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 MAN OF LETTERS AS A MAN OF BUSINESS"
by William Dean Howells
I think that every man ought to work for his living, without
exception, and that when he has once avouched his willingness to
work, society should provide him with work and warrant him a
living. I do not think any man ought to live by an art. A man's
art should be his privilege, when he has proven his fitness to
exercise it, and has otherwise earned his daily bread; and its
results should be free to all. There is an instinctive sense of
this, even in the midst of the grotesque confusion of our
economic being; people feel that there is something profane,
something impious, in taking money for a picture, or a poem, or a
statue. Most of all, the artist himself feels this. He puts on
a bold front with the world, to be sure, and brazens it out as
Business; but he knows very well that there is something false
and vulgar in it; and that the work which cannot be truly priced
in money cannot be truly paid in money. He can, of course, say
that the priest takes money for reading the marriage service, for
christening the new-born babe, and for saying the last office for
the dead; that the physician sells healing; that justice itself
is paid for; and that he is merely a party to the thing that is
and must be. He can say that, as the thing is, unless he sells
his art he cannot live, that society will leave him to starve if
he does not hit its fancy in a picture, or a poem, or a statue;
and all this is bitterly true. He is, and he must be, only too
glad if there is a market for his wares. Without a market for
his wares he must perish, or turn to making something that will
sell better than pictures, or poems, or statues. All the same,
the sin and the shame remain, and the averted eye sees them
still, with its inward vision. Many will make believe otherwise,
but I would rather not make believe otherwise; and in trying to
write of Literature as Business I am tempted to begin by saying
that Business is the opprobrium of Literature.
II.
Literature is at once the most intimate and the most articulate
of the arts. It cannot impart its effect through the senses or
the nerves as the other arts can; it is beautiful only through
the intelligence; it is the mind speaking to the mind; until it
has been put into absolute terms, of an invariable significance,
it does not exist at all. It cannot awaken this emotion in one,
and that in another; if it fails to express precisely the meaning
of the author, if it does not say HIM, it says nothing, and is
nothing. So that when a poet has put his heart, much or little,
into a poem, and sold it to a magazine, the scandal is greater
than when a painter has sold a picture to a patron, or a sculptor
has modelled a statue to order. These are artists less
articulate and less intimate than the poet; they are more
exterior to their work; they are less personally in it; they part
with less of themselves in the dicker. It does not change the
nature of the case to say that Tennyson and Longfellow and
Emerson sold the poems in which they couched the most mystical
messages their genius was charged to bear mankind. They
submitted to the conditions which none can escape; but that does
not justify the conditions, which are none the less the
conditions of hucksters because they are imposed upon poets. If
it will serve to make my meaning a little clearer we will suppose
that a poet has been crossed in love, or has suffered some real
sorrow, like the loss of a wife or child. He pours out his
broken heart in verse that shall bring tears of sacred sympathy
from his readers, and an editor pays him a hundred dollars for
the right of bringing his verse to their notice. It is perfectly
true that the poem was not written for these dollars, but it is
perfectly true that it was sold for them. The poet must use his
emotions to pay his provision bills; he has no other means;
society does not propose to pay his bills for him. Yet, and at
the end of the ends, the unsophisticated witness finds the
transaction ridiculous, finds it repulsive, finds it shabby.
Somehow he knows that if our huckstering civilization did not at
every moment violate the eternal fitness of things, the poet's
song would have been given to the world, and the poet would have
been cared for by the whole human brotherhood, as any man should
be who does the duty that every man owes it.
The instinctive sense of the dishonor which money-purchase does
to art is so strong that sometimes a man of letters who can pay
his way otherwise refuses pay for his work, as Lord Byron did,
for a while, from a noble pride, and as Count Tolstoy has tried
to do, from a noble conscience. But Byron's publisher profited
by a generosity which did not reach his readers; and the Countess
Tolstoy collects the copyright which her husband foregoes; so
that these two eminent instances of protest against business in
literature may be said not to have shaken its money basis. I
know of no others; but there may be many that I am culpably
ignorant of. Still, I doubt if there are enough to affect the
fact that Literature is Business as well as Art, and almost as
soon. At present business is the only human solidarity; we are
all bound together with that chain, whatever interests and tastes
and principles separate us, and I feel quite sure that in writing
of the Man of Letters as a Man of Business, I shall attract far
more readers than I should in writing of him as an Artist.
