Short Story-Writing: An Art or a Trade?

by N. Bryllion Fagin

It is the possession of this individual angle upon the everlasting panorama of life and death which distinguishes the vital master from the flabby mechanic. We might call it philosophy of life, independence of mind, originality, idealism, or what not, in all cases it makes for substance—the thing by which a work of art lives.

No slight is intended on the value of form in literature. If the appropriate masterful form clothes this vital substance, so much the better, of course, but it is the substance that is the protoplasm. Form follows fads and fashions, and is decidedly mortal; substance alone illustrates the immutable law of the indestructibility of matter. With all their beautiful rhetoric and genial humor, the Spectator and Tatler papers of Addison and Steele are mildly entertaining dead matter today, but the tragedies and comedies of the Bard of Avon are as appealing today as three centuries ago, even though handicapped by a form no longer in vogue. Dostoyevsky’s novels, to take a more modern example, were written in a style as clumsy and uncouth as ever novels could be written in, but their burning pages sear the souls of men who read them. The gift of substance is in them—a fiery miracle, an Apocalypse.

The one supremely outstanding feature in our American fiction is its lack of substance. Some of us have the O. Henry style and some of us have the Henry James style and still others have the Washington Irving or the Poe style; some of us can plot and others can end a story with a flourish; some possess a dazzling vocabulary and others are genii of rhetoric—but how many have something sustaining to impart to a world drowning in platitudes? How much of worth has our fiction added to the world’s sum of comprehension of beauty, of truth? We have developed schools and systems of teaching and learning how to say things; we have bent every effort toward the evolving of a science of expression only to find that we have been too busy expressing to acquire what to express. American ethics has always been a point of national pride, but we have never applied it to the art of talking brilliantly when one has nothing to say. As George Macdonald once put it: “... If a man has nothing to communicate, there is no reason why he should have a good style, any more than why he should have a good purse without any money, or a good scabbard without any sword.”

Again, the acquisition of nobility of form is not to be discouraged, but the possession of something to tell the world is the sublimest of gifts, and gains the world’s everlasting gratitude; and the greatest seeming anomaly in the conditions under which American literature is produced is that this gift is not only rated at a discount but fought, vilified, grappled with. The only way the gift can be acquired, if it can, is through an insatiable interest in the stuff and forms of life; but such interest leads to inquiry and inquiry leads to heresy; venerable taboos are broken. The anomaly becomes a normal result of an inferior conception of the rights and functions of literature. Prejudices are placed above art; policies above truth; words above meanings.

Once, at a suffrage gathering, a young writer was introduced by a friend to a famous writer whose encouragement the beginner desired. At the end of the evening the friend asked the famous writer for his impressions of the budding genius. “I have not read any of his work,” the famous writer answered, “but I am afraid he has not the makings of a genius. The way he snubbed the poor girl I introduced him to merely because she is a salesgirl indicates that he lacks the voracious interest in the human element which marks the true artist. How is he ever going to talk Man when he doesn’t know Man?”

Voracious interest—that’s the path that leads to the gift of substance, to the “philosophy of life,” the original angle! Cæsar saw before he conquered. And he had to come a long way before he could see. But he wanted to see. And it is wanting to see that is the whip of genius. Dickens walked the streets of London for hours, through rain and fog and slush and shine, because he wanted to see it, all of it, every nook and corner of it. Balzac tramped the length and breadth of Paris, haunted parks and shops and drawing-rooms, because the human comedy appealed to him. The Russian Kuprin dressed himself in a diver’s suit and had himself lowered many fathoms into the Black Sea because he wanted to experience the sensations of a diver. And Jack London circled the globe because he wanted to see what it is like.

A little class-room episode comes to mind. In the poetry class Carl Sandburg came up for discussion. A few of his Chicago poems were read when a fair would-be poet spoke up in protest. “I have lived in Chicago all my life,” she said, “and have never seen the things Sandburg sees!” But there was another student in the room, a very unobtrusive little girl sitting somewhere in the back of the room, and she suddenly came to her instructor’s rescue. “That’s why you are not Sandburg!” she exclaimed....

The true artist is the perpetual explorer. He cannot invent the substance of his work, but he can discover it in the life of nature and his fellow-men. And the more he sees the more he learns to see, for to be able to see the new and unexplored in the old and elemental is the highest art in itself. A hunchback to a child in the streets is an object to throw stones at, to a Victor Hugo he is a grand, heroic figure, fierce and glorious in his pathetic grandeur. A typhoon to a Chinese fisherman represents the wrath of his god for the omission of a prayer or a sacrifice; to Joseph Conrad it symbolizes the majestic resentment of the Sea itself against man’s desecration of its peace and beauty and mystery. Only the American artist knows no symbols and is warned against attempting to know.

Our great cry has always been: “Acquire form!” Grammar, rhetoric, metrics, technique—these have been the indispensable tools of our writers. They still are. But having acquired them our writers find they can fashion nothing beautiful, nothing lasting, nothing that will weather the storms of time. For no tools, no matter how sharp or perfect, can accomplish the feat of fashioning something out of vacuum. The American story always has laid claims to style—but it hasn’t lived. Writers have come and had their vogue and gone. Even years back when style was more leisurely and rounded, when the badge of haste was not upon it, Charles Dudley Warner remarked: “We may be sure that any piece of literature which attracts only by some trick of style, however it may blaze up for a day and startle the world with its flash, lacks the element of endurance. We do not need much experience to tell us the difference between a lamp and a Roman candle.”

This remark can be elaborated on, explained, complemented. The truth is that there can be no style without substance. These elements are not separate entities; only superficially do they seem to be. How much sweetness can a “sweet nothing” contain? How much beauty can a work of “art” contain which has emptiness of thought and ugliness of conception? How much truth can be embedded in a fundamental falsehood? Every great poet has found the soul of his poem determining its form. Great style grows from within—it is an off-shoot of great substance. To the American writer this relationship has never been apparent; and most of our critics, professing a lofty æstheticism from the shadows of their academies, have never paid attention to it. Our literature cannot boast the possession of a single lucid outline of this vital relationship between form and substance such as the following from Remy de Gourmont’s “Le Probleme du Style.” I wonder how many authors of textbooks exhorting American would-be authors to learn the cabalistic lore of expression have ever read this: