Part 3

To touch on the other, and co-lateral branch of the subject of our conversation. I held that the act of the woman who stood in front of a little mob bent on mischief was an act apparently, but not really, involving danger. The same act performed by a man most certainly would be courageous, but not in the case of the woman, because she would bank upon popular opinion as to the weakness of her sex. The opinion was her protection. She well knew that the rioters would not club her, a woman, and it was her “womanhood” that she counted on to preserve her. Hers then was a spurious bravery. So also is the man-killing woman a fake heroine. A woman may shoot a man, especially in the case of a so-called seduction, with the chances all in her favor that she will never be found guilty of murder. Pose as a heroine as she will, yet she knows perfectly well that she may rely on the support of a clamorous, sentimental and often hypocritical section of public opinion.

VII.

PLOT AND PROBABILITY.

There seems to be little to be said as to plot. I note that the books of instruction, weighty affairs some of them, more than a third of which seems to be badly assimilated from some handbook of grammar, lay great emphasis on plot. I hold that the first and most important thing is to create a character. You will naturally create secondary characters and out of them a situation will grow, and the situation is the plot. But for the rest of it, I believe that an imaginative man will find ideas for stories in all kinds of odd and unsuspected little things. H. G. Wells has told us somewhere how he saw a leaf floating on a little pool and that leaf suggested a canoe, the canoe again suggesting a lone man. From that grew the story of Æpyornis Island. Turning to other of his stories, you can certainly discover for yourself what may have been the germ of the idea. There is his fine “Country of the Blind,” which every ambitious writer should read. You easily see that the tale grew out of a pondering over the saying, “In the country of the blind, the one-eyed is king.” Again, thousands of men have watched hens scratching in a yard and to them has come the thought of wonder as to what would happen were men creatures of but an inch in stature, with other birds and beasts their present size. But it was Wells who conceived the notion of making a story out of it, and a gorgeous story it is, as any one who has read “The Food of the Gods” will admit.

Then there is R. B. Cunninghame Grahame, king of short story writers, as I believe. I pick up a book of his tales. It is “Brought Forward.” More properly they might be called sketches. I turn to the first at which the book opens. It is “With the North-East Wind,” a brief but tremendously vivid account of the funeral of Keir Hardie. I wish you would read it for yourself. Grahame is a wonder. Never did a mind figure to itself with more exact detail or greater energy all the parts and tints of a picture. Read this, which is the opening paragraph:

“A northeast haar had hung the city with a pall of gray. It gave an air of hardness to the stone-built houses, blending them with the stone-paved streets, till you could scarcely see where the houses ended and the street began. A thin gray dust hung in the air. It colored everything, and people’s faces all looked pinched with the first touch of autumn cold. The wind, boisterous and gusty, whisked the soot-grimed city leaves about in the high suburb at the foot of a long range of hills, making one think it would be easy to have done with life on such an uncongenial day.”

And, while I promised to refrain from long quotations, I cannot but help giving you this from the same sketch, for it seems to me a remarkable description of a crowd of men. I call your attention to Grahame’s way of doing it:

“John Ferguson was there, the old time Irish leader, the friend of Davitt and of Butt. Tall and erect he stood, dressed in his long frock coat, his roll of papers in one hand, and with the other stuck in his breast, with all the air of being the last Roman left alive. Tom Mann, with his black hair, his flashing eyes, and his tumultuous speech peppered with expletives. Behind him, Sandy Haddow of Parkhead, massive and Doric in his speech, with a gray woolen comforter rolled round his neck, and hands like the panel of a door. Champion, pale, slight and interesting, still the artillery officer in spite of socialism. John Burns; and Small, the miners’ agent, with his close brown beard and taste for literature. Smilie stood near, he of the seven elections, and then check weigher at a pit. There too, was silver-tongued Shaw Maxwell and Chisholm Robertson looking out darkly on the world through tinted spectacles; with him Bruce Glasier, girt with a red sash and with an aureole of fair curly hair around his head, half poet and half revolutionary.”

If you do not see that what I am insisting on is, after all, the main thing, that is the portrayal of character even in those few light touches, then my time is wasted writing this essay.

I turn to another page and find the sketch, “A Minor Prophet.” It is the tale of a man moved to preach his gospel of Love and Fellowship, and he preaches on, enwrapped in his subject, quite oblivious of the fact that one by one his little audience leaves, and then:

“He paused, and, looking round, saw he was all alone. The boys had stolen away, and the last workman’s sturdy back could be just seen as it was vanishing towards the public house.

“The speaker sighed, and wiped the perspiration from his forehead with a soiled handkerchief.

“Then, picking up his hat and his umbrella, a far-off look came into his blue eyes as he walked homewards almost jauntily, conscious that the inner fire had got the better of the fleshly tenement, and that his work was done.”