Besides, as an artist he has been done a great deal already; and
a commercial state like ours has really more concern in him as a
business man. Perhaps it may sometimes be different; I do not
believe it will till the conditions are different, and that is a
long way off.
III.
In the meantime I confidently appeal to the reader's imagination
with the fact that there are several men of letters among us who
are such good men of business that they can command a hundred
dollars a thousand words for all they write; and at least one
woman of letters who gets a hundred and fifty dollars a thousand
words. It is easy to write a thousand words a day, and supposing
one of these authors to work steadily, it can be seen that his
net earnings during the year would come to some such sum as the
President of the United States gets for doing far less work of a
much more perishable sort. If the man of letters were wholly a
business man this is what would happen; he would make his forty
or fifty thousand dollars a year, and be able to consort with
bank presidents, and railroad officials, and rich tradesmen, and
other flowers of our plutocracy on equal terms. But,
unfortunately, from a business point of view, he is also an
artist, and the very qualities that enable him to delight the
public disable him from delighting it uninterruptedly. "No rose
blooms right along," as the English boys at Oxford made an
American collegian say in a theme which they imagined for him in
his national parlance; and the man of letters, as an artist, is
apt to have times and seasons when he cannot blossom. Very often
it shall happen that his mind will lie fallow between novels or
stories for weeks and months at a stretch; when the suggestions
of the friendly editor shall fail to fruit in the essays or
articles desired; when the muse shall altogether withhold
herself, or shall respond only in a feeble dribble of verse which
he might sell indeed, but which it would not be good business for
him to put on the market. But supposing him to be a very
diligent and continuous worker, and so happy as to have fallen on
a theme that delights him and bears him along, he may please
himself so ill with the result of his labors that he can do
nothing less in artistic conscience than destroy a day's work, a
week's work, a month's work. I know one man of letters who wrote
to-day, and tore up tomorrow for nearly a whole summer. But even
if part of the mistaken work may be saved, because it is good
work out of place, and not intrinsically bad, the task of
reconstruction wants almost as much time as the production; and
then, when all seems done, comes the anxious and endless process
of revision. These drawbacks reduce the earning capacity of what
I may call the high-cost man of letters in such measure that an
author whose name is known everywhere, and whose reputation is
commensurate with the boundaries of his country, if it does not
transcend them, shall have the income, say, of a rising young
physician, known to a few people in a subordinate city.
In view of this fact, so humiliating to an author in the presence
of a nation of business men like ours, I do not know that I can
establish the man of letters in the popular esteem as very much
of a business man after all. He must still have a low rank among
practical people; and he will be regarded by the great mass of
Americans as perhaps a little off, a little funny, a little soft!
Perhaps not; and yet I would rather not have a consensus of
public opinion on the question; I think I am more comfortable
without it.
IV.
There is this to be said in defence of men of letters on the
business side, that literature is still an infant industry with
us, and so far from having been protected by our laws it was
exposed for ninety years after the foundation of the republic to
the vicious competition of stolen goods. It is true that we now
have the international copyright law at last, and we can at least
begin to forget our shame; but literary property has only
forty-two years of life under our unjust statutes, and if it is
attacked by robbers the law does not seek out the aggressors and
punish them, as it would seek out and punish the trespassers upon
any other kind of property; but it leaves the aggrieved owner to
bring suit against them, and recover damages, if he can. This
may be right enough in itself; but I think, then, that all
property should be defended by civil suit, and should become
public after forty-two years of private tenure. The Constitution
guarantees us all equality before the law, but the law-makers
seem to have forgotten this in the case of our infant literary
industry. So long as this remains the case, we cannot expect the
best business talent to go into literature, and the man of
letters must keep his present low grade among business men.
