THE NOVEL MUST GO

WILL N. HARBEN

The novel is doomed. If the automobile, the aeroplane, and the moving picture continue to develop during the next ten years as they have developed during the last ten, people will cease almost entirely to take interest in fiction.

It was not Henry Ford who told me this. Neither was it Mr. Wright, nor M. Pathé. The man who made this ominous prophecy about the novel is himself a successful novelist. He is Will N. Harben, author of Pole Baker, Ann Boyd, The Desired Woman, and many other widely read tales of life in rural Georgia.

Although he is so closely associated with the Southern scenes about which he has written, Mr. Harben spends most of his time in New York nowadays. He justifies this course interestingly—but before I tell his views on this subject I will repeat what he had to say about this possible extinction of the novel.

"You have read," he said, "of the tremendous vogue of Pickwick Papers when it was first published. No work of fiction since that time has been received with such enthusiasm.

"In London at that time you would find statuettes of Pickwick, Mr. Winkle, and Sam Weller in the shop windows. There were Pickwick punch-ladles, Pickwick teaspoons, Pickwick souvenirs of all sorts.

"Now, when you walk down Broadway, do you find any reminders of the popular novels of the day? You do not, except of course in the bookshops. But you do find things that remind you of contemporary taste. In the windows of stationers and druggists you find statuettes not of characters in the fiction of the day, but of Charlie Chaplin.

"Of course the moving picture has not supplanted the novel. But people all over the country are becoming less and less interested in fiction. The time which many people formerly gave to the latest novel they now give to the latest film.

"And the moving picture is by no means the only thing which is weaning us away from the novel. The automobile is a powerful influence in this direction.

"Take, for instance, the town from which I come—Dalton, Georgia. There the people who used to read novels spend their time which they used to give to that entertainment riding around in automobiles. Sometimes they go on long trips, sometimes they go to visit their friends in near-by towns. But automobiling is the way in which they nowadays are accustomed to spend their leisure.

"Naturally, this has its effect on their attitude toward novels. Years ago, when Dalton had a population of about three thousand, it had two well-patronized bookshops. Now it has a population of about seven thousand and no bookshops at all!

"I suppose one of the reasons is that people live their adventures by means of the automobile, and therefore do not care so much about getting adventures from the printed page. But the chief reason is one of time—the fact is that people more and more prefer automobiling to reading.

"Now, if the aeroplane were to be perfected—as we have every reason to believe it will be—so that we could travel in it as we now do in the automobile, what possible interest would we have in reading dry novels? It seems likely that in a hundred years we will be able to see clearly the surface of Mars—do you think that people will want to read novels when this wonderful new world is before their eyes?

"The authors themselves are beginning to realize this. They are becoming more and more nervous. They are not the placid creatures that they were in Sir Walter Scott's day. They feel that people are not as interested in them and their works as they used to be. I doubt very much if any publisher to-day would be interested, for example, in an author who produced a novel as long as David Copperfield and of the same excellence."

"But do you think," I asked, "that the fault is entirely that of the public? Haven't the authors changed, too?"

"I think that the authors have changed," said Mr. Harben, reflectively. "The authors do not live as they used to live.

"The authors no longer live with the people about whom they write. Instead, they live with other authors.

"Nowadays, an author achieves success by writing, we will say, about the people of his home in the Far West. Then he comes to New York. And instead of living with the sort of people about whom he writes, he lives with artists. That must have its effect upon his work."

"But is not that what you yourself did?" I asked. "A New York apartment-house is certainly the last place in the world in which to look for the historian of Pole Baker!"

Mr. Harben smiled. "But I don't live with artists," he said. "I try to live with the kind of people I write about. I resolved a long time ago to try to avoid living with literary people and to live with all sorts of human beings—with people who didn't know or care whether or not I was a writer.

"So I have for my friends and acquaintances sailors, merchants—people of all sorts of professions and trade. And people of that sort—people who make no pretensions to be artists—are the best company for a writer, for they open their hearts to him. A writer can learn how to write about humanity by living with humanity, instead of with other people who are trying to write about humanity."

"But at any rate you have left the part of the country about which you write," I said. "And wasn't that one of the things for which you condemned our hypothetical writer of Western tales?"

