THE LIBRARY OF THE 
 
 UNIVERSITY OF 
 
 NORTH CAROLINA 
 
 THE COLLECTION OF 
 NORTH CAROLINIANA 
 
 ENDOWED BY 
 
 JOHN SPRUNT HILL 
 
 CLASS OF 1889 
 
 CB 
 
 H523fl 
 
00032193545 
 
 This book must not 
 be taken from the 
 Library building. 
 
 laiS IITLE HAS 
 
 Form No. 471 
 
 BEEN MICROFILIV ED 
 
SHORT STORY WRITING; 
 
 An Art or a Trade? 
 
SHORT STORY- WRITING 
 
 An Art or a Trade? 
 
 by 
 
 N. BRYLLION FAGIN 
 
 Dean of the School of Literary Arts, Research Uni- 
 versity, Washington, D. C, and instructor in Short 
 Story Writing, University of Maryland. 
 
 W 
 
 NEW YORK 
 
 THOMAS SELTZER, INC. 
 
 1923 
 
Copyright, 1923, by 
 THOMAS SELTZER, I^X. 
 
 All Bights Reserved 
 
 PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OP AMERICA 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 CHAPTER PAGE 
 
 I Overture ....... 1 
 
 II Action 12 
 
 III *'0. Henryism'^ ...... 29 
 
 IV The Moving Pictures .... 48 
 V Verboten 67 
 
 VI The Artificial Ending . . . 101 
 
 VII Form and Substance .... 114 
 
 VIII Finale 125 
 
 IX Effect 132 
 
 Index 137 
 
 
SHORT STORY WRITING: 
 
 An Art or a Trade? 
 
CHAPTER I 
 
 Overture 
 
 Moods may be uncomfortable, and sad, and pain- 
 fully disturbing, but, on the other hand, they make 
 pleasant music occasionally. Here I sit in the dusk, 
 looking out Into the street that is ordinarily so 
 familiar to me, but has suddenly become blurred and 
 weirdly mysterious in the gathering murk. A veil 
 is over my eyes, which see the familiar houses across 
 the street, the young poplars In front of them, the 
 few passers-by. But my mind does not discern 
 these objects; It sees far subtler things — floating, 
 flimsy, evanescent. The dusk is in my mind, evok- 
 ing thoughts. Illusions, pictures — and speaking, 
 questioning, singing. The dusk is an overture to 
 the things I have set out to say, playing innumer- 
 able variations of my theme, whispering in every 
 note: "Stories, Stories, Stories!" 
 
 There as so many stories afloat in the world I 
 Every door and window and curtain and shade has 
 a story to tell; every clod and tree and leaf; and 
 every pebble of a human being washed by the waves 
 of life. And how many of these stories have I 
 helped to be told? And how many have I helped 
 
 1 
 
2 SHORT STORY-WRITING 
 
 to be maimed, mutilated of soul? Yes, and how 
 many have I helped to kill? 
 
 For I have been teaching, for a number of years, 
 the "Technique of Short Story-Writing," and my 
 guidance and judgment have meant life and death 
 to countless stories born in the breasts and minds 
 of trustful people. I have been the great discour- 
 ager and encourager of genius and quasi-genius, 
 and I know my hands are not without stain of liter- 
 ary blood. 
 
 I am not reproaching myself. Among the many 
 hundreds of men and women who derive their 
 daily bread and clothes and gasohne by directing 
 the story-fancy of the country's million or more 
 literary aspirants, I class myself among the most 
 conscientious and least harmful. The share of in- 
 jury I may have contributed has simply been the 
 unavoidable accompaniment of being engaged in a 
 profession grounded upon the popular belief that 
 literature is a trade, like plumbing, or tailoring, or 
 hod-carrying, and requires but an understanding of 
 the stupendous emoluments involved and a will to 
 learn. That it is in the interests of the profession 
 to foster and perpetuate this popular belief needs 
 no elaborate substantiation. But that the belief 
 itself should be based on a measure of solid truth 
 is a sardonic phenomenon calling for enlightening 
 discussion. 
 
 Professor Arlo Bates in one of his talks on 
 
OVERTURE 3 
 
 writing English once said: "Given a reasonable 
 intelligence and sufficient patience, any man with 
 the smallest gifts may learn to write at least mar- 
 ketable stuff, and may earn an honest livelihood, 
 if he studies the taste of the least exacting portion 
 of the public, and accommodates himself to the 
 whim of the time." It is the business of my pro- 
 fession to dedicate its services to the promotion of 
 the production of this "marketable stuff," and to 
 elevate its own calling it has blatantly labeled this 
 product as "Hterature." With this end in view 
 numerous textbooks have been written, thousands 
 of magazine articles have been pubhshed, and mil- 
 lions of copies of pamphlets and other advertising 
 matter distributed broadcast over the country. 
 The magic slogan is "Writers are made — not 
 born!" Then follows a "heart-to-heart" talk on 
 the advantages of a literary career, and the flour- 
 ishing of some dozen notable successes, measured 
 in formidable numbers of dollars received, usually 
 headed by Jack London and ending with Fannie 
 Hurst or some still more recent "arrival," and 
 finally concluding with the weighty query, explicitly 
 propounded or subtly implied: "Why aren't you 
 a story writer?" 
 
 The young man or young woman just out of the 
 gray portals of some fresh-water college and not 
 knowing what to turn to next, or the insipid clerk 
 dreaming over his ledger, or her typewriter, of 
 
4 SHORT STORY-WRITING 
 
 some Tyltyl cap thus suddenly comes Into possession 
 of a startling Idea. Why not be a story writer? 
 The work does not seem hard; compensation is said 
 to be good; and one Is master of one's own time 
 and destiny. The would-be casts his lot on the side 
 of practical reasoning, pays in a sum of money to 
 a school of fiction-writing or enrolls for a course 
 with one of our universities, buys a typewriter on 
 the installment plan, and begins to collect editorial 
 rejection slips. When the course is completed an- 
 other one is taken up, perhaps with another school, 
 thus crediting all lack of achievement to the insuf- 
 ficiency or inefficiency of the instruction received so 
 far, and the typewriter continues to click and the 
 periodic comings of the postman are again awaited 
 eagerly; for hadn't a major part of the instruction 
 been devoted to the inculcation of the conviction that 
 the world Is exceedingly tardy in extending its 
 acknowledgment of genius? Why, think of Jack 
 London; read his "Martin Eden" — biographical, 
 you know. Then, Masefield, dishwashing In New 
 York, and returning to England to become the fore- 
 most poet of the day; and Maupassant working 
 away at his little masterpieces for seven long years 
 before even venturing to bring them before the cold 
 light of the unappreciatlve world; and Kipling, 
 knocking about the streets of New York with his 
 wonderful Indian stories In his pockets and no 
 editor or publisher willing to look at them; and 
 
OVERTURE S 
 
 Knut Hamsun, working as a common farm hand in 
 North Dakota, and later as a common conductor 
 collecting fares on a Chicago street-car line, finally 
 returning to his native Norway to fame and fortune 
 and, ultimately, to a Nobel prize in literature. 
 Then think of our own more recent story writers — 
 Hergesheimer, writing away in obscurity for four- 
 teen years; Fannie Hurst, submitting thirty-five 
 stones to one periodical and succeeding with the 
 thirty-sixth — and now receiving $1800 for every 
 short story she writes, you know — etc., etc. 
 
 Fully ninety per cent, never do succeed and 
 finally become discouraged and drop out of the 
 ranks. Of the other ten per cent, many live to see 
 their names in print over a story or poem or article 
 in some obscure periodical, while a few ultimately 
 become our best sellers and their names adorn the 
 conspicuous pages in our most popular fiction peri- 
 odicals. Among the ninety per cent, are the hope- 
 lessly incompetent, with a sprinkling of artistic 
 idealists who utterly fail to accommodate them- 
 selves to the taste of the public and the whim of 
 the time. Among the ten per cent, are the keen, 
 shrewd, practical craftsmen who are able to get at 
 the spirit of the literary mart. To the chosen ones 
 among these comes the adulation of the populace 
 and the golden shekels blazing a glittering path 
 across the pages of special feature articles in our 
 Sunday newspapers. And these are the writers 
 
6 SHORT STORY-WRITING 
 
 who justify my profession in spreading the gospel 
 that one needs but a will to learn to achieve a suc- 
 cessful literary career. 
 
 If, with some such unpopular fellow as Nietzsche, 
 we should rise to a sublime pinnacle of contemp- 
 tuous detachment, we might say that the ninety per 
 cent, of failures do not deserve our pity. It is best 
 for a fighting, competitive world that weaklings 
 and incompetents are failures. We might even say 
 that the few artistic idealists among them deserve 
 no better. Life is a process of adaptation and com- 
 promise and, among men, a pair of sturdy legs are 
 of greater utility than a pair of feeble wings. 
 Perhaps there is a stern justice in the fate of a 
 Chatterton or, say, a Frangois Villon. But is it 
 not equally possible that by the grim, whimsical 
 jugglings of the gods a mist may sometimes en- 
 velop the battlefield of men, such let us say, as 
 brought confusion to the last hordes of the noble 
 Arthur, when 
 
 ". . .friend and foe were shadows in the mist, 
 
 And friend slew friend not knowing whom he slew; 
 
 and in the mist 
 
 Was many a noble deed, many a base, 
 And chance and craft..."? 
 
 Verily, such a "death-white" mist does envelop 
 our literary battlefield, and, in the confusion, my 
 profession, supported by the vast majority of 
 editors and professional critics, is aiding the weak 
 to conquer the strong. Blinded by the mist, we aid 
 
OVERTURE 7 
 
 aspirants to rise to power by craft and cunning, and 
 when they emerge to reign for a single day we 
 crown them, thus contributing to the future nothing 
 but the dust of our petty kings. Those who would 
 reign for centuries are jeered at, discouraged, van- 
 quished. 
 
 A dozen names leap to mind — pathetic examples 
 of great talent forced to decay, of great sincerity 
 diluted and polluted, of noble fires extinguished. 
 But of all these names the two most pregnant with 
 tragedy are those of Mark Twain and Jack London. 
 The author of "Huckleberry Finn" and "Tom 
 Sawyer," deep, penetrating, cynical, was obliged to 
 play the amusing clown until the end. The author 
 of "The Call of the Wild" and "Martin Eden" 
 until his dying breath continued to fill his lucrative 
 contracts with popular claptrap. If no one in 
 particular can be blamed, the sickly light shining 
 upon our literary firmament must take responsibil- 
 ity. There are formative years when a writer's 
 talent matures, mellows, is molded. The atti- 
 tude of the populace and, above all, of the oracles 
 on the mountains and in the temples is eagerly 
 watched and heeded. In the case of Jack London 
 the influence of this attitude as a determining factor 
 in the evolution of his career is a matter of record. 
 One of the editors of The Seven Arts, a monthly 
 magazine that was too lofty of purpose and too 
 pure of policy to continue existence, once invited 
 
8 SHORT STORY-WRITING 
 
 Jack London to submit any stories he might have 
 that had failed of acceptance with the popular mag- 
 azines because of lack of adaptation. London's 
 reply was that no such stories existed, and concluded 
 with a statement that explains very ingenuously the 
 melancholy disillusionment that pervades the best 
 of his work. "I don't mind telling you," he wrote, 
 "that had the United States been as kindly toward 
 the short story writer as France has always been 
 kindly, from the beginning of my writing career I 
 would have written many a score of short stories 
 quite different from the ones I have written."^ 
 It is clear, of course, to what particular brand of 
 kindliness London had reference. For the United 
 States is kindly toward the short story writer, very 
 kindly indeed. It was kindly toward Jack London 
 — but not in the way of helping him to bring forth 
 the best that was in him. And this was his tragedy 
 — and therein lies the unkindliness of the United 
 States toward all its short story writers. It wanted 
 none of the work of Jack London the man with a 
 soul and genuine emotions which burned for expres- 
 sion; it remunerated lavishly Jack London the 
 writer chap for his artificial concoctions that he de- 
 spised. It made Joseph Hergesheimer wait four- 
 teen years for the most moderate recognition while 
 giving such a writer as H. C. Witwer almost in- 
 stantaneous acclaim. It calls Ellis Parker Butler 
 
 ^Our America, by Waldo Frank. 
 
OVERTURE 9 
 
 a great humorist and George Ade a mere fable 
 writer. It proclaims O. Henry a prince of story 
 writers and doesn't even know that the unfortunate 
 Ambrose Bierce once lived among us. And the 
 vast majority of priests and oracles In my profession 
 persist In justifying and perpetuating this kind un- 
 klndllness and In Instructing the new generation 
 according to Its tenets. Example par excellence : 
 Speaks an Instructor In story writing In one of our 
 leading universities, In a critical and biographical 
 survey of our short story writers, of "Robert W. 
 Chambers, Imaginative artist," and of Jack London, 
 "at best a third-rate writer."^ 
 
 The sum and substance of all we preach may be 
 summarized In the one commandment we zealously 
 enforce above all others: "Thou shalt not write 
 anything an editor won't buy." Then we analyze 
 what editors do buy, arriving, by the process of in- 
 duction, at rules and regulations, which we promptly 
 proceed to Incorporate into textbooks for the un- 
 lettered. Some of our rules are flexible, others are 
 not, depending solely upon the attitude of their 
 compiler. An editor of a prominent periodical 
 once outlined the qualifications that recommended 
 a literary offering to him. He had set up before 
 him an ideal reader, an imaginary lady with a 
 family of daughters up in Vermont, and any manu- 
 script submitted to him had to answer satisfactorily 
 
 ^Our Short Story Writers, by Blanche Colton Williams, PH.D. 
 
10 SHORT STORY-WRITING 
 
 this mighty query: "Would the old lady want her 
 daughters to read this?" If this editor happened 
 to write a textbook for the instruction of the would- 
 be story writer, the old-lady-and-daughters question 
 would undoubtedly figure quite prominently therein. 
 I am not aware of any textbook on the subject by 
 this gentleman, but other writers have had this 
 question, or similar ones, in mind in evolving laws 
 for the would-be successful. 
 
 I admit that I have taught people to answer these 
 mighty queries, before permiitting them to entrust 
 their precious wares to the Post Office. For most 
 editors have a question of some sort — Will it 
 please some imaginary old man, or country girl, or 
 young parson, or the editor's own blue-eyed little 
 girl, or, especially, his advertisers; and when a man 
 or a woman pays hard-earned dollars for the in- 
 formation of how to "get by" the unfriendly editor, 
 my professional ethics demand that I supply this 
 Information to the limits of my knowledge. More- 
 over, when a man or a woman hands in a story 
 which has no earthly chance of being accepted by 
 any magazine because it is burdened with a soul 
 which violates every tradition and rule and policy 
 by which magazines are governed, it becomes my 
 duty to enlighten this student that his Is not the way 
 to "get by." For even such a student — an excep- 
 tion, to be sure — has read our advertising literature, 
 has studied the popular psychology of success, and 
 
OVERTURE 11 
 
 often, like the other plodders, sincerely believes that 
 a published story Is a masterpiece, a rejected one 
 worthless. If a story brings five dollars it Is a poor 
 one; If It brings fifty it is a good one; if it brings 
 five hundred it is a work of art. Gettlng-by, then, 
 becomes the supreme problem, and gettlng-by means 
 having in mind the old lady with her daughters or 
 the old man with the gout. And who can answer 
 what becomes of poor Lafcadio Hearn's queer idea 
 that 
 
 ''Literary success of any enduring kind is made only by refus- 
 ing to do what publishers want, by refusing to write what the 
 public want, by refusing to accept any popular standard, by refus- 
 ing to write anything to order"? 
 
 Poor, poor Indeed I 
 
CHAPTER II 
 
 Action 
 
 The very first rule our textbooks endeavor to 
 impress upon the would-be story writer is that 
 action must dominate his story. Whole chapters 
 are devoted to the importance of this ingredient, 
 bringing quotations from sundry editors proving 
 beyond the merest suspicion of a doubt that action 
 is the life and health of a story, the "punch" and 
 "pep" and "pull" of it. Then follow chapters on 
 how to capture action; on how to introduce it into 
 one's own stories; on how to govern its course to 
 the greatest advantage. 
 
 The editors quoted are, of course, all of the ad- 
 venture and action type magazines. One is reputed 
 to have stated his ideal beginning of a story to be 
 something like this: "'He got up and looked at 
 his watch. It was twelve o'clock. He went up 
 into the garret and hanged himself." Another is 
 said to like a more mystifying beginning, something 
 like this: "Who was the lady in 43? Was she the 
 blond man's wife, sister or sweetheart? John 
 couldn't sleep nights trying to find out." And still 
 another gives his preferences, in the form of an 
 
 12 
 
ACTION 13 
 
 announcement of a contest widely advertised in pro- 
 fessional magazines, for stories of "plot, of action, 
 of interesting complication. Spend the sweat of 
 your brow on deeds, not on acute character analysis; 
 on big situations, on suspense and appeal, not in 
 tedious description and fine writing." 
 
 The few editors who express preferences that 
 conflict with this cry for action are not quoted. 
 Here is one, for instance, who likes "realistic and 
 psychological stories from writers who want to do 
 for American life what Chekhov did for Russian 
 life. 'Plot' fiction of the type desired by popular 
 magazines is not wanted." But, then, there is the 
 implication that his is not a popular magazine, and 
 besides, he goes on to say that "our rates for fiction 
 are very modest." And here is another editor 
 who wants stories "that are characterized more by 
 feeling and artistry than by 'punch.' " But who is 
 she, for it is a she in this instance, to tell us what 
 is wanted ! Why, the circulation of her little peri- 
 odical is so insignificant that she is hardly justified 
 in having any wants at all! The fact that this little 
 publication publishes some of the most distinctive 
 stories written in America today does not count, of 
 course. It is not a widely-read magazine ; it does not 
 pay for contributions ; — it deserves no attention. 
 
 Plainly, our duty as instructors and moulders of 
 the new generation of story writers is to base our 
 instruction on the needs and preferences of the fie- 
 
14 SHORT STORY-WRITING 
 
 tion periodicals having the largest circulations and 
 able to pay well for material used. The inculcation 
 of literary ideals, the stimulation of original talent 
 and the enriching of our national letters are all 
 excellent themes for papers to be read before high- 
 brow clubs and respectable societies, but as prac- 
 tical propositions, in a practical world, they do not 
 lead anywhere. Any one who joins a class to take 
 up story-writing as a profession wants to sell — and 
 as quickly as possible. And the story that sells 
 today the quickest and brings the fattest check Is 
 the story of action. Hence our first rule: "Spend 
 the sweat of your brow on deeds !" 
 
 It is true that there do creep up some unpleasant 
 contradictions in our methods. After laying down 
 the law of action we refer students to Edgar Allan 
 Poe or Robert Louis Stevenson or Maupassant for 
 perfect short-story models, and they come back to 
 us In a state of perplexity. They have picked up 
 Poe and some garrulous old critic, in a superfluous 
 introduction, had pronounced "The Fall of the 
 House of Usher" to be Poe's best tale. They have 
 picked up Stevenson, and some equally old-fashioned 
 pedant had classed "Markheim" as a masterpiece. 
 They have picked up Maupassant, and, again, some 
 ancient scholar had lifted "Solitude" to a pre- 
 eminent position. Yet not one of these three stories 
 Is particularly conspicuous for action. Poe seems 
 to have spent the sweat of his brow in creating an 
 
ACTION 15 
 
 atmosphere of extreme morbidity (oh, terror-strik- 
 ing word in our optimistic texts!); Stevenson, on 
 acute character analysis; and the insane Frenchman 
 on some irrelevant pratthngs about soHtude and the 
 whys and wherefores of this queer life of ours. 
 
 Occasionally some student with sufficient courage 
 to voice his perplexity timidly inquires: "Would any 
 magazine accept such stories today? There is so 
 little action and still less optimism in them!" I 
 think of all the stories I have read in recent periodi- 
 cals that I can remember and am obliged to admit 
 that few present-day magazines would be tempted to 
 accept a story of the type on which the masters 
 chose to lavish their best work. I think this esti- 
 mate conservative, but soon the various anthologies 
 of the best short stories that have appeared in our 
 magazines in the last half dozen years leap into my 
 mind and protest against my harsh verdict. Some 
 sort of a change really has come over our fiction 
 recently. Fully twenty-five per cent, of the stories 
 in Mr. O'Brien's yearly collection, for instance, are 
 decidedly not of the '"rapid action" type, and more 
 than seventy-five per cent, of the stories in such an 
 anthology as that compiled by the late William Dean 
 Howells would not stand the "action" test, although 
 the latter anthology is not a very exact reflector 
 of modern tendencies since but few living writers 
 are represented. 
 
 So it becomes necessary to explain the discrepancy 
 
16 SHORT STORY-WRITING 
 
 between the type of story we teach our students to 
 produce and the type of story we refer them to 
 for study purposes. It becomes necessary to empha- 
 size the fact that such periodicals as "The Little 
 Review," "Midland," "The Pagan" (discontinued), 
 "The Stratford Journal" (temporarily suspended), 
 "The Wave," and a few others of the "unpopular" 
 group do not pay for contributions and that the 
 few "leaders" or "giants" in the group pay but little, 
 and that, therefore, few "respectable" writers con- 
 tribute to them. Of the youngsters that do make 
 their way to the top, once in a great while, through 
 the medium of these high-brow little magazines one 
 or two may ever hope to get into the "Big Four" 
 or similar high-prestiged and well-paying periodi- 
 cals. So that while it may be flattering to receive 
 the pale encomiums of a few snobbish critics, the 
 safest way is to write "real" stories full of red- 
 blooded action and reap a golden harvest. Let 
 those who do not care for the riches of a material 
 world be satisfied with the deluge of praise poured 
 upon a Sherwood Anderson; as for most, Hol- 
 worthy Hall or Octavus Roy Cohen seems a more 
 inviting model. 
 
 And if this does not really explain the uncanny 
 discrepancy in our texts and they still seem some- 
 what confused and more than a bit contradictory, 
 we can, as a last resort, have recourse to that elo- 
 quent dictum: Laws should be studied to be broken I 
 
ACTION 17 
 
 And we suddenly acquire the becoming halo of 
 Iconoclasts and have at last a satisfactory explana- 
 tion of why our students should read Poe and 
 Maupassant and Stevenson, yet not model their 
 own work along the best of these masters; why 
 they should study our anthologies full of such 
 ''anemic" stories as those of Dreiser, Anderson, 
 Cabell, Waldo Frank, Ben Hecht, Djuna Barnes, 
 and even those of Susan Glaspell and Alice Brown, 
 yet not write in similar vein but should emulate 
 rather writers whose names never appear in anthol- 
 ogies. 
 
