Part 10

It is not absolutely indispensable to select the subject of a novel before beginning to write it. Many authors prefer to write a third or a half of the novel before definitely committing themselves to a particular theme. For example, take _The Roll Call_, by Arnold--it must have been Arnold Constable, or perhaps it was Matthew. _The Roll Call_ is a very striking illustration of the point we would make. Somewhere along toward the end of _The Roll Call_ the author decided that the subject of the novel should be the war and its effect on the son of Hilda Lessways by her bigamous first husband--or, he wasn’t exactly her husband, being a bigamist, but we will let it go at that. Now Hilda Lessways was, or became, the wife of Edwin Clayhanger; and George Cannon, Clayhanger’s--would you say, stepson? Hilda’s son, anyway--George Cannon, the son of a gun--oh, pardon, the son of Bigamist Cannon--the stepson of, or son of the wife of, Edwin Clayhanger of the Five Towns--George Cannon.... Where were we?... Hilda Lessways Clayhanger, the--well, wife--of Bigamist Cannon....

The relationships in this novel are very confusing, like the novel and the subject of it, but if you can read the book you will see that it illustrates our point perfectly.

7

Well, go ahead and write. Don’t worry about the subject. You know how it is, a person often can’t see the forest for the trees. When you’re writing 70,000 words or maybe a few more you can’t expect to see your way out of ’em very easily. When you are out of the trees you can look back and see the forest. And when you are out of the woods of words you can glance over ’em and find out what they were all about.

However, the 80,000 words have to be written, and it is up to you, somehow or other, to set down the 90,000 parts of speech in a row. Now 100,000 words cannot be written without taking thought. Any one who has actually inscribed 120,000 words knows that. Any one who has written the 150,000 words necessary to make a good-sized novel (though William Allen White wouldn’t call _that_ good measure) understands the terrible difficulties that confront a mortal when he sits down to enter upon the task of authorship, the task of putting on paper the 200,000 mono- or polysyllables that shall hold the reader breathless to the end, if only from the difficulty of pronouncing some of them.

Where to start? For those who are not yet equipped with self-starters we here set down a few really first-class openings for either the spring or fall novel trade:

“Marinda was frightened. When she was frightened her eyes changed color. They were dark now, and glittering restlessly like the sea when the wind hauls northwest. Jack Hathaway, unfamiliar with weather signs, took no heed of the impending squall. He laughed recklessly, dangerously....” (Story of youth and struggle.)

“The peasant combed the lice from his beard, spat and said, grumbling: ‘Send us ploughs that we may till the soil and save Russia.... Send us ploughs.’” (Realistic story of Russia.)

“Darkness, suave, dense, enfolding, lay over the soft loam of the fields. The girl, moving silently across the field, felt the mystery of the dark; the scent of the soil and the caress of the night alike enchanted her. Hidden in the folds of her dress, clutched tightly in her fingers, was the ribbon he had given her. With a quick indrawing of her breath she paused, and, screened by the utter blackness that enveloped her, pressed it to her lips....” (Story of the countryside. Simple, trusting innocence. Lots of atmosphere. After crossing the field the girl strikes across Haunted Heath, a description of which fills the second chapter.)

All these are pretty safe bets, if you’re terribly hard up. Think them over. Practice them daily for a few weeks.

8

Now that you have some idea about writing a novel it may be as well for you to consider the consequences before proceeding to the irrevocable act.

One of the consequences will certainly be the discovery of many things in the completed manuscript that you never intended. This is no frivolous allusion to the typographical errors you will find--for a typewriter is as capable of spoonerisms as the human tongue. We have reference to things that you did not consciously put into your narrative.

And first let it be said that many things that seem to you unconscious in the work of skilled writers are deliberate art (as the phrase goes). The trouble is that the deliberation usually spoils the art. An example must be had and we will take it in a novel by the gifted American, Joseph Hergesheimer. Before proceeding further with this Manual for Beginners read _Java Head_ if you can; if not, never mind.

