UNIVERSITY OF CA RIVERSIDE LIBRART VV^HY AUTHORS GO WRONG GRANT M. OVERTON THE LIBRARY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA RIVERSIDE WHY AUTHORS GO WRONG AND OTHER EXPLANATIONS WHY AUTHORS GO WRONG AND OTHER EXPLANATIONS BY GRANT M. OVERTON AUTHOR OF "the WOMEN WHO MAKE OUR NOVELS" NEW YORK MOFFAT, YARD & COMPANY 1919 Copyright, 1919, BY MOFFAT, YARD tt COMPANY CONTENTS CHAPTER PAGE I. Why Authors Go Wrong .... i II. A Barbaric Yawp 25 III. In the Critical Court 39 IV. Book "Reviewing" 51 V. Literary Edivors, by One of Them . 103 VI. What Every Publisher Knows . , 119 VII. The Secret of the Best Seller . . 145 VIII. Writing a Novel 173 WHY AUTHORS GO WRONG AND OTHER EXPLANATIONS WHY AUTHORS GO WRONG AND OTHER EXPLANATIONS WHY AUTHORS GO WRONG THE subject of Why Authors Go Wrong is one to answering which a book might adequately be devoted and perhaps we shall write a book about it one of these days, but not now. When, as and if written the book dealing with the question will necessarily show the misleading nature of Mr. Arnold Bennett's title, The Truth About an Author — a readable little volume which does not tell the truth about an author in general, but only what we are politely requested to accept as the truth about Arnold Bennett. Mr. Bennett may or may not be telling the truth about himself in that book; his regard for the truth in respect of the characters of his fiction has been variable. Perhaps he is more scrupulous when it comes to himself, but we are at liberty to doubt it. For a man who will Why Authors Go Wrong occasionally paint other persons — even fictionary persons — as worse than they really are may not unnaturally be expected to depict himself as some- what better than he is. We must not stay with Mr. Bennett any longer just now. It is enough that he has not been content to wait for the curtain to rise and has insisted on thrusting himself into our prologue. Exit; and let us get back where we were. We were indicating that Why Authors Go Wrong is an extensive subject. It is so extensive because there are many authors and many, many more readers. It is extensive because it is a moral and not a literary question, a human and not an artistic problem. It is extensive because it is really un- answerable and anything that is essentially unan- swerable necessitates prolonged efforts to answer it, this on the well known theory that it is better that many be bored than that a few remain dissatisfied. Let us take up these considerations one by one. It seems unlikely that any one will misunderstand the precise subject itself. What, exactly, is meant by an author "going wrong"? The familiar eu- phemism, as perhaps most frequently used, is any- thing but ambiguous. Ambiguous-sounding words are generally fraught with a deadly and specific Why Authors Go Wrong meaning — another illustration of the eternal para- dox of sound and sense. But as used in the instance of an author, "going wrong" has a great variety of meanings. An au- thor has gone wrong, for example, when he has deliberately done work under his best; he has gone wrong when he has written for sentimental or les- thetic reasons and not, as he should, for money primarily ; he has gone wrong when he tries to uplift or educate his readers ; he has gone wrong when he has written too many books, or has not written enough books, or has written too fast or not fast enough, or has written what he saw and not what he felt, or what he felt and not what he saw, or posed in any fashion whatsoever. Ezra Pound, for example, has gone atrociously wrong by becoming a French Decadent instead of remaining a son of Idaho and growing up to be an American. Of course as a French Decadent he will always be a failure; as Benjamin De Casseres puts it, "the reality underlying his exquisite art is bourgeois and American. He is a ghost material- ized by cunning effects of lights and mirrors." Mr. Robert W. Chambers went wrong in an en- tirely different fashion. The usual charge brought against Mr. Chambers is that he consented to do Why Authors Go Wrong less than his best because it profited him. This is entirely untrue. Mr. Chambers's one mistake was that lie did not write to make money. Every writer should, because writing is a business and a business is something which can only be decently conducted with that end in view. Fancy a real estate business which should not be conducted to make money ! We should have to stop it imme- diately. It would be a menace to the community, for there is no telling what wickedness of purpose might lie behind it. A business not conducted pri- marily to make money is not a business but a blind ; and very likely a cover for operations of a criminal character. The safety of mankind lies in knowing motives and is imperilled by any enterprise that disguises them. And so for Mr. Qiambers to refrain deliberately from writing to make money was a very wrong thing for him to do. Far from having a wicked motive, he had a highly creditable motive, which does not excuse him in the least. His praiseworthy purpose was to write the best that was in him for the sake of giving pleasure to the widest possible number of his readers. There does not seem to be much doubt that he has done it; those who most disapprove of him will hardly deny that the vast sales of his half a hundred stories are incontestable evidence of his success in his aim. But what is the result ? On every hand he is misjudged and con- Why Authors Go Wrong demned. He is accused of acting on the right motive, which is called wrong! He is not blamed, as he should be, for acting on a wrong motive, which would, if understood, have been called right! What he should have done, of course, was to write sanely and consistently to make money, as did Amelia Barr. Mrs. Barr was not a victim of widespread contem- porary injustice and Mr. Chambers is and will remain so. Take another illustration — Mr. Winston Church- ill. One of the ablest living American novelists, he has gone so wrong that it cannot honestly be suj>- posed he will ever go right again. His earlier novels were not only delightful but actually important. His later novels are intolerable. In such a novel as The Inside of the Cup Mr. Churchill is not writing with the honorable and matter-of-course object of selling a large number of copies and getting an income from them; he is writing with the dishonorable and un- avowed object of setting certain ideas before you, the contemplation of which will, in his opinion, do you good. He wants you to think about the horror of a clergyman in leading strings to his wealthiest parishioner. As a fact, there is no horror in such a situation and Mr. Churchill cannot conjure up any. There is no horror, there are only two fools. Now if a man is a fool, he's a fool; he cannot become anything else, least of all a sensible man. A clergy- man in thrall to a rich individual of his congrega- Why Authors Go Wrong tion is a fool; and to picture him as painfully eman- cipating himself and becoming not only sensible but, as it were, heroic is to ask us to accept a contradic- tion in terms. For a fool is not a man who lacks sense, but a man who cannot acquire sense. Not even a miracle can make him sensible; if it could there would be no trouble with The Inside of the Cup, for a miracle, being, as G. K. Chesterton says, merely an exceptional occurrence, will always be acquiesced in by the intelligent reader. It would be possible to continue at great length giving examples of authors who have gone wrong and specifying the fifty-seven varieties of ways they have erred. But the mere enumeration of fallen authors is terribly depressing and quite useless. If we are to accomplish any good end we must try to find out why they have allowed themselves to be de- ceived or betra3'ed and what can be done in the shape of rescue work or preventive effort in the future. Perhaps we can reclaim some of them and guide others aright. After a consideration of cases — we shall not clog the discussion with statistics and shall confine our- selves to general results — we have been led by all the evidence to the conclusion that the principal trouble is with the authors. Little or none of the blame for Why Authors Go Wrong 7 the unfortunate situation rests on their readers. In- deed, in the majority of cases the readers are the great and unyielding force making for sanity and virtue in the author. Without the persistent moral pressure exerted by their readers many, many more authors would certainly stray from the path of busi- ness rectitude — not literary rectitude, for there is no such thing. What is humanly right is right in letters and nothing is right in letters that is wrong in the world. The commonest way in which authors go wrong is one already stated : By ceasing to write primarily for money, for a living and as much more as may come the writer's way. The commonest reason why authors go wrong in this way is comical — or would be if it were not so common. They feel ashamed to write for money first and last; they are seized with an absurd idea that there is something implicitly dis- graceful in acting upon such a motive. And so to avoid something that they falsely imagine to be dis- graceful they do something that they know is dis- graceful ; they write from some other motive and let the reader innocently think they are writing with the old and normal and honorable motive. So widespread is this delusion that it is abso- lutely necessary to digress for a moment and explain why writing to make money is respectable ! Why is anything respectable? Because it meets a human necessity and meets it in an open and aboveboard 8 Why Authors Go Wrong fashion without detriment to society in general or the individual in particular. All lawful business conforms to this definition and writing for money certainly does. Writing — or painting or sculptur- ing or anything else — not done to make money is not respectable because ( i ) it meets no human ne- cessity, (2) it is not done openly and aboveboard, (3) it is invariably detrimental to society, and (4) it is nearly always harmful to individuals, and most harmful to the individual engaged upon it. It is useless to say that a man who writes or paints or carves for something other than money meets a human necessity — a spiritual thirst for beauty, perhaps. There is no spiritual thirst for beauty which cannot be satisfied completely by work done for an adequate and monetary reward. And to satisfy the human longing for the beautiful with- out requiring a proper price is to demoralize society by showing men that they can have something for nothing. Now it is just here that the moral pressure of the great body of readers is felt, a pressure that is constantly misunderstood by the author. So surely as the writer has turned from writing to make money and has taken up writing for art's sake (whatever that means) or writing for some ethical purpose or writing in the interest of some propa- Why Authors Go Wrong ganda, though it be merely the propaganda of his own poor, single intellect — just so surely as he has done this his readers find him out. Whether they then continue to read him or not depends entirely on what they think of his new and unavowed (but patent) motive. Of course readers ought to be stern ; having caught their author in a wrong motive they ought to punish him by deserting him instantly. But readers are human; they are even surprising- ly selfish at times; they are capable of considering their own enjoyment, and, dreadful to say, they are capable of considering it first. So if, as in the case of Mr. Chambers, they find his new motive friendly and flattering they read him more than ever ; on the other hand, if they find the changed purpose dis- agreeable or tiresome, aiming to uplift them or to shock them unpleasantly or (sometimes) to make fun of them, they quit that author cold. And they hardly ever come back. Usually the author is not perspicacious enough to grasp the cause of the de- fection; it is amazing how seldom authors think there can be anything wrong with themselves. Usu- ally the abandoned author goes right over and joins a small sect of highbrows and proclaims the deplor- able state of his national literature. "The public be damned!" he says in effect, but the public is not damned, it is he that is damned, and the public has done its utmost to save him. Sometimes an author deliberately does work that lo Why Authors Go Wrong is less than his best, but he never does this with the idea of making money, or, if he entertains that idea, he fools no one but himself. There are known and even (we believe) recorded instances of an author ridiculing his own output and avowing with what he probably thought audacious candor : "Of course, this latest story of mine is junk — but it'll sell loo,- ooo copies !" It never does. The author is perfectly truthful in describing the book as worthless. If he implies as he always will in such a case that he deliberately did less than his best he is an unconscious liar. It was his best and its worthlessness was solely the re- sult of his total insincerity. For a man or woman may write a very bad book and write it with an ut- ter sincerity that will sell hundreds of thousands of copies ; but no one can write a very fine book insin- cerely and have it sell. The author who thinks that he has written a rather inferior novel for the sake of huge royalties has actually written the best he has in him, namely, a piece of cheese. The author who has actually written beneath his best has not done it for money, but to avoid making money. He thinks it is his best; he thinks it is something utterly artistic, aesthetically wonderful, highbrowedly pure, lofty and serene; he scorns money; to make money by it would be to soil it. What he cannot see is that it is not his best ; that it is very likely quite his worst ; Why Authors Go Wrong ii that when he has done his best he will unavoidably make money unless, like the misguided mortal we have just mentioned, deep insincerity vitiates his work. We are therefore ready, before going further, to formulate certain paradoxical principles governing all literarv work. To understand why authors go wrong we must first understand how authors may go right. The paradoxical rules which if observed will hold the author to the path of virtue and rectitude may be formulated briefly as follows : 1. An author must write to make money first of all, and every other purpose must be secondary to this purpose of money making. The paradoxy inherent in this principle is that while writing the author must never for a single moment think of the money he may make. 2. Every writer must have a stern and insistent moral purpose in his writing, and especially must he be animated by this purpose if he is writing fiction. The paradoxy here is that never, under any cir- cumstances, may the writer exhibit his moral pur- pose in his work. 3. A writer must not write too much nor must he write too little. He is writing too much if his 12 Why Authors Go Wrong successive books sell better and better; he is writ- ing too little if each book shows declining sales. This may appear paradoxical, but consider: If the writer's work is selling with accelerated speed the market for his wares will very quickly be over- supplied. This happened to Mr. Kipling one day. He had the wisdom to stop writing almost entirely, to let his production fall to an attenuated trickle; with the result that saturation was avoided, and there is now and will long continue to be a good, brisk, steady demand for his product. On the other hand, consider the case of Mrs. Blank (the reader will not expect us to be either so ungallant or so professionally unethical or so commercially unfair as to give her name). Mrs. Blank wrote a book every two or three years, and each was more of a plug than its predecessor. She began writing a book a year, and the third volume under her altered schedule was a best seller. It was also her best novel. Then why? why? why? do the authors go wrong? Because, if we must say it in plain English, they disregard every principle of successful authorship. When they have written a book or two and have made money they get it into their heads that it is ignoble to write for money and they try to write Why Authors Go Wrong 13 for something else — for Art, usually. But it is im- possible to write for Art, for Art is not an end but a means. When they do not try to write for Art they try to write for an Ethical Purpose, but they exhibit it as inescapably as if the book were a pulpit and the reader were sitting in a pew. Indeed, some modern fiction cannot be read unless you are sitting in a pew, and a very stiff and straight backed pew at that ; not one of these old fashioned, roomy, high walled family pews such as Dickens let us sit in, pews in which one could be comfortable and easy and which held the whole family, pews in which you could box the children's ears lightly without doing it publicly; no! the pews the novelists make us sit in these days are these confounded modern pews which stop with a jab in the small of your back and which are no better than public benches, but are intensely more uncomfortable — pews iu which, to ease your misery, you can do nothing but look for the mote in your neighbor's eye and the wrong color in your neighbor's cravat. Because — to get back to the whys of the authors — because when they are popular they overpopu- larize themselves, and when they are unpopular they lack the gumption to write more steadily and fight more gamely for recognition. We don't mean critical recognition, but popular recognition. How can an author expect the public, his public, any pub- lic, to go on swallowing him in increased amounts 14 Why Authors Go Wrong at meals placed ever closer together — for any length of time? And how, equally, can an author expect a public, his public, or any public, to acquire a taste for his work when he serves them a sample once a week, then once a month, then once a year? Why, a per- son could not acquire a taste for olives that way. 8 We have no desire to be personal for the sake of being personal, but we have every desire to be per- sonal in this discussion for the sake of being im- personal, pointed, helpful and clear. It is time to take a perfectly fresh and perfectly illustrative ex- ample of how not to write fiction. We shall take the case of Mr. Owen Johnson and his new novel, Virtuous Wives. Mr. Johnson will be suspected by the dense and conventional censors of American literature of hav- ing written Virtuous Wives to make money. Alack- aday, no! If he had a much better book might have come from his typewriter. Mr. Johnson was not thinking primarily of money, as he should have been (prior to the actual writing of the story). He was filled with a moral and uplifting aim. He had been shocked to the marrow by the spectacle of the lives led by some New York women — the kind Alice Duer Miller writes discreetly about. The partici- pation of America in the war had not begun. The Why Authors Go Wrong 15 performances of an inconsiderable few were unduly- conspicuous. Mr. Johnson decided to write a novel that would hold up these disgusting triflers (and worse) to the scorn of sane and decent Americans. He set to work. He finished his book. It was serialized in one of the several magazines which have displaced forever the old Sunday school library in the field of Awful Warning literature. In these forums Mr. Galsworthy and Gouverneur Morris in- scribe our present day chronicles of the Schoenberg- Cotta family, and writ large over their instalments, as part of the editorial blurb, we read the expression of a fervent belief that Vice has never been so Pow- erfully, Brilliantly and Convincingly Depicted in All Its Horror by Any Pen. But we divagate. Mr. Johnson's novel was printed serially and ap- peared then as a book with a solemn preface — the final indecent exhibition, outside of the story itself, of his serious moral purpose. And as a book it is failing utterly of its purpose. It has sold and is selling and Mr. Johnson is making and will make money out of it — which is what he did not want. What he did want he made impossible when he un- masked his great aim. The world may be perverse, but you have to take it as it is. The world may be childish, but none of us will live to see it grow up. If the world thinks you write with the honest and understandable ob- ject of making a living it attributes no ulterior mo- 1 6 Why Authors Go Wrong tive to you. The world says : "Jc>hn Smith, the butcher, sells me beeksteak in order to buy Mrs. Smith a new hat and the little Smiths shoes." The world buys the steaks and relishes them. But if John Smith tells the world and his wife every time they come to his shop : 'T am selling you this large, juicy steak to give you good red blood and make you Fit," then the world and his wife are resentful and say : "We think we don't like your large, juicy steaks. We are red blooded enough to have our own preferences. We will just go on down the street to the delicatessen — we mean the Liberty food shop — and buy some de-Hohenzollernized frank- furters, the well known Liberty sausage. To hell with the Kaiser!" And so John Smith merely makes money. Oh, yes, he makes money; a large, juicy steak is a large, juicy steak no matter how deadly the good intent in selling it. But John Smith is defeated in his real purpose. He does not fur- nish the world and his wife with the red corpuscles he yearned to give them. At this juncture we seem to hear exasperated cries of this character: "What do you mean by saying that an author must write for money first and last and yet must have a stern moral purpose? How can the two be reconciled? Why must he Why Authors Go Wrong 17 think of money until he begins to write and never after he begins to write? We understand why the moral object must not obtrude itself, but why need it be there at all?" Can a man serve two masters? Can he serve money and morality? Foolish question No. 58,914! He not only can but he always does when his work is good. A painter — a good painter — is a man who burns to enrich the world with his work and is determined to make the world pay him decently for it. A good sculptor is a man who has gritted his teeth with a resolution to give the world certain beautiful figures for which the world must reward him — or he will know the reason why ! A good corset manu- facturer is a man who is filled with an almost holy yearning to make people more shapely and more comfortable than he found them — and he is fanati- cally resolved that they shall acknowledge his achievement by making him rich ! For that's the whole secret. How is a man to know that he has painted great portraits or land- scapes or carved lovely monuments or made thou- sands shapelier and more easeful if not by the money they paid him ? How is an author to know that he has amused or instructed thousands if not by the size of his royalty checks? By hearsay? By mind reading? By plucking the petals of a daisy — "They love me. They love me not"? 