The field of the short story is first of all the field of the magazine. To be a successful story writer requires a comprehensive knowledge of the policies and preferences of the various periodicals that buy stories. It is natural to assume that literary agents, commercial critics, and teachers should be well aware of these editorial policies and preferences, and should make every effort to inspire the amateur with the respect and deference due such essential knowledge. We use this knowledge to stem any inclination to mischief. We hold it aloft, over the heads of the unmanageable ones, threatening them with failure, unless they become manageable. Thus we preserve the dignity of the profession and help stragglers on their weary pilgrimage to the golden calf.
For us the task is after all an easy one. It is but necessary to tabulate the good old taboos as to the content of our stories and then be-write and be-lecture them to make our words impressive. We do that in our teaching of photoplaywriting; we do it in the teaching of fiction-writing. But no one has ever seriously labeled the photoplay as it is finally produced on the screen as a form of literature, while our fiction undeniably is a form, if not the form, of our national literature. It behooves us, therefore, to bring forward all the pomp and pride and glory we are capable of and point out the peculiar characteristics that distinguish our fiction as a national product from the fiction of other nations. And we usually find it more advisable to do it by the negative method of pointing out what our fiction is not rather than by the positive method of pointing out what it is. Crystallizing the more-important undesirable and therefore absent elements in our fiction into single words, we can say that it is not pessimistic; that it is not lewd; that it is not irreverent; that it is not “red”; that it is not un-American.
This does not mean that our literature abstains from all discussion of the topics of pessimism, sex, religion, politics and economics, and Americanism. It is merely the extent to which they are discussed and the angle of discussion that elevate our fiction to a position of what passes for national expression. Like the vicious circle that governs photoplay scripts—adaptation of fiction stories being adapted in turn from the screen and re-adapted back again into scripts—our opinions on the phenomena of life are adaptations of the opinions imprisoned within covers of best sellers and our million-and-more-circulation magazines, only the circle is somewhat more complicated. Scripts are written to meet the prejudices of all moving-picture patrons; stories, to meet the needs of a particular type of reader. And this much must be said for our magazines: The variety of types has made possible whatever untrammelled literature we have. For after all there is a wide difference between the moral tone of Harper’s and the arch-sophistication of the Smart Set, or between the big-business glorification of the Saturday Evening Post and the New Success and the artistic quiet and rebelliousness of the Dial and the Little Review.
Whatever untrammelled literature we have, however, is little enough. The tone-givers, the guides, the molders are the magazines of power with public opinion and millions of dollars behind them, with unbreakable traditional prejudices and taboos. And so long as the humblest critic and the highest-paid institutional authority unite in upholding these traditional taboos as glittering marks of Americanism, public opinion will continue to demand a literature that is for the most part infantile, insipid and lifeless. The generations that rise to pound the typewriter keys in the production of stories are for the most part imbued with this negative conception of our literature and unquestionably the most dangerous instrument for the perpetuation of this degrading conception is the literary teaching profession. Again, in not a single textbook on story-writing have I been able to find an intelligent, fearless analysis of our national taboos and their effect of sterility upon our literature. I have found warnings and admonitions and scarecrows. “Thou shalt not!” is the sum and substance of our learned attitude on these mummifying influences. The vacillating feet of the aspirant are directed toward the proper, well-trodden roads at the very outset, and the punishment for straying is stressed to the point where it requires a superhuman courage to brave it.
Our first dictate is “Thou shalt not be morbid!” Depressing stuff may be characteristic of the Russians, the Germans, the French, the Italians, the Scandinavians, but not of the Americans. Ours is a young country, a free country, a happy country, full of the joy of existence. Ours is a hopeful people, cheerful and gay and proud; glad to be alive. “People have all the gloom they want,” says the editor of The American Magazine in his “Fourteen Points” to contributors. “They manufacture it on their own premises. You cannot sell them gloom. What they want to buy is a cure for their gloom. They don’t want to buy more gloom.” And Dr. Frank Crane in his ever-buoyant style exclaims: “The Saturday Evening Post and The American Magazine have what I call ‘good literature.’”[18]
Since salability is the only criterion of worth, any story that violates our fundamental optimistic tone is at once intercepted, revamped, “improved” or pronounced hopeless and condemned to extinction. “Not salable,” is a phrase as ominous as a jury’s “Guilty!” on a charge of murder in the first degree, and the only appeal possible is for the defendant to plead a sudden seizure of passionate desire to “pack up his troubles in his old kit bag and smile, smile, smile!” And so the law of supply and demand operates once more. The “calamity howler” is eliminated and the man or woman with the “smile that won’t come off” gets to the top. American literature becomes enriched by the advent of another “genius” imbued with the gospel that “life is great fun, after all!”
