Raw Material

by Dorothy Canfield Fisher

We are so used to this phenomenon that it does not seem strange to us. But it is strange—strange and tragic. And I do not in the least believe that the tragedy is one of the inevitable ones. I think it is simply a bad habit which has grown up as the modern world has taken to reading.

Why did the habit ever start? Naturally enough. Because the new medium of cheap printing let loose on the world the innate loquacity of writers, unrepressed by the limitations of the human voice. Other people have not been able to hear themselves think since Gutenberg enabled writers to drown out the grave, silent, first-hand mental processes of people blessed by nature with taciturnity. The writer is not born (as is his boast) with more capacity than other people for seeing color and interest and meaning in life; he is born merely with an irrepressible desire to tell everybody what he sees and feels. We have been hypnotized by his formidable capacity for speech into thinking that he is the only human being on whom life makes an impression. This is not so. He is merely so made that he cannot rest till he has told everybody who will listen to him, the impression that life has made on him. This is the queer mainspring of creative literature. The writer cannot keep a shut mouth. To speak out seems to be the only useful thing he can do in life. And in its way it is a very useful occupation. But there is no reason why other people who have other useful things to do should miss the purity and vividness of a first-hand impression of life which they could enjoy without spoiling it, as an artist always does, by his instant anxiety about how much of it he can carry off with him for his art, by his instant mental fumbling with technical means, by his anguished mental questions: “What would be the best way to get that effect over in a book?” or “How could you convey that impression in a dialogue?”

It is a dog’s life, believe me, this absurd, pretentious carrying about of your little literary yardstick and holding it up against the magnificent hugeness of the world. I cannot believe that it is necessary to have that yardstick in hand before seeing the hugeness which it can never measure. One proof that it is not necessary is the fact that artists enjoy the raw materials of arts which they do not practise, much more freely and light-heartedly than the raw material of their own. I love the materials from which painters make pictures and musicians make music vastly more than the materials from which novelists make novels, because I feel no responsibility about them, because I know that they do not mean for me a struggle, foredoomed to failure, to get them down on canvas or between the five lines of the musical staff.

Do I seem to be advocating a habit of mind which would put an end to the writing of novels altogether? Personally I do not believe that the foundations of the world would move by a hair if that end were brought about. But, as a matter of fact, I do not in the least think that novel-writing would be anything but immensely benefited by a reading public which had acquired its own eyesight and did not depend on the writer’s. Such a body of creative-minded readers would lift the art of fiction up to levels we have none of us conceived. With such a public of trained, practised observers, fiction could cast off the encumbering paraphernalia of explanations and photographs which now weigh it down. There need be no fear for the future of fiction if every one takes to being his own novelist. For then readers will not look in novels for what is never there, reality itself. They will look for what is the only thing that ought to be there, the impression which reality has made on the writer, and they will have an impression of their own with which to compare that of the writer. This will free the author forever from attempting the impossible, bricks-without-straw undertaking of trying to get life itself between the covers of a book.

For never, never can fiction hope to attain myriads of effects which life effortlessly puts over wherever we look, if we will only see what is there. If we leave those inimitable natural effects of beauty, or fun, or tragedy, or farce entirely for the professional writer to see and enjoy and ponder on, we are showing the same sort of passive, closed imaginations which lead Persians to sit obesely at ease on cushions, and watch professional dancers have all the fun of dancing. The phrase which we traditionally ascribe to them is this, “Why bother to dance yourselves, when you can hire somebody to do it much better?” But that is our own unspoken phrase about the raw material of art and its monopoly by the professional artist. We Westerners dance, ourselves, not because we have any notion that we can dance better than the professionals, but because we have discovered by experience that to dance gives us a very different sort of pleasure from that given by looking at professionals. We have also discovered that it does not at all prevent us from hiring professionals and enjoying them as much as any Persians.

It is for the active-minded people who enjoy doing their own thinking as well as watching the author do his, that I have put this volume together. When life speaks to them, their hearts answer, as a friend to a friend. They are my brothers and my sisters. They practise the delight-giving art of being their own authors. They know the familiar, exquisite interest of trying to arrange in coherence the raw material which life constantly washes up to every one in great flooding masses. And they do this for their own high pleasure, with no idea of profiting by it in the eyes of the world. They work to create order out of chaos with a single-hearted effort, impossible to poor authors, tortured by the aching need to get the results of their efforts into words intelligible to others.

Being useful in other ways to the world, it is quite permissible for them to indulge in what was pernicious self-indulgence for an artist like Wencelas Steinbock. They are good children who, having nourished themselves on the substantial food of useful work, may eat candy without risking indigestion. The artist’s work is the fatiguing attempt to transform the wonder of life into art! Those other disinterested observers of life, those wise, deeply pondering, far-seeing men and women, driven by their own need to make something understandable out of our tangled life, struggle, just as the artist does, to piece together what they see into intelligible order. But they do this in their own hearts, for their own satisfaction. How singularly free-handed and open-hearted and generous their attitude seems, compared to the artist’s frugal, not to say penurious, not to say avaricious, anxiety to utilize every scrap of his life as raw material for his art.

Such people have, as the reward for their disinterested attitude of mind, all the pleasures of the creative artist’s life and none of its terrible pains. All the pleasure, that is, except the dubious one of seeing themselves in print. This is—for me at least—a pleasure deeply colored with humiliation. The stuff which I manage to get into a printed book is so tragically dry and lifeless compared to the vibrating, ordered, succulent life which goes on inside my head before I put pen to paper! For my part, I envy the clever, happy people who are content to let it stay in their heads, and never try to decant it into a book, only to find that the bouquet and aroma are all gone. I quite sympathize with them when they are impatient with the verbose literal-minded garrulity with which most writers of fiction spread out clumsily over two pages that which takes but a flash to think or to feel. They think, and quite rightly, that what is slowly written out in the inaccurate, halting system we call language, bears little relation to the arrow-swift movements of the thinking mind and feeling heart.

That which is written down in an attempt to make it intelligible to everybody is a rude approximation like that of ready-made clothing, manufactured to fit every one somewhat and no one exactly. That which springs into being in the brain at a contact with life, exactly fits the comprehension, background, and experience of the person who owns the brain. There are no waste motions, no paragraphs to skip, no compressions too bare, no descriptions too wordy, none of those sore, never-solved problems of the writer who addresses unknown readers, “How much can I leave out? How far can I suggest and not state? How far can I trust the reader’s attention not to flag, his intelligence to understand at a hint, rather than at a statement? What experience of life can I presuppose him to have had?”