From a Real-Estate Dealer to a Realistic Novelist Dear Sir:--
I have been for some time interested in your projects for the improvement of literature. When I saw your name in the newspapers, I looked you up in "Who's Who," and found that your rating is excellent What pleased me was the bold way you attacked the old firms which have been living on their reputations. The way you showed up Dickens, Thackeray & Co. showed that you know a thing or two. As for W. Scott and the other speculators who have been preying on the credulity of the public, you gave them something to think about. You showed conclusively that instead of dealing in hard facts, they have been handing out fiction under the guise of novels.
Our minds run in the same channel: you deal in reality and I deal in realty, but the principle is the same. I inclose some of the literature which I am sending out. You see, I warn people against investing in stocks and bonds. These are mere paper securities, which take to themselves wings and fly away. But if you can get hold of a few acres of dirt, there you are. When a panic comes along, and Wall Street goes to smash, you can sit on your front porch in South Canaan without a care. You have your little all in something real.
You followed the same line of argumentation. You showed that there was nothing imaginative about your work. You could give a warranty deed for every fact which you put on the market. I was so pleased with your method that I bought a job lot of your books, so that I could see for myself how you conducted your business. Will you allow me, as one in the same line, to indulge in a little criticism? I am afraid that you are making the same mistake I made when I first went into real estate. I was so possessed with the idea of the value of land that I became "land poor." It strikes me that a novelist may become reality poor in the same way; that is, by investing in a great many realities that are not worth what he pays for them.
You see, there is a fact which we do not mention in our circulars. There is a great deal of land lying out of doors.
Some land is in great demand, and the real trick is to find out what that land is. You can't go out on the plains of Wyoming and give an acre of land the same value which an acre has in the Wall Street district. I speak from experience, having tried to convince the public that if the acres are real, the values I suggested must be real also. People wouldn't believe me, and I lost money.
And the same thing is true about improvements. They must be related to the market value of the land on which they are placed. A forty-story building at Goshenville Corners would be a mistake. There is no call for it.
This is the mistake which I fear you have been making. Your novel is a carefully prepared structure, and must have cost a great deal, but it is built on ground which is not worth enough to justify the investment. It has not what we call "site value." You yourself declare that you have no particular interest in the characters you describe at such length. All that you have to say for them is that they are real. It is as if I were to put up an expensive apartment-house on a vacant lot I have at North Ovid. North Ovid is real, and so would be the apartment-house; but what of it?
There are ninety millions of people in this country, all with characters which might be carefully studied, if we had time. But we haven't the time. So we have to choose our intimates. We prefer to know those who seem to us most worth knowing. You should remember that the novelist has no monopoly on realism. The newspapers are full of all sorts of realities. The historian is a keen competitor.
Do you know that when I went to the bookstore to get your works I fell in with a book on Garibaldi by a man named Trevelyan. When I got home I sat down with it and couldn't let it go. Garibaldi was all the time doing things, which you never allow your characters to do because you think they would not be real. He was acting in the most romantic and heroic manner possible. And his Thousand trooped after him as gayly as if they were in a melodrama. And yet I understand that Garibaldi was a real person, and that his exploits can be authenticated.
The competition in your line of business is fierce. You try to hold the reader's attention to the states of mind of a few futile persons who never did anything in particular that would make people want to know them exhaustively. And then along comes the historian who tells all about some one who does things they are interested in.
You can't wonder at the result. People who ought to be interested in fiction are carried away by biography, and the chances are that some of them will never come back. When they once get a taste for highly spiced intellectual victuals, you can't get them to relish the breakfast food you set before them. It seems to them insipid.
I know what you will say about Garibaldi. He was not your kind. You wouldn't touch such a character if it was offered to you at a bargain. After looking over that expedition to Sicily you would say that there was nothing in it for you. The motives weren't complicated enough. It was just plain heroics. You don't care so much for passions as for problems. You want something to analyze.
Well, what do you say to Cavour? When I was deep in Garibaldi I found I couldn't understand what he was driving at without knowing something about Cavour who was always mixed up with what was going on in that section of the world.
So I took up a Life of Cavour by a man named Thayer. It's the way I have; one thing suggests another. Once I went up to Duluth and invested in some corner lots on Superior Street. That suggested Superior City, just across the river. The two towns were running each other down at a great rate just then, so I stopped at West Superior to see what it had to say for itself. The upshot of the matter was that I sized up the situation about like this. A big city has
got to grow up at the head of Lake Superior. If Duluth grows as much as it thinks it will, it's bound to take in Superior. And if Superior grows as much as it thinks it will, it can't help taking in Duluth. So I concluded that the best thing for me was to take a flier in both.
When I saw what a big proposition the Unification of Italy was, I knew that there was room for the development of some mighty interesting characters before they got through with the business. So I plunged into the Life of Cavour, and I've never regretted it.
Talk about problems! That hero of yours in your last book--I know you don't believe in heroes,--at any rate, the leading man--was an innocent child walking with his nurse along Easy Street, when compared with Cavour. Cavour had fifty problems at the same time, and all of them were insoluble to every one except himself.
