by Thomas H. Uzzell

This work was originally published in the June, 1933 issue of Writers Digest. Extensive research uncovered no copyright renewal.

If you're determined to write good stories, if you want to be published in magazines you like to have lying on your living-room table when your friends call, you must learn something about the arts of court reporting, of photography, and of writing one-act plays! The literary story today tells stark facts—and how! The conversation in your stories should read as if it were taken from a dictaphone secreted preferably in a bedroom and should describe as a camera describes, without comment, and should move objectively, as if on a stage. A great deal of this quality fiction indeed might easily be mounted as a play.

In my article in the Writer's Digest for February, 1933, I discussed the subject matter of the literary story of today. Here I shall talk about its technique, its "how," its innovations in form.

The basic impulse in these new literary currents is a yearning after the truth, documented, case history, laboratory truth about life. Not in all recorded history—not even excepting Herodotus, who had a gift for detail, and old Petronius, who knew his facts of life—have tales been told with a more regardless determination to be factual. Are they factual? Are our good writers today nearer the truth than ever before? Is the new realism realistic? The answer is, yes and no. A fine impulse is at work in this new fiction. "My aim," explained one of these vigorous realists to me recently, "is to let my characters influence me rather than allow myself to influence them. I believe in being scrupulously honest with all my characters and with myself. My story is my characters' story; I let them tell it. I try not to cheat by bringing myself into it." What he sees or hears he writes, with little regard for editorial qualms and still less for his own. The result is often a stark, throbbing, closely-clipped piece of narrative prose. In reading it you almost feel embarrassment as if you were eavesdropping.

Let me give you an example: In Scribner's for May, 1932, you will find a story entitled, "Simple Aveu," by Nancy Hale, one of the most impressive of these younger realists. This story, which has won recognition as a piece of literature with lasting qualities, begins thus:

"Listen, sweet," the girl said. She held the Tom Collins glass in both her hands and turned it round and round between her palms. "You mustn't think I'm being awful."

"I don't think you're being awful," the man said.

"No, but I don't want you to think I'm just being promiscuous or anything. You know I'm not promiscuous, don't you?"

"Sure. I know you're not promiscuous."

"I mean, we agreed from way back that we'd tell each other if anything happened to change the way we felt."

"Sure, I know. I'm not kicking, am I?"

"No, I know you're not. But I just want you to know that I'm not just falling for this man."

"Well, what do you call it?"

~

Another disciple of this younger school of theatrical fiction is Erskine Caldwell. No writer clings to it more consistently than he and few have written more impressively in recent months. In Story magazine last year he had a romantic bit entitled "Indian Summer" which I have reprinted in my anthology, "Short Story Hits—1932." This narrative is interesting in its display of objectivity even though written in the first person! To write of an experience as if it were your own, and yet keep yourself out of it, is a feat, but Mr. Caldwell has done it. The trick was to tell precisely what the narrator-main character does but without reflecting upon it. If such a main character were a reflective type of person, the whole performance might be quite false, but if he is a boy of fourteen years he may be pardoned for "sticking to his story" without ornament. Note the peculiar adherence to this technique in these concluding lines of this story:

I waited in the middle of the road until she walked up the front steps and crossed the porch. She stopped there a moment and brushed her dress with her hands, as if she wanted to be sure that there was no muck clinging to it. When she opened the door and went inside, I was not certain whether she had glanced at me over her shoulder, or whether I merely imagined she had. Anyway, I believed she had, because I felt her looking at me, just as I was sure that she had held my hand for a moment.

"Jenny won't tell," I said, running up the road towards home. "Jenny won't tell," I kept saying over and over all the way there.

You may at first see nothing especially unusual about this passage but study it closely. You'll find no hint of consequences, no indulgence in memory, no effort to help the reader answer the question: What of it? Instead of the final sentence, for example, the author might have written: "Although I was very young and naturally fearful of results from what I had done, I was absolutely certain that Jenny would never tell upon me; a new bond of trust united us." This is much less neat and convincing than the original.

