Prejudices

by Charles Macomb Flandrau

I CAN never decide which is the more annoying to a writer: to have people elaborately ignore the fact that he writes and has written, or to have them assume that he can’t talk about, and isn’t interested in, anything but books in general and his own in particular. The happy medium is conversationally discovered by only a very few, but this no doubt is the case with almost all happy mediums. It isn’t in the least disconcerting to meet a person who is quite unaware of the fact that you are the clever Mr. Snooks, author of “The Swill Barrel: A Story of To-day.” Indeed, when your new acquaintance has not even heard of either you or your latest work, you may be able to have with him a perfectly rational and agreeable conversation. But there is a type of person who has read “The Swill Barrel” with interest, who knows you wrote it, and who for some cryptic reason never alludes to it or betrays the fact that he realizes you are the clever Mr. Snooks. This is really most trying. You know that he knows; he knows that you know that he knows, and you both somewhat consciously talk about other things—he, because of an utterly misguided idea that it is “in better taste” not to speak of a book to its author, and you, because, under the circumstances, you would rather die than admit you recognized a pen when you saw it reposing on a desk.

To refrain from speaking to a writer of his books because you think it in better taste not to, because “he must be so tired of having people talk to him about that book,” is to display a not particularly keen or sympathetic understanding of human nature. A writer, whether he be a novelist, a historian, a writer of essays, a writer of editorials, a poet, a reporter, a message indicting President of the United States, or the secretary of a charitable organization, invariably hopes that what he writes will be read; that it will please, amuse, instruct, inform, divert,—that, in a word, it will interest somebody, or rather, a group of somebodies. With many writers the commercial aspect of the transaction is, of course, always prominent, but their commercial success depends, after all, upon their ability to charm. Once having grasped the pen and set out to do any of these things, it is only human and natural to be gratified on learning that you have succeeded, and if the people you from time to time meet don’t tell you that you have, you remain in dreadful doubt. To the ears of a writer no music on earth is sweeter than intelligent praise, and even praise that is not intelligent is sweet if it has the ring of sincerity. I remember once taking in to dinner a young girl who assured me that she had very much enjoyed a certain story of mine because it had made her “cry and cry and cry.” Most insincerely, as I knew which story it must have been, I asked her the name of it. She thereupon adorably declared that she didn’t remember the name, she couldn’t recall where she had come across it, and she had forgotten what it was about, but she had “cried and cried and cried.”

Occasionally writers have assured me that it bored them to receive enthusiastic letters about their books, and I have at once, mentally, replied “You’re a liar.” No writer is ever anything but pleased to learn that some one has found something, anything, of interest or value in one of his efforts. One may write primarily for money, to make a living, but no matter to what trashy and flashy depths a writer may descend, there is always in his books something of himself. However hard he might try, he could not keep it out, and it immensely pleases him to have it discovered and commented upon, either in a letter from an unknown reader or in a five minutes’ conversation. To me few incidents are as agreeable, as altogether gratifying and satisfactory, as is the incident of opening an envelope addressed in an unknown handwriting and finding inside a letter that begins, “I have never written to an author before, but I feel that I must write to tell you that,” etc., etc. And any one who has written a book and declares that letters like this do not please him, is simply a poseur or untruthful, or both.

In the case of the great and famous it no doubt now and then ceases to be a pleasure. A daughter of Longfellow told me that her father had once received an imperative note from some woman, worded about as follows: “Dear Sir: I have issued invitations for a ladies’ luncheon a week from next Wednesday. There will be about fifty present and I wish to present each of them with your autograph as a souvenir. Kindly send me at once fifty autographs to the address given below.” Longfellow was the kindest and most courteous of men, but this was a little more than even he could “stand for,” as we would express it to-day. The luncheon was unautographic.

On the other hand, many persons not only do not ignore the fact that a writer is a writer, they have an inexplicable habit of regarding him and his books as a kind of legitimate prey. When they hear they are going to meet him at some gathering they make a point of refreshing their memories on the subject of his various volumes, if they have read them before, or endeavor to skim through one or two if they have not already made their acquaintance. They then have a comfortable feeling that their conversational equipment is complete, and they relentlessly talk to the poor wretch about nothing but his works. They ask him how he came to think of certain characters, if they were drawn from life, how long it takes him to write a novel, has he any regular hours for working or does he wait for an “inspiration,” how much does he get for a short story in such and such a magazine, has his latest book been selling well, doesn’t he find writing a delightful, a fascinating occupation, what is he writing now, when will it be finished, who is going to publish it, and does he get a lump sum for it or a royalty on every copy? I don’t exaggerate; in fact, I have omitted a long list of searching and personal questions to which a writer is constantly subjected. The ordinary attitude toward a person who makes his living by grinding out books has always been to me an inexplicable one. Nobody with the smallest grain of sense or tact is ever impelled to cross-question a lawyer about his cases in court or a doctor about his cases in the hospital. The thing is almost inconceivable, and when it does very occasionally happen, the thoughtless interlocutor is very properly snubbed. One would experience a certain delicacy in asking even a tailor about the various garments he was cutting and sewing, but comparatively few persons have scruples against putting a writer through the third degree. To me this has always been remarkable, because I realize that in almost every lawsuit, however trivial, and in almost every case of illness, there is more emotion, more hope and fear, more ingenuity, more drama, more “human interest,” than in all the novels and stories put together. And yet lawyers and doctors and tailors and real estate men seem to escape, while writers are everywhere lashed to the interrogatory mast.

