by Frank Norris
There are so many thousands like this young man of mine that a word in this connection seems appropriate; and the object of this present writing is to protest against this blind and unreasoned hegira, and to urge the point that tradition, precedent to the contrary notwithstanding, New York is not a literary centre.
I am perfectly well aware that this statement savours of hearsay, but at the same time I think it can be defended. As for instance:
Time was when Boston claimed the distinction that one now denies to New York. But one asserts that Boston made her claims good. In those days the reactionary movement of populations from the cities toward the country had not set in. A constant residence winter and summer in the country was not dreamed of by those who had the leisure and the money to afford it. As much as possible the New England writers crowded to Boston, or to Cambridge, which is practically the same thing, and took root in the place. There was their local habitation; there they lived, and thence they spread their influence. Remember that at the height of the development of the New England school there were practically no other writers of so great importance the length and breadth of the land. This huddling about a common point made it possible to visit all the homes of nearly all of the most eminent American literati in a single day. The younger men, the aspirants, the Unpublished, however, thrown into such society, could not fail to be tremendously impressed, and, banded together as these great ones were, their influence counted enormously. It was no unusual sight to see half a dozen of these at the same dinner table. They all knew each other intimately, these Bostonians, and their word was Lex, and the neophites came from all corners of the compass to hear them speak, and Boston did in good earnest become the Hub, the centre of Literary thought and work in the United States.
But no such conditions obtain in New York to-day. During the last ten years two very important things have happened that bear upon this question. First has come the impulse toward a country life — a continued winter and summer residence in the country. Authors more than any other class of workers can afford this since their profession can be carried anywhere. They need no city offices. They are not forced to be in touch with the actual business life of Broadway. Secondly, since the days of the Bostonian supremacy a tremendous wave of literary production has swept over the United States. Now England has ceased to be the only place where books are written. Poems are now indited in Dakota, novels composed in Wyoming, essays written in Utah, and criticisms flourish in Kansas. A thousand and one Little Centres have sprung up. Literary groups are formed everywhere, in Buffalo, in San Francisco, in Indianapolis and Chicago.
All this detracts from the preponderance of any one city, such as New York, as Literary dictator. You shall find but a very small and meager minority of the Greater Men of Letters who have their homes in Manhattan. Most of them preferred to live in the places whereof they treat in their books, in New Orleans, in Indiana, in Kentucky, or Virginia, or California, or Kansas, or Illinois. If they come to New York at all it is only temporarily, to place their newest book or to arrange with publishers for future work.
The result of this is as is claimed. New York is not a literary centre. The publishing houses are there, the magazines, all the distributing machinery, but not the writers. They do not live there. They do not care to come there. They regard the place simply as a distributing point for their wares.
Literary centres produce literary men. Paris, London and Boston all have their long lists of native-born writers — men who were born in these cities and whose work was identified with them. But New York can claim but ridiculously few of the men of larger caliber as her own. James Whitcomb Riley is from Indiana, Joel Chandler Harris is a Southerner. Howells came from Boston, Cable from New Orleans, Hamlin Garland from the West. Bret Harte from California, Mark Twain from the Middle West, Harold Frederic and Henry James found England more congenial than the greatest city of their native land. Even among the younger generation there are but few who can be considered as New Yorkers. Although Richard Harding Davis wrote accurately and delightfully of New York people, he was not born in New York, did not receive his first impetus from New York influences, and does not now live in New York. Nor is his best work upon themes or subjects in any way related to New York.
In view of all these facts it is difficult to see what the Great Unpublished have to gain by a New York residence. Indeed, it is much easier to see how very much they have to lose.
The writing of fiction has many drawbacks, but one of its blessed compensations is the fact that of all the arts it is the most independent. Independent of time, of manner and of place. Wherever there is a table and quiet, there the novel may be written. “Ah, but the publishing houses are in New York.” What has that to do with it? Do not for a moment suppose that your novel will be considered more carefully because you submit it in person. It is not as though you were on the lookout for odd jobs which, because of a personal acquaintance with editors and publishers, might be put in your way. The article, the story, the essay, poem or novel is just as good, just as available, just as salable whether it comes from Washington Territory or Washington Square.
Not only this, but one believes that actual residence in New York is hostile and inimical to good work. The place, admittedly, teems with literary clubs, circles, associations, organizations of pseudo-literati, who foregather at specified times to “read papers” and “discuss questions.” It is almost impossible for the young writer who comes for a first time to the city to avoid entangling himself with them; and of the influences that tend to stultify ambition, warp original talent and definably and irretrievably stamp out the last spark of productive ability one knows of none more effective than the literary clubs.