In isolating this literary trend, I am describing a phenomenon that emanates from the very soul of much of the best creative writing in America with the aim of helping you understand and, I hope, do some of your own. Popular fiction even of today reflects the mood and mannerisms of avant garde writing of yesterday.

To convince you of the possibilities of this art of motion picture or, more accurately, "talkie" realism, let us consider what is possibly the most famous, if not the most beautiful, use of it in the story writing of our day. This is Ernest Hemingway's universally admired short narrative, "The Killers," which you will find reprinted in O'Brien's "Best Stories" of 1927. Note the camera-like treatment of Mr. Hemingway's opening.

The door of Henry's lunch-room opened and two men came in. They sat down at the counter.

"What's yours?" George asked them.

"I don't know," one of the men said. "What do you want to eat, Al?"

"I don't know," said Al. "I don't know what I want to eat."

Outside it was getting dark. The street-light came on outside the window. The two men at the counter read the menu. From the other end of the counter Nick Adams watched them. He had been talking to George when they came in.

"I'll have a roast pork tenderloin with apple sauce and mashed potato," the first man said.

"It isn't ready yet."

The only way such writing differs from a photographic sound record is in the names given the men and I suppose the author felt impelled, possibly reluctantly, to give them names to keep them straight! This story throughout is flawless. The plot idea, being obvious, simple and terrific in its implications is eminently suitable for objective, omniscient treatment. How utterly different in mood, subject matter and viewpoint from that equally brief classic of twenty-five years ago, O. Henry's "An Unfinished Story." It begins, you remember:

We no longer groan and heap ashes upon our heads when the flames of Tophet are mentioned. For, even the preachers have begun to tell us that God is radium, or ether or some scientific compound, and that the worst we wicked ones may expect is a chemical reaction.

This is introducing things in the good, leisurely old Victorian manner! Story writers in those days, followed the noble traditions of Meredith, Henry James, Edith Wharton, and even Kipling, took you into their confidence, played with their stories, coached you from the sidelines as you read. That day is over in the most impressive writing of today in both stories and novels.

~

Today the novels of Aldus Huxley, Theodore Dreiser, Sinclair Lewis, Ben Hecht, Sherwood Anderson, John Dos Passos, and Ernest Hemingway and in the stories of Dorothy Parker, Kay Boyle, Jack Conroy, George Milburn, Loury Charles Wimberly, John Herrmann, Josephine Herbst, and Leane Zugsmith, you will find more or less adherence to this externalization of viewpoint. These writers, most typical of the literary work of their time, as far as they can, let their characters tell their own stories. "Not what we believe or think, but what we see and hear," would seem to be the first law of their lexicon.

Whence came it all? What are the influences at work on these literary leaders and is this new art with us to stay? Much easier it is to appraise this art than to trace its history. To do the latter would require a lengthy and, I fear, rather tedious chapter in literary history. My belief is that the objectivity cult really began with the birth of American realism and this, I think we all now agree, began with a book of poetry, "Spoon River Anthology," and a novel, "Sister Carie," both of which, if my memory serves me, appeared about a quarter century ago.

Masters' epitaphs and Dreiser's story of the woman who lived more or less openly in sin crashed through the gates of sentimentalism and conventional enslavement to the past and made it easier for every serious literary worker since then to tell the truth about American life. Both these pioneer works were objective in treatment; both were "case records," were fearless jobs in reporting the simple truth. Sherwood Anderson in his volume of sketches of an American town, "Winesburgh, Ohio," several years later, ended the Age of O. Henry. Hemingway learned from Anderson and most of our strongest story writers have since learned from these two.

