And friend slew friend not knowing whom he slew;
... and in the mist
Was many a noble deed, many a base,
And chance and craft...”?
Verily, such a “death-white” mist does envelop our literary battlefield, and, in the confusion, my profession, supported by the vast majority of editors and professional critics, is aiding the weak to conquer the strong. Blinded by the mist, we aid aspirants to rise to power by craft and cunning, and when they emerge to reign for a single day we crown them, thus contributing to the future nothing but the dust of our petty kings. Those who would reign for centuries are jeered at, discouraged, vanquished.
A dozen names leap to mind—pathetic examples of great talent forced to decay, of great sincerity diluted and polluted, of noble fires extinguished. But of all these names the two most pregnant with tragedy are those of Mark Twain and Jack London. The author of “Huckleberry Finn” and “Tom Sawyer,” deep, penetrating, cynical, was obliged to play the amusing clown until the end. The author of “The Call of the Wild” and “Martin Eden” until his dying breath continued to fill his lucrative contracts with popular claptrap. If no one in particular can be blamed, the sickly light shining upon our literary firmament must take responsibility. There are formative years when a writer’s talent matures, mellows, is molded. The attitude of the populace and, above all, of the oracles on the mountains and in the temples is eagerly watched and heeded. In the case of Jack London the influence of this attitude as a determining factor in the evolution of his career is a matter of record. One of the editors of The Seven Arts, a monthly magazine that was too lofty of purpose and too pure of policy to continue existence, once invited Jack London to submit any stories he might have that had failed of acceptance with the popular magazines because of lack of adaptation. London’s reply was that no such stories existed, and concluded with a statement that explains very ingenuously the melancholy disillusionment that pervades the best of his work. “I don’t mind telling you,” he wrote, “that had the United States been as kindly toward the short story writer as France has always been kindly, from the beginning of my writing career I would have written many a score of short stories quite different from the ones I have written.”[1]
It is clear, of course, to what particular brand of kindliness London had reference. For the United States is kindly toward the short story writer, very kindly indeed. It was kindly toward Jack London—but not in the way of helping him to bring forth the best that was in him. And this was his tragedy—and therein lies the unkindliness of the United States toward all its short story writers. It wanted none of the work of Jack London the man with a soul and genuine emotions which burned for expression; it remunerated lavishly Jack London the writer chap for his artificial concoctions that he despised. It made Joseph Hergesheimer wait fourteen years for the most moderate recognition while giving such a writer as H. C. Witwer almost instantaneous acclaim. It calls Ellis Parker Butler a great humorist and George Ade a mere fable writer. It proclaims O. Henry a prince of story writers and doesn’t even know that the unfortunate Ambrose Bierce once lived among us. And the vast majority of priests and oracles in my profession persist in justifying and perpetuating this kind unkindliness and in instructing the new generation according to its tenets. Example par excellence: Speaks an instructor in story writing in one of our leading universities, in a critical and biographical survey of our short story writers, of “Robert W. Chambers, imaginative artist,” and of Jack London, “at best a third-rate writer.”[2]
The sum and substance of all we preach may be summarized in the one commandment we zealously enforce above all others: “Thou shalt not write anything an editor won’t buy.” Then we analyze what editors do buy, arriving, by the process of induction, at rules and regulations, which we promptly proceed to incorporate into textbooks for the unlettered. Some of our rules are flexible, others are not, depending solely upon the attitude of their compiler. An editor of a prominent periodical once outlined the qualifications that recommended a literary offering to him. He had set up before him an ideal reader, an imaginary lady with a family of daughters up in Vermont, and any manuscript submitted to him had to answer satisfactorily this mighty query: “Would the old lady want her daughters to read this?” If this editor happened to write a textbook for the instruction of the would-be story writer, the old-lady-and-daughters question would undoubtedly figure quite prominently therein. I am not aware of any textbook on the subject by this gentleman, but other writers have had this question, or similar ones, in mind in evolving laws for the would-be successful.
I admit that I have taught people to answer these mighty queries, before permitting them to entrust their precious wares to the Post Office. For most editors have a question of some sort— Will it please some imaginary old man, or country girl, or young parson, or the editor’s own blue-eyed little girl, or, especially, his advertisers; and when a man or a woman pays hard-earned dollars for the information of how to “get by” the unfriendly editor, my professional ethics demand that I supply this information to the limits of my knowledge. Moreover, when a man or a woman hands in a story which has no earthly chance of being accepted by any magazine because it is burdened with a soul which violates every tradition and rule and policy by which magazines are governed, it becomes my duty to enlighten this student that his is not the way to “get by.” For even such a student—an exception, to be sure—has read our advertising literature, has studied the popular psychology of success, and often, like the other plodders, sincerely believes that a published story is a masterpiece, a rejected one worthless. If a story brings five dollars it is a poor one; if it brings fifty it is a good one; if it brings five hundred it is a work of art. Getting-by, then, becomes the supreme problem, and getting-by means having in mind the old lady with her daughters or the old man with the gout. And who can answer what becomes of poor Lafcadio Hearn’s queer idea that
“Literary success of any enduring kind is made only by refusing to do what publishers want, by refusing to write what the public want, by refusing to accept any popular standard, by refusing to write anything to order”?