SOME HARMFUL INFLUENCES

HARRY LEON WILSON

From the Pacific Coast—from what is enthusiastically termed "the Golden West"—from that section of the United States which is large and chivalrous and gladly suffers suffrage—comes a voice, replying to my question: "What is the matter with contemporary fiction?"

And the voice says, "Cherchez la femme!"

It is the voice of Mr. Harry Leon Wilson, author of Bunker Bean, Ruggles of Red Gap, and many another popular novel, and co-author with Mr. Booth Tarkington of several successful plays. Mr. Wilson believes that the dullness and insincerity of our novels are due to the taste of most of their readers—that is, to the taste of the women.

I asked Mr. Wilson what, in his opinion, was the influence most harmful to the development of literature in America.

"I know little about literature," Mr. Wilson replied, "but if you mean the novel, I should say the intense satisfaction with it as it is, of the maker, the seller, and the buyer. And to trace this baneful satisfaction to its source, I should say it lies in the lack of a cultivated taste in our women readers of fiction.

"Publishers are agreed, I believe, that women buy the great bulk of their output. The current novel is as deliberately planned to please the woman buyer as is any other bit of trade goods. The publisher knows what she wants to read, the writer finds out from the publisher, and you can see the result in the advertisements—and the writer's royalty statements.

"'We want,' says the publisher, 'a stunning girl for the cover and a corking good love interest to catch the women.' (Publishers do talk that way when they have safely locked themselves in their low dens.)

"This love interest is always said to be wholesome and sweet. I don't know. Certainly it is sweet enough. In the trade novel it's as if you took a segment of rich layer cake, the chocolate-and-jelly kind, poured over it a half-pint of nice thick molasses, and then, just to make sure, sprinkled this abundantly with fine sugar.

"Anyway, that's what the publisher has found—and he has the best means of knowing—that the American woman will buy year in and year out. And you can't blame him for printing it. A publisher with ideals of his own couldn't last any longer than a grocer with ideals of his own, or a clergyman.

"And least of all can you blame the author for writing this slush, because nine times out of ten he doesn't know any better. How should he, with no one to tell him?

"And that," said Mr. Wilson, "is another evil almost as great in its influence as the undeveloped taste of our women readers. I mean our lack of authoritative criticism. Now we really do get a good novel once in a blue moon, but one who has been made wary by the mass of trade novels would never suspect it from reading our book reviews. The good novel, it is true, is praised heartily, but then so are all the bad novels—and how is one to tell?

"At least eighty-five per cent. of our book reviews are mere amiable, perfunctory echoes of the enthusiastic 'canned' review which the publisher obligingly prints on the paper jacket of his best seller. I sometimes suspect this task is allotted to a member of the staff who is known to be 'fond of reading.'

"Another evil influence is often alleged—the pressure the business office puts on the reviewer to be tender with novels that are lavishly advertised, but I have never thought there was more than a grain of truth in this.

"Perhaps a publisher wouldn't continue to patronize a sheet that habitually blurted out the truth about his best sellers, but I really doubt that this was ever put to an issue. I don't believe the average book-reviewer knows any better than the average novelist the difference between a good and a bad novel.

"It isn't so with the other arts. We have critics for those. Music, sculpture, painting—we know the best and get the best.

"But, then, the novel is scarcely considered to be an art form. Any one can—and does—write a novel, if he can only find the time. It isn't supposed to be a thing one must study, like plumbing or architecture.

"The novelist who wants to write a best seller this year studies the best seller of last year, and wisely, because that is what the publisher wants—something like his last one that sold big. He is looking for it night and day and for nothing else. He wants good carpenters who have followed the design that women have liked. Fiction is the one art you don't take seriously, and there is no one to tell us we should; there are no critics to inform the writers and the readers and make the publishers timid.

"True, we have in this country two or three, possibly four, critics who can speak with authority, men who know what the novel has been, what it is with us, what it ought to be. One of them is a friend of mine, and I reproached him lately for not speaking out in meeting oftener.

"His defense was pathetic. First, that ninety out of a hundred of our novels are beneath criticism. Second, as to the remaining ten that would merit the rapier instead of the bludgeon—'criticism is harder to sell than post-meridian virtue. I have tried.'

"And he has to eat as often as any publisher. So there you are! People are not going to pay him for finding fault with something they are intensely satisfied with. It all comes back to the women. When their taste is corrected we shall have better novels. But not before then!"

"Mr. Wilson," I said, "do you believe that the development of the magazine, with its high prices and serialization, has been harmful or beneficial to fiction?"

"In the first place, the magazine hasn't developed," he answered. "It has merely multiplied—the cheap ones, I mean. And prices have not increased except to about a dozen of our national favorites. Where there is one writer who can get fifteen hundred dollars for a short story, or fifteen thousand dollars for the serial rights to a novel, there are a thousand who can get not more than a fifteenth of those prices.