 Having thus explained the validity of our first 
 rule and having insisted on strict compliance there- 
 with, we proceed to evolve methods for a satisfac- 
 tory meeting of our rule. If action must dominate 
 a story there should be some system of capturing 
 this indispensable ingredient, of imprisoning it with- 
 in our brief literary form, of whipping it into mar- 
 ketable shape. We find this system and reduce It 
 to terse understandable terms. We dig down into 
 our bag of story-lore and lo ! we flourish before the 
 weak eyes of the uninitiate another magic com- 
 mandment : Complicate ! Complicate if you would 
 have Action in your stories. Complicate if you 
 would have Suspense. Complicate if you would 
 exchange rejection slips for checks I 
 
 It is true that we are careful to explain our 
 schemes of complication, lest they be taken too 
 
18 SHORT STORY-WRITING 
 
 literally. Accompanying our commandments are 
 various precautionary remarks about Logic and 
 Plausibility and numerous other qualifying state- 
 ments. But in the main Action and Complication 
 are held forth as the two most important principles 
 of sound story-writing. First of all, then, our 
 students are urged to plot and complicate so that 
 there be not a tedious moment in their product. 
 Let every sentence move forward the action. Let 
 new developments, startling in their unusualness 
 and unexpectedness, crop up all the time. And 
 don't forget to keep in reserve the grandest develop- 
 ment of all, the most surprising, for the very 
 end. The Denouement is the thing 1 Charming 
 word — French, you know. 
 
 I remember a young girl who attended my classes 
 but a short time. ''My weakness seems to be a lack 
 of inventiveness," she confided to me. "My plots 
 are too quiet." She handed in a story and I agreed 
 with her. Her plots were quiet, but it was the 
 quiet of Spoon River and Winesburg and Gopher 
 Prairie. She knew intimately the little old Southern 
 town she hailed from, and she had the gift of mak- 
 ing me know it. I knew it in its past and present 
 and future, which was all of one tone and texture; 
 I knew its proud inhabitants, patrician and plebeian; 
 I felt its pulse. I told the girl not to attempt to 
 infuse plot into her story and suggested a number of 
 magazines that might accept it as it was. 
 
ACTION 19 
 
 "But I don't want to write for these small pub- 
 lications!" she objected. "Nobody has ever heard 
 of them. I want to get into the 'Saturday Evening 
 Post,' the 'Cosmopolitan,' and the 'Red Book.' 
 And they want more plot than I manage to put into 
 my stories; that's what — told me." And she named 
 a much advertised commercial critic. 
 
 Evidently I proved incapable of generating within 
 her the coveted element of inventiveness, for the 
 girl dropped out after an exceedingly brief stay 
 and I have heard nothing from or of her since. Her 
 name has not yet appeared in the Saturday Evening 
 Post, nor in the Cosmopolitan, nor in the Red Book 
 — nor, to my knowledge, in any other magazine. 
 The eminent critic had done his work very well 
 indeed. His teachings that every story must have 
 an ingenious plot had seemingly struck root, and 
 the girl with her plotless little town and its plotless 
 little lives has probably decided, in utter despair, 
 that her mind is hopelessly devoid of the one 
 essential for successful story-writing — inventiveness. 
 
 Of course, she could have been made to stay and 
 persevere a little longer, and perhaps she might 
 have yet attained her modicum of success. If to 
 her quiet little story a few entanglement tricks had 
 been dexterously applied the girl would have been 
 satisfied and probably also some editor or another 
 of the more remunerative magazines to which she 
 aspired. The aspect of her sleepy Southern town 
 
20 SHORT STORY-WRITING 
 
 would have undergone a strange metamorphosis, 
 and her lethargic hero and heroine would have been 
 changed into inhabitants of some hectic metropolis, 
 but that, of course, would have merely proved the 
 magic of sound technique. 
 
 One of the surest of these tricks of ours is the 
 introduction of a second or third line of interest. 
 Where a story is thin and uninteresting an entirely 
 different story can be brought in and the two skill- 
 fully connected, related and correlated. Our texts 
 abound in geometric diagrams of lines and curves 
 and circles, bisected and intersected, zig-zagging, 
 up and down, rising to various points of crises and 
 climaxes and catastrophes, and falling again with 
 the inevitable denouement. These diagrams look 
 like sacred hieroglyphics to the credulous student 
 who approaches their cryptic meaning with a rever- 
 ent awe. Given a story that reads too "narratives- 
 like, that lacks interest because too few crises are 
 arrived at, and its weakness can usually be traced 
 to its single line of interest which is not thick 
 enough to generate the necessary amount of sus- 
 pense. The introduction of another line brightens 
 it up, adds suspense, complication — Interest. 
 
 The process really is a simple one. The moving 
 pictures employ it, invariably, with greatest effect. 
 A young man is leading the confident life of a fresh- 
 man in some Middle-Western town. The first line 
 is started. The young man's environment is pic- 
 
ACTION 21 
 
 tured, his habits and likes and dislikes and his tower- 
 ing ambitions. He is a marked man. But here his 
 line breaks. The continuity writer has become busy 
 introducing an entirely different line of interest. 
 Beautiful Lady Psyche has left her shire castle and 
 is sailing for America on the Mammoth liner. The 
 orchestra is playing, and the Lady is standing on 
 the upper deck, her delicate white hands grasping 
 the railing. Her eyes are deep and wistful and 
 hopeful. We know, of course, even at this time, 
 that she will in some fateful way meet our unsus- 
 pecting freshman. It is only a question of time. 
 Her career and his will become entangled and 
 merged into one. In the meantime we are watch- 
 ing and waiting. But at this point the continuity 
 writer again breaks the line and begins an entirely 
 new one. On the liner is "Taffy" Slim and he is 
 scheming to rob Lady Psyche of her famous jewels. 
 Now we are watching Taffy's career. He succeeds 
 and makes his get-away, but Lady Psyche's jewels 
 are known the world over, having been photog- 
 raphed on numerous occasions for the rotogravure 
 supplements of our Sunday newspapers, and Taffy 
 finds himself unable to dispose of them. He wan- 
 ders through the length and breadth of our land 
 starving, with a fortune's worth of jewels in his 
 pocket, until finally, he comes to our Mid-Western 
 college town and meets our freshman. This clever 
 hero buys the jewels for a bun and — oh, gallantry of 
 
22 SHORT STORY-WRITING 
 
 gallantries I — undertakes to return them to their 
 beautiful heart-broken owner. Now we see how 
 these three lines have been crossed and recrossed 
 and why! We don't know yet what the gallant's 
 reward will consist of but we hope it will be a pro- 
 posal of matrimony; in fact, we are not willing to 
 accept anything less for our hero. 
 
 In the short story this double-or multiple-line-of- 
 interest method was employed most successfully by 
 O. Henry and is clung to by most of his followers. 
 Its skillful manipulation undoubtedly results in a 
 more marketable product. It insures a thrilling 
 sequence of events, if not always a logical one. It 
 is one of our most venerated tricks. We underline 
 it in our texts. We point out its potency in unmis- 
 takable terms. We hold it up as a shining revela- 
 tion to a gasping novitiate, and for revelations the 
 timeworn practice is to demand blind, absolute 
 acceptance. 
 
 One result of our attitude has just been traced in 
 the experience of the girl with her sleepy little 
 Southern town story. The incompetent who cannot 
 think in terms of criss-cross lines is eliminated. 
 Artificiality is not only encouraged but placed at a 
 premium. Sincerity and that highest of artistic 
 qualities, simplicity, are held up as baneful stumb- 
 ling blocks in the way of successful authorship. We 
 may have read Joseph Hergesheimer but we have 
 never heard of his philosophic Chwang-Tze whose 
 
ACTION 23 
 
 pithy sentence prefaces "Java Head," a sentence 
 full of illuminating words: "It is only the path of 
 pure simplicity which guards and preserves the 
 spirit." By undermining the young story-teller's 
 faith in the path of pure simplicity we undermine 
 his spirit; we maim it; often destroy it completely. 
 Aside from the effect upon our story writers, this 
 doctrine of constant action and complication and 
 entanglement has also been one of the causes that 
 have kept American fiction until very recently 
 almost entirely in the cheaply Romantic school of 
 the long-forgotten past. It has become strongly 
 rooted in our readers through a perpetual diet of 
 fiction that embodies these "vital" ingredients, and 
 consequently also in our editors who must alertly 
 watch the demand to engage successfully in its 
 supply. As far as we are concerned it would seem 
 that the great realists and naturalists have lived 
 and died in vain. We are still writing largely fairy 
 tales, American in color and setting to be sure, about 
 bizarre adventures and quixotic adventurers. And 
 in our institutions of learning we are still preaching 
 that stories must be full of thrilling incidents and 
 brave denouements to be interesting and meritorious. 
 We are still living in the fantastic land of improb- 
 able plots where men bound and rebound according 
 to specific orders of the author. That "the value 
 of a dramatic action has nothing to do with novelty 
 of incident or the tingle of physical suspense" ; that 
 
24 SHORT STORY-WRITING 
 
 "Character, motive and fatality, man and the earth 
 and the gods — such are the elements of dramatic 
 action,"^ has, as yet, occurred to few of us. 
 
 An admission must be made : It is becoming 
 increasingly difficult to find plot material that hasn't 
 been worn threadbare by immoderate use. The 
 South Seas and the Pacific Islands have been pretty 
 well covered. Alaska and Hudson Bay are no 
 longer inviting. The cow-boy story, though not 
 yet entirely extinct, is fast becoming so. The crook 
 story, though still popular with a particular type of 
 magazine and magazine purchaser, requires a 
 greater measure of ingenuity to be attractive. Base- 
 ball and football heroism is still going strong but 
 the market is limited. The Country-Boy-who-be- 
 comes-a-Wall-Street-magnate story will probably 
 continue as long as the large business fiction maga- 
 zines will retain their million-and-more circulation 
 marks, but it is beginning to tax the writer's inven- 
 tive capacity for brilliant deals for the hero to get 
 to that crowded narrow thoroughfare below Brook- 
 lyn bridge. The rash-things-that-pretty-girls-do 
 story is just now having its vogue, but will blow over 
 like a Bill Hart or Douglas Fairbanks fame. The 
 situation is gloomy indeed, even critical — if we wish 
 to look at it that way. Many old writers as well as 
 young ones admit it. 
 
 ^ The Case of "John Haivthorne," Ludwig Lewisohn, The 
 Nation, February 16, 1921. 
 
ACTION 25 
 
 But we don't. We are optimists. When cor- 
 nered we say: "Yes, the present market does have 
 some such aspect, but it simply proves one thing — 
 the necessity for the greater mastery of technique, 
 for more originality." Then we proceed to elu- 
 cidate. We define originality. It isn't concerned 
 with theme but with the handling of theme. There 
 are no new themes under the sun; never were. A 
 novel twist applied to a threadbare theme is origi- 
 nality. These twists can be learned — that's what we, 
 teachers of technique, are here for: to show how. 
 The secret lies not only in plenty of action and com- 
 plication but in the spectacular handling of these 
 elements. There are many ways of doing it effec- 
 tively; plot order, for instance. 
 
 The common fault of the inexpert literary mech- 
 anician is that he usually tells his story in the 
 chronological order. Assuming that his story pre- 
 sents a series of twenty steps, composed of incidents 
 and episodes of varying Intensity, he presents them 
 all in the order of time of occurrence, thus obtaining 
 a quiet narrative lacking in either suspense or 
 "punch." But it is possible to juggle these steps in 
 different ways so as to get them to unfold in a most 
 dramatic sequence. It is possible to reverse this 
 chronological order and begin with incident number 
 twenty and work back to number one. That is, 
 instead of narrating the crimes of our picaresque 
 hero, which finally get him into jail, in the order of 
 
26 SHORT STORY-WRITING 
 
 commission, we begin with the man already safely 
 tucked away behind the bars — it is nearly always a 
 man; women get into jails but rarely in our fiction, 
 except for the heart-rending scene of meeting their 
 husbands or sweethearts — and then work back to 
 his crimes and the day when evil was not yet in his 
 heart and he was still attending the Y. M. C. A. 
 
 We may then use this "logical" method of plot 
 order or we may use a mixed method or we may 
 use any one of a number of variants of these 
 methods. We may, for example, begin with step 
 number five and run up to step number ten, then 
 work in steps one to five and proceed with step num- 
 ber eleven. Or we may begin with step one, then 
 skip number two, withholding it as a missing link 
 in the chain for the sole purpose of intriguing the 
 reader, and spring it after step nineteen. All we 
 need to know is how to do these jugglings with the 
 greatest possible skill — and this is where originality 
 comes to the fore: in the play of craftsmanship. 
 
 This jugglery we can teach with an absolutely 
 clear conscience. We can cite any number of great 
 masters who have at various times employed these 
 several schemes of plot development. Maupassant 
 and Kipling and Stevenson and Poe and O. Henry 
 and even the quiet Chekhov have all placed their 
 stamp of approval upon these methods by employ- 
 ing them in their own celebrated little masterpieces. 
 There is really no necessity to question whether 
 
ACTION 27 
 
 they came upon these methods consciously or Intui- 
 tively, from within or without. This would raise 
 the uncomfortable problem of synthetic and analytic 
 processes, which would merely confuse the student 
 and lead nowhere. There may be a distinction 
 between Incidents marshalling themselves In some 
 inevitable sequence of which the author may not 
 even be aware and Incidents juggled about artifi- 
 cially by a writer who has had it Impressed upon him 
 that method A is more dramatic than method B. 
 There may be a distinction; but for our purposes 
 it is best not to consider it. Suffice us merely to 
 point out that our story-construction lore is justified 
 by the masters. The deductions are simple enough : 
 Learn the tricks of the masters and be a master 
 yourself. 
 
 I said we can teach plot legerdemain with a clear 
 conscience. As for me, however, I have often 
 shuddered to think what a zealous graduate might 
 have done to such a story as Conrad's "Youth." In 
 his or her deft hand it certainly would not have 
 remained a mere "Narrative," told in the colorless 
 chronological order; it would have become a finished 
 short-story. Assuredly finished. 
 
 And yet it must be admitted that a skillful manip- 
 ulation of our tricks is, after all, not so easily 
 acquired. There is a brain and a temperament 
 which is especially adaptable to them, but to the 
 majority they remain an occult science forever 
 
28 SHORT STORY-WRITING 
 
 beyond their ken. These unhappy toilers cannot 
 apply them to their labors. For most students are 
 unable to construct the slightest kind of plot. 
 There's a certain knack that must be acquired. The 
 young, inexperienced mind must be disciplined along 
 certain grooves. Most students seem to be unable 
 to concentrate unless driven to do so. I experiment 
 with my class. Unexpectedly I announce a theme 
 and request the class to construct an incident. Like 
 children bent upon solving a puzzle, they go to 
 work and I am left to examine the result. Fully 
 fifty per cent, have used the same situation and 
 denouement, as if by agreement; forty-nine per cent. 
 have striven to inject a novel twist or "O. Henry- 
 ism" at the end. But the one per cent! Why here 
 is but a thin bit of paper, with just a few lines 
 scribbled on it. If this is an incident, it is a very 
 short incident, indeed. It reads: "I have never 
 been able to write under pressure. I must find my- 
 self in a proper mood. I suppose I shall never make 
 a story writer." I smile. I have a vivid picture of 
 young Tommy Sandys losing his scholarship because 
 one elusive word had refused to respond to his 
 bidding. 
 
CHAPTER III 
 
 "O. Henryism'' 
 
 The mottoes of most of our fiction periodicals are 
 told on their covers: "A magazine of clever fic- 
 tion," "A magazine of bright fiction," "A magazine 
 of entertaining fiction," "A magazine of frisky fic- 
 tion." But with all the available supply of novel 
 plot material exhausted by writers who had the good 
 fortune of being here before our generation had an 
 opportunity, what is left to us is neither clever, 
 bright, nor entertaining. However, O. Henry 
 proved that it was possible to take the same age-old 
 material and brighten it up with a coat of sparkling 
 cleverness. He had but to juggle his incidents in 
 such a way as to make them follow one another in 
 a most spectacular sequence. He had but to play 
 upon the credulity of his reader. Like the stage 
 magician, he said to his audience: "Observe that 
 there is a tree here and a fountain there, and with- 
 out moving a finger I shall reverse their positions. 
 Now watch, presto! Here they are I" And the 
 audience applauded, wondering how he did it, and 
 crowned him king of the wizards. 
 
 The king of the wizards, then, occupies a most 
 
 29 
 
30 SHORT STORY-WRITING 
 
 honorable position in our textbooks. Stories written 
 in the vein of O. Henry sell more readily than 
 stories written in the vein of any other master. 
 There is a brightness, a snappiness, a cheerfulness 
 of style about them that draws the artistic sensibili- 
 ties of editors. And yet our insistence upon the 
 emulation of O. Henry has not produced many other 
 O. Henrys. Perhaps it is because O. Henry went 
 to the highways and byways of North and Central 
 America for his plot material which he then juggled 
 to his heart's content, while our students go to O. 
 Henry for their plot material. Perhaps also it is 
 because O. Henryism was as much a part of William 
 Sidney Porter as was his speaking voice which is 
 buried with him. 
 
 A very young student once lodged a complaint 
 against her own unruly self. "It is absolutely impos- 
 sible for me to write a single sentence in the O. 
 Henry way," she said. "My stuff somehow doesn't 
 have that swing — it's dead. I don't believe I shall 
 ever learn. I am too sad of disposition, I suppose." 
 
 That was one time I did not smile. "Why should 
 you want to write like O. Henry?" I asked. "Why 
 don't you try to wear the shape of shoes or the 
 color of clothes he wore, or drink the kind of ginger- 
 ale he preferred?" But I was sorry later for my 
 unguarded outburst, for I realize that that was not 
 the way to make story writers, not the kind that 
 sell, at any rate. 
 
^'O. HENRYISM" 31 
 
 After all, O. Henry's technique consisted mainly 
 of a series of clever tricks, and tricks can be taught, 
 even though not perhaps his dexterity in performing 
 them. His was truly a gift of the Magi and not 
 really a gift of the gods. Admitting that through 
 his superficial cleverness there occasionally glimmers 
 an uncommon understanding of and a sympathy for 
 the people whose destinies he juggles, the fact 
 remains that his example is that of clever execution 
 rather than artistic conception. It remains needless, 
 then, for us to point to anything else in his makeup 
 save his successful technique. We read a dozen of 
 his stories, call attention to their brilliant manner- 
 isms and surprising twists at the end, and exhort 
 our students to go and do likewise. Sometimes we 
 go a little further and discuss the underlying psy- 
 chology upon which O. Henry based his loops and 
 twists — his belief that our modern reader was so 
 well-nourished on stereotyped fiction as to guess the 
 conclusion of a story by its beginning, and, conse- 
 quently, O. Henry led him on to believe that his 
 guess was being borne out until the very end, when 
 a pleasantly startling disappointment was sprung 
 upon him. 
 
 To substantiate our eulogies of the wizard and 
 to impress upon the would-be writer the importance 
 of studying and emulating O. Henry, we quote copi- 
 ously from Stephen Leacock, Prof. C. Alphonso 
 Smith, and numerous other O. Henry friends. We 
 
32 SHORT STORY-WRITING 
 
 seldom, if ever, quote opinions of critics and editors 
 who are hostile to O. Henry and his cult. Here is 
 one editor, for instance, who actually believes that 
 "the effects of such mannerism, trickery, shallow- 
 ness, and artifice as distinguished O. Henry's 
 work, are baleful on all literary students who do 
 not despise them."^ We know that this editor's 
 opinion must not be credited with importance. His 
 is only a small Greenwich Village publication. The 
 checks that writers receive come from editors who 
 do like O. Henry's ways; in fact, prefer O. Henry- 
 esque stories almost to the exclusion of any other 
 type. Hence we examine the work of our students 
 with a feeling of satisfaction. By far the greater 
 number have imbibed our teachings. Their work 
 shows a striving after cleverness, witty flippancy, 
 grotesque slang, and an attempt to cap the denoue- 
 ment with a novel twist, a perfectly surprising turn. 
 Thus we know that our work is not in vain; at 
 least some of our students are on the way to success. 
 Again, this is not a plea on behalf of those incom- 
 petents who are not O. Henryesquely gifted and arc 
 therefore not on the way to success. It is merely 
 a dispassionate consideration of the profession of 
 teaching story-writing and its existing standards and 
 ethics. Since. the O. Henry story is held up as the 
 supreme model, it is only fair to inquire into the 
 
 * Joseph Kling, editor of The Pagan, in symposium appended to 
 "The Best College Short stories." The Stratford Company. 
 
"O. HENRYISM" 33 
 
 results thus produced. We have been so eloquent 
 with pride on the progress of our short story. Since 
 Professor Brander Matthews first expounded its 
 philosophy, away back in 1884, and connected the 
 two little words by a hyphen to distinguish this form 
 beginning with an Initial Impulse and running up to 
 a Climax and falling down to a Denouement from 
 the story which is merely short, it has become our 
 prevailing form of literature. The quantity turned 
 out annually is beyond the dreams of such a pioneer 
 as Poe. But the quality — ah, that is another story I 
 What proportion of this wholesale output can be 
 candidly, suppressing for the moment our desire to 
 experience flattering sensations, added to our 
 national literary treasury? How many memorable 
 stories come to mind to waylay us with their poig- 
 nant spell of subtlety and beauty — such, let us say, 
 as Kipling's "Without Benefit of Clergy," or Chek- 
 hov's "Ward No. 6," or Maupassant's "In the 
 Moonlight"? Few, isn't it? And peculiar, is it 
 not, that though we have been heaping the warmest 
 of praise upon Richard Harding Davis and Clar- 
 ence Budington Kelland and George Randolph 
 Chester and Richard Washburn Child and Mary 
 Roberts Rinehart and a score or more of our other 
 popular writers, the few memorable stories that do 
 come to mind were not written by these favorites. 
 How much of the O. Henryesque is to be found in 
 Mary E. Wilkins Freeman's "Revolt of Mother," 
 
34 SHORT STORY-WRITING 
 
 or in Theodore Dreiser's "The Lost Phoebe,"^ or, 
 to take a more recent example, in Anzia Yezierska's 
 "Hungry Hearts"?^ These stories are everything 
 that the wizard's stories are not. They are neither 
 breezy, nor flippant, nor surprising; nor "refresh- 
 ing." Judged by our standards they are anomahes. 
 I am sufficiently steeped in our inspirational litera- 
 ture to be aware of the dangers of pessimism. 
 The Doctors Crane and Orison Swett Marden and 
 Walt Mason have left their effect upon my disposi- 
 tion. But it is only logical to deduct that if all the 
 O. Henry standards that we have so triumphantly 
 established and extolled for the guidance of our 
 story writers have failed to produce a single great 
 story to compare with the best that other countries 
 which do not preach and practice O. Henryism have 
 produced, there is something wrong with our stand- 
 ards. These are unusual times we are living in. 
 Everything that has seemed to us wise and sound 
 and sublime is coming in for a share of skepticism 
 and revaluation. Unquestionable things are being 
 questioned. Is it not a propitious time to attempt 
 a revaluation of our short-story dogmas? What 
 is the contribution of O. Henryism to our national 
 letters and to the short story as a form of literary 
 expression? How great an artist really was Wil- 
 
 2 Both of these stories are to be found in William Dean Howells' 
 "Great Modern American Stories: An Anthology." Boni & 
 Liveright. 
 
 * Houghton, Mifflin Co. 
 
"O. HENRYISM" 35 
 
 liam Sidney Porter, the founder of the Cult? Is it 
 sacrilege to attempt to answer these questions? 
 
