There were rendezvous of disconsolate comrades in the Press Club or Anderton’s Hotel, where they greeted each other with the gloomy inquiry, “Got anything yet?” and then, smoking innumerable cigarettes, in lieu, sometimes, of more substantial nourishment, cursed the cruelty of life, the abominable insecurity of journalism, and their own particular folly in entering that ridiculous, heartbreaking, soul-destroying career.... One by one, in course of time, they found other jobs down the same old street.
I determined to abandon regular journalism altogether, and to become a “literary gent” in the noblest meaning of the words, and anyhow a free lance. I have always regarded journalism as merely a novitiate for real literature, a training school for life and character, from which I might gain knowledge and inspiration for great novels, as Charles Dickens had done. My ambition, at that time, was limitless, and I expected genius to break out in me at any moment. Oh, Youth! Here, then, was my chance, now that I was free from the fetters of the journalistic prison house.
With a wealth of confidence and hope, but very little capital of a more material kind, I took a cottage at the seashore for a month and departed there with my wife and small boy. It was a coast-guard’s cottage at Littlehampton, looking on to the sea and sand, and surrounded by a fence one foot high, like the doll’s house it was. There, in a tiny room, filled with the murmur of the sea, and the vulgar songs of seaside Pierrots, I wrote my novel, The Street of Adventure, in which I told, in the guise of fiction, the history of The Tribune newspaper, and gave a picture of the squalor, disappointment, adventure, insecurity, futility, and good comradeship of Fleet Street.
It was much to be desired that this novel of mine should be a success. Even my wife’s humorous contentment with poverty, which has always been a saving grace in my life, did not eliminate the need of a certain amount of ready money. The Street of Adventure, my most successful novel, cost me more than I earned. In the first place, it narrowly escaped total oblivion, which would have saved me great anxiety and considerable expense. After leaving the coast-guard’s cottage at Littlehampton, with my manuscript complete—150,000 words in one month—I had to change trains at Guildford to get to London from some other place. My thoughts were so busy with the story I had written, and with the fortune that awaited me by its success, that I left the manuscript on the mantelpiece in the waiting room of Guildford Station, and did not discover my loss until I had been in London some hours. It seemed—for five minutes of despair—like the loss of my soul. Never should I have had the courage to rewrite that novel which had cost so much labor and so much nervous emotion. Despairingly I telegraphed to the station master, and my joy was great when, two hours later, I received his answer: “Papers found.” Little did I then know that if he had used them to brighten his fire I should have been saved sleepless nights and unpleasant apprehensions.
It was accepted and published by William Heinemann, on a royalty basis, and it was gloriously reviewed. But almost immediately I received a writ of libel from one of my friends and colleagues on the late Tribune, and sinister rumors reached me that Franklin Thomasson, the proprietor, and six other members of the staff were consulting their solicitors on the advisability of taking action against me. I saw ruin staring me in the face. My fanciful narrative had not disguised carefully enough the actuality of the Tribune and its staff. My fancy portraits and amiable caricatures had been identified, and could not be denied. Fortunately only one writ was actually presented and proceeded with, against myself and Heinemann, but the book was withdrawn from circulation at a time when the reviews were giving it columns of publicity, and it was killed stone dead—though later it had a merry resurrection.
The man who took a libel action against me was the character who in my book is called Christopher Codrington, the same young man who had lifted his hat when the lights went out and said, “Dead! Dead!” He and I had been good friends, and I believed, and still believe, that my portrait of him was a very agreeable and fanciful study of his amiable peculiarities—his Georgian style of dress, his gravity of speech, his Bohemianism. But he resented that portrait, and was convinced that I had grossly maligned him. The solicitors employed by myself and Heinemann to prepare the defense piled up the usual bill of costs (and I had to pay the publisher’s share as well as my own), so that by the time the case was ready to come into court I knew that, win or lose, I should have some pretty fees to pay. It never came into court. A few days before the case was due, I met “Christopher Codrington” in Fleet Street! We paused, hesitated, raised our hats solemnly, and then laughed (we had always been much amused with each other).
“What about some lunch together?” I suggested.
“It would never do,” he answered. “In a few days we shall be engaged in a legal duel.”
“Meanwhile one must eat,” I remarked casually.