them, in a moment of exasperation, "butchers." The scenario writer has to alter the story somewhat to earn his money, and the continuity writer leaves his impress, too, in the shape of a few changes. The director wants to make it a "director's picture," so he has to give himself a little scope; and the supervisor, and the film editor might appear unimportant if they made no contribution. So the story is added to and cut, with remakes, and retakes, and a resulting failure that is no one's fault, but certainly no one's credit. Pictures with unity of effect under this syndicate system are a miracle of co-operation. Too many conferences take the life out of the story. There are hopeful signs, however, of a change in method, one being the recommendation of the new Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences that the continuity of a story be written down to the last minute detail, so that the director can take the script and shoot from it without a single change or delay from story conferences. To prepare for a new picture, "The Musician," Paramount is sending star, scenarist, and director into seclusion on Catalina Island, with ininstructions not to return until the continuity is ready to the last detail.

These, then, are the tribulations that beset the path of the good story toward the screen and they present one cheering aspect. They explain so much. Authors who understand the complexities of the business are less inclined to rash judgment when they encounter stories on the screen that are not half so convincing as some of their own. It is natural and quite general to conclude on seeing these vapid photoplays that the purchase of the stories was simply another case of inefficiency or dishonesty. Certainly there is some buying on motives other than the merit of the ma

terial, and there are many intricacies of split commissions. But the chances are that the stories for these productions were honestly bought and their choice decided by some conviction of story value. Their last unhappy state is doubtless as far from the ideal of the director as it is from yours. The uncertainty of success with even the most promising stories is one of the reasons why dishonesty in this branch of the business can thrive at all. A second-rate story under present conditions has almost an equal chance of success with a good one. "So why not take this one," says the crafty trader. 'I can get it from the author at half the price and you and I can divide the other half." Then, too, the real value of the story is so difficult to measure that it is hard to know when either party is being cheated. An author walked into one of the New York offices not long ago and laid his manuscript on the desk of an executive of one of the well-known companies. "It's a good story," he declared, "and I won't accept a cent less than twelve thousand dollars!" The movie man consulted with the next higher-up, and returned the answer, "Your story is worth twenty-five hundred to us and not a cent more." "All right," said the author meekly and took his check. Perhaps authors get the short end but producers, too, occasionally sometimes fail to get their value. "Marriage," by H. G. Wells, for example, must have cost a penny, but it does n't pan out in the picture.

Of course the industry is fully aware of its own deficiencies, so the Colossus has now assumed an attitude more like Rodin's Thinker. The answer to at least part of his problems is Better Stories, but the next question is: What makes a good screen story? and the next: Where are they coming from?

T

HERE is a sonnet in this month's collection which embodies many interesting faults. Interesting faults, by the way, are rare; they are generally found in the work of someone who has the genuine poetic instinct but has not yet conquered the medium of his art. The uninteresting faults, which are in a large majority, are these: total ignorance of poetic form (for example, one author enclosed some jagged, irregular verses which he had entitled a sonnet); sentimentality (hackneyed treatment of hackneyed themes); moralizing (the sort of "keep smiling" verses of which Edgar Guest's effusions are typical); heart throbs (perfervid exposition of one's personal emotions); and cheap humour. The interesting faults, on the other hand, are the slight lapses which mar otherwise careful work.

1 Thou art my love, I seek thee here or where 2 Beauty's most lovely image may be seen,

3 Where in the breeze the glistening birches are

4 Dancing like nymphs before the hemlock's green.

5

Among the phantom beeches by the brook

6 Awaiting Spring's inspired rhapsody,

7 Yearning within her tender heart I look

8 And hark as for a promised melody.

9 A will o' the wisp art thou, th'inviolate,
10 Holding my vagrant soul a prisoner,
11 Thou art the risen lark at Heaven's gate
12 Singing to thine entranced listener.
13 How shall I praise the power that from a clod
14 Creates the man, from man creates the god?

