Chapter V: Part 5

Not long ago Robert Cortes Holliday admitted to me that his favorite writer was Laurence Sterne. This is important. There is much about them that is similar. There is the same whimsical, care-free, genial attitude toward events. I’m sure that if Laurence Sterne carried a walking stick he balanced it as nicely and at the same angle as does Bob. Holliday loves people, and he loves talk. So did Sterne. Holliday tempers his sentimentality by shafts of wit and real tenderness. So did Sterne. They are both good fellows, anyway, though two centuries apart. Holliday is of the Indianapolis group of writers. His great fondness for Booth Tarkington is a result of this, as well as the deep drawl of his voice. He is large, slow-moving, solemn of visage, with eyes that twinkle constantly behind very thick spectacles. His first advance toward life was as an artist. He was then bookseller, librarian, publisher’s reader and editor. As editor of +The Bookman+, and as “Contributing Editor” he has won a wide following for his rambling essays written under the pseudonym of “Murray Hill”. His love of books, his wide reading, his curiosity and explorative sense, make him either, through his books or his person, a peculiarly warm hearted, friendly human being.

MURRAY HILL’S RECOLLECTIONS OF JAMES HUNEKER

There is a rather frisky looking apartment house there now, a pastry shop and tea room occupying the ground floor--behind it, the other side of a venerable brick wall, a tiny, ancient burying ground. But in days of yesteryear here stood a tavern of renown, the Old Grape Vine, which on this site, Sixth Avenue at Eleventh Street, had given cheer since Sixth Avenue was little more than a country road. A sagging, soiled-white, two-story frame structure, with great iron grill lamps before the door. Within, the main room was somewhat reminiscent of London’s Olde Cheshire Cheese.

The proprietor was a canny Scot, one MacClellan. (“Old Mac”! Whither has he gone?) I was coming along by there the other day, and I asked a man with whom I chanced to walk if he remembered the Old Grape Vine. “Ah! yes,” he said; “they had mutton pies there.” They did. And excellent ale, also, served in battered pewter mugs. “They” had here, too (some fifteen years ago), excellent society beneath the dingy light. Roaring, roistering George Luks (as he was then) very much to the fore. At the rickety mahogany table where Frans-Halsian George held forth frequently was to be found the painter William J. Glackens, and his brother “Lew”, humorous draughtsman for “Puck”. Ernest Lawson sometimes came in. A Mr. Zinzig, a very pleasant soul and an excellent pianist and teacher of the piano, often was of the company. A Mr. Fitzgerald, art critic in those days of the “Sun”, occasionally “sat in”. And a delightful old cock, Mr. Stephenson, art critic then of the “Evening Post”. There was a man of the sea who continuously told stories of Japan. (After eleven he was somewhat given to singing.) There was an illustrator for a twopenny magazine, who (so as to seem to be a large staff) signed a variety of names to his work. From the land of R. L. S., he. One time while in a doze (somewhere else) he was robbed. His comment upon his misfortune became a classic line. It was: “By heaven! As long as whisky is sold to lose ten dollars is enough to drive a Scot mad!” (This was long before anybody had even heard of the illustrious Mr. Volstead.) And many more there were. Oh me! ah me! How the picture has changed!

Well, the point of all this (if it have any point) is that it was in the Old Grape Vine (of tender memory) that I first saw James Gibbons Huneker. I think that, in his promenades as an impressionist, he was there but seldom. Though we know that high among the Seven Arts he rated the fine art of drinking Pilsner. The old places of Martin’s and Lüchow’s (headquarters on a time for the musical cognoscenti) were ports of call on his rounds, and he moved freely, I believe, among the places of refreshment along the foreign quarter of lower Fourth Avenue. At the Grape Vine, I understand, he was an especial friend of Luks, and probably of Glackens and Lawson. And, though he was a very famous man, he seemed to like the motley company.

Ten or twelve years ago I was earning a living more honestly than perhaps I have been making one since. I was a clerk in a book store--the retail department, it happened, of the house which publishes Mr. Huneker’s books. And there, from my position “on the floor”, I frequently saw him moving in and out. Moving rather slowly, with the dignity of bulk. A distinguished figure, quietly but quite neatly dressed, very erect in carriage, head held well back, supporting his portliness with that physical pride of portly men, a physiognomy of Rodinesque modeling--his cane a trim touch to the ensemble. He was, I distinctly remember, held decidedly in regard by the retail staff because he was (what, by a long shot, a good many “authors” were not) exceedingly affable in manner to us clerks.

The moment I have particularly in mind was when Samuel Butler’s volume “The Way of All Flesh” first appeared in an American edition. We all know all about Butler now. But, looking back, it certainly is astonishing how innocent most all of us then were of any knowledge of the great author of “Erewhon”. Even so searching a student of literature as W. C. Brownell was practically unacquainted with Butler. He was taking home a copy of “The Way of All Flesh” to read. Mr. Huneker was standing by. In some comment on the book, he remarked that Butler had been a painter. “A painter!” exclaimed Mr. Brownell, in a manner as though wondering how it came about he knew so little of the man. “But this”, said Mr. Huneker, referring to the novel, “is not his best stuff. That is in his note books.” Brownell: “And where are they?” Huneker: “In the British Museum.” Mr. Brownell made a fluttering gesture (as though to express that he “gave up”) toward Mr. Huneker. “He knows everything!” he ejaculated.

