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Title: The modern writer
Author: Sherwood Anderson
Release date: September 20, 2023 [eBook #71691]
Language: English
Original publication: San Francisco: The Lantern Press, 1925
Credits: Charlene Taylor, Chuck Greif and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive)
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE MODERN WRITER ***
THE MODERN
WRITER
BY SHERWOOD ANDERSON
[Illustration]
SAN FRANCISCO + MCMXXV
THE LANTERN PRESS
GELBER, LILIENTHAL, INC.
COPYRIGHT MCMXXV
THE MODERN WRITER
BY SHERWOOD ANDERSON
After all it is not very strange that we in America have been a long
time coming to the beginning of something like a national literature.
Nations are not made in a short time and we Americans have been trying
to make rather a large nation. In a compact small country in which for
hundreds of years the same people have lived, slowly building up
traditions, telling old tales, singing old songs, the story teller or
the poet has something in which he can rest. People grown old, as a
people, on the same land, through which old rivers flow, looking out for
generations upon the same great plains and up into the same mountains,
come to know each other in an intimate way unknown to us here. The son
following in the footsteps of a father dreams old dreams. The land
itself whispers to him. Stories are in the very air about the writer.
They spring up out of the soil on which for many hundreds of years
people of one blood have been born, have lived, suffered, had moments of
happiness and have died.
In America the writer is faced with a situation that is unique. Our
country is vast. In it are to be found so many different conditions of
life, so many different social traditions that the writer who attempts
to express in his work something national is in an almost impossible
position. At best, as yet, he can only snatch at fragments. California
is not Maine. North Dakota is not Louisiana. Ohio is not North Carolina.
We are as yet strangers to each other. We are all of us just a little
afraid of each other. Time only can weld us together, make us one
people, make us understand each other. And in understanding alone is the
real love of comrades, that is the beginning of a real love of our
country.
Now I am an American writer and I have been by critics in general
classed among that rather vague group known as the Moderns. I have set
myself here to speak to you on the subject of modern American writing.
The whole business of expressing definite opinions is new to me. I am in
my nature a teller of tales, not a preacher, and I have been told that
in trying to address any considerable number of people on a large
subject it is a mistake to try to cover too much ground, that the writer
should confine himself to the making of a few points, but how I am to
do that on such a subject as Modernism I do not know. As a matter of
fact I have, within the last year, written a book on the subject, a book
called _A Story Teller’s Story_ and in it there are I believe something
like a hundred and thirty thousand words. Now that the book, half a
tale, half an attempt to put down certain notions of my own, is written,
I look forward eagerly to the getting of my hands on the proofs. There
are so many things I shall not succeed in getting said, even in a large
book.
As everyone knows, there is in the world at this time what is broadly
termed a Modern movement. It has expressed itself in a great many ways.
In a short time within the last fifteen or twenty years, it has
practically revolutionized painting all over the world. It has crept
into the writing of prose, into the making of song, into sculpture,
into architecture. Although you may not realize it the fact is that the
neckties worn by many men in our city streets and the dresses worn by
the women have been influenced by the movement. The street scene of the
American city is becoming more colorful, designs are bolder. The modern
movement is beginning to express itself in buildings. In our residences
we are less inclined to copy the impulses of old lands. Architecture,
long one of the most dead and dreary of the arts as practiced in
America, is becoming alive. It will become every year, I believe, more
alive.
But it would be impossible for me, in a short article to speak in any
general way on so broad a subject. It will be enough if I can give you
some notions of what the present day American writer is faced with, what
conditions he has to meet, what difficulties are to be overcome, what
in my opinion is making American writing so bad and what in present day
conditions tends to make it better.
As no man can speak of the writing of a country without saying something
of the history of the intellectual life of the country, I shall have to
begin by speaking of that.
It is, I think, pretty well understood among us that the intellectual
life of America had its home nest in New England. Our culture is as yet
a puritanical New England culture. The New England states, all cold,
hard and stony, produced a rather cold and stony culture, but the New
Englander, like so many repressed and defeated peoples, was
intellectually energetic. He spread his notion of life out over the
country. Living as he did in a land where the ground was cold and
comparatively unproductive underfoot and the skies cold and forbidding
overhead, he spent a great deal of his time cultivating God. His art
impulse was non-sensual, intellectual. Life to the New Englander was not
to be lived here and now. Life was to be spent in preparation for a life
after death. Love of his fellow man did not enter into the New
Englander’s scheme, and the arts were made the servants of morality.
