book might adequately
be devoted and perhaps we shall write a book about
it one of these days, but not now. When, as and
if written the book dealing with the question will
necessarily show the misleading nature of Mr.
Arnold Bennett’s title, The Truth About an
Author—a readable little volume which does not
tell the truth about an author in general, but only
what we are politely requested to accept as the truth
about Arnold Bennett. Mr. Bennett may or
may not be telling the truth about himself in that
book; his regard for the truth in respect of the
characters of his fiction has been variable. Perhaps
he is more scrupulous when it comes to himself, but
we are at liberty to doubt it. For a man who will[2]
occasionally paint other persons—even fictionary
persons—as worse than they really are may not
unnaturally be expected to depict himself as somewhat
better than he is.
We must not stay with Mr. Bennett any longer
just now. It is enough that he has not been content
to wait for the curtain to rise and has insisted on
thrusting himself into our prologue. Exit; and let
us get back where we were.
We were indicating that Why Authors Go Wrong
is an extensive subject. It is so extensive because
there are many authors and many, many more
readers. It is extensive because it is a moral and
not a literary question, a human and not an artistic
problem. It is extensive because it is really unanswerable
and anything that is essentially unanswerable
necessitates prolonged efforts to answer it,
this on the well-known theory that it is better that
many be bored than that a few remain dissatisfied.
2
Let us take up these considerations one by one.
It seems unlikely that any one will misunderstand
the precise subject itself. What, exactly, is meant
by an author “going wrong”? The familiar euphemism,
as perhaps most frequently used, is anything
but ambiguous. Ambiguous-sounding words
are generally fraught with a deadly and specific[3]
meaning—another illustration of the eternal paradox
of sound and sense.
But as used in the instance of an author, “going
wrong” has a great variety of meanings. An author
has gone wrong, for example, when he has
deliberately done work under his best; he has gone
wrong when he has written for sentimental or æsthetic
reasons and not, as he should, for money
primarily; he has gone wrong when he tries to uplift
or educate his readers; he has gone wrong when he
has written too many books, or has not written
enough books, or has written too fast or not fast
enough, or has written what he saw and not what
he felt, or what he felt and not what he saw, or
posed in any fashion whatsoever.
Ezra Pound, for example, has gone atrociously
wrong by becoming a French Decadent instead of
remaining a son of Idaho and growing up to be an
American. Of course as a French Decadent he will
always be a failure; as Benjamin De Casseres
puts it, “the reality underlying his exquisite art is
bourgeois and American. He is a ghost materialized
by cunning effects of lights and mirrors.”
3
Mr. Robert W. Chambers went wrong in an entirely
different fashion. The usual charge brought
against Mr. Chambers is that he consented to do[4]
less than his best because it profited him. This is
entirely untrue. Mr. Chambers’s one mistake was
that he did not write to make money. Every
writer should, because writing is a business and a
business is something which can only be decently
conducted with that end in view. Fancy a real
estate business which should not be conducted to
make money! We should have to stop it immediately.
It would be a menace to the community,
for there is no telling what wickedness of purpose
might lie behind it. A business not conducted primarily
to make money is not a business but a blind;
and very likely a cover for operations of a criminal
character. The safety of mankind lies in knowing
motives and is imperilled by any enterprise that
disguises them.
And so for Mr. Chambers to refrain deliberately
from writing to make money was a very wrong
thing for him to do. Far from having a wicked
motive, he had a highly creditable motive, which
does not excuse him in the least. His praiseworthy
purpose was to write the best that was in him for
the sake of giving pleasure to the widest possible
number of his readers. There does not seem to be
much doubt that he has done it; those who most
disapprove of him will hardly deny that the vast
sales of his half a hundred stories are incontestable
evidence of his success in his aim. But what is
the result? On every hand he is misjudged and condemned.[5]
He is accused of acting on the right
motive, which is called wrong! He is not blamed,
as he should be, for acting on a wrong motive, which
would, if understood, have been called right! What
he should have done, of course, was to write sanely
and consistently to make money, as did Amelia Barr.
Mrs. Barr was not a victim of widespread contemporary
injustice and Mr. Chambers is and will
remain so.
Take another illustration—Mr. Winston Churchill.
One of the ablest living American novelists,
he has gone so wrong that it cannot honestly be supposed
he will ever go right again. His earlier novels
were not only delightful but actually important. His
later novels are intolerable. In such a novel as The
Inside of the Cup Mr. Churchill is not writing with
the honorable and matter-of-course object of selling
a large number of copies and getting an income from
them; he is writing with the dishonorable and unavowed
object of setting certain ideas before you,
the contemplation of which will, in his opinion, do
you good. He wants you to think about the horror
of a clergyman in leading strings to his wealthiest
parishioner. As a fact, there is no horror in such
a situation and Mr. Churchill cannot conjure up any.
There is no horror, there are only two fools. Now
if a man is a fool, he’s a fool; he cannot become
anything else, least of all a sensible man. A clergyman
in thrall to a rich individual of his congregation[6]
is a fool; and to picture him as painfully emancipating
himself and becoming not only sensible but,
as it were, heroic is to ask us to accept a contradiction
in terms. For a fool is not a man who lacks
sense, but a man who cannot acquire sense. Not
even a miracle can make him sensible; if it could
there would be no trouble with The Inside of the
Cup, for a miracle, being, as G. K. Chesterton says,
merely an exceptional occurrence, will always be
acquiesced in by the intelligent reader.
4
It would be possible to continue at great length
giving examples of authors who have gone wrong
and specifying the fifty-seven varieties of ways they
have erred. But the mere enumeration of fallen
authors is terribly depressing and quite useless. If
we are to accomplish any good end we must try to
find out why they have allowed themselves to be deceived
or betrayed and what can be done in the shape
of rescue work or preventive effort in the future.
Perhaps we can reclaim some of them and guide
others aright.
After a consideration of cases—we shall not clog
the discussion with statistics and shall confine ourselves
to general results—we have been led by all the
evidence to the conclusion that the principal trouble
is with the authors. Little or none of the blame for[7]
the unfortunate situation rests on their readers. Indeed,
in the majority of cases the readers are the
great and unyielding force making for sanity and
virtue in the author. Without the persistent moral
pressure exerted by their readers many, many more
authors would certainly stray from the path of business
rectitude—not literary rectitude, for there is no
such thing. What is humanly right is right in
letters and nothing is right in letters that is wrong in
the world.
The commonest way in which authors go wrong
is one already stated: By ceasing to write primarily
for money, for a living and as much more as may
come the writer’s way. The commonest reason why
authors go wrong in this way is comical—or would
be if it were not so common. They feel ashamed to
write for money first and last; they are seized with
an absurd idea that there is something implicitly disgraceful
in acting upon such a motive. And so to
avoid something that they falsely imagine to be disgraceful
they do something that they know is disgraceful;
they write from some other motive and let
the reader innocently think they are writing with the
old and normal and honorable motive.
So widespread is this delusion that it is absolutely
necessary to digress for a moment and explain
why writing to make money is respectable! Why is
anything respectable? Because it meets a human
necessity and meets it in an open and aboveboard[8]
fashion without detriment to society in general or
the individual in particular. All lawful business
conforms to this definition and writing for money
certainly does. Writing—or painting or sculpturing
or anything else—not done to make money is
not respectable because (1) it meets no human necessity,
(2) it is not done openly and aboveboard,
(3) it is invariably detrimental to society, and (4)
it is nearly always harmful to individuals, and most
harmful to the individual engaged upon it.
It is useless to say that a man who writes or
paints or carves for something other than money
meets a human necessity—a spiritual thirst for
beauty, perhaps. There is no spiritual thirst for
beauty which cannot be satisfied completely by work
done for an adequate and monetary reward. And
to satisfy the human longing for the beautiful without
requiring a proper price is to demoralize society
by showing men that they can have something for
nothing.
5
Now it is just here that the moral pressure of the
great body of readers is felt, a pressure that is
constantly misunderstood by the author. So surely
as the writer has turned from writing to make
money and has taken up writing for art’s sake
(whatever that means) or writing for some ethical
purpose or writing in the interest of some propaganda,[9]
though it be merely the propaganda of his
own poor, single intellect—just so surely as he has
done this his readers find him out. Whether they
then continue to read him or not depends entirely on
what they think of his new and unavowed (but
patent) motive. Of course readers ought to be
stern; having caught their author in a wrong motive
they ought to punish him by deserting him instantly.
But readers are human; they are even surprisingly
selfish at times; they are capable of considering
their own enjoyment, and, dreadful to say, they are
capable of considering it first. So if, as in the case
of Mr. Chambers, they find his new motive friendly
and flattering they read him more than ever; on the
other hand, if they find the changed purpose disagreeable
or tiresome, aiming to uplift them or to
shock them unpleasantly or (sometimes) to make
fun of them, they quit that author cold. And they
hardly ever come back. Usually the author is not
perspicacious enough to grasp the cause of the defection;
it is amazing how seldom authors think
there can be anything wrong with themselves. Usually
the abandoned author goes right over and joins
a small sect of highbrows and proclaims the deplorable
state of his national literature. “The public
be damned!” he says in effect, but the public is not
damned, it is he that is damned, and the public has
done its utmost to save him.
Sometimes an author deliberately does work that[10]
is less than his best, but he never does this with the
idea of making money, or, if he entertains that idea,
he fools no one but himself. There are known and
even (we believe) recorded instances of an author
ridiculing his own output and avowing with what
he probably thought audacious candor: “Of course,
this latest story of mine is junk—but it’ll sell 100,000
copies!”
It never does. The author is perfectly truthful
in describing the book as worthless. If he implies
as he always will in such a case that he deliberately
did less than his best he is an unconscious liar. It
was his best and its worthlessness was solely the result
of his total insincerity. For a man or woman
may write a very bad book and write it with an utter
sincerity that will sell hundreds of thousands of
copies; but no one can write a very fine book insincerely
and have it sell.
The author who thinks that he has written a
rather inferior novel for the sake of huge royalties
has actually written the best he has in him, namely,
a piece of cheese. The author who has actually
written beneath his best has not done it for money,
but to avoid making money. He thinks it is his
best; he thinks it is something utterly artistic,
æsthetically wonderful, highbrowedly pure, lofty and
serene; he scorns money; to make money by it
would be to soil it. What he cannot see is that it
is not his best; that it is very likely quite his worst;[11]
that when he has done his best he will unavoidably
make money unless, like the misguided mortal we
have just mentioned, deep insincerity vitiates his
work.
We are therefore ready, before going further, to
formulate certain paradoxical principles governing
all literary work.
6
To understand why authors go wrong we must
first understand how authors may go right. The
paradoxical rules which if observed will hold the
author to the path of virtue and rectitude may be
formulated briefly as follows:
1. An author must write to make money first of
all, and every other purpose must be secondary to
this purpose of money making.
The paradoxy inherent in this principle is that
while writing the author must never for a single
moment think of the money he may make.
2. Every writer must have a stern and insistent
moral purpose in his writing, and especially must he
be animated by this purpose if he is writing fiction.
The paradoxy here is that never, under any circumstances,
may the writer exhibit his moral purpose
in his work.
3. A writer must not write too much nor must
he write too little. He is writing too much if his[12]
successive books sell better and better; he is writing
too little if each book shows declining sales.
This may appear paradoxical, but consider: If
the writer’s work is selling with accelerated speed
the market for his wares will very quickly be over-supplied.
This happened to Mr. Kipling one day.
He had the wisdom to stop writing almost entirely,
to let his production fall to an attenuated trickle;
with the result that saturation was avoided, and
there is now and will long continue to be a good,
brisk, steady demand for his product.
On the other hand, consider the case of Mrs.
Blank (the reader will not expect us to be either
so ungallant or so professionally unethical or so
commercially unfair as to give her name). Mrs.
Blank wrote a book every two or three years, and
each was more of a plug than its predecessor. She
began writing a book a year, and the third volume
under her altered schedule was a best seller. It was
also her best novel.
7
Then why? why? why? do the authors go wrong?
Because, if we must say it in plain English, they
disregard every principle of successful authorship.
When they have written a book or two and have
made money they get it into their heads that it is
ignoble to write for money and they try to write[13]
for something else—for Art, usually. But it is impossible
to write for Art, for Art is not an end but
a means. When they do not try to write for Art
they try to write for an Ethical Purpose, but they
exhibit it as inescapably as if the book were a pulpit
and the reader were sitting in a pew. Indeed, some
modern fiction cannot be read unless you are sitting
in a pew, and a very stiff and straight backed pew
at that; not one of these old fashioned, roomy, high
walled family pews such as Dickens let us sit in,
pews in which one could be comfortable and easy
and which held the whole family, pews in which
you could box the children’s ears lightly without
doing it publicly; no! the pews the novelists make
us sit in these days are these confounded modern
pews which stop with a jab in the small of your
back and which are no better than public benches,
but are intensely more uncomfortable—pews in
which, to ease your misery, you can do nothing but
look for the mote in your neighbor’s eye and the
wrong color in your neighbor’s cravat.
Because—to get back to the whys of the authors—because
when they are popular they overpopularize
themselves, and when they are unpopular
they lack the gumption to write more steadily and
fight more gamely for recognition. We don’t mean
critical recognition, but popular recognition. How
can an author expect the public, his public, any public
to go on swallowing him in increased amounts[14]
at meals placed ever closer together—for any length
of time? And how, equally, can an author expect a
public, his public, or any public, to acquire a taste for
his work when he serves them a sample once a week,
then once a month, then once a year? Why, a person
could not acquire a taste for olives that way.
8
We have no desire to be personal for the sake of
being personal, but we have every desire to be personal
in this discussion for the sake of being impersonal,
pointed, helpful and clear. It is time to
take a perfectly fresh and perfectly illustrative example
of how not to write fiction. We shall take
the case of Mr. Owen Johnson and his new novel,
Virtuous Wives.
Mr. Johnson will be suspected by the dense and
conventional censors of American literature of having
written Virtuous Wives to make money. Alackaday,
no! If he had a much better book might
have come from his typewriter. Mr. Johnson was
not thinking primarily of money, as he should have
been (prior to the actual writing of the story). He
was filled with a moral and uplifting aim. He had
been shocked to the marrow by the spectacle of the
lives led by some New York women—the kind Alice
Duer Miller writes discreetly about. The participation
of America in the war had not begun. The[15]
performances of an inconsiderable few were unduly
conspicuous. Mr. Johnson decided to write a novel
that would hold up these disgusting triflers (and
worse) to the scorn of sane and decent Americans.
He set to work. He finished his book. It was
serialized in one of the several magazines which
have displaced forever the old Sunday school library
in the field of Awful Warning literature. In these
forums Mr. Galsworthy and Gouverneur Morris inscribe
our present-day chronicles of the Schoenberg-Cotta
family, and writ large over their instalments,
as part of the editorial blurb, we read the expression
of a fervent belief that Vice has never been so Powerfully,
Brilliantly and Convincingly Depicted in All
Its Horror by Any Pen. But we divagate.
Mr. Johnson’s novel was printed serially and appeared
then as a book with a solemn preface—the
final indecent exhibition, outside of the story itself,
of his serious moral purpose. And as a book it is
failing utterly of its purpose. It has sold and is
selling and Mr. Johnson is making and will make
money out of it—which is what he did not want.
What he did want he made impossible when he unmasked
his great aim.
The world may be perverse, but you have to take
it as it is. The world may be childish, but none
of us will live to see it grow up. If the world thinks
you write with the honest and understandable object
of making a living it attributes no ulterior motive[16]
to you. The world says: “John Smith, the
butcher, sells me beefsteak in order to buy Mrs.
Smith a new hat and the little Smiths shoes.” The
world buys the steaks and relishes them. But if
John Smith tells the world and his wife every time
they come to his shop: “I am selling you this large,
juicy steak to give you good red blood and make
you Fit,” then the world and his wife are resentful
and say: “We think we don’t like your large, juicy
steaks. We are red blooded enough to have our
own preferences. We will just go on down the
street to the delicatessen—we mean the Liberty food
shop—and buy some de-Hohenzollernized frankfurters,
the well-known Liberty sausage. To hell
with the Kaiser!” And so John Smith merely
makes money. Oh, yes, he makes money; a large,
juicy steak is a large, juicy steak no matter how
deadly the good intent in selling it. But John Smith
is defeated in his real purpose. He does not furnish
the world and his wife with the red corpuscles
he yearned to give them.
9
At this juncture we seem to hear exasperated
cries of this character: “What do you mean by
saying that an author must write for money first
and last and yet must have a stern moral purpose?
How can the two be reconciled? Why must he[17]
think of money until he begins to write and never
after he begins to write? We understand why the
moral object must not obtrude itself, but why need
it be there at all?”
Can a man serve two masters? Can he serve
money and morality? Foolish question No. 58,914!
He not only can but he always does when his work
is good.
A painter—a good painter—is a man who burns
to enrich the world with his work and is determined
to make the world pay him decently for it. A
good sculptor is a man who has gritted his teeth
with a resolution to give the world certain beautiful
figures for which the world must reward him—or
he will know the reason why! A good corset manufacturer
is a man who is filled with an almost holy
yearning to make people more shapely and more
comfortable than he found them—and he is fanatically
resolved that they shall acknowledge his
achievement by making him rich!
For that’s the whole secret. How is a man to
know that he has painted great portraits or landscapes
or carved lovely monuments or made thousands
shapelier and more easeful if not by the money
they paid him? How is an author to know that he
has amused or instructed thousands if not by the
size of his royalty checks? By hearsay? By mind
reading? By plucking the petals of a daisy—“They
love me. They love me not”?
[18]Every man can and must serve two masters, but
the one is the thing that masters him and the other
is the evidence of his mastery. Every man must
before beginning work fix his mind intently upon
the making of money, the money which shall be
an evidence of his mastery; every man on beginning
work and for the duration of the work must
fix his mind intently and exclusively on the service
of morality, the great master whose slave he is in
the execution of an Invisible Purpose. And no
man dare let his moral purpose expose itself in his
work, for to do that is to do a presumptuous and
sacrilegious thing. The Great Moralizer, who has
in his hands each little one of us workers, holds his
Purpose invisible to us; how then can we venture
to make visible what He keeps invisible, how can
we have the audacity to practice a technique that
He Himself does not employ?
For He made the world and all that is in it.
And He made it with a moral end in view, as we
most of us believe. But not the wisest of us pretends
that that moral object is clearly visible. It
does not disclose itself to us directly; we are aware
of it only indirectly; and are influenced by it forevermore.
If the world was so made, who are we
that think ourselves so much more adroit than Him
as to be able to expose boldly what He veils and
to reveal what He hath hidden?
There are those, of course, who see no moral explanation[19]
of the universe; but they are not always
consistent. There is that famous passage of
Joseph Conrad’s in which he declines the ethical
view and says he would fondly regard the panorama
of creation as pure spectacle—the marvellous
spectacle being, perchance, a moral end in itself.
And yet no man ever wrote with a deeper manifestation
and a more perfect concealment of his
moral purpose than Conrad; for exactly the thing
to which all his tales are passionate witnesses is the
sense of fidelity, of loyalty, of endurance—above
all, the sense of fidelity—that exists in mankind.
Man, in the Conradist view, is a creature of an
inexhaustible loyalty to himself and to his fellows.
This inner and utter fidelity it is which makes the
whole legend of Lord Jim, which is the despairing
cry that rings out at the last in Victory, which
reaches lyric heights in Youth, which is the profound
pathos of The End of the Tether, which, in
its corruption by an incorruptible metal, the silver
of the mine, forms the dreadful tragedy of Nostromo.
An immortal, Conrad, but not the admiring
and passive spectator he diffidently declares
himself to be!
10
Have we covered all the cases? Obviously not.
It is no more possible to deal with all the authors[20]
who go wrong than it is to call all the sinners to
repentance. But sin is primarily a question between
the sinner and his own conscience, and the
errors of authors are invariably questions between
the authors and the public. The public is
the best conscience many an author has; and the
substitution of a private self-justification for a public
vindication has seldom been a markedly successful
undertaking in human history. Yet there
is a class of writers for whom no public vindication
is possible; who affect, indeed, to scorn it;
who set themselves up as little gods. They are
the worshippers of Art. They are the ones who
not only do not admit but who deliberately deny
a moral purpose in anything; who think that a
something they call pure Beauty is the sole end of
existence, of work, of life, and is alone to be worshipped.
It is a cult of Baal.
For these Artists despise money, and in despising
money they cheapen themselves and become
creatures of barter. They sneer at morality and
reject it; immediately the world disappears: “And
the earth was without form, and void.” They demoralize
honest people with whom they come in
contact by demolishing the possibly imperfect but
really workable standards which govern normal
lives—and never replacing them. What is their
Beauty? It is what each one of them thinks beautiful.
What is their Art? It is what each cold[21]
little selfish soul among them chooses to call Art.
What is their achievement? Self-destruction.
They are the spiritual suicides, they are the moral
defectives, they are the outcasts of humanity, the
lepers among the workers of the world. For them
there can be neither pity nor forgiveness; for they
deny the beauty of rewarded toil, the sincerity of
honest labor, the mystical humanity of man.
Of them no more. Let us go back in a closing
moment to the contemplation of the great body of
men and women who labor cheerfully and honorably,
if rather often somewhat mistakenly, to make
their living, to do good work and make the world
pay them for it, yet leaving with the world the
firm conviction that it has had a little the better
of the bargain! These are the authors who “go
wrong,” and with whose well-meant errors we have
been dealing, not very methodically but perhaps
not unhelpfully. Is there, then, no parting word
of advice we can give our authors? To be sure
there is! When our authors are quite sure they
will not go wrong, they may go write!
[22]
[24]
IT was the handy phrase to describe Walt Whitman:
The “barbaric yawp.” In its elegant
inelegance the neatly adjectived noun was felt to
be really brilliant. Stump speakers “made the
eagle scream”; a chap like Whitman had to be characterized
handily too.
The epigrammatic mind is the card index mind.
Now the remarkable thing about the card index is
its casualty list. People who card index things are
people who proceed to forget those things. The
same metal rod that transfixes the perforated cards
pierces the indexers’ brains. A mechanical device
has been called into play. Brains are unnecessary
any more. The day of pigeonholes was slightly
better; for the pigeonholes were not unlike the
human brain in which things are tucked away together,
because they really have some association
with each other. But the card index alphabetizes
ruthlessly. Fancy an alphabetical brain!
Epigrams are like that. A man cannot take the
trouble to think; he falls back on an epigram. He
cannot take the trouble to remember and so he
card indexes. The upshot is that he can find[26]
nothing in the card index and of course has no
recollection to fall back on. Or he recalls the epigram
without having the slightest idea what it was
meant to signify.
But this is not to be about card indexes nor even
about epigrams. It is to be a barbaric yawp, by
which it is to be supposed was once meant the happy
consciousness and the proud wonder that struck
into the heart of an American poet. Whitman was
not so much a poet as the chanteyman of Longfellow’s
Ship of State. There was an hour when the
chanteyman had an inspiration, when he saw as
by an apocalyptic light all the people of these
United States linked and joined in a common effort.
Every man, woman and child of the millions tailed
on the rope; every one of them put his weight and
muscle to the task. It was a tremendous hour. It
was the hour of a common effort. It was the hour
for which, Walt felt, men had risked their lives
a century earlier. It was a revealed hour; it had
not yet arrived; but it was sure to come. And in
the glow of that revelation the singer lifted up his
voice and sang.... God grant he may be hearing
the mighty chorus!
2
America is not a land, but a people. And a
people may have no land and still they will remain[27]
a people. There has, for years, been no country
of Poland; but there are Poles. There has been
a country of Russia for centuries, but there is
to-day no Russian people. What makes a people?
Not a land certainly. Not political forms nor
political sovereignty. Not even political independence.
Nor, for that matter, voices that pretend
or aspire to speak the thoughts of a nation.
Poland has had such voices and Russia has had
her artists, musicians, novelists, poets.
The thing that makes a people is a thing over
which statesmen have no control. Geography
throws no light on the subject. Nor does that
study of the races of man which is called anthropology.
It is not a psychological secret (psychology
covers a multitude of guesses). Philosophy
may evolve beautiful systems of thought, but systems
of thought have nothing to do with the particular
puzzle before us.
The secret must be sought elsewhere. Is it an
inherited thing, this thing that makes a people?
That can’t be; ours is a mixed inheritance here in
America. Is it an abstract idea? Abstract ideas
are never more than architectural pencillings and
seldom harden into concrete foundations. Is it a
common emotion? If it were we should be able
to agree on a name for it. Is it an instinct? An
instinct might be back of it.
What is left? Can it be a religion? As such[28]
it should be easily recognizable. But an element
of religion? An act of faith?
Yes, for faith may exist with or without a creed,
and the act of faith may be deliberate or involuntary.
Willed or unwilled the faith is held; formulated
or unformulated the essential creed is there.
Let us look at the people of America, men and
women of very divergent types and tempers far
apart; men and women of inextricable heredities
and of confusing beliefs—even, ordinarily, of
clashing purposes. Each believes a set of things,
but the beliefs of them all can be reduced to a lowest
common denominator, a belief in each other; just
as the beliefs of them all have a highest common
multiple, a willingness to die in defence of America.
To some of them America means a past, to some
the past has no meaning; to some of them America
means a future, to others a future is without significance.
But to all of them America means a
present to be safeguarded at the cost of their lives,
if need be; and the fact that the present is the
translation of the past to some and the reading of
the future to others is incidental.
3
We would apply these considerations to the affair
of literature; and having been tiresomely generalizing[29]
we shall get down to cases that every one can
understand.