You will never find the best men at these gatherings. You will never hear the best work read in this company, you will never evolve any original, personal, definite ideas or ideals under such influence. The discussions of the literary clubs are made up of puerile arguments that have done duty for years in the college text-books. Their work — the papers quoted and stories read aloud — is commonplace and conventional to the deadliest degree, while their “originality” — the ideas that they claim are their very own — is nothing but a distortion and dislocation of preconceived notions, mere bizarre effects of the grotesque and the improbable. “Ah, but the spur of competition.” Competition is admirable in trade — it is even desirable in certain arts. It has no place in a literary career. It is not as though two or more writers were working on the same story, each striving to better the others. That would, indeed, be true competition. But in New York, where the young writer — any writer — may see a dozen instances in a week of what he knows is inferior work succeeding where he fails, competition is robbed of all stimulating effect and, if one is not very careful, leaves only the taste of ashes in the mouth and rancour and discontent in the heart.
With other men’s novels the novelist has little to do. What this writer is doing, what that one is saying, what books this publishing house is handling, how many copies so-and-so’s book is selling — all this fuss and feathers of “New York as a literary centre” should be for him so many distractions. It is all very well to say “let us keep in touch with the best thought in our line of work.”
“Let us be in the movement.” The best thought is not in New York; and even if it were, the best thought of other men is not so good for you as your own thought, dug out of your own vitals by your own unaided efforts, be it never so inadequate.
You do not have to go to New York for that. Your own ideas, your own work will flourish best if left alone untrammeled and uninfluenced. And believe this to be true, that wherever there is a table, a sheet of paper and a pot of ink, there is a Literary Centre if you will. You will find none better the world over.
THE AMERICAN PUBLIC AND “POPULAR” FICTION
The American people judged by Old World standards — even sometimes according to native American standards — have always been considered a practical people, a material p
eople.
We have been told and have also told ourselves that we are hard-headed, that we rejoiced in facts and not in fancies, and as an effect of this characteristic were not given to books. We were not literary, we assumed, were not fond of reading. We, who were subjugating a continent, who were inventing machinery and building railroads, left it to the older and more leisurely nations — to France and to England to read books.
On the face of it this would seem a safe assumption. As a matter of fact, the American people are the greatest readers in the world. That is to say, that, count for count, there are more books read in the United States in one year than in any other country of the globe in the same space of time.
Nowhere do the circulations attain such magnitude as they do with us. A little while ago — ten years ago — the charge that we did not read was probably true. But there must exist some mysterious fundamental connection between this recent sudden expansion of things American — geographic, commercial and otherwise — and the demand for books. Imperialism, Trade Expansion, the New Prosperity and the Half Million Circulation all came into existence at about the same time.
Merely the fact of great prosperity does not account for the wider reading. Prosperous periods, good prices, easy credit and a mobile currency have occurred often before without producing the demand for books. Something more than prosperity has suddenly swept across the continent and evaded the spirit of the times. Something very like an awakening, something very like a renaissance and the 70,000,000 have all at once awakened to the fact that there are books to be read. As with all things sudden, there is noticeable with this awakening a lack of discrimination, the 70,000,000 are so eager for books that, faute de mieux, anything printed will pass current for literature. It is a great animal, this American public, and having starved for so long, it is ready, once aroused, to devour anything. And the great presses of the country are for the most part merely sublimated sausage machines that go dashing along in a mess of paper and printer’s ink turning out the meat for the monster.
There are not found wanting many who deplore this and who blackguard the great brute for his appetite. Softly, softly. If the Megatherium has been obliged to swallow wind for sustenance for several hundred years, it would be unkind to abuse him because he eats the first lot of spoiled hay or over-ripe twigs that is thrust under the snout of him. Patience and shuffle the cards. Once his belly filled, and the pachyderm will turn to the new-mown grass and fruit trees in preference to the hay and twigs.
So the studios and the Browning classes need not altogether revile the great American public. Better bad books than no books; better half a loaf of hard bread than no frosted wedding-cake. The American people, unlike the English, unlike the French and other Europeans, have not been educated and refined and endoctrinated for 2,000 years, and when you remember what they have done in one hundred years, tamed an entire continent, liberated a race, produced a Lincoln, invented the telegraph, spanned the plains — when you remember all this, do not spurn the 70,000,000 because they do not understand Henry James, but be glad that they even care for “The Duchess” and “Ouida.” The wonder of it is not that they do not read or appreciate the best, but that they have set apart any time at all in the struggle of civilizing the wilderness and forging steel rivets to so much as pick up any kind or description of a book.
Consider the other nations, France for instance — the very sanctum of Art, the home and birthplace of literature. Compare the rural districts of France with the rural districts of the United States, and in the comparison allow, if you like, for all the centuries of quiet uninterrupted growth, the wilderness tamed, life domesticated, reduced to routine that modem France enjoys. Do you suppose for one moment that a bourgeois family of — say — Tours is on the same level in the matter of its reading as the household of a contractor’s family in — for example — Martinez, California, or Cheyenne, Wyoming?