As I have hinted, it is but a little while that he has had any
standing at all. I may say that it is only since the was that
literature has become a business with us. Before that time we
had authors, and very good ones; it is astonishing how good they
were; but I do not remember any of them who lived by literature
except Edgar A. Poe, perhaps; and we all know how he lived; it
was largely upon loans. They were either men of fortune, or they
were editors, or professors, with salaries or incomes apart from
the small gains of their pens; or they were helped out with
public offices; one need not go over their names, or classify
them. Some of them must have made money by their books, but I
question whether any one could have lived, even very simply, upon
the money his books brought him. No one could do that now,
unless he wrote a book that we could not recognize as a work of
literature. But many authors live now, and live prettily enough,
by the sale of the serial publication of their writings to the
magazines. They do not live so nicely as successful
tradespeople, of course, or as men in the other professions when
they begin to make themselves names; the high state of brokers,
bankers, railroad operators, and the like is, in the nature of
the case, beyond their fondest dreams of pecuniary affluence and
social splendor. Perhaps they do not want the chief seats in the
synagogue; it is certain they do not get them. Still, they do
very fairly well, as things go; and several have incomes that
would seem riches to the great mass of worthy Americans who work
with their hands for a living--when they can get the work. Their
incomes are mainly from serial publication in the different
magazines; and the prosperity of the magazines has given a whole
class existence which, as a class, was wholly unknown among us
before the war. It is not only the famous or fully recognized
authors who live in this way, but the much larger number of
clever people who are as yet known chiefly to the editors, and
who may never make themselves a public, but who do well a kind of
acceptable work. These are the sort who do not get reprinted
from the periodicals; but the better recognized authors do get
reprinted, and then their serial work in its completed form
appeals to the readers who say they do not read serials. The
multitude of these is not great, and if an author rested his
hopes upon their favor he would be a much more embittered man
than he now generally is. But he understands perfectly well that
his reward is in the serial and not in the book; the return from
that he may count as so much money found in the road--a few
hundreds, a very few thousands, at the most.
V.
I doubt, indeed, whether the earnings of literary men are
absolutely as great as they were earlier in the century, in any
of the English-speaking countries; relatively they are nothing
like as great. Scott had forty thousand dollars for "Woodstock,"
which was not a very large novel, and was by no means one of his
best; and forty thousand dollars had at least the purchasing
powers of sixty thousand then. Moore had three thousand guineas
for "Lalla Rookh," but what publisher would be rash enough to pay
twenty-five thousand dollars for the masterpiece of a minor poet
now? The book, except in very rare instances, makes nothing like
the return to the author that the magazine makes, and there are
but two or three authors who find their account in that form of
publication. Those who do, those who sell the most widely in
book form, are often not at all desired by editors; with
difficulty they get a serial accepted by any principal magazine.
On the other hand, there are authors whose books, compared with
those of the popular favorites, do not sell, and yet they are
eagerly sought for by editors; they are paid the highest prices,
and nothing that they offer is refused. These are literary
artists; and it ought to be plain from what I am saying that in
belles-lettres, at least, most of the best literature now first
sees the light in the magazines, and most of the second best
appears first in book form. The old-fashioned people who flatter
themselves upon their distinction in not reading magazine
fiction, or magazine poetry, make a great mistake, and simply
class themselves with the public whose taste is so crude that
they cannot enjoy the best. Of course this is true mainly, if
not merely, of belles-lettres; history, science, politics,
metaphysics, in spite of the many excellent articles and papers
in these sorts upon what used to be called various emergent
occasions, are still to be found at their best in books. The
most monumental example of literature, at once light and good,
which has first reached the public in book form is in the
different publications of Mark Twain; but Mr. Clemens has of late
turned to the magazines too, and now takes their mint mark before
he passes into general circulation. All this may change again,
but at present the magazines--we have no longer any reviews--form
the most direct approach to that part of our reading public which
likes the highest things in literary art. Their readers, if we
may judge from the quality of the literature they get, are more
refined than the book readers in our community; and their taste
has no doubt been cultivated by that of the disciplined and
experienced editors. So far as I have known these they are men
of aesthetic conscience, and of generous sympathy. They have
their preferences in the different kinds, and they have their
theory of what kind will be most acceptable to their readers; but
they exercise their selective function with the wish to give them
the best things they can. I do not know one of them--and it has
been my good fortune to know them nearly all--who would print a
wholly inferior thing for the sake of an inferior class of
readers, though they may sometimes decline a good thing because
for one reason or another they believe it would not be liked.