The point we have tried to make condenses to
this: The present is supremely important to us all.
To some of us it is all important because of the
past, and to some of us it is of immense moment
because of the future, and to the greatest number
(probably) the present is of overshadowing concern
because it is the present—the time when they
count and make themselves count. It is now or
never, as it always is in life, though the urgency
of the hour is not always so apparent.
It was now or never with the armies in the field,
with the men training in the camps, with the coal
miners, the shipbuilders, the food savers in the
kitchens. It is just as much now or never with the
poets, the novelists, the essayists—with the workers
in every line, although they may not see so distinctly
the immediacy of the hour. Everybody
saw the necessity of doing things to win the war;
many can see the necessity of doing things that
will constitute a sort of winning after the war.
There is always something to be won. If it is not
a war it is an after the war. “Peace hath its victories
no less renowned than war” is a fine sounding
line customarily recited without the slightest
recognition of its real meaning. The poet did
not mean that the victories of peace were as greatly
acclaimed as the victories of war, but that the sum[30]
total of their renown was as great or greater because
they are more enduring.
4
Now for the cases.
It is the duty, the opportunity and the privilege
of America now, in the present hour, to make it
impossible hereafter for any one to raise such a
question as Bliss Perry brings up in his book The
American Spirit in Literature, namely, whether
there is an independent American literature. Not
only does Mr. Perry raise the question, but, stated
as baldly as we have stated it, the query was thereupon
discussed, with great seriousness, by a well-known
American book review! We are happy
to say that both Mr. Perry and the book review
decided that there is such a thing as an
American literature, and that American writing is
not a mere adjunct (perhaps a caudal appendage)
of English literature. All Americans will feel
deeply gratified that they could honorably come to
such a conclusion. But not all Americans will feel
gratified that the conclusion was reached on the
strength of Emerson, Lowell, Longfellow, Whittier,
Holmes, Whitman, Poe and others of the immortal
dead. Some Americans will wish with a
faint and timid longing that the conclusion might
have been reached, or at least sustained, on the[31]
strength of Tarkington, Robert Herrick, Edith
Wharton, Mary Johnston, Gertrude Atherton,
Mary S. Watts, William Allen White, Edgar Lee
Masters, Amy Lowell, Edna Ferber, Joseph
Hergesheimer, Owen Wister and a dozen or so
other living writers over whose relative importance
as witnesses for the affirmative we have no desire
to quarrel. Mr. Howells, we believe, was called
to the stand.
If we had not seen it we should refuse to credit
our senses. The idea of any one holding court to-day
to decide the question as to the existence of an
independent American literature is incredibly
funny. It is the peculiarity of criticism that any
one can set up a court anywhere at any time for
any purpose and with unlimited jurisdiction.
There are no rules of procedure. There are no
rules of evidence. There is no jury; the people
who read books may sit packed in the court room,
but there must be no interruptions. Order in the
court! Usually the critic-judge sits alone, but
sometimes there are special sessions with a full
bench. Writs are issued, subpœnas served, witnesses
are called and testimony is taken. An injunction
may be applied for, either temporary or
permanent. Nothing is easier than to be held in
contempt.
[32]
5
The most striking peculiarity of procedure in the
Critical Court is with regard to what constitutes
evidence. You might, in the innocence of your
heart, suppose that a man’s writings would constitute
the only admissible evidence. Not at all. His
writings have really nothing to do with the case.
What is his Purpose? If, as a sincere individual,
he has anywhere exposed or stated his object in
writing books counsel objects to the admission of
this Purpose as evidence on the ground that it is
incompetent, irrelevant and immaterial; and not
sound Art. On the other hand if, as an artist, he
has embodied his Purpose in his fiction so that
every intelligent reader may discover it for himself
and feel the glow of a personal discovery, counsel
will object to the admission of his books as evidence
on the ground that they are incompetent, irrelevant
and immaterial; and not the best proof.
Counsel will demand that the man himself be examined
personally as to his purpose (if he is alive)
or will demand a searching examination of his
private life (if he be dead). The witness is
always a culprit and browbeating the witness is
always in order. I am a highbrow and you are a
lowbrow; what the devil do you mean by writing
a book anyway?
Before the trial begins the critic-judge enunciates[33]
certain principles on which the verdict will be based
and the verdict is based on those principles whether
they find any application in the testimony or not. A
favorite principle with the man on the bench is that
all that is not obscure is not Art. It isn’t phrased as
intelligibly as that, to be sure; a common way to put
it is to lay down the rule that the popularity of a
book (which means the extent to which it is understood
and therefore appreciated) has nothing to do
with the case, tra-la, has nothing to do with the
case. Another principle is that sound can be
greater than sense, which, in the lingo of the Highest
Criticism, is the dictum that words and sentences
can have a beauty apart from the meaning
(if any) that they seek to convey. And there
really is something in this idea; for example, what
could be lovelier than the old line, “Eeny, meeny,
miny-mo”? Shakespeare, a commercial fellow
who wrote plays for a living, knew this when he
let one of his characters sing:
“When that I was and a little tiny boy,
With hey, ho, the wind and the rain,
A foolish thing was but a toy,
For the rain it raineth every day.”
And a little earlier in Twelfth Night:
“Like a mad lad,
Pare thy nails, dad;
Adieu, goodman devil.”
[34]Which is not only beautiful as sound, but without
the least sense unless it hath the vulgarity to be
looked for in the work of a mercenary playwright.
6
But the strangest thing about the proceedings in
the Critical Court is their lack of contemporary interest.
Rarely, indeed, is anything decided here
until it has been decided everywhere else. For the
great decisions are the decisions of life and not decisions
on the past. A man has written twenty
books and he is dead. He is ripe for consideration
by the Critical Court. A man has written two
novels and has eighteen more ahead of him. The
Critical Court will leave him alone until he is past
all helping. It seems never to occur to the critic-judge
that a young man who has written two
novels is more important than a dead man who has
written twenty novels. For the young man who
has written two novels has some novels yet to be
written; he can be helped, strengthened, encouraged,
advised, corrected, warned, counselled, rebuked,
praised, blamed, presented with bills of particulars,
and—heartened. If he has not genius
nothing can put it in him, but if he has, many
things can be done to help him exploit it. And
a man who is dead cannot be affected by anything
you say or do; the critic-judge has lost his chance[35]
of shaping that writer’s work and can no longer
write a decree, only an epitaph.
To be brutally frank: Nobody cares what the
Critical Court thinks of Whitman or Poe or Longfellow
or Hawthorne. Everybody cares what
Tarkington does next, what Mary Johnston tackles,
what the developments are in the William Allen
White case, what becomes of Joseph Hergesheimer,
whether Amy Lowell achieves great work in that
contrapuntal poetry she calls polyphonic prose.
On these things depend the present era in American
literature and the possibilities of the future. And
these things are more or less under our control.
The people of America not only believe that
there is an independent American literature, but
they believe that there will continue to be. Some
of them believe in the past of that literature, some
of them believe in its future; but all of them believe
in its present and its presence. Their voice
may be stifled in the Critical Court (silence in the
court!) but it is audible everywhere else. It is
heard in the bookshops where piles of new fiction
melt away, where new verse is in brisk demand,
where new biographies and historical works are
bought daily and where books on all sorts of
weighty subjects flake down from the shelves into
the hands of customers.
The voice of the American people is articulate in
the offices of newspapers which deal with the news[36]
of new books. It makes a seismographic record
in the ledgers of publishing houses. It comes to
almost every writer in letters of inquiry, comment
and commendation. What, do you suppose, a
writer like Gene Stratton-Porter cares whether the
Critical Court excludes her work or condemns it?
She can re-read hundreds and thousands of letters
from men and women who tell her how profoundly
her books have—tickled their fancy? pleased their
love of verbal beauty? taxed their intellectuals to
understand? No, merely how profoundly her
books have altered their whole lives.
Hear ye! Hear ye! Hear ye! The Critical
Court is in session. All who have business with
the court draw near and give attention!
[37]
[38]
[39]
III
IN THE CRITICAL COURT
THE Critical Court being in session, William
Dean Howells, H. W. Boynton, W. C.
Brownell, Wilson Follett and William Marion
Reedy sitting, the case of Booth Tarkington,
novelist, is called.
Counsel for the Prosecution: If it please the
court, this case should go over. The defendant,
Mr. Tarkington, is not dead yet.
Mr. Howells: I do not know how my colleagues
feel, but I have no objection to considering the
work of Mr. Tarkington while he is alive.
Mr. Follett: I think it would be better if we
deferred the consideration of Mr. Tarkington until
it is a little older.
Counsel for the Defense (in this case Mr.
Robert Cortes Holliday, biographer of Tarkington):
“It”?
Mr. Follett: I mean his work, or works. Perhaps
I should have said “them.”
Mr. Holliday: “They,” not “them.” Exception.
And “are” instead of “is.” Gentlemen, I[40]
have no wish to prejudice the case for my client,
but I must point out that if you wait until he is a
little older he may be dead.
Mr. Boynton: So much the better. We can
then consider his works in their complete state and
with reference to his entire life.
Mr. Holliday: But it would then be impossible
to give any assistance to Mr. Tarkington. The
chance to influence his work would have passed.
Mr. Brownell: That is relatively unimportant.
Mr. Holliday: I beg pardon but Mr. Tarkington
feels it rather important to him.
Mr. Boynton: My dear Mr. Holliday, you really
must remember that it is not what seems important
to Mr. Tarkington that can count with us,
but what is important in our eyes.
Mr. Holliday: Self-importance.
Mr. Boynton (stiffly): Certainly not. Merely
self-confidence. But on my own behalf I may say
this: I am unwilling to consider Mr. Tarkington’s
works in this place at this time; but I am willing
to pass judgment in an article for a newspaper or
a monthly magazine or some other purely perishable
medium. That should be sufficient for Mr.
Tarkington.
Mr. Follett: I think the possibility of considering
Mr. Tarkington must be ruled out, anyway, as
one or more of his so-called works have first appeared
serially in the Saturday Evening Post.
[41]Mr. Holliday (noting the effect of this revelation
on the members of the court): Very well, I
will not insist. Booth, you will have to get along
the best you can with newspaper and magazine reviews
and with what people write to you or tell you
face to face. Be brave, Tark, and do as you aren’t
done by. After all, a few million people read you and
you make enough to live on. The court will pass
on you after you are dead, and if you dictate any
books on the ouija board the court’s verdict may
be helpful to you then; you might even manage the
later Henry James manner.
Clerk of the Court (Prof. William Lyon
Phelps): Next case! Mrs. Atherton please step
forward!
Mrs. Atherton (advancing with composure): I
can find no one to act for me, so I will be my own
counsel. I will say at the outset that I do not care
for the court, individually or collectively, nor for
its verdict, whatever it may be.
Prof. Phelps: I must warn you that anything
you say may, and probably will, be used against
you.
Mrs. Atherton: Oh, I don’t mind that; it’s the
things the members of the court have said against
me that I purpose to use against them.
Mr. Brownell: Are you, by any chance, referring
to me, Madam?
Mrs. Atherton: I do not refer to persons, Mr.[42]
Brownell. I hit them. No, I had Mr. Boynton
particularly in mind. And perhaps Gene Stratton-Porter.
Is she here? (Looks around menacingly).
No. Well, go ahead with your nonsense.
Mr. Howells (rising): I think I will withdraw
from consideration of this case. Mrs. Atherton
has challenged me so often——
Mr. Boynton: No, stay. I am going to stick
it out——
Mr. Follett: I think there is no question but
that we should hold the defendant in contempt.
Mrs. Atherton: Mutual, I assure you. (She
sweeps out of the room and a large section of the
public quietly follows her.)
Clerk Phelps: Joseph Hergesheimer to the
bar! (A short, stocky fellow with twinkling eyes
steps forward.) Mr. Hergesheimer?
Mr. Hergesheimer: Right.
Mr. Reedy: Good boy, Joe!
Mr. Follett: It won’t do, it won’t do at all.
There’s only The Three Black Pennys and Gold and
Iron and a novel called Java Head to go by. Saturday
Evening Post. And bewilderingly unlike
each other. Seem artistic but are too popular, I
fancy, really to be sound.
Mr. Hergesheimer: With all respect, I should
like to ask whether this is a court of record?
Mr. Howells: It is.
Mr. Hergesheimer: In that case I think I shall[43]
press for a verdict which may be very helpful to
me. I should like also to have the members of the
court on record respecting my work.
Mr. Boynton: Just as I feared. My dear fellow,
while we should like to be helpful and will
endeavor to give you advice to that end it must
be done unobtrusively ... current reviews ...
we’ll compare your work with that of Hawthorne
and Hardy or perhaps a standard Frenchman.
That will give you something to work for. But
you cannot expect us to say anything definite about
you at this stage of your work. Suppose we were
to say what we really think, or what some really
think, that you are the most promising writer in
America to-day, promising in the sense that you
have most of your work before you and in the
sense that your work is both popular and artistically
fine. Don’t you see the risk?
Mr. Hergesheimer: I do, and I also see that
you would make your own reputation much more
than you would make mine. I write a story. I
risk everything with that story. You deliver a
verdict. Why shouldn’t you take a decent chance,
too?
Mr. Follett: Why should I take any more
chances than I have to with my contemporaries? I
pick them pretty carefully, I can tell you.
Mr. Hergesheimer: I shall write a novel to be
published after my death. There was Henry[44]
Adams. He stipulated that The Education of
Henry Adams should not be published until after
his death; and everybody says it is positively brilliant.
Mr. Follett (relieved): That is a wise decision.
But don’t be disheartened. I’ll probably be able to
get around to you in ten years, anyway. (Mr.
Hergesheimer bows and retires.)
Clerk Phelps: John Galsworthy!
Mr. Follett (brightening): Some of the Englishmen!
This is better! Besides, I know all about
Galsworthy.
Mr. Galsworthy (coming forward): I feel
much honored.
Counsel for the Prosecution: If the court
please, I must state that for some time now Mr.
Galsworthy has been published serially in a magazine
with a circulation of one digit and six ciphers.
Or one cipher and six digits, I cannot remember
which.
Mr. Brownell: What, six? Then he has more
readers than can be counted on the fingers of one
hand. There are only five fingers on a hand. I
think this is conclusive.
Mr. Boynton: Oh, decidedly.
Mr. Follett: But I put him in my book on modern
novelists, all of whom were hand picked.
Mr. Galsworthy (with much calmness for one
uttering a terrible heresy): Perhaps that’s the difficulty,[45]
really. All hand picked. Do you know, I
rather believe in literary windfalls. But I beg to
withdraw. (And he does.)
The Clerk: Herbert George Wells!
Mr. Wells (sauntering up and speaking with a
certain inattention): Respecting my long novel,
Joan and Peter, there are some points that need to
be made clear. Peter, you know, is called Petah
by Joan. Petah is a sapient fellow. He is even
able to admire the Germans because, after all, they
knew where they were going, they knew what they
were after, their education had them headed for
something. It had, indeed. I think Petah overlooks
the fact that it had headed them for Paris
in 1914.
The point that Oswald and I make in the book is
that England and the Empire, in 1914 and prior
thereto, had not been headed for anything, educationally
or otherwise, except Littleness in every
field of political endeavor, except Stupidity in every
province of human affairs. And the proof of this,
we argue, is found in the first three years of the
Great War. No doubt. The first three years of
the war prove so many things that this may well be
among them; don’t you think so?
Without detracting from the damning case which
Oswald and I make out against England it does
occur to me, as I poke over my material for a new
book, that as the proof of a pudding is in the eating[46]
so the proof of a nation at war is in the fighting.
Indisputable as the bankruptcy of much British
leadership has been, indisputable as it is that General
Gough lost tens of thousands of prisoners, hundreds
of guns and vast stores of ammunition, it is
equally indisputable that the Australians who died
like flies at the Dardanelles died like men, that the
Tommies who were shot by their own guns at
Neuve Chapelle went forward like heroes, that the
undersized and undernourished and unintellectual
Londoners from Whitechapel who fell in Flanders
gave up their immortal souls like freemen and Englishmen
and kinsmen of the Lion Heart.
And if it comes to a question as to the blame for
the war as distinguished from the question as to
the blame for the British conduct of the war, the
latter being that with which Joan and Peter is almost
wholly concerned, I should like to point out
now, on behalf of myself and the readers of my
next book, that perhaps I am not entirely blameless.
Perhaps I bear an infinitesimal portion of the terrible
responsibility which I have showed some unwillingness
to place entirely and clearly on Germany.
For after all, it was Science that made the war
and that waged it; it was the idolatry of Science that
had transformed the German nation by transforming
the German nature. It was the proofs of what
Science could do that convinced Prussia of her[47]
power, that made her confident that with this new
weapon she could overstride the earth. I had a
part in setting up that worship of Science. I have
been not only one of its prophets but a high priest
in its temple.
And I am all the more dismayed, therefore, when
I find myself, as in Joan and Peter, still kneeling at
the shrine. What is the cure for war? I ask.
Petah tells us that our energies must have some
other outlet. We must explore the poles and dig
through the earth to China. He himself will go
back to Cambridge and get a medical degree; and
if he is good enough he’ll do something on the
border line between biology and chemistry. Joan
will build model houses. And the really curious
thing is that the pair of them seem disposed to run
the unspeakable risks of trying to educate still another
generation, a generation which, should it have
to fight a war with a conquering horde from Mars,
might blame Peter and Joan severely for the sacrifices
involved, just as they blame the old Victorians
for the sacrifice of 1914-1918.
Mr. Howells: In heaven’s name, what is this
tirade?
Mr. Brownell: Mr. Wells is merely writing his
next book, that’s all.
(As it is impossible to stop Mr. Wells the court
adjourns without a day.)
[48]
[50]
ON the subject of Book “Reviewing” we feel
we can speak freely, knowing all about the
business, as we do, though by no means a practitioner,
and having no convictions on the score of
it. For we point with pride to the fact that, though
many times indicted, a conviction has never been
secured against us. However, it isn’t considered
good form (whatever that is) to talk about your
own crimes. For instance, after exhausting the
weather, you should say pleasantly to your neighbor:
“What an interesting burglary you committed
last night! We were all quite stirred up!” It is
almost improper (much worse than merely immoral)
to exhibit your natural egoism by remarking:
“If I do say it, that murder I did on Tuesday
was a particularly good job!”
For this reason, if for no other, we would refrain,
ordinarily, from talking about book “reviewing”;
but since Robert Cortes Holliday has mentioned
the subject in his Walking-Stick Papers and
thus introduced the indelicate topic once and for
all, there really seems no course open but to pick[52]
up the theme and treat it in a serious, thoughtful
way.
2
Book reviewing is so called because the books are
not reviewed, or viewed (some say not even read).
They are described with more or less accuracy and
at a variable length. They are praised, condemned,
weighed and solved by the use of logarithms.
They are read, digested, quoted and tested for butter
fat. They are examined, evalued, enjoyed and
assessed; criticised, and frequently found fault with
(not the same thing, of course); chronicled and
even orchestrated by the few who never write
words without writing both words and music.
James Huneker could make Irvin Cobb sound like
a performance by the Boston Symphony. Others,
like Benjamin De Casseres, have a dramatic gift.
Mr. De Casseres writes book revues.
3
Any one can review a book and every one should
be encouraged to do it. It is unskilled labor.
Good book reviewers earn from $150 to $230 a
week, working only in their spare time, like the
good-looking young men and women who sell the
Saturday Evening Post, the Ladies’ Home Journal
and the Country Gentleman but who seldom earn[53]
over $100 a week. Book reviewing is one of the
very few subjects not taught by the correspondence
schools, simply because there is nothing to teach.
It is so simple a child can operate it with perfect
safety. Write for circular giving full particulars
and our handy phrasebook listing 2,567 standard
phrases indispensable to any reviewer—FREE.
In reviewing a book there is no method to be
followed. Like one of the playerpianos, you shut
the doors (i.e., close the covers) and play (or
write) by instinct! Although no directions are
necessary we will suggest a few things to overcome
the beginner’s utterly irrational sense of helplessness.
One of the most useful comments in dealing with
very scholarly volumes, such as A History of the
Statistical Process in Modern Philanthropical Enterprises
by Jacob Jones, is as follows: “Mr. Jones’s
work shows signs of haste.” The peculiar advantage
of this is that you do not libel Mr. Jones; the
haste may have been the printer’s or the publisher’s
or almost anybody’s but the postoffice’s. In the
case of a piece of light fiction the best way to start
your review is by saying: “A new book from the
pen of Alice Apostrophe is always welcome.” But
suppose the book is a first book? One of the finest
opening sentences for the review of a first book
runs: “For a first novel, George Lamplit’s Good
Gracious! is a tale of distinct promise.” Be careful[54]
to say “distinct”; it is an adjective that fits
perfectly over the shoulders of any average-chested
noun. It gives the noun that upright, swagger
carriage a careful writer likes his nouns to have.
4
But clothes do not make the man and words do
not make the book review. A book review must
have a Structure, a Skeleton, if it be no more than
the skeleton in the book closet. It must have a
backbone and a bite. It must be able to stand
erect and look the author in the face and tell him
to go to the Home for Indigent Authors which the
Authors’ League will build one of these days after
it has met running expenses.
Our favorite book reviewer reviews the ordinary
book in four lines and a semi-colon. Unusual
books drain his vital energy to the extent of a
paragraph and a half, three adjectives to the square
inch.
He makes it a point to have one commendatory
phrase and one derogatory phrase, which gives a
nicely balanced, “on the one hand ... on the
other hand” effect. He says that the book is attractively
bound but badly printed; well-written but
deficient in emotional intensity; full of action but
weak in characterization; has a good plot but is
devoid of style.
[55]He reads all the books he reviews. Every little
while he pounces upon a misquotation on page 438,
or a misprint on page 279. Reviewers who do not
read the books they review may chance upon such
details while idly turning the uncut leaves or while
looking at the back cover, but they never bring in
three runs on the other side’s error. They spot the
fact that the heroine’s mother, who was killed in
a train accident in the fourth chapter, buys a refrigerator
in the twenty-third chapter, and they
indulge in an unpardonable witticism as to the heroine’s
mother’s whereabouts after her demise. But
the wrong accent on the Greek word in Chapter
XVII gets by them; and as for the psychological
impulse which led the hero to jump from Brooklyn
Bridge on the Fourth of July they miss it entirely
and betray their neglect of their duty by alluding
to him as a poor devil crazed with the heat. The
fact is, of course, that he did a Steve Brodie because
he found something obscurely hateful in the
Manhattan skyline. Day after day, while walking
to his work on the Brooklyn Rapid Transit, he
gazed at the saw-toothed outline of the buildings
limned against the sky. Day by day his soul kept
asking: “Why don’t they get a gold filling for that
cavity between the Singer and Woolworth towers?”
And he would ask himself despondently: “Is this
what I live for?” And gradually he felt that it
was not. He felt that it might be something to[56]
die about, however. And so, with the rashness of
youth, he leaped. The George Meredith-Thomas
Hardy irony came into the story when he was
pulled out of the river by his rival in Dorinda’s
affections, Gregory Anthracyte, owner of the magnificent
steam yacht Chuggermugger.
So much for the anatomy of a book review. Put
backbone into it. Read before you write. Look
before you leap. Be just, be fair, be impartial;
and when you damn, damn with faint praise, and
when you praise, praise with faint damns. Be all
things to all books. Remember the author. Review
as you would be reviewed by. If a book is
nothing in your life it may be the fault of your
life. And it is always less expensive to revise your
life than to revise the book. Your life is not
printed from plates that cost a fortune to make
and another fortune to throw away. “Life is too
short to read inferior books,” eh? Books are too
good to be guillotined by inferior lives—or inferior
livers. Bacon said some books were to be digested,
but he neglected to mention a cure for dyspeptics.
5
But when we say so much we have only touched
the surface of a profound matter. The truth of
that matter, the full depth of it, may as well be
plumbed at once. A book cannot be reviewed. It[57]
can only be written about or around. It is insusceptible
of such handling as is accorded a play,
for example.
A man with more or less experience in seeing
plays and with more or less knowledge of the
drama goes to the first performance of a new comedy
or tragedy or whatnot. There it is before him
in speech and motion and color. It is acted. The
play, structurally, is good or bad; the acting is
either good or bad. Every item of the performance
is capable of being resolved separately
and estimated; and the collective interest or importance
of these items can be determined, is, in
fact, determined once and for all by the performance
itself. The observer gets their collective impact
at once and his task is really nothing but a
consideration afterward in such detail as he cares
to enter upon of just how that impact was secured.
Did you ever, in your algebra days, or even in your
arithmetically earnest childhood, “factor” a quantity
or a number? Take 91. A little difficult, 91,
but after some mental and pencil investigation you
found that it was obtained by multiplying 13 by 7.
Very well. You knew how the impact of 91 was
produced; it was produced by multiplying 13 by 7.
You had reviewed the number 91 in the sense that
you might review a play.
Now it is impossible to review a book as you
would factor a number or a play. You can’t be[58]
sure of the factors that make up the collective impact
of the book upon you. There’s no way of
getting at them. They are summed up in the book
itself and no book can be split into multipliable
parts. A book is not the author times an idea times
the views of the publisher. A book is unfactorable,
often undecipherable. It is a growth. It is
a series of accretions about a central thought. The
central thought is like the grain of sand which the
oyster has pearled over. The central thought may
even be a diseased thought and the pearl may be a
very lovely and brilliant pearl, superficially at least,
for all that. There is nothing to do with a book
but to take it as it is or go at it hammer and tongs,
scalpel and curette, chisel and auger—smashing it
to pieces, scraping and cutting, boring and cleaving
through the layers of words and subsidiary
ideas and getting down eventually to the heart of
it, to the grain of sand, the irritant thought that
was the earliest foundation.
