enthusiastic letters about their books, and I have at once, mentally,
replied “You’re a liar.” No writer is ever anything but pleased to learn
that some one has found something, anything, of interest or value in one
of his efforts. One may write primarily for money, to make a living, but
no matter to what trashy and flashy depths a writer may descend, there
is always in his books something of himself. However hard he might try,
he could not keep it out, and it immensely pleases him to have it
discovered and commented upon, either in a letter from an unknown reader
or in a five minutes’ conversation. To me few incidents are as
agreeable, as altogether gratifying and satisfactory, as is the incident
of opening an envelope addressed in an unknown handwriting and finding
inside a letter that begins, “I have never written to an author before,
but I feel that I must write to tell you that,” etc., etc. And any one
who has written a book and declares that letters like this do not please
him, is simply a _poseur_ or untruthful, or both.
In the case of the great and famous it no doubt now and then ceases to
be a pleasure. A daughter of Longfellow told me that her father had once
received an imperative note from some woman, worded about as follows:
“Dear Sir: I have issued invitations for a ladies’ luncheon a week from
next Wednesday. There will be about fifty present and I wish to present
each of them with your autograph as a souvenir. Kindly send me at once
fifty autographs to the address given below.” Longfellow was the kindest
and most courteous of men, but this was a little more than even he could
“stand for,” as we would express it to-day. The luncheon was
unautographic.
On the other hand, many persons not only do not ignore the fact that a
writer is a writer, they have an inexplicable habit of regarding him and
his books as a kind of legitimate prey. When they hear they are going
to meet him at some gathering they make a point of refreshing their
memories on the subject of his various volumes, if they have read them
before, or endeavor to skim through one or two if they have not already
made their acquaintance. They then have a comfortable feeling that their
conversational equipment is complete, and they relentlessly talk to the
poor wretch about nothing but his works. They ask him how he came to
think of certain characters, if they were drawn from life, how long it
takes him to write a novel, has he any regular hours for working or does
he wait for an “inspiration,” how much does he get for a short story in
such and such a magazine, has his latest book been selling well, doesn’t
he find writing a delightful, a fascinating occupation, what is he
writing now, when will it be finished, who is going to publish it, and
does he get a lump sum for it or a royalty on every copy? I don’t
exaggerate; in fact, I have omitted a long list of searching and
personal questions to which a writer is constantly subjected. The
ordinary attitude toward a person who makes his living by grinding out
books has always been to me an inexplicable one. Nobody with the
smallest grain of sense or tact is ever impelled to cross-question a
lawyer about his cases in court or a doctor about his cases in the
hospital. The thing is almost inconceivable, and when it does very
occasionally happen, the thoughtless interlocutor is very properly
snubbed. One would experience a certain delicacy in asking even a tailor
about the various garments he was cutting and sewing, but comparatively
few persons have scruples against putting a writer through the third
degree. To me this has always been remarkable, because I realize that in
almost every lawsuit, however trivial, and in almost every case of
illness, there is more emotion, more hope and fear, more ingenuity, more
drama, more “human interest,” than in all the novels and stories put
together. And yet lawyers and doctors and tailors and real estate men
seem to escape, while writers are everywhere lashed to the interrogatory
mast.
It also has always seemed strange that a man or woman who writes books,
however thin and lacking in importance, is invariably given, wherever he
goes, a luncheon, a dinner, or that altogether horrible form of human
intercourse known as a “tea.” Other men and women who from every point
of view have made a success of their lives can enter a town, stay for
two weeks and depart without being noticed. But when Richard Thyng
Snooks (author of “The Swill Barrel: A Story of To-day,” a very poor
story I beg to assert) arrives, innumerable festivities are arranged in
his honor. He is asked to luncheon and dinner, it is hoped that he can
be prevailed upon to “say something,” anything, at some entertainment
during his all too brief stay. The local branch of the Federated Women’s
Clubs invariably tries to lasso him, and is terribly disappointed if it
doesn’t succeed. Knowing many writers of books, as by accident I happen
to, this is something I have never been able to comprehend.
