The Man of Letters as a Man of Business
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William Dean Howells >> The Man of Letters as a Man of Business
The syndicate has no doubt advanced the prosperity of the short
story by increasing the demand for it. We Americans had already
done pretty well in that kind, for there was already a great
demand for the short story in the magazines; but the syndicate of
Sunday editions particularly cultivated it, and made it very
paying. I have heard that some short-story writers made the
syndicate pay more for their wares than they got from the
magazines for them, considering that the magazine publication
could enhance their reputation, but the Sunday edition could do
nothing for it. They may have been right or not in this; I will
not undertake to say, but that was the business view of the case
with them.
In spite of the fact that short stories when gathered into a
volume and republished would not sell so well as a novel, the
short story flourished, and its success in the periodicals began
to be felt in the book trade: volumes of short stories suddenly
began to sell. But now again, it is said the bottom has dropped
out, and they do not sell, and their adversity in book form
threatens to affect them in the magazines; an editor told me the
other day that he had more short stories than he knew what to do
with; and I was not offering him a short story of my own, either.
A permanent decline in the market for a kind of literary art
which we have excelled in, or if we have not excelled, have done
some of our most exquisite work, would be a pity.
There are other sorts of light literature once greatly in demand,
but now apparently no longer desired by editors, who ought to
know what their readers desire. Among these is the travel
sketch, to me a very agreeable kind, and really to be regretted
in its decline. There are some reasons for its decline besides a
change of taste in readers, and a possible surfeit. Travel
itself has become so universal that everybody, in a manner, has
been everywhere, and the foreign scene has no longer the charm of
strangeness. We do not think the Old World either so romantic or
so ridiculous as we used; and perhaps from an instinctive
perception of this altered mood writers no longer appeal to our
sentiment or our humor with sketches of outlandish people and
places. Of course this can hold true only in a general way; the
thing is still done, but not nearly so much done as formerly.
When one thinks of the long line of American writers who have
greatly pleased in this sort, and who even got their first fame
in it, one must grieve to see it obsolescent. Irving, Curtis,
Bayard Taylor, Herman Melville, Ross Browne, Ik Marvell,
Longfellow, Lowell, Story, Mr. James, Mr. Aldrich, Colonel Hay,
Mr. Warner, Mrs. Hunt, Mr. C.W. Stoddard, Mark Twain, and many
others whose names will not come to me at the moment, have in
their several ways richly contributed to our pleasure in it; but
I cannot now fancy a young author finding favor with an editor in
a sketch of travel, or a study of foreign manners and customs;
his work would have to be of the most signal importance and
brilliancy to overcome the editor's feeling that the thing had
been done already; and I believe that a publisher if offered a
book of such things, would look at it askance, and plead the
well-known quiet of the trade. Still, I may be mistaken.
I am rather more confident about the decline of another literary
species, namely, the light essay. We have essays enough and to
spare, of certain soberer and severer sorts, such as grapple with
problems and deal with conditions; but the kind I mean, the
slightly humorous, gentle, refined, and humane kind, seems no
longer to abound as it once did. I do not know whether the
editor discourages them, knowing his readers' frame, or whether
they do not offer themselves, but I seldom find them in the
magazines. I certainly do not believe that if anyone were now to
write essays such as Mr. Warner's "Backlog Studies," an editor
would refuse them; and perhaps nobody really writes them. Nobody
seems to write the sort that Colonel Higginson formerly
contributed to the periodicals, or such as Emerson wrote.
Without a great name behind it, I am afraid that a volume of
essays would find few buyers, even after the essays had made a
public in the magazines. There are, of course, instances to the
contrary, but they are not so many or so striking as to make me
think that the essay could not be offered as a good opening for
business talent.
I suspect that good poetry by well-known hands was never better
paid in the magazines than it is now. I must say, too, that I
think the quality of the minor poetry of our day is better than
that of twenty-five or thirty years ago. I could name half a
score of young poets whose work from time to time gives me great
pleasure, by the reality of its feeling, and the delicate
perfection of its art, but I will not name them, for fear of
passing over half a score of others equally meritorious. We have
certainly no reason to be discouraged, whatever reason the poets
themselves have to be so, and I do not think that even in the
short story our younger writers are doing better work than they
are doing in the slighter forms of verse. Yet the notion of
inviting business talent into this field would be as preposterous
as that of asking it to devote itself to the essay. What book of
verse by a recent poet, if we except some such peculiarly gifted
poet as Mr. Whitcomb Riley, has paid its expenses, not to speak
of any profit to the author? Of course, it would be rather more
offensive and ridiculous that it should do so than that any other
form of literary art should do so; and yet there is no more
provision in our economic system for the support of the poet
apart from his poems, than there is for the support of the
novelist apart from his novel. One could not make any more money
by writing poetry than by writing history, but it is a curious
fact that while the historians have usually been rich men, and
able to afford the luxury of writing history, the poets have
usually been poor men, with no pecuniary justification in their
devotion to a calling which is so seldom an election.
