PART THREE
AFTER THIS I DRIFTED INTO THE SPHERE OF influence of New York as inevitably as a soapsud in an emptying bath drifts towards a plughole. The attraction of that city lies in the fact that, for me, she is the expression of hope. She is the expression of the hope of all humanity. And she is the negation of the thing I hate most—of nationality. New York is not America, because she is the expression of an ideal vaster and more humane. There has been nothing more disastrous for humanity than the conception of nationality. For the sense of race something may be said. But that men living on one side of an imaginary line called a “frontier” should automatically hate people born on the other side of that line is a conception of madness—of the madness that the gods send to people whom they are about to destroy. I was crossing the Rhine at Kehl the other day. On one side of an invisible line the ripples in the water, the fish, the reeds are French—on the other echt Deutsch. It was as curious to remember that as to recollect that in a certain township in Indiana a committee of people called Staubenheim, Racockski and Svendsen are engaged in teaching people called Adams and Whittier … to be American! The Americanisation committee at least is dignified by the one set of names, the list of raw material on which they work contains the others. A certain race-consciousness on the other hand may benefit the individual and help the state. If you can be sure that you are pure-blooded Pole, Jew, Gaul or Anglo-Saxon, you may realise your limitations and try to modify your race-exaggerations, so that you may live in peace with the Franco-Italian-BohemianSlav hybrids that live round you. You may even be conscious of ancient roots, traditions and histories of which to be proud so that, not to shame them, you may become a better and no narrower citizen of a conglomerate land.
For myself I am of such a mixed blood that I have no race-consciousness to help me, and I have as little national consciousness. Only one thing will arouse any national or race feeling in me. It is to hear one national express hatred for another nation. If I hear a Frenchman express contempt, say, for American art, I find myself become excitedly American of New York. Or if an Englishman by his bearing implies contempt for either of the other two nations I go, as the saying is, completely off the handle. Still more, whilst an American is abusing France I shall for that moment find myself actually French, or if the Frenchman abuses England I shall find myself defending my compatriots with a passion of which few indeed of them will be capable. I suppose the only body of men for whom I have anything approaching a settled dislike are the subjects of Mr. Hitler—if it be not the subjects of Mr. Mussolini. And that is because it is impossible not to believe that both nations have designs on France, and one at least against the peace of Poland. Yet if I hear a Frenchman or a Pole uttering diatribes against either nation, I cannot avoid pointing out the terrible nature of the Prussian’s necessities in his dreary and infertile landscape as I point out the glorious traditions of the Italian.
This is in the main because I have a hatred for hatred—the most maiming of all the passions. Murder, back-bite, rob, torture if you will. These are normal human occupations, and may be conducted without loss of self-respect. But to hate is not only to lose your sense of proportion, but to become a monomaniac. It is to curtail your powers. To combat a man or a rat you must understand the nature of the individual or the rodent. Great generals win battles because they know instinctively what is going on in the minds of the commanders opposed to them, never because of hatred! Prussia lost the late war because she completely misunderstood what was passing in the minds of her opponents, and she has handicapped herself for a generation in even the unnamed contest between nations that will for long obtain because she has not understood that though Christendom is vague in its boundaries, yet by the tradition of centuries and the gradual growth of a conscience, a little sense of chivalry has arisen in us. It is centuries since—with deference to a certain club and to the British and American customs services—it is centuries since a civilised body of human beings burned a book. This is because a book is a living thing, and to burn a book whilst taking credit for not murdering the author, is to put yourself outside civilisation. If you burn the author you earn at least some respect for having the courage of your convictions. It is to be reminded once more of Louvain! And what have you done when you have wreaked your hate? … For myself I believe I can say that I never hated a human being in my life—for more than half a day. That is what makes a novelist. He is a person who must not side with his characters, so, in his life, he must not side with himself. Nor even with his own side. He is, therefore, the only person who is fit to rule our world. Or to put it more acceptably: it is only the statesman with the gifts of the true novelist who could teach this world how bearably to run itself. That was proved nineteen hundred years ago. Since then we have not got much further.
I permit myself this little excursion into the field of the moralist, which is one I seldom tread. I have lived a long time and thought constantly about these matters. And I have seen, gradually—at least the Western World veering towards that point of view. So one day these words may find themselves preach ing to the converted.