Such surgery may be highly skilful or highly and
wickedly destructive; it may uncover something
worth while and it may not; naturally, you don’t go
in for much of it, if you are wise, and as a general
thing you take a book as it is and not as it
once was or as the author may, in the innocence of
his heart or the subtlety of his experience, have
intended it to be.
[59]
6
Surgery on a book is like surgery on a human
being, for a book is alive; ordinarily the only justification
for it is the chance of saving life. If the
operator can save the author’s life (as an author)
by cutting he ought to go ahead, of course. The
fate of one book is nothing as against the lives of
books yet unwritten; the feelings of the author
are not necessarily of more account than the
screams of the sick child’s parent. There have
been such literary operations for which, in lieu of
the $1,000 fee of medical practise, the surgeon has
been rewarded and more than repaid by a private
letter of acknowledgement and heartfelt thanks.
No matter how hard up the recipient of such a letter
may be, the missive seldom turns up in those
auction rooms where the A. L. S. (or Autograph
Letter with Signature) sometimes brings an unexpected
and astonishingly large price.
7
There is a good deal to be said for taking a book
as it is. Most books, in fact, should be taken that
way. For the number of books which contain
within them issues of life and death is always very
small. You may handle new books for a year and
come upon only one such. And when you do, unless[60]
you recognize its momentousness, no responsibility
rests on you to do anything except follow a
routine procedure. In this domain ignorance is a
wholly valid excuse; no one would think of blaming
a general practitioner of medicine for not removing
the patient’s vermiform appendix on principle,
so to say. Unless he apprehended conclusively
that the man had appendicitis and unless he knew
the technique of the operation he would certainly
be blamed for performing it. Similarly, unless the
handler of new books is dead sure that a fatality
threatens Harold Bell Wright or John Galsworthy
or Mary Roberts Rinehart, unless the new
book of Mr. Wright or Mr. Galsworthy or
Mrs. Rinehart is a recognizable and unmistakable
symptom, unless, further, he knows what to
uncover in that book and how to uncover it, he has
no business to take the matter in hand at all.
Though the way of most “reviewers” with new
books suggests that their fundamental motto must
be that one good botch deserves another.
Not at all. Better, if you don’t know what to
do, to leave bad enough alone.
But since the book as it is forms 99 per cent. of
the subject under consideration this aspect of dealing
with new books should be considered first and
most extensively. Afterward we can revert to the
one percent. of books that require to go under the
knife.
[61]
8
Now the secret of taking a book as it is was
never very abstruse and is always perfectly simple;
nevertheless, it seems utterly to elude most of the
persons who deal with new books. It is a secret
only because it is forever hidden from their eyes.
Or maybe they deliberately look the other way.
There exists in the world as at present constituted
a person called the reporter. He is, mostly,
an adjunct of the daily newspaper; in small places,
of the weekly newspaper. It is, however, in the
cities of America that he is brought to his perfection
and in this connection it is worth while pointing
out what Irvin Cobb has already noted—the
difference between the New York reporter and the
reporter of almost any other city in America. The
New York reporter “works with” his rival on another
sheet; the reporter outside New York almost
never does this. Cobb attributed the difference to
the impossible tasks that confront reporters in New
York, impossible, that is, for single-handed accomplishment.
A man who should attempt to
cover alone some New York assignments, to “beat”
his fellow, would be lost. Of course where a New
York paper details half a dozen men to a job real
competition between rival outfits is feasible and
sometimes occurs. But the point here is this: The
New York reporter, by generally “working with”[62]
his fellow from another daily, has made of his
work a profession, with professional ideals and
standards, a code, unwritten but delicate and decidedly
high rules of what is honorable and what
is not. Elsewhere reporting remains a business,
decently conducted to be sure, open in many instances
to manifestations of chivalry; but essentially
keen, sharp-edged, cutthroat competition.
Now it is of the reporter in his best and highest
estate that we would speak here—the reporter who
is not only a keen and honest observer but a happy
recorder of what he sees and hears and a professional
person with ethical ideals in no respect inferior
to those of any recognized professional man
on earth.
There are many things which such a reporter will
not do under any pressure of circumstance or at
the beck of any promise of reward. He will not
distort the facts, he will not suppress them, he will
not put in people’s mouths words that they did not
say and he will not let the reader take their words
at face value if, in the reporter’s own knowledge,
the utterance should be perceptibly discounted. No
reporter can see and hear everything and no reporter’s
story can record even everything that the
observer contrived to see and hear. It must record
such things as will arouse in the reader’s mind a
correct image and a just impression.
How is this to be done? Why, there is no[63]
formula. There’s no set of rules. There’s nothing
but a purpose animating every word the man
writes, a purpose served, and only half-consciously
served, by a thousand turns of expression, a thousand
choices of words. Like all honest endeavors
to effect a purpose the thing is spoiled, annulled,
made empty of result by deliberate art. Good reporters
are neither born nor made; they evolve
themselves and without much help from any outside
agency, either. They can be hindered but not prevented,
helped but not hurt. You may remember a
saying that God helps those who help themselves.
The common interpretation of this is that when a
man gets up and does something of his own initiative
Providence is pretty likely to play into his
hands a little; not at all, that isn’t what the proverb
means. What it does mean is just this: That those
who help themselves, who really do lift themselves
by their bootstraps, are helped by God; that it isn’t
they who do the lifting but somebody bigger than
themselves. Now there is no doubt whatever that
good reporters are good reporters because God
makes them so. They aren’t good reporters at
three years of age; they get to be. Does this seem
discouraging? It ought to be immensely encouraging,
heartening, actually “uplifting” in the finest
sense of a tormented word. For if we believed
that good reporters were born and not made there
would be no hope for any except the gifted few,[64]
endowed from the start; and if we believed that
good reporters were made and not born there would
be absolutely no excuse for any failures whatever—every
one should be potentially a good reporter
and it would be simply a matter of correct training.
But if we believe that a good reporter is
neither born nor made, but makes himself with the
aid of God we can be unqualifiedly cheerful. There
is hope for almost any one under such a dispensation;
moreover, if we believe in God at all and in
mankind at all we must believe that between God
and mankind the supply of topnotch reporters will
never entirely fail. The two together will come
pretty nearly meeting the demand every day in the
year.
9
Perhaps the reader is grumbling, in fact, we seem
to hear murmurs. What has all this about the
genesis and nature of good reporters to do with
the publication of new books? Why, this: The
only person who can deal adequately and amply
with 99 new books out of a hundred—the 99 that
require to be taken as they are—is the good reporter.
He’s the boy who can read the new book
as he would look and listen at a political convention,
or hop around at a fire—getting the facts, getting
them straight (yes, indeed, they do get them
straight) and setting them down, swiftly and selectively,[65]
to reproduce in the mind of the public
the precise effect of the book itself. The effect—not
the means by which it was achieved, not the
desirability of it having been achieved, not the
artistic quality of it, not the moral worth of it, not
anything in the way of a corollary or lesson or
a deduction, however obvious—just the effect.
That’s reporting. That’s getting and giving the
news. And that’s what the public wants.
Some people seem to think there is something
shameful in giving the public what it wants. They
would, one supposes, highly commend the grocer
who gave his customer something “just as good”
or (according to the grocer) “decidedly better.”
But substitution, open or concealed, is an immoral
practice. Nothing can justify it, no nobility of
intention can take it out of the class of deception
and cheating.
But, they cry, the public does not want what is
sufficiently good, let alone what is best for it; that
is why it is wrong to give the public what it wants.
So they shift their ground and think to escape on
a high moral plateau or table land. But the table
land is a tip-table land. What they mean is that
they are confidently setting their judgment of what
the public ought to want against the public’s plain
decision what it does want. They are a few dozens
against many millions, yet in their few dozen intelligences
is collected more wisdom than has been[66]
the age-long and cumulative inheritance of all the
other sons of earth. They really believe that....
Pitiable....
10
A new book is news. This might almost be set
down as axiomatic and not as a proposition needing
formal demonstration by the Euclidean process.
Yet it is susceptible of such demonstration and we
shall demonstrate accordingly.
In the strict sense, anything that happens is news.
Everybody remembers the old distinction, that if
a dog bites a man it is very likely not news, but
that if a man bites a dog it is news beyond all cavil.
Such a generalization is useful and fairly harmless
(like the generalization we ourselves have just
indulged in and are about proving) if—a big if—the
broad exception be noted. If a dog bites John
D. Rockefeller, Jr., it is not only news but rather
more important, or certainly more interesting, news
than if John Jones of Howlersville bites a dog.
For the chances are that John Jones of Howlersville
is a poor demented creature, after all. Now
the dog that bites Mr. Rockefeller is very likely
a poor, demented creature, too; but the distinction
lies in this: the dog bitten by John Jones is almost
certainly not as well-known or as interesting or as
important in the lives of a number of people as[67]
Mr. Rockefeller. Pair off the cur that puts his
teeth in the Rockefeller ankle, if you like, with
the wretch who puts his teeth in an innocent canine
bystander (it’s the innocent bystander who always
gets hurt); do this and you still have to match up
the hound of Howlersville with Mr. Rockefeller.
And the scale of news values tips heavily away
from Howlersville and in the direction of 26
Broadway.
So it is plain that not all that happens is news
compared with some that happens. The law of
specific interest, an intellectual counterpart of the
law of specific gravity in the physical world, rules
in the world of events. Any one handling news
who disregards this law does so at his extreme
peril, just as any one building a ship heavier than
the water it displaces may reasonably expect to
see his fine craft sink without a trace.
Since a new book is a thing happening it is news,
subject to the broad correction we have been discussing
above, namely, that in comparison with
other new books it may not be news at all, its specific
interest may be so slight as to be negligible
entirely.
But if a particular new book is news, if its specific
interest is moderately great, then obviously,
we think, the person best fitted to deal with it is
a person trained to deal with news, namely, a reporter.
Naturally we all prefer a good reporter.
[68]
11
The question will at once be raised: How is the
specific interest of a new book to be determined?
We answer: Just as the specific interest of any kind
of potential news or actual news is determined—in
competition with the other news of the day and
hour. What is news one day isn’t news another.
This is a phenomenon of which the regular reader
of every daily paper is more or less consciously
aware. There are some days when “there’s no
news in the paper.” There are other days when
the news in the paper is so big and so important
that all the lesser occurrences which ordinarily get
themselves chronicled are crowded out. Granting
a white paper supply which does not at present exist,
it would, of course, be possible on the “big
days” to record all these lesser doings; and consistently,
day in and day out, to print nicely proportioned
accounts of every event attaining to a
certain fixed level of specific interest. But the
reader who may think he would like this would
speedily find out that he didn’t. Some days he
would have a twelve page newspaper and other
days (not Sundays, either) he would have one of
thirty-six pages. He would be lost, or rather, his
attention would be lost in the jungle of events that
all happened within twenty-four hours, with the
profuse luxuriance of tropical vegetation shooting[69]
up skyward by inches and feet overnight. His
natural appetite for a knowledge of what his fellows
were doing would be alternately starved and
overfed; malnutrition would lead to chronic and
incurable dyspepsia; soon he would become a hateful
misanthrope, shunning his fellow men and having
a seizure every time Mr. Hearst brought out
the eighth edition (which is the earliest and first)
of the New York Evening Journal. It is really
dreadful to think what havoc a literal adhesion to
the motto of the New York Times—“All the news
that’s fit to print”—would work in New York City.
No mortal has more than a certain amount of
time daily and a certain amount of attention (according
to his mental habit and personal interest)
to bestow on the perusal of a newspaper, or news,
or the printed page of whatever kind. On Sunday
he has much more, it is likely, but still there is a
limit and a perfectly finite bound. Consequently
the whole problem for the persons engaged in
gathering and preparing news for presentation to
readers sums up in this: “How many of the day’s
doings attaining or exceeding a certain level of
public interest and importance, shall we set before
our clients?” Easily answered, in most cases; and
the size of the paper is the index of the answer.
Question Two: “What of the day’s doings shall be
served up in the determined space?”
For this question there is never an absolute or[70]
ready answer, and there never can be. On some of
the affairs to be reported all journalists would
agree; but they would differ in their estimates of
the relative worth of even these and the lengths at
which they should be treated; about lesser occurrences
there would be no fixed percentage of agreement.
12
Now the application of all this to the business of
giving the news of books should be fairly clear.
A new book is news—and so, sometimes, is an old
one, rediscovered. Since a new book is news it
should be dealt with by a news reporter. Not all
that happens is news; not all the new books published
are news; new books, like new events of all
sorts, are news when they compete successfully
with a majority of their kind.
There is no more sense in reporting—that is, describing
individually at greater or less length—all
the new books than there would be in reporting
every incident on the police blotters of a lively
American city. Recording new books is another
matter; somewhere, somehow, most occurrences in
this world get recorded in written words that reach
nearly all who are interested in the happenings (as
in letters) or are accessible to the interested few
(as the police records). The difference between the
reporter and the recorder is not entirely a difference[71]
of details given. The recorder usually follows a prescribed
formula and makes his record conform
thereto; the good reporter never has a formula and
never can have one. Let us see how this works out
with the news of books.
13
The recorder of new books generally compiles a
list of Books Received or Books Just Published and
he does it in this uninspired and conscientious manner:
IN THE HEART OF A FOOL. By William
Allen White. A story of Kansas in the last
half-century, centered in a single town, showing
its evolution from prairie to an industrial
city with difficult economic and labor problems;
the story told in the lives of a group of
people, pioneers and the sons of pioneers—their
work, ambitions, personal affairs, &c.
New York: The Macmillan Company. $1.60.
That would be under the heading Fiction. An entry
under the heading Literary Studies or Essays
might read:
OUR POETS OF TO-DAY. By Howard Willard
Cook. Volume II. in a series of books on
modern American writers. Sketches of sixty-eight
American poets, nearly all living, including[72]
Edgar Lee Masters, Amy Lowell,
Witter Bynner, Robert Service, Edgar Guest,
Charles Divine, Carl Sandburg, Joyce Kilmer,
Sara Teasdale, George Edward Woodberry,
Percy Mackaye, Harriet W. Monroe, &c.
New York: Moffat, Yard & Co. $1.60.
These we hasten to say would be unusually full
and satisfactory records, but they would be records
just the same—formal and precise statements of
events, like the chronological facts affixed to dates
in an almanac. If all records were like these
there would be less objection to them; but it is an
astonishing truth that most records are badly kept.
Why, one may never fathom; since the very formality
and precision make a good record easy.
Yet almost any of the principal pages or magazines
in the United States devoted to the news of new
books is likely to make a record on this order:
IN THE HEART OF A FOOL. By William
Allen White. Novel of contemporary American
life. New York, &c.
Such a record is, of course, worse than inadequate;
it is actually misleading. Mr. White’s book
happens to cover a period of fifty years. “Contemporary
American life” would characterize quite
as well, or quite as badly, a story of New York
and Tuxedo by Robert W. Chambers.
[73]
14
The reporter works in entirely another manner.
He is concerned to present the facts about a new
book in a way sufficiently arresting and entertaining
to engage the reader. As Mr. Holliday says
with fine perception, the true function of the describer
of new books is simply to bring a particular
volume to the attention of its proper public.
To do that it is absolutely necessary to “give the
book,” at least to the extent of enabling the reader
of the article to determine, with reasonable accuracy
(1) whether the book is for him, that is, addressed
to a public of which he is one, and (2)
whether he wants to read it or not.
Whether the book is good or bad is not the point.
A man interested in sociology may conceivably
want to read a book on sociology even though it is
an exceedingly bad book on that subject and even
though he knows its worthlessness. He may want
to profit by the author’s mistakes; he may want to
write a book to correct them; or he may merely
want to be amused at the spectacle of a fellow sociologist
making a fool of himself, a spectacle by
no means rare but hardly ever without a capacity
for giving joy to the mildly malicious.
The determination of the goodness or badness
of a book is not and should not be a deliberate
purpose of the good book reporter. Why? Well,[74]
in many cases it is a task of supererogation. Take
a reporter who goes to cover a public meeting at
which speeches are made. He does not find it
necessary to say that Mr. So-and-So’s speech was
good. He records what Mr. So-and-So says, or a
fair sample of it; which is enough. The reader
can see for himself how good or bad it was and
reach a conclusion based on the facts as tempered
by his personal beliefs, tastes and ideas.
In the same way, it is superfluous for the book
reporter to say that Miss Such-and-Such’s book on
New York is rotten. All he need do is to set down
the incredible fact that Miss Such-and-Such locates
the Woolworth building at Broadway, Fifth Avenue
and Twenty-third street, and refers to the Aquarium
as the fisheries section of the Bronx Zoo. If this
should not appear a sufficient notice of the horrible
nature of the volume the reporter may very properly
give the truth about the Woolworth building and the
Aquarium for the benefit of people who have never
visited New York and might be unable to detect
Miss Such-and-Such’s idiosyncrasies.
The rule holds in less tangible matters. Why
should the book reporter ask his reader to accept
his dictum that the literary style of a writer is
atrocious when he can easily prove it by a few sentences
or a paragraph from the book?
[75]
15
Yet books are still in the main “reviewed,” instead
of being given into the hands of trained news
reporters. Anything worse than the average book
“review” it would certainly be difficult to find in
the length and breadth of America. And England,
despite the possession of some brilliant talents, is
nearly as badly off.
No one who is not qualified as a critic should
attempt to criticise new books.
There are but few critics in any generation—half
a dozen or perhaps a dozen men in any single
one of the larger countries are all who could qualify
at a given time; that much seems evident.
What is a critic? A critic is a person with an education
unusually wide either in life or in letters,
and preferably in both. He is a person with huge
backgrounds. He has read thousands of books
and has by one means or another abstracted the
essence of thousands more. He has perhaps
travelled a good deal, though this is not essential;
but he has certainly lived with a most peculiar and
exceptional intensity, descending to greater emotional
and intellectual depths than the majority of
mankind and scaling higher summits; he has, in
some degree, the faculty of living other people’s
lives and sharing their human experiences which is
the faculty that, in a transcendent degree, belongs[76]
to the novelist and storyteller. A critic knows the
past and the present so well that he is able to erect
standards, or uncover old standards, by which he
can and does measure the worth of everything that
comes before him. He can actually show you, in
exact and inescapable detail, how De Morgan compares
with Dickens and how Gilbert K. Chesterton
ranks with Swift and whether Thackeray learned
more from Fielding or from Daniel Defoe and he
can trace the relation between a period in the life
of Joseph Conrad and certain scenes and settings in
The Arrow of Gold.
Such a man is a critic. Of course critics make
mistakes but they are not mistakes of ignorance, of
personal unfitness for the task, of pretension to a
knowledge they haven’t. They are mistakes of
judgment; such mistakes as very eminent jurists
sometimes make after years on the bench. The
jurist is reversed by the higher court and the critic
is reversed by the appellate decree of the future.
The mistakes of a real critic, like the mistakes of
a real jurist, are always made on defensible, and
sometimes very sound, grounds; they are reasoned
and seasoned conclusions even if they are not the
correct conclusions. The mistakes of the 9,763 persons
who assume the critical ermine without any
fitness to wear it are quite another matter; and
they are just the mistakes that would be made
by a layman sitting in the jurist’s seat. The[77]
jurist knows the precedents, the rules of evidence,
the law; he is tolerant and admits exceptions into
the record. So the critic; with the difference that
the true critic merely presides and leaves the verdict
to that great jury of true and right instincts
which we call “the public.” The genuine critic is
concerned chiefly to see that the case gets before the
jury cleanly. Without presuming to tell the jury
what its verdict must be—except in extraordinary
circumstances—he does instruct it what the verdict
should be on, what should be considered in arriving
at it, what principles should guide the decision.
But the near-critic (God save the mark!) has it
in his mind that he must play judge and jury too.
He doesn’t like the writer’s style, or thinks the plot
is poor, or this bad or that defective. Instead of
carefully outlining the evidence on which the public
might reach a correct verdict on these points he
delivers a dictum. It doesn’t go, of course, at
least for long; and it never will.
Let us be as specific as is possible in this, as specific,
that is, as a general discussion can be and
remain widely applicable.
I don’t like the writer’s style. I am not a person
of critical equipment or pretensions. I am, we
will say, a book reporter. I do not declare, with
a fiat and a flourish, that the style is bad; I merely
present a chunk of it. There is the evidence, and
nothing else is so competent, so relevant or so material,[78]
as the lawyers would say. I may, in the
necessity to be brief and the absence of space for
an excerpt, say that the style is adjectival, or adverbial,
or diffuse, or involved or florid or something
of that sort, if I know it to be. These would
be statements of fact. “Bad” is a statement of
opinion.
I may call the plot “weak” if it is weak (a fact)
and if I know weakness in a plot (which qualifies
me to announce the fact). But if I call the plot
“poor” I am taking a good deal upon myself. Its
poorness is a matter of opinion. Some stories are
spoiled by a strong plot which dominates the reader’s
interest almost to the exclusion of other things—fine
characterization, atmosphere, and so on.
And even restrictions of space can hardly excuse
the lack of courtesy, or worse, shown by the near-critic
who calls the plot weak or the style diffuse or
involved, however much these may be facts, and
who does not at least briefly explain in what way
the style is diffuse (or involved) and wherein the
weakness of the plot resides. But to put a finger
on the how or the where or the why requires a
knowledge and an insight that the near-critic does
not possess and will not take the trouble to acquire;
so we are asking him to do the impossible. Nevertheless
we can ask him to do the possible; and that
is to leave off talking or writing on matters he
knows nothing about.
[79]
16
The task of training good book reporters is not
a thing to be easily and lightly undertaken. And
the first essential in the making of such a reporter
is the inculcation of a considerable humility of
mind. A near-critic can afford to think he knows
it all, but a book reporter cannot. Besides a sense
of his own limitations the book reporter must possess
and develop afresh from time to time a mental
attitude which may best be summed up in this distinction:
When a piece of writing seems to him
defective he must stop short and ask himself, “Is
this defect a fact or is it my personal feeling?” If
it is a fact he must establish it to his own, and
then to the reader’s, satisfaction. If it is his personal
impression or feeling, merely, as he may conclude
on maturer reflection, he owes it to those
who will read his article either not to record it or
to record it as a personal thing. There is no sense
in saying only the good things that can be said
about a book that has bad things in it. Such a
course is dishonest. It is equally dishonest, and
infinitely more common, to pass off private opinions
as statements of fact.
When in doubt, the doubt should be resolved in
favor of the author. A good working test of
fact versus personal opinion is this: If you, as a
reporter, cannot put your finger on the apparent[80]
flaw, cannot give the how or where or why of the
thing that seems wrong, it must be treated as your
personal feeling. A fact that you cannot buttress
might as well not be a fact at all—unless, of course,
it is self-evident, in which case you have only to
state it or exhibit your evidence to command a universal
assent.
All that we have been saying respecting the fact
or fancy of a flaw in a piece of writing applies with
equal force, naturally, to the favorable as well as
the unfavorable conclusion you, as a book reporter,
may reach. Because a story strikes you as wonderful
it does not follow that it is wonderful. You
are under a moral obligation, at least, to establish
the wonder of it. The procedure for the book reporter
who has to describe favorably and for the
book reporter who has to report unfavorably is the
same. First comes the question of fact, then the
citation, if possible, of evidence; and if that be
impossible the brief indication of the how, the
where, the why of the merit reported. If the meritoriousness
remains a matter of personal impression
it ought so to be characterized but may warrantably
be recorded where an adverse impression
would go unmentioned. The presumption is in
favor of the author. It should be kept so.
[81]
17
In all this there is nothing impossible, nothing
millennial. But what has been outlined of the
work of the true book reporter is as far as possible
from what we very generally get to-day. We get
unthinking praise and unthinking condemnation;
we do not expect analysis but we have a right to
expect straightaway exposition and a condensed
transliteration of the book being dealt with.
“Praise,” we have just said, and “condemnation.”
That is what it is, and there is no room in
the book reporter’s task either for praise or condemnation.
He is not there to praise the book
any more than a man is at a political convention
to praise a nominating speech; he is there to describe
the book, to describe the speech, to report
either. A newspaperman who should begin his account
of a meeting in this fashion, “In a lamentably
poor speech, showing evidences of hasty preparation,
Elihu Root,” &c., would be fired—and ought
to be. No matter if a majority of those who heard
Mr. Root thought the same way about it.
18
The book reporter will be governed in his work
by the precise news value in the book he is dealing[82]
with at the moment he is dealing with it. This
needs illustration.
On November 11, 1918, an armistice was concluded
in Europe, terminating a war that had lasted
over four years. In that four years books relating
to the war then being waged had sold heavily,
even at times outselling fiction. Had the war
drawn to a gradual end the sales of these war books
would probably have lessened, little by little, until
they reached and maintained a fairly steady level.
From this they would doubtless have declined, as
the end drew near, lower and lower, until the foreseen
end came, when the interest in them would
have been as great, but not much greater, than the
normal interest in works of a historical or biographical
sort.
But the end came overnight; and suddenly the
whole face of the world was transformed. The reaction
in the normal person was intense. In an
instant war books of several pronounced types became
intolerable reading. How I Reacted to the
War, by Quintus Quintuple seemed tremendously
unimportant. Even Mr. Britling was, momentarily,
utterly stale and out of date. Reminiscences
of the German ex-Kaiser were neither interesting
nor important; he was a fugitive in Holland.
