Read Ebook: The Mentor: Makers of American Fiction Vol. 6 Num. 14 Serial No. 162 September 1 1918 by Maurice Arthur Bartlett

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Fiction Makers of Modern American Fiction Booth Tarkington Robert W. Chambers Richard Harding Davis Jack London Rex Beach Stewart Edward White Makers of Modern American Fiction Norris' Realism and McCutcheon's Romanticism John Fox and Harold McGrath A Group of Popular Story-Tellers Dreiser and Dixon Harrison and Bacheller Fiction Notes in Varied Keys Fiction of Adventure Each Holds a Place of His Own Supplementary Reading The Open Letter The Couriers of the Postal Service The Mentor in the Desert Transcriber's Notes

FICTION

There is a popular notion that anyone can write a story. A good novel is easy reading, and it seems, on that account, to be easy writing. Many a reader, in the comfortable enjoyment of good fiction, misses the genius of it altogether. He is like the skeptical young man who could see nothing difficult in the art of sculpture. "All you need to do," he said, "is to get a block of marble, then take a hammer and chisel, and knock off the parts you don't want." So stated, sculpture does seem very simple. But, after all, there is some importance in knowing what parts of the marble to knock off.

Many of us feel, at times, an inward stir that prompts us to express ourselves in the written word. We are quite sure that we could write a novel or a play. That we don't do so is simply because we are so busy--or something else. "I could write plays as well as Shakespeare if I'd a mind to," said someone years ago to Charles Lamb. "Yes," answered the gentle humorist, "anyone could write plays as well as Shakespeare--if he had the mind to."

Some take their pen in hand to prove to themselves how easy it all is. When they have tried out several of the productions that they have dashed off so readily, they sometimes discover that what was easy writing for them was hard reading for others, and the wise ones then come to realize that the good fiction that makes such easy reading is often the finished and refined product of double and re-doubled labor.

For those that are determined to win their way in fiction, the means for study and observation are ample. There are many books on the art of writing to inform and guide the aspiring author, and there is a wealth of fiction literature ever at hand to supply him with examples of good story writing. In a helpful, informing book on the technique of fiction, Professor Charles F. Horne makes clear the essential elements of the novel--which he finds to be six in number: Plot, Motive or Verisimilitude, truth to life, Character Portrayal, Emotional Quality--Sentiment, Passion, Background, Style. "A novel," Professor Horne writes, "cannot consist simply of a fixed picture, a description of a man in repose. It must show him acting and acted upon. In other words, it deals with man in his relation to his environment. Hence it must have two essentials: the man and his movements; that is, the characters and the story. The causes and effects of these two essentials give us two more. The man can only move as he is swayed internally by his emotions; and the movement can only be seen externally in its effect on his surroundings, his background. These four form the positive elements or content of the novel, and they must be presented under the limitations set by man's experience of life or verisimilitude, and by his modes of conveying ideas, his style of speech."

W. D. M.

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SEPTEMBER 1, 1918 VOLUME 6 NUMBER 14

ONE

TWO

What impresses one most about Mr. Robert W. Chambers is his amazing versatility. In addition to being a popular novelist, he is an expert on rare rugs; an artist, and so well qualified a judge of fine art that he can talk intelligently to the curators and directors of museums about the old masters on exhibition there; equipped with an understanding of Chinese and Japanese antiques so that he can detect forgeries in that art; an authority on mediaeval armor; a lover of outdoors, of horses, dogs, and an ardent collector of butterflies; and, in addition, a thorough man of the world, who knows Paris and Petrograd, and many of the out-of-the-way corners of the earth. These are the qualities that come to mind readily, but the list is far from complete. The longer one knows Mr. Chambers, the more varied the knowledge he finds in him.

Out of such rich mental resources Mr. Chambers draws his material for fiction. He writes two novels a year for a large public that eagerly devours them. Mr. Chambers' life is a full and active one.

On a basis of solid fact, it would seem impossible for one man to do all this work. Where does he ever find time to do it? The answer lies in the fact that Mr. Chambers keeps regular hours--office hours, almost--for his writing, all of which is done in long hand. At that he is not a rapid writer, frequent revision is essential, and a passion for the verification of details consumes much time. Yet the bulk and excellence of the accomplished performance remains an established fact; and in many ways it is little less than marvelous.

