A Writer's Friends

‘WOULD N’T you like me to drive you about?’ asked a charming girl whom I met at a tea not long since in a little town to which I had just come. ‘ You’d find such interesting things to write about.’

What a familiar ring the question had! A writer’s friends, even his chance acquaintances, seem bent on helping provide that literary material which apparently they feel is his prime need. There are those, too, among my intimate friends, who go so far as to advise me on what class of writing they think I should do well to adhere to. My friend Olympia, who herself has never written a line more serious than ‘The bird on Auntie’s hat,’ confides that she has little hope of a play of mine which is tossing about among the theatrical managers in New York. ‘The subject,’ says Olympia, ‘is unpopular,’ and she proceeds to take me to task for not sticking to a previous field into which I had ventured, one in which, Olympia believes, I ‘have a better chance.’

All this kind interest in my work is the more surprising in that, so far as I can recall. I have never asked for even the slightest aid or advice of the sort that is proffered.

It is possible that I should have profited by doing so. Be that as it may, I can only wonder if other writers, at any rate those who live, as I do, quite outside a literary milieu, are subject to a similar solicitude.

There is another thing, also, that must afflict to some degree everyone who writes, or at least who writes fiction. It is the claim one’s acquaintances make to be able to identify characters and localities one has depicted. We may try to forestall this evil by having inserted at the start of a novel, ‘The characters in this book do not represent any living persons.’ But it is all the same. They pounce on one after another, and no insistence on the writer’s part that the tags are wrong has an atom’s weight in changing their opinion.

A lady leans across the table at a luncheon with a slightly truculent air, though plainly she is not altogether unpleased: ‘I see you have my father in your new novel.’ The only resemblance I myself can discern between the lady’s father and the character in question is a similarly luxuriant crop of white hair and the somewhat important manner from which neither is entirely free. The people in a certain small town where I lived for a brief time still declare that the scene of a story I wrote while I was among them was their own town. To my protest that it is far from the one I had in mind, they reply: ‘Yes, but the fishman — why, everyone recognized him!’ Well, it is true I did borrow an old fish peddler who used to go up and down their streets, crying his wares in an original strain.

Considerably more trying, however, is the suspicion which all we who write fiction labor under, that the experiences of our heroes or heroines must have been in large part our own. How else could we know some of these things? I myself was early made aware of the extent to which we must take on our own shoulders the sins of our creatures when I was told of a devout woman I had known in my childhood who, after reading my first novel, exclaimed: ‘And to think the author was once in my Sunday-school class!’

Then there is another suspicion from which we suffer, the suspicion of our friends that sooner or later we may use them as copy. Eager — yes, urgent, as they often are that we should portray certain mutual acquaintances, the last thing they desire, for all the poet’s prayer, is to see themselves as others see them. Especially in a small place is a writer considered an unsafe person to have about. People whom we meet there are all more or less on their guard.

Another price we pay for becoming writers is in having our friends and relatives — alas, too often the latter! — consider it their bounden duty to tell us they do not approve of what we have written. There may be writers so fortunate they have never been subject to pricks of this sort, or so tough-fibred they fail to feel them. I doubt it. I myself certainly find it exceedingly exasperating when my cousin Georgiana writes, in regard to a novel of mine that has recently appeared, that she has to admit many of its happenings were ‘entirely too sordid ’ for her taste. Do none of these candid folk realize that without exception what a writer turns out is so sickeningly below what he had hoped to achieve that he scarcely needs them to point out its deficiencies, especially when he has the professional critic to do this for him; above all, that the things he writes, however poor, are his children, whom, it is true, he has shamelessly exposed to the public view, but whose frailties it is no less painful to be reminded of than of those of his flesh-and-blood progeny?

Nor is there the least assurance of pleasing these captious familiars any better when we leave the always debatable ground of what is allowable in fiction and deliver ourselves through other channels. When a paper of mine entitled ‘Babbitt’s Big Brother’ appeared, again it was my old friend Olympia who was the first to challenge the views I had expressed. ‘For my part,’ she wrote, ‘I have no patience with labor. I don’t mind admitting I am a thoroughgoing Bourbon.’ As for my aunt Rebecca and my aunt Ellen, it is difficult to decide whether they are more shocked or saddened when they come upon my views on social problems, or see in print those touching religion, though I derive some comfort from the fact that the journals which harbor these opinions rarely find a place on my aunts’ tables.

But there is a very different type from whom we are also pretty sure to hear. Of these, one who comes to my mind first is, like Olympia, a lifelong friend. Unlike Olympia, however, Harriet is almost completely sympathetic with my social views. She seldom misses anything I write, or fails to be complimentary, but invariably she wishes to engage me in further discussion of what I have written. Sensitive as Harriet is, it is unthinkable to administer the slap which on occasion I have no hesitation in giving Olympia. Yet it is equally impossible to explain to Harriet that while she, a woman living on a comfortable (inherited) income, is formulating, in leisure, the questions which she says my ‘stimulating’ article has ‘provoked,’already that train of thought — of six months or so ago — which she seeks to prolong is losing, for me, its sharp edges, and I am laboring on a very dissimilar article which I hope will take care of at least my taxes and insurance, both shortly due.

It is, to tell the truth, precisely with friends who are the most flattering about our work that we may be called upon to face some of our most acute embarrassments. With Harriet, for instance, merely to know I have begun a book starts her asking when it will be out, while if she learns I am trying my hand at a play, before I even have the script ready to offer she is not only prophesying the wildest success for it on Broadway, but envisioning its author living in royal state in Hollywood, on the profits sure to accrue ‘when it goes into the movies.’ On the whole, I am not sure but that I prefer one of Olympia’s gloomy predictions.

It is this fable about profits that brings us, too, manuscripts from old and intimate friends who beg for our ‘frank opinion’ of their work. It is even more obnoxious, we perceive now, to give than to receive advice about writing. It is usually the choice between losing a friend or telling the truth, and all too often it is the truth which has to suffer. I was, in fact, astounded when my friend Ernestine sent me her first story — Ernestine, who had always presented such brilliant papers before the club, and been so merciless in her judgments of even the most illustrious professional writers! Not that I really minded encouraging Ernestine,except for the time involved. It was with Mrs. Tracy I found myself in an almost tragic dilemma. One of the wittiest women I have ever known, and with no little ability in several practical lines, when, through one of those sharp reversals so common to-day, her husband’s fortune was swept away, it occurred to her that by waiting down some of those stories with which she was accustomed to convulse a whole roomful of people she could earn enough to support herself and her shattered husband through their remaining years. As the only author, she wrote, of her acquaintance, she turned to me, enclosing a sample — a story not only entirely formless, but utterly flat when separated from the woman’s sparkling presence. I confess I dropped tears on her scribbled lines, but what could I tell her?

After a sleepless night, I replied that while my own opinion could not, of course, be accepted as final, and while undoubtedly she possessed some of the gifts without which few writers could hope to succeed, yet, considering the length of time necessary to master the technique, all the difficulties, I felt it would be unwise for her to count on writing as a source of income. My answer was as soft as I knew how to — or dared — make it. Yet she came back rather huffily, asking me please to return the story, as the editor of some woman’s publication, whom she had met socially, was ‘anxious to see it.’ Furthermore, I do not believe that Mrs. Tracy has ever entirely forgiven me. Both she and Ernestine believe, I am confident, that somehow or other I am responsible for their lack of recognition in what they are still convinced is a profitable, as well as most pleasurable, profession.