The book reporter who had any sense of news
values grasped this immediately. Books that a
month earlier would have been worth 1,000 to[83]
1,500 word articles were worth a few lines or no
space at all. On the other hand books which had
a historical value and a place as interesting public
records, such as Ambassador Morgenthau’s Story,
were not diminished either in interest or in importance.
Some books which had been inconsequential were
correspondingly exalted by the unprecedented turn
of affairs. These were books on such subjects as
the re-education of disabled fighters, the principles
which might underlie the formation of a league of
nations, problems of reconstruction of every sort.
They had been worth, some of them, very small
articles a week earlier; now they were worth a
column or two apiece.
19
No doubt we ought to conclude this possibly tedious
essay with some observations on the one per
cent. of books which call for swift surgery. But
such an enterprise is, if not impossible, extraordinarily
difficult for the reason that the same operation
is never called for twice.
In a sense it is like cutting diamonds, or splitting
a large stone into smaller stones. The problem
varies each time. The cutter respects certain principles
and follows a careful technique. That is all.
We shall, for the sake of the curious, take an[84]
actual instance. In 1918 there was published a
novel called Foes by Mary Johnston, an American
novelist of an endowment so decided as fairly to
entitle her to the designation “a genius.”
Miss Johnston’s first novel had appeared twenty
years earlier. Her first four books—nay, her first
two, the second being To Have and to Hold—placed
her firmly in the front rank of living romantic
writers. The thing that distinguished her
romanticism was its sense of drama in human affairs
and human destiny. Added to this was a
command of live, nervous, highly poetic prose.
History—romance; it did not matter. She could
set either movingly before you.
Her work showed steady progress, reaching a
sustained culmination in her two Civil War novels,
The Long Roll and Cease Firing. She experimented
a little, as in her poetic drama of the
French Revolution, The Goddess of Reason, and in
The Fortunes of Garin, a tapestry of mediæval
France. The Wanderers was a more decided venture,
but a perfectly successful. Then came Foes.
Considered purely as a romantic narrative, as a
story of friendship transformed into hatred and the
pursuit of a private feud under the guise of wreaking
Divine vengeance, Foes is a superb tale. Considered
as a novel, Foes is a terrible failure.
Why? Is it not sufficient to write a superb tale?
Yes, if you have essayed nothing more. Is a novel[85]
anything more than “a good story, well told”?
Yes, if the writer essays to make more of it.
The novelist who has aimed at nothing beyond
the “good story, well told” has a just grievance
against any one who asks anything further. But
against the novelist who has endeavored to make
his story, however good, however well told, the
vehicle for a human philosophy or a metaphysical
speculation, the reader has a just grievance—if the
endeavor has been unsuccessful or if the philosophy
is unsound.
Now as to the soundness or unsoundness of a
particular philosophy every reader must pronounce
for himself. The metaphysical idea which was the
basis of Miss Johnston’s novel was this: All gods
are one. All deities are one. Christ, Buddha; it
matters not. “There swam upon him another great
perspective. He saw Christ in light, Buddha in
light. The glorified—the unified. Union.” Upon
this idea Miss Johnston reconciles her two foes.
This perfectly comprehensible mystical conception
is the rock on which the whole story is founded—and
the rock on which it goes to pieces. It will
be seen at once that the conception is one which
no Christian can entertain and remain a Christian—nor
any Buddhist, and remain a Buddhist, either.
To the vast majority of mankind, therefore, the
philosophy of Foes was unsound and the novel was[86]
worthless except for the superficial incidents and
the lovely prose in which they were recounted.
It might be thought that for those who accepted
the mystical concept Miss Johnson imposed, Foes
would have been a novel of the first rank. No,
indeed; and for this reason:
Her piece of mysticism was supposed to be arrived
at and embraced by a dour Scotchman of
about the year of Our Lord 1750. It was supposed
to transform the whole nature of that man so as to
lead him to give over a life-long enmity in which
he had looked upon himself as a Divine instrument
to punish an evil-doer.
Now however reasonable or sound or inspiring
and inspiriting the mystical idea may have seemed
to any reader, he could not but be fatally aware
that, as presented, the thing was a flat impossibility.
Scotchmen of the year 1750 were Christians above
all else. They were, if you like, savage Christians;
some of them were irreligious, some of them were
God-defying, none of them were Deists in the all-inclusive
sense that Miss Johnston prescribes. The
idea that Christ and Buddha might possibly be
nothing but different manifestations of the Deity is
an idea which could never have occurred to the
eighteenth century Scotch mind—and never did.
Least of all could it have occurred to such a man
as Miss Johnston delineates in Alexander Jardine.
The thing is therefore utterly anachronistic. It[87]
is a historical anachronism, if you like, the history
here being the history of the human spirit in its
religious aspects. Every reader of the book, no
matter how willing he may have been to accept the
novelist’s underlying idea, was aware that the endeavor
to convey it had utterly failed, was aware
that Miss Johnston had simply projected her idea,
her favorite bit of mysticism, into the mind of one
of her characters, a Scotchman living a century and
a half earlier! But the thoughts that one may
think in the twentieth century while tramping the
Virginia hills are not thoughts that could have
dawned in the mind of a Scottish laird in the eighteenth
century, not even though he lay in the flowering
grass of the Roman Campagna.
... And so there, in Foes, we have the book
in a hundred which called for something more than
the intelligent and accurate work of the book reporter.
Here was a case of a good novelist, and
a very, very good one, gone utterly wrong. It was
not sufficient to convey to the prospective reader
a just idea of the story and of the qualities of it.
It was necessary to cut and slash, as cleanly and as
swiftly and as economically as possible—and as
dispassionately—to the root of the trouble. For
if Miss Johnston were to repeat this sort of performance
her reputation would suffer, not to speak
of her royalties; readers would be enraged or misled;
young writers playing the sedulous ape would[88]
inflict dreadful things upon us; tastes and tempers
would be spoiled; publishers would lose money;—and,
much the worst of all, the world would be deprived
of the splendid work Mary Johnston could
do while she was doing the exceedingly bad work
she did do.
Perhaps the most disturbing thing about the
blunder in Foes was the fact that there was no
necessity for it. The Christian religion, which was
the religion of Alexander Jardine, provides for
reconciliation, indeed, it exacts it. There was the
way for Miss Johnston to bring her foes together.
Of course, it would not have been intellectually so
exciting. But there is such a thing as emotional
appeal, and it is not always base; there are emotions
in the human so high and so lofty that it is
wiser not to try to transcend them....
The appearance of part of the foregoing in Books
and the Book World of The Sun, New York,
brought a letter from Kansas which should find a
place in this volume. The letter, with the attempted
answer, may as well be given here. The writer is
head of the English department in a State college.
He wrote:
20
“I hope that the mails lost for your college professors
of English subscribers their copies of Books[89]
and the Book World [containing the foregoing observations
on Book Reporting].... College professors
do not like to be disturbed—and most of
us cannot be, for that matter. The TNT in those
pages was not meant for us, perhaps, but it should
have been.
“When I read Book Reporting I dictated three
pages of protest, but did not send it on—thanks to
my better judgment.... Then I decided, since
you had added so much to my perturbation, to ask
you to help me.
“We need it out here—literary help only, of
course. This is the only State college on what was
once known as the ‘Great Plains.’ W. F. Cody
won his sobriquet on Government land which is now
our campus. Our students are the sons and daughters
of pioneers who won over grasshoppers,
droughts, hot winds and one crop farms. They
are so near to real life that the teaching of literature
must be as real as the literature—rather, it
ought to be. That’s where I want you to help me.
“I am not teaching literature here now as I was
taught geology back in Missouri. That’s as near
as I shall tell you how I teach—it is bad enough
and you might not help me if I did. (Perhaps,
in fairness to you, I should say that for several
years never less than one-third of those to whom
we gave degrees have majored in English, and always[90]
as many as the next two departments combined.)
“Here’s what I am tired of and want to get
away from:
“1. Testing students on reading a book by asking
fact questions about what is in the book—memory
work, you see.
“2. Demanding of students a scholarship in the
study of literature that is so academic that it is
Prussian.
“3. Demanding that students serve time in literature
classes as a means of measuring their advance
in the study of literature.
“Here’s what I want you to help me with in some
definite concrete way: (Sounds like a college professor
making an assignment—beg pardon.)
“1. Could you suggest a scheme of ‘book reporting’
for college students in literature classes?
(An old book to a new person is news, isn’t it?)
“2. Give me a list of books published during
the last ten years that should be included in college
English laboratory classes in literature. I want
your list. I have my own, but fear it is too academic.
“3. What are some of the things which should
enter into the training of teachers of high school
English? Part of our work, especially in the summer,
is to give such training to men and women[91]
who will teach composition and literature in Kansas
high schools.
“Your help will not only be appreciated, but it
will be used.”
21
To answer adequately these requests would take
about six months’ work and the answers would
make a slender book. And then they would exhibit
the defects inseparable from a one man response.
None of which excuses a failure to attempt to answer,
though it must extenuate failures in the attempt.
We shall try to answer, in this place, though
necessarily without completeness. If nothing better
than a few suggestions is the result, why—suggestions
may be all that is really needed.
And first respecting the things our friend is tired
of and wants to get away from:
1. Fact questions about what is in the book—memory
work—are not much use if they stop with
the outline of the story. What is not in the book
may be more important than what is. Why did the
author select this scene for narration and omit that
other, intrinsically (it seems) the more dramatically
interesting of the two? See The Flirt, by Booth
Tarkington, where a double murder gets only a
few lines and a small boy’s doings occupy whole
chapters.
[92]2. Scholarship is less important than wide reading,
though the two aren’t mutually exclusive. A
wide acquaintance doesn’t preclude a few profoundly
intimate friendships. Textual study has spoiled
Chaucer, Shakespeare and Milton for most of us.
Fifty years hence Kipling and Masefield will be
spoiled in the same way.
3. Time serving over literature is a waste of
time. There are only three ways to teach literature.
The first is by directing students to books for
voluntary reading—hundreds of books, thousands.
The second is by class lectures—entertaining, idea’d,
anecdoted, catholic in range and expository in character.
The third is by conversation—argumentative
at times, analytic at moments, but mostly by
way of exchanging information and opinions.
Study books as you study people. Mix among
them. You don’t take notes on people unless, perchance,
in a diary. Keep a diary on books you
read, if you like, but don’t “take notes.” Look for
those qualities in books that you look for in people
and make your acquaintances by the same (perhaps
unformulated) rules. To read snobbishly is
as bad as to practise snobbery among your fellows.
22
We go on to the first of our friend’s requests
for help. It is a scheme for “book reporting” for[93]
college students in literature classes and he premises
that an old book to a new reader is news. Of
course it is.
Let the student take up a book that’s new to him
and read it by himself, afterward writing a report
of it to be read to the class. When he comes
to write his report he must keep in the forefront of
his mind this one thing:
To tell the others accurately enough about that
book so that each one of them will know whether
or not he wants to read it.
That is all the book reporter ever tries for.
No book is intended for everybody, but almost
every book is intended for somebody. The problem
of the book reporter is to find the reader.
Comparison may help. For instance, those who
enjoy Milton’s pastoral poetry will probably enjoy
the long poem in Robert Nichols’s Ardours and
Endurances. Those who like Thackeray will like
Mary S. Watts. Those who like Anna Katharine
Green will thank you for sending them to The
Moonstone, by one Wilkie Collins.
Most stories depend upon suspense in the action
for their main effect. You must not “give away”
the story so as to spoil it for the reader. In a mystery
story you may state the mystery and appraise
the solution or even characterize it—but you mustn’t
reveal it.
Tell ’em that Mr. Hergesheimer’s Java Head is[94]
an atmospheric marvel, but will disappoint many
readers who put action first. Tell ’em that William
Allen White writes (often) banally, but so
saturates his novel with his own bigheartedness
that he makes you laugh and cry. Tell ’em the
truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth
as well as you can make it out—and for heaven’s
sake ask yourself with every assertion: “Is this
a fact or is it my personal opinion?” And a fact,
for your purpose, will be an opinion in which a
large majority of readers will concur.
23
“Give me a list of books published during the
last ten years that should be included in college
English laboratory classes in literature. I want
your list. I have my own, but fear it is too academic.”
The following list is an offhand attempt to comply
with this request. It is offered merely for the
suggestions it may contain. If the ten year restriction
is rigid we ask pardon for such titles as may
be a little older than that. Strike them out.
For Kansans: Willa Sibert Cather’s novels,
O Pioneers! and My Antonia, chronicling people
and epochs of Kansas-Nebraska. William Allen
White’s A Certain Rich Man and In the Heart of[95]
a Fool, less for their Kansas-ness than for their
Americanism and humanity.
For Middle Westerners: Meredith Nicholson’s
The Valley of Democracy. Zona Gale’s Birth. Carl
Sandburg’s Chicago Poems. Edgar Lee Masters’s
Spoon River Anthology. Vachel Lindsay’s longer
poems. Mary S. Watts’s Nathan Burke and Van
Cleve: His Friends and His Family. Lord Charnwood’s
life of Lincoln. William Dean Howells’s
The Leatherwood God. Booth Tarkington’s The
Conquest of Canaan (first published about fourteen
years ago) and The Magnificent Ambersons. Gene
Stratton-Porter’s A Daughter of the Land, her
Freckles and her A Girl of the Limberlost. One or
two books by Harold Bell Wright. The Passing
of the Frontier, by Emerson Hough, and other
books in the Chronicles of America series published
by the Yale University Press.
For Americans: Mary S. Watts’s The Rise of
Jennie Cushing. Owen Wister’s The Virginian (if
not barred under the ten year rule). Booth Tarkington’s
The Flirt. Novels with American settings
by Gertrude Atherton and Stewart Edward White.
Mary Johnston’s The Long Roll and Cease Firing.
Willa Sibert Cather’s The Song of the Lark. Edith
Wharton’s Ethan Frome. Alice Brown’s The Prisoner.
Ellen Glasgow’s The Deliverance. Corra
Harris’s A Circuit-Rider’s Wife. All of O. Henry.
Margaret Deland’s The Iron Woman. Earlier[96]
novels by Winston Churchill. Ernest Poole’s The
Harbor. Joseph Hergesheimer’s The Three Black
Pennys, his Gold and Iron and his Java Head. Historical
books by Theodore Roosevelt. American
biographies too numerous to mention. From Isolation
to Leadership: A Review of American Foreign
Policy by Latané (published by the educational department
of Doubleday, Page & Company). Essays,
such as those of Agnes Repplier.
Each of these enumerations presupposes the
books already named, or most of them. Don’t treat
them as pieces of literary workmanship. Many of
them aren’t. Those that have fine literary workmanship
have something else, too—and it’s the
other thing, or things, that count. Fine art in a
book is like good breeding in a person, a passport,
not a Magna Charta. “Manners makyth man”—yah!
24
We are also asked:
“What are some of the things which should enter
into the training of teachers of high school English?”
We reply:
A regard for literature, not as it reflects life, but
as it moulds lives. A profound respect for an author
who can find 100,000 readers, a respect at least
equal to that entertained for an author who can[97]
write superlatively well. For instance: Get it out
of your head that you can afford to condescend
toward a best seller, or to worship such a writer
as Stevenson for his sheer craftsmanship.
An instinct for what will nourish the ordinary
man or woman as keen as your perception of what
will be relished by the fastidious reader. Don’t
insist that people must live on what you, or any
one else, declare to be good for them. It is not for
nothing that they “don’t know anything about literature,
but know what they like.”
A confidence in the greater wisdom of the greatest
number. Tarkington got it right. The public
wants the best it is capable of understanding; its
understanding may not be the highest understanding,
but “the writer who stoops to conquer doesn’t
conquer.” Neither does the writer who never concedes
anything. The public’s standard can’t always
be wrong; the private standards can’t always
be right.
Arnold Bennett says, quite rightly, that the
classics are made and kept alive by “the passionate
few.” But the business of high school teachers of
English is not with the passionate few—who will
look after themselves—but with the unimpassioned
many. You can lead the student to Mr. Pope’s
Pierian spring, but you cannot make him drink.
Unless you can show him, in the Missourian sense,
it’s all off. If you can’t tell what it is a girl likes[98]
in Grace S. Richmond how are you going to show
her what she’ll like in Dickens? Unless you know
what it is that “they” get out of these books they
do read you won’t be able to bait the hook with the
things you want them to read. Don’t you think
you’ve got a lot to learn yourself? And mightn’t
you do worse than sit down yourself and read attentively,
at whatever personal cost, some of the
best sellers?
It all goes back to the size of the teacher’s share
of our common humanity. A person who can’t
read a detective story for the sake of the thrills
has no business teaching high school English. A
person who is a literary snob is unfit to teach high
school English. A person who can’t sense (better
yet, share) the common feeling about a popular
writer and comprehend the basis of it and sympathize
a little with it and express it more or less articulately
in everyday speech is not qualified to teach
high school English.
25
A word about writing “compositions” in high
school English classes. Make ’em write stories instead.
If they want to tackle thumbnail sketches
or abstracter writing—little essays—why, let ’em.
Abstractions in thought and writing are like the
ocean—it’s fatally easy to get beyond your depth,[99]
and every one else’s. Read what Sir Arthur
Quiller-Couch says about this in his Studies in Literature.
Once in a while a theologian urges us to
“get back to the Bible.” Well, there is one sense,
at least, in which the world would do well to get
back to the Bible, or to the Old Testament, at any
rate. As Gardiner points out in his The Bible as
English Literature, it was the fortune or misfortune
of ancient Hebrew that it had no abstractions.
Everything was stated in terms of the five senses.
There was no such word as “virtue”; you said
“sweet smellingness” or “pleasant tastingness” or
something like that. And everybody knew what
you meant. Whereas “virtue” means anything
from personal chastity to a general meritoriousness
that nobody can define. The Greeks introduced abstract
thinking and expression and some Germans
blighted the world by their abuse.
What should enter into the training of high
school teachers of English? Only humbleness,
sanity, catholicity of viewpoint, humor, a continual
willingness to learn, a continuous faith in the people—and
undying enthusiasm. Only these—and
the love of books.
[100]
[101]
LITERARY EDITORS
BY ONE OF THEM
[102]
[103]
V
LITERARY EDITORS, BY ONE OF THEM
THE very term “literary editor” is a survival.
It is meaningless, but we continue to use it
because no better designation has been found, just
as people in monarchical countries continue to speak
of “King George” or “Queen Victoria of Spain.”
Besides, there is politeness to consider. No one
wants to be the first to allude publicly and truthfully
to “Figurehead George” or “Social Leader
Victoria.”
Literary editors who are literary are not editors,
and literary editors who are editors are no longer
literary. Of old there were scholarly, sarcastic
men (delightful fellows, personally) who sat in
cubbyholes and read unremittingly. Afterward, at
night, they set down a few thoughtful, biting words
about what they had read. These were printed.
Publishers who perused them felt as if knives had
been stuck in their backs. Booksellers who read
them looked up to ask each other pathetically: “But
what does it mean?” Book readers who read them
resolved that the publication of a new book should[104]
be, for them, the signal to read an old one. It was
good for the secondhand trade.
We’ve changed all that, or, if we haven’t, we’re
going to. Take a chap who runs what is called
a “book section.” This is a separate section or
supplement forming part of a daily or Sunday
newspaper. Its pages are magazine size—half the
size of newspaper pages. They number from eight
to twenty-eight, depending on the season and the
advertising. The essential thing to realize about
such a section is that it requires an editor to run
it.
It does not require a literary man, or woman, at
all. The editor of such a section need have no
special education in the arts or letters. He must
have judgment, of course, and if he has not some
taste for literary matters he may not enjoy his
work as he will if he has that taste. But high-browism
is fatal.
Can our editor “review” a book? Perhaps not.
It is no matter. Maybe he knows a good review
when he sees it, which will matter a good deal.
Maybe he can get capable people to deal with the
books for him. Which will matter more than anything
else on earth in the handling of his book
section.
A section will most certainly require, to run it,
a man who can tell a good review (another word-survival)
and who can get good reviewers. It[105]
will require a man, or woman, with a sharp, clear
and very broad viewpoint. Such exist. What do
we mean—viewpoint?
The right conception, it seems to us, starts with
the proposition that a new book is news (sometimes
an old one is news too) and should be dealt with
as such. Perhaps, we are dealing only with a state
of mind, in all this, but states of mind are important.
They are the only states where self-determination
is a sure thing. To get on:
Your literary editor is like unto a city editor, an
individual whose desk is usually not so far away
but that you can study him in his habitat. The city
editor tries to distinguish the big news from the
little news. The literary editor will wisely do the
same. What is big news in the world of books?
Well, a book that appears destined to be read as
widely fifty years hence as it is to-day on publication
is big news. And a book that will be read
immediately by 100,000 people is bigger news.
People who talk about news often overlook the
ephemeral side of it. Much of the newsiness and
importance of news resides in its transiency. What
is news to-day isn’t news to-morrow. But to-day
100,000 people, more or less, will want to know
about it.
Illustration: Two events happen on the same day.
One of them will be noted carefully in histories
written fifty years hence, but it affects, and interests,[106]
at the hour of its occurrence very few persons.
Of course it is news, but there may easily, at that
hour, be much bigger. For another event occurring
on that same day, though of a character which
will make it forgotten fifty years later, at once and
directly affects the lives of the hundred thousand.
Parallel: Two books are published on the same
day. One of them will be dissected fifty years
later by the H. W. Boyntons and Wilson Folletts
of that time. But the number of persons who will
read it within the twelvemonth of its birth is small—in
the hundreds. The other book will be out of
print and unremembered in five years. But within
six months of its publication hundreds of thousands
will read it. Among those hundreds of
thousands there will be hundreds, and maybe thousands,
whose thoughts, ideas, opinions will be seriously
modified and in some cases lastingly modified—whose
very lives may change trend as a result of
reading that book.
No need to ask which event and which book is
the bigger news. News is not the judgment of
posterity on a book or event. News is not even
the sum total of the effects of an event or a book
on human society. News is the immediate importance,
or interest, of an event or a book to the
greatest number of people.
Eleanor H. Porter writes a new story. One in
every thousand persons in the United States, or[107]
perhaps more, wants to know about it, and at once.
Isidor MacDougal (as Frank M. O’Brien would
say) writes a literary masterpiece. Not one person
in 500,000 cares, or would care even if the subject
matter were made comprehensible to him. The
oldtime “reviewer” would write three solid columns
about Isidor MacDougal’s work. The present-day
literary editor puts it in competent hands for a
simplified description to be printed later; and meanwhile
he slaps Mrs. Porter’s novel on his front
page.
The troubles of a literary editor are the troubles
of his friend up the aisle, the city editor. The
worst of them is the occasional and inevitable error
in giving out the assignment. All his reporters are
good book reporters, but like the people on the
city editor’s staff they have usually their limitations,
whether temperamental or knowledgeable. Every
once in a while the city editor sends to cover a fire
a reporter who does speechified dinners beautifully
but who has no sympathy with fires, who can’t get
through the fire lines, who writes that the fire
“broke out” and burns up more words misdescribing
the facts than the copyreader can extinguish
with blue air and blue pencil. Just so it will happen
in the best regulated literary editor’s sanctum
that, now and then, the editor will give the wrong
book to the right man. Then he learns how unreasonable[108]
an author can be, if he doesn’t know
already from the confidences of publishers.
The literary editor’s point of view, we believe,
must be that so well expressed by Robert Cortes
Holliday in the essay on That Reviewer “Cuss” in
the book Walking-Stick Papers. Few books that
get published by established publishing houses are
so poor or so circumscribed as not to appeal to a
body of readers somewhere, however small or scattered.
The function of the book reporter is transcendently
to find a book’s waiting audience. If
he can incidentally warn off those who don’t belong
to that audience, so much the better. That’s a
harder thing to do, of course.
2
The first requisite in a good book section is that
it shall be interesting. As regards the news of new
books, this is not difficult where book reporters,
with the reporter’s attitude, are on the job. Reporter’s
stories are sometimes badly written, but
they are seldom dull. New books described by persons
who have it firmly lodged in their noodles that
they are “reviewing” the books, fare badly. The
reviewer-obsession manifests itself in different
ways. Sometimes the new book is made to march
past the reviewer in column of squads, deploying
at page 247 into skirmish formation and coming[109]
at page 431 into company front. Very fine, but
the reader wants to see them in the trenches, or,
headed by the author uttering inspiriting yells, going
over the top. On other occasions the reviewer
assumes the so-called judicial attitude, the true
inwardness of which William Schwenk Gilbert was
perhaps the first to appreciate, with the possible exception
of Lewis Carroll. Then doth our reviewer
tell us what will be famous a century hence. Much
we care what will be famous a century hence.
What bothers us is what we shall read to-morrow.
Of course it may happen to be one and the same
book. Very well then, why not say so?
The main interest of the book section is served
by getting crackajack book reporters. They will
suffice for the people who read the section because
they are interested in books. If the literary editor
stops there, however, he might as well never have
started. These people would read the book section
anyway, unless it were filled throughout with absolutely
unreadable matter, as has been known to
happen. Even then they would doubtless scan the
advertisements. At least, that is the theory on
which publishers hopefully proceed. There are
book sections where the contributors always specify
that their articles shall have a position next to advertising
matter.
No, the literary editor must interest people who
do not especially care about books as such. He[110]
can do it only by convincing them that books are
just as full of life and just as much a part of a
normal scheme of life as movies, or magazine cut-outs,
or buying things on the instalment plan.
Many a plain person has been led to read books by
the fact that books are sometimes sold for instalment
payments. Anything so sold, the ordinary
person at once realizes, must be something which
will fit into his scheme of existence. Acting on an
instinct so old that its origin is shrouded in the
mists of antiquity, the ordinary person pays the instalments.
