When a Man's Single: A Tale of Literary Life

by J. M. Barrie

'Well, he is more an artist than a writer, though, strictly speaking, he is neither. To that man is the honour of having created a profession. He furnishes rooms for interviews.'

'I don't quite understand,' said Rob.

'It is in this way,' Simms explained. 'Interviews in this country are of recent growth, but it has been already discovered that what the public want to read is not so much a celebrity's views on any topic as a description of his library, his dressing-gown, or his gifts from the king of Kashabahoo. Many of the eminent ones, however, are very uninteresting in private life, and have no curiosities to show their interviewer worth writing about, so your countryman has started a profession of providing curiosities suitable for celebrities at from five pounds upwards, each article, of course, having a guaranteed story attached to it. The editor, you observe, intimates his wish to include the distinguished person in his galaxy of "Men of the Moment," and then the notability drops a line to our friend saying that he wants a few of his rooms arranged for an interview. Your countryman sends the goods, arranges them effectively, and puts the celebrity up to the reminiscences he is to tell about each.'

'I suppose,' said Rob, with a light in his eye, 'that the interviewer is as much taken in by this as—well, say, as I have been by you?'

'To the same extent,' admitted Simms solemnly. 'Of course he is not aware that before the interview appears the interesting relics have all been packed up and taken back to our Scottish friend's show-rooms.'

The distinguished novelist in the chair told Rob (without having been introduced to him) that his books were beggaring his publishers.

'What I make my living off,' he said, 'is the penny dreadful, complete in one number. I manufacture two a week without hindrance to other employment, and could make it three if I did not have a weak wrist.'

It was thus that every one talked to Rob, who, because he took a joke without changing countenance, was considered obtuse. He congratulated one man on his article on chaffinches in the Evening Firebrand, and the writer said he had discovered, since the paper appeared, that the birds he described were really linnets. Another man was introduced to Rob as the writer of In Memoriam.

'No,' said the gentleman himself, on seeing Rob start, 'my name is not Tennyson. It is, indeed, Murphy. Tennyson and the other fellows, who are ambitious of literary fame, pay me so much a page for poems to which they put their names.'

At this point the applause became so deafening that Simms and Rob, who had been on their way to another room, turned back. An aged man, with a magnificent head, was on his feet to describe his first meeting with Carlyle.