New York, when I reached there in 1924, seemed more than half-way towards that ideal. I had on landing no sense of crossing a frontier, though I am sensitive to these things, so that if I cross the bridge into Brooklyn I feel myself very sensibly in the foreign. There are, of course, customs and emigration authorities like beads on a string behind the Lady who stands with uplifted torch. But these amiable people—they have never treated me at least with anything but paternal kindness—these people so completely defeat the purpose for which they exist, that they might just as well not be there. For they are there presumably to keep out the undesirable. But the undesirable will always get in by means of forged papers, whereas the desirable are always inconvenienced, and are not infrequently excluded. It is, for instance, obviously better for a state to contain, say, truthful polygamists than lying ones. Yet by the present systems a lying polygamist has only got to deny that he is one and in he will go. Before the polygamist who does not lie there will stand the angel with the flaming sword. But if you know that a man is a polygamist—or a woman a polyandrist—you can always watch them and prevent their obtaining more than their share of life partners. As for smuggling….
I only twice in innumerable crossings smuggled anything. It seemed easy to do—the trouble coming afterwards. In each case the crime was an act of benevolence, by which I in no way profited. In the first place I was taken in hand by a bevy of young things who knew that side of the world far better than I. They insisted that I must smuggle various embroidered articles of attire. I refused to be a party to breaking the law of any country not my own. But at last they forced me to give them the keys of my cabin and my trunks. I had no difficulty in getting through the customs, but the trouble came then. The young people had scattered to cities distant from New York and from each other. They ordered me to forward whatever I found not belonging to me in my trunks. It cost me several weeks of correspondence and forwarding and re-forwarding of parcels. I did not know the English or French names of most of these articles of attire—and as for the American! …
The second occasion was less reprehensible, but more expensive. A dignitary of the Anglican Episcopalian Church being sick, asked me to bring him a couple of bottles of Courvoisier, 1860. It was a perfectly proper proceeding on his part, for the consumption was authorised by his doctor, the alcohol supplied by the State aggravating his complaint. I arrived in New York with the two bottles, and at once set off for Park Avenue with one of them. I had to pay a call on the way, and left the bottle in the first taxi. I then decided that I was not fit to be trusted with the remaining bottle, so I asked the bishop’s daughter to come and fetch it. And she left it in a taxi.
I had then to buy two other bottles—which I made the bootlegger deliver, and Courvoisier, 1860, being rare in Manhattan, it taught me a lesson. But as I imagine I should do exactly the same once more if I were asked, I suppose the lesson not to have much profited me.
At any rate I set foot in New York just before the Democratic Convention, without any more strangeness of feeling than if I had just been going round the corner anywhere to buy a packet of cigarettes. It is possible that the perturbation of mind in which I found myself obscured my powers of observation, but I do not think so. I have never found New York strange…. And to me she seems singularly un changing. That is because the lines of the streets are never altered, and I do not walk with my nose in the air looking at the skylines. So that in New York I feel safe. The moment I set foot on the ground from a steamer gangway tranquillity descends on me. Paris a little frightens and London saddens me intensely. But little old New York I imagine will go on being—ah, how much too good for me to the end of the chapter! … What wouldn’t I give to be crossing Sheridan Square at this moment! Yet, if I look over my shoulder I shall see through the leaves of an olive tree red sails on the Mediterranean. The other day the editor of the magazine that asked Mr. Joyce to write an article on how it feels to be going blind asked me to write one on how it feels to be an expatriate…. Pretty bad! I shall, when I have finished writing this, eat food such as appears on few New York tables and drink wine that few but New York millionaires could procure…. But I would give all I shall have here for a glass of hot milk at a tiny cafeteria beside a filling station on Lower Sixth Avenue, with the bootleggers’ lorries thundering by, after one at night, between an Estonian Jew and a Magyar veterinary surgeon…. Poor modest dreams!
Certainly my perturbations were sufficient to obscure boundaries for me. They formed a double tragedy—that of the review and that of poor Quinn. In the British Museum there are the wonderful clay bas-reliefs of Sardanapalus hunting. One of the marvellous little clay cameos shows a lion dying with its spine above the hips pierced by an arrow of the King’s. In his last months Quinn was like that lion. He had the sense of power, and power was leaving him. His threats were like the roaring of a lion, but they no longer had the power to terrify.