There was so much of life of which the New Englander was forbidden to
speak, toward which he did not dare be too sympathetic that as a result
and while New England ruled, gentility and respectability became the
passion of our writers. In literature sins might be committed in France
or in some vague place far away like the South Seas, but among the
heroes and heroines of the writer’s fancy there must be no sin. As that
was a quite impossible supposition, in as much as the writer must after
all deal with human beings, the writers found a way out. The “good” and
the “bad” man notion was played up to the limit. Women in books became
all virgins or adventuresses. The good man had a hard struggle before
him but he always ended by getting rich and marrying the virgin, after
almost falling into the clutches of the adventuress. The puritanic mind
was satisfied. It was made happy. The man reader of the books could
always in the end follow with satisfaction the fancy of the writer and
end by becoming a millionaire and the woman reader could in fancy get
married, not as so often happens in real life by using methods that
would shock the puritan beyond recovery, but simply by virtue of
inherent goodness and virginity. It was a kind of patent formula that
always worked in books. And in books and in the “movies” it still works
pretty well. If any of you want to become writers and want to succeed it
is still the best of all formulas to follow.
It all fitted in so neatly, you see.
For while in our schools and colleges and in our literature the puritan,
the New Englander ruled, people were pouring into America from all over
western Europe. The cold blood of the men of the North was being mixed
constantly with the warmer blood of the South. Italians came. The Greeks
and the southern Slavs came in hundreds of thousands. The eager highly
temperamental Jews and the imaginative Celts poured in. On the West
coast they got the Spaniard and the Mexican, and no man ever, I believe,
accused the Spaniard or the Mexican of being puritanic.
The intellectual life of the country was being formed and controlled by
English Protestants while the physical American was being built up of a
mixture of all of the bloods of the western world and the process is
still, I believe, going on. In our political thought the Adamses of New
England, with their desire to establish an intellectual aristocracy,
are still, I believe, more powerful than Lincoln the artist democrat,
and, although by the world in general Whitman is recognized as our one
great American poet, I have heard of no general movement to introduce
him into our public schools to take the place of the decidedly second
rate and imitative New Englander, Longfellow.
I am sure that almost everyone nowadays knows that there is at this
moment something happening in the spiritual life of the American people.
In the first place, there has been for a long time now, and particularly
among our younger men and women, a rather intense boredom with the more
obvious impulses of our American life. There is a new restlessness that
is more and more expressing itself in individual revolution against the
social laws and customs of another age. Old gods are dead and we have
all gone hunting new gods. Men and women are seeking expression for
their lives in new and bolder ways and everywhere among writers the
Modern is but the man who is trying to give expression to the newer
impulses of our lives in books, in song, in painting and in all the
others of the seven arts.
You must understand of course that as a nation we have put something
across. Coming to America as we did, in reality scattered herds of
peoples from dozens of European countries, often not speaking the same
language, not having back of us the same traditions, spreading ourselves
out rapidly over a vast country, cutting down forests, building
railroads and bridges over rivers, mountains and deserts, learning to
know each other a little in the process, building cities and towns,
making the mines produce, making the land produce, we had for a long
time need of all our energies for purely physical purposes. A poet or a
painter in California in ’49 or in the middle west in Abraham Lincoln’s
day would have been a nuisance and a pest.
A man I know was during the war arrested and sent to jail for being
opposed to war, and I was discussing his fate with a friend.
“He ought to be sent to jail,” said my friend. “He ought to be hung. Any
man ought to be hung who doesn’t know any better than to be right when
all other decent healthy people in the world are wrong.”
However, let me return to my theme. I am trying to sketch briefly some
of the conditions that are at the bottom of what I conceive to be going
on nowadays in American writing. When we Americans had got our country
pretty well settled and had fought and won our Civil War, something else
happened. There came a revolution more widespread and deep in its
meaning than any other revolution that has ever happened in the western
world. Starting out as we did as an agricultural people we Americans
found ourselves suddenly landed in the very midst of the industrial age.
From being a nation of farmers, craftsmen and merchants we became,
almost within a generation, the leading industrial nation of the world.
We became factory hands rather than craftsmen, owners of factories
rather than land owners.