That no literature can thrive on such a barren optimism seems to be a statement so obvious as to challenge even the mere ordinary intelligence offering it. Yet pedants carry forward this optimism-tradition and preach, and lecture, and prate about the spirit of America, and threaten and punish and outlaw the few unfortunate rebels. What literature can a country produce which refuses to take even the most timid peep at life as it is, which shuts its eyes in very horror at the most fundamental problems of the land, which does not brood, contemplate or inquire, which does not know the benediction of a tear or the relief of a sigh? Can a steady diet of sugar produce anything more invigorating than diabetes? And literary sugar is what we think and preach and worship. All heroines are pretty; all heroes succeed; all complications are solved; wedding bells ring; promotions are given out; only bad people die young; the good live to a mellow age of four score and ten; life is a fairy-tale in which all the fairies are sweet young things waving magic wands over honest young brokers of their choice; the world, and America especially, is a Vale of Tempe where limousines are passed out as the reward of virtue and endeavor and where successful matches are consummated.
Our writers must be either inanimate machines or sorry human beings trained to suppress their instincts and moods. They must be on their guard not to succumb to the “blues”; quick to inhibit any sad reflection or discouraging thought. “If you can’t see the sun is shining,” wrote one editor very bluntly, rejecting a “depressing” story, “take Epsom salts and sleep it over.” And whether they are drowsy or not, sleep it over our writers must. Those who suffer with insomnia find their good neighbors either snoring peacefully or stamping about in infuriated protest. Our writers must sift their experience; if it is tragic or insufficiently uplifting they must dispatch it to oblivion. It is really most advisable not to draw upon experience at all. Not of such stuff can optimistic fiction be made. For is there life without tears and heartache and doubt; without innumerable deaths of precious fragile dreams; without graying of heads; without perplexity? Hence arises what Van Wyck Brooks calls “the doctrine of the fear of experience.... It assumes that experience is not the stuff of life but something essentially meaningless; and not merely meaningless but an obstruction which retards and complicates our real business of getting on in the world and getting up in the world, and which must, therefore, be ignored and forgotten and evaded and beaten down by every means in our power.”[19]
Here again the inconsistency in our theory of optimistic fiction is glaring. We shriek anathemas at any native product that repudiates it, yet we bow with respect to importations. We acclaim all the morbid geniuses of Europe; we accord their works places of special privilege in our curricula; we consider it a mark of culture to mention the titles of at least a half-dozen depressing books. Even our most respectable magazines are proud on occasion to publish a story by an eminent European author with the flamboyant legend placed upon it or boxed in the center of its first page by the editor: “No one but Gorki (or Maeterlink, or D’Annunzio, or D. H. Lawrence, or whoever else it might be) would have the courage to write a story such as this, and no magazine in America but The—— would have the courage to publish it.” The same legend is placed sometimes upon the work of a native writer, but after reading the story one finds that either the writer did not dare, after all, or that the editor of the brave magazine edited the contribution; that both the writer and the worthy editor had been so frightened at the mere flap of a wing that they had to offer an apology for attempting to soar.
This inconsistency is particularly reflected in our current criticism and literary textbooks. With the same breath a reviewer will praise Dostoyevski and chastise some native youngster for his horrible morbidity. In the same chapter the text will refer to Chekhov and Maupassant and Zola and Poe with almost cringing reverence and eloquently preach the gospel of cheap optimism as the supreme message of the story writer. And the young would-be procures copies of the great masters, reads them, and comes back perplexed. “Why do they write about such horrid things?” asks one young student. I look into her large, innocent eyes and smile. The Great Creator must have been in a diplomatic mood when he invented a smile. I glance down at my copy of The Literary News, lying on my desk and note that an editor of a prominent and liberally-paying magazine is in the market for “stories of rapid action—cheery short stories, encouraging, helpful—the kind that makes the world better,” and I proceed to discuss how this kind of story is written....
