before us Gerrit Ammidon, a fellow so quixotic that he marries twice
out of sheer chivalry. He has drawn for us the fantastic scroll of
such a man, a sea-shape not to be matched on shore. Well, then,
down in the corner, he must inscribe for us another contrasting,
balancing, compensating, miniatured scroll--a land-shape in the person
of Roger Brevard who is so unquixotic as to offset Gerrit Ammidon
completely. Gerrit Ammidon will marry twice for incredible reasons
and Roger Brevard will not even marry once for the most compelling
of reasons--love. The beautiful melody proclaimed by the violins is
brutally parodied by the tubas.
9
Is it all right thus? It is not all right thus and it never can be so
long as life remains the unpatterned thing we discern it to be. If
life were completely patterned it would most certainly not be worth
living. When we say that life is unpatterned we mean, of course, that
we cannot read all its patterns (we like to assume that all patterns
are there, because it comforts us to think of a fundamental Order and
Symmetry).
But so long as life is largely unpatterned, or so long as we cannot
discern all its patterns, life is eager, interesting, surprising and
altogether distracting and lovely however bewildering and distressing,
too. Different people take the unreadable differently. Some, like
Thomas Hardy, take it in defiant bitterness of spirit; some, like
Joseph Conrad, take it in profound faith and wonder. Hardy sees the
disorder that he cannot fathom; Conrad admires the design that he can
only incompletely trace. To Hardy the world is a place where--
“As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods;
They kill us for their sport.”
To Conrad the world is a place where men may continually make the
glorious and heartening discovery that a solidarity exists among them;
that they are united by a bond as unbreakable as it is mysterious.
And to others, as regrettably to Mr. Hergesheimer writing _Java Head_,
the world is a place where it is momentarily sufficient to trace
casual symmetries without thought of their relation to an ineluctable
whole.
10
What, then, is the novelist to do? Is it not obvious that he must not
busy himself too carefully with the business of patterning the things
he has to tell? For the moment he has traced everything out nicely and
beautifully he may know for a surety that he has cut himself off from
the larger design of Life. He has got his little corner of the Oriental
rug all mapped out with the greatest exactitude. But he has lost touch
with the bigger intricacy beyond his corner. It is a prayer rug. He had
better kneel down and pray.
Now there are novels in which no pattern at all is traced; and these
are as bad as those which minutely map a mere corner. These are
meaningless and confused stories in which nobody can discern any cause
or effect, any order or law, any symmetry or proportion or expressed
idea. These are the novels which have been justified as a “slice of
life” and which have brought into undeserved disrepute the frequently
painstaking manner of their telling. The trouble is seldom primarily,
as so many people think, with the material but with its presentation.
You may take almost any material you like and so present it as to make
it mean something; and you may also take almost any material you like
and so present it as to make it mean nothing to anybody. A heap of
bricks is meaningless; but the same bricks are intelligible expressed
as a building of whatever sort, or merely as a sidewalk with zigzags,
perhaps, of a varicolor.
The point we would make--and we might as well try to drive it home
without further ineffectual attempts at illustration--is that you must
do some patterning with your material, whether bricks for a building or
lives for a story; but if you pattern too preciously your building will
be contemptible and your story without a soul. In your building you
must not be so decided as to leave no play for another’s imagination,
contemplating the structure. In your narrative you must not be so
dogmatic about two and two adding to four as to leave no room for a
wild speculation that perhaps they came to five. For it is not the
certainty that two and two have always made four but the possibility
that some day they may make five that makes life worth living--and
guessing about on the printed page.
11
Perhaps the most serious consequence of writing a novel is the
revelation of yourself it inevitably entails.
We are not thinking, principally, of the discovery you will make of the
size of your own soul. We have in mind the laying bare of yourself to
others.