We should, of course, be surprised now that anybody _did not_ know that Butler had been a painter. When, just a short time ago, W. Somerset Maugham adapted for the purposes of his sensational novel “The Moon and Sixpence” the character and career of Paul Gauguin, it was in the pages of Huneker that many first looked for, and found, intelligence concerning the master of the Pont Aven school of painting. Well, Gauguin is now an old story. And Ibsen, Tolstoy, Wagner, Nietzsche, Meredith, Henry James, William James, Bergson, Anatole France, Lemaître, Faguet, Shaw, Wilde, George Moore, Yeats, Synge, Schnitzler, Rodin, Matisse, Picasso, Van Gogh, George Luks--they all are old stories, too ... now. But it was our Steeplejack, James Huneker, who was our pioneer watcher of the skies. And what in the large sweep of his vision of the whole field of the world’s beauty he saw, he reported with infinite gusto. “Gusto”, as H. L. Mencken in the Huneker article of his “Book of Prefaces” says, “unquenchable, contagious, inflammatory.”

The extent of the personal contact which Mr. Huneker enjoyed and maintained with the first-rate literary men of the world, was amazing. While I was with the bookshop I speak of, “presentation copies” of each new book of his, to be sent out “with the compliments of the author”, were piled up for forwarding literally several feet high. They went to all the great in letters, in every country, that you could think of. Anatole France, Joseph Conrad, Georg Brandes, Edmund Gosse, George Moore--people like that.

Vast was the incoming stream of books to him: presentation copies, review copies, publicity copies; so great a flood that it was necessary for him periodically to call in an old book man to clear his shelves by carting away a wagonload or two of genuine treasure. A catalogue I one time saw of such volumes “from the library of James Huneker” was sufficient in riches to have been the catalogue of the entire stock of a very fair shop dealing in “association” volumes, first editions, and so forth. And a survey of the books themselves made it quite apparent that a reader who has read every word that Huneker ever printed (and that would be a person who has read a good deal) may yet (very likely) be a reader who has not read some of the best of Huneker. I refer to “Jimmie’s” humorous, pungent marginalia.

Mr. Huneker’s close friends have taken occasion since his death to speak warmly of his kindness toward obscure, struggling talent. There was a side to him, akin to this, which I have not seen commented upon. Huneker’s fame as a critic had been for years accepted throughout Europe. When his “New Cosmopolis” was published (a book I did not myself think so highly of) Joyce Kilmer, then newly come to journalism, reviewed it for the New York “Times”, very eulogistically. Mr. Huneker went to the trouble of looking up Kilmer to thank him very simply for his praise.

Mr. Huneker was a loyal and disinterested servant of good literature wherever he found it, and his happily was the power to be an ambassador to success--as in the case of William McFee’s “Casuals of the Sea”. Through my connection with the matter of “Casuals” I suppose it was, that a correspondence came about between Mr. Huneker and me. And in all my days I have never seen so energetic a correspondent. It seems to me that I got a letter from him about every other morning. I dropped out of the publishing business and went to Indiana for a time. I let him know when I got there, my motive in this being mainly to notify him that I _was_ out of the publishing business and so was no longer in a position to give any business attention to letters relating to books. But letters from him continued to reach me with the same regularity. While, I hardly need say, I enjoyed this correspondence enormously, I was decidedly embarrassed by it, as I could not but keenly feel that I was taking up his time to no purpose. Still, of course, I felt that I should answer each letter of his without an impolite delay, and no sooner did he get my reply than he answered back again. Gradually, however, we got the thing slowed down.

His letters were prodigal of witty things. I am afraid I have not kept them; if I have, I do not know where they are--I move about a good deal. One neat play of words I remember. I do not know whether or not he himself ever used it elsewhere. I did use it in a book, giving due credit to Mr. Huneker. I had told him that I was going in for writing on my own. His comment was: “He that lives by the pen shall perish by the pen.” Some of his letters, I recall, were signed, “Jim, the Penman.”

And it was no simple trick to read them. He used a pale ink. The handwriting was small, curious, and to me almost illegible. Why compositors did not mob him I do not know. He wrote everything by hand; never would learn to use a typewriter, and declared that he could not acquire the faculty of dictation.

This leads me to the story of one of the articles he contributed to +The Bookman+. When, upon my return to New York, I became (for a time) editor of this magazine I pursued him for contributions. Yes, later on he would send us something, but always it was later on, later on. I had about given up hope of ever getting anything from him when a bulky wad of closely-written “copy” on yellow paper arrived. Expecting that it would take me a couple of days to decipher the manuscript, I joyously acknowledged receipt of it at once, without a thought of questioning the nature of the article. When I tried to read the article, after I had held the first page sidewise, next upside down, then examined it in a mirror, I “passed the buck” and sent the copy straight on to the printers. If printers had read him before printers ought to be able to again. I advertised the article to appear in the next number of the magazine. When I got the article back in galley proofs--I got a jolt. It wasn’t “+Bookman+ stuff” at all--all about a couple of “old rounders”, as Mr. Huneker called them, taking a stroll.