Now in _Java Head_ the purpose of Mr. Hergesheimer was, aside from the evocation of a beautiful bit of a vanished past, the delineation of several persons of whom one represented the East destroyed in the West and another the West destroyed in the East. Edward Dunsack, back in Salem, Massachusetts, the victim of the opium habit, represented the West destroyed in the East; the Chinese wife of Gerrit Ammidon represented the East destroyed in the West. Mr. Hergesheimer took an artist’s pride in the fact that the double destruction was accomplished with what seemed to him the greatest possible economy of means; almost the only external agency employed, he pointed out, was opium. Very well; this is æstheticism, pure and not so simple as it looks. It is a Pattern. It is a musical phrase or theme presented as a certain flight of notes in the treble, repeated or echoed and inverted in the bass. It is a curve on one side of a staircase balanced by a curve on the other. It is a thing of symmetry and grace and it is the expression, perfect in its way, of an idea. Kipling expressed very much the same idea when he told us that East is East and West is West and never the twain shall meet. Mr. Hergesheimer amplifies and extends. If the two are brought in contact each is fatal to the other. Is that all?

It is not all, it is the mere beginning. When you examine _Java Head_ with the Pattern in mind you immediately discover that the Pattern is carried out in bewildering detail. Everything is symmetrically arranged. For instance, many a reader must have been puzzled and bewildered by the heartbreaking episode at the close of the novel in which Roger Brevard denies the delightful girl Sidsall Ammidon. The affair bears no relation to the currents of the tale; it is just a little eddy to one side; it is unnecessarily cruel and wounding to our sensibilities. Why have it at all?

The answer is that in his main narrative Mr. Hergesheimer has set before us Gerrit Ammidon, a fellow so quixotic that he marries twice out of sheer chivalry. He has drawn for us the fantastic scroll of such a man, a sea-shape not to be matched on shore. Well, then, down in the corner, he must inscribe for us another contrasting, balancing, compensating, miniatured scroll--a land-shape in the person of Roger Brevard who is so unquixotic as to offset Gerrit Ammidon completely. Gerrit Ammidon will marry twice for incredible reasons and Roger Brevard will not even marry once for the most compelling of reasons--love. The beautiful melody proclaimed by the violins is brutally parodied by the tubas.

9

Is it all right thus? It is not all right thus and it never can be so long as life remains the unpatterned thing we discern it to be. If life were completely patterned it would most certainly not be worth living. When we say that life is unpatterned we mean, of course, that we cannot read all its patterns (we like to assume that all patterns are there, because it comforts us to think of a fundamental Order and Symmetry).

But so long as life is largely unpatterned, or so long as we cannot discern all its patterns, life is eager, interesting, surprising and altogether distracting and lovely however bewildering and distressing, too. Different people take the unreadable differently. Some, like Thomas Hardy, take it in defiant bitterness of spirit; some, like Joseph Conrad, take it in profound faith and wonder. Hardy sees the disorder that he cannot fathom; Conrad admires the design that he can only incompletely trace. To Hardy the world is a place where--

“As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods; They kill us for their sport.”

To Conrad the world is a place where men may continually make the glorious and heartening discovery that a solidarity exists among them; that they are united by a bond as unbreakable as it is mysterious.

And to others, as regrettably to Mr. Hergesheimer writing _Java Head_, the world is a place where it is momentarily sufficient to trace casual symmetries without thought of their relation to an ineluctable whole.

10

What, then, is the novelist to do? Is it not obvious that he must not busy himself too carefully with the business of patterning the things he has to tell? For the moment he has traced everything out nicely and beautifully he may know for a surety that he has cut himself off from the larger design of Life. He has got his little corner of the Oriental rug all mapped out with the greatest exactitude. But he has lost touch with the bigger intricacy beyond his corner. It is a prayer rug. He had better kneel down and pray.

