Why Authors Go Wrong, and Other Explanations

by Grant M. Overton

10

What, then, is the novelist to do? Is it not obvious that he must not busy himself too carefully with the business of patterning the things he has to tell? For the moment he has traced everything out nicely and beautifully he may know for a surety that he has cut himself off from the larger design of Life. He has got his little corner of the Oriental rug all mapped out with the greatest exactitude. But he has lost touch with the bigger intricacy beyond his corner. It is a prayer rug. He had better kneel down and pray.

Now there are novels in which no pattern at all is traced; and these are as bad as those which minutely map a mere corner. These are meaningless and confused stories in which nobody can discern any cause or effect, any order or law, any symmetry or proportion or expressed idea. These are the novels which have been justified as a “slice of life” and which have brought into undeserved disrepute the frequently painstaking manner of their telling. The trouble is seldom primarily, as so many people think, with the material but with its presentation. You may take almost any material you like and so present it as to make it mean something; and you may also take almost any material you like and so present it as to make it mean nothing to anybody. A heap of bricks is meaningless; but the same bricks are intelligible expressed as a building of whatever sort, or merely as a sidewalk with zigzags, perhaps, of a varicolor.

The point we would make—and we might as well try to drive it home without further ineffectual attempts at illustration—is that you must do some patterning with your material, whether bricks for a building or lives for a story; but if you pattern too preciously your building will be contemptible and your story without a soul. In your building you must not be so decided as to leave no play for another’s imagination, contemplating the structure. In your narrative you must not be so dogmatic about two and two adding to four as to leave no room for a wild speculation that perhaps they came to five. For it is not the certainty that two and two have always made four but the possibility that some day they may make five that makes life worth living—and guessing about on the printed page.

11

Perhaps the most serious consequence of writing a novel is the revelation of yourself it inevitably entails.

We are not thinking, principally, of the discovery you will make of the size of your own soul. We have in mind the laying bare of yourself to others.

Of course you do reveal yourself to yourself when you write a book to reveal others to others. It has been supposed that a man cannot say or do a thing which does not expose his nature. This is nonsense; you do not expose your nature every time you take the subway, though a trip therein may very well be an index to your manners. The fact remains that no man ever made a book or a play or a song or a poem, with any command of the technique of his work, without in some measure giving himself away. Where this is not enough of an inducement some other, such as a tin whistle with every bound copy, is offered; no small addition as it enables the reviewer to declare, hand on heart, that “this story is not to be whistled down the wind.” Some have doubted Bernard Shaw’s Irishism, which seems the queerer as nearly everything he has written has carried a shillelagh concealed between the covers. Recently Frank K. Reilly of Chicago gave away one-cent pieces to advertise a book called Penny of Top Hill Trail. He might be said, and in fact he hereby is said, thus to have coppered his risk in publishing it.... All of which is likely to be mistaken for jesting. Let us therefore jest that we may be taken with utmost seriousness.

The revelation of yourself to yourself, which the mere act of writing a novel brings to pass, may naturally be either pleasant or unpleasant. Very likely it is unpleasant in a majority of instances, a condition which need not necessarily reflect upon our poor human nature. If we did not aspire so high for ourselves we should not suffer such awful disappointments on finding out where we actually get off. The only moral, if there is one, lies in our ridiculous aim. Imagine the sickening of heart with which Oscar Wilde contemplated himself after completing The Picture of Dorian Grey! And imagine the lift it must have given him to look within himself as he worked at The Ballad of Reading Gaol! The circumstances of life and even the actual conduct of a man are not necessarily here or there—or anywhere at all—in this intimate contemplation. There is one mirror before which we never pose. God made man in His own image. God made His own image and put it in every man.

It is there! Nothing in life transcends the wonder of the moment when, each for himself, we make this discovery. Then comes the struggle to remold ourselves nearer to our heart’s desire. It succeeds or it doesn’t; perhaps it succeeds only slightly; anyway we try for it. The sleeper, twisting and turning, dreaming and struggling, is the perfect likeness of ourselves in the waking hours of our whole earthly existence. Because they have seen this some have thought life no better than a nightmare. Voltaire suggested that the earth and all that dwelt thereon was only the bad dream of a god on some other planet. We would point out the bright side of this possibility: It presupposes the existence somewhere of a mince pie so delicious and so powerful as to evoke the likenesses of Cæsar and Samuel Gompers, giraffes, Mr. Taft, violets, Mr. Roosevelt, Piotr Ilitch Tchaikovski, Billy Sunday, Wu-Ting Fang, Helen of Troy and Mother Jones, groundhogs, H. G. Wells; perhaps Bolshevism is the last writhe. Mince pie, unwisely eaten instead of the dietetic nectar and ambrosia, may well explain the whole confused universe. And you and I—we can create another universe, equally exciting, by eating mince pie to-night!... You see there is a bright side to everything, for the mince pie is undoubtedly of a heavenly flavor.