1 8 Why Authors Go Wrong Every man can and must serve two masters, but the one is the thing that masters him and the other is the evidence of his mastery. Every man must before beginning work fix his mind intently upon the making of money, the money which shall be an evidence of his mastery; every man on begin- ning work and for the duration of the work must fix his mind intently and exclusively on the service of morality, the great master whose slave he is in the execution of an Invisible Purpose. And no man dare let his moral purpose expose itself in his work, for to do that is to do a presumptuous and sacrilegious thing. The Great Moralizer, who has in his hands each little one of us workers, holds his Purpose invisible to us ; how then can we venture to make visible what He keeps invisible, how can we have the audacity to practice a technique that He Himself does not employ? For He made the world and all that is in it. And He made it with a moral end in view, as we most of us believe. But not the wisest of us pre- tends that that moral object is clearly visible. It does not disclose itself to us directly ; we are aware of it only indirectly; and are influenced by it for- evermore. If the world was so made, who are we that think ourselves so much more adroit than Him as to be able to expose boldly what He veils and to reveal what He hath hidden? There are those, of course, who see no moral ex- Why Authors Go Wrong 19 planation of the universe; but they are not always consistent. There is that famous passage of Joseph Conrad's in which he declines the ethical view and says he would fondly regard the pano- rama of creation as pure spectacle — the marvellous spectacle being, perchance, a moral end in itself. And yet no man ever wrote with a deeper mani- festation and a more perfect concealment of his moral purpose than Conrad; for exactly the thing to which all his tales are passionate witnesses is the sense of fidelity, of loyalty, of endurance — above all, the sense of fidelity — that exists in mankind, Man, in the Conradist view, is a creature of an inexhaustible loyalty to himself and to his fellows. This inner and utter fidelity it is which makes the whole legend of Lord Jim, which is the despairing cry that rings out at the last in Victory, which reaches lyric heights in Youth, which is the pro- found pathos of The End of the Tether, which, in its corruption by an incorruptible metal, the silver of the mine, forms the dreadful tragedy of Nos- tronio. An immortal, Conrad, but not the admir- ing and passive spectator he diffidently declares himself to be! 10 Have we covered all the cases? Obviously not. It is no more possible to deal with all the authors 20 Why Authors Go Wrong who go wrong than it is to call all the sinners to repentance. But sin is primarily a question be- tween the sinner and his own conscience, and the errors of authors are invariably questions be- tween the authors and the public. The public is the best conscience many an author has; and the substitution of a private self-justification for a pub- lic vindication has seldom been a markedly suc- cessful undertaking in human history. Yet there is a class of writers for whom no public vindica- tion is possible; who affect, indeed, to scorn it; who set themselves up as little gods. They are the worshippers of Art. They are the ones who not only do not admit but who deliberately deny a moral purpose in anything; who think that a something they call pure Beauty is the sole end of existence, of work, of life, and is alone to be wor- shipped. It is a cult of Baal. For these Artists despise money, and in despis- ing money they cheapen themselves and become creatures of barter. They sneer at morality and reject it; immediately the world disappears: "And the earth was without form, and void." They de- moralize honest people with whom they come in contact by demolishing the possibly imperfect but really workable standards which govern normal lives — and never replacing them. What is their Beauty? It is what each one of them thinks beau- tiful. What is their Art? It is what each cold Why Authors Go Wrong 21 Httle selfish soul among them chooses to call Art. What is their achievement? Self-destruction. They are the spiritual suicides, they are the moral defectives, they are the outcasts of humanity, the lepers among the workers of the world. For them there can be neither pity nor forgiveness; for they deny the beauty of rewarded toil, the sincerity of honest labor, the mystical humanity of man. Of them no more. Let us go back in a closing moment to the contemplation of the great body of men and women who labor cheerfully and honor- ably, if rather often somewhat mistakenly, to make their living, to do' good work and make the world pay them for it, yet leaving with the world the firm conviction that it has had a little the better of the bargain ! These are the authors who "go wrong," and with whose well meant errors we have been dealing, not very methodically but perhaps not unhelpfully. Is there, then, no parting word of advice we can give our authors? To be sure there is! When our authors are quite sure they will not go wrong, they may go write ! A BARBARIC YAWP II A BARBARIC YAWP IT was the handy phrase to describe Wah Whit- man: The "barbaric yawp." In its elegant inelegance the neatly adjectived noun was felt to be really brilliant. Stump speakers "made the eagle scream" ; a chap like Whitman had to be char- acterized handily too. The epigrammatic mind is the card index mind. Now the remarkable thing about the card index is its casualty list. People who card index things are people who proceed to forget those things. The same metal rod that transfixes the perforated cards pierces the indexers' brains. A mechanical device has been called into play. Brains are unnecessary any more. The day of pigeonholes was slightly better; for the pigeonholes were not unlike the human brain in which things are tucked away to- gether, because they really have some association with each other. But the card index alphabetizes ruthlessly. Fancy an alphabetical brain! Epigrams are like that. A man cannot take the trouble to think ; he falls back on an epigram. He cannot take the trouble to remember and so he card indexes. The upshot is that he can find 25 26 Why Authors Go Wrong nothing in the card index and of course has no recollection to fall back on. Or he recalls the epi- gram without having the slightest idea what it was meant to signify. But this is not to be about card indexes nor even about epigrams. It is to be a barbaric yawp, by which it is to be supposed was once meant the happy consciousness and the proud wonder that struck into the heart of an American poet. Whitman was not so much a poet as the chantey man of Longfel- low's Ship of State. There was an hour when the chanteyman had an inspiration, when he saw as by an apocalyptic light all the people of these United States linked and joined in a common effort. Every man, woman and child of the millions tailed on the rope ; every one of them put his weight and muscle to the task. It was a tremendous hour. It was the hour of a common effort. It was the hour for which, Walt felt, men had risked their lives a century earlier. It was a revealed hour; it had not yet arrived; but it was sure to come. And in the glow of that revelation the singer lifted up his voice and sang. . . . God grant he may be hearing the mighty chorus I America is not a land, but a people. And a people may have no land and still they will remain A Barbaric Yawp 27 a people. There has, for years, been no country of Poland; but there are Poles. There has been a country of Russia for centuries, but there is to-day no Russian people. What makes a people? Not a land certainly. Not political forms nor political sovereignty. Not even political indepen- dence. Nor, for that matter, voices that pretend or aspire to speak the thoughts of a nation. Poland has had such voices and Russia has had her artists, musicians, novelists, poets. The thing that makes a people is a thing over which statesmen have no control. Geography throws no light on the subject. Nor does that study of the races of man which is called anthro- pology. It is not a psychological secret (psychol- ogy covers a multitude of guesses). Philosophy may evolve beautiful systems of thought, but sys- tems of thought have nothing to do with the par- ticular puzzle before us. The secret must be sought elsewhere. Is it an inherited thing, this thing that makes a people? That can't be; ours is a mixed inheritance here in America. Is it an abstract idea? Abstract ideas are never more than architectural pencillings and seldom harden into concrete foundations. Is it a common emotion? If it were we should be able to agree on a name for it. Is it an instinct? An instinct might be back of it. What is left? Can it be a religion? As such 28 Why Authors Go Wrong it should be easily recognizable. But an element of religion? An act of faith? Yes, for faith may exist with or without a creed, and the act of faith may be deliberate or involun- tar3^ Willed or unwilled the faith is held ; formu- lated or unformulated the essential creed is there. Let us look at the people of America, men and women of very divergent types and tempers far apart; men and women of inextricable heredities and of confusing beliefs — even, ordinarily, of clashing purposes. Each believes a set of things, but the beliefs of them all can be reduced to a low- est common denominator, a belief in each other; just as the beliefs of them all have a highest common multiple, a willingness to die in defence of America. To some of them America means a past, to some the past has no meaning; to some of them America means a future, to others a future is without sig- nificance. But to all of them America means a present to be safeguarded at the cost of their lives, if need be; and the fact that the present is the translation of the past to some and the reading of the future to others is incidental. We would apply these considerations to the affair of literature ; and having been tiresomely generaliz- A Barbaric Yawp 29 ing we shall get down to cases that every one can understand. The point we have tried to make condenses to this: The present is supremely important to us all. To some of us it is all important because of the past, and to some of us it is of immense moment because of the future, and to the greatest number (probably) the present is of overshadowing con- cern because it is the present — the time when they count and make themselves count. It is now or never, as it always is in life, though the urgency of the hour is not always so apparent. It was now or never with the armies in the field, with the men training in the camps, with the coal miners, the shipbuilders, the food savers in the kitchens. It is just as much now or never with the poets, the novelists, the essayists — with the workers in every line, although they may not see so dis- tinctly the immediacy of the hour. Everybody saw the necessity of doing things to win the war; many can see the necessity of doing things that will constitute a sort of winning after the war. There is always something to be won. If it is not a war it is an after the war. "Peace hath its vic- tories no less renowned than war" is a fine sound- ing line customarily recited without the slightest recognition of its real meaning. The poet did not mean that the victories of peace were as greatly acclaimed as the victories of war, but that the sum 30 Why Authors Go Wrong total of their renown was as great or greater be- cause they are more enduring. Now for the cases. It is the duty, the opportunity and the privilege of America now, in the present hour, to make it impossible hereafter for any one to raise such a question as Bliss Perry brings up in his book The American Spirit in Literature, namely, whether there is an independent American literature. Not only does Mr. Perry raise the question, but, stated as baldly as we have stated it, the query was there- upon discussed, with great seriousness, by a well- known American book review ! We are happy to say that both Mr. Perry and the book re- view decided that there is such a thing as an American literature, and that American writing is not a mere adjunct (perhaps a caudal appendage) of English literature. All Americans will feel deeply gratified that they could honorably come to such a conclusion. But not all Americans will feel gratified that the conclusion was reached on the strength of Emerson, Lowell, Longfellow, Whit- tier, Holmes, Whitman, Poe and others of the im- mortal dead. Some Americans will wish with a faint and timid longing that the conclusion might have been reached, or at least sustained, on the A Barbaric Yawp strength of Tarkington, Robert Herrick, Edith Wharton, Mary Johnston, Gertrude Atherton, Mary S. Watts, William Allen White, Edgar Lee Masters, Amy Lowell, Edna Ferber, Joseph Hergesheimer, Owen Wister and a dozen or so other living writers over whose relative importance as witnesses for the affirmative we have no desire to quarrel. Mr. Howells, we believe, was called to the stand. If we had not seen it we should refuse to credit our senses. The idea of any one holding court to- day to decide the question as to the existence of an independent American literature is incredibly funny. It is the peculiarity of criticism that any one can set up a court anywhere at any time for any purpose and with unlimited jurisdiction. There are no rules of procedure. There are no rules of evidence. There is no jury; the people who read books may sit packed in the court room, but there must be no interruptions. Order in the court! Usually the critic judge sits alone, but sometimes there are special sessions with a full bench. Writs are issued, subpoenas served, wit- nesses are called and testimony is taken. An in- junction may be applied for, either temporary or permanent. Nothing is easier than to be held in contempt. 2^2. Why Authors Go Wrong The most striking pecuHarity of procedure in the Critical Court is with regard to what constitutes evidence. You might, in the innocence of your heart, suppose that a man's writings would consti- tute the only admissible evidence. Not at all. His writings have really nothing to do with the case. What is his Purpose? If, as a sincere individual, he has anywhere exposed or stated his object in writing books counsel objects to the admission of this Purpose as evidence on the ground that it is incompetent, irrelevant and immaterial; and not sound Art. On the other hand if, as an artist, he has embodied his Purpose in his fiction so that every intelligent reader may discover it for himself and feel the glow of a personal discovery, counsel will object to the admission of his books as evi- dence on the ground that they are incompetent, ir- relevant and immaterial; and not the best proof. Counsel will demand that the man himself be ex- amined personally as to his purpose (if he is alive) or will demand a searching examination of his private life (if he be dead). The witness is always a culprit and browbeating the witness is always in order. I am a highbrow and you are a lowbrow; what the devil do you mean by writing a book anyway? Before the trial begins the critic-judge enunciates A Barbaric Yawp 33 certain principles on which the verdict will be based and the verdict is based on those principles whether they find any application in the testimony or not. A favorite principle with the man on the bench is that all that is not obscure is not Art. It isn't phrased as intelligibly as that, to be sure; a common way to put it is to lay down the rule that the popularity of a book (which means the extent to which it is under- stood and therefore appreciated) has nothing to do with the case, tra-la, has nothing to do with the case. Another principle is that sound can be greater than sense, which, in the lingo of the High- est Criticism, is the dictum that words and sen- tences can have a beauty apart from the meaning (if any) that they seek to convey. And there really is something in this idea; for example, what could be lovelier than the old line, "Eeny, meeny, miny-mo" ? Shakespeare, a commercial fellow who wrote plays for a living, knew this when he let one of his characters sing: "When that I was and a little tiny boy, With hey, ho, the wind and the rain, A foolish thing was but a toy, For the rain it raineth every day." And a little earlier in Twelfth Night: "Like a mad lad. Pare thy nails, dad; Adieu, goodman devil." 34 Why Authors Go Wrong Which is not only beautiful as sound, but without the least sense unless it hath the vulgarity to be looked for in the work of a mercenary playwright. But the strangest thing about the proceedings in the Critical Court is their lack of contemporary in- terest. Rarely, indeed, is anything decided here until it has been decided everywhere else. For the great decisions are the decisions of life and not de- cisions on the past. A man has written twenty books and he is dead. He is ripe for consideration by the Critical Court. A man has written two novels and has eighteen more ahead of him. The Critical Court will leave him alone until he is past all helping. It seems never to occur to the critic- judge that a young man who has written two novels is more important than a dead man who has written twenty novels. For the young man who has written two novels has some novels yet to be written ; he can be helped, strengthened, encour- aged, advised, corrected, warned, counselled, re- buked, praised, blamed, presented with bills of par- ticulars, and — heartened. If he has not genius nothing can put it in him, but if he has, many things can be done to help him exploit it. And a man who is dead cannot be affected by anything you say or do; the critic-judge has lost his chance A Barbaric Yawp 35 of shaping that writer's work and can no longer write a decree, only an epitaph. To be brutally frank : Nobody cares what the Critical Court thinks of Whitman or Poe or Long- fellow or Hawthorne. Everybody cares what Tarkington does next, what Mary Johnston tackles, what the developments are in the William Allen White case, what becomes of Joseph Hergesheimer, whether Amy Lowell achieves great work in that contrapuntal poetry she calls polyphonic prose. On these things depend the present era in American literature and the possibilities of the future. And these things are more or less under our control. The people of America not only believe that there is an independent American literature, but they believe that there will continue to be. Some of them believe in the past of that literature, some of them believe in its future; but all of them be- lieve in its present and its presence. Their voice may be stifled in the Critical Court (silence in the court!) but it is audible everywhere else. It is heard in the bookshops where piles of new fiction melt away, where new verse is in brisk demand, where new biographies and historical works are bought daily and where books on all sorts of weighty subjects flake down from the shelves into the hands of customers. The voice of the American people is articulate in the offices of newspapers which deal with the news 36 Why Authors Go Wrong of new books. It makes a seismographic record in the ledgers of publishing houses. It comes to almost every writer in letters of inquiry, comment and commendation. What, do you suppose, a writer like Gene Stratton-Porter cares whether the Critical Court excludes her work or condemns it? She can reread hundreds and thousands of letters from men and women who tell her how profoundly her books have — tickled their fancy? pleased their love of verbal beauty? taxed their intellectuals to understand? No, merely how profoundly her books have altered their whole lives. Hear ye! Hear ye! Hear ye! The Critical Court is in session. All who have business with the court draw near and give attention! IN THE CRITICAL COURT Ill IN THE CRITICAL COURT ^TIHE Critical Court being in session, William A Dean Howells, H. W. Boynton, W. C. Brownell, Wilson Follctt and William Marion Reedy sitting, the case of Booth Tarkington, novelist, is called. Counsel for the Prosecution : If it please the court, this case should go over. The defendant, Mr. Tarkington, is not dead yet. Mr. Howells : I do not know how my colleagues feel, but I have no objection to considering the work of Mr. Tarkington while he is alive. Mr. Follett: I think it would be better if we deferred the consideration of Mr. Tarkington until it is a little older. Counsel for the Defense {in this case Mr. Robert Cortes Holliday, biographer of Tarking- ton) : "It"? Mr. Follett : I mean his work, or works. Per- haps I should have said "them." Mr. Holliday: "They," not "them." Excep- tion. And "are" instead of "is." Gentlemen, I 39 40 Why Authors Go Wrong have no wish to prejudice the case for my client, but I must point out that if you wait until he is a little older he may be dead. Mr. BoYNTON : So much the better. We can then consider his works in their complete state and with reference to his entire life. Mr. HoLLiDAY : But it would then be impossible to give any assistance to Mr. Tarkington. The chance to influence his work would have passed. Mr. Brownell: That is relatively unimportant. Mr. HoLLiDAY : I beg pardon but Mr. Tarking- ton feels it rather important to him. Mr. BoYNTON : My dear Mr. Holliday, you really must remember that it is not what seems impor- tant to Mr. Tarkington that can count with us, but what is important in our eyes. Mr. Holliday: Self-importance. Mr. BoYNTON (stiMy) : Certainly not. Merely self-confidence. But on my own behalf I may say this : I am unwilling to consider Mr. Tarkington's works in this place at this time; but I am willing to pass judgment in an article for a newspaper or a monthly magazine or some other purely perish- able medium. That should be sufficient for Mr. Tarkington. Mr. FoLLETT : I think the possibility of consider- ing Mr. Tarkington must be ruled out, anyway, as one or more of his so-called works have first ap- peared serially in the Saturday Evening Post. In the Critical Court 41 Mr. HoLLiDAY (noting the effect of this reveUi- tion on the members of the court) : Very well, I will not insist. Booth, you will have to get along the best you can with newspaper and magazine re- views and with what people write to you or tell you face to face. Be brave, Tark, and do as you aren't done by. After all, a few million people read you and you make enough to live on. The court will pass on you after you are dead, and if you dictate any books on the ouija board the court's verdict may be helpful to you then ; you might even manage the later Henry James manner. Clerk of the Court (Prof. William Lyon Phelps): Next easel Mrs. Atherton please step forward ! Mrs. Atherton (advancing with composure) : I can find no one to act for me, so I will be my own counsel. I will say at the outset that I do not care for the court, individually or collectively, nor for its verdict, whatever it may be. Prof. Phelps: I must warn you that anything you say may, and probably will, be used against you. Mrs. Atherton : Oh, I don't mind that ; it's