In the canteen I ran in France there was a bookshelf containing some
twenty or thirty volumes, a haphazard collection made up of the
leavings of units passing through, of a small boxful obtained with
difficulty from Y headquarters, and of occasional wandering volumes
arriving from across the seas. The boys patronized the shelf eagerly
enough, and most of the time it was almost empty, volumes of religious
advice being the sole survivors of the demands made upon it. But though
practically everything in the nature of a novel or story went well, I
soon came to know that ten out of a dozen of the boys who asked for a
book would say first:
“Got anything by Harold Bell Wright?”
If I had, they took it. If I had not, they took anything else. It was
Harold Bell Wright against the field, with Wright winning every time.
There were only four of his books in my library, and they were on the
go unceasingly.
Now, I had never read one of them. Neither had anyone I knew--knew, at
least, in that old life which seemed so far away and long ago during
the war. Practically everyone in that literary past had told me how bad
they were, how fearful was the English in which they were written,
how false, vapid, and sentimental were their contents. And I wondered
at the passionate longing for the things displayed by the American
doughboy in his thousands. And not only the doughboy--the officers,
when they dropped in to see if there was something to read, usually
made the same request.
“They may be darned good fighters”, was my thought, “but they certainly
have a mighty poor taste in literature.”
There, of course, was where I made my mistake. They had no taste at all
for literature. Literature was not what they were after. They were not
even seeking a just estimate of human nature or of life. Probably none
of them had so much as a streak of the artist in him, and to appreciate
literature there must be a trace of that creature in your makeup. As
to their fellow men and life as they met it, they doubtless sized up
both in a manner satisfactory to themselves. What they wanted when they
read--well, was what they found in Harold Bell Wright.
What did they find, what are they finding, in his work?
One morning I asked one of the boys, a lad from a small town in
Pennsylvania who had brought back the last of the four, having read the
rest one after the other, why he liked Harold Bell Wright so much. He
was not used to expressing his critical convictions, but finally he
came out with:
“I don’t know as it’s the story so much, but you see, he kind of gets
at what I’ve tried to think about, and writes it so’s I can get hold of
it. And he sure does know a lot of nice American girls!”
At the time I thought no more of the problem of Harold Bell Wright and
his vast public. There were other matters to be attended to.
Yet there is something interesting here. Something it seems worth while
to pursue. The war is long over, the doughboys scattered. But all over
America Wright’s latest book is being read by hundreds of thousands of
copies. Remembering my experience as a librarian in a Y hut in France,
I feel sure that a large proportion of this public is young men--young
men who don’t care very much about reading any other books.
Wondering on the subject, I read this latest book myself. It was the
first one of Wright’s books that I had read, and judgment on an author
should not be passed on the authority of a single volume. But I am not
seeking to pass judgment; what I want to do is to get an explanation. I
think this one book will suffice for that. The book is not a book for
me. It doesn’t hold what I seek in a book. But it is not addressed to
me. It is, however, addressed to America; and America takes it to her
heart with enthusiasm.
In reading the story I found that the criticisms passed on Wright by
people who had never read him were inaccurate. The English he uses
is good English. Good, clear, strong English, with no taint of fine
writing. Nor was the book false or vapid, though it did not escape
sentimentality. But the sentimentality had nothing of the gross or
maudlin. It reminded me of the sentimentality I have met in small town
people who have had no wide contacts with life, and who accept face
values as realities--a mother is to them something inherently noble and
selfless, for instance, and even the fact that they have personally
known bad and selfish mothers will not modify this preconceived stand.
Such persons are shrewd and alert enough in the affairs of daily life,
but they have a certain number of rubber stamps passing as beliefs,
and become beliefs for them. There is a great deal of this sort of
sentimentality in America, and possibly elsewhere.
It is not this that makes Mr. Wright so popular in his country,
however. There are plenty of books written that are ten times as
sentimental as his, and which have no vogue at all; books that tell
more thrilling stories than he tells, too. For it is not the story they
tell that makes them to be demanded. These matters help, but are not
_it_. No. As I read, I remembered what the Pennsylvania boy had said.
He had found thoughts which he had tried to put into words himself,
tried to get clear in his mind, doubtless, expressed by his author,
expressed so that they became his own, expressed as he would like to
have expressed them himself.
The average American is not a thinker. He does not reflect upon life.
Books that are written for those who do think, who do reflect, plays
that are produced for such, do not interest him. They are not in his
field. Now, Wright is not a literary man. He does not wish to be one.