As against that there was the tragedy of the review. To see a review die is as painful as to have an intimate friend die under your eyes. It is a very similar process. They grow weaker and weaker. People rush round the bedside; they rush away to find nostrums; to find infallible physicians. They rush in and say they have found the never-failing nostrum, the infallible leech. All the while the man and the periodical die….
I had rushed to New York like that …. to find the infallible nostrum. The infallible nostrum would have been some way of really managing the business affairs of that undertaking. From the beginning they had been in a state of pie…. Printer’s pi.
On the face of it there was no reason why the review should not have paid its way. The price of production was ludicrously small, distribution cost almost nothing, subscribers were not difficult to get and really first-class contributors easy. But the business arrangements were impossible to handle. One had three markets. But two of them were barred by fantastic barbed-wire entanglements. In England things went quite smoothly. After we had got the copies printed and bound an English forwarding agency would pick them up. The House of Duckworth distributed them—without enthusiasm. But they distributed smoothly, efficiently and satisfactorily. They even lent us money to run the review with whilst I went to America. Surely no publishers could have shown greater love!
Indeed, the poor review was very largely financed by Duckworth. That is to say that I had put into it all the money earned in England by the first instalment of my large work. Curiously enough, the first instalment sold, as the saying is, like hot cakes, in England, whereas the second and subsequent volumes fell absolutely dead. I presume the English reader took the first volume for light comedy, and with the second discovered that I was in deadly earnest. I can think of no other reason. The English Press received all alike with rapture that, since the death of Lord Northcliffe, it has always exhibited over my work. For certainly, if I had any grudge against the country of my birth, it would not be against the Press or, really, against the publishers. It is professional to call them names, but I only know of one publisher who ever treated me dishonestly, and he makes up in literary intelligence what the others supply in an honesty that lacks æsthetic sense.
In America, on the other hand, the first volume of my work sold relatively very little. It got through, however, three editions—for which I received three hundred dollars, that too disappearing into the coffers of the review. The second volume, however—I suppose the American reader had by that time made up his mind that I was in deadly earnest—sold in New York an amazing number of copies. It came too late to help the review….
I have already said that Mr. Quinn and his lawyer had undertaken to relieve me of all American and French business affairs. Alas! … One evening, whilst Mr. Quinn was still in Paris, I returned home to my pavilion and in that small room shining in the light of candles I found Mr. Horace Liveright. Mr. Liveright was—and I daresay is—so darkly handsome that, when his presence radiates upon me, I always hear the strains of Mendelssohn on the air. Even when I merely think of him here I smell orange blossoms. Of course, my orange trees are only a few yards away. But he suggests to me the perpetual bridegroom, and it is a great pity that he has gone out of publishing.
He was sitting there, waiting to tell me that he was ready to take over the publication of the review and even, if necessary, to put a little money in it…. It was as if Apollo had descended into a poet’s garret!
I ran right over Paris to find Mr. Quinn. But Mr. Quinn objected.
I protested that Mr. Liveright was an extraordinarily capable and energetic publisher, publishing exactly the type of work that the review was to promote. It would make a sort of nucleus. Nothing is better than a sort of nucleus. An able and energetic publisher who can really sell good work is of infinite service to literature. He brings good work into the limelight usually reserved for commercial fiction, and he proves to other publishers that good work can be made to sell.
But Mr. Quinn still objected.
I have never discovered why I was the only honest man in the black world of Mr. Quinn and Ezra. I seemed to move amongst dark abysses, like the child in Swiss pictures. In a white nightgown, in a single beam of white light! Above me hovered those two, whispering guidance amidst the gloom….
Then, soon, I was in New York, at the National Arts Club, taking tea every afternoon between Mr. William Allen White and Miss Mary Austin, who told me, the one, all about the Democratic Convention, and the other all about the American Indian. I all the time was wondering what was the matter with the American business side of the review. It had an American publisher of Mr. Quinn’s appointment. Mr. Quinn, however, was too ill to see me. At the same time, he did not wish me to call on the publisher before himself seeing me. I had not had any accounts of the American sales of the review; neither, apparently, had Mr. Quinn. As American editor Mrs. Foster had a room in the publisher’s office, but beyond reports of the conversation of a lady accountant of that firm, she too could give me no definite information. In moments of elation the lady accountant would talk of sales and subscriptions that would have made us all permanently rich. When sad, she declared that the cost of carting to the office the copies which we delivered to Twenty-Third Street docks was ruining the publisher.