THREE

Richard Harding Davis was born in Philadelphia in 1864, and attended the Episcopal Academy and afterwards Lehigh and Johns-Hopkins Universities. In his college days he was weak in mathematics, but strong in all that made life full, joyous and vital. He entered eagerly into sports and wrote stories for the Lehigh magazines.

We have named scarcely half the titles of Davis' work. He was busy always with his pen, and, as one of his fellow craftsmen in literature observed, he "never penned a dull line." In all his stories he left a record of his sturdy Americanism and his passionate devotion to a just cause, wherever he found it.

He died suddenly of heart disease on April 12, 1916. The loss to literature was great and was keenly felt in a history-making time like this that demands an eloquent chronicler. Davis will always be remembered as one of the most buoyant, brave, heroic and industrious workers in the field of American literature, a man who saw life fully and clearly, and who reflected it truly, in healthy, ringing, inspiring tones.

FOUR

London tried schooling at different times in his early life, working between hours to pay for his education. After several months of stern, hard application, in which he covered about three years' preparatory work, he entered the University of California. The strain, however, of work and study combined was too much for him, and after three months he had to give up. Turning to things quite different, and with a desperate hope that he might find fresh inspiration in a new kind of life, he set off for the widely advertised Klondike to seek for gold. In the Klondike "nobody talks; everybody thinks; you get your true perspective; I got mine," he says. After a year of hard toil in the north, London returned home and assumed the burden of supporting his family, his father having died while he was away. He wrote story upon story, and finally gained acceptance and success. As book after book came out, the public grew to know and recognize Jack London as one of the strongest figures in American fiction.

He passed away on November 22, 1916, in the full swing of his intellectual vigor, and it will be long before his splendid achievement is forgotten, or the last of his books is consigned to the high shelves that spell oblivion. No matter how sparing one may be in the use of the word genius, for him it could be claimed. His name is one of the few among those of the writing men of our time with which the magic word is, without hesitation, to be linked. There was genius in his invention, in his imagery, in his nervous style. To him was given to know the moods of Arctic wastes and California valleys. The struggles of his own soul and mind and body he dissected and portrayed in "Martin Eden" and "John Barleycorn" . He was practically the only American writer to invade magnificently the prize-ring as a field for romantic narrative. Its seamy side, its sordid corruption, its driftage, as well as its brutal heroism, are reflected in such tales as "The Game," "The Abysmal Brute," "The Shadow and the Flash," and "The Mexican." "The Call of the Wild" challenges the very best dog-stories of all time. "The Sea Wolf" is an epic of salt brine, and creaking rigging, and man's inhumanity to man, and the "blond masters of the world." There followed "Burning Daylight" , and "The Valley of the Moon" , and "The Mutiny of the Elsinore" , which is "The Sea Wolf" "in a lower key," and "The Strength of the Strong" , and a dozen more. Whatever the field, there was a sureness of touch, and a power of graphic description that made the man always a figure and a force.

FIVE

It was in Alaska--the field of "The Forerunner," the Kipling poem that was for so many years lost and entirely forgotten by its author, the field of Robert W. Service's "Songs of a Sourdough," the field of so many of the tales of Jack London and Stewart Edward White, that Rex Beach first found literary expression. He did not set out in life to be a literary man. He was a husky youth, full of vitality and, even in his teens, a giant in strength. He was born in Atwood, Michigan, September 1, 1877, and he left his native place for the city of Chicago when he was eighteen years of age. He meant to study law, but, as he said, he "had no money--therefore had to find a place to eat." In those days the athletic associations of several of the large cities maintained football teams of giant gladiators to entertain the multitude. Young Beach had seen just one game of football, but when he presented himself, his physical architecture was so imposing that he was engaged without hesitation, as tackle, by the athletic association football manager. The college teams used to play an annual series with these huge professionals. Later they gave it up, because the "truck-horse professionals" hired by the athletic associations could not be hurt by anything short of an ax, while the college players, as Beach said, were apt to "tear under the wing." Beach played through the season, taking part in the games by which his team won the championship of America. Then, being desirous of eating regularly, he attached himself to the athletic association's swimming team and broke an indoor record at water polo. That was in 1897, when the Klondike excitement broke out. He stampeded with the rest. It was the spirit of adventure and no thought of finding material for fiction that took him to the Yukon.