To be sure, it can be said for them that it costs far less to set
up poet than to set up historian. There is no outlay for copying
documents, or visiting libraries, or buying books. In fact,
except as historian, the man of letters, in whatever walk, has
not only none of the expenses of other men of business, but none
of the expenses of other artists. He has no such outlay to make
for materials, or models, or studio rent as the painter or the
sculptor has, and his income, such as it is, is immediate. If he
strikes the fancy of the editor with the first thing he offers,
as he very well may, it is as well with him as with other men
after long years of apprenticeship. Although he will always be
the better for an apprenticeship, and the longer apprenticeship
the better, he may practically need none at all. Such are the
strange conditions of his acceptance with the public, that he may
please better without it than with it. An author's first book is
too often not only his luckiest, but really his best; it has a
brightness that dies out under the school he puts himself to, but
a painter or sculptor is only the gainer by all the school he can
give himself.
XI.
In view of this fact it become again very hard to establish the
author's status in the business world, and at moments I have
grave question whether he belongs there at all, except as a
novelist. There is, of course, no outlay for him in this sort,
any more than in any other sort of literature, but it at least
supposes and exacts some measure of preparation. A young writer
may produce a brilliant and very perfect romance, just as he may
produce a brilliant and very perfect poem, but in the field of
realistic fiction, or in what we used to call the novel of
manners, a writer can only produce an inferior book at the
outset. For this work he needs experience and observation, not
so much of others as of himself, for ultimately his characters
will all come out of himself, and he will need to know motive and
character with such thoroughness and accuracy as he can acquire
only through his own heart. A man remains in a measure strange
to himself as long as he lives, and the very sources of novelty
in his work will be within himself; he can continue to give it
freshness in no other way than by knowing himself better and
better. But a young writer and an untrained writer has not yet
begun to be acquainted even with the lives of other men. The
world around him remains a secret as well as the world within
him, and both unfold themselves simultaneously to that experience
of joy and sorrow that can come only with the lapse of time.
Until he is well on toward forty, he will hardly have assimilated
the materials of a great novel, although he may have accumulated
them. The novelist, then, is a man of letters who is like a man
of business in the necessity of preparation for his calling,
though he does not pay store-rent, and may carry all his affairs
under his hat, as the phrase is. He alone among men of letters
may look forward to that sort of continuous prosperity which
follows from capacity and diligence in other vocations; for
story-telling is now a fairly recognized trade, and the
story-teller has a money-standing in the economic world. It is
not a very high standing, I think, and I have expressed the
belief that it does not bring him the respect felt for men in
other lines of business. Still our people cannot deny some
consideration to a man who gets a hundred dollars a thousand
words. That is a fact appreciable to business, and the man of
letters in the line of fiction may reasonably feel that his place
in our civilization, though he may owe it to the women who form
the great mass of his readers, has something of the character of
a vested interest in the eyes of men. There is, indeed, as yet
no conspiracy law which will avenge the attempt to injure him in
his business. A critic, or a dark conjuration of critics, may
damage him at will and to the extent of their power, and he has
no recourse but to write better books, or worse. The law will do
nothing for him, and a boycott of his books might be preached
with immunity by any class of men not liking his opinions on the
question of industrial slavery or antipaedobaptism. Still the
market for his wares is steadier than the market for any other
kind of literary wares, and the prices are better. The
historian, who is a kind of inferior realist, has something like
the same steadiness in the market, but the prices he can command
are much lower, and the two branches of the novelist's trade are
not to be compared in a business way. As for the essayist, the
poet, the traveller, the popular scientist, they are nowhere in
the competition for the favor of readers. The reviewer, indeed,
has a pretty steady call for his work, but I fancy the reviewers
who get a hundred dollars a thousand words could all stand upon
the point of a needle without crowding one another; I should
rather like to see them doing it. Another gratifying fact of the
situation is that the best writers of fiction who are most in
demand with the magazines, probably get nearly as much money for
their work as the inferior novelists who outsell them by tens of
thousands, and who make their appeal to the innumerable multitude
of the less educated and less cultivated buyers of fiction in
book-form. I think they earn their money, but if I did not think
all of the higher class of novelists earned so much money as they
get, I should not be so invidious as to single out for reproach
those who did not.
The difficulty about payment, as I have hinted, is that
literature has no objective value really, but only a subjective
value, if I may so express it. A poem, an essay, a novel, even a
paper on political economy, may be worth gold untold to one
reader, and worth nothing whatever to another. It may be
precious to one mood of the reader, and worthless to another mood
of the same reader. How, then, is it to be priced, and how is it
to be fairly marketed? All people must be fed, and all people
must be clothed, and all people must be housed; and so meat,
raiment, and shelter are things of positive and obvious
necessity, which may fitly have a market price put upon them.
