It is to the interest of these same all-powerful advertisers to see that no aspersions be cast in our magazine fiction upon the inalienable rights and dignities of Business and that no dangerous views be expressed which might sway a vigilantly guarded public mind in undesirable directions. Existing social and political institutions may be defended in our fiction but not attacked or criticized; their merits may be extolled, but their demerits must not be betrayed to an innocent world. Private property is sacred; the State is always right—except when it attempts to interfere with Property; then a thinly veiled story decrying this interference as autocratic, tyrannous and un-American might get by and bring a fair price. Progress is a generality that affects us but little; the laws of change are suspended when applied to our literary reactions to our social life. Other nations may develop new schools of fictionists, young, virile, boldly speaking their minds on the moot problems of the day. We have no room for such impudence. Our literature is “pure,” level-headed, conservative. Some isolated muck-rakers appear here and there, but we give them no outlet for their muck-raking, and they must either reform or perish or, at best, when we are helpless to prevent it, get a measure of barren notoriety.
An army officer, an advanced student, once handed in a splendidly written story of army life, in which he gave a graphic portrayal of court-martial proceedings. The apathy and criminal nonchalance with which helpless boys were sentenced to long-term imprisonment, in the name of discipline, was so artistically woven into a thrilling plot that it made interesting reading even to the most avid fiction devotees. Yet the story had gone the rounds of nearly all the paying magazines without finding a market. A few friendly editors wrote the author personal letters, one editor going so far as to express his appreciation of the work, but admitting that the story was deemed “unavailable because it does not meet with the policy of this publication.” I supplied the discouraged author with a list of unconventional publications—for fortunately we do have a fighting number of them with us—that might welcome his story but could afford to pay either very little or not at all. He refused to waste his work on the “freaks,” and wanted to know if he could not revise the story to make it salable to a standard magazine. I told him that elimination of all incidents reflecting unfavorably upon the administration of law in our army would undoubtedly help. He protested that the incidents had been taken from life and held out for a while, but finally he succumbed to his intense desire to “get in.” The story was revised and made perfectly harmless—“sweet” and happy; it sold on its first trip. The officer has never again attempted to use life as a basis for fiction—indiscriminately. It was his first altercation with policies—and probably his last. It requires greater powers than he was blessed with to put up a more valiant resistance.
It is a sad comment on education that under existing circumstances, instructors of writers are obliged to help undermine this natural resistance a few rebellious spirits occasionally display. One whose entire stock in trade is a knowledge of markets and policies and an ability to expound existing standards is not in a very advantageous position to encourage disregard of immutable taboos. We must say, on reading a story which is off-standard, that it won’t sell, and why. We must formulate and enforce the rules that make for “success” in fiction writing. We must be vestals of the sacred fires. I am aware that “vestals” is not exactly the right word one should use in this connection; perhaps another word connoting less virtue would be more apt. But, after all, most of us are honest, and zealously believe that the fires are sacred and must not be allowed to go out or be polluted. Vision? Well,—aren’t the blind happy?
5. Americanism
As applied to our literature the term American has come to mean everything and anything. It compliments the mediocre twaddle of mediocre minds. To earn the compliment a story must be neither sad nor “fresh” nor irreverent nor “red.” It must not be burdened with too much thought or sincere emotion. It must have no glimmer of an original idea. It must “kiss the hand that feeds it,”—which means in this case that it must breathe a sweet humility to all our institutions, from the First Law of the land to the American Legion and Babe Ruth. It must be “glad to be alive and carry on”—everything that is old and respectable and decrepit and green with mold.