With two partners from Chicago, Beach was dumped off the boat at Rampart, on the Yukon, one rainy night. The three hadn't a dollar amongst them, but they had plenty of goods. Then things began to happen. "We prepared to become exorbitantly rich," in the words of Beach, "but it was a bad winter. There were fifteen hundred rough-necks in town, very little food and plenty of scurvy. I soon found that my strength was my legs. I could stampede with anybody. So I stampeded faithfully whenever I heard of a gold strike, all that winter." He became dissatisfied with his two Chicago partners, because they preferred to sit around the cabin cooking tasty messes to tearing through blizzards at the tail of a dog team. They wanted to wait for their million dollars until spring, but Beach wanted his by Christmas at the latest. And so he set off, and quickly fell under the spell of the Yukon. The glare of the white Arctic night, the toil of the long trail, the complicated struggle for existence, the reversion to primitive passions inevitable in a new civilization in process of formation, made an imperative call to him, and held him fascinated. The life about him moved him to write, and before long he was embarked on a literary career. "Pardners," his first story, appeared in 1904, and this was followed by the novel that gave him reputation--"The Spoilers," which appeared in 1906. Then came "The Barrier" in 1907, and "The Silver Horde" in 1909. They are all virile stories of Alaskan life that have stirred many thousands of readers. Some have gone into dramatic form, "The Barrier" having attained a new and distinguished success as a film picture. In "The Ne'er Do Well" and in "The Net" Beach sought Southern scenes, the former novel having Panama as its background, and "The Net" New Orleans during the Mafia days. "The Auction Block," published in 1914, deals with the favorite activities of modern Metropolitan life, and the sale of young girls into the marriage tie.

From the beginning, Mr. White's career has been one of prompt recognition and well-ordered prosperity. He was born at Grand Rapids, Michigan, on March 12, 1873. He attended no school until he was sixteen years of age, and yet, far from being behind his schoolmates, he entered the high school in the junior class with boys of his own age and graduated at eighteen, president of his class. He excelled in athletics and held the long distance running record of his school. He graduated a few years later from the University of Michigan, and then spent two years in the Columbia Law School, New York.

Mr. White produces his books fast and in highly finished form. He is essentially a realist. Human achievement, with all its vital interest and meaning, laid hold early on his imagination and gave to his stories their all-pervading sense of truth to life. As a critic has said, "One puts down a book by him with a feeling of having read through experiences, dramatic and full of romance, yet never breaking the bounds of probability--and that is fine art." Mr. White's home is in Santa Barbara, California, and his field of active experience includes a substantial part of the whole surface of the earth.

Mr. White entered the U. S. Service shortly after war was declared. The picture on the opposite side of this sheet shows him in uniform as Major of U. S. Field Artillery.

THE MENTOR ? DEPARTMENT OF LITERATURE

MAKERS OF MODERN AMERICAN FICTION

MENTOR GRAVURES

RICHARD HARDING DAVIS ? BOOTH TARKINGTON ? STEWART EDWARD WHITE JACK LONDON ? ROBERT W. CHAMBERS ? REX BEACH

EDITORIAL NOTE.--In this number of The Mentor the men that are making modern American fiction are considered. The women fiction writers will be considered in a later number.