I tell you there is no comparison whatever. The West may be wild even yet, may be what Boston would call uncultured, but it reads. There are people in Cheyenne and Martinez who can express an opinion — and a more intelligent opinion, mark you — on Maeterlinck and Bourget, better than the same class of readers in Belgium and France. And quite as likely as not the same class of people in the very native countries of the two writers named have never so much as heard of these writers.
This, admittedly, is the exception, but if our exceptional Martinez and Cheyenne people are so far advanced in literary criticism, we may reasonably expect that the rank and file below them are proportionately well on. Maeterlinck and Bourget are closed books to those rank-and-file readers yet. But again I say, this is not the point. The point is, that they are readers at all. Let them — in the name of future American literature — read their Duchesses and Ouidas and Edna Lyalls and Albert Rosses. What are their prototypes in France, Germany and Russia reading? They simply are not reading at all, and as often as not it is not because of the lack of taste, but because of the lack of sheer downright ability, because they do not know how to read.
A very great man once said that “books never have done harm,” and under this sign let us conquer. There is hardly a better to be found. Instead, then, of deploring the vast circulation of mediocre novels, let us take the larger view and find in the fact not a weakness, but a veritable strength. The more one reads — it is a curious consolatory fact — the more one is apt to discriminate. The ten-year-old who reads “Old Sleuth” to-day, in a little while will find Scott more to his liking. Just now the 70,000,000 is ten years old. But it is started right. Patience. Books have never done harm, and in the end let us be certain that the day will come when the real masterpiece, the real literature, will also be selling in its “five hundredth thousand.”
CHILD STORIES FOR ADULTS
There was a time, none too remote at this date of writing, when juvenile and adult fiction were two separate and distinct classifications. Boys read stories for boys and girls stories for girls, and the adults contented themselves with the wise lucubrations of their equals in years. But the last few years have changed all that — have changed everything in American literature, in fact.
Some far-distant day, when the critics and litterateurs of the twenty-second and twenty-third centuries shall be writing of our day and age, they will find a name for the sudden and stupendous demand for reading matter that has penetrated to all classes and comers since 1890. A great deal could be said upon this sudden demand in itself, and I think it can be proved to be the first effects of a genuine awakening — a second Renaissance. But the subject would demand an article by itself, and in the meanwhile we may use the term awakening as a self-evident fact and consider not so much the cause as the effects.
One of the effects, as has been already suggested, is the change in classifications. Old forms and formulas are, or are being rapidly broken up, and one school and style merging into others, till now what was once amusement for the children has become entertaining for the elders. And vice versa. The abruptness of the awakening has disjointed and inverted all the old fabric. “Robinson Crusoe,” written for adults, is now exclusively a “juvenile,” while “Treasure Island,” written for boys, has been snapped up by the parents.
Simultaneously with this topsy-turvy business, and I am sure in some way connected with it, comes the craze for stories about very young children for adult reading. A boy’s story must now be all about the doings of men, fighters preferably, man-slayers, terrible fellows full of blood and fury, stamping on their quarter-decks or counting doubloons by torchlight on unnamed beaches. Meanwhile the boy’s father with a solemn interest is following the fortunes of some terrible infant of the kindergarten, or the vagaries of a ten-year-old of a country town, or the teacup tragedy of “The Very Little Girl,” or “The Indiscretion of Pinky Trevethan,” or “The Chastening of Skinny McCleave,” etc., etc.
It is interesting to try to account for this. It may either be a fad or a phase. It is almost too soon to tell, but in either case the m
atter is worth considering.
Roughly speaking, the Child’s Stories for Adults fall into three classes. First there is “The Strange Child Story.” This is a very old favourite, and was pretty well installed long before the more recent developments. In “The Strange Child Story” the bid for the reader’s pity and sympathy fairly clamoured from between the lines. Always and persistently The Strange Child was misunderstood. He had “indefinable longings” that were ridiculed, budding talents that were nipped, heartaches — terrible, tear-compelling heartaches — that were ignored; and he lived in an atmosphere of gloom, hostility and loneliness that would have maddened an eremite.
But as his kind declined in popular estimate the country boy, the ten-year-old — who always went in swimmin’ and lost his tow — appeared in the magazines. There is no sentiment about him. Never a tear need be shed over the vicarious atonements of Pinky Trevethan or Skinny McCleave.
It is part of the game to pretend that the Pinkys and Skinnys and Peelys and Mickeys are different individuals. Error. They are merely different names of the boy that perennially and persistently remains the same. Do you know who he is? He is the average American business man before he grew up. That accounts for his popularity. The average business man had clean forgotten all about those early phases of primitive growth, and it amuses him immensely to find out that the scribe has been making a study of him and bringing to light the forgotten things that are so tremendously familiar when presented to the consideration. It is not fiction nor yet literature in the straightest sense of the word, this rehabilitation of Skinny McCleave. It has a value vaguely scientific, the same value that a specimen, a fossil insect, has when brought to the attention of the savant. It is the study of an extinct species, a report upon the American boy of thirty years ago.