Still, even this does not often happen; they would rather chance
the good thing they doubted of than underrate their readers'
judgment.
New writers often suppose themselves rejected because they are
unknown; but the unknown man of force and quality is of all
others the man whom the editor welcomes to his page. He knows
that there is always a danger that the reigning favorite may fail
to please; that at any rate, in the order of things, he is
passing away, and that if the magazine is not to pass away with
the men who have made it, there must be a constant infusion of
fresh life. Few editors are such fools and knaves as to let
their personal feeling disable their judgment; and the young
writer who gets his manuscript back may be sure that it is not
because the editor dislikes him, for some reason or no reason.
Above all, he can trust me that his contribution has not been
passed unread, or has failed of the examination it merits.
Editors are not men of infallible judgment, but they do use their
judgment, and it is usually good.
The young author who wins recognition in a first-class magazine
has achieved a double success, first, with the editor, and then
with the best reading public. Many factitious and fallacious
literary reputations have been made through books, but very few
have been made through the magazines, which are not only the best
means of living, but of outliving, with the author; they are both
bread and fame to him. If I insist a little upon the high office
which this modern form of publication fulfils in the literary
world, it is because I am impatient of the antiquated and
ignorant prejudice which classes the magazines as ephemeral.
They are ephemeral in form, but in substance they are not
ephemeral, and what is best in them awaits its resurrection in
the book, which, as the first form, is so often a lasting death.
An interesting proof of the value of the magazine to literature
is the fact that a good novel will have wider acceptance as a
book from having been a magazine serial.
I am not sure that the decay of the book is not owing somewhat to
the decay of reviewing. This does not now seem to me so
thorough, or even so general as it was some years ago, and I
think the book oftener comes to the buyer without the warrant of
a critical estimate than it once did. That is never the case
with material printed in a magazine of high class. A
well-trained critic, who is bound by the strongest ties of honor
and interest not to betray either his employer or his public, has
judged it, and his practical approval is a warrant of quality.
VI.
Under the regime of the great literary periodicals the prosperity
of literary men would be much greater than it actually is, if the
magazines were altogether literary. But they are not, and this
is one reason why literature is still the hungriest of the
professions. Two-thirds of the magazines are made up of material
which, however excellent, is without literary quality. Very
probably this is because even the highest class of readers, who
are the magazine readers, have small love of pure literature,
which seems to have been growing less and less in all classes. I
say seems, because there are really no means of ascertaining the
fact, and it may be that the editors are mistaken in making their
periodicals two-thirds popular science, politics, economics, and
the timely topics which I will call contemporanies; I have
sometimes thought they were. But however that may be, their
efforts in this direction have narrowed the field of literary
industry, and darkened the hope of literary prosperity kindled by
the unexampled prosperity of their periodicals. They pay very
well indeed for literature; they pay from five or six dollars a
thousand words for the work of the unknown writer, to a hundred
and fifty dollars a thousand words for that of the most famous,
or the most popular, if there is a difference between fame and
popularity; but they do not, altogether, want enough literature
to justify the best business talent in devoting itself to belles-
lettres, to fiction, or poetry, or humorous sketches of travel,
or light essays; business talent can do far better in drygoods,
groceries, drugs, stocks, real estate, railroads, and the like.
I do not think there is any danger of a ruinous competition from
it in the field which, though narrow, seems so rich to us poor
fellows, whose business talent is small, at the best.
