The Project Gutenberg eBook of Short Story-Writing: An Art or a
Trade?, by N. Bryllion Fagin

This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and
most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at
www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you
will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before
using this eBook.

Title: Short Story-Writing: An Art or a Trade?

Author: N. Bryllion Fagin

Release Date: October 23, 2021 [eBook #66600]

Language: English

Produced by: Charlene Taylor, Eleni Christofaki and the Online
             Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This
             file was produced from images generously made available by
             The Internet Archive/American Libraries.)

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SHORT STORY-WRITING: AN ART
OR A TRADE? ***





Transcriber’s note

Variable spelling and hyphenation have been retained. Minor punctuation
inconsistencies have been silently repaired. A list of the changes made
can be found at the end of the book. Formatting and special characters
are indicated as follows:

  _italic_




SHORT STORY WRITING: _An Art or a Trade?_




                          SHORT STORY-WRITING
                         _An Art or a Trade?_

                                 _by_

                           N. BRYLLION FAGIN

 Dean of the School of Literary Arts, Research University, Washington,
 D. C., and instructor in Short Story Writing, University of Maryland.

                            [Illustration]

                               NEW YORK
                         THOMAS SELTZER, INC.
                                 1923




                          Copyright, 1923, by
                         THOMAS SELTZER, INC.

                         _All Rights Reserved_

                PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA




CONTENTS


  CHAPTER                    PAGE

  I OVERTURE                  1

  II ACTION                  12

  III “O. HENRYISM”          29

  IV THE MOVING PICTURES     48

  V VERBOTEN                 67

  VI THE ARTIFICIAL ENDING  101

  VII FORM AND SUBSTANCE    114

  VIII FINALE               125

  IX EFFECT                 132

  INDEX                     137




SHORT STORY WRITING:

_An Art or a Trade_?




CHAPTER I

OVERTURE


Moods may be uncomfortable, and sad, and painfully disturbing, but, on
the other hand, they make pleasant music occasionally. Here I sit in
the dusk, looking out into the street that is ordinarily so familiar
to me, but has suddenly become blurred and weirdly mysterious in
the gathering murk. A veil is over my eyes, which see the familiar
houses across the street, the young poplars in front of them, the few
passers-by. But my mind does not discern these objects; it sees far
subtler things--floating, flimsy, evanescent. The dusk is in my mind,
evoking thoughts, illusions, pictures--and speaking, questioning,
singing. The dusk is an overture to the things I have set out to say,
playing innumerable variations of my theme, whispering in every note:
“Stories, Stories, Stories!”

There are so many stories afloat in the world! Every door and window and
curtain and shade has a story to tell; every clod and tree and leaf;
and every pebble of a human being washed by the waves of life. And
how many of these stories have I helped to be told? And how many have
I helped to be maimed, mutilated of soul? Yes, and how many have I
helped to kill?

For I have been teaching, for a number of years, the “Technique of
Short Story-Writing,” and my guidance and judgment have meant life and
death to countless stories born in the breasts and minds of trustful
people. I have been the great discourager and encourager of genius and
quasi-genius, and I know my hands are not without stain of literary
blood.

I am not reproaching myself. Among the many hundreds of men and women
who derive their daily bread and clothes and gasoline by directing
the story-fancy of the country’s million or more literary aspirants,
I class myself among the most conscientious and least harmful. The
share of injury I may have contributed has simply been the unavoidable
accompaniment of being engaged in a profession grounded upon the
popular belief that literature is a trade, like plumbing, or tailoring,
or hod-carrying, and requires but an understanding of the stupendous
emoluments involved and a will to learn. That it is in the interests
of the profession to foster and perpetuate this popular belief needs
no elaborate substantiation. But that the belief itself should be
based on a measure of solid truth is a sardonic phenomenon calling for
enlightening discussion.

Professor Arlo Bates in one of his talks on writing English once
said: “Given a reasonable intelligence and sufficient patience, any
man with the smallest gifts may learn to write at least marketable
stuff, and may earn an honest livelihood, if he studies the taste of
the least exacting portion of the public, and accommodates himself
to the whim of the time.” It is the business of my profession to
dedicate its services to the promotion of the production of this
“marketable stuff,” and to elevate its own calling it has blatantly
labeled this product as “literature.” With this end in view numerous
textbooks have been written, thousands of magazine articles have been
published, and millions of copies of pamphlets and other advertising
matter distributed broadcast over the country. The magic slogan is
“Writers are made--not born!” Then follows a “heart-to-heart” talk on
the advantages of a literary career, and the flourishing of some dozen
notable successes, measured in formidable numbers of dollars received,
usually headed by Jack London and ending with Fannie Hurst or some
still more recent “arrival,” and finally concluding with the weighty
query, explicitly propounded or subtly implied: “Why aren’t you a story
writer?”

The young man or young woman just out of the gray portals of some
fresh-water college and not knowing what to turn to next, or the
insipid clerk dreaming over his ledger, or her typewriter, of some
Tyltyl cap thus suddenly comes into possession of a startling idea.
Why not be a story writer? The work does not seem hard; compensation
is said to be good; and one is master of one’s own time and destiny.
The would-be casts his lot on the side of practical reasoning, pays in
a sum of money to a school of fiction-writing or enrolls for a course
with one of our universities, buys a typewriter on the installment
plan, and begins to collect editorial rejection slips. When the course
is completed another one is taken up, perhaps with another school, thus
crediting all lack of achievement to the insufficiency or inefficiency
of the instruction received so far, and the typewriter continues
to click and the periodic comings of the postman are again awaited
eagerly; for hadn’t a major part of the instruction been devoted to the
inculcation of the conviction that the world is exceedingly tardy in
extending its acknowledgment of genius? Why, think of Jack London; read
his “Martin Eden”--biographical, you know. Then, Masefield, dishwashing
in New York, and returning to England to become the foremost poet of
the day; and Maupassant working away at his little masterpieces for
seven long years before even venturing to bring them before the cold
light of the unappreciative world; and Kipling, knocking about the
streets of New York with his wonderful Indian stories in his pockets
and no editor or publisher willing to look at them; and Knut Hamsun,
working as a common farm hand in North Dakota, and later as a common
conductor collecting fares on a Chicago street-car line, finally
returning to his native Norway to fame and fortune and, ultimately, to
a Nobel prize in literature. Then think of our own more recent story
writers--Hergesheimer, writing away in obscurity for fourteen years;
Fannie Hurst, submitting thirty-five stories to one periodical and
succeeding with the thirty-sixth--and now receiving $1800 for every
short story she writes, you know--etc., etc.

Fully ninety per cent. never do succeed and finally become discouraged
and drop out of the ranks. Of the other ten per cent. many live to
see their names in print over a story or poem or article in some
obscure periodical, while a few ultimately become our best sellers and
their names adorn the conspicuous pages in our most popular fiction
periodicals. Among the ninety per cent. are the hopelessly incompetent,
with a sprinkling of artistic idealists who utterly fail to accommodate
themselves to the taste of the public and the whim of the time. Among
the ten per cent. are the keen, shrewd, practical craftsmen who are
able to get at the spirit of the literary mart. To the chosen ones
among these comes the adulation of the populace and the golden shekels
blazing a glittering path across the pages of special feature articles
in our Sunday newspapers. And these are the writers who justify my
profession in spreading the gospel that one needs but a will to learn
to achieve a successful literary career.

If, with some such unpopular fellow as Nietzsche, we should rise to
a sublime pinnacle of contemptuous detachment, we might say that the
ninety per cent. of failures do not deserve our pity. It is best for
a fighting, competitive world that weaklings and incompetents are
failures. We might even say that the few artistic idealists among them
deserve no better. Life is a process of adaptation and compromise and,
among men, a pair of sturdy legs are of greater utility than a pair
of feeble wings. Perhaps there is a stern justice in the fate of a
Chatterton or, say, a François Villon. But is it not equally possible
that by the grim, whimsical jugglings of the gods a mist may sometimes
envelop the battlefield of men, such let us say, as brought confusion
to the last hordes of the noble Arthur, when

      “... friend and foe were shadows in the mist,
      And friend slew friend not knowing whom he slew;
                                   ... and in the mist
      Was many a noble deed, many a base,
      And chance and craft...”?

Verily, such a “death-white” mist does envelop our literary
battlefield, and, in the confusion, my profession, supported by the
vast majority of editors and professional critics, is aiding the weak
to conquer the strong. Blinded by the mist, we aid aspirants to rise
to power by craft and cunning, and when they emerge to reign for a
single day we crown them, thus contributing to the future nothing but
the dust of our petty kings. Those who would reign for centuries are
jeered at, discouraged, vanquished.

A dozen names leap to mind--pathetic examples of great talent forced
to decay, of great sincerity diluted and polluted, of noble fires
extinguished. But of all these names the two most pregnant with tragedy
are those of Mark Twain and Jack London. The author of “Huckleberry
Finn” and “Tom Sawyer,” deep, penetrating, cynical, was obliged to
play the amusing clown until the end. The author of “The Call of the
Wild” and “Martin Eden” until his dying breath continued to fill his
lucrative contracts with popular claptrap. If no one in particular can
be blamed, the sickly light shining upon our literary firmament must
take responsibility. There are formative years when a writer’s talent
matures, mellows, is molded. The attitude of the populace and, above
all, of the oracles on the mountains and in the temples is eagerly
watched and heeded. In the case of Jack London the influence of this
attitude as a determining factor in the evolution of his career is a
matter of record. One of the editors of _The Seven Arts_, a monthly
magazine that was too lofty of purpose and too pure of policy to
continue existence, once invited Jack London to submit any stories he
might have that had failed of acceptance with the popular magazines
because of lack of adaptation. London’s reply was that no such stories
existed, and concluded with a statement that explains very ingenuously
the melancholy disillusionment that pervades the best of his work. “I
don’t mind telling you,” he wrote, “that had the United States been as
kindly toward the short story writer as France has always been kindly,
from the beginning of my writing career I would have written many a
score of short stories quite different from the ones I have written.”[1]

It is clear, of course, to what particular brand of kindliness London
had reference. For the United States is kindly toward the short story
writer, very kindly indeed. It was kindly toward Jack London--but not
in the way of helping him to bring forth the best that was in him.
And this was his tragedy--and therein lies the unkindliness of the
United States toward all its short story writers. It wanted none of
the work of Jack London the man with a soul and genuine emotions which
burned for expression; it remunerated lavishly Jack London the writer
chap for his artificial concoctions that he despised. It made Joseph
Hergesheimer wait fourteen years for the most moderate recognition
while giving such a writer as H. C. Witwer almost instantaneous
acclaim. It calls Ellis Parker Butler a great humorist and George Ade
a mere fable writer. It proclaims O. Henry a prince of story writers
and doesn’t even know that the unfortunate Ambrose Bierce once lived
among us. And the vast majority of priests and oracles in my profession
persist in justifying and perpetuating this kind unkindliness and in
instructing the new generation according to its tenets. Example par
excellence: Speaks an instructor in story writing in one of our leading
universities, in a critical and biographical survey of our short story
writers, of “Robert W. Chambers, imaginative artist,” and of Jack
London, “at best a third-rate writer.”[2]

The sum and substance of all we preach may be summarized in the one
commandment we zealously enforce above all others: “Thou shalt not
write anything an editor won’t buy.” Then we analyze what editors do
buy, arriving, by the process of induction, at rules and regulations,
which we promptly proceed to incorporate into textbooks for the
unlettered. Some of our rules are flexible, others are not, depending
solely upon the attitude of their compiler. An editor of a prominent
periodical once outlined the qualifications that recommended a literary
offering to him. He had set up before him an ideal reader, an imaginary
lady with a family of daughters up in Vermont, and any manuscript
submitted to him had to answer satisfactorily this mighty query:
“Would the old lady want her daughters to read this?” If this editor
happened to write a textbook for the instruction of the would-be story
writer, the old-lady-and-daughters question would undoubtedly figure
quite prominently therein. I am not aware of any textbook on the
subject by this gentleman, but other writers have had this question, or
similar ones, in mind in evolving laws for the would-be successful.

I admit that I have taught people to answer these mighty queries,
before permitting them to entrust their precious wares to the Post
Office. For most editors have a question of some sort-- Will it please
some imaginary old man, or country girl, or young parson, or the
editor’s own blue-eyed little girl, or, especially, his advertisers;
and when a man or a woman pays hard-earned dollars for the information
of how to “get by” the unfriendly editor, my professional ethics demand
that I supply this information to the limits of my knowledge. Moreover,
when a man or a woman hands in a story which has no earthly chance
of being accepted by any magazine because it is burdened with a soul
which violates every tradition and rule and policy by which magazines
are governed, it becomes my duty to enlighten this student that his
is not the way to “get by.” For even such a student--an exception,
to be sure--has read our advertising literature, has studied the
popular psychology of success, and often, like the other plodders,
sincerely believes that a published story is a masterpiece, a rejected
one worthless. If a story brings five dollars it is a poor one; if it
brings fifty it is a good one; if it brings five hundred it is a work
of art. Getting-by, then, becomes the supreme problem, and getting-by
means having in mind the old lady with her daughters or the old man
with the gout. And who can answer what becomes of poor Lafcadio Hearn’s
queer idea that

    “Literary success of any enduring kind is made only by refusing to
    do what publishers want, by refusing to write what the public want,
    by refusing to accept any popular standard, by refusing to write
    anything to order”?

Poor, poor indeed!




CHAPTER II

ACTION


The very first rule our textbooks endeavor to impress upon the would-be
story writer is that action must dominate his story. Whole chapters
are devoted to the importance of this ingredient, bringing quotations
from sundry editors proving beyond the merest suspicion of a doubt that
action is the life and health of a story, the “punch” and “pep” and
“pull” of it. Then follow chapters on how to capture action; on how to
introduce it into one’s own stories; on how to govern its course to the
greatest advantage.

The editors quoted are, of course, all of the adventure and action type
magazines. One is reputed to have stated his ideal beginning of a story
to be something like this: “He got up and looked at his watch. It was
twelve o’clock. He went up into the garret and hanged himself.” Another
is said to like a more mystifying beginning, something like this: “Who
was the lady in 43? Was she the blond man’s wife, sister or sweetheart?
John couldn’t sleep nights trying to find out.” And still another gives
his preferences, in the form of an announcement of a contest widely
advertised in professional magazines, for stories of “plot, of action,
of interesting complication. Spend the sweat of your brow on deeds, not
on acute character analysis; on big situations, on suspense and appeal,
not in tedious description and fine writing.”

The few editors who express preferences that conflict with this cry
for action are not quoted. Here is one, for instance, who likes
“realistic and psychological stories from writers who want to do for
American life what Chekhov did for Russian life. ‘Plot’ fiction of the
type desired by popular magazines is not wanted.” But, then, there is
the implication that his is not a popular magazine, and besides, he
goes on to say that “our rates for fiction are very modest.” And here
is another editor who wants stories “that are characterized more by
feeling and artistry than by ‘punch.’” But who is she, for it is a she
in this instance, to tell us what is wanted! Why, the circulation of
her little periodical is so insignificant that she is hardly justified
in having any wants at all! The fact that this little publication
publishes some of the most distinctive stories written in America today
does not count, of course. It is not a widely-read magazine; it does
not pay for contributions;--it deserves no attention.

Plainly, our duty as instructors and moulders of the new generation of
story writers is to base our instruction on the needs and preferences
of the fiction periodicals having the largest circulations and able
to pay well for material used. The inculcation of literary ideals,
the stimulation of original talent and the enriching of our national
letters are all excellent themes for papers to be read before high-brow
clubs and respectable societies, but as practical propositions, in a
practical world, they do not lead anywhere. Any one who joins a class
to take up story-writing as a profession wants to sell--and as quickly
as possible. And the story that sells today the quickest and brings the
fattest check is the story of action. Hence our first rule: “Spend the
sweat of your brow on deeds!”

It is true that there do creep up some unpleasant contradictions in
our methods. After laying down the law of action we refer students to
Edgar Allan Poe or Robert Louis Stevenson or Maupassant for perfect
short-story models, and they come back to us in a state of perplexity.
They have picked up Poe and some garrulous old critic, in a superfluous
introduction, had pronounced “The Fall of the House of Usher” to be
Poe’s best tale. They have picked up Stevenson, and some equally
old-fashioned pedant had classed “Markheim” as a masterpiece. They
have picked up Maupassant, and, again, some ancient scholar had lifted
“Solitude” to a pre-eminent position. Yet not one of these three
stories is particularly conspicuous for action. Poe seems to have spent
the sweat of his brow in creating an atmosphere of extreme morbidity
(oh, terror-striking word in our optimistic texts!); Stevenson, on
acute character analysis; and the insane Frenchman on some irrelevant
prattlings about solitude and the whys and wherefores of this queer
life of ours.

Occasionally some student with sufficient courage to voice his
perplexity timidly inquires: “Would any magazine accept such stories
today? There is so little action and still less optimism in them!” I
think of all the stories I have read in recent periodicals that I can
remember and am obliged to admit that few present-day magazines would
be tempted to accept a story of the type on which the masters chose to
lavish their best work. I think this estimate conservative, but soon
the various anthologies of the best short stories that have appeared
in our magazines in the last half dozen years leap into my mind and
protest against my harsh verdict. Some sort of a change really has come
over our fiction recently. Fully twenty-five per cent. of the stories
in Mr. O’Brien’s yearly collection, for instance, are decidedly not
of the “rapid action” type, and more than seventy-five per cent. of
the stories in such an anthology as that compiled by the late William
Dean Howells would not stand the “action” test, although the latter
anthology is not a very exact reflector of modern tendencies since but
few living writers are represented.

So it becomes necessary to explain the discrepancy between the type
of story we teach our students to produce and the type of story we
refer them to for study purposes. It becomes necessary to emphasize
the fact that such periodicals as “The Little Review,” “Midland,” “The
Pagan” (discontinued), “The Stratford Journal” (temporarily suspended),
“The Wave,” and a few others of the “unpopular” group do not pay for
contributions and that the few “leaders” or “giants” in the group pay
but little, and that, therefore, few “respectable” writers contribute
to them. Of the youngsters that do make their way to the top, once in
a great while, through the medium of these high-brow little magazines
one or two may ever hope to get into the “Big Four” or similar
high-prestiged and well-paying periodicals. So that while it may be
flattering to receive the pale encomiums of a few snobbish critics,
the safest way is to write “real” stories full of red-blooded action
and reap a golden harvest. Let those who do not care for the riches of
a material world be satisfied with the deluge of praise poured upon a
Sherwood Anderson; as for most, Holworthy Hall or Octavus Roy Cohen
seems a more inviting model.

And if this does not really explain the uncanny discrepancy in our
texts and they still seem somewhat confused and more than a bit
contradictory, we can, as a last resort, have recourse to that eloquent
dictum: Laws should be studied to be broken! And we suddenly acquire
the becoming halo of iconoclasts and have at last a satisfactory
explanation of why our students should read Poe and Maupassant and
Stevenson, yet not model their own work along the best of these
masters; why they should study our anthologies full of such “anemic”
stories as those of Dreiser, Anderson, Cabell, Waldo Frank, Ben Hecht,
Djuna Barnes, and even those of Susan Glaspell and Alice Brown, yet not
write in similar vein but should emulate rather writers whose names
never appear in anthologies.

Having thus explained the validity of our first rule and having
insisted on strict compliance therewith, we proceed to evolve methods
for a satisfactory meeting of our rule. If action must dominate a
story there should be some system of capturing this indispensable
ingredient, of imprisoning it within our brief literary form, of
whipping it into marketable shape. We find this system and reduce it to
terse understandable terms. We dig down into our bag of story-lore and
lo! we flourish before the weak eyes of the uninitiate another magic
commandment: Complicate! Complicate if you would have Action in your
stories. Complicate if you would have Suspense. Complicate if you would
exchange rejection slips for checks!

It is true that we are careful to explain our schemes of complication,
lest they be taken too literally. Accompanying our commandments are
various precautionary remarks about Logic and Plausibility and numerous
other qualifying statements. But in the main Action and Complication
are held forth as the two most important principles of sound
story-writing. First of all, then, our students are urged to plot and
complicate so that there be not a tedious moment in their product. Let
every sentence move forward the action. Let new developments, startling
in their unusualness and unexpectedness, crop up all the time. And
don’t forget to keep in reserve the grandest development of all,
the most surprising, for the very end. The Dénouement is the thing!
Charming word--French, you know.

I remember a young girl who attended my classes but a short time. “My
weakness seems to be a lack of inventiveness,” she confided to me. “My
plots are too quiet.” She handed in a story and I agreed with her. Her
plots were quiet, but it was the quiet of Spoon River and Winesburg
and Gopher Prairie. She knew intimately the little old Southern town
she hailed from, and she had the gift of making me know it. I knew
it in its past and present and future, which was all of one tone and
texture; I knew its proud inhabitants, patrician and plebeian; I felt
its pulse. I told the girl not to attempt to infuse plot into her story
and suggested a number of magazines that might accept it as it was.

“But I don’t want to write for these small publications!” she objected.
“Nobody has ever heard of them. I want to get into the ‘Saturday
Evening Post,’ the ‘Cosmopolitan,’ and the ‘Red Book.’ And they want
more plot than I manage to put into my stories; that’s what--told me.”
And she named a much advertised commercial critic.