But there is no such positive and obvious necessity, I am sorry
to say, for fiction, or not for the higher sort of fiction. The
sort of fiction which corresponds to the circus and the variety
theatre in the show-business seems essential to the spiritual
health of the masses, but the most cultivated of the classes can
get on, from time to time, without an artistic novel. This is a
great pity, and I should be very willing that readers might feel
something like the pangs of hunger and cold, when deprived of
their finer fiction; but apparently they never do. Their dumb
and passive need is apt only to manifest itself negatively, or in
the form of weariness of this author or that. The publisher of
books can ascertain the fact through the declining sales of a
writer; but the editor of a magazine, who is the best customer of
the best writers, must feel the market with a much more delicate
touch. Sometimes it may be years before he can satisfy himself
that his readers are sick of Smith, and are pining for Jones;
even then he cannot know how long their mood will last, and he is
by no means safe in cutting down Smith's price and putting up
Jones's. With the best will in the world to pay justly, he
cannot. Smith, who has been boring his readers to death for a
year, may write to- morrow a thing that will please them so much
that he will at once be a prime favorite again; and Jones, whom
they have been asking for, may do something so uncharacteristic
and alien that it will be a flat failure in the magazine. The
only thing that gives either writer positive value is his
acceptance with the reader; but the acceptance is from month to
month wholly uncertain. Authors are largely matters of fashion,
like this style of bonnet, or that shape of gown. Last spring
the dresses were all made with lace berthas, and Smith was read;
this year the butterfly capes are worn, and Jones is the favorite
author. Who shall forecast the fall and winter modes?
XII.
In this inquiry it is always the author rather than the
publisher, always the contributor rather than the editor, whom I
am concerned for. I study the difficulties of the publisher and
editor only because they involve the author and the contributor;
if they did not, I will not say with how hard a heart I should
turn from them; my only pang now in scrutinizing the business
conditions of literature is for the makers of literature, not the
purveyors of it.
After all, and in spite of my vaunting title, is the man of
letters ever a business man? I suppose that, strictly speaking,
he never is, except in those rare instances where, through need
or choice, he is the publisher as well as the author of his
books. Then he puts something on the market and tries to sell it
there, and is a man of business. But otherwise he is an artist
merely, and is allied to the great mass of wage-workers who are
paid for the labor they have put into the thing done or the thing
made; who live by doing or making a thing, and not by marketing a
thing after some other man has done it or made it. The quality
of the thing has nothing to do with the economic nature of the
case; the author is, in the last analysis, merely a workingman,
and is under the rule that governs the workingman's life. If he
is sick or sad, and cannot work, if he is lazy or tipsy and will
not, then he earns nothing. He cannot delegate his business to a
clerk or a manager; it will not go on while he is sleeping. The
wage he can command depends strictly upon his skill and
diligence.
I myself am neither sorry nor ashamed for this; I am glad and
proud to be of those who eat their bread in the sweat of their
own brows, and not the sweat of other men's brows; I think my
bread is the sweeter for it. In the meantime I have no blame for
business men; they are no more of the condition of things than we
workingmen are; they did no more to cause it or create it; but I
would rather be in my place than in theirs, and I wish that I
could make all my fellow-artists realize that economically they
are the same as mechanics, farmers, day-laborers. It ought to be
our glory that we produce something, that we bring into the world
something that was not choately there before; that at least we
fashion or shape something anew; and we ought to feel the tie
that binds us to all the toilers of the shop and field, not as a
galling chain, but as a mystic bond also uniting us to Him who
works hitherto and evermore.
I know very well that to the vast multitude of our
fellow-workingmen we artists are the shadows of names, or not
even the shadows. I like to look the facts in the face, for
though their lineaments are often terrible, yet there is light
nowhere else; and I will not pretend, in this light, that the
masses care any more for us than we care for the masses, or so
much. Nevertheless, and most distinctly, we are not of the
classes. Except in our work, they have no use for us; if now and
then they fancy qualifying their material splendor or their
spiritual dulness with some artistic presence, the attempt is
always a failure that bruises and abashes. In so far as the
artist is a man of the world, he is the less an artist, and if he
fashions himself upon fashion, he deforms his art. We all know
that ghastly type; it is more absurd even than the figure which
is really of the world, which was born and bred in it, and
conceives of nothing outside of it, or above it. In the social
world, as well as in the business world, the artist is anomalous,
in the actual conditions, and he is perhaps a little ridiculous.
Yet he has to be somewhere, poor fellow, and I think that he will
do well to regard himself as in a transition state. He is really
of the masses, but they do not know it, and what is worse, they
do not know him; as yet the common people do not hear him gladly
or hear him at all. He is apparently of the classes; they know
him, and they listen to him; he often amuses them very much; but
he is not quite at ease among them; whether they know it or not,
he knows that he is not of their kind. Perhaps he will never be
at home anywhere in the world as long as there are masses whom he
ought to consort with, and classes whom he cannot consort with.
The prospect is not brilliant for any artist now living, but
perhaps the artist of the future will see in the flesh the
accomplishment of that human equality of which the instinct has
been divinely planted in the human soul.