The writing of fiction

by Edith Wharton

Another difficulty connected with this one is that of keeping so firm a hold on the main lines of one’s characters that they emerge modified and yet themselves from the ripening or disintegrating years. Tolstoy had this gift to a supreme degree. Wherever in the dense forest of “War and Peace” a character reappears, often after an interval so long that the ear has almost lost the sound to which he rhymes, he is at once recognized as the same, profoundly the same, yet scored by new lines of suffering and experience. Natacha, grown into the fat slovenly mère-de-famille of the last chapters, is incredibly like and yet different to the phantom of delight who first captivated Prince Andrew; and the Prince himself, in those incomparable pages devoted to his long illness, where one watches the very process of dematerialization, the detachment from earthly things happening as naturally as the fall of a leaf, is the same as the restless and unhappy man who appears with his pathetic irritating little wife at the evening party of the first chapter.

Becky Sharp, Arthur Pendennis, Dorothea Casaubon, Lydgate, Charles Bovary—with what sure and patient touches their growth and decline are set forth! And how mysteriously yet unmistakably, as they reappear after each interval, the sense is conveyed that there has been an interval, not in moral experience only but in the actual lapse of the seasons! The producing of this impression is indeed the central mystery of the art. To its making go patience, meditation, concentration, all the quiet habits of mind now so little practised, so seldom inculcated; and to these must be added the final imponderable, genius, without which the rest is useless, and which, conversely, would be unusable without the rest.

VI

The evening party with which “War and Peace” begins is one of the most triumphant examples in fiction of the difficult art of “situating” the chief actors in the opening chapter of what is to be an exceptionally crowded novel. No reader is likely to forget, or to confuse the one with the other, the successive arrivals at that dull and trivial St. Petersburg reception; Tolstoy with one mighty sweep gathers up all his principal characters and sets them before us in action. Very different—though so notable an achievement in its way—is the first chapter of “The Karamazoff Brothers” (in the English or German translation—for the current French translation inexplicably omits it). In this chapter Dostoievsky has hung a gallery of portraits against a blank wall. He describes all the members of the Karamazoff family, one after another, with merciless precision and infernal insight. But there they remain hanging—or standing. The reader is told all about them, but is not allowed to surprise them in action. The story about them begins afterward, whereas in “War and Peace” the first paragraph leads into the thick of the tale, and every phrase, every gesture, carries it on with that slow yet sweeping movement of which Tolstoy alone was capable.

Many thickly-peopled novels begin more gradually—like “Vanity Fair,” for example—and introduce their characters in carefully-ordered succession. The process is obviously simpler, and in certain cases as effective. The morning stroll of M. and Mme. Reynal and their little boys, in the first chapter of “Le Rouge et le Noir,” sounds a note sufficiently portentous; and so does Major Pendennis’s solitary breakfast. In a general way there is much to be said for a quiet opening to a long and crowded novel; though the novelist might prefer to be able to fling all his characters on the boards at once, with Tolstoy’s regal prodigality. There is no fixed rule about this, or about any other method; each, in the art of fiction, to justify itself has only to succeed. But to succeed, the method must first of all suit the subject, must find its account, as best it can, with the difficulties peculiar to each situation.

The question where to begin is the next to confront the novelist; and the art of seizing on the right moment is even more important than that of being able to present a large number of characters at the outset.

Here again no general rule can be laid down. One subject may require to be treated from the centre, in the fashion dear to Henry James, with its opening in the heart of the action, and retrospective vistas radiating away from it on all sides, while others—of which “Henry Esmond” is one of the most beautiful examples—would lose all their bloom were they not allowed to ripen almost imperceptibly under the reader’s absorbed contemplation. Balzac, in his preface to “La Chartreuse de Parme”—almost the only public recognition of Stendhal’s genius during the latter’s life-time—reproves the author for beginning the book before its real beginning. Balzac knew well enough what the world would have lost had that opening picture of Waterloo been left out; but he insists that it is no part of the story Stendhal had set out to tell, and sums up with the illuminating phrase: “M. Beyle has chosen a subject [the Waterloo episode] which is real in nature but not in art.” That is, being out of place in that particular work of art, it loses its reality as art and remains merely a masterly study of a corner of a battle-field, the greatest the world was to know till Tolstoy’s, but no part of a composition, as Tolstoy’s always were.

VII

The length of a novel, more surely even than any of its other qualities, needs to be determined by the subject. The novelist should not concern himself beforehand with the abstract question of length, should not decide in advance whether he is going to write a long or a short novel; but in the act of composition he must never cease to bear in mind that one should always be able to say of a novel: “It might have been longer,” never: “It need not have been so long.”

Length, naturally, is not so much a matter of pages as of the mass and quality of what they contain. It is obvious that a mediocre book is always too long, and that a great one usually seems too short. But beyond this question of quality and weightiness lies the more closely relevant one of the development which this or that subject requires, the amount of sail it will carry. The great novelists have always felt this, and, within an inch or two, have cut their cloth accordingly.