“I will do what you want,” he remarked, at length. “I will do it willingly—most willingly.”
And he did. Our little business entailed some subsequent correspondence, and some work on Zangwill’s part. The work was done promptly; his letters answered mine by return of post. He gained nothing by his work, whereas the paper I represented gained a great deal.
. . . . . . . .
Alphonse Courlander was one of the many young and promising writers whom the war has killed. He was one of the most hard-working journalists in Fleet Street, and if he was not precisely brilliant, he had unusual gifts and used them to good purpose. I could never read his novels, but I understand they met with a certain success, and people whose opinion I respect have spoken highly of them.
He represented The Daily Express in Paris at the time the war broke out. He was the most conscientious of men, and he grappled with the extra work that grew up with the war with a fierce and fanatical energy. He overworked himself, and the horror of the war appears to have got on his nerves. He disappeared from Paris and was found wandering alone in London, neurasthenic, beaten, purposeless. A week or two later he died.
Courlander was a good example of a not unusual type of man one frequently meets in Fleet Street—a type that, in the end, is bound to meet either failure or tragedy. He was too highly strung for the rigours of the game: too sensitive; too ambitious for his weak frame. The type either takes to drink or wears itself out long before [138] ]middle age. Courlander was an abstemious man; perhaps if he had “let himself go” occasionally, he would have stood the strain of his work better. When I saw him, he was always busy, always up to date, always writing or going to write a novel in his spare time. He had very little inventive faculty and used to worry over his plots and worry his friends over them. “Plots! ... as if plots matter if you have anything to say!” I used to urge. And then he would look at me, mystified.
“But, Cumberland, what can you know about it? You have never written a novel.”
“Oh, but I have,” I would reply, “but no one will publish them.”
“Ah! that’s the reason.”
And he really believed that that was the reason.