Years ago one of them confided to me his recipe for a Ledger poem. “Whatever you do,” he said, “be careful not to use up a whole idea on a single poem, for if you do you’ll never be able to make a cent. I usually cut an idea into eight pieces, like a pie, and write a poem for each piece, though once or twice I have made sixteen pieces out of one. My ‘Two Brothers’ idea yielded me just sixteen poems, all accepted, for which I received $160. What do I mean by cutting up an idea? Well, I’ll tell you. I took for a whole idea two brothers brought up on a farm in the country, one of whom goes down to the city, while the other stays at home on the farm. Well, I wrote eight poems about those brothers, giving them such names as Homespun Bill and Fancy Jake, and the city man always went broke, and was glad to get back to the country again and find that Homespun Bill had either paid the mortgage on the place or saved the house from burning, or done something else calculated to commend him to the haymakers who subscribed for the paper. Then I wrote eight more, and in every one of those it was the yokel who got left; that is to say, Fancy Jake or Dashing Tom, or whatever I might choose to call him, would go to the city and either get rich in Wall Street—always Wall, never Broad or Nassau Street or Broadway, remember—and come back just in time to stop the sheriff’s sale and bid in the old homestead for some unheard-of figure, or else he would become a great physician and return to save his native village at a time of pestilence, or maybe I’d have him a great preacher and come back and save all their souls; anyway, I got eight more poems out of the pair, to say nothing of some stories that I used in another paper.”
I pondered for several moments over the words of the poet and then I said to him, “But if you were so successful with the ‘Two Brothers’ why didn’t you try to do as well with two sisters?”
“I did,” he replied. “I started a ‘Two Sisters’ series as soon as the brothers were all harvested, but I got them back on my hands again. You know Bonner is down on sisters.”
“Bonner is down on sisters!”
What stumbling-blocks there were in the path to literary fame which the poets of the early Ledger period sought to tread!
Fancy the feelings of one who has poured out his whole soul in a poem descriptive of sisterly love and learns that his labor has been in vain, not because of any fault on his part, not because his poem is not good, but simply and solely because “Bonner is down on sisters”! And then I hear the carping critic ask if I call that good editing. I say that it was the very best of editing. At any rate, it was good enough to make the Ledger fiction popular from one end of this country to the other; and it is because of that editing that we still find the old dusty files in the country garrets, along with the pop-corn ears and the wreaths of dried apples. I wonder how much of the ephemeral literature of to-day will be found sacredly guarded in anybody’s garret a quarter of a century hence?
But there were other folks besides sisters and matrimonial cousins who were regarded with disfavor by the great editor and thinker who long ago set the pace for modern American fiction.
Well do I remember Jack Moran coming upon us one bright morning, a dozen years ago, with bitter invective on his lips because his poem, “The Stepmother’s Prayer,” had been returned to him from the Ledger office. He read it aloud to us, and then inquired, pathetically, “Isn’t that poem all right?”
It was more than “all right.” It was a delicate, imaginative bit of verse, descriptive of the young bride kneeling reverently in the nursery of her new home and praying that God would make her a good mother to the sleeping stepchildren. It was a real poem—such a poem as poor, gifted Irish Jack Moran could write, but only when the mood was upon him, for he was not one of those makers of verse who go to work at six in the morning with their dinner-pails.
“Ah, Jack!” exclaimed a sympathizing poet, “you never should have taken it to the Ledger. Didn’t you know that Bonner was down on stepmothers? Change it round so as to make the stepmother a beast, and he’ll give you ten for it.”