Twelve Men

character, as it was revealed to me from day to day in intimate working contact with him under these conditions. Here, as I soon learned, and was glad to learn, was no namby-pamby scribbler of the old happy-ending, pretty- nothing school of literary composition. On the contrary he sounded, for the first time in my dealings with literary aspirants of every kind, that sure, sane, penetrating, non-sentimental note so common to the best writers of the Continent, a note entirely free from mush, bravado and cant. He had a style as clear as water, as simple as rain; color, romance, humor; and if a little too much of vanity and self-importance, still one could forgive him for they were rather well-based. Already used to dealing with literary and artistic aspirants of different kinds in connection with the publications of which I had been a part, this one appealed to me as being the best of them all and a very refreshing change.

One day, only a few weeks after I had met him, seeing that I was alert for fiction, poetry and short essays or prose phantasies, all illustrative of the spirit of New York, he brought me a little poem entitled “Neuvain,” which interested me greatly. It was so brief and forceful and yet so delicate, a double triolet of the old French order, but with the modernity and flavor of the streets outside, the conduit cars, hand-organs and dancing children of the pavements. The title seemed affected, seeing that the English word “Spring” would have done as well, but it was typical of his mood at the time, his literary adorations. He was in leash to the French school of which de Maupassant was the outstanding luminary, only I did not know it at the time.

“Charming,” I exclaimed quite enthusiastically. “I like this. Let me see anything else you have. Do you write short stories?”

For answer he merely stared at me for a little while in the most examining and arrogant and contemptuous way, as much as to say, “Let me see if you are really worth my time and trouble in this matter,” or “This sad specimen of alleged mentality is just beginning to suspect that I might write a short story.” Seeing that I merely smiled most genially in return, he finally deigned to say, “Sure, I write short stories. What do you think I’m in the writing game for?”

“But you might be interested in novels only or plays, or poetry.”

“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 to myself, “here is a young cub who certainly has talent, is crowded with 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 many years older, he needs to be encouraged. I was like that myself not so long ago. And besides, if I do not encourage this type of work financially (which is the best way of all), who will?”

About a week later I was given another and still more gratifying surprise, for one day, in his usual condescending manner, he brought to me two short pieces of fiction and laid them most gingerly on my desk with scarcely a word—“Here was something I might read if I chose,” I believe. The reading of these two stories gave me as much of a start as though 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 much point in them (The Second Motive; The Right Man). For by then having been struggling with the short- story problem in other magazine offices before this, I had become not a little pessimistic as to the trend of American short fiction, as well as long—the impossibility of finding any, even supposing 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 attempted anything even partially serious in America, was enough to make me believe that the world took anything even slightly approximating 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 primary warnings I had received from the president of this very organization—a most eager and ambitious and distressing 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 something new in fiction, something more virile and life-like than that “mush,” as he characterized it, to be found in the current magazines, still (1), it must have a strong appeal for the general reader (!); and (2), be very compelling in fact and clean, as the dear general reader would of course understand that word—a solid little pair of millstones which would unquestionably end in macerating everything vital out of any good story.

Still I did not despair; something might be done. And though I sighed, I hoped to be able to make my superior stretch a point in favor of the exceptional thing, or, as the slang phrase went, “slip a few over on him,” but that of course meant nothing or something, as you choose. My dream was really to find one or many like this youth, or a pungent kind of realism that would be true and yet within such limits as would make it usable. Imagine, then, my satisfaction in finding these two things, tales that I could not only admire genuinely but that I could publish, things that ought 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 smile-provoking. I called him and said as much, or nearly so—a mistake, as I sometimes think now, for art should be long—and bought them forthwith, hoping, almost against 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 most flamboyant and erratic character, a genius of sorts, volatile, restless, emotional, colorful, a veritable Verlaine-Baudelaire-Rops soul, who, not content to arrange and decorate the magazine each month, must needs wish to write, paint, compose verse and music and stage 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 makeup editor, a graduate of some distinguished sectarian school, who was more interested in St. Jerome and his Vulgate, as an embodiment of classic Latin, than he was in getting out the magazine. Still he had the advantage of being interesting—“and I learned about Horace from him.” Again, there was a most interesting and youthful and pretty, if severe, example of the Wellesley-Mt. Holyoke-Bryn Mawr school of literary art and criticism, a most engagingly interesting intellectual maiden, who functioned as assistant editor and reader in an adjoining room, along with the art-director, the makeup editor and an office boy. This very valuable and in some respects remarkable young woman, who while holding me in proper contempt, I fear, for my rather loose and unliterary ways, was still, as I had suspected before employing her, as keen for something 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, eliminating— 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, dreamers of reforms social, and I know not what else, who, holding the hope of achieving their ends or aims through some really forceful magazine, were by now beginning to make our place a center. It fairly swarmed for a time with aspirants; an amusing, vivid, strident world.

As for L----, all this being new to him, he was as interested, fascinated even, as any one well might be. He responded to it almost gayly at times, wondering whether something wonderful, international, enduring might not be made to come of it. He rapidly developed into one of the most pertinacious and even disconcerting youths I have ever met. At times he seemed to have a positive genius for saying and doing irritable and disagreeable things, not only to me but to others. Never having heard of me before he met me here, he was convinced, I think, that I was a mere nothing, with some slight 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 my art-director, he was at first a fool, later a genius; ditto my makeup man.

As for Miss E----, the Wellesley-Bryn Mawr-Mt. Holyoke assistant, who from the first had agreed with me that here indeed was a writer of promise, a genius 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 managed, probably on