The most of the material contributed to the magazines is the
subject of agreement between the editor and the author; it is
either suggested by the author, or is the fruit of some
suggestion from the editor; in any case the price is stipulated
beforehand, and it is no longer the custom for a well-known
contributor to leave the payment to the justice or the generosity
of the publisher; that was never a fair thing to either, nor ever
a wise thing. Usually, the price is so much a thousand words, a
truly odious method of computing literary value, and one well
calculated to make the author feel keenly the hatefulness of
selling his art at all. It is as if a painter sold his picture
at so much a square inch, or a sculptor bargained away a group of
statuary by the pound. But it is a custom that you cannot always
successfully quarrel with, and most writers gladly consent to it,
if only the price a thousand words is large enough. The sale to
the editor means the sale of the serial rights only, but if the
publisher of the magazine is also a publisher of books, the
republication of the material is supposed to be his right, unless
there is an understanding to the contrary; the terms for this are
another affair. Formerly something more could be got for the
author by the simultaneous appearance of his work in an English
magazine, but now the great American magazines, which pay far
higher prices than any others in the world, have a circulation in
England so much exceeding that of any English periodical, that
the simultaneous publication can no longer be arranged for from
this side, though I believe it is still done here from the other
side.
VII.
I think this is the case of authorship as it now stands with
regard to the magazines. I am not sure that the case is in every
way improved for young authors. The magazines all maintain a
staff for the careful examination of manuscripts, but as most of
the material they print has been engaged, the number of volunteer
contributions that they can use is very small; one of the
greatest of them, I know, does not use fifty in the course of a
year. The new writer, then, must be very good to be accepted,
and when accepted he may wait long before he is printed. The
pressure is so great in these avenues to the public favor that
one, two, three years, are no uncommon periods of delay. If the
writer has not the patience for this, or has a soul above cooling
his heels in the courts of fame, or must do his best to earn
something at once, the book is his immediate hope. How slight a
hope the book is I have tried to hint already, but if a book is
vulgar enough in sentiment, and crude enough in taste, and flashy
enough in incident, or, better or worse still, if it is a bit hot
in the mouth, and promises impropriety if not indecency, there is
a very fair chance of its success; I do not mean success with a
self-respecting publisher, but with the public, which does not
personally put its name to it, and is not openly smirched by it.
I will not talk of that kind of book, however, but of the book
which the young author has written out of an unspoiled heart and
an untainted mind, such as most young men and women write; and I
will suppose that it has found a publisher. It is human nature,
as competition has deformed human nature, for the publisher to
wish the author to take all the risks, and he possibly proposes
that the author shall publish it at his own expense, and let him
have a percentage of the retail price for managing it. If not
that, he proposes that the author shall pay for the stereotype
plates, and take fifteen per cent. of the price of the book; or
if this will not go, if the author cannot, rather than will not
do it (he is commonly only too glad to do anything he can), then
the publisher offers him ten per cent. of the retail price after
the first thousand copies have been sold. But if he fully
believes in the book, he will give ten per cent. from the first
copy sold, and pay all the costs of publication himself. The
book is to be retailed for a dollar and a half, and the publisher
is very well pleased with a new book that sells fifteen hundred
copies. Whether the author has as much reason to be so is a
question, but if the book does not sell more he has only himself
to blame, and had better pocket in silence the two hundred and
twenty-five dollars he gets for it, and bless his publisher, and
try to find work somewhere at five dollars a week. The publisher
has not made any more, if quite as much as the author, and until
a book has sold two thousand copies the division is fair enough.
After that, the heavier expenses of manufacturing have been
defrayed, and the book goes on advertising itself; there is
merely the cost of paper, printing, binding, and marketing to be
met, and the arrangement becomes fairer and fairer for the
publisher. The author has no right to complain of this, in the
case of his first book, which he is only too grateful to get
accepted at all. If it succeeds, he has himself to blame for
making the same arrangement for his second or third; it is his
fault, or else it is his necessity, which is practically the same
thing. It will be business for the publisher to take advantage
of his necessity quite the same as if it were his fault; but I do
not say that he will always do so; I believe he will very often
not do so.