For two years in succession a young woman came to my classes and each year she dropped out before the expiration of the term sending me a note of despair. She had traveled extensively through Europe and the Orient as well as through North and South America and she had accumulated a fund of experience to draw on for material. She tried hard to imprison it in story form but the finished product lacked thrill and suspense and airiness. She received nothing but the cold platitudes of printed rejection slips, while other students—as innocent of any knowledge of life as a fluffy ingénue capering through five reels of silent drama—who modeled their work along the lines of Popular Stories and the Jolly Book Magazine and the latest releases, and seasoned it with a generous dash of O. Henryism, occasionally displayed fair-sized checks. She worked away despondently and each succeeding story tended to prove that the text we were using and the current magazines we were studying were helping her but little. There was a heaviness, almost an eeriness, permeating her work, and yet it was a heaviness somewhat akin to that which permeates the work of Thomas Hardy. She admitted that most of the magazines we were studying bored her, that she preferred “Beyond the Horizon” and “John Ferguson” to “Irene” and “The Passing Show.” I advised her to write sombre tragedy, yes, morbid stuff. She produced a passably good story. It was rejected by the first magazine she sent it to with a personal letter expressing the editors’ regrets at their inability to accept such an interesting story, but they never purchased “depressing” material. Wouldn’t she be kind enough to let them see something else of her work, something in much lighter vein? She refused to try another market, insisting that she had known all along that she could not write. All the writers’ magazines she had read and even our own textbook declared most emphatically that “morbid” stories were not wanted. She discontinued her studies.
The next year she came back. “I can’t help writing,” she apologized. “I simply can’t resist the impulse to write. I don’t care if I don’t sell, I am going to write just for myself—whatever I like. I merely want you to see what I am doing.” A few months later she sold a tragic little tale to an unpopular little periodical. But she did not take advantage of this, her first success. Soon her work began to show labored flippancy and attempted ingenuity, and it looked ludicrously pathetic—a Hawthorne austerity with an H. C. Witwer lightness; the combination was irritably grotesque. Before the end of the year she dropped out again. And now she is back once more. Whether she will ever be able to cut away entirely from the cords of a moving-picture impulse only time can tell.
This case is a mild example of the struggle now waged with a sinister environment alien to all literary aspiration except for immediate gain by many lonely souls. Their resistance could be materially strengthened by sympathetic guidance. Contrary to the proverbial jibes of the cynics the literary aspirant is far from possessing an over-abundance of confidence. Intelligent persistence is a rare quality, not to be found among too many. The mediocre aspirant either soon deserts the ranks or begins to turn out salable wares. And the person with a genuine case of divine afflatus also either leaves the ranks with a curse in his heart or finally learns to turn out regulation material and becomes a cynic for life. Cynicism may be a much more admirable attitude than open-mouthed subservience, but it is not always conducive to sturdy accomplishment. Often it is a sense of surrender. And since missions seem to be such a popular necessity among our pedagogues and literary clergy, what could be a more worthy one than the saving of these lonely strugglers from life-long cynicism? But that requires, first of all, an intelligent and fearless weighing of the forces on either side and the rolling up of greater support on the side of the weaker. Truth and spontaneity are struggling against stifling commercialism and artifice; against a hostile environment resting complacently on old dilapidated dogmas, and chuckling contentedly with its moving-picture standards of life, art, and literature,—its moving-picture civilization.
CHAPTER V
Verboten
The field of the short story is first of all the field of the magazine. To be a successful story writer requires a comprehensive knowledge of the policies and preferences of the various periodicals that buy stories. It is natural to assume that literary agents, commercial critics, and teachers should be well aware of these editorial policies and preferences, and should make every effort to inspire the amateur with the respect and deference due such essential knowledge. We use this knowledge to stem any inclination to mischief. We hold it aloft, over the heads of the unmanageable ones, threatening them with failure, unless they become manageable. Thus we preserve the dignity of the profession and help stragglers on their weary pilgrimage to the golden calf.
For us the task is after all an easy one. It is but necessary to tabulate the good old taboos as to the content of our stories and then be-write and be-lecture them to make our words impressive. We do that in our teaching of photoplaywriting; we do it in the teaching of fiction-writing. But no one has ever seriously labeled the photoplay as it is finally produced on the screen as a form of literature, while our fiction undeniably is a form, if not the form, of our national literature. It behooves us, therefore, to bring forward all the pomp and pride and glory we are capable of and point out the peculiar characteristics that distinguish our fiction as a national product from the fiction of other nations. And we usually find it more advisable to do it by the negative method of pointing out what our fiction is not rather than by the positive method of pointing out what it is. Crystallizing the more-important undesirable and therefore absent elements in our fiction into single words, we can say that it is not pessimistic; that it is not lewd; that it is not irreverent; that it is not “red”; that it is not un-American.
This does not mean that our literature abstains from all discussion of the topics of pessimism, sex, religion, politics and economics, and Americanism. It is merely the extent to which they are discussed and the angle of discussion that elevate our fiction to a position of what passes for national expression. Like the vicious circle that governs photoplay scripts—adaptation of fiction stories being adapted in turn from the screen and re-adapted back again into scripts—our opinions on the phenomena of life are adaptations of the opinions imprisoned within covers of best sellers and our million-and-more-circulation magazines, only the circle is somewhat more complicated. Scripts are written to meet the prejudices of all moving-picture patrons; stories, to meet the needs of a particular type of reader. And this much must be said for our magazines: The variety of types has made possible whatever untrammelled literature we have. For after all there is a wide difference between the moral tone of Harper’s and the arch-sophistication of the Smart Set, or between the big-business glorification of the Saturday Evening Post and the New Success and the artistic quiet and rebelliousness of the Dial and the Little Review.
Whatever untrammelled literature we have, however, is little enough. The tone-givers, the guides, the molders are the magazines of power with public opinion and millions of dollars behind them, with unbreakable traditional prejudices and taboos. And so long as the humblest critic and the highest-paid institutional authority unite in upholding these traditional taboos as glittering marks of Americanism, public opinion will continue to demand a literature that is for the most part infantile, insipid and lifeless. The generations that rise to pound the typewriter keys in the production of stories are for the most part imbued with this negative conception of our literature and unquestionably the most dangerous instrument for the perpetuation of this degrading conception is the literary teaching profession. Again, in not a single textbook on story-writing have I been able to find an intelligent, fearless analysis of our national taboos and their effect of sterility upon our literature. I have found warnings and admonitions and scarecrows. “Thou shalt not!” is the sum and substance of our learned attitude on these mummifying influences. The vacillating feet of the aspirant are directed toward the proper, well-trodden roads at the very outset, and the punishment for straying is stressed to the point where it requires a superhuman courage to brave it.
1. Optimism
Our first dictate is “Thou shalt not be morbid!” Depressing stuff may be characteristic of the Russians, the Germans, the French, the Italians, the Scandinavians, but not of the Americans. Ours is a young country, a free country, a happy country, full of the joy of existence. Ours is a hopeful people, cheerful and gay and proud; glad to be alive. “People have all the gloom they want,” says the editor of The American Magazine in his “Fourteen Points” to contributors. “They manufacture it on their own premises. You cannot sell them gloom. What they want to buy is a cure for their gloom. They don’t want to buy more gloom.” And Dr. Frank Crane in his ever-buoyant style exclaims: “The Saturday Evening Post and The American Magazine have what I call ‘good literature.’”[18]