Chapter 5

The literary editor who signed my reviews for me was a youth of an independent turn of mind. He encouraged the expression in reviews of exactly what one thought; he liked an individual note in them; he had an enthusiasm for books of literary quality, somewhat to the neglect of other branches of the publishing business; he gathered about him a group of writers of a spirit kindred to his own; and he was rapidly moulding his department of his paper into a thing, perhaps a plaything, of life and colour.

But he lacked commercial tact. He wanted to make something like the English lighter literary journals. He offended the powers behind the man higher up. I saw him last on a Wednesday; he outlined his plans for the future. On Friday, I know he "made up" his paper. Saturday I looked for him, but he had gone from that place. There was in it a dried man of much hard experience of newspapers, who reigned in that youth's stead. The wrath of authority grinds with exceeding quickness.

This which I have written is history, as many excellent of mind know, and should be put into a book: for it reveals how close we came to having in this country a Literary Doings that could be read for pleasure. I continued to learn the business.

Sometimes reviewers are poets also. I know fifteen. Sometimes they are Irishmen. Sometimes both. I knew one who was one of those Celtic Poets. His name had all the colour of the late Irish literary movement. That is, after he became a man of letters; before that it was Bill Somethingorother. He was an earnest person, without humour (strange for an Irishman!), eloquent, very pronounced in his opinions; and he had never read anything at all (outside of Columbia University) before he was called to the literary profession. Later he went into politics, and became something at Washington. Some reviewers, again, are lexicographers. I know about a dozen of these, ranging in age from twenty-seven years to seventy. When they had finished writing the dictionary, they joined the army of the unemployed, and became reviewers. I am acquainted with one reviewer who has been everything, almost, under the sun--a husband, a father, and a householder; he has been successively a socialist, an aesthete, a Churchman, and a Roman Catholic. He is an eager student of the universe, a prodigiously energetic journalist, a lively and a humorous writer, a person of marked talent. He will be thirty shortly.

Sometimes reviews are charmingly written by veteran literary men, such as, for instance, Mr. Le Gallienne, and Mr. Huneker. Dr. Perry mentions among reviewers a group of seasoned bookmen, including Mr. Paul Elmer More and Professor Frank Mather, Jr. Mr. Boynton is another sound workman. On the other hand, by some papers, books are economically given out for review to reporters. And again (for the same reason), to editorial writers and to various editors. In America, you know, practically everybody connected with a newspaper is an editor. The man who sits all day in his shirt sleeves smoking a corncob pipe, clipping up with large scissors vast piles of newspapers, is exchange editor. There was a paper for which I worked from morn till dewy eve, reviewing hooks, where we used to say that we had an elevator editor and a scrub editor, and a nice charwoman she was.

Reviewers of course frequently differ widely in their conceptions of a book. I said one time of a book of Lady Gregory's that it was a highly amusing affair; and I gave numerous excerpts in support of my statement. I had enjoyed the book greatly. It was delightful, I thought. It was then a bit of a jolt to me to read a lengthy article by another reviewer of the same book, who set forth that Lady Gregory was an extremely serious person, with never a smile, and who gave copious evidence of this point in quotations. Each of us made out a perfectly good case.

Now suppose you read in the New York _This_, a daily paper, that Such-and-Such a book was the best thing of its kind since Adam. And suppose you found the same opinion to be that of the New York _Weekly That_ and of the New York _Weekly Other_. Notwithstanding that the New York Something-Else declared that this was the rottenest hook that ever came from the press, you would be inclined to accept the conclusion of the majority of critics, would you not? Well, I'll tell you this: the man who "does" the fiction week by week for the New York _This_ and for _The That_ and for _The Other_, is one and the same industrious person. I know him well. He has a large family to support (which is continually out of shoes) and his wife just presented him with a new set of twins the other day. He is now trying to add the job on _The Something-Else_ to his list.

Let us farther suppose that you are a magazine editor. You wrote this Such-and-Such book yourself. You are a very disagreeable person (we will imagine). You rejected three of my stories about my experiences as a vagabond. Farthermore, when I remonstrated with you about this over the telephone, you told me that you were very busy. When your book came out I happened to review it for three papers. I tried to do it justice although I didn't think much of the book, or of anything else that you ever did.

Now, reflecting upon the vast frailty of human nature, and considering the power of the reviewer to exercise petty personal pique, I think there is little dishonesty of this nature in reviews. The prejudice is the other way round, in "log rolling," as it is called, among little cliques of friends. Though I have known more than one case more or less like that of a reviewer man, otherwise fairly well balanced, who had a rabid antipathy to the work of Havelock Ellis. Whenever he got hold of a book of Havelock Ellis's he became blind and livid with rage.

