Popular Literature

A Contention that the Best Seller Has its own Vulgar but Inimitable Merits

ALDOUS HUXLEY

LET no one imagine, after reading the title of this article, that I am going to reveal the secret for infallibly concocting best sellers. If I knew that interesting recipe, I should be by this time the Corona-smoking owner of a Hispano-Suiza. But I do not know it—alas. Nor, I venture to affirm, does anyone else. For, if anyone really did know what the public wanted, would there—I ask— be as many impecunious authors as there actually arc? Would there be any but supremely successful publishers? Would theatrical managers ever go bankrupt?

That all authors fail to be prosperous is not, perhaps, a completely cogent argument in favour of my hypothesis; for authors may remain poor on principle, for the love of their art and other frivolous and irrelevant reasons. But the love of art has rather less weight, I fancy, with the majority of publishers and theatrical managers. Most of them would be only too glad to know the secret of popularity; and most of them quite honestly profess to be looking for nothing else.

AND yet they never find it. No publisher, no theatrical manager, ever ventures to prophesy with confidence. This novel, that play—will it be a success? They really cannot tell. And yet it is their business to know, they may be ruined for their lack of knowing. A producer will sometimes stake a fortune on his opinion—and lose the fortune. The piece which, he felt certain, was going to run three hundred nights, has to be ignominiously taken off after a week. And, less spectacularly, the same is true of novels. Publishers are incessantly making mistakes; it is notorious. They reject in manuscript books which afterwards turn out to be best sellers; and they print other books in huge quantities which have subsequently to be remaindered, or reduced to pulp—to pulp, from which paper will again be made; paper on which yet other balderdash will be printed; balderdash that in its turn will once more be reduced to pulp. Solemn and profoundly symbolical process! On this deep theme one could meditate at length. But I refrain . . .

We see, then, that the experts—the people whose business it is to know what the public wants—are constantly making mistakes. A man can spend a life time publishing, or producing plays, and be, at the end of it, just as liable to error—and to enormous error— as he was at the beginning. In a case where the most experienced cannot but confess their ignorance, it would be folly and presumption for a mere amateur, like myself, to lay down the law. It is impossible to give a recipe for the making of popular literature. Popular writers arc born, not made. To be a popular writer, a man must be born with just the right sort of vulgar mind, just the adequate amount of talent. For talent is necessary; let us make no mistake about that. Your highbrow, who, after reading a novel by Mrs. Barclay or Nat Gould, .declares derisively that he himself could do that sort of thing in his spare time, if he wanted to, is not telling the truth. He couldn't write that sort of thing; he couldn't write anything, in all probability, half so good. The fact that he can read Henry James is no guarantee of his being able to write Charles Garvice. In order to write anything—anything, that is to say, that other people will spend money to read—one must be born with a well developed power of self-expression. The soul that you express may be perfectly commonplace and vulgar; that makes no difference to your power of expressing it. Wordsworth's mind was more interesting and beautiful than Miss Wilcox's; but their powers of expression were about equal. Miss Wilcox, it may be, expressed Wilcoxism more effectively and completely than Wordsworth expressed Wordsworth. Her audience was wider than Wordsworth's, because more people have minds like that of the authoress of Laugh and the World Laughs with You than minds like that of the author of the Prelude. That is the difference between a popular and an unpopular artist. For every ten people with HcnryJamesian minds there arc several hundred with Nat-Gouldian minds. But from out of these two classes of people it is only the rare Goulds and Jameses, gifted with a literary talent, who know how to express themselves and, consequently, the other members of their class. The highbrow may have sense and modesty enough to realize that, in no circumstances, could he conceivably write a short story like one of Tehekov's; but he often imagines that it would be easy for him to turn out something in the style of the Saturday Evening Post. But lacking the requisite gift, he would find the one as impossible as the other.

Those people who have ever had anything to do with the editing of a periodical know how rare a thing is a talent that enables a human being to express what is within him. For every manuscript that is accepted, how many hundreds are returned with perfunctory thanks! Once, when I was working on the staff of the Athenaeum—Golly, what a paper! but I am sorry, none the less, that it is no more -the business manager took it into his head that a competition with prizes might send up the circulation. A small cheque was accordingly dangled before the noses of the British intelligentsia, who were given a chance of proving their intelligence by writing about the state of modern English literature. I forget how many hundreds of them were tempted. The number at any rate was considerable; a third of the resultant lucubrations fell to my share—1 had to read them through and select those that were to go before the judges who finally awarded the prize. I did my duty conscientiously and read all the essays through from beginning to end; drearier hours I never remember to have passed in all my life. The best of the essays aspired to a dim mediocrity; the worst were beneath all criticism.

