Page:Lovecraft letter to Henneberger 1924-02-02.pdf/2

 That is the kind of a public publishers confront, and only a fool or a rejection-venomed author could blame the publishers for a condition caused not by them but by the whole essence and historic tradition of our civilisation If publishers of general magazines sought and used artistically original types of fiction, they would lose their readers almost to a man. Half of the people wouldn't understand what the tales were about, and the other half would find the characters unsympathetic—because they would think and act like real people instead of like the dummies which the American middle classes have been taught and persuaded to consider and accept as people. Such, I repeat, is the inevitable condition regarding fiction; the enormous bulk of fiction which sets the national standard and determines the type of technical training given all fictional students. But even this is not all! Added to this, as if by the perversity of a malign fate, is the demand of an overspeeding public for excessive. Baldly put, the American people demand more stories per year than the really artistic authors of America could possibly write. A real artist never works fast, and never turns out large quantities. He can't contract to deliver so many words in such and such a time, but must work slowly, gradually, and by mood; utilising favourable states of mind and refraining from putting down the stuff his brain turns out when it is tired or disinclined to such work. How this, of course, won't do when there are hundreds of magazines to fill at regular intervals. So many pages per month or week have got to be filled, and if the artistic writers can't do it, the publishers must find the next-best thing—persons of mere talent, who can learn certain mechanical rules and technical twists, and put forth stuff of external smoothness, whose sole merit is conforming to patterns and rehashing the situations and reactions which have been found interesting to the people by previous experience. In many cases these writers achieve popularity—because the public recognise the elements that pleased them before, and are satisfied to receive them again in transposed form. Actually, the typical reader has very little true taste; and judges by absurd freaks, sentimentalities, and analogies. So it has come to be an accepted tradition that American fiction is not an art but a trade—a thing to be learnt by rule by almost anybody, and demanding above all else a complete submergence of one's own personality and thought in the general stream of conventional patterns which correspond to the bleakly uniform view of life forced on us by mediocre leadership. Success therefore comes not to the man of genius, but to the clever fellow who knows how to catch the public point of view and play up to it. Glittering tinsel reputations are built up, and dumb driven hundreds of otherwise honest plumbers take correspondence courses and try to be like these scintillant "great ones" whose achievements are really no more than mere charlatanry. Such is our fictional situation—indiscriminate hordes of writers, mostly without genius, striving by erroneous methods toward a goal which is erroneous to start with! You see the thing at its zenith in papers like THE SATURDAY EVENING POST—where men of more or less real talent are weighted down with the freely-flung gold which forms the price of their originality and artistic conscience. A fearful incubus—which only a few adroit or daring souls ever shake off.