My Friends the Writers

I

ACCORDING to our latest census there are one hundred and twenty-two million inhabitants of the United States. How many of this number are writers and would-be writers it would be hard to say, but they may be estimated, thanks to Mr. R. L. Duffus, at about two hundred thousand. Two hundred thousand individuals engaged in trying to write books, or fodder for the magazines, poems, plays, or scenarios. The ratio between what is written and what is published is, generally speaking, twenty to one — twenty attempts to one acceptance. I am glad to say that these odds neither deter writers from writing nor editors from reading what comes to them. There is nothing melancholy in this ratio. As Mr. Duffus says in his quotable volume, Books: Their Place in a Democracy, ‘it would be a cause for rejoicing if a million Americans were trying to write books, first, because people who try to write can be counted on to read; second, because out of a million manuscripts we could expect to sort out more good books than we do out of a fifth or a tenth or a twentieth of that number.’ If Florida real estate and Wall Street stocks remain at low ebb, and if the talkies continue in the same raucous voice, more people may be driven to write and to read American books. The hope is certainly worth cherishing.

Now the business of publishing— in which, for the sake of my argument, I include the writing, the submitting, and the selecting of material to be printed — is needlessly complicated. The business is complicated first by a sense of mystery: a manuscript is submitted, and immediately there ensues a silence which grows the more mysterious as it is prolonged, and which is seldom satisfactorily explained by the letters of decision that in nineteen cases out of twenty must be of polite rejection. Save for a few able and conscientious editors, letter writing to-day is a lost art, and if publishers and writers must still trust their dearest hopes to the mail, complications are bound to follow.

The business of publishing may be exposed to the vagaries of the post, but it is even more dependent upon the question of taste, and in this respect is more troublesome than any other business I can think of. It is just as natural for a writer to believe in what he has written as it is for a publisher to rely upon the tests of his experience. In their attitude toward an editor, writers sometimes remind me of the American motorists and the traffic cop: they are willing to acknowledge his authority so long as it does not apply to them personally; when they are challenged, the air becomes electric with antagonism.

Editors, like policemen, are not unfailingly right. Walter Page turned down David Harum, and Chicago gunmen still do as they please; but I do believe that editors are more right than wrong, and that there are often reasons for their actions which, if understood, would make them more forgivable. I am enough of a beginner to suffer the disappointments that come to an aspiring writer, and I have been long enough in the publishing business to have no mere pontifical regard for editors. So I should like — if I am able — to explain away some of the complications, the mystery, and the antagonism that surround a business in which the personal element is most important.

The sincerity of a writer is taken for granted; that of a publisher is not infrequently questioned. ‘I know you editors never read all of your manuscripts,’ a letter will say; ‘I am sending you my story even though I have been told you never accept unsolicited material,’ writes another; or, more fantastic still, ’I am submitting my article with faint hope, since I am aware of your prejudice against Catholic writers.’ There was a woman who pasted together the latter pages of her manuscript in order to prove whether or not every word of her novel had been read; there was a man who wrote me angrily declaring that his repeated rejections could only be explained by the fact that he was on the Publishers’ Black List — and threatening to sue me if he was! These are indications of a mistrust which turn an editor hot around the collar, and which our association were certainly the better without. Now I should think it would be obvious that anyone engaged, say, in the potato business would have to make it his practice to weed out his assortment, discarding the bad ones and caring not a whit whether the good were grown by Greeks or Nordics. A publisher is in the self-same fix, and, although his potatoes may not prove to be quite so small or tasty as the public wants, you may be sure that their selection is as honorable and conscientious as he can make it.

With an optimism that is rewarded perhaps once in two hundred times, a publisher steadfastly examines the chance manuscripts that come his way. Unsolicited material is generally disposed of rather more rapidly than that which has been solicited, for the same reason that one does not have to eat the whole of an egg to know that it is bad; but this is not to say that dogeared manuscripts which have evidently gone the rounds, or handwritten papers which strain the eyesight, are treated cynically. Don’t think that there is a black list of rejected authors which circulates in editorial circles: a publisher is an explorer by instinct, and it gives him solid joy to discover merit in what he knows has been turned down by competitors. Uncle Remus, Joel Chandler Harris’s classic, was rejected time and again, because it was in dialect, before it reached an editor with imagination enough to go against precedent. Trader Horn was accepted after having been shown to at least three publishers, I believe. All Quiet on the Western Front sold its half a million copies after its refusal by the first American publisher to whom it was offered; and the press of which I am editor gave a five-thousand-dollar prize to a manuscript that had languished unrewarded for nine months in a rival house.

