Theodore Dreiser 17 страница

to have one or another of his hirelings announce his passing from one

"important" meeting to another, within or without his own building,

telephone messages being "thrown in" on his line or barred out, wherever

he happened to be at the moment and when, presumably, he was deep in one

of those literary conferences or confidences with one employee or

another or with a group, for which he rapidly developed a passion.

Another of his vanities was to have his automobile announced and he be

almost forced into it by impetuous secretaries, who, because of orders

previously given, insisted that he must be made to keep certain

important engagements. Or he would send for one of his hirelings,

wherever he chanced to be--club, restaurant, his home--midnight if

necessary, to confer with him on some subject of great moment, and the

hireling was supposed to call a taxi and come post haste in order that

he might not be kept waiting.

"God!" L---- once remarked in my presence. "To think that a thinking

being has to be beholden to a thing like that for his weekly income!

Somebody ought to tap him with a feather-duster and kill him!"

But the manner in which L---- developed in this atmosphere! It was

interesting. At first, before the magazine became so significant or

well-organized, it was a great pleasure for me to associate with him

outside office hours, and a curious and vivid companion he made. He was

so intensely avid of life, so intolerant of the old, of anything

different to that which he personally desired or saw, that at times it

was most difficult to say anything at all for fear of meeting a rebuff

or at least a caustic objection. As I was very pleased to note, he had a

passion for seeing, as all youth should have when it first comes to the

great city--the great bridges, the new tunnels just then being completed

or dug, the harbor and bay, Coney Island, the two new and great railway

terminals, then under construction. Most, though, he reveled in

different and even depressing neighborhoods--Eighth Avenue, for

instance, about which he later wrote a story, and a very good one ("A

Quiet Duet"); Hell's Kitchen, that neighborhood that lies (or did), on

the West Side of Manhattan, between Eighth and Tenth Avenues,

Thirty-sixth and Forty-first Streets; Little Italy, the region below

Delancey and north of Worth Street on the East Side; Chinatown;

Washington Street (Syria in America); the Greeks in Twenty-seventh and

-eighth Streets, West Side. All these and many more phases of New York's

multiplex life took his full and restless attention. Once he said to me

quite excitedly, walking up Eighth Avenue at two in the morning--I was

showing him some rear tenement slums in the summertime--"God, how I hate

to go to bed in this town! I'm afraid something will happen while I'm

asleep and I won't see it!" That was exactly how he felt all the time, I

am sure.

And in those days he was most simple, a very Spartan of a boy. He hadn't

the least taste for drink, lived in a small hall-bedroom

somewhere--Eighth Avenue, I believe--and took his meals in those shabby

little quick-lunch rooms where the characters were more important to him

than the food. (My hat--my hat is in my hand!) Intellectually he was so

stern and ambitious that I all but stood in awe of and reverence before

him. Here, I said to myself, is one who will really do; let him be as

savage as he pleases. In America he probably needs to be.

And during this short time, what scraps of his early life he revealed!

By degrees I picked up bits of his early deprivations and difficulties,

if such they might be called. He had been a newspaper reporter, or had

tried to be, in Kansas City, had worked in the college restaurant and

laundry of the middle-West State university from which he had graduated,

to help pay his way. Afterward he had assisted the janitor of some great

skyscraper somewhere--Kansas City, I believe--and, what was most

pleasing to me, he in nowise emphasized these as youthful difficulties

or made any comment as to their being "hard." Neither did he try to

boastingly minimize them as nothing at all--another wretched pose. From

him I learned that throughout his youth he had been carried here and

there by the iron woman who was his mother and whom he seemed to adore

in some grim contentious way, smothering his comments as though he

disliked to say anything at all, and yet describing her at times as

coarse and vulgar, but a mother to him "all right," someone who had made

marked sacrifices for him.