It was sad to think that those poor copies that at the cost of such desperate labours we in Paris succeeded in getting on time to New York should have ruined anybody. I could myself have piled them all into a couple of taxis and have delivered them at that office for $2.50. But carting in New York was expensive, as we were to discover when we at last got the imaginative accounts.
No one could have any idea of the labour it cost me to get those copies there. The printer was fairly punctual. He would deliver them to the binder. I would sit at the binder’s while they were being bound. I would go to the emballeur and see them packed in cases, then I would sit on the tail of the wagon and see them delivered to the special train that was to take them to the Paris or the Ile de France at Havre…. At Havre they would miss the boat. All that in addition to reading the manuscripts, seeing the review through the press, because at those times my sub-editors always resigned—and writing, writing, day and night to get enough money to pay the contributors with. Heaven knows what in that day I didn’t write—articles for the most unknown papers as long as they only paid. For one I wrote whole weekly showers of reminiscences, travel pictures, wise cracks. Thousands of words a week. That just paid Miss Reid’s wages…. There were, I can assure you, some hair-raising Saturday afternoons. Then that paper shut down on me. The Editor said that he could not stand the way I always came out second-best in all my stories. He said his public could not stand it. It is the legitimate pride of the American that he always comes out top-dog. If he does not he says he does…. I said he could never have heard of the pride that apes humility. So I think I scared him off….
It was, of course, none of my business to go to the printers, buyers, packers and forwarding agents. By rights Me L—— should have done it. Mr. Quinn had said that Me L—— would take all the business affairs off my hands. Alas: what Me L—— had done had been to attend to the formation of Mr. Quinn’s limited liability company. That arduous undertaking took up all the rest of my time. It was not finished when the review expired. Day after day and day after day seven good men and true of us would file into that beautifully-appointed office with the heavy curtains, the Wingless Victory and the carnations in a vase on the perfectly beautiful ormolu table. Behind it would be Me L—— with his perfectly elegant figure, perfectly manicured hands, perfectly, perfectly fitting clothes and perfectly implacable manner. We seven would sit around him with the airs of shabby conspirators and he would lecture us on our duties. There would be Mr. Bird, Mr. Pound, the conscientious objector, myself and any three other people we could pick up in the street: Me L—— would become furious over the fact that here was a company being formed in France without a Frenchman on its board. But I would have taken a Frenchman if I could have got one…. A Frenchman! … I would have taken a Cochin-Chinese! Every time anybody fell out we had to begin the formation of the company all over again and just before every meeting broke up Me L—— would inform us that we all risked going to prison for life if so much as a comma in the prospectus was misplaced. The French people very properly do not want anybody to do business in their fertile land. The French people are peasants and prose-writers. They regard all business men as swindlers: so shareholders must be so protected against directors that no director can do any business. In this case Quinn and myself were the only real directors. We were also the only shareholders. So we had to be protected against ourselves.
One day everything really appeared to be fixed up, thanks to Mr. Robert Rodes, by then fiancé of Miss Reid. This astoundingly energetic young man with the aspect of a rifle bullet romantically manufactured powder puffs in an old, old house in an old, old street near the Comédie Française, and, once engaged to Miss Reid, he just took me under his arm and made things move. His rooms were like the oldest apartments in Greenwich Village and all hung over with extravagantly romantic lambskins on strings. He knew all French law, all English law, and all the laws of all the 49 States, and he could get round all of them. Such bright beings are not really meant to bless mankind, and all too soon Mr. Rodes married Miss Reid and carried her off to Stamford, Conn., there to manufacture stove-pipe elbows.
In the meantime we had our company. The prospectus occupied forty pages in the Journal Officiel, and we had to pay for them. Mr. Bird printed the most beautiful share certificates that can ever have been printed, and we didn’t have to pay for them. They were on vellum in the most beautiful and most minute type to be imagined. The whole forty pages had to go on them. I even sold four at a thousand francs apiece—to Miss Barney, Miss Gertrude Stein, a lady whose name I cannot call to mind, and the Duchesse de Clermont-Tonnerre. I thus became a financier, and those ladies had the right to be protected from me by all the rigour of French Law.
Alas! suddenly there came a thunderbolt from Me L——. His clerk had used the wrong formula for that prospectus, and he warned us that we all ran the risk of imprisonment for life if we went on publishing the review…. So that was how Mr. Quinn’s representative managed our business affairs in Paris….
