by Frank Norris
I suppose that never in the history of that particular firm was the search for a missing manuscript prosecuted with half the energy or ardour that ensued upon the discovery of this particular loss. From the desk-files of the senior partner to the shipping-slips of the packer’s assistant the hunt proceeded — and all in vain.
Meanwhile the day approached on which the Baron was to come for his answer and at last it arrived, and promptly at the appointed hour the poor little card with the hyphenated titled name written carefully and with beautiful flourishes in diluted ink was handed in.
Do you know what the publisher did? He wrote the absurd, pompous name across the order line of a check and signed his own name underneath, and the check was for an amount that would make even unpropitious Destiny take off his hat and bow politely.
And I tell you that my little Instructor-Baron, with eminent good-humour, but with the grand manner, a Marechal du royaume, waved it aside. Turenne could have been no more magnificent. (They do order these matters better in France.) His whole concern — hunger-pinched as he may easily have been at the very moment — his whole concern was to put the embarrassed publisher at his ease, to make this difficulty less difficult.
He assured him that his articles were written comme-ci, comme-ca, for his own amusement, that he could not think of accepting, etc.
And I like to remember that this whole affair, just as if it had been prepared in advance for a popular magazine whose editor insisted upon “happy endings,” did end well, and the publisher, who at the moment was involved in the intricacies of a vast correspondence with a Parisian publishing house, found a small position as translator in one of his sub-departments for the little Instructor-Baron who had the great good fortune to suffer the loss of a manuscript — in the right place.
And now the card — engraved, if you pleased-bears proudly the Baron’s name, supported by the inscription, “Official Translator and Director of Foreign Correspondence to the Firm of — & Co., Publishers.”
RETAIL BOOKSELLER: LITERARY DICTATOR
Of all the various and different kinds and characters of people who are concerned in the writing and making of a novel, including the author, the publisher, the critic, the salesman, the advertisement writer, the drummer — of all this “array of talent,” as the bill-boards put it, which one has the most influence in the success of the book? Who, of all these, can, if he chooses, help or hurt the sales the most? — assuming for the moment that sales are the index of success, the kind of success that at the instant we are interested in.
Each one of these people has his followers and champions. There are not found wanting those who say the publisher is the all-in-all. And again it is said that a critic of authority can make a book by a good review or ruin it by an unfavourable one. The salesman, others will tell you — he who is closest allied to the money transaction — can exert the all-powerful influence. Or again, surely in this day of exploitation and publicity the man who concocts great “ads” is the important one.
The author is next included. He can do no more than write the book, and as good books have failed and bad ones have succeeded — always considering failure and success in their most sordid meanings — the mere writing need not figure. But the fact remains that there are cases where publishers have exerted every device to start a book and still have known it to remain upon their hands; that critics have raved to heaven or damned to hell, and the novel has fallen or flown in spite and not because of them; that salesmen have cajoled and schemed, and yet have returned with unfilled orders, and that advertisements that have clamoured so loudly that even they who ran must have read, and yet the novel in question remained inert, immovable, a failure, a “plug.”
All these, then, have been tried and at times have been found wanting. There yet remains one exponent of the business of distributing fiction who has not been considered. He, one claims, can do more than any or all of the gentlemen just mentioned to launch or strand a novel.
Now let it be understood that by no possible manner of means does one consider him infallible. Again and again have his best efforts come to nothing. This, however, is what is claimed: he has more influence on success or failure than any of the others. And who is he?
The retailer. One can almost affirm that he is a determining factor in American fiction; that, in a limited sense, with him, his is the future. Author, critic, analyst and essayist may hug to themselves a delusive phantom of hope that they are the moulders of public opinion, they and they alone. That may be, sometimes. But consider the toiling and spinning retailer. What does the failure or success of the novel mean to the critic? Nothing more than a minute and indefinite increase or decrease of prestige. The publisher who has many books upon his list may recoup himself on one failure by a compensating success. The salesman’s pay goes on just the same whether his order slips are full or blank; likewise the stipend of the writer of “ads.” The author has no more to lose — materially — than the price of ink and paper. But to the retail bookseller a success means money made; failure, money lost. If he can dispose of an order of fifty books he is ahead by calculable, definite, concrete profits. If he cannot dispose of the fifty his loss is equally calculable, equally definite, equally concrete. Naturally, being a business man, he is a cautious man. He will not order a book which he deems unsalable, but he will lay in a stock of one that promises returns. Through him the book is distributed to the public. If he has a book in stock, the public gets it. If he does not have it, the public goes without. The verdict of the public is the essential to popularity or unpopularity, and the public can only pass verdict upon what it has read. The connection seems clear and the proposition proved that the retail bookseller is an almost paramount influence in American literature.