Now and again we are privileged to touch hands with some literary figure of the older generation, who was of the earth when Poe and his Virginia lived in the Fordham cottage; when Fenimore Cooper, returned from his long stay in Europe, was disputing with his neighbors on the shores of Lake Oneida, when Irving was looking down upon the noble Hudson from the slopes of his Sunnyside estate; and Holmes was babbling wise philosophy over his coffee cup at the Boston breakfast table. But there are not many of these links with the past left, and the number is diminishing rapidly. Far beyond the Biblical three-score and ten, Mr. William Dean Howells, as the dean of our literature, is a figure upholding its richest traditions; turning three-score and ten is Mr. James Lane Allen, whose name recalls the rare style and the throbbing life of the books dealing with the Blue Grass region of Kentucky. They are almost the last of the surviving great literary figures of yesterday. These men and their work have been covered in Mentor Number 25, "American Novelists." The writing men of today, the men with whom this article has to do, are for the most part those that have not traveled beyond late youth or early middle age. Their hats were flung into the ring in the present century; or, at the earliest, in the nineties of the last century. Finding the field of the novelist a broader one than it was in their fathers' time, they have blithely ventured, in their search for themes and material, to the four corners of the real or the imaginary earth. The following pages present a general review of the work of our well known fiction writers of the day. The works of Owen Wister, Winston Churchill, Thomas Nelson Page and George W. Cable are also considered fully in Mentor Number 25, so we lead off this article with a simple mention of these distinguished story-writers. In Wister's work there is a primal bigness and strength and, in certain passages, great tenderness and romantic charm. Two of his best known books, "The Virginian" and "Lady Baltimore," reveal these qualities.

Mr. Winston Churchill began with the somewhat trivial "The Celebrity" , regarded when it appeared as a satirical hit at the personality of Richard Harding Davis. Books that followed were, "Richard Carvel," "The Crisis," "The Crossing," "A Far Country," "Coniston," "Mr. Crewe's Career," "The Inside of the Cup," "The Dwelling-Place of Light." It is to a splendid persistence, an inexhaustible patience, a rigid adherence to his own ideals both in style and substance, that Winston Churchill owes the high position among American contemporary writers of fiction that he holds and has held for nearly two decades. Thomas Nelson Page and George W. Cable attained fame long ago as interpreters, in fiction, of Southern life, Mr. Page by his tender and beautiful "Marse Chan," "Meh Lady" and other stories, Mr. Cable by his romances of "Old Creole Days" and "John March, Southerner."

More than fifteen years have passed since Frank Norris died, yet no one has yet come to take quite his place as an apostle of American realism. Before he fell under the spell of ?mile Zola, with "McTeague," and began his Trilogy of the Wheat, he had been the most ardent of romanticists. His earliest ventures in literature were tales of love and chivalry, written when he was a boy in his teens in Paris. "McTeague" was begun in the undergraduate days at the University of California. It began to assume shape in his year of student work at Harvard; but was elaborated and polished for four years before the public was allowed to see it. In the meantime "Moran of the Lady Letty" had been dashed off in an interval of relaxation, and became Norris' first published book. Then came to Norris what he considered "the big idea," that summed up at once American life and American prosperity. He would write the Trilogy of the Wheat. In the first book, "The Octopus," he told of the fields and elevators of the Far West. "The Pit" showed the wheat as the symbol of mad speculation. With "The Wolf," to picture the lives of the consumers in the Eastern States and in Europe, the Trilogy was to end. But before the tale was written Frank Norris died, at thirty-two years of age.

A few years ago, Mr. George Barr McCutcheon was asked the question, "Where is Graustark?" Whimsically he attempted to jot down on paper directions for journeying to the imaginary mountain kingdom, starting from a railway station in Indiana. Someone rather ill-naturedly suggested that Mr. McCutcheon had originally discovered this country in Anthony Hope's "The Prisoner of Zenda." But then someone else pointed out that Anthony Hope in turn had found his inspiration in Stevenson's "Prince Otto," and that R. L. S. himself had certainly owed something to the Gerolstein of M. Eug?ne Sue's "The Mysteries of Paris." So neither the exact whereabouts of Graustark nor its ultimate source is of great importance. What really counts is that hundreds of thousands of readers have found delight in following the adventures of Mr. McCutcheon's stately heroines and somewhat irreverent heroes.

Every one of his romantic tales has met with generous welcome--"Graustark," "Beverly of Graustark," "Truxton King" and "The Prince of Graustark."

But Graustark, if the first string to Mr. McCutcheon's bow, is far from being the only one. Quite as wide in its popular appeal as any of the Graustark tales was "Brewster's Millions," with its curious starting problem. "Nedra" dealt with a desert island. "The Rose in the Ring" was the story of a circus. Other books not to be overlooked are "Jane Cable," "The Daughter of Anderson Crow," "The Man from Brodney's," and in shorter form, "The Day of the Dog," "The Purple Parasol," "Cowardice Court" and "The Alternative."

