Along with the author of “Winesburg, Ohio,” and “The Triumph of the Egg,” there are a host of other writers freshly reacting to life and honestly striving to embody their reactions into stories. It is strange to us, accustomed as we are to clever artificiality, it is even grotesque—this simplicity, naturalness, and daring, but it marks the birth of the American short story—that colorful short form which is destined to become the most perfect artistic expression of our national life. After all, to the true artist the public is no problem, it being composed primarily of himself alone. As Sherwood Anderson expressed it in another passage of the interview quoted above: “I would like a little to understand myself in this mixup, and I am writing with that end in view.” The curse of catering to the public has been a fallacy as great as that of our technique; we have assumed that fiction is made to order for a public, just as we have taught that technique comes first and story substance next. The great writers have all come before their public and have had to wait for the public to catch up with them, but if they hadn’t come first the public would never have caught up. We in America have always striven to give the public what it has wanted, but even in America the time is fast coming when the gracious public will be inquiring what stories our potent writers have to tell. But not until our writers realize fully that “The public is composed of numerous groups crying out: Console me, amuse me, sadden me, touch me, make me dream, laugh, shudder, weep, think. But the fine spirit says to the artist: Make something beautiful in the form that suits you, according to your personal temperament.”[33] This fine spirit is now becoming evident; it is working its way to the surface.
In this period of awakening, of the real birth of American literature, the genuine educator, always an open-minded student, can do no better than revaluate all his acceptances, all his hardened dogmas, all his hereditary literary and educational truths. If he is to help the confused multitude, baffled by a sudden consciousness of the phenomena of existence, to literary self-expression, he must first realize that no formulas are of any avail in the crises of life and therefore are of no avail in literature, the artistic emanation or transmutation of life. He must stimulate thought and independence of thought—even to the point of experimentation—for in such ways have all great contributions to the world’s cultural treasury been made. He must cultivate a genuine love of literature rather than of its usual incentive, the emoluments involved, whatever they be, and a critical appreciation of literary values. Thus he may become a positive force in the chariot of our literary progress—a leader, a driver, a discoverer.
CHAPTER IX
Effect
Self-flattery is indigenous to man. We like to flatter ourselves that our musings produce a desirable effect but we do not often know the complexion of this effect. What, for instance, shall it be in the case of serious-minded men and women interested in creating short stories and in the aspect of our literary field generally who have read sympathetically the preceding pages? If books are stimuli what shall this particular reaction be?
A few suggestions may not be amiss. They are in a measure a recapitulation of the thoughts expressed, but I like to think of them as formulated by my ideal reader as his more or less conscious artistic credo:
1. I believe that the short story is first of all a form of literature, not merely an article of manufacture.
2. Literature is a form of self-expression. I am a living entity, sensitive to the play and interplay of forces in and all about me. Life in the form of man, of institutions, of passions and ideas affects me and I would reproduce and interpret it. I would clarify it to myself; I would create for the love of creating, for the beauty of it, for the gratification of the creative urge within me.
3. I recognize no plots that are not derived from the life which I know, which is in and about me; nor any characters which are not derived from and tested by that life.
4. In all my work I have a desire to be truthful, rather than merely clever; simple rather than pretentious; natural rather than surprising. I would voice no thought nor emotion which is alien to my mind and temperament.
5. The genuineness of a view or an emotion is its justification. Truth and spontaneity are more to me than commercial artifice and success. There is no shame in failure except in so far as it implies a departure from standards of artistic honesty.