Fissiparous Fiction

—The other day I extorted a somewhat interesting disclosure from a novelist. By subjecting my intelligence and sympathy wholly to his for the time,— a method of approach to which I find novelists peculiarly vulnerable, — and flattering his literary vanity adroitly and indirectly without making him too plainly aware that I was flattering him, I led him into a train of confessions which, at least at first, he seemed to take pleasure in, as if they afforded him a certain relief.

“ Yes,” he said, “after all, the only thing that a novelist does is to split himself up into pieces and work himself over into a great many different people ; and his success, generally speaking, is proportioned to the skill with which he can make himself appear somebody else. My own method is to take, for instance, a phase of my own character which I do not like particularly, and yet am well aware of. I meditate on it a while, and build it up until it becomes a kind of shadow by my side, — a haunting, abstract presence.

“ So far, so good. But my personified quality is still no more than a kind of literary spook. I must materialize it, — bestow on it a form and a way of acting and talking, which of course must be as far as possible from my own. This is hard to do. The abstraction must be made to look, speak, and act not merely like a human being, but as one. It must be completely covered over with some kind of human flesh. One way of doing this is to pick out the external part of some actual person to fit the abstraction, and thrust the abstraction neck and heels into it. That, indeed, is what most people think we novelists are always doing. Some people affect to be terribly afraid we are going to do it with them. Sometimes it is done, to be sure. I don’t do it myself,— not so much, I think, because of any fear that my ‘ characters ’ will become troublesome to me as for the reason that I can never find any ready-made bodies which will fit my personified qualities. If I should use them, I should perceive that they were untrue to life.

“The next method is to make a composite body ; and that is what I do usually. The world is full of eyes, lips, noses, brows, heads of hair, beards, hands, shoulders, backs, legs, skins. These are the things of which people are made externally in stories. You may have noticed that ears are seldom spoken of by any writer of fiction. Unless the character is an unpleasant one, and we wish to make the personage appear ridiculous or repellent, we suppress the ears.

“ By the way, I have often wondered why some caricaturist, one half as clever, say, as the man who drew ‘ Ludovicus, Rex, and Ludovicus Rex,’ has not produced portraits of some well-known characters of fiction; using in the picture only the elements of the form and articles of clothing that are plainly mentioned by the authors, and leaving all the rest blank. The great majority of the figures so depicted would have no ears ; many of them would have no noses. There would be large numbers of cleverly drawn faces without any bodies at all, and some of the people would consist of nothing but clothes. Probably all of them would have some clothes. Most of the nice people would have delicate hands and long, tapering fingers, including those who are lowborn but high-minded ; coarse people of all sorts would be apt, in this collection, to have large and clumsy hands ; but very many of the ordinary run of people would be entirely handless. Probably not one picture in the collection would show a complete human being.

“ However, these pictures serve in books perfectly well for human beings, because the reader fills out the blank spaces. More important than the external form is the way of saying and doing things, in which the real life and soul of the person comes out. Here the reader does not wish to have much left to his imagination. He insists, with reason, upon being told just, what the people in the story do and say. Every speech and act must be characteristic, and all must be consistent. Now, how am I going to manage my piece of myself ? How shall I make a real outsider out of this abstraction of my own soul ? Why, I simply have to get a very close hold in my thoughts upon the abstraction, and think what this element of my own character, deprived of the other elements which qualify it, would do and say subject to the qualification of the bodily parts I have already given it. No doubt I and all other writers of fiction seem to see and hear characters, after a while, doing and saying things spontaneously, but that is only because we have already thought them out and set them going ; and it is dangerous to give them their heads, to do and say what they please, even then.

“ You see, people who are imagined outright might change insensibly and quite go to pieces ; but this stupid or mean or pretentious part of me, or this nice, generous, and bright part of me, would always be fairly consistent with itself. I get so that I know it pretty well, and have no particular difficulty in judging what it would do or say. Of course it involves pretty close study of myself under varying conditions, and that is why the novelist’s experience should be large. Then I must be harvesting material from others all the time to be worked up into my external composites.

“What effect, do you ask, does all this have on my own mind ? You think I should feel like a man who had been feeding himself into a sausage-machine and turning the crank himself ? Perhaps I ought to feel that way. but you know we get used to anything followed as a trade. Your first question reminds me of the quandary of a friend of mine when he read how a man of science had cut off the tails of successive generations of mice during five years, to see if he could produce a breed of tailless mice, and failed to bring about any effect on the mice. ‘ But what effect did it produce on the man of science?’ my friend asked. But, bless you ! I never feel any mental or moral deterioration from my study of myself or others. However, after I have finished a novel I feel somewhat as if I had been playing several simultaneous and prodigiously prolonged games of whist, and rigidly keeping track of everybody’s plays.”

“ I should call your method of creating characters the fissiparous method,” said I.

Will you believe that I was compelled to explain to this man of letters the meaning of the word “ fissiparous ” ? When I had made him understand that it describes those most interesting creatures which, when cut up into pieces, make as many new creatures as there are pieces, he smiled a shuddering little smile, and said no more about novelwriting that day. A great many times I have been glad I was not a novelist, but I was never more glad than after I had heard my friend’s account of his methods.