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“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.