the things the members of the court have said against me that I purpose to use against them. Mr. Brownell: Are you, by any chance, refer- ring to me, Madam? Mrs. Atherton : I do not refer to persons, Mr. 42 Why Authors Go Wrong Brownell. I hit them. No, I had Mr. Boynton particularly in mind. And perhaps Gene Stratton- Porter. Is she here? {Looks around menac- ingly). No. Well, go ahead with your nonsense. Mr. Ho WELLS (rising) : I think I will withdraw from consideration of this case. Mrs. Atherton has challenged me so often Mr. Boynton : No, stay. / am going to stick it out Mr. FoLLETT : I think there is no question but that we should hold the defendant in contempt. Mrs. Atherton : Mutual, I assure you. (She sweeps out of the room and a large section of the public quietly follows her.) Clerk Phelps : Joseph Hergesheimer to the bar! (A short, stocky fellow with twinkling eyes steps forward.) Mr. Hergesheimer? Mr. Hergesheimer: Right. Mr. Reedy : Good boy, Joe ! Mr. FoLLETT : It won't do, it won't do at all. There's only The Three Black Pennys and Gold and Iron and a novel called Java Head to go by. Sat- urday Evening Post. And bewilderingly unlike each other. Seem artistic but are too popular, I fancy, really to be sound. Mr. Hergesheimer: With all respect, I should like to ask whether this is a court of record ? Mr. HowELLs: It is. Mr. Hergesheimer: In that case I think I shall In the Critical Court 43 press for a verdict which may be very helpful to me. I should like also to have the members of the court on record respecting my work. Mr. BoYNTON : Just as I feared. My dear fel- low, while we should like to be helpful and will endeavor to give you advice tO' that end it must be done unobtrusively . . . current reviews . . . we'll compare your work with that of Hawthorne and Hardy or perhaps a standard Frenchman. That will give you something to work for. But you cannot expect us to say anything definite about you at this stage of your work. Suppose we were to say what we really think, or what some really think, that you are the most promising writer in America to-day, promising in the sense that you have most of your work before you and in the sense that your work is both popular and artistically fine. Don't you see the risk? Mr. Hergesheimer : I do, and I also see that you would make your own reputation much more than you would make mine. I write a story. I risk everything with that story. You deliver a verdict. Why shouldn't you take a decent chance, too? Mr. Follett: Why should I take any more chances than I have to with my contemporaries ? I pick them pretty carefully, I can tell you. Mr. Hergesheimer : I shall write a novel to be published after my death. There was Henry 44 Why Authors Go Wrong Adams. He stipulated that The Education of Henry Adams should not be published until after his death; and everybody says it is positively bril- liant. Mr. FoLLETT (relieved) : That is a wise decision. But don't be disheartened. I'll probably be able to get around to you in ten years, anyway. (Mr. Hergesheimer hows and retires.) Clerk Phelps : John Galsworthy ! Mr. FoLLETT (brightening) : Some of the Eng- lishmen! This is better! Besides, I know all about Galsworthy. Mr. Galsworthy (coming forward) : I feel much honored. Counsel for the Prosecution : If the court please, I must state that for some time now Mr. Galsworthy has been published serially in a maga- zine with a circulation of one digit and six ciphers. Or one cipher and six digits, I cannot remember which. Mr. Brownell: What, six? Then he has more readers than can be counted on the fingers of one hand. There are only five fingers on a hand. I think this is conclusive, Mr. Boynton : Oh, decidedly. Mr. Follett : But I put him in my book on mod- ern novelists, all of whom were hand picked. Mr. Galsworthy (with much calmness for one uttering a terrible heresy) : Perhaps that's the diffi- In the Critical Court 45 culty, really. All hand picked. Do you know, I rather believe in literary windfalls. But I beg to withdraw. (And he does.) The Clerk : Herbert George Wells ! Mr. Wells {sauntering up and speaking imth a certain inattention) : Respecting my long novel, Joan and Peter, there are some points that need to be made clear. Peter, you know, is called Petah by Joan. Petah is a sapient fellow. He is even able to admire the Germans because, after all, they knew where they were going, they knew what they were after, their education had them headed for something. It had, indeed. I think Petah over- looks the fact that it had headed them for Paris in 1914. The point that Oswald and I make in the book is that England and the Empire, in 1914 and prior thereto, had not been headed for anything, educa- tionally or otherwise, except Littleness in every field of political endeavor, except Stupidity in every province of human affairs. And the proof of this, we argue, is found in the first three years of the Great War. No doubt. The first three years of the war prove so many things that this may well be among them; don't you think so? Without detracting from the damning case which Oswald and I make out against England it does occur to me, as I poke over my material for a new book, that as the proof of a pudding is in the eat- 46 Why Authors Go Wrong ing so the proof of a nation at war is in the fighting. Indisputable as the bankruptcy of much British leadership has been, indisputable as it is that Gen- eral Gough lost tens of thousands of prisoners, hun- dreds of guns and vast stores of ammunition, it is equally indisputable that the Australians who died like flies at the Dardanelles died like men, that the Tommies who were shot by their own guns at Neuve Chapelle went forward like heroes, that the undersized and undernourished and unintellectual Londoners from Whitechapel who fell in Flanders gave up their immortal souls like freemen and Eng- lishmen and kinsmen of the Lion Heart. And if it comes to^ a question as to the blame for the war as distinguished from the question as to the blame for the British conduct of the war, the latter being that with which Joan and Peter is al- most wholly concerned, I should like to point out now, on behalf of myself and the readers of my next book, that perhaps I am not entirely blameless. Perhaps I bear an infinitesimal portion of the ter- rible responsibility which I have showed some un- willingness to place entirely and clearly on Ger- many. For after all, it was Science that made the war and that waged it; it was the idolatry of Science that had transformed the German nation ~by transform- ing the German nature. It was the proofs of what Science could do that convinced Prussia of her In the Critical Court 47 power, that made her confident that with this new weapon she could overstride the earth. I had a part in setting up that worship of Science. I have been not only one of its prophets but a high priest in its temple. And I am all the more dismayed, therefore, when I find myself, as in Joan and Peter, still kneeling at the shrine. What is the cure for war? I ask. Petah tells us that our energies must have some other outlet. We must explore the poles and dig through the earth to China. He himself will go back to Cambridge and get a medical degree; and if he is good enough he'll do something on the border line between biology and chemistry. Joan will build model houses. And the really curious thing is that the pair of them seem disposed to run the unspeakable risks of trying to educate still an- other generation, a generation which, should it have to fight a war with a conquering horde from Mars, might blame Peter and Joan severely for the sacri- fices involved, just as they blame the old Victorians for the sacrifice of 1914-1918. Mr. HowELLs: In heaven's name, what is this tirade? Mr. Brownell : Mr. Wells is merely writing his next book, that's all. {As it is impossible to stop Mr. Wells the court adjourns without a day.) BOOK ^'REVIEWING IV BOOK "reviewing" ON the subject of Book "Reviewing" we feel we can speak freely, knowing all about the business, as we do, though by no means a practi- tioner, and having no convictions on the score of it. For we point with pride to the fact that, though many times indicted, a conviction has never been secured against us. However, it isn't considered good form (whatever that is) to talk about your own crimes. For instance, after exhausting the weather, you should say pleasantly to your neigh- bor : "What an interesting burglary you committed last night! We were all quite stirred up!" It is almost improper (much worse than merely im- moral) to exhibit your natural egoism by remark- ing: "If I do say it, that murder I did on Tuesday was a particularly good job !" For this reason, if for no other, we would re- frain, ordinarily, from talking about book "review- ing"; but since Robert Cortes Holliday has men- tioned the subject in his Walking-Stick Papers and thus introduced the indelicate topic once and for all, there really seems no course open but to pick 51 52 Why Authors Go Wrong up the theme and treat it in a serious, thoughtful way. Book reviewing is so called because the books are not reviewed, or viewed (some say not even read). They are described with more or less accuracy and at a variable length. They are praised, condemned, weighed and solved by the use of logarithms. They are read, digested, quoted and tested for but- ter fat. They are examined, evalued, enjoyed and assessed ; criticised, and frequently found fault with (not the same thing, of course) ; chronicled and even orchestrated by the few who never write words without writing both words and music. James Huneker could make Irvin Cobb sound like a performance by the Boston Symphony. Others, like Benjamin De Casseres, have a dramatic gift. Mr. De Casseres writes book revues. Any one can review a book and every one should be encouraged to do it. It is unskilled labor. Good book reviewers earn from $150 to $230 a week, working only in their spare time, like the good-looking young men and women who sell the Saturday Evening Post, the Ladies' Home Journal and the Country Gentleman but who seldom earn Book "Reviewing" 53 over $100 a week. Book reviewing is one of the very few subjects not taught by the correspondence schools, simply because there is nothing to teach. It is so simple a child can operate it with perfect safety. Write for circular giving full particulars and our handy phrasebook listing 2,567 standard phrases indispensable to any reviewer — FREE. In reviewing a book there is no method to be followed. Like one of the playerpianos, you shut the doors (i.e., close the covers) and play (or write) hy instinct! Although no directions are necessary we will suggest a few things to overcome the beginner's utterly irrational sense of helpless- ness. One of the most useful comments in dealing with very scholarly volumes, such as A History of the Statistical Process in Modern Philanthropical En- terprises by Jacob Jones, is as follows : "Mr. Jones's work shows signs of haste." The peculiar advan- tage of this is that you do not libel Mr. Jones ; the haste may have been the printer's or the publisher's or almost anybody's but the postoffice's. In the case of a piece of light fiction the best way to start your review is by saying : "A new book from the pen of Alice Apostrophe is always welcome." But suppose the book is a first book ? One of the finest opening sentences for the review of a first book runs: "For a first novel, George Lamplit's Good Graciotis! is a tale of distinct promise." Be care- 54 Why Authors Go Wrong ful to say "distinct"; it is an adjective that fits perfectly over the shoulders of any average-chested noun. It gives the noun that upright, swagger carriage a careful writer likes his nouns to have. But clothes do not make the man and words do not make the book review. A book review must have a Structure, a Skeleton, if it be no more than the skeleton in the book closet. It must have a backbone and a bite. It must be able to stand erect and look the author in the face and tell him to go to the Home for Indigent Authors which the Authors' League will build one of these days after it has met running expenses. Our favorite book reviewer reviews the ordinary book in four lines and a semi-colon. Unusual books drain his vital energy to the extent of a paragraph and a half, three adjectives to the square inch. He makes it a point to have one commendatory phrase and one derogatory phrase, which gives a nicely balanced, "on the one hand ... on the other hand" effect. He says that the book is at- tractively bound but badly printed ; well-written but deficient in emotional intensity; full of action but weak in characterization; has a good plot but is devoid of style. Book "Reviewing" 55 He reads all the books he reviews. Every little while he pounces upon a misquotation on page 438, or a misprint on page 279. Reviewers who do not read the books they review may chance upon such details while idly turning the uncut leaves or while looking at the back cover, but they never bring in three runs on the other side's error. They spot the fact that the heroine's mother, who was killed in a train accident in the fourth chapter, buys a re- frigerator in the twenty-third chapter, and they indulge in an unpardonable witticism as to the hero- ine's mother's whereabouts after her demise. But the wrong accent on the Greek word in Chapter XVII gets by them; and as for the psychological impulse which led the herO' to jump from Brooklyn Bridge on the Fourth of July they miss it entirely and betray their neglect of their duty by alluding to him as a poor devil crazed with the heat. The fact is, of course, that he did a Steve Brodie be- cause he found something obscurely hateful in the Manhattan skyline. Day after day, while walking to his work on the Brooklyn Rapid Transit, he gazed at the saw-toothed outline of the buildings limned against the sky. Day by day his soul kept asking: "Why don't they get a gold filling for that cavity between the Singer and Woolworth towers ?" And he would ask himself despondently: "Is this what I live for?" And gradually he felt that it was not. He felt that it might be something to 56 Why Authors Go Wrong die about, however. And so, with the rashness of youth, he leaped. The George Meredith-Thomas Hardy irony came into the story when he was pulled out of the river by his rival in Dorinda's affections, Gregory Anthracyte, owner of the mag- nificent steam yacht Chuggermugger. So much for the anatomy of a book review. Put backbone into it. Read before you write. Look before you leap. Be just, be fair, be impartial; and when you damn, damn with faint praise, and when you praise, praise with faint damns. Be all things to all books. Remember the author. Re- view as you would be reviewed by. If a book is nothing in your life it may be the fault of your life. And it is always less expensive to revise your life than to revise the book. Your life is not printed from plates that cost a fortune to make and another fortune to throw away. "Life is too short to read inferior books," eh? Books are too good to be guillotined by inferior lives — or inferior livers. Bacon said some books were to be digested, but he neglected to mention a cure for dyspeptics. But when we say so much we have only touched the surface of a profound matter. The truth of that matter, the full depth of it, may as well be plumbed at once. A book cannot be reviewed. It Book "Reviewing" 57 can only be written about or around. It is insus- ceptible of such handling as is accorded a play, for example. A man with more or less experience in seeing plays and with more or less knowledge of the drama goes to the first performance of a new com- edy or tragedy or whatnot. There it is before him in speech and motion and color. It is acted. The play, structurally, is good or bad; the acting is either good or bad. Every item of the per- formance is capable of being resolved separately and estimated; and the collective interest or im- portance of these items can be determined, is, in fact, determined once and for all by the perform- ance itself. The observer gets their collective im- pact at once and his task is really nothing but a consideration afterward in such detail as he cares to enter upon of just how that impact was secured. Did you ever, in your algebra days, or even in your arithmetically earnest childhood, "factor" a quan- tity or a number? Take 91. A little difficult, 91, but after some mental and pencil investigation you found that it was obtained by multiplying 13 by 7. Very well. You knew how the impact of 91 was produced; it was produced by multiplying 13 by 7. You had reviewed the number 91 in the sense that you might review a play. Now it is impossible to review a book as you would factor a number or a play. You can't be 58 Why Authors Go Wrong sure of the factors that make up the collective im- pact of the book upon you. There's no way of getting at them. They are summed up in the book itself and no book can be split into multipliable parts. A book is not the author times an idea times the views of the publisher. A book is unfactor- able, often undecipherable. It is a growth. It is a series of accretions about a central thought. The central thought is like the grain of sand which the oyster has pearled over. The central thought may even be a diseased thought and the pearl may be a very lovely and brilliant pearl, superficially at least, for all that. There is nothing to do with a book but to take it as it is or go at it hammer and tongs, scalpel and curette, chisel and auger — smashing it to pieces, scraping and cutting, boring and cleav- ing through the layers of words and subsidiary ideas and getting down eventually to the heart of it, to the grain of sand, the irritant thought that was the earliest foundation. Such surgery may be highly skilful or highly and wickedly destructive; it may uncover something worth while and it may not; naturally, you don't go in for much of it, if you are wise, and as a gen- eral thing you take a book as it is and not as it once was or as the author may, in the innocence of his heart or the subtlety of his experience, have intended it to be. Book "Reviewing" 59 Surgery on a book is like surgery on a human being, for a book is alive; ordinarily the only justi- fication for it is the chance of saving life. If the operator can save the author's life (as an author) by cutting he ought to go ahead, of course. The fate of one book is nothing as against the lives of books yet unwritten; the feelings of the author are not necessarily of more account than the screams of the sick child's parent. There have been such literary operations for which, in lieu of the $1,000 fee of medical practise, the surgeon has been rewarded and more than repaid by a private letter of acknowledgement and heartfelt thanks. No matter how hard up the recipient of such a let- ter may be, the missive seldom turns up in those auction rooms where the A. L. S. (or Autograph Letter with Signature) sometimes brings an unex- pected and astonishingly large price. 7 There is a good deal to be said for taking a book as it is. Most books, in fact, should be taken that way. For the number of books which contain within them issues of life and death is always very small. You may handle new books for a year and come upon only one such. And when you do, un- 6o Why Authors Go Wrong less you recognize its momentousness, no responsi- bility rests on you to do anything except follow a routine procedure. In this domain ignorance is a wholly valid excuse; no one would think of blam- ing a general practitioner of medicine for not remov- ing the patient's vermiform appendix on principle, so to say. Unless he apprehended conclusively that the man had appendicitis and unless he knew the technique of the operation he would certainly be blamed for performing it. Similarly, unless the handler of new books is dead sure that a fatality threatens Harold Bell Wright or John Galsworthy or Mary Roberts Rinehart, unless the new book of Mr, Wright or Mr. Galsworthy or Mrs. Rinehart is a recognizable and unmistak- able symptom, unless, further, he knows what to uncover in that book and how to uncover it, he has no business to take the matter in hand at all. Though the way of most "reviewers" with new books suggests that their fundamental motto must be that one good botch deserves another. Not at all. Better, if you don't know what to do, to leave bad enough alone. But since the book as it is forms 99 percent, of the subject under consideration this aspect of deal- ing with new books should be considered first and most extensively. Afterward we can revert to the one percent, of books that require to go under the knife. Book "Reviewing" 6i 8 Now the secret of taking a book as it is was never very abstruse and is always perfectly simple; nevertheless, it seems utterly to elude most of the persons who deal with new books. It is a secret only because it is forever hidden from their eyes. Or maybe they deliberately look the other way. There exists in the world as at present consti- tuted a person called the reporter. He is, mostly, an adjunct of the daily newspaper; in small places, of the weekly newspaper. It is, however, in the cities of America that he is brought to his perfec- tion and in this connection it is worth while point- ing out what Irvin Cobb has already noted — the difference between the New York reporter and the reporter of almost any other city in America. The New York reporter "works with" his rival on an- other sheet; the reporter outside New York almost never does this. Cobb attributed the difference to the impossible tasks that confront reporters in New York, impossible, that is, for single-handed ac- complishment. A man who should attempt to cover alone some New York assignments, to "beat" his fellow, would be lost. Of course where a New York paper details half a dozen men to a job real competition between rival outfits is feasible and sometimes occurs. But the point here is this : The New York reporter, by generally "working with" 62 Why Authors Go Wrong his fellow from another daily, has made of his work a profession, with professional ideals and standards, a code, unwritten but delicate and de- cidedly high rules of what is honorable and what is not. Elsewhere reporting remains a business, decently conducted to be sure, open in many in- stances to manifestations of chivalry; but essen- tially keen, sharp-edged, cut-throat competition. Now it is of the reporter in his best and highest estate that we would speak here — the reporter who is not only a keen and honest observer but a happy recorder of what he sees and hears and a profes- sional person with ethical ideals in no respect in- ferior to those of any recognized professional man on earth. There are many things which such a reporter will not do under any pressure of circumstance or at the beck of any promise of reward. He will not distort the facts, he will not suppress them, he will not put in people's mouths words that they did not say and he will not let the reader take their words at face value if, in the reporter's