Of course you do reveal yourself to yourself when you write a book to
reveal others to others. It has been supposed that a man cannot say or
do a thing which does not expose his nature. This is nonsense; you do
not expose your nature every time you take the subway, though a trip
therein may very well be an index to your manners. The fact remains
that no man ever made a book or a play or a song or a poem, with any
command of the technique of his work, without in some measure giving
himself away. Where this is not enough of an inducement some other,
such as a tin whistle with every bound copy, is offered; no small
addition as it enables the reviewer to declare, hand on heart, that
“this story is not to be whistled down the wind.” Some have doubted
Bernard Shaw’s Irishism, which seems the queerer as nearly everything
he has written has carried a shillelagh concealed between the covers.
Recently Frank K. Reilly of Chicago gave away one-cent pieces to
advertise a book called _Penny of Top Hill Trail_. He might be said,
and in fact he hereby is said, thus to have coppered his risk in
publishing it.... All of which is likely to be mistaken for jesting.
Let us therefore jest that we may be taken with utmost seriousness.
The revelation of yourself to yourself, which the mere act of writing a
novel brings to pass, may naturally be either pleasant or unpleasant.
Very likely it is unpleasant in a majority of instances, a condition
which need not necessarily reflect upon our poor human nature. If
we did not aspire so high for ourselves we should not suffer such
awful disappointments on finding out where we actually get off. The
only moral, if there is one, lies in our ridiculous aim. Imagine the
sickening of heart with which Oscar Wilde contemplated himself after
completing _The Picture of Dorian Grey_! And imagine the lift it must
have given him to look within himself as he worked at _The Ballad of
Reading Gaol_! The circumstances of life and even the actual conduct of
a man are not necessarily here or there--or anywhere at all--in this
intimate contemplation. There is one mirror before which we never pose.
God made man in His own image. God made His own image and put it in
every man.
It is there! Nothing in life transcends the wonder of the moment when,
each for himself, we make this discovery. Then comes the struggle
to remold ourselves nearer to our heart’s desire. It succeeds or it
doesn’t; perhaps it succeeds only slightly; anyway we try for it.
The sleeper, twisting and turning, dreaming and struggling, is the
perfect likeness of ourselves in the waking hours of our whole earthly
existence. Because they have seen this some have thought life no
better than a nightmare. Voltaire suggested that the earth and all that
dwelt thereon was only the bad dream of a god on some other planet. We
would point out the bright side of this possibility: It presupposes the
existence somewhere of a mince pie so delicious and so powerful as to
evoke the likenesses of Cæsar and Samuel Gompers, giraffes, Mr. Taft,
violets, Mr. Roosevelt, Piotr Ilitch Tchaikovski, Billy Sunday, Wu-Ting
Fang, Helen of Troy and Mother Jones, groundhogs, H. G. Wells; perhaps
Bolshevism is the last writhe. Mince pie, unwisely eaten instead of
the dietetic nectar and ambrosia, may well explain the whole confused
universe. And you and I--we can create another universe, equally
exciting, by eating mince pie to-night!... You see there is a bright
side to everything, for the mince pie is undoubtedly of a heavenly
flavor.
We were saying, when sidetracked by the necessity of explaining the
universe, that the self-revelation which writing a book entails is in
most cases depressing, but not by any means always so. Boswell was not
much of a man judged by the standards of his own day or ours, either
one, yet Boswell knew himself better than he knew Dr. Johnson by the
time he had finished his life of the Doctor. It must have bucked him up
immensely to know that he was at least big enough himself to measure
a bigger man up and down, in and out, criss-cross and sideways,
setting down the complicated result without any error that the human
intelligence can detect. It must have appeased the ironical soul of
Henry Adams to realise that he was one of the very few men who had
never fooled himself about himself, and that evidence of his phenomenal
achievement in the shape of the book _The Education of Henry Adams_,
would survive him after his death--or at least, after the difficulties
of communicating with those on earth had noticeably increased (we make
this wise modification lest someone match Sir Oliver Lodge’s _Raymond,
or Life After Death_ with a volume called _Henry, or Re-Education After
Death_).