 O. Henry left us more than two hundred and fifty 
 stories. In the decade before his death he turned 
 out an average of twenty-five stories a year. Mr. 
 William Johnston, an editor of the New York 
 World relates* the struggles of O. Henry in trying 
 to live up to a three-year contract he had with that 
 paper calling for a story a week. There were weeks 
 when O. Henry would haunt the hotels and cafes 
 of New York in a frantic search of material, and 
 there were times when the stories could not be pro- 
 duced on time and O. Henry would sit down and 
 write the most ingenious excuses. Needless to state 
 that O. Henry's stories bear all the marks of this 
 haste and anxiety. Nearly all of them are sketchy, 
 reportorial, superficial, his gift of felicitous expres- 
 sion "camouflaging" the poverty of theme and char- 
 acter. The best of them lack depth and roundness, 
 often disclosing a glint of a sharp idea unworked, 
 untransmuted by thought and emotion. 
 
 Of his many volumes of stories, "The Four 
 MlUion" is without doubt the one which is most 
 widely known. It was his bold challenge to the 
 world that he was the discoverer — even though he 
 gave the census taker due credit — of four million 
 people Instead of four hundred In America's metrop- 
 olis that first attracted attention and admiration. 
 
 *The Bookman, February 1921. 
 
36 SHORT STORY-WRITING 
 
 The Implication was that he was imbued with the 
 purpose of unbaring the hves of these four miUion 
 and especially of the neglected lower classes. A 
 truly admirable and ambitious self-assignment. And 
 so we have "The Four Million." But to what 
 extent was he successful in carrying out his assign- 
 ment. How much of the surging, shifting, pale, 
 rich, orderly, chaotic, and wholly incongruous life 
 of New York is actually pulsating in the twenty-five 
 little stories collected in the volume? 
 
 What is the first one, "Tobin's Palm," if not a 
 mere long-drawn-out jest? Is it anything more than 
 an anecdote exploiting palmistry as a "trait" — to 
 use another technical term — or point? It isn't New 
 York, nor Tobin, nor any other character, that 
 makes this story interesting. It is O. Henry's trick 
 at the end. The prophecy is fulfilled, after all, in 
 such an unexpected way, and we are such satisfied 
 children I 
 
 What is the second story, the famous "Gift of 
 the Magi"? We have discussed It and analyzed It 
 in our texts and lauded it everywhere. How much 
 of the life of the four million does It hold up to us? 
 It Is better than the first story; yes, much better. 
 But why is it a masterpiece? Not because It tries 
 to take us into the home of a married couple 
 attempting to exist in our largest city on the hus- 
 band's income of $20 per week. No, that wouldn't 
 make it famous. Much better stories of poverty 
 
"O. HENRYISM" 37 
 
 have been written, much more faithful and poig- 
 nant, and the great appreciative public does not 
 even remember them. It is the wizard's mechanics, 
 his stunning invention — that's the thing I Delia 
 sells her hair and buys a fob for hubby's watch; 
 while at the same time hubby sells his watch and 
 buys her a comb. But you don't know all this until 
 they get together for the presentation of the gifts, 
 and then you gasp. We call this working criss-cross, 
 a plot of cross purposes. In this story we usually 
 overlook entirely one little thing — the last para- 
 graph. It really is superfluous and therefore con- 
 stitutes a breech of technique. We preach against 
 preaching. Tell your story, we say, and stop. 
 "Story" is synonymous with action. O. Henry 
 didn't stop — so that even he was sometimes a 
 breaker of laws. But this uncomfortable thought 
 doesn't really have to be noted ! 
 
 "A Cosmopolite in a Cafe" is a little skit proving 
 that "since Adam no true citizen of the world has 
 existed." It is the type of writing that is termed 
 "short story" by our humorous weeklies. 
 
 "Between Rounds" is the first story in the volume 
 that really displays O. Henry's gift of mature satire. 
 Here underneath his superficial jesting lurks reahty. 
 The pathos in the lives of the McCaskeys and the 
 Murphys is touched upon, lightly to be sure, but 
 sufficiently to indicate that O. Henry saw it. 
 
 The plotted happy ending with plenty of "punch" 
 
38 SHORT STORY-WRITING 
 
 Is best exemplified by "The Skylight Room." The 
 gullible reader must have really thought that Billy 
 Jackson was little Miss Leeson's name of some star. 
 But not so, ha-ha ! It really was the name of the 
 ambulance doctor who came to take her to the hos- 
 pital. "Fishy," you say? Not any more than "A 
 Service of Love." Not that the young couple in 
 this latter story might not have both worked and 
 concealed the fact from each other. But why both 
 in a laundry and in the same laundry? Coincidence 
 of course I Incidentally, can you recognize the 
 "Gift of the Magi" here? Shakespeare may have 
 never repeated, but O. Henry did, very frequently 
 too. Here we have again the poor loving couple 
 trying to get along on next to nothing a week. A 
 slightly different twist but the formula is the same. 
 Even the names of the principals are almost the 
 same. In "The Gift of the Magi" we had Delia 
 and Jim, In "A Service of Love" we have Delia and 
 Joe. 
 
 In "The Coming-out of Maggie" O. Henry again 
 brushes real life and real romance. In the hands of 
 a sincere artist this material could have been worked 
 into an immortal story. As a matter of fact, the 
 same basic theme — the heart-hunger of a neglected 
 girl — has been treated by Gorki in his "Her 
 Lover."^ And the difference between the two 
 stories is the difference between tinsel and diamond. 
 
 ^ See "Best Russian Short Stories," Modern Library. 
 
''O. HENRYISM" 39 
 
 ''Man About Town," "The Cop and the Anthem" 
 and "An Adjustment of Nature" are trivial things — 
 expanded anecdotes at best. "Memories of a Yellow 
 Dog" presents O. Henry at his happiest. It is a 
 fine bit of satire — a field in which lay his strength. 
 In "The Love-Philtre of Ikey Schoenstein" the 
 wizard again displays his bag of theatrical tricks. 
 And so he does in "Mammon and the Archer," 
 with its needless anti-climax — again breaking the 
 law: "Thou shalt stop when through." "Spring- 
 time a la Carte" is a long-drawn-out joke. So is 
 "From a Cabby's Seat." In "The Green Room" O. 
 Henry once more had a cursory gUmpse of his 
 "four million." 
 
 Now we reach "An Unfinished Story." Thanks 
 to the good imps that may have influenced him to 
 leave this story unfinished. It is the only one in the 
 volume that shows O. Henry was capable of genuine 
 emotion and had a sense of artistic truth. Dr. 
 Blanche Colton Williams would not include it among 
 O. Henry's best because "It is just what the author 
 called it — unfinished.'" Yes, admittedly, it is un- 
 finished — in a technical sense. The $5 a week shop- 
 girl has nothing to wear and does not go to the 
 dance with Piggy. And that's all that happens, 
 except a little sermon at the end in which O. Henry 
 intimates that the fellow that sets fire to an orphan 
 asylum, and murders a blind man for his pennies, 
 
 «"Our Short Story V^riters." Moffat, Yard and Company. 
 
40 SHORT STORY-WRITING 
 
 has a cleaner conscience than the prosperous-look- 
 ing gentleman who hires working girls and pays 
 them five or six dollars a week to live on in the city 
 of New York. To "finish" this story would have 
 necessitated the distortion of truth, the blurring of 
 the drab little picture. That Sidney Porter refused 
 to do it indicates to what extent he was above the 
 practical standards of his admiring disciples and 
 interpreters. 
 
 "The Caliph, Cupid and The Clock" is a bit of 
 romantic clap-trap. So is "Sisters of the Golden 
 Circle." "The Romance of a Busy Broker" is 
 the old absent-minded-professor-who-forgot-he-was- 
 married joke belabored to the dignity of a story. 
 
 "After Twenty Years" is another bit of writing 
 that has been burdened with unqualified encomiums 
 by the O. Henry clergy. The ingenuity of the plot 
 and the strong "kick" at the end fill them with a 
 halleluiah ecstacy. An empty little crook story, 
 sketchy, anecdotal, is hailed as a masterpiece. 
 
 In "Lost on Dress Parade" you can again recog- 
 nize the same old formula underlying the construc- 
 tion of "The Gift of the Magi" and "A Service of 
 Love." Another example of criss-cross plotting. 
 "By Courier" is a typical syndicate story. The wo- 
 man the doctor had held in his arms was only a 
 patient who had fainted. It was all a mistake. The 
 Best Girl forgives and forgets. Nevertheless it 
 represents an improvement over the old type of 
 
"O. HENRYISM" 41 
 
 similar story. The fair suspect was after all a 
 patient and not the hero's sister. 
 
 "The Furnished Room" is another indication that 
 O. Henry was capable of feeling the pulse of his 
 four million when he was so attuned, and "The 
 Brief Debut of Tilly," though in smaller measure, 
 corroborates it. 
 
 Thus an examination of O. Henry's work by any 
 one not blinded by hero-worship and popular esteem, 
 discloses at best an occasional brave peep at life, 
 hasty, superficial and dazzlingly flippant; an idea, 
 raw, unassimilated, timidly works its way to the 
 surface only to be promptly suppressed by a hand 
 skilled in producing sensational effects. At its 
 worst, his work is no more than a series of cheap 
 jokes renovated and expanded. But over all there 
 is the unmistakable charm of a master trickster, of 
 a facile player with incidents and words. 
 
 That William Sidney Porter was himself greatly 
 displeased with his accomplishment, that he even 
 held it in contempt is attested by his prevailing 
 cynical tone. He knew he was not creating art, that 
 he was not giving the best there was in him. There 
 was not time for that and editors did not want it, 
 and with a bitterness that Mark Twain and Jack 
 London shared to their dying day he continued to 
 perform tricks. Mr. William Johnston in his article 
 in the Bookman, referred to above, states that after 
 reading one of his, Mr. Johnston's, stories, in some 
 
42 SHORT STORY-WRITING 
 
 obscure Southern periodical, O. Henry wrote to 
 him: "I wish Vd written that story." The story 
 was probably not remarkable in any particular way. 
 Mr. Johnston is not known as a great story writer. 
 But O. Henry must have felt that it was written 
 sincerely and his own artifice weighed upon him. 
 
 This is the lesson that an honest teaching profes- 
 sion with any critical vision at all, undertaking to 
 mold a generation of fiction writers, ought to point 
 out. Instead of worshipping him blindly, calling 
 him the "American Maupassant," and quoting 
 from his biographies painstaking proof that he 
 was innocent of the crime of embezzlement for 
 which he served a prison sentence, we might at least 
 mention the danger of following his methods too 
 slavishly. The puritanic impulse which inhibits 
 any praise of a man's work unless it can first estab- 
 lish his "sterling" character is excruciatingly 
 laughable if not downright pathetic. Thus attempts 
 have been made by meticulous biographers to estab- 
 lish the fact that Edgar Allan Poe never tasted any 
 sinful beverage. And only then, having vindicated 
 his character, does the conscience of these brave bio- 
 graphers permit them to accept Poe as a great 
 writer and the pride of America. Whether O. 
 Henry was guilty or not does not change his stand- 
 ing as a story writer, nor his influence on other 
 writers, and It Is only as such that the student and 
 critic is Interested In him. 
 
"O. HENRYISM" 43 
 
 In our attitude toward O. Henry and O. Henry- 
 ism lies one explanation of the prevailing medioc- 
 rity of the contemporary American short story. 
 The conventional editor, teacher, student, and 
 reader look upon the short story as upon some in- 
 teresting puzzle, the key to which is cleverly con- 
 cealed until the befuddled reader is ready to "give 
 up." Our would-be writers seeking guidance from 
 my profession are never disabused of this concep- 
 tion but deliberately encouraged to retain It. We 
 overwhelm them with our analyses of the work of 
 the Master, with our glowing tributes to his art and 
 charm and genius, his purity of thought and his 
 philosophy. An article on O. Henry, containing 
 essentially the same material presented in this 
 chapter, was rejected by a magazine circulating 
 among young writers for the reason that "the 
 editor does not hold your views with regard to O. 
 Henry's contribution to the American short story. 
 He is our supreme short-story master. ..." In not 
 a single textbook on story-writing, of the many that 
 have come to my attention, have I found such a 
 simple estimate of O. Henry as this: "His weak- 
 ness lay in the very nature of his art. He was an 
 entertainer bent only on amusing and surprising his 
 reader. Everywhere brilliancy, but too often it is 
 joined to cheapness; art, yet art merging swiftly 
 into caricature. Like Harte, he cannot be trusted. 
 Both writers on the whole may be said to have 
 
44 SHORT STORY-WRITING 
 
 lowered the standards of American literature, since 
 both worked in the surface of life with theatric 
 intent. ... O. Henry moves, but he never lifts. 
 All is fortissimo; he slaps the reader on the back 
 and laughs loudly as if he were in a bar-room. His 
 characters, with few exceptions, are extremes, cari- 
 catures. Even his shop girls, in the limning of 
 whom he did his best work, are not really individ- 
 uals; rather are they types, symbols. His work 
 was literary vaudeville, brilliant, highly amusing, 
 and yet vaudeville."^ 
 
 This estimate, coming as it does from a standard 
 source, cannot be discounted by attributing it to 
 radical or ultra-advanced tendencies. The fact is 
 that the case of O. Henry is so simple that even 
 standard critics and historians, if they but choose 
 to be open-minded, can see through it. When in 
 1916 Mrs. Katharine Fullerton Gerould in an in- 
 terview with the late Joyce Kilmer called O. Henry 
 "a pernicious literary influence," even the New 
 York Times, though hastening to the defense of the 
 wizard, admitted that there might be something in 
 this outburst of depreciation of O. Henryism. "I 
 hear that O. Henry is held up as a model by critics 
 and professors of English," said Mrs. Gerould. 
 "The effect of this must be pernicious. It cannot 
 but be pernicious to spread the idea that he is a 
 
 "^ Fred Lewis Patee in The Cambridge History of American Lit- 
 erature, Vol. II, p. 394. I find that Mr. Alexander Jessup has 
 drawn on the same source on O. Henry in his Introduction to 
 "The Best American Humorous Stories," Modern Library. 
 
"O. HENRYISM" 45 
 
 master of the short story." And the TimeSj In an 
 editorial, although taking issue with Mrs. Gerould, 
 was obliged to conclude : 
 
 ''Maybe some day we shall get away from writ- 
 ing with a set of rules before us, and then we shall 
 have literature instead of best sellers. Maybe the 
 trouble with our writing is that we have developed 
 technique to such a point that Tom, Dick and 
 Harry are masters of technique and anybody who 
 can get the hang of it can write a publishable story. 
 Maybe our fiction has been whetted to a razor edge, 
 until it is technique and nothing else. Maybe the 
 story has been perfected until now we can tell per- 
 fectly a story that is not worth telling, but have not 
 even thought of learning what stones are worth 
 telling. Maybe, if we did that, and told them 
 without thinking of technique and without knowing 
 that there were any rules whatever, we might write 
 stories that would be remembered, say, ten years 
 hence. Maybe there is, after all, only one rule 
 for telling a story — to have one worth telling and 
 then to tell it as well as you can. Maybe that is 
 what is the matter with the American drama as 
 well as with American fiction. If we could unlearn 
 some of the rules and forget technique we might 
 not produce best sellers; and maybe if we told, as 
 clumsily as our ignorance of the rules compelled us, 
 stories that were worth telling, there might be no 
 more best sellers, only stories that would live as 
 
46 SHORT STORY-WRITING 
 
 long as the clumsy plots of Dickens and the inartis- 
 tic anecdotes of O. Henry." 
 
 Just how long O. Henry's stories will live and 
 his influence predominate is a prediction no one can 
 safely undertake to venture at this time. It de- 
 pends upon how long we will permit his influence 
 to predominate. The great mass of our reading 
 public will continue to venerate any writer as long 
 as our official censors continue to write panegyrics 
 of him, and our colleges to hold him up as a model. 
 The literary aspirants coming to us for instruction 
 are recruited largely from among this Indlscrimina- 
 tlng public. Sooner or later, however, we must 
 realize that the American Maupassant has not yet 
 come and that those who foisted the misnomer upon 
 William Sidney Porter have done the American 
 short story a great injury. Before this most popu- 
 lar of our literary forms can come into its own the 
 O. Henry cult must be demolished. O. Henry him- 
 self must be assigned his rightful position — among 
 the tragic figures of America's potential artists 
 whose genius was distorted and stifled by our pre- 
 vailing commercial and Infantile conception of liter- 
 ary values. Our short story itself must be cleansed ; 
 its paint and powder removed; Its fluffy curls shorn 
 — so that our complacent reader may be left to con- 
 template its *'rag and a bone and a hank of hair." 
 
 When the great American short-story master 
 finally does come, no titles borrowed from the 
 
"O. HENRYISM" 47 
 
 French or any other nationality will be necessary 
 and adequate. His own worth will forge his 
 crown, and his worth will not be measured In tricks 
 and stunts and puzzles and cleverness. His sole 
 object will not be to spring effects upon his unwary 
 reader. His will be sincere honest art — with due 
 apologies for this obvious contradiction in terms, 
 for art can be nothing but sincere ! — a result of 
 deep, genuine emotions and an overflowing imagina- 
 tion. His very soul will be imbued with the simple 
 truth, so succinctly put by Mr. H. L. Mencken, that 
 "the way to sure and tremendous effects is by the 
 route of simplicity, naturalness, ingenuousness."® 
 
 ^ Introduction to Ibsen's "Master Builder, Etc.," Modern Library, 
 
CHAPTER IV 
 
 The Moving Pictures 
 
 An assignment once given my class called for a 
 story based on this simple germ: "A servant kills 
 his master." To my great astonishment I found 
 that fully seventy-five per cent, of the class had 
 decided, as if by agreement, that the servant must 
 be either a Japanese or a Chinaman. Why? The 
 students themselves could not explain it, but I could. 
 I had observed this unison of plot conception many 
 times before. They had all drawn their inspira- 
 tion from the same inexhaustible source — the mov- 
 ing pictures. In all probability not a single stu- 
 dent had ever employed or seen his or her friends 
 employ a Japanese or Chinese servant. If they had 
 ever employed a servant at all, it was most likely 
 some negro girl, and yet their fancy had taken them 
 to the Asiatics. For every one has surely noticed 
 that in the moving pictures the lowly individual 
 who carries the master's suitcase is always an 
 Asiatic valet. It is fashionable and ethical. The 
 laborer, the servant, is nearly always a foreigner, 
 the American is the "boss," the domineering chap 
 who wears the full-dress suit and faces the camera 
 
 48 
 
THE MOVING PICTURES 49 
 
 with a compelling, clean-shaven chin. The drowsy 
 members of our A. F. of L. and the weak-eyed 
 bookkeepers and typists filling the galleries of our 
 motion-picture houses must feel highly flattered as 
 they applaud the shadows of their dreams projected 
 on the screen. What has plausibility to do with 
 the "Eighth Art"? And who is naive enough to 
 expect to find it there ? 
 
 Yet to the student of the modern American short 
 story, and novel as well, the moving pictures must 
 come in for a great share of consideration. This 
 institution exerts a tremendous influence on the 
 trend of our fiction, determining both its form and 
 substance. It is no longer a secret that most of 
 our prominent fiction-writers who still are unat- 
 tached to some studio are writing stories for the 
 magazines with a view to their ultimate adaptation 
 for the screen. A number of magazine publishers 
 maintain brokerage departments where the stories 
 appearing in their publications are sold to film 
 manufacturers and the profits thus realized divided 
 with the authors or quietly deposited to their own 
 accounts. The editors of these magazines are in- 
 structed to keep an eye on moving-picture possi- 
 bilities of manuscripts submitted to them. The 
 remuneration involved is so alluring that even 
 the best writers with high literary traditions be- 
 hind them are fast succumbing. But whereas 
 these old writers for the most part have al- 
 
50 SHORT STORY-WRITING 
 
 ready done their best work and have spent them- 
 selves, so that their loss to American letters is 
 not very serious, the effect of the moving- 
 pictures urge upon the young author is truly dis- 
 astrous. 
 
 To write for the screen as It Is at present man- 
 aged requires neither art nor knowledge. Writers 
 with any literary compunctions cannot hope to 
 succeed in a field which demands a complete distor- 
 tion of all values. What is required Is the ability 
 to supply some acrobatically Inclined matinee idols 
 and curly-haired Ingenues with fast-moving vehicles 
 to display their "stunts." It presupposes an Inti- 
 mate acquaintance with the peculiar talents of each 
 star. If a star can swim and dive and ride horse- 
 back and jump off a running train and dance grace- 
 fully opportunities must be provided In the scenario 
 for the parading of these talents. If another can 
 wear pretty clothes daintily or has pretty dimples 
 on her knees or looks particularly charming In the 
 uniform of a maid or a governess the scenario 
 writer must be governed accordingly in constructing 
 his story. It is precisely because no one outside of 
 a studio can have such an Intimate knowledge of the 
 abilities of the various stars featured by a produc- 
 ing company that staffs are employed to rewrite 
 and prepare for production every script purchased 
 from an outsider. 
 
 The moving-picture Industry is almost entirely 
 
THE MOVING PICTURES 51 
 
 dominated by investors who are as far from litera- 
 ture as the average would-be story writer is from 
 being featured in the pages of the Cosmopolitan. 
 Their concern is solely with the box-office. They 
 will purvey anything that will yield the desired divi- 
 dends. Manifestly to apply the word "art" to an 
 industry with such mercenaries at its helm is to 
 cover the word with mud, unless we stretch the 
 term to include the art of making money. As 
 Channing Pollock, in a "Plain Talk About the 
 Movies,"^ once said : "One of the troubles with the 
 regular theatre is its conviction that the possession 
 of a hundred thousand dollars turns a laundryman 
 into a litterateur." The remark is still more pun- 
 gently apposite to the cinema theatre. The ignor- 
 ance of the rich investors controlling the destinies 
 of the moving-picture industry is truly stupendous. 
 An anecdote current among scenario editors and 
 vouched for by one of them as an actual happening 
 throws a pitiless light on this prevailing trait. 
 When several years ago the craze of adapting 
 Dickens' novels for the screen was on, the president 
 of a large film corporation one day stormed into 
 his scenario editor's office and demanded to know 
 why Dickens' work had been permitted to go to a 
 rival company. The editor defended himself by 
 saying that some of Dickens' work could still be got. 
 "See to it, then," the great man ordered. "Wire 
 
 ^Photoplay Magazine, August, 1919. 
 
52 SHORT STORY-WRITING 
 
 Mr. Dickens that hereafter we want his entire 
 output!" 
 
 And these intellectual giants are influencing the 
 output of our Dickenses ! The singularly few ex- 
 ceptions in the industry are powerless to change the 
 state of affairs. They are either smothered by the 
 great ones or are tolerated because they are so in- 
 significant. And these great ones have decreed that 
 adaptations of stage successes, old classics, best 
 sellers, and magazine stories are more desirable 
 wares than original stories written especially for 
 the screen. The governing factor, of course, is the 
 previous advertising that these adapted stories have 
 had without cost to the film producers. Story 
 values are the least consideration. Our public is 
 so amusement-hungry and so well-trained that it will 
 consume anything. Besides, the star is ninety per 
 cent, of the show anyhow — people go to see the 
 celebrated So-and-so rather than the vehicle in 
 which So-and-so appears — otherwise the mag- 
 nates would not pay five hundred dollars for a story 
 and fifty thousand dollars for a star's performance 
 in it. 
 