These are but conspicuous examples of what is happening daily in the business of publishing: can it be said that editors are callous to the unknown or downtrodden writer? And, keen though the pleasure may be of scoring a success off an opponent, there is, I promise you, a still greater satisfaction that comes occasionally to a publisher — the satisfaction of detecting talent hid in a napkin and then, by the exercise of the best of his ability, of encouraging this talent to its fullest expression, perhaps even to the point of genius. Remember Page’s excited trip to the South when Mary Johnston’s first manuscript wandered into his hands; remember Kipling’s dedication to F. N. Doubleday, who both personally and professionally had encouraged him from the first; recall the great service of Mr. Brownell in the developing art of Mrs. Wharton; read in their published correspondence how Edward Garnett, a reader for a London publisher, strengthened and helped to develop the inexperienced Conrad. Between these authors and editors the business of publishing was no mere matter of contracts and royalty statements. Theirs was a friendship founded on mutual respect and strengthened by the give-and-take, the criticism and appraisal, which every writer needs. This is publishing at its best.

II

I have given you my word that all manuscripts that come to a publishing house are examined, and so they are. It is, I take it, generally understood that they are first read, not by the editor in chief, but by the professional manuscript reader, a person whose identity is usually concealed behind that cryptic signature ‘The Editors.’ Do not suppose, however, that this anonymity is a cloak for inexperience: a trustworthy reader is as indispensable to a publishing house as the magnetism and executive ability of the editor. George Meredith, the novelist, was a manuscript reader for many years; so was Edward Garnett, the friend of Conrad; Willa Cather read fiction for S. S. McClure in his heyday, E. V. Lucas read manuscripts for Methuen, Frank Swinnerton is a reader today. Because most of you have tried and will continue to try your cases before such judges as these, it might be fitting for me to give you Mr. Swinnerton’s qualification of this superior court of letters.

‘The professional reader’s task,’ he writes, ‘is very different from that of a reviewer, and much less simple. The publisher’s reader must have no vagaries. His prejudices must all be sunk when he takes up a manuscript. He must combine enthusiasm with calm; caution with boldness. He must be patient, wary, shrewd; he must know something upon every subject; he must be acquainted with all literatures, and, preferably, with several languages. He must understand the book trade, must have a very easy familiarity with the work of all living authors. . . . He is expected to mark down a bestseller at sight, and to distinguish between work that is immature through excess of genius and work that is crude through congenital incapacity. Taste, experience, and a subtle enjoyment of drudgery for the sake of its occasional rewards (purely spiritual, since he rarely experiences gratitude), go to form the publisher’s reader. Such readers have known the best when they saw it — so much is easy to the real critic. They have known, or thought they knew, a best-seller when they saw it — that is not so easy, even to the born publisher. And they have known and backed with their recommendation and encouragement every variety of literary promise: and this is the greatest service which they could possibly render either to the publisher or to the cause of modern literature. Such service could only be given by minds trained, patient, and extraordinarily perceptive. It calls for a special sort of courage, possessed by few men.’

Mr. Swinnerton is obviously talking about the best in the business; readers — to give you further examples — like the late Ripley Hitchcock of Appleton’s, who accepted David Harum and by cutting it one third shaped it into the fine book it was intended to be; like Ferris Greenslet, now editor of Houghton Mifflin, who visited Henry Adams periodically for twelve years and in the end persuaded him to have published that famous volume, The Education of Henry Adams.