Now there are novels in which no pattern at all is traced; and these are as bad as those which minutely map a mere corner. These are meaningless and confused stories in which nobody can discern any cause or effect, any order or law, any symmetry or proportion or expressed idea. These are the novels which have been justified as a “slice of life” and which have brought into undeserved disrepute the frequently painstaking manner of their telling. The trouble is seldom primarily, as so many people think, with the material but with its presentation. You may take almost any material you like and so present it as to make it mean something; and you may also take almost any material you like and so present it as to make it mean nothing to anybody. A heap of bricks is meaningless; but the same bricks are intelligible expressed as a building of whatever sort, or merely as a sidewalk with zigzags, perhaps, of a varicolor.

The point we would make--and we might as well try to drive it home without further ineffectual attempts at illustration--is that you must do some patterning with your material, whether bricks for a building or lives for a story; but if you pattern too preciously your building will be contemptible and your story without a soul. In your building you must not be so decided as to leave no play for another’s imagination, contemplating the structure. In your narrative you must not be so dogmatic about two and two adding to four as to leave no room for a wild speculation that perhaps they came to five. For it is not the certainty that two and two have always made four but the possibility that some day they may make five that makes life worth living--and guessing about on the printed page.

11

Perhaps the most serious consequence of writing a novel is the revelation of yourself it inevitably entails.

We are not thinking, principally, of the discovery you will make of the size of your own soul. We have in mind the laying bare of yourself to others.

Of course you do reveal yourself to yourself when you write a book to reveal others to others. It has been supposed that a man cannot say or do a thing which does not expose his nature. This is nonsense; you do not expose your nature every time you take the subway, though a trip therein may very well be an index to your manners. The fact remains that no man ever made a book or a play or a song or a poem, with any command of the technique of his work, without in some measure giving himself away. Where this is not enough of an inducement some other, such as a tin whistle with every bound copy, is offered; no small addition as it enables the reviewer to declare, hand on heart, that “this story is not to be whistled down the wind.” Some have doubted Bernard Shaw’s Irishism, which seems the queerer as nearly everything he has written has carried a shillelagh concealed between the covers. Recently Frank K. Reilly of Chicago gave away one-cent pieces to advertise a book called _Penny of Top Hill Trail_. He might be said, and in fact he hereby is said, thus to have coppered his risk in publishing it.... All of which is likely to be mistaken for jesting. Let us therefore jest that we may be taken with utmost seriousness.

The revelation of yourself to yourself, which the mere act of writing a novel brings to pass, may naturally be either pleasant or unpleasant. Very likely it is unpleasant in a majority of instances, a condition which need not necessarily reflect upon our poor human nature. If we did not aspire so high for ourselves we should not suffer such awful disappointments on finding out where we actually get off. The only moral, if there is one, lies in our ridiculous aim. Imagine the sickening of heart with which Oscar Wilde contemplated himself after completing _The Picture of Dorian Grey_! And imagine the lift it must have given him to look within himself as he worked at _The Ballad of Reading Gaol_! The circumstances of life and even the actual conduct of a man are not necessarily here or there--or anywhere at all--in this intimate contemplation. There is one mirror before which we never pose. God made man in His own image. God made His own image and put it in every man.

It is there! Nothing in life transcends the wonder of the moment when, each for himself, we make this discovery. Then comes the struggle to remold ourselves nearer to our heart’s desire. It succeeds or it doesn’t; perhaps it succeeds only slightly; anyway we try for it. The sleeper, twisting and turning, dreaming and struggling, is the perfect likeness of ourselves in the waking hours of our whole earthly existence. Because they have seen this some have thought life no better than a nightmare. Voltaire suggested that the earth and all that dwelt thereon was only the bad dream of a god on some other planet. We would point out the bright side of this possibility: It presupposes the existence somewhere of a mince pie so delicious and so powerful as to evoke the likenesses of Cæsar and Samuel Gompers, giraffes, Mr. Taft, violets, Mr. Roosevelt, Piotr Ilitch Tchaikovski, Billy Sunday, Wu-Ting Fang, Helen of Troy and Mother Jones, groundhogs, H. G. Wells; perhaps Bolshevism is the last writhe. Mince pie, unwisely eaten instead of the dietetic nectar and ambrosia, may well explain the whole confused universe. And you and I--we can create another universe, equally exciting, by eating mince pie to-night!... You see there is a bright side to everything, for the mince pie is undoubtedly of a heavenly flavor.

