We used to get most notable guests at the Savage—was not the list headed by Albert Edward, Prince of Wales. I was in the chair the night that Nansen was the guest of the evening. It was on the eve of his departure for the North Pole, and I hammered the table and asked the Club if they would allow me to invite our guest to write his name on the wall behind his seat, to remain there till he came back again. They assented with rapturous applause, and the name is there still, glazed over. I have told in another chapter what he said to the “Savage” who wished to accompany him to the Arctic Circle.
The Savage Club is, undoubtedly, one of the institutions of London, and every literary visitor to these shores should see one of its Saturday nights.
CHAPTER XV
MY CONNECTION WITH JOURNALISM
I must allude briefly to my long connection with journalism.
When I settled in London in 1891, I had already done a good deal of journalism in New York and San Francisco. In the latter my writing had chiefly lain in travel-articles on Japan, to which San Francisco, as the Pacific Capital of the United States, naturally looks. In New York I had written on travel—much of my Japs at Home appeared in travel-articles for the McClure Syndicate. But I also wrote a number of literary and personal articles for the New York Independent, the Sun, the World, and so on, such as my Reminiscences of Cardinal Newman told in the first person. In doing this I found that what America demanded was the personal reminiscence.
When I came to England, I naturally sought work on the same lines, and had no difficulty in finding editors who saw the opening for this comparatively fresh line in British journalism.
I turned first to Fisher, of the Literary World, whom I had met at the Idler teas, and who had invited me to do some reviewing for him. He had Table-Talk Notes as a feature, and here my first journalism appeared.
When I was helping Jerome to formulate To-day in 1893, I suggested to him that we should have a book of the week, in which we told as much about the author as we knew, and that biographical gossip about authors and artists and actors should be one of our chief features. He was completely in favour of it, and I wrote a good deal for him, especially about authors.
About the same time, Lewis Hind became editor of the now defunct Pall Mall Budget, and I carried out the same idea for him in a regular causerie, to which we gave the name of the Diner-Out, and which I signed “St. Barbe”—the family name of my maternal grandmother.