As a result, books are delivered at his
residence. At first he is frightened. But he who
looks and runs away may live to read another day.
And from living to read it is but a step to reading
to live.
Now one way to interest people who don’t care
about books for books’ sake is to get up attractive
pages, with pleasant or enticing headlines, with pictures,
with jokes in the corners of ’em, with some
new and original and not-hitherto-published matter
in them, with poetry (all kinds), with large type,
with signed articles so that the reader can know
who wrote it and like or hate him with the necessary
personal tag. But these things aren’t literary,
at all. They are just plain human and fall in the
field of action of every editor alive—though of
course editors who are dead are exempt from dealing
with them. That is why a literary editor has[111]
no need to be literary and, indeed, had better not
be if it is going to prevent his being human.
We have been talking about the literary editor
of a book section. There are not many book sections
in this country. There are hundreds of book
pages—half-pages and whole pages and double
pages. The word “technique” is a loathsome thing
and really without any significance in this connection,
inasmuch as there is no particular way of doing
the news of books well, and certainly no one
way of doing it that is invariably better than any
other. But for convenience we may permit ourselves
to use the word “technique” for a moment;
and, permission granted, we will merely say that
the technique of a book page or pages is entirely
different from the technique of a book section—if
you know what we mean.
Clarified (we hope) it comes down to this, that
things which a fellow would attempt in a book section
he would not essay in a book page or double
page. Conversely, things that will make a page
successful may be out of place in a section. It is
by no means wholly a matter of newspaper makeup,
though there is that to it, too. But a man with
a book section, though not necessarily more ambitious,
is otherwisely so. For one thing, he expects
to turn his reporters loose on more books than his
colleague who has only a page or so to turn around
in. For another, he will probably want to print a[112]
careful list of all books he receives, of whatever
sort, with a description of each as adequate as he
can contrive in from twenty to fifty words, plus
title, author, place of publication, publisher and
price. Such lists are scanned by publishers, booksellers,
librarians, readers in search of books on special
subjects—by pretty nearly everybody who reads
the section at all. Even the rather prosaic quality
of such a list has its value. A woman down in
Texas writes to the literary editor that there is too
much conscious cleverness in lots of the stuff he
prints, “but the lists of books are delightful”!
There you are. In editing a book section you must
be all things to all women.
The fellow with a page or two has quite other
preoccupations. Where’s a photo, or a cartoon?
Must have a headline to break the solidity of this
close-packed column of print. How about a funny
column? That gifted person, Heywood Broun,
taking charge of the book pages of the New York
Tribune, announces that he is in favor of anything
that will make book reviewing exciting. Nothing
can make book reviewing exciting except book reporting
and the books themselves; but if Broun is
looking for excitement he will find it while filling
the rôle of a literary editor. Before long he will
learn that everybody in the world who is not the
author of a book wants to review books—and some
who are authors are willing to double in both parts.[113]
Also, a considerable number of books are published
annually in these still United States and a considerable
percentage of those published find their way
to the literary editor. It is no joke to receive, list
with descriptions and sort out for assignment or
non-assignment an average of 1,500 volumes a
year, nor to assign to your book reporters, with as
much infallibility in choosing the reporter as possible,
perhaps half of the 1,500. Likewise there
are assignments which several reporters want, a
single book bespoken by four persons, maybe; and
there are book assignments that are received with
horror or sometimes with unflinching bravery by
the good soldier. To hand a man, for instance,
the extremely thick two-volume History of Labour
in the United States by Professor Commons and his
associates is like pinning a decoration on him for
limitless valor under fire—only the decoration bears
a strong resemblance to the Iron Cross.
3
Advertising?
Newspapers depend upon advertising for their
existence, let alone their profits, in most instances.
Of course, if there were no such things as advertisements
we should still have newspapers. The news
must be had. Presumably people would simply[114]
pay more for it, or pay as much in a more direct
way.
What is true of newspapers is true of parts of
newspapers. The fact that a new book is news,
and, as such, a thing that must more or less widely
but indispensably be reported, is attested by the
maintenance of book columns and pages in many
newspapers where book advertising there is none.
The people who read the Boston Evening Transcript,
for example, would hardly endure the abolition
of its book pages whether publishers used them
to advertise in or not.
At the same time the publisher finds, and can
find, no better medium than a good live book page
or book section; nor can he find any other medium,
nor can any other medium be created, in which his
advertising will reach his full audience. “The
trade” reads the excellent Publishers’ Weekly, librarians
have the journal of the American Library
Association, readers have the newspapers and magazines
of general circulation on which they rely for
the news of new books. But the good book page
or book section reaches all these groups. Publishers,
authors, booksellers, librarians, book buyers—all
read it. And if it is really good it spreads the
book-reading habit. Even a bookshop seldom does
that—we have one exception in mind, pretty well
known. People do not, ordinarily, read in a bookshop.
[115]Of course a literary editor who has any regard
for the vitality of his page or section is interested
in book advertising. There’s something wrong
with him if he isn’t. If he isn’t he doesn’t measure
up to his job, which is to get people to read books
and find their way about among them. A book
page or a book section without advertising is no
more satisfactory than a man or a woman without
a sense of the value of money. It looks lopsided
and it is lopsided. Readers resent it, and rightly.
It’s a beautiful façade, but the side view is disappointing.
The interest the literary editor takes in book
advertising need no more be limited than the interest
he takes in the growth or improvement of
any other feature of his page or section. It has
and can have no relation to his editorial or news
policy. The moment such a thing is true his usefulness
is ended. An alliance between the pen and
the pocketbook is known the moment it is made
and is transparent the moment it takes effect in
print. A literary editor may resent, and keenly,
as an editor, the fact that Bing, Bang & Company
do not advertise their books in his domain. He is
quite right to feel strongly about it. It has nothing
to do with his handling of the Bing Bang books.
That is determined by their news value alone. He
may give the Bing Bang best seller a front page
review and at the same time decline to meet Mr.[116]
Bing or lunch with Mr. Bang. And he will be entirely
honest and justified in his course, both ways.
Puff & Boom advertise like thunder. The literary
editor likes them both immensely, or, at least, he
appreciates their good judgment (necessarily it
seems good to him in his rôle as editor of the pages
they use). But Puff & Boom’s books are one-stick
stories. Well, it’s up to Puff & Boom, isn’t it?
Oh, well, first and last there’s a lot to being a
literary editor, new style. But first and last there’s
a lot to being a human. Any one who can be human
successfully can do the far lesser thing much
better than any literary editor has yet done it.
[117]
WHAT EVERY PUBLISHER
KNOWS
[118]
[119]
VI
WHAT EVERY PUBLISHER KNOWS
A BIG subject? Not necessarily. Discussed by
an authority? No, indeed. On the contrary,
about to be written upon by an amateur recording
impressions extending a little over a year but formed
in several relationships—as a “literary editor,” as an
author and, involuntarily, as an author’s agent—but
all friendly. Also, perhaps, as a pretty regular
reader of publishers’ products. What will first appear
as vastness in the subject will shrink on a
moment’s examination. For our title is concerned
only with what every publisher knows. A common
piece of knowledge; or if not, after all, very “common,”
at least commonly held—by book publishers.
To state the main conclusion first: The one
thing that every publisher knows, so far as a humble
experience can deduce, is that what is called
“general” publishing—meaning fiction and other
books of general appeal—is a highly speculative enterprise
and hardly a business at all. The clearest
analogy seems to be with the theatrical business.
Producing books and producing plays is terrifyingly
alike. Full of risks. Requiring, unless genius is[120]
manifested, considerable money capital. Likely to
make, and far more likely to lose, small fortunes
overnight.... Fatally fascinating. More an art
than an organization but usually requiring an organization
for the exhibition of the most brilliant art—like
opera. A habit comparable with hasheesh.
Heart-lifting—and headachy. ’Twas the night before
publication and all through the house not a
creature was stirring, not even a stenographer. The
day dawned bright and clear and a re-order for fifty
more copies came in the afternoon mail.... Absentmindedly,
the publisher-bridegroom pulled a
contract instead of the wedding ring from his pocket.
“With this royalty I thee wed,” he murmured. And
so she was published and they lived happily ever
after until she left him because he did not clothe
the children suitably, using green cloth with purple
stamping.
2
A fine old publishing house once went back over
the record of about 1,200 published books. This
was a rather conservative firm, as little of a gambler
as possible; its books had placed it, in every respect,
in the first rank of publishing houses.
Of the 1,200 books just one in ten had made any
sizable amount of money. The remaining 1,080
had either lost money, broken even, or made sums
smaller than the interest on the money tied up in[121]
them. Most of the 120 profitable books had been
highly profitable; it will not surprise you to learn
this when you reflect that these lucrative books had
each to foot the bill, more or less, for nine others.
So much for the analysis of figures. But what lay
behind the figures? In some cases it was possible
to tell why a particular book had sold. More often
it wasn’t.... Is this a business?
3
Thorwald Alembert Jenkinson has a book published.
It’s not a bad book, either; very good novel,
as a matter of fact. Sales rather poor. Mr. Jenkinson’s
publisher takes his next book with a natural
reluctance, buoyed up by the certitude that this
is a better story and has in it elements that promise
popularity. The publisher’s salesman goes on
the road. In Dodge City, Iowa, let us say, he enters
a bookseller’s and begins to talk the new Jenkinson
novel. At the sound of his voice and the sight of
the dummy the bookseller lifts repelling hands and
backs away in horror.
“Stock that?” asks the bookseller rhetorically.
“Not on your life! Why,” with a gesture toward
one shelf, “there’s his first book. Twenty copies
and only two sold!”
The new Jenkinson novel has a wretched advance
sale. Readers, not seeing it in the bookshops, may[122]
yet call for it when they read a review—not necessarily
a favorable account—or when they see it advertised.
If Mr. Jenkinson wrote histories or biographies
the bookseller’s wholly human attitude
would not much matter. But a novel is different.
The customer wanting Jenkinson’s History of
France would order it or go elsewhere, most likely.
The customer wanting Jenkinson’s new novel is
quite often content with Tarkington’s instead.
When you go to the ticket agency to get seats at
a Broadway show and find they have none left for
Whoop ’Er Up you grumble, and then buy seats at
Let’s All Go. Not that you really care. Not that
any one really cares. The man who produced
Whoop ’Er Up is also the producer of Let’s All Go,
both theatres are owned by a single group, the librettists
are one and the same and the music of both
is equally bad, proceeding from an identical source.
Even the stagehands work interchangeably on a
strict union scale. But Mr. Jenkinson did not write
Tarkington’s novel, the two books are published
by firms that have not a dollar in common, and only
the bookseller can preserve an evatanguayan indifference
over your choice.
4
The publisher’s salesman comes to the bookseller’s
lair equipped with dummies. These show the[123]
book’s exterior, its size, thickness, paper, binding
and (very important) its jacket. Within the
dummy are blank pages, or perhaps the first twenty
pages of the book printed over and over to give the
volume requisite thickness. The bookseller may
read these twenty pages. If the author has got
plenty of action into them the bookseller is favorably
impressed. Mainly he depends for his idea of
the book upon what the salesman and the publisher’s
catalogue tells him. He has to. He can’t read ’em all.
Sometimes the salesman can illustrate his remarks.
Henry Leverage wrote an ingenious story
called Whispering Wires in which the explanation
of a mysterious murder depended upon the telephone,
converted by a too-gifted electrician into a
single-shot pistol. Offering the story to the booksellers,
Harry Apeler carried parts of a telephone
receiver about the country with him, unscrewing
and screwing on again the delicate disc that you put
against your ear and showing how the deed was
done.
5
The bookseller, like every one else, goes by experience.
It is, or has been, his experience that
collections of short stories do not sell well. And
this is true despite O. Henry, Fannie Hurst and
Edna Ferber. It is so true that publishers shy at
short story volumes. Where there is a name that[124]
will command attention—Alice Brown, Theodore
Dreiser—or where a special appeal is possible, as in
Edward J. O’Brien’s The Best Short Stories of
191-, books made up of short tales may sell. But
there are depressing precedents.
In his interesting article on The Publishing Business,
appearing in 1916 in the Publishers’ Weekly
and since reprinted as a booklet, Temple Scott cites
Henri Bergson’s Creative Evolution as a modern
instance of a special sort of book finding its own
very special, but surprisingly large, public. “Nine
booksellers out of ten ‘passed’ it when the traveller
brought it round,” observes Mr. Scott. “Fortunately,
for the publisher, the press acted the part of
the expert, and public attention was secured.” Was
the bookseller to blame? Most decidedly not.
Creative Evolution is nothing to tie up your money
in on a dim chance that somewhere an enthusiastic
audience waits for the Bergsonian gospel.
Mr. Scott’s article, which is inconclusive, in our
opinion, points out clearly that as no two books are
like each other no two books are really the same article.
Much fiction, to be sure, is of a single stamp;
many books, and here we are by no means limited to
fiction, have whatever unity comes from the authorship
of a single hand. This unity may exist, elusively,
as in the stories of Joseph Conrad, or may
be confined almost wholly to the presence of the
same name on two titlepages, as in the fact that[125]
The Virginian and The Pentecost of Calamity are
both the work of Owen Wister.
No! Two books are most often and emphatically
not the same article. Mr. Scott is wholly
right when he points out every book should have advertising,
or other attention, peculiar to itself. A
method of reporting one book will not do for another,
any more than a publisher’s circular describing
one book will do to describe a second. The art
of reporting books or other news, like the art of advertising
books or other commodities, is one of endless
differentiation. In the absence of real originality,
freshness and ideas, both objects go unachieved
or else are achieved by speciousness, not to
say guile. You, for example, do not really believe
that by reading Hannibal Halcombe’s How to Heap
Up Happiness you will be able to acquire the equivalent
of a college education in 52 weeks. But somewhere
in How to Heap Up Happiness Mr. Halcombe
tells how he made money or how he learned to enjoy
pictures on magazine covers or a happy solution
of his unoriginal domestic troubles—any one of
which you may crave to know and honest information
of which will probably send you after the book.
6
At this point in the discussion of our subject we
have had the incredible folly to look back at our[126]
outline. Yes, there is an outline—or a thing of
shreds and patches which once went by that description.
What, you will say, wrecked so soon, after
a mere introduction of 1,500 words or so? Certainly.
Outlines are to writers what architects’
plans are to builders, or what red rags are supposed
to be to bulls. Or, as the proverbial (our favorite
adjective) chaff before the wind. Our outline says
that the subject of selling books should be subdivision
(c) under division 1 of the three partitions of
our subject. All Gaul and Poland are not the only
objects divided in three parts. Every serious subject
is, likewise.
Never mind. We shall have to struggle along as
best we can. We have been talking about selling
books, or what every publisher knows in regard to
it. Well, then, every publisher knows that selling
books as it has mainly to be conducted under present
conditions, is just as much a matter of merchandising
as selling bonnets, bathrobes and birdseed.
But this is one of the things that people outside the
publishing and bookselling businesses seldom grasp.
A cultural air, for them, invests the book business.
The curse of the genteel hangs about it. It is almost
professional, like medicine and baseball. It
has an odor, like sanctity.... All wrong.
Bonnets, bathrobes, birdseed, books. All are
saleable if you go about it right. And how is that?
you ask.
[127]The best way to sell bonnets is to lay a great
foundational demand for headgear. The best way
to sell bathrobes is to encourage bathing. The best
way to sell birdseed is to put a canary in every home.
It might be supposed that the best way to sell books
would be to get people to read. Yes, it might be
far more valuable in the end to stimulate and spread
the reading habit than to try to sell 100,000 copies
of any particular book.
Of course every publisher knows this and of
course all the publishers, associating themselves for
the promotion of a common cause not inconceivably
allied to the general welfare, spend time and money
in the effort to make readers—not of Mrs. Halcyon
Hunter’s Love Has Wings or Mr. Caspar Cartouche’s
Martin the Magnificent, but of books, just
good books of any sort soever. Yes, of course....
This would be—beg pardon, is—the thing that
actually and immediately as well as ultimately
counts: Let us get people to read, to like to read,
to enjoy reading, and they will, sooner or later, read
books. Sooner or later they’ll become book readers
and book buyers. Sooner or later books will sell as
well as automobiles....
On the merely technical side of bookselling, on
the immediate problem of selling particular new
novels, collections of short stories, histories, books
of verse, and all the rest, the publishers have, collectively
at least, not much to learn from their fellow[128]
merchants with the bonnets, bathrobes and
birdseed. The mechanism of merchandising is so
highly developed in America that many of the methods
resemble the interchangeable parts of standardized
manufactures everywhere. Suppose we have a
look at these methods.
7
The lesson of flexibility has been fully mastered
by at least two American publishing houses. With
their very large lists of new books they contrive to
avoid, as much as possible, fixed publication dates.
While their rivals are pinning themselves fast six
months ahead, these publishers are moving largely
but conditionally six and nine months ahead, and
less largely but with swift certainty three months,
two months, even one month from the passing moment.
And they are absolutely right and profit by
their rightness. For this reason: Everything that
is printed has in it an element of that timeliness, that
ephemerality if you like but also that widening ripple
of human interest which is the unique essence of
what we call “news.” This quality is present, in a
perceptible amount, even in the most serious sort of
printed matter. Let us take, as an example, Darwin’s
Origin of Species. Oh! exclaims the reader,
there surely is a book with no ephemerality about
it! No? But there was an immense quantity of[129]
just that in its publication. It came at the right
hour. Fifty years earlier it would have gone unnoticed.
To-day it is transcended by a body of
biological knowledge that Darwin knew not.
Fifty years, one way or the other, would have
made a vast difference in the reception, the import,
the influence of even so epochal a book as The
Origin of Species. Now a little reflection will show
that, in the case of lesser books, the matter of time
is far more sharply important. Darwin’s book was
so massive that ten or twenty years either way might
not have mattered. But in such a case as John
Spargo’s Bolshevism a few months may matter. In
the case of Mr. Britling the month as well as the
year mattered vitally. Time is everything, in the
fate of many a book, even as in the fate of a magazine
article, a poem, an essay, a short story. Arthur
Guy Empey was on the very hour with Over
the Top; but the appearance of his Tales from a
Dugout a few days after the signing of the armistice
on November 11, 1918, was one of the minor
tragedies of the war.
Therefore the publisher who can, as nearly as human
and mechanical conditions permit, preserve
flexibility in his publishing plans, has a very great
advantage over inelastic competitors. That iron-clad
arrangements at half year ahead can be avoided
the methods of two of the most important American
houses demonstrate. Either can get out a book[130]
on a month’s notice. More than once in a season
this spells the difference between a sale of 5,000
and one of 15,000 copies—that is, between not much
more than “breaking even” and making a handsome
profit.
8
Every book that is published requires advertising
though perhaps no two books call for advertising
in just the same way. One of the best American
publishing houses figures certain sums for advertising—whatever
form it may take—in its costs of
manufacture and then the individual volumes have
to take each their chances of getting, each, its proper
share of the money. Other houses have similar unsatisfactory
devices for providing an advertising
fund. The result is too often not unlike the revolving
fund with which American railways were
furnished by Congress—it revolved so fast that
there wasn’t enough to go round long.
A very big publishing house does differently. To
the cost of manufacture of each book is added a specific,
flat and appropriate sum of money to advertise
that particular book. The price of the book is
fixed accordingly. When the book is published
there is a definite sum ready to advertise it. No
book goes unadvertised. If the book “catches on”
there is no trouble, naturally, about more advertising
money; if it does not sell the advertising of it[131]
stops when the money set aside has been exhausted
and the publishers take their loss with a clear conscience;
they have done their duty by the book. It
may be added that this policy has always paid.
Combined with other distinctive methods it has put
the house which adopted it in the front rank.
9
Whether to publish a small, carefully selected list
of books in a season or a large and comprehensive
list is not wholly decided by the capital at the publisher’s
command. Despite the doubling of all costs
of book manufacture, publishing is not yet an enterprise
which requires a great amount of capital,
as compared with other industries of corresponding
volume. The older a publishing house the more
likely it is to restrict its list of new books. It has
more to lose and less to gain by taking a great number
of risks in new publications. At the same time
it is subjected to severe competition because the capital
required to become a book publisher is not large.
Hence much caution, too much, no doubt, in many
cases and every season. Still, promising manuscripts
are lamentably few. “Look at the stuff that
gets published,” is the classic demonstration of the
case.
The older the house, the stronger its already accumulated
list, the more conservative, naturally, it[132]
becomes, the less inclined to play with loaded dice
in the shape of manuscripts. Yet a policy of extreme
caution and conservatism is more dangerous
and deadly than a dash of the gambler’s makeup.
Two poor seasons together are noticed by the trade;
four poor seasons together may put a house badly
behind. A season with ten books only, all good,
all selling moderately well, is perhaps more meritorious
and more valuable in the long run than a
season with thirty books, nearly all poor except for
one or two sensational successes. But the fellow
who brings out the thirty books and has one or two
decided best sellers is the fellow who will make large
profits, attract attention and acquire prestige. It
is far better to try everything you can that seems to
have “a chance” than to miss something awfully
good. And, provided you drop the bad potatoes
quickly, it will pay you better in the end.
There must be a big success somewhere on your
list. A row of respectable and undistinguished
books is the most serious of defeats.
10
Suppose you were a book publisher and had put
out a novel or two by Author A. with excellent results
on the profit side of the ledger. Author A.
is plainly a valuable property, like a copper mine in
war time. A.’s third manuscript comes along in due[133]
time. It is entirely different from the first two so-successful
novels; it is pretty certain to disappoint
A.’s “audience.” You canvass the subject with
A., who can’t “see” your arguments and suggestions.
It comes to this: Either you publish the third novel
or you lose A. Which, darling reader, would you,
if you were the publisher, do? Would you choose
the lady and The Tiger?
You are neatly started as a book publisher. You
can’t get advance sales for your productions (to borrow
a term from the theatre). You go to Memphis
and Syracuse and interview booksellers. They say
to you: “For heaven’s sake, get authors whose
names mean something! Why should we stock fiction
by Horatius Hotaling when we can dispose of
125 copies of E. Phillips Oppenheim’s latest in ten
days from publication?” Returning thoughtfully
to New York, you happen to meet a Celebrated Author.
Toward the close of luncheon at the Brevoort
he offers to let you have a book of short stories.
One of them (it will be the title-story, of course)
was published in the Saturday Evening Post, bringing
to Mr. Lorimer, the editor, 2,500 letters and
117 telegrams of evenly divided praise and condemnation.
Short stories are a stiff proposition; but
the Celebrated Author has a name that will insure
a certain advance sale and a fame that will insure
reviewers’ attention. For you to become his publisher
will be as prestigious as it is adventitious.
[134]From ethical and other motives, you seek out the
C. A.’s present publisher—old, well-established house—and
inquire if Octavo & Duodecimo will have any
objection to your publishing the C. A.’s book of
tales. Mr. Octavo replies in friendly accents:
“Not a bit! Not a bit! Go to it! However,
we’ve lent ... (the C. A.) $2,500 at one time or
another in advance moneys on a projected novel.
Travel as far as you like with him, but remember
that he can’t give you a novel until he has given us
one or has repaid that $2,500.”
What to do? ’Tis indeed a pretty problem. If
you pay Octavo & Duodecimo $2,500 you can have
the C. A.’s next novel—worth several times as much
as any book of tales, at the least. On the other
hand, there is no certainty that the C. A. will deliver
you the manuscript of a novel. He has been
going to deliver it to Octavo & Duodecimo for three
years. And you can’t afford to tie up $2,500 on
the chance that he’ll do for you what he hasn’t done
for them. Because $2,500 is, to you, a lot of money.
In the particular instance where this happened
(except for details, we narrate an actual occurrence)
the beginning publisher went ahead and published
the book of tales, and afterward another book
of tales, and let Octavo & Duodecimo keep their
option on the C. A.’s next novel, if he ever writes
any. The probabilities are that the C. A. will write
short stories for the rest of his life rather than deliver[135]
a novel from which he will receive not one cent
until $2,500 has been deducted from the royalties.
11
English authors are keenest on advance money.
The English writer who will undertake to do a book
without some cash in hand before putting pen to
paper is a great rarity. An American publisher who
wants English manuscripts and goes to London
without his checkbook won’t get anywhere. A little
real money will go far. It will be almost unnecessary
for the publisher who has it to entrain for those
country houses where English novelists drink tea
and train roses. Kent, Sussex, Norfolk, Yorkshire,
Wessex, &c., will go down to London. Mr.
Britling will motor into town to talk about a contract.
All the London clubs will be named as rendezvous.
Visiting cards will reach the publisher’s
hotel, signifying the advent of Mr. Percival Fotheringay
of Houndsditch, Bayswater, Wapping Old
Stairs, London, B. C. Ah, yes, Fotheringay; wonderful
stories of Whitechapel and the East End,
really! Knows the people—what?
It has to be said that advances on books seem to
retard their delivery. We have in mind a famous
English author (though he might as well be American,
so far as this particular point is concerned)
who got an advance of $500 (wasn’t it?) some years[136]
ago from Quarto & Folio—on a book of essays.
Quarto & Folio have carried that title in their spring
and fall catalogues of forthcoming books ever since.
Spring and fall they despair afresh. Daylight saving
did nothing to help them—an hour gained was
a mere bagatelle in the cycles of time through which
Fads and Fatalities keeps moving in a regular and
always equidistant orbit. If some day the League
of Nations shall ordain that the calendar be set
ahead six months Quarto & Folio may get the completed
manuscript of Fads and Fatalities.
