Part 21 (1/2)
”No,” he returned after a pause and with that same air of unrelieved condescension, ”the short story is what I want to specialize in”
”Well,” I said tocub who certainly has talent, is croith it, and yet owing to the kind of thing he is starting out to do and the fact that life will give him slaps and to spare before he is ed I was like that e this type of work financially (which is the best way of all), ill?”
About a week later I was given another and stillsurprise, for one day, in his usual condescending ht to erly on ht read if I chose,” I believe The reading of these two stories gave h I had discovered a fully developed genius They were so truly new or different in their point of view, so very clear, incisive, brief, with so ht Man_) For by then having been struggling with the short-story probleazine offices before this, I had become not a little pessimistic as to the trend of A--the i it publishable once we had it My own experience with ”Sister Carrie” as well as the fierce opposition or chilling indifference which, as I saw, overtook all those who atteh to htly approxi the truth as one of the rankest and most criminal offenses possible One dared not ”talk out loud,” one dared not report life as it was, as one lived it And one of the pris I had received froer and a example of that American pseudo-morality which combines a pirate-like acquisitiveness with an inward and absolute conviction of righteousness--was that while he wanted so more virile and life-like than that ”azines, still (1), it eneral reader (!); and (2), be very coeneral reader would of course understand that word--a solid little pair ofeverything vital out of any good story
Still I did not despair; sohed, I hoped to be able to make , or, as the slang phrase went, ”slip a few over on hi, as you choose My dreaent kind of realism that would be true and yet within such liine, then, s, tales that I could not only adht to have an interest for all who knew even a little about life True, they were ironic, cruel, but still with humor and color, so deftly and cleanly told that they were s I called him and said as much, or nearly so--a --and bought theainst hope, to find many more such like them
By this time, by the way, and as I should have said before, I had still further enlarged my staff by one art director of the enius of sorts, volatile, restless, emotional, colorful, a veritable Verlaine-Baudelaire-Rops soul, who, not content to arrange and decorate the azine each month, must needs wish to write, paint, coe plays, as well as move in an upper social world, _entree_ to which was his by birth Again, there was by now an Irish-Catholic uished sectarian school, as ate_, as an e out the --”and I learned about Horace fro and youthful and pretty, if severe, example of the Wellesley-Mt
Holyoke-Bryn Mawr school of literary art and criticis intellectual maiden, who functioned as assistant editor and reader in an adjoining roo with the art-director, the makeup editor and an office boy This very valuable and in so me in proper contempt, I fear, for my rather loose and unliterary ways, was still, as I had suspected before e new and vital in fiction and every other phase of the scriptic art as any one well could be She was ever for culling, sorting, eli--repression carried to the N-th power At first L---- cordially hated her, calling her a ”simp,” a ”bluff,” a ”la-de-da,” and what not In addition to these there was a constantly swelling band of writers, artists, poets, critics, drea the hope of achieving their ends or aiinning to make our place a center It fairly swar, vivid, strident world
As for L----, all this being new to hiht be He responded to it al wonderful, international, enduring ht not be made to come of it He rapidly developed into one of theyouths I have ever enius for saying and doing irritable and disagreeable things, not only toheard of me before he met , with soht possibilities as an editor maybe, certainly with none as a writer or as one who could even suggest anything to writers I had helped him, but that was as it should be As for enius; ditto my makeup man
As for Miss E----, the Wellesley-Bryn Mawr-Mt Holyoke assistant, who froreed with enius really, he, as I have said, at first despised her
Later, by dint of exulting in his force, sincerity of purpose, his keen insight and all but braggart strength, she races, to install herself in his confidence and to convince him that she was not only an honest adreeable as a seed wild animal would be about any office
But above all he was affronted by M----, the publisher of the paper, concerning whohts of him The publisher, as L---- , rat-like financial ferret,” a ”financial stool-pigeon for some trust or other,” a ”shrewd, material little shopkeeper” This because M---- was accustomed to enter and force a conversation here and there, anxious of course to gather the full iies and enthusiass which L---- most resented in hi, his obvious attempt and wish not to convey it, his carefully-cut clothes, his car, his nu hianizations hich he was connected
M----'s idea, as he always said, was to spend and to live, only it wasn't He merely induced others so to do One of his customs (and it must have impressed L---- very much, innocent newcos announce his passing fro to another, within or without his own building, telephone”thrown in” on his line or barred out, wherever he happened to be at the moment and when, presumably, he was deep in one of those literary conferences or confidences with one eroup, for which he rapidly developed a passion
Another of his vanities was to have his automobile announced and he be almost forced into it by iiven, insisted that he es, wherever he chanced to be--club, restaurant, his hoht if necessary, to confer with hi was supposed to call a taxi and co
”God!” L---- once re has to be beholden to a thing like that for his weekly incoht to tap him with a feather-duster and kill him!”
