WHAT SHALL
WE DO
WITH IT?
Edwards wrote only one serial story during 1910, and turned his hand to that merely to bring up the financial returns and leave a safe margin for expenses. Nickel novels, a few short stories, a novelette for The Blue Book and the lengthening of two stories for paper-book publication comprised the year's work. He "soldiered" a little, but when a writer "soldiers" he is not necessarily idle. Edwards' thoughts were busy, and the burden of his reflections was this: Heaven had endowed him with a small gift of plot and counter-plot, and a little art for getting it into commercial form; but were his meager talents producing for him all that they should? Was the purely commercial aim, although held to with a strong sense of moral responsibility, the correct aim? After a score of years of hard work did he find himself progressing in any but a financial direction? Forgetting the past and facing the future with eyes fixed at a higher angle, how was he to proceed with his "little gift of words?" What should he do with it?
In the bright summer afternoons Edwards would walk out of his Fiction Factory and make a survey of it from various points. He was always so close to his work that he lost the true perspective. He was familiar with the minutiae, the thousand and one little details that went to make up the whole, but how did it look in the "all-together," stripped of sentiment and beheld in its three dimensions?
Paradoxically, the work appeared too commercial in some of its aspects, and not commercial enough in others. The sordid values were due to the demand which came to Edwards constantly and unsolicited, and which it was his unvarying policy always to meet. "All's fish that comes to the writer's net" was a saying of Edwards' that had cozzened his judgment. He was giving his best to work whose very nature kept him to a dead level of mediocrity. And within the last few years he had become unpleasantly aware that at least one editor believed him incapable of better things. This was largely Edwards' fault. Orders for material along the same old lines poured in upon him and he hesitated to break away from them and try out his literary wings.
Years before he had faced a similar question. The same principal of breaking away from something that was reasonably sure and regular for something else not so sure but which glowed with brighter possibilities, was involved. Vaguely he felt the call. He was forty-four, and had left behind him twenty-odd years of hard and conscientious effort. As he was getting on in years so should he be getting on with some of his dreams, before the light failed and the Fiction Factory grew dark and all dreaming and doing were at an end.
One evening in Christmas week, 1910, he mentioned his aspirations to a noted editor with whom he happened to be at dinner. The book that was to bring fame and fortune, the book Edwards had always been going to write but had never been able to find the time, was under discussion. "Write it," advised the noted one, "but not under your own name."
Edwards fell silent. What was there in the work he had done which made it impossible to put "John Milton Edwards" on the title page of his most ambitious effort? Were the nickel novels and the popular paper-backs to rise in judgment against him? He could not think so then, and he does not think so now.
"Why don't you write up your experiences as an author?" inquired the editor a few moments later. "You want to be helpful, eh? Well, there's your chance. Writers would not be the only ones to welcome such a book, and if you did it fairly well it ought to make a hit."
This suggestion Edwards adopted. Having the courage of convictions directly opposed to the noted editor's, the other one he will not accept.
The reflections of 1910 began to bear fruit in 1911. With the beginning of the present year Edwards gave up the five-cent fiction, not because—as already stated in a previous chapter—he considered it debasing to his "art," but because he needed time for the working out of a few of his dreams.