I do not think that Mr. Huneker has as yet since his death, to the time these rambling remarks are being written, received anything like adequate recognition in the press. The “obituary” articles in the newspapers have carried the air that he was hardly more than an excellent “newspaper man”--somewhat older, but something like (dare I say?) Heywood Broun or Alexander Woollcott. Ah! no; James Huneker was a critic and an artist, and a figure, too, in our national life. Though he was all his days until almost his last breath a hard-working journalist with an immediate “copy date” before him. And though he most naturally thought of himself, with common-sense pride in his calling, as a journalist. I remember his one time speaking of Arnold Bennett as “a hard-working journalist as well as a novel writer”. Indicating his great esteem for the character of journalist. And he used to speak too, with fraternal pride and affection in inflection, of young men who had written good books as being among “our men”, meaning associated with the same paper as himself.

At the remarkable funeral service held in the new Town Hall in New York high and touching honor was done his memory by the stage and the musical profession, but literature seemed to be officially represented by the person of Richard LeGallienne alone, and painting and sculpture not at all. The articles by Mr. Huneker’s colleagues among music critics have seemed very largely to claim him as quite their own. True, no doubt, his most penetrating writing was done in the field of musical criticism. But, also, Huneker was an evangel who belongs to the Seven Arts.

One thing should be added. It is a sad thing, but it is of the nature of life. A good editorial in the current number of “The New Republic” begins: “James Huneker named one of his best books ‘The Pathos of Distance’. In a single day his own figure is invested with the memorial gentleness there described.” No, not altogether in a single day. He had already begun, and more than begun, to recede into the pathos of distance. His flair was for the championship and interpretation of the “new” men. And, for the most part, his new men had become old men. His stoutest admirer must admit that Mr. Huneker’s work was “dated”.

But where (and this is sadder still) is his like to-day?

+Murray Hill+

_Alexander Woollcott_

Mr. Woollcott’s person is engaging enough to have jumped bodily from the pages of Charles Dickens, an author whom, by the way, he greatly admires. The first time I ever saw him was in Heywood Broun’s Paris studio, on New Year’s Eve, 1917-18. He was, there, a private in the United States Medical Corps, and his O. D.’s, I must say, made him seem more Bairnsfather than Dickens. He was lounged on a large low divan, peering solemnly at the company, a somewhat motley throng. Mr. Woollcott is short, rotund, jovial, given to elaborate and biting statements, punctuated by gestures which are often as grotesque as they are incisive. He was born in Phalanx, New Jersey, and was graduated from Hamilton College. Are not these facts, in themselves, Dickensonian? Woollcott, to me, is the most interesting of our dramatic critics; for he not only seems to have a knowledge of the theatre but he occasionally permits himself rare and unreasoning enthusiasms off the track of popular approval. His reputation was established as critic of the New York “Times”. He is now critic and colyumist of the “Herald”. It was his enthusiasm for Dickens which gave birth to a delightful volume, “Mr. Dickens Goes to the Play”. His enthusiasm for the army occasioned “The Command is Forward”. His enthusiasm for Mrs. Fiske prompted, “Mrs. Fiske ... Her Views on Acting, Actors and the Problems of the Stage”. More recently his essays have been collected in “Shouts and Murmurs”. The story he tells here is, he says, no essay at all. Maybe so. At any rate, it’s an interesting piece of literary history even if it does not do Mr. Woollcott justice in displaying him as the essayist of whimsicality and penetrating irony, which he is.

O. HENRY, PLAYWRIGHT

When, if ever, they call for a new editor of that amiable biography of O. Henry by C. Alphonso Smith, there should be added a chapter about his adventures as a playwright. To be sure, in the final stretch of this official history of Sydney Porter, the recording professor does say parenthetically: “Plans for a novel and a play were also much in his mind at this time, but no progress was made in actual construction.” Nothing, however, is vouchsafed as to what that play was, how it got into the aforesaid mind in the first place, and why it never came out. It never did come out, for as a playwright O. Henry was a little brother to that forlorn fellow who figures in Augustus Thomas’s reminiscences and whose successive lodgings in New York were always traceable by stray bits of manuscript which had never progressed beyond the brave beginning: “Act One, Scene One: A Ruined Garden.” To that family of dramatists O. Henry belonged. It was a large family. It still is.

This is really George Tyler’s story. He is one of those managers who are ever and always exploring for playwrights and players where no one else has looked. His ardor has always been addressed to the task of growing a dramatist where only a novelist grew before. He and Kipling, for instance, have spent unchronicled hours in conference over a Mulvaney play. But that is another story. Tyler would, I think, derive more heart-warming satisfaction out of extracting four acts from some reluctant teller of tales, than out of any contract he could sign with the most tested and chronically successful dramatist of the day. And just as the late Charles Frohman, by an incorrigible and disarming doggedness, finally badgered the bewildered Barrie into writing for the theatre, so Tyler hoped to make a playwright of O. Henry. He never encountered him on a street corner or dropped him a note about one of his stories without nagging him to try his hand at a play.