Let a piece of literary art reflect an unhackneyed thought, let it break any one of our ancient taboos, let it dare to belittle any one of our glorified generalities and dogmas—and it is promptly howled down as un-American. The literature of every other country on earth affords an interpretative and critical view of the psychology of the national mind it reflects, while American literature is least reflective of the American national mind, except in one particular: its cringing fear of the truth. Were it not for this fear to face the truth, and the inability of the average American to stand criticism, the great bulk of our “literature” would find no buyers and its content would undergo a radical change. It is this national trait that has given rise to the sublime injunction, “Don’t knock!” We may have heard of Matthew Arnold, but surely never of his heretic doctrine that literature is a criticism of life. To us literature is largely a matter of so many words at so much per word, or so many hugs and kisses and careers attained per magazine page.
Is it to be wondered at that with us we have the interminable problem: What shall we write about? With one of the largest countries in the world in which to live; with over one hundred millions of people living and working and battling and dreaming all about us; with a multitude of perplexing problems, international, national, municipal, class, clan, and individual, clamoring for solution; with a rich, ever-shifting panorama of a young, virile, national existence before us; with a million comedies and a million tragedies avidly looking at our typewriter keys—with all this to be had for the taking, isn’t it pathetically absurd that we must voyage the seven seas and scour all the corners of the earth in search of material? Open any magazine any month and note the proportion of stories located in far, out-of-the-way places. Even our best writers are following this romantic bent. Twenty-five per cent. of the stories contained in O’Brien’s “Year-book” for 1919 had a foreign setting; his “Year-book” for 1920 contained over thirty per cent. of stories with foreign settings—mostly exotic and bizarre. No serious objections could be taken to transcribing the life of foreign places, if we had first become aware of our own. But we have not. We hunt for foreign material simply because we are afraid to sift our own. We are only now beginning to realize that our young continent—this huge, crude meltingpot—is filled with brass and copper and gold, and that these metals are melting and fusing into some homogeneous substance, which we vaguely term America. We want this burst of consciousness to grow and sweep us along to great revelations, but a false pride and obsolete traditions and hypocritical dogmas are blocking the way. Parrot-like we shout from pulpit and rostrum and cathedra the old banality: “Boost! All the world loves a booster!” And because we like to be loved we dare not touch upon the wounds of life—the hunger, the passions, the buffets, the defeats that purge its sordidness, gild its drabness, and actuate us to nobler aspirations.
We pride ourselves that we have developed the short story to perfection. It has become our national form of literary expression. It has reached an unparalleled vogue. But, in truth, if we are entitled to pride, it is on account of our remarkable achievement of an ability to tell an entertaining tale without telling anything worth while. Paradoxically, we squeeze amusement out of nothing. We have attained an excellence of workmanship without the least depth of substance. But I am anticipating. This phase of the subject is so important that it deserves a chapter for itself, which it will receive later on. The real perfection of our short story is yet to come. The signs are that it is having its birth pangs at this time. Writers of rich promise have come to the fore recently—and here and there a magazine, either new or an old one with a new policy, to receive their product. Our perfected short story will be bold, fearless, vital; beating with the vigorous pulse of a giant nation stretching its limbs. It will be truly American—optimistic, with the rugged optimism of a Walt Whitman; brave, with the courage of an impetuous youth; rich, with the colors of a fertile soil and a blending humanity. Perhaps our short story is to fulfill the hopes H. G. Wells once had for the novel:
“The novel,” he wrote in An Englishman Looks at the World, “is to be the social mediator, the vehicle of understanding ... the criticism of laws and institutions and of social dogmas and ideas.... We are going to write ... about the whole of human life. We are going to deal with political questions and religious questions and social questions ... until a thousand pretenses and ten thousand impostures shrivel in the cold clear air of our elucidations.... Before we have done we will have all life within the scope of the novel.”
A lofty assignment, this, for a form of literature that is rooted, as our short story always has been, in the precept that to be interesting it must eschew reality. But we can carry it out—and will. Our pioneers are already on the trail—weak as yet, not a full-grown Chekhov among them—but gaining in hardihood, and singing. The hordes behind them are waiting in safety; let the trail become a bit smoother, the hardships lessened, and they will follow. In the meantime who that is filled with that eternally human envious admiration for pluck can keep back his “Good cheer!” and “Godspeed!”?