 The fact, however, that moving-picture producers 
 are not purchasing original scenarios does not deter 
 the numerous literary schools of the country from 
 offering instruction in photoplay writing. The ad- 
 vertising matter of these schools is as optimistic as 
 ever. "Makes $50,000 a year by writing for the 
 
THE MOVING PICTURES 53 
 
 screen," reads one headline. "Moving-picture 
 stories in demand everywhere!" reads another. 
 Then the information is generously volunteered 
 that a certain scenario writer in a California studio 
 is earning fifty thousand dollars a year; another 
 twenty-five thousand; and countless others between 
 five and ten thousand. Convincing proof is pre- 
 sented that no education or previous experience is 
 necessary; that one farmer in the backwoods of 
 Washington or Oregon or on the prairies of Illinois 
 has sold a scenario for eighteen hundred and fifty 
 dollars; that one woman who was never graduated 
 from a public school has written a masterpiece in 
 her spare time between cooking her victuals and 
 tending to her seven children and an invalid hus- 
 band, and that as a result of her exploit she has now 
 paid off the mortgage on her house and is experi- 
 menting with the mechanism of a Dodge car. 
 
 This alluring prospect of becoming affluent via 
 a course in photoplay writing is held out not only 
 by the average correspondence school but also by 
 not a few of our dignified institutions of learning. 
 There is no excuse for offering any instruction in an 
 art that is on such a low plane of development, ex- 
 cept, perhaps, that of elevating it, which is not an 
 aim avowed by any of these institutions; and, 
 besides, mere honesty alone ought to compel even 
 the most enterprising trustee or administrator to 
 reach the simple conclusion that since the demand 
 
54 SHORT STORY-WRITING 
 
 for original photoplays is practically non-existent, 
 as far as the novice is concerned, it is useless to 
 manufacture photoplaywrights. The refusal to 
 accept such a logical conclusion results in disappoint- 
 ments and heartaches and the upsetting of normal 
 useful careers. A glimpse at the record of original 
 scenarios purchased by some of our leading pro- 
 ducers even as far back as 1918, when the policy of 
 using adaptations only was not yet rigidly adhered 
 to, proves conclusively the extent of the market. 
 The American Film Company purchased only fif- 
 teen scenarios during the entire year. The Na- 
 tional Studios — twelve. William S. Hart — eight. 
 The Fairbanks Studio — six. The Dorothy Gish 
 Company — four. Mary Pickford — one. The 
 Chaplin Studio — one.^ 
 
 When it is considered that some of our ablest 
 fictionists and dramatists have been writing photo- 
 plays and that some of these accepted scenarios 
 were written for particular stars and often sent 
 direct to them or to their directors, the chances of 
 the obscure novice, even the most meritorious one, 
 are far from glorious indeed. And since 1918 the 
 policy of adaptations only has been enforced more 
 stringently — almost to the complete exclusion of 
 the original script submitted by the outsider. A 
 few producing companies have frankly admitted, 
 in the various writers' magazines, that they do not 
 
 2 E. M. Robbins, in the 1919 Year Book issued by Camera. 
 
THE MOVING PICTURES 55 
 
 even read manuscripts submitted by unknown out- 
 siders. 
 
 But while the great mass of aspirants may not be 
 aware of the true state of conditions our more or 
 less successful writers know It full well. The 
 Authors' League and the Pen Women's League 
 and the various Writers' Clubs throughout the 
 country have all discussed and analyzed the movlng- 
 plctures market, and their members are taking 
 means to meet Its eccentric exactions. Why write 
 a story In photoplay continuity or even detailed 
 synopsis form only to have it returned from the 
 Coast most likely unread, when the same material 
 can be written up In a short story or a novelette, Its 
 serial rights sold to a magazine and Its photoplay 
 rights reserved and offered to a film company which 
 Is then sure to accord It a friendly reading? As a 
 matter of record the price paid for photoplay rights 
 to a magazine story is usually twice and sometimes 
 tenfold the price paid for an original story written 
 especially for the screen. Part of this extra com- 
 pensation Is probably for the advertising value of 
 the story, and part for the judgment of the maga- 
 zine editor which the film magnates are more in- 
 clined to accept than that of their own hired editors. 
 That fiction writers are taking advantage of this 
 unusual opportunity to sell their work twice is an 
 absolute certainty. ''In fact, as several writers 
 remarked at the Writers' Club dinner, a large per- 
 
S6 SHORT STORY-WRITING 
 
 centage of the present-day magazine stories are 
 written — planned and plotted — with the screen 
 directly in mind. ... It is well known, on the in- 
 side of the game, that successful fictionists plan 
 every situation and bit of dialogue in certain stories, 
 visualizing, as they write, the way those situations 
 will, as they hope, work out on the screen."^ And 
 again: "Today, among the more successful writers 
 of action-stories for the magazines, there exists the 
 feeling that it is a criminal waste of time to write 
 originals for the screen. ' Their method is deliber- 
 ately to plan their fiction ... so that it will actually 
 contain abundant photoplay material, while yet 
 being properly balanced up with the necessary word- 
 painting and dialogue which good fiction demands. 
 In other words, they systematically plan their fiction 
 to make its picture possibilities 'hit the producer in 
 the eye' the first time he — or his scenario editor — 
 reads it. ... Almost nine-tenths of the pictures 
 shown today are adaptations of successful fiction 
 stories or stage plays. If you doubt that, watch 
 the productions in your theatres and note their 
 origin."* 
 
 What this "systematic planning" results in is 
 self-evident. The moving-picture story and the 
 fiction story are two different products. Their 
 technique is different. The photoplay is panto- 
 
 3 Arthur Leeds in The Writer's Montfily, April, 1919. 
 * Arthur Leeds in The Writer's Monthly, May, 1920. 
 
THE MOVING PICTURES 57 
 
 mime pure and simple. Ideas and emotions can 
 only be expressed by means of gestures and facial 
 contortions, with the aid of a schoolboy subtitle 
 flashed on the screen. Literary style, psychologic 
 delineation, and nice subtleties of thought and 
 emotion cannot be transmitted. The plot must un- 
 fold rapidly and teem with surprising and tense 
 situations. The actors must have something to do 
 every second. To write a fiction story with photo- 
 play possibilities requires a careful selection of 
 theme and plot. Unlike the magazines, which run 
 in types, each catering to a particular group of tem- 
 peramental and intellectual stratum of our people, 
 the moving pictures depend for success upon the 
 approval of the Ladles' Auxiliary Society and the 
 Chew Tobacco Club of Dead Hollow as well as 
 upon Greenwich Village and the bourgeois Philis- 
 tines of our metropolises. No theme must be used 
 that might give offense to any of these patrons; all 
 must be kept satisfied so that a continuance of their 
 patronage may be insured. It is also apparent that 
 the pale, quiet story which does not depend upon 
 action for its "punch" must be entirely sacrificed, 
 since it cannot possibly have any moving-picture 
 adaptability. Only the swift-moving, red-blooded 
 plot can be utilized. 
 
 Needless to suggest that our story writers are 
 well aware of these limitations. The fact that 
 their work is adapted almost wholesale into photo- 
 
58 SHORT STORY-WRITING 
 
 plays speaks eloquently for their knowledge on this 
 score. Needless to suggest, also, that they have 
 become expert mechanics in the way of constructing 
 a fiction story so that it will be certain to "hit the 
 producer in the eye." They have learned that "the 
 photoplaywright depends upon his ability to thitik 
 and write in action."^ And they have learned to 
 think and write in action. They have also taken 
 to heart the dictum regarding theme. "In selecting 
 your theme, ask yourself if either dialogue or de- 
 scription may not be really required to bring out 
 the theme satisfactorily. If such is the case, 
 abandon the theme. The few inserts permitted 
 cannot be relied upon to give much aid — the chief 
 reliance must be pantomime."^ It is only natural, 
 then, for our writers to eschew the unadaptable 
 theme altogether. 
 
 That the bulk of our magazine fiction is, there- 
 fore, not magazine fiction at all, but merely dis- 
 guised moving-picture stories is a fact that has 
 found entirely too little general publicity. A mov- 
 ing-picture story differs from a fiction story not 
 only in matter of technique and theme barred by 
 limitations of technique but also in many other 
 respects. As we have seen, because of the general 
 appeal of the moving pictures certain themes that 
 might offend any part of the great public must be 
 
 '^ Writing the Photoplay, Esenwein and Leeds. 
 « Ibid. 
 
THE MOVING PICTURES 59 
 
 avoided. Obviously this results In the humiliating 
 condition of degenerating to the standard of the 
 lowest patron, of courting his approval as the final 
 goal of successful authorship. But should, per- 
 chance, an author with a virile conscience bolt the 
 ranks of the meek conformists and yet, by dint of 
 extraordinarily fortunate circumstances, break 
 through with his product, the power of the various 
 Boards of Censorship must be reckoned with. 
 
 There are, of course, official, semi-official and 
 unofficial censors presiding over the production of 
 our magazine fiction, too. But while a revolting 
 author may take his work to some less respectable 
 magazine and thus save his soul, no such outlet 
 exists for the photoplaywright. His work must be 
 so harmless that it will pass not only the National 
 Board of Censorship but also the various State and 
 city boards, otherwise no enterprising producer will 
 risk his money producing It. The experienced 
 photoplaywright, then, studies the proscriptions of 
 the various boards and keeps himself informed of 
 all their decisions. He knows, for Instance, that 
 crime must be treated cautiously, and It must always 
 be punished in the end; that the National Board will 
 not pass a picture in which there Is a suicide, that 
 burglary may be shown, but not by what means it 
 Is committed; that flirtations with women of easy 
 virtue are banned; that lynching scenes are per- 
 missible only when the picture is laid in places 
 
60 SHORT STORY-WRITING 
 
 where no other law exists; that scenes showing kid- 
 napping do not always "get by"; that elopements 
 must be handled delicately; that, In short, the effect 
 of the picture on the young, the evil-minded, and 
 the weak-minded must always be carefully gaged. 
 The experienced photoplaywrlght also knows of 
 all Important precedents established by the censors. 
 He knows that Shakespeare's plays have not gotten 
 by unscathed; that "Macbeth" was deemed too full 
 of crime and "Romeo and Juliet" too full of love; 
 that a kiss between the two youngsters in the latter 
 play was limited to three feet; that Eugene Walter's 
 "Easiest Way" could not be exhibited In the sover- 
 eign State of Pennsylvania because the Board of 
 Censors of that State had condemned it "in accord- 
 ance with Section 6 of the Act. . . . Because it 
 deals with prostitution"; that in O. Henry's "Past 
 One at Rooney's" such sub-titles as "At one end 
 was a human pianola with drugged eyes," and "I 
 know how bad It looked — me smokin' and comin' 
 In here. But I'll promise you, Eddie — I'll give 
 up cigarettes and stay home every night if you want 
 me to" were deleted; etc., etc. And above all he 
 knows that religious and political views must never 
 be expressed. Furthermore, that If he breaks the 
 last law and does essay to express any views at all, 
 they must be the worn-out popular views that even 
 the humblest deacon or the mistress of the little red 
 schoolhouse back home might be gladdened with. 
 
THE MOVING PICTURES 61 
 
 because they have been cherishing them as an heri- 
 tage from their ancient forbears. 
 
 Thus the influence of the moving pictures on the 
 bulk of our magazine and even book fiction. It is 
 a moving-picture fiction, "strong," fast-moving, 
 starthng, full of cheap ideas and a gushy hackneyed 
 idealism, written largely by photoplaywrights who 
 use the fiction medium simply because it enables 
 them to exact a higher price for their product, and 
 catering to a photoplay public. For this moving- 
 picture influence extends not only to the makers of 
 stories but to the general reading public as well. It 
 tames it, if indeed it need any taming, molds it, 
 forms it into a hardened cast with a definite aesthet- 
 icism which it carries from the cinema house to 
 Happy Stories and Virile Stories and Goody Stories 
 and back again. There are traditional themes, 
 traditional views and a traditional treatment, in 
 spite of the loud cry for novelty, and any theme, 
 view or treatment violating the tradition, should it 
 succeed to get by the vigilantes higher up, has to 
 brave a combat with this traditional moving-picture 
 taste. 
 
 The young story writer, like his more mature 
 brother or sister, is infected with this influence and 
 from the very beginning of his career looks askance 
 at any doctrine that conflicts with his proud sesthet- 
 icism. But in our profession it is seldom that he is 
 required to be false to the culture of the screen. 
 
62 SHORT STORY-WRITING 
 
 Our textbooks and the bombastic dogmas they 
 largely exploit are themselves for the most part a 
 product of the same culture. He is told to think 
 in terms of action rather than in terms of idea and 
 character. He is trained in the construction and 
 management of situation and incident until, al- 
 though not consciously intending to, he is able, like 
 his more successful colleagues, to turn out passable 
 photoplay material. Small wonder that most of 
 our short stories abound in wooden characters, 
 clumsily moving about on well-oiled springs, think- 
 ing stereotyped thoughts and talking wooden dia- 
 logue. The atmosphere fanning upon them has 
 the hot fetid tang of the darkened-theatre air. 
 
 When told to write a story the student almost 
 without hesitation betakes himself to his supreme 
 source for plot material. It matters little that this 
 material itself merely represents the adaptation of 
 some fiction story. The moving pictures today 
 could be used as another illustration of Emerson's 
 theory of circles, or is it merely a modification of 
 the delightful pastime of see-saw of which we were 
 so fond in our childhood? The scenario writer 
 adapts the magazine story and the magazine story 
 writer adapts the photoplay story, etc., etc., ad in- 
 finitum. Of course the disguising twist often goes 
 with it, but the material nevertheless basically re- 
 mains the same. And, as a matter of fact, from 
 the point of view of salability the method is not 
 
THE MOVING PICTURES 63 
 
 without merit, everybody Involved — the scenario 
 editor, the producer, the public — recognizes In the 
 revamped material an old friend, and. If the re- 
 vamping has been done dexterously and Ingeniously, 
 glories In Its novel familiarity. The failures em- 
 ploying this method are confined mainly to two 
 classes of students — those who are temperamen- 
 tally entirely out of tune with the moving-picture 
 traditions, a small minority to be sure, and those 
 who, though favorably attuned to the spirit of the 
 silver sheet, fail to acquire the knack of giving their 
 work the necessary disguising twist which passes for 
 the much-vaunted novelty. 
 
 Admitting that It would be extremely difficult 
 and perhaps even futile to attempt to wean the 
 young student-majority away from the well-assimi- 
 lated Influence of the show house, one cannot avoid 
 speculation upon what could be made by a serious- 
 minded critical teaching profession of the open- 
 minded minority diffidently seeking encouragement 
 in their desire to follow newer traditions or to give 
 birth to still newer ones. If for one chapter in 
 our texts or for one semester in our institutions of 
 learning the joy of creating for the mere love of It, 
 for the sheer beauty of it, had been glorified as we 
 glorify popularity and commercial success, what a 
 buoyancy of spirit we could have engendered, what 
 a fluttering of young wings ! 
 
 For two years In succession a young woman came 
 
64 SHORT STORY-WRITING 
 
 to my classes and each year she dropped out before 
 the expiration of the term sending me a note of 
 despair. She had traveled extensively through 
 Europe and the Orient as well as through North 
 and South America and she had accumulated a fund 
 of experience to draw on for material. She tried 
 hard to Imprison It in story form but the finished 
 product lacked thrill and suspense and airiness. 
 She received nothing but the cold platitudes of 
 printed rejection slips, while other students — as 
 Innocent of any knowledge of life as a fluffy ingenue 
 capering through Rvc reels of silent drama — who 
 modeled their work along the lines of Popular 
 Stories and the Jolly Book Magazine and the latest 
 releases, and seasoned it with a generous dash of 
 O. Henryism, occasionally displayed fair-sized 
 checks. She worked away despondently and each 
 succeeding story tended to prove that the text we 
 were using and the current magazines we were 
 studying were helping her but little. There was a 
 heaviness, almost an eerlness, permeating her work, 
 and yet it was a heaviness somewhat akin to that 
 which permeates the work of Thomas Hardy. She 
 admitted that most of the magazines we were study- 
 ing bored her, that she preferred "Beyond the 
 Horizon" and "John Ferguson" to "Irene" and 
 "The Passing Show." I advised her to write som- 
 bre tragedy, yes, morbid stuff. She produced a 
 passably good story. It was rejected by the first 
 
THE MOVING PICTURES 65 
 
 magazine she sent it to with a personal letter expres- 
 sing the editors' regrets at their inability to accept 
 such an interesting story, but they never purchased 
 "depressing" material. Wouldn't she be kind 
 enough to let them see something else of her work, 
 something in much lighter vein? She refused to 
 try another market, insisting that she had known all 
 along that she could not write. All the writers' 
 magazines she had read and even our own textbook 
 declared most emphatically that "morbid" stories 
 were not wanted. She discontinued her studies. 
 
 The next year she came back. "I can't help 
 writing," she apologized. "I simply can't resist 
 the impulse to write. I don't care if I don't sell, 
 I am going to write just for myself — whatever I 
 like. I merely want you to see what I am doing." 
 A few months later she sold a tragic little tale to 
 an unpopular little periodical. But she did not take 
 advantage of this, her first success. Soon her work 
 began to show labored flippancy and attempted in- 
 genuity, and it looked ludicrously pathetic — a Haw- 
 thorne austerity with an H. C. Witwer lightness; 
 the combination was irritably grotesque. Before 
 the end of the year she dropped out again. And 
 now she is back once more. Whether she will ever 
 be able to cut away entirely from the cords of a 
 moving-picture impulse only time can tell. 
 
 This case is a mild example of the struggle now 
 waged with a sinister environment alien to all liter- 
 
66 SHORT STORY-WRITING 
 
 ary aspiration except for immediate gain by many 
 lonely souls. Their resistance could be materially 
 strengthened by sympathetic guidance. Contrary 
 to the proverbial jibes of the cynics the literary 
 aspirant is far from possessing an over-abundance 
 of confidence. Intelligent persistence is a rare qual- 
 ity, not to be found among too many. The medio- 
 cre aspirant either soon deserts the ranks or begins 
 to turn out salable wares. And the person with a 
 genuine case of divine afflatus also either leaves the 
 ranks with a curse in his heart or finally learns to 
 turn out regulation material and becomes a cynic 
 for life. Cynicism may be a much more admirable 
 attitude than open-mouthed subservience, but it is 
 not always conducive to sturdy accomplishment. 
 Often it is a sense of surrender. And since mis- 
 sions seem to be such a popular necessity among our 
 pedagogues and literary clergy, what could be a 
 more worthy one than the saving of these lonely 
 strugglers from life-long cynicism? But that re- 
 quires, first of all, an intelligent and fearless weigh- 
 ing of the forces on either side and the rolling up of 
 greater support on the side of the weaker. Truth 
 and spontaneity are struggling against stifling com- 
 mercialism and artifice; against a hostile environ- 
 ment resting complacently on old dilapidated dog- 
 mas, and chuckling contentedly with its moving-pic- 
 ture standards of life, art, and literature, — its mov- 
 ing-picture civilization. 
 
CHAPTER V 
 
 Verboten 
 
 The field of the short story Is first of all the field 
 of the magazine. To be a successful story writer 
 requires a comprehensive knowledge of the policies 
 and preferences of the various periodicals that buy 
 stories. It is natural to assume that literary agents, 
 commercial critics, and teachers should be well 
 aware of these editorial policies and preferences, 
 and should make every effort to inspire the amateur 
 with the respect and deference due such essential 
 knowledge. We use this knowledge to stem any 
 Inclination to mischief. We hold It aloft, over the 
 heads of the unmanageable ones, threatening them 
 with failure, unless they become manageable. Thus 
 we preserve the dignity of the profession and help 
 stragglers on their weary pilgrimage to the golden 
 calf. 
 
 For us the task is after all an easy one. It is but 
 necessary to tabulate the good old taboos as to the 
 content of our stories and then be-write and be-lec- 
 ture them to make our words impressive. We do 
 that In our teaching of photoplaywriting; we do it in 
 the teaching of fiction-writing. But no one has ever 
 
 67 
 
68 SHORT STORY-WRITING 
 
 seriously labeled the photoplay as It Is finally pro- 
 duced on the screen as a form of literature, while 
 our fiction undeniably Is a form, If not the form, of 
 our national literature. It behooves us, therefore, 
 to bring forward all the pomp and pride and glory 
 we are capable of and point out the peculiar char- 
 acteristics that distinguish our fiction as a national 
 product from the fiction of other nations. And we 
 usually find It more advisable to do It by the nega- 
 tive method of pointing out what our fiction is not 
 rather than by the positive method of pointing out 
 what it is. Crystallizing the more-Important unde- 
 sirable and therefore absent elements in our fiction 
 Into single words, we can say that It Is not 
 pessimistic; that It Is not lewd; that It Is not 
 irreverent; that It Is not ^^red" ; that It Is not 
 un-American. 
 
 This does not mean that our literature abstains 
 from all discussion of the topics of pessimism, sex, 
 religion, politics and economics, and Americanism. 
 It Is merely the extent to which they are discussed 
 and the angle of discussion that elevate our fiction 
 to a position of what passes for national expression. 
 Like the vicious circle that governs photoplay 
 scripts — adaptation of fiction stories being adapted 
 in turn from the screen and re-adapted back again 
 into scripts — our opinions on the phenomena of 
 life are adaptations of the opinions imprisoned 
 within covers of best sellers and our mlUIon-and- 
 
VERBOTEN 69 
 
 more-circulation magazines, only the circle Is some- 
 what more complicated. Scripts are written to 
 meet the prejudices of all moving-picture patrons; 
 stories, to meet the needs of a particular type of 
 reader. And this much must be said for our mag- 
 azines: The variety of types has made possible 
 whatever untrammelled literature we have. For 
 after all there is a wide difference between the moral 
 tone of Harper's and the arch-sophistication of the 
 Smart Set, or between the big-business glorification 
 of the Saturday Evening Post and the New Success 
 and the artistic quiet and rebelliousness of the Dial 
 and the Little Review. 
 
 Whatever untrammelled literature we have, how- 
 ever, is httle enough. The tone-givers, the guides, 
 the molders are the magazines of power with pub- 
 lic opinion and millions of dollars behind them, 
 with unbreakable traditional prejudices and taboos. 
 And so long as the humblest critic and the highest- 
 paid Institutional authority unite In upholding these 
 traditional taboos as glittering marks of American- 
 ism, public opinion will continue to demand a litera- 
 ture that is for the most part Infantile, Insipid and 
 lifeless. The generations that rise to pound the 
 typewriter keys in the production of stories are for 
 the most part imbued with this negative conception 
 of our literature and unquestionably the most dan- 
 gerous Instrument for the perpetuation of this 
 degrading conception is the literary teaching profes- 
 
70 SHORT STORY-WRITING 
 
 sion. Again, in not a single textbook on story- 
 writing have I been able to find an intelligent, fear- 
 less analysis of our national taboos and their effect 
 of sterility upon our literature. I have found 
 warnings and admonitions and scarecrows. "Thou 
 shalt not!" is the sum and substance of our learned 
 attitude on these mummifying influences. The vac- 
 illating feet of the aspirant are directed toward 
 the proper, well-trodden roads at the very outset, 
 and the punishment for straying is stressed to the 
 point where it requires a superhuman courage to 
 brave it. 
 