It also has always seemed strange that a man or woman who writes books, however thin and lacking in importance, is invariably given, wherever he goes, a luncheon, a dinner, or that altogether horrible form of human intercourse known as a “tea.” Other men and women who from every point of view have made a success of their lives can enter a town, stay for two weeks and depart without being noticed. But when Richard Thyng Snooks (author of “The Swill Barrel: A Story of To-day,” a very poor story I beg to assert) arrives, innumerable festivities are arranged in his honor. He is asked to luncheon and dinner, it is hoped that he can be prevailed upon to “say something,” anything, at some entertainment during his all too brief stay. The local branch of the Federated Women’s Clubs invariably tries to lasso him, and is terribly disappointed if it doesn’t succeed. Knowing many writers of books, as by accident I happen to, this is something I have never been able to comprehend.

Personally, my feeling toward my various scribbling friends is that I like them, not because they write, but in spite of it. We meet and gossip about a thousand things, but I can scarcely remember talking with any of them on the subject of writing. It is only with the kind of person who looks upon a printed and launched book as a sort of achievement (which of course it isn’t) that one talks about the making of books. Men and women who write, I have learned, are usually grateful when they can temporarily be made to forget about it.

It is conventional to think of writers as eccentric creatures who live apart in a world of their own. I have known many, but I have not found this to be the fact. As a rule I have discovered that the anecdotes about them have been built upon the most slender foundations, either by well-meaning admirers who imagined for them an interesting atmosphere of which they themselves were guiltless, or by malicious gossips who hoped to do them harm. The things printed about writers in newspapers are usually half truths ingeniously distorted, or absolute falsehoods. The actual peculiarities of writers, the little prejudices and habits and superstitions they almost all have to a greater or less degree, rarely find their way into type, because they are so rarely spoken of. One knows, of course, that Fénelon was able to write in comfort only when dressed in court costume, with fine, clean lace falling over his slender, aristocratic hands; that Balzac, in the agonies of composition, consumed quarts of strong coffee and wore a kind of monastic dressing gown; that Dickens always had upon his desk, wherever he went, a little collection of valueless ornaments he was used to seeing there, and without which he felt ill at ease and unable to begin his task; that Thackeray usually hated to write and, as a rule, dragged himself to his pen and ink with extreme repugnance; that Schiller kept in the drawer of his writing table half a dozen rotten apples, the smell of which he inhaled deeply before he was able to compose. Such instances, and hundreds of others, are authentic and historic. They have become known because the writers who were responsible for them are famous the world over, and nothing in their lives seems to be too insignificant to be ferreted out and proclaimed.

It is interesting to know that lesser scribes are everywhere, in all sincerity, the victims of much the same whims and unaccountable, innocent manias. A talented and successful woman novelist of my acquaintance once confided in me that she never felt like writing unless her hands were dirty. In winter, before sitting down to write, she always dusts a room, a shelf of books, or builds a fire. In summer she spends half an hour or so pulling up weeds in the garden. Her hands are then dirty and comfortable, and she can write with comparative enjoyment. A man I know, however, always scrubs his hands with hot water and soap before beginning to write, and then squirts a drop or two of cologne on them. This sounds as if he wrote highly romantic fiction or lackadaisical poetry. As a matter of fact, his subjects are history and political economy, and he is regarded as an authority upon those serious matters. But these are queer, intensely personal little traits that emerge diffidently, almost reluctantly, only when one knows a writer very well indeed. They are not the sort of stuff that finds its way into the newspapers.

My experience with writers may not be conclusive, but it seems to have dawned on me that, the more important a writer is, the more stable and justified his place is in the world of letters, the less eager he is to chatter about his profession. It is the person who has more or less accidentally had one story accepted by Scribner’s, Harpers’ or the Century, or the contributor to some third-rate sectional magazine, who insists upon talking of his “work,” who is forever hinting of the conspiracy among editors and publishers to reject anything unsigned by a well-known name. Real writers usually go about their business calmly, methodically and with little or no enthusiasm. It is rarely writing that they find “delightful and fascinating”; it is the having written. Those I have known intimately have without exception admitted that they could always re-read with interest certain passages from their own books when other diversions failed them, and while they often were conscious of opportunities lost, of having gone astray, of having failed to achieve the effect at which they aimed, they on the other hand were more than compensated by the discovery of certain phrases, paragraphs and whole pages they had almost forgotten and that struck them as being surprisingly skilful.