Scribbler's Luck
I
I TAKE for my text the twentieth-century axiom, ‘Accidents don’t happen.’ And I repeat these words despite the utter abandon with which Americans fling themselves and their automobiles about, it being my private conviction that the autopsy of any or all of these catastrophes would be sure to show a screw loose somewhere, if not in the chassis, then certainly in the motorist’s skull. Accidents don’t happen in literature any more than they do at railroad crossings: they are the perfectly logical results of human behavior. It was no accident that the manuscript of Thomas Carlyle’s French Revolution was chucked by a domestic into the fireplace; it was no accident when Colonel Lawrence’s dangerous manuscript, Seven Pillars of Wisdom, disappeared after having been left in an empty railway coach. Such things happen because authors are notoriously absent-minded. Nor was it an accident when Anne Parrish won the Harper Novel Contest, or when Sinclair Lewis was awarded the Nobel Prize. These things happen, if I may be allowed the phrase, because of the persistent-mindedness of the chosen few.
The word ‘persistence’ has a more agreeable association to-day than it had when I was young. ‘If you will persist,’ my parents would say, ‘in sliding down the banisters, you’ll hurt yourself! ’ Something of that stubborn quality the word still retains, but in modern usage it has lost much of its harmful implication. If, nowadays, you persist in what you are after, you won’t hurt yourself much — you’ll be a Success. Curiously enough, the most persistent people in all industry are commonly thought to be the laziest — I mean writers.
Since writing is unquestionably the worst-paid of all professions, those who do it have to be persistent if they are to survive. Of this the beginner soon becomes painfully aware. In no other business I can think of is an apprentice’s work so repeatedly thrown back in his face. In all fairness, however, it should be added that most beginning writers invite this treatment, not only because their work may be inadequate, but also because — whatever its potential value — they so seldom know how to publish it.
If I were a book agent, I should not spend much time trying to sell Rabelais to a Sunday School; yet this proposition is no more absurd than the disappointed efforts of a thousand new writers whose manuscripts fly back like homing pigeons. To make a name for one’s self in contemporary literature it is essential to discover as rapidly as possible, first, the kind of thing one is best equipped to write, and, second, the medium — any medium — in which it can be published to advantage. Selfknowledge is slow to come by. It took Gamaliel Bradford twenty-five years to discover that biography, not fiction, was his forte, and during that time he suffered continuously from rejection slips. But persistence will be rewarded. One may, in the end, even discover that he is not cut out to be a writer, and that knowledge, grim as death at the time, may prove to be a real blessing in disguise.
II
By a kind of rough classification the society of writers may be divided into two communities — those who dwell in ivory towers, and those who live in the sweatshops. There is not much love lost between them. The Ivory Tower commuters are a little scornful of the Sweatshoppers because of their prolific output; whereas, naturally enough, those who make their living by writing are at heart contemptuous of those who won’t risk body and soul for what they profess to love. Most beginners are members of the Ivory Tower set, but, as their work progresses and they become better known, they are tempted to climb off their perch and join the toilers below.
It hardly needs to be said that he who lives in an ivory tower writes primarily to please himself. And this is as it should be, up to the point where the craftsman, for his own satisfaction, feels impelled to show his work to others. With charming flattery he singles out those friends who, as he explains, are best qualified to judge his work. Generally speaking, it is their opinion that what he has written is not a bit worse — well, as a matter of fact, is a good deal better than something they saw the other day in the Saturday Evening Post (or the Atlantic), and if an editor will pay good money, etc., etc. The writer promptly sends his manuscript to the indicated haven, and in about ninety-six cases out of a hundred it is as promptly declined. When this experience has been repeated three or four times, your Ivory Tower resident begins to look sourly on the publishing world, which apparently has come to grief since Shakespeare’s day.
I think it needs to be insisted that, however much your writing may please you and your friends, there is no test comparable to that which it must undergo once it is in print. To see your work in cold, inerasable type; to realize how sturdily — or how meagrely! — the words convey your meaning; to hear a stranger praise or disparage your screed — this is an experience that gets in the blood, inflames the mind, and infects you, at least temporarily, with the itch to write.