American authors are much less insistent on advance
payments than their cousins 3,000 miles removed.
A foremost American publishing house has
two inflexible rules: No advance payments and no
verdict on uncompleted manuscripts. Inflexible—but
it is to be suspected that though this house never
bends the rule there are times when it has to break
it. What won’t bend must break. There are a few
authors for whom any publisher will do anything
except go to jail. Probably you would make the
same extensive efforts to retain your exclusive
rights in a South African diamond digging which
had already produced a bunch of Kohinoors.
12
There is a gentleman’s agreement among publishers,
arrived at some years back, not to indulge[137]
in cutthroat competition for each other’s authors.
This ethical principle, like most ethical principles
now existing, is dictated quite as much by considerations
of keeping a whole skin as by a sense of professional
honor. There are some men in the book
publishing business whose honorable standards have
a respect for the other fellow’s property first among
their Fourteen Points. There are others who are
best controlled by a knowledge that to do so-and-so
would be very unhealthy for themselves.
The agreement, like most unwritten laws, is interpreted
with various shadings. Some of these are
subtle and some of them are not. It is variously
applied by different men in different cases, sometimes
unquestionably and sometimes doubtfully.
But in the main it is pretty extensively and strictly
upheld, in spirit as in letter.
How far it transgresses authors’ privileges or
limits authors’ opportunities would be difficult to
say. In the nature of the case, any such understanding
must operate to some extent to lessen the
chances of an author receiving the highest possible
compensation for his work. Whether this is offset
by the favors and concessions, pecuniary and otherwise,
made to an author by a publisher to whom he
adheres, can’t be settled. The relation of author
and publisher, at best, calls for, and generally elicits,
striking displays of loyalty on both sides. Particularly[138]
among Americans, the most idealistic people
on earth.
In its practical working this publishers’ understanding
operates to prevent any publisher “approaching”
an author who has an accepted publisher
of his books. Unless you, as a publisher, are yourself
approached by Author B., whose several books
have been brought out by Publisher C., you are
theoretically bound hand and foot. And even if
Author B. comes to you there are circumstances under
which you may well find it desirable to talk
B.’s proposal over with C., hitherto his publisher.
After that talk you may wish B. were in Halifax.
If everybody told the truth matters would be greatly
simplified. Or would they?
If you hear that Author D., who writes very good
sellers, is dissatisfied with Publisher F., what is your
duty in the circumstances? Author D. may not
come to you, for there are many publishers for such
as he to choose from. Shall we say it is your duty
to acquaint D., indirectly perhaps, with the manifest
advantages of bringing you his next novel? We’ll
say so.
Whatever publishers agree to, authors are free.
And every publisher knows how easy it is to lose
an author. Why, they leave you like that! (Business
of snapping fingers.) And for the lightest reasons!
(Register pain or maybe mournfulness.) If
D. W. Griffith wanted to make a Movie of a Publisher[139]
Losing an Author he would find the action
too swift for the camera to record. Might as well
try to film The Birth of a Notion.
13
One of the most fascinating mysteries about publishers,
at least to authors, is the method or methods
by which they determine the availability of
manuscripts. Fine word, availability. Noncommittal
and all that. It has no taint of infallibility—which
is the last attribute a publisher makes pretensions
to.
There are places where one man decides whether
a manuscript will do and there are places where it
takes practically the whole clerical force and several
plebiscites to accept or reject the author’s offering.
One house which stands in the front rank in this
country accepts and rejects mainly on the verdicts
of outsiders—specialists, however, in various fields.
Another foremost publishing house has a special
test for “popular” novels in manuscript. An extra
ration of chewing gum is served out to all the stenographers
and they are turned loose on the type-written
pages. If they react well the firm signs a
contract and prints a first edition of from 5,000 to
25,000 copies, depending on whether it is a first
novel or not and the precise comments of the girls
at page 378.
[140]Always the sales manager reads the manuscript,
if it is at all seriously considered. What he says
has much weight. He’s the boy who will have to
sell the book to the trade and unless he can see things
in it, or can be got to, there is practically no hope
despite Dr. Munyon’s index finger.
Recently a publishing house of national reputation
has done a useful thing—we are not prepared
to say it is wholly new—by establishing a liaison
officer. This person does not pass on manuscripts,
unless incidentally by way of offering his verdict
to be considered with the verdicts of other department
heads. But once a manuscript has been accepted
by the house it goes straight to this man who
reads it intensively and sets down, on separate
sheets, everything about it that might be useful to
(a) the advertising manager, (b) the sales manager
and his force, and (c) the editorial people handling
the firm’s book publicity effort.
14
A little knowledge of book publishing teaches immense
humility. The number of known instances
in which experienced publishers have erred in judgment
is large. Authors always like to hear of these.
But too much must not be deduced from them.
Every one has heard of the rejection of Henry Sydnor
Harrison’s novel Queed. Many have heard of[141]
the publisher who decided not to “do” Vicente
Blasco Ibañez’s The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.
There was more than one of him, by the
way, and in each case he had an exceedingly bad
translation to take or reject (we are told), the only
worthy translation, apparently, being that which was
brought out with such sensational success in the
early fall of 1918. A publisher lost Spoon River
Anthology because of a delay in acceptance—he
wanted the opinion of a confrere not easily reached.
For every publisher’s mistake of this sort there could
probably be cited an instance of perspicacity much
more striking. Such was the acceptance of Edward
Lucas White’s El Supremo after many rejections.
And how about the publisher who accepted Queed?
15
Let us conclude these haphazard and very likely
unhelpful musings on an endless subject by telling a
true story.
In the spring of 1919 one of the principal publishing
houses in America and England undertook the
publication of a very unusual sort of a novel, semi-autobiographical,
a work of love and leisure by a
man who had gained distinction as an executive. It
was a fine piece of work, though strange; had a delightful
reminiscential quality. The book was made
up, a first edition of moderate size printed and[142]
bound. It was not till this had been done and the
book was ready to place on sale that the head of this
publishing house had an opportunity to read it.
The Head is a veteran publisher famous for his
prescience in the matter of manuscripts and for honorable
dealings.
He read the book through and was charmed by
it; he looked at the book and was unhappy. He
sent for everybody who had had to do with the making
of this book. He held up his copy and fluttered
pages and said, in effect:
“This has been done all wrong. Here is a book
of quite exceptional quality. I don’t think it will
sell. Only moderately, though perhaps rather steadily
for some years to come. It won’t make us
money. To speak of. But it deserves, intrinsically,
better treatment. Better binding. This is
only ordinary six-months’-selling novel binding. It
deserves larger type. Type with a more beautiful
face. Fewer lines to the page. Lovelier dress
from cover to cover.
“Throw away the edition that has been printed.
Destroy it or something. At least, hide it. Don’t
let any of it get out. For this has been done wrong,
all wrong. Do it over.”
So they went away from his presence and did it
right. It meant throwing away about $2,000. Or
was it a $2,000 investment in the good opinion of
people who buy, read and love books?
[143]
THE SECRET OF THE BEST SELLER
[144]
[145]
VII
THE SECRET OF THE BEST SELLER
BY “best seller” we may mean one of several
things. Dr. Emmett Holt’s Care and Feeding
of Children, of which the fifty-eighth edition
was printed in the spring of 1919, is one kind of
best seller; Owen Wister’s The Virginian is quite
another. The number of editions of a book is a
very uncertain indication of sales to a person not
familiar with book publishing. Editions may consist
of as few as 500 copies or as many as 25,000
or even 50,000. The advance sale of Gene Stratton-Porter’s
A Daughter of the Land was, if we recall
the figure exactly, 150,000 copies. These,
therefore, were printed and distributed by the day
when the book was placed on sale, or shortly thereafter.
To call this the “first edition” would be
rather meaningless.
One thousand copies of a book of poems—unless
it be an anthology—is a large edition indeed. But
not for Edgar Guest, whose books sell in the tens
of thousands. The sale, within a couple of years,
of 31,000 copies of the poems of Alan Seeger was
phenomenal.
[146]The first book of essays of an American writer
sold 6,000 copies within six months of its publication.
This upset most precedents of the bookselling
trade. The author’s royalties may have
been $1,125. A few hundred dollars should be
added to represent money received for the casual
publication of the essays in magazines before their
appearance in the book. Of course the volume did
not stop selling at the end of six months.
Compare these figures, however, with the income
of one of the most popular American novelists. A
single check for $75,000. Total payments, over a
period of fifteen years, of $750,000 to $1,000,000.
Yet it is doubtful if the books of this novelist
reached more than 65 per cent. of their possible
audience.
It is a moderate estimate, in our opinion, that
most books intended for the “general reader,”
whether fiction or not, do not reach more than one-quarter
of the whole body of readers each might
attain. With the proper machinery of publicity
and merchandising book sales in the United States
could be quadrupled. We share this opinion with
Harry Blackman Sell of the Chicago Daily News
and were interested to find it independently confirmed
by James H. Collins who, writing in the Saturday
Evening Post of May 3, 1919, under the heading
When Merchandise Sells Itself, said:
“Book publishing is one industry that suffers for[147]
lack of retail outlets. Even the popular novel sells
in numbers far below the real buying power of this
nation of readers, because perhaps 25 per cent. of
the public can examine it and buy it at the city bookstores,
while it is never seen by the rest of the public.
“For lack of quantity production based on wide
retail distribution the novel sells for a dollar and
a half.
“But for a dollar you can buy a satisfactory
watch.
“That is made possible by quantity production.
Quantity production of dollar watches is based on
their sale in 50,000 miscellaneous shops, through
the standard stock and the teaching of modern mercantile
methods. Book publishers have made experiments
with the dollar novel, but it sold just
about the same number of copies as the $1.50 novel,
because only about so many fiction buyers were
reached through the bookstores. Now the standard-stock
idea is being applied to books, with assortments
of 50 or 100 proved titles carried by the druggist
and stationer.”
2
Speaking rather offhandedly, we are of opinion
that not more than two living American writers of
fiction have achieved anything like a 100 per cent.[148]
sale of their books. These are Harold Bell Wright
and Gene Stratton-Porter.
I am indebted to Mr. Frank K. Reilly, president
of the Reilly & Lee Company, Chicago, selling
agents for the original editions of all Mr. Wright’s
books, for the following figures:
“We began,” wrote Mr. Reilly, “with That
Printer of Udell’s—selling, as I remember the figures,
about 20,000. Then The Shepherd of the
Hills—about 100,000, I think. Then the others in
fast growing quantities. For The Winning of
Barbara Worth we took four orders in advance
which totalled nearly 200,000 copies. On When a
Man’s a Man we took the biggest single order ever
placed for a novel at full price—that is, a cloth-bound,
‘regular’ $1.35 book—250,000 copies from
the Western News Company. The advance sale of
this 1916 book was over 465,000.”
Mr. Reilly wrote at the beginning of March,
1919, from French Lick, Indiana. At that time
Mr. Wright’s publishers had in hand a novel, The
Re-Creation of Brian Kent, published August 21,
1919. They had arranged for a first printing of
750,000 copies and were as certain of selling 500,000
copies before August 1 as you are of going to
sleep some time in the next twenty-four hours. It
was necessary to make preparations for the sale of
1,000,000 copies of the new novel before August
21, 1920.
[149]The sale of 1,000,000 copies of The Re-Creation
of Brian Kent within a year of publication may be
said to achieve a 100 per cent. circulation so far as
existing book merchandising facilities allow.
The sale, within ten years, of 670,733 copies of
Gene Stratton-Porter’s story, Freckles, approaches
a 100 per cent. sale but with far too much retardation.
3
How has the 100 per cent. sale for the Harold
Bell Wright books been brought within hailing distance?
Before us lies a circular which must have been
mailed to most booksellers in the United States
early in the spring of 1919. It is headed: “First
Publicity Advertisement of Our $100,000 Campaign.”
Below this legend is an advertisement of
The Re-Creation of Brian Kent. Below that is a
statement that the advertisement will appear, simultaneously
with the book’s publication, in “magazines
and national and religious weeklies having millions
upon millions of circulation. In addition to this
our newspaper advertising will cover all of the larger
cities of the United States.” Then follows a list
of “magazines, national and religious weeklies covered
by our signed advertising contracts.”
There are 132 of them. The range is from the
Atlantic Monthly and the New Republic to Vanity[150]
Fair and Town Topics in one slant; from System
and Physical Culture to Zion’s Herald and the
Catholic News; from Life to Needlecraft; from the
Photoplay World to the Girl’s Companion; from the
Outlook to the Lookout—and to and fro and back
and forth in a web covering all America between
the two Portlands.
There are about 140,000,000 persons in the
United States and Great Britain together. Over
100,000,000 of them, we are told, have read a Harold
Bell Wright book or seen a Harold Bell Wright
movie.
The secret of the sale of Mr. Wright’s books, so
far as the external factor is concerned, resides in
the fact that his stories have been brought to the
attention of thousands upon thousands who, from
one year’s end to the other, never have a new book
of fiction thrust upon their attention by advertising
or by sight of the book itself.
4
We speak of the “external factor.” There is an
external factor quite as much as an internal factor
in the success of every best seller of whatever sort.
The tendency of everybody who gives any attention
to the subject, but particularly the book publisher,
is to study the internal factor almost to the
exclusion of the other. What, you naturally ask[151]
yourself, are the qualities in this book that have
made it sell so remarkably?
The internal factor is important. Its importance,
doubtless, cannot be overrated. But it is not
the whole affair. Before we go further let us lay
down some general principles that are not often
formulated clearly enough even in the minds of
those to whom they import most.
1. The internal factor—certain qualities of the
book itself—predetermines its possible audience.
2. The external factor—the extent to which it is
brought to public attention, the manner in which
it is presented to the public, the ubiquity of copies
for sale—determines its actual audience.
3. The internal factor can make a best seller of
a book with almost no help from the external factor,
but cannot give it a 100 per cent. sale.
4. The external factor cannot make a big seller
where the internal factor is not of the right sort;
but it can always give a 100 per cent. sale.
5. The internal factor is only partly in the publisher’s
control; the external factor is entirely controllable
by the publisher.
There are two secrets of the best seller. One
resides in the book itself, the other rests in the manner
of its exploitation. One is inherent, the other
is circumstantial. One is partly controllable by
the publisher, the other is wholly so. Since a book
possessing certain qualities in a sufficient degree will[152]
sell heavily anyway, it is human nature to hunt
ceaselessly for this thing which will triumph over
every sort of handicap and obstacle. But it is a
lazy way to do. It is not good business. It cannot,
ultimately, pay. The successful book publisher
of the future is going to be the publisher who
works for a 100 per cent. sale on all his books.
When he gets a book with an internal factor which
would make it a best seller anyway, it will simply
mean that he will have to exert himself markedly
less to get a 100 per cent. result. He will have
such best sellers and will make large sums of money
with them, but they will be incidents and not
epochal events; for practically all his books will be
good sellers.
5
Before we go on to a discussion of the internal
factor of the best seller we want to stress once more,
and constructively and suggestively, the postnatal
attention it should receive. The first year and the
second summer are fatal to far too many books as
well as humans. And this is true despite the differences
between the two. If 100,000 copies represent
the 100 per cent. sale of a given volume you
may declare that it makes no difference whether
that sale is attained in six months or six years.
From the business standpoint of a quick turnover
six months is a dozen times better, you may argue;[153]
and if interest on invested money be thought of as
compounding, the apparent difference in favor of
the six-months’ sale is still more striking. This
would perhaps be true if the author’s next book
could invariably be ready at the end of the six-months’
period. Other ifs will occur to those with
some knowledge of the publishing business and a
moderate capacity for reflection.
Most books are wrongly advertised and inadequately
advertised, and rather frequently advertised
in the wrong places.
Of the current methods of advertising new fiction
only one is unexceptionably good. This is the
advertising which arrests the reader’s attention and
baits his interest by a few vivid sentences outlining
the crisis of the story, the dilemma that confronts
the hero or heroine, the problem of whether the
hero or heroine acted rightly; or paints in a few
swift strokes some exciting episode of the action—ending
with a question that will stick in the reader’s
mind. Such an advertisement should always have
a drawing or other illustration if possible. It
should be displayed in a generous space and should
be placed broadcast but with much discrimination as
to where it is to appear.
A kind of advertisement somewhat allied to this,
but not in use at all despite its assured selling power
would consist of the simple reproduction of a photographed
page of the book. The Detroit News has[154]
used such reproduced pages so effectively as illustrations
that it seems strange no publisher (so far
as we know) has followed suit. Striking pages,
and pages containing not merely objective thrill but
the flavor which makes the fascination of a particular
book, can be found in most novels. The
Detroit News selected a page of the highest effectiveness
from so subtle a romance as Joseph Conrad’s
The Arrow of Gold. This manner of advertising,
telling from its complete restraint, is applicable
to non-fiction. A page of a book of essays
by Samuel Crothers would have to be poorly taken
not to disclose, in its several hundred words, the
charm and fun of his observations. Publishers of
encyclopædias have long employed this “page-from-the-book”
method of advertisement with the best
results.
The ordinary advertisement of a book, making
a few flat assertions of the book’s extraordinary
merit, has become pretty hopelessly conventionalized.
The punch is gone from it, we rather fear
forever. In all conscience, it is psychologically defective
in that it tries to coerce attention and credence
instead of trying to attract, fascinate or
arouse the beholder. The advertiser is not different,
essentially, from the public speaker. The public
speaker who aims to compel attention by mere
thundering or by extraordinary assertions has no
chance against the speaker who amuses, interests,[155]
or agreeably piques his audience, who stirs his auditors’
curiosity or kindles their collective imagination.
There is too little personality in the advertising
of books, and when we say personality we mean,
in most cases, the author’s personality. The bald
and unconvincing recital of the opinion of the
Westminster Gazette, that this is a book every Anglo-American
should read, is as nothing compared
with a few dozen words that could have been written
of, or by, no man on earth except H. G. Wells.
The internal factor of H. G. Wells’s novel The
Undying Fire is so big that it constitutes a sort of
a least common multiple of the hopes, doubts and
fears of hundreds of thousands of humans. A 100
per cent. sale of the book, under existing merchandising
conditions, would be 400,000 copies, at the
very least. It ought to be advertised in every national
and religious weekly of 10,000 circulation
or over in the United States, and in every periodical
of that circulation reaching a rural audience. And
it ought to be advertised, essentially, in this manner:
Shall Man Curse God and Die?
No! Job Answered
No! H. G. Wells Tells Stricken Europe
Read His New Short Novel, “The Undying Fire,”
in Which He Holds Out the Hope that Men
[156]
May Yet Unite to Organize the World and
Save Mankind from Extinction
Such an appeal to the hope, the aspiration, the
unconquerable idealism of men everywhere, to the
social instinct which has its roots in thousands of
years of human history, cannot fail.
6
Books are wrongly advertised, as we have said,
and they are inadequately advertised, by which we
mean in too few places; and perhaps “insufficiently
advertised” had been a more accurate phrase.
It is correct and essential to advertise books in
periodicals appealing wholly or partly to book readers.
It is just as essential to recruit readers.
Book readers can be recruited just as magazine
readers are recruited. The most important way
of getting magazine readers is still the subscription
agent. Every community of any size in these
United States should have in it a man or woman
of at least high school education and alert enthusiasm
selling books of all the publishers. Where
there is a good bookstore such an agent is unnecessary
or may be found in the owner of the store or
an employee thereof. Most communities cannot
support a store given over entirely to bookselling.
In them let there be agents giving their whole time[157]
or their spare time and operating with practically
no overhead expense. Where the agents receive
salaries these must be paid jointly by all the publishers
whose books they handle. This should naturally
be done through a central bureau or selling
agency. Efficient agencies already exist.
The “book agent” is a classical joke. He is a
classical joke because he peddled one book, and the
wrong sort of a book, from door to door. You
must equip him with fifty books, new and alluring,
of all publishers; and arm him with sheets and circulars
describing enticingly a hundred others. He
must know individuals and their tastes and must
have one or more of the best book reviewing periodicals
in the country. He must have catalogues and
news notes and special offers to put over. If he
gives you all his time he must have assurance of a
living, especially until he has a good start or exhibits
his incapacity for pioneering. He must have
an incentive above and beyond any salary that may
be paid him.
But the consideration of details in this place is impossible.
The structural outline and much adaptable
detail is already in highly successful use by
periodicals of many sorts. In fundamentals it requires
no profounder skill than that of the clever
copyist.
[158]
7
We charged in the third count of our indictment
that books are rather frequently advertised in the
wrong places. We had in mind the principle that
for every book considerable enough to get itself
published by a publisher of standing there is, somewhere,
a particular audience; just as there is a certain
body of readers for every news item of enough
moment to get printed in a daily newspaper. A
juster way of expressing the trouble would be this:
Books are rather frequently not advertised in the
right places.
The clues to the right places must be sought in
the book itself and its authorship, always; and they
are innumerable. As no two books are alike the
best thing to do will be to take a specific example.
Harry Lauder’s A Minstrel in France will serve.
The first and most obvious thing to do is to advertise
it in every vaudeville theatre in America.
Wherever the programme includes motion pictures
flash the advertisement on the screen with a fifteen
second movie of Lauder himself. Posters and circulars
in the lobby must serve if there are no screen
pictures.
The next and almost equally obvious thing is to
have Lauder make a phonograph record of some
particularly effective passage in the book, marketing
the record in the usual way, at a popular price.[159]
Newspaper and magazine advertising must be used
heavily and must be distributed on the basis of circulation
almost entirely.
8
The external factor in the success of the best
seller is so undeveloped and so rich in possibilities
that one takes leave of it with regret; but we must
go on to some consideration of the internal factor
that makes for big sales—the quality or qualities in
the book itself.
Without going into a long and elaborate investigation
of best-seller books, sifting and reasoning
until we reach rock bottom, we had better put down
a few dogmas. These, then, are the essentials of
best-selling fiction so far as our observation and
intellect has carried us:
1. A good story; which means, as a rule, plenty
of surface action but always means a crisis in the
affairs of one or two most-likable characters, a crisis
that is satisfactorily solved.
Mark the italicized word. Not a “happy ending”
in the twisted sense in which that phrase is
used. Always a happy ending in the sense in which
we say, “That was a happy word”—meaning a fit
word, the “mot juste” of the French. Always a
fitting ending, not always a “happy ending” in the
sense of a pleasant ending. The ending of Mr.[160]
Britling Sees It Through is not pleasant, but fitting
and, to the majority of readers, uplifting, ennobling,
fine.
2. Depths below the surface action for those who
care to plumb them.
No piece of fiction can sell largely unless it has
a region of philosophy, moral ideas—whatever you
will to call it—for those who crave and must have
that mental immersion. The reader must not be
led beyond his depth but he must be able to go into
deep water and swim as far as his strength will
carry him if he so desires.
3. The ethical, social and moral implications of
the surface action must, in the end, accord with the
instinctive desires of mankind. This is nothing like
as fearful as it sounds, thus abstractly stated.
The instinctive desires of men are pretty well
known. Any psychologist can tell you what they
are. They are few, primitive and simple. They
have nothing to do with man’s reason except that
man, from birth to death, employs his reason in
achieving the satisfaction of these instincts. The
two oldest and most firmly implanted are the instinct
for self-preservation and the instinct to perpetuate
the race. The social instinct, much younger
than either, is yet thousands upon thousands of years
old and quite as ineradicable.
Because it violates the self-preservative instinct
no story of suicide can have a wide human audience[161]
unless, in the words of Dick at the close of Masefield’s
Lost Endeavour, we are filled with the feeling
that “life goes on.” The act of destruction
must be, however blindly, an act of immolation on
the altar of the race. Such is the feeling we get
in reading Jack London’s largely autobiographical
Martin Eden; and, in a much more striking instance,
the terrible act that closed the life of the heroine
in Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina falls well before the
end of the book. In Anna Karenina, as in War and
Peace, the Russian novelist conveys to every reader
an invincible conviction of the unbreakable continuity
of the life of the race. The last words of
Anna Karenina are not those which describe Anna’s
death under the car wheels but the infinitely hopeful
words of Levin:
“I shall continue to be vexed with Ivan the coach-man,
and get into useless discussions, and express
my thoughts blunderingly. I shall always be blaming
my wife for what annoys me, and repenting at
once. I shall always feel a certain barrier between
the Holy of Holies of my inmost soul, and the souls
of others, even my wife’s. I shall continue to pray
without being able to explain to myself why. But
my whole life, every moment of my life, independently
of whatever may happen to me, will be, not
meaningless as before, but full of the deep meaning
which I shall have the power to impress upon it.”
[162]
9
It is because they appeal so strongly and simply
and directly to our instinctive desires that the stories
of Jack London are so popular; it is their perfect
appeal to our social instinct that makes the tales
of O. Henry sell thousands of copies month after
month. Not even Dickens transcended O. Henry
in the perfection of this appeal; and O. Henry set
the right value on Dickens as at least one of his
stories shows.
Civilization and education refine man’s instinctive
desires, modify the paths they take, but do not
weaken them perceptibly from generation to generation
except in a few individual cases. Read the
second chapter of Harold Bell Wright’s The Shepherd
of the Hills and observe the tremendous call
to the instinct of race perpetuation, prefaced by a
character’s comment on the careless breeding of man
as contrasted with man’s careful breeding of animals.
And if you think the appeal is crude, be very
sure of this: The crudity is in yourself, in the instinct
that you are not accustomed to have set vibrating
with such healthy vigor.
10
All this deals with broadest fundamentals. But
they are what the publisher, judging his manuscript,[163]
must fathom. They are deeper down than the sales
manager need go, or the bookseller; deeper than
the critic need ordinarily descend in his examination
into the book’s qualities.