"On the whole, I think that the effect of the cheap monthlies has been good. They are the only ones that welcome the new writer. They try him out. Then, if the public takes to him, the better magazines find it out after a while and form an alliance with him—that is, if his characters are so sweet and wholesome that the magazine can still be left on the center-table where Cuthbert or Berryl might see it after school.

"Nowadays I never expect to find a good short story in any of the cheap magazines. Of course, it does happen now and then, but not often enough to make me impatient for their coming. And, of course, the cheap monthlies do print, for the most part, what are probably the worst short stories that will ever be written in the world—the very furthest from anything real.

"These writers, too, like the novelists, study one another instead of life. We will say one of them writes a short story about a pure young shopgirl of flower-like beauty who, spending an evening of innocent recreation in a notorious Tenderloin dive (one of those places that I, for one, have never been able to find), is insulted by the leader of Tammany Hall, who is always hanging around there for evil purposes. At the last moment she is saved from his loathsome advances by a dashing young stranger in a cute-cut blue serge suit, who carries her off in a taxicab and marries her at 2 A.M. And he, of course, proves to be the great traction magnate who owns all the city's surface-car lines.

"The other writers, and some new ones that never before thought of writing, read this story, which is called 'All for Love,' and learn to do the 'type'—the pure young shopgirl, a bit slangy in spite of her flower-like beauty; the abhorrent politician (some day he will have a distressing mix-up with his very own daughter in one of these evil places—see if he doesn't!), the low-browed dive-keeper, and the honest young traction magnate. They will learn with a little practice to do these as the dupes of the 'Be-a-cartoonist!' schools learn to draw 'An Irishman,' 'A German,' 'A Jew,' and the dental façade of Colonel Roosevelt.

"But we must remember that O. Henry came to us from the cheap magazines, never did get into the higher-priced ones, and was, by the way, wretchedly paid for his stories. True, he received good prices in his later days, but I doubt if they raised the average for his output to two hundred dollars a story. He neglected to come to the feast in a wedding garment, so the more pretentious magazines would have none of him.

"For one O. Henry, then, we can forgive the lesser monthlies for the bulk of their stuff that can be read only by born otoliths. The more magazines, the better our chance of finding the new man, and only in the cheap ones can he come to life."

Many dogmatic statements have been made concerning the great American novel. I have been told that it would come from the South, that it would come from the West, that it would never be written. But Mr. Wilson has a new and revolutionary theory.

"Will there," I asked, "ever be the great American novel? That is, will there ever be a novel which reflects American life as adequately as Vanity Fair reflects English life?"

"There have already been dozens of them!" was Mr. Wilson's emphatic reply. "To go no farther back, Booth Tarkington wrote one the other day, and so did Theodore Dreiser. (Dreiser's story, 'The "Genius,"' of course couldn't have appeared in any American magazine. Trust your canny publisher not to let his magazine hand know what his book hand is doing!)

"But let us lay forever that dear old question that has haunted our literary columns for so many years. The answer, of course, is that there is no novel that reflects English life any more adequately than The Turmoil, or 'The Genius,' or The Virginian, or Perch of the Devil, or Unleavened Bread, or The Rise of Silas Lapham reflects American life.

"Certainly Vanity Fair doesn't do this. It reflects but a very narrow section of London life. For the purposes of fictional portrayal England is just as big and difficult—as impossible in one novel—as the United States.

"To know England through fiction one must go to all her artists, past and present, getting a little from each. Hardy gives us an England that Thackeray never suspected, and Galsworthy gives us still another, not to go on to the England of George Moore, Phillpotts, Quiller-Couch, Wells, Bennett, Walpole, George, or Mackenzie. I hope at the proper time that a tasteful little tablet will be erected to my memory for having laid this ancient and highly respectable apparition."

In his interesting contribution to a symposium of opinions as to what are the six best novels in the English language, Mr. Wilson had some things to say about Dickens which were not likely to bring him a vote of thanks from the Dickens Fellowship. I wished to have his opinion of Dickens stated more definitely, and so, basing my question on a statement he had made in the symposium, I asked, "What qualities in the work of Charles Dickens make him a bad model for novelists to follow?"

Mr. Wilson replied: "Dickens has been a blight to most writers who were susceptible to his vices. He was a great humorist, but an inferior novelist, and countless other inferior novelists have believed that they could be great humorists by following his childishly easy formula.

"That is, those who were influenced by him copy his faults. Witness our school of characterization based on the Dickens method, a school holding that 'character' is a mere trick of giving your creation exaggerated mannerisms or physical surfaces—as with Dickens it was rarely anything else.