It is n’t so difficult to break into print. True, the odds are formidable that you won’t sell your first story to one of the high-price fiction magazines, or your first article to one of the ‘quality group.’ It’s easier to stoop to conquer. Since time immemorial, British colonels have written letters to the London Times. Their choleric temper established a tradition in journalism; every daily of consequence has its letter columns to-day. And it might surprise you to learn how far these little letters throw their gleams, especially if the correspondent gives evidence of knowing what he is talking about. A fresh opinion vigorously pressed is a godsend to an editor in search of material, and it is fair to say that a good many magazine articles have originated in such modest surroundings.
In American newspapers, on the same editorial page that reprints the letters or on a near-by page, you are likely to find another popular feature, the Columnist. Eugene Field and B. L. T. conducted columns that made Chicago hum in the old days. ‘The Bowling Green ’ by Christopher Morley was one reason why people swore by the old Evening Post. In the Boston Herald Philip Hale’s quiddities used to be as New England as good chowder. Don Marquis in the old Tribune wrote a vernacular hard to beat. These men were eager to give space to contributors with something to say; in different ways they have stimulated the writing of keen and colloquial sketches and verse.
The dean of them all to-day is, of course, ‘F. P. A.’ For more than twenty years his column, ‘The Conning Tower,’ has been the source of crackling brevities, the sure detective of sloppy English, the medium in which appear as illuminating translations as an American has ever made of Horace, and finally the headquarters of such refreshing new talent as could be found. In ‘The Conning Tower,’ the public had early recognition of George Kaufman, Morrie Ryskind, Louis Untermeyer, Robert Benchley, to mention four names out of a hundred. ‘ But I was not doing favors for these boys,’ Mr. Adams wrote; ‘the favors were on the other foot.’ F. P. A. gave — he still gives — a gold watch to the writer of the best contribution each year. His timepieces have been won by Deems Taylor, Newman Levy, Dorothy Parker, Will Irwin, Gelett Burgess, Helene Mullins.
Newspapers, if rightly approached, have other openings for beginners. Tucked away in some back office of the plant there is likely to be a careworn individual known as the ‘literary’ or ‘book review’ editor. It is his portion to receive upward of five thousand new books each year from the publishers, and by way of return to print appropriate chitchat about their authors, and appropriate reviews of their contents. An ‘appropriate review,’ in the publishers’ sense, is one which deals in quotable superlatives; and it is no wonder if, overworked as he is, your literary editor takes the friendlier course and occasionally accepts new books at their blurb value. Obviously he cannot read all five thousand of them himself, and, since he has no budget with which to hire assistance, the best he can do is to find people who will review new volumes for the sake of owning them.
That is where new writers come in. I realize that literary criticism in the United States is in low estate, and certainly I have no wish to feed more half-baked judgments to an already bilious public; but I do believe that there are some few beginners who exert in their private reading a perception and discrimination which might be even better in print. Here again it may not avail you much at the outset to aim for the best-paying association. The book supplements of the New York Times, the Herald Tribune, the Saturday Review of Literature, manifestly have at their command a sufficient number of ‘authorities’ to make them somewhat uninterested in beginners. It would be more serviceable, I should think, to seek to attach yourself to a respected daily in your neighborhood. Your pay will be the review copies and the experience you gain in print, and, when you have filled twenty-five or thirty columns of newspaper type, cull out the best of your work and see if you can talk business with one of those paying editors who would almost certainly have turned you down at the outset.
Newspapers are a good proving ground for literary ambition. It would be hard to find a prose writer of consequence to-day who has not used them, in one way or another, when breaking into print. Letters to an editor, book reviews, sketches for the columnist, short travel articles such as the Christian Science Monitor uses on its back page, occasional dramatic or musical criticism — these are some of the odd jobs a beginner may pick up if he will persist in writing. Doing is healthier than daydreaming. A newspaper requires that you write clearly and without frills, and heed the discipline of words. Like its stepsister, advertising, it promotes a quickness in expression, and yet still seems to nourish the most insidious of ambitions. If ever there was a newspaper man who did not live with the idea of some day writing a book, point him out to me.
III
The brief acknowledgment that appears in Ernest Hemingway’s early book, In Our Time, pays the author’s respects to the editors of the Little Review, the Transatlantic Review, and This Quarter, in whose columns some of his early stories appeared. Though I do not know exactly how little these publications paid him, I should conjecture that the sum total was probably considerably less than he would receive to-day for any single one of the stories were they available for sale. But, setting to one side the ever-fascinating problem of recompense, what I wish to emphasize is that Hemingway the beginner, instead of battering vainly at the front gate, went in by the side door.