Ordinarily it will be enough for the purpose to
analyze a story along the lines of human instinct
as it has been modified by our society and our surroundings
and conventionalized by habit. The publishers
of Eleanor H. Porter’s novel Oh, Money!
Money! were not only wholly correct but quite sufficiently
acute in their six reasons for predicting—on
the character of the story alone—a big sale.
The first of these was that the yarn dealt with the
getting and spending of money, “the most interesting
subject in the world,” asserted the publishers—and
while society continues to be organized on its
present basis their assertion is, as regards great
masses of mankind, a demonstrable fact.
The second reason was allied to the first; the
story would “set every reader thinking how he
would spend the money.” And the third: it was a
Cinderella story, giving the reader “the joy of
watching a girl who has never been fairly treated
come out on top in spite of all odds.” This is a
powerful appeal to the modified instinct of self-preservation.
The fourth reason—“the scene is laid
in a little village and the whole book is a gem of
country life and shrewd Yankee philosophy”—answers
to the social hunger in the human heart.[164]
Fifth: “A charming love theme with a happy ending.”
Sixth: “The story teaches an unobtrusive
lesson ... that happiness must come from within,
and that money cannot buy it.” To go behind such
reasons is, for most minds, not to clarify but to confuse.
Folks feel these things and care nothing
about the source of the river of feeling.
11
With the non-fictional book the internal factor
making for large sales is as diverse as the kinds
of non-fictional volumes. A textbook on a hitherto
untreated subject of sudden interest to many thousands
of readers has every prospect of a large sale;
but this is not the kind of internal factor that a
publisher is likely to err in judging! Any alert
business man acquiring correct information will
profit by such an opportunity.
But there is a book called In Tune with the Infinite,
the work of a man named Ralph Waldo
Trine, which has sold, at this writing, some 530,000
copies, having been translated into eighteen languages.
A man has been discovered sitting on the
banks of the Yukon reading it; it has been observed
in shops and little railway stations in Burmah and
Ceylon. This is what is called, not at all badly, an
“inspirational book.” Don’t you think a publisher
might well have erred in judging that manuscript?
[165]Mr. Trine’s booklet, The Greatest Thing Ever
Known, has sold 160,000 copies; his book What
All the World’s A-Seeking, is in its 138,000th. It
will not do to overlook the attractiveness of these
titles. What, most people will want to know, is
“the greatest thing ever known”? And it is human
to suppose that what you are seeking is what all the
world is after, and to want to read a book that holds
out an implied promise to help you get it.
The tremendous internal factor of these books
of Mr. Trine’s is that they articulate simple (but
often beautiful) ideas that lie in the minds of hundreds
of thousands of men and women, ideas unformulated
and by the hundred thousand unutterable.
For any man who can say the thing that is
everywhere felt, the audience is limitless.
In autobiography a truly big sale is not possible
unless the narrative has the fundamental qualities
we have designated as necessary in the fictional best
seller. All the popular autobiographies are stories
that appeal powerfully to our instinctive desires and
this is the fact with such diverse revelations as those
of Benjamin Franklin and Benvenuto Cellini, Jean
Jacques Rousseau and Henry Adams. The sum of
the instinctive desires is always overwhelmingly in
favor of normal human existences. For this reason
the predetermined audience of Mr. Tarkington’s
Conquest of Canaan is many times greater
than that of Mr. Dreiser’s Sister Carrie. A moment’s[166]
reflection will show that this is inevitable,
since these instinctive desires of ours are so many
resistless forces exerted simultaneously on us and
combining, in a period of years, to make a single
resultant force impelling us to lead normal, sane,
“healthy” and wholesome lives. On such lives,
lived by the vast majority of men and women everywhere,
the security of every form of human society
depends; indeed, the continued existence of man
on the face of the earth is dependent upon them.
You may say that Rousseau, Cellini, Marie Bashkirtseff,
even Franklin and Henry Adams, led existences
far from normal. The answer is that we
accept the stories of their lives in fact where we
(or most of us) would never accept them in fiction.
We know that these lives were lived; and the
very circumstance that they were abnormal lives
makes us more eager to know about and understand
them. What most of us care for most is such a
recital as Hamlin Garland’s A Son of the Middle
Border. The secret of the influence of the life of
Abraham Lincoln upon the American mind and
the secret of the appeal made by Theodore Roosevelt,
the man, to his countrymen in general during
his lifetime is actually one and the same—the triumph
of normal lives, lived normally, lived up to
the hilt, and overshadowing almost everything else
contemporary with them. Such men vindicate common
lives, however humbly lived. We see, as in[167]
an apocalyptic vision, what any one of us may become;
and in so far as any one of us has become so
great we all of us share in his greatness.
12
But perhaps the greatest element in predetermining
the possible audience for a non-fiction book is
its timeliness. Important, often enough, in the case
of particular novels, the matter of timeliness is much
more so with all other books soever. It cannot be
overlooked in autobiography; The Education of
Henry Adams attracted a great host of readers in
1918 and 1919 because it became accessible to them
in 1918 and not in 1913 or 1929. In 1918 and
1919 the minds of men were peculiarly troubled.
Especially about education. H. G. Wells was articulating
the disastrous doubts that beset numbers
of us, first, in Joan and Peter, with its subtitle, The
Story of an Education, drawing up an indictment
which, whatever its bias, distortion and unfairness
yet contained a lot of terrible truth; and then, in
The Undying Fire, dedicated “to all schoolmasters
and schoolmistresses and every teacher in the
world,” returning to the subject, but this time constructively.
Yes, a large number of persons were
thinking about education in 1918-19, and the ironical
attitude of Henry Adams toward his own was
of keenest interest to them.
[168]
13
We have discussed the internal factor which
makes for a big sale in books rather sketchily because,
as a whole, book publishers can tell it when
they see it (all that is necessary) even though it may
puzzle authors who haven’t mastered it. So far as
authors are concerned we believe that this factor can,
in many instances, be mastered. The enterprise is
not different from developing a retentive memory,
or skill over an audience in public speaking; but as
with both these achievements no short cut is really
possible and advice and suggestion (you can’t honestly
call it instruction) can go but a little way. No
end of nonsense has been uttered on the subject of
what it is in books that makes them sell well, and
nonsense will not cease to be uttered about it while
men write. What is of vastly more consequence
than any effort to exploit the internal factor in best
sellers is the failure to make every book published
sell its best. If, in general, books sell not more than
one-quarter the number of copies they should sell,
an estimate to which we adhere, then the immediate
and largest gain to publishers, authors and public
will be in securing 100 per cent. sales.
14
A word in closing about the familiar argument
that the habits of our people have changed, that[169]
they no longer have time to read books, that motoring
and movies have usurped the place of reading.
Intercommunication is not a luxury but a necessity.
Transportation is only a means of intercommunication.
As the means of intercommunication—books,
newspapers, mail services, railroads, aircraft,
telephones, automobiles, motion pictures—multiply
the use of each and every one increases with
one restriction: A new means of intercommunication
paralleling but greatly improving an existing means
will largely displace it—as railroads have largely
superseded canals.
As a means of a particular and indispensable kind
of intercommunication nothing has yet appeared
that parallels and at the same time decidedly improves
upon books. Newspapers and magazines do
not and cannot, though they most nearly offer the
same service. You cannot go in your Ford to hear
from the lips of Mr. Tarkington his new novel and
seeing it on the screen isn’t the same thing as reading
it—as we all know. And until some inventor
enables us to sit down with an author and get his
story whole, at our own convenience and related in
his own words, by some device much more attractive
than reading a book,—why, until then books
will be bought and read in steadily increasing numbers.
For with its exercise the taste for intercommunication
intensifies. To have been somewhere
is to want to read about it, to have read about a[170]
place is to want to go there in innumerable instances.
It is a superficial view that sees in the
spread of automobiles and motion pictures an arrest
of reading. As time goes on and more and
more people read books, both absolutely and relatively
to the growth of populations, shall we hear
a wail that people’s habits have changed and that
the spread of book-reading has checked the spread
of automobiling and lessened the attendance at the
picture shows? Possibly we shall hear that outcry
but we doubt it; nor does our doubt rest upon
any feeling that books will not be increasingly read.
[172]
[173]
VIII
WRITING A NOVEL
THERE are at least as many ways of writing
a novel as there are novelists and doubtless
there are more; for it is to be presumed that every
novelist varies somewhat in his methods of labor.
The literature on the business of novel-writing is
not extensive. Some observations and advice on
the part of Mr. Arnold Bennett are, indeed, about
all the average reader encounters; we have forgotten
whether they are embedded in The Truth About
An Author or in that other masterpiece, How to Live
on 2,400 Words a Day. It may be remarked that
there is no difficulty in living on 2,400 words a day,
none at all, where the writer receives five cents a
word or better.
But there we go, talking about money, a shameful
subject that has only a backstairs relation to
Art. Let us ascend the front staircase together,
first. Let us enter the parlor of Beauty-Is-Truth-Truth-Beauty,
which, the poet assured us, is all we
know or need to know. Let us seat ourselves in
lovely æsthetic surroundings. If later we have to[174]
go out the back way maybe we can accomplish it
unobserved.
There are only three motives for writing a novel.
The first is to satisfy the writer’s self, the second
is to please or instruct other persons, the third is
to earn money. We will consider these motives in
order.
2
The best novels are written from a blending of
all three motives. But it is doubtful if a good
novel has ever been written in which the desire to
satisfy some instinct in himself was not present
in the writer’s purpose.
Just what this instinct is can’t so easily be answered.
Without doubt the greatest part of it
is the instinct of paternity. Into the physiological
aspects of the subject we shall not enter, though
they are supported by a considerable body of evidence.
The longing to father—or mother—certain
fictitious characters is not often to be denied.
Sometimes the story as a story, as an entity, is
the beloved child of its author. Did not Dickens
father Little Nell? How, do you suppose, Barrie
has thought of himself in relation to some of his
youngsters? Any one who has read Lore of Proserpine
not only believes in fairies but understands
the soul of Maurice Hewlett. The relation of the[175]
creator of a story to his persons is not necessarily
parental. It is always intensely human.
O. Henry was variously a Big Brother (before
the Big Brothers had been thought of), a father,
an uncle, a friend, a distant cousin, a mere acquaintance,
a sworn enemy of his people. It has
to be so. For the writer lives among the people
he creates. The cap of Fortunatus makes him invisible
to them but he is always there—not to interfere
with them nor to shape their destinies but to
watch them come together or fly apart, to hear what
they say, to guess what they think (from what they
say and from the way they behave), to worry over
them, applaud them, frown; but forever as a recorder.
3
None of the author’s troubles must appear in
the finished record. Still wearing Fortunatus’s cap
he is required to be as invisible to the reader as to
the people he describes. There are exceptions to
this rule. Dickens was the most notable. Many
readers prefer to have a tale told them by a narrator
frankly prejudiced in favor of some of the
characters and against others. Many—but not a
majority.
In the best novel that Booth Tarkington has so
far written, The Flirt, the dominating figure is a
heartless young woman to whom the reader continuously[176]
itches to administer prussic acid in a fatal
dose. But Mr. Tarkington does not scald Cora
Madison with boiling invective nor blister her with
hot irony. He relates her doings in the main
almost dispassionately; and set forth thus nakedly
they are more damnable than any amount of sound
and fury could make them appear to be. Mr.
Tarkington does not wave the prussic acid bottle,
though here and there, distilled through his narrative
and perceptible more in the things he selects to
tell about than in his manner of telling them, the
reader is conscious of a faint odor of almond blossoms,
signifying that the author has uncorked the
acid bottle—perhaps that his restraint in not emptying
it may be the more emphasized.
May we set things down a little at random?
Then let us seize this moment to point out to the
intending novel writer some omissions in The Flirt.
Our pupil will, when he comes to write his novel,
be certain to think of the “strong scenes.” He will
be painfully eager to get them down. It is these
scenes that will “grip” the reader and assure his
book of a sale of 100,000 copies.
Battle, murder and sudden death are generally
held to be the very meat of a strong scene. But
when the drunkard Ray Vilas, Cora Madison’s discarded
lover, shoots down Valentine Corliss and
then kills himself, Mr. Tarkington does not fill
pages with it. He takes scarce fifteen lines—perhaps[177]
a little over 100 words—to tell of the double
slaying. Nor does he relate what Ray Vilas and
Cora said to each other in that last interview which
immediately preceded the crime. “Probably,” says
Mr. Tarkington, “Cora told him the truth, all of
it; though of course she seldom told quite the truth
about anything in which she herself was concerned”—or
words to that effect.
Where oh where is the strong scene? Ah, one
man’s strength is another’s weakness. The Flirt
is full of strong scenes but they are infrequently the
scenes which the intending novel writer, reviewing
his tale before setting to work, would select as the
most promising.
4
Besides the instinct of paternity—or perhaps in
place of it—the novelist may feel an instinct to
build something, or to paint a beautiful picture, or
mold a lovely figure. This yearning of the artist,
so-called, is sometimes denoted by the word “self-expression,”
a misnomer, if it be not a euphemism,
for the longing to fatherhood. There is just as
much “self-expression” in the paternity of a boy
or a girl as in the creation of a book, a picture or
a building. The child, in any case, has innumerable
other ancestors; you are not the first to have
written such a book or painted such a picture.
[178]How about the second motive in novel-writing,
the desire to please or instruct others? The only
safe generalization about it seems to be this: A
novel written exclusively from this motive will be
a bad novel. A novel is not, above everything, a
didactic enterprise. Yet even those enterprises of
the human race which are in their essence purely
didactic, designed “to warn, to comfort, to command,”
such as sermons and lessons in school, seldom
achieve their greatest possible effect if instruction
or improvement be the preacher’s or teacher’s
unadorned and unconcealed and only purpose.
Take a school lesson. Teachers who get the
best results are invariably found to have added
some element besides bare instruction to their work.
Sometimes they have made the lesson entertaining;
sometimes they have exercised that imponderable
thing we call “personal magnetism”; sometimes
they have supplied an incentive to learn that didn’t
exist in the lesson itself.
Take a sermon. If the auditor does not feel
the presence in it of something besides the mere
intelligence the words convey the sermon leaves the
auditor cold.
Pure intellect is not a force in human affairs.
Bach wrote music with a very high intellectual content
but the small leaven of sublime melody is present
in his work that lasts through the centuries.
Shakespeare and Beethoven employed intellect and[179]
emotionalism in the proportion of fifty-fifty. Sir
Joshua Reynolds mixed his paint “with brains, sir”;
but the significant thing is that Sir Joshua did not
use only gray matter on his palette. Those who
economize on emotionalism in one direction usually
make up for it, not always consciously, in another.
Joseph Hergesheimer, writing Java Head, is very
sparing in the emotionalism bound up with action
and decidedly lavish in the emotionalism inseparable
from sensuous coloring and “atmosphere.”
No, a novel written wholly to instruct will never
do; but neither will a novel written entirely to
please, to give æsthetic or sensuous enjoyment to
the reader. Such a novel is like a portion of a fine
French sauce—with nothing to spread it on. It is
honey without a crust to dip.
5
Writing a novel purely to make money has a
tainted air, thanks to the long vogue of a false
tradition. If so, The Vicar of Wakefield ought to
be banished from public libraries; for Goldsmith
needed the money and made no bones about saying
so. The facts are, of course, unascertainable; but
we would be willing to wager, were there any way
of deciding the bet, that more novels of the first
rank have been written either solely or preponderantly[180]
to earn money than for any other reason
whatever.
It isn’t writing for the sake of the money that
determines the merit of the result; that is settled
by two other factors, the author’s skill and the
author’s conscience. And the word “skill” here
necessarily includes each and every endowment the
writer possesses as well as such proficiency as he
may have acquired.
Suppose A. and B. both to have material for a
first-rate novel. Both are equally skilled in novel
writing. Both are equally conscientious. A. writes
his novel for his own satisfaction and to please and
instruct others. He is careful and honest about it.
He delights in it. B. writes his novel purely to
make a few thousand dollars. He is, naturally,
careful and honest in doing the job; and he probably
takes such pleasure in it as a man may take
in doing well anything he can do well, from laying
a sewer to flying an airplane. We submit that B.’s
may easily be the better novel. It is true that B.
is under a pressure that A. does not know and that
B.’s work may be affected in ways of which he is
not directly aware by the necessity to sell his finished
product. But most of the best work in the
world is done under some compulsion or other;
and it is the sum of human experience that the compulsion
to do work which will find favor in the
eyes of the worker’s fellows is the healthfullest[181]
compulsion of them all. Certainly it is more
healthful than the compulsion merely to please
yourself. And if B. is under a pressure A.’s danger
lies precisely in the fact that he is not under a
pressure, or under too slight a pressure. It is a
tenable hypothesis that Flaubert would have been
a better novelist if he had had to make a living by
his pen. Some indirect evidence on the point may
possibly be found in the careers of certain writers
whose first books were the product of a need to
buy bread and butter; and whose later books were
the product of no need at all—nor met any.
So much for motives in novel-writing. You
should write (1) because you need the money, (2)
to satisfy your own instincts, and (3) to please and,
perchance, instruct other persons.
Take a week or two to get your motives in order
and then, and not until then, read what follows,
which has to do with how you are presently to proceed
about the business of writing your novel.
6
It is settled that you are going to write a novel.
You have examined your motive and found it pure
and worthy of you. Comes now the great question
of how to set about the business.
At this point let no one rise up and “point out”
that Arnold Bennett has told how. Arnold Bennett[182]
has told how to do everything—how to live on
twenty-four hours a day (but not how to enjoy it),
how to write books, how to acquire culture, how to
be yourself and manage yourself (in the unfortunate
event that you cannot be someone else or
have no one, like a wife, to manage you), how to
do everything, indeed, except rise up and call
Arnold Bennett blessed.
The trouble with Mr. Bennett’s directions is—they
won’t work.
Mr. Bennett tells you to write like everything and
get as much of your novel done as possible before
the Era of Discouragement sets in. Then, no matter
how great your Moment of Depression, you will
be able to stand beside the table, fondly stroking a
pile of pages a foot high, and reassure yourself,
saying: “Well, but here, at least, is so much done.
No! I cannot take my hand from the plough now!
No! I must Go On. I must complete my destiny.”
(One’s novel is always one’s Destiny of
the moment.)
It sounds well, but the truth is that when you
strike the Writer’s Doldrums the sight of all that
completed manuscript only enrages you to the last
degree. You are embittered by the spectacle of so
much effort wasted. You feel like tearing it up
or flinging it in the wastebasket. If you are a
Rudyard Kipling or an Edna Ferber, you do that
thing. And your wife or your mother carefully retrieves[183]
your Recessional or your Dawn O’Hara and
sends it to the publisher who brings it out, regardless
of expense, and sells a large number of copies—to
the booksellers, anyway.
Mr. Bennett also tells you how to plan the long,
slow culminant movement of your novel; how to
walk in the park and compose those neat little climaxes
which should so desirably terminate each
chapter; how to—— But what’s the use? Let us
illustrate with a fable.
Once an American, meeting Mr. Bennett in London,
saluted him, jocularly (he meant it jocularly)
with the American Indian word of greeting:
“How?”
Mr. Bennett immediately began to tell him how
and the American never got away until George H.
Doran, the publisher, who was standing near by,
exclaimed:
“That’s enough, Enoch, for a dollar volume!”
(Mr. Doran, knowing Bennett well, calls him by
his first name, a circumstance that should be pointed
out to G. K. Chesterton, who would evolve a touching
paradox about the familiarity of the unfamiliar.)
That will do for Arnold. If we mention Arnold
again it must distinctly be understood that we have
reference to some other Arnold—Benedict Arnold
or Matthew Arnold or Dorothy Arnold or Arnold
Daly.
[184]Well, to get back (in order to get forward), you
are about beginning your novel (nice locution,
“about beginning”) and are naturally taking all the
advice you can get, if it doesn’t cost prohibitively,
and this we are about to give doesn’t.
The first thing for you to do is not, necessarily,
to decide on the subject of your novel.
It is not absolutely indispensable to select the
subject of a novel before beginning to write it.
Many authors prefer to write a third or a half of
the novel before definitely committing themselves
to a particular theme. For example, take The Roll
Call, by Arnold—it must have been Arnold
Constable, or perhaps it was Matthew. The Roll Call
is a very striking illustration of the point we would
make. Somewhere along toward the end of The
Roll Call the author decided that the subject of the
novel should be the war and its effect on the son of
Hilda Lessways by her bigamous first husband—or,
he wasn’t exactly her husband, being a bigamist,
but we will let it go at that. Now Hilda Lessways
was, or became, the wife of Edwin Clayhanger;
and George Cannon, Clayhanger’s—would you say,
stepson? Hilda’s son, anyway—George Cannon,
the son of a gun—oh, pardon, the son of Bigamist
Cannon—the stepson of, or son of the
wife of, Edwin Clayhanger of the Five Towns—George
Cannon.... Where were we?...[185]
Hilda Lessways Clayhanger, the—well, wife—of
Bigamist Cannon....
The relationships in this novel are very confusing,
like the novel and the subject of it, but if
you can read the book you will see that it illustrates
our point perfectly.
7
Well, go ahead and write. Don’t worry about
the subject. You know how it is, a person often
can’t see the forest for the trees. When you’re
writing 70,000 words or maybe a few more you
can’t expect to see your way out of ’em very easily.
When you are out of the trees you can look back
and see the forest. And when you are out of the
woods of words you can glance over ’em and find
out what they were all about.
However, the 80,000 words have to be written,
and it is up to you, somehow or other, to set down
the 90,000 parts of speech in a row. Now 100,000
words cannot be written without taking thought.
Any one who has actually inscribed 120,000 words
knows that. Any one who has written the 150,000
words necessary to make a good-sized novel
(though William Allen White wouldn’t call that
good measure) understands the terrible difficulties
that confront a mortal when he sits down to enter
upon the task of authorship, the task of putting on[186]
paper the 200,000 mono- or polysyllables that shall
hold the reader breathless to the end, if only from
the difficulty of pronouncing some of them.
Where to start? For those who are not yet
equipped with self-starters we here set down a few
really first-class openings for either the spring or
fall novel trade:
“Marinda was frightened. When she was
frightened her eyes changed color. They were
dark now, and glittering restlessly like the sea when
the wind hauls northwest. Jack Hathaway, unfamiliar
with weather signs, took no heed of the
impending squall. He laughed recklessly, dangerously....”
(Story of youth and struggle.)
“The peasant combed the lice from his beard,
spat and said, grumbling: ‘Send us ploughs that we
may till the soil and save Russia.... Send us
ploughs.’” (Realistic story of Russia.)
“Darkness, suave, dense, enfolding, lay over the
soft loam of the fields. The girl, moving silently
across the field, felt the mystery of the dark; the
scent of the soil and the caress of the night alike
enchanted her. Hidden in the folds of her dress,
clutched tightly in her fingers, was the ribbon he
had given her. With a quick indrawing of her
breath she paused, and, screened by the utter blackness
that enveloped her, pressed it to her lips....”
(Story of the countryside. Simple, trusting
innocence. Lots of atmosphere. After crossing the[187]
field the girl strikes across Haunted Heath, a
description of which fills the second chapter.)
All these are pretty safe bets, if you’re terribly
hard up. Think them over. Practice them daily
for a few weeks.
8
Now that you have some idea about writing a
novel it may be as well for you to consider the consequences
before proceeding to the irrevocable act.
One of the consequences will certainly be the discovery
of many things in the completed manuscript
that you never intended. This is no frivolous
allusion to the typographical errors you will find—for
a typewriter is as capable of spoonerisms as
the human tongue. We have reference to things
that you did not consciously put into your narrative.
And first let it be said that many things that
seem to you unconscious in the work of skilled
writers are deliberate art (as the phrase goes).
The trouble is that the deliberation usually spoils
the art. An example must be had and we will take
it in a novel by the gifted American, Joseph
Hergesheimer. Before proceeding further with
this Manual for Beginners read Java Head if you
can; if not, never mind.
Now in Java Head the purpose of Mr. Hergesheimer
was, aside from the evocation of a beautiful[188]
bit of a vanished past, the delineation of several
persons of whom one represented the East
destroyed in the West and another the West
destroyed in the East. Edward Dunsack, back in
Salem, Massachusetts, the victim of the opium
habit, represented the West destroyed in the East;
the Chinese wife of Gerrit Ammidon represented
the East destroyed in the West. Mr. Hergesheimer
took an artist’s pride in the fact that the
double destruction was accomplished with what
seemed to him the greatest possible economy of
means; almost the only external agency employed,
he pointed out, was opium. Very well; this is
æstheticism, pure and not so simple as it looks.
It is a Pattern. It is a musical phrase or theme
presented as a certain flight of notes in the treble,
repeated or echoed and inverted in the bass. It is
a curve on one side of a staircase balanced by a
curve on the other. It is a thing of symmetry and
grace and it is the expression, perfect in its way,
of an idea. Kipling expressed very much the same
idea when he told us that East is East and West
is West and never the twain shall meet. Mr.
Hergesheimer amplifies and extends. If the two
are brought in contact each is fatal to the other.
Is that all?
It is not all, it is the mere beginning. When
you examine Java Head with the Pattern in mind
you immediately discover that the Pattern is carried[189]
out in bewildering detail. Everything is symmetrically
arranged. For instance, many a reader
must have been puzzled and bewildered by the
heartbreaking episode at the close of the novel in
which Roger Brevard denies the delightful girl
Sidsall Ammidon. The affair bears no relation to
the currents of the tale; it is just a little eddy to
one side; it is unnecessarily cruel and wounding to
our sensibilities. Why have it at all?