Frankly, this sonnet would fare badly with most modern critics, because it violates several contemporary taboos. Its most serious fault is certainly its thin, abstract direction. It also suffers from weak rhymes, outmoded elisions and, in line 11, a too clear echo from Shakspere's Sonnet XXIX. Line 1, the contrast between here and where is vague. Line 2 is meaningless verbiage. Just what is "Beauty's most lovely image"? Is it a face? a solitary beach? a forest? We must know. Poetry is not a matter of fact, to be sure, but it must provide material for the sensuous imagination. Lines 3 and 4 are the first indication of power. The picture, though not startling, does much to redeem the first quatrain. Again, line 5 suggests the thin, wintry leaves of the beeches very well, but the image immediately fades in the vague and hackneyed phrasing of line 6. In line 7 her has no antecedent, and the meaningless line is further confused. In line 8, the word melody forms a double-weak and identical rhyme with rhapsody in line 6. Rhyming can be no worse, unless it

The sonnet under consideration is entitled "On the Ideal," and at once our attention weakens. To go back to first principles: Abstractions are to be shunned. Whatever the Ideal is, it must be embodied in concrete form, something that can be imagined. It may be embodied as a person, a mountain, a wind, a season, a forest; in any case, it must be definite, else we can not grasp its significance. The reader of this sonnet will subsequently discover that the Ideal is the creative force moving through nature, and his interest will depend on the skill of the author in presenting objects which reveal this force.

is entirely false. In line 9, th'inviolate is an unnecessary and cumbersome elision; furthermore, inviolate is meaningless. Inviolate to what? Line 10 is harmless; line 11, as has been pointed out, is almost a quotation from Shakspere's sonnet. Line 12 is musical, but again we find a double-weak identical rhyme, listener. The terminal couplet of the sonnet shows more ability of epigram than we should have expected from the rest of the poem. Very well, the sonnet is destroyed. What is left? Why consider it at all since it shows so many faults? Because these faults are all obviously part of the apprenticeship of one who really possesses the poetic instinct. Even the tooclose adaptation from Shakspere shows a study of models without which no technique can be developed. The construction of the idea is excellent, and the metrical movement of the poem shows a musical ear developed by practice and susceptible of further development. It is apparent that all the weaknesses of the sonnet are on the surface; they are remediable.

A short lyric entitled "Rain" shows similar faults and possibilities:

1 Rain against my window pane,
(Rain against my heart)

2

3 Blurring outlines in the street. (Blurring pain in part)

4

6 To warn

stare,

me in what rooms they mean to

7 I do not mind; in fact, I think I'd dare
8 Invite them in on rainy nights to dine.

9 My house holds wistful songs of many spheres,
10 No singer doubts the tale his neighbour tells,
11 No guest there dreads the devil or his spells,
12 Nor frowns upon a startling truth he hears.
13. And so my house means hospitality,
14 God visits there; He likes society.

A pleasantly fantastic, conceited poem, written appropriately in conversational idiom. Technically, it needs much strengthening. In the first place, the figures presented by lines 2 and 3 refer to the same object but contradict each other. The image, therefore, is erased. Line 2 suggests a bubble; so does the verb stretches. Why, then, square? Our minds had already conceived the image of a sphere. This comment may seem carping but it applies to a really serious fault: the mixing of images, an enlargement of the old fault of mixed metaphor. Jessamine and mine form an identical rhyme. The second quatrain is pleasant and well-turned. In line 9, "Wistful songs of many spheres" might well be strengthened, but, in general, the third quatrain continues the conceit effectively. The terminal couplet, which should be the strongest part of the poem, is the weakest. In the first place, the doubleweak, identical rhyme of hospitality with society is impossible. In the second place, I complain vigorously against the practice common among budding poets of dragging in God to prop up their work when their inspiration is at its lowest ebb. This couplet should be removed, and another, more climactic and more in tone with the rest of the poem, should be substituted.

EVERAL things have been accu

magazine situation in America during the past few months particularly. I am stimulated to set out the gist of these things partly by rereading Mrs. Gerould's admirable article in the "The Free Lance Writer's Handbook" on The American Short Story.

First, then, about the choice of magazines by writers, as possible markets. Writers are being constantly advised to try magazines outside "The Quality Group"; not to be too particular about choice of markets. The many who advise writers thus leave certain facts out of consideration.

With the well-recognized exceptions. of Adventure, The Danger Trail, and a few others, the "adventure magazines," which cry in and out of season for Action, Action, and then more Action"we do not care how the story is told so long as it is filled with thrills, crammed with stirring, pulsing incident, -Action, Action"!!-such magazines are poor media if quality of work is to be considered, and not merely that which moves me to tear my hair whenever I hear it, "The Writing Game"! I suppose there will always be a certain number of "Writing-Game" persons who will remain quite willing to stultify what talents God has given them for the purpose of seeing their names at half-a-centa-word in the Contents Tables of the pulp-papers; who are actually pleased to have succeeded in turning out a "salable" story of impossible people under imaginary circumstances doing continuously a series of of incredible stunts for the momentary delectation of morons with twenty cents to spend.

