"SCRIBBLING ITCH"

Evening Post, Volume CXXV, Issue 18, 22 January 1938, Page 24

"SCRIBBLING ITCH"

BECOMING A NOVELIST

Ono of the' most curious questions about a writer, and one least often answered in biographies, !s why he ever became a writer at all; why, instead of the active' and'friendly career of .'a doctor-or a revolutionist or an engineer or an actor or an aviator, tie should choose to sit alone year after year, making up fables or commenting on: what other and livelier citizens actually do.. ■ • ■ ~

And how did a Harry Sinclair Lewis, son of an. average doctor in a Midwestern prairie village, who never heard at table any conversation except ' "Is Mrs. Harmon feeling any better?" and "butter's gone up again"— a youth who till he was ready to enter university had'never seen'any professional writer exeppt the local country editors—how came it that at 11 he had already decided to become a short-story ■writer, and that at 14 he sent off to "Harper's Magazine" what he belisved to be a poem? "Anyway, cause or not, there .was at 11 or earlier, the itch for scribbling," he says in "Breaking. Into Print.". "I must have been about 10 when I regularly wrote a newspaper with the most strictly limited clientele in the world —myself. It had 'departments' with not only a by-line but a portrait of the departmental editor., "By the time I had wiggled doubtfully into Yale, the itch was beyond prophylaxis. To writing, then, I de- ! voted more eagerness than any study, any: ; sport.- , -During, Yale I had; my first acceptance iby a.real magazine— and it was critical, slightly scandalous, and, I can now see, 'inclined. tp.;.make any number of worthy: persons uncomfortable. ■'-.'' ■..'.'■■

"So 1920, and 'Main Street' and the damned photographs, interviews, invitations to lecture, nibbles (still resisted) from Hollywood, and air the rest of. the clamour with which the world- tries, inevitably, to keep a writer from his job, and even when it has been rather sweaty and nervejangling I have enjoyed it more than I would h-ve enjoyed anything exceD* pure research in a laboratory. "And' as the recipe for writing, all writing, I remember no high-flown counsel but always' and only Mary Heaton Vorse's jibe, delivered to a bunch of young and mostly incompetent hopefuls back in 1911; 'The art of writing is the art of applying the seat of the1 pants to the seat of the chair.' As' for the .others, let, them -go to Hollywood or. to the 'studios' of the N.8.C.',: and everything will be idealistic,-and the literary caravan 'will march gaily on."