The answer is that in his main narrative Mr.
Hergesheimer has set before us Gerrit Ammidon,
a fellow so quixotic that he marries twice out of
sheer chivalry. He has drawn for us the fantastic
scroll of such a man, a sea-shape not to be matched
on shore. Well, then, down in the corner, he must
inscribe for us another contrasting, balancing,
compensating, miniatured scroll—a land-shape in
the person of Roger Brevard who is so unquixotic
as to offset Gerrit Ammidon completely. Gerrit
Ammidon will marry twice for incredible reasons
and Roger Brevard will not even marry once for
the most compelling of reasons—love. The beautiful
melody proclaimed by the violins is brutally
parodied by the tubas.
9
Is it all right thus? It is not all right thus and
it never can be so long as life remains the unpatterned[190]
thing we discern it to be. If life were completely
patterned it would most certainly not be
worth living. When we say that life is unpatterned
we mean, of course, that we cannot read all its
patterns (we like to assume that all patterns are
there, because it comforts us to think of a fundamental
Order and Symmetry).
But so long as life is largely unpatterned, or so
long as we cannot discern all its patterns, life is
eager, interesting, surprising and altogether distracting
and lovely however bewildering and distressing,
too. Different people take the unreadable
differently. Some, like Thomas Hardy, take it in
defiant bitterness of spirit; some, like Joseph
Conrad, take it in profound faith and wonder.
Hardy sees the disorder that he cannot fathom;
Conrad admires the design that he can only incompletely
trace. To Hardy the world is a place
where—
“As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods;
They kill us for their sport.”
To Conrad the world is a place where men may
continually make the glorious and heartening discovery
that a solidarity exists among them; that
they are united by a bond as unbreakable as it is
mysterious.
And to others, as regrettably to Mr. Hergesheimer
writing Java Head, the world is a place[191]
where it is momentarily sufficient to trace casual
symmetries without thought of their relation to an
ineluctable whole.
10
What, then, is the novelist to do? Is it not
obvious that he must not busy himself too carefully
with the business of patterning the things he has
to tell? For the moment he has traced everything
out nicely and beautifully he may know for a
surety that he has cut himself off from the larger
design of Life. He has got his little corner of the
Oriental rug all mapped out with the greatest exactitude.
But he has lost touch with the bigger
intricacy beyond his corner. It is a prayer rug. He
had better kneel down and pray.
Now there are novels in which no pattern at all
is traced; and these are as bad as those which
minutely map a mere corner. These are meaningless
and confused stories in which nobody can
discern any cause or effect, any order or law, any
symmetry or proportion or expressed idea. These
are the novels which have been justified as a “slice
of life” and which have brought into undeserved
disrepute the frequently painstaking manner of
their telling. The trouble is seldom primarily, as
so many people think, with the material but with
its presentation. You may take almost any material
you like and so present it as to make it mean[192]
something; and you may also take almost any
material you like and so present it as to make it
mean nothing to anybody. A heap of bricks is
meaningless; but the same bricks are intelligible
expressed as a building of whatever sort, or merely
as a sidewalk with zigzags, perhaps, of a varicolor.
The point we would make—and we might as
well try to drive it home without further ineffectual
attempts at illustration—is that you must do some
patterning with your material, whether bricks for
a building or lives for a story; but if you pattern
too preciously your building will be contemptible
and your story without a soul. In your building
you must not be so decided as to leave no play for
another’s imagination, contemplating the structure.
In your narrative you must not be so dogmatic
about two and two adding to four as to leave no
room for a wild speculation that perhaps they came
to five. For it is not the certainty that two and two
have always made four but the possibility that
some day they may make five that makes life worth
living—and guessing about on the printed page.
11
Perhaps the most serious consequence of writing
a novel is the revelation of yourself it inevitably
entails.
[193]We are not thinking, principally, of the discovery
you will make of the size of your own soul. We
have in mind the laying bare of yourself to others.
Of course you do reveal yourself to yourself
when you write a book to reveal others to others.
It has been supposed that a man cannot say or do
a thing which does not expose his nature. This is
nonsense; you do not expose your nature every
time you take the subway, though a trip therein
may very well be an index to your manners. The
fact remains that no man ever made a book or a
play or a song or a poem, with any command of the
technique of his work, without in some measure
giving himself away. Where this is not enough
of an inducement some other, such as a tin whistle
with every bound copy, is offered; no small addition
as it enables the reviewer to declare, hand on heart,
that “this story is not to be whistled down the
wind.” Some have doubted Bernard Shaw’s Irishism,
which seems the queerer as nearly everything
he has written has carried a shillelagh concealed
between the covers. Recently Frank K. Reilly of
Chicago gave away one-cent pieces to advertise a
book called Penny of Top Hill Trail. He might
be said, and in fact he hereby is said, thus to have
coppered his risk in publishing it.... All of
which is likely to be mistaken for jesting. Let us
therefore jest that we may be taken with utmost
seriousness.
[194]The revelation of yourself to yourself, which the
mere act of writing a novel brings to pass, may
naturally be either pleasant or unpleasant. Very
likely it is unpleasant in a majority of instances,
a condition which need not necessarily reflect upon
our poor human nature. If we did not aspire so
high for ourselves we should not suffer such awful
disappointments on finding out where we actually
get off. The only moral, if there is one, lies in our
ridiculous aim. Imagine the sickening of heart
with which Oscar Wilde contemplated himself after
completing The Picture of Dorian Grey! And
imagine the lift it must have given him to look
within himself as he worked at The Ballad of Reading
Gaol! The circumstances of life and even the
actual conduct of a man are not necessarily here or
there—or anywhere at all—in this intimate contemplation.
There is one mirror before which we
never pose. God made man in His own image.
God made His own image and put it in every man.
It is there! Nothing in life transcends the
wonder of the moment when, each for himself, we
make this discovery. Then comes the struggle to
remold ourselves nearer to our heart’s desire. It
succeeds or it doesn’t; perhaps it succeeds only
slightly; anyway we try for it. The sleeper, twisting
and turning, dreaming and struggling, is the
perfect likeness of ourselves in the waking hours
of our whole earthly existence. Because they have[195]
seen this some have thought life no better than a
nightmare. Voltaire suggested that the earth and
all that dwelt thereon was only the bad dream of a
god on some other planet. We would point out
the bright side of this possibility: It presupposes
the existence somewhere of a mince pie so delicious
and so powerful as to evoke the likenesses of
Cæsar and Samuel Gompers, giraffes, Mr. Taft,
violets, Mr. Roosevelt, Piotr Ilitch Tchaikovski,
Billy Sunday, Wu-Ting Fang, Helen of Troy and
Mother Jones, groundhogs, H. G. Wells; perhaps
Bolshevism is the last writhe. Mince pie, unwisely
eaten instead of the dietetic nectar and ambrosia,
may well explain the whole confused universe.
And you and I—we can create another universe,
equally exciting, by eating mince pie to-night!...
You see there is a bright side to everything, for the
mince pie is undoubtedly of a heavenly flavor.
We were saying, when sidetracked by the necessity
of explaining the universe, that the self-revelation
which writing a book entails is in most cases
depressing, but not by any means always so. Boswell
was not much of a man judged by the standards
of his own day or ours, either one, yet Boswell
knew himself better than he knew Dr. Johnson
by the time he had finished his life of the Doctor.
It must have bucked him up immensely to know
that he was at least big enough himself to measure
a bigger man up and down, in and out, criss-cross[196]
and sideways, setting down the complicated result
without any error that the human intelligence can
detect. It must have appeased the ironical soul of
Henry Adams to realise that he was one of the
very few men who had never fooled himself about
himself, and that evidence of his phenomenal
achievement in the shape of the book The Education
of Henry Adams, would survive him after his
death—or at least, after the difficulties of communicating
with those on earth had noticeably increased
(we make this wise modification lest someone
match Sir Oliver Lodge’s Raymond, or Life
After Death with a volume called Henry, or Re-Education
After Death).
It must have sent a thrill of pleasure through the
by no means insensitive frame of Joseph Conrad
when he discovered, on completing Nostromo, that
he had a profounder insight into the economic bases
of modern social and political affairs than nine-tenths
of the professional economists and sociologists—plus
a knowledge of the human heart that
they have never dreamed worth while. For Conrad
saw clearly, and so saw simply; the “silver of
the mine” of this, his greatest story, was, it is true,
an incorruptible metal, but it could and did alter
the corruptible nature of man—and would continue
to do so through generation after generation long
after his Mediterranean sailor-hero had become
dust.
[197]Even in the case of the humble and unknown
writer whose completed manuscript, after many
tedious journeys, comes home to him at last, to
be re-read regretfully but with an undying belief
not so much in the work itself as in what it was
meant to express and so evidently failed to—even
in his case the great consolation is the attestation
of a creed. Very bad men have died, as does the
artist in Shaw’s The Doctor’s Dilemma, voicing
with clarity and beauty the belief in which they
think they have lived or ought to have lived; but a
piece of work is always an actual living of some part
of the creed that is in you. It may be a failure but
it has, with all its faults, a gallant quality, the quality
of the deed done, which men have always admired,
and because of which they have invented those
things we call words to embody their praise.
But what of the consequences of revealing yourself
to others? Writing a novel will surely mean
that you will incur them. We must speak of them
briefly; and then we may get on to the thing for
which you are doubtless waiting with terrible patience—the
way to write the novel itself. Never
fear! If you will but endure steadfastly you shall
Know All.
12
“Certainly, publish everything,” commented the
New York Times editorially upon a proposal to[198]
give out earnings, or some other detail, of private
businesses. “All privacy is scandalous,” added the
newspaper. In this satirical utterance lies the ultimate
justification for writing a novel.
All privacy is scandalous. If you don’t believe
it, read some of the prose of James Joyce. A Portrait
of The Artist As a Young Man will do for a
starter. Ulysses is a follow-up. H. G. Wells likes
the first, while deploring so much sewerage in the
open street. You see, nothing but a sincere conviction
concerning the wickedness of leaving anything
at all unmentioned in public could justify
such narratives as Mr. Joyce’s.
In a less repulsive sense, the scandal of privacy
is what underlies any novel of what we generally
call the “realistic” sort. Mr. Dreiser, for instance,
thinks it scandalous that we should not know and
publicly proclaim the true nature of such men as
Hurstwood in his Sister Carrie. Mr. Hardy thinks
it scandalous that the world should not publicly
acknowledge the purity of Tess Durbeyfield and
therefore he gives us a book in which she is, as the
subtitle says, “faithfully presented.” Gene Stratton-Porter
thinks it scandalous not to tell the truth
about such a boy as Freckles. The much-experienced
Mr. Tarkington, stirred to his marrow
by what seems almost a world conspiracy to condone
the insufferable conceit of the George
Amberson Minafers among us, writes The Magnificent[199]
Ambersons to make us confess how we hate
’em—and how our instinctive faith in them is
vindicated at last.
Every novelist who gains a public of any size or
permanence deliberately, and even joyfully, faces
the consequences of the revelation of himself to
some thousands of his fellow-creatures. We don’t
mean that he always delineates himself in the person
of a character, or several characters, in his
stories. He may do that, of course, but the self-exposure
is generally much more merciless. The
novelist can withhold from the character which,
more or less, stands for himself his baser qualities.
What he cannot withhold from the reader is his
own mind’s limitations.
A novel is bounded by the author’s horizons. If
a man can see only so far and only so deep his
book will show it. If he cannot look abroad, but
can perceive nothing beyond the nose on his face,
that fact will be fully apparent to his co-spectators
who turn the pages of his story. If he can see
only certain colors those who look on with him will
be aware of his defect. Above all, if he can see
persons as all bad or all good, all black or all white,
he will be hanged in effigy along with the puppets
he has put on paper.
This is the reason why every one should write
a novel. There is only one thing comparable with
it as a means of self-immolation. That, of course,[200]
is tenure of public office. And as there are not
nearly enough public offices to serve the need of
individual discipline, novelizing should be encouraged,
fomented—we had almost said, made compulsory.
Compulsion, however, defeats its own
ends. Let us elect to public offices, as we would
choose to fill scholarships, those who cannot,
through some misfortune, write novels; and let us
induce all the other people in the world that we can
to put pen to paper—not that they may enrich the
world with immortal stories, not that they may
make money, become famous or come to know
themselves, but solely that we may know them for
what they are.
If Albert Burleson had been induced to write a
novel would we have made him a Congressman
and would President Wilson have made him Postmaster-General?
If William, sometime of Germany,
had written a novel would the Germans have
acquiesced in his theory of Divine Right? Georges
Clemenceau wrote novels and was chosen of the
people to lead them. Hall Caine and Marie Corelli
and Rider Haggard and Arnold Bennett have
written novels which enable us to gauge them pretty
accurately—and not one of them has yet been invited
to help run the League of Nations. The
reason is simple: We know them too well.
All privacy is scandalous. Thomas Dixon says:
“It is positively immoral that the world should[201]
run on without knowing the depths to which I can
sink. I must write The Way of a Man and make
the world properly contemptuous of me.” Zona
Gale reflects to herself: “After all, with nothing but
these few romances and these Friendship Village
stories, people have no true insight into my real
tastes, affinities, predilections, qualities of mind.
I will write about a fruit and pickle salesman, an
ineffectual sort of person who becomes, almost involuntarily,
a paperhanger. That will give them
the idea of me they lack.”
William Allen White, without consciously thinking
anything of the kind, is dimly aware that people
generally have a right to know him as a big-hearted
man who makes some mistakes but whose
sympathy is with the individual man and woman
and whose passion is for social progress. The best
way to make people generally acquainted with
William Allen White is to write a novel—say,
In The Heart of a Fool, which they will read....
The best way to get to know anybody is to get him
to talking about somebody else. Talk about one’s
self is a little too self-conscious.
And there you have it! It is exactly because
such a writer as H. G. Wells is in reality pretty
nearly always talking about himself that we find it
so difficult to appraise him rightly on the basis of
his novels. Self-consciousness is never absent
from a Wells book. It is this acute self-consciousness[202]
that makes so much of Henry James valueless
to the great majority of readers. They cannot get
past it, or behind it. The great test fails. Mr.
James is dead, and the only way left to get at the
truth of Mr. Wells will be to make him Chancellor
of the Exchequer or, in a socialized British republic,
Secretary of Un-War....
Dare to be a Daniel Carson Goodman. Write
That Novel. Don’t procrastinate, don’t temporize.
Do It Now, reserving all rights of translation of
words into action in all countries, including the
Scandinavian. Full detailed instructions as to the
actual writing follow.
13
You may not have noticed it, but even so successful
a novelist as Robert W. Chambers is careful
to respect the three unities that Aristotle (wasn’t
it?) prescribed and the Greeks took always into
account. Not in a single one of his fifty novels
does the popular Mr. Chambers disregard the three
Greek unities. Invariably he looks out for the
time, the place and the girl.
If Aristotle recommended it and Robert W.
Chambers sticks to it, perhaps you, about to write
your first novel, had better attend to it also.
Now, to work! About a title. Better have one,
even if it’s only provisional, before you begin to[203]
write. If you can, get the real, right title at the
outset. Sometimes having it will help you through—not
to speak of such cases as Eleanor Hallowell
Abbott’s. The author of Molly Make-Believe, The
Sick-a-Bed Lady and Old-Dad gets her real, right
title and then the story mushrooms out of it, like
a house afire. Ourselves, we are personally the
same. We have three corking titles for as many
novels. One is written. The other two we haven’t
to worry about. They have only to live up to their
titles, which may be difficult for them but will make
it easy for ourselves. We have a Standard.
Everything that lives up to the promise of our
superlative title goes in, everything that is alien to
it or unworthy of it, stays out. This, we may add
parenthetically, was the original motive in instituting
titles of nobility. A man was made a Baron.
Very well, it was expected that he would conform
his character and conduct accordingly. Things
suitable to a Baron he would thenceforth be and
do, things unbefitting his new, exalted station he
would kindly omit.... It works better with books
than with people, so cheer up. Your novel will
come out more satisfactorily than you think.
Which brings us to the matter of the ending.
Should it be happy or otherwise? More words
have been wasted on this subject than on any other
aspect of fictioneering. You must understand
from the very first that you, personally, have nothing[204]
whatever to say about the ending of your story.
That will be decided by the people of your tale and
the events among which they live. In other words,
the preponderant force in determining the ending
is—inevitability.
Most people misunderstand inevitability. Others
merely worry about it, as if it were to-morrow’s
weather. Shall we take an umbrella, they ask
anxiously, lest it rain inevitably? Or will the inevitable
come off hot, so that an overcoat will be
a nuisance? Nobody knows, not even the weather
forecaster in Washington. If there were a corresponding
official whose duty it would be to forecast
with equal inaccuracy the endings of novels life
would go on much the same. Readers would still
worry about the last page because they would know
that the official prediction would be wrong at least
half the time. If the Ending Forecaster prophesied:
“Lovers meet happily on page 378; villain
probably killed in train accident” we would go
drearily forward confident that page 378 would disclose
the heroine, under a lowering sky, clasped in
the villain’s arms while the hero lay prone under a
stalled Rolls-Royce, trying to find out why the carburetor
didn’t carburete.
Inevitability is not the same as heredity. Heredity
can be rigorously controlled—novelists are the
real eugenists—but inevitability is like natural selection
or the origin of species or mutations or O.[205]
Henry: It is the unexpected that happens. Environment
has little in common with inevitability.
In the pages of any competent novelist the girl in
the slums will sooner or later disclose her possession
of the most unlikely traits. Her bravery, her
innocence will become even more manifest than
her beauty. The young feller from Fifth avenue,
whose earliest environment included orange spoons
and Etruscan pottery, will turn out to be a lowdown
brute. Environment is what we want it to be, inevitability
is what we are.
You think, of course, that you can pre-determine
the outcome of this story you are going to write.
Yes, you can! You can no more pre-determine the
ending than you can pre-determine the girl your
son will marry. It’s exactly like that. For you
must come face to face, before you have written
50 pages of your book, with an appalling and inspiring
Fact. You might as well face it here.
14
The position of the novelist engaged in writing
a novel can only be indicated by a shocking exaggeration
which is this: He is not much better than
a medium in a trance.
Now of course such a statement calls for the most
exact explanation. Nobody can give it. Such a
statement calls for indisputable evidence. None exists.[206]
Such a statement, unexplained and unsupported
by testimony, is a gross and unscientific assumption
not even worthy to be damned by being
called a hypothesis. You said it. Nevertheless, the
thing’s so.
We, personally, having written a novel—or maybe
two—know what we are talking about. The
immense and permanent curiosity of people all over
the planet who read books at all fixes itself upon
the question, in respect of the novelist: “How
does he write?” As Mary S. Watts remarks, that
is the one thing no novelist can tell you. He
doesn’t know himself. But though it is the one
thing the novelist can’t tell you it is not one of
those things that, in the words of Artemus Ward,
no feller kin find out. Any one can find out by
writing a novel.
And to write one you need little beyond a few
personalities firmly in mind, a typewriter and lots
of white paper. An outline is superfluous and
sometimes harmful. Put a sheet of paper in the
machine and write the title, in capital letters. Below,
write: “By Theophrastus Such,” or whatever
you happen unfortunately to be called or elect, in
bad taste, to call yourself. Begin.
You will have the first few pages, the opening
scene, possibly the first chapter, fairly in mind; you
may have mental notes on one or two things your[207]
people will say. Beyond that you have only the
haziest idea of what it will all be about. Write.
As you write it will come to you. Somehow.
What do you care how? Let the psychologists
stew over that.
They, in all probability, will figure out that the
story has already completely formed itself, in all
its essentials and in many details, in your subconscious
mind, the lowermost cellar of your uninteresting
personality where moth and rust do not corrupt,
whatever harm they may do higher up, and
where the cobwebs lie even more thickly than in
your alleged brain. As you write, and as the result
of the mere act of writing, the story, lying
dormant in your subcellar, slowly shakes a leg,
quivers, stretches, extends itself to its full length,
yawns, rises with sundry anatomical contortions
and advancing crosses the threshold of your subconsciousness
into the well-dusted and cleaned basement
of your consciousness whence it is but a step
to full daylight and the shadow of printed black
characters upon a to-and-fro travelling page.
In other words, you are an automaton; and to be
an automaton in this world of exuberant originality
is a blissful thing.
Your brain is not engaged at all. This is why
writing fiction actually rests the brain. It is why
those who are suffering from brain-fag find recreation
and enjoyment, health and mental strength in[208]
writing a short story or a novel. The short story
is a two weeks’ vacation for the tired mind. Writing
a novel is a month, with full pay. It is true
that readers are rather prone to resent the widespread
habit of novelists recuperating and recovering
their mental faculties at their readers’ expense.
This resentment is without any justification in fact,
since for every novelist who recovers from brain-fag
by writing a work of fiction there are thousands
of readers who restore their exhausted intellects
with a complete rest by reading the aforesaid work
of fiction.
Of course the subconscious cellar theory of novel-writing
is not final and authoritative. There is at
least one other tenable explanation of how novels
are written, and we proceed to give it.
This is that the story is projected through the
personality of the writer who is, in all respects, no
more than a mechanism and whose rôle may be
accurately compared to that of a telephone transmitter
in a talk over the wire.
This theory has the important virtue of explaining
convincingly all the worst novels, as well as all
the best. For a telephone transmitter is not responsible
for what is spoken into it or for what it
transmits. It is not to blame for some very silly
conversations. It has no merit because it forwards
some very wise words. Similarly, if the novelist is
merely a transmitter, a peculiarly delicate and sensitive[209]
medium for conveying what is said and done
somewhere else, perhaps on some other plane by
some other variety of mortals, the novelist is in no
wise to blame for the performances or utterances of
his characters, or clients as they ought, in this view,
to be called; the same novelist might, and probably
would, be the means of transmitting the news of
splendid deeds and the superb utterances of glorious
people, composing one story, and the inanities, verbal
or otherwise, of a lot of fourth dimensional
Greenwich Villagers, constituting another and infinitely
inferior story.... To be sure this explanation,
which relieves the novelist of almost all responsibility
for his novels, ought also to take from
him all the credit for good work. If he is a painfully
conscientious mortal he may grieve for years
over this; but if his first or his second or his third
book sells 100,000 copies he will probably be willing,
in the words of the poet, to take the cash and
let the credit go. Very greedy men invariably insist
on not merely taking the cash but claiming the
credit as well; saintly men clutch at the credit and
instruct their publishers that all author’s royalties
are to be made over to the Fund for Heating the
Igloos of Aged and Helpless Eskimos. But the
funny thing about the whole business is that the
world, which habitually withholds credit where
credit is due, at other times insists on bestowing
credit anyway. There have been whole human[210]
philosophies based upon the principle of Renunciation
and even whole novels, such as those of Henry
James. But it doesn’t work. Renounce, if you
like, all credit for the books which bear your name
on the title-page. The world will weave its laurel
wreath and crown you with bays just the same.
Men have become baldheaded in a single night in
the effort to avoid unmerited honor and by noon
the next day have looked as if they were bacchantes
or at least hardy perennials, so thick have been the
vine leaves in their hair, or rather on the site of it....
Which takes us away from our subject.
Where were we? Oh, yes, about writing your
novel....
As soon as you have done two or three days’
stint on the book—you ought to plan to write so
many words a day or a week, and it’s no matter
that you don’t know what they will be—as soon
as you’ve got a fairish start you will find that you
have several persons in your story who are, to all
intents and purposes, as much alive as yourself and
considerably more self-willed. They will promptly
take the story in their hands and you will have
nothing to do in the remaining 50,000 words or
more but to set down what happens. The extreme
physical fatigue consequent upon writing so many
words is all you have to guard against. Play golf
or tennis, if you can, so as to offset this physical
fatigue by the physical rest and intellectual exercise[211]
they respectively afford. Auction bridge in the
evenings, or, as Frank M. O’Brien says, reading
De Morgan and listening to the phonograph, will
give you the emotional outlet you seek.
15
No doubt many who have read the foregoing will
turn up their noses at the well-meant advice it contains,
considering that we have largely jested on a
serious subject. We take this occasion to declare
most earnestly, at the conclusion of our remarks,
that we have seldom been so serious in our life.
Such occasional levities as we have allowed ourselves
to indulge in have been plain and obvious,
and of no more importance in the general scheme
of what we have been discussing than the story
of the Irishman with which the gifted after-dinner
speaker circumspectly introduces his most burning
thoughts.
We mean what we have said. Writing a novel
is one of the most rounded forms of self-education.
It is one of the most honorable too, since, unlike the
holder of public office, the person who is getting
the education does not do so at the public expense.
We have regard, naturally, to the mere act of writing
the novel. If afterward it finds a publisher and
less probably a public—that has nothing to do with
the author, whose self-culture, intensive, satisfying[212]
and wholesome, has been completed before that
time.
Whether a novelist deserves any credit for the
novel he writes is a question, but he will get the
credit for it anyway and nothing matters where
so wonderful an experience is to be gained. Next
to being hypnotized, there is nothing like it; and
it has the great advantage that you know what you
are doing whereas the hypnotic subject does not.
No preparation is necessary or even desirable since,
even in so specific a detail as the outline of the
story the people of your narrative take things entirely
in their own hands and reduce the outline to
the now well-known status of a scrap of paper....
We talk of “advice” in writing a novel. The best
advice is not to take any.
THE END
Obvious typographical errors have been corrected.
Inconsistencies in hyphenation have been standardized.
.jpg "Why Authors Go Wrong And Other Explanations, by Grant Martin Overton")