Most magazine editors quite naturally have to keep their eyes on the main chance. When they ‘buy big names,’ as the saying goes, they do so knowing that Irvin Cobb will attract more of the news-stand customers than, let us say, Irving Codd — even though Mr. Codd’s story may be rather the better of the two. Many editors pride themselves on discovering new writers, and certainly some of them actually do. But I intend no cynicism when I say that it is easier to ‘discover’ a new talent after it has begun to find its way into print than to spot it in a shopworn manuscript. Most magazines of huge circulation play safe; they are likely to take over the work of a new writer only after duly observing his early steps. Magazines of smaller subscription, less beholden to the news stands, can afford to be more independent. Discovery, in short, is in inverse ratio to the size of the circulation: the smaller the pond, the more chance a tadpole has of singing a solo. I suppose my argument reaches its logical extreme in the case of an ‘unknown’ who publishes a pamphlet at his own expense, writes its entire contents, and then sits down to be, mayhap, its only reader. I have subscribed, incidentally, to a one-man show of this kind. It was the Villager; it came from New York City, and, by the sheer originality of its copy, had found not one reader but a host of them, here and abroad.
In England, where printing costs are cheap, it is a relatively easy matter for writers of a feather to flock together and set a new periodical in motion. The Yellow Book is a pretty example from the mauve decade. Shortly after the war, the Adelphi appeared, and in its first year, being largely the handiwork of Katherine Mansfield, J. Middleton Murry, and H. M. Tomlinson, it caught the instant attention of other writers — and readers — near and far. In the United States such journals, owing to the high cost of publication, have a more precarious existence. But exist they do, — if only for a day, — and it is well worth while for a beginner — as it is for an editor — to keep in touch with them.
I recall the little periodical S 4 N, chartered by some young men fresh from Yale. Its life was short, but in its heyday it printed several pieces by an unknown, Thornton Wilder. Again, the Little Review, which gave Hemingway his start, was edited in Chicago by Margaret Anderson, who had the courage to serialize — ten years ago, when it took courage! — portions of James Joyce’s Ulysses. This Quarter hailed, as its name implies, from Paris. Edmund Walsh was its editor, if I remember right, and its contributors, like those of Broom, transition, and Secession, cultivated the unorthodox. Although these journals, I believe, are now spasmodically if not definitely out of print, others are alive which continue to champion new talent.
First, there is Poetry, Harriet Monroe’s valiant little paper, which in recent years has done more to encourage the writing of verse than any other sheet. How many people, I wonder, are acquainted with the Midlander, a bimonthly published in Iowa City, which has been bringing to the surface some uncommonly good short stories? The Modern Quarterly, which comes from New York City and is edited for ‘thinkers,’ specializes in critical and contemplative essays, book criticism, and verse. Founded by Harvard undergraduates, the Hound and Horn moved on to New York City to revive the tradition that sank with the Dial. Likewise from New York comes the American Spectator, which, despite the fanfare of ‘big names’ with which it began, may in future have opportunity for fresh and alert talent. Side by side with more serious articles, the Southwest Review of Dallas, Texas, prints stories and verse that are a credit to native sons. Historical material is very ably presented in the New England Quarterly. I am told you need to have a Communist ticket to contribute to the New Masses, and that your fiction or verses ought to touch pretty closely the proletarian and his problems. Finally, for those who delight in experimentation, the two quarterlies Pagany and Contact offer a ‘modern’ opportunity for prose and verse. Though their audiences may be limited to the knowing few, these periodicals do maintain, each in its own way, a high standard. The fact that they printed the early work of Hemingway is not to say that they will cotton to your hopefuls. But this you can be sure of: they are no respecters of names. Their latitude is half of their importance. They may pay you little or nothing for your contribution; but there are times in literature, as in life, when it is good policy for a beginner to give something for nothing.
0. Henry pocketed his first return as a writer when he sold a sheaf of ‘wisecracks’ to a Western newspaper. The idea for George Kaufman’s first play came from some sketches in ‘The Conning Tower.’ A friend of mine fresh from college had some bright sayings accepted by Life which so encouraged him that within three months he became a steady and very welcome contributor both to that magazine and to Punch. There is plenty of opportunity for a humorous turn of mind. I hear that the New Yorker pays a five-spot for those howlers which it delights in quoting from the press. I understand that the Saturday Evening Post pays very well for the anecdotes and light verse which appear in its ‘Post Scripts’ department.
