: Why Authors Go Wrong and Other Explanations by Overton Grant M Grant Martin - Authorship

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AND OTHER EXPLANATIONS

We must not stay with Mr. Bennett any longer just now. It is enough that he has not been content to wait for the curtain to rise and has insisted on thrusting himself into our prologue. Exit; and let us get back where we were.

Let us take up these considerations one by one.

It seems unlikely that any one will misunderstand the precise subject itself. What, exactly, is meant by an author "going wrong"? The familiar euphemism, as perhaps most frequently used, is anything but ambiguous. Ambiguous-sounding words are generally fraught with a deadly and specific meaning--another illustration of the eternal paradox of sound and sense.

But as used in the instance of an author, "going wrong" has a great variety of meanings. An author has gone wrong, for example, when he has deliberately done work under his best; he has gone wrong when he has written for sentimental or aesthetic reasons and not, as he should, for money primarily; he has gone wrong when he tries to uplift or educate his readers; he has gone wrong when he has written too many books, or has not written enough books, or has written too fast or not fast enough, or has written what he saw and not what he felt, or what he felt and not what he saw, or posed in any fashion whatsoever.

Ezra Pound, for example, has gone atrociously wrong by becoming a French Decadent instead of remaining a son of Idaho and growing up to be an American. Of course as a French Decadent he will always be a failure; as Benjamin De Casseres puts it, "the reality underlying his exquisite art is bourgeois and American. He is a ghost materialized by cunning effects of lights and mirrors."

Mr. Robert W. Chambers went wrong in an entirely different fashion. The usual charge brought against Mr. Chambers is that he consented to do less than his best because it profited him. This is entirely untrue. Mr. Chambers's one mistake was that he did not write to make money. Every writer should, because writing is a business and a business is something which can only be decently conducted with that end in view. Fancy a real estate business which should not be conducted to make money! We should have to stop it immediately. It would be a menace to the community, for there is no telling what wickedness of purpose might lie behind it. A business not conducted primarily to make money is not a business but a blind; and very likely a cover for operations of a criminal character. The safety of mankind lies in knowing motives and is imperilled by any enterprise that disguises them.

And so for Mr. Chambers to refrain deliberately from writing to make money was a very wrong thing for him to do. Far from having a wicked motive, he had a highly creditable motive, which does not excuse him in the least. His praiseworthy purpose was to write the best that was in him for the sake of giving pleasure to the widest possible number of his readers. There does not seem to be much doubt that he has done it; those who most disapprove of him will hardly deny that the vast sales of his half a hundred stories are incontestable evidence of his success in his aim. But what is the result? On every hand he is misjudged and condemned. He is accused of acting on the right motive, which is called wrong! He is not blamed, as he should be, for acting on a wrong motive, which would, if understood, have been called right! What he should have done, of course, was to write sanely and consistently to make money, as did Amelia Barr. Mrs. Barr was not a victim of widespread contemporary injustice and Mr. Chambers is and will remain so.

It would be possible to continue at great length giving examples of authors who have gone wrong and specifying the fifty-seven varieties of ways they have erred. But the mere enumeration of fallen authors is terribly depressing and quite useless. If we are to accomplish any good end we must try to find out why they have allowed themselves to be deceived or betrayed and what can be done in the shape of rescue work or preventive effort in the future. Perhaps we can reclaim some of them and guide others aright.

After a consideration of cases--we shall not clog the discussion with statistics and shall confine ourselves to general results--we have been led by all the evidence to the conclusion that the principal trouble is with the authors. Little or none of the blame for the unfortunate situation rests on their readers. Indeed, in the majority of cases the readers are the great and unyielding force making for sanity and virtue in the author. Without the persistent moral pressure exerted by their readers many, many more authors would certainly stray from the path of business rectitude--not literary rectitude, for there is no such thing. What is humanly right is right in letters and nothing is right in letters that is wrong in the world.

So widespread is this delusion that it is absolutely necessary to digress for a moment and explain why writing to make money is respectable! Why is anything respectable? Because it meets a human necessity and meets it in an open and aboveboard fashion without detriment to society in general or the individual in particular. All lawful business conforms to this definition and writing for money certainly does. Writing--or painting or sculpturing or anything else--not done to make money is not respectable because it meets no human necessity, it is not done openly and aboveboard, it is invariably detrimental to society, and it is nearly always harmful to individuals, and most harmful to the individual engaged upon it.

It is useless to say that a man who writes or paints or carves for something other than money meets a human necessity--a spiritual thirst for beauty, perhaps. There is no spiritual thirst for beauty which cannot be satisfied completely by work done for an adequate and monetary reward. And to satisfy the human longing for the beautiful without requiring a proper price is to demoralize society by showing men that they can have something for nothing.

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