Evidently I proved incapable of generating within her the coveted
element of inventiveness, for the girl dropped out after an exceedingly
brief stay and I have heard nothing from or of her since. Her name
has not yet appeared in the _Saturday Evening Post_, nor in the
_Cosmopolitan_, nor in the _Red Book_--nor, to my knowledge, in any
other magazine. The eminent critic had done his work very well indeed.
His teachings that _every_ story must have an ingenious plot had
seemingly struck root, and the girl with her plotless little town and
its plotless little lives has probably decided, in utter despair, that
her mind is hopelessly devoid of the one essential for successful
story-writing--inventiveness.

Of course, she could have been made to stay and persevere a little
longer, and perhaps she might have yet attained her modicum of success.
If to her quiet little story a few entanglement tricks had been
dexterously applied the girl would have been satisfied and probably
also some editor or another of the more remunerative magazines to
which she aspired. The aspect of her sleepy Southern town would have
undergone a strange metamorphosis, and her lethargic hero and heroine
would have been changed into inhabitants of some hectic metropolis, but
that, of course, would have merely proved the magic of sound technique.

One of the surest of these tricks of ours is the introduction of
a second or third line of interest. Where a story is thin and
uninteresting an entirely different story can be brought in and the
two skillfully connected, related and correlated. Our texts abound
in geometric diagrams of lines and curves and circles, bisected and
intersected, zig-zagging, up and down, rising to various points of
crises and climaxes and catastrophes, and falling again with the
inevitable dénouement. These diagrams look like sacred hieroglyphics
to the credulous student who approaches their cryptic meaning with a
reverent awe. Given a story that reads too “narrative”-like, that lacks
interest because too few crises are arrived at, and its weakness can
usually be traced to its single line of interest which is not thick
enough to generate the necessary amount of suspense. The introduction
of another line brightens it up, adds suspense, complication--Interest.

The process really is a simple one. The moving pictures employ it,
invariably, with greatest effect. A young man is leading the confident
life of a freshman in some Middle-Western town. The first line is
started. The young man’s environment is pictured, his habits and likes
and dislikes and his towering ambitions. He is a marked man. But here
his line breaks. The continuity writer has become busy introducing an
entirely different line of interest. Beautiful Lady Psyche has left
her shire castle and is sailing for America on the Mammoth liner. The
orchestra is playing, and the Lady is standing on the upper deck,
her delicate white hands grasping the railing. Her eyes are deep and
wistful and hopeful. We know, of course, even at this time, that
she will in some fateful way meet our unsuspecting freshman. It is
only a question of time. Her career and his will become entangled
and merged into one. In the meantime we are watching and waiting.
But at this point the continuity writer again breaks the line and
begins an entirely new one. On the liner is “Taffy” Slim and he is
scheming to rob Lady Psyche of her famous jewels. Now we are watching
Taffy’s career. He succeeds and makes his get-away, but Lady Psyche’s
jewels are known the world over, having been photographed on numerous
occasions for the rotogravure supplements of our Sunday newspapers,
and Taffy finds himself unable to dispose of them. He wanders through
the length and breadth of our land starving, with a fortune’s worth
of jewels in his pocket, until finally, he comes to our Mid-Western
college town and meets our freshman. This clever hero buys the jewels
for a bun and--oh, gallantry of gallantries!--undertakes to return
them to their beautiful heart-broken owner. Now we see how these three
lines have been crossed and recrossed and why! We don’t know yet what
the gallant’s reward will consist of but we hope it will be a proposal
of matrimony; in fact, we are not willing to accept anything less for
our hero.

In the short story this double-or multiple-line-of-interest method
was employed most successfully by O. Henry and is clung to by most
of his followers. Its skillful manipulation undoubtedly results in a
more marketable product. It insures a thrilling sequence of events, if
not always a logical one. It is one of our most venerated tricks. We
underline it in our texts. We point out its potency in unmistakable
terms. We hold it up as a shining revelation to a gasping novitiate,
and for revelations the timeworn practice is to demand blind, absolute
acceptance.

One result of our attitude has just been traced in the experience of
the girl with her sleepy little Southern town story. The incompetent
who cannot think in terms of criss-cross lines is eliminated.
Artificiality is not only encouraged but placed at a premium. Sincerity
and that highest of artistic qualities, simplicity, are held up as
baneful stumbling blocks in the way of successful authorship. We
may have read Joseph Hergesheimer but we have never heard of his
philosophic Chwang-Tze whose pithy sentence prefaces “Java Head,”
a sentence full of illuminating words: “It is only the path of pure
simplicity which guards and preserves the spirit.” By undermining the
young story-teller’s faith in the path of pure simplicity we undermine
his spirit; we maim it; often destroy it completely.

Aside from the effect upon our story writers, this doctrine of constant
action and complication and entanglement has also been one of the
causes that have kept American fiction until very recently almost
entirely in the cheaply Romantic school of the long-forgotten past. It
has become strongly rooted in our readers through a perpetual diet of
fiction that embodies these “vital” ingredients, and consequently also
in our editors who must alertly watch the demand to engage successfully
in its supply. As far as we are concerned it would seem that the great
realists and naturalists have lived and died in vain. We are still
writing largely fairy tales, American in color and setting to be
sure, about bizarre adventures and quixotic adventurers. And in our
institutions of learning we are still preaching that stories must be
full of thrilling incidents and brave dénouements to be interesting and
meritorious. We are still living in the fantastic land of improbable
plots where men bound and rebound according to specific orders of
the author. That “the value of a dramatic action has nothing to do
with novelty of incident or the tingle of physical suspense”; that
“Character, motive and fatality, man and the earth and the gods--such
are the elements of dramatic action,”[3] has, as yet, occurred to few
of us.

An admission must be made: It is becoming increasingly difficult to
find plot material that hasn’t been worn threadbare by immoderate use.
The South Seas and the Pacific Islands have been pretty well covered.
Alaska and Hudson Bay are no longer inviting. The cow-boy story,
though not yet entirely extinct, is fast becoming so. The crook story,
though still popular with a particular type of magazine and magazine
purchaser, requires a greater measure of ingenuity to be attractive.
Baseball and football heroism is still going strong but the market is
limited. The Country-Boy-who-becomes-a-Wall-Street-magnate story will
probably continue as long as the large business fiction magazines will
retain their million-and-more circulation marks, but it is beginning to
tax the writer’s inventive capacity for brilliant deals for the hero
to get to that crowded narrow thoroughfare below Brooklyn bridge. The
rash-things-that-pretty-girls-do story is just now having its vogue,
but will blow over like a Bill Hart or Douglas Fairbanks fame. The
situation is gloomy indeed, even critical--if we wish to look at it
that way. Many old writers as well as young ones admit it.

But we don’t. We are optimists. When cornered we say: “Yes, the present
market does have some such aspect, but it simply proves one thing--the
necessity for the greater mastery of technique, for more originality.”
Then we proceed to elucidate. We define originality. It isn’t concerned
with theme but with the handling of theme. There are no new themes
under the sun; never were. A novel twist applied to a threadbare theme
is originality. These twists can be learned--that’s what we, teachers
of technique, are here for: to show how. The secret lies not only in
plenty of action and complication but in the spectacular handling of
these elements. There are many ways of doing it effectively; plot
order, for instance.

The common fault of the inexpert literary mechanician is that he
usually tells his story in the chronological order. Assuming that his
story presents a series of twenty steps, composed of incidents and
episodes of varying intensity, he presents them all in the order of
time of occurrence, thus obtaining a quiet narrative lacking in either
suspense or “punch.” But it is possible to juggle these steps in
different ways so as to get them to unfold in a most dramatic sequence.
It is possible to reverse this chronological order and begin with
incident number twenty and work back to number one. That is, instead of
narrating the crimes of our picaresque hero, which finally get him into
jail, in the order of commission, we begin with the man already safely
tucked away behind the bars--it is nearly always a man; women get into
jails but rarely in our fiction, except for the heart-rending scene
of meeting their husbands or sweethearts--and then work back to his
crimes and the day when evil was not yet in his heart and he was still
attending the Y. M. C. A.

We may then use this “logical” method of plot order or we may use a
mixed method or we may use any one of a number of variants of these
methods. We may, for example, begin with step number five and run up
to step number ten, then work in steps one to five and proceed with
step number eleven. Or we may begin with step one, then skip number
two, withholding it as a missing link in the chain for the sole purpose
of intriguing the reader, and spring it after step nineteen. All we
need to know is how to do these jugglings with the greatest possible
skill--and this is where originality comes to the fore: in the play of
craftsmanship.

This jugglery we can teach with an absolutely clear conscience. We can
cite any number of great masters who have at various times employed
these several schemes of plot development. Maupassant and Kipling and
Stevenson and Poe and O. Henry and even the quiet Chekhov have all
placed their stamp of approval upon these methods by employing them in
their own celebrated little masterpieces. There is really no necessity
to question whether they came upon these methods consciously or
intuitively, from within or without. This would raise the uncomfortable
problem of synthetic and analytic processes, which would merely
confuse the student and lead nowhere. There may be a distinction
between incidents marshalling themselves in some inevitable sequence
of which the author may not even be aware and incidents juggled about
artificially by a writer who has had it impressed upon him that method
A is more dramatic than method B. There may be a distinction; but for
our purposes it is best not to consider it. Suffice us merely to point
out that our story-construction lore is justified by the masters. The
deductions are simple enough: Learn the tricks of the masters and be a
master yourself.

I said we can teach plot legerdemain with a clear conscience. As for
me, however, I have often shuddered to think what a zealous graduate
might have done to such a story as Conrad’s “Youth.” In his or her deft
hand it certainly would not have remained a mere “Narrative,” told in
the colorless chronological order; it would have become a finished
short-story. Assuredly finished.

And yet it must be admitted that a skillful manipulation of our
tricks is, after all, not so easily acquired. There is a brain and a
temperament which is especially adaptable to them, but to the majority
they remain an occult science forever beyond their ken. These unhappy
toilers cannot apply them to their labors. For most students are unable
to construct the slightest kind of plot. There’s a certain knack that
must be acquired. The young, inexperienced mind must be disciplined
along certain grooves. Most students seem to be unable to concentrate
unless driven to do so. I experiment with my class. Unexpectedly I
announce a theme and request the class to construct an incident. Like
children bent upon solving a puzzle, they go to work and I am left to
examine the result. Fully fifty per cent. have used the same situation
and dénouement, as if by agreement; forty-nine per cent. have striven
to inject a novel twist or “O. Henryism” at the end. But the one per
cent! Why here is but a thin bit of paper, with just a few lines
scribbled on it. If this is an incident, it is a very short incident,
indeed. It reads: “I have never been able to write under pressure. I
must find myself in a proper mood. I suppose I shall never make a story
writer.” I smile. I have a vivid picture of young Tommy Sandys losing
his scholarship because one elusive word had refused to respond to his
bidding.




CHAPTER III

“O. HENRYISM”


The mottoes of most of our fiction periodicals are told on their
covers: “A magazine of clever fiction,” “A magazine of bright fiction,”
“A magazine of entertaining fiction,” “A magazine of frisky fiction.”
But with all the available supply of novel plot material exhausted by
writers who had the good fortune of being here before our generation
had an opportunity, what is left to us is neither clever, bright, nor
entertaining. However, O. Henry proved that it was possible to take
the same age-old material and brighten it up with a coat of sparkling
cleverness. He had but to juggle his incidents in such a way as to make
them follow one another in a most spectacular sequence. He had but to
play upon the credulity of his reader. Like the stage magician, he said
to his audience: “Observe that there is a tree here and a fountain
there, and without moving a finger I shall reverse their positions. Now
watch, presto! Here they are!” And the audience applauded, wondering
how he did it, and crowned him king of the wizards.

The king of the wizards, then, occupies a most honorable position
in our textbooks. Stories written in the vein of O. Henry sell more
readily than stories written in the vein of any other master. There is
a brightness, a snappiness, a cheerfulness of style about them that
draws the artistic sensibilities of editors. And yet our insistence
upon the emulation of O. Henry has not produced many other O. Henrys.
Perhaps it is because O. Henry went to the highways and byways of North
and Central America for his plot material which he then juggled to
his heart’s content, while our students go to O. Henry for their plot
material. Perhaps also it is because O. Henryism was as much a part of
William Sidney Porter as was his speaking voice which is buried with
him.

A very young student once lodged a complaint against her own unruly
self. “It is absolutely impossible for me to write a single sentence
in the O. Henry way,” she said. “My stuff somehow doesn’t have that
swing--it’s dead. I don’t believe I shall ever learn. I am too sad of
disposition, I suppose.”

That was one time I did not smile. “Why should you want to write like
O. Henry?” I asked. “Why don’t you try to wear the shape of shoes
or the color of clothes he wore, or drink the kind of ginger-ale he
preferred?” But I was sorry later for my unguarded outburst, for I
realize that that was not the way to make story writers, not the kind
that sell, at any rate.

After all, O. Henry’s technique consisted mainly of a series of clever
tricks, and tricks can be taught, even though not perhaps his dexterity
in performing them. His was truly a gift of the Magi and not really a
gift of the gods. Admitting that through his superficial cleverness
there occasionally glimmers an uncommon understanding of and a sympathy
for the people whose destinies he juggles, the fact remains that his
example is that of clever execution rather than artistic conception.
It remains needless, then, for us to point to anything else in his
makeup save his successful technique. We read a dozen of his stories,
call attention to their brilliant mannerisms and surprising twists at
the end, and exhort our students to go and do likewise. Sometimes we
go a little further and discuss the underlying psychology upon which
O. Henry based his loops and twists--his belief that our modern reader
was so well-nourished on stereotyped fiction as to guess the conclusion
of a story by its beginning, and, consequently, O. Henry led him on to
believe that his guess was being borne out until the very end, when a
pleasantly startling disappointment was sprung upon him.

To substantiate our eulogies of the wizard and to impress upon the
would-be writer the importance of studying and emulating O. Henry, we
quote copiously from Stephen Leacock, Prof. C. Alphonso Smith, and
numerous other O. Henry friends. We seldom, if ever, quote opinions of
critics and editors who are hostile to O. Henry and his cult. Here is
one editor, for instance, who actually believes that “the effects of
such mannerism, trickery, shallowness, and artifice as distinguished O.
Henry’s work, are baleful on all literary students who do not despise
them.”[4] We know that this editor’s opinion must not be credited with
importance. His is only a small Greenwich Village publication. The
checks that writers receive come from editors who do like O. Henry’s
ways; in fact, prefer O. Henryesque stories almost to the exclusion
of any other type. Hence we examine the work of our students with
a feeling of satisfaction. By far the greater number have imbibed
our teachings. Their work shows a striving after cleverness, witty
flippancy, grotesque slang, and an attempt to cap the dénouement with a
novel twist, a perfectly surprising turn. Thus we know that our work is
not in vain; at least some of our students are on the way to success.

Again, this is not a plea on behalf of those incompetents who are not
O. Henryesquely gifted and are therefore not on the way to success. It
is merely a dispassionate consideration of the profession of teaching
story-writing and its existing standards and ethics. Since the O. Henry
story is held up as the supreme model, it is only fair to inquire
into the results thus produced. We have been so eloquent with pride
on the progress of our short story. Since Professor Brander Matthews
first expounded its philosophy, away back in 1884, and connected the
two little words by a hyphen to distinguish this form beginning with
an Initial Impulse and running up to a Climax and falling down to a
Dénouement from the story which is merely short, it has become our
prevailing form of literature. The quantity turned out annually is
beyond the dreams of such a pioneer as Poe. But the quality--ah, that
is another story!

What proportion of this wholesale output can be candidly, suppressing
for the moment our desire to experience flattering sensations, added to
our national literary treasury? How many memorable stories come to mind
to waylay us with their poignant spell of subtlety and beauty--such,
let us say, as Kipling’s “Without Benefit of Clergy,” or Chekhov’s
“Ward No. 6,” or Maupassant’s “In the Moonlight”? Few, isn’t it? And
peculiar, is it not, that though we have been heaping the warmest
of praise upon Richard Harding Davis and Clarence Budington Kelland
and George Randolph Chester and Richard Washburn Child and Mary
Roberts Rinehart and a score or more of our other popular writers,
the few memorable stories that do come to mind were not written by
these favorites. How much of the O. Henryesque is to be found in Mary
E. Wilkins Freeman’s “Revolt of Mother,” or in Theodore Dreiser’s
“The Lost Phoebe,”[5] or, to take a more recent example, in Anzia
Yezierska’s “Hungry Hearts”?[6] These stories are everything that
the wizard’s stories are not. They are neither breezy, nor flippant,
nor surprising; nor “refreshing.” Judged by our standards they are
anomalies.

I am sufficiently steeped in our inspirational literature to be aware
of the dangers of pessimism. The Doctors Crane and Orison Swett Marden
and Walt Mason have left their effect upon my disposition. But it is
only logical to deduct that if all the O. Henry standards that we
have so triumphantly established and extolled for the guidance of our
story writers have failed to produce a single great story to compare
with the best that other countries which do not preach and practice O.
Henryism have produced, there is something wrong with our standards.
These are unusual times we are living in. Everything that has seemed to
us wise and sound and sublime is coming in for a share of skepticism
and revaluation. Unquestionable things are being questioned. Is it not
a propitious time to attempt a revaluation of our short-story dogmas?
What is the contribution of O. Henryism to our national letters and to
the short story as a form of literary expression? How great an artist
really was William Sidney Porter, the founder of the Cult? Is it
sacrilege to attempt to answer these questions?

O. Henry left us more than two hundred and fifty stories. In the
decade before his death he turned out an average of twenty-five
stories a year. Mr. William Johnston, an editor of the New York
_World_ relates[7] the struggles of O. Henry in trying to live up to a
three-year contract he had with that paper calling for a story a week.
There were weeks when O. Henry would haunt the hotels and cafés of New
York in a frantic search of material, and there were times when the
stories could not be produced on time and O. Henry would sit down and
write the most ingenious excuses. Needless to state that O. Henry’s
stories bear all the marks of this haste and anxiety. Nearly all of
them are sketchy, reportorial, superficial, his gift of felicitous
expression “camouflaging” the poverty of theme and character. The best
of them lack depth and roundness, often disclosing a glint of a sharp
idea unworked, untransmuted by thought and emotion.

Of his many volumes of stories, “The Four Million” is without doubt
the one which is most widely known. It was his bold challenge to the
world that he was the discoverer--even though he gave the census
taker due credit--of four million people instead of four hundred in
America’s metropolis that first attracted attention and admiration.
The implication was that he was imbued with the purpose of unbaring
the lives of these four million and especially of the neglected lower
classes. A truly admirable and ambitious self-assignment. And so we
have “The Four Million.” But to what extent was he successful in
carrying out his assignment. How much of the surging, shifting, pale,
rich, orderly, chaotic, and wholly incongruous life of New York is
actually pulsating in the twenty-five little stories collected in the
volume?

What is the first one, “Tobin’s Palm,” if not a mere long-drawn-out
jest? Is it anything more than an anecdote exploiting palmistry as a
“trait”--to use another technical term--or point? It isn’t New York,
nor Tobin, nor any other character, that makes this story interesting.
It is O. Henry’s trick at the end. The prophecy is fulfilled, after
all, in such an unexpected way, and we are such satisfied children!

What is the second story, the famous “Gift of the Magi”? We have
discussed it and analyzed it in our texts and lauded it everywhere.
How much of the life of the four million does it hold up to us? It
is better than the first story; yes, much better. But why is it a
masterpiece? Not because it tries to take us into the home of a married
couple attempting to exist in our largest city on the husband’s income
of $20 per week. No, that wouldn’t make it famous. Much better stories
of poverty have been written, much more faithful and poignant, and
the great appreciative public does not even remember them. It is the
wizard’s mechanics, his stunning invention--that’s the thing! Della
sells her hair and buys a fob for hubby’s watch; while at the same time
hubby sells his watch and buys her a comb. But you don’t know all this
until they get together for the presentation of the gifts, and then
you gasp. We call this working criss-cross, a plot of cross purposes.
In this story we usually overlook entirely one little thing--the last
paragraph. It really is superfluous and therefore constitutes a breech
of technique. We preach against preaching. Tell your story, we say, and
stop. “Story” is synonymous with _action_. O. Henry didn’t stop--so
that even he was sometimes a breaker of laws. But this uncomfortable
thought doesn’t really have to be noted!

“A Cosmopolite in a Café” is a little skit proving that “since Adam no
true citizen of the world has existed.” It is the type of writing that
is termed “short story” by our humorous weeklies.

“Between Rounds” is the first story in the volume that really displays
O. Henry’s gift of mature satire. Here underneath his superficial
jesting lurks reality. The pathos in the lives of the McCaskeys and
the Murphys is touched upon, lightly to be sure, but sufficiently to
indicate that O. Henry saw it.

The plotted happy ending with plenty of “punch” is best exemplified by
“The Skylight Room.” The gullible reader must have really thought that
Billy Jackson was little Miss Leeson’s name of some star. But not so,
ha-ha! It really was the name of the ambulance doctor who came to take
her to the hospital. “Fishy,” you say? Not any more than “A Service of
Love.” Not that the young couple in this latter story might not have
both worked and concealed the fact from each other. But why both in a
laundry and in the same laundry? Coincidence of course! Incidentally,
can you recognize the “Gift of the Magi” here? Shakespeare may have
never repeated, but O. Henry did, very frequently too. Here we have
again the poor loving couple trying to get along on next to nothing a
week. A slightly different twist but the formula is the same. Even the
names of the principals are almost the same. In “The Gift of the Magi”
we had Della and Jim, in “A Service of Love” we have Delia and Joe.