Personally, my feeling toward my various scribbling friends is that I
like them, not because they write, but in spite of it. We meet and
gossip about a thousand things, but I can scarcely remember talking with
any of them on the subject of writing. It is only with the kind of
person who looks upon a printed and launched book as a sort of
achievement (which of course it isn’t) that one talks about the making
of books. Men and women who write, I have learned, are usually grateful
when they can temporarily be made to forget about it.
It is conventional to think of writers as eccentric creatures who live
apart in a world of their own. I have known many, but I have not found
this to be the fact. As a rule I have discovered that the anecdotes
about them have been built upon the most slender foundations, either by
well-meaning admirers who imagined for them an interesting atmosphere of
which they themselves were guiltless, or by malicious gossips who hoped
to do them harm. The things printed about writers in newspapers are
usually half truths ingeniously distorted, or absolute falsehoods. The
actual peculiarities of writers, the little prejudices and habits and
superstitions they almost all have to a greater or less degree, rarely
find their way into type, because they are so rarely spoken of. One
knows, of course, that Fénelon was able to write in comfort only when
dressed in court costume, with fine, clean lace falling over his
slender, aristocratic hands; that Balzac, in the agonies of composition,
consumed quarts of strong coffee and wore a kind of monastic dressing
gown; that Dickens always had upon his desk, wherever he went, a little
collection of valueless ornaments he was used to seeing there, and
without which he felt ill at ease and unable to begin his task; that
Thackeray usually hated to write and, as a rule, dragged himself to his
pen and ink with extreme repugnance; that Schiller kept in the drawer of
his writing table half a dozen rotten apples, the smell of which he
inhaled deeply before he was able to compose. Such instances, and
hundreds of others, are authentic and historic. They have become known
because the writers who were responsible for them are famous the world
over, and nothing in their lives seems to be too insignificant to be
ferreted out and proclaimed.
It is interesting to know that lesser scribes are everywhere, in all
sincerity, the victims of much the same whims and unaccountable,
innocent manias. A talented and successful woman novelist of my
acquaintance once confided in me that she never felt like writing unless
her hands were dirty. In winter, before sitting down to write, she
always dusts a room, a shelf of books, or builds a fire. In summer she
spends half an hour or so pulling up weeds in the garden. Her hands are
then dirty and comfortable, and she can write with comparative
enjoyment. A man I know, however, always scrubs his hands with hot water
and soap before beginning to write, and then squirts a drop or two of
cologne on them. This sounds as if he wrote highly romantic fiction or
lackadaisical poetry. As a matter of fact, his subjects are history and
political economy, and he is regarded as an authority upon those serious
matters. But these are queer, intensely personal little traits that
emerge diffidently, almost reluctantly, only when one knows a writer
very well indeed. They are not the sort of stuff that finds its way into
the newspapers.
My experience with writers may not be conclusive, but it seems to have
dawned on me that, the more important a writer is, the more stable and
justified his place is in the world of letters, the less eager he is to
chatter about his profession. It is the person who has more or less
accidentally had one story accepted by _Scribner’s_, _Harpers’_ or the
_Century_, or the contributor to some third-rate sectional magazine, who
insists upon talking of his “work,” who is forever hinting of the
conspiracy among editors and publishers to reject anything unsigned by a
well-known name. Real writers usually go about their business calmly,
methodically and with little or no enthusiasm. It is rarely writing that
they find “delightful and fascinating”; it is the having written. Those
I have known intimately have without exception admitted that they could
always re-read with interest certain passages from their own books when
other diversions failed them, and while they often were conscious of
opportunities lost, of having gone astray, of having failed to achieve
the effect at which they aimed, they on the other hand were more than
compensated by the discovery of certain phrases, paragraphs and whole
pages they had almost forgotten and that struck them as being
surprisingly skilful.