own knowledge, the utterance should be perceptibly discounted. No reporter can see and hear everything and no re- porter's story can record even everything that the observer contrived to see and hear. It must record such things as will arouse in the reader's mind a correct image and a just impression. How is this to be done? Why, there is no Book "Reviewing" 63 formula. There's no set of rules. There's noth- ing but a purpose animating every word the man writes, a purpose served, and only half -consciously served, by a thousand turns of expression, a thou- sand choices of words. Like all honest endeavors to effect a purpose the thing is spoiled, annulled, made empty of result by deliberate art. Good re- porters are neither born nor made; they evolve themselves and without much help from any outside agency, either. They can be hindered but not pre- vented, helped but not hurt. You may remember a saying that God helps those who help themselves. The common interpretation of this is that when a man gets up and does something of his own initia- tive Providence is pretty likely to play into his hands a little ; not at all, that isn't what the proverb means. What it does mean is just this: That those who help themselves, who really do lift themselves by their bootstraps, are helped by God ; that it isn't they who do the lifting but somebody bigger than themselves. Now there is no doubt whatever that good reporters are good reporters because God makes them so. They aren't good reporters at three years of age; they get to be. Does this seem discouraging? It ought to be immensely encour- aging, heartening, actually "uplifting" in the finest sense of a tormented word. For if we believed that good reporters were born and not made there would be no hope for any except the gifted few, 64 Why Authors Go Wrong endowed from the start; and if we beheved that good reporters were made and not bom there would be absolutely no excuse for any failures whatever — every one should be potentially a good reporter and it would be simply a matter of correct train- ing. But if we believe that a good reporter is neither born nor made, but makes himself with the aid of God we can be unqualifiedly cheerful. There is hope for almost any one under such a dispensa- tion; moreover, if we believe in God at all and in mankind at all we must believe that between God and mankind the supply of topnotch reporters will never entirely fail. The two together will come pretty nearly meeting the demand every day in the year. Perhaps the reader is grumbling, in fact, we seem to hear murmurs. What has all this about the genesis and nature of good reporters to do with the publication of new books? Why, this: The only person who can deal adequately and amply with 99 new books out of a hundred — the 99 that require to be taken as they are — is the good re- porter. He's the boy who can read the new book as he would look and listen at a political conven- tion, or hop around at a fire— getting the facts, get- ting them straight (yes, indeed, they do get them straight) and setting them down, swiftly and se- Book "Reviewing" 65 lectively, to reproduce in the mind of the pubHc the precise effect of the book itself. The effect — not the means by which it was achieved, not the desirabihty of it having been achieved, not the artistic quality of it, not the moral worth of it, not anything in the way of a corollary or lesson or a deduction, however obvious — just the effect. That's reporting. That's getting and giving the news. And that's what the public wants. Some people seem to think there is something shameful in giving the public what it wants. They would, one supposes, highly commend the grocer who gave his customer something "just as good" or (according to the grocer) "decidedly better." But substitution, open or concealed, is an immoral practice. Nothing can justify it, no nobihty of intention can take it out of the class of deception and cheating. But, they cry, the public does not want what is sufficiently good, let alone what is best for it; that is why it is wrong to give the public what it wants. So they shift their ground and think to escape on a high moral plateau or table land. But the table land is a tip-table land. What they mean is that they are confidently setting their judgment of what the public ought to want against the public's plain decision what it does want. They are a few dozens against many millions, yet in their few dozen intel- ligences is collected more wisdom than has been 66 Why Authors Go Wrong the age-long and cumulative inheritance of all the other sons of earth. They really believe that. . . . Pitiable ... lO A new book is news. This might almost be set down as axiomatic and not as a proposition needing formal demonstration by the Euclidean process. Yet it is susceptible of such demonstration and we shall demonstrate accordingly. In the strict sense, anything that happens is news. Everybody remembers the old distinction, that if a dog bites a man it is very likely not news, but that if a man bites a dog it is news beyond all cavil. Such a generalization is useful and fairly harm- less (like the generalization we ourselves have just indulged in and are about proving) if — a big if — ' the broad exception be noted. If a dog bites John D. Rockefeller, Jr., it is not only news but rather more important, or certainly more interesting, news than if John Jones of Howlersville bites a dog. For the chances are that John Jones of Howlers- ville is a poor demented creature, after all. Now the dog that bites Mr, Rockefeller is very likely a poor, demented creature, too; but the distinction lies in this : the dog bitten by John Jones is almost certainly not as well-known or as interesting or as important in the lives of a number of people as Book "Reviewing" 67 Mr. Rockefeller. Pair off the cur that puts his teeth in the Rockefeller ankle, if you like, with the wretch who puts his teeth in an innocent canine bystander (it's the innocent bystander who always gets hurt) ; do this and you still have to match up the hound of Howlersville with Mr. Rockefeller. And the scale of news values tips heavily away from Howlersville and in the direction of 26 Broadway. So it is plain that not all that happens is news compared with some that happens. The law of specific interest, an intellectual counterpart of the law of specific gravity in the physical world, rules in the world of events. Any one handling news who disregards this law does so at his extreme peril, just as any one building a ship heavier than the water it displaces may reasonably expect to see his fine craft sink without a trace. Since a new book is a thing happening it is news, subject to the broad correction we have been dis- cussing above, namely, that in comparison with other new books it may not be news at all, its spe- cific interest may be so slight as to be negligible entirely. But if a particular new book is news, if its spe- cific interest is moderately great, then obviously, we think, the person best fitted to deal with it is a person trained to deal with news, namely, a re- porter. Naturally we all prefer a good reporter. 68 Why Authors Go Wrong II The question will at once be raised : How is the specific interest of a new book to be determined? We answer : Just as the specific interest of any kind of potential news or actual news is determined — in competition with the other news of the day and hour. What is news one day isn't news another. This is a phenomenon of which the regular reader of every daily paper is more or less consciously aware. There are some days when "there's no news in the paper." There are other days when the news in the paper is so big and so important that all the lesser occurrences which ordinarily get themselves chronicled are crowded out. Granting a white paper supply which does not at present ex- ist, it would, of course, be possible on the "big days" to record all these lesser doings; and con- sistently, day in and day out, to print nicely pro- portioned accoimts of every event attaining to a certain fixed level of specific interest. But the reader who may think he would like this would speedily find out that he didn't. Some days he would have a twelve page newspaper and other days (not Sundays, either) he would have one of thirty-six pages. He would be lost, or rather, his attention would be lost in the jungle of events that all happened within twenty-four hours, with the profuse luxuriance of tropical vegetation shooting Bcx>k "Reviewing" 69 up skyward by inches and feet overnight. His natural appetite for a knowledge of what his fel- lows were doing would be alternately starved and overfed; malnutrition would lead to chronic and incurable dyspepsia; soon he would become a hate- ful misanthrope, shunning his fellow men and hav- ing a seizure every time Mr. Hearst brought out the eighth edition (which is the earliest and first) of the New York Evening Journal. It is really dreadful to think what havoc a literal adhesion to the motto of the New York Times — "All the news that's fit to print" — would work in New York City. No mortal has more than a certain amount of time daily and a certain amount of attention (ac- cording to his mental habit and personal interest) to bestow on the perusal of a newspaper, or news, or the printed page of whatever kind. On Sunday he has much more, it is likely, but still there is a limit and a perfectly finite bound. Consequently the whole problem for the persons engaged in gathering and preparing news for presentation to readers sums up in this: "How many of the day's doings attaining or exceeding a certain level of public interest and importance, shall we set before our clients?" Easily answered, in most cases; and the size of the paper is the index of the answer. Question Two : "What of the day's doings shall be served up in the determined space?" For this question there is never an absolute or 70 Why Authors Go Wrong ready answer, and there never can be. On some of the affairs to be reported all journalists would agree; but they would differ in their estimates of the relative worth of even these and the lengths at which they should be treated; about lesser occur- rences there would be no fixed percentage of agree- ment. 12 Now the application of all this to the business of giving the news of books should be fairly clear. A new book is news — and so, sometimes, is an old one, rediscovered. Since a new book is news it should be dealt with by a news reporter. Not all that happens is news; not all the new books pub- lished are news; new books, like new events of all sorts, are news when they compete successfully with a majority of tlieir kind. There is no more sense in reporting — that is, de- scribing individually at greater or less length — all the new books than there w^ould be in reporting every incident on the police blotters of a lively American city. Recording new books is another matter; somewhere, somehow, most occurrences in this world get recorded in written words that reach nearly all who are interested in the happenings (as in letters) or are accessible to the interested few (as the police records). The difference between the reporter and the recorder is not entirely a difference Book "Reviewing" 71 of details given. The recorder usually follows a pre- scribed formula and makes his record conform thereto ; the good reporter never has a formula and never can have one. Let us see how this works out with the news of books. The recorder of new books generally compiles a list of Books Received or Books Just Published and he does it in this uninspired and conscientious man- ner: IN THE HEART OF A FOOL. By William Allen White. A story of Kansas in the last half-century, centered in a single town, show- ing its evolution from prairie to an industrial city with difficult economic and labor prob- lems; the story told in the lives of a group of people, pioneers and the sons of pioneers — their work, ambitions, personal affairs, &c. New York: The Macmillan Company. $1.60. That would be under the heading Fiction. An en- ti-y under the heading Literary Studies or Essays might read : OUR POETS OF TO-DAY. By Howard Willard Cook. Volume H. in a series of books on modern American writers. Sketches of sixty- eight American poets, nearly all living, in- y2 Why Authors Go Wrong eluding Edgar Lee Masters, Amy Lowell, Witter Bynner, Robert Service, Edgar Guest, Charles Divine, Carl Sandburg, Joyce Kilmer, Sara Teasdale, George Edward Woodberry, Percy Mackaye, Harriet W. Monroe, &c. New York : Moffat, Yard & Co. $i.6o. These we hasten to say would be imusually full and satisfactory records, but they would be records just the same — formal and precise statements of events, like the chronological facts affixed to dates in an almanac. If all records were like these there would be less objection to them; but it is an astonishing truth that most records are badly kept. Why, one may never fathom; since the very for- mality and precision make a good record easy. Yet almost any of the principal pages or magazines in the United States devoted to the news of new books is likely to make a record on this order: IN THE HEART OF A FOOL. By WilHam Allen White. Novel of contemporary Amer- ican life. New York, &c. Such a record is, of course, worse than inade- quate ; it is actually misleading. Mr. White's book happens to cover a period of fifty years. "Con- temporary American life" would characterize quite as well, or quite as badly, a story of New York and Tuxedo by Robert W. Chambers. Book "Reviewing" j-X) 14 The reporter works in entirely another manner. He is concerned to present the facts about a new book in a way sufficiently arresting and entertain- ing to engage the reader. As Mr. Holliday says with fine perception, the true function of the de- scriber of new books is simply to bring a particu- lar volume to the attention of its proper public. To do that it is absolutely necessary to "give the book," at least to the extent of enabling the reader of the article to determine, with reasonable accu- racy (i) whether the book is for him, that is, ad- dressed to a public of which he is one, and (2) whether he wants to read it or not. Whether the book is good or bad is not the point. A man interested in sociology may conceivably want to read a book on sociology even though it is an exceedingly bad book on that subject and even though he knows its worthlessness. He may want to profit by the author's mistakes; he may want to write a book to correct them; or he may merely want to be amused at the spectacle of a fellow soci- ologist making a fool of himself, a spectacle by no means rare but hardly ever without a capacity for giving joy to the mildly malicious. The determination of the goodness or badness of a book is not and should not be a deliberate purpose of the good book reporter. Why? Well, 74 Why Authors Go Wrong in many cases it is a task of supererogation. Take a reporter who goes to cover a pubhc meeting at which speeches are made. He does not find it necessary to say that Mr. So-and-So's speech was good. He records what Mr. So-and-So says, or a fair sample of it; which is enough. The reader can see for himself how good or bad it was and reach a conclusion based on the facts as tempered by his personal beliefs, tastes and ideas. In the same way, it is superfluous for the book reporter to say that Miss Such-and-Such's book on New York is rotten. All he need do is to set down the incredible fact that Miss Such-and-Such locates the Wool worth building at Broadway, Fifth Avenue and Twenty-third street, and refers to the Aquarium as the fisheries section of the Bronx Zoo. If this should not appear a sufficient notice of the horrible nature of the volume the reporter may very properly give the truth about the Woolworth building and the Aquarium for the benefit of people who have never visited New York and might be unable to detect Miss Such-and-Such's idiosyncrasies. The rule holds in less tangible matters. Why should the book reporter ask his reader to accept his dictum that the literary style of a writer is atrocious when he can easily prove it by a few sen- tences or a paragraph from the book? Book "Reviewing" 75 Yet books are still in the main "reviewed," in- stead of being given into the hands of trained news reporters. Anything worse than the average book "review" it would certainly be difficult to find in the length and breadth of America. And England, despite the possession of some brilliant talents, is nearly as badly off. No one who is not qualified as a critic should attempt to criticise new books. There are but few critics in any generation — half a dozen or perhaps a dozen men in any single one of the larger countries are all who could qual- ify at a given time; that much seems evident. What is a critic ? A critic is a person with an edu- cation unusually wide either in life or in letters, and preferably in both. He is a person with huge backgrounds. He has read thousands of books and has by one means or another abstracted the essence of thousands more. He has perhaps travelled a good deal, though this is not essential; but he has certainly lived with a most peculiar and exceptional intensity, descending to greater emo- tional and intellectual depths than the majority of mankind and scaling higher summits; he has, in some degree, the faculty of living other people's lives and sharing their human experiences which is the faculty that, in a transcendant degree, belongs 76 Why Authors Go Wrong to the novelist and storyteller. A critic knows the past and the present so well that he is able to erect standards, or uncover old standards, by which he can and does measure the worth of everything that comes before him. He can actually show you, in exact and inescapable detail, how De Morgan com- pares with Dickens and how Gilbert K. Chesterton ranks with Swift and whether Thackeray learned more from Fielding or from Daniel Defoe and he can trace the relation between a period in the life of Joseph Conrad and certain scenes and settings in The Arrow of Gold. Such a man is a critic. Of course critics make mistakes but they are not mistakes of ignorance, of personal unfitness for the task, of pretension to a knowledge they haven't. They are mistakes of judgment; such mistakes as very eminent jurists sometimes make after years on the bench. The jurist is reversed by the higher court and the critic is reversed by the appellate decree of the future. The mistakes of a real critic, like the mistakes of a real jurist, are always made on defensible, and sometimes very sound, grounds; they are reasoned and seasoned conclusions even if they are not the correct conclusions. The mistakes of the 9,763 per- sons who assume the critical ermine without any fitness to wear it are quite another matter; and they are just the mistakes that would be made by a layman sitting in the jurist's seat. The Book "Reviewing" y'j jurist knows the precedents, the rules of evidence, the law; he is tolerant and admits exceptions into the record. So the critic; with the difference that the true critic merely presides and leaves the ver- dict to that great jury of true and right instincts which we call "the public." The genuine critic is concerned chiefly to see that the case gets before the jury cleanly. Without presuming to tell the jury what its verdict must be — except in extraordinary circumstances — he does instruct it what the verdict should be on, what should be considered in arriv- ing at it, what principles should guide the decision. But the near-critic (God save the mark!) has it in his mind that he must play judge and jury too. He doesn't like the writer's style, or thinks the plot is poor, or this bad or that defective. Instead of carefully outlining the evidence on which the pub- lic might reach a correct verdict on these points he delivers a dictum. It doesn't go, of course, at least for long; and it never will. Let us be as specific as is possible in this, as spe- cific, that is, as a general discussion can be and remain widely applicable. I don't like the writer's style. I am not a per- son of critical equipment or pretensions. I am, we will say, a book reporter. I do not declare, with a fiat and a flourish, that the style is bad ; I merely present a chunk of it. There is the evidence, and nothing else is so competent, so relevant or so ma- 78 Why Authors Go Wrong terlal, as the lawyers would say. I may, in the necessity to be brief and the absence of space for an excerpt, say that the style is adjectival, or ad- verbial, or diffuse, or involved or florid or some- thing of that sort, if I know it to be. These would be statements of fact. "Bad" is a statement of opinion. I may call the plot "weak" if it is weak (a fact) and if I know weakness in a plot (which qualifies me to announce the fact). But if I call the plot "poor" I am taking a good deal upon myself. Its poorness is a matter of opinion. Some stories are spoiled by a strong plot which dominates the reader's interest almost to the exclusion of other things — fine characterization, atmosphere, and so on. And even restrictions of space can hardly excuse the lack of courtesy, or worse, shown by the near- critic who calls the plot weak or the style diffuse or involved, however much these may be facts, and who does not at least briefly explain in what way the style is diffuse (or involved) and wherein the weakness of the plot resides. But to put a finger on the how or the where or the why requires a knowledge and an insight that the near-critic does not possess and will not take the trouble to acquire; so we are asking him to do the impossible. Never- theless we can ask him to do the possible; and that is to leave off talking or writing on matters he knows nothing about. Book "Reviewing" 79 16 The task of training good book reporters is not a thing to be easily and lightly undertaken. And the first essential in the making of such a reporter is the inculcation of a considerable humility of mind. A near-critic can afford to think he knows it all, but a book reporter cannot. Besides a sense of his own limitations the book reporter must pos- sess and develop afresh from time to time a mental attitude which may best be summed up in this dis- tinction : When a piece of writing seems to him defective he must stop short and ask himself, "Is this defect a fact or is it my personal feeling?" If it is a fact he must establish it to his own, and then to the reader's, satisfaction. If it is his per- sonal impression or feeling, merely, as he may con- clude on maturer reflection, he owes it to those who will read his article either not to record it or to record it as a personal thing. There is no sense in saying only the good things that can be said about a book that has bad things in it. Such a course is dishonest. It is equally dishonest, and infinitely more common, to pass off private opin- ions as statements of fact. When in doubt, the doubt should be resolved in favor of the author. A good working test of fact versus personal opinion is this : If you, as a reporter, cannot put your finger on the apparent 8o Why Authors Go Wrong