But he does reflect upon life, upon the obvious life with which the
public comes into contact. It is not individual experience he seeks to
express, it is not the growth of character in conflict with life as it
is found in this or that man or woman. Mr. Wright is a preacher. What
he wants to do, and does do, is to expound basic problems of right
and wrong in a manner that will reach the greatest possible number
of persons. He works toward this with the utmost sincerity and in
the clutch of an immense conviction. He has a theme to teach. And he
believes to a passionate degree in America and the American, believes
that if only certain things can be set right, then our ship of state,
our nation, will make the port of the millennium or something almost as
good. There is a moving quality in a belief like this, a beauty; it is
certainly one of the causes of Mr. Wright’s tremendous popularity.
Let there be no mistake as to Mr. Wright’s quality as a workman.
There is nothing ill considered or sloppy in his methods. When he
has finished a book he has put into it the best work of which he is
capable, and taken an infinite amount of pains. He gets his basic
theme first, as clear as possible in his mind, and hangs on to this
until it begins to call for exploitation. Thereupon he sets to work
at his foundations, making a pattern of his idea, with its darks and
lights, its good and bad, its conflict and outcome. He chooses a symbol
that shall express the main thought of the book. In “Helen of the Old
House”, for instance, he wished to make clear that coöperation between
the men who work and the men who think is necessary in this world. So
he has for his leading character a man who is a helpless cripple but
who is wise, full of love and justice. Associated with this man is his
friend and servant, a creature strong physically, but mentally weak and
undeveloped. Between them they work out a satisfactory existence, and
influence the entire book. In this way Mr. Wright plans out his sermon,
presents his lesson. His characters are chosen to exploit his theme
and he selects them, not for their human value, but for their value in
putting into story form the theme in his mind. Last, he proceeds to
write his book in a manner that will appeal to the largest possible
public. He wants the shopgirl and the clerk, the factory hand and the
traction man, the cowboy and the village postmistress to read it, and
he writes it in the way he believes they will like best--he writes it
to meet the popular taste.
You may say that this is not the way of an artist. To this Mr. Wright
retorts that a man who succeeds in his aim, who puts his idea into a
form that will appeal to the public for whom he writes, even though
that public is numbered by the millions, is still an artist. He is
attacking problems that beset his readers, putting them into words
that they have not for themselves, thinking for them the thoughts they
want to but do not know how to think. He is a preacher of democracy
speaking to a public obsessed by bread and butter problems because it
has to be, and trying to show the best road to the solution of the
difficulties of these problems; he is speaking to a public that prefers
types to individuals, and that wants in a book the kind of story that
it wishes for itself. If this writer is criticized by another public
for not proceeding in a manner which would alienate this special, this
large audience, the criticism is based on a misconception of the entire
affair.
Wright’s solutions are sane, sound, and kindly. The guidance he
offers is safe. He has horse sense and his appeal is to horse sense,
perhaps slightly sublimated. If the young American is reading him, he
is reading what will help to clarify and steady himself. Also, it is
to be remembered that many of those who read him are not readers at
all, in the broad sense. If he did not write they would read nothing.
But reading him, they begin to form the habit of reading, and in time
they will take another book than his when one of his is not to be had.
In fact, he is training readers in a nation which, in spite of our
multiplicity of papers and magazines, is emphatically not a nation of
readers.
He is making thinkers too. Don’t be too ready to laugh at that. He may
not make you think, but you are a mere fraction of America. If you want
to know America in the bulk read one of Wright’s books, and try to get
back of it to the men and women who ask for him in their millions, who
want him because he expresses what they need to have expressed. Wright
understands them, and he may help you to understand them. They have
nothing to do with literature and its standards, but they have a whole
lot to do with America and her standards. Wright’s creative energy is
directed toward them, and the book he writes is a mere instrument to
his end, shaped to fit it to its use. That is why he is so popular: not
because he cannot give a literary public what it cries for, but because
he can give his own public what it really needs.
_Arthur Bartlett Maurice_
With a memory for literary facts that is overpowering, Arthur Bartlett
Maurice has long been known to the book loving public for his
“Chronicle and Comment.” This was famous in +The Bookman+ years past,
and now appears in the literary supplement of the New York “Herald”,
which Mr. Maurice is editing. It is his wont to remember obscure
facts about the authors of a generation past, though he, himself, is
a youngish man. He has written books of such reminiscings as “The New
York of the Novelist”, “The London of the Novelists”, etc., etc. For
sixteen years he was connected with +The Bookman+, for nine of those
he was its editor. His contact with writers was constant and broad.
He brought to the magazine at a time when the United States had not
awakened vividly to an understanding of its own writers, the charm of
enthusiasm and personality. Mr. Maurice is an indefatigable worker.
He pursues a literary fact with eagerness and purpose. Usually he
downs it. He has an exceptional editorial sense. From a journalistic
standpoint his supplement is the liveliest in the country. Maurice is
a Princeton man, and a loyal one. He spends much time there. He was,
in fact, born as well as educated in New Jersey and has lived for some
years in East Orange. Mr. Maurice is an able editor and journalist, a
rapid and engaging conversationalist, a companion of rare wit and charm.