Of all our taboos none has contributed so large a share in keeping our literature swathed in baby blankets as that on sex. In its essence it is merely a direct irradiation of taboo No. 1 on optimism. If everything in the universe is good and beautiful and holy and the writer’s business is to chant incessant halleluiahs, then sex is all of these and must be treated reverently. Its unsavory aspects as well as those leading to unhappiness must be passed by, and since in the muddled world we are living in sex has felt most severely the combined forces of bigotry, suppression and inhibition, of pathologic social and moral conditions, its aspects are most frequently unsavory and unhappy and therefore must be either ignored entirely or made savory and happy. We have a hoary phrase perpetually playing upon our glib lips—it is to the effect that we are a “clean-living, moral people.” The phrase itself has long lost its meaning, even to the most uninformed of citizens, but it has remained a sacred fetish forever, it seems.
Again it is not in the total abstaining from any treatment of sex that our taboo is expressed, but in our peculiar angle of treatment. Total abstaining were indeed impossible, for any literature, and least of all for our literature. The truth is that ours is, in the main, essentially a sex-literature—largely because of our “reverent” attitude. Strong elemental forces long suppressed erupt in irrepressible, if furtive, curiosity. No country on earth can boast of as many periodicals specializing in the risque, the sexually-sensational, the cheaply suggestive, as the land of the “clean-living.” The fact is incontrovertible. Where there is a continued supply there must be a continued demand. Our publishers know their market. Even the titles of a host of our periodicals exploit, not too artistically, this crude reaction of a sex-conscious people. “Saucy Stories,” “Breezy Stories,” “Snappy Stories,” “Live Stories,” “Droll Stories,” “The Parisienne,” “True Stories,” “The Follies,” “Telling Tales,” “Secrets,” “I Confess,” “True Confessions,” “High Life,” “Hot Dog,”—these are some of the titles that wink mischievously at the purchaser timid with guilt. But the purchaser is rarely pleased with his dissipation. He finds the wine exceedingly mild. Most of the stories under the suggestive cover bearing the inviting title and a still more inviting pretty girl, usually attired in very becoming négligé, are, after all, “clean.”
And this “cleanness” is the characteristic blight of nine-tenths of our entire literature. It is vulgar with the lowest kind of sex-consciousness but it doesn’t go “too far.” It is the “cleanness” of our moving pictures. Is there any reason why a production entitled “Du Barry” in Europe should be rechristened to read “Passion” for American exhibition? Is there any reason why Barrie’s “Admirable Crichton” should become “Male and Female” as a photoplay? Is there any reason for such titles as “Sex,” “The Restless Sex,” “His Wedded Wife,” “The First Night,” “The She Woman,” “The Leopard Woman,” “Wedded Husbands,” “Why Wives Go Wrong,” “Forbidden Fruit,” “The Primrose Path,” “What Happened to Rosa,” “Why Change Your Wife?” “The Woman Untamed,” etc., etc? It surely does not require an erudite psychoanalyst to find the reason for this avalanche of suggestiveness.
Perhaps, if they deemed it wise to speak, our motion-picture producers could shed some light on the subject. Seemingly their opinion of our “clean-living, moral people” is not very flattering. And their judgment is substantially founded upon the generous reports they receive from the distributing exchanges.
Here, too, carefully as the titles are selected the pictures themselves are “clean.” If they were not, the various Boards of Censorship would have seen to it that they become so. At most a director will manage to show the heroine plunging into her morning’s rose-water bath, as in “Male and Female,” for instance, or an exotic harem partially disrobing for a cold dip into the perfumed waters of the Rajah’s pool, as in “Kismet.” Whether the scenes are vitally necessary to the unfolding of the plot is immaterial. They constitute an irresistible attraction in themselves, and must be smuggled in, if possible. A couple of feet of nakedness results in thousands of dollars’ worth of advertising.
What is true of the moving pictures is equally true of our spoken stage. Think of “Twin Beds” and “Up in Mabel’s Room” and “Parlor, Bedroom and Bath” and “Mary’s Ankle” and “Nighty, Nighty” and “Scrambled Wives” and “Ladies’ Night in a Turkish Bath” and “Getting Gertie’s Garter” and the various “Follies” and “Scandals” and a hundred-and-one other titles which were surely chosen for a purpose—the same purpose which impelled some years ago the manager of the old Academy of Music in New York to advertise a stock company production of Daudet’s “Sapho” as the “greatest immoral play ever written.” And again the plays themselves are not remotely as licentious as the titles would intimate.