flaw, cannot give the how or where or why of the thing that seems wrong, it must be treated as your personal feehng. A fact that you cannot buttress might as well not be a fact at all — unless, of course, it is self-evident, in which case you have only to state it or exhibit your evidence to command a uni- versal assent. All that we have been saying respecting the fact or fancy of a flaw in a piece of writing applies with equal force, naturally, to the favorable as well as the unfavorable conclusion you, as a book reporter, may reach. Because a story strikes you as won- derful it does not follow that it is wonderful. You are under a moral obligation, at least, to establish the wonder of it. The procedure for the book re- porter who has to describe favorably and for the book reporter who has to report unfavorably is the same. First comes the question of fact, then the citation, if possible, of evidence; and if that be impossible the brief indication of the how, the where, the why of the merit reported. If the meri- toriousness remains a matter of personal impres- sion it ought so to be characterized but may warrant- ably be recorded where an adverse impression would go unmentioned. The presumption is in favor of the author. It should be kept so. Book "Reviewing" 8i 17 In all this there is nothing impossible, nothing millennial. But what has been outlined of the work of the true book reporter is as far as possible from what we very generally get to-day. We get unthinking praise and unthinking condemnation; we do not expect analysis but we have a right to expect straightaway exposition and a condensed transliteration of the book being dealt with. "Praise," we have just said, and "condemna- tion." That is what it is, and there is no room in the book reporter's task either for praise or con- demnation. He is not there to praise the book any more than a man is at a political convention to praise a nominating speech; he is there to de- scribe the book, to describe the speech, to report either. A newspaperman who should begin his ac- count of a meeting in this fashion, "In a lamentably poor speech, showing evidences of hasty prepara- tion, Elihu Root," &c., would be fired — and ought to be. No matter if a majority of those who heard Mr. Root thought the same way about it. 18 The book reporter will be governed in his work by the precise news value in the book he is dealing 82 Why Authors Go Wrong with at the moment he is dealing with it. This needs illustration. On November ii, 1918, an armistice was con- cluded in Europe, terminating a war that had lasted over four years. In that four years books relat- ing to the war then being waged had sold heavily, even at times outselling fiction. Had the war drawn to a gradual end the sales of these war books would probably have lessened, little by little, until they reached and maintained a fairly steady level. From this they would doubtless have declined, as the end drew near, lower and lower, until the fore- seen end came, when the interest in them would have been as great, but not much greater, than the normal interest in works of a historical or biograph- ical sort. But the end came overnight; and suddenly the whole face of the world was transformed. The re- action in the normal person was intense. In an instant war books of several pronounced types be- came intolerable reading. How I Reacted to the War by Quintus Quintuple seemed tremendously unimportant. Even Mr. Britling was, momentar- ily, utterly stale and out of date. Reminiscences of the German ex-Kaiser were neither interesting nor important; he was a fugitive in Holland. The book reporter who had any sense of news values grasped this immediately. Books that a month earlier would have been worth 1,000 to Book "Reviewing" 83 1,500 word articles were worth a few lines or no space at all. On the other hand books which had a historical value and a place as interesting public records, such as Ambassador Morgenthau's Story, were not diminished either in interest or in impor- tance. Some books which had been inconsequential were correspondingly exalted by the unprecedented turn of affairs. These were books on such subjects as the re-education of disabled fighters, the principles which might underlie the formation of a league of nations, problems of reconstruction of every sort. They had been worth, some of them, very small articles a week earlier; now they were worth a column or two apiece. No doubt we ought to conclude this possibly tedi- ous essay with some observations on the one per cent, of books which call for swift surgery. But such an enterprise is, if not impossible, extraor- dinarily difficult for the reason that the same opera- tion is never called for twice. In a sense it is like cutting diamonds, or splitting a large stone into smaller stones. The problem varies each time. The cutter respects certain prin- ciples and follows a careful technique. That is all. We shall, for the sake of the curious, take an 84 Why Authors Go Wrong actual instance. In 191 8 there was pubhshed a novel called Foes by Mary Johnston, an American novelist of an endowment so decided as fairly to entitle her to the designation "a genius." Miss Johnston's first novel had appeared twenty years earlier. Her first four books — nay, her first two, the second being To Have and to Hold — placed her firmly in the front rank of living roman- tic writers. The thing that distinguished her romanticism was its sense of drama in human af- fairs and human destiny. Added to this was a command of live, nervous, highly poetic prose. History — romance; it did not matter. She could set either movingly before you. Her work showed steady progress, reaching a sustained culmination in her two Civil War novels. The Long Roll and Cease Firing. She experi- mented a little, as in her poetic drama of the French Revolution, The Goddess of Reason, and in The Fortunes of Garin, a tapestry of mediaeval France. The Wanderers was a more decided ven- ture, but a perfectly successful. Then came Foes. Considered purely as a romantic narrative, as a story of friendship transformed into hatred and the pursuit of a private feud under the guise of wreak- ing Divine vengeance, Foes is a superb tale. Con- sidered as a novel. Foes is a terrible failure. Why? Is it not sufficient to write a superb tale? Yes, if you have essayed nothing more. Is a novel Book "Reviewing" 85 anything more than "a. good story, well told"? Yes, if the writer essays to make more of it. The novelist who has aimed at nothing beyond the ''good story, well told" has a just grievance against any one who asks anything further. But against the novelist who has endeavored to make his story, however good, however well told, the vehicle for a human philosophy or a metaphysical speculation, the reader has a just grievance — if the endeavor has been unsuccessful or if the philosophy is unsound. Now as to the soundness or unsoundness of a particular philosophy every reader must pronounce for himself. The metaphysical idea which was the basis of Miss Johnston's novel was this: All gods are one. All deities are one. Christ, Buddha; it matters not. "There swam upon him another great perspective. He saw Christ in light, Buddha in light. The glorified — the unified. Union/' Up- on this idea Miss Johnston reconciles her two foes. This perfectly comprehensible mystical concep- tion is the rock on which the whole story is founded — and the rock on which it goes to pieces. It will be seen at once that the conception is one which no Christian can entertain and remain a Christian — nor any Buddhist, and remain a Buddhist, either. To the vast majority of mankind, therefore, the philosophy of Foes was unsound and the novel was 86 Why Authors Go Wrong worthless except for the superficial incidents and the lovely prose in which they were recounted. It might be thought that for those who accepted the mystical concept Miss Johnson imposed, Foes would have been a novel of the first rank. No, indeed; and for this reason: Her piece of mysticism was supposed to be ar- rived at and embraced by a dour Scotchman of about the year of Our Lord 1750. It was supposed to transform the whole nature of that man so as to lead him to give over a life-long enmity in which he had looked upon himself as a Divine instrument to punish an evil-doer. Now however reasonable or sound or inspiring and inspiriting the mystical idea may have seemed to any reader, he could not but be fatally aware that, as presented, the thing was a flat impossibility. Scotchmen of the year 1750 were Christians above all else. They were, if you like, savage Christians; some of them were irreligious, some of them were God-defying, none of them were Deists in the all-in- clusive sense that Miss Johnston prescribes. The idea that Christ and Buddha might possibly be nothing but different manifestations of the Deity is an idea which could never have occurred to the eighteenth century Scotch mind — and never did. Least of all could it have occurred to such a man as Miss Johnston delineates in Alexander Jardine. The thing is therefore utterly anachronistic. It Book "Reviewing" 87 is a historical anachronism, if you Hke, the history here being the history of the human spirit in its religious aspects. Every reader of the book, no matter how willing he may have been to accept the novelist's underlying idea, was aware that the en- deavor to convey it had utterly failed, was aware that Miss Johnston had simply projected her idea, her favorite bit of mysticism, into the mind of one of her characters, a Scotchman living a century and a half earlier! But the thoughts that one may think in the twentieth century while tramping the Virginia hills are not thoughts that could have dawned in the mind of a Scottish laird in the eigh- teenth century, not even though he lay in the flower- ing grass of the Roman Campagna. . . . And so there, in Foes, we have the book in a hundred which called for something more than the intelligent and accurate work of the book re- porter. Here was a case of a good novelist, and a very, very good one, gone utterly wrong. It was not sufficient to convey to the prospective reader a just idea of the story and of the qualities of it. It was necessary to cut and slash, as cleanly and as swiftly and as economically as possible — and as dispassionately — to the root of the trouble. For if Miss Johnston were to repeat this sort of per- formance her reputation would suffer, not to speak of her royalties; readers would be enraged or mis- led; young writers playing the sedulous ape would 88 Why Authors Go Wrong inflict dreadful things upon us; tastes and tempers would be spoiled; publishers would lose money; — and, much the worst of all, the world would be de- prived of the splendid work Mary Johnston could do while she was doing the exceedingly bad work she did do. Perhaps the most disturbing thing about the blunder in Foes was the fact that there was no necessity for it. The Christian religion, which was the religion of Alexander Jardine, provides for reconciliation, indeed, it exacts it. There was the way for Miss Johnston to bring her foes together. Of course, it would not have been intellectually so exciting. But there is such a thing as emotional appeal, and it is not always base; there are emo- tions in the human so high and so lofty that it is wiser not to try to transcend them. . . . The appearance of part of the foregoing in Books and the Book World of The Sun, New York, brought a letter from Kansas which should find a place in this volume. The letter, with the attempted answer, may as well be given here. The writer is head of the English department in a State col- lege. He wrote: 20 "I hope that the mails lost for your college pro- fessors of English subscribers their copies of Books Book "Reviewing" 89 and the Book World [containing the foregoing ob- servations on Book Reporting]. . . . College pro- fessors do not like to be disturbed — and most of us cannot be, for that matter. The TNT in those pages was not meant for us, perhaps, but it should have been. "When I read Book Reporting I dictated three pages of protest, but did not send it on — thanks to my better judgment, . . . Then I decided, since you had added so much to my perturbation, to ask you to help me. "We need it out here — literary help only, of course. This is the only State college on what was once known as the 'Great Plains.' W. F. Cody won his sobriquet on Government land which is now our campus. Our students are the sons and daugh- ters of pioneers who won over grasshoppers, droughts, hot winds and one crop farms. They are so near to real life that the teaching of litera- ture must be as real as the literature — rather, it ought to be. That's where I want you to help me. "I am not teaching literature here now as I was taught geology back in Missouri. That's as near as I shall tell you how I teach — it is bad enough and you might not help me if I did. (Perhaps, in fairness to you, I should say that for several years never less than one-third of those to whom we gave degrees have majored in English, and al- 90 Why Authors Go Wrong ways as many as the next two departments com- bined.) "Here's what I am tired of and want to get away from: "i. Testing students on reading a book by ask- ing fact questions about what is in the book — memory work, you see. "2. Demanding of students a scholarship in the study of literature that is so academic that it is Prussian. "3. Demanding that students serve time in lit- erature classes as a means of measuring their ad- vance in the study of literature. "Here's what I want you to help me with in some definite concrete way: (Sounds like a college pro- fessor making an assignment — beg pardon.) "i. Could you suggest a scheme of 'book re- porting' for college students in literature classes? (An old book to a new person Is news, isn't it?) "2. Give me a list of books published during the last ten years that should be included in college English laboratory classes in literature. I want your list. I have my own, but fear it is too aca- demic. "3. What are some of the things which should enter into the training of teachers of high school English? Part of our work, especially in the simi- mer, is to give such training to men and women Book "Reviewing" 91 who will teach composition and literature in Kan- sas high schools. "Your help will not only be appreciated, but it will be used." 21 To answer adequately these requests would take about six months' work and the answers would make a slender book. And then they would exhibit the defects inseparable from a one man response. None of which excuses a failure to attempt to an- swer, though it must extenuate failures in the at- tempt. We shall try to answer, in this place, though necessarily without completeness. If nothing bet- ter than a few suggestions is the result, why — sug- gestions may be all that is really needed. And first respecting the things our friend is tired of and wants to get away from : I. Fact questions about what is in the book — memory work — are not much use if they stop with the outline of the story. What is not in the book may be more important than what is. Why did the author select this scene for narration and omit that other, intrinsically (it seems) the more dramatically interesting of the two? See The Flirt, by Booth Tarkington, where a double murder gets only a few lines and a small boy's doings occupy whole chapters. p2 Why Authors Go Wrong 2. Scholarship is less important than wide read- ing, though the two aren't mutually exclusive. A wide acquaintance doesn't preclude a few profound- ly intimate friendships. Textual study has spoiled Chaucer, Shakespeare and Milton for most of us. Fifty years hence Kipling and Masefield will be spoiled in the same way. 3. Time serving over literature is a waste of time. There are only three ways to teach litera- ture. The first is by directing students to books for voluntary reading — hundreds of books, thousands. The second is by class lectures — entertaining, idea'd, anecdoted, catholic in range and expository in char- acter. The third is by conversation — argumenta- tive at times, analytic at moments, but mostly by way of exchanging information and opinions. Study books as you study people. Mix among them. You don't take notes on people imless, per- chance, in a diary. Keep a diary on books you read, if you like, but don't "take notes." Look for those qualities in books that you look for in people and make your acquaintances by the same (per- haps unformulated) rules. To read snobbishly is as bad as to practise snobbery among your fellows. 22 We go on to the first of our friend's requests for help. It is a scheme for "book reporting" for Book "Reviewing" 93 college students in literature classes and he premises that an old book to a new reader is news. Of course it is. Let the student take up a book that's new to him and read it by himself, afterward writing a re- port of it to be read to the class. When he comes to write his report he must keep in the forefront of his mind this one thing: To tell the others accurately enough about that book so that each one of them will know whether or not he wants to read it. That is all the book reporter ever tries for. No book is intended for everybody, but almost every book is intended for somebody. The prob- lem of the book reporter is to find the reader. Comparison may help. For instance, those who enjoy Milton's pastoral poetry will probably enjoy the long poem in Robert Nichols's Ardours and Endurances. Those who like Thackeray will like Mary S. Watts. Those who like Anna Katharine Green will thank you for sending them to The Moonstone, by one Wilkie Collins. Most stories depend upon suspense in the action for their main effect. You must not "give away" the story so as to spoil it for the reader. In a mys- tery story you may state the mystery and appraise the solution or even characterize it — ^but you mustn't reveal it. Tell 'em that Mr. Hergesheimer's Java Head is 94 Why Authors Go Wrong an atmospheric marvel, but will disappoint many readers who put action first. Tell 'em that Will- iam Allen White writes (often) banally, but so saturates his novel with his own bigheartedness that he makes you laugh and cry. Tell 'em the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth as well as you can make it out — and for heaven's sake ask yourself with every assertion: *Ts this a fact or is it my personal opinion?" And a fact, for your purpose, will be an opinion in which a large majority of readers will concur. 23 "Give me a list of books published during the last ten years that should be included in college English laboratory classes in literature. I want your list. I have my own, but fear it is too aca- demic." The following list is an offhand attempt to com- ply with this request. It is offered merely for the suggestions it may contain. If the ten year restric- tion is rigid we ask pardon for such titles as may be a little older than that. Strike them out. For Kansans: Willa Sibert Gather's novels, O Pioneers! and My Antonia, chronicling people and epochs of Kansas-Nebraska. William Allen White's A Certain Rich Man and In the Heart of Book "Reviewing" 95 a Fool, less for their Kansas-ness than for their Americanism and humanity. For Middle Westerners: Meredith Nicholson's The Valley of Democracy. Zona Gale's Birth. Carl Sandburg's Chicago Poems. Edgar Lee Masters's Spoon River Anthology. Vachel Lindsay's longer poems. Mary S. Watts's Nathan Burke and Van Cleve: His Friends and His Family. Lord Cham- wood's life of Lincoln. William Dean Howells's The Leatherwood God. Booth Tarkington's The Conquest of Canaan (first published about fourteen years ago) and The Magnificent Ambersons. Gene Stratton-Porter's A Daughter of the Land, her Freckles and her A Girl of the Limherlost. One or two books by Harold Bell Wright. The Passing of the Frontier, by Emerson Hough, and other books in the Chronicles of America series published by the Yale University Press. For Americans : Mary S. Watts's The Rise of Jennie Gushing. Owen Wister's The Virginian (if not barred under the ten year rule). Booth Tar- kington's The Flirt. Novels with American settings by Gertrude Atherton and Stewart Edward White. Mary Johnston's The Long Roll and Cease Firing. Willa Sibert Gather's The Song of the Lark. Edith Wharton's Ethan Frome. Alice Brown's The Pris- oner. Ellen Glasgow's The Deliverance. Corra Harris's A Circuit-Rider's Wife. All of O. Henry. Margaret Deland's The Iron Woman. Earlier 96 Why Authors Go Wrong novels by Winston Churchill, Ernest Poole's The Harbor. Joseph Hergesheimer's The Three Block Pennys, his Gold and Iron and his Java Head. His- torical books by Theodore Roosevelt. American biographies too numerous to mention. From Isola- tion to Leadership: A Review of American Foreign Policy by Latane (published by the educational de- partment of Doubleday, Page & Company). Es- says, such as those of Agnes Repplier. Each of these enumerations presupposes the books already named, or most of them. Don't treat them as pieces of literary workmanship. Many of them aren't. Those that have fine literary work- manship have something else, too — and it's the other thing, or things, that count. Fine art in a book is like good breeding in a person, a passport, not a Magna Charta. "Manners makyth man"-^ yah! 24 We are also asked : "What are some of the things which should en- ter into the training of teachers of high school En- glish?" We reply : A regard for literature, not as it reflects life, but as it moulds lives. A profound respect for an au- thor who can find 100,000 readers, a respect at least equal to that entertained for an author who can Book "Reviewing" 97 write superlatively well. For instance : Get it out of your head that you can afford to condescend toward a best seller, or to worship such a writer as Stevenson for his sheer craftsmanship. An instinct for what will nourish the ordinary man or woman as keen as your perception of what will be relished by the fastidious reader. Don't insist that people must live on what you, or any one else, declare to be good for them. It is not for nothing that they "don't know anything about lit- erature, but know what they like." A confidence in the greater wisdom of the great- est number. Tarkington got it right. The public wants the best it is capable of understanding; its understanding may not be the highest understand- ing, but "the writer who stoops to conquer doesn't conquer." Neither does the writer who never con- cedes anything. The public's standard can't al- ways be wrong; the private standards can't always be right. Arnold Bennett says, quite rightly, that the classics are made and kept alive by "the passionate few." But the business of high school teachers of English is not with the passionate few — who will look after themselves — ^but with the unimpassioned many. You can lead the student to Mr. Pope's Pierian spring, but you cannot make him drink. Unless you can show him, in the Missourian sense, it's all off. If you can't tell what it is a girl likes 98 Why Authors Go Wrong in Grace S. Richmond