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from this article: the first, because it not only shows something of how Wright spent his time during this trying period, but also tells of his love for animals. (His friends who visit him in the west tell much of his odd pets, which vary from horses to lizards.) The second, because it shows his attitude toward a circumstance of his life about which he is particularly reticent but which, nevertheless, teaches a lesson as great as any contained in his novels.

Oh yes, indeed, there were blue spots, too. There were days and nights of such despondency and loneliness that I would almost have given my soul for someone just to "stand by'

But on the whole I was happy. After all, I was not alone, with only those who were paid to stay with me, and who looked upon their jobs as a penalty. The country about my camp was filled with creatures who were intensely interested in my situation: wild burros, deer, coyotes, mountain lions, foxes, peccaries, and many kinds of birds. There was not an hour of the day or night when some living thing was not taking notice of me. And were we not all alike trying to live?

I am not a physician. For me to give anything like medical advice would be an impertinence. I have here told only what I did. My case may be different from yours. Different cases must certainly call for different treatment. Perhaps sunshine, even taken in broken doses as I took it, would not do for you. But I am quite sure that some of the things which helped me will help anyone.

And so I say: The first thing you must do is to face the facts. Get your trouble out into the open and look at it squarely. Do not deceive yourself. Do not permit others to deceive you. Show your doctor that he can trust you with the truth.

Recovered, he turned again to writing, with even more vigor than before. How does he write?

In the first place, he publishes only once every two years. He believes that his best work can be done slowly and he believes, also, that his public prefers to hear from him at these inter

vals. This may be a superstition of his. At any rate, the fact that his sales continue undiminished not only on his new work, but on his old, seems to prove the psychological wisdom of his own and his publishers' methods.

Months of research and thought go into the preparation for actual writing. He is meticulous in his demands on himself for accuracy of detail. He first decides on the idea which he shall attempt to convey through his story, the theme of his parable. If his setting requires a knowledge he does not possess, he goes to outlying district or to factory or to experts to ascertain the facts. He then creates a set of characters. They become real to him, and he moves them into his setting and theme. The characters, he says, develop the plot. Incident builds to incident, and he watches carefully to build thematic, character, and plot climaxes.

After this outline is completed, he sits down to write a first draft that bears little relation to those that follow. He allows himself, often, to overdevelop many incidents. His first manuscript is then arranged in loose leaf form. This he goes over time and time again. Few of the incidents in a Wright novel are products of sheer imagination. He takes incidents from actual life; for he insists that such incidents can be highly dramatic, even melodramatic, and still be factual. When he has satisfied his own conscience in regard to a script, he submits it to friends and experts, to be sure that all is correct. It is only then that he is ready for publication.

This is hard work. It is conscientious work. Its results are well known, and are justified. In his quiet study looking out over the desert at Tucson, with his family, his horses, his simple routine of life, Harold Bell Wright

conceives and executes these modern parables of his. They succeed, I think, first because they embody the simple philosophies and aspirations of the ordinary man

and by the ordinary and by the ordinary

man I mean every man, when he is free of the shell of sophistication, thick or thin, with which he is encased. Then, they succeed because they are written by a man who has taught himself by hard work to construct them so that they will succeed; and because the purpose behind them is so strong that it has not allowed him carelessness, has

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OUR FICTIONAL COUNTERPARTS

By June E. Downey

IF you like to read people and vert"; an explanation which although

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here's an experi

ment that should be quite to your taste. Ask a score or so of readers of books to tell you what they think, say of Mabel and Mark Sabre of "If Winter Comes"; of Doctor Kennicott and Carol of "Main Street"; of Babbitt; of Alice and Priam Farll of Bennett's "Buried Alive"; of Melville Stoner of Sherwood Anderson's "Out of Nowhere into Nothing", or Hugh McVey in his "Poor White".

"If Winter Comes" arouses such violent feelings of antipathy or admiration that it's an excellent book to try readers out on. Do they think Mark wears a halo or a foolscap? Are they impatient at Mabel or sorry for her? Whichever it is, they are giving you an intimate revelation of themselves.

"But revelations of what sort?" you ask. Is it ourselves we like in liking others? Or just the reverse? Do we prefer them different?

If indeed we knew just why we like people in books or out of them, could explain why we fall in love—or hate - with no regard to emotional speed limits, we should be far advanced on the road to self knowledge and ready to take our doctor's degree in personality.

The failure of Mark and Mabel in their matrimonial venture has been explained - but I think not adequately by calling attention to the wide divergence between them temperamentally. Mark — it has been said was an "introvert"; Mabel, an “extro

unsatisfactory will serve to introduce us to one of the famous distinctions of today, a distinction which is well worth study if we would understand people.

Extrovert and introvert made He them, but with many subvarieties. The extrovert wears his soul inside out and the introvert his outside in. Therefore, the former is not hard to understand, he's en rapport with external reality; quick to sense life's conventionalities and fashions, its duties and romances, for his eyes devour the multicolored posters in the marketplace. But the introvert looks inward, fascinated by the curious lights and shadows that flit across the silver screen of consciousness. The introvert is gauche, maladroit; at the banquet of life he makes inexcusable blunders with salad forks and coffee spoons.

The extrovert expresses his emotions spontaneously and effectively. He is sociable and almost certain to undergo the typical human experiences - love, marriage, and parenthood. He gets into quick rapport with the crowd (witness that famous extrovert, Lloyd George); he may become the famous preacher, Billy Sunday, or the infamous adventurer.

The introvert cannot express his emotions easily; their very intensity renders him powerless; when they break through the crust of reserve it is as a volcanic eruption creating havoc and desolation. His loves lead him often into the desert instead of the garden.