We had got into a new age almost over night. What had happened to us?
Standardization, for one thing.
Let me explain. As a natural result of industrial growth came
standardization. As anyone will understand, the man who owns a factory
for the making of women’s dresses, chewing gum, cigars, automobiles,
men’s hats, must, if his factory is to grow to the huge output he
desires, create in the public mind a widespread demand for one kind of
cigar, one kind of hat, one style of dress, one make of automobile.
Advertising as a force in our American life began to grow and here it is
that the present day American writer came into flower.
As a natural result of the demand for standardization of taste and
material desires came the modern magazine. The magazine with a
circulation of a million or two million became not unusual. The real
purpose, as everyone understands, was to create through advertising, a
nation-wide demand for certain commodities. The magazines were business
institutions run by business men with business ends in view. They have
served the purpose for which they were created admirably and taken for
what they are, that is to say at bottom merely as propaganda instruments
for business expansion, no man can quarrel with them.
However, it happens you see that the advertising medium, put out frankly
as an advertising medium, cannot exist. Although the modern man and
woman of the streets has been pretty effectually standardized as regards
his hat, the cigarette he smokes, the automobile he drives, he cannot in
reality be standardized. Few of us will as yet order our wives from a
mail order house. Although in America and during the long period during
which we have all been so busy conquering the mechanical world we have
in general looked upon the poet or the artist as rather a sissy, a nut,
a man who had better be brushed aside, we all have something of the poet
and lover in us. We cannot, at least not as yet, spend our hours of
leisure outside factory and office hours just looking at advertisements
of factory products and becoming excited because some man has performed
the heroic feat of going from the city of New York to San Francisco,
getting there in twenty-four hours in an aeroplane--instead of taking
four or five days on a train, has found a machine that will get him
there. We are really interested in the man in the machine--not in the
machine itself.
Little thoughts leak in. We wonder why the man wanted to go to San
Francisco in such a hurry--what he thought and felt as he rushed
along--what he was up to. There are all kinds of disturbing little
fancies. Our minds will not become standardized. They fly away from the
machine to the man. There remains a curious interest in one another.
Young men take girls on their arms and wander out at night into the
darkness. Young men become friends and spend nights walking and talking
together. Nothing that gets settled remains quite settled. When some of
us become too old or tired to try any more to think or feel there is
always youth coming on. Even marriage doesn’t settle things for us
although for a long time our novelists went on the assumption that it
did.
We find ourselves having to be intrigued into the pages of the
magazines--and if the magazines are to retain the large circulation they
require to do their work of standardization writers must be made to
serve their purpose.
The commercialization of the art follows as a perfectly natural result.
The popular writer is then just the man of talent who is willing to sell
his talent to the business man who publishes the magazine or to the book
publisher after large sales and the more talented he is the better he
gets paid. There is a job to be done and he does it, keeping his eye
always on the main chance, that is to say on the great unthinking buying
public. His position is pretty secure. In America we are in the habit of
thinking of the thing that succeeds as good, and therefore the man
whose books sell by the hundreds of thousands is looked up to with
respect. If success is the standard of measurement how can we do
anything else?
It happens, however, that the arts are not democratic, never have been,
and probably never will be. There is a nigger in the woodpile. The
ordinary standards of measurement do not quite work. We all have a vague
feeling there is something very much wrong. There is.
Let us look at the situation a moment. If you are a man conducting a
magazine that has a circulation of hundreds of thousands, or if you are
a movie magnate owning a business in which there is a huge initial
investment, you have to be pretty careful about treading on toes, do you
not? Your readers or patrons must not be offended or driven away. You
are appealing, must of necessity appeal, to a large number of people,
and among any large number of people there will be Catholics,
Protestants, Christian Scientists, believers in the Garden of Eden,
Darwinians, suburban housewives in large numbers, puritans, moralists,
all kinds of people with all kinds of notions of the good and bad.
Very well then--if you are a writer intent on catching and holding the
fancy of the crowd you have got to have a technique. You have got to
become the artful dodger, have got to invent or learn the trick of
creating in the mind of your audience the sensations of terror, delight,
amusement, suspense, without in any way actually touching the reality of
lives.