It is interesting to see what follows from this and to note how the retailer in the end can effectually throttle the sham novelist who has fooled the public once. Were it not for the retailer, the sham novelist would get an indefinite number of chances for his life; but so long as the small book-dealer lives and acts, just so long will bad work — and one means by this wholly bad, admittedly bad, hopelessly bad work — fail to trick the reading public twice. Observe now the working of it. Let us take a typical case. A story by an unknown writer is published. By strenuous exploitation the publishers start a vogue. The book begins to sell. The retailer, observing the campaign of publicity managed by the publishers, stocks up with the volume; surely when the publishers are backing the thing so strong it will be a safe venture; surely the demand will be great. It does prove a safe venture; the demand is great; the retailer disposes of fifty, then of a second order of one hundred, then of two hundred, then of five hundred. The book is now in the hands of the public. It is read and found sadly, sadly wanting. It is not a good story; it is trivial; it is insincere. Far and wide the story is condemned.
Meanwhile the unknown writer, now become famous, is writing a second novel. It is finished, issued, and the salesman who travels for the publishers begins to place his orders. The retailer, remembering the success of this author’s past venture, readily places a large order. Two hundred is not, in his opinion, an overstock. So it goes all over the country. Returns are made to the author, and he sees that some fifty thousand have been sold. Encouraging, is it not? Yes, fifty thousand have been sold — by the publisher to the retailer; but here is the point — not by the retailer to the public. Of the two hundred our dealer took from the publisher’s traveling salesman, one hundred and ninety yet remain upon his counters. The public, fooled once, on the first over-praised, over-exploited book, refuse to be taken in a second time. Who is the loser now? Not the author, who draws royalties on copies sold to the tradesman — the retailer; not the publisher, who makes his profit out of the same transaction; but the retailer, who is loaded down with an unsalable article.
Meanwhile our author writes his third novel. So far as he can see, his second book is as great a popular success as his first. His semiannual statements are there to show i
t — there it is in black and white; figures can’t lie. The third novel is finished and launched. At the end of the first six months after publication day the author gets his publisher’s statement of sales. Instead of the expected 10,000 copies sold, behold the figure is a bare 1,500. At the end of the second six months the statement shows about 250. The book has failed. Why? Because the retailer refuses to order it. He has said to the soliciting salesman, “Why should I, in Heaven’s name, take a third book by this man when I have yet one hundred and ninety copies of his second novel yet to sell?”
It is hard for the salesman to controvert that argument. He may argue that the third book is a masterpiece, and — mark this — it may in fact be a veritable, actual masterpiece, a wonderful contribution to the world’s literature; it is all of no effect. There stands the block of unsold books, 190 strong, and all the eloquence in the world will not argue them off the counter. After this our author’s publisher will have none of his books. Even if he writes a fourth and submits it, the publisher incontinently declines it. This author is no longer a “business proposition.”
There cannot but be an element of satisfaction in all this, and a source of comfort to those who take the welfare of their country’s literature seriously to heart. The sham novelist who is in literature (what shall we say) “for his own pocket every time” sooner or later meets the wave of reaction that he cannot stem nor turn and under which he and his sham are conclusively, definitely and irrevocably buried. Observe how it works out all down the line. He fools himself all of the time, he fools the publisher three times, he fools the retail dealer twice, and he fools the Great American Public just exactly once.
AN AMERICAN SCHOOL OF FICTION?
It seems to me that it is a proposition not difficult of demonstration that the United States of America has never been able to boast of a school of fiction distinctively its own. And this is all the more singular when one considers that in all other activities Americans are peculiarly independent in thought and in deed, and have acquired abroad a reputation — even a notoriety — for being original.
In the mechanical arts, in the industries, in politics, in business methods, in diplomacy, in ship-building, in war, even in dentistry, if you please — even in the matter of riding race-horses — Americans have evolved their own methods, quite different from European methods.
Hardy and adventurous enough upon all other lines, disdainful of conventions, contemptuous of ancient custom, we yet lag behind in the arts — slow to venture from the path blazed long ago by Old World masters.
It is preeminently so in the fine arts. No sooner does an American resolve upon a career of painting, sculpture or architecture than straight he departs for Paris, the Beaux Arts and the Julien atelier; and, his education finished, returns to propagate French ideas; French methods; and our best paintings today are more French than American; French in conception, in composition, in technique and treatment.
I suppose that the nearest we ever came to an organized school of native-born Americans, writing about American things from an American point of view, was in the days of Lowell, Longfellow, Holmes, Whittier and the rest of that illustrious company. But observe: How is this group spoken of and known to literature? Not as the American school, but as the New England school. Even the appellation “New” England as differentiated from “old” England is significant. And New England is not America.
Hawthorne, it will be urged, is a great name among American writers of fiction. Not peculiarly American, however. Not so distinctively and unequivocally as to lay claim to a vigorous original Americanism. “The Scarlet Letter” is not an American story, but rather a story of an English colony on North American soil. “The Marble Faun” is frankly and unreservedly foreign. Even the other novels were pictures of a very limited and circumscribed life — the life of New England again.
