If a popular writer today ever asks himself what his chances are for
fame, he may well conclude that popularity is all he should hope for.
He must see that the public have become accustomed to reading books
but once, as they read a newspaper; that to maintain his position he
must continue to bring out new books; and that when he comes to an end,
other writers will take his place. He will notice also that authors who
once reached a large audience now miss their old effect even though
they continue to produce books--as though they had left the track of
popularity without knowing it. He may wonder whether they are merely
repeating themselves before an audience that must have novelty, or
whether--(comfort too tempting!)--their work has improved beyond the
public taste.
However he analyzes it, the tendency he observes in our writing is a
tendency toward journalism instead of art. The reward of journalistic
success may be popularity, the temporary spotlight, but it cannot be
fame. Fame is continued admiration for something that endures. The
service that journalism renders us is too great not to have a vast
appreciation, but the service is for a day, and the interest of a
day is novelty, news, and the reward of news is the headline or the
spotlight, not fame. Our books are largely written as news, advertised
as news, criticized as news. Mr. Van Loon writes that James Harvey
Robinson’s new book “is a bomb.” Another very contemporary critic says
that Mr. Van Loon’s own new book “has all the thrills of a Nick Carter
detective story”. Since the books so described are studies in history,
we might expect them to have the praise of being true, but truth and
news are not necessarily the same thing. To call a book a bomb or to
compare it to a Nick Carter story is to give it the praise of news,
which goes off but once. Mr. Van Loon and Mr. Robinson must write other
books if they wish to hold the spotlight; the bombs of memory, however
cherished, cannot compete with actual noises.
The journalistic tendency is felt perhaps in all the arts, but most
in books and in the theatre, less in music, still less in painting,
and least in architecture and sculpture. From these last we can learn,
if we need a reminder, what are the conditions of enduring art, and
what, in contrast to popularity, is fame. Sculpture and architecture,
from the substantial nature of their medium, must submit to be looked
at more than once, to be lived with, finally to be judged by the good
opinions of many men over a long period of time; and a good opinion
of such work, so lived with, will depend less on the first impression
than on habitual contact. For such work popularity is difficult, if not
impossible. “Three Soldiers” is a popular book; the Farragut statue in
Madison Square is not a popular statue. What statue is popular? It can
have only the better kind of success, if any; like the Farragut, it can
be famous, loved and returned to over an indefinite length of time. For
we can read a book once and throw it aside, or hear music or see a play
but once, and then criticize it; it lies entirely in our choice whether
we shall read or hear twice. How different our criticism would be if
it were based on at least half a dozen readings and hearings.
It would be a misfortune to seem to be attacking journalism as such;
what is here intended is only to distinguish between journalism and
art. Art is the expression of life we can live with habitually. But
there is much about life which we ought to know, and yet we do not care
to dwell on, nor even enjoy hearing the first time. To give us this,
along with other news, is the function of journalism. Mrs. Stowe’s
disclosure of Byron’s private life may have been as necessary to
print as she thought it was, in the interest of justice and morality,
but it was journalism, not art. As much may be said today for Mr.
O’Neill’s plays, which as they follow each other in journalistic
succession maintain a journalistic success by bringing headline news
of society. If Mr. O’Neill should stop writing now, would his plays
hold the stage? Of course the question is irrelevant if he is primarily
concerned with educating us to the truth, as Mrs. Stowe was, but if he
has an artist’s interest in the permanent audience, in the judgment
that ripens with long acquaintance, he may ask himself whether he has
written anything yet that human beings will care to live with. “Three
Soldiers”, to return to the striking example, was frankly advertised
and properly criticized as journalism, as news, revelations of the
now-it-can-be-told kind. In what he had to tell, Mr. Dos Passos, like
Mrs. Stowe in her Byron story, may have been wrong, and nothing worse
can be said of news than that it is not correct. But whether wrong
or right, the book will be read widely as long as the psychology of
the American soldier is a subject of popular debate, and then it will
become as forgotten as Mrs. Stowe’s far more sensational paper. For
all we know, Mr. Dos Passos may be an artist as well as a journalist.
When he begins the career of the artist, he will learn the old truth
about art, that it is long, and that its reward in fame comes slowly.