At the county fairs back in Ohio when I was a boy there used to be a
kind of faker who went about with a machine. Into this machine he put a
pound of sugar and started it going. It whirled about with great
rapidity and produced a kind of cloud-like candy concoction that looked
tremendously inviting. A pound of sugar would make a bushel of the
stuff, but when you had bought a bag of it and put a whole handful into
your mouth it melted away to nothing.
That is in reality the effect desired in the manufacture of any popular
art. It is the effect produced in reality by all the successful men, by
the realists who pretend to give you photographic reproductions of life
itself, by the respectable fine writers of the more conservative
magazines and publishing houses, as well as the men who fill the pages
of the cheap adventure magazines, the men called by the newspaper
fraternity “the bunk shooters.” You must seem to give a lot while really
giving nothing. No one must be hurt. No one must be offended. No one
must be made to think or feel. Keep it up and you will get rich.
To actually touch people’s lives is the unforgivable sin. Both thinking
and feeling are dangerous exercises, and besides people do not like
them.
You have got to get a special technique but if you are a writer and can
do it successfully you will be mighty well paid. Why, there are any
number of writers in America who receive from two to three or even five
thousand dollars for single short stories and if they are lucky and also
sell movie rights they often get two or three times that much. Writers
of the popular sort often make incomes of bankers or brokers, live
during the summer in villas in Maine or in the California Carmel
Highlands, drive expensive motor cars, own yachts and have a simply
splendid time apparently and never during a long lifetime make a single
contribution to the art of writing or write anything that a living soul
would ever think of reading after the writer has died or his temporary
vogue has passed.
I hope you understand, however, that all this has nothing at all to do
with the art of writing, that is to say in any sense in which real
writers of the world, men who have cared something about their craft
have always thought of it. These men have no more to do with the art of
writing than the average American movie star has to do with the art of
acting or the men who make the girls’ heads you see on the covers of our
American magazines have to do with the art of painting. It is all a kind
of special thing. You live in San Francisco and write dialect stories
concerning an imaginary kind of people who live in a Dutch settlement in
the Pennsylvania hills, or you live in a New York hotel and write
stories about cowboys or heroic lumberjacks. It is totally unnecessary
to know life, and in fact it will be better for you to let life alone.
Life, you see, is a complex delicate thing. Anything may happen in
life. We all know that. People hardly ever do as we think they should.
There are no plot short stories in life. All the clever tricks by which
effects are to be got on the printed page are in reality a selling out
of ourselves. If it is your purpose to live in a pasteboard world you
have got to avoid storms. There is always that huge, comfortable,
self-satisfied American audience made up of all kinds of people with
little prejudices, hates and fears that must not be offended. To know
men and women, to be in the least sympathetic with them in their actual
trials and struggles is a handicap. If it is your desire to be that kind
of a writer, to grow rich and be successful by writing and if you have a
natural talent that can be made to serve your purpose, stay just as far
away as possible from any real thinking or feeling about actual men and
women. Stay in the pasteboard world. Believe in your heroic cowboys and
lumberjacks. Go to the movies all you can. Read the magazines. Go to the
short story schools and learn the bag of tricks. Spend your time
thinking up plots for stories and never by any chance let the plots grow
naturally out of the lives and the hopes, joys and the sufferings of the
people you are writing about. That is the road to success.
And now, men and women, I am afraid you will think me an ill-natured
fellow. I have spent so large a part of my allotted time here in
speaking of what in my opinion is tending to make writing in America so
bad. It doesn’t seem right. I must remember that I am from Chicago--a
highly cultured center, surely--and that in Chicago we have a motto. Our
city mayor got it up several years ago, and for a year or two it was
plastered about everywhere on the walls and billboards of the city. “Put
away your hammer and get out your horn,” it said.
Now I shall try to do that.
There is, you see, a modern movement in America. We are not so
self-satisfied as we must often seem to strangers, to men from foreign
parts. We still walk about and talk things over among ourselves. There
is, if you are sensitive enough to feel it, a wistful something in the
air here. You will feel it in any large crowd. At present the Modern
Movement is perhaps a groping ill-defined movement but it exists. In
painting there are a number of men who have stopped making pleasant
enough drawings of the old swimming hole and the magazine cover lady,
who have thrown overboard the tricks of realism and representation and
the absorption in surface technique and who are trying to bring feeling
and form back into painting. The same thing is going on in the writing
of poetry. Architecture is freeing itself from imitation of dead
impulses and is taking new life.