Cooper, you will say, was certainly American in attitude and choice of subject; none more so. None less, none less American. As a novelist he is saturated with the romance of the contemporary English story-tellers. It is true that his background is American. But his heroes and heroines talk like the characters out of Bulwer in their most vehement moods, while his Indians stalk through all the melodramatic tableaux of Byron, and declaim in the periods of the border noblemen in the pages of Walter Scott.
Poe we may leave out of classification; he shone in every branch of literature but that of novel-writing. Bret Harte was a writer of short stories and — oh, the pity of it, the folly of it! — abandoned the field with hardly more than a mere surface-scratching.
There can be no doubt that had Mr. Henry James remained in America he would have been our very best writer. If he has been able to seize the character and characteristics so forcibly of a people like the English, foreign to him, different, unfamiliar, what might he not have done in the very midst of his own countrymen, into whose company he was born, reared and educated. All the finish of style, the marvelous felicity of expression would still have been his and at the same time, by the very nature of the life he lived and wrote about, the concrete, the vigorous, the simple direct action would have become a part of his work, instead of the present ultimate vagueness and indecision that so mars and retards it.
Of all the larger names remain only those of Mr. Howells and Mr. Clemens. But as the novelists, as such, are under consideration, even Mark Twain may be left out of the discussion. American to the core, posterity will yet know him not as a novel-writer, but as a humourist. Mr. Howells alone is left, then, after the elimination is complete. Of all producers of American fiction he has had the broadest vision, at once a New Englander and a New Yorker, an Easterner and — in the Eastern sense — a Westerner. But one swallow does not make a summer, nor does one writer constitute a “school.” Mr. Howells has had no successors. Instead, just as we had with “Lapham” and “The Modem Instance” laid the foundation of fine, hardy literature, that promised to be our very, very own, we commence to build upon it a whole confused congeries of borrowed, faked, pilfered romanticisms, building a crumbling gothic into a masonry of honest brown-stone, or foisting colonial porticos upon façades of Montpelier granite, and I cannot allow this occasion to pass without protest against what I am sure every serious-minded reader must consider a lamentable discrowning.
Of the latter-day fiction writers Miss Wilkins had more than all others convinced her public of her sincerity. Her field was her own; the place was ceded to her. No other novelist could invade her domain and escape the censure that attaches to imitation. Her public was loyal to her because it believed in her, and it was a foregone conclusion that she would be loyal to it.
More than this: A writer who occupies so eminent a place as Miss Wilkins, who has become so important, who has exerted and still can exert so strong an influence, cannot escape the responsibilities of her position. She cannot belong wholly to herself, cannot be wholly independent. She owes a duty to the literature of her native country.
Yet in spite of all this, and in spite of the fact that those who believe in the future of our nation’s letters look to such established reputations as hers to keep the faith, to protest, though it is only by their attitude, silently and with dignity, against corruptions, degradations; in spite of all this, and in the heyday of her power, Miss Wilkins chooses to succumb to the momentary, transitory set of the tide, and forsaking her own particular work, puts forth, one of a hundred others, a “colonial romance.” It is a discrowning. It can be considered as no less. A deliberate capitulation to the clamour of the multitude. Possibly the novelist was sincere, but it is perilously improbable that she would have written her “Colonial Romance” had not “colonial romances” been the fashion. On the face of it Miss Wilkins has laid herself open to a suspicion of disingenuousness that every honest critic can only deplore. Even with all the sincerity in the world she had not the right to imperil the faith of her public, to undermine its confidence in her. She was one of the leaders. It is as if a captain, during action, had deserted to the en
emy.
It could not have been even for the baser consideration of money. With her success assured in advance Miss Wilkins can be above such influences. Nor of fame. Surely no great distinction centres upon writers of “colonial romances” of late. Only the author herself may know her motives, but we who looked to her to keep the standard firm — and high — have now to regret the misfortune of a leader lost, a cause weakened However, it is a question after all if a “school,” understood in the European sense of the word, is possible for America just yet. France has had its schools of naturalism and romance, Russia its schools of realism, England its schools of psychologists. But France, Russia and England now, after so many centuries of growth, may be considered as units. Certain tendencies influence each one over its whole geographical extent at the same time. Its peoples have been welded together to a certain homogeneousness. It is under such conditions that “schools” of fiction, of philosophy, of science and the like arise.
But the United States are not yet, in the European sense, united. We have existed as a nation hardly more than a generation and during that time our peoples have increased largely by emigration. From all over the globe different races have been pouring in upon us. The North has been settled under one system, the South under another, the Middle West under another, the East under another. South Central and Far West under still others. There is no homogeneousness among us as yet. The Westerner thinks along different lines from the Easterner and arrives at different conclusions. What is true of California is false of New York. Mr. Cable’s picture of life is a far different thing than that of Mr. Howells.
The “school” implies a rallying of many elements under one standard. But no such thing is possible to-day for American writers. Mr. Hamlin Garland could not merge his personality nor pool his ideals with Edith Wharton. Their conceptions of art are as different as the conditions of life they study in their books.