In the period when I was a free lance reviewer, I used to review generally only books that I was particularly interested in, books on subjects with which I was familiar, books by authors whom I knew all about. And in writing my reviews I used to wait now and then for an idea. Those were happy, innocent, amateur days. That is: when my thoughts got stalled I would throw myself on a couch for a bit, or I would look out at my window, or I took a turn about Gramercy Park for a breath of air. Reviews sometimes had to be in by the following day, or, so my editor would declare to me with much vigour over the telephone, the paper would go to smash; and then he would hold them in type for three weeks. But they rarely had to be done within a couple of hours or less.

In the course of time I got down to brass tacks; I took a staff position, a desk job. It was up to me to review everything going, in a steady ceaseless grind. I began work at half past nine in the morning. When I was commuting I began earlier, taking up a book on the train. Between nine thirty and a quarter to eleven I did a book, say, on the extermination of the house-fly; from then until lunch time, three hundred words on a very pleasant novel called, for instance, "Roast Beef, Medium"; in the afternoon, three-quarters of a column on a "History of the American Negro"; winding up the day, perhaps, with a lively article about a popular book on "Submarine Diving and Light Houses"; and taking home at night the "Note Books of Samuel Butler." I began the morrow, very likely, with an "omnibus article" lumping together five books on the Panama Canal. And then, as the publishers of the latest book on art had turned in a double-column hundred-agate-line "ad" the week before, it was necessary to do something serious "for" that masterpiece. I reviewed a dictionary and a couple of cookery books. At the holiday season I polished off a jumble of Christmas and New Year's cards, a pile of picture calendars, and a table full of "juveniles." Woman suffrage, alcoholism, New Thought, socialism, minor poetry, big game hunting, militarism, athletics, architecture, eugenics, industry, European travel, education, eroticism, red blood fiction, humour, uplift books, white slavery, nature study, aviation, bygone kings (and their mistresses), statesmen, scientists, poverty, disease, and crime, I had always with me. I became a slightly bald reviewer.

Books of theology and of philosophy were given out to a theologian; books concerning the dramatic art were done by the dramatic critic; and those on music went to the music critic. We had an occasional letter from Paris on current French literature.

In addition to writing (for I was an editor), I read the "literary" galley proofs; "made up" once a week down in the composing room late at night; compiled the feature variously called in different papers _Books Received_, _Books of the Week_, or _The Newest Books_; and got out the correspondence of the literary department--with publishers and with fools who write in about things. I also went over the foreign exchange, that is: clipped literary notes out of foreign papers. Once a month I surveyed the current magazines. I worked in the office on every holiday of the year except Christmas and New Year's, and frequently on Sundays at home.

With a view to attracting the intellectual elite to a profession where this class is needed, I will tell you what I got for this. It should be understood, however, that I was with one of the great papers, which paid a scale of generous salaries. Mine was forty dollars a week. That is a good deal of money for a literary man to earn regularly. But--

I did, indeed, have an assistant in this office; there was a person associated with me who took the responsibility of everything in the department that was excellent. That is, I was "assistant literary editor." Few newspapers can afford to employ a chief solely for each department. It is recognised that the work of the literary editor can be economically combined with that of the dramatic editor, or with that of the art critic; or the art critic runs the Saturday supplement, or some such thing. My chief looked in every day or so, and frequently, perhaps in striving for exact honesty I should say regularly, contributed reviews. He directed the policy of the department, subject, of course, to criticism from "down stairs."

But (as I was about to say above) that regular income is very uncertain. Universities cultivate a sense of security in their professors, in order to obtain loyal service and lofty endeavour. The editorial tenure, as all men know, is a house of sand--a summer's breeze, a wash of the tide, and the editor is a refugee. I know the editor of literary pages that go far and wide, who has held down that job now for over a year. That man is troubled: none has ever stood in his shoes for much longer than that.

"Don't fool yourself," I heard a successful young journalist say the other day to a very conscientious young reviewer. "Good work won't get you anything. Play politics, office politics all the while." Doubtless sound advice, this, for any gainful employment.

Now about that prime department of the press called the business office. Many people firmly believe that all book reviews--and dramatic criticisms and editorials--are bought by "the interests." One of the principal librarians of New York holds this view of reviews. I never knew a reviewer who was bound to tell anything but the truth as he saw it. Nor have I ever written in any review a word that I knew to be false; and I believe that few reviewers do. Because, however, this or that publishing house was "a friend of ours," or because the husband of this author used to work for the paper (pure sentiment!), or that one is a friend of the wife of The Editor (caution!), it has been suggested to me by my chief that I "go easy" with certain books.