In “The Coming-out of Maggie” O. Henry again brushes real life and real
romance. In the hands of a sincere artist this material could have been
worked into an immortal story. As a matter of fact, the same basic
theme--the heart-hunger of a neglected girl--has been treated by Gorki
in his “Her Lover.”[8] And the difference between the two stories is
the difference between tinsel and diamond.

“Man About Town,” “The Cop and the Anthem” and “An Adjustment of
Nature” are trivial things--expanded anecdotes at best. “Memories of
a Yellow Dog” presents O. Henry at his happiest. It is a fine bit of
satire--a field in which lay his strength. In “The Love-Philtre of
Ikey Schoenstein” the wizard again displays his bag of theatrical
tricks. And so he does in “Mammon and the Archer,” with its needless
anti-climax--again breaking the law: “Thou shalt stop when through.”
“Springtime à la Carte” is a long-drawn-out joke. So is “From a Cabby’s
Seat.” In “The Green Room” O. Henry once more had a cursory glimpse of
his “four million.”

Now we reach “An Unfinished Story.” Thanks to the good imps that may
have influenced him to leave this story unfinished. It is the only one
in the volume that shows O. Henry was capable of genuine emotion and
had a sense of artistic truth. Dr. Blanche Colton Williams would not
include it among O. Henry’s best because “It is just what the author
called it--unfinished.”[9] Yes, admittedly, it is unfinished--in a
technical sense. The $5 a week shop-girl has nothing to wear and does
not go to the dance with Piggy. And that’s all that happens, except a
little sermon at the end in which O. Henry intimates that the fellow
that sets fire to an orphan asylum, and murders a blind man for
his pennies, has a cleaner conscience than the prosperous-looking
gentleman who hires working girls and pays them five or six dollars a
week to live on in the city of New York. To “finish” this story would
have necessitated the distortion of truth, the blurring of the drab
little picture. That Sidney Porter refused to do it indicates to what
extent he was above the practical standards of his admiring disciples
and interpreters.

“The Caliph, Cupid and The Clock” is a bit of romantic clap-trap. So is
“Sisters of the Golden Circle.” “The Romance of a Busy Broker” is the
old absent-minded-professor-who-forgot-he-was-married joke belabored to
the dignity of a story.

“After Twenty Years” is another bit of writing that has been burdened
with unqualified encomiums by the O. Henry clergy. The ingenuity of
the plot and the strong “kick” at the end fill them with a halleluiah
ecstacy. An empty little crook story, sketchy, anecdotal, is hailed as
a masterpiece.

In “Lost on Dress Parade” you can again recognize the same old formula
underlying the construction of “The Gift of the Magi” and “A Service
of Love.” Another example of criss-cross plotting. “By Courier” is a
typical syndicate story. The woman the doctor had held in his arms
was only a patient who had fainted. It was all a mistake. The Best
Girl forgives and forgets. Nevertheless it represents an improvement
over the old type of similar story. The fair suspect was after all a
patient and not the hero’s sister.

“The Furnished Room” is another indication that O. Henry was capable of
feeling the pulse of his four million when he was so attuned, and “The
Brief Debút of Tilly,” though in smaller measure, corroborates it.

Thus an examination of O. Henry’s work by any one not blinded by
hero-worship and popular esteem, discloses at best an occasional brave
peep at life, hasty, superficial and dazzlingly flippant; an idea, raw,
unassimilated, timidly works its way to the surface only to be promptly
suppressed by a hand skilled in producing sensational effects. At its
worst, his work is no more than a series of cheap jokes renovated and
expanded. But over all there is the unmistakable charm of a master
trickster, of a facile player with incidents and words.

That William Sidney Porter was himself greatly displeased with his
accomplishment, that he even held it in contempt is attested by his
prevailing cynical tone. He knew he was not creating art, that he was
not giving the best there was in him. There was not time for that and
editors did not want it, and with a bitterness that Mark Twain and
Jack London shared to their dying day he continued to perform tricks.
Mr. William Johnston in his article in the _Bookman_, referred to
above, states that after reading one of his, Mr. Johnston’s, stories,
in some obscure Southern periodical, O. Henry wrote to him: “I wish
_I’d_ written that story.” The story was probably not remarkable in
any particular way. Mr. Johnston is not known as a great story writer.
But O. Henry must have felt that it was written sincerely and his own
artifice weighed upon him.

This is the lesson that an honest teaching profession with any critical
vision at all, undertaking to mold a generation of fiction writers,
ought to point out. Instead of worshipping him blindly, calling him the
“American Maupassant,” and quoting from his biographies painstaking
proof that he was innocent of the crime of embezzlement for which
he served a prison sentence, we might at least mention the danger
of following his methods too slavishly. The puritanic impulse which
inhibits any praise of a man’s work unless it can first establish his
“sterling” character is excruciatingly laughable if not downright
pathetic. Thus attempts have been made by meticulous biographers
to establish the fact that Edgar Allan Poe never tasted any sinful
beverage. And only then, having vindicated his character, does the
conscience of these brave biographers permit them to accept Poe as a
great writer and the pride of America. Whether O. Henry was guilty or
not does not change his standing as a story writer, nor his influence
on other writers, and it is only as such that the student and critic is
interested in him.

In our attitude toward O. Henry and O. Henryism lies one explanation
of the prevailing mediocrity of the contemporary American short story.
The conventional editor, teacher, student, and reader look upon the
short story as upon some interesting puzzle, the key to which is
cleverly concealed until the befuddled reader is ready to “give up.”
Our would-be writers seeking guidance from my profession are never
disabused of this conception but deliberately encouraged to retain it.
We overwhelm them with our analyses of the work of the Master, with our
glowing tributes to his art and charm and genius, his purity of thought
and his philosophy. An article on O. Henry, containing essentially the
same material presented in this chapter, was rejected by a magazine
circulating among young writers for the reason that “the editor does
not hold your views with regard to O. Henry’s contribution to the
American short story. He _is_ our supreme short-story master....” In
not a single textbook on story-writing, of the many that have come
to my attention, have I found such a simple estimate of O. Henry as
this: “His weakness lay in the very nature of his art. He was an
entertainer bent only on amusing and surprising his reader. Everywhere
brilliancy, but too often it is joined to cheapness; art, yet art
merging swiftly into caricature. Like Harte, he cannot be trusted.
Both writers on the whole may be said to have lowered the standards
of American literature, since both worked in the surface of life
with theatric intent.... O. Henry moves, but he never lifts. All is
fortissimo; he slaps the reader on the back and laughs loudly as if he
were in a bar-room. His characters, with few exceptions, are extremes,
caricatures. Even his shop girls, in the limning of whom he did his
best work, are not really individuals; rather are they types, symbols.
His work was literary vaudeville, brilliant, highly amusing, and yet
vaudeville.”[10]

This estimate, coming as it does from a standard source, cannot be
discounted by attributing it to radical or ultra-advanced tendencies.
The fact is that the case of O. Henry is so simple that even standard
critics and historians, if they but choose to be open-minded, can
see through it. When in 1916 Mrs. Katharine Fullerton Gerould in an
interview with the late Joyce Kilmer called O. Henry “a pernicious
literary influence,” even the New York _Times_, though hastening to the
defense of the wizard, admitted that there might be something in this
outburst of depreciation of O. Henryism. “I hear that O. Henry is held
up as a model by critics and professors of English,” said Mrs. Gerould.
“The effect of this must be pernicious. It cannot but be pernicious
to spread the idea that he is a master of the short story.” And the
_Times_, in an editorial, although taking issue with Mrs. Gerould, was
obliged to conclude:

“Maybe some day we shall get away from writing with a set of rules
before us, and then we shall have literature instead of best sellers.
Maybe the trouble with our writing is that we have developed technique
to such a point that Tom, Dick and Harry are masters of technique and
anybody who can get the hang of it can write a publishable story. Maybe
our fiction has been whetted to a razor edge, until it is technique and
nothing else. Maybe the story has been perfected until now we can tell
perfectly a story that is not worth telling, but have not even thought
of learning what stories are worth telling. Maybe, if we did that,
and told them without thinking of technique and without knowing that
there were any rules whatever, we might write stories that would be
remembered, say, ten years hence. Maybe there is, after all, only one
rule for telling a story--to have one worth telling and then to tell it
as well as you can. Maybe that is what is the matter with the American
drama as well as with American fiction. If we could unlearn some of the
rules and forget technique we might not produce best sellers; and maybe
if we told, as clumsily as our ignorance of the rules compelled us,
stories that were worth telling, there might be no more best sellers,
only stories that would live as long as the clumsy plots of Dickens
and the inartistic anecdotes of O. Henry.”

Just how long O. Henry’s stories will live and his influence
predominate is a prediction no one can safely undertake to venture
at this time. It depends upon how long we will permit his influence
to predominate. The great mass of our reading public will continue
to venerate any writer as long as our official censors continue to
write panegyrics of him, and our colleges to hold him up as a model.
The literary aspirants coming to us for instruction are recruited
largely from among this indiscriminating public. Sooner or later,
however, we must realize that the American Maupassant has not yet come
and that those who foisted the misnomer upon William Sidney Porter
have done the American short story a great injury. Before this most
popular of our literary forms can come into its own the O. Henry cult
must be demolished. O. Henry himself must be assigned his rightful
position--among the tragic figures of America’s potential artists whose
genius was distorted and stifled by our prevailing commercial and
infantile conception of literary values. Our short story itself must be
cleansed; its paint and powder removed; its fluffy curls shorn--so that
our complacent reader may be left to contemplate its “rag and a bone
and a hank of hair.”

When the great American short-story master finally does come, no titles
borrowed from the French or any other nationality will be necessary
and adequate. His own worth will forge his crown, and his worth will
not be measured in tricks and stunts and puzzles and cleverness. His
sole object will not be to spring effects upon his unwary reader.
His will be sincere honest art--with due apologies for this obvious
contradiction in terms, for art can be nothing but sincere!--a result
of deep, genuine emotions and an overflowing imagination. His very soul
will be imbued with the simple truth, so succinctly put by Mr. H. L.
Mencken, that “the way to sure and tremendous effects is by the route
of simplicity, naturalness, ingenuousness.”[11]




CHAPTER IV

THE MOVING PICTURES


An assignment once given my class called for a story based on this
simple germ: “A servant kills his master.” To my great astonishment I
found that fully seventy-five per cent. of the class had decided, as if
by agreement, that the servant must be either a Japanese or a Chinaman.
Why? The students themselves could not explain it, but I could. I had
observed this unison of plot conception many times before. They had all
drawn their inspiration from the same inexhaustible source--the moving
pictures. In all probability not a single student had ever employed
or seen his or her friends employ a Japanese or Chinese servant. If
they had ever employed a servant at all, it was most likely some
negro girl, and yet their fancy had taken them to the Asiatics. For
every one has surely noticed that in the moving pictures the lowly
individual who carries the master’s suitcase is always an Asiatic
valet. It is fashionable and ethical. The laborer, the servant, is
nearly always a foreigner, the American is the “boss,” the domineering
chap who wears the full-dress suit and faces the camera with a
compelling, clean-shaven chin. The drowsy members of our A. F. of L.
and the weak-eyed bookkeepers and typists filling the galleries of our
motion-picture houses must feel highly flattered as they applaud the
shadows of their dreams projected on the screen. What has plausibility
to do with the “Eighth Art”? And who is naïve enough to expect to find
it there?

Yet to the student of the modern American short story, and novel
as well, the moving pictures must come in for a great share of
consideration. This institution exerts a tremendous influence on the
trend of our fiction, determining both its form and substance. It is no
longer a secret that most of our prominent fiction-writers who still
are unattached to some studio are writing stories for the magazines
with a view to their ultimate adaptation for the screen. A number of
magazine publishers maintain brokerage departments where the stories
appearing in their publications are sold to film manufacturers and the
profits thus realized divided with the authors or quietly deposited to
their own accounts. The editors of these magazines are instructed to
keep an eye on moving-picture possibilities of manuscripts submitted
to them. The remuneration involved is so alluring that even the best
writers with high literary traditions behind them are fast succumbing.
But whereas these old writers for the most part have already done
their best work and have spent themselves, so that their loss to
American letters is not very serious, the effect of the moving-pictures
urge upon the young author is truly disastrous.

To write for the screen as it is at present managed requires neither
art nor knowledge. Writers with any literary compunctions cannot hope
to succeed in a field which demands a complete distortion of all
values. What is required is the ability to supply some acrobatically
inclined matinée idols and curly-haired ingénues with fast-moving
vehicles to display their “stunts.” It presupposes an intimate
acquaintance with the peculiar talents of each star. If a star can
swim and dive and ride horse-back and jump off a running train and
dance gracefully opportunities must be provided in the scenario for the
parading of these talents. If another can wear pretty clothes daintily
or has pretty dimples on her knees or looks particularly charming
in the uniform of a maid or a governess the scenario writer must be
governed accordingly in constructing his story. It is precisely because
no one outside of a studio can have such an intimate knowledge of the
abilities of the various stars featured by a producing company that
staffs are employed to rewrite and prepare for production every script
purchased from an outsider.

The moving-picture industry is almost entirely dominated by investors
who are as far from literature as the average would-be story writer is
from being featured in the pages of the _Cosmopolitan_. Their concern
is solely with the box-office. They will purvey anything that will
yield the desired dividends. Manifestly to apply the word “art” to an
industry with such mercenaries at its helm is to cover the word with
mud, unless we stretch the term to include the art of making money. As
Channing Pollock, in a “Plain Talk About the Movies,”[12] once said:
“One of the troubles with the regular theatre is its conviction that
the possession of a hundred thousand dollars turns a laundryman into a
littérateur.” The remark is still more pungently apposite to the cinema
theatre. The ignorance of the rich investors controlling the destinies
of the moving-picture industry is truly stupendous. An anecdote current
among scenario editors and vouched for by one of them as an actual
happening throws a pitiless light on this prevailing trait. When
several years ago the craze of adapting Dickens’ novels for the screen
was on, the president of a large film corporation one day stormed into
his scenario editor’s office and demanded to know why Dickens’ work had
been permitted to go to a rival company. The editor defended himself
by saying that some of Dickens’ work could still be got. “See to it,
then,” the great man ordered. “Wire Mr. Dickens that hereafter we want
his entire output!”

And these intellectual giants are influencing the output of our
Dickenses! The singularly few exceptions in the industry are powerless
to change the state of affairs. They are either smothered by the
great ones or are tolerated because they are so insignificant. And
these great ones have decreed that adaptations of stage successes,
old classics, best sellers, and magazine stories are more desirable
wares than original stories written especially for the screen. The
governing factor, of course, is the previous advertising that these
adapted stories have had without cost to the film producers. Story
values are the least consideration. Our public is so amusement-hungry
and so well-trained that it will consume anything. Besides, the star is
ninety per cent. of the show anyhow--people go to see the celebrated
So-and-so rather than the vehicle in which So-and-so appears--otherwise
the magnates would not pay five hundred dollars for a story and fifty
thousand dollars for a star’s performance in it.

The fact, however, that moving-picture producers are not purchasing
original scenarios does not deter the numerous literary schools of the
country from offering instruction in photoplay writing. The advertising
matter of these schools is as optimistic as ever. “Makes $50,000 a
year by writing for the screen,” reads one headline. “Moving-picture
stories in demand everywhere!” reads another. Then the information is
generously volunteered that a certain scenario writer in a California
studio is earning fifty thousand dollars a year; another twenty-five
thousand; and countless others between five and ten thousand.
Convincing proof is presented that no education or previous experience
is necessary; that one farmer in the backwoods of Washington or Oregon
or on the prairies of Illinois has sold a scenario for eighteen hundred
and fifty dollars; that one woman who was never graduated from a public
school has written a masterpiece in her spare time between cooking her
victuals and tending to her seven children and an invalid husband, and
that as a result of her exploit she has now paid off the mortgage on
her house and is experimenting with the mechanism of a Dodge car.

This alluring prospect of becoming affluent via a course in photoplay
writing is held out not only by the average correspondence school but
also by not a few of our dignified institutions of learning. There is
no excuse for offering any instruction in an art that is on such a low
plane of development, except, perhaps, that of elevating it, which is
not an aim avowed by any of these institutions; and, besides, mere
honesty alone ought to compel even the most enterprising trustee or
administrator to reach the simple conclusion that since the demand
for original photoplays is practically non-existent, as far as the
novice is concerned, it is useless to manufacture photoplaywrights. The
refusal to accept such a logical conclusion results in disappointments
and heartaches and the upsetting of normal useful careers. A glimpse
at the record of original scenarios purchased by some of our leading
producers even as far back as 1918, when the policy of using
adaptations only was not yet rigidly adhered to, proves conclusively
the extent of the market. The American Film Company purchased only
fifteen scenarios during the entire year. The National Studios--twelve.
William S. Hart--eight. The Fairbanks Studio--six. The Dorothy Gish
Company--four. Mary Pickford--one. The Chaplin Studio--one.[13]

When it is considered that some of our ablest fictionists and
dramatists have been writing photoplays and that some of these accepted
scenarios were written for particular stars and often sent direct to
them or to their directors, the chances of the obscure novice, even the
most meritorious one, are far from glorious indeed. And since 1918 the
policy of adaptations only has been enforced more stringently--almost
to the complete exclusion of the original script submitted by the
outsider. A few producing companies have frankly admitted, in the
various writers’ magazines, that they do not even read manuscripts
submitted by unknown outsiders.

But while the great mass of aspirants may not be aware of the true
state of conditions our more or less successful writers know it full
well. The Authors’ League and the Pen Women’s League and the various
Writers’ Clubs throughout the country have all discussed and analyzed
the moving-pictures market, and their members are taking means to meet
its eccentric exactions. Why write a story in photoplay continuity or
even detailed synopsis form only to have it returned from the Coast
most likely unread, when the same material can be written up in a
short story or a novelette, its serial rights sold to a magazine and
its photoplay rights reserved and offered to a film company which is
then sure to accord it a friendly reading? As a matter of record the
price paid for photoplay rights to a magazine story is usually twice
and sometimes tenfold the price paid for an original story written
especially for the screen. Part of this extra compensation is probably
for the advertising value of the story, and part for the judgment of
the magazine editor which the film magnates are more inclined to accept
than that of their own hired editors.

That fiction writers are taking advantage of this unusual opportunity
to sell their work twice is an absolute certainty. “In fact, as several
writers remarked at the Writers’ Club dinner, a large percentage of
the present-day magazine stories are written--planned and plotted--with
the screen directly in mind.... It is well known, on the inside of
the game, that successful fictionists plan every situation and bit of
dialogue in certain stories, visualizing, as they write, the way those
situations will, as they hope, work out on the screen.”[14] And again:
“Today, among the more successful writers of action-stories for the
magazines, there exists the feeling that it is a criminal waste of
time to write originals for the screen. Their method is deliberately
to plan their fiction ... so that it will actually contain abundant
photoplay material, while yet being properly balanced up with the
necessary word-painting and dialogue which good fiction demands. In
other words, they systematically plan their fiction to make its picture
possibilities ‘hit the producer in the eye’ the first time he--or his
scenario editor--reads it.... Almost nine-tenths of the pictures shown
today are adaptations of successful fiction stories or stage plays. If
you doubt that, watch the productions in your theatres and note their
origin.”[15]

What this “systematic planning” results in is self-evident. The
moving-picture story and the fiction story are two different products.
Their technique is different. The photoplay is pantomime pure and
simple. Ideas and emotions can only be expressed by means of gestures
and facial contortions, with the aid of a schoolboy subtitle flashed
on the screen. Literary style, psychologic delineation, and nice
subtleties of thought and emotion cannot be transmitted. The plot must
unfold rapidly and teem with surprising and tense situations. The
actors must have something _to do_ every second. To write a fiction
story with photoplay possibilities requires a careful selection of
theme and plot. Unlike the magazines, which run in types, each catering
to a particular group of temperamental and intellectual stratum of
our people, the moving pictures depend for success upon the approval
of the Ladies’ Auxiliary Society and the Chew Tobacco Club of Dead
Hollow as well as upon Greenwich Village and the bourgeois Philistines
of our metropolises. No theme must be used that might give offense to
any of these patrons; all must be kept satisfied so that a continuance
of their patronage may be insured. It is also apparent that the pale,
quiet story which does not depend upon action for its “punch” must be
entirely sacrificed, since it cannot possibly have any moving-picture
adaptability. Only the swift-moving, red-blooded plot can be utilized.

Needless to suggest that our story writers are well aware of these
limitations. The fact that their work is adapted almost wholesale into
photoplays speaks eloquently for their knowledge on this score.
Needless to suggest, also, that they have become expert mechanics in
the way of constructing a fiction story so that it will be certain
to “hit the producer in the eye.” They have learned that “the
photoplaywright depends upon his ability to _think_ and _write_ in
action.”[16] And they have learned to think and write in action. They
have also taken to heart the dictum regarding theme. “In selecting
your theme, ask yourself if either dialogue or description may not be
really required to bring out the theme satisfactorily. If such is the
case, abandon the theme. The few inserts permitted cannot be relied
upon to give much aid--the chief reliance _must_ be pantomime.”[17] It
is only natural, then, for our writers to eschew the unadaptable theme
altogether.

