THE MODERN WRITER

BY SHERWOOD ANDERSON SAN FRANCISCO + MCMXXV THE LANTERN PRESS GELBER, LILIENTHAL, INC. COPYRIGHT MCMXXV

THE MODERN WRITER BY SHERWOOD ANDERSON

FTER ALL it is not very strange that we in America have been a long time coming to the beginning of something like a national literature. Nations are not made in a short time and we Americans have been trying to make rather a large nation. In a compact small country in which for hundreds of years the same people have lived, slowly building up traditions, telling old tales, singing old songs, the story teller or the poet has something in{1} which he can rest. People grown old, as a people, on the same land, through which old rivers flow, looking out for generations upon the same great plains and up into the same mountains, come to know each other in an intimate way unknown to us here. The son following in the footsteps of a father dreams old dreams. The land itself whispers to him. Stories are in the very air about the writer. They spring up out of the soil on which for many hundreds of years people of one blood have been born, have lived, suffered, had moments of happiness and have died.

In America the writer is faced with a situation that is unique. Our country is vast. In it are to be found so many different conditions of life, so many different social traditions that the writer who attempts to express in his work something national is in an almost impossible position. At best, as yet, he can{2} only snatch at fragments. California is not Maine. North Dakota is not Louisiana. Ohio is not North Carolina. We are as yet strangers to each other. We are all of us just a little afraid of each other. Time only can weld us together, make us one people, make us understand each other. And in understanding alone is the real love of comrades, that is the beginning of a real love of our country.

Now I am an American writer and I have been by critics in general classed among that rather vague group known as the Moderns. I have set myself here to speak to you on the subject of modern American writing. The whole business of expressing definite opinions is new to me. I am in my nature a teller of tales, not a preacher, and I have been told that in trying to address any considerable number of people on a large subject it is a mistake to try to cover too much ground, that the writer should{3} confine himself to the making of a few points, but how I am to do that on such a subject as Modernism I do not know. As a matter of fact I have, within the last year, written a book on the subject, a book called A Story Teller’s Story and in it there are I believe something like a hundred and thirty thousand words. Now that the book, half a tale, half an attempt to put down certain notions of my own, is written, I look forward eagerly to the getting of my hands on the proofs. There are so many things I shall not succeed in getting said, even in a large book.

As everyone knows, there is in the world at this time what is broadly termed a Modern movement. It has expressed itself in a great many ways. In a short time within the last fifteen or twenty years, it has practically revolutionized painting all over the world. It has crept into the writing of prose, into the making of{4} song, into sculpture, into architecture. Although you may not realize it the fact is that the neckties worn by many men in our city streets and the dresses worn by the women have been influenced by the movement. The street scene of the American city is becoming more colorful, designs are bolder. The modern movement is beginning to express itself in buildings. In our residences we are less inclined to copy the impulses of old lands. Architecture, long one of the most dead and dreary of the arts as practiced in America, is becoming alive. It will become every year, I believe, more alive.

But it would be impossible for me, in a short article to speak in any general way on so broad a subject. It will be enough if I can give you some notions of what the present day American writer is faced with, what conditions he has to meet, what difficulties are to be overcome, what{5} in my opinion is making American writing so bad and what in present day conditions tends to make it better.

As no man can speak of the writing of a country without saying something of the history of the intellectual life of the country, I shall have to begin by speaking of that.

It is, I think, pretty well understood among us that the intellectual life of America had its home nest in New England. Our culture is as yet a puritanical New England culture. The New England states, all cold, hard and stony, produced a rather cold and stony culture, but the New Englander, like so many repressed and defeated peoples, was intellectually energetic. He spread his notion of life out over the country. Living as he did in a land where the ground was cold and comparatively unproductive underfoot and the skies cold and forbidding overhead, he spent a great deal of{6} his time cultivating God. His art impulse was non-sensual, intellectual. Life to the New Englander was not to be lived here and now. Life was to be spent in preparation for a life after death. Love of his fellow man did not enter into the New Englander’s scheme, and the arts were made the servants of morality. There was so much of life of which the New Englander was forbidden to speak, toward which he did not dare be too sympathetic that as a result

and while New England ruled, gentility and respectability became the passion of our writers. In literature sins might be committed in France or in some vague place far away like the South Seas, but among the heroes and heroines of the writer’s fancy there must be no sin. As that was a quite impossible supposition, in as much as the writer must after all deal with human beings, the writers found a way out. The “good” and the “bad” man notion was played up to{7} the limit. Women in books became all virgins or adventuresses. The good man had a hard struggle before him but he always ended by getting rich and marrying the virgin, after almost falling into the clutches of the adventuress. The puritanic mind was satisfied. It was made happy. The man reader of the books could always in the end follow with satisfaction the fancy of the writer and end by becoming a millionaire and the woman reader could in fancy get married, not as so often happens in real life by using methods that would shock the puritan beyond recovery, but simply by virtue of

inherent goodness and virginity. It was a kind of patent formula that always worked in books. And in books and in the “movies” it still works pretty well. If any of you want to become writers and want to succeed it is still the best of all formulas to follow.

