again. When a young woman sat down before me, and treated me as if I were a sort of receptacle into which she could pour, with complete abandonment of reticence, shame and the natural feelings of a woman with a man, everything which lay festering in the darkness of her mind, I admit that I blushed like fire and wanted the Earth to open and swallow me up. I was so nervous, that I pulled a chair in front of my own and leaned on it for support, while I twisted my legs round each other and smoked a cigar. It was the limit, to me.

For the point is, that you are not an analyst at all until you learn something similar to what the painter of the nude learns. A true painter looks at the naked body before him, not with the eye of passion, but the dispassionate eye of the artist. Ibsen's greatest tragedy, "When We Dead Awaken," circles about that point. The model was in love with the sculptor, but he merely looked upon her as so much landscape, as so much material for his art. It was for that reason that she left him, and his tragedy began.

Just so the true analyst looks on his patient as a "case," that is, someone for whom he has the minimum of personal interest. And the reason for this is, that otherwise he himself would soon become involved. For it is a normal part of the process of analysis that the patient should make a "transference" to the analyst. Take an example: A young girl comes to you for understanding and help. You give her both to a quite extraordinary degree; for the new science is really a deeper insight into people than anything hitherto. Is n't it natural that she should not only come to lean upon you, to feel that you alone understand her, that with you alone she can tell all and receive an all-wise toleration, but also that she should come to look on you as something in the nature of a wizard, a mighty man, even something godlike? Naturally, she begins to center her whole life upon you. It need n't of course go as far as falling in love. It may be the trust of the child for the parent, or the feeling of a sister for a wonderful brother;

but often it is love, downright human love.

Naturally if you responded to her emotionally, the game would be up. You would be in it yourself, and quite cease to be her analyst. It is even dangerous to go on letting her love you. You must begin very soon to show her the meaning of the transference, so that you don't choke off all possibility of her finding someone more suitable. And this, too, is part of the process. If the analyst keeps his head, remains kind but impersonal, sympathetic but aloof, and at the same time gives the patient a clear understanding of what it all means, the transference begins to dissolve, and the patient naturally turns to someone else, this often eventuating in marriage, or in reconciliation of husband and wife.

But this composure of the analyst comes slowly and comes hard. Neurotic woman are often "sticky." They center on the person they love with a particular vehemence and intensity. Everything you do, everything you say, everything you ever did, is matter for their intense interest. In a way, they are analyzing you all the time you are analyzing them. They find out things about your history, about your personal relations with others. They sometimes boldly try to draw you in and draw you on. They accuse you of hardness of heart, of a metallic impersonality, they say you are not human, they become jealous of you and watchful.

You must keep your head. I had one rarely beautiful young woman who kept telling me that is wasn't a "transference" at all; she was in love with me; her love for me prevented her from mixing with others; she had nothing in the world but her love for me. Finally, one day she came down in a motor car, and when she slipped off her fur coat, she stood forth in a dancing dress, bewitchingly charming. She had felt that she must show me that she could look very beautiful, and so she had come in costume.

It took me some time to harden myself, not only against the beauty and charm of women (for I suppose, like a great many poets, I had always been afflicted by woman's beauty

and rather liked falling for it), but also against the sense of shame. Try as I would in the early days, when suddenly some quite charming person disclosed to me in the most casual, or even embarrassed way, the most secret details of her hidden wishes or her relation with some man, I simply blushed. I hated the fact that I blushed, but I could n't help it.

Another trouble was this: I was suffering myself from some very painful problems. Even an analyst has his weak points, his all too human inferiorities, his "complexes," as they are called. Now we know that a murderer, for instance, may go around for years and no one may know that he committed the crime. Nevertheless, let someone refer in his presence to a similar crime, and unless he has great self-control, he starts or grows pale. It is the same when our complexes are touched upon. Naturally one's patients sometimes suffer from the same trouble; and they are not only mentioning it, but explaining it to you, laying it on thick, never dreaming that you yourself have the same weakness. Your heart almost jumps out of your body; you tremble and sweat, and wish your patient outside the door.

In short, you sit there a poor weak miserable sinner, but simply must, for the patient's sake, remain impersonal, aloof, balanced, wise. Like the surgeon's hand, you must not tremble. Yet one of the greatest analysts we have lost his poise on a certain occasion. It happened that in spite of everything one of his women patients had disturbed him. She was a woman who overpowered men right and left, and when she chose to do so, could bag her game. He was a powerful man, but despite his iron will, she afflicted him for a few days, and he had, as he put it, to analyze not only her, but also himself. During those days he had a small class in psychology. The pupils were studying to be analysts, and naturally could read into every word and gesture of his some deeper meaning. They were allowed to ask questions. One of them in his question mentioned the name of the woman.