Every O. Henry story naturally prompted such a hope. Every one of them fairly tingled with the stuff of which plays are made; and much of that stuff, rented or borrowed or blandly stolen, has since found its way into theatres all over the world. But it was so much easier to write a story, and for a while the Tyler blandishments had no visible effect. The drowsy dramatist that is probably in all of us and that was certainly in O. Henry, stirred uneasily in response to the Tyler proddings, but never really wakened.

O. Henry’s connection with the theatre had been slight and discouraging. He had, in a needy moment, written the libretto of a musical comedy called “Lo”, for which Franklin P. Adams ingenuously fashioned the lyrics and A. Baldwin Sloane the music--a promising but impractical triumvirate whose first and only effort started boldly out from Chicago, wandered erratically around the middle west for fourteen weeks, and then died somewhere, alone, neglected, and unsung. New York never saw it and neither, for that matter, did O. Henry.

Then, in a sudden fit of industry, he drew up a scenario for a comedy, perhaps with the solemn intention of writing it, but more probably in the hope that it would impress the importunate Tyler and lead to a small advance of cash. Indeed, there is still in existence the back of an envelope which served as a ledger wherein were noted the sums, amounting in all to more than $1,200, that were doled out to O. Henry to keep his spirits up and in the faint hope that he might actually get around some day to writing that comedy.

The stories O. Henry wrote, their abundance and their spasmodic unevenness, can never be understood by one who does not keep in mind the fact that he was chronically penniless and forever dashing off pieces either to quiet some editor who had lent him money or to extract himself from pawn at some hotel. This continuous pauperism is usually explained in one of two ways, either that he tossed largess right and left like some latter day Robin Hood or that his pockets were continuously drained by blackmailers whose silence was necessary to his peace. But really no explanation is urgent, for O. Henry earned comparatively little money even in his most successful years and the great sums which his works eventually brought did not begin to stream in until after his death.

It was from such a fellow that Tyler received at last the somewhat cloudy scenario of a comedy to be based on “The World and the Door”, a story which appears now as the first one in the posthumous collection called “Whirligigs”. The story has as its setting one of those little lazy colonies of expatriates in South America--the wistful colonies of which every member has a good legal reason for not returning to the United States. O. Henry had seen them at close range in the unhappy years when he and the Jennings brothers were themselves fugitives from justice. “The World and the Door” spins a romance between a New Yorker who had shot down a fellow roisterer in a drunken brawl and a lovely woman who had given aconite to her husband and left hurriedly for foreign parts. The tale reaches its acute crisis when the two fugitives discover that neither victim has died and that both of them are free to abandon romance and return to civilization. From that story the scenario was made and set aside to simmer.

Then one Sunday morning, at a time when H. B. Warner, a Tyler star, was involved in a moribund entertainment that was sinking rapidly out in Chicago, in walked Tyler’s father all aglow over a new volume of O. Henry stories. It contained the yarn which every one knows as “A Retrieved Reformation”. I find that when, from time to time, polls are solemnly opened to decide which was the best of all he wrote, the vote goes either to that fragment, so Dickensy in its flavor, “An Unfinished Story”, or to that rarer and more delicate work, “A Municipal Report”. (My own choice would always be for “The Skylight Room”.) But I suppose there is no doubt that “A Retrieved Reformation” is the most widely known of all the tales O. Henry told. It is the story of Jimmy Valentine, ex-convict and retired safe cracker, who, having reformed and settled down as a bank cashier, has so artfully builded his alias that the pursuing detective cannot prove the identity. Just in the moment when he is turning away, baffled, panic word is rushed in that a child has been locked by accident in the bank’s new vault, a child sure to die of suffocation unless, by some miracle, there can be found in time one of the half dozen men in the world so expert in safe cracking that, with eyes blindfolded and fingers sensitized, they can decipher any combination. Of course the heroic Valentine must volunteer his buried talent and, by his success at it, confess the suspected identity. And of course, since O. Henry was a spinner of fairy tales, the detective does not laugh cynically and arrest the lad, but bursts instead into affecting tears and goes pensively away forever.

Tyler read that story, shut the book with a snap and began telegraphing hotly in every direction. Out in Chicago was Warner needing a new play as a drooping flower needs water. Then one wire went to O. Henry, offering $500 for the dramatic rights. The offer was accepted with pathetic promptitude, first by wire and then by the following letter:

Asheville, N. C., _October_ 23, 1909.

Mr. George C. Tyler
Liebler & Co.
N. Y. City.

+My dear Mr. Tyler+: I hereby transfer to you the entire dramatic
rights of the story you write me about--the title is “A Retrieved
Reformation.” I am glad to be able to hand you over anything that
you might be able to use.

But I want you to let the $500 that I owe you still remain owing,
for I am going to write that play yet and soon. I’ve been in
bad shape for a long time, both as to writing and refunding. I’m
wrestling with a bad case of neurasthenia (so the doctor says),
but I’m getting back into good shape again. I am living about six
miles out of Asheville and spend most of the time climbing hills
and living out-of-doors. I have knocked off 20 pounds weight. I eat
like a drayman and don’t know what booze tastes like. In fact, I’ll
be better than ever in another week or two.