Thus far I have indicated a number of markets which may tempt a beginner from his Ivory Tower. But before committing yourself to the mail there is one last thing you must do. It is imperative that you know something about the customers. Whether you aim at the Midlander, the Saturday Evening Post, or the Atlantic, the practice is the same. Read several issues of the magazine and familiarize yourself with its menu.
Perhaps I can best show you what I mean by making a diagnosis of the Atlantic Monthly. On the average there are eighteen contributions to an issue, exclusive of the ‘Contributors’ Club.’ They will include two short stories, two poems, and for the rest what may be vaguely classified as ‘articles.’ You will observe that nowhere down the table of contents is there any reference to old Concord, which used once to be the Fleet Street of the Atlantic. This is, first, because Mr. Thoreau and Mr. Emerson no longer abide there, and, secondly, because the literary essay is sleeping, although not dead, to-day. James Norman Hall keeps the tradition alive. So do Agnes Repplier, Charles D. Stewart, and a very few others. Essayists in the best sense of the word are a dwindling group. This condition is only temporary, nor should it deter you if you think you have the essayist’s gift. But you must realize that, in the snatched-at reading of the twentieth century, the article, not the essay, is accorded first place.
What possible articles come within your range? I might begin by citing some topics which you had better leave alone. Tirades on Prohibition from either side of the fence had best be confined to table talk. There’s not much save heat left to contribute to that subject. Travel letters by you or your relatives are on the whole — as we say in a rejection — ‘better adapted to private than to general circulation.’ Protests against the growing lawlessness of the United States need to be specific and hard-hitting if they are to carry any weight. The subject is on everyone’s mind, but I’m inclined to think it’s the work for an expert. Finally, please shun droll papers about your quaint neighbors or facetious dialogues with your canary bird. They are the poison ivy in every manuscript basket.
Aim, instead, at a target on which you have brought to bear a good deal of your own observation, and as you examine it let common sense be unopposed by convention. Are you fond of dogs? Have you had a succession of them in your household? Have you raised a puppy? Did it ever occur to you that you were the dog and he the master?
Have you and your wife ever fancied yourselves coasting down the Connecticut River in a canoe? Was it a romance or a farce? How were the flies?
If you are a parent you have doubtless been lectured to on the parentchild relationship. But how about the parent-nurse relationship? I can think of cases which need going into.
Among your family heirlooms are there letters or journals whose vivacity and turn of phrase throw a fresh light upon ‘the good old days’? Material which is indisputably ancient and, by the same token, dry as dust were best retained in some historical archive. But material which comes down without blemish from Revolutionary ancestors, sea captains, forty-niners, Johnny Rebs, Indian fighters, may have potential value for any one of several magazines to-day.
Have you friends who call themselves psychic? Do they try to introduce you to the fine art of table-tipping and automatic writing or other ectoplasmic enjoyment? And does your ‘resistance’ stop the show? We might hear about it.
Are you a movie fan, and if so what do you think of the programmes you are regaled with to-day? Do you hover beside your radio in fair weather and foul? It is high time that the consumers of both these forms of entertainment spoke their minds in a free and interesting fashion.
We are veering, as you see, toward controversy, which seems to be the ultimate goal of most articles, and one reason, incidentally, why this form of writing will never really subordinate the essay. If you take naturally to argufying, it ought to be possible to find subjects which you can discuss with the proper ring of authority. If you are called into action by what some other writer has said, bear in mind that the manuscript of your rebuttal ought to be posted with the least possible delay. If the Atlantic raises a question of divorce morality which you wish to combat, see that your answer is in the editor’s hands within two weeks of the original publication. The manufacturing problem of sustaining in successive numbers a running controversy is so difficult that few editors will bother with it. To save yourself unnecessary labor, it may be wise to couch your reply in the form of a letter, which, as you will explain, could readily be expanded into a short article with more concrete illustrations if so desired. Every journal of opinion maintains a correspondence department for those who take issue with its contributors. It is well to take part in such a forum, and, of course, even better if your statement is so downright convincing that the editor asks you to develop it for the body of the magazine. As a parting injunction, let me say that an article ought to be specific rather than general in its citation, positive rather than passive in its feeling, forthright rather than satirical in its utterance. We Americans still bring so much sincerity to our reading that we are apt to be irritated by sarcasm, bewildered by irony.