A fine ending to a fine piece of writing, indeed. Yet for “plot” the story has nothing but a man moved to preach and finding no hearers. Again, in “The Bathers,” by H. G. Dwight, you have a first class piece of work, but nothing happens except a brief wrestle. Yet the story is both stirring and dramatic. A hundred delicate shades of character and temperament are shown us. But set before the reader is the invisible world of inward inclinations and dispositions.

As for probability, or, if you will, plausibility, about both of which the instructors are anxiously concerned, I do not believe that consideration of either enters into the matter of acceptance by editors. Tell a good story, and whether it deals with pterodactyls or fays, devils or angels, it will stand on its own merits as a story. You have seen Wells bringing the world to an end in many different ways: you have seen him carving animals into the shapes of men (Island of Dr. Moreau), or causing angels to be shot (The Wonderful Visit), or leaping into the Fourth Dimension (The Story of Mr. Davidson’s Eyes), or travelling into the year 30,000 (Time Machine), but always there is verisimilitude. We know that it cannot be true, the tale he tells, but we are willing to believe with him that it is true. For romance is a legitimate field. If you can imagine a rattling good fairy story, go to it. Mark Twain wrote a good tale about a microbe and Verne wrote a good one about a trip on a meteor to the farthest edge of the solar system. There is plenty of room in between these for you. True, just at this present moment the pendulum swings toward realism, or, if it has not swung, at any rate there is a mountain of realistic stuff on hand, but at any moment a fantastic romance may leap into favor. So close your ears to the short story professors with their warnings against improbability and all that kind of thing. Write what you feel you must write, for if you must write, you must, and if you are not impelled to writing, not all the reading of books, nor listening to lectures will aid you one whit.

VIII.

ON SEX.

William Marion Reedy said, “In literature just now it is sex o’ clock.” He was deploring somewhat the insistence upon sex and sex matters that seems to be fashionable. We had a good talk on that, and, presently, that outspoken, clear-minded writer, Frank Putnam, joined in. So there were three editors, neither of whom had puritanical notions, all pretty much in accord. We came to a rough kind of conclusion that there was distortion of a kind when matters of sex occupied too prominent a place in literature. Understand me, no one of us were other than gross in part ourselves, but we knew that the part that sex played in our lives was very small as compared with other things. In some ill-defined way it seemed that in literature it should bear about the same proportion that it does in actual life. In life, there are women who sell themselves, men who seduce, women who attract seducers, and those who get into all kinds of trouble because of sex, and that being the case, it is folly to hide it, or to pretend that things are otherwise. A writer should not be mealy mouthed. But when there is an over insistence upon sexual appetite, we are forced to believe that it can be explained only by the aberration of a perverted fancy. There is a happy medium between monsters of virtue all correct, constrained and charming, and human billy-goats. To be sure there is an impetuosity of the senses, an upwelling of the blood, but there is something else.

Unfortunately, nationally, we are given to false modesty. Perhaps it is the revolt against that which has made for this over insistence on sex in literature. If so, it will eventually prove to have been a most excellent thing should it succeed in bringing us to our senses. For, as matters are, and according to the accepted standard of “respectability,” we would give welcome to neither a Henry Fielding with his “Tom Jones,” a Smollett, a Swift, a W. L. George, a Lawrence, a George Moore nor even a Shakespeare with his Sonnets. Much less could we have a Balzac, a De Maupassant, a Murger or a Moliere. As it is, we are debarred from much that is well worth while from the pens of foreign authors, while there is a very active underground trade, as every man knows, in stuff that is frankly pornographic.

IX.

SO THEY MARRIED AND--

Just now, I turned to a pile of common novels, the sort that is here today and gone tomorrow, and opened them at the last page. Somewhere there I found that “she floated into his arms,” “the strains of the Wedding March were borne on an afternoon air,” “You are the only one I have lived for,” or some such sentence.

I also find that of ten short stories submitted for inspection, nine deal with the problem of getting a wife.

Now, as will be clear to every thinking man, the problems of life do not end with marriage. Rather do they begin with them. Marriage is not an ideal state, the end of grief, the solution of all problems. In fact, under present economic conditions, it is exactly what has been called an _egosime a deux_. To throw two people together, in everlasting close proximity, is a dangerous thing to do at any time, and in any conditions. The only possible amelioration is a community of intellectual interests between man and wife, which, as we know, is extremely rare. Lacking that, there must be frequent discontent. The two parties to the contract are thrown too much together. The feminine “moods” get on the nerves of the man. The very fact that convention prevents the man from having other female friends, and the woman from having male friends, exacerbates the trouble. The two become more or less isolated and there is revolt--perhaps openly expressed, perhaps hidden. The first fierce sexual appetite being satisfied, “love” passes into coldness and by a natural transition, coldness into dislike. Then come children perhaps, and marriage sinks into a stern, indissolvable partnership with never ending worry and fret for the man, and unending petty toil for the woman. Utter boredom is called virtue and morality. A musty, fusty old pair, yawning in each other’s faces on a front porch in utter vacuity, are pointed out by the conventional as a model of contentment. A volume would not exhaust the list of troubles that come when the marriage state is entered. So, let us in writing, paint things as they are to the end that the young shall hold no illusions. Paint no idyllic picture of love in a cottage, nor present something that has but the remotest reference to life as it is.

