We have said that to tell his own truth the American writer will have to sit longer before his subject and will have more to do to express it, than if he chose it from a country of more ancient practices in art, and of longer ancestral sojourns. We have said that he will be urged not to tell his own truth considerably more than an English or German or French writer would be. These authors are at least not advised to imitate American expression, and they live in countries where the habit of copying the work of other artists is much less widely regarded as an evidence of sophistication than it is here.
The American writer must also face a marked historical peculiarity of our national letters. The publishing centres of England and of Germany and of France are in the midst of these nations. Outside the daily press, the greater part of the publishing business of our own country is in New York—situated in the northeast corner, nearly a continent away from many of our national interests and from many millions of our population. By an odd coincidence, outside the daily press, the field of our national letters in magazine and book publication seems to be occupied not at all with individual impressions of truth from over the whole country, but with what may be called the New York truth.
The young American author in the Klondike or in San Francisco who desires to sit long before his subject and to reveal its hitherto unrecorded aspect must do so with the clear knowledge that the field of publication for him in the East is already filled by our old friend the New York Klondike, scarcely changed by the disappearance of one dog or sweater from the early days of the gold discoveries; and that no earthquake has shaken the New York San Francisco.
Of course we know, because she almost annually reassures the country on these points, that New York instantly welcomes all original and fresh writing arising from the remotest borders of the nation; and that in all these matters she is not and never possibly could be dull. Yet one can understand how the Klondike author, interested, as Mr. Galsworthy advises, in seeing an object in “the way that he alone can see it” and “with the part of him which makes him This man and not That,” might feel a trifle dashed by New York’s way of showing her love of originality in spending nearly all the money and energy her publishers and reviewers have in advertising and in praising authors as the sixteenth Kipling of the Klondike or the thirtieth O. Henry, of California. This is apt to be bewildering, too, for the readers of Mr. Kipling and O. Henry, who have enjoyed in the tales of each of these men the truth told “with the part of him which makes him This man and not That.” It is possible to understand, too, how the young author in San Francisco may feel that since New York’s consciousness of his city has remained virtually untouched for eight years by the greatest cataclysm of nature on our continent, perhaps she overrates the extreme swiftness and sensitiveness of her reaction to novel impression from without; and might conceivably not hear a story of heretofore unexpressed aspects of San Francisco told by the truthful voice of one young writer.
These are some of my own guesses as to why individual impressions of our national life are few and why they are not greatly in vogue in America. Whether they be poor or good guesses they represent one Middle Western reader’s observation of some of the actual difficulties that will have to be faced in America by the writer who by temperament desires to follow that golden and beautiful way of Flaubert’s, which Mr. Galsworthy has mentioned.
This writer will doubtless get from these difficulties far more fun than he ever could have had without them. They are suggested here in the pages of The Little Review, not at all with the idea of discouraging a single traveler from setting out on that splendid road, but rather as a step towards the beginning of that true and long comradeship with effort that is worth befriending which our felicitous English well-wisher hopes may be The Little Review’s abiding purpose.
“Henceforth I ask not Good Fortune: I, myself, am Good Fortune.”
Impression
George Soule
Her life was late a new-built house—