I got out the scenario of “The World and the Door” some days ago
and began to plan out the acts and scenes. I’ll surprise you with
it as soon as I get down to hard work.

I deeply appreciate your leniency and kindness and intend to “come
up to scratch” yet with the goods.

So, the dramatic rights of the “Retrieved Reformation” are yours
and if you strike another story you like take it too.

In the meantime, I owe you $500, am going to pay it and remain

Sincerely yours

+Sydney Porter+.

P. S. If you want a more formal assignment of the rights of the
story, send on the papers and I will sign ’em.

Tyler then sent for Paul Armstrong, a wise old artisan of the theatre, who could be counted on to turn the story into a play without spilling anything, and who could also be expected to do it quickly, as he too was probably without funds. Armstrong read the story, agreed to try his hand at it, and vanished. It turned out later that he had been locked up in a room at the Hotel Algonquin, but for a week there was no signal from him and it was upon an impresario fuming with impatience and uneasiness that he sauntered nonchalantly in at the end of that week. Tyler launched at once on a burning speech in which he gave his opinion of Broadway as a habitat for men who thought they were playwrights, his opinion of the faithless and the irresponsible denizens of that territory, and his opinion of his own bitter and thankless job, which he said, he was minded to forsake then and there in favor of farming. Which oration Armstrong interrupted by producing from his ulster the completed four act manuscript of a melodrama, the first of the crook plays, “Alias Jimmy Valentine”. The next day they were all on their way to Chicago and eleven days later the piece was produced there. Within three weeks, therefore, after Tyler first read “A Retrieved Reformation”, its dramatization began a run which was to make reputations for some people and fortunes for others; which was to tweak and tantalize playgoers all over America, England, France, Spain and South Africa; and which was to breed a very epidemic of plays in which no self-respecting protagonist would think of approaching the first act without a neat murder or at least a bank robbery to his credit.

I often think how much it adds to a playgoer’s interest in a piece to know something of the manner in which it came to be written, something of the source of its incident and its viewpoint, something, that is, of its own biography. Consider those first nighters in Chicago who encountered Jimmy Valentine in the Sing Sing scene, met with him the sorry procession of prison types and finally followed him in his precarious flight into respectability. How they would have gaped had they known (and probably not more than one or two of them even guessed) that this, in a sense, was O. Henry’s own story, that he too had been a convicted felon, that he had come to know the original of Jimmy Valentine when they were both in prison together in Ohio, and that at that very time he, like Jimmy, was building with his own hands a new identity in a new world.

If this missing chapter ever does find its way into the O. Henry biography, there ought, I suppose, to be a footnote about the actress picked up out of space to play the leading feminine rôle. For “Alias Jimmy Valentine”, that company of Warner’s out in Chicago would do well enough. But the cast of the play required a new leading woman. Someone mentioned casually that there was a promising newcomer to be seen that very afternoon in a special matinée somewhere on Broadway. Tyler dropped in, took one look, and engaged her forthwith--a lovely, droll, wide eyed young actress who had just come in out of the provinces and who was already footsore from her weary rounds of the managers’ offices in an effort to persuade someone that she knew how to act. Her name was Laurette Taylor.

But that is a footnote. And “Alias Jimmy Valentine” itself is important in the story of O. Henry as a playwright only because it yielded Paul Armstrong something like $100,000 while it yielded O. Henry, whose idea it had been, nothing like that at all. He made just $500 out of it. This painful discrepancy was something which the guileful Tyler meant that O. Henry should not be allowed to forget. Every week, when the official copy of the box office statement went through the mails to Armstrong as a matter of routine, a duplicate copy was mailed to O. Henry. It was, of course, a lean time in which Armstrong did not receive each week more for writing the play than O. Henry received all told for having invented it. After a little succession of such weekly reminders, the wear and tear upon O. Henry’s spirits became visible.

Witness this letter which arrived in New York early in 1910:

Asheville, N. C.
Monday

+My dear Mr. Tyler+,

I had expected to be in N. Y. before this but I am not. I have been
putting in all my time getting in good shape for future campaigns,
and doing practically no work at all. Have entirely recovered my
health and feel fine and fit. I have done barely enough writing
to keep the possum from the door since I’ve been down here, but I
think I have gained greatly thereby.

Got a little proposition to make to you.

If you’ll advance me $500, I’ll come at once to N. Y., establish
myself in some quiet rural spot of the metropolis known only to
yourself and your emissaries and get to work and finish a play. I
will not let my whereabouts or even the fact that I am in the city
be known to anyone but you; and I will give all my time and energy
to the play.

As collateral, I can only make over to you the dramatic rights of
all my stories until the work is done. The new play “Alias J. V.”
has inspired me to believe I can do something for both of us.

If you will do this, let me know immediately and I will come.

Of course if you don’t care to do it, it won’t affect our future
relations. But I want to get in the game, and I’ll stick to you
_exclusively_ until we try it out.

Yours as ever

+Sydney Porter+.

c/o Jas. S. Coleman.