In prose the movement is expressing itself in a growing number of men
who are really trying to be honest to the materials in which they work.
Let me explain what I mean by that, if I can.
I think you will all agree with me that in an older day in America, when
a great majority of the men who worked in the crafts, the blacksmiths,
silversmiths, shoemakers, harness makers, saddle makers, builders of
vehicles, furniture, etc., worked in small shops, with a few apprentices
to help, there was a feeling in the workman that later was pretty much
destroyed.
The factory came and swept the individual workman aside and with him
went much of the old workman’s feeling toward tools and materials.
The workman in the Ford factory, for example, has nothing at all to do
with his tools or the materials in which he works. His own individual
feeling toward tools and materials is ruthlessly suppressed. Individual
reaction to tools and materials is simply not wanted. What is wanted is
a highly standardized product turned out at a low manufacturing cost.
The hand of standardization is laid upon the workman in the factories as
I have tried to show you how it is being laid upon the workman in prose
who wants also to live on the expensive scale of the banker or the
broker.
I have tried to show you here that the popular magazines are but
factories for efficient standardization of the minds of people for the
purpose of serving the factories. I think they do not really pretend to
be anything else.
I am bringing no personal accusation against the factory owner or the
publishers of factory-made literature. They are business men and if I
were a business man I would try to be a good one. I would try to make
money. And anyway the individual factory owner or the individual owner
or owners of a magazine with a circulation of hundreds of thousands has
no more to do with the matter than have you and I. They also are caught
in a trap. Present day conditions are but the natural result of our
living in an industrial age. Until the impulse for vast production of
second-rate goods and the tendency to be satisfied with second-rate art
wears itself out or people grow tired of it things will go on just as
they are.
Back of it all, of course, lies the silly notion that people can get
happiness out of success, out of making money, the silly notion that any
man can be happy doing poor or sloppy work no matter how much temporary
success or praise he may win.
You must bear in mind that the mass of people here in America are
pretty much what the mass of people have always been in every other
country in every age, that is to say, rather lazy-minded, pretty
immature. We are given to childish pretense, to pretending to be the
thing we secretly admire rather than to go to all the trouble of being
it. We accept what is given us. For most of us, I suspect, bad hurried
cheap work doesn’t matter too much. It is the craftsman really who
suffers.
Now if you will consider with me what I have just said and will bear in
mind that the manufacturer of stories for popular magazines has nothing
at all to do with writing, and if you will also bear in mind that the
writer is but the workman whose materials are human lives you will get
at what I am trying to say and will understand the attitude toward his
work that the so-called Modern is trying to take.
The individual impulse in men to do good work goes on. Men are arising
everywhere who are trying to be true to the very complex materials they
have to try to handle. In spite of standardization the individual
impulses of men as workmen cannot quite be put down.
As I have gone about in the streets of American towns and cities I have
noticed that even the Ford cannot escape the workman impulse. Boys buy
second hand Fords and rebuild them into ‘Bugs’ and these ‘Bugs’ are
often enough light, graceful and fine. Ugly lines have been cut away.
Something altogether lacking in grace has been made graceful and it
would be worth while if people could come to understand that the boy who
does that is a craftsman following a craftsman’s impulse and is more
important to the community than a dozen manufacturers of cheap novels,
little tame verses or cheap magazine stories. He is meeting the
aesthetic needs of his nature with the materials at hand, and a Cezanne,
a Matisse, a Turgenieff or a Shakespeare could do no more than that. The
artist is after all but the craftsman working more intensively in more
complex and delicate materials.
The artist who works in stone, in color, sounds, words, building
materials, and often in steel, as in the designing of bodies for some of
the finer automobiles, is but the craftsman working in materials that
are often elusive and difficult to handle and bringing into his work not
only the skill of the craftsman but also the attempt at an expression of
some need of his own inner being. That is the whole story.
The Modern Movement, then, seen from this point of view, is in reality
an attempt on the part of the workman to get back into his own hands
some control over the tools and materials of his craft. In certain
fields it is very difficult. In the theatre, for example, the artist, to
work at all, has to have an expensive equipment. There is needed a large
investment and money doesn’t like to take chances. It is much safer when
the theater wants to be artistic to run into Belasco realism, bring a
Child’s restaurant onto the stage or have a real automobile cross the
stage at thirty miles an hour--something of that sort, some stunt, is
safer when large sums of money have to be spent.