 1. Optimism 
 
 Our first dictate is "Thou shalt not be morbid!" 
 Depressing stuff may be characteristic of the Rus- 
 sians, the Germans, the French, the Italians, the 
 Scandinavians, but not of the Americans. Ours is 
 a young country, a free country, a happy country, 
 full of the joy of existence. Ours is a hopeful peo- 
 ple, cheerful and gay and proud; glad to be alive. 
 "People have all the gloom they want," says the 
 editor of The American Magazine in his "Fourteen 
 Points" to contributors. "They manufacture it on 
 their own premises. You cannot sell them gloom. 
 What they want to buy is a cure for their gloom. 
 They don't want to buy more gloom." And Dr. 
 Frank Crane in his ever-buoyant style exclaims: 
 
VERBOTEN 71 
 
 ^^The Saturday Evening Post and The American 
 Magazine have what I call 'good literature.' "^ 
 
 Since salability is the only criterion of worth, any 
 story that violates our fundamental optimistic tone 
 is at once intercepted, revamped, "improved" or 
 pronounced hopeless and condemned to extinction. 
 "Not salable," is a phrase as ominous as a jury's 
 "Guilty!" on a charge of murder in the first degree, 
 and the only appeal possible is for the defendant 
 to plead a sudden seizure of passionate desire to 
 "pack up his troubles in his old kit bag and smile, 
 smile, smile !" And so the law of supply and demand 
 operates once more. The "calamity howler" is 
 eliminated and the man or woman with the "smile 
 that won't come off" gets to the top. American 
 literature becomes enriched by the advent of another 
 "genius" imbued with the gospel that "life is great 
 fun, after all!" 
 
 That no literature can thrive on such a barren 
 optimism seems to be a statement so obvious as to 
 challenge even the mere ordinary intelligence offer- 
 ing it. Yet pedants carry forward this optimism- 
 tradition and preach, and lecture, and prate about 
 the spirit of America, and threaten and pun- 
 ish and outlaw the few unfortunate rebels. What 
 literature can a country produce which refuses to 
 take even the most timid peep at life as it is, which 
 
 1 Dr. Frank Crane to the Literary Novice, An Interview. 
 Writer's Monthly, January, 1921. 
 
72 SHORT STORY-WRITING 
 
 shuts its eyes in very horror at the most fundamental 
 problems of the land, which does not brood, con- 
 template or inquire, which does not know the bene- 
 diction of a tear or the relief of a sigh? Can a 
 steady diet of sugar produce anything more invigor- 
 ating than diabetes? And literary sugar is what we 
 think and preach and worship. All heroines are 
 pretty; all heroes succeed; all complications are 
 solved; wedding bells ring; promotions are given 
 out; only bad people die young; the good live to a 
 mellow age of four score and ten; life is a fairy- 
 tale in which all the fairies are sweet young things 
 waving magic wands over honest young brokers of 
 their choice; the world, and America especially, is 
 a Vale of Tempe where limousines are passed out 
 as the reward of virtue and endeavor and where 
 successful matches are consummated. 
 
 Our writers must be either inanimate machines 
 or sorry human beings trained to suppress their 
 instincts and moods. They must be on their guard 
 not to succumb to the "blues"; quick to inhibit any 
 sad reflection or discouraging thought. "If you 
 can't see the sun is shining," wrote one editor very 
 bluntly, rejecting a "depressing" story, "take Epsom 
 salts and sleep it over." And whether they are 
 drowsy or not, sleep it over our writers must. Those 
 who suffer with insomnia find their good neighbors 
 either snoring peacefully or stamping about in 
 infuriated protest. Our writers must sift their 
 
VERBOTEN 73 
 
 experience; if it is tragic or insufficiently uplifting 
 they must dispatch it to oblivion. It is really most 
 advisable not to draw upon experience at all. Not 
 of such stuff can optimistic fiction be made. For 
 is there life without tears and heartache and doubt; 
 without innumerable deaths of precious fragile 
 dreams; without graying of heads; without per- 
 plexity? Hence arises what Van Wyck Brooks calls 
 ''the doctrine of the fear of experience. ... It 
 assumes that experience is not the stuff of life but 
 something essentially meaningless; and not merely 
 meaningless but an obstruction which retards and 
 complicates our real business of getting on in the 
 world and getting up in the world, and which must, 
 therefore, be ignored and forgotten and evaded 
 and beaten down by every means in our power."^ 
 
 Here again the inconsistency in our theory of 
 optimistic fiction is glaring. We shriek anathemas 
 at any native product that repudiates it, yet we bow 
 with respect to importations. We acclaim all the 
 morbid geniuses of Europe; we accord their works 
 places of special privilege in our curricula; we con- 
 sider it a mark of culture to mention the titles of at 
 least a half-dozen depressing books. Even our 
 most respectable magazines are proud on occasion 
 to publish a story by an eminent European author 
 with the flamboyant legend placed upon it or boxed 
 in the center of its first page by the editor: "No 
 
 2 Letters and Leadership. 
 
74 SHORT STORY-WRITING 
 
 one but Gorki (or Maeterlink, or D'AnnunzIo, or 
 D. H. Lawrence, or whoever else It might be) would 
 have the courage to write a story such as this, and 
 
 no magazine in America but The would 
 
 have the courage to publish it." The same legend 
 is placed sometimes upon the work of a native 
 writer, but after reading the story one finds that 
 either the writer did not dare, after all, or that the 
 editor of the brave magazine edited the contribu- 
 tion; that both the writer and the worthy editor had 
 been so frightened at the mere flap of a wing that 
 they had to offer an apology for attempting to soar. 
 This inconsistency is particularly reflected in our 
 current criticism and literary textbooks. With the 
 same breath a reviewer will praise Dostoyevski and 
 chastise some native youngster for his horrible 
 morbidity. In the same chapter the text will refer 
 to Chekhov and Maupassant and Zola and Poe with 
 almost cringing reverence and eloquently preach 
 the gospel of cheap optimism as the supreme 
 message of the story writer. And the young would- 
 be procures copies of the great masters, reads them, 
 and comes back perplexed. "Why do they write 
 about such horrid things?" asks one young student. 
 I look into her large, innocent eyes and smile. The 
 Great Creator must have been in a diplomatic mood 
 when he invented a smile. I glance down at my 
 copy of The Literary News, lying on my desk and 
 note that an editor of a prominent and liberally- 
 
VERBOTEN 75 
 
 paying magazine is In the market for "stories of 
 rapid action — cheery short stories, encouraging, 
 helpful — the kind that makes the world better," and 
 I proceed to discuss how this kind of story Is 
 written. . . . 
 
 2. Sex 
 
 Of all our taboos none has contributed so large 
 a share in keeping our literature swathed In baby 
 blankets as that on sex. In its essence It is merely 
 a direct irradiation of taboo No. 1 on optimism. 
 If everything in the universe is good and beautiful 
 and holy and the writer's business is to chant in- 
 cessant halleluiahs, then sex is all of these and must 
 be treated reverently. Its unsavory aspects as well 
 as those leading to unhapplness must be passed by, 
 and since in the muddled world we are living in sex 
 has felt most severely the combined forces of big- 
 otry, suppression and inhibition, of pathologic social 
 and moral conditions, its aspects are most frequently 
 unsavory and unhappy and therefore must be either 
 ignored entirely or made savory and happy. We 
 have a hoary phrase perpetually playing upon our 
 glib lips — it is to the effect that we are a "clean- 
 living, moral people." The phrase itself has long 
 lost its meaning, even to the most uninformed of 
 citizens, but it has remained a sacred fetish forever, 
 it seems. 
 
 Again it Is not in the total abstaining from any 
 
76 SHORT STORY-WRITING 
 
 treatment of sex that our taboo is expressed, but in 
 our peculiar angle of treatment. Total abstaining 
 were indeed impossible, for any literature, and 
 least of all for our literature. The truth is that ours 
 is, in the main, essentially a sex-literature — largely 
 because of our ''reverent" attitude. Strong ele- 
 mental forces long suppressed erupt in irrepres- 
 sible, if furtive, curiosity. No country on earth can 
 boast of as many periodicals specializing in the 
 risque, the sexually-sensational, the cheaply sugges- 
 tive, as the land of the "clean-living." The fact is 
 incontrovertible. Where there is a continued supply 
 there must be a continued demand. Our publishers 
 know their market. Even the titles of a host of 
 our periodicals exploit, not too artistically, this 
 crude reaction of a sex-conscious people. "Saucy 
 Stories," "Breezy Stories," "Snappy Stories," "Live 
 Stories," "Droll Stories," "The Parisienne," "True 
 Stories," "The Folhes," "TeUing Tales," "Secrets," 
 "I Confess," "True Confessions," "High Life," 
 "Hot Dog," — these are some of the titles that wink 
 mischievously at the purchaser timid with guilt. 
 But the purchaser is rarely pleased with his dissipa- 
 tion. He finds the wine exceedingly mild. Most 
 of the stories under the suggestive cover bearing the 
 inviting title and a still more inviting pretty girl, 
 usually attired in very becoming negligey are, after 
 all, "clean." 
 
 And this "cleanness" is the characteristic blight 
 
VERBOTEN 77 
 
 of nine-tenths of our entire literature. It is vulgar 
 with the lowest kind of sex-consciousness but it 
 doesn't go "too far." It is the "cleanness" of our 
 moving pictures. Is there any reason why a pro- 
 duction entitled "Du Barry" in Europe should be 
 rechristened to read "Passion" for American exhibi- 
 tion? Is there any reason why Barrie's "Admirable 
 Crichton" should become "Male and Female" as 
 a photoplay? Is there any reason for such titles 
 as "Sex," "The Restless Sex," "His Wedded Wife," 
 "The First Night," "The She Woman," "The Leop- 
 ard Woman," "Wedded Husbands," "Why Wives 
 Go Wrong," "Forbidden Fruit," "The Primrose 
 Path," "What Happened to Rosa," "Why Change 
 Your Wife?" "The Woman Untamed," etc., etc? 
 It surely does not require an erudite psychoanalyst 
 to find the reason for this avalanche of sugges- 
 tiveness. 
 
 Perhaps, if they deemed it wise to speak, our 
 motion-picture producers could shed some light on 
 the subject. Seemingly their opinion of our "clean- 
 living, moral people" is not very flattering. And 
 their judgment is substantially founded upon the 
 generous reports they receive from the distributing 
 exchanges. 
 
 Here, too, carefully as the titles are selected the 
 pictures themselves are "clean." If they were not, 
 the various Boards of Censorship would have seen 
 to it that they become so. At most a director will 
 
78 SHORT STORY-WRITING 
 
 manage to show the heroine plunging into her 
 morning's rose-water bath, as in "Male and 
 Female," for instance, or an exotic harem partially 
 disrobing for a cold dip into the perfumed waters of 
 the Rajah's pool, as in "Kismet." Whether the 
 scenes are vitally necessary to the unfolding of the 
 plot is immaterial. They constitute an irresistible 
 attraction in themselves, and must be smuggled in, 
 if possible. A couple of feet of nakedness results 
 in thousands of dollars' worth of advertising. 
 
 What is true of the moving pictures is equally 
 true of our spoken stage. Think of "Twin Beds" 
 and "Up in Mabel's Room" and "Parlor, Bedroom 
 and Bath" and "Mary's Ankle" and "Nighty, 
 Nighty" and "Scrambled Wives" and "Ladies' 
 Night in a Turkish Bath" and "Getting Gertie's 
 Garter" and the various "Follies" and "Scandals" 
 and a hundred-and-one other titles which were surely 
 chosen for a purpose — the same purpose which 
 impelled some years ago the manager of the old 
 Academy of Music in New York to advertise a stock 
 company production of Daudet's "Sapho" as the 
 "greatest immoral play ever written." And again 
 the plays themselves are not remotely as licentious 
 as the titles would intimate. 
 
 What, then, is this "cleanness" of ours? What 
 are its impositions and how far can they be 
 stretched? The answer is simple and more than a 
 trifle sad. Our "cleanness" excludes serious 
 
VERBOTEN 79 
 
 thought. ^'Something audacious suits us, but noth- 
 ing salacious," writes one editor of a well-known 
 publication of the frothy type. "Salacious" stands 
 for thought, reflection, analysis. A little sugges- 
 tiveness, a hint, a double-edged joke, a farcical situa- 
 tion, a vulgar thrust, will do. But a lieep, sincere 
 analysis, a fearless uncovering of a cowering con- 
 science — that is salacious, immoral, lewd, unclean. 
 That accounts for the free and open dissemination 
 of so much debasing, lurid stuff and the hypocritical 
 suppression of Dreiser and Cabell. That accounts 
 for the popularity of Bertha M. Clay et al. and the 
 unpopularity of Sherwood Anderson et al. Sex is a 
 fit subject to jest about, to inject breezily as a gently- 
 naughty stimulant. Sex as an elemental force which 
 shapes the lives of men and women, which actuates 
 their struggles in this terrestrial sphere of ours, 
 making for success or failure, for happiness or de- 
 spair, for sinner or saint, is vile, lascivious, and 
 therefore taboo. 
 
 The literary teaching profession has not passed 
 this degrading scene unnoticed. It has broken up In 
 two camps. The great mass of instructors have 
 simply adopted the position that a writer must give 
 whatever is demanded of him. Would a tailor re- 
 fuse to accept an order calling for a fabric he per- 
 sonally does not approve of and a fashion he 
 detests? Granted that this Is not a particularly 
 lofty conception of literary art, it is still less perni- 
 
80 SHORT STORY-WRITING 
 
 cious than the conception held by the smaller group 
 of so-called idealists in the profession. To these 
 the sex aspect of our literature calls for stormy de- 
 nunciation. They would impress upon the future 
 writer the sanctity of his mission. The pen must 
 not be polluted. Sex must be left alone entirely. 
 The moral tone must be preserved in all productions. 
 Laws for the ruthless suppression of the unclean 
 must be fought for and their enactment obtained. 
 What these honest Puritans cannot understand 
 is that the entire class of bawdy, sex-reeking litera- 
 ture is a product of the very laws they have been 
 fortunate enough to have enacted; that the complete 
 abolition of these laws and the absolute cessation 
 from persecution in the interests of morality of 
 any expression of sex would purge our literature of 
 the curse as nothing else. If any one could pur- 
 chase a mature, intelligent literary expression of 
 the mysterious passion that animates nature and 
 moves the world, the profane effusions of shriveled 
 minds would appear shocking and abhorrent by com- 
 parison. All literature that has ever been written 
 has dealt directly or indirectly with the relation of 
 men and women — for the very trite reason that all 
 life that has ever been lived has been the life of this 
 relation of men and women. To place the yellow 
 ticket of evil upon this relation as a literary sub- 
 ject is to degrade it beyond words of contempt. 
 The prevailing spectacle of our literary sewage is 
 
VERBOTEN 81 
 
 perfectly natural: the thought of uncleanness 
 wrapped around the stuff of life is bound to pollute 
 it. 
 
 But the pernicious influence of this immoral taboo 
 goes beyond its direct inhibition of the most legit- 
 imate of themes. It perpetuates an aesthetic lit- 
 erary tenet which is a relic of the Age of Darkness. 
 It is to the effect that the morality or unmorality of 
 its contents determines the value of a literary pro- 
 duction. "It is a shame that such splendid writing 
 should be wasted on such an atrocious theme," said 
 a sweet little lady student apropos Sherwood An- 
 derson's "The Other Woman. "^ The remark at 
 once characterized her as a member of the Second- 
 Grade Bigots. The First-Grade Bigots would not 
 permit themselves to see any excellences in a work 
 so pronouncedly unorthodox. When cornered, the 
 little lady admitted that there might be sound psy- 
 chology in Anderson's story — and a large measure 
 of unsavory truth. "But why choose such horrid 
 themes when there are so many nice, clean ones?" 
 It is the cry of all Pollyanna-nurtured readers. It's 
 the cry of the author of "Pollyanna" herself. "Is 
 there, then, no human experience that deals with the 
 good, the happy, the beautiful?" she asks, in a cir- 
 cular issued by her publishers. "Are joy, faith and 
 purity utterly illogical? Is only the thunder-cloud 
 
 3 Little Re<vieiv, May-June, 1920. Also included in E. J. O'Brien's 
 "Best Short Stories of 1920," Small, Maynard & Company, and in 
 Anderson's "The Triumph of the Egg." B. W. Huebsch. 
 
82 SHORT STORY-WRITING 
 
 real? — the sunshine a sham?" In such cases argu- 
 ment is impossible. The criterion of moral and 
 optimistic content is deep-rooted and well-nourished 
 by authority. Is it not largely this same criterion 
 that for more than a half century prevented the 
 acceptance by the Judges of Walt Whitman as a 
 poet, and that is excluding the name of Theo- 
 dore Dreiser from its rightful place in our scholarly 
 histories of the modern American novel? 
 
 To counteract this blind perpetuation of a falla- 
 cious doctrine demands a complete severance with 
 old school criticism and old-age pedagogy. Not 
 until authority-worship is mightily shaken can this 
 be accomplished. But that would be a hopeless task 
 to undertake. The great mass must have and will 
 have its Great Authorities to bow to. It is easier 
 than to depend upon one's own critical faculties. 
 Besides, habit has become second nature. We have 
 always been taught that knowledge is merely to 
 know where to find what we want to know. No, 
 we must be merciful; our literary apostles must 
 remain. But among them there are those that are 
 blind with senility and those that are glowing with 
 fresh vision. Let us follow the more musical of the 
 new criers until they, in their turn, reach their dot- 
 age and truth turns to ashes in their toothless 
 mouths. In no other way can we hope to uproot 
 the puerile beliefs that art can be judged by its 
 optimistic or uplifting message, by its morality, or 
 
VERBOTEN 83 
 
 by any other of, what Joel Elias Spuigarn terms, the 
 "Seven confusions." We have not yet reached the 
 stage where the relativity of the term "morality" 
 can be discussed with impunity and to any consider- 
 able advantage. But we can bring to bear upon a 
 rising generation of readers and writers all the force 
 of our warm logic to combat the notion that any 
 standard of morality, no matter how sublime, has 
 any determining value in art. We can insist that a 
 story might be entirely devoid of any moral signifi- 
 cance and yet be an immortal masterpiece; that the 
 whole notion is merely another one of the confusions 
 we have inherited from an age which was too busy 
 developing the raw resources of a vast young con- 
 tinent — a task which necessitated the invocation of 
 Providential aid — to pay attention to literature. 
 
 "To say that poetry (or any other art) is moral 
 or immoral is as meaningless as to say that an 
 equilateral triangle is moral and an isosceles triangle 
 immoral. Surely we must realize the absurdity of 
 testing anything by a standard which does not belong 
 to it or a purpose for which it was not intended. 
 Imagine these whiffs of conversation at a dinner 
 table : 'This cauliflower would be excellent if it 
 had only been prepared in accordance with interna- 
 tional law.' 'Do you know why my cook's pastry is 
 so good? He has never told a lie or seduced a 
 woman.' But why multiply obvious examples? 
 We do not concern ourselves with morals when we 
 
84 SHORT STORY-WRITING 
 
 test the engineer's bridge or the scientist's re- 
 searches; indeed we go farther, and say that it is 
 the moral duty of the scientist to disregard morals 
 in his search for truth. As a man he may be judged 
 by moral standards, but the truth of his conclusions 
 can only be judged by the standard of science. . . . 
 Art is expression, and poets succeed or fail by their 
 success or failure in completely and perfectly 
 expressing themselves. If the ideals they express 
 are not the ideals we admire most, we must blame 
 not the poets but ourselves; in the world where 
 morals count we have failed to give them the 
 proper material out of which to rear a nobler edi- 
 fice. To separate art and morality is not to destroy 
 moral values but to augment them — to give them 
 increased powers and a new freedom in the realm 
 in which they have the right to reign.' 
 
 1)4 
 
 3. Religion 
 
 It is literally true that American literature is not 
 irreverent. The penalty for meddling with religion 
 in any unconventional way is contemptuous obscur- 
 ity. But meddling with religion in a way that 
 brings out its blessings to humanity is praiseworthy 
 and leads to opulence and glory. For that reason 
 nine-tenths of our literature has a strain of religious 
 righteousness running through it. In the main 
 
 * Joel Elias Spingarn, "The Seven Arts and The Seven Con- 
 fusions," Seven Arts, March, 1917. 
 
VERBOTEN 85 
 
 the specters of Cotton Mather and Jonathan 
 Edwards still hover over our literary output, Impart- 
 ing to It a theological tint. Our fictlonlsts are still 
 obsessed with the Idea that a story or a novel must 
 preach, must Instill the right kind of Ideals, must 
 exert a redeeming Influence upon Its reader. To be 
 sure, the experienced ones among them are fully 
 aware of the dangers of obvious moralizing, but 
 they have mastered the devious ways of preaching 
 without arousing the reader's suspicion that he 
 Is being preached to. 
 
 It Is this last point — the devious ways of unsus- 
 pected preaching — that my profession Is concerned 
 with. Either we are altogether silent on the sub- 
 ject of religion In literature, deeming It too ticklish 
 a subject upon which to commit ourselves, or we 
 are zealous in our efforts to perpetuate the tradition 
 that literature must complement the work of the 
 church, only in a less outspoken way. Perhaps we 
 do not do It consciously but the results obtained 
 are the same. We merely advise students as to 
 what subjects may be exploited and what subjects 
 may not. Surely a subject bordering on the atheis- 
 tic could never be made salable; not more than two 
 or three periodicals would be open to such a story — 
 and these of the obscure, ''freaky" kind. Without 
 a doubt even such a mild story as Balzac's "An 
 Atheist's Mass" could never have seen the light of 
 publication in an American periodical. The fact 
 
86 SHORT STORY-WRITING 
 
 that the hero remains unconverted to the end would 
 be fatal. We may write a story about an atheist, 
 and have written such, but in our story, when the 
 denouement comes, the hero must exclaim to the 
 assembled multitude, that he had tried to live with- 
 out God and had found it unprofitable. The fact 
 that there might be some poor wretch of a hero in 
 this queer wide world who would not issue such a 
 proclamation does not detract from the urgency of 
 such a denouement. It is one of our devious ways; 
 without it the story can hope to travel no farther 
 than the return-to-author basket. The characters 
 we create must ultimately come to know God and 
 the church — or they never come to know the reader. 
 It is doubtful if an American Flaubert could hope 
 for as cordial a reception of an atheistic character 
 of his as the French have accorded the mediocre 
 M. Homais of "Madame Bovary" fame. 
 
 It is far from my purpose to leave the implication 
 that literature should preach atheism; but neither 
 should it preach religion, theology, or anything else, 
 for that matter, except in so far as life itself is a 
 sermon to whomever it pleases to view it as such. 
 "As a rule we may say that nothing in the world 
 improves one less than sermonizing books and con- 
 versations; nothing is more wearisome, quite apart 
 from the fact that nothing is more inartistic. . . . 
 We do not demand of an author that he should 
 work to make us better. . . . All that we 
 
VERBOTEN 87 
 
 can demand of him Is that he work conscien- 
 tiously."^ The moment an author stoops to uplift 
 us he loses his balance as an artistic observer, 
 recorder, and interpreter. 
 
