I wrote an article once dealing with Maceo and Cuba, whereupon a journalist from those parts jumped up and called me a fat Basque ox.
The Catalans have also obliged me with some choice insults, which I have found engaging. When I lectured in Barcelona in the Casa del Pueblo, La Veu de Catalunya undertook to report the affair, picturing me as talking platitudes before an audience of professional bomb throwers and dynamiters, and experts with the Browning gun.
Naturally, I was enchanted.
Recently, when writing for the review España, I had a similar experience, which reminded me of my connection with the smaller periodicals of fifteen years ago. Some gentlemen, mostly natives of the provinces, approached the editor, Ortega y Gasset, with the information that I was not a fit person to contribute to a serious magazine, as what I wrote was not so, while my name would ruin the sale of the weekly.
These pious souls and good Christians imagined that I might need that work in order to earn my living, so in the odour of sanctity they did whatever lay in their power to deprive me of my means of support. Oh, noble souls! Oh, ye of great heart! I salute you from a safe distance, and wish you the most uncomfortable beds in the most intolerable wards set apart for scurvy patients, in any hospital of your choosing, throughout the world.
THIRST FOR GLORY
Fame, success, popularity, the illusion of being known, admired and esteemed, appeal in different ways to authors. To Salvador Rueda, glory is a triumphant entrance into Tegucigalpa, where he is taken to the Spanish Casino, and crowned with a crown of real laurel. To Unamuno, glory is the assurance that people will be interested in him at least a thousand years after he is dead. And to others the only glory worth talking about is that courted by the French writer, Rabbe, who busied himself in Spain with la gloire argent comptant. Some yearn for a large stage with pennons and salvos and banners, while others are content with a smaller scene.
Ortega y Gasset says that to me glory reduces itself to the proportions of an agreeable dinner, with good talk across the table.
And he is right. To mingle with pleasant, intelligent, cordial persons is one of the more alluring sorts of fame.
There is something seductive and ingratiating about table talk when it is spirited. A luxurious dining room, seating eight or ten guests, of whom three or four are pretty women, one of whom should be a foreigner; as many men, none of them aristocrats—generally speaking, aristocrats are disagreeable—nor shall we admit artists, for they are in the same class as the aristocrats; one's neighbour, perhaps, is a banker, or a Jew of aquiline feature, and then the talk touches on life and on politics, relieved with a little gallantry toward the ladies, from time to time allowing to each his brief opportunity to shine—all this, beyond doubt, is most agreeable.