This is not the whole story. James Joyce with his mental probings, T. S. Eliot with his brutal stabblings at the truth in his ironic poetry and, in this country, H. L. Mencken with his satiric lashing of all our conventions, literary and otherwise, have all conspired to put into the hands of our story writers their laboratory methods of work. The swift growth in this materialistic country of ours with its mechanized culture has undoubtedly helped also to breed in our serious writers a certain self-consciousness, a timidity possibly, which leads them to believe that their art is greater than themselves. How easy, then, the conclusion that they have but to put on their show and retire gracefully, perhaps heroically, from the scene.

You will gather from this exposition of the objectivity cult that I do not altogether approve of it. I do not disapprove of it when used appropriately; new beauties, new power have been brought by it into our most distinctly American literary art, the short story, but at the same time I am sure that the strainings of these selfless writers may be carried too far. Certain I am that many of them in their endeavors through objectivity to escape one type of falsification of life have, without knowing it, cultivated others.

Examine the theory itself. The young realist whom I quoted above says, in effect, that it is wrong to try to "influence" his characters, that it is dishonest to manipulate life, that it is cheating his characters to "bring himself into their story." This frequently heard principle of realism is specious. Art is communication of feeling from the artist to the beholder and any effort to eliminate the artist's feeling and thoughts toward life is in the direction of killing fiction as an art.

Since all creative writing involves more or less manipulation of life, the principle quoted would make all fiction dishonest. Why shouldn't a writer "bring himself into his story?" Why not? Suppose he should succeed in attaining complete objectivity. He would have made of himself a motion picture camera and a recording sound machine. Photography, critics seem to agree, is hardly a fine art; it's too mechanical. Our objectivity cult aims, then, to reduce our literary art to mechanism!

~

A leading literary magazine recently returned a manuscript expressing admiration of the new writer's abilities but explaining refusal to accept for publication chiefly because of the writer's adherence to objective narrative. The omniscient author wrote about crude American peasant types as if he were one of them. The style was naive, jerky, childishly limited. "This cult of inarticulateness has gone far enough," wrote this magazine's editor.

I advised this writer to let the story be told by someone who could interpret it somewhat, explain what it's all about. I have his answer before me; "I can't do this. Since I am writing realism I can't let my narrator explain things; my action must speak for itself." His action may be allowed to speak for itself when it can do this but when it can't then the narrator-author must help it out.

Hemingway in some of his recent stories has, in my opinion, fallen into needless obscurities by his uncompromising adherence to the current cult of inarticulateness and objectivity.

William Faulkner in most of his southern short stories unerringly selects a minor character local narrator figure who tells the story, giving just the right amount of flavor and interpretation. Kipling understood this necessity; Stevenson used it unerringly in his extraordinarily beautiful "The Merry Men," and Tarkington (in "Seventeen," for example) produced a matchless use of it in a humorous story.

Why shouldn't an author, even a short story writer, put himself into his stories? What greater delight in writing fiction than in telling the world how brave, how adventurous, how cruel, you yourself find it? Why be so timid? The objectivists never can tell a good story unless life itself furnishes a plot made to hand, and is this a handicap! Once you forbid an author to "make up things," he's done for. In the greatest fictional art the author has always been the dominate and most inspiring human element in that story. Is "David Copperfield" anything but Dickens? (It's his biography!) Are Maupassant's (mostly objective) famous stories anything but his own adventures, real or imagined? Aren't the novels of Sinclair Lewis, Upton Sinclair, Branch Cabell, the plays the G. B. Shaw, boldly manipulated versions of the minds and souls of these authors?

The truth, yes, and shame the devil, you earnest, ambitious young writers! But remember that you yourself are a human being before you are an author! The truth, before all else, is your own life and its meaning to you. Some stories you will wish to write will largely "tell themselves' and shine in brightest beauty when objectively told; others will need a number of spot lights, possibly a busy prompter from the wings, and, who knows, you may even have to come forth for a little curtain speech before and after you display your show. Can you make a good curtain speech? Writers must be able to do many things!