The answer to this seems to have been cautious and conditional, for further explanations soon started north as follows:

Asheville, N. C., 1/25 ’10.

+My dear Mr. Tyler+:

I will be brief. Why I want the money in a lump sum is to make a
getaway quick. Your proposition is better than mine, but it lacks
the hastiness and expedition necessary to a big theatrical success.
As I told you I have been busy down here for about four months
getting rid of cirrhosis of the liver, fatty degeneration of the
heart and neurasthenia--none of which troubles I have ever had. But
I was about as nervous and reflex-actiony as the hind-leg of a frog
as shown in the magazine-section of almost any Sunday newspaper.
The country and the mountains have been worth more to me than
money--I am almost as strong and tough as a suffragette.

But I have (by order of the Old Doctor) avoided work gladly and
cheerfully. Consequently I have as much money on hand as was left
lying around the box office at the last performance of “Lo.”

Now, suppose we have a few moments conversation as heart-to-heart
as an editorial on chicken-salad in the Ladies’ Home Journal by
Edward Everett Hale.

I owe something in the neighborhood of $500 down here that should
and shall be paid before the obsequious porter of the So. Ry. Co.
can have the opportunity of brushing the soot off the window sill
of Mr. Pullman’s car onto the left knee of my new trousers. I’m not
after money now--it’s transportation, transposition and a chance
that I want. I can work the proposition out in the short story
line; but it’s slow, Colonel, slow. I want to get into the real
game, and I’ll stake my reputation as the best short story writer
within a radius of Asheville that we can pull it off.

Here’s what I need in order to start things going.

I’ve got to pay up everything here and leave a small bunch of
collateral with my long-suffering family to enable them to purchase
the usual cuisine of persimmons and rabbits for a while.

I will do this.

If you will send me the necessary sinews, I will start for N.
Y. on Wednesday or Thursday of next week. I will, on arrival,
secure a room or two with privilege of bath 3 flights above, and
’phone you the next morning. Thenceforth I am yours and Mr. Ford’s
until results have been accomplished. I will place all my time at
your disposal until the play is finished. My proposition is not
unselfish--I expect to make it profitable to myself as well as to
you.

Proviso--

Don’t give it away to any magazine, or anybody else, that I am
there. I will be in retirement and working for you as long as
may be necessary. My mail will be sent here as it has been, and
forwarded there. My family will remain here during the Summer. They
seem to like the idea of my returning to N. Y., although I have
been reasonably kind to them.

Now, listen.

You know how much “front” counts. I’m not afraid of N. Y. police
or editors: but if I arrive there in a linen suit, pith helmet and
tennis shoes what would Big Bill Edwards do to me but shovel me
into a cart and dump me into East River?

So get busy with your telegraph blanks. Send me $750 _by wire_ when
you get this and I’ll strike N. Y. Thursday at the latest. I’ve got
to have some margin, and you’ll get my exclusive services thereby.
Take another chance. You can’t lose.

I am enclosing as a rather poor collateral the rights to my stories.

I hate to make any new dickers with the magazine people and that’s
why I put the matter so strenuously up to you. I know now how much
better (financially) the stage business is:--thanks to you.

Tell Oom Paul Armstrong that I hope he’ll crack the safe for all
it’s worth in “Alias Jimmy”. I got the press notices that you had
sent me.

I’m awfully sorry to have to come back to town and write a better
play than Mr. Armstrong has--but I need the money--he won’t mind.

With best regards

+Sydney Porter+

c/o Jas. S. Coleman.

P. S. To summarize--$750--by--wire--not by an A. D.
T.--satisfaction guaranteed or money refunded.

This appears to have been followed breathlessly by a telegram which read thus:

LIKE TO HAVE FUNDS DO WIRE TODAY WILL POSITIVELY BE THERE ON TIME
HAVE CUT OUT SPENDING AND CHIANTI S. P.

Tyler seems to have thought it wisest to send only a part of the sum demanded and to do that by mail. By the end of February this glowing message came up from Asheville:

WILL ARRIVE AT NOON MONDAY IF YOUR HUNDRED WIRED TODAY EXCLUSIVE
WORK GUARANTEED UNTIL SATISFACTORY RESULTS

SYDNEY PORTER

And this was followed by one even more urgent:

WIRE BALANCE AM WAITING AT THE DEPOT

PORTER

So Tyler wired the balance, but the promised phone message from the modest and secluded lodgings never came. The first tidings came from a hospital, to which O. Henry had been taken mortally ill with pneumonia. He had received the money, retained the margin, and started north. But once he had found himself at the gates of Bagdad, he had stood wide eyed for a moment and then drifted happily off among the bazaars, stumbling on some old cronies, and given himself over to celebration of his return from exile. Tyler never saw him again. And the great American play--“The World and the Door”, a comedy in three acts by the author of “The Four Million”--was never written.

_Mary Austin_

In “_The Bookman Anthology of Verse_” I wrote of Mrs. Austin as follows:

“Few people in America understand native rhythms as does Mary Austin. Born in Illinois, she has divided her life between the Far West and the East, making it her special effort to understand the country as a whole. She has written plays, essays, novels and studies of American life. Her work among the Indians has given her not only an unusual mastery of subtle cadences in prose and poetry; but a certain mystic sense of the trend of national feeling that approaches the visionary. A commanding presence, an intuitive understanding and a discriminating tolerance make Mrs. Austin a truly vital force in American life and literature.”

