FINALE
There is more than a modicum of depression, then, in a contemplative
sweep of the literary product we are instrumental in creating. Even
the most complacent members in my profession must find it so. For
one thing, the very lack of variety in the finished product we so
painstakingly cultivate must occasionally become irksome, if nothing
more serious. Analyzing stories by a hundred different writers, both
successful and would-be, and all of these stories with one puny soul
must in the end become a very tiresome routine indeed.
It is true that we are not masters of the situation. Who are we to set
up standards and direct the footsteps of the young toward them? We are
but the interpreters of existing standards and the formulators and
expositors of ways that lead to the meeting of the exaction imposed
by them. But if an uneasy thought sometimes, at dusk, buzzes into
our incautious ear that the existing standards lead to unregenerate
mediocrity, should we not pause and ask if perpetuating these standards
is for the good of our souls or even for the work we love (and a
great many of us really do love our work!)? Perhaps a revision of
our texts--if not a bonfire--might result in fewer stories but more
inspiring ones. Perhaps the demolition of magazine standards might
result in the birth of literary standards. As it is, should we not
face the truth that all the masters that have ever manipulated pen or
typewriter have disregarded our standards and set up new ones of their
own? They may not have gone to the extent of a Kipling who wrote to a
beginner that “No man’s advice is the least benefit in our business,
and I am a very busy man. Keep on trying until you either fail or
succeed.” They all have looked for and accepted intelligent advice of
one kind or another--from eminent contemporaries and from those that
had preceded them. But they have not slavishly copied and imitated.
They have not felt that any advice had the power of divine commandment.
No real artist could be expected to create anything in the environment
of the rubrics and inhibitions with which we have surrounded him.
All the blame that can be heaped upon the public and our magazine
editors does not absolve the literary clergy from the share of harm
they have contributed to the existing state of the American short
story. The cheapest form of advertising and the most erudite and
conscientious of our textbooks combine in the creation of a peculiar
psychology that a story is some concoction that any one might learn to
make up by mere exertion. Here is a typical advertisement appearing on
the back page of a current magazine:
HOW I MADE $350.00 ON ONE SHORT STORY And How I Learned To Write, In
Only a Few Evenings, Stories That Actually Sell Themselves.
Then follows a full-page testimony of some one who has made a great
success of story-writing by spending the small sum of $5 on the course
advertised. The course itself was prepared by a leading professor
in a leading eastern university and whose name is well-known in the
literary world. And almost every important textbook on the subject
abounds in statements such as the following taken from one of the
most intelligent works: “the events which go to make up a fictional
plot are artificially arranged so as to bring about a particular
result,”[29] besprinkled with numerous analogies to the various trades
and professions and how long it takes for the average apprentice to
become an accomplished artizan. The psychology of tricks and twists and
points is foisted upon the writer, the reader, the editor. By constant
repetition we ourselves begin to acquire it, if we had it not when we
started....
And yet this short volume is not wholly pessimistic. I would not want
to leave that impression. For as already stated there have always been
writers with a real touch of divine afflatus who have never paid
any attention either to our psychology or to our tricks, or to our
inhibitions. “Every fine artist in American fiction will be seen to
have discarded both the technical and moral pattern of the magazine
tradition and to have developed one of his own.”[30] And the number of
these heretics is growing--much faster than some of us are aware. They
suffer obscurity and often poverty as all great heretics always have
suffered, but they have the fortitude of their calling. Let us listen
to the confession of one of them:
“... However, you know that the short-story form has become
among us very much what I call corrupt. Publishers of short
stories sought what they called the story with a kick in it. Plots
for short stories were found and about these plots our writers
sought to hang a semblance of reality to life. The plot, however,
being uppermost in the writers’ minds, what we got was a snappy,
entertaining, artificial thing, forgotten completely an hour after
it was read.
“Perhaps because of a native laziness, I found myself unable to
think up plots. To try to do so bored me unspeakably. On the other
hand, there were all about me human beings living their lives and
in the process of doing so creating drama....
“I have tried to clutch at it and reproduce in writing some of that
drama....”[31]
When the problem involved is what to tell, the sharpening of the
faculty of seeing what is worth while, the problem of how to tell
becomes of secondary importance. In fact the same literary heretic
believes that “An impulse needs but be strong enough to break through
the lack of technical training ... technical training might well
destroy the impulse....”[32]
Along with the author of “Winesburg, Ohio,” and “The Triumph of the
Egg,” there are a host of other writers freshly reacting to life
and honestly striving to embody their reactions into stories. It is
strange to us, accustomed as we are to clever artificiality, it is even
grotesque--this simplicity, naturalness, and daring, but it marks the
birth of the American short story--that colorful short form which is
destined to become the most perfect artistic expression of our national
life. After all, to the true artist the public is no problem, it being
composed primarily of himself alone. As Sherwood Anderson expressed
it in another passage of the interview quoted above: “I would like a
little to understand myself in this mixup, and I am writing with that
end in view.” The curse of catering to the public has been a fallacy as
great as that of our technique; we have assumed that fiction is made to
order for a public, just as we have taught that technique comes first
and story substance next. The great writers have all come before their
public and have had to wait for the public to catch up with them, but
if they hadn’t come first the public would never have caught up. We
in America have always striven to give the public what it has wanted,
but even in America the time is fast coming when the gracious public
will be inquiring what stories our potent writers have to tell. But
not until our writers realize fully that “The public is composed of
numerous groups crying out: Console me, amuse me, sadden me, touch me,
make me dream, laugh, shudder, weep, think. But the fine spirit says
to the artist: Make something beautiful in the form that suits you,
according to your personal temperament.”[33] This fine spirit is now
becoming evident; it is working its way to the surface.
In this period of awakening, of the real birth of American literature,
the genuine educator, always an open-minded student, can do no better
than revaluate all his acceptances, all his hardened dogmas, all
his hereditary literary and educational truths. If he is to help
the confused multitude, baffled by a sudden consciousness of the
phenomena of existence, to literary self-expression, he must first
realize that no formulas are of any avail in the crises of life and
therefore are of no avail in literature, the artistic emanation or
transmutation of life. He must stimulate thought and independence of
thought--even to the point of experimentation--for in such ways have
all great contributions to the world’s cultural treasury been made. He
must cultivate a genuine love of literature rather than of its usual
incentive, the emoluments involved, whatever they be, and a critical
appreciation of literary values. Thus he may become a positive force in
the chariot of our literary progress--a leader, a driver, a discoverer.