His project, as I have just told you, was the unification of Italy. But he hadn't any regulated monopoly in the business. A whole bunch of unifiers were ahead of him; each one of them was trying to unify Italy in his own way. They were all working at cross-purposes.
Now Cavour didn't try, as you might have expected, to reconcile these people. He saw that it couldn't be done. He didn't mind their hating one another; when they got too peaceable he would make an occasion for them to hate him. He kept them all irreconcilably at work, till, in spite of themselves, they got to working together. And when they began to do that, Cavour would encourage them in it. As long as they were all working for Italy he didn't care what they thought of each other or of him. He had his eye on the main chance--for Italy.
I notice that in your novel, when your man got into trouble he threw up the sponge. That rather turned me against him and I wished I hadn't wasted so much time on his affairs. That wasn't the way with Thayer's hero. One of the largest deals Cavour ever made was with Napoleon III, who at that time had the reputation of being the biggest promoter of free institutions in Europe. He was a regular wizard in diplomacy. Whatever he said went. You see they hadn't realized then that he was doing business on borrowed capital.
Well, Napoleon agreed to underwrite, for Cavour, the whole project of Italian Unity. Everybody thought it was going through all right, when suddenly Napoleon, from a place called Villafranca, wired that the deal was off.
That floored Cavour. He was down and out. He couldn't realize ten cents on the dollar on his securities. If he had been like your man, Thayer would have had to bring his book to an end with that chapter. He would have left the reader plunged in gloom.
Cavour was mad for awhile and went up to Switzerland to cool off. Thayer describes the way he went up to a friend's house, near Lake Geneva, with his coat on his arm. "Unannounced, he strode into the drawing-room, threw himself into an easy-chair, and asked for a glass of iced water."
Then he poured out his wrath over the Villafranca incident, but he didn't waste much time over that. In a few moments he was enthusiastically telling of the new projects he had formed. "We must not look back, but forward," he told his friends. "We have followed one road. It is blocked. Very well, we will follow another."
That's the kind of man Cavour was. You forgot that he was a European statesman. When you saw him with his coat off, drinking ice-water and talking about the future, you felt toward him just as you would toward a first-rate American who was of Presidential size.
Now, I'm not saying that there's any more realism to the square inch in a Life of Cavour than in a Life of Napoleon III. It would take as much labor on the part of a biographer to tell what Napoleon III really was as to tell what Cavour really was--perhaps more. But you come up against the law of supply and demand. You can't get around that. There isn't much inquiry for Napoleon, now that his boom is over.
The way Thayer figured it was, I suppose, something like this. It would take eight or ten years to assemble the materials for a first-rate biography such as he wished to make. If he chose Napoleon there would be steady deterioration in the property, and when the improvements were put on there would be no demand. If he put the same work on Cavour, he would get the unearned increment. I think he showed his sense.
Of course the biographer has the advantage of you in one important particular. He knows how his story is coming out In a way, he's betting on a certainty. Now you, as I judge, don't know how your story is coming out, and if it doesn't come out, all you have to do is to say that is the way you meant it to be. You cut off so many square feet of reality, and let it go at that. Now that is very convenient for you, but from the reader's point of view, it's unsatisfactory. It mixes him up, and he feels a grudge against you whenever he thinks how much better he might have spent his time than in following a plot that came to nothing. You see you are running up against that same law of supply and demand. There are so many failures in the world that the market is overstocked with them. There is a demand for successes.
When I was in an old house which I took on the foreclosure of a mortgage the other day, I came upon a little old novel, of a hundred years ago. It was the sentimental kind that you despise. It was called "Alonzo and Melissa," which was enough to condemn it in your eyes. But the preface seemed to me to have some sense.
The author says: "It is believed that this story contains no indecorous stimulants, nor is it filled with inexplicated incidents imperceptible to the understanding. When anxieties have been excited by involved and doubtful events, they are afterwards elucidated by their consequences. In this the writer believes that he has generally copied Nature."
I have a feeling that those inexplicated incidents in your novel might have been elucidated by their consequences if you had chosen a person whose actions were of the kind to have some important consequences. In tying up to an inconsequential person you lost that chance.
I don't mean to discourage you, because I believe you have it in you to make a novel that would be as interesting as half the biographies that are written. But you must learn a trick from the successful biographers, and not invest in second-rate realities. The best is none too good. You have to exercise judgment in your initial investment.
Now, if I were going to build a realistic novel, and had as much skill in detail as you have, and as much intellectual capital to invest, I would go right down to the business centre, so to speak, and invest in a really valuable piece of reality; and then I would develop it. The first investment might seem pretty steep, but it would pay in the end. If you could get a big man, enthusiastic over a big cause, in conflict with big forces, and bring in a lot of worth-while people to back him up, and then bring the whole thing to some big conclusion, you would have a novel that would be as real as the biographies I have been reading, and as interesting. I think it would be worth trying.
Respectfully yours,
R.S. LANDMANN.
P.S. If you don't feel that you can afford to make such a heavy investment as I have suggested, why don't you put your material into a short story?
[The end]
Samuel McChord Crothers's essay: On Realism As An Investment