It is an editor’s duty to cut when necessary, to call forward and to inspire when a writer’s initiative is low, and in time of stress to suggest that very title which will give a fillip to the whole. Remember Michael Angelo’s fine saying, ‘The more the marble wastes, the more the statue grows.’ Remember the lady who complimented a bishop on his sermon, but added that she thought it was a bit too long. ‘Madam, I did not have time to make it shorter.’ We are all of us addicted to long-windedness and it usually takes our wives or some other patient first reader to tell us so. I have known of autobiographical notes which ran to nearly eight hundred thousand words, but which were breathed on by a capable editor and came out a readable book of one eighth the size. I have known where small omissions amounting in all to but three thousand words were a means of shifting sentimentality into true feeling. Have patience with the editor if he wants you to leave out things: he is probably right.

Or let us suppose that a good title is missing. I can instance a popular novel published this summer for which the editor supplied the title before the book was a third written. The phrase capped the situation admirably and so clarified the design that it was the easier to write. I think of the titles in the Atlantic Monthly and in Harper’s as being happy choices; how many of them have been supplied by the editors they would not allow me to say. As for the stimulus, mental and material, which it is an editor’s duty to supply, I shall have much to say about that later.

III

It requires modesty — or rather the lack of it — to say that I have served an apprenticeship in the company I have just mentioned. Yet in eight years’ reading, guided as I have been by two sage sets of initials, ‘E. S.’ and ‘F. C.,’ I have gathered some random and, I hope, practical suggestions which may be of use to you. I shall begin with the magazine field. I presume that you all have a general knowledge of the market. To make this specific, I have known writers who kept a loose-leaf notebook in which, on separate sheets, they set down the requirements of the magazine which they might hope to fill, the names of the editors with whom they have corresponded, and the probable price they would receive for a paper of a given length. Then, below these terms, they would list the success or failure of their respective manuscripts. If such a record infuriates you, you can always burn it and begin a fresh one.

In studying a magazine’s menu, many writers are tempted to submit material on a subject which has lately been given space and discussion. Now, unless the topic is red-hot, the editor will be disinclined to revert to it. Thus you will save yourselves time and energy by writing him, not an article, but a letter stating your immediate reactions to the subject in question, touching of course on those aspects to which you believe the other writer has not done full justice. If your letter has vigor and persuasion, you may very well be commissioned to write a more formal reply for the magazine.

In other respects make your letters to the editor as brief as possible. It may help if you tell why you think you are qualified to write the paper you are submitting. But it won’t help to say that you are offering it to him at ‘the usual rates’ — for obviously it is not to his advantage to ‘skin’ you. An editor must pay you fairly if he is to continue to receive your work. If it is iiction or verse that you are contributing, don’t, in heaven’s name, crowd your envelope; two stories or three poems should be the limit at any one time, and they should be selected if possible with a difference, so as to serve as a foil to each other. A man I know used to submit his sketches to Life in series of threes, one of them being a drudge which had been turned down before but which by its vaguely familiar contours seemed to sharpen the quality of the others.

In submitting book material — which, incidentally, it is obligatory to have typed — it is not necessary to fret yourself about the copyright, which the publisher will arrange for in the event of acceptance. State — if you please — that you would like to reserve the dramatic and motionpicture rights; most publishers will be glad to let you handle them. These eventualities will take care of themselves when the time comes. More important at the outset is the physical well-being of the manuscript itself. A book manuscript will be convenient to read if it is packed in the box that contained the typewriting paper, and if the chapters are separately clipped and then divided into either two or three sections, each section bound in a paper cover. Pages are apt to be torn from loose-leaf holders or from giant clasps. Above all abhor that springback contraption which only Jack Dempsey could hold open for ten minutes at a time.

A book publisher is entitled to six weeks for his consideration; that time is short enough if several readings are necessary. Plan for this interval in specifying your return address — and don’t send follow-up letters unless your nerves can’t stand the strain. Finally, and above all, keep a carbon copy in case of accident. A publisher cannot be held accountable if your material is lost en route.