how are you going to show her what she'll like in Dickens? Unless you know what it is that "they" get out of these books they do read you won't be able to bait the hook with the things you want them to read. Don't you think you've got a lot to learn yourself? And mightn't you do worse than sit down yourself and read at- tentively, at whatever personal cost, some of the best sellers? It all goes back to the size of the teacher's share of our common humanity. A person who can't read a detective story for the sake of the thrills has no business teaching high school English. A person who is a literary snob is unfit to teach high school English. A person who can't sense (better yet, share) the common feeling about a popular writer and comprehend the basis of it and sympa- thize a little with it and express it more or less ar- ticulately in everyday speech is not qualified to teach high school English. A word about writing "compositions" in high school English classes. Make 'em write stories in- stead. If they want to tackle thumbnail sketches or abstracter writing — little essays — why, let 'em. Abstractions in thought and writing are like the ocean — it's fatally easy to get beyond your depth, Book "Reviewing" 99 and every one else's. Read what Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch says about this in his Studies in Lit- erature. Once in a while a theologian urges us to "get back to the Bible." Well, there is one sense, at least, in which the world would do well to get back to the Bible, or to the Old Testament, at any rate. As Gardiner points out in his The Bible as English Literature, it was the fortune or misfortune of ancient Hebrew that it had no abstractions. Everything was stated in terms of the five senses. There was no such word as "virtue"; you said "sweet smellingness" or "pleasant tastingness" or something like that. And everybody knew what you meant. Whereas "virtue" means anything from personal chastity to a general meritoriousness that nobody can define. The Greeks introduced ab- stract thinking and expression and some Germans blighted the world by their abuse. What should enter into the training of high school teachers of English? Only humbleness, sanity, catholicity of viewpoint, humor, a continual willingness to learn, a continuous faith in the peo- ple — and undying enthusiasm. Only these — and the love of books. LITERARY EDITORS BY ONE OF THEM V LITERARY EDITORS, BY ONE OF THEM THE very term "literary editor" is a survival. It is meaningless, but we continue to use it because no better designation has been found, just as people in monarchical countries continue to speak of "King George" or "Queen Victoria of Spain." Besides, there is politeness to consider. No one wants to be the first to allude publicly and truth- fully to "Figurehead George" or "Social Leader Victoria." Literary editors who are literary are not editors, and literary editors who are editors are no longer literary. Of old there were scholarly, sarcastic men (delightful fellows, personally) who sat in cubbyholes and read unremittingly. Afterward, at night, they set down a few thoughtful, biting words about what they had read. These were printed. Publishers who perused them felt as if knives had been stuck in their backs. Booksellers who read them looked up to ask each other pathetically : "But what does it mean?" Book readers who read them resolved that the publication of a new book should 103 I04 Why Authors Go Wrong be, for them, the signal to read an old one. It was good for the secondhand trade. We've changed all that, or, if we haven't, we're going to. Take a chap who runs what is called a "book section." This is a separate section or supplement forming part of a daily or Sunday newspaper. Its pages are magazine size — half the size of newspaper pages. They number from eight to twenty-eight, depending on the season and the advertising. The essential thing to realize about such a section is that it requires an editor to run it It does not require a literary man, or woman, at all. The editor of such a section need have no special education in the arts or letters. He must have judgment, of course, and if he has not some taste for literary matters he may not enjoy his work as he will if he has that taste. But high- browism is fatal. Can our editor "review" a book? Perhaps not. It is no matter. Maybe he knows a good review when he sees it, which will matter a good deal. Maybe he can get capable people to deal with the books for him. Which will matter more than any- thing else on earth in the handling of his book section. A section will most certainly require, to run it, a man who can tell a good review (another word- survival) and who can get good reviewers. It Literary Editors 105 will require a man, or woman, with a sharp, clear and very broad viewpoint. Such exist What do we mean — viewpoint? The right conception, it seems to us, starts with the proposition that a new book is news (sometimes an old one is news too) and should be dealt with as such. Perhaps we are dealing only with a state of mind, in all this, but states of mind are impor- tant. They are the only states where self-deter- mination is a sure thing. To get on : Your literary editor is like unto a city editor, an individual whose desk is usually not so far away but that you can study him in his habitat. The city editor tries to distinguish the big news from the little news. The literary editor will wisely do the same. What is big news in the world of books? Well, a book that appears destined to be read as widely fifty years hence as it is to-day on publica- tion is big news. And a book that will be read immediately by 100,000 people is bigger news. People who talk about news often overlook the ephemeral side of it. Much of the newsiness and importance of news resides in its transiency. What is news to-day isn't news to-morrow. But to-day 100,000 people, more or less, will want to know about it. Illustration : Two events happen on the same day. One of them will be noted carefully in histories written fifty years hence, but it affects, and inter- io6 Why Authors Go Wrong ests, at the hour of its occurrence very few persons. Of course it is news, but there may easily, at that hour, be much bigger. For another event occur- ring on that same day, though of a character which will make it forgotten fifty years later, at once and directly affects the lives of the hundred thousand. Parallel : Two books are published on the same day. One of them will be dissected fifty years later by the H. W. Boyntons and Wilson Folletts of that time. But the number of persons who will read it within the twelvemonth of its birth is small — in the hundreds. The other book will be out of print and unremembered in five years. But within six months of its publication hundreds of thou- sands will read it. Among those hundreds of thousands there will be hundreds, and maybe thou- sands, whose thoughts, ideas, opinions will be seri- ously modified and in some cases lastingly modified — whose very lives may change trend as a result of reading that book. No need to ask which event and which book is the bigger news. News is not the judgment of posterity on a book or event. News is not even the sum total of the effects of an event or a book on human society. News is the immediate impor- tance, or interest, of an event or a book to the greatest number of people. Eleanor H. Porter writes a new story. One in every thousand persons in the United States, or Literary Editors 107 perhaps more, wants to know about it, and at once. Isidor MacDougal (as Frank M. O'Brien would say) writes a literary masterpiece. Not one per- son in 500,000 cares, or would care even if the sub- ject matter were made comprehensible to him. The oldtime "reviewer" would write three solid columns about Isidor MacDougal's work. The present-day Hterary editor puts it in competent hands for a simplified description to be printed later ; and mean- while he slaps Mrs. Porter's novel on his front page. The troubles of a literary editor are the troubles of his friend up the aisle, the city editor. The worst of them is the occasional and inevitable error in giving out the assignment. All his reporters are good book reporters, but like the people on the city editor's staff they have usually their limitations, whether temperamental or knowledgable. Every once in a while the city editor sends to cover a fire a reporter who does speechified dinners beautifully but who has no sympathy with fires, who can't get through the fire lines, who writes that the fire "broke out" and burns up more words misdescrib- ing the facts than the copyreader can extinguish with blue air and blue pencil. Just so it will hap- pen in the best regulated literary editor's sanctum that, now and then, the editor will give the wrong book to the right man. Then he learns how un- io8 Why Authors Go Wrong reasonable an author can be, if he doesn't know already from the confidences of publishers. The literary editor's point of view, we believe, must be that so well expressed by Robert Cortes Holliday in the essay on That Rcznewer "Cuss" in the book Walking -Stick Papers. Few books that get published by established publishing houses are so poor or so circumscribed as not to appeal to a body of readers somewhere, however small or scat- tered. The function of the book reporter is tran- scendently to find a book's waiting audience. If he can incidentally warn off those who don't belong to that audience, so much the better. That's a harder thing to do, of course. The first requisite in a good book section is that it shall be interesting. As regards the news of new books, this is not difficult where book reporters, with the reporter's attitude, are on the job. Re- porter's stories are sometimes badly written, but they are seldom dull. New books described by per- sons who have it firmly lodged in their noodles that they are "reviewing" the books, fare badly. The reviewer-obsession manifests itself in different ways. Sometimes the new book is made to march past the reviewer in column of squads, deploying at page 247 into skirmish formation and coming Literary Editors 109 at page 431 into company front. Very fine, but the reader wants to see them in the trenches, or, headed by the author uttering inspiriting yells, go- ing over the top. On other occasions the reviewer assumes the so-called judicial attitude, the true inwardness of which William Schwenk Gilbert was perhaps the first to appreciate, with the possible ex- ception of Lewis Carroll. Then doth our reviewer tell us what will be famous a century hence. Much we care what will be famous a century hence. What bothers us is what we shall read to-morrow. Of course it may happen to be one and the same book. Very well then, why not say so? The main interest of the book section is served by getting crackajack book reporters. They will suffice for the people who read the section because they are interested in books. If the literary editor stops there, however, he might as well never have started. These people would read the book section anyway, unless it were filled throughout with ab- solutely unreadable matter, as has been known to happen. Even then they would doubtless scan the advertisements. At least, that is the theory on which publishers hopefully proceed. There are book sections where the contributors always specify that their articles shall have a position next to ad- vertising matter. No, the literary editor must interest people who do not especially care about books as such. He no Why Authors Go Wrong can do it only by convincing them that books are just as full of life and just as much a part of a nonnal scheme of life as movies, or magazine cut- outs, or buying things on the instalment plan. Many a plain person has been led to read books by the fact that books are sometimes sold for instal- ment payments. Anything so sold, tlie ordinary person at once realizes, must be something which will fit into his scheme of existence. Acting on an instinct so old that its origin is shrouded in the mists of antiquity, the ordinary person pays the in- stalments. As a result, books are delivered at his residence. At first he is frightened. But he who looks and runs away may live to read another day. And from living to read it is but a step to reading to live. Now one way to interest people who don't care about books for books' sake is to get up attractive pages, with pleasant or enticing headlines, with pic- tures, with jokes in the comers of 'em, with some new and original and not-hitherto-published matter in them, with poetry (all kinds), with large type, with signed articles so that the reader can know who wrote it and like or hate him with the neces- sary personal tag. But these things aren't literary, at all. They are just plain human and fall in the field of action of every editor alive — though of course editors who are dead are exempt from deal- ing with them. That is why a literary editor has Literary Editors iii no need to be literary and, indeed, had better not be if it is going to prevent his being human. We have been talking about the literary editor of a book section. There are not many book sec- tions in this country. There are hundreds of book pages — half -pages and whole pages and double pages. The word "technique" is a loathsome thing and really without any significance in this connec- tion, inasmuch as there is no particular way of do- ing the news of books well, and certainly no one way of doing it that is invariably better than any other. But for convenience we may permit our- selves to use the word "technique" for a moment; and, permission granted, we will merely say that the technique of a book page or pages is entirely different from the technique of a book section — if you know what we mean. Clarified (we hope) it comes down to this, that things which a fellow would attempt in a book sec- tion he would not essay in a book page or double page. Conversely, things that will make a page successful may be out of place in a section. It is by no means wholly a matter of newspaper make- up, though there is that to it, too. But a man with a book section, though not necessarily more ambi- tious, is otherwisely so. For one thing, he expects to turn his reporters loose on more books than his colleague who has only a page or so to turn around in. For another, he will probably want to print a 112 Why Authors Go Wrong careful Hst of all books he receives, of whatever sort, with a description of each as adequate as he can contrive in from twenty to fifty words, plus title, author, place of publication, publisher and price. Such lists are scanned by publishers, book- sellers, librarians, readers in search of books on spe- cial subjects — by pretty nearly everybody who reads the section at all. Even the rather prosaic quality of such a list has its value. A woman down in Texas writes to the literary editor that there is too much conscious cleverness in lots of the stuff he prints, "but the lists of books are deHghtful"! There you are. In editing a book section you must be all things to all women. The fellow with a page or two has quite other preoccupations. Where's a photo, or a cartoon? Must have a headline to break the solidity of this close-packed column of print. How about a funny column? That gifted person, Heywood Broun, taking charge of the book pages of the New York Tribune, announces that he is in favor of anything that will make book reviewing exciting. Nothing can make book reviewing exciting except book re- porting and the books themselves; but if Broun is looking for excitement he will find it while fiUing the role of a literary editor. Before long he will learn that everybody in the world who is not the author of a book wants to review books — and some who are authors are willing to double in both parts. Literary Editors 113 Also, a considerable number of books are published annually in these still United States and a consider- able percentage of those published find their way to the literary editor. It is no joke to receive, list with descriptions and sort out for assignment or non-assignment an average of 1,500 volumes a year, nor to assign to your book reporters, with as much infallibility in choosing the reporter as pos- sible, perhaps half of the 1,500. Likewise there are assignments which several reporters want, ■ a single book bespoken by four persons, maybe; and there are book assignments that are received with horror or sometimes with unflinching bravery by the good soldier. To hand a man, for instance, the extremely thick two- volume History of Labour in the United States by Professor Commons and his associates is like pinning a decoration on him for limitless valor under fire — only the decoration bears a strong resemblance to the Iron Cross. 3 Advertising? Newspapers depend upon advertising for their existence, let alone their profits, in most instances. Of course, if there were no such things as advertise- ments we should still have newspapers. The news must be had. Presumably people would simply 114 Why Authors Go Wrong pay more for it, or pay as much in a more direct way. What is true of newspapers is true of parts of newspapers. The fact that a new book is news, and, as such, a thing that must more or less widely but indispensably be reported, is attested by the maintenance of book columns and pages in many newspapers where book advertising there is none. The people who read the Boston Evening Tran- script, for example, would hardly endure the aboli- tion of its book pages whether publishers used them to advertise in or not. At the same time the publisher finds, and can find, no better medium than a good live book page or book section ; nor can he find any other medium, nor can any other medium be created, in which his advertising will reach his full audience. "The trade" reads the excellent Publishers' Weekly, H- brarians have the journal of the American Library Association, readers have the newspapers and mag- azines of general circulation on which they rely for the news of new books. But the good book page or book section reaches all these groups. Publish- ers, authors, booksellers, librarians, book buyers — all read it. And if it is really good it spreads the book reading habit. Even a bookshop seldom does that — we have one exception in mind, pretty well known. People do not, ordinarily, read in a book- shop. Literary Editors 115 Of course a literary editor who has any regard for the vitality of his page or section is interested in book advertising. There's something wrong with him if he isn't. If he isn't he doesn't measure up to his job, which is to get people to read books and find their way about among them. A book page or a book section without advertising is no more satisfactory than a man or a woman without a sense of the value of money. It looks lopsided and it is lopsided. Readers resent it, and rightly. It's a beautiful fagade, but the side view is disap- pointing. The interest the literary editor takes in book advertising need no more be limited than the in- terest he takes in the growth or improvement of any other feature of his page or section. It has and can have no relation to his editorial or news policy. The moment such a thing is true his use- fulness is ended. An alliance between the pen and the pocketbook is known the moment it is made and is transparent the moment it takes effect in print. A literary editor may resent, and keenly, as an editor, the fact that Bing, Bang & Company do not advertise their books in his domain. He is quite right to feel strongly about it. It has nothing to do with his handling of the Bing Bang books. That is determined by their news value alone. He may give the Bing Bang best seller a front page review and at the same time decline to meet Mr. ii6 Why Authors Go Wrong Bing or lunch with Mr. Bang. And he will be en- tirely honest and justified in his course, both ways. Puff & Boom advertise like thunder. The Hterary editor likes them both immensely, or, at least, he appreciates their good judgment (necessarily it seems good to him in his role as editor of the pages they use). But Puff & Boom's books are one-stick stories. Well, it's up to Puff & Boom, isn't it? Oh, well, first and last there's a lot to being a literary editor, new style. But first and last there's a lot to being a human. Any one who can be hu- man successfully can do the far lesser thing much better than any literary editor has yet done it. WHAT EVERY PUBLISHER KNOWS VI WHAT EVERY PUBLISHER KNOWS A BIG subject? Not necessarily. Discussed by an authority ? No, indeed. On the contrary, about to be written upon by an amateur recording impressions extending a little over a year but formed in several relationships — as a "literary editor," as an author and, involuntarily, as an author's agent — ^but all friendly. Also, perhaps, as a pretty regular reader of publishers' products. What will first ap- pear as vastness in the subject will shrink on a moment's examination. For our title is concerned only with what every publisher knows. A common piece of knowledge; or if not, after all, very "com- mon," at least commonly held — by book publishers. To state the main conclusion first : The one thing that every publisher knows, so far as a hum- ble experience can deduce, is that what is called "general" publishing — meaning fiction and other books of general appeal — is a highly speculative en- terprise and hardly a business at all. The clearest analogy seems to be with the theatrical business. Producing books and producing plays is terrifyingly alike. Full of risks. Requiring, unless genius is 119 I20 Why Authors Go Wrong manifested, considerable money capital. Likely to make, and far more likely to lose, small fortunes overnight. . , . Fatally fascinating. More an art than an organization but usually requiring an organ- ization for the exhibition of the most brilliant art — like opera. A habit comparable with hasheesh. Heart-lifting — and headachy. 