IV
I have concluded from my reading that by far the larger number of essays and articles are written by men, whereas the majority of short stories are written by women. Which is to say that men like to run into facts and women away from them. With the hope of refracting some light upon your own individual problems, I mean to pick over the types of stories which customarily one finds in a manuscript heap.
Women, of course, love to champion something, or to better somebody, so it is not unnatural that there should be a considerable number of crusading short stories. There is one group with which you are familiar and which for the sake of brevity I might catalogue as ‘Lo, the Poor Indian!’ stories. These denounce the exploitation, the indignities, practised upon our Reservations. Then there are stories pointing at the corruption of our city officials. (Perhaps we shall have a New York anthology of them some day.) Again there are those tales which show us a Good Little Man being tyrannized by Big Business. Of course he wins out in the end. My approach may be flip, but do not take these stories too lightly; the truth is that social injustice is the very core of much of our most dramatic material.
Less earnest in their intent are the Dialect Stories. There is a pretty steady applause for Kentucky mountaineer tales with their carly-English lingo and their fine primitive ways. Negro stories have lately moved north from the plantations to Harlem. With the emergence of skilled Negro writers, I notice that these stories have acquired a dramatic value and a dignity which quite subordinate the slapstick comedy of old. This is a definite advance. Willa Cather was one of the first to dramatize the Bohemians and Scandinavians in our West. A very few writers to-day write knowingly and most amusingly of the Pennsylvania Dutch. As yet relatively unexplored are the farming communities of Poles in our New England states and the Portuguese who man the fishing boats from Cape Ann to Provincetown. The Irish and the Germans have been so long in our midst that no one thinks to distinguish between their ways and our own. Times have changed since Mr. Dooley was our Delphic oracle.
Gun play, rum running, and crime stories have been overdone. In December 1929, Ray Long passed a rule that with the new year Cosmopolitan would not purchase another racketeer story of any kind. Too many crooks spoiled the broth.
I for my part have inveighed consistently against stories about Art with a capital A. It seems perfectly natural that beginners should be tempted with the idea of writing a story telling how fame, fortune, and a blonde came to an impecunious young man when his first play finally electrified Broadway. The wish may be father to the thought, but the trouble is that such recitals seldom ring true. Artists and their models, sculptors and their troubles, novelists and their best sellers — it is well to fight shy of these temperamental matters which are so easily exaggerated. It takes an old hand at the game to write knowingly of art in the making.
Stick to business, which I suspect all of you will know something about at the outset of your writing. Business has gone a long way in fiction since George Lorimer began to edit the Saturday Evening Post. One of his finds was a Chicago writer by the name of Edna Ferber, who was then serving her time on a newspaper. Her ‘Emma McChcsney’ stories were the first to project the business woman into the short story, and people like Alice Foote MacDougall have kept her there ever since. The perfection of the businesssuccess story has, I think, been one of the chief reasons why the Post has been so enormously successful. To write a story about a harassed widow who in her desperation made — and sold! — the best wild-grape jelly in her state; to work up a yarn about a lackadaisical youth who would do nothing but go fishing, despite the indignation of his best girl and the village gossips, but who, of course, was all the while tracking down the fresh-water pearls which made his fortune — to develop themes of this sort seems rather small potatoes to a gentleman in an Ivory Tower with an admiration for Keats. But I’m inclined to think it’s the kind of thing he can buckle down to with a greater degree of plausibility than, let us say, the frustration of a young musical genius. In these downcast times it is doubly cheering to read of someone who makes money — even if his fortune is only on paper. And it pays.
Stories of the hard-riding West have begun to fade, although, curiously enough, I believe there will always be a market for them in England. ‘Dude ranches,’ Reno, and sanatorium life are the glimpses of the Wild West which we get to-day in American fiction — or just plain farmers.
I have reserved till the last the mention of a type of story whose increasing number I believe is directly attributable to hard times. I mean the story of Utopia. It may be laid in Heaven or Hell, on the lost continent of Atlantis, or on Mars — which the hero has unexpectedly reached by airplane. Whatever the destination, the purpose has been the same: to make an example of a community which is run the way it should be. The world has been so much with us these past three years that it is a positive relief to go somewhere else where there are no rising taxes and falling incomes, and no unemployment. But bear in mind that it takes a Milton — or someone not much less — to build a Paradise, and that even then his devils are apt to be his most ‘convincing’ characters.