 The attitude of our literature toward religion is 
 based on a churchy interpretation of life and char- 
 acter which was unconsciously but none the less com- 
 prehensively expressed in a magazine article by Dr. 
 Frank Crane. ''Church people," he wrote, "as a 
 rule, pay their debts, observe the decencies of life, 
 are clean of mind and body, cultivate those qualities 
 that make for a successful and contented life, and 
 get along together peacefully. And, as a rule, the 
 embezzlers, thugs, drunkards, harlots, rascals, adul- 
 terers, gamblers, and swindlers do not cultivate 
 church-going to any great extent."^ 
 
 This is a safe and sane doctrine to embrace when 
 writing fiction for the popular magazines. Our 
 editors, almost universally, have embraced it, and 
 even though the Reverend Doctor specifically states 
 that he speaks of people "as a rule," which would 
 permit of exceptions, editors at large will not recog- 
 nize the existence of such exceptions. Truth does 
 not count and experience is an illusion. If a writer 
 has in his life had the misfortune of coming across 
 a man or woman who was kind, charitable, gentle, 
 moral, and noble and yet instead of being affiliated 
 
 ^ George Brandes, On Reading. 
 
 ^ "All Else Will Pass," People's Favorite Magazine, January, 
 1921. 
 
88 SHORT STORY-WRITING 
 
 with a church was a member of the Secular League 
 and a subscriber to the Truth Seeker he would best 
 suppress the latter two points. If a writer has read 
 statistics of extra-generous donations made to vari- 
 ous church funds and has found among the names 
 of donors not a few of universally notorious embez- 
 zlers, he must ignore the fact, if only in the interests 
 of his career. His motto must be: Never write 
 anything about church that could not be turned into 
 an advertisement of the institution. If the motto 
 conflicts with life, scratch life. 
 
 And yet religion, like sex, is one of the basic 
 forces of life; it has helped to shape the course of 
 human history and civilization. To deny the artist 
 the prerogative to touch upon it unless it be in 
 praise is to deny him the means to probe the human 
 soul. To compel him to accept any institution as 
 infallible and therefore beyond question of imper- 
 fection is to fetter his spirit. That a man who is a 
 respected member of a respected church cannot be 
 a thief in his business life or a brute at home is a 
 more prostituting doctrine, the more so if not ac- 
 tually believed in but adopted for commercial pur- 
 poses only, than any harlot was ever guided by, 
 because it is so flagrantly contrary to truth. That 
 the call of sex can never prove stronger than the 
 holiest of religious precepts is a malicious canon of 
 hypocritical dogmatism. This is the natural stuff 
 of literature — the dramatic conflicts and seeming 
 
VERBOTEN 89 
 
 paradoxes, physical, psychic and Intellectual, the 
 eternal clash of nature and dogma, of passion and 
 Idea, of man and the world. 
 
 Puny fledgelings come to us for Instruction In 
 aerial literary navigation and we look In the tome 
 of Thou Shalt Nots and clip their weak little wings. 
 "Never dare to lift yourself more than a yard above 
 the earth," we admonish; "and you'll find It easier 
 if you use this trick and that," we add. If, per- 
 chance, one of them after awhile finds the fawning 
 breath of the earth too close and spreads Its wings 
 and begins to soar up Into the clear ether we shrug 
 our shoulders compassionately and say to the rest: 
 "Another young bird gone wrong." It has broken 
 the limits of our taboos; It has tasted the wine of 
 pure ozone; It has heard the call of exploration; It 
 has turned Irreverent. Should It succeed In grow- 
 ing a few dazzling feathers by the time It comes 
 back In sight we may meet It with music and shout to 
 It the hospitality of our gardens — as a mark of our 
 ability to appreciate fine feathers; but more fre- 
 quently we let It starve to death and keep the music 
 for a touching funeral. During their lifetime we 
 have nothing to do with the Irreverent. . . . 
 
 4. Social and Political Prohleuis 
 
 No literature Is more afraid of a courageous pre- 
 sentation of the social welter which America, In 
 cr mmon with all the rest of the world. Is undergoing 
 
90 SHORT STORY-WRITING 
 
 in this age of reconstruction, than American litera- 
 ture. Not that it entirely fails to touch upon the 
 mighty problems that have shaken our national life, 
 but it still clings to an ancient sense of delicacy and 
 an orthodox point of view which determines what 
 may and may not be said. Whether a writer really 
 subscribes to the point of view which colors nearly 
 all of our efforts is immaterial; in order to sell his 
 product he must adopt it, irrespective of any pro- 
 testing personal scruples he might feel. Thus we 
 find our literature, with the exception of a small and 
 highly unprofitable part, expressing no more ad- 
 vanced views on the social phenomena of the day 
 than our forefathers held, and most frequently less 
 advanced. 
 
 The editor of The Coming Nation, discussing the 
 kind of stories that are not wanted by film com- 
 panies, mentions, among others, stories "where the 
 hero arises and makes a soap-box speech on Social- 
 ism converting all by-standers."^ This statement 
 applies with equal force to our magazine fiction as 
 well. That no respectable editor of a fiction peri- 
 odical will take such stories is a fact universally 
 known among people acquainted with prevailing 
 policies of our magazines. There would be nothing 
 sinister in this policy, it would even be highly laud- 
 able, were it based on the logical assumption that 
 men's minds are not so easily swayed and that there- 
 
 "^ Writing the Photoplay, Esenwein & Leeds. 
 
VERBOTEN 91 
 
 fore no audience of by-standers can be converted by 
 a single speech. But it is based on no such rea- 
 soning. The fact is that the story depicting a 
 speaker converting by a few eloquent phrases, 
 let us say, a body of strikers, to the employer's 
 point of view, impelling them to forsake their 
 scheming leaders, tainted by European gold, 
 of course, and return to work will and does find 
 a ready market. Even the lack of story values 
 are frequently overlooked where such a Active inci- 
 dent occurs. The greatest of our national weeklies 
 and monthlies will open their columns to the padded 
 dissertation in story disguise on the unreasonable- 
 ness of workingmen, or the inefficiency of govern- 
 ment control of industries, or the blessings of a Big 
 Business Administration. 
 
 What really determines the policy of exclusion of 
 certain topics or angles of presentation is the safe- 
 guarding of the interests of the big advertisers and 
 the personal prejudices of the publishers. Our 
 experienced writers, as well as the instructors of 
 student-writers who know their business, know these 
 prejudices perfectly. They know that popular views 
 "get by" even if the artistry is not so very obstru- 
 sive. They know that unless one can fall in with 
 the established views of the great majority it is 
 best to leave social and political problems alone 
 and to write about the South Seas, or Alaska, or the 
 romantic story of John Jones, Jr., a son of a village 
 
92 SHORT STORY-WRITING 
 
 blacksmith, who, after many thrilling hardships 
 finally married Ivy Van Schyler, the pampered heir- 
 ess of noble lineage and a huge block of sound rail- 
 road stock. They even know such small details as 
 that if a hero uses soap, it is best not to mention it 
 by an existing brand, for it may offend advertisers 
 trying to fasten upon the public rival brands; that 
 ''talking machine" is safer than "Victrola" or "Gra- 
 fonola" or any other patented name; that, in a 
 word, no free advertising be given any company, 
 thus causing other advertisers to complain. They 
 know that it is dangerous to make a character in- 
 timate that his health has been impaired as a result 
 of drinking too much ginger-ale, or taking headache 
 powders, or yeast, or tobacco, or anything else, for 
 that matter, that advertisers sell. It makes no 
 difference whether a writer has accumulated a fund 
 of personal observation to corroborate his state- 
 ment. There are people who are trying to sell 
 these products and will surely lodge a protest with 
 the advertising manager of the publication in which 
 such a story appears. In fact, numerous cases 
 where such inadvertent remarks have resulted in 
 diminished advertising space are on record. 
 
 It is to the interest of these same all-powerful 
 advertisers to see that no aspersions be cast in our 
 magazine fiction upon the inalienable rights and 
 dignities of Business and that no dangerous views 
 be expressed which might sway a vigilantly guarded 
 
VERBOTEN 93 
 
 public mind In undesirable directions. Existing 
 social and political Institutions may be defended In 
 our fiction but not attacked or criticized; their 
 merits may be extolled, but their demerits must not 
 be betrayed to an innocent world. Private prop- 
 erty is sacred; the State is always right — except 
 when it attempts to Interfere with Property; then a 
 thinly veiled story decrying this interference as 
 autocratic, tyrannous and un-American might get by 
 and bring a fair price. Progress is a generality 
 that affects us but little ; the laws of change are sus- 
 pended when applied to our literary reactions to 
 our social life. Other nations may develop new 
 schools of fictlonists, young, virile, boldly speaking 
 their minds on the moot problems of the day. We 
 have no room for such impudence. Our literature 
 is "pure," level-headed, conservative. Some Iso- 
 lated muck-rakers appear here and there, but we 
 give them no outlet for their muck-raking, and they 
 must either reform or perish or, at best, when we 
 are helpless to prevent it, get a measure of barren 
 notoriety. 
 
 An army officer, an advanced student, once 
 handed in a splendidly written story of army life, 
 in which he gave a graphic portrayal of court-mar- 
 tial proceedings. The apathy and criminal noncha- 
 lance with which helpless boys were sentenced to 
 long-term Imprisonment, in the name of discipline, 
 was so artistically woven into a thrilling plot that 
 
94 SHORT STORY-WRITING 
 
 It made Interesting reading even to the most avid 
 fiction devotees. Yet the story had gone the rounds 
 of nearly all the paying magazines without finding 
 a market. A few friendly editors wrote the author 
 personal letters, one editor going so far as to ex- 
 press his appreciation of the work, but admitting 
 that the story was deemed "unavailable because It 
 does not meet with the policy of this publication." 
 I supplied the discouraged author with a list of un- 
 conventional publications — for fortunately we do 
 have a fighting number of them with us — that might 
 welcome his story but could afford to pay either 
 very little or not at all. He refused to waste his 
 work on the "freaks," and wanted to know If he 
 could not revise the story to make It salable to a 
 standard magazine. I told him that elimination of 
 all incidents reflecting unfavorably upon the admin- 
 istration of law In our army would undoubtedly 
 help. He protested that the Incidents had been 
 taken from life and held out for a while, but finally 
 he succumbed to his Intense desire to "get In." 
 The story was revised and made perfectly harmless 
 — "sweet" and happy; It sold on Its first trip. The 
 officer has never again attempted to use life as a 
 basis for fiction — indiscriminately. It was his first 
 altercation with policies — and probably his last. 
 It requires greater powers than he was blessed with 
 to put up a more valiant resistance. 
 
 It is a sad comment on education that under exist- 
 
VERBOTEN 95 
 
 ing circumstances, instructors of writers are obliged 
 to help undermine this natural resistance a few re- 
 bellious spirits occasionally display. One whose 
 entire stock in trade is a knowledge of markets and 
 policies and an ability to expound existing standards 
 is not in a very advantageous position to encourage 
 disregard of immutable taboos. We must say, on 
 reading a story which is off-standard, that it won't 
 sell, and why. We must formulate and enforce 
 the rules that make for "success" in fiction writing. 
 We must be vestals of the sacred fires. I am aware 
 that "vestals" is not exactly the right word one 
 should use in this connection; perhaps another word 
 connoting less virtue would be more apt. But, 
 after all, most of us are honest, and zealously be- 
 lieve that the fires are sacred and must not be al- 
 lowed to go out or be polluted. Vision? Well, 
 — aren't the blind happy? 
 
 5. Americanism 
 
 As applied to our literature the term American 
 has come to mean everything and anything. It 
 compliments the mediocre twaddle of mediocre 
 minds. To earn the compliment a story must be 
 neither sad nor "fresh" nor irreverent nor "red." 
 It must not be burdened with too much thought or 
 sincere emotion. It must have no glimmer of an 
 original idea. It must "kiss the hand that feeds 
 it," — which means in this case that it must breathe 
 
96 SHORT STORY-WRITING 
 
 a sweet humility to all our institutions, from the 
 First Law of the land to the American Legion and 
 Babe Ruth. It must be "glad to be alive and carry 
 on"— everything that is old and respectable and 
 decrepit and green with mold. 
 
 Let a piece of literary art reflect an unhackneyed 
 thought, let it break any one of our ancient taboos, 
 let it dare to belittle any one of our glorified gener- 
 alities and dogmas — and it is promptly howled 
 down as un-American. The literature of every 
 other country on earth affords an interpretative and 
 critical view of the psychology of the national mind 
 it reflects, while American literature is least reflec- 
 tive of the American national mind, except in one 
 particular: its cringing fear of the truth. Were it 
 not for this fear to face the truth, and the inability 
 of the average American to stand criticism, the 
 great bulk of our "literature" would find no buyers 
 and its content would undergo a radical change. 
 It is this national trait that has given rise to the sub- 
 lime injunction, "Don't knock!" We may have 
 heard of Matthew Arnold, but surely never of his 
 heretic doctrine that literature is a criticism of life. 
 To us literature is largely a matter of so many 
 words at so much per word, or so many hugs and 
 kisses and careers attained per magazine page. 
 
 Is it to be wondered at that with us we have the 
 interminable problem: What shall we write about? 
 With one of the largest countries in the world in 
 
VERBOTEN 97 
 
 which to live; with over one hundred miUions of 
 people living and working and battling and dream- 
 ing all about us; with a multitude of perplexing 
 problems, international, national, municipal, class, 
 clan, and individual, clamoring for solution ; with a 
 rich, ever-shifting panorama of a young, virile, 
 national existence before us; with a million comedies 
 and a million tragedies avidly looking at our type- 
 writer keys — with all this to be had for the taking, 
 isn't it pathetically absurd that we must voyage the 
 seven seas and scour all the corners of the earth in 
 search of material? Open any magazine any 
 month and note the proportion of stories located 
 in far, out-of-the-way places. Even our best writers 
 are following this romantic bent. Twenty-five per 
 cent, of the stories contained in O'Brien's "Year- 
 book" for 1919 had a foreign setting; his 'Tear- 
 book" for 1920 contained over thirty per cent, of 
 stories with foreign settings — mostly exotic and 
 bizarre. No serious objections could be taken to 
 transcribing the life of foreign places, if we had 
 first become aware of our own. But we have not. 
 Wc hunt for foreign material simply because we are 
 afraid to sift our own. We are only now beginning 
 to realize that our young continent — this huge, 
 crude meltingpot — is filled with brass and copper 
 and gold, and that these metals are melting and 
 fusing into some homogeneous substance, which we 
 vaguely term America. We want this burst of con- 
 
98 SHORT STORY-WRITING 
 
 sclousness to grow and sweep us along to great 
 revelations, but a false pride and obsolete traditions 
 and hypocritical dogmas are blocking the way. 
 Parrot-like we shout from pulpit and rostrum and 
 cathedra the old banality: "Boost! All the world 
 loves a booster!" And because we like to be loved 
 we dare not touch upon the wounds of life — the hun- 
 ger, the passions, the buffets, the defeats that purge 
 its sordldness, gild Its drabness, and actuate us to 
 nobler aspirations. 
 
 We pride ourselves that we have developed the 
 short story to perfection. It has become our 
 national form of literary expression. It has 
 reached an unparalleled vogue. But, in truth. If we 
 are entitled to pride, it Is on account of our remark- 
 able achievement of an ability to tell an entertain- 
 ing tale without telling anything worth while. 
 Paradoxically, we squeeze amusement out of 
 nothing. We have attained an excellence of work- 
 manship without the least depth of substance. But 
 I am anticipating. This phase of the subject is so 
 important that It deserves a chapter for itself, which 
 it will receive later on. The real perfection of our 
 short story is yet to come. The signs are that It Is 
 having Its birth pangs at this time. Writers of 
 rich promise have come to the fore recently — and 
 here and there a magazine, either new or an old 
 one with a new policy, to receive their product. 
 Our perfected short story will be bold, fearless, 
 
VERBOTEN 99 
 
 vital; beating with the vigorous pulse of a giant 
 nation stretching its limbs. It will be truly Ameri- 
 can — optimistic, with the rugged optimism of a 
 Walt Whitman; brave, with the courage of an Im- 
 petuous youth ; rich, with the colors of a fertile soil 
 and a blending humanity. Perhaps our short story 
 Is to fulfill the hopes H. G. Wells once had for the 
 novel : 
 
 "The novel," he wrote In An Englishman Looks 
 at the JVorldy "Is to be the social mediator, the 
 vehicle of understanding . . . the criticism of 
 laws and institutions and of social dogmas and 
 ideas . . . We are going to write 
 about the whole of human life. We are going to 
 deal with political questions and religious questions 
 and social questions . . . until a thousand pre- 
 tenses and ten thousand Impostures shrivel In the 
 cold clear air of our elucidations. . . . Before 
 we have done we will have all life within the scope 
 of the novel." 
 
 A lofty assignment, this, for a form of literature 
 that Is rooted, as our short story always has been, 
 in the precept that to be Interesting It must eschew 
 reality. But we can carry it out — and will. Our 
 pioneers are already on the trail — weak as yet, not 
 a full-grown Chekhov among them — but gaining in 
 hardihood, and singing. The hordes behind them 
 are waiting in safety; let the trail become a bit 
 smoother, the hardships lessened, and they will 
 
100 SHORT STORY-WRITING 
 
 follow. In the meantime who that is filled with that 
 eternally human envious admiration for pluck can 
 keep back his "Good cheer!" and "Godspeed!"? 
 
CHAPTER VI 
 
 The Artificial Ending 
 
 One of the surest tags of the American short 
 story has been its happy ending. No matter what 
 vicissitudes the hero or heroine may have undergone, 
 what problems and tragedies may have overtaken 
 them, what unmendable exploits of circumstance or 
 fate they may have been subjected to, in the end 
 all must be well with them. The happy ending is a 
 direct result of our uplift optimism, of our Polly- 
 anna philosophy of life, of our fear of reality. We 
 have always justified it on the ground of our national 
 psychology, which, we claim, is buoyant and aggres- 
 sive and won't accept defeat. We have insisted 
 that the American always "gets what he wants 
 w^hen he wants it." And even the cynics among us 
 did not dispute our last claim; they pointed to the 
 happy ending. 
 
 It is true that of late, since it has become the 
 fashion to question everything, the happy ending 
 has come in for its share of blasphemous discussion. 
 Here and there views have been expressed that a 
 happy ending is not absolutely necessary to make a 
 story readable; some of these views are so decid- 
 
 101 
 
102 SHORT STORY-WRITING 
 
 edly antagonistic as to maintain that a happy ending 
 is invariably inartistic, which simply proves, again, 
 that rebound is directed with equal force but in 
 opposite direction as the original bound. Even 
 aspiring story writers come in occasionally inocu- 
 lated with doubt of the very propriety of the happy 
 ending. To such, we the votaries of the perfect 
 short story, having exhausted all our erudite argu- 
 ments in a vain attempt at reconversion, finally 
 apply the one unfailing argument — the threat of 
 the editorial rejection slip. The happy ending, we 
 admit, may not always be artistic, and it may not 
 always bring an acceptance, but the unhappy ending 
 almost invariably brings a rejection. 
 
 The fallacy of the happy ending clearly illustrates 
 the lack of any sound system of thought or reason- 
 ing underlying the exposition and production of 
 American fiction. We have the support of vener- 
 able theories and formulas and high-sounding 
 abstractions, but not of facts and logic. It is as if 
 we dared not examine the result of the application 
 of our theories and the filling of our formulas. 
 Glibly we state the psychology of the average Ameri- 
 can reader, which we profess to know so well, but 
 do not care to assure ourselves whether our deduc- 
 tions, and even our major premises are correct. For 
 if it were true that the average reader always 
 demands a happy ending, we would have no explana- 
 tion of the popularity of most of the works of Poe, 
 
THE ARTIFICIAL ENDING 103 
 
 Bret Harte, Jack London, Kipling, Conrad, Mau- 
 passant, and even the gray Russians. Doubtless 
 there are individual characteristics in the writings 
 of these gentlemen that have appealed to our happily- 
 disposed readers, but how much of the appeal has 
 been due to a vogue created by official O. K.'ers? 
 The inchoate reversion to an insistence on the 
 unhappy ending, which is becoming apparent among 
 some layers of our reading public, tends to con- 
 firm this suggestion. For it is not probable that 
 the same people who have never been able to enjoy 
 a story unless it ended happily should suddenly 
 have been seized with a passionate amour for the 
 "morbid" ending; and, from any rational point of 
 view, it is just as fallacious to accept the unhappy 
 ending as an invariable rule as it is to accept the 
 happy ending. One may be as artificial as the other. 
 Manifestly there are kinks in the average reader's 
 psychology of which we have not been aware, or 
 if we have, have paid little attention to. This psy- 
 chology which we have taken for granted and 
 builded upon is not after all so solid as we have 
 supposed it to be. It can be and is being molded. 
 It appears that the present-day average reader fears 
 nothing so much as the imputation of being average. 
 Here and there a brave soul may vociferously boast 
 of being a "low-brow," thus betraying a troubled 
 consciousness of mediocrity, but on the whole the 
 tendency is to deplore the tastes of the average, 
 
104 SHORT STORY-WRITING 
 
 thereby Imputing to one's self, by implication of 
 contrast, the possession of tastes above those of 
 the average. Hence the sudden ability to enjoy an 
 unhappy ending. Hence also the distrust of the 
 average editor of this sudden growth In taste. He 
 knows Its make-believe nature : the average reader 
 may learn to pretend a dislike for the good old 
 happy ending, but in truth he enjoys It as much as 
 he ever did. Hence the continued demand for 
 stories with happy endings. 
 
 This may not be such a cheering view of the 
 average reader's psychology, but neither Is It 
 entirely cheerless. By exploiting Its hypocritical 
 vein of pretended admiration for good literature, 
 we may hope ultimately to develop a genuine 
 admiration. People of habitual coarse tastes, for 
 beverages, delicacies, clothes or arts, usually begin 
 the refining process by affecting the tastes of those 
 whom they think their betters. The process Itself 
 is rather long and tedious and often disheartening. 
 But the aping instinct helps measurably. We cannot 
 hope to have a discriminating reading public In a 
 day. Too long have we Impressed upon our public 
 the blessings of a happy disposition and the artistry 
 of reflecting it In our literature. Too long have we 
 brazened about our pride In Pollyanna, Walling- 
 ford, Torchy, and a hundred other Active chasers of 
 the blues, who won't take defeat but go on singing 
 on their way. The happy story, with its breezy 
 
THE ARTIFICIAL ENDING 105 
 
 style, its giggling climax, and its smacking denoue- 
 ment has become a fixed type from which our 
 readers' affection cannot be so quickly alienated. 
 
 D. W. Griffith, one of the ablest producers of 
 moving pictures, is reported to have made the state- 
 ment that the average spectator of cinema drama 
 has the intelligence of a nine-year-old child/ That 
 Mr. Griffith is justified in his statement may be 
 assumed from the huge success he has had in pur- 
 veying cinema entertainment. He has made mil- 
 lions where others have made scanty half-millons. 
 Verily, he knows his public and is in a position to 
 estimate its mental powers with some measure of 
 accuracy. His contempt of its intelligence does him 
 credit. . . . 
 
 One of his greatest successes has been his pro- 
 duction of ''Way Down East," a spectacular melo- 
 drama of the old angel-girl-Satan-man variety, 
 with a resulting illegitimate baby which happily 
 sees fit to die, leaving the little mother to find work 
 with a good Christian family. But her past is 
 against her and she is finally driven out into a 
 terrible snow-storm by a man who quotes the Bible 
 by the yard, and the women in the audience wet 
 their little handkerchiefs, and the men hawk and 
 cough and blow their noses. The big scene of the 
 picture, and which is probably responsible for 
 seventy-five per cent, of the picture's phenomenal 
 
 ^Literary Digest, May 14, 1921. 
 