However, the workman in words or in color has a better chance. If, for
example, I can make my living by going somewhere and delivering a dull
sermon, something like this, to a lot of good-natured patient people, or
by working six months of the year in an advertising agency writing soap
advertisements, I can perhaps save enough money to write disregarding
the magazines for another six months. I know one very good modern
painter who becomes a house painter when he is broke, and one of
America’s finest poets works as a reporter on a newspaper. In America,
just now, it is not too hard for a man to make a living, particularly if
he is discreet enough not to have children.
And then things are slowly getting better. In his “_Life on the
Mississippi_” Mark Twain said something to the effect that the writer in
the end always wrote what the public and the editors wanted. “We often
write what we think and feel but in the end we scratch all out and give
them what they want,” he said. I am not quoting exactly. You will find
it in the book. The fact is that it was pretty much true in Twain’s day
and isn’t quite so true now.
That the workman is a better and truer man when he is given control of
the tools and materials of his craft is being found out. There is a
small public growing up that has discrimination enough to want good
work. Honest books begin to sell a little. Honest painting that isn’t
just pretty picture making begins to sell. Puritanism, as such, is
pretty well licked. It cannot any longer so easily suppress books of
artistic merit because some housewife is afraid the morals of her
daughter, who has just come home from the movies or the Follies, will be
ruined by being told how babies happen to be born. The force of the New
England moralistic culture is spent. Today in America any man of talent
who writes a book that is significant, a work of art, can get it
published and there will be critics to acclaim him. The real pioneering
for the better workmen has been done by men like Whitman and Dreiser for
the writers, and others like Stieglitz, Marin and the critics Rosenfeld,
Cheney and others for the painters.
If you want to do good work and can pick up a living in some way there
will be people to recognize what you are trying to do and perhaps no man
has a right to ask more than that. There are ways to get moments of
happiness out of life other than by making money and being successful
and the men who grind out second-rate flashy stories for the magazines
have their bad moments. They are not really happy men. It is no fun,
believe me, to wake up in the middle of the night and to realize that
you have sold out your own craft.
For it is as true as there is a sun in the sky that men cannot live in
the end without love of craft. It is to the man what love of children is
to the woman. When you are considering what it is that makes the younger
generation so restless, what makes the workers on your buildings and in
your factories such indifferent workmen, what makes so much of
contemporary art cheap and transitory, consider also what the
industrial age has tended to do to this old love of craft so deeply
rooted in men.
It is a dangerous process. Soil the workman’s tools and materials long
enough and he may turn and kill you. You are striking at the very root
of the man’s being.
However, I do not want to be sensational. In spite of the growth of
standardization there are for me many hopeful signs. Men are becoming
increasingly conscious of what is being done to them. The very man who
lends his talents to cheapness is unconvinced. He will come to you in
private with an apology. “I have to live,” he will say. “I have a wife
and children. I am only doing cheap work for the time being. When I have
made a little money I intend to do some honest, decent work.”
In reality I think many men of talent might be saved for the doing of
good work in the arts if the whole situation could be clearly stated.
Too often the younger man or woman who has talent does not get the
situation in hand until he is too old to save himself. We have all been
brought up with the notion, firmly planted in us, that to succeed in a
material sense is the highest end for a life. Our fathers tell us that.
Often our mothers tell us so. Schools and universities often enough
teach the same lesson. We hear it on all sides and when we are young and
uncertain our very youthful humbleness often enough betrays us. Are we
to set ourselves up against the opinions of our elders? How are we to
know that truth to ourselves, to the work of our own hands, to our own
inner impulses, is the most vital thing in life? It has become almost a
truism here in America that no man does good work in the arts until he
is past forty. Nearly all the so called Moderns, the younger men, so
called, are already gray. It takes a long time for most men to get
ground under their feet, to find out a little their own truth in life.
The effort to find out the truth is what is called the Modern Movement.
It is growing. Do not have any doubt about that.
Let me state the matter again. It cannot be stated too often. The
writer, the painter, the musician, the practitioner of any of the arts
who wants to do real work and honest work has got to put money making
aside. He has got to forget it. There is but one way in which the young
man or woman of talent can defeat the corrupting influence of the
present day magazines and most of the book publishers and that is by
forgetting their existence and giving all his attention to his work. And
again let me say that when I speak of corrupting influence I am not
speaking of the men who run these institutions as corrupt individuals.