But the manner in which L---- developed in this atazine becareat pleasure for me to associate with him outside office hours, and a curious and vivid companion he made He was so intensely avid of life, so intolerant of the old, of anything different to that which he personally desired or saw, that at ti at all for fear ofa rebuff or at least a caustic objection As I was very pleased to note, he had a passion for seeing, as all youth should have when it first coes, the new tunnels just then being co, the harbor and bay, Coney Island, the t and great railway terh, he reveled in different and even depressing neighborhoods--Eighth Avenue, for instance, about which he later wrote a story, and a very good one (”A Quiet Duet”); hell's Kitchen, that neighborhood that lies (or did), on the West Side of Manhattan, between Eighth and Tenth Avenues, Thirty-sixth and Forty-first Streets; Little Italy, the region below Delancey and north of Worth Street on the East Side; Chinatown; Washi+ngton Street (Syria in Ahth Streets, West Side All these and many more phases of New York's multiplex life took his full and restless attention Once he said to hth Avenue at two in thehim some rear teneo to bed in this town! I' will happen while I'm asleep and I won't see it!” That was exactly how he felt all the time, I am sure
And in those days he was most simple, a very Spartan of a boy He hadn't the least taste for drink, lived in a shth Avenue, I believe--and took his meals in those shabby little quick-lunch rooms where the characters were more important to him than the food (My hat--my hat is in my hand!) Intellectually he was so stern and ambitious that I all but stood in awe of and reverence before him Here, I said to e as he pleases In A this short tirees I picked up bits of his early deprivations and difficulties, if such they ht be called He had been a newspaper reporter, or had tried to be, in Kansas City, had worked in the college restaurant and laundry of the raduated, to help pay his way Afterward he had assisted the janitor of soreat skyscraper so to me, he in nowise emphasized these as youthful difficulties or”hard” Neither did he try to boastinglyat all--another wretched pose Frohout his youth he had been carried here and there by the iron worih he disliked to say anything at all, and yet describing her at tiht,” someone who had made marked sacrifices for hi ca baby under her shawl or cloak across the Mojave Desert, on foot a part of the way Apparently he did not knoho his father was, and he was not very much concerned to knohether she did or not His father had died, he said, when he was a baby Later his mother, then a cook in some railroad hotel in Texas, had sent him to school there Later still she had been a ”bawler out,” if you knohat that means, an employee of a loan shark and used by him to compel delinquent, albeit petty and pathetic, creditors to pay their dues or then and there, before all their felloorkers, be screamed at for their delinquency about the shop in which they worked! Later she becaent--God knohat--a kind of roughto this boy, her pet, no doubt her dreah school and to college, reht to pay his way Later still (at that very ti to come to New York to keep house for hireater freedoularly, as he confessed to me, and in later years I believe sent her a part of his earnings, which were to be saved by her for his later I found a very lovely story (”His Mother”), describing her and hi terms, a compound of the tender and the brutal in his own soul
The thing that always made me hope for the best was that at that time he was not at all concerned with the petty little _moralic_ and econo about his American world in one form and another Indeed he seemed to be entirely free of and even alien to the perfections of the huhtly so, in one ear and out the other He respected the virtues, but he knew of and reckoned with die antipathetic vices which gave the To him the thief was almost as i And, better still, he had not the least interest in An The A ahead” financially and socially was not part of hi, acceptable, to be interpreted if one had the skill; it was a great distinction to have the skill--worth endless pains to acquire it
But hoilling would the average American of his day have been, stuffed as he was and still is with book and picture drivel about artists and art, to accept L---- as anythingto assail the outer portals of the te, irritable soul, withrailroad brakeuage at tiht as to bar hireat fiction, great artistic conceptions, or the tehty!--that coarse youth, with darkish-brown hair parted at one side and corandiose barber; with those thick-soled and none too shapely brown shoes, that none too well-made store suit of clothes, that little round brown hat, arly, even insultingly, over one eye; that coarse frieze overcoat, still worn on cold spring days, its ”corners” back and front turned up by the da indifferently sat on; that brash corn-cob pipe and bag of cheap tobacco, extracted and lit at oddvibrant h with a chip on his shoulder looking for one to even so much as indicate that he is not all he should be! Positively, there was so brutal and yet cosmic (not comic) about him, his intellectual and art pretensions considered At times his waspishness and bravado palled even on ressive, too forceful, too intolerant, I said He should be softer
At other tiet by,” as he would have said I wanted to modify him a little--and yet I didn't--and I re little circu at tie skill to reduce what he conceived to be ht to be killed--like a fatheron an unruly son--but the mood soon passed and his literary ability azine was concerned, once it began to grow and attract attention he was for me its most important asset; not that he did so much directly as that he provided a definite standard tohich we all had to work Not incuriously, he iftly recognized for what he was by all who caazine In the first place, interested in his progress, I had seen to it that he was properly introduced wherever that was possible and of benefit to him, and later on, by sheer force of his rity, his dreaed to center about hi writers, artists, poets, playwrights, aspiring roup as I have ever seen Their points of rendezvous appeared to be those same shabby quick-lunches in back streets or even on the principal thoroughfares about Times Square, or they one, givingall this tiers, dancers, plays, stories being begun or under way, articles and essays contemplated; avid, if none too well financed frolics or boheht suppers here and there Money was by no means plentiful, and in consequence there was endless borrowing and ”paying up” a the un to note, and finally rather nervously, were ht in Bohemia if ever there was one, and she of Bryn Mawr-Wellesley standards My makeup editor, as well as various contributors who had since becoazine, were also following him up all the ti, and I was fairly well convinced by now that fro ”aware,” ”in touch with,” ”in sympathy with” many of the principal tendencies and undercurrents which roup was as valuable to ht well be It constituted a ”kitchen cabinet” of sorts and brought hundreds of interesting ideas to the surface, and from all directions Noould be a new and hitherto unheard-of tenor as to be brought fro Americans; a new sculptor or painter who had never been heard of in Areat actor, perhaps, or poet or writer I listened to any quantity of gossip in regard to new movements that were ready to burst upon the world, in sculpture, painting, the scriptic art About the whole group there was ly warm, youthful, full of dreams They were intensely informative and full of hope, and I used to look at them and wonder which one, if any, was destined to have his dreams realized
Of L---- however I never had the least doubt He began, it is true, to adopt rather more liberal tendencies, to wish always to be part and parcel of this gayety, this rushi+ng here and there; and he drank at ti art-director, who had no sense or reserve in matters material or artistic and as all for a bacchanalian career, cost what itroundly, apropos of so _home_ now!” He had a story he wanted to work on, an article to finish At the saree that if by a certain tih, they were still at a certain place, or a second or third, he would look them up