It must have sent a thrill of pleasure through the by no means
insensitive frame of Joseph Conrad when he discovered, on completing
_Nostromo_, that he had a profounder insight into the economic bases
of modern social and political affairs than nine-tenths of the
professional economists and sociologists--plus a knowledge of the
human heart that they have never dreamed worth while. For Conrad saw
clearly, and so saw simply; the “silver of the mine” of this, his
greatest story, was, it is true, an incorruptible metal, but it could
and did alter the corruptible nature of man--and would continue to do
so through generation after generation long after his Mediterranean
sailor-hero had become dust.
Even in the case of the humble and unknown writer whose completed
manuscript, after many tedious journeys, comes home to him at last,
to be re-read regretfully but with an undying belief not so much in
the work itself as in what it was meant to express and so evidently
failed to--even in his case the great consolation is the attestation
of a creed. Very bad men have died, as does the artist in Shaw’s _The
Doctor’s Dilemma_, voicing with clarity and beauty the belief in which
they think they have lived or ought to have lived; but a piece of
work is always an actual living of some part of the creed that is in
you. It may be a failure but it has, with all its faults, a gallant
quality, the quality of the deed done, which men have always admired,
and because of which they have invented those things we call words to
embody their praise.
But what of the consequences of revealing yourself to others? Writing
a novel will surely mean that you will incur them. We must speak of
them briefly; and then we may get on to the thing for which you are
doubtless waiting with terrible patience--the way to write the novel
itself. Never fear! If you will but endure steadfastly you shall Know
All.
12
“Certainly, publish everything,” commented the New York _Times_
editorially upon a proposal to give out earnings, or some other
detail, of private businesses. “All privacy is scandalous,” added the
newspaper. In this satirical utterance lies the ultimate justification
for writing a novel.
All privacy is scandalous. If you don’t believe it, read some of the
prose of James Joyce. _A Portrait of The Artist As a Young Man_ will do
for a starter. _Ulysses_ is a follow-up. H. G. Wells likes the first,
while deploring so much sewerage in the open street. You see, nothing
but a sincere conviction concerning the wickedness of leaving anything
at all unmentioned in public could justify such narratives as Mr.
Joyce’s.
In a less repulsive sense, the scandal of privacy is what underlies
any novel of what we generally call the “realistic” sort. Mr.
Dreiser, for instance, thinks it scandalous that we should not know
and publicly proclaim the true nature of such men as Hurstwood in
his _Sister Carrie_. Mr. Hardy thinks it scandalous that the world
should not publicly acknowledge the purity of Tess Durbeyfield and
therefore he gives us a book in which she is, as the subtitle says,
“faithfully presented.” Gene Stratton-Porter thinks it scandalous not
to tell the truth about such a boy as Freckles. The much-experienced
Mr. Tarkington, stirred to his marrow by what seems almost a world
conspiracy to condone the insufferable conceit of the George Amberson
Minafers among us, writes _The Magnificent Ambersons_ to make us
confess how we hate ’em--and how our instinctive faith in them is
vindicated at last.
Every novelist who gains a public of any size or permanence
deliberately, and even joyfully, faces the consequences of the
revelation of himself to some thousands of his fellow-creatures.
We don’t mean that he always delineates himself in the person of a
character, or several characters, in his stories. He may do that, of
course, but the self-exposure is generally much more merciless. The
novelist can withhold from the character which, more or less, stands
for himself his baser qualities. What he cannot withhold from the
reader is his own mind’s limitations.
A novel is bounded by the author’s horizons. If a man can see only so
far and only so deep his book will show it. If he cannot look abroad,
but can perceive nothing beyond the nose on his face, that fact will be
fully apparent to his co-spectators who turn the pages of his story. If
he can see only certain colors those who look on with him will be aware
of his defect. Above all, if he can see persons as all bad or all good,
all black or all white, he will be hanged in effigy along with the
puppets he has put on paper.