I am speaking only in the workman’s sense. I am speaking only of the
workman in relation to his tools and materials.
Consider for a moment the materials of the prose writer, the teller of
tales. His materials are human lives. To him these figures of his fancy,
these people who live in his fancy should be as real as living people.
He should be no more ready to sell them out than he would sell out his
men friends or the woman he loves. To take the lives of these people and
bend or twist them to suit the needs of some cleverly thought out plot
to give your readers a false emotion is as mean and ignoble as to sell
out living men or women. For the writer there is no escape, as there is
no real escape for any craftsman. If you handle your materials in a
cheap way you become cheap. The need of making a living may serve you as
an excuse but it will not save you as a craftsman. Nothing really will
save you if you go cheap with tools and materials. Do cheap work and you
are yourself cheap. That is the truth.
To speak again of the way out for the Moderns--for the young man or the
young woman who wishes to do work for which he need not, in the end and
when the temporary acclaim that so often follows cheap and flashy work
has passed, be ashamed, well, there is one. In America it is not too
difficult to make a living. Mr. Henry Mencken says that in America any
man not a complete fool cannot help make a living, and there is some
truth in what he says. If you have no money and no one will give you
any, make your living in some other way and keep the real side of
yourself for the honest work you want to do in your own craft. There are
worse fates than being poor. If you have talent do not sell out your
birthright. My own belief is that there never was a people in the world
more anxious for men of talent to stay on the track and be true to the
crafts than we Americans. We all know something is wrong with the flood
of cheap work we are always getting. The literary clubs and the various
kinds of culture clubs that spring up everywhere are perhaps rather
silly in some of their gropings but they mean something. Often enough
the man who spends all of his own life absorbed in money making would
really like his wife and children to have something else as an end in
life. I suspect that is the real reason there are so many young men and
women in colleges who have no real interest in scholarship. They want
something and their parents want something for them. Is it any wonder
they do not know what they want?
At bottom Americans are kind. They are good natured. So anxious are we
as a people for men of talent that it takes but the merest show of
talent to get recognition among us. Why, any man or woman who wants to
be respected has but to set himself up as a poet. He does not need to
write poetry. Let him write a few verses. We will all invite him to dine
with us, we will put up with his idiosyncracies and small vanities, we
will nurse and feed him like a very babe.
And if he is a musician or a young painter we will, as likely as not,
shell out our money and send him off to Paris to become as commonplace
and unreal and successful as an artist as the very people we have been
talking about here today.
But my preaching on this subject had better come to an end. It is a
subject on which books might be written. When your young man or woman
has made the sacrifices for the sake of a craft that I have spoken of as
necessary--and they are not really sacrifices at all--the struggle has
but begun. There remains the question of talent and if you have talent
that doesn’t settle the matter.
There is no agreement among artists as to the ends they are seeking, no
absolute standards. “A. E.”, the famous Irish publicist, painter and
poet once said that a literary movement consisted of several men of
talent living at the same time and cordially hating each other.
That is the truth and yet it is not quite true. What it really means is
that when men are devoted to their work there will still remain a wide
difference of opinion as to methods, treatments of the subject, the
baffling question of form achieved or not achieved--the question of when
a craftsman’s work becomes also a work of art. These are old questions
about which all craftsmen have always struggled among themselves. It is
all a queer and fascinating game just as life itself is queer and
fascinating.
The real reward I fancy lies just in the work itself, nowhere else. If
you cannot get it there, you will not get it at all.
And speaking for my craft I can say that it is tremendously worth while.
You are undertaking a task that can never be finished. You are starting
on a road that has no end. The longest life will be too short to ever
really get you anywhere near what you want. And that I should say is the
best part of the story.
_One thousand copies
of this book have been printed
for The Lantern Press, San Francisco,
(Gelber, Lilienthal, Inc.)
by Edwin & Robert Grabhorn.
Nine hundred & fifty copies are on
B. R. Book Paper,
numbered from 51 to 1000,
and fifty on Japan Vellum, numbered
from 1 to 50._
[Illustration]
_This is copy number_
185
* * * * *
Typographical errors corrected by the etext transcriber:
ever do as as=> ever do as {pg 23}
worked in the the=> worked in the {pg 26}
no absollute standards=> no absolute standards {pg 43}
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