Casualties of the Pen

I ONCE knew a very unhappy fellow. He worked at a publishing house where pulp magazines go down the assembly line like Ford cars. His job was to read and to rewrite impossible stories which by a little tinkering could be made possible. Thus they could be bought very cheap. He had another assignment which for a different kind of person could have been quite interesting. Whenever his firm decided to launch a new magazine devoted to a special kind of fiction, such as stories of the sea, girls ransacked the files of former issues for yarns that could, with a little fixing, be reprinted. Very often these stories had to be brought up to date: pearl-handled revolvers changed to automatics, speedy buckboards changed to automobiles, and the general clamor and bustle of modern life introduced in place of the more peaceful atmosphere of an earlier age.

It was this chap’s job to do it, and he never complained. For many the job would not have been so bad. But this man was also a writer, and a good writer. The first two stories he had ever written had been bought by a magazine of high rank. That, however, was ten years in the past, and during all that time he had been working steadily, but without a sale. Of all the hard lots in writing, it seems to me he had drawn the most heartbreaking.

Why writing should have such cruel chances I don’t know, but of all careers it seems the most naked and exposed. I know that painters will disagree and maintain that they are the true bearers of the cross, but the fact remains that nobody expects a painter to sell anything. He can be a good painter for years and no one thinks any less of him for not making a sale. If a writer is to keep the respect of his family and friends, his name must appear in print, and he must pay his bills.

One hazard arises from the changes in public taste. Colonel Dey, producer of a fabulous number of Nick Carter stories, shot himself because the Nick Carter vogue went out and he could not adapt his style to the standards of the pulp magazines which took the place of the dime novel. Lucky the writer who does not outlive his vogue. Even luckier the one who actually finds his vogue. The weddings of demand with natural abilities which make the writing fortunes are, as far as I can see, completely fortuitous.

And if the writer is exposed to the changes in public taste and suffers thereby, he has a second and even more dread enemy in himself.

‘It is our duty to compose our characters, not books,’ says Montaigne, and many a writer, sitting sterile in front of his typewriter, has wondered what inner devil it is that keeps his mind as stirred up and inchoate as a full stand at a ball game. That is why so many of them resort to tricks of self-hypnosis. I once visited in a house which Wilbur Daniel Steele had occupied. His table was an old schoolmaster’s desk, and I have no doubt that its presence in the room tickled some obscure chord in his fancy and thus helped to set the stage. But much more interesting were the long, sloping chutes that had been made to fit over the windows. Their wide end was toward the ceiling, so that they could admit light and air, while at the same time keeping out distracting sights and sounds.

Another writer I know works only at night, away from home. Scores of writers are dependent upon a change of scene for getting out of a slump, and many find the change from city to country of great value. I know one fellow for whom the first snowfall of the year brings a few days of great production.

There is one cruel answer for most of these in-and-out writers, and that ans wer is that they should not be writing at all. In any other civilization they probably would not be. But somewhere in the Declaration of Independence it is implied that every American can, if only he wills it, be a successful contributor to magazines. Unfortunately, there was a time when many who had no real grip on the profession could be. The market was big; the universities, with their writing courses and childish standards of success, helped. Many young people have a knack of imitation which in a big market may mean a success or two. And the flattery which in this country is accorded writing success is so heady that, once tasted, it can actually ruin the whole remainder of a life.

The depression has squeezed out many of the writers, just as it has squeezed out those who live on the fringe of other professions. The accumulated disappointment must, in its total, be very great. I think that it is among these people who live on the fringe that temperament is at its worst, and, while many of the steady producers have their peculiarities, they are, generally speaking, producers at will. I am ready to defend the thesis that so-called temperament is not necessary to an artist, and that it is infinitely more harmful to him than to men in more prosaic kinds of endeavor. If the ironworker does not feel like running the job, the job runs him. The business man works under a schedule which pushes him into tasks; if, for a day or so, he does not feel like running the business, the business runs him. But the writer begins fresh every day (with the exception, perhaps, of some holdover in the way of developing an argument or carrying on a narrative sequence). By and large, he has to furnish the push; and on the sour days, when he does not feel like pushing, nothing gets done.

It is probable that the higher one gets in the writing scale the less there is of that hamstringing doubt of self which is at the bottom of what passes for temperament. There seems to be no question that Chaucer was an easy writer, and so were Shakespeare and Richardson and Fielding and Scott and practically all the other masters. Trollope is, of course, the great example of the steady producer. They must all have been extraordinarily well adjusted inwardly, free from the anxiety which comes from trying a task beyond one’s powers. The steady slugger is the best bet in prize fighting, and the steady producer the best bet in literature.

The writer is exposed to the vagaries of the market and he is exposed to the vagaries of his own make-up. There is one other danger which he runs, and in many ways the miseries which arise from this source are the most tragic, for they depend upon what might be called a change in artistic conscience. Many writers never change their professional outlook; their first story is like their last, with the possible addition that the first story is usually the best. Others have to face the handicap of growth and changes in their inner composition, often in the direction of greater artistic integrity. Occasionally you meet a writer whose name used to appear in the popular magazines, and he will tell you that he has given up the ‘ cheese ’ and is working on something really good. Often he is whistling to keep his courage up. The change in his mental flora has completely canceled an earlier profitable knack.

Undoubtedly they do these things better in older countries where the philosophy is that of making a sow’s ear into a good sow’s ear, rather than into a silk purse.

There is a story out of Hollywood which is often told among writers and which is generally received with shocked silence or contemptuous laughter. The story is that of a moving-picture magnate who started life as a maker of buttonholes. One day as he was making a tour of his vast plant he came to a small room in which a young man sat idly before a typewriter. The magnate watched him for a time, and then inquired what the young man’s job was. The latter said that he was a writer, and the magnate said, ‘Vell, vy don’t you write?’