The good reviewer does go easy with most books. It is a mark of his excellence as a reviewer that he has a catholic taste, that he sees that books are written to many standards, and that every book, almost, is meet for some. It is not his business to break things on the wheel; but to introduce the book before him to its proper audience; always recognising, of course, sometimes with pleasant subtle irony, its limitations. It is only when a book pretends to be what it is not, that he damns it. All that is not business, but sensible, sensitive criticism.

To return. The business office exerts not a direct but a moral influence, so to put it, upon the literary department. Business tact must be recognised. A hostile review already in type and in the plan of the next issue may be "killed" when a large "ad" announcing books brought out by the publisher of this one so treated comes in for the next paper; and then search is made for a book from the same publisher which may be favourably reviewed. Or a hostile review may be held over until a time more politic for its release, say following several enthusiastic reviews. And there is no sense in noticing in one issue a disproportionate number of books published by one house.

In concluding my discussion I will draw two portraits of professional reviewers, one composite of a class, the other a picture of a man who stands at the top of his profession.

Seated at his desk is a little man with a pointed beard and a large bald spot on top of his head. This man has been all his life a literary hack. He has read manuscript for publishing houses; he has novelised popular plays for ha-penny papers, and dramatised trashy novels for cheap producers; he has done routine chore writing in magazine offices, made translations for pirate publishers, and picked up an odd sum now and then by a "Sunday story." He has always been an anonymous writer. He has never had sufficient intellectual character to do anything well. The downward side of middle age finds him afflicted with various physical ailments, entirely dependent upon a precarious position at a moderate salary, without influential friends, completely disillusioned, with a mediocre mind now much fagged, devoid of high ambition, and with a most unstimulating prospect before him. His attitude toward the business of book reviewing is that he wishes he had gone into the tailor business or that his father had left him a grocery store. He would not have succeeded, however, as either a tailor or a grocer, as he has even less business than literary ability. Farther, he regards himself as a gentleman, and books strike him as being more gentlemanly than trade. He has got along as well as he has, by bluff about his extensive acquaintance with literature, and his long experience in writing and publishing.

This type of reviewing man says that he does the thing "mechanically." About the new crop of juvenile books, let us say, he says the same thing again now that he said four years ago. "One idea every other paragraph," is his principle, and he thinks it sufficient in a review. Sufficient, that is, to "get by." And whatever gets by, in his view, "pleases them just as well as anything else." Our friend of this character has a considerable number of stock remarks which may at any time be written very rapidly. One of these sentences is: "This book furnishes capital reading;" another says that this book "is welcome;" and he holds as a general principle that, "the reviewer who reads the book is lost."

Occasionally, very occasionally, there is found among reviewers the type of old-fashioned person who used to be called a "man of letters." This is a wild dream, but it would be a grand thing for American reviewing if every one of our young reviewers could have for an hour each week the moral benefit of the society of such a man. I know one who now has been active in New York literary journalism for something like thirty years--a fine intellectual figure of a man. He makes his living out of this, indeed, but his interest is in the thing itself, in literature. He has all that one really needs in the world, he has the esteem of the most estimable people, and he follows with unceasing pleasure a delightful occupation. He is as keen to-day, he declares, on the "right way of putting three words together" as he was when he began to write. His mellow, witty, and gentlemanly style is saturated with the sounds, scents and colours of literature. The exercise of his cultivated judgment is not a trade, but a sacred trust. To look at him and to think of his admirable career is to realise the dignity of his calling--discussing with authority the books of the world as they come from the press.

VI

LITERARY LEVITIES IN LONDOW

Now it's a funny thing, that, come to think of it. Some folks have questioned whether, the other way round, it could be done in this country at all. It's a pleasant view anyhow that the matter presents of that curious affair the English character.

There is a notion knocking about over here that considerable rigmarole is required to meet an Englishman. And very probably few who have tried it would dispute that it is somewhat difficult to "meet" an ordinary Englishman to whom you are not known in a railway carriage. With the big 'uns, however, the business appears to be simple enough. Foolish doings do clutter up one's luggage with letters of introduction when all that is needed to board round with the most celebrated people in England is a glance at a "Who's Who" in a public library to get addresses.

For the purpose of convenience the writer of these souvenirs will refer to himself as "I" and "me." I was all done up in health and was advised by doctors to clear out at once. So I bought a steamship ticket, packed a kit bag, crossed the water and took a couple of strolls about that island over there; when, feeling fitter, I turned up in London for a look about.

It sort of came over me that in my haste of departure I had neglected to bring any of my friends along, or to equip myself with the means of making others here. I was unarmed, so to say--a "Yank" in an obviously hostile country. This, you see, was before the war, before we and Britain had got so genuinely sweet on one another.