Your methods of work will be designed by yourself and primarily for speed and facility, and anything I may have to offer should be subject to discard if it does not fit easily into your scheme. Speed is of utmost importance, since a good mind in motion will always travel faster than a pencil or typewriter. Personally I prefer a soft pencil with a sharp point, and in writing I keep open a wide margin to the left of my page so that when my mind begins to skip ahead I can jot down phrases which will give me the idea for the paragraph or the dialogue when my laboring pencil at last catches up with the procession. Some people can use the typewriter direct as they compose; I envy their speed, but not often their style, which in most cases seems prolific and in need of hand-picking. On the other hand, I would urge college graduates of composition courses to shun the wordsplitting and critical analysis which is apt to impede their action — to shun these refinements until they have set down the bulk of their ideas. Not until then is the time to fuss. Pope, who puts things neater than most, capped this situation when he drew from his own experience the line,

Dean Briggs used to advise that when you were on the track of a good subject it was well to run after it as long as you could keep your eyes alert. This, paradoxically enough, applies most specifically to those waiters who have other things to do. A writer at liberty will school himself to write for about the same span of time each day. But for the many who are writing ‘outside’ their other responsibilities it is expedient to force an expanding idea for all that it’s worth even at the expense of a sleepless night. Sleep you can always make up. But a good solid start is imperative in a short story, essay, or article, so that as one reads it after an interval one irresistibly acquires the momentum to finish it. Writing is at its lowest point of attraction when one must go back to an unfinished manuscript which seems to have lost all possibility of motion.

Finally, I suppose there is no greater means of facility than that of keeping a notebook with you to stuff with those thoughts and observations and ‘wise cracks’ which come from heaven knows where and which will disappear quickly if they are not jotted down. This flotsam and jetsam of the mind is often of immense value. Once you can acquire the habit of salvaging it you will be the richer. Sinclair Lewis, I believe, keeps voluminous notebooks. The author of The Cloister and the Hearth put such store in the practice that he willed his collection of notes to the British Museum for the guidance of future English authors. Read Katherine Mansfield’s Journals and Samuel Butler’s Notebooks if you want to see the close interplay of random ideas and creative art.

IV

These are elementary concerns; more subtle is the problem of revision. Now an editor would prefer to write a letter of frank criticism rather than of polite evasion were it not that the first course is apt to get him into trouble. If a book has seriously interested a reader he will probably take notes about it, and if there proves to be a disappointing conclusion these notes may show where and why the story has gone off the track. Should these be embodied in the letter of rejection? An editor knows that in eight cases out of ten a book revised by the author at his suggestion is apt to be returned the worse for the effort. Still, he remembers the exception when the improvement brought national success. And there is a third factor: the time and industry which are represented in the writer’s work and out of respect for which something more than a noncommittal reply is due.

Under these circumstances I think the rejection should be as specific as the interest warrants. If the editor holds little hope for the manuscript he need only mention the main objections to it; if, on the other hand, he believes that it might be successfully altered he should be specific even to chapter and page. The writer must understand that he is undertaking a revision with no definite assurance of acceptance, yet even so I think he will be glad for the counsel. Beginning writers especially, it seems to me, are hard put to it for impartial and experienced advice.

You may think I am implying a sense of infallibility on the part of the editor, which I do not intend. I have already cited instances of mistaken judgment such as you yourselves may have suffered. But my point is that where one publisher misses the promise in a manuscript another will be almost sure to detect it. In any case, as between author’s agents, publisher’s readers, and enthusiastic friends, I would take the publisher’s word as the most impartial.

A good agent is as helpful as a good editor, but a great deal rarer. It should be his business to criticize your work, to place it to the best advantage, and to act as a friendly go-between in the matter of payment. He should also reserve the right to reject what he considers as your inferior writing. A bad agent is apt to charge you a fee at the outset, accept your manuscripts without discrimination, relay them to editors in the same thoughtless fashion, and so lead you on to false hopes. I have been told of an agent who refused a new client on the grounds that she had on her list as many writers as she could properly attend to. We need more of that sort. For writers of magazine fiction, and especially for those living at a distance from the publishing centres, an agent is often desirable. For writers of essays and articles, for writers of books, the need is not so evident. In the case of established writers the agent may even prove to be obnoxious. The practice of ‘shopping around’ for the high price can become downright reprehensible when applied to books. It threatens the loyalty between an author and his publisher and it introduces the unscrupulous element of bribery.

