Set Down in Malice: A Book of Reminiscences

by Gerald Cumberland

Of “ghosting” I have done a little and seen much. I know well a very prosperous musical composer of talent who has paid me to write many articles that he has signed with his own name. You call me an accomplice? But then it was nothing to me what he did with my articles when I had written them. Believe me, the practice is [108] ]very common. The man who signs the articles furnishes the ideas: the ghost merely expresses them.

The same musical composer was commissioned a few years ago to write an orchestral work for an important musical festival. We will call him Birket. Either Birket was too busy to write the work or he felt he had not the ability to do it; whatever the reason, he went to a friend of mine—a man of far superior gifts to his more famous colleague—and offered him a certain sum to do the work for him. My friend—Foster will do for his name—consented, and the work was duly performed at the festival, conducted by Birket, and I attended in my capacity as musical critic.

How eminent men who are not writers do itch to see themselves in print! It is not enough that their speeches are reported, their paintings and musical compositions criticised, their sentences recorded by every daily newspaper, their acting, singing and what not lauded to the skies: they must themselves write: or, if they cannot write, it must appear to the public that they have written. Why? Just vanity. That word “vanity” will explain nine-tenths of the seemingly inexplicable things in the conduct of most of our public men. A man accepts a knighthood because, as a rule, he is vain; he refuses it for the same reason; he advertises that he has refused it because he is vain; and, because he is vain, he refuses to advertise that he has refused it.

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A great deal has been written about the romance of Fleet Street. But romance is in a man’s mind and heart, and it is true that many romantically minded men go to Fleet Street. Fleet Street gives us a sense of importance, a sense of too much importance. We like to feel that we are powerful, but only a mere handful of men in The Street have power that is worth while. What we of the rank and file write is soon forgotten, for newspaper readers are, for [109] ]the most part, people who devour print greedily, neither masticating nor assimilating the things they devour. Newspapers confuse the mind and bring it to a state of drugged apathy. Did you ever meet a really voracious reader of newspapers who possessed the gift of sifting and weighing evidence, or one who had an accurate memory, or one who could think clearly and logically, or one who was not bewildered and befogged by mere words?

But even if we men in Fleet Street have no real power, we have what is much the same thing: we have the illusion of power. We come into close contact with people much more important than ourselves, and some of these people fawn on us, for we are the necessary intermediaries between themselves and the public.

But romance? Why is Fleet Street romantic? Well, as I have already said, it is because so many journalists themselves are romantic.... But I wonder if that really is the reason, and as I wonder I begin to think that though it is true one meets adventurous, talented and original people by the score in newspaper offices, yet, after all, it is not they who make journalism seem full of savour, of rich delight, of unexpectedness and excitement, of high romance. No; it is writing itself that is romantic: mere words and the colour and music of words; the smell of printers’ ink; the wet feel of a paper fresh from the press; the sounds of telephone bells and of machinery; the joy of expressing oneself; the lovely, great joy of signing one’s name to an article and knowing that in twenty-four hours it will have been read or glanced at by perhaps half-a-million people.... But it seems to me as I write that I am utterly failing to communicate to you who read the romantic nature of journalism. To you it is, perhaps, merely a slipshod profession, a profession in which there is something sordid and vulgar and as unromantic as Monday morning. To me a man who writes with distinction is the most interesting creature in the world: I [110] ]cannot know too much about him; I can never tire of his talk. Actors bore me. So do politicians, lawyers, men of science, those who are professionally religious, doctors, musicians. But writers and financiers—especially Jewish financiers—are to me full of subtlety; their souls are elusive, and their minds are cunning past all reckoning. It is frequently said that the art of writing is possessed by most people. The art of writing correctly may be, but the “correct” writer is frequently not a writer at all, for he cannot compel people to read him. A writer without readers is not a writer; he is simply a man who murmurs to himself very laboriously. But the writer who can claim thousands of readers—I mean even such writers as Mr Charles Garvice and the lady who invented The Rosary—are in essentials more highly endowed with the true writer’s gifts than many mandarins who live cloistered in Oxford and Cambridge. And I say this in spite of the fact that I have never been able to read more than ten consecutive pages of any book of Mr Garvice’s that I have picked up, and that The Rosary seems to me a story of such amazing flapdoodleism that——

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Arnold Bennett says somewhere that living in the theatrical world is like living a story out of The Arabian Nights. To me Fleet Street is more amazing than the bazaars of Cairo, more mysterious than the hermaphroditic Sphinx. And perhaps one of the most amazing things about Fleet Street is the easy way in which many men earn money.

Some years ago I was on the staff of a paper where I had for a colleague a dark blue-eyed young man who was our crime specialist. He had just come from the provinces, and had not even a rudimentary notion of how to write. He knew he couldn’t write; he boasted of it. And he cared nothing for newspapers or books or anything even remotely connected with literature. But he had an [111] ]amazing talent for sniffing out crime. I remember a great jewel robbery which he got wind of half-a-day before anyone else, and, in a way known only to himself, he obtained full particulars of the affair, writing a half-column “story” before any other paper in the kingdom even knew there was a story to write. He entertained me vastly, and I used to go with him sometimes at night when he called at Scotland Yard for news. Scotland Yard never gives away news unless it is in its own interest to do so. But I am very much inclined to believe that it was somewhere in Scotland Yard that he obtained his most valuable information. We would walk down wide corridors there together, sit ten minutes in a waiting-room, interview an official who invariably said: “Nothing doing to-night,” and come away. But that was quite enough for my friend. “I must go to Poplar straight away,” he would say, as we came away; or perhaps: “I can just catch the last train to Guildford”; or “There is nothing at all in the rumour of that murder in Battersea.” I used to look at him in amazement and exclaim: “But how do you know?” “Ah!” he would reply; “they say that walls have ears. But much more frequently they have tongues.”