"Dickens created vaudeville 'characters'—unsurpassed for twenty-minute sketches, deadly beyond that to the mentally mature. His stock in trade was the grotesque make-up. In stage talk he couldn't create a 'straight' part.

"Strip his people of their make-ups, verbal, hirsute, sartorial, surgical, pathological, what not—and dummies remain. Meet them once and you know them for the rest of the tale, the Micawbers, Gamps, Pecksniffs, Nicklebys; each has his stunt and does it over and over at each new meeting, to the—for me, at least—maddening delay of the melodrama. I like melodrama as well as any one, badgered heroines, falsely accused heroes, missing wills, trap-doors, disguised philanthropists, foul murders, and even slow-dying children who are not only moralists, but orators; and I like to see the villain get his at last, and get it good; but I can't read Dickens any more, because the tale must be held up every five minutes for one of the funny 'characters' to do his stunt.

"How many years will it take us—writers, I mean—to realize that there are no characters in Dickens in the sense that Dmitri in The Brothers Caramazov is a character? How few of our current novelists can distinguish between the soulless caricaturing of Dickens and the genuine character-drawing of a Turgenieff or a Dostoievski!

"How few of us can see how the soul of Dmitri is slowly unfolded to the reader with never a bit of make-up! To this moment, I don't know if he wore a beard or not; but I know the man. Dickens would have given him funny whiskers, astigmatism, a shortened leg, a purple nose, and still to make sure we wouldn't mistake him a catch phrase for his utterance.

"Any novelist who has mastered the rudiments of his craft, even though he hasn't an atom of humor in his make-up, can write a Dickens novel, and any publisher will print it for the Christmas trade if it's fairly workman-like, and it will be warmly praised in the reviews. That happens every season.

"And that's why Dickens is a bad model. If one must have a model, why not Hall Caine, infinitely the superior of Dickens as a craftsman? Of course, having no humor, he can't be read by people who have, but he knows his trade, where Dickens was a preposterous blunderer."

Charles Belmont Davis once told me that a novelist should have some other regular occupation besides writing. I asked Mr. Wilson his opinion on this subject.

"Mr. Davis didn't originate this theory," he said. "It's older than he is. Anyway, I don't believe in it. I know of no business to-day that would leave a man time to write novels, and a novelist worth his salt won't have time for any other business.

"Of course, the ideal novelist would at one time or another have been anything. The ideal novelist has two passions, people and words, and he should have had and should continue to have as many points of contact with life as possible. But if he has reached the point where he can write to please me, I want him not to waste time doing anything else.

"Personally, I wish I might have been, for varying intervals, a Russian Grand Duke, an Eighth Avenue undertaker, the manager of a five-and-ten-cent store, a head waiter, a burglar, a desk sergeant at the Thirtieth Street Police Station, and a malefactor of great wealth, preferably one that gets into the snapshots at Newport, reading from left to right. But Heaven has denied me practically all of these avenues to a knowledge of my humankind, and I am too busy keeping up with the current styles of all millinery fiction to take to any of them at this late day.

"Besides, I have a bad example to deter me, having just read The High Priestess, by Robert Grant, who has another business than novel writing—something connected with the law, I believe, in Boston. I have no means of knowing how valuable a civic unit he may have been in his home town, but I do feel that he has cheated the world of a great deal by keeping to this other business, whatever it may be.

"From the author of Unleavened Bread we once had a right to expect much. But The High Priestess chiefly makes me regret that he didn't have to write novels or starve; by its virtues of construction, which are many and admirable, and by its utter lack of power to communicate any emotion whatsoever, which is conspicuous and lamentable. He seems to have written his novel with an adding-machine, and instinctively I blame that 'other business' of his, in which he seems to have forgotten—for he did know it once—that a novelist may or may not think straight, but he must feel.

"Perhaps he wasn't a real novelist, after all. I suspect a real novelist would starve in any other business."

I told Mr. Wilson that a prominent American humorist writer had classed Mark Twain with Artemus Ward and Philander Doesticks, and said that these men were not genuine humorists, but "the Charlie Chaplins of their time."

Mr. Wilson smiled. "Isn't this rather high praise for Charlie Chaplin?" he asked. "How far is this idolatry of the movie actor to go, anyway? True, Mr. Chaplin is a skilled comedian, pre-eminent in his curious new profession, but to my thinking he lacks repose at those supreme moments when he is battering the faces of his fellow-histrions with the wet mop or the stuffed club, or walking on their stomachs; but I may be prejudiced. I know I shouldn't have ranked him with Mark Twain, arch-humanist and satirist and one of the few literary artists who have attained the world stature—so that we must go back and back to Cervantes to find his like."