It is the voice of Mr. Harry Leon Wilson, author of _Bunker Bean_,
_Ruggles of Red Gap_, and many another popular novel, and co-author with
Mr. Booth Tarkington of several successful plays. Mr. Wilson believes
that the dullness and insincerity of our novels are due to the taste of
most of their readers--that is, to the taste of the women.
I asked Mr. Wilson what, in his opinion, was the influence most harmful
to the development of literature in America.
"I know little about literature," Mr. Wilson replied, "but if you mean
the novel, I should say the intense satisfaction with it as it is, of
the maker, the seller, and the buyer. And to trace this baneful
satisfaction to its source, I should say it lies in the lack of a
cultivated taste in our women readers of fiction.
"Publishers are agreed, I believe, that women buy the great bulk of
their output. The current novel is as deliberately planned to please the
woman buyer as is any other bit of trade goods. The publisher knows what
she wants to read, the writer finds out from the publisher, and you can
see the result in the advertisements--and the writer's royalty
statements.
"'We want,' says the publisher, 'a stunning girl for the cover and a
corking good love interest to catch the women.' (Publishers do talk that
way when they have safely locked themselves in their low dens.)
"This love interest is always said to be wholesome and sweet. I don't
know. Certainly it is sweet enough. In the trade novel it's as if you
took a segment of rich layer cake, the chocolate-and-jelly kind, poured
over it a half-pint of nice thick molasses, and then, just to make sure,
sprinkled this abundantly with fine sugar.
"Anyway, that's what the publisher has found--and he has the best means
of knowing--that the American woman will buy year in and year out. And
you can't blame him for printing it. A publisher with ideals of his own
couldn't last any longer than a grocer with ideals of his own, or a
clergyman.
"And least of all can you blame the author for writing this slush,
because nine times out of ten he doesn't know any better. How should he,
with no one to tell him?
"And that," said Mr. Wilson, "is another evil almost as great in its
influence as the undeveloped taste of our women readers. I mean our lack
of authoritative criticism. Now we really do get a good novel once in a
blue moon, but one who has been made wary by the mass of trade novels
would never suspect it from reading our book reviews. The good novel, it
is true, is praised heartily, but then so are all the bad novels--and
how is one to tell?
"At least eighty-five per cent. of our book reviews are mere amiable,
perfunctory echoes of the enthusiastic 'canned' review which the
publisher obligingly prints on the paper jacket of his best seller. I
sometimes suspect this task is allotted to a member of the staff who is
known to be 'fond of reading.'
"Another evil influence is often alleged--the pressure the business
office puts on the reviewer to be tender with novels that are lavishly
advertised, but I have never thought there was more than a grain of
truth in this.
"Perhaps a publisher wouldn't continue to patronize a sheet that
habitually blurted out the truth about his best sellers, but I really
doubt that this was ever put to an issue. I don't believe the average
book-reviewer knows any better than the average novelist the difference
between a good and a bad novel.
"It isn't so with the other arts. We have critics for those. Music,
sculpture, painting--we know the best and get the best.
"But, then, the novel is scarcely considered to be an art form. Any one
can--and does--write a novel, if he can only find the time. It isn't
supposed to be a thing one must study, like plumbing or architecture.
"The novelist who wants to write a best seller this year studies the
best seller of last year, and wisely, because that is what the publisher
wants--something like his last one that sold big. He is looking for it
night and day and for nothing else. He wants good carpenters who have
followed the design that women have liked. Fiction is the one art you
don't take seriously, and there is no one to tell us we should; there
are no critics to inform the writers and the readers and make the
publishers timid.
"True, we have in this country two or three, possibly four, critics who
can speak with authority, men who know what the novel has been, what it
is with us, what it ought to be. One of them is a friend of mine, and I
reproached him lately for not speaking out in meeting oftener.
"His defense was pathetic. First, that ninety out of a hundred of our
novels are beneath criticism. Second, as to the remaining ten that would
merit the rapier instead of the bludgeon--'criticism is harder to sell
than post-meridian virtue. I have tried.'
"And he has to eat as often as any publisher. So there you are! People
are not going to pay him for finding fault with something they are
intensely satisfied with. It all comes back to the women. When their
taste is corrected we shall have better novels. But not before then!"
"Mr. Wilson," I said, "do you believe that the development of the
magazine, with its high prices and serialization, has been harmful or
beneficial to fiction?"
"In the first place, the magazine hasn't developed," he answered. "It
has merely multiplied--the cheap ones, I mean. And prices have not
increased except to about a dozen of our national favorites. Where there
is one writer who can get fifteen hundred dollars for a short story, or
fifteen thousand dollars for the serial rights to a novel, there are a
thousand who can get not more than a fifteenth of those prices.