THE production which finally won the prize was of the sort that one of the regular contributors might have written against time and extenuated with fatigue—the sort of article for which he would have excused himself to the editor and which the editor would have printed reluctantly and because there was no other copy on hand. The whole affair was a striking proof that there are more people who can read modern literature than can write even passable modern journalism.

A certain native talent, then, and a mind that is more Wilcoxian than Wordsworthian—these are the indispensable qualifications of the popular author. The things that please such a mind will be the things the public likes; and the talent will make it possible for the mind to express itself. Formulas cannot replace talent nor induce a frame of mind. There arc no recipes for making popular literature; no short cuts to becoming a best seller. The best one can do is to analyse the sort of literature that is popular, so as to show what arc the more or less invariable elements on which individual writers work.

The first generalization that must be made is so obvious that I am almost ashamed to make it. It is this. No literature can be popular that deals with anything but the primary instincts and the emotions dependent upon them. All intellectual interests arc ruled out. Popular literature must be 'human'—that is to say it must deal with men and women in so far as they resemble the brutes. The heroes and heroines of best sellers feel, but never think; thinking is a chilly, uncomfortable process—it is essentially 'inhuman'. The all-too human themes of popular novels are the instincts of reproduction, self-preservation and gregariousness; with their dependent emotions, love—sacred and profane —anil the parental emotions; anger, fear, the love of danger, acquisitiveness and its corollaries; conscience, the sense of honour, pride, ambition, emulation and all the other emotions which we feel because we live in herds, like dogs and not, like cats, in solitude.

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Such, then, is the stuff on which the author of the best seller must work. The pattern on which he cuts it will vary with his temperament, the epoch in which he happens to live, his nationality and education. Thus, it is sufficiently notorious that love, in the Latin and the Anglo-Saxon countries, is treated rather differently. All that concerns the reproductive instinct is treated by the French bestsellers with an almost scientific matterof-factness. In England and across the ocean the majority of popular novels leave one to suppose that there is nothing to be matter-of-fact about.

OF recent years, this has Somowhat changed, and the facts of nature have been freely admitted in more than one work having a sale of more than fifty thousand copies. We are still, however, a long way away from the dry precision of the characteristic Parisian comedy. It is a significant fact that your French popular writer, when he wishes to talk about the reproductive instinct, finds an elegant and almost technical vocabulary ready to hand, a vocabulary in which he can go into the most intimate details with precision and yet with elegance and decorum. An English writer desirous of imitating him is compelled to be gross for lack of that vocabulary. Those who have at any time been rash enough to undertake the translation of a French novel will know the fearful difficulty of finding merely decent equivalents for what in the original was perfectly polished and urbane. Shall one be gross, or bowdlerize? I must confess that, confronted by that dilemma, I have bowdlerized.

Even the other less scabrous instincts are treated in different fashions in different countries. Take, for example, ambition and the love of money. It may be a mere fancy, but my impression is that these passions are more frequently, more fully and unequivocally treated in French literature than in the Anglo-Saxon. Balzac's Rastignac brooding over Paris is one of a large family of ambitious young men who are prepared to go to any length to make their fortune. Rastignac has a score of brothers in the works of Balzac himself, dozens more in Zola; and when the lesser novelists can spare a moment from love, they like to bring in some Machiavellian personage of the same clan. Ambition and acquisitiveness figure largely, it is true, in English and American fiction. But it will be found, I think, that the Anglo-Saxon counterparts of Rastignac are rarely so ruthless, so logical, so frankly immoral as Balzac's hero. In the fiction magazines, young men make good and acquire large lumps of cash; but they do it in a very genteel way, without infringing the moral code, or doing harm to anyone except the villain, who is, of course, fair game.

THE young man who makes a great deal of money in a perfectly honourable fashion, marries the heroine in the last chapter and lives happy ever after, is, of course, the ideal hero of popular fiction. For he represents what we should all like to be and what so few of us are; he compensates by his virtue and his happiness for the chronic inclemency and the incurable moral weakness of the reader's life. A perfectly good and happy people would have no need of literature. One of the principal functions of the popular literature in the present state of society, is to do ideal justice and to make dreams come true.

Popular literature fulfills on this earth the function of heaven. It is there that good men are rewarded and the bad punished; it is there that we seem to other people what we imagine ourselves to be or fondly wish that we were. Those extraordinary novels of Mrs. Barclay's in which luscious young men of five and twenty fall wildly in love with sexagenarian females constitute the heaven —the world where wishes are fulfilled and justice done—of all the unmarried and superannuated women in the miserable world of reality. Every best seller has something of this heavenly quality of compensations for the harshness of reality.

But heaven would not be heaven if it were not for hell; we appreciate the good and the delicious only in contrast with what is horrible and bad. That is why the heroes and heroines of every melodrama pass through four and a half acts of unmerited persecution before emerging from the imbroglio into serenity. All's Well That Ends Well—it is difficult to think of any best seller that might not have had that title.