A NOTE ON ALCOVES

"Such is the present state of the world: and the nature of the

animated beings which exist upon it, is hardly in any degree less

worthy of our contemplation than its other features. Yet our first

attention is justly due to Man, for whose sake all other things appear

to have been produced by Nature; though with so great and severe

penalties for the enjoyment of her bounteous gifts, that it is far

from easy to determine whether she has proved to him a kind parent or

a merciless step-mother."

_I._

_A Note on Alcoves_

§ 9

"The literary artist plays: and the sole end of his endeavor is to

divert himself...."

Seated now at my desk, I weighed the phrase. All valid artists in

letters might or might not with justice be describable as life's

half-frightened playboys. I, in any event, knew that, whatever other

motives might now and then have prompted me, the Biography had been

written in chief for my own diversion. Whenever people had unfavorably

criticised my writing--I now perceived,--my first emotion had been,

always, surprise at their imagining I had especially tried to give

pleasure to them. I had, instead, for nearly a quarter of a century,

been trying with the Biography to divert myself. That might or might

not be the correct principle upon which to write novels: it was most

certainly a principle to which I was committed in any justifying of

the form and scope of the Biography.

So I tapped out upon my typewriter, first of all, as a self-obvious

axiom, "The literary artist labors primarily to divert himself...."

§ 10

It is surprising, though, what protean gifts a theme develops once

you attempt to grapple with it. When I was just now moved to set down

on paper my personal notions as to the form and scope and aim of the

novel, as these notions are illustrated in the Biography, the affair

seemed simple. With the task actually begun, the typewriter-bell may

hardly tinkle thrice (for my machine is of a venerable model) before

one sees that the guide to further composition must be that once

celebrated chapter, in I forget whose Natural History, upon The Snakes

of Iceland. It read, as you recall, "There are no snakes in Iceland."

For one perceives that the form and scope of the novel, if not

similarly non-existent, at least stay indeterminable in lands wherein

the form and the scope of prose fiction stay limitless.

The aim, however, of the written, printed and formally labeled novel

is, I take it, to divert. Such is (one may assume with in any event

quite reputable backing) the only aim of creative writing, and of

all the arts. But much the same sort of diversion seems to be the

purpose of a staggering number of human endeavors: and it is when one

considers the novels which are not formally labeled, that the theme

evasively assumes all manner of shapes, and the field of prose fiction

is revealed as limitless.

I do not hunt paradox. I wish in real sincerity to acknowledge that our

trade of novel writing and publishing is an ineffably minor evincement

of the vast and pride-evoking truth, that human beings are wiser than

reason. Pure reason--I mean, as pure as human reason assays,--reveals

out of hand that the main course of daily living is part boredom,

part active discomfort and fret, and, for the not inconsiderable

rest, a blundering adherence to some standard derived from this or

that hearsay. But human beings, in this one abnegation infinitely

wise, here all discard the use of their reasoning powers, which are

perhaps felt here to be at least as gullible as usual: and brave men

cheerily deny their immersion in the futile muddle through which they

toil lip-deep.... Pinned to the wall, the more truthful of flesh

and blood may grant that this current afternoon does, by the merest

coincidence, prove answerable to some such morbid and over-colored

description by people bent on being "queer": but in the admitter's mind

forgetfulness is already about its charitable censorship of the events

of the morning, to the intent that this amended account be placed on

file with many expurgated editions of yesterday and the most brilliant

romances about to-morrow.... For human memory and human optimism are

adepts at the prevarications which everybody grasps, retails and

tirelessly reiterates: these two it is who coin the fictions which

every person weaves into the interminable extravaganza that he recites

to himself as an accurate summing-up of his own past and future: and

everywhere about this earth's revolving surface moves a circulating

library of unwritten novels bound in cloth and haberdashery.

The wholesome effect of these novels is patent. It is thanks to this

brace of indefatigable romancers, it is due to the lax grasp of memory

and to the perennation of optimism, that nobody really needs to notice

how the most of us, in unimportant fact, approach toward death through

gray and monotonous corridors. Besides, one finds a number of colorful

alcoves here and there, to be opened by intoxication or venery, by

surrender to the invigorating lunacy of herd action, or even by mental

concentration upon new dance-steps and the problems of chess and

auction bridge. One blunders, indeed, into a rather handsome number of

such alcoves which, when entered, temporarily shut out the rigidity

and the only exit of the inescapable corridor. Life thus becomes for

humankind a far different matter from what it would seem to any

merely reasonable creature, since life's monotonous main tenor is thus

diversified by an endless series of slight distracting interests and

of small but very often positive pleasures in the way of time-wasting

and misdemeanor. And in addition, as we go, all sorts of merry tales

are being interchanged, about what lies beyond the nearing door and the

undertaker's little black bag.