Edward Carpenter, in his “Love’s Coming of Age” has much to say on this subject. The little book is packed full of sound common sense. Stories on the relations of the sexes that do not touch on the triangle feature have been written in plenty, and the _Smart Set_ has had many good pages on the theme. But it has been overlooked by Americans, that William Makepeace Thackeray, a satirist second only to Swift, brought a consummate cleverness to bear on the subject. His married couples pass in review before the reader like a series of warnings. We read with amusement, to recognize with seriousness, moving among us in life the very characters he portrays. We know his _Miss Blanche_, acting the martyr, eyes ever welling with tears, trying to catch a husband who will sympathize with her sensitive heart. We have seen a _Mrs. O’Dowd_, pompous and boastful and proud, bent on marrying every bachelor she can lay her hands on. We know _Amelias_, wildly jealous, leading a husband a devil of a time. We remember many like _Helen Pendennis_, silly country prudes of no education, full of the harshness of Puritanism. We recall decent women like _Lady Castlewood_ married to drunken and imbecile boors, and by contrast, high-strung fellows tied to women who have the minds and the education of a kitchen maid. There are families of _Pontos_ yawning in solitude, men whose acquaintances are too vulgar for their wives, and wives who scorn their husbands.... Go to Thackeray if you would write, and, when tempted to dismiss your characters with the reflection that marriages are made in Heaven, bear in mind that if such was the case, Heaven was often a bad workman as far as generating earthly happiness is concerned.

X.

Sample Subject Suggestions.

Whether I was born with a crooked streak, or whether much travel in odd corners of the world and living with odd people has given me a kind of twist I do not know. Some times I am very sorry for myself: but I cannot see things in the way people tell me I should see them. The worst of it is that this disability of mine places a bar between me and my fellows more often than not. For instance, I cannot see anything very noble, elevating or inspiring in the ritual of secret societies. The “good lessons” that others tell me are to be learned in the hidden arcana, I never find. I draw the most extravagantly wrong inferences from the ritual. Whenever I hear public speakers say nice things which seem to please my neighbors, my mind goes off at a tangent in a kind of examination as it did the other day when I read a story in which much stress was laid on southern hospitality. I very much doubted that there was in the south any more hospitality than in the north, or the east, or the west. Tramping the roads of the south as I often do, I find that one autoist out of twenty-five or so will offer to carry me to the next town. That is about the proportion I found in the north. Of course, in the south, exactly as in the north, where advantages are to be gained, or where favors are to be expected, there is a rush to do honor. If I am known as a writing fellow, I am taken to see the show places, the local sights, the scenic views. But if I happen along dressed as a common laborer, I meet no more hospitality in the south than anywhere else. The watchdog south of the Mason and Dixon line is as unfriendly as his cousin in Ohio or Minnesota. I tell this, not by way of persuading you to my viewpoint, but so that you shall examine at first hand some of the notes which I have made from time to time as bases for prospective short stories. Given time, I shall make stories around them myself, but, if you beat me to it, well and good. My mental attitude in this respect is much like the hen who cackles when she has laid an egg. She has produced the potential chick, if foster mothers make it actual, well and good. So, if you make a story of any one of these, you have my benison.

_First._ I read a lecture by Conan Doyle in the course of which he assured us that on the other side of the veil we shall meet our soul mates. Soon after that appeared in print, I had no less than five manuscripts of stories based on the idea that although lovers were separated here, there would be a ringing of bells in heaven when they rushed together, with an eternity before them.

Now it seems to me that some of us who have had experiences, and, in the course of time have been happily delivered from our affinities, would not be elated over the prospect that Doyle sets before us. There’s a story there.

_Second._ A fairly well-written pamphlet foretold a time when Labor, uprising in its might would put all executives to work with pick and shovel, hammer and saw, when the day of rejoicing would be at hand.