I was never to know what had happened in New York. After many days of waiting I saw Mr. Quinn once. It was awe-inspiring to go into his shrouded apartment, where there were the Picassos and Seurats and Brzeskas and the dim African blacknesses with, hanging over them all, the sense of the hastening doom of their owner. But Mr. Quinn was in no condition to talk about the business of the review. He was gentle and almost apologetic. He confessed that the publisher had been too much for him. Apparently to him too the publisher had reflected the moods of his temperamental accountant. When he had been feeling good the sales had seemed to him more than satisfactory and the subscriptions unprecedented for a periodical of the sort. When depressed he had seen himself being ruined by the enterprise.
By the time he had told me that much poor Quinn was too tired to say any more about business. He went on for a short time to talk in a whisper about Jack Yeats and W. B. and George Moore and A. E. and Mr. Joyce…. He said I should see him again soon, when he was better able to talk about things….
I went back to the National Arts Club and began once more furiously writing articles to keep the review going. A New York paper—I think the old Evening Post—had got to hear of my existence. I found as secretary in the Club a young woman from Seattle. She was as amazing as Mr. Rodes and afterwards of the greatest service to me, even when she had become the dictatress of the shoe and leather trade. At the moment I dictated articles on literary-criticism to her in the mornings, and Mr. William Allen White dictated his dispatches about the Democratic Congress in the afternoon. Mr. White took me to a sitting of the Congress. His dispatches were said to render it to the life—so what the inside of that young lady’s head can have been like it is difficult to imagine. I was at that time writing rather fluidly.
Miss Kerr’s successor had the laugh of me—or I of her—next year. I was living in one of those rambling, old, gloomy apartments in West Sixteenth Street that I so love. Miss Kerr had found it for me. It had a lot of rather rude, very early Colonial furniture, and some fine prints of birds and flowers. After I had been there three months, with Miss Caroline Gordon as my secretary, I decided that I must give a large tea-party. I had given tea to one, two, or three Thursday guests at a time, and Miss Gordon had made tea on a gas-ring in one of the two parlours. But I wanted to have fifty or sixty people, and I thought it would be better if the tea was made in one of the other rooms. So I sent Miss Gordon to ask the janitrix if she could not lend me an electric kettle or at least a spirit lamp. The janitrix said, “Why doesn’t Mr. F—— use his kitchen?” The front door, which I always used, opened into the larger parlour. To the left was a door going into a passage that I had never explored. In the passage was a kitchen! … Miss Gordon said:
“Imagine a man who is in an apartment for six months and does not know that it has a kitchen!”
I said:
“Imagine a young lady who makes tea every day for three months on a gas-ring in a parlour and does not know she is in command of a perfectly-appointed kitchen!”
… During that tea-party a representative of the chief transpontine newspaper tried to interview me. I pointed out that I had a tea-party on, and that I was also packing my trunks to go to Chicago. He said that did not matter to him, but I pointed out that it did to me. He went away—and wrote an interview with me. It ended:
“Mr. F—— is one of the most ill-favoured men I have ever seen. But he has a kind smile.”
One day while I was dictating there came a thundering knock on the door. Mr. Edgar Lee Masters burst in. He said:
“Have you any postage stamps?”
Miss Gordon and I exclaimed simultaneously that we had none.
He said:
“Why haven’t you any postage stamps? You ought to have postage stamps!” and slammed the door.
He must have taken me for the janitor. I suppose I ought to have replied:
“I have no postage stamps, but I have the honour of having written the first article about you that was ever written in Europe!”
A few days after Mr. Quinn’s secretary rang me up and said that Mr. Quinn would see me on the day after the morrow at two. At nine that morning I received from Mr. Quinn a letter of incredibly violent abuse. He had expected me at two the day before. Whether the secretary made the mistake or I, I do not know. He said that there would have been no sense in his making the date for a day after the morrow. I do not follow the reasoning, but it may have been so.
That was the end of the transatlantic review. I understood from Mrs. Foster that Mr. Quinn wrote his letter just before being put under morphia, and that for the rest of the time he lived he was kept under that stupefiant. He died whilst I was still on the high seas returning to Paris—or maybe just after.
