In spite of my knowing that I was not doing all I ought to do as a playwright, these were happy and prosperous years. I was very active in the politics of the theater and very happy at home. My boys were growing up. Donald was at Pomfret and Owen at Choate, and Mrs. Davis and I sold our house in Yonkers and came to New York.
Always when I have the least to do I demand the most time in which to do it, just as when I am not writing at all I insist that I can’t live without an elaborate writing room, although I know perfectly well that I have done the best work of my life with a ten-cent pad of paper and the top of a trunk. In any case, I found the ride to Yonkers too long, and we once more joined the ranks of apartment dwellers.
As a matter of fact, I have usually found that about the time a writer starts in surrounding himself with every luxury in the way of an aid to his work he never does very much with his swell equipment besides occasionally showing it off to admiring acquaintances. It is quite probable that the money he earned to pay for his elaborate study he earned by writing a play on the top of a barrel. I myself have worked in all sorts of places, ranging from a three-dollar-a-week hall bedroom to a studio library in a pent house in the Park Avenue section. During the most prolific years of my life most of my work was done at a desk in the living room of an apartment with two small boys playing about on the floor and crawling between my legs. It is, I suppose, because I have always had so much fun with my writing that the members of my family have never stood in any great awe of my labors, and I suppose the boys saw no good reason why I should try to keep an amusing game all to myself, and usually insisted on being let in on it.
Edgar Wallace told me last year that he loved New York and always had a wonderful rest when he came here. It was, he said, the noisiest city in the world and the only place on earth where he couldn’t write. Personally I can write better in New York than I can anywhere else, and although I am afraid I demand more quiet and privacy as the years go past, I am still quite untroubled by anything less than a riveting machine.
Some rather facetious remarks have been made about the volume of my production, but this same Edgar Wallace makes me look like a drone. When I am hard at work I turn out about four thousand words a day, usually in longhand, written with the softest and dirtiest lead pencil that a nickel can buy. Mr. Wallace tells me that on a good day he dictates ten thousand words. I know that twenty-three percent of all the novels sold in England last year were of his writing, and he calmly threw in three or four plays by way of good measure. Ever since I dined with him I have laughed with scorn at any one bold enough to insinuate that I write too much, and I have been filled with good resolutions.
I surely must settle down to work. No matter how much a man may enjoy his job, every writer in the world has times when he thinks he is through. It’s part of the game. We all of us have hours of profound depression when we are afraid of the future and in terror of our own limitations. We are sure that no good story will ever again come to us and doubtful if we would know what to do with it if it did. This is natural enough when a writer has just finished a play or a novel, because, of course, he has put all he had into it and his mind feels empty. But this mood often comes at other times, and the best cure for it is to hang around doing nothing until you happen to read a fine novel that has just been published or see a really good play—the right play always sends me out of the theater walking on air, and I go to bed tingling all over to wake up the next morning with a new hope and a new determination.
The worst disease, however, that comes to a writer who has been at his job for a long time is the awful fear of being “dated.” Of course it’s hard for one of middle age to write of life in any other way than as he knows it, and equally, of course, our lasting impressions do not come to us after fifty. I fussed for a while over the fear of getting to be a back number, and wondered if I could possibly grow to understand what we were pleased to call “the new generation.” I found, or fancied I found, a great change in the old world, until I happened to recall that these changes had been going on since time began. A very careful study of audiences convinced me that they still reacted to an honest emotion, just exactly as they always had done, and that the only difference in the world around me was that the old gods had different names.
To me, with my conviction that as the world goes on it gets better and more worth living in, it makes no difference at all whether it is the custom to say “Hail! Cæsar!” or “Hello, Cæsar,” and I very much doubt if any of our changes are very much deeper than this. We were a sentimental people, as every race of adventurers must be. Now we have become a very practical race, hard boiled, if one prefers to put it that way. A little while ago we slopped over about our emotions because that was the custom; to-day for the same reason we pretend we haven’t any. Of course our emotions weren’t any greater because we made a fuss about them, or any less because we now cover them up. The relationship between men and women has changed during the last ten years, so had it changed in the generation before that, and so on back to the time of Adam, but that relationship then and now was a thing of enormous interest, and a swell thing to write a play about.
It’s the writer’s business to meet the mood of the hour, and all he has to do to meet this mood is to learn to sympathize with it. Just so long as I feel myself a part of the life around me there is no reason why I shouldn’t keep on writing, and at present I most decidedly do feel that. If the time ever comes when I find myself bewildered and afraid of a strange world that I no longer understand, I’ll stop—or rather, on second thought—perhaps I’ll write a play about how hard it is to understand it!
At this time I stepped out of my job as President of the Dramatists’ Guild and took the presidency of the Authors’ League of America. This, as it happens, is not an honorary position, but comes under the head of honest labor, and during the long fight between the Dramatists and the Theatrical Managers’ Association that resulted in the present Dramatists’ contract, I served on all of the many committees in addition to my work as President of the League. I loved the work; the friendships I formed among the members of the fighting committees are among the pleasant and most helpful contacts of my life.