Someone recently spoke of John Fox, Jr., as a writer who never misses fire. Certainly he has staked a definite claim to the Cumberland Range and the primitive people who dwell in its valleys and along its mountainsides. As early as 1894, "A Mountain Europa" appeared. It was followed by "A Cumberland Vendetta," "Hell-for-Sartain," "The Kentuckians," "Crittendon," and "Blue Grass and Rhododendrons." But it was not until 1903, with "The Little Shepherd of Kingdom Come," that Mr. Fox came fully into his own. Incidentally, his fellow-craftsman, Mr. George Barr McCutcheon, considers the title the best title in all American fiction. The high standard established in "The Little Shepherd of Kingdom Come" has been maintained in "The Trail of the Lonesome Pine" and "The Heart of the Hills." Into that imaginary Central Europe which lies somewhere east of Dresden, west of Warsaw, and north of the Balkans, Harold McGrath went for such early books as "Arms and the Woman" and "The Puppet Crown." Those tales were in the first rank among the thousands of stories that about that time were being written about the fanciful kingdoms and principalities, and the natural gift for story spinning that the author showed then has been in evidence in his subsequent tales in other fields. From among the twenty odd books that now bear his name, it is not easy to make a selection. Perhaps those most conspicuous on the score of popularity have been "The Man on the Box," "Half a Rogue," "The Goose Girl," "The Carpet of Bagdad," and "The Voice in the Fog."

While still an undergraduate, Mr. Jesse Lynch Williams wrote several of the tales that went to make up his first published volume, "Princeton Stories." In his second volume, "The Stolen Story and Other Stories," Mr. Williams struck an entirely new note. Of the tale from which the book drew its title, Richard Harding Davis, himself the author of "Gallegher," once said that it was "the very best of American yarns of newspaper life." Two others of the collection of striking ingenuity were "The Great Secretary of State Interview" and "The Cub Reporter and the King of Spain." Among Jesse Lynch Williams' later books are "The Day-Dreamer," "My Lost Duchess," and "The Married Life of the Frederick Carrolls."

It was along the road of anonymity that Basil King finally found the way to pronounced success. In "Griselda," "Let Not Man Put Asunder," "In the Garden of Charity," "The Steps of Honor," and "The Giant's Strength" he had won recognition as an accomplished story-teller. But still his audience was a comparatively limited one. Then, in 1910, appeared "The Inner Shrine," a story of Franco-American life. It was read from one end of the land to the other, and greatly piqued curiosity as to the authorship, which, for many months, was carefully concealed. A dozen different names were suggested and accepted before it became an open secret that the story was the work of Basil King. The success of "The Inner Shrine" was perhaps largely responsible for the success of the subsequent "The Wild Olive" and "The Street Called Straight."

In by-gone years it was Brand Whitlock, the Mayor of Toledo; in recent times it has been Brand Whitlock, the American Minister to Belgium, that has obscured Brand Whitlock, novelist. Yet despite the height he has attained in the fields of politics and of diplomacy, he is, and is likely always to remain, at heart a man of letters. Some day it may be given to him to "write the book as he sees it, for the God of things as they are." Meanwhile he claims recognition here on the basis of such works of fiction as "The Thirteenth District," "The Happy Average," "The Turn of the Balance," and "The Gold Brick," a collection of short stories that appeared in 1910.

Samuel Hopkins Adams' first essay in the field of sustained fiction was "The Mystery," written in 1905, in collaboration with Stewart Edward White. The following year appeared "The Flying Death," a tale of Montauk Point. Subsequent novels by Mr. Adams have been "Average Jones," "The Secret of Lonesome Cave," "Little Miss Grouch," and "The Clarion," the last named being a story involving newspaper life and the sinister influence of the tainted money of patent medicine advertisers on the liberty of the press.