What, then, is this “cleanness” of ours? What are its impositions and how far can they be stretched? The answer is simple and more than a trifle sad. Our “cleanness” excludes serious thought. “Something audacious suits us, but nothing salacious,” writes one editor of a well-known publication of the frothy type. “Salacious” stands for thought, reflection, analysis. A little suggestiveness, a hint, a double-edged joke, a farcical situation, a vulgar thrust, will do. But a deep, sincere analysis, a fearless uncovering of a cowering conscience—that is salacious, immoral, lewd, unclean. That accounts for the free and open dissemination of so much debasing, lurid stuff and the hypocritical suppression of Dreiser and Cabell. That accounts for the popularity of Bertha M. Clay et al. and the unpopularity of Sherwood Anderson et al. Sex is a fit subject to jest about, to inject breezily as a gently-naughty stimulant. Sex as an elemental force which shapes the lives of men and women, which actuates their struggles in this terrestrial sphere of ours, making for success or failure, for happiness or despair, for sinner or saint, is vile, lascivious, and therefore taboo.
The literary teaching profession has not passed this degrading scene unnoticed. It has broken up in two camps. The great mass of instructors have simply adopted the position that a writer must give whatever is demanded of him. Would a tailor refuse to accept an order calling for a fabric he personally does not approve of and a fashion he detests? Granted that this is not a particularly lofty conception of literary art, it is still less pernicious than the conception held by the smaller group of so-called idealists in the profession. To these the sex aspect of our literature calls for stormy denunciation. They would impress upon the future writer the sanctity of his mission. The pen must not be polluted. Sex must be left alone entirely. The moral tone must be preserved in all productions. Laws for the ruthless suppression of the unclean must be fought for and their enactment obtained.
What these honest Puritans cannot understand is that the entire class of bawdy, sex-reeking literature is a product of the very laws they have been fortunate enough to have enacted; that the complete abolition of these laws and the absolute cessation from persecution in the interests of morality of any expression of sex would purge our literature of the curse as nothing else. If any one could purchase a mature, intelligent literary expression of the mysterious passion that animates nature and moves the world, the profane effusions of shriveled minds would appear shocking and abhorrent by comparison. All literature that has ever been written has dealt directly or indirectly with the relation of men and women—for the very trite reason that all life that has ever been lived has been the life of this relation of men and women. To place the yellow ticket of evil upon this relation as a literary subject is to degrade it beyond words of contempt. The prevailing spectacle of our literary sewage is perfectly natural: the thought of uncleanness wrapped around the stuff of life is bound to pollute it.
But the pernicious influence of this immoral taboo goes beyond its direct inhibition of the most legitimate of themes. It perpetuates an æsthetic literary tenet which is a relic of the Age of Darkness. It is to the effect that the morality or unmorality of its contents determines the value of a literary production. “It is a shame that such splendid writing should be wasted on such an atrocious theme,” said a sweet little lady student apropos Sherwood Anderson’s “The Other Woman.”[20] The remark at once characterized her as a member of the Second-Grade Bigots. The First-Grade Bigots would not permit themselves to see any excellences in a work so pronouncedly unorthodox. When cornered, the little lady admitted that there might be sound psychology in Anderson’s story—and a large measure of unsavory truth. “But why choose such horrid themes when there are so many nice, clean ones?” It is the cry of all Pollyanna-nurtured readers. It’s the cry of the author of “Pollyanna” herself. “Is there, then, no human experience that deals with the good, the happy, the beautiful?” she asks, in a circular issued by her publishers. “Are joy, faith and purity utterly illogical? Is only the thunder-cloud real?—the sunshine a sham?” In such cases argument is impossible. The criterion of moral and optimistic content is deep-rooted and well-nourished by authority. Is it not largely this same criterion that for more than a half century prevented the acceptance by the Judges of Walt Whitman as a poet, and that is excluding the name of Theodore Dreiser from its rightful place in our scholarly histories of the modern American novel?
To counteract this blind perpetuation of a fallacious doctrine demands a complete severance with old school criticism and old-age pedagogy. Not until authority-worship is mightily shaken can this be accomplished. But that would be a hopeless task to undertake. The great mass must have and will have its Great Authorities to bow to. It is easier than to depend upon one’s own critical faculties. Besides, habit has become second nature. We have always been taught that knowledge is merely to know where to find what we want to know. No, we must be merciful; our literary apostles must remain. But among them there are those that are blind with senility and those that are glowing with fresh vision. Let us follow the more musical of the new criers until they, in their turn, reach their dotage and truth turns to ashes in their toothless mouths. In no other way can we hope to uproot the puerile beliefs that art can be judged by its optimistic or uplifting message, by its morality, or by any other of, what Joel Elias Spingarn terms, the “Seven confusions.” We have not yet reached the stage where the relativity of the term “morality” can be discussed with impunity and to any considerable advantage. But we can bring to bear upon a rising generation of readers and writers all the force of our warm logic to combat the notion that any standard of morality, no matter how sublime, has any determining value in art. We can insist that a story might be entirely devoid of any moral significance and yet be an immortal masterpiece; that the whole notion is merely another one of the confusions we have inherited from an age which was too busy developing the raw resources of a vast young continent—a task which necessitated the invocation of Providential aid—to pay attention to literature.
