Twelve Men

I do not claim that the result was fatal. It may even, or at least might, have had value, combined with an older or slightly more balanced temperament. But it seemed to me that it offered too quickly what should have come, if at all, as the result of much effort. For in regard to the very things L---- should have most guarded against—show and the shallow pleasures of social and night and material life in New York—M---- was most specious. I never knew a more intriguing and fascinating man in this respect nor one who cared less for those he used to obtain his unimportant ends. He had positive genius for making the gaudy and the unworthy seem worthy and even perfect. During his earlier days there, L---- had more than once “cursed him out” (in his absence, of course), to use his own expressive phrase, for his middle-West trade views, as he described them, his shabby social and material ideals, and yet, as I could plainly see, even at that time the virus of his theories was working. For it must be remembered that L---- was very new to New York, very young, and never having had much of anything he was no doubt slightly envious of the man’s material facility, the sense of all-sufficiency, exclusiveness and even a kind of petty trade grandeur with which he tried to surround himself.

Well, that might not have proved fatal either, only L---- needed some one to keep him true to himself, his individual capabilities, to constantly caution and if possible sober him to his very severe taste, and as it was he was all but surrounded by acolytes and servitors.

A little later, having left M----‘s and assumed another editorial position, and being compelled to follow the various current magazines more or less professionally, I was disturbed to note that there began to appear in various publications—especially M----‘s, which was flourishing greatly for the moment—stories which while exhibiting much of the deftness and repression as well as an avidity for the true color of things, still showed what I had at first feared they might: a decided compromise. That curse of all American fiction, the necessarily happy ending, had been impressed on him—by whom? To my sincere dissatisfaction, he began writing stories, some at least, which concerned (1), a young woman who successfully abandoned art dreams for advertising; (2), a middle-aged charmer, female, who attempted libertinage and was defeated, American style; (3), a Christmas picture with sweetness and light reigning on every hand (Dickens at his sentimentalest could have done no worse); (4), a Broadway press agent who, attempting to bring patronage to a great hotel via chic vice, accidentally and unintentionally mates an all-too-good young society man turned hotel manager to a grand heiress. And so on and so on, not ad infinitum but for a period at least—the ten years in which he managed to live and work.

And, what was more, during this new period I heard and occasionally saw discouraging things in connection with him from time to time. True to his great promise, for I sincerely think M---- had a genuine fondness for his young protege, as much of a fondness as he could well have for anything, he guaranteed him perhaps as much as three thousand a year; sent him to Stockholm at the age of twenty-four or five to meet and greet the famous false pole discoverer, Doctor Cook; allowed him to go to Paris in connection with various articles; to Rome; sent him into the middle and far West; to Broadway for dramatic and social studies. Well and good, only he wanted always in what was done for him the “uplift” note, the happy ending-or at least one not vulgar or low—whereas my idea in connection with L----, gifted as he was, was that he should confine himself to fiction as an art and without any regard to theories or types of ending, believing, as I did, that he would definitely establish himself in that way in the long run. I had no objection of course to experiences of various kinds, his taking up with any line of work which might seem at the moment far removed from realistic writing, providing always that the star of his ideal was in sight. Whenever he wrote, be it early or late, it must be in the clear, incisive, uncompromising vein of these first stories and with that passion for revelation which characterized him at first, that same unbiased and unfettered non-moral viewpoint.