§ 11

These are not, though, the only anæsthetics. The human maker of fiction

furnishes yet other alcoves, whether with beautiful or shocking ideas,

with many fancy-clutching toys that may divert the traveller's mind

from dwelling on the prevalent tedium of his journey and the ambiguity

of its end. I have not yet, of course, come to consideration of the

formally labeled novel, for this much is true of every form of man-made

fiction, whether it be concocted by poets or statesmen, by bishops in

conclave or by advertisers in the back of magazines. And since memory

and optimism, as has been said, are the archetypal Homer and St. John,

the supreme and most altruistic of all deceivers, the omnipotent and

undying masters of omnipresent fictive creation, their "methods" are

in the main pursued by the great pair's epigoni; who likewise tend to

deal with the large deeds of superhuman persons seen through a glow of

amber lucency, not wholly unakin to that of maple syrup.

Of the romances which make for business prosperity and religious

revivals and wars to end war forever, here is no call to speak. Nor

need I here point out that well-nigh everyone who anywhere writes prose

to-day, whether it take form as a tax return or a magazine story or a

letter beginning "My dear So-and-so," is consciously composing fiction:

and in the spoken prose of schoolrooms and courts of law and social

converse, I think, no candid person will deny that expediency and

invention collaborate. It may be true that lies have short legs, but

civilization advances upon them.

§ 12

I, in any event, get daily bewilderment from considering how

deep-rooted seem all life's serious and practical endeavors in

implausible fictions. The most long-headed of us, for instance, may

reasonably confess to some faith in money and in mathematics: these

things at least are stable realities, these are the pillars, the very

Bohas and Jakin in the Temple of Common-Sense. And yet, here also, is

disclosed by two minutes' consideration another side.

Money I regard, I hope, with all appropriate gravity. I know that I

now and then accept without derisory outcry, even thankfully, small

metal disks disfigured with a remarkably unaquiline eagle and the

fat-jowled head of a female criminal very neatly guillotined. Nor am

I here deceived by appearances. These things suggest extremely rococo

poker-chips, they look like counters to be used in playing some sort of

game, for the sound reason that this is precisely what they are. And

we play. We all play quite gravely, at every hour in our lives, at the

game wherein these disks, which in themselves no mortal could regard

with æsthetic pleasure or employ for any imaginable practical purpose,

are supposed to be worth something. In time we get quite used to these

horary excursions of fancy: and indeed we so enter into the spirit of

the game as very often to "buy" things with a feeling that the clerk is

swindling us, rather than we him.

But, as an even more remarkable fiction, I consider the new five-dollar

bill which I chance this morning to possess. In itself, like the metal

disks, it is worth nothing: and its glazed surface chills the thought

of devoting it to the one use suggested by its general dimensions. It

bears, though, I find, an engraved assurance that to the bearer of this

paper the People's National Bank of Strasburg, Virginia, will pay five

dollars.

Since, as it happens, the president and the cashier of that

institution have not signed in the spaces reserved for them, the

assurance comes unsupported: for it nobody, so far as I can see,

assumes any least responsibility. Yet, in any event, if the unsponsored

statement be true, such is the sole value of this paper rectangle: its

only virtue is that in Strasburg, Virginia, you can exchange it for

five dollars.

I have no intention of going to Strasburg, Virginia: I shall instead

buy something with this note, under the romantic pretence that the

shopkeeper is going to exchange it, in Strasburg, Virginia, for

five dollars. And he will part with it to somebody else on the same

imaginative terms. And that make-believe will continue until this note

is worn out. Meanwhile this bit of paper will gravely be exchanged,

in varied surroundings, for every sort of commodity.... It will

be transmuted into dinners, it will tread the pavements of remote

outlandish cities in the form of a pair of shoes, and as pajamas it

will pass beyond the proper scope of my meditations. It will flower

into orchids, it will blaze as coal. Not without ostentation will it

fall into the collection plate, nor toward Christmas flutter into the

kettle of the Salvation Army: more furtively will it, thrice-folded,

slip into the top of the feminine stocking. Darkness will sometimes

engulf it like a pocket. Very deep will it descend, as fares the sewer

rat, into grim social underworlds; as most inferior whiskey it will be

swallowed up; and in the manner of the dead that are laid away, will

it go down into the steel catacombs beneath banking houses. Thence

presently it will arise. It will arise unchanged, a trifle deteriorate

in crispness perhaps, yet very potent to aid in lifting mortgages, in

raising children, and in elevating many households, I would like to

think, in the avatar of two of my books.... But never on any forenoon

in Strasburg, Virginia, will it be exchanged for five dollars: and the

one purpose for which this paper is so precisely designed is precisely

the one to which it will not ever be put.