There is no doubt that publishers who would be classified as ‘lily-white’ by the Carnegie Foundation occasionally have dirty work done for them by agents. Let us suppose, for instance, that an author has been disappointed at the sale and reception of his latest book. He distrusts the advertising appropriation; he suspects that the sales force are asleep on their feet; he is not likely to infer that the book is inferior to his best — which, of course, is often the brutal truth. In this melancholy he is approached by an agent who commiserates with him and so gradually turns the conversation in the direction of another publisher, who, he intimates, will be glad to offer the writer a larger advance than he has ever received and a royalty as good or perhaps a shade better than his present rate — provided, of course, that he gives them the option on his next three books. Unless the author is wary he may be seduced at this point, forgetting that one of his next three books may so far exceed his others in its success as to entitle him to a royalty quite other than that which is offered.

It is no exaggeration to say that every author of prominence has heard the siren’s call in some such fashion as this. Some of them change publishers for the sake of being attached to a more secure and dignified firm, some are frankly attracted by the size of the bribe. Most of them, I am glad to say, communicate the terms of the offer to their publisher — and stand pat. Barrie and Galsworthy with Scribners; Kipling and Conrad with Doubleday, Page that was; Mark Twain with Harpers; Anne Douglas Sedgwick and Sabatini with Houghton Mifflin; E. Phillips Oppenheim and Jeffery Farnol with Little, Brown; A. Edward Newton and Mazo de la Roche with the Atlantic Monthly Press; Joseph Lincoln with Appleton; Hergesheimer with Alfred Knopf — here are associations which have endured despite all temptations, and with benefit, I feel certain, as much to the writer as to the publisher. Generally speaking, to see an author leave a firm which has been identified with his early and middle years is to witness a breach of faith. There is very little real occasion for divorce in publishing.

‘But,’ a writer may protest, ‘granting that the association between an editor and myself is a personal one, what is to happen when that member of the publishing house who has had most to do with my work leaves the organization to take a new post or to set up a firm of his own? Where does my loyalty begin and end?’ To answer this query no single generalization will serve. Publishing houses are continually undergoing changes. For instance, the original firm of Doubleday, Page and Company had, as its magnets, F. N. Doubleday and Walter Page. Not many years after Ambassador Page’s death, his heir in the business, Arthur Page, withdrew from publishing. The Doubledays, father and son, then acquired a new partner in the person of George Doran, who had already established a large firm of his own. Mr. Doran took with him into the new combination of Doubleday, Doran his authors and his assistants, among the latter John Farrar and Stanley Rinehart, two able young men who shortly resigned and began publishing under their own names. Farrar and Rinehart, rightly it seemed to me, retained their hold on certain authors with whose work they had been closely identified. And presently Mr. Doran, seeing the beckoning finger of William Randolph Hearst, also resigned from the combination to devote himself to Mr. Hearst’s book interests. Now what is to be Mr. Doran’s attitude toward authors? Will he try to recapture the allegiance of his former authors, will he go gunning for those affiliated with other publishers, or will he devote himself wholly to new talent? Only the latter course will go unchallenged.

We all know that an author’s first books may not be profitable. Conrad’s early volumes were published at a loss, and at the outset Hardy’s novels had a costly reception. But a publisher worth his salt is not going to allow an author in whom he has confidence to remain static and his books a loss if he can possibly help it. You may be sure that over a space of years a publisher will invest in an author in a better than even proportion to the response which his writing has invoked. Once a writer begins to make headway, more sail and still more sail will be crowded on. Certain it is that a publisher will build more steadily for a loyal writer than for one who is ever in the market for the highest bidder.

By loyalty, of course, I do not mean obeisance. He who waits to be appreciated may end by receiving charity. Most of us must impose our own valuation in this life, and in publishing, as in any other business, there are occasions when one is justified in asking for a raise. Should other offers come your way, quote them candidly to your publisher, for they will tend to increase your value in his eyes, and if other circumstances are favorable up may go your royalty rate. I shall go into this matter in more detail; for the present I want to convince you that if you will allow yourselves the loyalty, candor, and forbearance that are indispensable in any intimacy you will in the long run receive from your publisher more favorable treatment and a better royalty return than could be got by any amount of contract jumping and poker playing.

