Like most real humorists whom I have known, and I have known many from Mark Twain and Bill Nye downwards, Jerome is not a “funny man” in ordinary life. He is, on the contrary, except when he is on his legs, before an audience, or taking his pen in his hand, apt to be a very serious man, though his conversation is always illuminated by flashes of wit. He is much more apt to air strong opinions about serious questions. The Jerome you see in Paul Kelvin and The Third Floor Back is the real Jerome. He is the loyalest friend and most tender-hearted man imaginable. His kindness and hospitality are unbounded. You cannot stay with Jerome in his own house without being inspired by the deepest respect and affection for him. He is an ideal husband and father, a friend of the struggling, a just and generous master. Like Conan Doyle, though he has never shone in first-class cricket or golf, Jerome is very athletic in his tastes. In spite of his glasses, he is a fine tennis-player and croquet-player; he is a fine skater also, and devoted to the river and horses. It was partly a horse accident in which he and Norma Lorimer were involved, and both showed extraordinary courage, which made me feel for him as I do.
He is essentially an open-air man, whose thoughts are all outside directly he has got through his statutory amount of work with his secretary.
But though the serious man weighs down the humorist in Jerome, you would not guess it from his personal appearance. When he rises to speak, his bright eye, the smile playing round his mouth, his cool confident bearing, the very way in which he arranges his hair, which has not yet a particle of grey about it, is more suggestive of the humorist, the man who is accustomed to making hundreds roar with laughter at his speeches, and scores of thousands with the flashes of his pen.
Jerome has no love for London, though he has a town residence and enjoys Bohemian society, and is very popular in it. For many years he has lived on the Upper Thames, and he is in the habit of going to Switzerland for the skating.
I asked Carl Hentschel, who was one of the three who went on the trip immortalised in Three Men in a Boat, to tell me about it. He said—
“It is rather interesting to look back to the days of Three Men in a Boat. Jerome at that time was in a solicitor’s office in Cecil Street, where the Hotel Cecil now stands, George Wingrave was a junior clerk in a bank in the City, and I was working in a top studio in Windmill Street, close to where the Lyric Theatre now stands, having to look after a lot of Communists, who had had to leave Paris. Our one recreation was week-ending on the river. It was roughing it in a manner which would hardly appeal to us now. Jerome and Wingrave used to live in Tavistock Place, now pulled down, and that was our starting-point to Waterloo and thence to the river. It says much for our general harmony that, during the years we spent together in such cramped confinement, we never fell out, metaphorically or literally. It was Jerome’s unique style which enabled him to bring out the many and various points in our trip. It was a spell of bad weather that broke up our parties. A steady downpour for three days would dampen even the hardiest river-enthusiast. One incident, which, I believe, was never recorded, but would have made invaluable copy in Jerome’s hands, happened on one of our last trips. We were on our way up the river, and late in the afternoon, as the sky looked threatening, we agreed to pull up and have our frugal meal, which generally consisted of a leg of Welsh mutton, bought at the famous house in the Strand, now pulled down, with salad. We started preparing our meal on the bank, when the threatened storm burst. We hastily put up our canvas over the boat, and bundled all the food into it anyhow. It got pitch dark, and we were compelled to find the lamp and tried to light it. After a while we found the lamp, but it would not light; luckily we found two candle ends, and by their feeble light began our meal. We had hardly begun our meal when I said after the first mouthful of salad, ‘What’s wrong with the salad?’ George also thought it was queer, but Jerome thought there was nothing wrong. Jerome always did have a peculiar taste. Anyhow, he was the only one who continued. It was not till the next day that we discovered that owing to our carelessness of using two medicine bottles of similar shape, one containing vinegar and the other Colza oil, the lamp and the salad were both a bit off.”
When I asked Jerome what first gave him the idea of writing he said—
“I always wanted to be a writer. It seemed to me an easy and dignified way of earning a living. I found it difficult; I found it exposes you to a vast amount of abuse. Sometimes, after writing a book or play which seemed to me quite harmless, I have been staggered at the fury of indignation it seems to have excited among my critics. If I had been Galileo, attacking the solar science of the sixteenth century, I could not have been assaulted by the high priests of journalism with more anger and contempt. But the work itself has always remained delightful to me. I think it was Zangwill who said to me once, ‘A writer, to succeed, has to be not only an artist, but a shopkeeper’—and of the two, the shopkeeper is the more necessary. I am not sure who said that last sentence; it may have been myself.
“You write your book or play while talking to the morning stars. It seems to you beautiful—wonderful. You thank whatever gods there be for having made you a writer. The book or the play finished, the artist takes his departure, to dream of fresh triumphs. The shopkeeper—possibly a married shopkeeper with a family—comes into the study, finds the manuscript upon the desk. Then follows the selling, bargaining, advertising. It is a pretty hateful business, even with the help of agents. The book or the play you thought so fine, you thought that every one was bound to like it. Your publisher, your manager, is doubtful. You have a feeling that they are accepting it out of sheer charity—possibly they knew your father, or have heard of your early struggles—and yield to an unbusinesslike sentiment of generosity. It appears, and anything from a hundred to two hundred and fifty experienced and capable journalists rush at it to tear it to pieces. It is marvellous—their unerring instinct. There was one sentence where the grammar was doubtful—you meant to reconsider it, but overlooked it; it appears quoted in every notice; nothing else in the book appears to have attracted the least attention. At nine-tenths of your play the audience may have laughed; there was one scene which did not go well; it is the only scene the critic has any use for. Their real feeling seems to be that the writer is the enemy of the public; the duty of all concerned is to kill him. If he escapes alive, that counts to him.
“I remember the first night of a play by my friend, Henry Arthur Jones. There had been some opposition; it was quite evident that the gallery were only waiting for him to appear to ‘boo’ him, as if he had been a criminal on the way to the scaffold. I was standing by the gallery exit, and the people were coming out. Said one earnest student to another, as they passed me, ‘Why didn’t the little——come out and take his punishment like a man?’ ‘Cowardly, I call it,’ answered the other. They knew what was in store for him in the next morning’s papers; they knew that a year’s work, perhaps two, had been wasted. I suppose that it would be asking too much to suggest that they might also have imagined the heartache and the disappointment. The playwright who does not succeed in keeping every one of a thousand individuals, of different tastes and views and temperaments, interested and amused for every single minute of two hours, must not be allowed any mercy.