"On the whole, I think that the effect of the cheap monthlies has been
good. They are the only ones that welcome the new writer. They try him
out. Then, if the public takes to him, the better magazines find it out
after a while and form an alliance with him--that is, if his characters
are so sweet and wholesome that the magazine can still be left on the
center-table where Cuthbert or Berryl might see it after school.
"Nowadays I never expect to find a good short story in any of the cheap
magazines. Of course, it does happen now and then, but not often enough
to make me impatient for their coming. And, of course, the cheap
monthlies do print, for the most part, what are probably the worst
short stories that will ever be written in the world--the very furthest
from anything real.
"These writers, too, like the novelists, study one another instead of
life. We will say one of them writes a short story about a pure young
shopgirl of flower-like beauty who, spending an evening of innocent
recreation in a notorious Tenderloin dive (one of those places that I,
for one, have never been able to find), is insulted by the leader of
Tammany Hall, who is always hanging around there for evil purposes. At
the last moment she is saved from his loathsome advances by a dashing
young stranger in a cute-cut blue serge suit, who carries her off in a
taxicab and marries her at 2 A.M. And he, of course, proves to be the
great traction magnate who owns all the city's surface-car lines.
"The other writers, and some new ones that never before thought of
writing, read this story, which is called 'All for Love,' and learn to
do the 'type'--the pure young shopgirl, a bit slangy in spite of her
flower-like beauty; the abhorrent politician (some day he will have a
distressing mix-up with his very own daughter in one of these evil
places--see if he doesn't!), the low-browed dive-keeper, and the honest
young traction magnate. They will learn with a little practice to do
these as the dupes of the 'Be-a-cartoonist!' schools learn to draw 'An
Irishman,' 'A German,' 'A Jew,' and the dental facade of Colonel
Roosevelt.
"But we must remember that O. Henry came to us from the cheap magazines,
never did get into the higher-priced ones, and was, by the way,
wretchedly paid for his stories. True, he received good prices in his
later days, but I doubt if they raised the average for his output to two
hundred dollars a story. He neglected to come to the feast in a wedding
garment, so the more pretentious magazines would have none of him.
"For one O. Henry, then, we can forgive the lesser monthlies for the
bulk of their stuff that can be read only by born otoliths. The more
magazines, the better our chance of finding the new man, and only in the
cheap ones can he come to life."
Many dogmatic statements have been made concerning the great American
novel. I have been told that it would come from the South, that it would
come from the West, that it would never be written. But Mr. Wilson has a
new and revolutionary theory.
"Will there," I asked, "ever be the great American novel? That is, will
there ever be a novel which reflects American life as adequately as
_Vanity Fair_ reflects English life?"
"There have already been dozens of them!" was Mr. Wilson's emphatic
reply. "To go no farther back, Booth Tarkington wrote one the other day,
and so did Theodore Dreiser. (Dreiser's story, 'The "Genius,"' of course
couldn't have appeared in any American magazine. Trust your canny
publisher not to let his magazine hand know what his book hand is
doing!)
"But let us lay forever that dear old question that has haunted our
literary columns for so many years. The answer, of course, is that there
is no novel that reflects English life any more adequately than _The
Turmoil_, or '_The Genius_,' or _The Virginian_, or _Perch of the
Devil_, or _Unleavened Bread_, or _The Rise of Silas Lapham_ reflects
American life.
"Certainly _Vanity Fair_ doesn't do this. It reflects but a very narrow
section of London life. For the purposes of fictional portrayal England
is just as big and difficult--as impossible in one novel--as the United
States.
"To know England through fiction one must go to all her artists, past
and present, getting a little from each. Hardy gives us an England that
Thackeray never suspected, and Galsworthy gives us still another, not to
go on to the England of George Moore, Phillpotts, Quiller-Couch, Wells,
Bennett, Walpole, George, or Mackenzie. I hope at the proper time that a
tasteful little tablet will be erected to my memory for having laid this
ancient and highly respectable apparition."
In his interesting contribution to a symposium of opinions as to what
are the six best novels in the English language, Mr. Wilson had some
things to say about Dickens which were not likely to bring him a vote of
thanks from the Dickens Fellowship. I wished to have his opinion of
Dickens stated more definitely, and so, basing my question on a
statement he had made in the symposium, I asked, "What qualities in the
work of Charles Dickens make him a bad model for novelists to follow?"
Mr. Wilson replied: "Dickens has been a blight to most writers who were
susceptible to his vices. He was a great humorist, but an inferior
novelist, and countless other inferior novelists have believed that they
could be great humorists by following his childishly easy formula.
"That is, those who were influenced by him copy his faults. Witness our
school of characterization based on the Dickens method, a school holding
that 'character' is a mere trick of giving your creation exaggerated
mannerisms or physical surfaces--as with Dickens it was rarely anything
else.
