Frank Norris, who taught me something new about my country, had set out deliberately to do that very thing. He explained his ideas in a book, “The Responsibilities of the Novelist”; and I might, if I wanted to take the time, play a trick upon you, by quoting sentences from his book, mixed in with sentences from my book, and you could not tell the difference. For example, who is it that says: “No art that is not in the end understood by the People can live or ever did live a single generation”? Who says: “It is the complaint of the coward, this cry against the novel with a purpose”? Who says: “The muse is a teacher, not a trickster”? Who says: “Truth in fiction is just as real and just as important as truth anywhere else”? It is Frank Norris who says all these things.
He goes on to point out that the pulpit reaches us only on Sundays, and the newspaper is quickly forgotten, but the novel stays with us all the time. And yet, facing this responsibility, there are novelists who admit that they write for money, and “you and I and the rest of us do not consider this disreputable!” Norris goes on to voice his own attitude toward his work: “I never truckled; I never took off the hat to Fashion and held it out for pennies. By God, I told them the truth. They liked it or they didn’t like it. What had that to do with me? I told them the truth.”
He qualifies his doctrine by the statement that the novelist must not let his purpose run away with his story. I have an idea he must have let publishers and critics persuade him he had done that in “The Octopus”; for in “The Pit,” the second volume of his proposed trilogy, he is more tame and conventional. He tries to interest us in a grain broker and his wife as human beings—and he cannot do that, because parasites are not and cannot be interesting, except in satire after the fashion of “Babbitt.” We miss the epic sweep and bigness of “The Octopus,” and we are not consoled by the fact that “The Pit” had twice the sale.
The relationship between the novelist’s purpose and his story is very simple; the two things are one, and of equal importance, and the novelist must have them both in hand at every moment of his work. The consequence of losing either is equally fatal. The novelist who loses his grip upon the story and the characters who are living the story, begins at once to write a tract or a sermon—I know all about that, having done it. But equally fatal it is to lose your grip upon your purpose; for then you are doing meaningless reporting, and becoming a camera instead of a creative intellect.
I am prepared to hear it said many times that the author of this book does not know the difference between a tract or sermon and a work of art. But those who read the book, not to get material for ridicule, but to learn the truth about art, will note that I have praised in this book only the artists who were big enough and strong enough to keep both their imaginative impulse and their intellectual control; I have failed to mention a goodly company of artists who fought valiantly for freedom and justice, but who do not belong among the greatest, for precisely the reason that their impulse to teach and to preach ran away with their inspiration. That is why you miss such names as Plato and Sir Thomas More and Ferdinand Lassalle and Bertha von Suttner and John Ruskin and Walter Besant and Charles Kingsley and Charles Reade and Robert Buchanan and John Davidson and Richard Whiteing and Francis Adams and Harriet Beecher Stowe and Edward Bellamy.
CHAPTER CVI
THE OLD-FASHIONED AMERICAN
David Graham Phillips affords an interesting illustration of the power of bourgeois criticism to suppress and abolish those writers who threaten its ideology. He was by all odds the greatest novelist of the period in which he wrote, a sturdy and vigorous personality, who looked at the world about him with his own eyes and really had something to say. He was worth a dozen of the imitation novelists who were acclaimed as great during the first ten years of the century. But Phillips was a “muck-rake man,” a prophet and a satirist; therefore the critics patronized him, and since his death they have forgotten him. No biography has been published, and a new generation will have to make the discovery that he wrote the biggest piece of American fiction of his time.
Phillips was eleven years older than myself, but we arrived upon the literary scene together, and I used to meet him now and then in New York. I have an idea that I annoyed him; he was generous in praising my books, but that did not satisfy me—I wanted to make a Socialist out of him, and he would not have it! He was the genuine old-fashioned American, the wearer of square-toed shoes and a string tie. I do not mean that I ever saw him in that costume, but that his view of human society was derived from that period. He came from the Middle West, and believed in the simple, small-town democracy he had there known. A man of common sense, he hated all forms of social pretense and finickyness. Like a good American, he respected money and the power of money, but he wanted the people who had this power to behave like sensible human beings, and he was infuriated because they took to putting on “side,” getting English butlers and five footmen in livery.
He blamed this especially on the women. He loathed the modern parasitic female, to the extent of some twenty volumes, exposing every aspect of her foolishness and empty-headedness. She it was who dragged men to ruin, she caused the corruption of government and a general riot of greed, in order that she might have silk stockings and jewels and servants. She had spurned the jobs of cooking and sewing and making home, without ever having taken the trouble to learn to do these efficiently. Now she couldn’t do even her foolish society job; she couldn’t run a rich man’s household and be an intelligent companion, she couldn’t bear healthy children, or raise them to be anything but shirkers.
Proper people were shocked by Phillips because he talked so plainly, and fastidious people considered him coarse. As a matter of fact, he was a man of tender heart and true refinement, who put on an aspect of rough common sense as a matter of principle. Cut out all this nonsense, he seems to say to his readers; you know we all want money, we all like comfort, we are all selfish creatures; you women especially are making silly pretenses, you know you have to be kept, and you prefer a man who is self-willed and masterful, a fighting man. So he recorded “The Fashionable Adventures of Joshua Craig,” and irritated many fine ladies. So in “Old Wives for New” he preaches the common sense idea, that if a woman is lazy and sluttish and refuses to work at her job as wife, her husband is justified in getting rid of her and marrying a young and attractive woman. In “The Hungry Heart” he deals with the eternal triangle, and shows a husband forgiving an erring wife—which you would think was good Christian doctrine, but which is contrary to fancy notions of sexual implacability. In “The Husband’s Story” he portrays a wife who marries a man because she believes he will succeed; she helps him to succeed, and they rise high, but finding that the higher they get, the less interest there is in life.