That the bulk of our magazine fiction is, therefore, not magazine
fiction at all, but merely disguised moving-picture stories is a fact
that has found entirely too little general publicity. A moving-picture
story differs from a fiction story not only in matter of technique
and theme barred by limitations of technique but also in many other
respects. As we have seen, because of the general appeal of the moving
pictures certain themes that might offend any part of the great
public must be avoided. Obviously this results in the humiliating
condition of degenerating to the standard of the lowest patron, of
courting his approval as the final goal of successful authorship. But
should, perchance, an author with a virile conscience bolt the ranks
of the meek conformists and yet, by dint of extraordinarily fortunate
circumstances, break through with his product, the power of the various
Boards of Censorship must be reckoned with.

There are, of course, official, semi-official and unofficial censors
presiding over the production of our magazine fiction, too. But while
a revolting author may take his work to some less respectable magazine
and thus save his soul, no such outlet exists for the photoplaywright.
His work must be so harmless that it will pass not only the National
Board of Censorship but also the various State and city boards,
otherwise no enterprising producer will risk his money producing it.
The experienced photoplaywright, then, studies the proscriptions of
the various boards and keeps himself informed of all their decisions.
He knows, for instance, that crime must be treated cautiously, and it
must always be punished in the end; that the National Board will not
pass a picture in which there is a suicide, that burglary may be shown,
but not by what means it is committed; that flirtations with women of
easy virtue are banned; that lynching scenes are permissible only when
the picture is laid in places where no other law exists; that scenes
showing kidnapping do not always “get by”; that elopements must be
handled delicately; that, in short, the effect of the picture on the
young, the evil-minded, and the weak-minded must always be carefully
gaged.

The experienced photoplaywright also knows of all important precedents
established by the censors. He knows that Shakespeare’s plays have
not gotten by unscathed; that “Macbeth” was deemed too full of crime
and “Romeo and Juliet” too full of love; that a kiss between the two
youngsters in the latter play was limited to three feet; that Eugene
Walter’s “Easiest Way” could not be exhibited in the sovereign State of
Pennsylvania because the Board of Censors of that State had condemned
it “in accordance with Section 6 of the Act.... Because it deals
with prostitution”; that in O. Henry’s “Past One at Rooney’s” such
sub-titles as “At one end was a human pianola with drugged eyes,” and
“I know how bad it looked--me smokin’ and comin’ in here. But I’ll
promise you, Eddie--I’ll give up cigarettes and stay home every night
if you want me to” were deleted; etc., etc. And above all he knows that
religious and political views must never be expressed. Furthermore,
that if he breaks the last law and does essay to express any views at
all, they must be the worn-out popular views that even the humblest
deacon or the mistress of the little red schoolhouse back home might be
gladdened with, because they have been cherishing them as an heritage
from their ancient forbears.

Thus the influence of the moving pictures on the bulk of our magazine
and even book fiction. It is a moving-picture fiction, “strong,”
fast-moving, startling, full of cheap ideas and a gushy hackneyed
idealism, written largely by photoplaywrights who use the fiction
medium simply because it enables them to exact a higher price for their
product, and catering to a photoplay public. For this moving-picture
influence extends not only to the makers of stories but to the general
reading public as well. It tames it, if indeed it need any taming,
molds it, forms it into a hardened cast with a definite æstheticism
which it carries from the cinema house to _Happy Stories_ and _Virile
Stories_ and _Goody Stories_ and back again. There are traditional
themes, traditional views and a traditional treatment, in spite of the
loud cry for novelty, and any theme, view or treatment violating the
tradition, should it succeed to get by the vigilantes higher up, has to
brave a combat with this traditional moving-picture taste.

The young story writer, like his more mature brother or sister, is
infected with this influence and from the very beginning of his
career looks askance at any doctrine that conflicts with his proud
æstheticism. But in our profession it is seldom that he is required to
be false to the culture of the screen. Our textbooks and the bombastic
dogmas they largely exploit are themselves for the most part a product
of the same culture. He is told to think in terms of action rather than
in terms of idea and character. He is trained in the construction and
management of situation and incident until, although not consciously
intending to, he is able, like his more successful colleagues, to
turn out passable photoplay material. Small wonder that most of our
short stories abound in wooden characters, clumsily moving about on
well-oiled springs, thinking stereotyped thoughts and talking wooden
dialogue. The atmosphere fanning upon them has the hot fetid tang of
the darkened-theatre air.

When told to write a story the student almost without hesitation
betakes himself to his supreme source for plot material. It matters
little that this material itself merely represents the adaptation
of some fiction story. The moving pictures today could be used as
another illustration of Emerson’s theory of circles, or is it merely
a modification of the delightful pastime of see-saw of which we were
so fond in our childhood? The scenario writer adapts the magazine
story and the magazine story writer adapts the photoplay story, etc.,
etc., ad infinitum. Of course the disguising twist often goes with it,
but the material nevertheless basically remains the same. And, as a
matter of fact, from the point of view of salability the method is not
without merit, everybody involved--the scenario editor, the producer,
the public--recognizes in the revamped material an old friend, and, if
the revamping has been done dexterously and ingeniously, glories in
its novel familiarity. The failures employing this method are confined
mainly to two classes of students--those who are temperamentally
entirely out of tune with the moving-picture traditions, a small
minority to be sure, and those who, though favorably attuned to the
spirit of the silver sheet, fail to acquire the knack of giving their
work the necessary disguising twist which passes for the much-vaunted
novelty.

Admitting that it would be extremely difficult and perhaps even
futile to attempt to wean the young student-majority away from the
well-assimilated influence of the show house, one cannot avoid
speculation upon what could be made by a serious-minded critical
teaching profession of the open-minded minority diffidently seeking
encouragement in their desire to follow newer traditions or to give
birth to still newer ones. If for one chapter in our texts or for one
semester in our institutions of learning the joy of creating for the
mere love of it, for the sheer beauty of it, had been glorified as we
glorify popularity and commercial success, what a buoyancy of spirit we
could have engendered, what a fluttering of young wings!

For two years in succession a young woman came to my classes and
each year she dropped out before the expiration of the term sending
me a note of despair. She had traveled extensively through Europe
and the Orient as well as through North and South America and she
had accumulated a fund of experience to draw on for material. She
tried hard to imprison it in story form but the finished product
lacked thrill and suspense and airiness. She received nothing but the
cold platitudes of printed rejection slips, while other students--as
innocent of any knowledge of life as a fluffy ingénue capering through
five reels of silent drama--who modeled their work along the lines
of _Popular Stories_ and the _Jolly Book Magazine_ and the latest
releases, and seasoned it with a generous dash of O. Henryism,
occasionally displayed fair-sized checks. She worked away despondently
and each succeeding story tended to prove that the text we were using
and the current magazines we were studying were helping her but little.
There was a heaviness, almost an eeriness, permeating her work, and yet
it was a heaviness somewhat akin to that which permeates the work of
Thomas Hardy. She admitted that most of the magazines we were studying
bored her, that she preferred “Beyond the Horizon” and “John Ferguson”
to “Irene” and “The Passing Show.” I advised her to write sombre
tragedy, yes, morbid stuff. She produced a passably good story. It was
rejected by the first magazine she sent it to with a personal letter
expressing the editors’ regrets at their inability to accept such an
interesting story, but they never purchased “depressing” material.
Wouldn’t she be kind enough to let them see something else of her work,
something in much lighter vein? She refused to try another market,
insisting that she had known all along that she could not write.
All the writers’ magazines she had read and even our own textbook
declared most emphatically that “morbid” stories were not wanted. She
discontinued her studies.

The next year she came back. “I can’t help writing,” she apologized.
“I simply can’t resist the impulse to write. I don’t care if I don’t
sell, I am going to write just for myself--whatever I like. I merely
want you to see what I am doing.” A few months later she sold a tragic
little tale to an unpopular little periodical. But she did not take
advantage of this, her first success. Soon her work began to show
labored flippancy and attempted ingenuity, and it looked ludicrously
pathetic--a Hawthorne austerity with an H. C. Witwer lightness; the
combination was irritably grotesque. Before the end of the year she
dropped out again. And now she is back once more. Whether she will ever
be able to cut away entirely from the cords of a moving-picture impulse
only time can tell.

This case is a mild example of the struggle now waged with a sinister
environment alien to all literary aspiration except for immediate gain
by many lonely souls. Their resistance could be materially strengthened
by sympathetic guidance. Contrary to the proverbial jibes of the cynics
the literary aspirant is far from possessing an over-abundance of
confidence. Intelligent persistence is a rare quality, not to be found
among too many. The mediocre aspirant either soon deserts the ranks or
begins to turn out salable wares. And the person with a genuine case
of divine afflatus also either leaves the ranks with a curse in his
heart or finally learns to turn out regulation material and becomes a
cynic for life. Cynicism may be a much more admirable attitude than
open-mouthed subservience, but it is not always conducive to sturdy
accomplishment. Often it is a sense of surrender. And since missions
seem to be such a popular necessity among our pedagogues and literary
clergy, what could be a more worthy one than the saving of these lonely
strugglers from life-long cynicism? But that requires, first of all,
an intelligent and fearless weighing of the forces on either side and
the rolling up of greater support on the side of the weaker. Truth and
spontaneity are struggling against stifling commercialism and artifice;
against a hostile environment resting complacently on old dilapidated
dogmas, and chuckling contentedly with its moving-picture standards of
life, art, and literature,--its moving-picture civilization.




CHAPTER V

VERBOTEN


The field of the short story is first of all the field of the magazine.
To be a successful story writer requires a comprehensive knowledge
of the policies and preferences of the various periodicals that buy
stories. It is natural to assume that literary agents, commercial
critics, and teachers should be well aware of these editorial policies
and preferences, and should make every effort to inspire the amateur
with the respect and deference due such essential knowledge. We use
this knowledge to stem any inclination to mischief. We hold it aloft,
over the heads of the unmanageable ones, threatening them with failure,
unless they become manageable. Thus we preserve the dignity of the
profession and help stragglers on their weary pilgrimage to the golden
calf.

For us the task is after all an easy one. It is but necessary to
tabulate the good old taboos as to the content of our stories and
then be-write and be-lecture them to make our words impressive. We do
that in our teaching of photoplaywriting; we do it in the teaching of
fiction-writing. But no one has ever seriously labeled the photoplay
as it is finally produced on the screen as a form of literature, while
our fiction undeniably is a form, if not _the_ form, of our national
literature. It behooves us, therefore, to bring forward all the pomp
and pride and glory we are capable of and point out the peculiar
characteristics that distinguish our fiction as a national product from
the fiction of other nations. And we usually find it more advisable
to do it by the negative method of pointing out what our fiction is
not rather than by the positive method of pointing out what it is.
Crystallizing the more-important undesirable and therefore absent
elements in our fiction into single words, we can say that it is not
_pessimistic_; that it is not _lewd_; that it is not _irreverent_; that
it is not “_red_”; that it is not _un-American_.

This does not mean that our literature abstains from all discussion of
the topics of pessimism, sex, religion, politics and economics, and
Americanism. It is merely the extent to which they are discussed and
the angle of discussion that elevate our fiction to a position of what
passes for national expression. Like the vicious circle that governs
photoplay scripts--adaptation of fiction stories being adapted in turn
from the screen and re-adapted back again into scripts--our opinions
on the phenomena of life are adaptations of the opinions imprisoned
within covers of best sellers and our million-and-more-circulation
magazines, only the circle is somewhat more complicated. Scripts
are written to meet the prejudices of all moving-picture patrons;
stories, to meet the needs of a particular type of reader. And this
much must be said for our magazines: The variety of types has made
possible whatever untrammelled literature we have. For after all there
is a wide difference between the moral tone of _Harper’s_ and the
arch-sophistication of the _Smart Set_, or between the big-business
glorification of the _Saturday Evening Post_ and the _New Success_ and
the artistic quiet and rebelliousness of the _Dial_ and the _Little
Review_.

Whatever untrammelled literature we have, however, is little enough.
The tone-givers, the guides, the molders are the magazines of power
with public opinion and millions of dollars behind them, with
unbreakable traditional prejudices and taboos. And so long as the
humblest critic and the highest-paid institutional authority unite in
upholding these traditional taboos as glittering marks of Americanism,
public opinion will continue to demand a literature that is for the
most part infantile, insipid and lifeless. The generations that rise
to pound the typewriter keys in the production of stories are for the
most part imbued with this negative conception of our literature and
unquestionably the most dangerous instrument for the perpetuation of
this degrading conception is the literary teaching profession. Again,
in not a single textbook on story-writing have I been able to find an
intelligent, fearless analysis of our national taboos and their effect
of sterility upon our literature. I have found warnings and admonitions
and scarecrows. “Thou shalt not!” is the sum and substance of our
learned attitude on these mummifying influences. The vacillating feet
of the aspirant are directed toward the proper, well-trodden roads at
the very outset, and the punishment for straying is stressed to the
point where it requires a superhuman courage to brave it.


1. _Optimism_

Our first dictate is “Thou shalt not be morbid!” Depressing stuff
may be characteristic of the Russians, the Germans, the French, the
Italians, the Scandinavians, but not of the Americans. Ours is a young
country, a free country, a happy country, full of the joy of existence.
Ours is a hopeful people, cheerful and gay and proud; glad to be alive.
“People have all the gloom they want,” says the editor of _The American
Magazine_ in his “Fourteen Points” to contributors. “They manufacture
it on their own premises. You cannot sell them gloom. What they want
to buy is a cure for their gloom. They don’t want to buy more gloom.”
And Dr. Frank Crane in his ever-buoyant style exclaims: “_The Saturday
Evening Post_ and _The American Magazine_ have what I call ‘good
literature.’”[18]

Since salability is the only criterion of worth, any story that
violates our fundamental optimistic tone is at once intercepted,
revamped, “improved” or pronounced hopeless and condemned to
extinction. “Not salable,” is a phrase as ominous as a jury’s “Guilty!”
on a charge of murder in the first degree, and the only appeal possible
is for the defendant to plead a sudden seizure of passionate desire
to “pack up his troubles in his old kit bag and smile, smile, smile!”
And so the law of supply and demand operates once more. The “calamity
howler” is eliminated and the man or woman with the “smile that won’t
come off” gets to the top. American literature becomes enriched by the
advent of another “genius” imbued with the gospel that “life is great
fun, after all!”

That no literature can thrive on such a barren optimism seems
to be a statement so obvious as to challenge even the mere
ordinary intelligence offering it. Yet pedants carry forward this
optimism-tradition and preach, and lecture, and prate about the spirit
of America, and threaten and punish and outlaw the few unfortunate
rebels. What literature can a country produce which refuses to take
even the most timid peep at life as it is, which shuts its eyes in
very horror at the most fundamental problems of the land, which does
not brood, contemplate or inquire, which does not know the benediction
of a tear or the relief of a sigh? Can a steady diet of sugar produce
anything more invigorating than diabetes? And literary sugar is what
we think and preach and worship. All heroines are pretty; all heroes
succeed; all complications are solved; wedding bells ring; promotions
are given out; only bad people die young; the good live to a mellow age
of four score and ten; life is a fairy-tale in which all the fairies
are sweet young things waving magic wands over honest young brokers of
their choice; the world, and America especially, is a Vale of Tempe
where limousines are passed out as the reward of virtue and endeavor
and where successful matches are consummated.

Our writers must be either inanimate machines or sorry human beings
trained to suppress their instincts and moods. They must be on
their guard not to succumb to the “blues”; quick to inhibit any sad
reflection or discouraging thought. “If you can’t see the sun is
shining,” wrote one editor very bluntly, rejecting a “depressing”
story, “take Epsom salts and sleep it over.” And whether they are
drowsy or not, sleep it over our writers must. Those who suffer with
insomnia find their good neighbors either snoring peacefully or
stamping about in infuriated protest. Our writers must sift their
experience; if it is tragic or insufficiently uplifting they must
dispatch it to oblivion. It is really most advisable not to draw upon
experience at all. Not of such stuff can optimistic fiction be made.
For is there life without tears and heartache and doubt; without
innumerable deaths of precious fragile dreams; without graying of
heads; without perplexity? Hence arises what Van Wyck Brooks calls “the
doctrine of the fear of experience.... It assumes that experience is
not the stuff of life but something essentially meaningless; and not
merely meaningless but an obstruction which retards and complicates our
real business of getting on in the world and getting up in the world,
and which must, therefore, be ignored and forgotten and evaded and
beaten down by every means in our power.”[19]

Here again the inconsistency in our theory of optimistic fiction is
glaring. We shriek anathemas at any native product that repudiates it,
yet we bow with respect to importations. We acclaim all the morbid
geniuses of Europe; we accord their works places of special privilege
in our curricula; we consider it a mark of culture to mention the
titles of at least a half-dozen depressing books. Even our most
respectable magazines are proud on occasion to publish a story by an
eminent European author with the flamboyant legend placed upon it or
boxed in the center of its first page by the editor: “No one but Gorki
(or Maeterlink, or D’Annunzio, or D. H. Lawrence, or whoever else it
might be) would have the courage to write a story such as this, and no
magazine in America but _The_---- would have the courage to publish
it.” The same legend is placed sometimes upon the work of a native
writer, but after reading the story one finds that either the writer
did not dare, after all, or that the editor of the brave magazine
edited the contribution; that both the writer and the worthy editor had
been so frightened at the mere flap of a wing that they had to offer an
apology for attempting to soar.

This inconsistency is particularly reflected in our current criticism
and literary textbooks. With the same breath a reviewer will praise
Dostoyevski and chastise some native youngster for his horrible
morbidity. In the same chapter the text will refer to Chekhov and
Maupassant and Zola and Poe with almost cringing reverence and
eloquently preach the gospel of cheap optimism as the supreme message
of the story writer. And the young would-be procures copies of the
great masters, reads them, and comes back perplexed. “Why do _they_
write about such horrid things?” asks one young student. I look into
her large, innocent eyes and smile. The Great Creator must have been in
a diplomatic mood when he invented a smile. I glance down at my copy
of _The Literary News_, lying on my desk and note that an editor of a
prominent and liberally-paying magazine is in the market for “stories
of rapid action--cheery short stories, encouraging, helpful--the kind
that makes the world better,” and I proceed to discuss how this kind of
story is written....


2. _Sex_

Of all our taboos none has contributed so large a share in keeping our
literature swathed in baby blankets as that on sex. In its essence
it is merely a direct irradiation of taboo No. 1 on optimism. If
everything in the universe is good and beautiful and holy and the
writer’s business is to chant incessant halleluiahs, then sex is all
of these and must be treated reverently. Its unsavory aspects as well
as those leading to unhappiness must be passed by, and since in the
muddled world we are living in sex has felt most severely the combined
forces of bigotry, suppression and inhibition, of pathologic social and
moral conditions, its aspects are most frequently unsavory and unhappy
and therefore must be either ignored entirely or made savory and happy.
We have a hoary phrase perpetually playing upon our glib lips--it is
to the effect that we are a “clean-living, moral people.” The phrase
itself has long lost its meaning, even to the most uninformed of
citizens, but it has remained a sacred fetish forever, it seems.

Again it is not in the total abstaining from any treatment of sex that
our taboo is expressed, but in our peculiar angle of treatment. Total
abstaining were indeed impossible, for any literature, and least of all
for our literature. The truth is that ours is, in the main, essentially
a sex-literature--largely because of our “reverent” attitude.
Strong elemental forces long suppressed erupt in irrepressible,
if furtive, curiosity. No country on earth can boast of as many
periodicals specializing in the risque, the sexually-sensational, the
cheaply suggestive, as the land of the “clean-living.” The fact is
incontrovertible. Where there is a continued supply there must be a
continued demand. Our publishers know their market. Even the titles of
a host of our periodicals exploit, not too artistically, this crude
reaction of a sex-conscious people. “Saucy Stories,” “Breezy Stories,”
“Snappy Stories,” “Live Stories,” “Droll Stories,” “The Parisienne,”
“True Stories,” “The Follies,” “Telling Tales,” “Secrets,” “I Confess,”
“True Confessions,” “High Life,” “Hot Dog,”--these are some of the
titles that wink mischievously at the purchaser timid with guilt. But
the purchaser is rarely pleased with his dissipation. He finds the
wine exceedingly mild. Most of the stories under the suggestive cover
bearing the inviting title and a still more inviting pretty girl,
usually attired in very becoming _négligé_, are, after all, “clean.”

And this “cleanness” is the characteristic blight of nine-tenths
of our entire literature. It is vulgar with the lowest kind of
sex-consciousness but it doesn’t go “too far.” It is the “cleanness” of
our moving pictures. Is there any reason why a production entitled “Du
Barry” in Europe should be rechristened to read “Passion” for American
exhibition? Is there any reason why Barrie’s “Admirable Crichton”
should become “Male and Female” as a photoplay? Is there any reason for
such titles as “Sex,” “The Restless Sex,” “His Wedded Wife,” “The First
Night,” “The She Woman,” “The Leopard Woman,” “Wedded Husbands,” “Why
Wives Go Wrong,” “Forbidden Fruit,” “The Primrose Path,” “What Happened
to Rosa,” “Why Change Your Wife?” “The Woman Untamed,” etc., etc? It
surely does not require an erudite psychoanalyst to find the reason for
this avalanche of suggestiveness.

Perhaps, if they deemed it wise to speak, our motion-picture producers
could shed some light on the subject. Seemingly their opinion of our
“clean-living, moral people” is not very flattering. And their judgment
is substantially founded upon the generous reports they receive from
the distributing exchanges.

