That’s it! That’s always been it, and that always will be it—I’m not that kind of an old man!
J. S.
THE FRUIT OF FAME
To the Editor of The Idler.
Dear Sir: I have told many strange and distressing stories in my time; tales of struggle, of suffering, of sorrow and of bitter disappointment; for I, Sir, am an author, and the telling of tales has long been my vocation. But of all the tales which I have spun from the thread of my inner consciousness, there is none, I believe, more strange or more filled with disillusionment than the true story which I am about to tell you now.
I began writing at an early age. Indeed, I was writing short stories while yet in the high school and selling them before I had done with college. The history of my younger years does not differ greatly from that of most young authors; it is the history of an existence which would have been inexpressibly sordid had it not been glorified by youthful hope and ambition. I married young and was forced to write constantly in order to make both ends meet. The years went slipping by almost unnoticed until suddenly one day I awoke to find myself upon the verge of middle age and realized that for years I had been postponing the writing of my first real book, meanwhile falling unconsciously into the habit of giving all of my attention to the market value of what I wrote and growing more and more indifferent to the question of its literary merit. I had, in fact, become a confirmed hack-writer.
The discovery shocked me into action. I determined then and there that I would write a novel worthy of my powers if I had to give to that task the time which should be employed in rest and sleep. I had never taken many holidays; now I took none at all. Every odd moment was employed on the great task which should lift me out of the rut and transform me from a mere fiction machine into a creative artist. I shall not bore you with the details of that work; how I toiled far into the night and arose before daybreak to finish a chapter or retouch a paragraph; how I struggled with my style which had become corrupted and florid from the writing of sensational stories of adventure; how I tossed in my bed when I should have been sleeping, made wakeful by the excitement under which I labored. Suffice it to say, through infinite pains and toil I finally wrote the last line of The Pin-headed Girl, and sent it off to Messrs. Buckram and Sons with a high heart. It was accepted.
The publishers, according to their usual custom, offered me a royalty of ten per cent.; for you must know, Sir, that it is only the established and successful author who can make his own terms. We poor devils who are appearing in cloth for the first time must be content with what is offered, for no publisher considers a meritorious manuscript a recommendation in any way equal to a well-known name. The book of a famous author, like a notorious brand of soap, is supposed to sell itself, whereas, in the case of an unknown scribbler, a demand for the work must be created by advertising. Now it is an axiom with publishers that a modern novel, unless it happen to be a story of extraordinary vitality, is dead in six months. With the birth of the autumn list, the spring list dies, which is to say, when the books which appear in the autumn are thrown upon the market, the demand for those which appeared in the spring is immediately checked and often dies out altogether. In six months novels are old; good only for bargain sales, second-hand stores and circulating libraries. It is therefore necessary that a book achieve a good sale in the first six months if it is to enjoy such a sale at all.
Realizing this and taking into consideration the fact that The Pin-headed Girl was the work of a literary nobody, my publishers set industriously to work to create a reputation for me. I will say for them that they spared no expense in making my name familiar to the public. It was flaunted on every side, so that no man could ride in the subway, pick up a magazine or open a theater program without being made acquainted with the fact that Hackett A. Long was the author of The Pin-headed Girl. No man could read a literary supplement or a monthly review without learning that I took coffee with my breakfast; had a fondness for Russian boar-hounds (never having owned one); preferred reading opera scores to hearing the singers; did most of my work between the hours of three and five in the afternoon; disliked Bohemian restaurants; bought my cigarettes by the hundred; wore a wing collar; and many other things, some of which were true and some not. If you glanced at any of the illustrated papers at that time, you must have seen me riding in my six-cylinder roadster (loaned for the occasion by the obliging publisher), sitting upon the stoop of my cottage by the sea, or seated, pen in hand, at my desk in the very act of producing literature. I assure you, Sir, your correspondent was no inconsiderable figure in the public eye at that time.