At that time I had two acquaintances resident in London. One, a Bostonian, whose attention was quite occupied with a new addition to his family; the other was the errand man stationed before my place of abode. He was an amiable soul, whose companionable nature, worldly wisdom and topographical knowledge I much appreciated. He instructed me in the culinary subject of "bubble and squeak" and many other learned matters; but unfortunately his social connections were limited to one class.

One time not a great while back I happened to review in succession for a New York paper several books by Hilaire Belloc. Mr. Belloc had written me a note thanking me for these reviews. I decided to write Mr. Belloc that I was in London and to ask if he could spare a moment for me to look at him, Mr. Belloc being one of my literary passions.

Then an ambitious idea popped into my head. I determined to write the same request to all the people in England I had ever reviewed. Reviewing, mostly anonymous, had been my business for several years, with other literary chores on the side. I communicated to Mr. Chesterton the fact that I had come over to look about, told him my belief that he was one of the noblest and most interesting monuments in England, and asked him if he supposed that he could be "viewed" by me, at some street corner, say, at a time appointed, as he rumbled past in his triumphal car.

Writing to famous people that you don't know is somewhat like the drink habit. It is easy to begin; it is pleasurably stimulating; it soon fastens itself upon you to the extent that it is exceedingly difficult to stop indulgence and it leads you straight to excess. I wound up, I think, with Hugh Walpole. I had liked that "Fortitude" thing very much.

My Englishised Boston friend--he's the worst Englishman I saw over there--simply threw up his hands. He groaned and fell into a chair.

"Holy cat!" he cried, or English words to that effect, "you can't come over here and do that way. It's not done," he declared. "You can't meet Englishmen in that fashion. These people will think you are a wild, bounding red Indian. They'll all go out of town until you leave the country."

Well, I saw it was awfully bad. I have disgraced the U.S.A. That's what comes of having crude notions about meeting people. I felt pretty cheap. I felt sorry for my friend too, because he had to stay there where he lived and try to hold his head up while I could slink off back home. My friend pointed out to me that Mr. Chesterton and the other gentlemen had only my word for it that I had any connection with literature, and that as far as they were aware I might be the worst kind of crook, and at the very best was in all likelihood a very great bore.

Annie, the maid at my lodgings, handed me a bunch of mail. Mr. Belloc was particularly eager to see me, he said. He gave me an intimate two page account of his movements for the past couple of weeks or so. He had just been out to sea in his boat, the _Nona_, and had only got back after a good deal of difficulty outside; this he hoped would account for the delay of a day or so in his reply.

During the Whitsun days he had to travel about England to see his children at their various schools, and after that he had to go to settle again about his boat, where she lay in a Welsh port. Then he must speak at Eton. He would be "available," however, at the beginning of the next week, when he hoped I would "take a meal" with him. Perhaps he could be of some use in acquainting me with England; it would be such a pleasure to meet me, and so on. Very nice attitude for a man so slightly acquainted with one.

Mr. Chesterton wished to thank me for my letter and to say that he would be pleased if I cared to come down to spend an afternoon with him at Beaconsfield. Mr. Walpole apologised very greatly for seeming so curtly inhospitable, but he was only in London for a short time and had difficulty in squeezing his engagements in. This week, too, was infernally complicated by Ascot. But couldn't I come round on Monday to lunch with him at his club?

Mr. Chesterton is a grand man. Smokes excellent cigars. But first, as you come up the hill, from the railway station toward the old part of the village and to the little house Overroads, you enter, as like as not, as I did, a gate set in a pleasant hedge, and you knock at a side door, to the mirth later of Mrs. Chesterton.

This agreeable entrance is that for tradesmen. The way you should have gone in is round somewhere on another road. A maid admits you to a small parlour and in a moment Mrs. Chesterton comes in to inquire if you have an appointment with her husband. She always speaks of Mr. Chesterton as "my husband." It develops that the letter you sent fixing the appointment got balled up in some way. It further develops that a good many things connected with Mr. Chesterton's life and house get balled up. Mrs. Chesterton's line seems to be to keep things about a chaotic husband as straight as possible.

Mr. Chesterton is a very fat man. His portraits, I think, hardly do him sufficient honour in this respect. He has a remarkably red face. And a smallish moustache, lightish in colour against this background. His expression is extraordinarily innocent; he looks like a monstrous infant. A tumbled mane tops him off. He sits in his parlour in a very small chair.

Did I write him when I was coming? Wonder what became of the letter? Doesn't remember it. Perhaps it is in his dressing gown. Has a habit of sticking things that interest him into the pocket of his dressing gown. Where, do you suppose, is his dressing gown? However, no matter. "Have a cigar. Do have a cigar. Wonder where my cigars are! Where are my cigars?" Mrs. Chesterton locates them.