One hears much of the long, discouraging struggle for acceptance and
recognition waged by young authors, how their manuscripts are returned
unread by the editors of great magazines because their names are
unknown, and so on. Having been a reader on a magazine myself, I listen
to such tales with an exceedingly skeptical ear. In the United States,
at least, it is much more difficult to keep out of print than to get
into it. Editors and publishers read, or have their readers read, with
the most painstaking care, absolutely everything submitted to them. Not
to do so would be fatal; it would incur the risk of missing something,
of failing to make the occasional big killing. Being human, they
naturally make mistakes they bitterly regret; and it seems to me that
this usually happens when the manuscripts sent in have about them a
touch of genius. Genius is always somewhat ahead of its time, and
publishers are invariably a little afraid of it. They have toward it
much the same attitude that a nice old lady might have toward an
invitation from Wilbur Wright to take a spin with him in his flying
machine. They prefer something more reliable, more within their
experience. It is said that Kipling’s “Plain Tales” made the rounds of
all our magazines and publishing houses before they found any one
sufficiently daring to print them. They were “different,” both in matter
and in manner; they were not of the old reliable, tried and true
variety; they had about them something very like genius. But it seems
incredible that anyone nowadays, who can borrow a respectable plot and
unfold it in a style sufficiently lacking in originality, should be
denied admittance to the magazines and the publishers’ catalogues. I
don’t believe it. And at present the field appears to offer unusual
opportunities, for not long ago Laura Jean Libbey decided (at least so I
read in a New York paper) “to lay down her tired pen and give other
women writers a chance.” Miss Libbey is furthermore said to have
declared to the reporter who interviewed her on her retirement from the
active world of letters, that in looking back upon her busy career she
had but one regret; she sometimes feared that the name of one of her
books was too long. When asked which one it could have been, she replied
that it was the novel entitled, “You Would Not Have Blamed Her for Going
Wrong, if You Had Known What the Conditions Were at Home.”
“ANN VERONICA”
About an hour ago I finished reading the latest novel of Mr. H. G.
Wells. I laid it aside and since then I have been thinking about it.
During the past month a great many other persons apparently have been
doing precisely the same thing. For whatever may be one’s verdict on the
novels of Mr. Wells, and the verdicts are absorbingly different, it
cannot be said that these volumes do not incite one to think. The
ordinary American and English novel does not. It may be, and often is,
skilful and diverting; it holds the attention and “passes the time,” but
on finishing it one immediately begins to think of something else. It
almost never seems to be the cause of the slightest kind of mental
result. Personally, I cannot, for instance, conceive of one’s reading a
book by Mrs. Humphry Ward, Robert Chambers, Richard Harding Davis,
Hamlin Garland, Robert Hichens, not to mention hundreds of others, and
having, subsequently, any kind of mental reaction. They all without
doubt write more or less well, amuse a great many people for a few
hours, and incidentally make a good and honest living. But there it all
ends. They are trained performers, and entirely justified because they
are so well trained. They do things we are all accustomed to having well
done and they do them better than most. Almost invariably I applaud the
industrious Mrs. Ward when she produces still another work of fiction;
it is usually so neat, so competent, so adequate, so professional. She
once wrote with not much skill an important book, “Robert Elsmere,” and
since then she has made an enormous income by writing with extreme skill
books of no importance whatever. Toward the ordinary “good” writer of
contemporary novels I confess that I feel very much as one feels at the
theater devoted to vaudeville, when a lady hops along an almost
invisible wire on one leg, or a gentleman gracefully promenades about
the stage on his hands or his head. It is all rather difficult to do; it
has taken time and training; it is diverting to watch and it is well
paid for. But when the curtain descends one begins to think about the
performing seals or the ventriloquist who is advertised to appear next.
As soon as the act is over, it is over. There is nothing to reflect
upon, to take home with one, so to speak. I should dislike to give the
impression that for this reason I depreciate the act or “look down” on
it. Such is not the case. I merely beg, superfluously, perhaps, to
state, that it has its place in the world, fulfills its little destiny,
and that its destiny has nothing to do with the progress, or even the
activity, of human thought.
