C—O—B—B
By Sinclair Lewis
A man has to be not only famous but well-beloved before the little facts of his biography become known to any one but his mother and his aunts. Voltaire and Rousseau are useful persons to whom to refer when you are dragged to a talk-party, but you feel no burning curiosity as to where they were born or what editorial page saw their first effusions. It is Robert Louis Stevenson whose home in Samoa you photograph; whose refuge in Monterey you visit. And so it is with Irvin S. Cobb, who is three things: a big reporter, a big writer, and a big man.
If there is a newspaperman in New York who says that he doesn’t know that Cobb was born in Paducah, Kentucky, in 1876; that his first newspaper work was on the Paducah Daily News, that he did the Goebel murder trial, moved to Louisville, came to New York and stole a job on the Evening Sun, then that newspaperman is one of the I-knew-him-when club, whose family name is Legion and whose middle name is occasionally Liar. To be a New York newspaperman it is necessary to know Doc Perry’s and the fact that Cobb was born in Paducah.
There’s a reason for it other than the fact that Cobb is a big writer and a well-beloved man. That is: Cobb has made Paducah, and all the other Paducahs—in Kentucky, and Minnesota, and California, and Vermont—from which the rest of us came, live for us, in fiction which gets us as no foreign tale ever can. He makes one smell the soil—a thing that has been said of him so often that it is a platitude.
Covering the Portsmouth Peace Conference for the Sun, writing humorous stuff for the Evening World, making a national reputation for straight reporting with his account of the Thaw trial, Irvin Cobb had developed into a good, dependable star reporter when suddenly he broke away and in a story in the Saturday Evening Post, a story called “The Escape of Mr. Trimm,” he made himself known as a probable genius. No one could tell, yet, but in that story, the dramatic structure of it, the words like sparks from a third-rail in a snow-storm, the intensity with which the author saw himself as the chief character of the tale, there was evidenced a new American genius. Lord knows we needed him. We had—we still have—been letting England and France and Kulturland beat us ten to one in fiction. We had—we still have—a number of expert penmen who could do well with a wealthy young Yale grad. in a motor car; others, largely feminine, who could cheer our hearts with sweet stories about the Little Woman Who Always Smiled. But where were the writers who could go out on the street, really see the folks going by, and present them truthfully and interestingly in fiction? With one lone short story, Cobb had elected himself as one member of that missing and much needed class of geniuses.
Stories of the South followed; other stories, too, of New York. The mere list of them, as they appear in the two books called “Back Home” and “The Escape of Mr. Trimm” is enough to bring thrills to every reader of fiction: The Belled Buzzard, An Occurrence up a Side Street, Another of Those Cub Reporter Stories, Smoke of Battle, The Exit of Anse Dugmore, Fishhead; Words and Music, Five Hundred Dollars Reward, Up Clay Street, The Mob from Massac, Black and White, and the rest.... “Words and Music,” the first story in “Back Home” might be used as a test for the Americanism of anybody. It’s a seditious, Confederate, Southern story, but anybody, Yank or Southerner, who doesn’t thrill to it, doesn’t feel all the old traditions of the real country when he reads it, is a fake-American, a person of hyphenation.
Meanwhile, writing these slices of authentic genius, Cobb was not forgetting his humor, and he decorated the Saturday Evening Post with improper references to stomachs and dentists and vittles and art, published in book form as “Cobb’s Anatomy,” and “Cobb’s Bill-of-Fare,” then with irreverent things about the tourists and real-estate artists from the Grand Canyon to San Francisco, published as “Roughing It De Luxe,” and still more irreverent things about the grand old game of doing the American tourist, published in “Europe Revised.”
And then the Great War, and Cobb’s account of it in “Paths of Glory.”
I have listed his books at such length—because they are at such length. Here is Cobb, aged only thirty-nine, a mere child in the game. A few years ago everybody was surprisedly saying that he was a good fellow, fished discriminatingly, told edifying tales, was a friend of Bob Davis and George Horace Lorimer and Sam Blythe, was not very handsome, but was one of the few big newspapermen in whose records there wasn’t one single black spot, one single case of meanness or pettiness or failure in sympathy. The diagnosis was usually wound up, “He will be a big writer.” That is, to-day, no proper ending for this scholarly biography of Cobb, for he is a big writer, and his permanent place depends upon his written word.
WHEN A FELLER NEEDS A FRIEND
BY BRIGGS