The free-lance writer and artist abound in the metropolis, and with them is associated a motley free-lance crew that has no counterpart elsewhere on this continent. New York’s “Grub Street” is one of the truest indications of her metropolitan character. In other American cities the newspaper is written, illustrated, and edited by men and women on salaries, as are the comparatively few magazines and the technical press covering our country’s material activities. But in New York, while hundreds of editors, writers, and artists also rely upon a stated, definite stipend, several times as many more live without salaried connections, sometimes by necessity, but as often by choice. These are the dwellers in Grub Street.
This thoroughfare has no geographical definition. Many of the natives of Manhattan Island know as little of it as do the truck loads of visitors “seeing New York,” who cross and recross it unwittingly. Grub Street begins nowhere and ends nowhere; yet between these vague terminals it runs to all points of the compass, turns sharp corners, penetrates narrow passageways, takes its pedestrians up dark old stairways one moment and through sumptuous halls of steel and marble the next, touching along the way more diverse interests than any of the actual streets of Manhattan, and embracing ideals, tendencies, influences, and life-currents that permeate the nation’s whole material and spiritual existence. Greater Grub Street is so unobtrusive that a person with no affair to transact therein might dwell a quarter-century in New York and never discover it; yet it is likewise so palpable and vast to its denizens that by no ordinary circumstances would any of them be likely to explore all its infinite arteries, veins, and ganglia.
Not long ago there arrived on Park Row for the first time in his life a newspaper reporter of conspicuous ability along a certain line. In the West he had made a name for his knack at getting hold of corporate reports and court decisions several days in advance of rival papers. Once, in Chicago, by climbing over the ceiling of a jury-room, he was able to publish the verdict in a sensational murder trial a half-hour before it had been brought in to the judge. A man invaluable in following the devious windings of the day’s history as it must be written in newspapers, he had come to Park Row as the ultimate field of development for his especial talent. To demonstrate what he had done, he brought along a thick sheaf of introductory letters from Western editors. There was one for every prominent editor and publisher in the New York newspaper field, yet after all had been delivered it seemed to avail nothing. Nobody had offered him a situation.
“The way to get along in New York is to go out and get the stuff,” explained a free lance whom he fell in with in a William Street restaurant. “Get copy they can’t turn down—deliver the goods.”
In that dull summer season all the papers were filled with gossip about a subscription book that had been sold at astonishing prices to that unfailing resource of newspapers, the “smart set.” Charges of blackmail flew through the city. Official investigation had failed to reveal anything definite about the work, which was said to be in process of printing. In twenty-four hours the newcomer from the West appeared in the office of a managing editor with specimen pages of the book itself. Where he had got them nobody knew. No one cared. They were manifestly genuine, and within two hours a certain sensational newspaper scored a “beat.” At last accounts he was specializing in the same line, obtaining the unobtainable and selling it where it would bring the best price.
This is one type of free lance.
At the other end of the scale may be cited the all-around scientific worker who came to the metropolis several years ago, after long experience in the departments at Washington. Lack of influence there had thrown him on the world at forty. Accustomed to living on the rather slender salary that goes with a scientific position, and knowing no other way of getting a livelihood, he set out to find in New York a place similar to that he had held in the capital. He is a man who has followed the whole trend of modern scientific progress as a practical investigator—a deviser of experiments and experimental apparatus, a skilled technical draughtsman, a writer on scientific subjects, and a man of field experience in surveying and research that has taken him all over the world. New York offered him nothing resembling the work he had done in Washington; but in traveling about the town among scientific and technical publishers he got commissions to write an article or two for an encyclopedia. These led him into encyclopedic illustration as well, and then he took charge of a whole section of the work, gathering his materials outside, writing and drawing at home, and visiting the publisher’s office only to deliver the finished copy. Encyclopedia writing and illustration has since become his specialty. His wide experience and knowledge fit him to cope with diverse subjects, and he earns an income which, if not nearly so large as that of the free-lance reporter, is quite as satisfactory as his Washington salary. As soon as one encyclopedia is finished in New York, another is begun, and from publisher to publisher go a group of encyclopedic free-lances, who will furnish an article on integral calculus or the Vedic pantheon, with diagrams and illustrations—and very good articles at that.
II
Who but a Balzac will take a census of Greater Grub Street, enumerating its aristocrats, its well-to-do obscure bourgeois, its Bohemians, its rakes and evil-doers, its artisans and struggling lower classes? Among its citizens are the materials of a newer Comédie Humaine. The two personalities outlined above merely set a vague intellectual boundary to this world. In its many kinds and stations of workers Grub Street is as irreducible as nebulæ. Its aristocracy is to be found any time in that “Peerage” of Grub Street, the contents pages of the better magazines, where are arrayed the names of successful novelists, essayists, and short-story writers, of men and women who deal with specialties such as travel, historical studies, war correspondence, nature interpretation, sociology, politics, and every other side of life and thought; and here, too, are enlisted their morganatic relatives, the poets and versifiers, and their showy, prosperous kindred, the illustrators, who may be summoned from Grub Street to paint a portrait at Newport. This peerage is real, for no matter upon what stratum of Grub Street each newcomer may ultimately find his level of ability, this is the goal that was aimed at in the beginning. This is the Dream.
Staid, careful burghers of the arts, producing their good, dull, staple necessities in screed and picture, live about the lesser magazines, the women’s periodicals, the trade and technical press, the syndicates that supply “Sunday stuff” to newspapers all over the land, the nameless, mediocre publications that are consumed by our rural population in million editions. The Bohemian element is found writing “on space” for newspapers this month, furnishing the press articles of a theatre or an actress the next, running the gamut of the lesser magazines feverishly, flitting hither and thither, exhausting its energies with wasteful rapidity, and never learning the business tact and regularity that keep the burgher in comfort and give his name a standing at the savings bank. The criminal class of Grub Street includes the peddler of false news, the adapter of other men’s ideas, and the swindler who copies published articles and pictures outright, trusting to luck to elude the editorial police. The individual in this stratum has a short career and not a merry one; but the class persists with the persistence of the parasite. Grub Street’s artisans are massed about the advertising agencies, producing the plausible arguments put forth for the world of merchandise, and the many varieties of illustration that go with them; while the nameless driftwood which floats about the whole thoroughfare includes no one knows how many hundreds of aspirants whose talents do not suffice for any of these classes, together with the peddler of other men’s wares on commission, who perhaps ekes out a life by entering as a super at the theatres, the artists’ models, both men and women, who pose in summer and are away with a theatrical company in winter, the dullard, the drone, the ne’er-do-well, the palpable failure. At one end, Art’s chosen sons and daughters; at the other, her content, misguided dupes.