“To say that poetry (or any other art) is moral or immoral is as meaningless as to say that an equilateral triangle is moral and an isosceles triangle immoral. Surely we must realize the absurdity of testing anything by a standard which does not belong to it or a purpose for which it was not intended. Imagine these whiffs of conversation at a dinner table: ‘This cauliflower would be excellent if it had only been prepared in accordance with international law.’ ‘Do you know why my cook’s pastry is so good? He has never told a lie or seduced a woman.’ But why multiply obvious examples? We do not concern ourselves with morals when we test the engineer’s bridge or the scientist’s researches; indeed we go farther, and say that it is the moral duty of the scientist to disregard morals in his search for truth. As a man he may be judged by moral standards, but the truth of his conclusions can only be judged by the standard of science.... Art is expression, and poets succeed or fail by their success or failure in completely and perfectly expressing themselves. If the ideals they express are not the ideals we admire most, we must blame not the poets but ourselves; in the world where morals count we have failed to give them the proper material out of which to rear a nobler edifice. To separate art and morality is not to destroy moral values but to augment them—to give them increased powers and a new freedom in the realm in which they have the right to reign.”[21]
It is literally true that American literature is not irreverent. The penalty for meddling with religion in any unconventional way is contemptuous obscurity. But meddling with religion in a way that brings out its blessings to humanity is praiseworthy and leads to opulence and glory. For that reason nine-tenths of our literature has a strain of religious righteousness running through it. In the main the specters of Cotton Mather and Jonathan Edwards still hover over our literary output, imparting to it a theological tint. Our fictionists are still obsessed with the idea that a story or a novel must preach, must instill the right kind of ideals, must exert a redeeming influence upon its reader. To be sure, the experienced ones among them are fully aware of the dangers of obvious moralizing, but they have mastered the devious ways of preaching without arousing the reader’s suspicion that he is being preached to.
It is this last point—the devious ways of unsuspected preaching—that my profession is concerned with. Either we are altogether silent on the subject of religion in literature, deeming it too ticklish a subject upon which to commit ourselves, or we are zealous in our efforts to perpetuate the tradition that literature must complement the work of the church, only in a less outspoken way. Perhaps we do not do it consciously but the results obtained are the same. We merely advise students as to what subjects may be exploited and what subjects may not. Surely a subject bordering on the atheistic could never be made salable; not more than two or three periodicals would be open to such a story—and these of the obscure, “freaky” kind. Without a doubt even such a mild story as Balzac’s “An Atheist’s Mass” could never have seen the light of publication in an American periodical. The fact that the hero remains unconverted to the end would be fatal. We may write a story about an atheist, and have written such, but in our story, when the dénouement comes, the hero must exclaim to the assembled multitude, that he had tried to live without God and had found it unprofitable. The fact that there might be some poor wretch of a hero in this queer wide world who would not issue such a proclamation does not detract from the urgency of such a dénouement. It is one of our devious ways; without it the story can hope to travel no farther than the return-to-author basket. The characters we create must ultimately come to know God and the church—or they never come to know the reader. It is doubtful if an American Flaubert could hope for as cordial a reception of an atheistic character of his as the French have accorded the mediocre M. Homais of “Madame Bovary” fame.
It is far from my purpose to leave the implication that literature should preach atheism; but neither should it preach religion, theology, or anything else, for that matter, except in so far as life itself is a sermon to whomever it pleases to view it as such. “As a rule we may say that nothing in the world improves one less than sermonizing books and conversations; nothing is more wearisome, quite apart from the fact that nothing is more inartistic.... We do not demand of an author that he should work to make us better.... All that we can demand of him is that he work conscientiously.”[22] The moment an author stoops to uplift us he loses his balance as an artistic observer, recorder, and interpreter.