My note on this would suggest a story to the effect that a couple of dozen really first-class executives drawn from capitalistic enterprises, and paid a higher wage than they could hope for in their old jobs, would marshal the forces of Labor and win for it the victory it craves. The story would go on to show that Labor is not willing to undertake the sacrifice that would lead to victory: that it is mistrustful and too prone to treat its own friends with coldness, denunciation, ridicule, suspicion; that it is too prone to hot air and sentimentality. The conclusion would be drawn as a salutary lesson to Labor, that while Capital measures all things by dollars and cents, it is not too stingy to pay a good price for what it wants. Consequently it wins, for money gets the man.

_Third._ An editorial told of the good time coming when Labor and Capital shall meet face to face.

I do not believe in any such good time, and would do all in my power to prevent such a meeting. My reasons would be that in the past, Labor and Capital have met face to face, and the clash of countenances was like unto that when two rams meet, both of whom are enamoured of the same ewe. I project a story then setting that forth, with the ultimate decision arrived at that Capital admits it must get all that it can at the lowest price, and Labor must get all it can at the least exertion cost. Under such circumstances, it is idle to hope for agreement, and my story should show both parties putting aside camouflage and agreeing on the issue.

_Fourth._ In a secret society, I heard a national official talk for an hour or more on the elevating influence of lodge work, praising the members present for their attention to duty.

My story would show that most men attend lodge as a refuge and a hiding place, to escape the boredom of home, wife and children and that lodge work was really nothing but solemn play, and neither religion nor a substitute for it.

_Fifth._ In high wrath, a man wrote a letter to a local paper denouncing the editor for the stand he had taken. The man then felt that he had stung the editor, and imagined him squirming under the blows received.

Write a story showing that under such circumstances a newspaper editor is highly pleased, for the objecting letter shows him that for once the bombastic nonsense he has written was read.

XI.

On Style.

On the subject of style, the authors of books telling how to write, flounder solemnly. They remind me very much of Van Vechten’s tale of the rather massive female who tried to explain a cubistic production to an outspoken doubter and coming a cropper in the effort, proved that she knew nothing about the subject. The said doubter had declared that “There’s always a lot of talk, but nothing is clear.” And it is exactly so when self appointed instructors arise to explain “style” in literature.

Perhaps if you get this into your mind it will serve. To tell a story, two persons are involved--a writer and a reader. It is the business of the writer to win, _to persuade the reader_. All the rest follows. The writer must choose the clearest way, the nearest way, the most pleasant way. His manner of doing that is his style.

Next, how shall style be attained? Take Thoreau for your teacher in this. He said: “If you have anything to say it will fall from you as a stone falls from your hand.” You know that is true. Of course, different men will have different ways of expressing themselves just as they have mannerisms in their daily acts. But we must remember that one man’s style will not fit another man. Imitation is idle. That is all I can tell you about style. I could wrap what I have said above into a cloak of ornamental language or cover it layer upon layer with elaborations as the layers of an onion are about a central core, but could say nothing else of value. Still, as many books have been written on the subject by master minds, and as I have those books on my shelves, I shall give you in the paragraph that follows, some idea of what stylists have to say, and, that being done, shall copy for you certain passages from books not very popular and therefore hard to get at, so that for yourself you may see the extraordinary differences in style.

Take Schopenhauer’s view. It is to be found in his _Parerga_.

“Every mediocre writer tries to mask his own natural style.... If they would go honestly to work, and say, quite simply, the things they have really thought, and just as they have thought them, these writers would be readable and, within their own proper sphere, even instructive.

“But instead of this they try to make the reader believe that their thoughts have gone much further and deeper than is really the case. They say what they have to say in long sentences that wind about in a forced and unnatural way; they coin new words and write prolix periods which go round and round in the thought and wrap it up in a sort of disguise. They tremble between the two separate aims of communicating what they want to say and of concealing it. Their object is to dress it up so that it may look learned and deep, in order to give people the impression that there is very much more than for the moment meets the eye.” And again: “The first rule for good style is that the author should have something to say.”

The English novelist, Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, in a lecture delivered at the University of Cambridge, has this to say: “As technically manifested in literature it (style) is the power to touch with ease, grace, precision, any note in the gamut of human thought or emotion.”

Next take the Frenchman, Comte de Buffon. It was he who said: “The style is the man himself.” I think you will understand and enjoy the passage that follows:

“But when he has made a plan, when once he has brought together and put in order all the thoughts essential to his subject, he will see easily the instant when he ought to take up his pen, he will feel with certainty that his mind is ready to bring forth, he will be pressed to give birth to his ideas, and will find only pleasure in writing; his ideas will succeed each other easily, and the style will be natural and ready; the warmth born of this pleasure will diffuse itself everywhere and give life to each expression; the animation will become higher and higher; the tone will become exalted; objects will take on color; and feeling blended with intellect will increase the warm glow, will carry it farther, will make it pass from that which one says to that which one is about to say, and the style will become interesting and luminous.”

I cull this for you from John Ruskin: