Twelve Men

drinking bouts, absolute drunkenness, in which, according to the Johnsonian tradition and that of Messieurs Rabelais and Moliere, the weary intellect and one’s guiding genius were immersed in a comforting Lethe of rye.

Such things cost money, however. In addition, my young friend, due to a desire no doubt to share in the material splendors of his age (a doctrine M---- was ever fond of spouting—and as a duty, if you please), had saddled himself, for a time at least, with an apartment in an exclusive square on the East Side, the rent of which was a severe drain. Before this there had been, and after it were still, others, obligations too much for him to bear financially, all in the main taken for show, that he might be considered a literary success. Now and again (so I was told by several of his intimates), confronted by a sudden exhaustion of his bank balance, he would leave some excellent apartment house or neighborhood, where for a few months he had been living in grand style, extracting his furniture as best he might, or leaving it and various debts beside, and would take refuge in some shabby tenement, or rear rooms even, and where, touched by remorse or encouraged by the great literary and art traditions (Balzac, Baudelaire, Johnson, Goldsmith, Verlaine) he would toil unendingly at definite money-yielding manuscripts, the results of which carried to some well-paying successful magazine would yield him sufficient to return to the white lights—often even to take a better apartment than that which last had been his. By now, however, one of the two children he eventually left behind him had been born. His domestic cares were multiplying, the marriage idea dull. Still he did not hesitate to continue those dinners given to his friends, the above-mentioned group or its spiritual kin, either in his apartment or in a bohemian restaurant of great show in New York. In short, he was a fairly successful short-story writer and critic in whom still persisted a feeling that he would yet triumph in the adjacent if somewhat more difficult field of popular fiction.

It was during this period, if I may interpolate an incident, that I was waiting one night in a Broadway theater lobby for a friend to appear, when who should arrive on the scene but L----, most outlandishly dressed in what I took to be a reductio ad absurdum of his first pose, as I now half-feared it to be: that of the uncouth and rugged young American, disclaiming style in dress at least, and content to be a clod in looks so long as he was a Shelley in brains. His suit was of that coarse ill-fitting character described as Store, and shelf- worn; his shoes all but dusty brogans, his headgear a long-visored yellowish-and-brown cross-barred cap. He had on a short, badly-cut frieze overcoat, his hands stuck defiantly in his trousers pockets, forcing its lapels wide open. And he appeared to be partially if not entirely drunk, and very insolent. I had the idea that the drunkenness and the dress were a pose, or else that he had been in some neighborhood in search of copy which required such an outfit. Charitably let us accept the last. He was accompanied by two satellic souls who were doing their best to restrain him.

“Come, now! Don’t make a scene. We’ll see the show all right!”

“Sure we’ll see the show!” he returned contentiously. “Where’s the manager?”

A smug mannikin whose uniform was a dress suit, the business manager himself, eyed him in no friendly spirit from a nearby corner.

“This is Mr. L----,” one of the satellites now approached and explained to the manager. “He’s connected with M----‘s Magazine. He does short stories and dramatics occasionally.”

The manager bowed. After all, M----‘s Magazine had come to have some significance on Broadway. It was as well to be civil. Courtesy was extended for three, and they went in.

As for myself, I resented the mood and the change. It was in no way my affair—his life was his own—and still I resented it. I did not believe that he was as bad as he seemed. He had too much genuine sense. It was just boyish swagger and show, and still it was time that he was getting over that and settling down. I really hoped that time would modify all this.

One thing that made me hope for the best was that very shortly after this M----‘s Magazine blew completely up, leaving him without that semi-financial protection which I felt was doing him so much harm. The next favorable sign that I observed was that a small volume of short stories, some sixteen in number, and containing the cream of his work up to that time, was brought to a publishing house with which I was financially identified at the time, and although no word was said to me (I really think he took great care not to see me), still it was left and on my advice eventually published (it sold, I believe, a little under five hundred copies). But the thing that cheered me was that it contained not one story which could be looked upon as a compromise with his first views. And better, it had been brought to the concern with which I was connected—intentionally, I am sure. I was glad to have had a hand in its publication. “At least,” I said, “he has not lost sight of his first ideal. He may go on now.”

And thereafter, in one magazine and another, excellent enough to have but a small circulation, I saw something of his which had genuine merit. A Western critical journal began to publish a series of essays by him, for which I am sure he received nothing at all. Again, three or four years later, a second volume of stories, almost if not quite as good as his first, was issued by this same Western paper. He was trying to do serious work; but he still sought and apparently craved those grand scenes on the farm or in some New York restaurant or an expensive apartment, and when he could no longer afford it. He still wrote happy-ending, or compromise, stories for any such magazine as would receive him, and was apparently building up a reasonably secure market for them. In the meantime the moving-picture scenario market had developed, and he wrote for it. His eyes were also turning toward the stage, as one completed manuscript and several “starts” turned over to me after his death proved. One day some one who knew him and me quite well assured me that L----, having sent out many excellent stories only to have them returned, had one day cried and then raged, cursing America for its attitude toward serious letters—an excellent sign, I thought, good medicine for one who must eventually forsake his hope of material grandeur and find himself. “In time, in time,” I said, “he will eat through the husks of these other things, the ‘M---- complex,’ and do something splendid. He can’t help it. But this fantastic dream of grandeur, of being a popular success, will have to be lived down.”

For a time now I heard but little more save once that he was connected with a moving-picture concern, suggesting plots and making some money. Then I saw a second series of essays in the same Western critical paper—that of the editor who had published his book—and some of them were excellent, very searching and sincere. I felt that he was moving along the right line, although they earned him nothing. Then one week, very much to my surprise, there was a very glowing and extended commentary on myself, concerning which for the time being I decided to make no comment; and a little later, perhaps three weeks, a telephone call. Did I recall him? (!) Could he come and see me? (!) I invited him to dinner, and he came, carrying, of all things—and for him, the ex-railroad boy—a great armful of red roses. This touched me.

“What’s the idea?” I inquired jovially, laughing at him.

He blushed like a girl, a little irritably too, I thought, for he found me (as perhaps he had hoped not to) examining and critical, and he may have felt that I was laughing at him, which I wasn’t. “I wished to give them to you, and I brought ‘em. Why shouldn’t I?”

“You know you should bring them if you want me to have them, and I’m only too glad to get them, anyway. Don’t think I’m criticizing.”

He smiled and began at once on the “old days,” as he now called them, a sad commentary on our drifting days. Indeed he seemed able to talk of little else or fast enough or with too much enthusiasm. He went over many things and people—M----; K----, the wonderful art-director, now insane and a wreck; the group of which he and I had once