The attitude of our literature toward religion is based on a churchy interpretation of life and character which was unconsciously but none the less comprehensively expressed in a magazine article by Dr. Frank Crane. “Church people,” he wrote, “as a rule, pay their debts, observe the decencies of life, are clean of mind and body, cultivate those qualities that make for a successful and contented life, and get along together peacefully. And, as a rule, the embezzlers, thugs, drunkards, harlots, rascals, adulterers, gamblers, and swindlers do not cultivate church-going to any great extent.”[23]
This is a safe and sane doctrine to embrace when writing fiction for the popular magazines. Our editors, almost universally, have embraced it, and even though the Reverend Doctor specifically states that he speaks of people “as a rule,” which would permit of exceptions, editors at large will not recognize the existence of such exceptions. Truth does not count and experience is an illusion. If a writer has in his life had the misfortune of coming across a man or woman who was kind, charitable, gentle, moral, and noble and yet instead of being affiliated with a church was a member of the Secular League and a subscriber to the Truth Seeker he would best suppress the latter two points. If a writer has read statistics of extra-generous donations made to various church funds and has found among the names of donors not a few of universally notorious embezzlers, he must ignore the fact, if only in the interests of his career. His motto must be: Never write anything about church that could not be turned into an advertisement of the institution. If the motto conflicts with life, scratch life.
And yet religion, like sex, is one of the basic forces of life; it has helped to shape the course of human history and civilization. To deny the artist the prerogative to touch upon it unless it be in praise is to deny him the means to probe the human soul. To compel him to accept any institution as infallible and therefore beyond question of imperfection is to fetter his spirit. That a man who is a respected member of a respected church cannot be a thief in his business life or a brute at home is a more prostituting doctrine, the more so if not actually believed in but adopted for commercial purposes only, than any harlot was ever guided by, because it is so flagrantly contrary to truth. That the call of sex can never prove stronger than the holiest of religious precepts is a malicious canon of hypocritical dogmatism. This is the natural stuff of literature—the dramatic conflicts and seeming paradoxes, physical, psychic and intellectual, the eternal clash of nature and dogma, of passion and idea, of man and the world.
Puny fledgelings come to us for instruction in aerial literary navigation and we look in the tome of Thou Shalt Nots and clip their weak little wings. “Never dare to lift yourself more than a yard above the earth,” we admonish; “and you’ll find it easier if you use this trick and that,” we add. If, perchance, one of them after awhile finds the fawning breath of the earth too close and spreads its wings and begins to soar up into the clear ether we shrug our shoulders compassionately and say to the rest: “Another young bird gone wrong.” It has broken the limits of our taboos; it has tasted the wine of pure ozone; it has heard the call of exploration; it has turned irreverent. Should it succeed in growing a few dazzling feathers by the time it comes back in sight we may meet it with music and shout to it the hospitality of our gardens—as a mark of our ability to appreciate fine feathers; but more frequently we let it starve to death and keep the music for a touching funeral. During their lifetime we have nothing to do with the irreverent....
No literature is more afraid of a courageous presentation of the social welter which America, in common with all the rest of the world, is undergoing in this age of reconstruction, than American literature. Not that it entirely fails to touch upon the mighty problems that have shaken our national life, but it still clings to an ancient sense of delicacy and an orthodox point of view which determines what may and may not be said. Whether a writer really subscribes to the point of view which colors nearly all of our efforts is immaterial; in order to sell his product he must adopt it, irrespective of any protesting personal scruples he might feel. Thus we find our literature, with the exception of a small and highly unprofitable part, expressing no more advanced views on the social phenomena of the day than our forefathers held, and most frequently less advanced.
The editor of The Coming Nation, discussing the kind of stories that are not wanted by film companies, mentions, among others, stories “where the hero arises and makes a soap-box speech on Socialism converting all by-standers.”[24] This statement applies with equal force to our magazine fiction as well. That no respectable editor of a fiction periodical will take such stories is a fact universally known among people acquainted with prevailing policies of our magazines. There would be nothing sinister in this policy, it would even be highly laudable, were it based on the logical assumption that men’s minds are not so easily swayed and that therefore no audience of by-standers can be converted by a single speech. But it is based on no such reasoning. The fact is that the story depicting a speaker converting by a few eloquent phrases, let us say, a body of strikers, to the employer’s point of view, impelling them to forsake their scheming leaders, tainted by European gold, of course, and return to work will and does find a ready market. Even the lack of story values are frequently overlooked where such a fictive incident occurs. The greatest of our national weeklies and monthlies will open their columns to the padded dissertation in story disguise on the unreasonableness of workingmen, or the inefficiency of government control of industries, or the blessings of a Big Business Administration.