'Twas the night be- fore publication and all through the house not a creature was stirring, not even a stenographer. The day dawned bright and clear and a re-order for fifty more copies came in the afternoon mail. . . . Ab- sentmindedly, the publisher-bridegroom pulled a contract instead of the wedding ring from his pocket. "With this royalty I thee wed," he murmured. And so she was published and they lived happily ever after until she left him because he did not clothe the children suitably, using green cloth with purple stamping. A fine old publishing house once went back over the record of about 1,200 published books. This was a rather conservative firm, as little of a gambler as possible ; its books had placed it, in every respect, in the first rank of publishing houses. Of the 1,200 books just one in ten had made any sizable amount of money. The remaining 1,080 had either lost money, broken even, or made sums smaller than the interest on the money tied up in What Every Publisher Knows 121 them. Most of the 120 profitable books had been highly profitable; it will not surprise you to learn this when you reflect that these lucrative books had each to foot the bill, more or less, for nine others. So much for the analysis of figures. But what lay behind the figures? In some cases it was possible to tell why a particular book had sold. More often it wasn't. ... Is this a business? Thorwald Alembert Jenkinson has a book pub- lished. It's not a bad book, either; very good novel, as a matter of fact. Sales rather poor. Mr. Jen- kinson's publisher takes his next book with a nat- ural reluctance, buoyed up by the certitude that this is a better story and has in it elements that prom- ise popularity. The publisher's salesman goes on the road. In Dodge City, Iowa, let us say, he enters a bookseller's and begins to talk the new Jenkinson novel. At the sound of his voice and the sight of the dummy the bookseller lifts repelling hands and backs away in horror, "Stock that?" asks the bookseller rhetorically. "Not on your Hfe! Why," with a gesture toward one shelf, "there's his first book. Twenty copies and only two sold !" The new Jenkinson novel has a wretched advance sale. Readers, not seeing it in the bookshops, may 122 Why Authors Go Wrong yet call for it when they read a review — not neces- sarily a favorable account — or when they see it ad- vertised. If Mr. Jenkinson wrote histories or bi- ographies the bookseller's wholly human attitude would not much matter. But a novel is different. The customer wanting Jenkinson's History of France would order it or go elsewhere, most likely. The customer wanting Jenkinson's new novel is quite often content with Tarkington's instead. When you go to the ticket agency to get seats at a Broadway show and find they have none left for Whoop 'Er Up you grumble, and then buy seats at Let's All Go. Not that you really care. Not that any one really cares. The man who produced Whoop 'Er Up is also the producer of Let's All Go, both theatres are owned by a single group, the li- brettists are one and the same and the music of both is equally bad, proceeding from an identical source. Even the stagehands work interchangeably on a strict union scale. But Mr. Jenkinson did not write Tarkington's novel, the two bo6ks are published by firms that have not a dollar in common, and only the bookseller can preserve an evatanguayan indif- ference over your choice. The publisher's salesman comes to the booksell- er's lair equipped with dummies. These show the What Every Publisher Knows 123 book's exterior, its size, thickness, paper, binding and (very important) its jacket. Within the dummy are blank pages, or perhaps the first twenty pages of the book printed over and over to give the volume requisite thickness. The bookseller may read these twenty pages. If the author has got plenty of action into them the bookseller is favor- ably impressed. Mainly he depends for his idea of the book upon what the salesman and the publisher's catalogue tells him. He has to. He can't read 'em all. Sometimes the salesman can illustrate his re- marks. Henry Leverage wrote an ingenious story called Whispering Wires in which the explanation of a mysterious murder depended upon the tele- phone, converted by a too-gifted electrician into a single-shot pistol. Offering the story to the book- sellers, Harry Apeler carried parts of a telephone receiver about the country with him, unscrewing and screwing on again the delicate disc that you put against your ear and showing how the deed was done. 5 The bookseller, like every one else, goes by ex- perience. It is, or has been, his experience that collections of short stories do not sell well. And this is true despite O. Henry, Fannie Hurst and Edna Ferber. It is so true that publishers shy at short story volumes. Where there is a name that 124 Why Authors Go Wrong will command attention — Alice Brown, Theodore Dreiser — or where a special appeal is possible, as in Edward J. O'Brien's The Best Short Stories of 19 1-, books made up of short tales may sell. But there are depressing precedents. In his interesting article on The Publishing Busi- ness, appearing in 19 16 in the Publishers' Weekly and since reprinted as a booklet, Temple Scott cites Henri Bergson's Creative Evolution as a modem instance of a special sort of book finding its own very special, but surprisingly large, public, "Nine booksellers out of ten 'passed' it when the traveller brought it round," observes Mr. Scott. "Fortu- nately, for the publisher, the press acted the part of the expert, and public attention was secured." Was the bookseller to blame? Most decidedly not. Creative Evolution is nothing to tie up your money in on a dim chance that somewhere an enthusiastic audience waits for the Bergsonian gospel. Mr. Scott's article, which is inconclusive, in our opinion, points out clearly that as no two books are like each other no two books are really the same ar- ticle. Much fiction, to be sure, is of a single stamp ; many books, and here we are by no means limited to fiction, have whatever unity comes from the author- ship of a single hand. This unity may exist, elu- sively, as in the stories of Joseph Conrad, or may be confined almost wholly to the presence of the same name on two titlepages, as in the fact that What Every Publisher Knows 125 The Virginian and The Pentecost of Calamity are both the work of Owen Wister. No! Two books are most often and emphat- ically not the same article. Mr. Scott is wholly right when he pK)ints out every book should have ad- vertising, or other attention, peculiar to itself. A method of reporting one book will not do for an- other, any more than a publisher's circular describ- ing one book will do to describe a second. The art of reporting books or other news, like the art of ad- vertising books or other commodities, is one of end- less differentiation. In the absence of real orig- inality, freshness and ideas, both objects go un- achieved or else are achieved by speciousness, not to say guile. You, for example, do not really believe that by reading Hannibal Halcombe's How to Heap Up Happiness you will be able to acquire the equiv- alent of a college education in 52 weeks. But some- where in How to Heap Up Happiness Mr. Halcombe tells how he made money or how he learned to en- joy pictures on magazine covers or a happy solution of his unoriginal domestic troubles — any one of which you may crave to know and honest informa- tion of which will probably send you after the book. At this point in the discussion of our subject we have had the incredible folly to look back at our 126 Why Authors Go Wrong outline. Yes, there is an outline — or a thing of shreds and patches which once went by that descrip- tion. What, you will say, wrecked so soon, after a mere introduction of 1,500 words or so? Cer- tainly. Outlines are to writers what architects' plans are to builders, or what red rags are supposed to be to bulls. Or, as the proverbial (our favorite adjective) chaff before the wind. Our outline says that the subject of selling books should be subdivi- sion (c) under division i of the three partitions of our subject. All Gaul and Poland are not the only objects divided in three parts. Every serious sub- ject is, likewise. Never mind. We shall have to struggle along as best we can. We have been talking about selling books, or what every publisher knows in regard to it. Well, then, every publisher knows that selling books as it has mainly to be conducted under pres- ent conditions, is just as much a matter of merchan- dising as selling bonnets, bathrobes and birdseed. But this is one of the things that people outside the publishing and bookselling businesses seldom grasp. A cultural air, for them, invests the book business. The curse of the genteel hangs about it. It is al- most professional, like medicine and baseball. It has an odor, like sanctity. . . . All wrong. Bonnets, bathrobes, birdseed, books. All are saleable if you go about it right. And how is that? you ask. What Every Publisher Knows 127 The best way to sell bonnets is to lay a great foundational demand for headgear. The best way to sell bathrobes is to encourage bathing. The best way to sell birdseed is to put a canary in every home. It might be supposed that the best way to sell books would be to get people to read. Yes, it might be far more valuable in the end to stimulate and spread the reading habit than to try to sell 100,000 copies of any particular book. Of course every publisher knows this and of course all the publishers, associating themselves for the promotion of a common cause not inconceivably allied to the general welfare, spend time and money in the effort to make readers — not of Mrs. Halcyon Hunter's Love Has Wings or Mr. Caspar Car- touche's Martin the Magnificent, but of books, just good books of any sort soever. Yes, of course. . . . This would be — beg pardon, is — the thing that actually and immediately as well as ultimately counts : Let us get people to read, to like to read, to enjoy reading, and they will, sooner or later, read books. Sooner or later they'll become book readers and book buyers. Sooner or later books will sell as well as automobiles. . . . On the merely technical side of bookselling, on the immediate problem of selling particular new novels, collections of short stories, histories, books of verse, and all the rest, the publishers have, col- lectively at least, not much to learn from their fel- 128 Why Authors Go Wrong low merchants with the bonnets, bathrobes and birdseed. The mechanism of merchandising is so highly developed in America that many of the meth- ods resemble the interchangeable parts of standard- ized manufactures everywhere. Suppose we have a look at these methods. The lesson of flexibility has been fully mastered by at least two American publishing houses. With their very large lists of new books they contrive to avoid, as much as possible, fixed publication dates. While their rivals are pinning themselves fast six months ahead, these publishers are moving largely but conditionally six and nine months ahead, and less largely but with swift certainty three months, two months, even one month from the passing mo- ment. And they are absolutely right and profit by their rightness. For this reason: Everything that is printed has in it an element of that timeliness, that ephemerality if you like but also that widening rip- ple of human interest which is the unique essence of what we call "news." This quahty is present, in a perceptible amount, even in the most serious sort of printed matter. Let us take, as an example, Dar- win's Origin of Species. Oh ! exclaims the reader, there surely is a book with no ephemerality about itl No? But there was an immense quantity of What Every Publisher Knows 129 just that in its publication. It came at the right hour. Fifty years earlier it would have gone un- noticed. To-day it is transcended by a body of biological knowledge that Darwin knew not. Fifty years, one way or the other, would have made a vast difference in the reception, the import, the influence of even so epochal a book as The Origin of Species. Now a little reflection will show that, in the case of lesser books, the matter of time is far more sharply important. Darwin's book was so massive that ten or twenty years either way might not have mattered. But in such a case as John Spargo's Bolshevism a few months may matter. In the case of Mr. Britling the month as well as the year mattered vitally. Time is everything, in the fate of many a book, even as in the fate of a maga- zine article, a poem, an essay, a short story. Ar- thur Guy Empey was on the very hour with Over the Top; but the appearance of his Tales from a Dugout a few days after the signing of the armis- tice on November 11, 1918, was one of the minor tragedies of the war. Therefore the publisher who can, as nearly as hu- man and mechanical conditions permit, preserve flexibility in his publishing plans, has a very great advantage over inelastic competitors. That iron- clad arrangements a half year ahead can be avoided the methods of two of the most important Amer- ican houses demonstrate. Either can get out a book 130 Why Authors Go Wrong on a month's notice. More than once in a season this spells the difference between a sale of 5,000 and one of 15,000 copies — that is, between not much more than "breaking even" and making a handsome profit. 8 Every book that is published requires advertising though perhaps no two books call for advertising in just the same way. One of the best American publishing houses figures certain sums for adver- tising — whatever form it may take — in its costs of manufacture and then the individual volumes have to take each their chances of getting, each, its proper share of the money. Other houses have similar un- satisfactory devices for providing an advertising fund. The result is too often not unlike the re- volving fund with which American railways were furnished by Congress — it revolved so fast that there wasn't enough to go round long. A very big publishing house does differently. To the cost of manufacture of each book is added a spe- cific, flat and appropriate sum of money to adver- tise that particular book. The price of the book is fixed accordingly. When the book is published there is a definite sum ready to advertise it. No book goes unadvertised. If the book "catches on" there is no trouble, naturally, about more advertis- ing money; if it does not sell the advertising of it What Every Publisher Knows 131 stops when the money set aside has been exhausted and the pubHshers take their loss with a clear con- science; they have done their duty by the book. It may "be added that this policy has always paid. Combined with other distinctive methods it has put the house which adopted it in the front rank. Whether to publish a small, carefully selected list of books in a season or a large and comprehensive list is not wholly decided by the capital at the pub- lisher's command. Despite the doubling of all costs of book manufacture, publishing is not yet an en- terprise which requires a great amount of capital, as compared with other industries of corresponding volume. The older a publishing house the more likely it is to restrict its list of new books. It has more to lose and less to gain by taking a great num- ber of risks in new publications. At the same time it is subjected to severe competition because the cap- ital required to become a book publisher is not large. Hence much caution, too much, no doubt, in many cases and every season. Still, promising manu- scripts are lamentably few. "Look at the stuff that gets published," is the classic demonstration of the case. The older the house, the stronger its already ac- cumulated list, the more conservative, naturally, it 132 Why Authors Go Wrong becomes, the less inclined to play with loaded dice in the shape of manuscripts. Yet a policy of ex- treme caution and conservatism is more dangerous and deadly than a dash of the gambler's makeup. Two poor seasons together are noticed by the trade ; four poor seasons together may put a house badly behind. A season with ten books only, all good, all selling moderately well, is perhaps more meri- torious and more valuable in the long run than a season with thirty books, nearly all poor except for one or two sensational successes. But the fellow who brings out the thirty books and has one or two decided best sellers is the fellow who will make large profits, attract attention and acquire prestige. It is far better to try everything you can that seems to have "a chance" than to miss something awfully good. And, provided you drop the bad potatoes quickly, it will pay you better in the end. There tnust be a big success somewhere on your list. A row of respectable and undistinguished books is the most serious of defeats. 10 Suppose you were a book publisher and had put out a novel or two by Author A. with excellent re- sults on the profit side of the ledger. Author A. is plainly a valuable property, like a copper mine in war time. A.'s third manuscript comes along in due What Every Publisher Knows 133 time. It is entirely different from the first two so- successful novels; it is pretty certain to disappoint A.'s "audience." You canvass the subject with A., who can't "see" your arguments and suggestions. It comes to this : Either you publish the third novel or you lose A. Which, darling reader, would you, if you were the publisher, do? Would you choose the lady and The Tiger? You are neatly started as a book publisher. You can't get advance sales for your productions (to bor- row a term from the theatre). You go to Memphis and Syracuse and interview booksellers. They say to you: "For heaven's sake, get authors whose names mean something! Why should we stock fic- tion by Horatius Hotaling when we can dispose of 125 copies of E. Phillips Oppenheim's latest in ten days from publication?" Returning thoughtfully to New York, you happen to meet a Celebrated Au- thor. Toward the close of luncheon at the Brevoort he offers to let you have a book of short stories. One of them (it will be the title-story, of course) was published in the Saturday Evening Post, bring- ing to Mr. Lorimer, the editor, 2,500 letters and 117 telegrams of evenly divided praise and con- demnation. Short stories are a stiff proposition ; but the Celebrated Author has a name that will insure a certain advance sale and a fame that will insure reviewers' attention. For you to become his pub- lisher will be as prestigious as it is adventitious. 134 Why Authors Go Wrong From ethical and other motives, you seek out the C. A.'s present pubhsher — old, well-established house — and inquire if Octavo & Duodecimo will have any objection to your publishing the C. A.'s book of tales. Mr, Octavo replies in friendly accents: "Not a bit! Not a bit! Go to it! However, we've lent . . . (the C. A.) $2,500 at one time or another in advance moneys on a projected novel. Travel as far as you like with him, but remember that he can't give you a novel until he has given us one or has repaid that $2,500." What to do? 'Tis indeed a pretty problem. If you pay Octavo & Duodecimo $2,500 you can have the C. A.'s next novel — worth several times as much as any book of tales, at the least. On the other hand, there is no certainty that the C. A. will de- liver you the manuscript of a novel. He has been going to deliver it to Octavo & Duodecimo for three years. And you can't afiford to tie up $2,500 on the chance that he'll do for you what he hasn't done for them. Because $2,500 is, to you, a lot of money. In the particular instance where this happened (except for details, we narrate an actual occur- rence) the beginning publisher went ahead and pub- lished the book of tales, and afterward another book of tales, and let Octavo & Duodecimo keep their option on the C. A.'s next novel, if he ever writes any. The probabilities are that the C. A. will write short stories for the rest of his life rather than de- What Every Publisher Knows 135 liver a novel from which he will receive not one cent until $2,500 has been deducted from the royalties. II English authors are keenest on advance money. The English writer who will undertake to do a book without some cash in hand before putting pen to paper is a great rarity. An American publisher who wants English manuscripts and goes to London without his checkbook won't get anywhere. A little real money will go far. It will be almost unneces- sary for the publisher who has it to entrain for those country houses where English novelists drink tea and train roses. Kent, Sussex, Norfolk, York- shire, Wessex, &c., will go down to London. Mr. Britling will motor into town to talk about a con- tract. All the London clubs will be named as ren- dezvous. Visiting cards will reach the publisher's hotel, signifying the advent of Mr. Percival Foth- eringay of Houndsditch, Bayswater, Wapping Old Stairs, London, B. C. Ah, yes, Fotheringay ; won- derful stories of Whitechapel and the East End, really ! Knows the people — what ? It has to be said that advances on books seem to retard their delivery. We have in mind a famous English author (though he might as well be Amer- ican, so far as this particular point is concerned) who got an advance of $500 (wasn't it?) some years 136 Why Authors Go Wrong ago from Quarto & Folio — on a book of essays. Quarto & Folio have carried that title in their spring and fall catalogues of forthcoming books ever since. Spring and fall they despair afresh. Daylight sav- ing did nothing to help them — an hour gained was a mere bagatelle in the cycles of time through which Fads and Fatalities keeps moving in a regular and always equidistant orbit. If some day the League of Nations shall ordain that the calendar be set ahead six months Quarto & Folio may get the com- pleted manuscript of Fads and Fatalities. American authors are much less insistent on ad- vance payments than their cousins 3,000 miles re- moved. A foremost American publishing house has two inflexible rules : No advance payments and no verdict on uncompleted manuscripts. Inflexible — but it is to be suspected that though this house never bends the rule there are times when it has to break it. What won't bend must break. There are a few authors for whom any publisher will do anything except go to jail. Probably you would make the same extensive efforts to retain your exclusive rights in a South African diamond digging which had already produced a bunch of Kohinoors. There is a gentleman's agreement among pub- lishers, arrived at some years back, not to indulge What Every Publisher Knows 137 in cutthroat competition for each other's authors. This ethical principle, like most ethical principles now existing, is dictated quite as much by considera- tions of keeping a whole skin as by a sense of pro- fessional honor. There are some men in the book publishing business whose honorable standards have a respect for the other fellow's property first among their Fourteen Points. There are others who are best controlled by a knowledge that to do so-and-so would be very unhealthy for themselves. The agreement, like most unwritten laws, is in- terpreted with various shadings. Some of these are subtle and some of them are not. It is variously applied by different men in different cases, some- times unquestionably and sometimes doubtfully. But in the main it is pretty extensively and strictly upheld, in spirit as in letter. How far it transgresses authors' privileges or limits authors' opportunities would be difficult to say. In the nature of the case, any such under- standing must operate to some extent to lessen the chances of an author receiving the highest possible compensation for his work. Whether this is offset by the favors and concessions, pecuniary and other- wise, made to an author by a publisher to whom he adheres, can't be settled. The relation of author and publisher, at best, calls for, and generally elicits, striking displays of loyalty on both sides. Particu- 138 Why Authors Go Wrong larly among- Americans, the most ideaHstic people on earth. In its practical working this publishers' under- standing operates to prevent any publisher "ap- proaching" an author who has an accepted publisher of his books. Unless you, as a publisher, are your- self approached by Author B., whose several books have been brought out by Publisher C, you are theoretically bound hand and foot. And even if Author B. comes to you there are circumstances un- der which you may well find it desirable to talk B.'s proposal over with C, hitherto his publisher. After that talk you may wish B. were in Halifax. If everybody told the truth matters would be greatly simplified. Or would they? If you hear that Author D., who writes very good sellers, is dissatisfied with Publisher F., what is your duty in the circumstances? Author D. may not come to you, for there are many publishers for such as he to choose from. Shall we say it is your duty to acquaint D., indirectly perhaps, with the manifest advantages of bringing you his next novel? We'll say so. Whatever publishers agree to, authors are free. And every publisher knows how easy it is to lose an author. Why, they leave you like that ! (Busi- ness of snapping fingers. ) xA.nd for the lightest rea- sons! (Register pain or maybe moumfulness.) If D. W. Griffith wanted to make a Movie of a Pub- What Every Publisher Knows 139 hsher Losing an Author he would find the action too swift for the camera to record. Might as well try to film The Birth of a Notion. 