More About the “New Note”
The idea of “the new note” might be worked out more fully, but after all little or nothing would be gained by elaboration. Given this note of craft love all the rest must follow, as the spirit of self-revelation, which is also a part of the new note, will follow any true present-day love of craft. You will remember we once discussed Coningsby Dawson’s The Garden Without Walls. What I quarreled with in that book was that the writer looked outside of himself for his material. Even realists have done this—as, for example, Howells; and to that extent have failed. The master Zola failed here. Why do we so prize the work of Whitman, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Twain, and Fielding? Is it not because as we read we are constantly saying to ourselves, “This book is true. A man of flesh and blood like myself has lived the substance of it. In the love of his craft he has done the most difficult of all things: revealed the workings of his own soul and mind”?
To get near to the social advance for which all moderns hunger, is it not necessary to have first of all understanding? How can I love my neighbor if I do not understand him? And it is just in the wider diffusion of this understanding that the work of a great writer helps the advance of mankind. I would like to have you think much of this in your attitude toward all present-day writers. It is so easy for them to bluff us from our position, and I know from my own experience how baffling it is constantly to be coming upon good, well-done work that is false.
In this connection I am tempted to give you the substance of a formula I have just worked out. It lies here before me, and if you will accept it in the comradely spirit in which it is offered I shall be glad. It is the most delicate and the most unbelievably difficult task to catch, understand, and record your own mood. The thing must be done simply and without pretense or windiness, for the moment these creep in your record is no longer a record, but a mere mass of words meaning nothing. The value of such a record is not in the facts caught and recorded but in the fact of your having been able truthfully to make the record—something within yourself will tell you when you have not done it truthfully. I myself believe that when a man can thus stand aside from himself, recording simply and truthfully the inner workings of his own mind, he will be prepared to record truthfully the workings of other minds. In every man or woman dwell dozens of men and women, and the highly imaginative individual will lead fifty lives. Surely this can be said if it can be said that the unimaginative individual has led one life.
The practice of constantly and persistently making such a record as this will prove invaluable to the person who wishes to become a true critic of writing in the new spirit. Whenever he finds himself baffled in drawing a character or in judging one drawn by another, let him turn thus in upon himself, trusting with child-like simplicity and honesty the truth that lives in his own mind. Indeed, one of the great rewards of living with small children is to watch their faith in themselves and to try to emulate them in this art.
If the practice spoken of above is followed diligently, a kind of partnership will in time spring up between the hand and the brain of the writer. He will find himself becoming in truth a cattle herder, a drug clerk, a murderer, for the benefit of the hand that is writing of these, or the brain that is judging the work of another who has written of these.
To be sure this result will not always follow, and even after long and patient following of the system one will run into barren periods when the brain and the hand do not co-ordinate. In such a period it seems to me the part of wisdom to drop your work and begin again patiently making a record of the workings of your own mind, trying to put down truthfully those workings during the period of failure. I would like to scold every one who writes, or who has to do with writing, into adopting this practice, which has been such a help and such a delight to me.
Sherwood Anderson.