Here, too, carefully as the titles are selected the pictures themselves
are “clean.” If they were not, the various Boards of Censorship would
have seen to it that they become so. At most a director will manage
to show the heroine plunging into her morning’s rose-water bath, as in
“Male and Female,” for instance, or an exotic harem partially disrobing
for a cold dip into the perfumed waters of the Rajah’s pool, as in
“Kismet.” Whether the scenes are vitally necessary to the unfolding of
the plot is immaterial. They constitute an irresistible attraction in
themselves, and must be smuggled in, if possible. A couple of feet of
nakedness results in thousands of dollars’ worth of advertising.

What is true of the moving pictures is equally true of our spoken
stage. Think of “Twin Beds” and “Up in Mabel’s Room” and “Parlor,
Bedroom and Bath” and “Mary’s Ankle” and “Nighty, Nighty” and
“Scrambled Wives” and “Ladies’ Night in a Turkish Bath” and
“Getting Gertie’s Garter” and the various “Follies” and “Scandals”
and a hundred-and-one other titles which were surely chosen for a
purpose--the same purpose which impelled some years ago the manager
of the old Academy of Music in New York to advertise a stock company
production of Daudet’s “Sapho” as the “greatest immoral play ever
written.” And again the plays themselves are not remotely as licentious
as the titles would intimate.

What, then, is this “cleanness” of ours? What are its impositions and
how far can they be stretched? The answer is simple and more than a
trifle sad. Our “cleanness” excludes serious thought. “Something
audacious suits us, but nothing salacious,” writes one editor of a
well-known publication of the frothy type. “Salacious” stands for
thought, reflection, analysis. A little suggestiveness, a hint, a
double-edged joke, a farcical situation, a vulgar thrust, will do.
But a deep, sincere analysis, a fearless uncovering of a cowering
conscience--that is salacious, immoral, lewd, unclean. That accounts
for the free and open dissemination of so much debasing, lurid stuff
and the hypocritical suppression of Dreiser and Cabell. That accounts
for the popularity of Bertha M. Clay _et al._ and the unpopularity
of Sherwood Anderson _et al._ Sex is a fit subject to jest about, to
inject breezily as a gently-naughty stimulant. Sex as an elemental
force which shapes the lives of men and women, which actuates their
struggles in this terrestrial sphere of ours, making for success or
failure, for happiness or despair, for sinner or saint, is vile,
lascivious, and therefore taboo.

The literary teaching profession has not passed this degrading scene
unnoticed. It has broken up in two camps. The great mass of instructors
have simply adopted the position that a writer must give whatever is
demanded of him. Would a tailor refuse to accept an order calling for
a fabric he personally does not approve of and a fashion he detests?
Granted that this is not a particularly lofty conception of literary
art, it is still less pernicious than the conception held by the
smaller group of so-called idealists in the profession. To these the
sex aspect of our literature calls for stormy denunciation. They would
impress upon the future writer the sanctity of his mission. The pen
must not be polluted. Sex must be left alone entirely. The moral tone
must be preserved in all productions. Laws for the ruthless suppression
of the unclean must be fought for and their enactment obtained.

What these honest Puritans cannot understand is that the entire
class of bawdy, sex-reeking literature is a product of the very laws
they have been fortunate enough to have enacted; that the complete
abolition of these laws and the absolute cessation from persecution
in the interests of morality of any expression of sex would purge our
literature of the curse as nothing else. If any one could purchase
a mature, intelligent literary expression of the mysterious passion
that animates nature and moves the world, the profane effusions of
shriveled minds would appear shocking and abhorrent by comparison. All
literature that has ever been written has dealt directly or indirectly
with the relation of men and women--for the very trite reason that all
life that has ever been lived has been the life of this relation of
men and women. To place the yellow ticket of evil upon this relation
as a literary subject is to degrade it beyond words of contempt. The
prevailing spectacle of our literary sewage is perfectly natural: the
thought of uncleanness wrapped around the stuff of life is bound to
pollute it.

But the pernicious influence of this immoral taboo goes beyond its
direct inhibition of the most legitimate of themes. It perpetuates
an æsthetic literary tenet which is a relic of the Age of Darkness.
It is to the effect that the morality or unmorality of its contents
determines the value of a literary production. “It is a shame that such
splendid writing should be wasted on such an atrocious theme,” said
a sweet little lady student apropos Sherwood Anderson’s “The Other
Woman.”[20] The remark at once characterized her as a member of the
Second-Grade Bigots. The First-Grade Bigots would not permit themselves
to see any excellences in a work so pronouncedly unorthodox. When
cornered, the little lady admitted that there might be sound psychology
in Anderson’s story--and a large measure of unsavory truth. “But why
choose such horrid themes when there are so many nice, clean ones?”
It is the cry of all Pollyanna-nurtured readers. It’s the cry of the
author of “Pollyanna” herself. “Is there, then, no human experience
that deals with the good, the happy, the beautiful?” she asks, in a
circular issued by her publishers. “Are joy, faith and purity utterly
illogical? Is only the thunder-cloud real?--the sunshine a sham?”
In such cases argument is impossible. The criterion of moral and
optimistic content is deep-rooted and well-nourished by authority. Is
it not largely this same criterion that for more than a half century
prevented the acceptance by the Judges of Walt Whitman as a poet, and
that is excluding the name of Theodore Dreiser from its rightful place
in our scholarly histories of the modern American novel?

To counteract this blind perpetuation of a fallacious doctrine
demands a complete severance with old school criticism and old-age
pedagogy. Not until authority-worship is mightily shaken can this
be accomplished. But that would be a hopeless task to undertake.
The great mass must have and will have its Great Authorities to bow
to. It is easier than to depend upon one’s own critical faculties.
Besides, habit has become second nature. We have always been taught
that knowledge is merely to know where to find what we want to know.
No, we must be merciful; our literary apostles must remain. But among
them there are those that are blind with senility and those that are
glowing with fresh vision. Let us follow the more musical of the new
criers until they, in their turn, reach their dotage and truth turns
to ashes in their toothless mouths. In no other way can we hope to
uproot the puerile beliefs that art can be judged by its optimistic
or uplifting message, by its morality, or by any other of, what Joel
Elias Spingarn terms, the “Seven confusions.” We have not yet reached
the stage where the relativity of the term “morality” can be discussed
with impunity and to any considerable advantage. But we can bring to
bear upon a rising generation of readers and writers all the force of
our warm logic to combat the notion that any standard of morality, no
matter how sublime, has any determining value in art. We can insist
that a story might be entirely devoid of any moral significance and yet
be an immortal masterpiece; that the whole notion is merely another
one of the confusions we have inherited from an age which was too busy
developing the raw resources of a vast young continent--a task which
necessitated the invocation of Providential aid--to pay attention to
literature.

“To say that poetry (or any other art) is moral or immoral is as
meaningless as to say that an equilateral triangle is moral and an
isosceles triangle immoral. Surely we must realize the absurdity of
testing anything by a standard which does not belong to it or a purpose
for which it was not intended. Imagine these whiffs of conversation at
a dinner table: ‘This cauliflower would be excellent if it had only
been prepared in accordance with international law.’ ‘Do you know why
my cook’s pastry is so good? He has never told a lie or seduced a
woman.’ But why multiply obvious examples? We do not concern ourselves
with morals when we test the engineer’s bridge or the scientist’s
researches; indeed we go farther, and say that it is the moral duty of
the scientist to disregard morals in his search for truth. As a man he
may be judged by moral standards, but the truth of his conclusions can
only be judged by the standard of science.... Art is expression, and
poets succeed or fail by their success or failure in completely and
perfectly expressing themselves. If the ideals they express are not
the ideals we admire most, we must blame not the poets but ourselves;
in the world where morals count we have failed to give them the proper
material out of which to rear a nobler edifice. To separate art and
morality is not to destroy moral values but to augment them--to give
them increased powers and a new freedom in the realm in which they have
the right to reign.”[21]


3. _Religion_

It is literally true that American literature is not irreverent.
The penalty for meddling with religion in any unconventional way is
contemptuous obscurity. But meddling with religion in a way that brings
out its blessings to humanity is praiseworthy and leads to opulence and
glory. For that reason nine-tenths of our literature has a strain of
religious righteousness running through it. In the main the specters
of Cotton Mather and Jonathan Edwards still hover over our literary
output, imparting to it a theological tint. Our fictionists are still
obsessed with the idea that a story or a novel must preach, must
instill the right kind of ideals, must exert a redeeming influence
upon its reader. To be sure, the experienced ones among them are fully
aware of the dangers of obvious moralizing, but they have mastered the
devious ways of preaching without arousing the reader’s suspicion that
he is being preached to.

It is this last point--the devious ways of unsuspected preaching--that
my profession is concerned with. Either we are altogether silent on the
subject of religion in literature, deeming it too ticklish a subject
upon which to commit ourselves, or we are zealous in our efforts to
perpetuate the tradition that literature must complement the work of
the church, only in a less outspoken way. Perhaps we do not do it
consciously but the results obtained are the same. We merely advise
students as to what subjects may be exploited and what subjects may
not. Surely a subject bordering on the atheistic could never be made
salable; not more than two or three periodicals would be open to such
a story--and these of the obscure, “freaky” kind. Without a doubt even
such a mild story as Balzac’s “An Atheist’s Mass” could never have seen
the light of publication in an American periodical. The fact that
the hero remains unconverted to the end would be fatal. We may write
a story about an atheist, and have written such, but in our story,
when the dénouement comes, the hero must exclaim to the assembled
multitude, that he had tried to live without God and had found it
unprofitable. The fact that there might be some poor wretch of a hero
in this queer wide world who would not issue such a proclamation does
not detract from the urgency of such a dénouement. It is one of our
devious ways; without it the story can hope to travel no farther than
the return-to-author basket. The characters we create must ultimately
come to know God and the church--or they never come to know the reader.
It is doubtful if an American Flaubert could hope for as cordial a
reception of an atheistic character of his as the French have accorded
the mediocre M. Homais of “Madame Bovary” fame.

It is far from my purpose to leave the implication that literature
should preach atheism; but neither should it preach religion, theology,
or anything else, for that matter, except in so far as life itself is
a sermon to whomever it pleases to view it as such. “As a rule we may
say that nothing in the world improves one less than sermonizing books
and conversations; nothing is more wearisome, quite apart from the fact
that nothing is more inartistic.... We do not demand of an author that
he should work to make us better.... All that we can demand of him
is that he work conscientiously.”[22] The moment an author stoops to
uplift us he loses his balance as an artistic observer, recorder, and
interpreter.

The attitude of our literature toward religion is based on a churchy
interpretation of life and character which was unconsciously but none
the less comprehensively expressed in a magazine article by Dr. Frank
Crane. “Church people,” he wrote, “as a rule, pay their debts, observe
the decencies of life, are clean of mind and body, cultivate those
qualities that make for a successful and contented life, and get along
together peacefully. And, as a rule, the embezzlers, thugs, drunkards,
harlots, rascals, adulterers, gamblers, and swindlers do not cultivate
church-going to any great extent.”[23]

This is a safe and sane doctrine to embrace when writing fiction for
the popular magazines. Our editors, almost universally, have embraced
it, and even though the Reverend Doctor specifically states that
he speaks of people “as a rule,” which would permit of exceptions,
editors at large will not recognize the existence of such exceptions.
Truth does not count and experience is an illusion. If a writer has in
his life had the misfortune of coming across a man or woman who was
kind, charitable, gentle, moral, and noble and yet instead of being
affiliated with a church was a member of the Secular League and a
subscriber to the Truth Seeker he would best suppress the latter two
points. If a writer has read statistics of extra-generous donations
made to various church funds and has found among the names of donors
not a few of universally notorious embezzlers, he must ignore the fact,
if only in the interests of his career. His motto must be: Never write
anything about church that could not be turned into an advertisement of
the institution. If the motto conflicts with life, scratch life.

And yet religion, like sex, is one of the basic forces of life; it has
helped to shape the course of human history and civilization. To deny
the artist the prerogative to touch upon it unless it be in praise
is to deny him the means to probe the human soul. To compel him to
accept any institution as infallible and therefore beyond question of
imperfection is to fetter his spirit. That a man who is a respected
member of a respected church cannot be a thief in his business life or
a brute at home is a more prostituting doctrine, the more so if not
actually believed in but adopted for commercial purposes only, than
any harlot was ever guided by, because it is so flagrantly contrary to
truth. That the call of sex can never prove stronger than the holiest
of religious precepts is a malicious canon of hypocritical dogmatism.
This is the natural stuff of literature--the dramatic conflicts and
seeming paradoxes, physical, psychic and intellectual, the eternal
clash of nature and dogma, of passion and idea, of man and the world.

Puny fledgelings come to us for instruction in aerial literary
navigation and we look in the tome of Thou Shalt Nots and clip their
weak little wings. “Never dare to lift yourself more than a yard
above the earth,” we admonish; “and you’ll find it easier if you use
this trick and that,” we add. If, perchance, one of them after awhile
finds the fawning breath of the earth too close and spreads its wings
and begins to soar up into the clear ether we shrug our shoulders
compassionately and say to the rest: “Another young bird gone wrong.”
It has broken the limits of our taboos; it has tasted the wine of pure
ozone; it has heard the call of exploration; it has turned irreverent.
Should it succeed in growing a few dazzling feathers by the time it
comes back in sight we may meet it with music and shout to it the
hospitality of our gardens--as a mark of our ability to appreciate fine
feathers; but more frequently we let it starve to death and keep the
music for a touching funeral. During their lifetime we have nothing to
do with the irreverent....


4. _Social and Political Problems_

No literature is more afraid of a courageous presentation of the social
welter which America, in common with all the rest of the world, is
undergoing in this age of reconstruction, than American literature.
Not that it entirely fails to touch upon the mighty problems that have
shaken our national life, but it still clings to an ancient sense of
delicacy and an orthodox point of view which determines what may and
may not be said. Whether a writer really subscribes to the point of
view which colors nearly all of our efforts is immaterial; in order
to sell his product he must adopt it, irrespective of any protesting
personal scruples he might feel. Thus we find our literature, with the
exception of a small and highly unprofitable part, expressing no more
advanced views on the social phenomena of the day than our forefathers
held, and most frequently less advanced.

The editor of _The Coming Nation_, discussing the kind of stories that
are not wanted by film companies, mentions, among others, stories
“where the hero arises and makes a soap-box speech on Socialism
converting all by-standers.”[24] This statement applies with equal
force to our magazine fiction as well. That no respectable editor of a
fiction periodical will take such stories is a fact universally known
among people acquainted with prevailing policies of our magazines.
There would be nothing sinister in this policy, it would even be
highly laudable, were it based on the logical assumption that men’s
minds are not so easily swayed and that therefore no audience of
by-standers can be converted by a single speech. But it is based on
no such reasoning. The fact is that the story depicting a speaker
converting by a few eloquent phrases, let us say, a body of strikers,
to the employer’s point of view, impelling them to forsake their
scheming leaders, tainted by European gold, of course, and return to
work will and does find a ready market. Even the lack of story values
are frequently overlooked where such a fictive incident occurs. The
greatest of our national weeklies and monthlies will open their columns
to the padded dissertation in story disguise on the unreasonableness of
workingmen, or the inefficiency of government control of industries, or
the blessings of a Big Business Administration.

What really determines the policy of exclusion of certain topics or
angles of presentation is the safe-guarding of the interests of the
big advertisers and the personal prejudices of the publishers. Our
experienced writers, as well as the instructors of student-writers who
know their business, know these prejudices perfectly. They know that
popular views “get by” even if the artistry is not so very obstrusive.
They know that unless one can fall in with the established views of
the great majority it is best to leave social and political problems
alone and to write about the South Seas, or Alaska, or the romantic
story of John Jones, Jr., a son of a village blacksmith, who, after
many thrilling hardships finally married Ivy Van Schyler, the pampered
heiress of noble lineage and a huge block of sound railroad stock. They
even know such small details as that if a hero uses soap, it is best
not to mention it by an existing brand, for it may offend advertisers
trying to fasten upon the public rival brands; that “talking machine”
is safer than “Victrola” or “Grafonola” or any other patented name;
that, in a word, no free advertising be given any company, thus causing
other advertisers to complain. They know that it is dangerous to make
a character intimate that his health has been impaired as a result of
drinking too much ginger-ale, or taking headache powders, or yeast, or
tobacco, or anything else, for that matter, that advertisers sell. It
makes no difference whether a writer has accumulated a fund of personal
observation to corroborate his statement. There are people who are
trying to sell these products and will surely lodge a protest with the
advertising manager of the publication in which such a story appears.
In fact, numerous cases where such inadvertent remarks have resulted in
diminished advertising space are on record.

It is to the interest of these same all-powerful advertisers to see
that no aspersions be cast in our magazine fiction upon the inalienable
rights and dignities of Business and that no dangerous views be
expressed which might sway a vigilantly guarded public mind in
undesirable directions. Existing social and political institutions may
be defended in our fiction but not attacked or criticized; their merits
may be extolled, but their demerits must not be betrayed to an innocent
world. Private property is sacred; the State is always right--except
when it attempts to interfere with Property; then a thinly veiled story
decrying this interference as autocratic, tyrannous and un-American
might get by and bring a fair price. Progress is a generality that
affects us but little; the laws of change are suspended when applied to
our literary reactions to our social life. Other nations may develop
new schools of fictionists, young, virile, boldly speaking their minds
on the moot problems of the day. We have no room for such impudence.
Our literature is “pure,” level-headed, conservative. Some isolated
muck-rakers appear here and there, but we give them no outlet for their
muck-raking, and they must either reform or perish or, at best, when we
are helpless to prevent it, get a measure of barren notoriety.

An army officer, an advanced student, once handed in a splendidly
written story of army life, in which he gave a graphic portrayal of
court-martial proceedings. The apathy and criminal nonchalance with
which helpless boys were sentenced to long-term imprisonment, in
the name of discipline, was so artistically woven into a thrilling
plot that it made interesting reading even to the most avid fiction
devotees. Yet the story had gone the rounds of nearly all the
paying magazines without finding a market. A few friendly editors
wrote the author personal letters, one editor going so far as to
express his appreciation of the work, but admitting that the story
was deemed “unavailable because it does not meet with the policy of
this publication.” I supplied the discouraged author with a list of
unconventional publications--for fortunately we do have a fighting
number of them with us--that might welcome his story but could afford
to pay either very little or not at all. He refused to waste his work
on the “freaks,” and wanted to know if he could not revise the story
to make it salable to a standard magazine. I told him that elimination
of all incidents reflecting unfavorably upon the administration of law
in our army would undoubtedly help. He protested that the incidents
had been taken from life and held out for a while, but finally he
succumbed to his intense desire to “get in.” The story was revised
and made perfectly harmless--“sweet” and happy; it sold on its first
trip. The officer has never again attempted to use life as a basis
for fiction--indiscriminately. It was his first altercation with
policies--and probably his last. It requires greater powers than he was
blessed with to put up a more valiant resistance.

It is a sad comment on education that under existing circumstances,
instructors of writers are obliged to help undermine this natural
resistance a few rebellious spirits occasionally display. One whose
entire stock in trade is a knowledge of markets and policies and an
ability to expound existing standards is not in a very advantageous
position to encourage disregard of immutable taboos. We must say, on
reading a story which is off-standard, that it won’t sell, and why.
We must formulate and enforce the rules that make for “success” in
fiction writing. We must be vestals of the sacred fires. I am aware
that “vestals” is not exactly the right word one should use in this
connection; perhaps another word connoting less virtue would be more
apt. But, after all, most of us are honest, and zealously believe that
the fires are sacred and must not be allowed to go out or be polluted.
Vision? Well,--aren’t the blind happy?


5. _Americanism_

As applied to our literature the term American has come to mean
everything and anything. It compliments the mediocre twaddle of
mediocre minds. To earn the compliment a story must be neither sad nor
“fresh” nor irreverent nor “red.” It must not be burdened with too much
thought or sincere emotion. It must have no glimmer of an original
idea. It must “kiss the hand that feeds it,”--which means in this case
that it must breathe a sweet humility to all our institutions, from
the First Law of the land to the American Legion and Babe Ruth. It
must be “glad to be alive and carry on”--everything that is old and
respectable and decrepit and green with mold.

Let a piece of literary art reflect an unhackneyed thought, let it
break any one of our ancient taboos, let it dare to belittle any one of
our glorified generalities and dogmas--and it is promptly howled down
as un-American. The literature of every other country on earth affords
an interpretative and critical view of the psychology of the national
mind it reflects, while American literature is least reflective of the
American national mind, except in one particular: its cringing fear
of the truth. Were it not for this fear to face the truth, and the
inability of the average American to stand criticism, the great bulk
of our “literature” would find no buyers and its content would undergo
a radical change. It is this national trait that has given rise to the
sublime injunction, “Don’t knock!” We may have heard of Matthew Arnold,
but surely never of his heretic doctrine that literature is a criticism
of life. To us literature is largely a matter of so many words at so
much per word, or so many hugs and kisses and careers attained per
magazine page.

