Is It What Our Readers Want?

( Originally Published Early 1900's )

IT seems high time to reexamine a shibboleth that has for many years simplified editing for the Gileadites of the blue pencil in the strongholds of financially successful American magazines. Large corporations nowadays conduct groups of such periodicals. To their editors the test query that heads this article appears beautifully practical and logical and is, in actual value, exquisitely the reverse. It is obvious that we are not speaking here of magazines specializing in any definitely circumscribed field, nor of the ancient and overdignified "quality group," as advertisers call it. We refer to the great moneyed mediums popularly supposed to encourage creative literature. The truth is that American readers are left still wanting by the modern magazine, however, prevalent be a certain form of specious and meretricious writing.

Modern advertising has degenerated simply into a study of how the desire to spend money may be played upon by any one with a product to sell. Its peculiar (to say the least) application of psychology has gradually taken hold of the handling of periodical literature. Whether or not you "go in" very thoroughly for statistics, you attempt to as-certain the particular kind of trash that soothes without puzzling the stereotyped mind; the concocted verisimilitude that passes for "real life" with the unthinking. You work out its value in dollars and cents as a circulation builder. You arrive at a mathematical conclusion that has no more to do with that difficult and delighting art we call "good writing" than a mail order catalogue. You can then compose a recipe for the kind of thing your readers will "eat up." Sex, sensationalism, sentimentality, "up to the minute" stuff. And think of the money you can make at it! If you make money the magazine is a success; you, as a writer, are a success; you can buy a country place in the environs of Manhattan and own your own car.

This, then, is the Lure of Literature for the younger writers in America who have a style and something to say. They either succumb to this philosophy or they do not. If they do not, well, their experience in the past has been that they do not flourish, though the necessarily independent attitude of the strong-minded young writer is, to a slight degree, better recognized now, due to much painful pioneering. But in general the old meaning-less query, "Is it what our readers want?" rules supreme.

For we know well enough what they want —want in its true sense of "lack." They want a literature that is a living expression of unusual personalities, not a syncopated tune, played on a cash register, by shrewd but mediocre minds. They want analyses of human beings by minds capable at least of intelligent, if not of profound, interpretation; they want stories dealing with old situations, either in the light of modern rationality, what there is of it, or, at least, from a freshly personal point of view. They want work of intellectual integrity and uncompromising individuality. They get the products of fake, sensationalism, compromise, adherence to formula. They get fed to them constantly everything that appeals to their worst tastes, to their cheapest desires, to their weakest (if unanalyzed) emotions. They gobble this pap, and the editors wax proud that they "know human nature."

For it works out in dollars and cents, you see. It works out in dollars and cents. Is not that, after all, the highest standard? Turning to the days of the early Renaissance, when the passion for ideas and culture was otherwise, we are led to wonder just how greatly the world progresses. Well, we have at least produced some few smaller publishers and booksellers, who, thrive as they may, tend with ingenuous ardor the flickering flame on the altar of good writing. We have seen a few of the smaller "faddish" magazines evincing a real desire for independent expression. The flourishing magazine companies that exist as large commercial organizations primarily cannot wholly over-shadow the country with the dollar mark. They merely do the best they can.

Think it over. Take a glance at the magazine counter in any subway station; weigh and analyze the amount of yawp, bun-combe, purely meretricious appeal. Then decide whether this attack is ill-grounded or not. And, in the last analysis, the remedy lies with the readers. It is by their suffrages that such a condition exists. What do you want?