But after meeting with and working for M---- under this new arrangement and being apparently fascinated for the moment by his personality, he seemed to me to gradually lose sight of his ideal, to be actually taken in by the plausible arguments which the latter could spin with the ease that a spider spins gossamer. In that respect I insist that M---- was a bad influence. Under his tutelage L---- gradually became, for instance, an habitue of a well-known and pseudo-bohemian chop-house, a most mawkish and naively imitative affair, intended frankly to be a copy or even the original, forsooth, of an old English inn, done, in so far as its woodwork was concerned, in smoked or dark-stained oak to represent an old English interior, its walls covered with long-stemmed pipes and pictures of English hunting and drinking scenes, its black-stained but unvarnished tables littered with riding, driving and country-life society papers, to give it that air of sans ceremonie with an upper world of which its habitues probably possessed no least inkling but most eagerly craved. Here, along with a goodly group of his latter-day friends, far different from those by whom he had first been surrounded—a pretentious society poet of no great merit but considerable self-emphasis, a Wall Street broker, posing as a club man, raconteur, “first-nighter” and what not, and several young and ambitious playwrights, all seeking the heaven of a Broadway success—he began to pose as one of the intimates of the great city, its bosom child as it were, the cynosure and favorite of its most glittering precincts—a most M-----like proceeding. His clothes by now, for I saw him on occasion, had taken on a more lustrous if less convincing aspect than those he had worn when I first knew him. The small round hat or rakish cap, typical of his Western dreams, had now given way to a most pretentious square-topped derby, beloved, I believe, of undertakers and a certain severe type of banker as well as some clergymen, only it was a light brown. His suit and waistcoat were of a bright English tweed, reddish- brown or herring-bone gray by turns, his shoes box-toed perfections of the button type. He carried a heavy cane, often a bright leather manuscript case, and seemed intensely absorbed in the great and dramatic business of living and writing. “One must,” so I read him at this time, “take the pleasures as well as the labors of this world with the utmost severity.” Here, with a grand manner, he patronized the manager and the waiters, sent word to his friend the cook, who probably did not know him at all, that his chop or steak was to be done just so. These friends of his, or at least one of them (the poet) he met every day at five for an all-essential game of chess, after which an evening paper was read and the chop ordered. Ale—not beer—in a pewter mug was comme il faut, the only thing for a gentleman of letters, worthy of the name, to drink.

I am sorry to write so, for after all youth must have its fling. Still, I had expected better of L----, and I was a little disappointed to see that earlier dream of simplicity and privation giving way to an absolutely worthless show. Besides, twenty or thirty such stories as “The Right Man,” “Sweet Dreams,” “The Man With the Broken Fingers,” “The Second Motive,” would outweigh a thousand of the things he was getting published and the profits of which permitted him these airs.

Again, during the early days of his success with M----, he had married—a young nurse who had previously been a clerk in a store, a serious, earnest and from one point of view helpful person, seeing that she could keep his domestic affairs in order and bear him children, which she did, but she had no understanding of, or flair for, the type of thing he was called upon to do. She had no instinct for literature or the arts, and aside from her domestic capacities little skill or taste for “socializing.” And, naturally, he was neglecting her. His head was probably surging with great ideas of art and hence a social supremacy which might well carry him anywhere. He had bought a farm some distance from New York, where in a community supposedly inhabited by successful and superior men of letters he posed as a farmer at times, mowing and cocking hay as became a Western plow-boy; and also, as the mood moved him, and as became a great and secluded writer, working in a den entirely surrounded by books in fine leather bindings (!) and being visited by those odd satellites of the scriptic art who see in genius of this type the summum bonum of life. It was the thing to do at that time, for a writer to own a farm and work it. Horace had. One individual in particular, a man of genuine literary and critical ability and great taste in the matter of all the arts but with no least interest in or tolerance for the simplicities of effort, came here occasionally, as I heard, to help him pile hay, and this in a silk shirt and a monocle; a second—and a most fascinating intellectual flaneur, who, however, had no vision or the gift of dreams—came to eat, drink, talk of many things to be done, to steal a few ideas, borrow a little money perhaps or consume a little morphine, and depart; a third came to spout of his success in connection with plays, or his proposed successes; a fourth to paint a picture, urged on by L----; a fifth to compose rural verse; a sixth, a broker or race-track tout or city bar-tender (for color, this last), to marvel that one of L----‘s sense, or any one indeed, should live in the country at all. There were