Poor, poor indeed!
CHAPTER II
Action
The very first rule our textbooks endeavor to impress upon the would-be story writer is that action must dominate his story. Whole chapters are devoted to the importance of this ingredient, bringing quotations from sundry editors proving beyond the merest suspicion of a doubt that action is the life and health of a story, the “punch” and “pep” and “pull” of it. Then follow chapters on how to capture action; on how to introduce it into one’s own stories; on how to govern its course to the greatest advantage.
The editors quoted are, of course, all of the adventure and action type magazines. One is reputed to have stated his ideal beginning of a story to be something like this: “He got up and looked at his watch. It was twelve o’clock. He went up into the garret and hanged himself.” Another is said to like a more mystifying beginning, something like this: “Who was the lady in 43? Was she the blond man’s wife, sister or sweetheart? John couldn’t sleep nights trying to find out.” And still another gives his preferences, in the form of an announcement of a contest widely advertised in professional magazines, for stories of “plot, of action, of interesting complication. Spend the sweat of your brow on deeds, not on acute character analysis; on big situations, on suspense and appeal, not in tedious description and fine writing.”
The few editors who express preferences that conflict with this cry for action are not quoted. Here is one, for instance, who likes “realistic and psychological stories from writers who want to do for American life what Chekhov did for Russian life. ‘Plot’ fiction of the type desired by popular magazines is not wanted.” But, then, there is the implication that his is not a popular magazine, and besides, he goes on to say that “our rates for fiction are very modest.” And here is another editor who wants stories “that are characterized more by feeling and artistry than by ‘punch.’” But who is she, for it is a she in this instance, to tell us what is wanted! Why, the circulation of her little periodical is so insignificant that she is hardly justified in having any wants at all! The fact that this little publication publishes some of the most distinctive stories written in America today does not count, of course. It is not a widely-read magazine; it does not pay for contributions;—it deserves no attention.
Plainly, our duty as instructors and moulders of the new generation of story writers is to base our instruction on the needs and preferences of the fiction periodicals having the largest circulations and able to pay well for material used. The inculcation of literary ideals, the stimulation of original talent and the enriching of our national letters are all excellent themes for papers to be read before high-brow clubs and respectable societies, but as practical propositions, in a practical world, they do not lead anywhere. Any one who joins a class to take up story-writing as a profession wants to sell—and as quickly as possible. And the story that sells today the quickest and brings the fattest check is the story of action. Hence our first rule: “Spend the sweat of your brow on deeds!”
It is true that there do creep up some unpleasant contradictions in our methods. After laying down the law of action we refer students to Edgar Allan Poe or Robert Louis Stevenson or Maupassant for perfect short-story models, and they come back to us in a state of perplexity. They have picked up Poe and some garrulous old critic, in a superfluous introduction, had pronounced “The Fall of the House of Usher” to be Poe’s best tale. They have picked up Stevenson, and some equally old-fashioned pedant had classed “Markheim” as a masterpiece. They have picked up Maupassant, and, again, some ancient scholar had lifted “Solitude” to a pre-eminent position. Yet not one of these three stories is particularly conspicuous for action. Poe seems to have spent the sweat of his brow in creating an atmosphere of extreme morbidity (oh, terror-striking word in our optimistic texts!); Stevenson, on acute character analysis; and the insane Frenchman on some irrelevant prattlings about solitude and the whys and wherefores of this queer life of ours.
Occasionally some student with sufficient courage to voice his perplexity timidly inquires: “Would any magazine accept such stories today? There is so little action and still less optimism in them!” I think of all the stories I have read in recent periodicals that I can remember and am obliged to admit that few present-day magazines would be tempted to accept a story of the type on which the masters chose to lavish their best work. I think this estimate conservative, but soon the various anthologies of the best short stories that have appeared in our magazines in the last half dozen years leap into my mind and protest against my harsh verdict. Some sort of a change really has come over our fiction recently. Fully twenty-five per cent. of the stories in Mr. O’Brien’s yearly collection, for instance, are decidedly not of the “rapid action” type, and more than seventy-five per cent. of the stories in such an anthology as that compiled by the late William Dean Howells would not stand the “action” test, although the latter anthology is not a very exact reflector of modern tendencies since but few living writers are represented.
So it becomes necessary to explain the discrepancy between the type of story we teach our students to produce and the type of story we refer them to for study purposes. It becomes necessary to emphasize the fact that such periodicals as “The Little Review,” “Midland,” “The Pagan” (discontinued), “The Stratford Journal” (temporarily suspended), “The Wave,” and a few others of the “unpopular” group do not pay for contributions and that the few “leaders” or “giants” in the group pay but little, and that, therefore, few “respectable” writers contribute to them. Of the youngsters that do make their way to the top, once in a great while, through the medium of these high-brow little magazines one or two may ever hope to get into the “Big Four” or similar high-prestiged and well-paying periodicals. So that while it may be flattering to receive the pale encomiums of a few snobbish critics, the safest way is to write “real” stories full of red-blooded action and reap a golden harvest. Let those who do not care for the riches of a material world be satisfied with the deluge of praise poured upon a Sherwood Anderson; as for most, Holworthy Hall or Octavus Roy Cohen seems a more inviting model.
And if this does not really explain the uncanny discrepancy in our texts and they still seem somewhat confused and more than a bit contradictory, we can, as a last resort, have recourse to that eloquent dictum: Laws should be studied to be broken! And we suddenly acquire the becoming halo of iconoclasts and have at last a satisfactory explanation of why our students should read Poe and Maupassant and Stevenson, yet not model their own work along the best of these masters; why they should study our anthologies full of such “anemic” stories as those of Dreiser, Anderson, Cabell, Waldo Frank, Ben Hecht, Djuna Barnes, and even those of Susan Glaspell and Alice Brown, yet not write in similar vein but should emulate rather writers whose names never appear in anthologies.