X.

From Émile Zola.


My dear Comrade:

You ask how I write my plays. Alas! I should rather tell you how I do
not write them.

Have you noticed the small number of new writers who take their chances
in the theater? The explanation is that in reality, for our generation
of free artists, the theater is repugnant, with its cookery, its
hobbles, its demand for immediate and brutal success, its army of
collaborators, to which one must submit, from the imposing leading man
down to the prompter. How much more independent are we in the novel! And
that's why, when the glamor of the footlights makes the blood dance, we
prefer to exercise it by keeping aloof and to remain the absolute
masters of our works. In the theater we are asked to submit to too much.

Let me add that in my own case I have harnessed myself to a group of
novels which will take twenty-five years of my life. The theater is a
dissipation which I shall doubtless not permit myself until I am very
old.

After all, if I could indulge in the theater. I should try to _make_
plays much less than is the custom. In literature truth is always in
inverse proportion to the construction. I mean this: The comedies of
Molière are sometimes of a structure hardly adequate, while those of