Why Authors Go Wrong, and Other Explanations

by Grant M. Overton

We were saying, when sidetracked by the necessity of explaining the universe, that the self-revelation which writing a book entails is in most cases depressing, but not by any means always so. Boswell was not much of a man judged by the standards of his own day or ours, either one, yet Boswell knew himself better than he knew Dr. Johnson by the time he had finished his life of the Doctor. It must have bucked him up immensely to know that he was at least big enough himself to measure a bigger man up and down, in and out, criss-cross and sideways, setting down the complicated result without any error that the human intelligence can detect. It must have appeased the ironical soul of Henry Adams to realise that he was one of the very few men who had never fooled himself about himself, and that evidence of his phenomenal achievement in the shape of the book The Education of Henry Adams, would survive him after his death—or at least, after the difficulties of communicating with those on earth had noticeably increased (we make this wise modification lest someone match Sir Oliver Lodge’s Raymond, or Life After Death with a volume called Henry, or Re-Education After Death).

It must have sent a thrill of pleasure through the by no means insensitive frame of Joseph Conrad when he discovered, on completing Nostromo, that he had a profounder insight into the economic bases of modern social and political affairs than nine-tenths of the professional economists and sociologists—plus a knowledge of the human heart that they have never dreamed worth while. For Conrad saw clearly, and so saw simply; the “silver of the mine” of this, his greatest story, was, it is true, an incorruptible metal, but it could and did alter the corruptible nature of man—and would continue to do so through generation after generation long after his Mediterranean sailor-hero had become dust.

Even in the case of the humble and unknown writer whose completed manuscript, after many tedious journeys, comes home to him at last, to be re-read regretfully but with an undying belief not so much in the work itself as in what it was meant to express and so evidently failed to—even in his case the great consolation is the attestation of a creed. Very bad men have died, as does the artist in Shaw’s The Doctor’s Dilemma, voicing with clarity and beauty the belief in which they think they have lived or ought to have lived; but a piece of work is always an actual living of some part of the creed that is in you. It may be a failure but it has, with all its faults, a gallant quality, the quality of the deed done, which men have always admired, and because of which they have invented those things we call words to embody their praise.

But what of the consequences of revealing yourself to others? Writing a novel will surely mean that you will incur them. We must speak of them briefly; and then we may get on to the thing for which you are doubtless waiting with terrible patience—the way to write the novel itself. Never fear! If you will but endure steadfastly you shall Know All.

12

“Certainly, publish everything,” commented the New York Times editorially upon a proposal to give out earnings, or some other detail, of private businesses. “All privacy is scandalous,” added the newspaper. In this satirical utterance lies the ultimate justification for writing a novel.

All privacy is scandalous. If you don’t believe it, read some of the prose of James Joyce. A Portrait of The Artist As a Young Man will do for a starter. Ulysses is a follow-up. H. G. Wells likes the first, while deploring so much sewerage in the open street. You see, nothing but a sincere conviction concerning the wickedness of leaving anything at all unmentioned in public could justify such narratives as Mr. Joyce’s.

In a less repulsive sense, the scandal of privacy is what underlies any novel of what we generally call the “realistic” sort. Mr. Dreiser, for instance, thinks it scandalous that we should not know and publicly proclaim the true nature of such men as Hurstwood in his Sister Carrie. Mr. Hardy thinks it scandalous that the world should not publicly acknowledge the purity of Tess Durbeyfield and therefore he gives us a book in which she is, as the subtitle says, “faithfully presented.” Gene Stratton-Porter thinks it scandalous not to tell the truth about such a boy as Freckles. The much-experienced Mr. Tarkington, stirred to his marrow by what seems almost a world conspiracy to condone the insufferable conceit of the George Amberson Minafers among us, writes The Magnificent Ambersons to make us confess how we hate ’em—and how our instinctive faith in them is vindicated at last.

Every novelist who gains a public of any size or permanence deliberately, and even joyfully, faces the consequences of the revelation of himself to some thousands of his fellow-creatures. We don’t mean that he always delineates himself in the person of a character, or several characters, in his stories. He may do that, of course, but the self-exposure is generally much more merciless. The novelist can withhold from the character which, more or less, stands for himself his baser qualities. What he cannot withhold from the reader is his own mind’s limitations.

A novel is bounded by the author’s horizons. If a man can see only so far and only so deep his book will show it. If he cannot look abroad, but can perceive nothing beyond the nose on his face, that fact will be fully apparent to his co-spectators who turn the pages of his story. If he can see only certain colors those who look on with him will be aware of his defect. Above all, if he can see persons as all bad or all good, all black or all white, he will be hanged in effigy along with the puppets he has put on paper.