The same experience will come to Scott Fitzgerald and Dorothy Speare,
or to any others who bring us news of the Younger Generation; they now
enjoy our gratitude for the news, but in that kind of popularity there
are always the seeds of neglect and obscurity--they must bring us more
news, and more news, and they must keep up to date, or we will have
another town crier. And what town crier, for all the attention he got,
ever had fame?
It would be a misfortune also to seem to say that the author who misses
popularity is necessarily an artist, or that even temporary success is
not to be admired. But in American letters we are beginning to wonder
why our great successes are so transitory; why a writer who sells
more copies of his first book than did Thackeray or Dickens, does not
continue like them to reach a large public with succeeding books; and
why he does not, like them, continue to be read after he has ceased to
write. The explanation suggested is that most American writers, not
only today but throughout the last twenty-five years, have written as
journalists--have put out their material not as life but as news about
life, and the critics have discussed it as news, and the readers have
come to look for the news in it, and for nothing else. Some novelists
still writing began their work with successful stories of local color,
which we read in order to learn about Louisiana or Pennsylvania or
the middle west; having got the information we were looking for, we
went elsewhere to look into other novelties. It goes without saying
that in this process we readers have done injustice to many a work of
art; “Old Creole Days” and “Main Traveled Roads” have something for
the permanent reader, as well as for the news seeker, and “Trilby”--to
speak of an English book, is still a magnificent romance of friendship
and chivalry, though it expired of its own success as a bulletin from
the Latin Quarter and a document in hypnotism.
Are we doing a similar injustice to works of art today, by asking of
them only a temporary service? How many of us will read a novel or a
poem more than once, or will go several times to the same play? How
many young writers care to aim at such an audience, who ask of art
the privilege of entering themselves into the novel or poem or play,
of living the lives of the characters, of falling in love with hero
or heroine, of hating the villain, and of repeating this experience
with deeper emotions on each rereading? The future of our literature
is bound up with such questions. We shall have plenty of stories of
the studious or psychological kind, plenty of philosophical or social
minded novels and poems, but that is not enough; we must have the
opportunity to reach experience in our own imagination, and do our own
thinking about it. The author’s point of view, if presented apart from
life or with life only as an illustration of it, is after all nothing
but news. We read a book by Mr. Keynes to get his latest ideas on the
economics of the Treaty, or a book by Mr. Shaw to see what he will say
next, or one by Winston Churchill, once an artist, to see whether we
share his opinion of the churches or his guesses about immortality;
but to art we return to meet old friends like Tom Sawyer or
Leatherstocking or David Harum or Doctor Lavendar, to be with them, to
come under their influence, to reflect upon their fortunes. I thought I
saw such art in “The Age of Innocence”, but most of my neighbors read
the book as a sort of Baedeker of old New York, to catch Mrs. Wharton
in mistakes of information. Now I think I see such art in Joseph
Anthony’s “The Gang”, which I read with pleasure the more undisturbed
because my neighbors find in it no news at all, and therefore leave it
alone.
_Thomas L. Masson_
For nearly thirty years Tom Masson was the Managing Editor of “Life”.
He watched it through various phases of humor and propaganda. He knew
the writers of light and of heavier verse, the artists of gay or of
poignant sketches, the fashioners of new anecdotes, the cullers of old.
This short, slight, wiry Connecticut Yankee, who peers at you through
large and heavy spectacles, has probably read, written, and planned
more jokes than any other living human being. His voice is as dry
and as sharp as his wit. Now, when he is not editing his department,
“Short Turns and Encores”, for “The Saturday Evening Post”, he sits
out in New Jersey and busily writes essays and short stories. For such
a quiet little man to have been the cause of so many riotous laughs
seems odd. I have never heard him laugh loudly himself--just a soft,
short, nervous, almost apologetic laugh, as if it seemed to him a sin
really to laugh at a thing which might not be as funny as it should
be. However, there is always the twinkle behind the glasses. Like
“Surrender Books” his essays are often quiet bookish observations,
usually with a quaint viewpoint, developed and explained by several
thousand rambling but delightful words. His acquaintance among American
writers is unlimited, for there is no man so dull that he does not
like to consider himself funny; and I fancy many a lay reader of these
paragraphs will look back with a blush to the time when Tom Masson
rejected, or perhaps accepted, a whimsical or at least a would-be
amusing manuscript.