What really determines the policy of exclusion of certain topics or angles of presentation is the safe-guarding of the interests of the big advertisers and the personal prejudices of the publishers. Our experienced writers, as well as the instructors of student-writers who know their business, know these prejudices perfectly. They know that popular views “get by” even if the artistry is not so very obstrusive. They know that unless one can fall in with the established views of the great majority it is best to leave social and political problems alone and to write about the South Seas, or Alaska, or the romantic story of John Jones, Jr., a son of a village blacksmith, who, after many thrilling hardships finally married Ivy Van Schyler, the pampered heiress of noble lineage and a huge block of sound railroad stock. They even know such small details as that if a hero uses soap, it is best not to mention it by an existing brand, for it may offend advertisers trying to fasten upon the public rival brands; that “talking machine” is safer than “Victrola” or “Grafonola” or any other patented name; that, in a word, no free advertising be given any company, thus causing other advertisers to complain. They know that it is dangerous to make a character intimate that his health has been impaired as a result of drinking too much ginger-ale, or taking headache powders, or yeast, or tobacco, or anything else, for that matter, that advertisers sell. It makes no difference whether a writer has accumulated a fund of personal observation to corroborate his statement. There are people who are trying to sell these products and will surely lodge a protest with the advertising manager of the publication in which such a story appears. In fact, numerous cases where such inadvertent remarks have resulted in diminished advertising space are on record.
It is to the interest of these same all-powerful advertisers to see that no aspersions be cast in our magazine fiction upon the inalienable rights and dignities of Business and that no dangerous views be expressed which might sway a vigilantly guarded public mind in undesirable directions. Existing social and political institutions may be defended in our fiction but not attacked or criticized; their merits may be extolled, but their demerits must not be betrayed to an innocent world. Private property is sacred; the State is always right—except when it attempts to interfere with Property; then a thinly veiled story decrying this interference as autocratic, tyrannous and un-American might get by and bring a fair price. Progress is a generality that affects us but little; the laws of change are suspended when applied to our literary reactions to our social life. Other nations may develop new schools of fictionists, young, virile, boldly speaking their minds on the moot problems of the day. We have no room for such impudence. Our literature is “pure,” level-headed, conservative. Some isolated muck-rakers appear here and there, but we give them no outlet for their muck-raking, and they must either reform or perish or, at best, when we are helpless to prevent it, get a measure of barren notoriety.
An army officer, an advanced student, once handed in a splendidly written story of army life, in which he gave a graphic portrayal of court-martial proceedings. The apathy and criminal nonchalance with which helpless boys were sentenced to long-term imprisonment, in the name of discipline, was so artistically woven into a thrilling plot that it made interesting reading even to the most avid fiction devotees. Yet the story had gone the rounds of nearly all the paying magazines without finding a market. A few friendly editors wrote the author personal letters, one editor going so far as to express his appreciation of the work, but admitting that the story was deemed “unavailable because it does not meet with the policy of this publication.” I supplied the discouraged author with a list of unconventional publications—for fortunately we do have a fighting number of them with us—that might welcome his story but could afford to pay either very little or not at all. He refused to waste his work on the “freaks,” and wanted to know if he could not revise the story to make it salable to a standard magazine. I told him that elimination of all incidents reflecting unfavorably upon the administration of law in our army would undoubtedly help. He protested that the incidents had been taken from life and held out for a while, but finally he succumbed to his intense desire to “get in.” The story was revised and made perfectly harmless—“sweet” and happy; it sold on its first trip. The officer has never again attempted to use life as a basis for fiction—indiscriminately. It was his first altercation with policies—and probably his last. It requires greater powers than he was blessed with to put up a more valiant resistance.
It is a sad comment on education that under existing circumstances, instructors of writers are obliged to help undermine this natural resistance a few rebellious spirits occasionally display. One whose entire stock in trade is a knowledge of markets and policies and an ability to expound existing standards is not in a very advantageous position to encourage disregard of immutable taboos. We must say, on reading a story which is off-standard, that it won’t sell, and why. We must formulate and enforce the rules that make for “success” in fiction writing. We must be vestals of the sacred fires. I am aware that “vestals” is not exactly the right word one should use in this connection; perhaps another word connoting less virtue would be more apt. But, after all, most of us are honest, and zealously believe that the fires are sacred and must not be allowed to go out or be polluted. Vision? Well,—aren’t the blind happy?
As applied to our literature the term American has come to mean everything and anything. It compliments the mediocre twaddle of mediocre minds. To earn the compliment a story must be neither sad nor “fresh” nor irreverent nor “red.” It must not be burdened with too much thought or sincere emotion. It must have no glimmer of an original idea. It must “kiss the hand that feeds it,”—which means in this case that it must breathe a sweet humility to all our institutions, from the First Law of the land to the American Legion and Babe Ruth. It must be “glad to be alive and carry on”—everything that is old and respectable and decrepit and green with mold.
