Page 405: “He raised a thin forefinger and levelled it along the table.” What image is called up?
By what detailed description and exposition does Mr. Perry make you “believe,” at least momentarily, that Simec had really invented the appliance?
What locale is suggested, outside the immediate setting? Does it matter, in a narrative of this kind?
General. Mr. Perry’s views should be spread abroad to all who would master the art of story writing. “No art is rarer, or more difficult of attainment.... First there is the plot. I think the good short story demands a plot. Stylistic writing designed to atone for the lack of a definite idea, or to stand in lieu of a definitely worked out plot is not to my way of thinking a pure short story. There must be a plot, a plot peculiar to itself and peculiar to the medium in which it is set forth. Very rarely, I believe, may the perfect short story plot be adapted to any other vehicle. Nine times out of ten it would not serve as the motif of the play, the novel, the film or the sketch. The piece of short fiction, thus, is sui generis. Again the scope is limited. There may be no leisurely characterization, no extended dissertation; descriptions are admissible only where they assist in carrying on the action—or at least do not interfere with it—and in the telling of the tale there is no place in the scheme for aught save the ultimate objective.
“Thus carried out and presented in type we have something which we may regard as the polished gem of literature, establishing a mood in the reader out of all proportion to its size—and perhaps its importance. For the short story very largely is designed for entertainment, and rarely bears the moral purpose of the great novel or the didactic intent of the essay.
“I say ‘very largely.’ There are, of course, short stories written with a purpose—some great ones—but that purpose is best realized when the essential characteristics of the story form are observed, when the reader in other words feels whatever emotions, or grasps whatever lesson the writer intended to convey, through the medium of a strong, deeply marked plot carried with precision from situation to clash to dénouement.”—Lawrence Perry.
THE PATH OF GLORY
Starting Point and First Processes. “It so happens in the case of ‘The Path of Glory’ that I can give you exactly the germinal idea from which the story sprang. Three months before I wrote it a friend put into my hand two letters. The first was written by Piatt Andrew of The American Ambulance at Paris and gave the full details of a wonderful funeral accorded a young American volunteer driver who was killed on an early trip; the second was the last personal letter of the young man to his family—the letter of a young man of education and breeding and in no way similar to the Nat letter of my story save as they both expressed a fundamental human longing. Copies were being made and I was offered some. I carried mine home and laid them by. But they haunted me. ‘There’s a story there,’ I thought. However, I didn’t seem to get a story—at once. Nevertheless my mind played with the letters. That funeral! The story of course lay there, but how to set it off, enhance it properly. One day thinking it over idly—I have a vagabond mind and never attack a problem in any logical fashion—the solution dawned quite suddenly. It would be best set off by contrast, of course, with some unthinkably shabby funeral, and would receive its greatest force by being reconstructed through the minds of a people to whom a funeral is a precious event.”—Mary Brecht Pulver.
After a statement to the effect that she knows “people to whom the trappings and ceremonials of death take on a sense of privilege,” Mrs. Pulver continues:
“Just here I got some paper and a pencil and wrote the story. Or rather it wrote itself—as my stories usually do. When I began describing the lonely farm in which my people lived I had not the least idea who the people were—how many, what sex, age, race, or previous condition of servitude. There was a family in that house. A family preferably in hard luck. Then at the foot of the hill I saw a lame boy driving a cow. I walked along with him—and recognizing him as Luke, and acquainting myself with his ideas and frame of mind, I knew of course who his people were, how many, their habits, their names—‘all’s to it,’ as Luke would have said.