I have said that mankind is divided into those who are merely the stuff to fill graves and those who are artists. If that dictum is to be accepted it will be necessary to include Mr. Quinn among the artists. For along with the generally accepted primary arts there goes another great art—that of life. If you so live your life as to be in harmony with your tenets, of a clear vision and of benefit to your fellows and to the advancement of truth, you may account yourself as of the Ruling Class…. Long, lean, burning like a coal with passion, Mr. Quinn, by the practice of a learned profession, became a very rich man, and then relatively impoverished himself in the passionate pursuit of beautiful things and in championing oppressed artists. In his quest for beautiful things he got together a treasure, the thought of which is a delight, as of an august monument that will not easily be forgotten. In addition he was of infinite service to a whole world of artists, and to a whole school of art.
My own contact with him was unfortunate, but the essence of the misfortune was that I came upon him too late in his life. Had he then retained his great abilities and been fated to live longer, he would have added great service to his other great services to the arts.
I never understood what happened as regards the review on his return to New York. I gathered that it had been his intention to get one of the older houses to take over the publication, but that, finding them difficult to persuade, and being worn out by suffering, he had pitched upon one of the newer publishers that he had so whole-heartedly denounced. This gentleman, who possessed a certain flair for good writing, was, when it came to the business of publishing, apparently quite uninstructed. He nevertheless drove with Mr. Quinn a bargain that nothing but his extreme exhaustion could have let him make. My provisional sketch of an agreement with Mr. Liveright had been that I would deliver to him at the quayside, free of duty, a certain number of copies at a very low rate, but one that would still have left a satisfactory profit. After that Liveright, Inc., was to dispose of them how it pleased. This would have been a very equitable arrangement, avoiding all confusion of accounts and placing the burden of expense where it should naturally fall.
The other gentleman apparently persuaded Mr. Quinn that we ought to pay the cost of carting from the quayside to his uptown office. He then persuaded Mr. Quinn that the cover was unsuitable, and obtained his sanction for the rebinding of the copies. They thus had to be re-carted from the office to, I imagine, Garden City—judging by the cost of the transport; the covers were ripped off and they were re-bound, and they were re-recarted to the publisher’s office. All this must have been highly profitable to somebody, but in the event a review produced for three cents a copy and selling to the American public for sixty, continued to run up a debt balance against us in the publisher’s books.
At the Paris office of the review we received from all over America such a continuing volume of correspondence and such innumerable manuscripts, and Mrs. Foster in New York had to deal with so many more, that there must have been some sales. Indeed, on one occasion the publisher asked us to reprint a number. This may explain a puzzling fact. We published only twelve numbers of the review. After it had died we received some figures from New York. These furnished accounts of the sales of thirteen numbers. Each showed practically no sales, and each showed a heavy debit against the review.
Heaven forbid that I should be taken as impugning the honesty of the publisher. The mere nature of the entertainment that he offered me would have been sufficient to disarm the most suspicious. He took a taxi-cab and showed me Brooklyn Bridge, which I must have crossed a hundred times before then and the Aquarium on the Battery, where I had gone courting when I was a child, and the Woolworth building and the Flat Iron corner where, when ladies wore skirts, the skirts used to be whisked over their heads by the wind. And he enjoyed these wonders with the ingenuousness of a New England schoolmarm, and we finished up the day at a bone-dry night-club, where more than a hundred Russians in national costume sang the “Boatsong of the Volga.” … Didn’t someone once say that Russia was the only country in which to live, because, there, there was only one man who sang the “Boatsong” and him they executed?
So that all I took away from New York on that occasion was a sufficiency of speakeasy cards to fill a small card-index box. Everyone I met gave me speakeasy cards—the bootblack at the corner of West Tenth and Sixth; the man I bought my papers from; strangers in the streets and tubes…. On my first visit to New York, when she was still little and old, every fifth man in the street would stop me and ask: “Well, and what are your impressions of New York?” … The handing out of speakeasy cards took the place of that diversion.
I may say that, during that visit, so great was my respect for the laws of a foreign country, I didn’t go to any speakeasy except for one call at a house in Washington Place. To this I had been taken years ago, when it had been a blindpig frequented by the more lively of the Four Hundred….
I may be asked why I did not take legal proceedings to obtain proper accounts from the review…. In the first place, as I have said, my principles will not allow me to take legal proceedings against anyone—and then, it is useless for a foreign writer to take proceedings against a New York publisher. The courts in New York are so congested that any such action takes at least two years to come to trial. The plaintiff during that time can publish nothing, either in Europe or America—for he will not continue to publish with the firm that he considers to have wronged him, and that firm can obtain an injunction preventing him from publishing with any one else until the trial of the action. He cannot in the meantime publish anything at home, because if he does he will lose his American copyright. Thus, if he is dependent on his pen, he will be ruined….