It all fitted in so neatly, you see.{8}

For while in our schools and colleges and in our literature the puritan, the New Englander ruled, people were pouring into America from all over western Europe. The cold blood of the men of the North was being mixed constantly with the warmer blood of the South. Italians came. The Greeks and the southern Slavs came in hundreds of thousands. The eager highly temperamental Jews and the imaginative Celts poured in. On the West coast they got the Spaniard and the Mexican, and no man ever, I believe, accused the Spaniard or the Mexican of being puritanic.

The intellectual life of the country was being formed and controlled by English Protestants while the physical American was being built up of a mixture of all of the bloods of the western world and the process is still, I believe, going on. In our political thought the Adamses of New England, with their desire to estab{9}lish an intellectual aristocracy, are still, I believe, more powerful than Lincoln the artist democrat, and, although by the world in general Whitman is recognized as our one great American poet, I have heard of no general movement to introduce him into our public schools to take the place of the decidedly second rate and imitative New Englander, Longfellow.

I am sure that almost everyone nowadays knows that there is at this moment something happening in the spiritual life of the American people. In the first place, there has been for a long time now, and particularly among our younger men and women, a rather intense boredom with the more obvious impulses of our American life. There is a new restlessness that is more and more expressing itself in individual revolution against the social laws and customs of another age. Old gods are dead and we have all gone{10} hunting new gods. Men and women are seeking expression for their lives in new and bolder ways and everywhere among writers the Modern is but the man who is trying to give expression to the newer impulses of our lives in books, in song, in painting and in all the others of the seven arts.

You must understand of course that as a nation we have put something across. Coming to America as we did, in reality scattered herds of peoples from dozens of European countries, often not speaking the same language, not having back of us the same traditions, spreading ourselves out rapidly over a vast country, cutting down forests, building railroads and bridges over rivers, mountains and deserts, learning to know each other a little in the process, building cities and towns, making the mines produce, making the land produce, we had for a long time need of all our energies for purely{11} physical purposes. A poet or a painter in California in ’49 or in the middle west in Abraham Lincoln’s day would have been a nuisance and a pest.

A man I know was during the war arrested and sent to jail for being opposed to war, and I was discussing his fate with a friend.

“He ought to be sent to jail,” said my friend. “He ought to be hung. Any man ought to be hung who doesn’t know any better than to be right when all other decent healthy people in the world are wrong.”

However, let me return to my theme. I am trying to sketch briefly some of the conditions that are at the bottom of what I conceive to be going on nowadays in American writing. When we Americans had got our country pretty well settled and had fought and won our Civil War, something else happened. There came a revolution more widespread and deep{12} in its meaning than any other revolution that has ever happened in the western world. Starting out as we did as an agricultural people we Americans found ourselves suddenly landed in the very midst of the industrial age. From being a nation of farmers, craftsmen and merchants we became, almost within a generation, the leading industrial nation of the world. We became factory hands rather than craftsmen, owners of factories rather than land owners.

We had got into a new age almost over night. What had happened to us?

Standardization, for one thing.

Let me explain. As a natural result of industrial growth came standardization. As anyone will understand, the man who owns a factory for the making of women’s dresses, chewing gum, cigars, automobiles, men’s hats, must, if his factory is to grow to the huge output he desires, create in the public mind a widespread{13} demand for one kind of cigar, one kind of hat, one style of dress, one make of automobile.

Advertising as a force in our American life began to grow and here it is that the present day American writer came into flower.

As a natural result of the demand for standardization of taste and material desires came the modern magazine. The magazine with a circulation of a million or two million became not unusual. The real purpose, as everyone understands, was to create through advertising, a nation-wide demand for certain commodities. The magazines were business institutions run by business men with business ends in view. They have served the purpose for which they were created admirably and taken for what they are, that is to say at bottom merely as propaganda instruments for business expansion, no man can quarrel with them.{14}

However, it happens you see that the advertising medium, put out frankly as an advertising medium, cannot exist. Although the modern man and woman of the streets has been pretty effectually standardized as regards his hat, the cigarette he smokes, the automobile he drives, he cannot in reality be standardized. Few of us will as yet order our wives from a mail order house. Although in America and during the long period during which we have all been so busy conquering the mechanical world we have in general looked upon the poet or the artist as rather a sissy, a nut, a man who had better be brushed aside, we all have something of the poet and lover in us. We cannot, at least not as yet, spend our hours of leisure outside factory and office hours just looking at advertisements of factory products and becoming excited because some man has performed the heroic feat of going from the city of{15} New York to San Francisco, getting there in twenty-four hours in an aeroplane—instead of taking four or five days on a train, has found a machine that will get him

there. We are really interested in the man in the machine—not in the machine itself.