So my brief analysis is at an end. You ought, as I have said, to diagnose for yourself the contents of the magazines to which you wish to contribute. You ought to estimate, for instance, the average length of the stories in the Midlander; you ought not to be told that the Post does not favor fiction much under five-thousand words, or that the Atlantic prefers its meat well done whereas transition takes its rare. If you wish to experiment with the stream-of-consciousness method, there’s no point in your sending the result to the Red Book. If a story which you had pictured to yourself as a character study suddenly breaks out into good brisk melodrama, give it its head; and, when it is done, send it to one of the adventure magazines, where it probably belongs. And finally, don’t be knocked flat by the first two rejections, if come they must. Rupert Hughes, whose name appears to be a trade-mark on certain magazines, claims to have received over two thousand rejection slips in his time.
Ray Long, for twenty years one of our ablest magazine editors, has published in book form the twenty stories which seemed to him the best in his experience. This is what he says about one of them: ‘W. C. Lengel was representing the Hearst group of American magazines in Europe. One night, in Paris, he went to a prize fight with some friends. There he met a young chap named Hemingway, Ernest Hemingway. He and Hemingway took to each other from the start. During the evening the new friend confided to Lengel that he had written a short story. Bill, always on the alert for new material, asked him to send it around the next day. And in due course the manuscript came across the sea to me, and with it the most enthusiastic letter of praise that I ever received from Lengel.
‘I read the story. It left me cold. Absolutely cold. For the life of me I could n’t see why my associate had got so excited about it. I rejected the story.
‘Next it went to Scribner ’s. Maxwell Perkins, one of the most astute editors in the land, liked the story fairly well, but thought it should be cut down. Hemingway refused to do the cutting, and when someone else tackled the job it was found that the story as edited did n’t make sense. The author in writing it had cut out every word that could be spared. Next it went to the Saturday Evening Post. And bounded back like a rubber ball. Next Collier ’s. Same result.
‘And then one night I picked up the Atlantic Monthly and started to read “Fifty Grand,” just to see what they had done with it. They had n’t done a thing. But the editor of the Atlantic had seen in the story what Bill Lengel had seen in it, and what the others, myself heading the list, had overlooked. And what I saw the minute I read the story in type.
‘Next day I wired Lengel to ask his friend Hemingway to forgive me for the stupidest blunder I’d ever made as an editor. For “Fifty Grand” was one of the best short stories that ever came to my hands. It was — and is — I think the best prize-fight story I ever read.’
This is a generous statement, but not, I think, too generous in its praise. And if one of Hemingway’s best — this hard-boiled narrative of a fighter who hit below the belt — is tossed from pillar to post, to fetch up in the end in what someone has politely called ‘the favorite organ of the National Education Association ’ — if such things happen to an established writer, surely it is not unreasonable to expect that the work of a beginner may have to spend some time on the road.
V
To be sure, it takes spunk and infinite patience to stand up against an inexplicable rebuff week in, week out. It is exasperating to endure the interminable interval — measured not in days but in expectation deferred — which passes between the submission of a manuscript and the decision; it is painful to have your fondest hopes stepped on, to head them up again toward the sunlight only to have them squashed a second time. It does n’t help much to know that this is the common lot. You hear occasionally the phrase ‘a hard-shell business man.’ It would be illuminating if the gentleman would sometime tell us how he got that way; there are times when authors would give a good deal to enjoy the oblivion of a turtle. Most literary folk of my acquaintance have no more protection than a soft-shell crab; their armor is very sensitive to the touch.
Writers of any age, and especially beginners, are in constant need of solace and stimulus. Solace can be had from a number of sources. There are the P. E. N. clubs, whose members, I gather, make the most of each other’s exploits and so pass from hand to hand a heady potion of Dutch courage. There arc manuscript clubs which, by affording the opportunity of reading a paper amid congenial surroundings, often call a desirable manuscript into being. Again there is the help to be had from a competent literary agent. You may not be able to rate one at first, but you may have recourse to one later if your work persists in finding its way into print. A good agent will give your manuscripts the individual attention which a good editor would like to if he had the time. But naturally, not being in business for his health, he cannot devote attention to manuscripts which he has no confidence of being able to place.