This is the reason why every one should write a novel. There is only
one thing comparable with it as a means of self-immolation. That, of
course, is tenure of public office. And as there are not nearly enough
public offices to serve the need of individual discipline, novelizing
should be encouraged, fomented--we had almost said, made compulsory.
Compulsion, however, defeats its own ends. Let us elect to public
offices, as we would choose to fill scholarships, those who cannot,
through some misfortune, write novels; and let us induce all the other
people in the world that we can to put pen to paper--not that they may
enrich the world with immortal stories, not that they may make money,
become famous or come to know themselves, but solely that we may know
them for what they are.
If Albert Burleson had been induced to write a novel would we have
made him a Congressman and would President Wilson have made him
Postmaster-General? If William, sometime of Germany, had written
a novel would the Germans have acquiesced in his theory of Divine
Right? Georges Clemenceau wrote novels and was chosen of the people to
lead them. Hall Caine and Marie Corelli and Rider Haggard and Arnold
Bennett have written novels which enable us to gauge them pretty
accurately--and not one of them has yet been invited to help run the
League of Nations. The reason is simple: We know them too well.
All privacy is scandalous. Thomas Dixon says: “It is positively
immoral that the world should run on without knowing the depths to
which I can sink. I must write _The Way of a Man_ and make the world
properly contemptuous of me.” Zona Gale reflects to herself: “After
all, with nothing but these few romances and these _Friendship Village_
stories, people have no true insight into my real tastes, affinities,
predilections, qualities of mind. I will write about a fruit and
pickle salesman, an ineffectual sort of person who becomes, almost
involuntarily, a paperhanger. That will give them the idea of me they
lack.”
William Allen White, without consciously thinking anything of the
kind, is dimly aware that people generally have a right to know him as
a big-hearted man who makes some mistakes but whose sympathy is with
the individual man and woman and whose passion is for social progress.
The best way to make people generally acquainted with William Allen
White is to write a novel--say, _In The Heart of a Fool_, which they
will read.... The best way to get to know anybody is to get him to
talking about somebody else. Talk about one’s self is a little too
self-conscious.
And there you have it! It is exactly because such a writer as H. G.
Wells is in reality pretty nearly always talking about himself that
we find it so difficult to appraise him rightly on the basis of his
novels. Self-consciousness is never absent from a Wells book. It is
this acute self-consciousness that makes so much of Henry James
valueless to the great majority of readers. They cannot get past it, or
behind it. The great test fails. Mr. James is dead, and the only way
left to get at the truth of Mr. Wells will be to make him Chancellor
of the Exchequer or, in a socialized British republic, Secretary of
Un-War....
Dare to be a Daniel Carson Goodman. Write That Novel. Don’t
procrastinate, don’t temporize. Do It Now, reserving all rights of
translation of words into action in all countries, including the
Scandinavian. Full detailed instructions as to the actual writing
follow.
13
You may not have noticed it, but even so successful a novelist as
Robert W. Chambers is careful to respect the three unities that
Aristotle (wasn’t it?) prescribed and the Greeks took always into
account. Not in a single one of his fifty novels does the popular Mr.
Chambers disregard the three Greek unities. Invariably he looks out for
the time, the place and the girl.
If Aristotle recommended it and Robert W. Chambers sticks to it,
perhaps you, about to write your first novel, had better attend to it
also.
Now, to work! About a title. Better have one, even if it’s only
provisional, before you begin to write. If you can, get the real,
right title at the outset. Sometimes having it will help you
through--not to speak of such cases as Eleanor Hallowell Abbott’s. The
author of _Molly Make-Believe_, _The Sick-a-Bed Lady_ and _Old-Dad_
gets her real, right title and then the story mushrooms out of it,
like a house afire. Ourselves, we are personally the same. We have
three corking titles for as many novels. One is written. The other two
we haven’t to worry about. They have only to live up to their titles,
which may be difficult for them but will make it easy for ourselves.