What will in point of fact become of it, I learn after serious inquiry

into this mystery--in financial circles, wherein I was humored as a

harmless lunatic,--is that, when the note gets sufficiently dirty and

decrepit, "some bank will turn it in, at Washington," in exchange for

a fresh paper rectangle; and the senior note will then be destroyed by

Treasury employees. But nobody will ever convey to Strasburg, Virginia,

this representation of Benjamin Harrison looking like a dishonest

Santa Claus, and of the Pilgrims putting ashore at Plymouth Rock to

investigate the phenomena of a wind that blows two ways and of a tree

growing from the ocean. Nobody will ever deal logically with all this

intricate engraving: and if anybody ever did, he would, as the very

cream of this monetary fiction, be thought "queer." At worst, his

sanity would become a matter of medical investigation: at best, he

would be given for this paper rectangle another banknote, and the

romancing would now gild a different Carcassonne.

And similarly outrageous seem to any calm considering the fictions

of mathematics. This fact, indeed, was recently pointed out to me by

my small son, in whom his governess was endeavoring to implant the

conviction that two and two make four. But the child stayed sceptical.

He was reservedly polite about a rational "Suppose you had two apples,

and I gave you two more apples, how many apples would you have then?"

He conceded with readiness, not unflavored with resignation to the

obtuseness of grown-up persons, that in such circumstances he would

have four apples, but could not eat that many without being real sick.

Yet that two and two, in consequence, make four, he excluded as a

logical inference: and he depreciated that inference by stating it did

not mean anything. He was, of course, quite right.

For that "two and two make four" becomes, the very instant that you

play this familiar axiom the childish trick of thinking about it, at

best an unprovable hypothesis. That two apples and two more apples

compose four apples is, as my son admitted, plain enough. Or, you may

change your unit to a penny, a match, a pencil, or to a bungalow, and

still produce convincing evidence to prove your arithmetic. But the

mathematician requests us to consider an abstract "two," to believe

in two apples with the pomaceousness removed: his incorporal and

incorporeal "two" has never existed and never can exist. His "two" is

not merely a fiction, but an inconceivable fiction which the human mind

can no more, really, imagine than it can his "four." You need only for

one moment attempt to form some rational and clear-cut idea of this

"two" to perceive that the governess in fact was (with all respect to

her) talking about incredible fictions, just as my son affirmed.... And

when the mathematician goes on from "two" and "four" into the higher

branches of his romance weaving, and postulates as yet other realities

his "lines" that have length but no breadth or thickness, or his

"points" that have not even length, you face the choice between fleeing

from his self-evident lunacy and accepting his insane but very useful

fictions.

§ 13

So do we all exist as if in a warm grateful bath, submerged and soothed

by fiction. In contrast to the inhabitants of the Scilly Islands, who

are reputed to have lived by taking in one another's washing, so do

we live by interchanging tales that will not wash. There seems to be

no bound, no frontier trading-post appointed anywhere to this barter

of current fiction, not in the future nor in the years behind.... Men

have been, almost cynically, shown with what ease the romance which we

call history may be recast throughout, now that America rejoices in an

amended past which has all been painstakingly rewritten with more care

of the King's English, and wherein the War of the Revolution takes its

proper place as the latest addition to the list of German outrages.

State legislatures dispose of man's arboreal ancestry by passing a

law against it: and Congress, by bestowing upon non-intoxicating

beverages an illegal alcoholic content, at once repeats and repudiates

the miracle of Cana. Our newspapers continue the war-time economizing

of intelligence, and still serve patriotic substitutes in serials,

wherein Black and Yellow and Red perils keep colorful the outlook, and

fiends oppose broad-minded seraphim in every political difference. Our

clergy are no less prolific in their more futuristic school of art,

and on every Sabbath morning discourse engagingly of paradise and of

that millennium of which the arrival is at present being furthered by

the more "modern" of our prelates bringing fearlessly to bear upon the

mystery of the Incarnation the intellect of a midwife.... The past, the

present and the future are thus everywhere presented in the terms of

generally diverting prose fictions: and life is rendered passable by

our believing in those which are most to our especial liking.

