This book is mainly about past writers. I have tried to draw a few general conclusions from the history of the short story about what sort of art it is and where it may go. I have had to ignore my own experience of teaching it because this requires an approach that is different, personal, and perhaps without any general application at all.
When I began to teach story writing, I was not even certain that it could be taught. I soon realized that it could be taught, in exactly the same degree as painting, as a skill. Admittedly, I could teach it only in a manner that resembled my own, but once more I discovered that growing technical control soon makes an end of imitation, and scarcely does a young writer begin to feel confidence in himself than he works in a different way from his teacher. The stories of my students that I remember best only bore a faint general resemblance to my own and little resemblance to one another. By that time they were drawing upon their own experience, which was not mine.
It is easier, I think, to teach the short story than the novel; easier still to teach the drama. The short story and the drama have this in common—that there are certain subjects that are necessarily bad, so that one must give more attention to the subject and less to the treatment. The story, like the play, must have the element of immediacy, the theme must plummet to the bottom of the mind. A character is not enough to make a play; an atmosphere is not enough to make a play, for the audience falls asleep. It must have a coherent action. When the curtain falls everything must be changed. An iron bar must have been bent and been seen to be bent.
William Butler Yeats once said to a young dramatist, "Set your play first in tenth-century Byzantium, then in fourteenth-century Florence, then in modem Ireland, and if it remains equally true of all, write it." This seems like a rather pompous version of what he said to me, "If you want to write a play, write it on the back of a postcard, and I'll tell you whether we can produce it or not."
That, of course, is something no elderly novelist could say to a younger man, for ninety or more per cent of a novel is treatment. What could any practicing novelist have advised Thomas Hardy to do with a theme like Far From the Madding Crowd except to forget it? The novel is greater than the subject, or, rather, the novel has so many suhjects that a novelist can afford to make a mess even of the principal one.
That is why I sometimes spent a month of teaching, restraining my students from writing and confining them to the elaboration of subjects written in four lines—five if they must be garrulous. Anything more is not subject but treatment. When they wrote, "Betty, a high school teacher, aged thirty-five and a talented artist, who for ten years has been married to a dull official of the Forestry Commission, falls in love with a young man who is the representative of an insurance firm," I knew I was headed for trouble the moment they put pen to paper. The story was already written in their heads, and there would be nothing for me to do but ask, "Is your high school necessary? Is your forest necessary? Is your insurance firm necessary?" The story was written, and written in terms of a particular person in a particular situation at a particular time, and ninety-nine times out of a hundred the author had forgotten what the theme was. I am not trying to suggest that the realistic description of character and background is unnecessary; as I have said about Hemingway's work any realistic art is a marriage between the importance of the material and the importance of the artistic treatment, but, for the young writer at least, it must not lose sight of the former. That is the significance of Yeats's advice—"'Set it first tenth-century Byzantium." Lacking a knowledge of Byzantium, few of us can do that, but we can, at least, isolate our subject and consider it as something that might happen outside twentieth-century Winesburg or Dublin.
It is true that Chekhov wrote stories that cannot be summarized in a few lines, but that is the very rock his imitators always perish on, for they forget that be also wrote hundreds of stories that can. The extraordinary formless form that he invented for the story and the play is the creation of a man who was a perfect master of the commercial short story and the music hall sketch. "I send you a pound of tea for the satisfaction of your physical needs" writes a character in one of the later stories, but the inarticulate loneliness of that line should not blind us to the fact that it is really a line from some slapstick comedy that is suddenly being given a new meaning.
I am sure of the wisdom of the advice I gave my students on this point—"Set your imagination free." I have never been sure that I was right in advising them not to begin writing even then, until they had first written two or three rough treatments, but this may merely have been to warn them against the sort of mistake I made so often myself.
The first question I have had to ask myself about a subject, having tried to assure myself first of all that I was not handling the theme of a novel by mistake, was, "Is this a conte or a nouvelle? Can it be handled in one quick scene, combining exposition and development, or do I isolate the exposition in the first few paragraphs and allow the development to take place in three scenes or five?" If, for instance, it is the story of a father's death, should I begin with the birth of his eldest son or with the actual death? I hate drama used for exposition because it invariably reminds me of the intolerable five or ten minutes at the opening of a well-made play in which the husband helpfully recalls to the wife that they have now been married twenty-five years and have seven children, the eldest of whom has just become an architect, the second of whom is attending the university to become a doctor, and so on. Drama is the proof that the writer offers of the truth of his narrative, and should be used only in this way. It should always have the electrifying effect it has in a Greek play when the voice of the Chorus stops and we see the specific illustration of what we have heard as poetic generalization. In storytelling the reader should be aware that the storyteller's voice has stopped. But if I decide that the development is best handled in three or four scenes, which scenes shall I choose and in which order shall I arrange them, for this will decide exactly where the light is to fall. As I have said in discussing Babel's "Squadron Commander Trunov," the three episodes are so arranged that the story expresses a meaning which is not necessarily part of the story at all. In fact, by a simple rearrangement of scenes it could be made to mean something quite different.
But the real reason for the advice I gave my students was that a young writer who is gifted at all has more genius than talent, and is liable to write passages or scenes of great beauty that really have nothing to do with what he wants to say. George Moore's enchanting description of trying to help the younger Yeats with his impossible play, The Shadowy Waters, is true of more than poets. There are always those beautiful passages that the young writer cannot possibly sacrifice, and in draft after drart of a story I have found that lovely unnecessary description of a Wisconsin twilight turning up to confuse me and the reader. As I have said, the good advice is more for my own benefit than the students, but I would still say that a writer should bank down his creative fire until he knows precisely the object against which it is to be directed.
After that, the rest is rereading and rewriting. The writer should never forget that he is also a reader, though a prejudiced one, and if he cannot read his own work a dozen times he can scarcely expect a reader to look at it twice. Likewise, what bores him after the sixth reading is quite liable to bore a reader at the first, and what pleases him after the twelfth may please a reader at the second. Most of my stories have been rewritten a dozen times, a few of them fifty times.
Alas, it is a process that cannot continue forever, for words are finite things and even the loveliest poetry loses its magic in time, even for the man who wrote it, but in this imperfect world it is the nearest we can come to the pleasure of the immortals, who can forever look on perfect beauty without wearying of it.
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Excerpted from The Lonely Voice with permission of the publisher, The Melville House Publishing.
