I never had a chance to study anything deeply. To pass any of my nautical exams I was simply crammed with rules and never learned the roots. So far as I remember, of any studies I suffered at school, what we called plain ordinary "sums" gave me as hard a hammering as anything. I never could learn to do more than add and subtract and blunder through division. Salt hoss and hardtack and rope-ends constituted my curriculum after the age of fourteen and a half.
Sometimes an author's mere phrase will give me a clear picture, but not often. I can't recall a writer of recent date who can do that for me.
I have a fresh vision, usually, for each picture I form myself, except where I am using a character or a scene over and over again, as in a series. I mean, I don't see any building as a mere pattern, nor any man as a type altogether.
Oh, yes! My own imagination works like a pre-war non-union artisan when I am writing: smoothly, without strikes, and never kicking at a bit of overtime. When reading, unless the stuff grips extra hard, the imagination is like one of the post-war scum who never work except to fight up to the pay window, then strike till next pay-day.
No, I don't think so. Perhaps I ought.
Louis Dodge: When I read a story I consider it an excellent or a poor story just in proportion as I see it and realize it—and all the characters—clearly, as if I were participating in it. I like swift strokes which make things vivid and real. For example, in The Master of Ballantrae, Stevenson, wishing to indicate the deterioration of a man's character, pictures him as he walks with his little son. "Mackellar" is speaking: "It was pretty to see the pair returning, full of briers, and the father as flushed and sometimes as bemuddied as the child; for they were equal sharers in all sorts of boyish entertainment, digging in the beach, damming of streams, and what not; and I have seen them gaze through a fence at cattle with the same childish contemplation." That last phrase (the italics are mine)—does it leave anything invisible? The real masters do make me see colors and smell odors and feel beaten down by forces. When I was a boy I took the writer's word for it; but now he has to show me. That, perhaps, is the test of a "rattling" story—that it shows us instead of telling us.
I can see things clearly with my eyes shut, but only the major colors appear; the blue of the sea and sky, the red and black of fire and smoke, the green of grass. When I see human faces I see only expressions. I can now see the face of "Barnaby Rudge's" mother, with the expression of mysterious and hidden terror in it.
Solid geometry was easier to me than plane geometry—perhaps because it came afterward, perhaps because the additional dimension made the thing more tangible.
I don't like stock figures; yet I confess that when I think of school-masters I think of dear old Professor Lane of Quitman College, a bent old man with calm dark eyes and a meek manner and an iron-gray mustache; and when I think of western sheriffs I always think of Bob Dowe of Maverick County, Texas, who spoke softly and "went and got 'em." I try not to use stock figures.
I would rather write stories than read them. Making a story is my own adventure; reading one is following another man.