Despite a career of literary activity that goes back twenty years, it is almost entirely to the books of the past four or five years that Rupert Hughes owes his present position as a popular novelist. In this later work, in such books as "What Will People Say?" "Empty Pockets" and "We Can't Have Everything," he has found his theme in modern Gotham: New York in the grip of the latest follies, the insensate, all-day and all-night pursuit of pleasure, the dance, the eating and drinking, and the squandering. Mr. Hughes' novels reveal a range of knowledge of even the remote corners of the great city that has been painstakingly acquired, and that is used with the sense of selection of the accomplished story-teller. Only a few months beyond undergraduate life Owen Johnson published "Arrows of the Almighty" and "In the Name of Liberty." They were read by a limited audience, mildly applauded, and then forgotten. Later, showing the Balzacian influence, came "Max Fargus," dealing with the seamy side of New York law offices. In the point of material success, it could hardly be considered an improvement on the earlier books. Then, one day, in a whimsical mood, the author turned back to memories of his schoolboy years in Lawrenceville. The road that led to success and recognition had been found. From one end of the land to the other, growing boys, and boys that had grown up, and boys with gray beards laughed over every fresh exploit of "The Prodigious Hickey," and "Dink Stover," and "Doc McNooder," and "The Tennessee Shad," and "The Triumphant Egghead," and "Brian de Boru Finnegan." Motor parties traveling between New York and Philadelphia acquired the habit of breaking the journey at Lawrenceville for the purpose of visiting "The Jigger Shop," where Hungry Smeed established the Great Pancake record. Then Mr. Johnson took one of his heroes from the school to the university, and "Stover of Yale" was the most talked-of book of a month. Turning to a broader field, the author found, in the turbulent life of twentieth-century New York, the background for "The Sixty-first Second," "The Salamander," "Making Money," "The Woman Gives," and "Virtuous Wives."

It is no disparagement of Edwin Lefevre as a workman to say that one short story, written at a single sitting before breakfast, is of more permanent importance than all the rest of his production combined. For that story is "The Woman and Her Bonds," which, without any hesitation, is to be ranked among the really big short tales of American fiction. It is the first of the collection known as "Wall Street Stories," a book which brought to Mr. Lefevre quick recognition. Wall Street is the author's particular field, and many of his characters are easily recognized by those in intimate touch with the money mart of the Western world. Besides "Wall Street Stories," Mr. Lefevre has written "Samson Rock of Wall Street," "The Golden Flood," and "To the Last Penny."

A vigorous, if undeniably crude, figure in contemporary American fiction, is Theodore Dreiser. Lacking style and literary distinction, frequently bordering on the ridiculous, he nevertheless, by a rigid devotion to a certain kind of realism that omits no details, has built up a following that chooses to regard him as something of a great man. His first book, written a dozen years or more ago, was "Sister Carrie." It introduced a soiled, unsentimental, rather sordid, but pathetic and very human heroine. After a career in Chicago, Sister Carrie made her way to New York, and eventually climbed to comfortable heights of worldly success. "Jennie Gerhardt" was in much the same vein and manner. "The Financier" gave a picture of American business life as it was or as Mr. Dreiser conceived it to be during the Civil War and the Reconstruction Period. Whatever its merits or demerits may be, "The Genius," his latest novel, owes its chief prominence to its much debated morality.

After a life of activity in many fields, Thomas Dixon entered the writing lists with "The Leopard's Spots" , in which, powerfully if somewhat unevenly, he depicted conditions in certain states of the South under the carpet-bag and negro domination of the late sixties. Following up the same phase of history, he introduced, in "The Clansman," the Kluklux Klan, and showed the work accomplished by that mysterious organization in bringing about the redemption of the afflicted district. Among Mr. Dixon's later books are "The Traitor," "The One Woman," and "The Sins of the Father."

Back in the nineties of the last century there was a corner of New York City known as Monkey Hill. It was in the shadow of the Brooklyn Bridge, and crowning it, standing far back from the street, was a kind of chalet that served as a club for certain writing men. Among these men was Irving Bacheller, and to pleasant evenings in the club may be traced "Eben Holden" , the most popular of Mr. Bacheller's many popular books. As early as 1893, he had written "The Master of Silence;" "The Still House of Darrow" appeared in 1894. But it was "Eben Holden" that made the author's name for a time a household word. That book was followed by "D'ri and I," "Darrel of the Blessed Isles," and "Vergilius," a tale of ancient Rome. In his later books, such as "Keeping Up With Lizzie" and "Charge It," Mr. Bacheller plays whimsically with the problems of modern extravagance. His latest novel is "The Light in the Clearing."

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