The writing of fiction

by Edith Wharton

In writing of the short story I may have seemed to dwell too much on the need of considering every detail in its plan and development; yet the short story is an improvisation, the temporary shelter of a flitting fancy, compared to the four-square and deeply-founded monument which the novel ought to be.

It is not only that the scale is different; it is because of the reasons for its being so. If the typical short story be the foreshortening of a dramatic climax connecting two or more lives, the typical novel usually deals with the gradual unfolding of a succession of events divided by intervals of time, and in which many people, in addition to the principal characters, play more or less subordinate parts. No need now to take in sail and clear the decks; the novelist must carry as much canvas and as many passengers as his subject requires and his seamanship permits.

Still, the novel-theme is distinguished from that suited to the short story not so much by the number of characters presented as by the space required to mark the lapse of time or to permit the minute analysis of successive states of feeling. The latter distinction, it should be added, holds good even when the states of feeling are all contained in one bosom, and crowded into a short period, as they are in “The Kreutzer Sonata.” No one would think of classing “The Kreutzer Sonata,” or “Ivan Ilyitch,” or “Adolphe,” among short stories; and such instances prove the difficulty of laying down a hard-and-fast distinction between the forms. The final difference lies deeper. A novel may be all about one person, and about no more than a few hours in that person’s life, and yet not be reducible to the limits of a short story without losing all significance and interest. It depends on the character of the subject chosen.

Since the novel-about-one-person has been touched on, it may be well, before going farther, to devote a short parenthesis to its autobiographical or “subjective” variety. In the study of novel-technique one might almost set aside the few masterpieces in this class, such as the “Princesse de Clèves,” “Adolphe” and “Dominique,” as not novels at all, any more than Musset’s “Confession d’un Enfant du Siècle” is a novel. They are, in fact, all fragments of autobiography by writers of genius; and the autobiographical gift does not seem very closely related to that of fiction. In the case of the authors mentioned, none but Madame de La Fayette ever published another novel, and her other attempts were without interest. In all the arts abundance seems to be one of the surest signs of vocation. It exists on the lowest scale, and, in the art of fiction, belongs as much to the producer of “railway novels” as to Balzac, Thackeray or Tolstoy; yet it almost always marks the great creative artist. Whatever a man has it in him to do really well he usually keeps on doing with an indestructible persistency.

There is another sign which sets apart the born novelist from the authors of self-confessions in novel-form; that is, the absence of the objective faculty in the latter. The subjective writer lacks the power of getting far enough away from his story to view it as a whole and relate it to its setting; his minor characters remain the mere satellites of the principal personage (himself), and disappear when not lit up by their central luminary.

Such books are sometimes masterpieces; but if by the term “art of fiction” be understood the creation of imaginary characters and the invention of their imaginary experiences—and there seems no more convenient definition—then the autobiographical tale is not strictly a novel, since no objectively creative effort has gone to its making.

It does not follow that born novelists never write autobiographical novels. Instances to the contrary will occur to every one and none more obvious than that of “The Kreutzer Sonata.” There is a gulf between such a book and “Adolphe.” Tolstoy’s tale, though almost avowedly the study of his own tortured soul, is as objective as Othello. The magic transposition has taken place; in reading the story we do not feel ourselves to be in a resuscitated real world (a sort of Tussaud Museum of wax figures with actual clothes on), but in that other world which is the image of life transposed in the brain of the artist, a world wherein the creative breath has made all things new. If one happened to begin one’s acquaintance with Tolstoy by reading “The Kreutzer Sonata” one would not need to be told that it was the creation of a brain working objectively, a brain which had produced, or was likely to produce, other novels of a wholly different kind; whereas of such books as “Dominique” or “Adolphe,” were one to light on them as unpreparedly, one would say: “This is not the invention of a novelist but the self-analysis of a man of genius.”

There is one famous book which might be described as the link between the real novel and the autobiography in novel-disguise. This is Goethe’s “Werther.” Here a youth of genius, as yet unpractised in the art of fiction, has related, under the thinnest of concealments, the story of his own unhappy love. The tale is intensely subjective. The hero is never once seen from the outside, the minor figures are hardly drawn out of the limbo of the unrealized; yet how instantly the difference between “Werther” and “Adolphe” declares itself! The latter tale is completely self-contained; it never suggests in the writer the power or the desire to project a race of imaginary characters. “Werther” does. Every page thrills with the dawning gift of creation. The lover has not been too much absorbed in his own anguish to turn its light on things external to him. The young Goethe who has noted Charlotte’s way of cutting the bread-and-butter for her little brothers and sisters, and set down the bourgeois humours and the sylvan charm of the ball in the forest, is already a novelist.

IV

The question of form—already defined as the order, in time and importance, in which the incidents of the narrative are grouped—is, for obvious reasons, harder to deal with in the novel than in the short story, and most difficult in the novel of manners, with its more crowded stage, and its continual interweaving of individual with social analysis.