IN NEW YORK'S "FLEET STREET"
The inexperienced free lance who attempts to invade New York, as we did, with no magazine reputation and no friends at court among the experts of the periodical market, may be assured that he will receive a surprising amount of courtesy. But this courtesy is likely to be administered to help soften the blows of a series of disappointments. Anybody but a genius or one of fortune's darlings may expect that New York, which has a deep and natural distrust of strangers, will require that the newcomer earn his bread in blood-sweat until he has established a reputation for producing the goods. Dear old simple-hearted Father Knickerbocker has been gold-bricked so often that a breezy, friendly manner puts him immediately on his guard.
Most of the editors with whom you will have to deal are home folks, like yourself, from Oskaloosa and Richmond and Santa Barbara and Quincy. Few are native-born New Yorkers, and scarcely any of them go around with their noses in the air in an "upstage Eastern manner." Most of them are graduates of the newspaper school, and remnants of newspaper cynicism occasionally appear in their outspoken philosophy. But be not deceived by this, for even in the newspaper office the half-baked cub who is getting his first glimpses of woman's frailties and man's weak will is the only cynic who means all he says. All reporters who are worth their salt mellow with the years; and editors who amount to much usually are ex-reporters trained to their jobs by long experience. The biggest editors and the ones with the biggest hearts have the biggest jobs. Most of the snubs you will receive will come from little men in little jobs, trying to impress you with a "front." The biggest editors of the lot are plain home folks whom you would not hesitate to invite to a dinner in a farmhouse kitchen.
What you ought to know when you invade New York without much capital and no reputation to speak of is that you are making a great mistake to move there so early, and that most of the editors to whom you address yourself know you are making a mistake but are too soft-hearted to tell you so.
Like most other over-optimistic free lances, we invaded New York with an expeditionary force which was in a woeful state of unpreparedness.
In a street of brownstone fronts in mid-town Manhattan, a hurdy-gurdy strummed a welcome to us in the golden November sunlight, and a canary in a gilt cage twittered ecstatically from an open window. This moment is worthy of mention because it was the happiest that was granted to us for a number of months thereafter. We rented a small furnished room, top floor rear, and went out for a stroll on Broadway, looking the city over with the appraising eyes of conquerors. We were joyously confident.
One reason why we thought we would do well here was that the latter months of the period preceding our supposedly triumphal entry had seen me arrive at the point of earning almost as much money at free lancing as I could have made as a reporter. Meantime, I had thrilled to see my name affixed to contributions in Collier's, Leslie's, Outlook and Outing, not to mention a few lesser magazines. I thought I knew a "story" when I saw one. I knew how to take photographs and prepare a manuscript for marketing, and New York newspapers and magazines had been treating me handsomely. What we did not realize was that while the New York markets were hospitable enough to western material, they required no further assistance in reporting the activities of Manhattan Island. We had moved away from our gold mine.
Our home and workshop now was a cubbyhole so small that every piece of furniture in the place was in close proximity to something else. My battered desk was jam against my roommate's drawing table, and his chair backed against a bed. Then, except for a narrow aisle to the door, there was a chair which touched another bed, which touched a trunk; the trunk touched ends with a washstand, which was jam against a false mantel pasted onto the wall, and the mantel was in juxtaposition with a bureau which poked me in the back. The window looked south, and adjacent buildings allowed it to have sunlight for almost half an hour a day.
Yet it would have been a cheerful enough place if our mail had not been so depressing. Everything we sent out came right back with a bounce, sometimes on the same day that we posted it. With indefatigable zeal we wrote feature "stories" about big topics in America's biggest city and furnished illustrations for the text. But the manuscripts did not sell. For two bitter months we kept at it before we discovered what was wrong. You may wonder how we could have been so blind. But there was no one to tell us what to do. We had to find out by experience.
In November our income was $60.90, all of it echoes from the past for material written in the west.
"How that crowd in the old office would laugh at us when we trailed back home, defeated!"
That was the thought which was at once a nightmare and a goad to further desperate effort. Day after day the Art Department and the kodak and I explored New York's highways and centers of interest. The place was ripe with barrels and barrels of good "feature stories," and I knew it; and the markets were not unfriendly, for by mail I had sold to them before. But now we could not "land."
On Christmas Day there was a dismal storm. Our purses were almost flat, and my box from home failed to arrive. To get up an appetite for dinner that night we went for a walk in a joy killing blizzard. I wanted to die and planned to do so. The only reason I did not jump off of a pier was the providential intervention of several stiff cocktails. (I am theoretically a prohibitionist, but grateful to the enemy for having saved my life.) The black cloud that shut out all sunlight was our measly total for December—$18.07.
One glimmer of hope remained in a growing suspicion that perhaps some of the "stories" we had submitted had seen print shortly before we arrived. Possibly some other free lances—I would now estimate the number as somewhere between nine hundred and a thousand—had gone over the island of Manhattan with a fine tooth comb? I began haunting the side streets to seek out the most hidden possibilities, and ended in triumph one afternoon in a little uptown bird store.