"Not necessarily," said Mr. Harben. "It sometimes happens that an author can write about the scenes he knows best only after he has gone away from them. I know that this is true of myself.

"It's in line with the old saws about 'distance lends enchantment' and 'emotion remembered in tranquillity,' you know. I believe that Du Maurier was able to write his vivid descriptions of life in the Latin Quarter of Paris because he went to London to do it.

"You see, I absorbed life in Georgia for many years. And in New York I can remember it and get a perspective on it and write about it."

"Then," I said, "you would go to Georgia, I suppose, if you wanted to write a story about life in a New York apartment?"

Mr. Harben thought for a moment. "No," he said, slowly, "I don't think that I'd go to Georgia to write about New York. I think that a novel about New York must be written in New York—while a novel about Dalton, Georgia, must be written away from Dalton, Georgia."

"How do you account for that?" I asked.

"Well," said Mr. Harben, "for one thing there is something bracing about New York's atmosphere that makes it easier to write when one is here. Once I tried to write a novel in Dalton, and I simply couldn't do it.

"And the reason why a novel about New York must be written in New York is because you can't absorb New York as you might absorb Georgia, so to speak, and then go away and express it. New York is so thoroughly artificial that there is nothing about it which a writer can absorb.

"New York hasn't the puzzles and adventures and surprises that Georgia has. Everybody knows about apartment-houses and skyscrapers and subways and elevators and dumb-waiters—there's nothing new to say about them.

"I sometimes think that the reason why the modern novel about New York City is so uninteresting is because everybody tries to write about New York City. And their novels are all of one pattern—necessarily, because life in New York City is all of one pattern.

"In bygone days this was not true of New York. For instance, Mr. Howells's novels about New York City were about a community in which people lived in real houses and had families and friends. In those days life in New York had its problems and surprises and adventures; it was not lived mechanically and according to a set pattern.

"What I have said about the advisability of an author's leaving the scenes about which he is to write is not universally true. There are writers who do better work by staying in the place where the scenes of their stories are laid. For instance, Joel Chandler Harris did better work by staying in the South than he would have done if he had gone away."

"But wasn't that because his negro folk-tales were a sort of 'glorified reporting' rather than creative work?" I asked.

"No," said Mr. Harben; "they were creative work. Joel Chandler Harris remembered just the bare skeleton of the stories as the negro had told them to him. And he developed them imaginatively. That was creative work. And he did most of his writing, and the best of his writing, in the office of The Constitution."

"In view of what you said about the difficulty of absorbing New York life," I suggested, "I suppose that, in your opinion, the great American novel will not be written about New York."

"What do you mean by the great American novel?" asked Mr. Harben. "So far as I know there is no great English novel or great Russian novel."

"I suppose that the term means a novel inevitably associated with the national literature," I said. "You cannot think of English literature without thinking of Vanity Fair, for instance. Certainly there is no American novel so conspicuously a reflection of our national life as that novel is of English life."

"Well," said Mr. Harben, "it is difficult to think of American literature or of American life without thinking of the novels of William Dean Howells. But the great American novel, to use that term, would be less likely to come into being than the great English novel.

"You see, the United States is not as compact as England. London, it may be said, is England; it has all the characteristics of England, and in the season all England may be met there."

Mr. Harben is not in sympathy with the theories of some of our modern realists.

"The trouble with the average realist," he said, "is that he doesn't believe that the emotions are real. As a matter of fact, the greatest source of material for the novelist is to be found in the emotional and spiritual side of human nature. If writers were more receptive to spiritual and emotional impressions they would make better novels. It is the soul of man that the greatest novels are written about—there is Dostoievski's Crime and Punishment, for example!"

In spite of his criticisms of some of the methods of the modern realists, Mr. Harben believes strongly in the importance of one realistic dogma, that which has to do with detailed description.

"Why is it that Pepys's Diary is interesting to us?" he asked. "It is because of its detail.

"But if Pepys had been a Howells—if he had been as careful in describing great things as he was in describing small things—then his Diary would be ten times more valuable to us than it is. And so Howells's novels will be valuable to people who read them a thousand years from now to get an idea of how we live.

"That is, Howells's novels will be valuable if people read novels in the years that are to come! Perhaps they will not be reading novels or anything else. For all we know, thought-transference may become as common a thing as telephony is now. And if this comes to pass nobody will read!"