THE NOVELIST'S ART
The Writing of Fiction. By Edith Wharton. (Scribners. 7s. 6d. ) As a subject for criticism, fiction is still a gigantic virgin continent, compared with which other forms of literature are over-populated little islands, all mapped, measured and drained ages ago. Now and then an explorer sets out for this unknown territory, or a group of pioneers clear away some of the undergrowth. Thus, Henry James in his critical prefaces may be said to have made camps and trails right
ftcross the continent. Then came Mr. Percy Lubbock, with his Craft of Fiction, who succeeded in linking up all these camps with a light railway. And in her new book, Mrs. Wharton maybe said to take a trip on this railway, but occasionally phe makes not -Unladylike excursions into the surrounding
jungle. In her last chapter (there are only five in all), we hear a great trashing in the undergrowth, and we see her emerge in triumph leading a jungle monster she has dis- covered and captured, one Marcel Proust. Her little study, consisting of short chapters on the Short Story, Constructing a Novel, Character and Situation, is very sensible indeed, but not only is it rather slight, it is also rather scrappy. The text, though presented smoothly enough, suggests notes rather than an argument. It may be urged that this is no disadvantage, that the subject of technique in fiction is so vast that an approach to it by way of scattered notes instead of a closely-woven argument (like that of Mr. Lubbock) is more likely to be fruitful in results. But the business of presenting and proving a thesis, of developing an argument, demands more consistency and clarity of thought than the business of producing notes, random comments. And the richer the subject, the more extensive its ramifications, the more necessary it is to think clearly and consistently about it. For example, I do not think that if Mrs.. Wharton had been developing an argument, she would have talked of " the novel. of manners," as she does so frequently in these .pages. She would have left such a crude category to the literary historiank who' must, of necessity, work with the clumsiest tools.
The fact that her study is slight and scrappy—a bundle of notes rather than a closely-woven argument—makes it dis- appointing, and we cannot accept it as a companion volume
to Mr, Lubbock's Craft of Fiction. But Mrs. Wharton has practised and, reflected upon her art too long and too scrupu- lously not to givens some really valuable comments on the novel. Thus, she puts forward a shrewd parallel between the- " slice
of life " fiction of the French realists of the 'eighties, after- Wards imported into this country, and the ultra-subjective, the
"stream of consciousness " novels that arc so fashionable at the moment. Both of them are a departure from the vital tradition in. novel-writing, a turning aside into blind alleys, stunts . rather; than genuine . developments in the art. Mrs. Wharton's comment upon this " stream of consciousness " fiction is so good that it must be quoted ti " This attempt to note down every half-aware stirring of thought and sensation, the automatic reactions to every passing impression, Is not as new as its present exponents appear to think. It has been used by most of the greatest novelists, not as an end in itself, but as it happened to serve their general design : " as when their-object was to portray a mind in one Of those moments of acute mental stress when it records with meaningless precision a series of discon- nected irapr.ssions. The value of such " effects " iii rniiking vivid a tidal rush of emotion has never been unknown since fiction became psychological, and novelists-grew-aware of the intensity with which, at such- times, irrelevant- trifles impinge upon the brain 1 but they. have never been deluded by the idea that the subconscious—that, Mrs. Harris of the. psychologists---/could in itself furnish the materials. for their art. • All`the greatest of thorn, from Balzao and Thickeray onward, have made use of the' starnmerings and murimuirige of the half-conscious mind whenever—but only when—such" a state of mental flux fitted into the whole picture of the person portrayed. Their observation showed them that in the world of normal men life is conducted, at least in its decisive moments, on fairly coherent and selective lines, and that only thus can the great fundamental affairs of bread-getting and home-and-tribe organizing be oerried on. Drama, situation, is made out of the conflieta thus produced between social order and individual appetites, and the art of rendering life in fiction can never, in the last analysis, be anything,. or need to be anything, but the disengaging of crucial moments from the welter of existence . . . "
This is well said, even if you do not agree, as I: do -not agree, that drama, situation, can only arise out of the conflict between social order and individual appetites.
She might have added, though she does riot, that behind all these " stunts " in fiction, the dead " slice of life " of the 'eighties, the " stream of consciousness " trick of to-day that will be equally dead in ten or twenty years, there is the desire, on the part of inferior writers, to substitute for the exacting and wearing process of vital creation some more mechanical and far easier process. After all, it is comparatively easy to fill notebooks, as the old realists did, with descriptions of furniture and pots and pans, out of which they made novels. In the same way—as people. will soon realize—it is comparatively easy to slap down, just as they come, someone's mental reactions, which cannot be challenged and must be accepted. Here is the opening passage from a recent wild specimen of this manner, an American one :--
" Ineffably cataclysmic he watched the swallows rippling in. Wave after wave. Would they engulf him ? Detachedly he beheld the lapwings, lap, lap, lap, lay a ripple farthering up the beach. Footprints on the sands of crime. No. Peck, peek, peccadilloes. Lapses of lapwings fluttering over the shore. He lay tack on the beach, was it under the beech ;.memories of rumpled protesting petti- coats swept aside the beech no beseeching he besought silence to break. No breach."
It is far easier to do this than to write a short .report of a street accident. I will guarantee to teach any person over twelve years of age and possessing a fair vocabulary the trick of it in a morning. The writers who abuse this ultra- subjective manner imagine that they are beginning a new chapter in the history of fiction. As a matter of fact they are actually ending an old one. The more promising younger novelists are showing a desire to return to a more objective manner of presentation, having read their Tchekhov, and it ;ii; safe to prophesy that in twenty years the Joyce tradition will be as dead as the Zola tradition is now. There is something mechanical, pedantic at the heart of both that is powerless to save them from putrefaction, J. B. PRIESTLEY.
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