Is it to be wondered at that with us we have the interminable problem:
What shall we write about? With one of the largest countries in the
world in which to live; with over one hundred millions of people
living and working and battling and dreaming all about us; with a
multitude of perplexing problems, international, national, municipal,
class, clan, and individual, clamoring for solution; with a rich,
ever-shifting panorama of a young, virile, national existence before
us; with a million comedies and a million tragedies avidly looking at
our typewriter keys--with all this to be had for the taking, isn’t it
pathetically absurd that we must voyage the seven seas and scour all
the corners of the earth in search of material? Open any magazine any
month and note the proportion of stories located in far, out-of-the-way
places. Even our best writers are following this romantic bent.
Twenty-five per cent. of the stories contained in O’Brien’s “Year-book”
for 1919 had a foreign setting; his “Year-book” for 1920 contained
over thirty per cent. of stories with foreign settings--mostly exotic
and bizarre. No serious objections could be taken to transcribing
the life of foreign places, if we had first become aware of our own.
But we have not. We hunt for foreign material simply because we are
afraid to sift our own. We are only now beginning to realize that our
young continent--this huge, crude meltingpot--is filled with brass
and copper and gold, and that these metals are melting and fusing
into some homogeneous substance, which we vaguely term America. We
want this burst of consciousness to grow and sweep us along to great
revelations, but a false pride and obsolete traditions and hypocritical
dogmas are blocking the way. Parrot-like we shout from pulpit and
rostrum and cathedra the old banality: “Boost! All the world loves a
booster!” And because we like to be loved we dare not touch upon the
wounds of life--the hunger, the passions, the buffets, the defeats
that purge its sordidness, gild its drabness, and actuate us to nobler
aspirations.

We pride ourselves that we have developed the short story to
perfection. It has become our national form of literary expression. It
has reached an unparalleled vogue. But, in truth, if we are entitled
to pride, it is on account of our remarkable achievement of an ability
to tell an entertaining tale without telling anything worth while.
Paradoxically, we squeeze amusement out of nothing. We have attained
an excellence of workmanship without the least depth of substance.
But I am anticipating. This phase of the subject is so important that
it deserves a chapter for itself, which it will receive later on. The
real perfection of our short story is yet to come. The signs are that
it is having its birth pangs at this time. Writers of rich promise
have come to the fore recently--and here and there a magazine, either
new or an old one with a new policy, to receive their product. Our
perfected short story will be bold, fearless, vital; beating with
the vigorous pulse of a giant nation stretching its limbs. It will be
truly American--optimistic, with the rugged optimism of a Walt Whitman;
brave, with the courage of an impetuous youth; rich, with the colors of
a fertile soil and a blending humanity. Perhaps our short story is to
fulfill the hopes H. G. Wells once had for the novel:

“The novel,” he wrote in _An Englishman Looks at the World_, “is to be
the social mediator, the vehicle of understanding ... the criticism of
laws and institutions and of social dogmas and ideas.... We are going
to write ... about the whole of human life. We are going to deal with
political questions and religious questions and social questions ...
until a thousand pretenses and ten thousand impostures shrivel in the
cold clear air of our elucidations.... Before we have done we will have
all life within the scope of the novel.”

A lofty assignment, this, for a form of literature that is rooted, as
our short story always has been, in the precept that to be interesting
it must eschew reality. But we can carry it out--and will. Our pioneers
are already on the trail--weak as yet, not a full-grown Chekhov among
them--but gaining in hardihood, and singing. The hordes behind them are
waiting in safety; let the trail become a bit smoother, the hardships
lessened, and they will follow. In the meantime who that is filled
with that eternally human envious admiration for pluck can keep back
his “Good cheer!” and “Godspeed!”?




CHAPTER VI

THE ARTIFICIAL ENDING


One of the surest tags of the American short story has been its
happy ending. No matter what vicissitudes the hero or heroine may
have undergone, what problems and tragedies may have overtaken them,
what unmendable exploits of circumstance or fate they may have been
subjected to, in the end all must be well with them. The happy ending
is a direct result of our uplift optimism, of our Pollyanna philosophy
of life, of our fear of reality. We have always justified it on the
ground of our national psychology, which, we claim, is buoyant and
aggressive and won’t accept defeat. We have insisted that the American
always “gets what he wants when he wants it.” And even the cynics among
us did not dispute our last claim; they pointed to the happy ending.

It is true that of late, since it has become the fashion to question
everything, the happy ending has come in for its share of blasphemous
discussion. Here and there views have been expressed that a happy
ending is not absolutely necessary to make a story readable; some
of these views are so decidedly antagonistic as to maintain that a
happy ending is invariably inartistic, which simply proves, again,
that rebound is directed with equal force but in opposite direction as
the original bound. Even aspiring story writers come in occasionally
inoculated with doubt of the very propriety of the happy ending. To
such, we the votaries of the perfect short story, having exhausted all
our erudite arguments in a vain attempt at reconversion, finally apply
the one unfailing argument--the threat of the editorial rejection slip.
The happy ending, we admit, may not always be artistic, and it may not
always bring an acceptance, but the unhappy ending almost invariably
brings a rejection.

The fallacy of the happy ending clearly illustrates the lack of any
sound system of thought or reasoning underlying the exposition and
production of American fiction. We have the support of venerable
theories and formulas and high-sounding abstractions, but not of
facts and logic. It is as if we dared not examine the result of the
application of our theories and the filling of our formulas. Glibly
we state the psychology of the average American reader, which we
profess to know so well, but do not care to assure ourselves whether
our deductions, and even our major premises are correct. For if it
were true that the average reader always demands a happy ending, we
would have no explanation of the popularity of most of the works of
Poe, Bret Harte, Jack London, Kipling, Conrad, Maupassant, and even
the gray Russians. Doubtless there are individual characteristics in
the writings of these gentlemen that have appealed to our happily
disposed readers, but how much of the appeal has been due to a vogue
created by official O. K.’ers? The inchoate reversion to an insistence
on the unhappy ending, which is becoming apparent among some layers
of our reading public, tends to confirm this suggestion. For it is
not probable that the same people who have never been able to enjoy a
story unless it ended happily should suddenly have been seized with a
passionate amour for the “morbid” ending; and, from any rational point
of view, it is just as fallacious to accept the unhappy ending as an
invariable rule as it is to accept the happy ending. One may be as
artificial as the other.

Manifestly there are kinks in the average reader’s psychology of which
we have not been aware, or if we have, have paid little attention to.
This psychology which we have taken for granted and builded upon is not
after all so solid as we have supposed it to be. It can be and is being
molded. It appears that the present-day average reader fears nothing
so much as the imputation of being average. Here and there a brave
soul may vociferously boast of being a “low-brow,” thus betraying a
troubled consciousness of mediocrity, but on the whole the tendency is
to deplore the tastes of the average, thereby imputing to one’s self,
by implication of contrast, the possession of tastes above those of the
average. Hence the sudden ability to enjoy an unhappy ending. Hence
also the distrust of the average editor of this sudden growth in taste.
He knows its make-believe nature: the average reader may learn to
pretend a dislike for the good old happy ending, but in truth he enjoys
it as much as he ever did. Hence the continued demand for stories with
happy endings.

This may not be such a cheering view of the average reader’s
psychology, but neither is it entirely cheerless. By exploiting its
hypocritical vein of pretended admiration for good literature, we may
hope ultimately to develop a genuine admiration. People of habitual
coarse tastes, for beverages, delicacies, clothes or arts, usually
begin the refining process by affecting the tastes of those whom they
think their betters. The process itself is rather long and tedious and
often disheartening. But the aping instinct helps measurably. We cannot
hope to have a discriminating reading public in a day. Too long have we
impressed upon our public the blessings of a happy disposition and the
artistry of reflecting it in our literature. Too long have we brazened
about our pride in Pollyanna, Wallingford, Torchy, and a hundred other
fictive chasers of the blues, who won’t take defeat but go on singing
on their way. The happy story, with its breezy style, its giggling
climax, and its smacking dénouement has become a fixed type from which
our readers’ affection cannot be so quickly alienated.

D. W. Griffith, one of the ablest producers of moving pictures, is
reported to have made the statement that the average spectator of
cinema drama has the intelligence of a nine-year-old child.[25] That
Mr. Griffith is justified in his statement may be assumed from the
huge success he has had in purveying cinema entertainment. He has made
millions where others have made scanty half-millions. Verily, he knows
his public and is in a position to estimate its mental powers with
some measure of accuracy. His contempt of its intelligence does him
credit....

One of his greatest successes has been his production of “Way Down
East,” a spectacular melodrama of the old angel-girl-Satan-man variety,
with a resulting illegitimate baby which happily sees fit to die,
leaving the little mother to find work with a good Christian family.
But her past is against her and she is finally driven out into a
terrible snow-storm by a man who quotes the Bible by the yard, and the
women in the audience wet their little handkerchiefs, and the men hawk
and cough and blow their noses. The big scene of the picture, and which
is probably responsible for seventy-five per cent. of the picture’s
phenomenal success, shows a whole river of ice floating down toward a
furiously-dashing waterfall. The poor little heroine is on one of the
huge cakes of ice fast nearing the watery precipice, while the good
boy who loves her honestly is jumping like an acrobat after her in the
teeth of a raging storm.

Now, all the moving-picture patrons in the country, from the past
experience of having witnessed one thousand pictures and read ten
thousand magazine stories, ought to know that there is not one chance
in a million that the plucky lover will not arrive in time to rescue
his sweetheart--such things have not happened and do not happen (in
our stories, of course!), yet they become wide-eyed and panting with
excitement, as if they were in doubt about the outcome. Griffith
uses the “cut-back” every ten or twenty feet, showing the thundering
falls, the crashing ice with the limp figure of the girl upon it,
the boy precariously maintaining his balance, then back again to the
falls; thus prolonging the agony until he thinks the public has got
its money’s worth; then the boy arrives, clasps the girl in his arms,
his erring Christian father asks her forgiveness and welcomes her as
a prospective daughter-in-law, and the public file out in the lobby,
exclaiming ecstatically to one another: “What a masterpiece!” Verily,
this Mr. Griffith knew whereof he spoke.

Our public is still thrilled with a climax of whose outcome there
ought to be not the slightest doubt. Which merely proves that if our
fiction still has a measure of suspense it is not due to our clever
technique but to the almost fabulous stupidity of the large mass of
readers. We have evolved our tricks of technique for the prime purpose
of maintaining a keen suspense, of keeping the outcome of the conflict
which every story must have in the balance, of heightening the reader’s
curiosity to follow the destiny of the hero or heroine in whose behalf
his sympathies have been enlisted to a satisfactory end. But if after,
let us say, twenty years of reading fiction, there should suddenly dawn
upon our average reader’s mind the idea that as the hero or heroine
of a story is always immortal and unconquerable in the end, no matter
how circumstances may appear to be against him or her for the moment,
would not our skillfully woven suspense suffer a severe jolt? Of what
use would it be to fear for the safety of the trapped little girl when
a dogged confidence, gained by profitable experience in reading, would
suggest that she is due at the altar on page five and would inevitably
keep her appointment? Of what use would be taking seriously the
pugilistic encounters of the Man-Who-Can’t-Be-Knocked-Out? Why thrill
with anxiety over an overturned automobile when it is certain that the
hero pinned underneath it will have sustained nothing more serious than
a few scratches that must heal before the final sentence is completed?
What would become of all our tricks and ingenuity and inventiveness?
Would not this one convention of the invariably happy ending then
defeat all our efforts at creating suspense? And if that happened would
it not be the direst calamity to all we have worked for, to the entire
mechanism of our “perfect” story?

The preceding paragraph is prophetic of what ultimately must happen. As
yet that day may be far off in the hazy distance, but when it comes the
philosophy of our short story must undergo a complete metamorphosis.
Its own glaring contradictions, if not external influences, must
ultimately bring that about. To preach Suspense as the highest law,
then kill it at its very inception by another law of the happy
ending is an absurdity that cannot long remain unapparent even to a
nine-year-old intelligence.

Meantime the reaction noted in some quarters toward the invariably
unhappy ending is just as sinister an influence toward the rise of
another absurdity. Whether this reaction be sincere--as in the case
of those who have been fed with glucose fiction ad nauseam--or merely
fashionable--as in the case of most of the Left Wing of our present-day
average reading public--if crystallized and perpetuated as a dogma it
is bound to constitute a serious hindrance in the evolution of the
short story. Once and for all we must come to an acceptance of the
truth that there can be but one kind of an ending to a story--whether
happy or unhappy--and that is the logical one, an ending which is a
direct inevitable outgrowth of the story itself. No law can be made
that would apply to all stories; each story generates its own laws.
The question of repugnance or preferences of the reader does not
enter here at all. The question of cause and effect, of intelligent
probability gaged by a keen observation of the laws or lack-of-laws of
reality--this question alone must become paramount and decisive.

It is true that the noblest literary works, from the dramas of Æschylus
to the present day, have all been tinged with sadness--Maupassant’s
definition of literature as being a mirror of life, proving a true
one. Also that other one--is it by Goethe?--that literature is the
conscience of the human race. In the world of men, with the dark
mystery of death as an ever-present certainty, thus sowing a sense of
the futility of all human aspirations and achievement in the hearts
of even the most aggressive of us; with a lurking consciousness of
insurmountable limitations besetting our fondest dreams; with a still
more pronounced consciousness that the maturing of dreams frequently
marks their decay, and almost always marks the thawing of their dewy
glitter--in such a world, literature, welling up from the depths of
inner consciousness, cannot help being tinged with sadness. In fact,
the vast bulk of the world’s literary masterpieces consists of
tragedies. The sooner this fundamental fact is woven into the fiber of
American fiction the sooner will American fiction become the mirror of
American life and the conscience of the American people.

But this solemn historic consideration does not justify the adoption
of a rigid rule that an unhappy ending of a story is artistic and that
a happy one is always inartistic. Least of all could it be justified
in its application to the short story, which frequently deals with
but a single incident in the life of a character rather than with a
complete history. There are infinitely more probabilities of ultimate
defeat in a complete history than in a single experience. Death is
not always the price of an adventure, nor disillusionment that of an
undertaking. Conrad’s “Youth,” melancholy as it is with the breath of
finiteness of all our glorious epochs, has no tragic ending. The young
commander has dared through stress and storm and adversity, has pitted
the strength of his youth against that of the sea and has come out
victorious, glowing with the symbolic message: “Do or Die!” And though,
when he recounts the narrative of that first command of his, youth is
far behind him, he is filled with lyric memories of it far sweeter
than his distant exploit itself. Mary E. Wilkins Freeman’s “Revolt
of Mother” ends happily and yet logically and artistically. Perhaps
in her next encounter with her hard-hearted and hard-headed husband
Mother won’t be as successful, but in this one which Mrs. Freeman had
chosen to relate, she carries the day. Maupassant’s “Moonlight” ends
well. The old Abbé realizes that “God perhaps has made such nights
as this to clothe with his ideals the loves of men,” and the young
couple can henceforth love unmolested. James Branch Cabell’s “Wedding
Jest” ends happily, although satirically--the point of the story--not
a happy one by any means--being contained particularly in the ending.
An enumeration of all the great short stories that have happy endings
would make a paragraph of considerable length.

From any technical point of view the unhappy ending, when canonized
into a convention, will defeat any skill and ingenuity or even natural
artistry in the maintenance of suspense. After a while readers will
learn that every story must end unhappily and will be on their guard.
Already the few periodicals that have made a convention of the
unconventional ending are suffering a depressing monotony. There really
is no reason for following the love illusions of the unsophisticated
heroine when it is certain that disillusionment awaits her in the
end. Nor is there reason for feeling elated over the success of our
hero when we know that it is temporary, that it is only a matter of
paragraphs or pages before this success will be turned into defeat.

If then we arrive at the conclusion that neither the happy ending nor
the tragic ending is in itself an indication of artistry, but must be
considered in its relation to the story it ends, we arrive at a view
which is at once rational and simple--so simple, in fact, that it seems
banal to emphasize it. In the matter of endings we have been thinking
in terms of producing the greatest effect, totally ignoring their
inevitability as culminating points of given sets of plot influences.
We know that the end of a story marks an emphatic place which leaves
the greatest impression upon the reader’s mind; it is, rhetorically, a
strategic point, and therefore we concentrate all our surprises, our
jugglery, our uplift message and our disposition upon this point. We
want the reader to go away smiling, or pleasantly startled, or, if we
write for the conventionally unconventional publication, unpleasantly
satisfied. The fact that a writer after having set his characters in
motion and allowing them to act and react upon the various forces of
the plot, to mold and be molded, has no power over the ending other
than that of guiding the threads of his story--characters, motives
and circumstances--to the end they are logically bound for, is as yet
obscure among us. We are associating the ending with its impressions
upon the reader, with its gallery value--rather than with the soul
of the story. As Mr. Carl Van Doren, former literary editor of _The
Nation_ and now of _The Century_ has expressed it: “According to all
the codes of the more serious kinds of fiction, the unwillingness--or
the inability--to conduct a plot to its legitimate ending implies some
weakness in the artistic character.”[26]

This weakness that Mr. Van Doren refers to in reality arises from
our very conception of the function of fiction and the motives that
govern its birth. In a majority of cases the prime motive for writing
a story is to obtain a check from a publisher; the dazzling figures
cited in our newspapers and writers’ magazines as the incomes of some
fictionists exert an irresistible appeal. The constant hammering upon
literature as a commodity which can be and is being produced as any
other commodity at such and such a price, the size being determined
upon its ability to perform the clownish function of supplying a laugh
or a thrill to the largest number of T. B. M.’s or T. B. W.’s, is
another influence responsible for this weakness. That fiction is a
medium for the expression of a writer’s reactions to his business of
living is a view that mighty few of our writers, editors, and literary
savants seem to hold. So that the fallacy of the happy ending, and of
the unhappy ending as well, is inevitably bound up with the larger
fallacy of mistaking the manufacture of stories for the function of
literature.




CHAPTER VII

FORM AND SUBSTANCE


Jack London in his confessions of his struggle for recognition as a
writer gives this formula for success in literature: Health, Work,
and a Philosophy of Life. Health is necessary, of course, in order to
do any hard work, and in a world against which old Malthus railed,
nothing can be attained without hard work. But it is the value of the
third ingredient which is most often overlooked and the absence of
which is responsible for the failure of most of our literary output to
rise above the level of mediocrity. We have noted, in another place,
that Jack London himself, in the bulk of his production, failed to
strike more than an occasional deep and sincere chord, but it was not
because his ear was faulty; it was simply because his audience rejected
precisely the deep chord.

Let it be understood that by a philosophy of life Jack London did not
refer to any definite view on economic reform or social regeneration.
Narrow, limited, prejudiced views have but little place in literature;
if presented by the hand of an artist, they may appeal for a short
time, but never for very long. Great writers there have been who were
not as actively engaged in the squabbles of the world as Jack London
was and who did not take definite sides in the skirmishes of any
generation but they have all had a philosophy of life none the less,
in that they have all had a broad, philosophic comprehension of the
basic laws which govern human life and actions; of causes and effects
conducive to human suffering and happiness; and of the reactions of
these basic laws upon the author himself so that he is able to present
them from a definite angle--his angle.

It is the possession of this individual angle upon the everlasting
panorama of life and death which distinguishes the vital master from
the flabby mechanic. We might call it philosophy of life, independence
of mind, originality, idealism, or what not, in all cases it makes for
substance--the thing by which a work of art lives.

No slight is intended on the value of form in literature. If the
appropriate masterful form clothes this vital substance, so much the
better, of course, but it is the substance that is the protoplasm. Form
follows fads and fashions, and is decidedly mortal; substance alone
illustrates the immutable law of the indestructibility of matter. With
all their beautiful rhetoric and genial humor, the Spectator and Tatler
papers of Addison and Steele are mildly entertaining dead matter today,
but the tragedies and comedies of the Bard of Avon are as appealing
today as three centuries ago, even though handicapped by a form no
longer in vogue. Dostoyevsky’s novels, to take a more modern example,
were written in a style as clumsy and uncouth as ever novels could be
written in, but their burning pages sear the souls of men who read
them. The gift of substance is in them--a fiery miracle, an Apocalypse.

The one supremely outstanding feature in our American fiction is its
lack of substance. Some of us have the O. Henry style and some of us
have the Henry James style and still others have the Washington Irving
or the Poe style; some of us can plot and others can end a story with
a flourish; some possess a dazzling vocabulary and others are genii of
rhetoric--but how many have something sustaining to impart to a world
drowning in platitudes? How much of worth has our fiction added to the
world’s sum of comprehension of beauty, of truth? We have developed
schools and systems of teaching and learning how to say things; we
have bent every effort toward the evolving of a science of expression
only to find that we have been too busy expressing to acquire what to
express. American ethics has always been a point of national pride, but
we have never applied it to the art of talking brilliantly when one
has nothing to say. As George Macdonald once put it: “... If a man has
nothing to communicate, there is no reason why he should have a good
style, any more than why he should have a good purse without any money,
or a good scabbard without any sword.”

Again, the acquisition of nobility of form is not to be discouraged,
but the possession of something to tell the world is the sublimest of
gifts, and gains the world’s everlasting gratitude; and the greatest
seeming anomaly in the conditions under which American literature is
produced is that this gift is not only rated at a discount but fought,
vilified, grappled with. The only way the gift can be acquired, if
it can, is through an insatiable interest in the stuff and forms of
life; but such interest leads to inquiry and inquiry leads to heresy;
venerable taboos are broken. The anomaly becomes a normal result of
an inferior conception of the rights and functions of literature.
Prejudices are placed above art; policies above truth; words above
meanings.

