In the construction of these stories there was endless variation but in all of them human beings, the lives of human beings, were altogether disregarded. An Alabama Negro was given the shrewdness of a Connecticut Yankee, a trick that made some writer temporarily famous and brought him wealth. Having made his Negro think like a Yankee, having made him practice all the smart cute tricks of the Yankee, there was nothing to stop the writer producing a thousand tales with the hybrid Negro as the hero of them all. Only the giving out of the patience of the editors or of the public could stop him, and both seemed inexhaustible.
As to what the writer himself suffered under these circumstances, that was a different matter. One supposed that any man who attempted the writer’s craft had, at the beginning, some real interest in the people about him but this was quickly lost. The imaginative life of the romancer must be lived entirely in a queer pasteboard world.
It was a peculiarity of the writer’s craft that one must of necessity give oneself to the people about whom one wrote, must in a quite special way believe in the existence of these people, and a peculiar childlike credulousness must result to the writer who so completely separated himself from actual life. Having acquired sudden fame and wealth such a writer woke up some morning to find himself irrevocably dead. The actuality of life could not reach him. On all sides of him people suffered, were touched with moments of nameless joy, loved and died, and the manufacturer of society detectives, desert heroes and daring adventures by sea and land could no longer see life at all. With unseeing eyes, deaf ears and benumbed senses he must walk through life—a movie hero, a stage star or a rich and successful manufacturer of romances—no longer a human being at all. One had no notion of giving oneself to that kind of death in life but to find out what one did not want to do was but half the battle.
After all the tales themselves came quickly. In certain moods one became impregnated with the seeds of a hundred new tales in one day. The telling of the tales, to get them into form, to clothe them, find just the words and the arrangement of words that would clothe them—that was a quite different matter. I wanted to find, if I could, the men who would help me toward the solution of that problem.
For even an unknown and unsuccessful scribbler in America the situation is difficult enough. Even the very sweetness of our people in their attitude toward our writers is destructive. You have seen how I myself was allowed to play like a reckless child among advertising men, constantly forgiven for my impudence, often paid an absurd figure for writing an unimportant advertisement—that any one of forty men, not authors, would have gladly written with more care at half my price—simply because I was an author.
Well, I had published certain tales over my own name and my fate was sealed. That the tales were not liked by many of the critics did not matter too much. To be sure, my books did not sell, but I was discussed in the newspapers and literary magazines and my picture was occasionally printed and finally a very second-rate English writer of romances, very popular in our country, spoke well of me and Mr. Frank Harris spoke ill of me.
Ye gods, I was lost and must flee. The very grocer at the corner, with whom I was wont to sit on the steps by the back door of the store on summer evenings while he talked of his life as a young sailor on a lake steamer looked at me with new eyes. He began speaking like a very movie hero. His tales, that had been so naturally and humanly told, became grotesques of tales. The fellow had some idea I might make him the hero of some improbable romance of our inland seas, one always holding the helm in some desperate storm or jumping overboard to rescue some broker’s daughter, and tried heroically to supply me with materials. He had in his youth read some novel of the seas and now he began to lie valiantly, telling me all the desperate escapades of which he had heard or read as having happened to himself. Shades of Defoe and Melville, such a sea and such a sailor’s life as he manufactured! I remembered almost with tears in my eyes the little homely real stories he had formerly been in the habit of telling of himself, and left him never to return. I was even vicious enough to rob him, for his defection, of my grocery trade.
How utterly all my life had been changed by a little public attention! Even some of my friends went the road of the grocer. I remember that I had, at just that time, done a deed affecting my personal life that had lost me the respect of some of my acquaintances. One of them saw my picture, printed I think in the Literary Digest, and immediately afterward wrote me a letter. “You are a great artist and may do anything you please. I forgive you everything,” he wrote and as I read the letter my heart went sick within me. “At any rate why do they want to dehumanize us?” I asked myself. Violently then I cursed the romancers. They were in reality at the bottom of it all. Not satisfied with the cowboys the sailors and the detectives they had descended upon their brothers of the pen and the brush. A poet was a certain kind of man with long hair and no food who went about muttering to himself. There was no escape for him. That he was and his fate was fixed. To be sure I had myself known some American poets and had found them in their everyday life much like all the other people I knew except that they were a trifle more sensitive to life and its beauties and, before they became widely known as poets, sometimes wrote beautiful bits describing their inner reaction to some flash of beauty that had come to them. They were that before they became widely known as poets and then later they were usually goners.
That was how it was with the poet. The painter usually starved in a garret and went about his small room pale and emaciated, with a palette stuck on his thumb, and then one day a lovely lady came along the street, saw how that he was a genius and married him. I’ll say this for us scribblers and the actors. We got off better. We usually, in the romances, sat on a park bench with the tramps and had a dirty newspaper blown to us by a cold wind. On the front page of the newspaper was a large picture of ourselves and an announcement that fame had come. Then we went and bought the tramps a breakfast with our last dollar before we went to live in a great house with servants. We scribblers and the actors got off the least shamefully in the romances but then, it is to be remembered, fellows of our own craft got up these yarns that had so stuck in the public mind and that they had for that reason perhaps a little pity for us.
All of this however concerned the materials for tales. One had to do one’s own winnowing in any event. I was in New York and was after something other than stories. Would I find what I wanted? I was somewhat afraid of the writers, particularly of the ones whose work I most admired because I thought they must be a special kind of being, quite different from the men I had known. (No doubt I was myself the victim of the same romancers I have just been cursing.) There were certain men I thought had written of America and American writing with an understanding that had been a help to me. I was what I was, a rough and tumble participant in life. As yet there had been little time for study, for quiet thought.