Novelists and News

Suggesting That, in the Event of a National Catastrophe, It Were Well to Keep the Novelists in a Safe Place

L. L. JONES

I BELIEVE the Genoa Conference has passed without any leading novelist's writing a series of articles in the midst of it. T. hat seemed a hopeful indication—a world muddle actually going on without a world novelist's being muddled up in it. Describing the Genoa Conference was the one kind of thing that writers like H. G. Wells and Blasco Ibanez were totally unfit to do. This was about the first time they did not do it. Maybe there is a change in the tide.

That is a singular illusion when you come to think of it, the illusion as to the relation between the value of a modern writer's product and the agitation of his life. It has been believed for many years, for example, that if you stir up H. G. Wells with a Russian revolution or something of the kind, you will have a doubly stirring consequence, or that if you can get Rudyard Kipling into a trench in war time, battle hymns of the highest quality are bound to come of it. The notion has persisted not only in publishers and in the public, but probably also in these writers themselves, although precisely the opposite rule has run through the entire lives of both of them. Wells has never been so interesting as when leading a quiet life, and Kipling has never been so exciting as when he was not excited by any sort of public disturbance.

I mention Wells and Kipling simply because they are so obvious, but instances will occur to any reader of a magazine. Articles by people to whom exciting things have happened are usually the dullest in the magazine, and it seems to be true of the best contributors. The more things that happen to or around a writer, the fewer things happen inside him.

The Indiana Earthquake

IN order not to seem flippant about the greatest war in all history and the splendor of its literary consequences, I will take an imaginary catastrophe. Suppose an earthquake began in Indiana to-morrow, and kept the whole State rocking and splitting for about a year, pieces of it falling in every week or so. Within three weeks Blasco Ibanez would be there, and ten days before that, a dozen other excellent novelists, including Wells, of course, whose literary work not only had nothing to do with the treatment of earthquakes, but was invariably produced under conditions as different as it is possible to conceive from those prevailing in the stricken region. Everyone knows that no novelist writes his best during an earthquake, or even immediately after making his escape. It seems a simple and almost unnecessary thing to remark that not one of the most moving pages of fiction was ever composed while sitting through an earthquake. Yet no sooner would Indiana get fairly to shaking, than everybody would seem glad to learn from the newspapers that his favorite novelist was out there being tossed about, having apparently sought the place at once, as a desirable one for literary composition.

From experience of literary activities arising from recent world wars, revolutions, conferences and so forth, we can foresee exactly the literary consequences of this Indiana earthquake. The longer the earthquake went on the more certainly would it attach to it writers whose talents were manifestly unsuited to an adequate rendering of the earthquake, and who, nevertheless, would all be writing of nothing else. Publishers would vie with one another and spend enormous sums on forcing these inapplicable writers—pleasant, tranquil persons, many of them—out into the shaking zone. Soon it would be a matter of conscience with everyone to write only of the earthquake, and if he did for any reason write of something else, he would apologize as Mr. Marshall used to do during the war whenever he wrote a novel in which nobody was killed.

The Waste of Energy

FOR it is not as if the earthquake drew to it only Wells, Ibanez, Dr. Frank Crane, Lillian Russell, Sir Philip Gibbs, Frank Simonds, Heywood Broun, the Pathé News man, Nicholas Murray Butler, W. R. Hearst, Lord Northcliffe, and others trained to an instantaneous mental hospitality, who would be just as willing and competent to absorb an earthquake as anything else. But people of really strong preference and aptitude for other things would nevertheless be made to turn away and write about it. Hence that great waste of incompatible literary energy, such as we saw in the war and the revolution, and that long series of volumes, all compassionate, all humane, but also in every other way almost identical—two perfunctory volumes by Sir Gilbert Murray on the Lesson of the Earthquake, one by Professor John Dewey on The Earthquake in the Public Mind, Miss Repplier's Atlantic papers on The Growing Superficiality of Young People at Earthquakes, Mr. Herbert Croly's The Peace Treaty in the Light of the Earthquake, Miss Austen on Sex Life at the Earthquake, Mr. Owen Wister's Regrets at the Disappearing Indianapolis.

In that dark moment when the earth closed over the State of Indiana, the voice of literary criticism would be stilled, but there is no harm now in my venturing a complaint or two. Instead of mitigating the Indiana castastrophe, most of the writers I have named would add to it. For instead of doing something they could do quite well, they would persist in doing only what they could do very badly. Thus to the loss of Indiana, which could not be helped, would be added many little losses that might easily have been avoided. Just at the moment when we are in need of consolation for the loss of Indiana, craving an innocent diversion from letters and the arts, our literary men have got themselves into such a state that they could not console us for the loss of a pocket knife. In an effort to keep abreast of every movement of the public mind, almost every one of them has fallen behind his own mind. Never does a man of letters seem so far behind the capacities of his own intellect as in the right hand column of a hundred newspapers sorrowing with the world in its present condition. So after the Indiana disaster all its agreeable literary diversities disappear.

Characteristics are all gone and there remains only that earthquake manner. If anyone doubts this, I ask him to read again The New Machiavelli and Mr. Polly and then imagine a series of articles that Mr. Wells would probably be writing from among the ruins of South Bend. Let him count up the scores of anonymous persons who wrote just as good articles from the depths of Russia and the Washington Conference as Mr. Wells did, and then reckon the number of those persons who could have written Tono-Bungay. In any new disaster, if it lasted long enough, you would find him in the general confusion equally out of place, and drawing an enormous salary in reward for his dislocation.

In order to be fair-minded on this subject we must take some such imaginary instance, or one that is far away. If this Indiana disaster were at the present moment actually upon us, I know that I myself at least should lose my head, just as I lost it during the war. With Senator Beveridge and Booth Tarkington engulfed, and Terre Haute and Wabash College caving in, I should feel callous if I went about my business without giving them a great many of my thoughts; and when the public mind was stunned by the calamity, I should greatly respect those novelists who each published a solid volume showing from beginning to end how completely he himself also was stunned.

Literary Waste Products

WHEN the entire country was in a state of confusion, it would seem a patriotic duty not only to be confused but to express oneself as confusedly as possible. But from this distance I can see that these duties would be exaggerated, not only without benefit to Indiana, but actually to the disadvantage of such of Indiana's victims as survived. There is no more reason why a good novelist in the public distress should become a poor newspaper reporter, than why a good bootmaker carried away by the general gloom should become an indifferent undertaker.

These discursions under the shock of the news of the day are, I suppose, more common among my literary contemporaries than in any earlier period. I suppose there never was a time when the novel of last week looked so much like the newspaper of last year. That is because experience is the lazy mind's substitute for reflection, and the recording of actualities is a cheap alternative for invention. It has nothing to do with the portentous nature of the time. And one of the unpleasant results of the contemporary method is that we are constantly encountering in the books the very things we were hoping to escape when we left the streets, or laid down the newspapers and the magazines, the fancy of the narrator having made no change in them. Of course, there is not necessarily a loss to letters when novelists fill the front pages of newspapers. The loss begins only when the front pages of newspapers alone fill up the novelists.

Now I feel safe in saying in advance that one sad by-product of the Indiana earthquake would be the loss of balance between experience and imagination in the literary mind. In its sensitive response to the actual it would communicate to the reader its own stupefaction, when there was plenty to be had from the newspapers.