Once, at a suffrage gathering, a young writer was introduced by a
friend to a famous writer whose encouragement the beginner desired.
At the end of the evening the friend asked the famous writer for his
impressions of the budding genius. “I have not read any of his work,”
the famous writer answered, “but I am afraid he has not the makings
of a genius. The way he snubbed the poor girl I introduced him to
merely because she is a salesgirl indicates that he lacks the voracious
interest in the human element which marks the true artist. How is he
ever going to talk Man when he doesn’t know Man?”

Voracious interest--that’s the path that leads to the gift of
substance, to the “philosophy of life,” the original angle! Cæsar saw
before he conquered. And he had to come a long way before he could see.
But he wanted to see. And it is wanting to see that is the whip of
genius. Dickens walked the streets of London for hours, through rain
and fog and slush and shine, because he wanted to see it, all of it,
every nook and corner of it. Balzac tramped the length and breadth of
Paris, haunted parks and shops and drawing-rooms, because the human
comedy appealed to him. The Russian Kuprin dressed himself in a diver’s
suit and had himself lowered many fathoms into the Black Sea because he
wanted to experience the sensations of a diver. And Jack London circled
the globe because he wanted to see what it is like.

A little class-room episode comes to mind. In the poetry class Carl
Sandburg came up for discussion. A few of his Chicago poems were read
when a fair would-be poet spoke up in protest. “I have lived in Chicago
all my life,” she said, “and have never seen the things Sandburg sees!”
But there was another student in the room, a very unobtrusive little
girl sitting somewhere in the back of the room, and she suddenly came
to her instructor’s rescue. “That’s why you are not Sandburg!” she
exclaimed....

The true artist is the perpetual explorer. He cannot invent the
substance of his work, but he can discover it in the life of nature
and his fellow-men. And the more he sees the more he learns to see,
for to be able to see the new and unexplored in the old and elemental
is the highest art in itself. A hunchback to a child in the streets is
an object to throw stones at, to a Victor Hugo he is a grand, heroic
figure, fierce and glorious in his pathetic grandeur. A typhoon to a
Chinese fisherman represents the wrath of his god for the omission of
a prayer or a sacrifice; to Joseph Conrad it symbolizes the majestic
resentment of the Sea itself against man’s desecration of its peace and
beauty and mystery. Only the American artist knows no symbols and is
warned against attempting to know.

Our great cry has always been: “Acquire form!” Grammar, rhetoric,
metrics, technique--these have been the indispensable tools of our
writers. They still are. But having acquired them our writers find
they can fashion nothing beautiful, nothing lasting, nothing that
will weather the storms of time. For no tools, no matter how sharp or
perfect, can accomplish the feat of fashioning something out of vacuum.
The American story always has laid claims to style--but it hasn’t
lived. Writers have come and had their vogue and gone. Even years back
when style was more leisurely and rounded, when the badge of haste was
not upon it, Charles Dudley Warner remarked: “We may be sure that any
piece of literature which attracts only by some trick of style, however
it may blaze up for a day and startle the world with its flash, lacks
the element of endurance. We do not need much experience to tell us the
difference between a lamp and a Roman candle.”

This remark can be elaborated on, explained, complemented. The truth
is that there can be no style without substance. These elements are
not separate entities; only superficially do they seem to be. How
much sweetness can a “sweet nothing” contain? How much beauty can a
work of “art” contain which has emptiness of thought and ugliness of
conception? How much truth can be embedded in a fundamental falsehood?
Every great poet has found the soul of his poem determining its form.
Great style grows from within--it is an off-shoot of great substance.
To the American writer this relationship has never been apparent; and
most of our critics, professing a lofty æstheticism from the shadows
of their academies, have never paid attention to it. Our literature
cannot boast the possession of a single lucid outline of this vital
relationship between form and substance such as the following from Remy
de Gourmont’s “Le Probleme du Style.” I wonder how many authors of
textbooks exhorting American would-be authors to learn the cabalistic
lore of expression have ever read this:

“A new fact or a new idea is worth more than a fine phrase. A lovely
phrase is a lovely thing and so is a lovely flower. But their duration
is almost the same--a day, a century. Nothing dies more swiftly than a
style which does not rest upon the solidity of vigorous thinking. Such
a style shrivels like a stretched skin; it falls in a heap as ivy does
from the rotten tree that once gave it support....

“It is probably an error to attempt to distinguish between form and
substance.... There is no such thing as amorphous matter; all thought
has a limit, hence a form, since it is a partial representation of true
or possible, real or imaginary life. Substance engenders form exactly
as the tortoise and the oyster do the materials of their respective
shells....

“Form without a foundation, style without thought--what a poor thing it
is!...

“If nothing lives in literature except by its style, that is because
works well thought out are invariably well written. But the converse is
not true. Style alone is nothing....

“The sign of the man in any intellectual work is the thought. The
thought _is_ the man. And style and thought are one.”[27]

If we were candid enough the proper answer to make to this brilliant
Frenchman would be: “Who told you that literature is an ‘intellectual
work’?” But we are not candid enough. Only in our strictly professional
journals do we dare liken literature to cobbling or tin-smithing or
hod-carrying; in the official world, in our lectures and book-reviews,
we consider it an art and talk of Muses and Pegasus and all the
artistic divinities of Mount Olympus and Chillicothe.

A simple confession will not be amiss here. This discussion has been
largely a plea for the man and woman who would find in literature,
and in the short story specifically, the relief of a burdened soul.
The influences that would withhold this relief are multitudinous and
powerful. The struggle is unequal and pathetic. But of the hundreds
of literary aspirants that have come to my personal notice only an
isolated individual here and there was blessed with any kind of a
burden. The vast multitude of souls were cheerfully lightweight
and unencumbered. These aspirants came to study technique so that
they might learn how to write salable stories, but they had no
stories to tell. Some of them believed they could become great story
writers because when at school they had received excellent marks
in composition; others claimed on more general grounds a gift of
expression and they wished to put it to practical use. That it was
necessary to have lived in order to write of life was a thought that
had never occurred to them. They were blissfully unaware of such a
necessity. They needed form, nothing else, and applied themselves
conscientiously toward its acquisition. The irony of the whole matter
is that they actually estimated their deficiency accurately: form was
what they wanted, and nothing else. After a while they began to sell.
In all cases the unhappy aspirants who were plagued with thoughts and
emotions have found it harder to sell, no matter how much excellence of
form they succeeded in acquiring. In the field of the American short
story, the “lightweights” have it, so far.

It is true, of course, that even a lightweight must have something to
clothe with his all-potent form--be it a skeleton ever so rattling. But
that has been answered in Chapter IV on the Moving Pictures. There are
themes a-plenty, airy, optimistic, harmless themes that no respectable
editor, reader, or Board of Censorship can object to. They can be
adapted and readapted an infinity of times, provided each time a new
twist or a “different” trick is introduced.

All our themes seem to have divided themselves into two grand classes:
Stereotyped themes out of which stories are made, and Life themes out
of which literature is made. The first class contains an abundance of
material that any one might have for the taking, but which to make
salable requires all the tricks of form that we have so flamboyantly
evolved to disguise its hackneyed origin. The second class contains all
the substances of existence that only those that feel their kinship
thereto can transmute into literature. All the style and form that
the science of writing can teach cannot hope to produce one breathing
story unless the theme is eloquent with this kinship. Such is the story
of genius--the story that lives and endures. Such a story may or may
not have mechanical values; it will captivate and thrill; ruffle and
soothe; make and destroy. Such a story will be found to have a theme
not chosen with an eye for gallery approval; not even because the
writer himself approves of it. One cannot approve or disapprove of the
stuff he is made of. One merely accepts it. After all there is only one
theme--inexhaustible--out of which genuine literature has always been
and always will be made, perhaps it is the simple theme of Tagore’s
court poet: “The theme of Krishna, the lover god, and Radha, the
beloved, the Eternal Man and the Eternal Woman, the sorrow that comes
from the beginning of time, and the joy without end.”[28]




CHAPTER VIII

FINALE


There is more than a modicum of depression, then, in a contemplative
sweep of the literary product we are instrumental in creating. Even
the most complacent members in my profession must find it so. For
one thing, the very lack of variety in the finished product we so
painstakingly cultivate must occasionally become irksome, if nothing
more serious. Analyzing stories by a hundred different writers, both
successful and would-be, and all of these stories with one puny soul
must in the end become a very tiresome routine indeed.

It is true that we are not masters of the situation. Who are we to set
up standards and direct the footsteps of the young toward them? We are
but the interpreters of existing standards and the formulators and
expositors of ways that lead to the meeting of the exaction imposed
by them. But if an uneasy thought sometimes, at dusk, buzzes into
our incautious ear that the existing standards lead to unregenerate
mediocrity, should we not pause and ask if perpetuating these standards
is for the good of our souls or even for the work we love (and a
great many of us really do love our work!)? Perhaps a revision of
our texts--if not a bonfire--might result in fewer stories but more
inspiring ones. Perhaps the demolition of magazine standards might
result in the birth of literary standards. As it is, should we not
face the truth that all the masters that have ever manipulated pen or
typewriter have disregarded our standards and set up new ones of their
own? They may not have gone to the extent of a Kipling who wrote to a
beginner that “No man’s advice is the least benefit in our business,
and I am a very busy man. Keep on trying until you either fail or
succeed.” They all have looked for and accepted intelligent advice of
one kind or another--from eminent contemporaries and from those that
had preceded them. But they have not slavishly copied and imitated.
They have not felt that any advice had the power of divine commandment.
No real artist could be expected to create anything in the environment
of the rubrics and inhibitions with which we have surrounded him.

All the blame that can be heaped upon the public and our magazine
editors does not absolve the literary clergy from the share of harm
they have contributed to the existing state of the American short
story. The cheapest form of advertising and the most erudite and
conscientious of our textbooks combine in the creation of a peculiar
psychology that a story is some concoction that any one might learn to
make up by mere exertion. Here is a typical advertisement appearing on
the back page of a current magazine:

    HOW I MADE $350.00 ON ONE SHORT STORY And How I Learned To Write, In
    Only a Few Evenings, Stories That Actually Sell Themselves.

Then follows a full-page testimony of some one who has made a great
success of story-writing by spending the small sum of $5 on the course
advertised. The course itself was prepared by a leading professor
in a leading eastern university and whose name is well-known in the
literary world. And almost every important textbook on the subject
abounds in statements such as the following taken from one of the
most intelligent works: “the events which go to make up a fictional
plot are artificially arranged so as to bring about a particular
result,”[29] besprinkled with numerous analogies to the various trades
and professions and how long it takes for the average apprentice to
become an accomplished artizan. The psychology of tricks and twists and
points is foisted upon the writer, the reader, the editor. By constant
repetition we ourselves begin to acquire it, if we had it not when we
started....

And yet this short volume is not wholly pessimistic. I would not want
to leave that impression. For as already stated there have always been
writers with a real touch of divine afflatus who have never paid
any attention either to our psychology or to our tricks, or to our
inhibitions. “Every fine artist in American fiction will be seen to
have discarded both the technical and moral pattern of the magazine
tradition and to have developed one of his own.”[30] And the number of
these heretics is growing--much faster than some of us are aware. They
suffer obscurity and often poverty as all great heretics always have
suffered, but they have the fortitude of their calling. Let us listen
to the confession of one of them:

    “... However, you know that the short-story form has become
    among us very much what I call corrupt. Publishers of short
    stories sought what they called the story with a kick in it. Plots
    for short stories were found and about these plots our writers
    sought to hang a semblance of reality to life. The plot, however,
    being uppermost in the writers’ minds, what we got was a snappy,
    entertaining, artificial thing, forgotten completely an hour after
    it was read.

    “Perhaps because of a native laziness, I found myself unable to
    think up plots. To try to do so bored me unspeakably. On the other
    hand, there were all about me human beings living their lives and
    in the process of doing so creating drama....

    “I have tried to clutch at it and reproduce in writing some of that
    drama....”[31]

When the problem involved is what to tell, the sharpening of the
faculty of seeing what is worth while, the problem of how to tell
becomes of secondary importance. In fact the same literary heretic
believes that “An impulse needs but be strong enough to break through
the lack of technical training ... technical training might well
destroy the impulse....”[32]

Along with the author of “Winesburg, Ohio,” and “The Triumph of the
Egg,” there are a host of other writers freshly reacting to life
and honestly striving to embody their reactions into stories. It is
strange to us, accustomed as we are to clever artificiality, it is even
grotesque--this simplicity, naturalness, and daring, but it marks the
birth of the American short story--that colorful short form which is
destined to become the most perfect artistic expression of our national
life. After all, to the true artist the public is no problem, it being
composed primarily of himself alone. As Sherwood Anderson expressed
it in another passage of the interview quoted above: “I would like a
little to understand myself in this mixup, and I am writing with that
end in view.” The curse of catering to the public has been a fallacy as
great as that of our technique; we have assumed that fiction is made to
order for a public, just as we have taught that technique comes first
and story substance next. The great writers have all come before their
public and have had to wait for the public to catch up with them, but
if they hadn’t come first the public would never have caught up. We
in America have always striven to give the public what it has wanted,
but even in America the time is fast coming when the gracious public
will be inquiring what stories our potent writers have to tell. But
not until our writers realize fully that “The public is composed of
numerous groups crying out: Console me, amuse me, sadden me, touch me,
make me dream, laugh, shudder, weep, think. But the fine spirit says
to the artist: Make something beautiful in the form that suits you,
according to your personal temperament.”[33] This fine spirit is now
becoming evident; it is working its way to the surface.

In this period of awakening, of the real birth of American literature,
the genuine educator, always an open-minded student, can do no better
than revaluate all his acceptances, all his hardened dogmas, all
his hereditary literary and educational truths. If he is to help
the confused multitude, baffled by a sudden consciousness of the
phenomena of existence, to literary self-expression, he must first
realize that no formulas are of any avail in the crises of life and
therefore are of no avail in literature, the artistic emanation or
transmutation of life. He must stimulate thought and independence of
thought--even to the point of experimentation--for in such ways have
all great contributions to the world’s cultural treasury been made. He
must cultivate a genuine love of literature rather than of its usual
incentive, the emoluments involved, whatever they be, and a critical
appreciation of literary values. Thus he may become a positive force in
the chariot of our literary progress--a leader, a driver, a discoverer.




CHAPTER IX

EFFECT


Self-flattery is indigenous to man. We like to flatter ourselves that
our musings produce a desirable effect but we do not often know the
complexion of this effect. What, for instance, shall it be in the
case of serious-minded men and women interested in creating short
stories and in the aspect of our literary field generally who have read
sympathetically the preceding pages? If books are stimuli what shall
this particular reaction be?

A few suggestions may not be amiss. They are in a measure a
recapitulation of the thoughts expressed, but I like to think of them
as formulated by my ideal reader as his more or less conscious artistic
credo:

1. I believe that the short story is first of all a form of literature,
not merely an article of manufacture.

2. Literature is a form of self-expression. I am a living entity,
sensitive to the play and interplay of forces in and all about me. Life
in the form of man, of institutions, of passions and ideas affects me
and I would reproduce and interpret it. I would clarify it to myself;
I would create for the love of creating, for the beauty of it, for the
gratification of the creative urge within me.

3. I recognize no plots that are not derived from the life which I
know, which is in and about me; nor any characters which are not
derived from and tested by that life.

4. In all my work I have a desire to be truthful, rather than merely
clever; simple rather than pretentious; natural rather than surprising.
I would voice no thought nor emotion which is alien to my mind and
temperament.

5. The genuineness of a view or an emotion is its justification. Truth
and spontaneity are more to me than commercial artifice and success.
There is no shame in failure except in so far as it implies a departure
from standards of artistic honesty.

6. I recognize no taboos. Every phase of life is a worthy theme; every
experience known to man is a worthy plot. Things which have interested
me have interested other people and I seek to communicate my personal
vision to the world. I recognize no valid reason for withholding any
part of my vision merely because it may prove unpleasant, uncustomary
or unprofitable to some reader. I do not force him to read my work.

7. Nor do I recognize that I have any right, for any reason whatsoever,
to color the stuff of life, the reality of which I write. The measure
of my success is the measure in which I can make my reality the
reality of those who would read me.

8. The standard of my opinions and emotions is contained within me.
I refuse to modify them, to render them less objectionable, or more
innocuous, or more in conformity with the standard of the moving
pictures or the specifications of any editor, critic, teacher or good
friend.

9. I recognize no subject which is rooted in life as either moral
or immoral. Every phase of existence is a legitimate theme for the
artist, and its morality or immorality is a matter of the reader’s own
interpretation.

10. I am not afraid of being either pessimistic or optimistic. My moods
and ideas are my own and will not be changed to suit the buyer.

11. I am not afraid of being either radical or conservative, depressive
or “exhilarating,” religious or agnostic, constructive or destructive.
The fearless presentation of one’s honest views is a virtue in itself.

12. I have no fear of displeasing any one, of displeasing even a
majority of readers, editors, critics, citizens. I have faith that
there is always a fearless minority willing to hear an honest word;
that there are always some avenues for the transmission of the
independent vision. Frequently this minority in time grows to a
majority--and another rebellious minority takes its place.

13. I believe that all technique is but a means toward effective
expression. No tricks are of any value in themselves. No puzzles or
jugglings with life’s experiences are of any avail, and no technique
is worthy of art except in so far as it furthers clarification and
artistic presentation of my message.

14. I believe that all the instruction I can get can only be in the way
of developing facility of expression. No teacher or textbook can teach
me the stuff out of which literature is made.

15. I believe that style is “of the man himself,” that it comes from
within, that no amount of imitation of O. Henry can give me O. Henry’s
cleverness, and that no amount of style, even my own, can cover a lack
of substance.

16. There is only one ending that my story can have. It may be happy or
unhappy or merely logical. Every problem imposes its own solution. I
can dictate no dénouement, for the characters involved work out their
own destiny acceptable to them or to the inevitability of their problem.

17. I believe that if I am myself I am original. My life is different
from the life of any one else. Manufacturing startling or spectacular
originality is impossible. There is only one theme at bottom of all
stories and that is Life. It is only the way I look at it which you do
not know.

18. Finally I believe that each artist after all works in his own way.
My way may be as good as the ways of other writers and will surely
suit my moods and my thoughts better. Each of us in his own way merely
tries to state and to clarify the tragedy and comedy, the ugliness and
the beauty of the things he knows and lives and feels.

19. The short story is but another medium for the expression of my
reaction to the business of living. I refuse to be a clown entertaining
the gallery.

20. If I depart from this credo and write what commercial policy
may dictate rather than my artistic self I shall not be afraid to
acknowledge the inferior character of the product rather than label it
as literature. My conscience is no coward, even in defeat.


THE END




INDEX



Addison, Joseph, 115.

Ade, George, 9.

_Admirable Crichton, The_, 77.

Aeschylus, 109.

_American Magazine, The_, 70, 71.

Anderson, Sherwood, 16, 17, 79, 81, 128, 129; _The Other Woman_, 81.

_Atheist’s Mass, An_, 85, 86.


Balzac, Honoré, de, 85, 86, 118; _An Atheist’s Mass_, 85, 86.

Barnes, Djuna, 17.

Barrie, J. M., 77.

Bates, Arlo, 2.

_Beyond the Horizon_, 64.

Bierce, Ambrose, 9.

Brandes, Georg, 87.

Brooks, Van Wyck, 73.

Brown, Alice, 17.

Butler, Ellis Parker, 8.


Cabell, James Branch, 17, 79; _The Wedding Jest_, 111.

Clay, Bertha M., 79.

Chambers, Robert W., 9.

Chatterton, Thomas, 6.

Chekhov, Anton, 13, 26, 74, 99; _Ward No. 6_, 33.

Chester, George Randolph, 33.

Chwang-Tse, 22, 23.

Cohen, Octavus Roy, 16.

Conrad, Joseph, 27, 103, 119; _Youth_, 27, 110.

Crane, Frank, 34, 71, 87.


D’Annunzio, Gabrielle, 74.

Davis, Richard Harding, 33.

Daudet, Alphonse, 78.

_Dial, The_, 69.

Dickens, Charles, 51, 118.

Dostoyevski, Fyodor, 74, 116.

Dreiser, Theodore, 17, 34, 79, 82; _The Lost Phoebe_, 34.


Edwards, Jonathan, 85.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 62.

Esenwein, J. Berg, 127; _Writing the Photoplay_, 58, 90; _Writing the
Short Story_, 127.


_Fall of the House of Usher, The_, 14, 15.

Flaubert, Gustave, 86; _Madame Bovary_, 86.

_Four Million, The_, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40.

Frank, Waldo, 8, 17.

Freeman, Mary E. Wilkins, 33, 110; _The Revolt of Mother_, 33, 110, 111.


Gerould, Katharine Fullerton, 44.

Glaspell, Susan, 17.

Gorki, Maxim, 38, 74; _Her Lover_, 38.

Gourmont, Remy de, 120, 121; _Le Probleme du Style_, 120, 121.

Griffith, David Wark, 105, 106.


Hall, Holworthy, 16.

Hamsun, Knut, 5.

Hardy, Thomas, 64.

_Harper’s Magazine_, 69.

Harte, Bret, 103.

Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 65.

Hearn, Lafcadio, 11.

Hecht, Ben, 17.

_Her Lover_, 38.

Hergesheimer, Joseph, 5, 8; _Java Head_, 23.

Howells, William Dean, 15; _Great Modern American Stories_, 34.

Hugo, Victor, 119.

_Hungry Hearts_, 34.

Hurst, Fannie, 5.


_In the Moonlight_, 33, 111.

Irving, Washington, 116.


James, Henry, 116.

_Java Head_, 23.