As witness let me give you one sorry illustration. Let us say that it is a poor season and that I, a publisher, have had a disappointing list. Now I learn that I can secure the next book by the famous author of Thundering Mudpuddles if I will pay a preposterous advance and the maximum royalty. I need a feature, and I do so. The author receives my guaranteed advance, it is true, but so much has this cost me that unless the book responds to its first advertising I am tempted to stop the campaign short rather than throw good money after what is already lost. In which case the sales will be short, I shall be out of pocket, and the author of Thundering Mudpuddles will be looking for some other fish to hook.

V

We have, you may observe, moved definitely into the field of the accepted writer. To press home some of the points of my charge let me quote the Ten Commandments for authors, compiled by a Philadelphia publisher, Mr. Gordon Dorrance. They are irrespective of sex: —

1. Don’t starve to death. If you can’t write, work. Read Martin Eden.

2. Don’t show your work to friends. Show it to enemies. They’ll criticize it.

3. Don’t tell everyone you’re writing a book. Get it accepted.

4. Don’t write long handwritten letters about your MS. Use a typewriter; be brief.

5. Don’t send an ‘Arabian Nights’ to a Bible publisher. Know your market.

6. Don’t submit your fall novel November 15, and expect the publisher ‘to have it in the stores by Christmas.’ He won’t.

7. Don’t use a pen name. Your publisher does n’t.

8. Don’t criticize first and inquire afterwards. Information is understanding.

9. Don’t bother the bookseller. He has one show window and 10,000 new books every year to put in it.

10. Don’t change publishers. Old friends are best.

But it is not my purpose to leave you with a mouthful of ‘don’ts.’ Anyone who writes, anyone who tries to support himself on the perilous crutch of literature, will know that what American writers need most is encouragement, not prohibitions. The lot of a writer in America to-day wants protesting. As a people we are fairly literate, fairly generous, and exceedingly prosperous; this being so, it is the more to be resented that the bonuses of our civilization should go to movie actors, real estate promoters, and automobile manufacturers, to people who sit in trees, croon songs, or win a dance marathon, but seldom or never to one who writes a good book. The membership of the Authors League is about two thousand, and of course not all of them are authors of books. ‘At most,’ says Mr. Duffus, ‘there are probably not more than five thousand professional authors in the country, of whom a great many are not making a living out of their writing and of whom only a handful are making a living out of books alone.’ If an author can make a place for himself in the magazines, if he has the voice and temerity for the lecture platform, if he can be persuaded to give radio talks, or if he can make a lucky strike with the movies or the stage, then and then only can he afford to write books. If he has given those hostages to fortune which Bacon never gave, — a wife and children, — he simply must diversify his talent in order to make up his budget. Save for a few exceptional cases, the writing of books alone would not be enough to pay his bills.

On this score figures speak louder than words. Let us start with a new writer. I should say that twenty-five hundred copies is a slightly better than average sale for a first novel. On such a sale the publisher is lucky if he breaks even. The beginning author conventionally receives a 10 per cent royalty. Thus, if his first novel — priced at $2.00 — is slightly better than average, he stands to make $500. If that is the result of a year’s work, he will not trouble the Income Tax Collector. I fancy, however, that most first novels are written by people who have contrived to spare the time from some other form of occupation.

Next we have the established writer. His early books have created a moderate reputation and a certain public. We will say that his book achieves a sale of 15,000 copies and that he rates a 15 per cent royalty. If his volume is priced at $2.50, he will receive a royalty of 37½ cents a copy, or a total of $5625 gross income for his book year. If his hostages to fortune and his bread and butter cost him no more than this, he will not be in debt.

Finally, there is the best-seller, whose books — usually fiction — mount to 50,000 or 100,000 copies. His royalty will probably begin at 15 per cent and move up a peg or two in proportion to the sales. For such a writer $20,000 would be a generous book income. Last year 8927 new titles were issued in the United States; of that total it has been estimated that not more than thirtytwo reached a 50,000 sale. Thirty-two prosperous volumes out of a total of nearly 9000. And we all know that a best-selling author is now in, now out of favor.