The novels of Mr. Wells, on the other hand, are quite different. I am
not going to review them, criticise or appraise them. That has been
done, and will be done, by far more able pens than mine. I simply have
an irresistible desire to record that whatever one thinks about them
they are, after all, first and last, novels about which it is impossible
not to think. This seems to me to be a great deal at the outset. I am
unable to recall more than three other English-writing novelists of the
present day who inspire me with the same sensations. To sit for awhile
and reflect on this volume leads me far away from it into a tortuous
maze of thought about all kinds of things--about life, about art, about
literary style in general, and then about certain specific aspects and
corners and byways, disputed boundaries and quaking bogs of these
subjects, in particular. The book has been discussed in my presence by
several persons, all of whom are unusually intelligent, and I think my
only reason for mentioning it is because it got these good minds
started, got them going with, to me, distinctly interesting results. The
discussions shed a light and also erected a perfect barricade of
question marks at the end of every path I have, in considering the
matter, attempted to tread.
The story, like the stories of most great writers (and it gives me
pleasure to be able to say that I happen to consider Mr. Wells a great
writer), is exceedingly simple. The unupholstered skeleton of it is
this: A young English girl of an upper-middle-class family lives with
her father and her aunt in a pleasant, comfortable London suburb. The
temperaments, ideas and activities of the father and the aunt are
absolutely mid-Victorian. The girl, however, has inhaled the atmosphere
of the twentieth century. She has gone to lectures at a college and
studied biology; in an immature fashion she inevitably belongs to a
world entirely different from that of her estimable and tedious father,
from that of her refined and intellectually unawakened aunt. One evening
she wishes to go to a fancy-dress party with some artistic friends of
hers who live in the same suburb. Her father, with his vague, natural
and perfectly comprehensible horror of anything “artistic,” forbids her
to go, makes it, in fact, impossible to go; whereupon the daughter,
revolting from her sheltered, commonplace, mentally stultifying
domesticity, leaves the paternal hearth and undertakes to lead a life
of her own in London. The rest of the story has to do with the
development of the mind and soul of the girl who is both essentially
feminine and essentially modern.
Of course I was intensely interested in the comments to which I have
referred, not so much because they threw light on the book (the book
speaks for itself), but because of the light they threw on the persons
who made them and the questions they evoked.
“Yes, I read the book and I consider it objectionable from almost every
point of view,” declared Smith.
“What you really mean is that you consider it objectionable from every
point of view which you are by temperament and education capable of
taking,” replied Jones. “There are other points of view in the world; no
one person is able to possess them all. I, for instance, do not consider
the book objectionable in any way. It strikes me as being a theme, or
rather several themes, of vital interest treated by a master in a
masterly fashion.”
“But I cannot feel that such themes are legitimate in a work of
fiction--a work of art,” protested Smith; “especially,” he went on,
“when they are treated so mercilessly--with so much--so much----”
“So much truth,” Jones interposed in a tone of superiority and triumph.
“You will have to admit, I am sure, that there isn’t a false note in the
whole story; it has the ring of relentless truth from the first page to
the last. Do you mean to say that you shrink from the truth--that you
don’t prefer truth always to prevail?”
Smith squirmed a trifle, but held his ground. “I am not at all sure
that, in a work of fiction (and a work of fiction should be a work of
art), absolute truth should be sought for. I see the difference between
art and science. Why should one endeavor to be the other?” he inquired.
“But a novel purports to be a picture of life.”
“Yes, exactly--a picture; and a picture isn’t life itself; it is, or
ought to be, after all, a picture,” said Smith, momentarily triumphant
in turn. “The human body, for instance, has been painted and sculptured
from the beginning of civilization, and, indeed, before it, but even
to-day, with all our modern passion for fact or verity or whatever you
choose to call it, even the most realistic of sculptors and painters has
a tendency to grope toward beauty of form, to portray human beings
without clothes more as they ought to look rather than as they actually
do. This, it seems to me, is the wonderful privilege and function of
art. It should embellish life, not perpetuate its ugliness. Toward the
writing of novels I feel much the same. There are entire sides of life
that do not strike me as a proper field of exploitation in a tale, a
narrative, a novel.”