We were saying, when sidetracked by the necessity of explaining the universe, that the self-revelation which writing a book entails is in most cases depressing, but not by any means always so. Boswell was not much of a man judged by the standards of his own day or ours, either one, yet Boswell knew himself better than he knew Dr. Johnson by the time he had finished his life of the Doctor. It must have bucked him up immensely to know that he was at least big enough himself to measure a bigger man up and down, in and out, criss-cross and sideways, setting down the complicated result without any error that the human intelligence can detect. It must have appeased the ironical soul of Henry Adams to realise that he was one of the very few men who had never fooled himself about himself, and that evidence of his phenomenal achievement in the shape of the book _The Education of Henry Adams_, would survive him after his death--or at least, after the difficulties of communicating with those on earth had noticeably increased (we make this wise modification lest someone match Sir Oliver Lodge’s _Raymond, or Life After Death_ with a volume called _Henry, or Re-Education After Death_).

It must have sent a thrill of pleasure through the by no means insensitive frame of Joseph Conrad when he discovered, on completing _Nostromo_, that he had a profounder insight into the economic bases of modern social and political affairs than nine-tenths of the professional economists and sociologists--plus a knowledge of the human heart that they have never dreamed worth while. For Conrad saw clearly, and so saw simply; the “silver of the mine” of this, his greatest story, was, it is true, an incorruptible metal, but it could and did alter the corruptible nature of man--and would continue to do so through generation after generation long after his Mediterranean sailor-hero had become dust.

Even in the case of the humble and unknown writer whose completed manuscript, after many tedious journeys, comes home to him at last, to be re-read regretfully but with an undying belief not so much in the work itself as in what it was meant to express and so evidently failed to--even in his case the great consolation is the attestation of a creed. Very bad men have died, as does the artist in Shaw’s _The Doctor’s Dilemma_, voicing with clarity and beauty the belief in which they think they have lived or ought to have lived; but a piece of work is always an actual living of some part of the creed that is in you. It may be a failure but it has, with all its faults, a gallant quality, the quality of the deed done, which men have always admired, and because of which they have invented those things we call words to embody their praise.

But what of the consequences of revealing yourself to others? Writing a novel will surely mean that you will incur them. We must speak of them briefly; and then we may get on to the thing for which you are doubtless waiting with terrible patience--the way to write the novel itself. Never fear! If you will but endure steadfastly you shall Know All.

12

“Certainly, publish everything,” commented the New York _Times_ editorially upon a proposal to give out earnings, or some other detail, of private businesses. “All privacy is scandalous,” added the newspaper. In this satirical utterance lies the ultimate justification for writing a novel.

All privacy is scandalous. If you don’t believe it, read some of the prose of James Joyce. _A Portrait of The Artist As a Young Man_ will do for a starter. _Ulysses_ is a follow-up. H. G. Wells likes the first, while deploring so much sewerage in the open street. You see, nothing but a sincere conviction concerning the wickedness of leaving anything at all unmentioned in public could justify such narratives as Mr. Joyce’s.