All of this simply means that your experienced writer will try to keep several pots boiling. The talkies are said to be the reason why movie producers are no longer paying large sums for The Life of Christ (Papini, you remember, was supposed to have received $50,000 for his) or for An American Tragedy of our day; while to dramatize a novel requires a very skilled hand indeed. The fiction magazines and the newspaper syndicates — the first and second serial rights, as you might say — are, however, temptingly attractive. The high-price fiction magazines pay very handsomely; $10,000 is by no means their top figure for a full-length serial — I doubt, for instance, if it would buy more than six chapters of Temple Bailey. What is more, the magazines would seem to illuminate a writer’s name almost as brightly as the electric signs of Broadway. So they do — but as a magazine writer, not as a book writer. Those fat checks, which one has to write for occasionally between books when the bank balance is low, have a way of becoming the sole objective, and when that happens they must usually take the place of book royalties, for only the few and best contributors to the big fiction periodicals command respect and success in the book trade. What you gain from the magazines you are apt to sacrifice from your books.

In short, I believe that the American fiction magazines have injured rather than improved the standing of our books. They have cultivated the habit of short rather than long reading; they have so appropriated the short story to themselves that a serious volume of such fiction can hardly be sold across the counter; they have helped to create a prejudice against collected papers which has really hit the essayist; and what is worst, it seems to me, they have lured authors on to the writing of bright, happy, facile fiction as brittle as it is sentimental. There are perhaps fifteen writers in this country who earn from all sources — though seldom the major share from their books — an income of $50,000 a year or more. Several of them must be known to you, and I hope I imply no snobbishness when I say that their work is more often respected for its craftsmanship than for its literary genius.

This is not meant for a blanket indictment. I know that there are discriminating authors who contribute intelligently to the magazines and who retain their independence to the point of writing honest and ambitious books. I believe that the best and most conscientious writers are justified in receiving as handsome sums as can be obtained from such sources. I wish some of it came my way. But I am also aware of a good many names which flashed brilliantly at the outset and then faded into a kind of dull adornment to those vapid girls whose faces cover our news stands. We have more than our share of roadside casualties in American letters.

VI

Of course, the truth is that some kind of compromise has got to be made by writers. Though these are days of material prosperity, one still must make an oblique approach to the profession of letters and can only afford to write books when, as Virginia Woolf says, one has a little money and a room of one’s own. Only young men can afford to retire — and they are usually so young that they have little to write about. Meantime the rest of us plod on, working at any one of a hundred jobs and, on the side, scrimping from week-ends, holidays, and our night’s sleep the precious time for our writing. Sinclair Lewis tapping out his first novels by night after spending his day as publicity man for a New York publisher; Christopher Morley as a literary advisor and columnist; Edwin Arlington Robinson, whom Roosevelt made a clerk in the New York Customs House; Conrad coming back from his ships; Samuel Butler cutting loose from his sheep raising; James Truslow Adams serving a dozen years on Wall Street so that he could at last devote his time to history; William De Morgan waiting till he was sixty before he began. So long as the candle of hope burns, time does not trouble us. ‘When Keats was my age,’ we think in secret, ‘he had written the “Ode to a Nightingale”; the year after next I shall be as old as Thackeray when he wrote Vanity Fair; Galsworthy did not begin his novels till his middle-thirties.’ Thus, aspiration spurs itself on.

Nothing I can say will deter you; no amount of editorial rebuffs will quench your spirit if you have the genuine disease, cacoethes scribendi,the scribbling mania. ‘One thinks,’ writes James Norman Hall, ‘of men, some of them rich in worldly possessions, and therefore under no compulsion to write; others wretchedly poor; some of remarkable and varied gifts; some with talents pathetically meagre; but all of them having this in common— that they spent their lives in obscure and solitary literary toil without once hearing a heartening shout of public acclaim.’

There are other ways, of course, of getting over a stone wall than by merely butting it with your head. If your fiction does not come off well enough even to satisfy your wife, who is generally tolerant in such matters, it might be worth while to try your hand at some other medium — children’s stories, perhaps, or the essay. I would urge every beginning writer to read that anonymous essay in Harper’s Magazine entitled ‘The Fight for Glory,’ in which a successful writer, whom I presume to be Gamaliel Bradford, recounts the failures which he suffered before finding his feet at last.

I wish to quote from this tale of woe.