§ 14

Man is, they say, the only animal that has reason; and so he must have

also, if he is to stay sane, diversions to prevent his using it. Man,

always nearing and always conscious of approaching death with its

unpredictable sequel, and yet bored beyond sufferance by the routine of

his daily living, must in this predicament have playthings to divert

him from bringing pitiless reason to bear upon his dilemma: and he must

have too the false values which he ascribes to these playthings.

The lines of Pope that I have quoted elsewhere dwell truthfully

enough upon life's endless playing,--upon the playing of the child

with straws and rattles, of the young man with his mistresses, of the

mature with wealth and worldly honors, and of the aged with rosaries

and prayer-books. But the solace, the true virtue, of these playthings

arises from the fiction that the player tells to himself about them. No

child plays with a straw: he brandishes a sword that has just chopped

off a dragon's head. The young man, exultant, terrified, touches and

uncovers, not an expanse of epidermis and small hairs and sweat glands,

but the body of a goddess. The banker is reveling in that romance

about Strasburg, Virginia: and the aged clasp not a prayer-book but the

key to eternal bliss. Everywhere, in fine, the creating romantic who

lives in every human being is either composing or else borrowing the

kind of romance which most potently diverts him, and prevents his going

mad.

§ 15

Well, it is the privilege of the novelist--I mean, at last, the

novelist who is frankly listed as such in Who's Who--to aid according

to his abilities in this old world-wide effort, so to delude mankind

that nobody from birth to death need ever really bother about his, upon

the whole, unpromising situation in the flesh. It is the privilege of

the novelist who happens also to be an artist, to blaze a trail upon

which his readers may follow, and be delighted by the by-products of

his hedonism. For it is his higher privilege to divert his own thoughts

from unprofitable and rational worrying; and to lead such as may choose

to follow him in one more desperate sortie from that ordered living and

from the selves of which all men are tired.

So I suspect there must always be, to the last digit, precisely as many

"methods" as there are novelists. For the endeavor of the novelist,

even by the lowest and most altruistic motives, is to tell untruths

that will be diverting: and of their divertingness he needs, and

in fact can have (prior to the receipt of royalty statements), no

touchstone save only the response which these untruths evoke from him.

His primary endeavor must therefore, upon merely rational and sordid

grounds, be to divert, not any possible reader, but himself.

By the novelist who is more tradesman than artist, and who is guided

by ideals rather than selfishness, this truth is not recognised:

and he often commits the deadly error of succumbing to praiseworthy

motives. He, as a rule, indeed, wrong-headedly begins by considering

his public's real virtues and aspirations; he endeavors to strengthen

these by finding for them vicarious exercise: and he thus allows

himself to be misled into evanescence through philanthropy. Now it is

the privilege of the public (which, to be sure, has an alternative)

to consider the artist: but the artist who for one half second during

his hours of play with ink and paper considers anybody except himself

is contriving a suicide without dignity. For the one really ponderable

sort of writer--the writer who communicates to us something of his

own delight and interest in his playing, and who thus in the end

contributes to our general human happiness,--has been influenced while

about this playing by none save selfish considerations. He has written

wholly to divert himself: he has for that moment been inclavated to

pleasure-seeking with somewhat the ruthlessness of a Nero and all the

tenacity of a débutante: and if I seem unduly to emphasise this obvious

fact, it is merely because the man afterward so often lies about it.

Some tale-tellers find themselves most readily bedrugged by yearning

toward loveliness unknown and unobtainable: these are, we say, our

romanticists. To them are, technically, opposed such Pollyannas among

fiction writers as Mr. Theodore Dreiser and Mr. Sinclair Lewis, who can

derive a species of obscure æsthetic comfort from considering persons

even less pleasantly situated than themselves,--somewhat as a cabin

passenger on a sinking ship might consider the poor devils in the

steerage,--and so turn rhyparographer, and write "realism." The process

is not unnatural, and has been more or less profitable since at least

the time of Piræicus.

But, either way, the inspiring principle remains unchanged: you think

of that which is above or below you in order to avoid thinking of what

is about you. So it really does not greatly matter whether you travel

with Marco Polo to Cathay or with the Kennicotts to Gopher Prairie.

The excursion may be for the purpose of looking at beautiful things

wistfully or at ugly things contemptuously: the point is that it is an

excursion from the place where you regard over-familiar things with a

yawn.