106 SHORT STORY-WRITING 
 
 success, shows a whole river of ice floating down 
 toward a furiously-dashing waterfall. The poor 
 little heroine is on one of the huge cakes of ice fast 
 Rearing the watery precipice, while the good boy 
 who loves her honestly is jumping like an acrobat 
 after her in the teeth of a raging storm. 
 
 Now, all the moving-picture patrons in the coun- 
 try, from the past experience of having witnessed 
 one thousand pictures and read ten thousand maga- 
 zine stories, ought to know that there is not one 
 chance in a million that the plucky lover will not 
 arrive in time to rescue his sweetheart — such things 
 have not happened and do not happen (in our 
 stones, of course!), yet they become wide-eyed and 
 panting with excitement, as if they were in doubt 
 about the outcome. Griffith uses the "cut-back" 
 every ten or twenty feet, showing the thundering 
 falls, the crashing ice with the limp figure of the 
 girl upon it, the boy precariously maintaining his 
 balance, then back again to the falls; thus prolong- 
 ing the agony until he thinks the public has got its 
 money's worth; then the boy arrives, clasps the girl 
 in his arms, his erring Christian father asks her 
 forgiveness and welcomes her as a prospective 
 daughter-in-law, and the public file out in the lobby, 
 exclaiming ecstatically to one another: "What a 
 masterpiece!" Verily, this Mr. Griffith knew 
 whereof he spoke. 
 
 Our public is still thrilled with a climax of whose 
 
THE ARTIFICIAL ENDING 107 
 
 outcome there ought to be not the slightest doubt. 
 Which merely proves that if our fiction still has a 
 measure of suspense it is not due to our clever tech- 
 nique but to the almost fabulous stupidity of the 
 large mass of readers. We have evolved our tricks 
 of technique for the prime purpose of maintaining 
 a keen suspense, of keeping the outcome of the con- 
 flict which every story must have in the balance, of 
 heightening the reader's curiosity to follow the des- 
 tiny of the hero or heroine in whose behalf his 
 sympathies have been enlisted to a satisfactory end. 
 But if after, let us say, twenty years of reading 
 fiction, there should suddenly dawn upon our aver- 
 age reader's mind the idea that as the hero or hero- 
 ine of a story is always immortal and unconquer- 
 able in the end, no matter how circumstances may 
 appear to be against him or her for the moment, 
 would not our skillfully woven suspense suffer a 
 severe jolt? Of what use would it be to fear for the 
 safety of the trapped little girl when a dogged con- 
 fidence, gained by profitable experience in reading, 
 would suggest that she is due at the altar on page 
 five and would inevitably keep her appointment? Of 
 what use would be taking seriously the pugilistic 
 encounters of the Man-Who-Can't-Be-Knocked- 
 Out? Why thrill with anxiety over an overturned 
 automobile when it is certain that the hero pinned 
 underneath it will have sustained nothing more 
 serious than a few scratches that must heal before 
 
108 SHORT STORY-WRITING 
 
 the final sentence is completed? What would 
 become of all our tricks and ingenuity and inventive- 
 ness? Would not this one convention of the invari- 
 ably happy ending then defeat all our efforts at 
 creating suspense? And if that happened would it 
 not be the direst calamity to all we have worked for, 
 to the entire mechanism of our "perfect" story? 
 
 The preceding paragraph is prophetic of what 
 ultimately must happen. As yet that day may be 
 far off in the hazy distance, but when it comes the 
 philosophy of our short story must undergo a com- 
 plete metamorphosis. Its own glaring contradic- 
 tions, if not external influences, must ultimately bring 
 that about. To preach Suspense as the highest law, 
 then kill it at its very inception by another law of 
 the happy ending is an absurdity that cannot long 
 remain unapparent even to a nine-year-old intel- 
 ligence. 
 
 Meantime the reaction noted in some quarters 
 toward the invariably unhappy ending is just as 
 sinister an influence toward the rise of another 
 absurdity. Whether this reaction be sincere — as in 
 the case of those who have been fed with glucose 
 fiction ad nauseam — or merely fashionable — as in 
 the case of most of the Left Wing of our present- 
 day average reading public — if crystallized and per- 
 petuated as a dogma it is bound to constitute a 
 serious hindrance in the evolution of the short story. 
 Once and for all we must come to an acceptance of 
 
THE ARTIFICIAL ENDING 109 
 
 the truth that there can be but one kind of an ending 
 to a story — whether happy or unhappy — and that 
 is the logical one, an ending which Is a direct inevi- 
 able outgrowth of the story Itself. No law can be 
 made that would apply to all stories; each story 
 generates Its own laws. The question of repugnance 
 or preferences of the reader does not enter here at 
 all. The question of cause and effect, of Intelligent 
 probability gaged by a keen observation of the laws 
 or lack-of-laws of reality — this question alone must 
 become paramount and decisive. 
 
 It is true that the noblest literary works, from the 
 dramas of ^schylus to the present day, have all 
 been tinged with sadness — Maupassant's definition 
 of literature as being a mirror of life, proving a true 
 one. Also that other one — is it by Goethe? — that 
 literature Is the conscience of the human race. In 
 the world of men, with the dark mystery of death 
 as an ever-present certainty, thus sowing a sense of 
 the futility of all human aspirations and achieve- 
 ment in the hearts of even the most aggressive of 
 us; with a lurking consciousness of Insurmountable 
 limitations besetting our fondest dreams; with a still 
 more pronounced consciousness that the maturing 
 of dreams frequently marks their decay, and almost 
 always marks the thawing of their dewy glitter — in 
 such a world, literature, welling up from the depths 
 of inner consciousness, cannot help being tinged with 
 sadness. In fact, the vast bulk of the world's lit- 
 
110 SHORT STORY-WRITING 
 
 erary masterpieces consists of tragedies. The sooner 
 this fundamental fact is woven into the fiber of 
 American fiction the sooner will American fiction 
 become the mirror of American life and the con- 
 science of the American people. 
 
 But this solemn historic consideration does not 
 justify the adoption of a rigid rule that an unhappy 
 ending of a story is artistic and that a happy one is 
 always inartistic. Least of all could it be justified 
 in its application to the short story, which frequently 
 deals with but a single incident in the life of a char- 
 acter rather than with a complete history. There 
 are infinitely more probabilities of ultimate defeat 
 in a complete history than in a single experience. 
 Death is not always the price of an adventure, nor 
 disillusionment that of an undertaking. Conrad's 
 "Youth," melancholy as it is with the breath of 
 finiteness of all our glorious epochs, has no tragic 
 ending. The young commander has dared through 
 stress and storm and adversity, has pitted the 
 strength of his youth against that of the sea and has 
 come out victorious, glowing with the symbolic mes- 
 sage : "Do or Die!" And though, when he re- 
 counts the narrative of that first command of his, 
 youth is far behind him, he is filled with lyric mem- 
 ories of it far sweeter than his distant exploit itself. 
 Mary E. Wilkins Freeman's "Revolt of Mother" 
 ends happily and yet logically and artistically. Per- 
 haps in her next encounter with her hard-hearted 
 
THE ARTIFICIAL ENDING 111 
 
 and hard-headed husband Mother won't be as suc- 
 cessful, but in this one which Mrs. Freeman had 
 chosen to relate, she carries the day. Maupassant's 
 "Moonlight" ends well. The old Abbe realizes 
 that "God perhaps has made such nights as this to 
 clothe with his ideals the loves of men," and 
 the young couple can henceforth love unmolested. 
 James Branch Cabell's "Wedding Jest" ends hap- 
 pily, although satirically — the point of the story — 
 not a happy one by any means — being contained par- 
 ticularly in the ending. An enumeration of all the 
 great short stories that have happy endings would 
 make a paragraph of considerable length. 
 
 From any technical point of view the unhappy 
 ending, when canonized into a convention, will 
 defeat any skill and ingenuity or even natural artis- 
 try in the maintenance of suspense. After a while 
 readers will learn that every story must end unhap- 
 pily and will be on their guard. Already the few 
 periodicals that have made a convention of the un- 
 conventional ending are suffering a depressing mo- 
 notony. There really is no reason for following the 
 love illusions of the unsophisticated heroine when it 
 is certain that disillusionment awaits her in the end. 
 Nor is there reason for feeling elated over the suc- 
 cess of our hero when we know that it is temporary, 
 that it is only a matter of paragraphs or pages 
 before this success will be turned into defeat. 
 
 If then we arrive at the conclusion that neither 
 
112 SHORT STORY-WRITING 
 
 the happy ending nor the tragic ending is in itself 
 an indication of artistry, but must be considered in 
 its relation to the story it ends, we arrive at a 
 view which is at once rational and simple — so 
 simple, in fact, that it seems banal to emphasize it. 
 In the matter of endings we have been thinking in 
 terms of producing the greatest effect, totally ignor- 
 ing their inevitability as culminating points of given 
 sets of plot influences. We know that the end of 
 a story marks an emphatic place which leaves the 
 greatest impression upon the reader's mind; it is, 
 rhetorically, a strategic point, and therefore we con- 
 centrate all our surprises, our jugglery, our uplift 
 message and our disposition upon this point. We 
 want the reader to go away smiling, or pleasantly 
 startled, or, if we write for the conventionally un- 
 conventional publication, unpleasantly satisfied. 
 The fact that a writer after having set his char- 
 acters in motion and allowing them to act and react 
 upon the various forces of the plot, to mold and be 
 molded, has no power over the ending other than 
 that of guiding the threads of his story — characters, 
 motives and circumstances — to the end they are 
 logically bound for, is as yet obscure among us. We 
 are associating the ending with Its Impressions upon 
 the reader, with its gallery value — rather than with 
 the soul of the story. As Mr. Carl Van Doren, 
 former literary editor of The Nation and now of 
 The Century has expressed it: "According to all 
 
THE ARTIFICIAL ENDING 113 
 
 the codes of the more serious kinds of fiction, the 
 unwillingness — or the Inability — to conduct a plot to 
 its legitimate ending Implies some weakness in the 
 artistic character."^ 
 
 This weakness that Mr. Van Doren refers to In 
 reality arises from our very conception of the func- 
 tion of fiction and the motives that govern its 
 birth. In a majority of cases the prime motive for 
 writing a story is to obtain a check from a publisher; 
 the dazzling figures cited in our newspapers and 
 writers' magazines as the incomes of some fictlonlsts 
 exert an irresistible appeal. The constant hammer- 
 ing upon literature as a commodity which can be 
 and is being produced as any other commodity at 
 such and such a price, the size being determined 
 upon its ability to perform the clownish function of 
 supplying a laugh or a thrill to the largest number 
 of T. B. M.'s or T. B. W.'s, is another Influence 
 responsible for this weakness. That fiction Is a 
 medium for the expression of a writer's reactions 
 to his business of living Is a view that mighty few 
 of our writers, editors, and literary savants seem 
 to hold. So that the fallacy of the happy ending, 
 and of the unhappy ending as well. Is Inevitably 
 bound up with the larger fallacy of mistaking the 
 manufacture of stories for the function of literature. 
 
 2 "Booth Tarkington," The Nation, February 9, 1921. 
 
CHAPTER VII 
 
 Form and Substance 
 
 Jack London In his confessions of his struggle for 
 recognition as a writer gives this formula for success 
 in literature : Health, Work, and a Philosophy of 
 Life. Health Is necessary, of course, In order to 
 do any hard work, and in a world against which old 
 Malthus railed, nothing can be attained without 
 hard work. But It is the value of the third ingredi- 
 ent which is most often overlooked and the absence 
 of which is responsible for the failure of most of 
 our literary output to rise above the level of medi- 
 ocrity. We have noted, in another place, that Jack 
 London himself, in the bulk of his production, failed 
 to strike more than an occasional deep and sincere 
 chord, but It was not because his ear was faulty; 
 it was simply because his audience rejected precisely 
 the deep chord. 
 
 Let it be understood that by a philosophy of life 
 Jack London did not refer to any definite view on 
 economic reform or social regeneration. Narrow, 
 limited, prejudiced views have but little place in 
 literature; if presented by the hand of an artist, 
 they may appeal for a short time, but never for very 
 
 114 
 
FORM AND SUBSTANCE 115 
 
 long. Great writers there have been who were not 
 as actively engaged in the squabbles of the world as 
 Jack London was and who did not take definite 
 sides in the skirmishes of any generation but they 
 have all had a philosophy of life none the less, in 
 that they have all had a broad, philosophic compre- 
 hension of the basic laws which govern human life 
 and actions; of causes and effects conducive to 
 human suffering and happiness; and of the reactions 
 of these basic laws upon the author himself so that 
 he is able to present them from a definite angle — 
 his angle. 
 
 It is the possession of this individual angle upon 
 the everlasting panorama of life and death which 
 distinguishes the vital master from the flabby 
 mechanic. We might call it philosophy of life, 
 independence of mind, originality, idealism, or what 
 not. In all cases it makes for substance — the thing 
 by which a work of art lives. 
 
 No slight is intended on the value of form In 
 literature. If the appropriate masterful form 
 clothes this vital substance, so much the better, of 
 course, but it is the substance that is the protoplasm. 
 Form follows fads and fashions, and is decidedly 
 mortal; substance alone Illustrates the immutable 
 law of the indestructibility of matter. With all 
 their beautiful rhetoric and genial humor, the Spec- 
 tator and Tatler papers of Addison and Steele are 
 mildly entertaining dead matter today, but the trag- 
 
116 SHORT STORY-WRITING 
 
 edies and comedies of the Bard of Avon are as 
 appealing today as three centuries ago, even though 
 handicapped by a form no longer in vogue. Dos- 
 toyevsky's novels, to take a more modern example, 
 were written in a style as clumsy and uncouth as 
 ever novels could be written in, but their burning 
 pages sear the souls of men who read them. The 
 gift of substance is in them — a fiery miracle, an 
 Apocalypse. 
 
 The one supremely outstanding feature in our 
 American fiction is its lack of substance. Some of 
 us have the O. Henry style and some of us have the 
 Henry James style and still others have the Wash- 
 ington Irving or the Poe style; some of us can plot 
 and others can end a story with a flourish; some 
 possess a dazzling vocabulary and others are genii 
 of rhetoric — but how many have something sus- 
 taining to impart to a world drowning in platitudes? 
 How much of worth has our fiction added to the 
 world's sum of comprehension of beauty, of truth? 
 We have developed schools and systems of teaching 
 and learning how to say things; we have bent every 
 effort toward the evolving of a science of expression 
 only to find that we have been too busy expressing 
 to acquire what to express. American ethics has 
 always been a point of national pride, but we have 
 never applied it to the art of talking brilliantly when 
 one has nothing to say. As George Macdonald 
 once put it: ". . . If a man has nothing to 
 
FORM AND SUBSTANCE 117 
 
 communicate, there Is no reason why he should have 
 a good style, any more than why he should have a 
 good purse without any money, or a good scabbard 
 without any sword." 
 
 Again, the acquisition of nobility of form Is not 
 to be discouraged, but the possession of something 
 to tell the world is the sublimest of gifts, and gains 
 the world's everlasting gratitude; and the greatest 
 seeming anomaly in the conditions under which 
 American literature is produced is that this gift is 
 not only rated at a discount but fought, vilified, 
 grappled with. The only way the gift can be 
 acquired, if it can, is through an insatiable interest 
 in the stuff and forms of life; but such interest leads 
 to inquiry and inquiry leads to heresy; venerable 
 taboos are broken. The anomaly becomes a normal 
 result of an inferior conception of the rights and 
 functions of literature. Prejudices are placed above 
 art; policies above truth; words above meanings. 
 
 Once, at a suffrage gathering, a young writer was 
 introduced by a friend to a famous writer whose 
 encouragement the beginner desired. At the end of 
 the evening the friend asked the famous writer for 
 his impressions of the budding genius. "I have not 
 read any of his work," the famous writer answered, 
 "but I am afraid he has not the makings of a genius. 
 The way he snubbed the poor girl I Introduced him 
 to merely because she is a salesgirl indicates that 
 he lacks the voracious interest in the human element 
 
118 SHORT STORY-WRITING 
 
 which marks the true artist. How is he ever going 
 to talk Man when he doesn't know Man?" 
 
 Voracious interest — that's the path that leads* to 
 the gift of substance, to the ''philosophy of life," 
 the original angle ! Caesar saw before he con- 
 quered. And he had to come a long way before 
 he could see. But he wanted to see. And it is 
 wanting to see that is the whip of genius. Dickens 
 walked the streets of London for hours, through 
 rain and fog and slush and shine, because he wanted 
 to see it, all of it, every nook and corner of it. Bal- 
 zac tramped the length and breadth of Paris, 
 haunted parks and shops and drawing-rooms, be- 
 cause the human comedy appealed to him. The 
 Russian Kuprin dressed himself in a diver's suit 
 and had himself lowered many fathoms into the 
 Black Sea because he wanted to experience the 
 sensations of a diver. And Jack London 
 circled the globe because he wanted to see what 
 it is like. 
 
 A little class-room episode comes to mind. In 
 the poetry class Carl Sandburg came up for dis- 
 cussion. A few of his Chicago poems were read 
 when a fair would-be poet spoke up in protest. "I 
 have lived in Chicago all my life," she said, "and 
 have never seen the things Sandburg sees I" But 
 there was another student In the room, a very unob- 
 trusive little girl sitting somewhere in the back of 
 the room, and she suddenly came to her Instruc- 
 
FORM AND SUBSTANCE 119 
 
 tor's rescue. "That's why you are not Sandburg!" 
 she exclaimed. 
 
 The true artist is the perpetual explorer. He 
 cannot invent the substance of his work, but he can 
 discover it in the life of nature and his fellow-men. 
 And the more he sees the more he learns to see, for 
 to be able to see the new and unexplored in the old 
 and elemental is the highest art in itself. A hunch- 
 back to a child in the streets is an object to throw 
 stones at, to a Victor Hugo he is a grand, heroic fig- 
 ure, fierce and glorious in his pathetic grandeur. A 
 typhoon to a Chinese fisherman represents the. wrath 
 of his god for the omission of a prayer or a sacrifice ; 
 to Joseph Conrad it symbolizes the majestic resent- 
 ment of the Sea itself against man's desecration of 
 its peace and beauty and mystery. Only the Ameri- 
 can artist knows no symbols and is warned against 
 attempting to know. 
 
 Our great cry has always been : "Acquire form I" 
 Grammar, rhetoric, metrics, technique — these have 
 been the indispensable tools of our writers. They 
 still are. But having acquired them our writers 
 find they can fashion nothing beautiful, nothing 
 lasting, nothing that will weather the storms of time. 
 For no tools, no matter how sharp or perfect, can 
 accomplish the feat of fashioning something out of 
 vacuum. The American story always has laid 
 claims to style — but it hasn't lived. Writers have 
 come and had their vogue and gone. Even years 
 
120 SHORT STORY-WRITING 
 
 back when style was more leisurely and rounded, 
 when the badge of haste was not upon it, Charles 
 Dudley Warner remarked: "We may be sure that 
 any piece of literature which attracts only by some 
 trick of style, however it may blaze up for a day and 
 startle the world with its flash, lacks the element of 
 endurance. We do not need much experience to 
 tell us the difference between a lamp and a Roman 
 candle." 
 
 This remark can be elaborated on, explained, 
 complemented. The truth is that there can be no 
 style without substance. These elements are not 
 separate entities; only superficially do they seem to 
 be. How much sweetness can a "sweet nothing" 
 contain? How much beauty can a work of "art" 
 contain which has emptiness of thought and ughness 
 of conception? How much truth can be embedded in 
 a fundamental falsehood? Every great poet has 
 found the soul of his poem determining its form. 
 Great style grows from within — it is an off-shoot of 
 great substance. To the American writer this rela- 
 tionship has never been apparent; and most of our 
 critics, professing a lofty aestheticism from the 
 shadows of their academies, have never paid atten- 
 tion to it. Our literature cannot boast the posses- 
 sion of a single lucid outline of this vital relationship 
 between form and substance such as the following 
 from Remy de Gourmont's "Le Probleme du Style." 
 I wonder how many authors of textbooks exhorting 
 
FORM AND SUBSTANCE 121 
 
 American would-be authors to learn the cabalistic 
 lore of expression have ever read this : 
 
 "A new fact or a new idea is worth more than 
 a fine phrase. A lovely phrase is a lovely thing and 
 so is a lovely flower. But their duration is almost 
 the same — a day, a century. Nothing dies more 
 swiftly than a style which does not rest upon the 
 solidity of vigorous thinking. Such a style shrivels 
 like a stretched skin; it falls in a heap as ivy 
 does from the rotten tree that once gave it 
 support. 
 
 "It is probably an error to attempt to distinguish 
 between form and substance. . . . There is no 
 such thing as amorphous matter; all thought has 
 a limit, hence a form, since it is a partial representa- 
 tion of true or possible, real or imaginary life. Sub- 
 stance engenders form exactly as the tortoise and 
 the oyster do the materials of their respective 
 shells. . . . 
 
 "Form without a foundation, style without 
 thoiight — what a poor thing it is I . . . 
 
 "If nothing lives in literature except by its style, 
 that is because works well thought out are invari- 
 ably well written. But the converse is not true. 
 Style alone is nothing. 
 
 "The sign of the man in any intellectual work is 
 the thought. The thought is the man. And style 
 and thought are one."^ 
 
 ^ From Ludwig Lewisohn's translation in "A Modern Book of 
 Criticism." Boni & Liveright. 
 
122 SHORT STORY-WRITING 
 
 If we were candid enough the proper answer to 
 make to this brilliant Frenchman would be: "Who 
 told you that literature Is an 'intellectual work'?" 
 But we are not candid enough. Only in our strictly 
 professional journals do we dare liken literature to 
 cobbling or tin-smithing or hod-carrying; in the 
 official world, in our lectures and book-reviews, we 
 consider it an art and talk of Muses and Pegasus 
 and all the artistic divinities of Mount Olympus 
 and Chillicothe. 
 
 A simple confession will not be amiss here. This 
 discussion has been largely a plea for the man and 
 woman who would find in literature, and in the 
 short story specifically, the relief of a burdened 
 soul. The influences that would withhold this relief 
 are multitudinous and powerful. The struggle is 
 unequal and pathetic. But of the hundreds of 
 literary aspirants that have come to my personal 
 notice only an isolated individual here and there was 
 blessed with any kind of a burden. The vast multi- 
 tude of souls were cheerfully lightweight and unen- 
 cumbered. These aspirants came to study technique 
 so that they might learn how to write salable stories, 
 but they had no stories to tell. Some of them be- 
 lieved they could become great story writers because 
 when at school they had Deceived excellent marks in 
 composition; others claimed on more general 
 grounds a gift of expression and they wished to put 
 it to practical use. That it was necessary to have 
 
FORM AND SUBSTANCE 123 
 
 lived In order to write of life was a thought that had 
 never occurred to them. They were blissfully un- 
 aware of such a necessity. They needed form, noth- 
 ing else, and applied themselves conscientiously to- 
 ward its acquisition. The irony of the whole matter 
 is that they actually estimated their deficiency ac- 
 curately: form was what they wanted, and nothing 
 else. After a while they began to sell. In all cases 
 the unhappy aspirants who were plagued with 
 thoughts and emotions have found it harder to sell, 
 no matter how much excellence of form they suc- 
 ceeded in acquiring. In the field of the American 
 short story, the "lightweights" have it, so far. 
 