For two hours the young woman who was the proprietor of the store submitted to a searching interview, and I emerged with enough material for a full page spread. Then, taking no chances of being turned down because the contribution was too long, I condensed the "story" into a column. The manuscript went to the Sunday Editor of the New York Sun, with a letter pleading that "just this once" he grant me the special favor of a note to explain why he would not be able to use what I had to offer.
"Well enough written," he scribbled on the rejection slip, "but Miss Virginia has been done too many times before."
With that a great light dawned. Further investigation discovered that we had run into the same difficulty on numerous other occasions. We newcomers had no notion of how thoroughly and often the city had been pillaged for news. We could not tell old stuff from new. Manhattan Island is, indeed, the most perilous place in all America for the green and friendless free lance to attempt to earn a living. There is a wonderful abundance of "stories," but nearly all of them that the eye of the beginner can detect have been marketed before. Any other island but Manhattan! When dog days came around, I took a vacation on Bois Blanc in the Straits of Mackinac, and found more salable "stories" along its thinly populated shores than Manhattan had been able to furnish in three months. Everything I touched on Bois Blanc was new, and all my own. Anything on Manhattan is everybody's.
But to return to our troubles in New York. The only hope I could see was to create a line of writing all our own. This determination resulted in a highly specialized type of "feature" for which we found a market in the morning New York World. It combined novelty with the utmost essence of timeliness. For example, precluding any possibility of being anticipated on the opening of Coney Island's summer season, we wrote early in February:
"If reports from unveracious employees of Coney Island are to be trusted, the summer season of 1910 is going to bring forth thrilling novelties for the air and the earth and the tunnels beneath the earth."
We listed then the Biplane Hat Glide (women were wearing enormous hats that season) and Motor Ten Pins—get in a motor car and run down dummies which count respectively, a child, ten points; a blind man, five; a newsboy, one. Then the Shontshover. We explained the Shontshover in detail because it was supposed to have a particularly strong appeal to the millions who ride in the subway:
"New York's good-natured enjoyment of its inadequate subway service is responsible for the third novelty of the season. In honor of a gentleman who once took a ride in one of his own subway cars during the rush hour, the device has been named the 'Shontshover' (from 'Shonts' and 'shover'). It is the sublimation of a subway car, a cross between a cartridge and a sardine can. The passengers are packed into the shell with a hydraulic ram, then at high speed are shot through a pneumatic tube against a stone wall. Because of the great number of passengers the Shontshover can carry in a day, the admission price to the tube is to be only twenty-five cents."
We suggested on other occasions that new churches should have floors with an angle of forty-five degrees, on account of the prevailing fashion of large hats among women; that City Hall employees were outwitting Mayor Gaynor's time clock by paying the night watchman to punch it for them at sunrise, and that beauty had become a bar to a job as waitress in numerous New York restaurants. (O shades of George Washington, forgive us that one, at least!) These squibs did nobody any harm, and did us on the average, the good of the price of a week's room rent. We never meant them to be taken seriously or ever supposed that any one in the world would swallow them whole. But among our readers was a square-headed German; and one of the most absurd of our imaginings turned out, as a result, to be a physical possibility.
"Ever since it was announced, a few days ago, that hazing in a modified modernized form is to be permitted at West Point," we related, "a reporter for the World has been busily interviewing people of all ages and interests to find the latest ideas on the subject.... Some small boys in Van Cortlandt Park yesterday afternoon, diabolo experts, suggested 'plebe diabolo.' It is simply diabolo for grown-ups. A rope takes the place of the customary string and a first year man is used for a spool. Any one can see at a glance what a great improvement this would be over the old-fashioned stunt of tossing the plebe in a blanket."
A few months later I picked up a copy of the Scientific American and chortled to read the account of a German acrobat who was playing in vaudeville as the "Human Diabolo."
But this sort of thing was merely temporizing, and we finally had to abandon it for subjects more substantial. By a slow and harrowing process we learned our specialties and made a few helpful friends in New York's Fleet Street. The fittest among the many manuscripts turned out by our copy mill survived to teach us that the surest way into print is to write about things closest to personal knowledge—simple and homely themes close to the grass roots. We turned again to middle western topics and the magazines opened their doors to us. We plugged away for six months and cleared a profit large enough to pay off all our debts and leave a little margin. Then we felt that we could look the west in the face again, and go home, if we liked, without a consciousness of utter defeat. For though we had not won, neither had we lost. Our books struck a balance.
When the Wanderlust began calling again in May, I sat many an evening in the window of our little room, gazing down into the backyard cat arena or up at the moon, and dragging away at a Missouri corncob pipe in a happy revery. Some of my manuscript titles of editorial paragraphs contributed to Collier's trace what happened next:
Longings at the Window.
Packing Up.
A Mood of Moving Day.
From Cab to Taxi.
Outdoor Sleeping Quarters.
Shortcake.
Which is to say that it was sweet to see the home folks again, to eat fried chicken and honest homemade strawberry shortcake and to slumber on a sleeping porch. Our forces had beat a strategic retreat, but the morale was not gone. Our determination was firm to assault New York again at the first favorable opportunity. Meanwhile, we had learned a thing or two.