When one considers these truisms,--and fails to see why they need be

disputed by anybody not actually engaged in the physical labor of

teaching or of contributing to the more successful periodicals,--then

the form and scope of even the formally labeled novel seems, plainly,

fluctuating and indeterminable. The novelist, it is apparent, will

write in the form--with such dramatic, epic or lyric leanings as his

taste dictates,--which he personally finds alluring: his rhythms will

be such as caress his personal pair of ears: and the scope of his

writing will be settled by what he personally does or does not find

interesting. For the serious prose craftsman will write primarily to

divert himself,--with a part thrifty but in the main a philanthropic

underthought of handing on, at a fair price, the playthings and the

games which he contrives, for the diversion of those with a like taste

in anodynes. And to do this will content him. For he will believe that

he may win to fame by brewing oblivion, he will hope to invent, if he

prove thrice lucky, some quite new form of "let's pretend." But he

will not believe that anybody with a valid claim to be considered a

post-graduate child can gravely talk about affixing limits to the form

and scope of that especial pastime.

§ 16

And so his "creed," to my experience, stays troublingly nebulous.

At most he will admit but general tenets to himself, conceding very

secretly:

Imprimis, I play, when all is said, with common-sense and piety, as my

fellows appraise these matters, and with death also. I have embarked in

a gaming in which to win is not possible: and every sensible person of

course thinks this extremely foolish. Yet I know that, for my purpose,

the opinions of all other persons are negligible. My own opinions, if

indeed I have the patience and the temerity to unearth them, are, as

I know also, erroneous; they are unstable: but they remain, none the

less, the only reliable guides to my intended goal, diversion.... And

my rational standards can be adhered to, I consider, with more safety

if they are kept concealed.

Item, I must find out what are, in reality, my real beliefs: and I must

set these forth to the best possible advantage; and I must be zealous,

above all, not ever to regard my beliefs quite seriously. Human ideas

are of positive worth in that they make fine playthings for the less

obtuse of mankind. That seems to be the ultimate lean value of all

human ideas, even of my ideas. I must carefully conceal my knowledge of

this humiliating fact.

Item, I must cherish my ideas as I do my children, with a great love

commingled with admitted inability to foresee what they may be like

to-morrow. For my ideas and my impressions, in the moment that these

visit and pass away from the consciousness which is I, from the

fragment of consciousness which insecurely lurks inside this skull,

are the only realities known to me in the brief while wherein I am, as

yet, permitted to play with common-sense and piety and death. I will to

enjoy and play with and, it may be, to perpetuate after my flickering

from this skull, these true realities: if I succeed in perpetuating

them, that is well; if I fail, I shall not at all worry about this

failure once I am dead, and I am fairly certain to be dead by and by.

At worst, the ability and the body and the life which transiently were

at my disposal will have been really used, both to make something and

to divert me.... And at best, it would be foolhardy not to keep such

intentions concealed.

Item, with human life as a whole I have no grave concern, and I am

beguiled by no notion of "depicting" it. My concern is solely with

myself. I have no theory of what we call "life's" cause or object;

nor can I detect in material existence any general trend. The stars

and the continents, the mountains and these flustering hordes of men,

every mole-hill and the diligent dancing of gnat swarms,--all appears

to blend in a vagrant and very prettily tinted and generally amusing

stream by which I too am swept onward. If but for my dignity's sake, I

prefer to conceal my knowledge of this fact.

Item, there is upon me a resistless hunger to escape from use and wont:

I seem more utterly resolved than are my fellows, not to be bored: and

it is in my endeavor to evade the tediousness of familiar things that I

am playing--playing, as I know, quite futilely,--with common-sense and

piety and death. Such levity tends, it well may be, to no applaudable

outcome: meanwhile this playing diverts me.... And meanwhile, my

fellows being what they are, my amusement is a matter very profitably

concealed.

Item, I really must, in the teeth of all solicitation, refuse to

plagiarize anything from what people call "nature" and "real life." My

playing, which I term my "art," has no concern with things which, in

any case, are too ill-managed to merit imitation. For, still adhering

to that simile of the prettily tinted stream, I am persuaded my art

need not pretend to be a treatise upon hydrodynamics: my art is well

content to be the autobiography of an unvalued straw adrift in this

sparkling and babbling stream that hastens toward an unguessable ocean.

Let us avoid guesswork, since it is profitless. Let us avoid, too, no

reasonable pains to conceal this fact.

Item, let us avoid, also, the narcotizing perils of reverence,--even

for our juniors, who are in all æsthetic matters invariably in the

right,--or of being quite as serious about ourselves and our doings

in collusion with printers and publishers as if mankind and the books

of men were of grave and demonstrable importance. And let us, above

all, avoid disastrous candors, and say boldly none of these things.

Let us who "write" protest that we have no concealments, that we

expose ourselves entire, and that our unselfish aim is to benefit

and entertain other persons, the while that we play ceaselessly with

common-sense and piety and death.