Jessup, Alexander, 44.

_John Ferguson_, 64.

Johnston, William, 35, 41, 42.


Kelland, Clarence Budington, 33.

Kipling, Rudyard, 4, 26, 103, 126; _Without Benefit of Clergy_, 33.

Kling, Joseph, 32.

Kuprin, Ivan, 118.


Lawrence, D. H., 74.

Leeds, Arthur, 56.

Lewisohn, Ludwig, 23, 24.

_Literary Digest_, The, 105.

_Little Review, The_, 16, 69, 81.

London, Jack, 4, 7, 8, 9, 41, 103, 114, 115, 118; _Martin Eden_, 4.

_Lost Phoebe, The_, 34.


McCardell, Roy L., 55.

Macdonald, George, 116.

_Madame Bovary_, 86.

Maeterlink, Maurice, 74.

Malthus, 114.

Marden, Orison Swett, 34.

_Markheim_, 14, 15.

_Martin Eden_, 4.

Masefield, John, 4.

Mason, Walt, 34.

Mather, Cotton, 85.

Matthews, Brander, 33.

Maupassant, Guy de, 14, 15, 26, 33, 103, 109, 111, 130; _Solitude_, 14,
15; _In the Moonlight_, 33, 111.

Mencken, H. L., 47.


_Nation, The_, 24, 112, 113, 128.

_New Success, The_, 69.


O’Brien, Edward J., 15; _Best Short Stories of 1920_, 81, 97; _Best
Short Stories of 1919_, 97.

O. Henry, 9, 22, 26, 29, 30, 31, 32, 35, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46, 60,
116, 135; _The Four Million_, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40.

_Our America_, 8.

_Our Short Story Writers_, 9, 39.


_Pagan, The_, 16, 32.

_Passing of King Arthur, The_, 6.

Patee, Fred Lewis, 44.

_People’s Favorite Magazine_, 87.

Poe, Edgar Allan, 14, 15, 26, 42, 74, 102, 116; _The Fall of the House
of Usher_, 14, 15.

Pollock, Channing, 51.

Porter, William Sidney (See “O. Henry”).

_Probleme du Style, Le_, 121.


_Revolt of Mother, The_, 33, 110, 111.

Rinehart, Mary Roberts, 33.

Robbins, E. M., 54.


Sandburg, Carl, 118.

_Sapho_, 78.

_Saturday Evening Post, The_, 69, 71.

_Seven Arts, The_, 7, 84.

Shakespeare, 60, 116.

_Smart Set, The_, 69.

_Solitude_, 14, 15.

Spingarn, Joel Elias, 83.

Steele, Richard, 115.

Stevenson, Robert Louis, 14, 26; _Markheim_, 14, 15.


Tagore, Rabindranath, 124.

_Tatler, The_, 115.

_Times, The New York_, 45.

_Triumph of the Egg, The_, 129.

Twain, Mark, 7, 41.


Van Doren, Carl, 112, 113.

Villon, François, 6.


Walter, Eugene, 60.

_Ward No. 6_, 33.

Warner, Charles Dudley, 120.

_Wedding Jest, The_, 111.

Wells, H. G., 99.

Whitman, Walt, 82, 99.

Williams, Blanche Colton, 9, 39.

_Winesburg, Ohio_, 129.

_Without Benefit of Clergy_, 33.

Witwer, H. C., 8, 65.

_Writer’s Monthly, The_, 56, 71.

_Writing the Photoplay_, 58, 90.

_Writing the Short Story_, 127.


Yezierska, Anzia, 34; _Hungry Hearts_, 34.

_Youth_, 27, 110.


Zola, Emile, 74.



FOOTNOTES:

[1] _Our America_, by Waldo Frank.

[2] _Our Short Story Writers_, by Blanche Colton Williams, PH.D.

[3] _The Case of “John Hawthorne,”_ Ludwig Lewisohn, _The Nation_,
February 16, 1921.

[4] Joseph Kling, editor of _The Pagan_, in symposium appended to “The
Best College Short stories.” The Stratford Company.

[5] Both of these stories are to be found in William Dean Howells’
“Great Modern American Stories: An Anthology.” Boni & Liveright.

[6] Houghton, Mifflin Co.

[7] The Bookman, February 1921.

[8] See “Best Russian Short Stories,” Modern Library.

[9] “Our Short Story Writers.” Moffat, Yard and Company.

[10] Fred Lewis Patee in _The Cambridge History of American
Literature_, Vol. II, p. 394. I find that Mr. Alexander Jessup has
drawn on the same source on O. Henry in his Introduction to “The Best
American Humorous Stories,” Modern Library.

[11] Introduction to Ibsen’s “Master Builder, Etc.,” Modern Library.

[12] _Photoplay Magazine_, August, 1919.

[13] E. M. Robbins, in the 1919 Year Book issued by _Camera_.

[14] Arthur Leeds in _The Writer’s Monthly_, April, 1919.

[15] Arthur Leeds in _The Writer’s Monthly_, May, 1920.

[16] _Writing the Photoplay_, Esenwein and Leeds.

[17] _Ibid._

[18] Dr. Frank Crane to the Literary Novice, An Interview. _Writer’s
Monthly_, January, 1921.

[19] _Letters and Leadership._

[20] _Little Review_, May-June, 1920. Also included in E. J. O’Brien’s
“Best Short Stories of 1920,” Small, Maynard & Company, and in
Anderson’s “The Triumph of the Egg.” B. W. Huebsch.

[21] Joel Elias Spingarn, “The Seven Arts and The Seven Confusions,”
_Seven Arts_, March, 1917.

[22] George Brandes, _On Reading_.

[23] “All Else Will Pass,” _People’s Favorite Magazine_, January, 1921.

[24] _Writing the Photoplay_, Esenwein & Leeds.

[25] _Literary Digest_, May 14, 1921.

[26] “Booth Tarkington,” _The Nation_, February 9, 1921.

[27] From Ludwig Lewisohn’s translation in “A Modern Book of
Criticism.” Boni & Liveright.

[28] “The Victory,” in _Hungry Stones and Other Stories_.

[29] _Writing the Short Story_, by J. Berg Esenwein, A.M., Lit.D.

[30] Editorial Reviewer in _The Nation_.

[31] Sherwood Anderson in an interview for Brentano’s _Book Chat_.

[32] Sherwood Anderson advertising an exhibition of his paintings in
the _Little Review_.

[33] Guy de Maupassant, in his preface to _Pierre et Jean_.




Corrections

The first line indicates the original, the second the correction.

p. 1

  There as so many stories afloat
  There are so many stories afloat

p. 105

  where others have made scanty half-millons
  where others have made scanty half-millions

p. 124

  it will captivate and thrill; ruffle annd soothe;
  it will captivate and thrill; ruffle and soothe;

p. 126

  and accepted intelligent advice of one kind or another--from eniment
  and accepted intelligent advice of one kind or another--from eminent

p. 133

  Truth and spontaniety are more to me than commercial artifice and
  success.
  Truth and spontaneity are more to me than commercial artifice and
  success.

p. 134

  I have no fear of displeasing ony one,
  I have no fear of displeasing any one,

*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SHORT STORY-WRITING: AN ART OR
A TRADE? ***

Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions will
be renamed.

Creating the works from print editions not protected by U.S. copyright
law means that no one owns a United States copyright in these works,
so the Foundation (and you!) can copy and distribute it in the
United States without permission and without paying copyright
royalties. Special rules, set forth in the General Terms of Use part
of this license, apply to copying and distributing Project
Gutenberg-tm electronic works to protect the PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm
concept and trademark. Project Gutenberg is a registered trademark,
and may not be used if you charge for an eBook, except by following
the terms of the trademark license, including paying royalties for use
of the Project Gutenberg trademark. If you do not charge anything for
copies of this eBook, complying with the trademark license is very
easy. You may use this eBook for nearly any purpose such as creation
of derivative works, reports, performances and research. Project
Gutenberg eBooks may be modified and printed and given away--you may
do practically ANYTHING in the United States with eBooks not protected
by U.S. copyright law. Redistribution is subject to the trademark
license, especially commercial redistribution.

START: FULL LICENSE

THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE
PLEASE READ THIS BEFORE YOU DISTRIBUTE OR USE THIS WORK

To protect the Project Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting the free
distribution of electronic works, by using or distributing this work
(or any other work associated in any way with the phrase "Project
Gutenberg"), you agree to comply with all the terms of the Full
Project Gutenberg-tm License available with this file or online at
www.gutenberg.org/license.

Section 1. General Terms of Use and Redistributing Project
Gutenberg-tm electronic works

1.A. By reading or using any part of this Project Gutenberg-tm
electronic work, you indicate that you have read, understand, agree to
and accept all the terms of this license and intellectual property
(trademark/copyright) agreement. If you do not agree to abide by all
the terms of this agreement, you must cease using and return or
destroy all copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in your
possession. If you paid a fee for obtaining a copy of or access to a
Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work and you do not agree to be bound
by the terms of this agreement, you may obtain a refund from the
person or entity to whom you paid the fee as set forth in paragraph
1.E.8.

1.B. "Project Gutenberg" is a registered trademark. It may only be
used on or associated in any way with an electronic work by people who
agree to be bound by the terms of this agreement. There are a few
things that you can do with most Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works
even without complying with the full terms of this agreement. See
paragraph 1.C below. There are a lot of things you can do with Project
Gutenberg-tm electronic works if you follow the terms of this
agreement and help preserve free future access to Project Gutenberg-tm
electronic works. See paragraph 1.E below.

1.C. The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation ("the
Foundation" or PGLAF), owns a compilation copyright in the collection
of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works. Nearly all the individual
works in the collection are in the public domain in the United
States. If an individual work is unprotected by copyright law in the
United States and you are located in the United States, we do not
claim a right to prevent you from copying, distributing, performing,
displaying or creating derivative works based on the work as long as
all references to Project Gutenberg are removed. Of course, we hope
that you will support the Project Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting
free access to electronic works by freely sharing Project Gutenberg-tm
works in compliance with the terms of this agreement for keeping the
Project Gutenberg-tm name associated with the work. You can easily
comply with the terms of this agreement by keeping this work in the
same format with its attached full Project Gutenberg-tm License when
you share it without charge with others.

1.D. The copyright laws of the place where you are located also govern
what you can do with this work. Copyright laws in most countries are
in a constant state of change. If you are outside the United States,
check the laws of your country in addition to the terms of this
agreement before downloading, copying, displaying, performing,
distributing or creating derivative works based on this work or any
other Project Gutenberg-tm work. The Foundation makes no
representations concerning the copyright status of any work in any
country other than the United States.

1.E. Unless you have removed all references to Project Gutenberg:

1.E.1. The following sentence, with active links to, or other
immediate access to, the full Project Gutenberg-tm License must appear
prominently whenever any copy of a Project Gutenberg-tm work (any work
on which the phrase "Project Gutenberg" appears, or with which the
phrase "Project Gutenberg" is associated) is accessed, displayed,
performed, viewed, copied or distributed:

  This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and
  most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no
  restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it
  under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this
  eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the
  United States, you will have to check the laws of the country where
  you are located before using this eBook.

1.E.2. If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is
derived from texts not protected by U.S. copyright law (does not
contain a notice indicating that it is posted with permission of the
copyright holder), the work can be copied and distributed to anyone in
the United States without paying any fees or charges. If you are
redistributing or providing access to a work with the phrase "Project
Gutenberg" associated with or appearing on the work, you must comply
either with the requirements of paragraphs 1.E.1 through 1.E.7 or
obtain permission for the use of the work and the Project Gutenberg-tm
trademark as set forth in paragraphs 1.E.8 or 1.E.9.

1.E.3. If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is posted
with the permission of the copyright holder, your use and distribution
must comply with both paragraphs 1.E.1 through 1.E.7 and any
additional terms imposed by the copyright holder. Additional terms
will be linked to the Project Gutenberg-tm License for all works
posted with the permission of the copyright holder found at the
beginning of this work.

1.E.4. Do not unlink or detach or remove the full Project Gutenberg-tm
License terms from this work, or any files containing a part of this
work or any other work associated with Project Gutenberg-tm.

1.E.5. Do not copy, display, perform, distribute or redistribute this
electronic work, or any part of this electronic work, without
prominently displaying the sentence set forth in paragraph 1.E.1 with
active links or immediate access to the full terms of the Project
Gutenberg-tm License.

1.E.6. You may convert to and distribute this work in any binary,
compressed, marked up, nonproprietary or proprietary form, including
any word processing or hypertext form. However, if you provide access
to or distribute copies of a Project Gutenberg-tm work in a format
other than "Plain Vanilla ASCII" or other format used in the official
version posted on the official Project Gutenberg-tm website
(www.gutenberg.org), you must, at no additional cost, fee or expense
to the user, provide a copy, a means of exporting a copy, or a means
of obtaining a copy upon request, of the work in its original "Plain
Vanilla ASCII" or other form. Any alternate format must include the
full Project Gutenberg-tm License as specified in paragraph 1.E.1.

1.E.7. Do not charge a fee for access to, viewing, displaying,
performing, copying or distributing any Project Gutenberg-tm works
unless you comply with paragraph 1.E.8 or 1.E.9.

1.E.8. You may charge a reasonable fee for copies of or providing
access to or distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works
provided that:

* You pay a royalty fee of 20% of the gross profits you derive from
  the use of Project Gutenberg-tm works calculated using the method
  you already use to calculate your applicable taxes. The fee is owed
  to the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm trademark, but he has
  agreed to donate royalties under this paragraph to the Project
  Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation. Royalty payments must be paid
  within 60 days following each date on which you prepare (or are
  legally required to prepare) your periodic tax returns. Royalty
  payments should be clearly marked as such and sent to the Project
  Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation at the address specified in
  Section 4, "Information about donations to the Project Gutenberg
  Literary Archive Foundation."

* You provide a full refund of any money paid by a user who notifies
  you in writing (or by e-mail) within 30 days of receipt that s/he
  does not agree to the terms of the full Project Gutenberg-tm
  License. You must require such a user to return or destroy all
  copies of the works possessed in a physical medium and discontinue
  all use of and all access to other copies of Project Gutenberg-tm
  works.

* You provide, in accordance with paragraph 1.F.3, a full refund of
  any money paid for a work or a replacement copy, if a defect in the
  electronic work is discovered and reported to you within 90 days of
  receipt of the work.

* You comply with all other terms of this agreement for free
  distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm works.

1.E.9. If you wish to charge a fee or distribute a Project
Gutenberg-tm electronic work or group of works on different terms than
are set forth in this agreement, you must obtain permission in writing
from the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation, the manager of
the Project Gutenberg-tm trademark. Contact the Foundation as set
forth in Section 3 below.

1.F.

1.F.1. Project Gutenberg volunteers and employees expend considerable
effort to identify, do copyright research on, transcribe and proofread
works not protected by U.S. copyright law in creating the Project
Gutenberg-tm collection. Despite these efforts, Project Gutenberg-tm
electronic works, and the medium on which they may be stored, may
contain "Defects," such as, but not limited to, incomplete, inaccurate
or corrupt data, transcription errors, a copyright or other
intellectual property infringement, a defective or damaged disk or
other medium, a computer virus, or computer codes that damage or
cannot be read by your equipment.

1.F.2. LIMITED WARRANTY, DISCLAIMER OF DAMAGES - Except for the "Right
of Replacement or Refund" described in paragraph 1.F.3, the Project
Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation, the owner of the Project
Gutenberg-tm trademark, and any other party distributing a Project
Gutenberg-tm electronic work under this agreement, disclaim all
liability to you for damages, costs and expenses, including legal
fees. YOU AGREE THAT YOU HAVE NO REMEDIES FOR NEGLIGENCE, STRICT
LIABILITY, BREACH OF WARRANTY OR BREACH OF CONTRACT EXCEPT THOSE
PROVIDED IN PARAGRAPH 1.F.3. YOU AGREE THAT THE FOUNDATION, THE
TRADEMARK OWNER, AND ANY DISTRIBUTOR UNDER THIS AGREEMENT WILL NOT BE
LIABLE TO YOU FOR ACTUAL, DIRECT, INDIRECT, CONSEQUENTIAL, PUNITIVE OR
INCIDENTAL DAMAGES EVEN IF YOU GIVE NOTICE OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH
DAMAGE.

1.F.3. LIMITED RIGHT OF REPLACEMENT OR REFUND - If you discover a
defect in this electronic work within 90 days of receiving it, you can
receive a refund of the money (if any) you paid for it by sending a
written explanation to the person you received the work from. If you
received the work on a physical medium, you must return the medium
with your written explanation. The person or entity that provided you
with the defective work may elect to provide a replacement copy in
lieu of a refund. If you received the work electronically, the person
or entity providing it to you may choose to give you a second
opportunity to receive the work electronically in lieu of a refund. If
the second copy is also defective, you may demand a refund in writing
without further opportunities to fix the problem.

1.F.4. Except for the limited right of replacement or refund set forth
in paragraph 1.F.3, this work is provided to you 'AS-IS', WITH NO
OTHER WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT
LIMITED TO WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY OR FITNESS FOR ANY PURPOSE.

1.F.5. Some states do not allow disclaimers of certain implied
warranties or the exclusion or limitation of certain types of
damages. If any disclaimer or limitation set forth in this agreement
violates the law of the state applicable to this agreement, the
agreement shall be interpreted to make the maximum disclaimer or
limitation permitted by the applicable state law. The invalidity or
unenforceability of any provision of this agreement shall not void the
remaining provisions.

1.F.6. INDEMNITY - You agree to indemnify and hold the Foundation, the
trademark owner, any agent or employee of the Foundation, anyone
providing copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in
accordance with this agreement, and any volunteers associated with the
production, promotion and distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm
electronic works, harmless from all liability, costs and expenses,
including legal fees, that arise directly or indirectly from any of
the following which you do or cause to occur: (a) distribution of this
or any Project Gutenberg-tm work, (b) alteration, modification, or
additions or deletions to any Project Gutenberg-tm work, and (c) any
Defect you cause.

Section 2. Information about the Mission of Project Gutenberg-tm

Project Gutenberg-tm is synonymous with the free distribution of
electronic works in formats readable by the widest variety of
computers including obsolete, old, middle-aged and new computers. It
exists because of the efforts of hundreds of volunteers and donations
from people in all walks of life.

Volunteers and financial support to provide volunteers with the
assistance they need are critical to reaching Project Gutenberg-tm's
goals and ensuring that the Project Gutenberg-tm collection will
remain freely available for generations to come. In 2001, the Project
Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation was created to provide a secure
and permanent future for Project Gutenberg-tm and future
generations. To learn more about the Project Gutenberg Literary
Archive Foundation and how your efforts and donations can help, see
Sections 3 and 4 and the Foundation information page at
www.gutenberg.org

Section 3. Information about the Project Gutenberg Literary
Archive Foundation

The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation is a non-profit
501(c)(3) educational corporation organized under the laws of the
state of Mississippi and granted tax exempt status by the Internal
Revenue Service. The Foundation's EIN or federal tax identification
number is 64-6221541. Contributions to the Project Gutenberg Literary
Archive Foundation are tax deductible to the full extent permitted by
U.S. federal laws and your state's laws.

The Foundation's business office is located at 809 North 1500 West,
Salt Lake City, UT 84116, (801) 596-1887. Email contact links and up
to date contact information can be found at the Foundation's website
and official page at www.gutenberg.org/contact

Section 4. Information about Donations to the Project Gutenberg
Literary Archive Foundation

Project Gutenberg-tm depends upon and cannot survive without
widespread public support and donations to carry out its mission of
increasing the number of public domain and licensed works that can be
freely distributed in machine-readable form accessible by the widest
array of equipment including outdated equipment. Many small donations
($1 to $5,000) are particularly important to maintaining tax exempt
status with the IRS.

The Foundation is committed to complying with the laws regulating
charities and charitable donations in all 50 states of the United
States. Compliance requirements are not uniform and it takes a
considerable effort, much paperwork and many fees to meet and keep up
with these requirements. We do not solicit donations in locations
where we have not received written confirmation of compliance. To SEND
DONATIONS or determine the status of compliance for any particular
state visit www.gutenberg.org/donate

While we cannot and do not solicit contributions from states where we
have not met the solicitation requirements, we know of no prohibition
against accepting unsolicited donations from donors in such states who
approach us with offers to donate.

International donations are gratefully accepted, but we cannot make
any statements concerning tax treatment of donations received from
outside the United States. U.S. laws alone swamp our small staff.

Please check the Project Gutenberg web pages for current donation
methods and addresses. Donations are accepted in a number of other
ways including checks, online payments and credit card donations. To
donate, please visit: www.gutenberg.org/donate

Section 5. General Information About Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works

Professor Michael S. Hart was the originator of the Project
Gutenberg-tm concept of a library of electronic works that could be
freely shared with anyone. For forty years, he produced and
distributed Project Gutenberg-tm eBooks with only a loose network of
volunteer support.

Project Gutenberg-tm eBooks are often created from several printed
editions, all of which are confirmed as not protected by copyright in
the U.S. unless a copyright notice is included. Thus, we do not
necessarily keep eBooks in compliance with any particular paper
edition.

Most people start at our website which has the main PG search
facility: www.gutenberg.org

This website includes information about Project Gutenberg-tm,
including how to make donations to the Project Gutenberg Literary
Archive Foundation, how to help produce our new eBooks, and how to
subscribe to our email newsletter to hear about new eBooks.