We have a Standard. Everything that lives up to the promise of our
superlative title goes in, everything that is alien to it or unworthy
of it, stays out. This, we may add parenthetically, was the original
motive in instituting titles of nobility. A man was made a Baron. Very
well, it was expected that he would conform his character and conduct
accordingly. Things suitable to a Baron he would thenceforth be and do,
things unbefitting his new, exalted station he would kindly omit.... It
works better with books than with people, so cheer up. Your novel will
come out more satisfactorily than you think.
Which brings us to the matter of the ending. Should it be happy or
otherwise? More words have been wasted on this subject than on any
other aspect of fictioneering. You must understand from the very first
that you, personally, have nothing whatever to say about the ending
of your story. That will be decided by the people of your tale and the
events among which they live. In other words, the preponderant force in
determining the ending is--inevitability.
Most people misunderstand inevitability. Others merely worry about it,
as if it were to-morrow’s weather. Shall we take an umbrella, they ask
anxiously, lest it rain inevitably? Or will the inevitable come off
hot, so that an overcoat will be a nuisance? Nobody knows, not even
the weather forecaster in Washington. If there were a corresponding
official whose duty it would be to forecast with equal inaccuracy the
endings of novels life would go on much the same. Readers would still
worry about the last page because they would know that the official
prediction would be wrong at least half the time. If the Ending
Forecaster prophesied: “Lovers meet happily on page 378; villain
probably killed in train accident” we would go drearily forward
confident that page 378 would disclose the heroine, under a lowering
sky, clasped in the villain’s arms while the hero lay prone under a
stalled Rolls-Royce, trying to find out why the carburetor didn’t
carburete.
Inevitability is not the same as heredity. Heredity can be rigorously
controlled--novelists are the real eugenists--but inevitability is
like natural selection or the origin of species or mutations or O.
Henry: It is the unexpected that happens. Environment has little in
common with inevitability. In the pages of any competent novelist the
girl in the slums will sooner or later disclose her possession of the
most unlikely traits. Her bravery, her innocence will become even more
manifest than her beauty. The young feller from Fifth avenue, whose
earliest environment included orange spoons and Etruscan pottery, will
turn out to be a lowdown brute. Environment is what we want it to be,
inevitability is what we are.
You think, of course, that you can pre-determine the outcome of
this story you are going to write. Yes, you can! You can no more
pre-determine the ending than you can pre-determine the girl your son
will marry. It’s exactly like that. For you must come face to face,
before you have written 50 pages of your book, with an appalling and
inspiring Fact. You might as well face it here.
14
The position of the novelist engaged in writing a novel can only be
indicated by a shocking exaggeration which is this: He is not much
better than a medium in a trance.
Now of course such a statement calls for the most exact explanation.
Nobody can give it. Such a statement calls for indisputable evidence.
None exists. Such a statement, unexplained and unsupported by
testimony, is a gross and unscientific assumption not even worthy to
be damned by being called a hypothesis. You said it. Nevertheless, the
thing’s so.
We, personally, having written a novel--or maybe two--know what we
are talking about. The immense and permanent curiosity of people all
over the planet who read books at all fixes itself upon the question,
in respect of the novelist: “_How_ does he write?” As Mary S. Watts
remarks, that is the one thing no novelist can tell you. He doesn’t
know himself. But though it is the one thing the novelist can’t tell
you it is not one of those things that, in the words of Artemus Ward,
no feller kin find out. Any one can find out by writing a novel.
And to write one you need little beyond a few personalities firmly in
mind, a typewriter and lots of white paper. An outline is superfluous
and sometimes harmful. Put a sheet of paper in the machine and write
the title, in capital letters. Below, write: “By Theophrastus Such,” or
whatever you happen unfortunately to be called or elect, in bad taste,
to call yourself. Begin.
You will have the first few pages, the opening scene, possibly the
first chapter, fairly in mind; you may have mental notes on one or two
things your people will say. Beyond that you have only the haziest
idea of what it will all be about. Write.
As you write it will come to you. Somehow. What do you care how? Let
the psychologists stew over that.