My first efforts [says the writer], and for some years my only efforts, were in poetry. I wrote long poems and short poems, light poems and heavy poems, grave poems and gay. The odd thing was that I wrote for myself and made little attempt at publication. When I did, timidly, begin to send out one or two, the receipt of the deadly printed slip of rejection froze my courage so entirely that I put my verses back in my drawer and abandoned the attempt. Even to-day those printed slips, which still come, give me the same feeling of numbing, paralyzing irritation which they gave me then, carry with them the desolating inference that I had better be selling patent medicines than dabbling in literature.

I shortly turned from poetry to novels, poured all my passionate aspiration, literary and other, into an autobiographical romance. No publisher would look at it. Probably it was as well for me that they did not, but the total and blighting rejection was just as disheartening, for all that. I wrote a novel dealing with a young and earnest minister’s loss of belief; for in those days religion was still a power in the world. Just as I finished it, Mrs. Ward’s Robert Elsmere appeared and, though I had never heard of it, it made my book seem a palpable and futile imitation. I then wrote three other novels, which got published somehow. The first paid its way and had a little notice; the others died before they were born, and after that the publishers would pay no attention to me. My unconquerable obstinacy refused to yield even so, and I tried more novels, I still try to dispose of one occasionally to some innocent publisher who asks me for some of my productions.

I was even foolish enough to waste my energy for years in the most hopeless and gigantic undertaking that can delude any author, the one that fooled Henry James out of some of the best hours of his life, the theatre. ... I have in my drawer some fifteen plays, only one of which ever struggled into print, — at my own expense, — while not one of them has ever come within speaking distance of the stage. For — to me — the fascination of such work is simply irresistible.

And at last — though in a field different from any of these — there came encouragement, acceptance, and demand. Literature is a hard road with many turnings, any one of which, if patiently pursued, may bring you to a wellspring of your own.

The toil and tribulation of making your solitary way has never been better described than by Arthur Machen, to whom, as to many another, recognition came bitterly late. In his reminiscences, Far Off Things, he said: —

No; the only course is to go on stumbling and struggling and blundering like a man lost in a dense thicket on a dark night; a thicket, I say, of rebounding boughs that punish with the sting of a whiplash, of thorns that savagely lacerate the flesh, — it is the flesh of the heart, alas! that they tear,

— of sharp rocks of agony and black pools of despair. Such is the obscure wood of the literary life; such, at least, it was to me. You struggle to find your way; but again and again you ask yourself whether, for you, there is any way. You think you have hit upon the lucky track at last. And lo! before your feet is the black pit. And such is not alone the adventure of little, ineffectual struggling men. How old was glorious Cervantes, now serene forever amongst the immortals, when he found his way to that village of La Mancha? Fifty, I think, or almost fifty. And he had been striving for years to write plays, and poetry, and short stories of passion and sentiment; and it was only the roar of applause that thundered up from the world when the Knight and the Squire were seen riding over the hill that convinced Cervantes that at last he had discovered his true path; if indeed he were ever convinced of the magnitude and majesty of the achievement of Don Quixote.

And if these things are done with the great, what will be done with the little? If the clear-voiced leaders of the everlasting choir are to suffer so and agonize, what of miserable little Welshmen stammering and stuttering by the Wandle, in the obscure rectory among the hills, in waste places by Shepherd’s Bush, in gloomy Great Russell Street, where the ghosts of dead, disappointed authors go sighing to and fro? For the fate of the little literary man there is no articulate speech that is sufficient; one must fall back upon aoi, or oimoi, or alas, or some such vague lament of unutterable woe.

This is bad enough in a country as literate and as devoted to its literature as England; in the United States the writer’s lot is further complicated by an indifference on the part of the public, who are too intent upon their golf, radios, movies, and beauty contests to care much what is in a book; by a commercial prosperity which holds out enticing rewards if only the writer will compromise himself utterly in advertising, in the fiction magazines, or in Hollywood; and worse, by a prevailing opinion, even among the writer’s acquaintances, that any man who walks by himself and who obviously makes no money by it must be a little cracked. Some of you will perhaps receive no greater reward than what I can only describe as the thrill that comes to you immediately a piece of writing has been finished to your satisfaction. A few of you, driven forward by a spirit strengthened by adversity, and oblivious of the fleshpots of Egypt, may see the promised land and make your voices heard above the syncopated clamor. Come what may, be true to yourselves.