This, I think, did not do justice to her extraordinary vitality, her knowledge of the Indians and the desert, her command of folklore and of language. Her platform manner, her control of an audience, makes her one of the best lecturers I know. An unusual person, Mary Austin. She likes to be called Chisera, or “The Witch Woman”. She seems almost that.

WOMEN AS AUDIENCE

Among the most resented attitudes to which women have been reduced by our androcentric culture, is that of passive spectator to the male performance. The whole feminist movement, in fact, is energized by our resistance to that rôle, and our determination to participate in constructive movement by contact. It is disconcerting then, to discover, after the removal of the political bar, that in everything but the personal accomplishment we are still in a state of practical nullity toward our national culture, owing to our never having learned, as women, the business of being audience. All that we have learned, it now appears, is the art of sitting still in more or less becoming attitudes.

It is a humiliating admission for so confirmed a feminist as myself to make, but a survey of what is actually transacting among the organized and federated groups of women from whom creative social reaction might have been expected, shows them, in respect to literature, art, and education, very much in the state of those conscientious attendants at concerts who have to wait until the conductor turns around to know when to applaud the orchestra. Any public performer who is clever enough to make the applausive gesture at suitable intervals can be sure of a sufficient feminine claque to keep him circulating in the Big Time of platform attention without any particular deserts.

Consider in this connection, the fate of recent European candidates for the American claque as they have enfiladed across our lecture field. Whenever they have been of sufficient prominence to attract mixed audiences of men and women, those who had nothing to say found themselves swiftly and emphatically curtailed in their opportunities of saying it. Few laurels of alien growth have ever sprouted vigorously enough in the atmosphere of self-conscious democracy, to conceal the want of pertinence in the wearer of them. But when the lecturer is of the type whose access to the American pocketbook is chiefly by way of the stereotyped women’s organizations, the shadow of a leaf upon his brow--less, the mere poise of that brow as if it wore the wreath--is enough to insure his thrift campaign against frost. After a few months of circulation among women’s club audiences he will be in a position to command the top price from the New York magazines for telling the American public the low opinion he has formed of its native culture.

Not that I would deny to, say, W. L. George, such confirmation of his estimate of the inferior intelligence of women as he derives from those who can be brought together to hear him express it. What I am here to affirm is that neither the ease with which American women can be intellectually imposed upon, nor their failure to function creatively as audience to our bourgeoning literature and art, is to be taken as indicative of any lack of capacity critically to appreciate, or individually to produce their share of it. It has to do with the general inexperience of women in collective reaction, and is about as indicative as the movements of a waltzing horse of what could normally be expected.

Let me illustrate from the women’s magazines, which are theoretically created in response to what the editors, assisted by the advertisers, really know of what women want. Actually, in addition to their function as trade journals, which they admirably fill, women’s magazines represent what the men editors think it desirable for women to read, modified by the erroneous conviction of advertisers that the spread of advanced ideas among women lessens the consumption of bottled mincemeat, colored insert breakfast food, and full-page flour. There was “The Ladies’ Home Journal” which, under Mr. Bok, built up an unprecedented standard of magazine popularity. At the same time it failed to retard in the slightest degree the successful development of all the ideas it opposed,--suffrage, women’s clubs, family limitation and the like,--which went on progressively among the very women on whose living room tables the “Journal” was periodically displayed.

It is this curious lack of causality between what women unprotestingly take in, and what they can be counted on to do, that inhibits the free expression of woman-mindedness in our literature and art. There is no more sequential relation between what they listen to and what they think, than there is between their morals and the things they can be induced to sit through in the moving picture houses.

The photodrama provides us with one of the most illuminating side lights on the failure of women to function representatively as audience, in their neglect of the quality of “form” in cultural expression. The criterions of women are interior. What was meant, what was subjectively felt by the protagonists, determines for them the affectuality of the action. High ground for this interior standard being established by convention, an audience of women can not only be made to accept, but can be induced to applaud offenses against essential decency. Let it be clearly understood that the boudoir scene is an incident in a proper honeymoon, and details which every man in the audience knows were introduced with libidinous intent, will “get by” with the women. On the same general level this is true of books. In the second rank of popular magazines, one feels certain, we are saved from a great deal of potential indecency only by the circumstance of their being read largely by men.

I have lectured many times before women audiences, on the social significance of literature, and I have made a habit of setting down immediately afterward the significant questions asked with the result that, turning them over just now, I find not one indicative of the desire, or the sense of obligation on the part of the reader, to enter into the creative struggle. What they do seem to want is suggestions for obtaining creative _results_ for themselves, or items by which they may participate effectively in the _talk_ about creative work. Or they will be satisfied with mere entertainment.

