I have often regretted that I did not form a close personal connection with a single publishing house over there, instead of having each individual book, as it was ready, sold to whichever publisher the agent happens to do business with.
Also I blame myself for not learning the art of pleasing the American novel-reader. Their book market is a much more valuable one than ours, and unfortunately the worst fault a novel can have in their eyes is its being “too British.” A book like The Tragedy of the Pyramids is anathema to them.
The only prose book I published during my sojourn in America was The Art of Travel, for which the publisher, a Greek, forgot to pay me a single penny of what he contracted. I afterwards turned into it an advertisement for the North German Lloyd, and got something, about fifty pounds, I think, out of them.
I must not take leave of America without recording my impressions of the other American cities which I visited besides New York and Boston.
San Francisco, Seattle, Tacoma and other western towns were spoiled for me, because the working-classes in them were so “swollen-headed” and rude that any educated or gently-born person felt like a victim of the French Revolution as he was making his way to the scaffold, surrounded by wild mobs thirsting for his blood. The lower classes in the cities of the Pacific Coast insult you to show that they are your equals. And except as manual labourers, they never could be anybody’s equals, because God created them so common. It is these people and the unscrupulous speculators who make money. The decent people get ground between the upper and lower grindstone in a land where living costs out of all proportion to the rewards of education.
We spent some time also in Washington, which is their exact converse. Washington has its vulgar rich, who go there to make a “season” of it, and its venal and lobbying politicians who make the vast temple, which acts as the American Capitol, a den of thieves, but they do not take the first place in the public eye. The really fine elements in the American nation are well represented at Washington, and form a natural Court, in which the President may or may not be prominent. That depends on whether he is fit to be their leader. It is they, and not the President, who keep up the traditions of their country before the eyes of the various Embassies. Such a man was Colonel John Hay. Their presence helps to make Washington a delightful city.
The American Government is extremely polite and hospitable to visiting authors. I was such a small author in those days that I felt positively embarrassed when, a few hours after our arrival in Washington, President Cleveland’s private secretary, Colonel Dan Lamont, called with an invitation for us to go to supper with the President and Mrs. Cleveland and be present at the last reception they gave before they left the White House.
And when President Harrison came into office, Mr. Blaine, the new Secretary of State, invited us to share his private box to witness the inaugural procession.
ISRAEL ZANGWILL
Drawn by Yoshio Markino