Читать книгу Why Authors Go Wrong, and Other Explanations - Grant M. Overton - Страница 11

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We have no desire to be personal for the sake of being personal, but we have every desire to be personal in this discussion for the sake of being impersonal, pointed, helpful and clear. It is time to take a perfectly fresh and perfectly illustrative example of how not to write fiction. We shall take the case of Mr. Owen Johnson and his new novel, Virtuous Wives.

Mr. Johnson will be suspected by the dense and conventional censors of American literature of having written Virtuous Wives to make money. Alackaday, no! If he had a much better book might have come from his typewriter. Mr. Johnson was not thinking primarily of money, as he should have been (prior to the actual writing of the story). He was filled with a moral and uplifting aim. He had been shocked to the marrow by the spectacle of the lives led by some New York women—the kind Alice Duer Miller writes discreetly about. The participation of America in the war had not begun. The performances of an inconsiderable few were unduly conspicuous. Mr. Johnson decided to write a novel that would hold up these disgusting triflers (and worse) to the scorn of sane and decent Americans. He set to work. He finished his book. It was serialized in one of the several magazines which have displaced forever the old Sunday school library in the field of Awful Warning literature. In these forums Mr. Galsworthy and Gouverneur Morris inscribe our present-day chronicles of the Schoenberg-Cotta family, and writ large over their instalments, as part of the editorial blurb, we read the expression of a fervent belief that Vice has never been so Powerfully, Brilliantly and Convincingly Depicted in All Its Horror by Any Pen. But we divagate.

Mr. Johnson’s novel was printed serially and appeared then as a book with a solemn preface—the final indecent exhibition, outside of the story itself, of his serious moral purpose. And as a book it is failing utterly of its purpose. It has sold and is selling and Mr. Johnson is making and will make money out of it—which is what he did not want. What he did want he made impossible when he unmasked his great aim.

The world may be perverse, but you have to take it as it is. The world may be childish, but none of us will live to see it grow up. If the world thinks you write with the honest and understandable object of making a living it attributes no ulterior motive to you. The world says: “John Smith, the butcher, sells me beefsteak in order to buy Mrs. Smith a new hat and the little Smiths shoes.” The world buys the steaks and relishes them. But if John Smith tells the world and his wife every time they come to his shop: “I am selling you this large, juicy steak to give you good red blood and make you Fit,” then the world and his wife are resentful and say: “We think we don’t like your large, juicy steaks. We are red blooded enough to have our own preferences. We will just go on down the street to the delicatessen—we mean the Liberty food shop—and buy some de-Hohenzollernized frankfurters, the well-known Liberty sausage. To hell with the Kaiser!” And so John Smith merely makes money. Oh, yes, he makes money; a large, juicy steak is a large, juicy steak no matter how deadly the good intent in selling it. But John Smith is defeated in his real purpose. He does not furnish the world and his wife with the red corpuscles he yearned to give them.