13 One of the most fascinating mysteries about pub- lishers, at least to authors, is the method or meth- ods by which they determine the availability of manuscripts. Fine word, availability. Noncom- mittal and all that. It has no taint of infallibility — which is the last attribute a publisher makes pre- tensions to. There are places where one man decides whether a manuscript will do and there are places where it takes practically the whole clerical force and several plebiscites to accept or reject the author's offering. One house which stands in the front rank in this country accepts and rejects mainly on the verdicts of outsiders — specialists, however, in various fields. Another foremost publishing house has a special test for "popular" novels in manuscript. An extra ration of chewing gum is served out to all the ste- nographers and they are turned loose on the type- written pages. If they react well the firm signs a contract and prints a first edition of from 5,000 to 25,000 copies, depending on whether it is a first novel or not and the precise comments of the girls at page 378. 140 Why Authors Go Wrong Always the sales manager reads the manuscript, if it is at all seriously considered. What he says has much weight. He's the boy who will have to sell the book to the trade and unless he can see things in it, or can be got to, there is practically no hope despite Dr. Munyon's index finger. Recently a publishing house of national reputa- tion has done a useful thing — we are not prepared to say it is wholly new — by establishing a liaison officer. This person does not pass on manuscripts, unless incidentally by way of offering his verdict to be considered with the verdicts of other depart- ment heads. But once a manuscript has been ac- cepted by the house it goes straight to this man who reads it intensively and sets down, on separate sheets, everything about it that might be useful to (a) the advertising manager, (b) the sales manager and his force, and (c) the editorial people handling the firm's book publicity effort. A little knowledge of book publishing teaches im- mense humility. The number of known instances in which experienced publishers have erred in judg- ment is large. Authors always like to hear of these. But too much must not be deduced from them. Every one has heard of the rejection of Henry Syd- nor Harrison's novel Queed. Many have heard of What Every Publisher Knows 141 the publisher who decided not to "do" Vicente Blasco Ibafiez's The Four Horsemen of the Apoc- alypse. There was more than one of him, by the way, and in each case he had an exceedingly bad translation to take or reject (we are told), the only worthy translation, apparently, being that which was brought out with such sensational success in the early fall of 191 8. A publisher lost Spoon River Anthology because of a delay in acceptance — he wanted the opinion of a confrere not easily reached. For every publisher's mistake of this sort there could probably be cited an instance of perspicacity much more striking. Such was the acceptance of Edward Lucas White's El Supremo after many rejections. And how about the publisher who accepted Queed? 15 Let us conclude these haphazard and very likely unhelpful musings on an endless subject by telling a true story. In the spring of 19 19 one of the principal pubHsh- ing houses in America and England undertook the publication of a very unusual sort of a novel, semi- autobiographical, a work of love and leisure by a man who had gained distinction as an executive. It was a fine piece of work, though strange; had a de- lightful reminiscential quality. The book was made up, a first edition of moderate size printed and 142 Why Authors Go Wrong bound. It was not till this had been done and the book was ready to place on sale that the head of this publishing house had an opportunity to read it. The Head is a veteran publisher famous for his prescience in the matter of manuscripts and for hon- orable dealings. He read the book through and was charmed by it; he looked at the book and was unhappy. He sent for everybody who had had to do with the mak- ing of this book. He held up his copy and flut- tered pages and said, in effect : "This has been done all wrong. Here is a book of quite exceptional quality. I don't think it will sell. Only moderately, though perhaps rather stead- ily for some years to come. It won't make us money. To speak of. But it deserves, intrin- sically, better treatment. Better binding. This is only ordinary six-months'-selling novel binding. It deserves larger type. Type with a more beautiful face. Fewer lines to the page. Lovelier dress from cover to cover. "Throw away the edition that has been printed. Destroy it or something. At least, hide it. Don't let any of it get out. For this has been done wrong, all wrong. Do it over." So they went away from his presence and did it right. It meant throwing away about $2,000. Or was it a $2,000 investment in the good opinion of people who buy, read and love books ? THE SECRET OF THE SELLER BEST VII THE SECRET OF THE BEST SELLER BY "best seller" we may mean one of several things. Dr. Emmett Holt's Care and Feed- ing of Children, of which the fifty-eighth edition was printed in the spring of 1919, is one kind of best seller; Owen Wister's The Virginian is quite another. The number of editions of a book is a very uncertain indication of sales to a person not familiar with book publishing. Editions may con- sist of as few as 500 copies or as many as 25,000 or even 50,000. The advance sale of Gene Strat- ton-Porter's A Daughter of the Land was, if we re- call the figure exactly, 150,000 copies. These, therefore, were printed and distributed by the day when the book was placed on sale, or shortly there- after. To call this the "first edition" would be rather meaningless. One thousand copies of a book of poems — unless it be an anthology — is a large edition indeed. But not for Edgar Guest, whose books sell in the tens of thousands. The sale, within a couple of years, of 31,000 copies of the poems of Alan Seeger was phenomenal. 145 146 Why Authors Go Wrong The first book of essays of an American writer sold 6,000 copies within six months of its publi- cation. This upset most precedents of the book- selling trade. The author's royalties may have been $1,125. ^ ^^w hundred dollars should be added to represent money received for the casual publication of the essays in magazines before their appearance in the book. Of course the volume did not stop selling at the end of six months. Compare these figures, however, with the income of one of the most popular American novelists. A single check for $75,000. Total payments, over a period of fifteen years, of $750,000 to $1,000,000. Yet it is doubtful if the books of this novelist reached more than 65 per cent, of their possible audience. It is a moderate estimate, in our opinion, that most books intended for the "general reader," whether fiction or not, do not reach more than one- quarter of the whole body of readers each might attain. With the proper machinery of publicity and merchandising book sales in the United States could be quadrupled. We share this opinion with Harry Blackman Sell of the Chicago Daily News and were interested to find it independently con- firmed by James H. Collins who, writing in the Sat- urday Evening Post of May 3, 19 19, under the head- ing When Merchandise Sells Itself, said : "Book publishing is one industry that suffers for The Best Seller 147 lack of retail outlets. Even the popular novel sells in numbers far below the real buying power of this nation of readers, because perhaps 25 per cent, of the public can examine it and buy it at the city book stores, while it is never seen by the rest of the public. "For lack of quantity production based on wide retail distribution the novel sells for a dollar and a half. "But for a dollar you can buy a satisfactory watch. "That is made possible by quantity production. Quantity production of dollar watches is based on their sale in 50,000 miscellaneous shops, through the standard stock and the teaching of modern mer- cantile methods. Book publishers have made ex- periments with the dollar novel, but it sold just about the same number of copies as the $1.50 novel, because only about so many fiction buyers were reached through the bookstores. Now the stand- ard-stock idea is being applied to books, with assort- ments of 50 or 100 proved titles carried by the drug- gist and stationer." Speaking rather offhandedly, we are of opinion that not more than two living American writers of fiction have achieved anything like a 100 per cent. 148 Why Authors Go Wrong sale of their books. These are Harold Bell Wright and Gene Stratton-Porter. I am indebted to Mr. Frank K. Reilly, president of the Reilly & Lee Company, Chicago, selling agents for the original editions of all Mr. Wright's books, for the following figures : "We began," wrote Mr. Reilly, "with That Printer of Udell's — selling, as I remember the fig- ures, about 20,000. Then The Shepherd of the Hills — about 100,000, I think. Then the others in fast growing quantities. For The Winning of Barbara Worth we took four orders in advance which totalled nearly 200,000 copies. On When a Man's a Man we took the biggest single order ever placed for a novel at full price — that is, a cloth- bound, 'regular' $1.35 book — 250,000 copies from the Western News Company. The advance sale of this 1916 book was over 465,000." Mr. Reilly wrote at the beginning of March, 1919, from French Lick, Indiana, At that time ]\Ir. Wright's publishers had in hand a novel. The Re-Creation of Brian Kent, published August 21, 19 1 9. They had arranged for a first printing of 750,000 copies and were as certain of selling 500,- 000 copies before August i as you are of going to sleep some time in the next twenty-four hours. It was necessary to make preparations for the sale of 1,000,000 copies of the new novel before August 21, 1920. The Best Seller 149 The sale of 1,000,000 copies of The Re-Creation of Brian Kent within a year of publication may be said to achieve a 100 per cent, circulation so far as existing book merchandising facilities allow. The sale, within ten years, of 670,733 copies of Gene Stratton-Porter's story, Freckles, approaches a 100 per cent, sale but with far too much retarda- tion. How has the 100 per cent, sale for the Harold Bell Wright books been brought within hailing dis- tance ? Before us lies a circular which must have been mailed to most booksellers in the United States early in the spring of 1919. It is headed: "First Publicity Advertisement of Our $100,000 Cam- paign." Below this legend is an advertisement of The Re-Creation of Brian Kent. Below that is a statement that the advertisement will appear, simul- taneously with the book's publication, in "magazines and national and religious weeklies having millions upon millions of circulation. In addition to this our newspaper advertising will cover all of the larger cities of the United States." Then follows a list of "magazines, national and religious weeklies cov- ered by our signed advertising contracts." There are 132 of them. The range is from the Atlantic Monthly and the New Republic to Vanity 150 Why Authors Go Wrong Fair and Town Topics in one slant; from System and Physical Culture to Zion's Herald and the Catholic News; from Life to Needlecraft; from the Photoplay World to the Girl's Companion; from the Outlook to the Lookout — and to and fro and back and forth in a web covering all America between the two Portlands. There are about 140,000,000 persons in the United States and Great Britain together. Over 100,000,000 of them, we are told, have read a Har- old Bell Wright book or seen a Harold Bell Wright movie. The secret of the sale of Mr. Wright's books, so far as the external factor is concerned, resides in the fact that his stories have been brought to the attention of thousands upon thousands who, from one year's end to the other, never have a new book of fiction thrust upon their attention by advertising or by sight of the book itself. We speak of the "external factor." There is an external factor quite as much as an internal factor in the success of every best seller of whatever sort. The tendency of everybody who gives any atten- tion to the subject, but particularly the book pub- lisher, is to study the internal factor almost to the exclusion of the other. What, you naturally ask The Best Seller 151 yourself, are the qualities in this book that have made it sell so remarkably? The internal factor is important. Its impor- tance, doubtless, cannot be overrated. But it is not the whole affair. Before we go further let us lay down some general principles that are not often formulated clearly enough even in the minds of those to whom they import most. 1. The internal factor — certain qualities of the book itself — predetermines its possible audience. 2. The external factor — the extent to which it is brought to public attention, the manner in which it is presented to the public, the ubiquity of copies for sale — determines its actual audience. 3. The internal factor can make a best seller of a book with almost no help from the external fac- tor, but cannot give it a 100 per cent. sale. 4. The external factor cannot make a big seller where the internal factor is not of the right sort; but it can always give a 100 per cent. sale. 5. The internal factor is only partly in the pub- lisher's control; the external factor is entirely con- trollable by the publisher. There are two secrets of the best seller. One resides in the book itself, the other rests in the man- ner of its exploitation. One is inherent, the other is circumstantial. One is partly controllable by the publisher, the other is wholly so. Since a book possessing certain qualities in a sufficient degree will 152 Why Authors Go Wrong sell heavily anyway, it is human nature to hunt ceaselessly for this thing .which will triumph over every sort of handicap and obstacle. But it is a lazy way to do. It is not good business. It can- not, ultimately, pay. The successful book pub- lisher of the future is going to be the publisher who works for a 100 per cent, sale on all his books. When he gets a book with an internal factor which would make it a best seller anyway, it will simply mean that he will have to exert himself markedly less to get a 100 per cent, result. He will have such best sellers and will make large sums of money with them, but they will be incidents and not epochal events; for practically all his books will be good sellers. Before we go on to a discussion of the internal factor of the best seller we want to stress once more, and constructively and suggestively, the postnatal attention it should receive. The first year and the second summer are fatal to far too many books as well as humans. And this is true despite the dif- ferences between the two. If 100,000 copies rep- resent the 100 per cent, sale of a given volume you may declare that it makes no difference whether that sale is attained in six months or six years. From the business standpoint of a quick turnover six months is a dozen times better, you may argue; The Best Seller 153 and if interest on invested money be thought of as compounding, the apparent difference in favor of the six-months' sale is still more striking. This would perhaps be true if the author's next book could invariably be ready at the end of the six- months' period. Other ifs will occur to those with some knowledge of the publishing business and a moderate capacity for reflection. Most books are wrongly advertised and inade- quately advertised, and rather frequently advertised in the wrong places. Of the current methods of advertising new fic- tion only one is unexceptionably good. This is the advertising which arrests the reader's attention and baits his interest by a few vivid sentences outlining the crisis of the storj^ the dilemma that confronts the hero or heroine, the problem of whether the hero or heroine acted rightly; or paints in a few swift strokes some exciting episode of the action — ending with a question that will stick in the reader's mind. Such an advertisement should always have a drawing or other illustration if possible. It should be displayed in a generous space and should be placed broadcast but with much discrimination as to where it is to appear. A kind of advertisement somewhat allied to this, but not in use at all despite its assured selling power would consist of the simple reproduction of a photo- graphed page of the book. The Detroit News has 154 Why Authors Go Wrong used such reproduced pages so effectively as illus- trations that it seems strange no publisher (so far as we know) has followed suit. Striking pages, and pages containing not merely objective thrill but the flavor which makes the fascination of a par- ticular book, can be found in most novels. The Detroit News selected a page of the highest effec- tiveness from so subtle a romance as Joseph Con- rad's The Arrow of Gold. This manner of adver- tising, telling from its complete restraint, is af>- plicable to non-fiction. A page of a book of essays by Samuel Crothers would have to be poorly taken not to disclose, in its several hundred words, the charm and fun of his observations. Publishers of encyclopaedias have long employed this "page-from- the-book" method of advertisement with the best results. The ordinary advertisement of a book, making a few flat assertions of the book's extraordinary merit, has become pretty hopelessly conventional- ized. The punch is gone from it, we rather fear forever. In all conscience, it is psychologically de- fective in that it tries to coerce attention and cre- dence instead of trying to attract, fascinate or arouse the beholder. The advertiser is not differ- ent, essentially, from the public speaker. The pub- lic speaker who aims to compel attention by mere thundering or by extraordinary assertions has no chance against the speaker who amuses, interests, The Best Seller 155 or agreeably piques his audience, who stirs his au- ditors' curiosity or kindles their collective imagina- tion. There is too little personality in the advertising of books, and when we say personality we mean, in most cases, the author's personality. The bald and unconvincing recital of the opinion of the Westminster Gazette, that this is a book every An- glo-American should read, is as nothing compared with a few dozen words that could have been writ- ten of, or by, no man on earth except H. G. Wells. The internal factor of H. G. Wells's novel The Undying Fire is so big that it constitutes a sort of a least common multiple of the hopes, doubts and fears of hundreds of thousands of humans. A 100 per cent, sale of the book, under existing merchan- dising conditions, would be 400,000 copies, at the very least. It ought to be advertised in every na- tional and religious weekly of 10,000 circulation or over in the United States, and in every periodical of that circulation reaching a rural audience. And it ought to be advertised, essentially, in this manner : Shall Man Curse God and Die? No! J oh Answered No! H. G. Wells Tells Stricken Europe Read His Nezv Short Novel, "The Undying Fire," in Which He Holds Out the Hope that Men 156 Why Authors Go Wrong May Yet Unite to Organize the World and Save Mankind from Extinction Such an appeal to the hope, the aspiration, the unconquerable idealism of men everywhere, to the social instinct which has its roots in thousands of years of human history, cannot fail. Books are wrongly advertised, as we have said, and they are inadequately advertised, by which we mean in too few places; and perhaps "insufficiently advertised" had been a more accurate phrase. It is correct and essential to advertise books in periodicals appealing wholly or partly to book read- ers. It is just as essential to recruit readers. Book readers can be recruited just as magazine readers are recruited. The most important way of getting magazine readers is still the subscription agent. Every community of any size in these United States should have in it a man or woman of at least high school education and alert enthusi- asm selling books of all the publishers. Where there is a good bookstore such an agent is unneces- sary or may be found in the owner of the store or an employee thereof. Most communities cannot support a store given over entirely to bookselling. In them let there be agents giving their whole time The Best Seller 157 or their spare time and operating with practically no overhead expense. Where the agents receive salaries these must be paid jointly by all the pub- lishers whose books they handle. This should nat- urally be done through a central bureau or selling agency. Efficient agencies already exist. The "book agent" is a classical joke. He is a classical joke because he peddled one book, and the wrong sort of a book, from door to door. You must equip him with fifty books, new and alluring, of all publishers; and arm him with sheets and cir- culars describing enticingly a hundred others. He must know individuals and their tastes and must have one or more of the best book reviewing period- icals in the country. He must have catalogues and news notes and special offers to put over. If he gives you all his time he must have assurance of a living, especially until he has a good start or ex- hibits his incapacity for pioneering. He must have an incentive above and beyond any salary that may be paid him. But the consideration of details in this place is im- possible. The structural outline and much adapt- able detail is already in highly successful use by periodicals of many sorts. In fundamentals it re- quires no profounder skill than that of the clever copyist. 158 Why Authors Go Wrong We charged in the third count of our indictment that bool