The kind of magazine which clutters up the newsstand and buys such material does not want good work, and the stir

ring competition through which alone. the writer who lands in it can dispose of his material is a competition to see who can most closely conform to a standard utterly subversive of good writing as competent critics recognize the same. I should like to see a general revolt of writers against the unworthy standards of such bunkum media as I have tried to indicate, and whose name is Legion among the cheaper grades of current magazines. Such a revolt, on a scale large enough to express itself emphatically, would probably be a wholesome thing not only for Letters but even for "markets." It might teach the mob of editors who are office-boys for the pulppaper magazine proprietors that selfrespecting producers of fiction are heartily tired of turning out what they allege their lowbrow "public" wants.

Most writers, the majority, probably, of the readers of THE WRITER-do not have to write for a living. If they all cut loose and began to depend on the sales of their production for a living they would be abruptly confronted with a choice between starvation and completely stultifying themselves in the mad, competitive scramble in the fine art of turning out literary junk. Just so long as writers go on producing deliberate hokum, just so long will the writing profession continue to be a mess. The sooner that process is brought to an end, the sooner will be remedied what is perhaps the most absurd set of conditions which have ever existed in the realm of English Literature.

There comes from the critics a constant succession of justified wails at the poor quality of current magazine literature. Despite variations in their criteria the critics are in general agreement. What is the answer?

The editors get what they want. That

is the basic answer. If the general trend of criticism is sound, and I believe it is, i. e., if too large a proportion of published material in American magazines is bunk, then, obviously, the fault is with the editors. They have bought the bunk-invited and even prescribed it, in many or most cases, and have presented it to the reading public. I am perfectly certain that America holds an appreciable number of sound writers who are not getting published, and for a variety of reasons, chief among which are:

1. The editorial obsession about "Names." Many magazines sell chiefly from the prominent list of "Names" on their front covers. In too many cases "Names" are the result of log-rolling and other "professional" processes which are only a little short (if at all) of chican

ery.

2. Despite constant editorial reiteration of a welcome to "new" and "young" writers, the really profound distaste of magazines for the process of "taking on" a "new" writer. There are, of course, innumerable cases per contra. Certain first-rate magazines honestly look for "promising work" among "new" writers. If they did not, the mere natural process of death would end all fiction publication at the end of a current literary generation! But the inertia, which means "resistance to change," even for the better, of editors in this respect is a very serious force to reckon with. It is, too, understandable. No small part of an established writer's salability is his reputation, and magazines must be sold. One can sympathize with the editorial mind here. The case of Joseph Hergesheimer writing without sale for fourteen formative years, and innumerable other cases, serve as the opposite argument. How many new names have appeared on the cover of Hearst's International-Cosmopolitan since it had that name? during the last five years, say, of the Cosmopolitan's existence before that merger?

Or

3. A perversion of taste on the part of those who are responsible for maga

zine contents, i. e., again the editors! Who, among comparatively "new" writers, are getting the laurels and the large checks? In this consideration I am constrained to go back some years because very new writers could not illustrate my purpose. They would be ephemeral, perhaps, and I could justly be put out of court on that possible ground. I must go back to include a group of writers who are only comparatively "new," but concerning whose "modernity" there can be no possible question. These would be Dreiser, Van Vechten, Kreymborg, Hecht, and Sherwood Anderson. They are well-established, "best sellers" today, and they are all "modern" and comparatively recent, i. e., it is not very long ago that they were unknown. This list might, of course, be very greatly extended, though not, perhaps, to the advantage of the issues being urged.

4. More and more must magazine fiction, if the current trends are allowed to continue, be restricted in subject-matter to the "popular" types, chiefly represented by (A) "Westerns," (B) The varieties of The Helen and Warren Story, (C) Adventure-Action Rough-Stuff, and (D) The Woman-Interest Story, sicklied or unsicklied o'er, as the case may be, by the pale cast of Sex.

How can critics expect the standard of quality in English Prose to be raised when the editorial tendency is increasingly towards the kind of thing turned out by writers like Dreiser, Van Vechten, Kreymborg, Hecht, and Sherwood Anderson? When the market for Quality and Distinction is at a discount, and when the kind of log-rolled material just commented upon gets itself increasingly put before the intelligent reading-public as America's Best?

There seems to be something rotten in Denmark. Things literary are not as they should be in our midst. The answer to the situation certainly includes a state of mind among American editors which might be the better for a checking-up. The publication premium is not, today,