"Dickens created vaudeville 'characters'--unsurpassed for twenty-minute
sketches, deadly beyond that to the mentally mature. His stock in trade
was the grotesque make-up. In stage talk he couldn't create a 'straight'
part.
"Strip his people of their make-ups, verbal, hirsute, sartorial,
surgical, pathological, what not--and dummies remain. Meet them once and
you know them for the rest of the tale, the Micawbers, Gamps,
Pecksniffs, Nicklebys; each has his stunt and does it over and over at
each new meeting, to the--for me, at least--maddening delay of the
melodrama. I like melodrama as well as any one, badgered heroines,
falsely accused heroes, missing wills, trap-doors, disguised
philanthropists, foul murders, and even slow-dying children who are not
only moralists, but orators; and I like to see the villain get his at
last, and get it good; but I can't read Dickens any more, because the
tale must be held up every five minutes for one of the funny
'characters' to do his stunt.
"How many years will it take us--writers, I mean--to realize that there
are no characters in Dickens in the sense that Dmitri in _The Brothers
Caramazov_ is a character? How few of our current novelists can
distinguish between the soulless caricaturing of Dickens and the genuine
character-drawing of a Turgenieff or a Dostoievski!
"How few of us can see how the soul of Dmitri is slowly unfolded to the
reader with never a bit of make-up! To this moment, I don't know if he
wore a beard or not; but I know the man. Dickens would have given him
funny whiskers, astigmatism, a shortened leg, a purple nose, and still
to make sure we wouldn't mistake him a catch phrase for his utterance.
"Any novelist who has mastered the rudiments of his craft, even though
he hasn't an atom of humor in his make-up, can write a Dickens novel,
and any publisher will print it for the Christmas trade if it's fairly
workman-like, and it will be warmly praised in the reviews. That happens
every season.
"And that's why Dickens is a bad model. If one must have a model, why
not Hall Caine, infinitely the superior of Dickens as a craftsman? Of
course, having no humor, he can't be read by people who have, but he
knows his trade, where Dickens was a preposterous blunderer."
Charles Belmont Davis once told me that a novelist should have some
other regular occupation besides writing. I asked Mr. Wilson his opinion
on this subject.
"Mr. Davis didn't originate this theory," he said. "It's older than he
is. Anyway, I don't believe in it. I know of no business to-day that
would leave a man time to write novels, and a novelist worth his salt
won't have time for any other business.
"Of course, the ideal novelist would at one time or another have been
anything. The ideal novelist has two passions, people and words, and he
should have had and should continue to have as many points of contact
with life as possible. But if he has reached the point where he can
write to please me, I want him not to waste time doing anything else.
"Personally, I wish I might have been, for varying intervals, a Russian
Grand Duke, an Eighth Avenue undertaker, the manager of a
five-and-ten-cent store, a head waiter, a burglar, a desk sergeant at
the Thirtieth Street Police Station, and a malefactor of great wealth,
preferably one that gets into the snapshots at Newport, reading from
left to right. But Heaven has denied me practically all of these avenues
to a knowledge of my humankind, and I am too busy keeping up with the
current styles of all millinery fiction to take to any of them at this
late day.
"Besides, I have a bad example to deter me, having just read _The High
Priestess_, by Robert Grant, who has another business than novel
writing--something connected with the law, I believe, in Boston. I have
no means of knowing how valuable a civic unit he may have been in his
home town, but I do feel that he has cheated the world of a great deal
by keeping to this other business, whatever it may be.
"From the author of _Unleavened Bread_ we once had a right to expect
much. But _The High Priestess_ chiefly makes me regret that he didn't
have to write novels or starve; by its virtues of construction, which
are many and admirable, and by its utter lack of power to communicate
any emotion whatsoever, which is conspicuous and lamentable. He seems to
have written his novel with an adding-machine, and instinctively I
blame that 'other business' of his, in which he seems to have
forgotten--for he did know it once--that a novelist may or may not think
straight, but he must feel.
"Perhaps he wasn't a real novelist, after all. I suspect a real novelist
would starve in any other business."
I told Mr. Wilson that a prominent American humorist writer had classed
Mark Twain with Artemus Ward and Philander Doesticks, and said that
these men were not genuine humorists, but "the Charlie Chaplins of their
time."
Mr. Wilson smiled. "Isn't this rather high praise for Charlie Chaplin?"
he asked. "How far is this idolatry of the movie actor to go, anyway?
True, Mr. Chaplin is a skilled comedian, pre-eminent in his curious new
profession, but to my thinking he lacks repose at those supreme moments
when he is battering the faces of his fellow-histrions with the wet mop
or the stuffed club, or walking on their stomachs; but I may be
prejudiced. I know I shouldn't have ranked him with Mark Twain,
arch-humanist and satirist and one of the few literary artists who have
attained the world stature--so that we must go back and back to
Cervantes to find his like."
_THE PASSING OF THE SNOB_