Much of this detachment is, I suspect, the residue of woman’s century old habit of thinking of books, magazines, plays, and painting as the sort of thing Daddy brings home from his hunting, toward which she has conceived her duty to be an uncritical disposition to make the best of what is offered. Thus there is always a tendency on the part of women to measure art by the ensuing fatness of their personal reactions, rather than by the social significance of the creative act; to be appreciative of the artist as a man rather than as a representative of the tribe of mankind. It may be that the slight touch of the exotic attaching to the foreign poet and novelist, which favors this feminine attitude of superior detachment from the sweat of achieving, has something to do with their preferential hearing. For the rest we have no evidence that Xantippe thought any more highly of the “Dialogues” than Carol Kennicott thought of the symposium at the drug store.

If it were not for the circumstance that few women’s clubs can be induced to pay to women artists the terms and attention that are conceded to men, the track to effective participation might be beaten out for them by women who have already trodden it for themselves. No doubt much of the collective ineffectiveness of women in this field is due to their never having acquired free movement of themselves as impersonal, unemphasized items of society.

An incident of constant recurrence in the life of every woman who has attained a reasonable literary expression of herself, is to be importuned by other women to write about this, to protest against that, or to write more often on matters concerning which it is her consuming desire to be permitted to write. When she responds with an impatient, “For heaven’s sake, if you like my stuff, don’t waste time telling me, tell the editor!” the most usual retort is a startled, “But he wouldn’t pay any attention to me, I’m no critic.” This is something more than an excessive estimate of the part critics play in the establishment of literary reputations. It is both evidence and result of woman’s inexperience in functioning as a particle of the democratic whole. Accustomed immemorially to presenting herself as an individual issue, as maiden, wife, mother, at the lowest as female, she tends still to approach the cultural poll in some specialized capacity. It is news to her that as paying member of the audience she has acquired both privilege and obligation in respect to the quality of the performance. Some day it will come to her, together with the horrid thought that she has been excluded this long time from cultural effectiveness, not by man’s wish to exclude her, but because she has never learned the game.

It must be failure of method. Nobody could accuse the women’s clubs of any failure of intention to do their whole duty by the literature of their native land. Have they not every one of them a book committee, and the habit of inviting visiting celebrities to sit on the platform whole afternoons at the price of saying a few words at the end of the regular program? Has not every author in America had one or more letters stating that the writer’s club has assigned that particular author to her for author’s day, and she has never read any of his works; will he not kindly send her a review of his life and works to read? Do not thousands of dollars pass annually by way of their lecture committees to the pockets of authors of whom nobody can say with certainty where, in the scheme of American values, they belong?

It would be unfair to attribute the failure of one of the most remarkable organizations ever created in any society, to produce an appreciable effect on our literature, to the four million women of the finer strain who make up its membership. Is not the whole situation a reflection of our common national disposition to regard all art as a performance, some kind of “show”? Whereas the artist himself knows it is a way of life, of which the book or the picture is the evidence rather than the object of pursuit. It is not likely that men, just as men, would do any better. But because women have rather definitely assumed the rôle of patrons of culture, because they have made a stagger at fulfilling it, they must come in for a certain amount of question. It is women who have already accepted the responsibility for social conditions in which mature men and women divide themselves, for purposes of culture, according to sex. So when we wish to talk about organized effort to produce a representative culture, we have nothing else to talk about but the women’s clubs.

European observers are disposed to credit this state of things to a want of sex power in our women; that is, to a feebleness in the whole delicate complex of vital responses which women make to men. It is interesting to note that Sinclair Lewis, whether deliberately or by one of those divine accidents to which the sincere artist is liable, related these two impotencies in the heroine of “Main Street”. But such an explanation proceeds primarily from the old view that men produce and women appreciate; a state of things which our whole American experiment is organized to deny. The most we can say of American women is that they have rejected the traditional mode of response to intellectual creativeness, without having taught themselves any more efficacious measures.

What women have to learn to be audience to, is not the book after it is written, nor the personality of the author who writes it, but the process by which a really vital book gets itself produced out of our communal experience. What they must assist at is not the adumbration of praise for work that is done, so much as the selection and emphasis of social conditions that have power over a book while it is doing. In this connection an Author’s League as much interested in what of the author is going into the book, as in what is coming back to him in the way of royalties, might be helpful.

It is a realization of the need of women to rehearse the rôle of audience in the collective key, that has led to the organization of the Women’s News Service, by which, through the medium of their local press, women will be enabled to practice, along lines already familiar, the rapid intake and response indispensable to their success as coefficients of a democratic culture. But the Women’s News Service aims only at establishing this rapport about what women are doing. What is needed is a realization that in the indigenous literature of America, there already exists a competent news service about life as it is living. The true approach to it from women is neither as women nor as critics, but as participators in the collective experience, of which the particular mode of poetry or fiction is the individual expression. Such an approach is neither instinctive in women, nor part of their social inheritance. It cannot, however, be assumed that men sitting together as an organized body to hear any available author read from or talk about his work, will produce any sort of result which will be found competent to support a creditable national literature, and to be of constructive value in the great age of American literature, must begin to be operative shortly. Otherwise it might be suspected that the rôle to which men assigned women, of sitting still and saying nothing except what is pleasant, is the one to which they are intrinsically best adapted.

_Burton Rascoe_