I may say, that in spite of this and similar experiences, by August, 1929, I had saved enough on my publications in New York—my books had ceased to be published in England, and three of them written at that date have never appeared in London, nor do they even appear in the catalogue of the British Museum Library—I had saved enough to consider finally paying off the debt I had incurred over the transatlantic. That had become considerable, because after the death of Mr. Quinn I had continued to run the review out of my own pocket, being determined that for the credit of the Arts the poor thing should run its twelve numbers. On the first of that month I lunched—I think with the W. C. Bullitts in their little house off Fifth Avenue. There were present Professor Erskine and a Professor of Economics at some university of the first eminence. He was, I was told, the first economist in the United States. He was going to lecture that afternoon on Prosperity and, since I was unable to go to the lecture, he was good enough to give me an aperçu of the situation. I was inclined myself to be pessimistic, and had said as much in an article in the Herald-Tribune. It appeared to me that the President and the Federal Reserve Bank between them had for purposes of their own frozen out the small speculator. I did not see how the Stock Market differed from any other market. The small speculator in his millions kept up the price of stocks just as the small buyer in his millions kept up the price of commodities. I asked: what would the proprietors of the five-and ten-cent stores say if the Executive succeeded in freezing out their customers? … And, indeed, the gains of the small speculators going largely into the pockets of those stores and of the manufacturer of the cheaper car and domestic labour-saving implements, would not the action of the President and the Bank seriously injure these industries?
I was overwhelmed, as the amateur in economics is always overwhelmed by the professional. I was told that I was speaking un-Americanly and un-American nonsense at that. I was in effect denying buoyancy to the American people. The President and the Federal Reserve Bank had acted prudently and with foresight in checking the extravagance of the small speculator. Their motive had been to get the control of the wealth of the country into the hands of the thirteen or fourteen great families who had always steered the finances of the United States with skill and wisdom. The slight check that the markets had experienced early in the year had in no way endangered Prosperity. It had been merely the momentary disturbance naturally attendant on the transference of power from one to another set of hands. The Professor of Economics said that he had that morning been talking with Mr. Lamont on that very point. Mr. Lamont had said that there was no fear for the continuance of Prosperity. The price of a stock did not depend on the earning value of the company that issued it. That was a consideration solely for bondholders. The price of a stock was created by demand, as is the case with every other commodity, and the demand was created by the country’s confidence in its own Prosperity…. And, look where you would, you could see no sign of the slightest check in public confidence….
I pointed out that the building trade was not in very good fettle and that a slump in the building trade was always a precursor of depression….
Then I was overwhelmed. Professor Erskine and the other Professor were both big men, and they and all the lightweights at the table joined in convincing me of my imbecility, of my being a traitor to the Republic and of my un-American-ness….
I never back my opinion in matters over which I have no mastery and I just hated to be accused of un-American-ness. For, if I am psychologically speaking un-American, what in the world am I? So I let myself be convinced.
I let myself be disastrously convinced, and I have suffered from it ever since. I took the advice of the only immensely great financier whose advice was at my disposal, and next day invested my money exactly according to his instructions. I was told that I was to sell out on the 17th December, and then my money would have increased by an exactly prophesied sum—and the increase would make up exactly the difference between the sum I had and the sum I needed. The addition of that coincidence to the other, that my birthday—O Sapientia!—was on the 17th December, was too much for me. Why should Minerva or someone not want to make me an appropriate present? I omitted to observe that the date on which I made that investment was the 4th August—the 15th anniversary of the declaration of the war…. Alas, poor dung-beetle!
On that 17th December…. But I will spare the reader the rest of the story …
In Paris, in 1924, the review staggered on its way towards death. The attendants rushed in and out looking for the nostrum or the leech…. Someone—Hemingway, I should think—brought in the usual young financier who was to run the review for ever. But the young financier, as is usually the case, turned out to have no money—or only so much as was allowed him by his female relatives. So we got to the twelfth number and I called a meeting of the four shareholders in Miss Gertrude Stein’s studio and there, surrounded by the Picassos and Matisses and the pictures of whoever was the latest white hope of modern painting—I think it was then M. “Baby” Bérard—I told that valiant four that they had lost their money.
