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Title: Why Authors Go Wrong, and Other Explanations

Author: Grant M. Overton

Release date: January 25, 2021 [eBook #64385]

Language: English

Credits: David E. Brown and The Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive)


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK WHY AUTHORS GO WRONG, AND OTHER EXPLANATIONS ***




  WHY AUTHORS GO WRONG
  AND
  OTHER EXPLANATIONS




  WHY AUTHORS
  GO WRONG

  AND OTHER EXPLANATIONS

  BY

  GRANT M. OVERTON
  AUTHOR OF “THE WOMEN WHO MAKE OUR NOVELS”

  [Illustration]


  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




  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 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 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
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. 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
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 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 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, 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 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; 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 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 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 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 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 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 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”?

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 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 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 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!




A BARBARIC YAWP




II

A BARBARIC YAWP


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 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 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 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 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
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 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.


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 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.”

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 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 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!




IN THE CRITICAL COURT




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 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_.

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. 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 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 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, 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 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 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._)




BOOK “REVIEWING”




IV

BOOK “REVIEWING”


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 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 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
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.

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 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 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 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.


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 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.


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” 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 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, 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, 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 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 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.


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 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 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 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 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.


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, 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?


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 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 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, 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.


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 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.


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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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.

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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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.




LITERARY EDITORS

BY ONE OF THEM




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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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.

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. 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.




WHAT EVERY PUBLISHER KNOWS




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 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 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 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 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 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 _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 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.

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
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 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 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 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 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 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.

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 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 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 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 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 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.

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 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 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?




THE SECRET OF THE BEST SELLER




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.

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 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. 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.

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 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
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 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; 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 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, 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
  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 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.


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. 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. 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 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.”


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, 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. 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?

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 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 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.


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 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 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.




WRITING A NOVEL




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 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 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 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 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.

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 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 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 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 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 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.

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?...
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 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
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 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 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 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 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 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.

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.

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 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 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.

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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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.
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. 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 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 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 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 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 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 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




TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES:


  Italicized text is surrounded by underscores: _italics_.

  Obvious typographical errors have been corrected.

  Inconsistencies in hyphenation have been standardized.



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