Little thoughts leak in. We wonder why the man wanted to go to San Francisco in such a hurry—what he thought and felt as he rushed along—what he was up to. There are all kinds of disturbing little fancies. Our minds will not become standardized. They fly away from the machine to the man. There remains a curious interest in one another. Young men take girls on their arms and wander out at night into the darkness. Young men become friends and spend nights walking and talking together. Nothing that gets settled remains quite settled. When some of us become too old or tired to try any more to think or feel there is al{16}ways youth coming on. Even marriage doesn’t settle things for us although for a long time our novelists went on the assumption that it did.

We find ourselves having to be intrigued into the pages of the magazines—and if the magazines are to retain the large circulation they require to do their work of standardization writers must be made to serve their purpose.

The commercialization of the art follows as a perfectly natural result.

The popular writer is then just the man of talent who is willing to sell his talent to the business man who publishes the magazine or to the book publisher after large sales and the more talented he is the better he gets paid. There is a job to be done and he does it, keeping his eye always on the main chance, that is to say on the great unthinking buying public. His position is pretty secure. In America we are in the habit of thinking{17} of the thing that succeeds as good, and therefore the man whose books sell by the hundreds of thousands is looked up to with respect. If success is the standard of measurement how can we do anything else?

It happens, however, that the arts are not democratic, never have been, and probably never will be. There is a nigger in the woodpile. The ordinary standards of measurement do not quite work. We all have a vague feeling there is something very much wrong. There is.

Let us look at the situation a moment. If you are a man conducting a magazine that has a circulation of hundreds of thousands, or if you are a movie magnate owning a business in which there is a huge initial investment, you have to be pretty careful about treading on toes, do you not? Your readers or patrons must not be offended or driven away. You are appealing, must of necessity ap{18}peal, to a large number of people, and among any large number of people there will be Catholics, Protestants, Christian Scientists, believers in the Garden of Eden, Darwinians, suburban housewives in large numbers, puritans, moralists, all kinds of people with all kinds of notions of the good and bad.

Very well then—if you are a writer intent on catching and holding the fancy of the crowd you have got to have a technique. You have got to become the artful dodger, have got to invent or learn the trick of creating in the mind of your audience the sensations of terror, delight, amusement, suspense, without in any way actually touching the reality of lives.

At the county fairs back in Ohio when I was a boy there used to be a kind of faker who went about with a machine. Into this machine he put a pound of sugar and started it going. It whirled{19} about with great rapidity and produced a kind of cloud-like candy concoction that looked tremendously inviting. A pound of sugar would make a bushel of the stuff, but when you had bought a bag of it and put a whole handful into your mouth it melted away to nothing.

That is in reality the effect desired in the manufacture of any popular art. It is the effect produced in reality by all the successful men, by the realists who pretend to give you photographic reproductions of life itself, by the respectable fine writers of the more conservative magazines and publishing houses, as well as the men who fill the pages of the cheap adventure magazines, the men called by the newspaper fraternity “the bunk shooters.” You must seem to give a lot while really giving nothing. No one must be hurt. No one must be offended. No one must be made to think or feel. Keep it up and you will get rich.{20}

To actually touch people’s lives is the unforgivable sin. Both thinking and feeling are dangerous exercises, and besides people do not like them.

You have got to get a special technique but if you are a writer and can do it successfully you will be mighty well paid. Why, there are any number of writers in America who receive from two to three or even five thousand dollars for single short stories and if they are lucky and also sell movie rights they often get two or three times that much. Writers of the popular sort often make incomes of bankers or brokers, live during the summer in villas in Maine or in the California Carmel Highlands, drive expensive motor cars, own yachts and have a simply splendid time apparently and never during a long lifetime make a single contribution to the art of writing or write anything that a living soul would ever think of reading after the writer has{21} died or his temporary vogue has passed.

I hope you understand, however, that all this has nothing at all to do with the art of writing, that is to say in any sense in which real writers of the world, men who have cared something about their craft have always thought of it. These men have no more to do with the art of writing than the average American movie star has to do with the art of acting or the men who make the girls’ heads you see on the covers of our American magazines have to do with the art of painting. It is all a kind of special thing. You live in San Francisco and write dialect stories concerning an imaginary kind of people who live in a Dutch settlement in the Pennsylvania hills, or you live in a New York hotel and write stories about cowboys or heroic lumberjacks. It is totally unnecessary to know life, and in fact it will be better for you to let life alone. Life, you see, is a complex delicate{22} thing. Anything may happen in life. We all know that. People hardly ever do as we think they should. There are no plot short stories in life. All the clever tricks by which