In spite of the limitation of that company I paid all the debts of the review … and then of course there was the usual incident of the unpaid contributor.
There was a writer for whose work I had the greatest admiration. I did not know, him very well personally. I bought some of his work and, since he was very, very poor, I paid for it considerably more than the standard rate of the review, which was very small. In such cases I paid for the contribution out of my own pocket, debiting the review with the standard page rate. I received in due course a receipt for my cheque…. Two months or so later, just after the review had stopped, I received a mild little letter from Mr. X—— … asking when I intended to pay for his contribution…. I looked at the receipt and then got my cheque back from the bank. The receipt and the endorsement were not in Mr. X’s handwriting. I understood at once what had happened. Mr. X—— was in domestic difficulties, he had left home and a member of his family without his knowledge must have taken the money.
I did not wish to make mischief for Mr. X—— so I wrote to him and said that the review had stopped, but as soon as its affairs were wound up I would send him a cheque. I could not do anything more, for at the moment I was quite penniless and living on borrowed money. I received from him a tart letter reproaching me for trepanning him into contributing to a moribund review.
Shortly after that I went to New York and sent Mr. X—— his cheque. It cost me exactly what I received for two articles that I contributed as “Visiting Critic” to the Herald-Tribune. Three weeks later I received by the same post a letter from an editor asking me to write an article about Mr. X——whose first book was just appearing in New York, and a letter from Mr. X—— from which there dropped out a cheque. I have never received such a letter. Mr. X—— began by saying that he had denounced me to every literary paper and to every author’s society in England and America.
I was a thief, a rogue, a swindler. I got writers to write for me and robbed them. He had been persuaded to write for my filthy review because people said it would do him good in America. What good had it done him? From the first he had been against writing for a fat, capitalist brute like me. There I was, rolling in money, with my gross thumbs stuck into the arm-holes of my bulging white waistcoat, a huge cigar dripping from my foul lips, basking in glory! And that glory had been bought with the sweat of the miserable wretches I had deluded! It was the glory of the dung-heap that was my natural and unspeakable habitat….
My secretary—there are fatalities!—in making out that cheque had dated it a year ahead, and I had not noticed!
I got dollar bills, registered them to his address, and marked the envelope: “To be delivered into addressee’s hands and to no other.” I never heard that he got it, but I suppose he did. I never heard either whether he actually sent out his denunciation of me. I daresay he did.
I sat down and wrote my article about him. In it I expressed my great admiration for his marvellous power of language and his great genius…. There is a pride which apes humility….
But I asked myself, naturally: What price glory! Then I went back to writing my long book.
PARIS, Jan. 12th—
TOULON, June 11th, 1933
I have not found occasion to explain why it was that my father pre-disposed me to see glamour in the City of New York….
I was rising seven when I first made, in company naturally with my parents, the Grand Tour, London, Paris, the Rhine, Alsace-Lorraine, the Midi, and so back through Paris to London. In Paris we had seen my oncle de l’Amérique. He had fascinated my infant eyes with his engaging breakfast-table manners. So, when we were lying off Bonn, on the Rhine steamer, I broke my breakfast egg on the edge of a glass…. My father, who for an English gentleman was an English gentleman, let out one roar. I can still see my egg and glass flying through the porthole into the sunlit Rhine…. When he had recovered himself he explained that no one who expected to grow into an English gentleman could do anything else with his breakfast egg than delicately to slice off its top with a knife and extract the contents with a tea-spoon. (You must, of course, if you wish to prevent the witches from flying over the sea, make a hole in the bottom of the shell when you have emptied it.)
So for years I had a “complex” of my father’s provision. My longing to eat eggs out of a glass, their gold mingling with that of butter and with pepper and salt, was something in which you would not believe. But something subconsciously paralysing rendered my hand powerless when I faced eggs on a breakfast table….
Then, on my first crossing of the Atlantic in relatively green salad days, at my first breakfast, I observed that the company in the saloon divided themselves into opposing groups, like the guests in Tartarin’s pension on the Righi…. The smaller body were provided with egg-cups; the larger, with glasses. I agitatedly called the table-steward and asked him who those people were who were breaking their eggs into glasses.
“Those ladies and gentlemen, sir,” he said, “are New Yorkers!”