 It is true, of course, that even a lightweight must 
 have something to clothe with his all-potent form — 
 be it a skeleton ever so rattling. But that has been 
 answered In Chapter IV on the Moving Pictures. 
 There are themes a-plenty, airy, optimistic, harmless 
 themes that no respectable editor, reader, or Board 
 of Censorship can object to. They can be adapted 
 and readapted an Infinity of times, provided each 
 time a new twist or a "different" trick Is Introduced. 
 
 All our themes seem to have divided themselves 
 into two grand classes : Stereotyped themes out of 
 which stories are made, and Life themes out of 
 which literature is made. The first class contains 
 an abundance of material that any one might have 
 for the taking, but which to make salable requires all 
 the tricks of form that we have so flamboyantly 
 
124 SHORT STORY-WRITING 
 
 evolved to disguise its hackneyed origin. The 
 second class contains all the substances of existence 
 that only those that feel their kinship thereto can 
 transmute into literature. All the style and form 
 that the science of writing can teach cannot hope 
 to produce one breathing story unless the theme is 
 eloquent with this kinship. Such Is the story of 
 genius — the story that lives and endures. Such a 
 story may or may not have mechanical values; it 
 will captivate and thrill; ruffle annd soothe; make 
 and destroy. Such a story will be found to have a 
 theme not chosen with an eye for gallery approval; 
 not even because the writer himself approves of It. 
 One cannot approve or disapprove of the stuff he 
 is made of. One merely accepts it. After all there 
 is only one theme — inexhaustible — out of which gen- 
 uine literature has always been and always will be 
 made, perhaps it is the slm.ple theme of Tagore's 
 court poet : "The theme of Krishna, the lover god, 
 and Radha, the beloved, the Eternal Man and the 
 Eternal Woman, the sorrow that comes from the 
 beginning of time, and the joy without end.'" 
 
 2 "The Victory," in Hungry Stones and Other Stories. 
 
CHAPTER VIII 
 
 Finale 
 
 There is more than a modicum of depression, 
 then, in a contemplative sweep of the literary prod- 
 uct we are instrumental in creating. Even the 
 most complacent members in my profession must 
 find it so. For one thing, the very lack of variety 
 in the finished product we so painstakingly cultivate 
 must occasionally become irksome, if nothing more 
 serious. Analyzing stories by a hundred different 
 writers, both successful and would-be, and all of 
 these stories with one puny soul must in the end 
 become a very tiresome routine indeed. 
 
 It is true that we are not masters of the situation. 
 Who are we to set up standards and direct the foot- 
 steps of the young toward them? We are but the 
 interpreters of existing standards and the formu- 
 lators and expositors of ways that lead to the meet- 
 ing of the exaction imposed by them. But if an 
 uneasy thought sometimes, at dusk, buzzes into our 
 incautious ear that the existing standards lead to 
 unregenerate mediocrity, should we not pause and 
 ask if perpetuating these standards is for the good 
 of our souls or even for the work we love (and a 
 
 125 
 
126 SHORT STORY-WRITING 
 
 great many of us really do love our work!) ? Per- 
 haps a revision of our texts — if not a bonfire — 
 might result in fewer stories but more inspiring ones. 
 Perhaps the demolition of magazine standards 
 might result in the birth of literary standards. As 
 it is, should we not face the truth that all the mas- 
 ters that have ever manipulated pen or typewriter 
 have disregarded our standards and set up new ones 
 of their own? They may not have gone to the 
 extent of a Kipling who wrote to a beginner that 
 "No man's advice is the least benefit in our business, 
 and I am a very busy man. Keep on trying until 
 you either fail or succeed." They all have looked 
 for and accepted intelligent advice of one kind or 
 another — from eniment contemporaries and from 
 those that had preceded them. But they have not 
 slavishly copied and imitated. They have not felt 
 that any advice had the power of divine command- 
 ment. No real artist could be expected to create 
 anything in the environment of the rubrics and in- 
 hibitions with which we have surrounded him. 
 
 All the blame that can be heaped upon the public 
 and our magazine editors does not absolve the liter- 
 ary clergy from the share of harm they have contri- 
 buted to the existing state of the American short 
 story. The cheapest form of advertising and the 
 most erudite and conscientious of our textbooks 
 combine in the creation of a peculiar psychology that 
 a story is some concoction that any one might learn 
 
FINALE 127 
 
 to make up by mere exertion. Here Is a typical 
 advertisement appearing on the back page of a cur- 
 rent magazine: 
 
 HOW I MADE $350.00 ON ONE SHORT STORY 
 And How I Learned To Write, In Only a Few 
 Evenings, Stories That Actually Sell Themselves. 
 
 Then follows a full-page testimony of some one who 
 has made a great success of story-wrlting by spend- 
 ing the small sum of $5 on the course advertised. 
 The course Itself was prepared by a leading pro- 
 fessor in a leading eastern university and whose 
 name is well-known in the literary world. And 
 almost every important textbook on the subject 
 abounds in statements such as the following taken 
 from one of the most intelligent works: "the events 
 which go to make up a fictional plot are artificially 
 arranged so as to bring about a particular result,"^ 
 besprinkled with numerous analogies to the various 
 trades and professions and how long it takes for 
 the average apprentice to become an accomplished 
 artizan. The psychology of tricks and twists and 
 points is foisted upon the writer, the reader, the 
 editor. By constant repetition we ourselves begin 
 to acquire it, if we had It not when we started. . . . 
 And yet this short volume is not wholly pessi- 
 mistic. I would not want to leave that impression. 
 For as already stated there have always been writers 
 with a real touch of divine afflatus who have never 
 
 3 Writing the Short Story, by J. Berg Esenwein, A.M., Lit.D. 
 
128 SHORT STORY-WRITING 
 
 paid any attention either to our psychology or to 
 our tricks, or to our inhibitions. "Every fine artist 
 In American fiction will be seen to have discarded 
 both the technical and moral pattern of the maga- 
 zine tradition and to have developed one of his 
 own."* And the number of these heretics is grow- 
 ing — much faster than some of us are aware. 
 They suffer obscurity and often poverty as all great 
 heretics always have suffered, but they have the for- 
 titude of their calling. Let us listen to the confes- 
 sion of one of them: 
 
 "... However, you know that the short-story form has become 
 among us very much what I call corrupt. Publishers of short 
 stories sought what they called the story with a kick in it. Plots 
 for short stories were found and about these plots our writers 
 sought to hang a semblance of reality to life. The plot, how- 
 ever, being uppermost in the writers' minds, what we got was a 
 snappy, entertaining, artificial thing, forgotten completely an 
 hour after it was read. 
 
 "Perhaps because of a native laziness, I found myself unable 
 to think up plots. To try to do so bored me unspeakably. On 
 the other hand, there were all about me human beings living 
 their lives and in the process of doing so creating drama. . . . 
 
 "I have tried to clutch at it and reproduce in writing some of 
 that drama. . . ." ^ 
 
 When the problem involved Is what to tell, the 
 sharpening of the faculty of seeing what Is worth 
 while, the problem of how to tell becomes of second- 
 ary Importance. In fact the same literary heretic 
 believes that "An Impulse needs but be strong 
 enough to break through the lack of technical train- 
 
 * Editorial Reviewer in The Nation. 
 
 ^ Sherwood Anderson in an interview for Brentano's Book Chat. 
 
FINALE • 129 
 
 ing. . . technical training might well destroy the 
 impulse. ... 
 
 Along with the author of "WInesburg, Ohio," 
 and "The Triumph of the Egg," there are a host of 
 other writers freshly reacting to life and honestly 
 striving to embody their reactions Into stories. It is 
 strange to us, accustomed as we are to clever artifici- 
 ality, it is even grotesque — this simplicity, natural- 
 ness, and daring, but It marks the birth of the Amer- 
 ican short story — that colorful short form which is 
 destined to become the most perfect artistic expres- 
 sion of our national life. After all, to the true artist 
 the public is no problem, It being composed primarily 
 of himself alone. As Sherwood Anderson expressed 
 it in another passage of the interview quoted above : 
 "I would like a little to understand myself In this 
 mixup, and I am writing with that end in view." 
 The curse of catering to the public has been a fal- 
 lacy as great as that of our technique; we have 
 assumed that fiction is made to order for a public, 
 just as we have taught that technique comes first 
 and story substance next. The great writers have 
 all come before their public and have had to wait 
 for the public to catch up with them, but if they 
 hadn't come first the public would never have caught 
 up. We In America have always striven to give the 
 public what it has wanted, but even In America the 
 
 ^ Sherwood Anderson advertising an exhibition of his paintingi 
 in the Little Revie<w. 
 
130 SHORT STORY-WRITING 
 
 time is fast coming when the gracious public will 
 be inquiring what stories our potent writers have to 
 tell. But not until our writers realize fully that 
 "The public is composed of numerous groups cry- 
 ing out: Console me, amuse me, sadden me, touch 
 me, make me dream, laugh, shudder, weep, think. 
 But the fine spirit says to the artist: Make some- 
 thing beautiful in the form that suits you, according 
 to your personal temperament."^ This fine spirit 
 is now becoming evident; it is working its way to 
 the surface. 
 
 In this period of awakening, of the real birth of 
 American literature, the genuine educator, always 
 an open-minded student, can do no better than re- 
 valuate all his acceptances, all his hardened dog- 
 mas, all his hereditary literary and educational 
 truths. If he is to help the confused multitude, 
 baffled by a sudden consciousness of the phenomena 
 of existence, to literary self-expression, he must first 
 realize that no formulas are of any avail in the 
 crises of life and therefore are of no avail in litera- 
 ture, the artistic emanation or transmutation of life. 
 He must stimulate thought and independence of 
 thought — even to the point of experimentation — 
 for in such ways have all great contributions to the 
 world's cultural treasury been made. He must 
 cultivate a genuine love of literature rather than of 
 its usual incentive, the emoluments involved, what- 
 
 "^ Guy de Maupassant, in his preface to Pierre et Jean. 
 
FINALE 131 
 
 ever they be, and a critical appreciation of literary 
 values. Thus he may become a positive force in 
 the chariot of our literary progress — a leader, a 
 driver, a discoverer. 
 
CHAPTER IX 
 
 Effect 
 
 Self-flattery Is indigenous to man. We like to 
 flatter ourselves that our musings produce a desir- 
 able effect but we do not often know the complexion 
 of this effect. What, for instance, shall it be in the 
 case of serious-minded men and women interested 
 in creating short stories and in the aspect of our lit- 
 erary field generally who have read sympathetically 
 the preceding pages? If books are stimuli what 
 shall this particular reaction be? 
 
 A few suggestions may not be amiss. They are 
 in a measure a recapitulation of the thoughts ex- 
 pressed, but I like to think of them as formulated 
 by my ideal reader as his more or less conscious 
 artistic credo : 
 
 1. I believe that the short story is first of all a 
 form of literature, not merely an article of manu- 
 facture. 
 
 2. Literature is a form of self-expression. I 
 am a living entity, sensitive to the play and interplay 
 of forces in and all about me. Life in the form of 
 man, of institutions, of passions and ideas affects 
 me and I would reproduce and interpret it. I 
 
 132 
 
EFFECT 133 
 
 would clarify it to myself; I would create for the 
 love of creating, for the beauty of It, for the grati- 
 fication of the creative urge within me. 
 
 3. I recognize no plots that are not derived 
 from the life which I know, which is in and about 
 me; nor any characters which are not derived from 
 and tested by that life. 
 
 4. In all my work I have a desire to be truth- 
 ful, rather than merely clever; simple rather than 
 pretentious; natural rather than surprising. I 
 would voice no thought nor emotion which is alien 
 to my mind and temperament. 
 
 5. The genuineness of a view or an emotion Is 
 its justification. Truth and spontaniety are more 
 to me than commercial artifice and success. There 
 Is no shame In failure except In so far as It Implies 
 a departure from standards of artistic honesty. 
 
 6. I recognize no taboos. Every phase of life 
 is a worthy theme; every experience known to man 
 is a worthy plot. Things which have Interested me 
 have interested other people and I seek to com- 
 municate my personal vision to the world. I recog- 
 nize no valid reason for withholding any part of 
 my vision merely because it may prove unpleasant, 
 uncustomary or unprofitable to some reader. I do 
 not force him to read my work. 
 
 7. Nor do I recognize that I have any right, 
 for any reason whatsoever, to color the stuff of life, 
 the reality of which I write. The measure of my 
 
134 SHORT STORY-WRITING 
 
 success is the measure in which I can make my real- 
 ity the reality of those who would read me. 
 
 8. The standard of my opinions and emotions 
 Is contained within me. I refuse to modify them, 
 to render them less objectionable, or more Innocu- 
 ous, or more in conformity with the standard of the 
 moving pictures or the specifications of any editor, 
 critic, teacher or good friend. 
 
 9. I recognize no subject which is rooted In life 
 as either moral or Immoral. Every phase of exist- 
 ence is a legitimate theme for the artist, and Its 
 morality or Immorality Is a matter of the reader's 
 own Interpretation. 
 
 10. I am not afraid of being either pessimistic or 
 optimistic. My moods and Ideas are my own and 
 win not be changed to suit the buyer. 
 
 11. I am not afraid of being either radical or 
 conservative, depressive or ^'exhilarating," religious 
 or agnostic, constructive or destructive. The fear- 
 less presentation of one's honest views Is a virtue 
 in itself. 
 
 12. I have no fear of displeasing ony one, of dis- 
 pleasing even a majority of readers, editors, critics, 
 citizens. I have faith that there Is always a fear- 
 less minority willing to hear an honest word; that 
 there are always some avenues for the transmission 
 of the independent vision. Frequently this minor- 
 ity in time grows to a majority — and another 
 rebellious minority takes its place. 
 
EFFECT 135 
 
 13. I believe that all technique is but a means 
 toward effective expression. No tricks are of any 
 value in themselves. No puzzles or jugglings with 
 life's experiences are of any avail, and no technique 
 is worthy of art except in so far as it furthers clari- 
 fication and artistic presentation of my message. 
 
 14. I believe that all the instruction I can get 
 can only be in the way of developing facility of ex- 
 pression. No teacher or textbook can teach me the 
 stuff out of which literature is made. 
 
 15. I believe that style is "of the man himself," 
 that it comes from within, that no amount of imita- 
 tion of O. Henry can give me O. Henry's clever- 
 ness, and that no amount of style, even my own, 
 can cover a lack of substance. 
 
 16. There is only one ending that my story can 
 have. It may be happy or unhappy or merely 
 logical. Every problem imposes its own solution. 
 I can dictate no denouement, for the characters in- 
 volved work out their own destiny acceptable to 
 them or to the inevitability of their problem. 
 
 17. I believe that if I am myself I am original. 
 My life is different from the life of any one else. 
 Manufacturing startling or spectacular originality is 
 impossible. There is only one theme at bottom of 
 all stories and that is Life. It is only the way I 
 look at it which you do not know. 
 
 18. Finally I believe that each artist after all 
 works in his own way. My way may be as good 
 
136 SHORT STORY-WRITING 
 
 as the ways of other writers and will surely suit 
 my moods and my thoughts better. Each of us in 
 his own way merely tries to state and to clarify the 
 tragedy and comedy, the ugliness and the beauty of 
 the things he knows and lives and feels. 
 
 19. The short story is but another medium for 
 the expression of my reaction to the business of liv- 
 ing. I refuse to be a clown entertaining the gallery. 
 
 20. If I depart from this credo and write what 
 commercial policy may dictate rather than my artis- 
 tic self I shall not be afraid to acknowledge the in- 
 ferior character of the product rather than label it 
 as literature. My conscience is no coward, even in 
 defeat. 
 
 The End 
 
INDEX 
 
 Addison, Joseph, 115. 
 
 Ade, George, 9. 
 
 Admirable Crichton, The, 77. 
 
 Aeschylus, 109. 
 
 American Magazine, The, 70, 
 
 71. 
 Anderson, Sherwood, 16, 17, 79, 
 
 81, 128, 129; The Other 
 
 Woman, 81. 
 Atheist's Mass, An, 85, 86. 
 Balzac, Honore, de, 85, 86, 
 
 118; An Atheist's Mass, 85, 
 
 86. 
 Barnes, Djuna, 17. 
 Barrie, J. M., 77. 
 Bates, Arlo, 2. 
 Beyond the Horizon, 64. 
 Bierce, Ambrose, 9. 
 Brandes, Georg, 87. 
 Brooks, Van Wyck, 73. 
 Brown, Alice, 17. 
 Butler, Ellis Parker, 8. 
 Cabell, James Branch, 17, 79; 
 
 The Wedding Jest, 111. 
 Clay, Bertha M., 79. 
 Chambers, Robert W., 9. 
 Chatterton, Thomas, 6. 
 Chekhov, Anton, 13, 26, 74, 99; 
 
 Ward No. 6, 33. 
 Chester, George Randolph, 33. 
 Chwang-Tse, 22, 23. 
 Cohen, Octavus Roy, 16. 
 Conrad, Joseph, 27, 103, 119; 
 
 Youth, 27, 110. 
 Crane, Frank, 34, 71, 87. 
 D'Annunzio, Gabrielle, 74. 
 Davis, Richard Harding, 33. 
 Daudet, Alphonse, 78. 
 Dial, The, 69. 
 Dickens, Charles, 51, 118. 
 Dostoyevski, Fyodor, 74, 116. 
 Dreiser, Theodore, 17, 34, 79, 
 
 82; The Lost Phoebe, 34. 
 Edwards, Jonathan, 85. 
 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 62. 
 Esenwein, J. Berg, 127; Writ- 
 ing the Photoplay, 58, 90; 
 
 Writing the Short Story, 127. 
 Fall of the House of Usher, 
 
 The, 14, 15. 
 Flaubert, Gustave, 86; Madame 
 
 B ovary, 86. 
 Four Million, The, 35, 36, 37, 
 
 38, 39, 40. 
 Frank, Waldo, 8, 17. 
 Freeman, Mary E. Wilkins, 33, 
 
 110; The Revolt of Mother, 
 
 33, 110, 111. 
 Gerould, Katharine Fullerton, 
 
 44. 
 Glaspell, Susan, 17. 
 Gorki, Maxim, 38, 74; Her 
 
 Lover, 38. 
 Gourmont, Remy de, 120, 121; 
 
 Le Probleme du Style, 120, 
 
 121. 
 
 137 
 
138 
 
 INDEX 
 
 Griffith, David Wark, 105, 106. 
 Hall, Holworthy, 16. 
 Hamsun, Knut, 5. 
 Hardy, Thomas, 64. 
 Harper's Magazine, 69. 
 Harte, Bret, 103. 
 Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 65. 
 Hearn, Lafcadio, 11. 
 Hecht, Ben, 17. 
 Her Lover, 38. 
 Hergesheimer, Joseph, 5, 8; 
 
 Java Head, 23. 
 Howells, William Dean, 15; 
 
 Great Modern American 
 
 Stories, 34. 
 Hugo, Victor, 119. 
 Hungry Hearts, 34. 
 Hurst, Fannie, 5. 
 In the Moonlight, 33, HI. 
 Irving, Washington, 116. 
 James, Henry, 116. 
 Java Head, 23. 
 Jessup, Alexander, 44. 
 John Ferguson, 64. 
 Johnston, William, 35, 41, 42. 
 Kelland, Clarence Budington, 
 
 33. 
 Kipling, Rudyard, 4, 26, 103, 
 
 126; Without Benefit of 
 
 Clergy, 33. 
 Kling, Joseph, 32. 
 Kuprin, Ivan, 118. 
 Lawrence, D. H., 74. 
 Leeds, Arthur, 56. 
 Lewisohn, Ludwig, 23, 24. 
 Literary Digest, The, 105. 
 Little Revieiv, The, 16, 69, 81. 
 London, Jack, 4, 7, 8, 9, 41, 103, 
 
 114, 115, 118; Martin Eden, 
 
 4. 
 Lost Phoebe, The, 34. 
 
 McCardell, Roy L., 55. 
 
 Macdonald, George, 116. 
 
 Madame Bovary, 86. 
 
 Maeterlink, Maurice, 74. 
 
 Malthus, 114. 
 
 Marden, Orison Swett, 34. 
 
 Markheim, 14, 15. 
 
 Martin Eden, 4. 
 
 Masefield, John, 4. 
 
 Mason, Walt, 34. 
 
 Mather, Cotton, 85. 
 
 Matthews, Brander, 33. 
 
 Maupassant, Guy de, 14, 15, 26, 
 33, 103, 109, 111, 130; Soli- 
 tude, 14, 15 ; In the Moon- 
 light, 33, 111. 
 
 Mencken, H. L., 47. 
 
 Nation, The, 24, 112, 113, 128. 
 
 Nevi' Success, The, 69. 
 
 O'Brien, Edward J., 15; Best 
 Short Stories of 1920, 81, 97; 
 Best Short Stories of 1919, 
 97. 
 
 O. Henry, 9, 22, 26, 29, 30, 31, 
 32, 35, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46, 
 60, 116, 135; The Four Mil- 
 lion, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40. 
 
 Our America, 8. 
 
 Our Short Story Writers, 9, 39. 
 
 Pagan, The, 16, 32. 
 
 Passing of King Arthur, The, 6. 
 
 Patee, Fred Lewis, 44. 
 
 People's Favorite Magazine, 87. 
 
 Poe, Edgar Allan, 14, 15, 26, 
 42, 74, 102, 116; The Fall 
 of the House of Usher, 14, 15. 
 
 Pollock, Channing, 51. 
 
 Porter, William Sidney (See 
 "O. Henry"). 
 
 Probleme du Style, Le, 121, 
 
INDEX 
 
 139 
 
 Revolt of Mother, The, 33, 110, 
 
 111. 
 Rinehart, Mary Roberts, 33. 
 Robbins, E. M., 54. 
 Sandburg, Carl, 118. 
 Sapho, 78. 
 Saturday Evening Post, The, 
 
 69, 71. 
 Seven Arts, The, 7, 84-. 
 Shakespeare, 60, 116. 
 Smart Set, The, 69. 
 Solitude, 14, 15. 
 Spingarn, Joel Elias, 83. 
 Steele, Richard, 115. 
 Stevenson, Robert Louis, 14, 26; 
 
 Markheim, 14, 15. 
 Tagore, Rabindranath, 124. 
 Tatler, The, 115. 
 Times, The Neiv York, 45. 
 Triumph of the Egg, The, 129. 
 
 Twain, Mark, 7, 41. 
 Van Doren, Carl, 112, 113. 
 Villon, Frangois, 6. 
 Walter, Eugene, 60. 
 Ward No. 6, 33. 
 Warner, Charles Dudley, 120. 
 Wedding Jest, The, HI. 
 Wells, H. G., 99. 
 Whitman, Walt, 82, 99. 
 Williams, Blanche Colton, 9, 39. 
 Winesburg, Ohio, 129. 
 Without Benefit of Clergy, 33. 
 Witwer, H. C, 8, 65. 
 Writer's Monthly, The, 56, 71. 
 Writing the Photoplay, 58, 90. 
 Writing the Short Story, 127. 
 Yezierska, Anzia, 34; Hungry 
 
 Hearts, 34. 
 Youth, 27, 110. 
 Zola, Emile, 74. 
 
 c- 
 
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