He baffles the crowd. But just because he is the man of mystery, the priest officiating at the altar behind the veil or the magician casting spells in the sacred wigwam, he may become a powerful leader. And if he adopt a practical purpose, concentrate on leading his people through the wilderness, he is the safest leader of all, for his distrust of things, his incapacity to adjust to reality quickly, has compelled him to face each danger far in advance, and to discount the disasters lurking in each crisis by preparing for it long before it arrives.

Moses and Aaron may serve us as exemplars of the great introvert and the great extrovert the one slow of tongue, seeing God in the burning bush that was consumed not; the other eloquent of speech and magnificent in purple robe adorned with golden bells and scarlet pomegranates. Said the Lord to Moses, "He shall be to thee a mouth, and thou shalt be to him as God."

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Now the clever fictionist knows intuitively the secrets of personality which the psychologists- those nutcrackers of the soul discover so slowly. Arnold Bennett in his "Buried Alive" has given us the pure comedy of unalloyed introversion and extroversion. Most of us, by the way, are ambiverts that is, extroverted while buying a bonnet or automobile and introverted, let us hope, while saying our prayers! Priam Farl of Bennett's delicious story is a deep dyed introvert, a famous painter so wrapped up in his art that face to face with life he is panicky, shy to the point of absurdity, placing between himself and life a common sense valet. One dreary night, on a flying trip to London, this valet sickens and dies with disconcerting and inconsiderate suddenness. When the attending physician assumes

that the helpless, tongue tied man in charge of affairs is the servant and that the dead man was the famous painter, the real Farll is much too shy to correct the misconception. News of the death of a celebrity gets abroad; a solemn interment of the valet in Westminster follows. Farll attends his own funeral, reads with interest his obituaries, and finds it something of a relief to be dead. But he misses acutely the man who stood between him and the world until Alice - pure extrovert, practical comfortable housewife — marries him out of hand and takes such good care of him that he finds himself painting masterpieces again, a diversion she encourages since it keeps him so quiet and contented. But you must read the story yourself if you would realize how expedient a thing it is to have an extrovert around, when questions as to who you actually are begin to trouble courts and the wife and son of the dead man whom you are supposed to be and aren't.

The mating of an extroverted woman and an introverted man of artistic or philosophical preoccupation is a happy chance, as novelists and life both teach

us.

She makes no effort to understand him and serves as a convenient buffer between him and the world. Her emotion flows out toward him as simply as toward a child and she tortures herself with no subtilties.

The reverse situation, an introverted wife and a practical extroverted husband, gives us on the fictional level Carol Kennicott and her Doctor, a combination not quite successful. A woman introvert very rarely finds the form of expression that might serve her as a safety valve, hence her capacity for creating disturbances in her domestic environment.

There is, indeed, one type of introvert who is difficult in any combination,

the emotional introvert (man or woman) who seeks to realize in this mundane sphere the Heavenly Romance. He falls in love with no flesh and blood maiden but with a creature of his own imagination, a moon maiden whose image he projects upon some woman who strays across his path at the right moment. Tragedies lurk in these curious projections of the introvert, who seeks the light that never was on land or sea. What woman could live up to Shelley's imagination? Certainly not Harriet, nor Cornelia, nor Mary, nor Emilia, nor Maria, nor Jane. "Epi"Epipsychidion" sublimated love poem of a sublimated soul alas, poor Shelley! And alas poor Harriet and Mary and Maria and Emilia! The Shelleyan type of introvert never marries his beloved, however many times he seeks the altar, and all his children are changelings.

It is evident that, on the whole, and apart from loving for one may love where he doesn't understand or even like introvert and extrovert eye one another askance. The extrovert is to the introvert an object of amazement

- and it may be of admiration. The insouciance with which the former makes love or loses his temper or buys bonds or bonbons or bluffs a jury or a tragic destiny is a perpetual mystery to the latter.

To the extrovert the introvert is an object of impatient speculation - and sometimes of amusement. What in thunder will the absurd fellow do next? Why not once in an eternity do the sensible obvious thing? Of what value to possess every sense but common sense?

or in our eccentricity; or we may choose our opposite as a companion. Each of us we are told is dogged by a shadowy unconscious self who plays extrovert to our introvert and introvert to our extrovert. Babbitt the roaring Babbitt - found his heart's brother in a strange and silent man who kept alive for him something of faith in the poetry of youth and far off ideals. Only, perhaps, when we live too rigidly in the inner or outer world do these strange passions for the opposite type develop. Ordinarily we prefer to feel at home, and suffer from a curious nostalgia of the spirit when introduced in a book or a parlor to those temperamentally alien to ourselves.

This is the reason why so many readers feel uneasy among Sherwood Anderson's introverted people. The myopic men and women who walk with eyes averted through the pages of "The Triumph of the Egg" affect them as beings from another world than that of shouting, gesticulating, prosperous America. And they are! Stray spirits from invisible realms, self created.

Melville Stoner of "Out of Nowhere into Nothing" completely baffles the extrovert, who condemns him impatiently as repulsive, a useless recluse, unreal a dream character. But the introverted reader who cherishes hidden sensitivities and cloistered thoughts actually likes this old bachelor, so utterly futile and yet so uncannily aware of the secret springs of life, so extraordinarily penetrating of vision.

Hugh McVey of "Poor White", an introvert of the imaginative type, an impractical inventor, is rescued from himself and exploited by a shrewd worldly promoter; he is saved from emotional starvation also by an accidentally acquired wife of considerable common sense. McVey does not make

Actually we like our friends, in books and out of them, for various reasons. We may enjoy seeing ourselves in them as in a mirror, to be assured of comradeship in our conformity to society friends, his friends make him! He is a

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