How I Began

( Originally Published 1944 )

See every difference never yet detected,
Remembering much I find my memory bare;

I BEGAN to be a writer by contemplating the future. At the time I was employed by the Federal Reserve Bank Branch, in Detroit, of the Seventh Federal Reserve Bank District of Chicago. That was before the First World War. I was doing all right for a young man, financially; I had every chance for advancement, and since I was already a father, I was exempt from the draft. As fast as the other boys got drafted, I got promoted. If I had remained there I would today be making a good yearly income with practically no work and spending my time on golf courses and other rendezvous for the bored and the over-fat. A clerk who worked next to me, by the name of Chalfont, is now head of the Detroit Branch of the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago. All I had to do was to have tagged along with him to have had an easy life, and a profitable one. But it occurred to me one day that my life span was a snap of the fingers in the face of eternity. I decided to do something about it. I looked around and sorted over the professions. I had studied law for some years, long enough to realize that it was as dubious a profession as there is in the land. I passed my legal examination and was certified to practice as a lawyer; but cringed from it. I am still, technically speaking, a lawyer.

My father had been a doctor. I had wished to be a doctor but he prevented it. The poor guy made next to nothing at doctoring and insisted that I should be a business man. My grandfather, on my mother's side, had been the proprietor of a fawncy private school, in Chicago. He had discouraged my being a teacher. I considered the various arts. The graphic arts were out. I couldn't draw a straight line down a sheet of paper. I could play the piano, but all of my inclination in music was toward the rowdy sort, and it was clear to me that if I became a musician I would end up as the piano-player in a bawdy house. I had once tried sculpture, but I could not make a piece of clay resemble anything but an amoeba.

All around me were men, officers of the bank, who stewed in their own boredom day by day and lived comfortably. I could see that all I needed to do was to apply an attrition attack and I would be in the same boat; all that was needed was the ability to live and grow older and be promoted by stages. But some-how this seemed to me like being buried prematurely, So one day I decided to write.

I carefully concealed this emprise ambition from everyone, especially my wife and my employers, by taking a pen name. I took the name of the county in which my father was born, in Versailles, Kentucky. It seemed to me that no one could ever possibly mispronounce "Woodford." As a matter of fact I have been called continuously "Woodful; Woodfill; Woodruff; Woodward; Windward," and what not. I give up. The only safe pen name in this country is Smith.

It occurred to me when I decided to become a writer that I could no more start in the Saturday Evening Post than I could go into the banking business and start as a vice-president. So I looked over the magazine stands to see where the absolute bottom was. I bought not only the current copy of a certain magazine, but several previous numbers, in a second-hand magazine shop. I took these home and studied them with approximately the attention which, at the bank, I might have given a submitted credit statement.

I took the stories apart and tried to find out what made them tick. When I had discovered the main drive behind most ,of the stories I tried to write one. It was awful. I put it away and several °days liter read a story in one of the magazines and then read mine. I discovered that while I had all of the elements of the other story there was something about my story that gave off an overpowering stench. This, l concluded, was simply the way I had written it. I turned to writing it in various ways until at last (I have forgotten how long I monkeyed with it several weeks, I think; possibly several months) it seemed fairly creditable. 1 sent it in. It was accepted. A check came back. I have often wondered whether it would not have been a whole lot better if it had been directly rejected. I some years later met the editor. I viewed him with mixed feelings, not knowing whether to be nice to him for having accepted my first story, or slug him for ruining my life.

The next few stories I wrote much too fast and too readily. I got a trouncing with rejection slips. So then I leveled off again and started all over using my first technique. After six months or so I began to sell again, and graduated into a new group of magazines. I wrote short stories for about ten years before I tackled my first novel. I sold the first novel the first time out. But I have always had, in my writing, one profound handicap which has held me back no end. I am not sentimental about love. To me love is, and always has been, a horizontal form of calisthenics. To think like that is the worst handicap the writer of ACST can possibly have. The greatest writers of ACST in this country are men and women who have been sexually frustrated. The sexual frustration sublimates itself in terms of the "tender emotion," and forms a sort of code language which goes as from the frustrated author to the frustrated reader. The successful author and the voracious reader take wing together and fly off into an escapist symbolism of sex called love. If you can help quantity-readers to do that you have a great chance of success, providing, as I said before, you provide constant conflict.

When, after I had been writing books for some years, one of them was made into a movie, I came out to Hollywood, largely because my daughter wished to have a look at the place. I didn't think I was ready for Hollywood yet, but we had to live somewhere, and Florida in the winters was getting terribly dull, although New England during the summers was better (Provincetown, Cape Cod).

When I got to Hollywood I got into pix (Warner Brothers) more or less by accident. From there I went to M.G.M. for two and a half years.

In the meantime I had been divorced. After sixteen years of marriage to me my wife had given up in despair, and she was quite within the bounds of reason in doing so. Besides, I from working at home for years had come to be much more closely associated with my daughter than most men are to their children, and we, being of the same temperament, struck it off fine together. We are both relieved to be free to follow carnivals around the country, catch and train mice, and otherwise lead a thoroughly discombobulated and thoroughly delightful life together. She, too, had begun to write, had sold a number of short stories, and to date three novels.

Back during the depression days a publisher in New York had suggested that I write a book on writing. I was in Richmond, Virginia, for the winter, at the time, and needed the advance dough badly. Nobody, ' then, knew what the depression was; everyone thought that his sudden apparent failure was due to some particular lapse on his part. I distastefully wrote the book on writing and sent it in, feeling that it would in all likelihood fall dead from the presses. It didn't. That was twelve years ago, and it sells more copies now than it did then. You can't just walk out on a racket like that when it has begun to pay off, so I had to do more writing about writing. It is my firm conviction, and always has been and I so stated in my first book on writing that nobody can possibly learn to write from a book on writing.

I learned to write, so far as I can trace back the phenomenon at all, "by ear," as many musicians learn to play by ear some of the best of them in fact. I read other writers' work and listened very carefully for the prose rhythms, and got some of them . . all of them except the sentimental love rhythms.

As I look back I remember that I went on for a long time working before I hopped off into the troublous Free Lance waters. I remember saving up a not inconsiderable sum before severing my business connections. I know for certain that if I had quit my job after I sold the first short story I would have foundered.

I am also afraid that if my wife had not had the good sense to divorce me I would have had a hard time. Writing is the most hazardous profession of which I know. It usually carries with it far less re-wards than most people think, much more work, and very little satisfaction; since you cannot, ever, say what you really think about anything. Many writers appear to do so but they are always restricted one way or another behind the scenes. The rewards of writing, however, are worth it for those tempera-mentally suited to such rewards. The freedom it brings from alarm clocks, for instance, is, in itself, not an inconsiderable item; and from time clocks, and other devices of torture invented by people who hold stock in things and milk other people of their labor at usurious rates.

If I were to attribute any small success I have had as a writer to any one source more than another, I would attribute it to my daughter, Louella, who is the ideal companion for an author.