“But what is a poor, unhappy man of talent to do?” exclaimed Jones.
“Here is Wells. He has observed with microscopic fidelity a young girl
whose character, habit of thought, conception of life, her attitude
toward the entire universe, in short, has developed and been formed in
an epoch grotesquely different from that in which her father and aunt
received their indelible impressions. The result is a domestic tragedy.
It interested Wells; he sees all around it; it strikes him as being of
immense value in the history of human shift and change; he wants to
record it; he does so with the marvelous vividness and truthfulness of
which he almost alone is at present master, and then you go and call him
offensive and objectionable and a lot of other things. What do you want
a man like that to do? Ought he to observe and reflect merely for his
own instruction, and then when he puts pen to paper, perpetrate a new
series of the ‘Elsie Books’ or ‘Dottie Dimple’?”
“Now, of course, you have become extreme and unfair,” objected Smith. “I
need hardly say that even during my earliest years I couldn’t endure the
‘Dottie Dimple’ and ‘Elsie’ tendencies of fiction. Besides, you know
perfectly well the sort of books I enjoy. You know that, strangely
enough, I revel in both Thackeray and Dickens. I have read ‘Middlemarch’
six times and hope to read it many times more. I can always re-read the
Brontës and Mrs. Gaskell and Meredith and Hardy. Howells has rarely
failed me. Henry James used to charm and enchant me and he still always
interests me even when I have to work hard to translate him. But what’s
the use of naming any others? The list is sufficiently comprehensive to
show that I am not narrow-minded.”
“The list is admirable as far as it goes,” Jones agreed; “I have but one
fault to find with it, which is that you have read this and several
other books by Wells with interest, and yet you will not accept him and
enroll his name. The man is important in the world of letters; if he
were not, you and I could not possibly spend so much time in talking
about him. Tacitly you admit this. Why do you refuse to admit it
positively? It makes me feel that you are not quite keeping in step with
your epoch, your age, your time, your period. This is a marvelous age,
and aren’t you rather deliberately falling behind it? By the way, where
does Balzac come in? You haven’t mentioned Balzac.”
“I have read nearly everything of Balzac with sincere interest,” Smith
admitted. “He is a literary wonder, a giant; sometimes he seems to me to
be a kind of intellectual monster.”
“Yet Balzac was anything but squeamish in his choice of subject or his
fashion of treating it. He, too, had his microscope. He stuck the end of
it in his eye and looked at life and wrote accounts of his
investigations. Surely they cannot always have pleased you!”
“No, they don’t. And here, you may laugh if you want to, but I can’t
help confessing that I have entirely different feelings when I read
awful things about French people. It is no doubt illogical, absurd,
anything you please; but somehow I can’t be upset and disgusted by the
turpitude of a hero named, for example, ‘Lucien de Rubempré,’ as I
should be if he did the same things and his name was Peter Jackson.”
“How splendidly limited you are!” reflected Jones. “It does not occur to
you that human life is human life; that the fact of its being English
or French, American or Norwegian, is a mere accident. In the end it is
always just the same. You can, in a word, endure the naked truth about
persons who are not of your own nationality and whose language is not
very familiar to you, but you hate to have the truth told about your
neighbors and acquaintances and friends. You hate to have a writer of
English tackle either the fundamental questions of existence, or any of
the ugly, gross, squalid, frightful, real aspects that can be found
without any trouble whatever in every well-regulated family.”
“George Eliot tackled a tragic and ugly incident in ‘Adam Bede,’ but I
think ‘Adam Bede’ is a great and beautiful book,” declared Smith. “You
see, it isn’t altogether a question of subject; it is largely a question
of treatment.”
“How differently Wells would have treated ‘Adam Bede’!” mused the other.