The Plight of Canadian Fiction

THE PLIGHT OF CANADIAN FICTION not impatien t and has the gift at all he may succeed in giving the editors the thing they want. He meets the market. Success may come to such a writer very quickly. In no time at all he may have an enormous income, because there are vast profits to be made from writing for the big slick magazines. \:Vhat such a wrifer has to do is be very careful to see that he is always saying the thing that people want to have said: he must never demand that a reader turn his head sharply to the left or the right: he must forever curb his instinct to say to the reader, "Look at it my way. You never looked at it before like this. But look at it." If he should make this mistake, and the editor should let it get by him, the consequences are apt to be pretty terrible for ev, erybody concerned. , The reader may have been made to feel uncomfortable. Worse still, he may actually have been made unhappy. He may write to the editor, or simply stop reading that particular writer and advise his friends to do so. The circulation of the magazine will drop if the same thing happens two or three times. If this dubious and revolutionary activity continues , the editor himself becomes the unhappiest man of all; he is out of the job. And properly so. He has failed as a comforter. I heard of an ' editor of a large Canadian national weekly who had figured this all out and was determined that he wouldn't lose his job. He had it ,figured out that his circulation was so large that anybody who wrote in his sheet was really writing for everybody. The problem) therefore, became a question of what everybody really liked; or the quality a piece should have that wquld recommend it to, absolutely everybody. In no time he solved the problem by the following process of elimination. It seemed obvious that a piece should have no personal 153 THE UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY quality whatever in,the writing: personal qualities separate the writer froln the masses. Everybody knows that. 'Then too, the piece shouldn)t be written too sharply: that would require the reader to stir himself and son1etimes focus his attention abruptly. This would b~ equivalent to making the reader feel uncomfortable, a thing to be dreaded like the infantile paralysis. ' And it was just as obvious that the piece should never sti'r up a train of thought: if it did, one group of readers might be separated from another and the whole national circulation idea lnight be destroyed. Most important of all the reader should never be deeply moved: he might start brooding. And no magazine.ever had a big circulation of brooders. So the ed-itor went up and down- the scale in this fashion, and he worked out his formula: "Everything must be watered down, everything must be thinned out till the piece has practically no substance, then n.o one can be offended." The editor felt quite happy about it. When even his best and most highly paid writers laid their work before him he smiled charmingly and said, "rrhis is fine but we'll have to thin it out a little more." This editor, who explained all this to me himself, was an intelligent man who thought he was doing what any other shrewd and intelligent man would do who wanted to hold his job. But the young Canadian writer, trying to Ineet the market and make some money, has as good a chance in this field as anybody else. The market in Canada for this kind of work is a modest one, but the pay might be a lot worse, and if the writer gets slick enough he can drift easily into the big American markets and get rich. He shouldn't deceive himself that it is as easy as it sounds. I t is a field of entertainment like vaudeville and is frigh tfully competitive. Great ingenuity is required. 154 THE PLIGHT OF CANADIAN FICTION My point is that there are rewards in...