Let a piece of literary art reflect an unhackneyed thought, let it break any one of our ancient taboos, let it dare to belittle any one of our glorified generalities and dogmas—and it is promptly howled down as un-American. The literature of every other country on earth affords an interpretative and critical view of the psychology of the national mind it reflects, while American literature is least reflective of the American national mind, except in one particular: its cringing fear of the truth. Were it not for this fear to face the truth, and the inability of the average American to stand criticism, the great bulk of our “literature” would find no buyers and its content would undergo a radical change. It is this national trait that has given rise to the sublime injunction, “Don’t knock!” We may have heard of Matthew Arnold, but surely never of his heretic doctrine that literature is a criticism of life. To us literature is largely a matter of so many words at so much per word, or so many hugs and kisses and careers attained per magazine page.
Is it to be wondered at that with us we have the interminable problem: What shall we write about? With one of the largest countries in the world in which to live; with over one hundred millions of people living and working and battling and dreaming all about us; with a multitude of perplexing problems, international, national, municipal, class, clan, and individual, clamoring for solution; with a rich, ever-shifting panorama of a young, virile, national existence before us; with a million comedies and a million tragedies avidly looking at our typewriter keys—with all this to be had for the taking, isn’t it pathetically absurd that we must voyage the seven seas and scour all the corners of the earth in search of material? Open any magazine any month and note the proportion of stories located in far, out-of-the-way places. Even our best writers are following this romantic bent. Twenty-five per cent. of the stories contained in O’Brien’s “Year-book” for 1919 had a foreign setting; his “Year-book” for 1920 contained over thirty per cent. of stories with foreign settings—mostly exotic and bizarre. No serious objections could be taken to transcribing the life of foreign places, if we had first become aware of our own. But we have not. We hunt for foreign material simply because we are afraid to sift our own. We are only now beginning to realize that our young continent—this huge, crude meltingpot—is filled with brass and copper and gold, and that these metals are melting and fusing into some homogeneous substance, which we vaguely term America. We want this burst of consciousness to grow and sweep us along to great revelations, but a false pride and obsolete traditions and hypocritical dogmas are blocking the way. Parrot-like we shout from pulpit and rostrum and cathedra the old banality: “Boost! All the world loves a booster!” And because we like to be loved we dare not touch upon the wounds of life—the hunger, the passions, the buffets, the defeats that purge its sordidness, gild its drabness, and actuate us to nobler aspirations.
We pride ourselves that we have developed the short story to perfection. It has become our national form of literary expression. It has reached an unparalleled vogue. But, in truth, if we are entitled to pride, it is on account of our remarkable achievement of an ability to tell an entertaining tale without telling anything worth while. Paradoxically, we squeeze amusement out of nothing. We have attained an excellence of workmanship without the least depth of substance. But I am anticipating. This phase of the subject is so important that it deserves a chapter for itself, which it will receive later on. The real perfection of our short story is yet to come. The signs are that it is having its birth pangs at this time. Writers of rich promise have come to the fore recently—and here and there a magazine, either new or an old one with a new policy, to receive their product. Our perfected short story will be bold, fearless, vital; beating with the vigorous pulse of a giant nation stretching its limbs. It will be truly American—optimistic, with the rugged optimism of a Walt Whitman; brave, with the courage of an impetuous youth; rich, with the colors of a fertile soil and a blending humanity. Perhaps our short story is to fulfill the hopes H. G. Wells once had for the novel:
“The novel,” he wrote in An Englishman Looks at the World, “is to be the social mediator, the vehicle of understanding ... the criticism of laws and institutions and of social dogmas and ideas.... We are going to write ... about the whole of human life. We are going to deal with political questions and religious questions and social questions ... until a thousand pretenses and ten thousand impostures shrivel in the cold clear air of our elucidations.... Before we have done we will have all life within the scope of the novel.”
A lofty assignment, this, for a form of literature that is rooted, as our short story always has been, in the precept that to be interesting it must eschew reality. But we can carry it out—and will. Our pioneers are already on the trail—weak as yet, not a full-grown Chekhov among them—but gaining in hardihood, and singing. The hordes behind them are waiting in safety; let the trail become a bit smoother, the hardships lessened, and they will follow. In the meantime who that is filled with that eternally human envious admiration for pluck can keep back his “Good cheer!” and “Godspeed!”?