University of Virginia Library

A NOVEL IN A WEEK

I am informed by an editor, associated with magazines that use no less than a million and a half words of fiction a month, that he has among his contributors more than one writer on whom he can rely to turn off a novel of 60,000 words in six days, and that he can put his finger on twenty novelists who think nothing of writing a novel of a hundred thousand words in anywhere from sixty to ninety days. He recalled to me, too, the case of a well-known novelist who has recently contracted to supply a publisher with four novels in one year, each novel to run to not less than a hundred thousand words. One thinks of the Scotsman with his "Where's your Willie Shakespeare now?"

Even Balzac's titanic industry must hide its diminished head before such appalling fecundity; and what would Horace have to say to such froglike verbal spawning, with his famous "labor of the file" and his counsel to writers "to take a subject equal to your powers, and consider long what your shoulders refuse, what they are able to bear." It is to be feared that "the monument more enduring than brass" is not erected with such rapidity. The only brass associated with the modern best seller is to be found in the advertisements; and, indeed, all that both purveyor and consumer seem to care about may well be summed up in the publisher's recommendation quoted by Professor Phelps: "This book goes with a rush and ends with a smash." Such, one might add, is the beginning and ending of all literary rockets.