You must keep your ears and eyes open for stimulus. It comes unexpectedly from what you may read in a newspaper, from gossip with your friends, from daydreams and coincidence. It is to be had from such ‘trade papers’ as the Authors’ League Bulletin, the Writer, Author and Journalist. Here, for example, are some of the articles in a single issue of the Writer’s Digest: ‘Write ’em, Cowboy,’ ‘Should I Collaborate?’ ‘Writing for the Talkies,’ ‘Goldilocks — New Style; or How to Make Fiction Heroines Attractive.’ It is seldom too late for a beginner to learn the tricks of the trade.
However friendly the solace, however stimulating your professional guidance, I want you to bear in mind that accidents don’t happen. It is no accident that has brought J. B. Priestley to his present position. After convalescing from the effects of the war, he went up to Cambridge at the age of twenty-three. There he read, wrote, and edited with might and main. He edited single-handed the best of the undergraduate reviews; he got himself into print. When he went down to London with his degree he became a reader for one of the large London publishers, he applied for and received the post of a reviewer for the Daily News, and persistently — and of course on the side — he tried his hand at essays and fiction. Some of the essays were not much good; they went the rounds and they went begging. But the best of them got into print and were eventually bound up in book form. Meantime Priestley had gone on to other things. He became a regular contributor to the English Saturday Review; his first fiction being no go, he sought for the collaboration of Hugh Walpole in the writing of Farthing Hall. Keeping himself in touch with publishers, he obtained the commission to write two biographies for the English Men of Letters Series. He kept everlastingly hammering his way into print, and in a little over eleven years has some eighteen books to show for it — at least three of them uncommonly good books. Now that may be extraordinarily energetic; it may reek of the sweatshop; but it’s not lucky, it’s not an accident.
It sounds so swift and easy, and yet in practice it is for most of us incredibly hard. To write a book, to write your first book, of 90,000 words is — a job! You keep thinking about it for years, with an urge that seems to renew itself each spring and fall. Finally you summon up determination; you block out the beginning, you make random notes on scraps of paper, you write the first few chapters, and secretly you picture your exaltation when the public comes to realize that this is the book it has been waiting for. ‘I never knew he had it in him,’ you can almost hear your relatives say, drat them! For perhaps a fortnight you walk on air. Then duties seem to interpose themselves between you and the eager block of paper; and when, after postponements, you settle down to it some evening, there is fuel but no spark. To blow on the coals, you read back over the pages you have written; and what you find seems so bleak, so lifeless, so short of genius, that despair grips you. And you go to bed.
This you must expect, if you are a beginner — false starts and discouragement. That is why I preach facility in small things, for only by such training can you gain the experience necessary to sustain your writing in the valleys between the peaks. And while your work is in progress, try not to tell people about it. This is hard to prevent, for, while the spell is on, you feel the world should take you at your hidden value. But keep the struggle from your friends, who will never understand its tribulation; and don’t tell editors until the end of the job is in sight. The world has grown skeptical about promised books, and its attitude is not unlike that of the publisher who received this letter from a Japanese student: —
HONORABLE SIR: -
Herewith I take pleasure submitting to your careful Editorship the first half of my newborn typoscript, ‘Relativity.’ Most unique in its predominating incident — the vivid plot which is mostly embodying a father, mother, and son, and I have been obliged to produce it most latent by continuously associating the son with his mother’s cousin and concentrating largely on him and her. Perhaps you will mourne in love with Roland; laugh in pensiveness with the foundling Frederika; regret in marriage with Paula, till at last she got the dreams of her life (the son) in the acme of France perrils!; be indifference with Pearl Boggs (whose right name was Mabel Peters), and then screach with her therewith, also, a screach of reunion and founded bliss. Won’t you peruse it, please, and decide shall I send you the remainder.
Many are called, but few are chosen. And how much pathos there is in the endeavor, no one can measure.
‘Anyone,’ to use the words of Keats, ‘with the curse in his or her blood that intensifies experience and makes moments beautiful or terrible beyond the comprehension of the cool outside observer’ must find release in the written word. ‘Conrad,’ said a critic, ‘suffered from gout and unwritten books.’ Everyone with the veriest trace of Keats’s curse in his veins suffers at one time or another from ‘ unwritten books.’ For some the times are never ripe, the equipment too difficult to seek, the project no clearer than a vague daydream. A few may pump their writing to the surface with the power of a Priestley. The majority are to be found in the middle distance — people whose aspiration builds them an ivory tower, and whose energy is forever tempting them to leave their seclusion for the vast, eloquent space of print.