In a less repulsive sense, the scandal of privacy is what underlies any novel of what we generally call the “realistic” sort. Mr. Dreiser, for instance, thinks it scandalous that we should not know and publicly proclaim the true nature of such men as Hurstwood in his _Sister Carrie_. Mr. Hardy thinks it scandalous that the world should not publicly acknowledge the purity of Tess Durbeyfield and therefore he gives us a book in which she is, as the subtitle says, “faithfully presented.” Gene Stratton-Porter thinks it scandalous not to tell the truth about such a boy as Freckles. The much-experienced Mr. Tarkington, stirred to his marrow by what seems almost a world conspiracy to condone the insufferable conceit of the George Amberson Minafers among us, writes _The Magnificent Ambersons_ to make us confess how we hate ’em--and how our instinctive faith in them is vindicated at last.

Every novelist who gains a public of any size or permanence deliberately, and even joyfully, faces the consequences of the revelation of himself to some thousands of his fellow-creatures. We don’t mean that he always delineates himself in the person of a character, or several characters, in his stories. He may do that, of course, but the self-exposure is generally much more merciless. The novelist can withhold from the character which, more or less, stands for himself his baser qualities. What he cannot withhold from the reader is his own mind’s limitations.

A novel is bounded by the author’s horizons. If a man can see only so far and only so deep his book will show it. If he cannot look abroad, but can perceive nothing beyond the nose on his face, that fact will be fully apparent to his co-spectators who turn the pages of his story. If he can see only certain colors those who look on with him will be aware of his defect. Above all, if he can see persons as all bad or all good, all black or all white, he will be hanged in effigy along with the puppets he has put on paper.

This is the reason why every one should write a novel. There is only one thing comparable with it as a means of self-immolation. That, of course, is tenure of public office. And as there are not nearly enough public offices to serve the need of individual discipline, novelizing should be encouraged, fomented--we had almost said, made compulsory. Compulsion, however, defeats its own ends. Let us elect to public offices, as we would choose to fill scholarships, those who cannot, through some misfortune, write novels; and let us induce all the other people in the world that we can to put pen to paper--not that they may enrich the world with immortal stories, not that they may make money, become famous or come to know themselves, but solely that we may know them for what they are.

If Albert Burleson had been induced to write a novel would we have made him a Congressman and would President Wilson have made him Postmaster-General? If William, sometime of Germany, had written a novel would the Germans have acquiesced in his theory of Divine Right? Georges Clemenceau wrote novels and was chosen of the people to lead them. Hall Caine and Marie Corelli and Rider Haggard and Arnold Bennett have written novels which enable us to gauge them pretty accurately--and not one of them has yet been invited to help run the League of Nations. The reason is simple: We know them too well.

All privacy is scandalous. Thomas Dixon says: “It is positively immoral that the world should run on without knowing the depths to which I can sink. I must write _The Way of a Man_ and make the world properly contemptuous of me.” Zona Gale reflects to herself: “After all, with nothing but these few romances and these _Friendship Village_ stories, people have no true insight into my real tastes, affinities, predilections, qualities of mind. I will write about a fruit and pickle salesman, an ineffectual sort of person who becomes, almost involuntarily, a paperhanger. That will give them the idea of me they lack.”

William Allen White, without consciously thinking anything of the kind, is dimly aware that people generally have a right to know him as a big-hearted man who makes some mistakes but whose sympathy is with the individual man and woman and whose passion is for social progress. The best way to make people generally acquainted with William Allen White is to write a novel--say, _In The Heart of a Fool_, which they will read.... The best way to get to know anybody is to get him to talking about somebody else. Talk about one’s self is a little too self-conscious.

And there you have it! It is exactly because such a writer as H. G. Wells is in reality pretty nearly always talking about himself that we find it so difficult to appraise him rightly on the basis of his novels. Self-consciousness is never absent from a Wells book. It is this acute self-consciousness that makes so much of Henry James valueless to the great majority of readers. They cannot get past it, or behind it. The great test fails. Mr. James is dead, and the only way left to get at the truth of Mr. Wells will be to make him Chancellor of the Exchequer or, in a socialized British republic, Secretary of Un-War....