At that, the analyst blushed in plain sight of all.

He was very simple and frank about it. He knew he was caught, and merely said, "Yes, I have been troubled about her lately. I need some analysis myself." Then the lesson went

on.

One of the things an analyst should rarely do is to go to the home of a patient. It usually introduces the personal element. One of my patients kept telephoning me that she was too ill to come; could n't I drop up to see her? I tried to explain to her. One time I said, "If you must see me, take a taxi and come down." She said she would die en route; she felt faint, sick, terrible. But she took the taxi, and though she came in as if she were half gone, she left smiling and capable. But finally I acceded to her and went to her home. She was laid out on a couch in negligee; and had the door closed by the servant. Then she said frankly that the cure for her was love. I disagreed.

Another trouble is that the analyst is expected to cut the Gordian knot at a single blow. A man of fifty came to me. He said he had married at twenty-one, not really a love match, but just what he wanted. He was building up a big business. During those busy years, he and his wife were quite content. They had no children. He went home every night, told her everything about himself, and never left her side after business hours. But at fifty his life-work was complete and the business was merged with a great corporation. He had lost his job. His whole nature now craved something else; craved in fact the one great thing he had missed, namely, passionate love. Just at that time he met a charming and sparkling woman. She was, beside, a great beauty. He fell madly in love with her. Naturally, he could n't tell his wife. He even invented excuses for being away from home. His wife was shocked at the change in him. She felt a subtle difference; that somehow he was withholding things, that he didn't care to be with her as he used to.

Matters grew worse. And now he felt he

was at the parting of the ways. His wife had been faithful and loyal, a good woman. Could he wreck her now, after all these years? What should he do?

What could I say? My wisdom remains extremely limited and human. I merely asked him:

"Can you give up the other woman?"

He stared into space for a long time. Then he looked at me.

"No," he said.

That ended the analysis.

But if all this shows a somewhat seamy side, there is, nevertheless, the other side. One is amazed if I may put it so, at the ceaseless miracle of life. I have had people come to me that appeared dull and commonplace. I wondered if it were worth bothering with them. What they said had no interest, what they did was tiresome. Yet as one began to peer deeper into them they disclosed all the wonders of human nature, one caught the echo of far off divine things.

In this way I came to know something about human nature. And when I had reached that point in my knowing, where was I? I found myself seeing so deeply that I could n't write about it at all. I could not lay out on paper the complex, mysterious, devilish and godlike workings of the human being. It was too much, it was too deep. So when I finished my big book, when "The Sea" was off my hands, and I knew that the time had come to turn back to stories, I felt more helpless than I did as a young man of twenty-four. Then I knew little, but what little I knew was usable. Now I appeared to know too much. If I showed life as I had seen it in its deeper aspects the 700-page novel of a James Joyce

(which describes merely the doings of one day) would be all too short. I should have to go to encyclopedic lengths.

I began to believe that they were right who warned me that analysis would finally end me as a writer.

But then I began to find a way. It was to forget about analysis, drop the scientific approach entirely, and go back to the ways of the teller of tales. In short, I came back to the place where what I wanted to do was to tell a good story and making it as interesting or amusing or delightful as possible. That was my only concern. Simply to tell stories, to spin yarns about people, and to do it as well as I could. Naturally whatever I have learnt in the past will manage to affect what I do; and I find indeed now when I write, that I have the sense of knowing my characters and feel at perfect ease in describing what they do, feeling quite sure that so they would do it.

With poetry off the boards, and analysis put by, I begin for the first time to find that fiction writing is a great adventure. Indeed, I have only learned just recently to be a real prose writer. In the other days, the poet was always getting in the way. But now prose itself fascinates me, and there is a kind of quick and intense delight in delineating people and watching them weave their plots of life.

I am more than glad that I was a psychoanalyst. During those terrific days I did the task which, so far as I could see, was laid upon me, of writing my big book. And during those days I learnt about men and women, so that now they are no longer strangers to me, but of my own kind and my own people.

T seems, in this day, to the editorial reader of a publishing house as though the world and his wife had foresworn all other occupations but writing. Manuscripts, large and small, mediocre and bad, prose and verse, come pouring in from all parts of the country in a never-ending stream. A good proportion of these are unsolicited by the publisher and are naturally looked upon at the outset with a certain amount of sceptical foreboding. So few of this type are worth the reading, so infinitesimally few ever find the printed page. And still they come - by the hundreds!

misjudgments or, in some cases, turn down a manuscript because they do not feel equipped to handle it.

In the case of The Viking Press, which we founded year ago, our primary aim was to find authors rather than books. This is not peculiar to the young publisher alone, but is much more evident in his quest for material. Suppose that Mr. X has written a novel of literary merit and sales possibility. The publisher accepts it, advertises it, sells it, establishes the author by every means in his power and then, when the sale of this book is exhausted, looks eagerly forward to succeeding books. If the novel is a poor seller, it does not mean for a moment that the next book will fail. A certain audience has been created, a certain prestige established, all of which can be entered on the credit side of the ledger when and if the next book comes. If, on the other hand, the novel has sold in large quantities the second book is bound to create some attention and in nine cases out of ten, unless extremely bad, is bound to have a good sale. It takes time and energy and money to build up an author. One book seldom does it. For every "Green Bay Tree," a first novel which sprang into instant success, there is a book by Sinclair Lewis or Sherwood Anderson, Willa Cather or E. M. Forster, Joseph Hergesheimer or Theodore Dreiser authors whose first works had comparatively small sales until they were established and their reputations built up by their publishers and their books. The publisher's satisfaction

The young publisher, particularly at the outset of his career, finds himself a dumping ground for the manuscripts rejected by other publishers. A manuscript to him, however, is a matter of import, be it solicited or unsolicited. There is a mistaken notion that the young publisher is so anxious to get material that he will take a mediocre book that the larger publisher would reject. If writers would stop to consider the prominence of a bad book on a small list as compared to a bad book lost in the abundance of titles of a large list, they would see the error of their misconceptions. Of course no writer considers his own work "bad" or even "mediocre." The fact that it has been rejected by a number of publishers is absolutely of no importance. Lytton Strachey's "Queen Victoria," Samuel Butler's "The Way of All Flesh," Keynes' "Economic Consequences of the Peace" and untold others are all evidence to the fact that publishers will and do make innumerable

and pride in helping to build up such a reputation cannot be measured in dollars and cents.

The young, middle aged and old publishers all want best-sellers, and yet many times a book that never sees the fringe of the best seller list is far more profitable to its publisher. Take, for instance, two books on our own list, "Maida's Little House" and "Maida's Little Shop" by Inez Haynes Irwin. These juveniles are unknown to any best seller list and yet, year after year, they achieve sales which if totalled would place them well up in the list. The steady seller is a source of income for years, the best-seller may only achieve its sale within a limited period of time. If a publisher can get a book which combines both steadiness and sensational sales, he has found a gold mine. Books of a serious specialized nature are often unknown to the general public and yet have astounding sales.

When the writer comes to make a choice of a publisher to whom he should submit his manuscript, he is naturally guided by his own preference in regard to that publisher's previous output and reputation. Here again, however, in one field, a misconception often arises. The writer of popular adventure or mystery stories often feels that, because a certain house has published works of literary merit, his own book will either be unwelcome or inadequately handled. There is hardly a publisher who is not on the lookout for good popular fiction without pretensions to importance or permanence. The reason for their lists being free of this type of story is manifest in the dearth of good material of this type. So many writers have excellent yarns to tell and feel that the narrative is self sufficient. Style, characterization, atmosphere are thrown to the three winds and narrative is snatched from the fourth. If a J. S. Fletcher, a Percival Wren, or an E. Phillips Oppenheim could read rejected manuscripts, they would find a treasure of material for endless books. Once the writer of a good tale

has found the way to tell it well, he will be welcomed with open arms by practically any publisher.

One of the surest ways to damn a manuscript is by letter. Many writers feel that the publisher can be "sold" before the manuscript is read. It is true that a good letter, giving a matter of fact statement of what the author is trying to do, may have an effect. On the other hand literally hundreds of authors heap praises upon themselves and their manuscripts in such abundance that the editorial reader sniffs, laughs—if he still has a sense of humor and gives the manuscript the most cursory sort of glance before rejecting it.

The last, and a very important item in a publisher's wants, is peace. Many, many years ago the publisher exhausted the list of mental curses to be flung at ambitious writers who accompany their manuscripts and insist upon personal interviews. In the case of the large publisher his staff is equipped to take care of these bugbears. The young publisher, however, has to see them himself. Women, in particular, are the arch offenders. If they only stopped to realize how much more effective, in nine cases out of ten, the manuscript is than the writer! Of course, if a writer has any reputation or any connection with the publisher, there is always a legitimate reason to talk things over before the reading. If, however, the author is unknown and, fearing for the reception of his book, calls upon the publisher, let his fears be two fold after the call.

In summing up the wants of a young publisher it is only natural that I draw upon our own experience and desires. There may be other publishers, equally young, whose needs are more general or more specialized. I believe, however, that The Viking Press represents the norm in wanting authors rather than books, steady sellers as well as bestsellers, popular fiction as well as books of literary merit, and represents every publisher the world over in the last named desire; peace, with of course, a modicum of plenty.