She had once "run" a restaurant in a Western mining camp, had then or

later carried him as a puling baby under her shawl or cloak across the

Mojave Desert, on foot a part of the way. Apparently he did not know who

his father was, and he was not very much concerned to know whether she

did or not. His father had died, he said, when he was a baby. Later his

mother, then a cook in some railroad hotel in Texas, had sent him to

school there. Later still she had been a "bawler out," if you know what

that means, an employee of a loan shark and used by him to compel

delinquent, albeit petty and pathetic, creditors to pay their dues or

then and there, before all their fellow-workers, be screamed at for

their delinquency about the shop in which they worked! Later she became

a private detective! an insurance agent--God knows what--a kind of rough

man-woman, as she turned out to be, but all the while clinging to this

boy, her pet, no doubt her dream of perfection. She had by turns sent

him to common and high school and to college, remitting him such sums of

money as she might to pay his way. Later still (at that very time in

fact) she was seeking to come to New York to keep house for him, only

he would not have that, perhaps sensing the need of greater freedom. But

he wrote her regularly, as he confessed to me, and in later years I

believe sent her a part of his earnings, which were to be saved by her

for him against a rainy day. Among his posthumous writings later I found

a very lovely story ("His Mother"), describing her and himself in

unsparing and yet loving terms, a compound of the tender and the brutal

in his own soul.

The thing that always made me hope for the best was that at that time he

was not at all concerned with the petty little _moralic_ and economic

definitions and distinctions which were floating about his American

world in one form and another. Indeed he seemed to be entirely free of

and even alien to them. What he had heard about the indwelling and

abiding perfections of the human soul had gone, and rightly so, in one

ear and out the other. He respected the virtues, but he knew of and

reckoned with die antipathetic vices which gave them their reason for

being. To him the thief was almost as important as the saint, the reason

for the saint's being. And, better still, he had not the least interest

in American politics or society--a wonderful sign. The American dream of

"getting ahead" financially and socially was not part of him--another

mark royal. All life was fascinating, acceptable, to be interpreted if

one had the skill; it was a great distinction to have the skill--worth

endless pains to acquire it.

But how unwilling would the average American of his day have been,

stuffed as he was and still is with book and picture drivel about

artists and art, to accept L---- as anything more than a raw, callow

yokel, presuming to assail the outer portals of the temple with his

muddy feet! A romping, stamping, irritable soul, with more the air of a

young railroad brakeman or "hand," than an artist, and with so much

coarse language at times and such brutality of thought as to bar him

completely, one might say, from having anything to do with great

fiction, great artistic conceptions, or the temple of art. What, sit

with the mighty!--that coarse youth, with darkish-brown hair parted at

one side and combed over one ear, in the manner of a grandiose barber;

with those thick-soled and none too shapely brown shoes, that none too

well-made store suit of clothes, that little round brown hat, more

often a cap, pulled rather savagely and vulgarly, even insultingly, over

one eye; that coarse frieze overcoat, still worn on cold spring days,

its "corners" back and front turned up by the damp and from being

indifferently sat on; that brash corn-cob pipe and bag of cheap tobacco,

extracted and lit at odd moments; what, that youth with the aggressive,

irritating vibrant manner--almost the young tough with a chip on his

shoulder looking for one to even so much as indicate that he is not all

he should be! Positively, there was something brutal and yet cosmic (not

comic) about him, his intellectual and art pretensions considered. At

times his waspishness and bravado palled even on me. He was too

aggressive, too forceful, too intolerant, I said. He should be softer.

At other times I felt that he needed to be all that and more to "get

by," as he would have said. I wanted to modify him a little--and yet I

didn't--and I remained drawn to him in spite of many irritating little

circumstances, all but infuriating at times, and actually calculated, it

seemed, with a kind of savage skill to reduce what he conceived to be my

lofty superiority. At times I thought he ought to be killed--like a

father meditating on an unruly son--but the mood soon passed and his

literary ability made amends for everything.

In so far as the magazine was concerned, once it began to grow and

attract attention he was for me its most important asset; not that he

did so much directly as that he provided a definite standard toward

which we all had to work. Not incuriously, he was swiftly recognized for

what he was by all who came in touch with the magazine. In the first

place, interested in his progress, I had seen to it that he was properly

introduced wherever that was possible and of benefit to him, and later

on, by sheer force of his mental capacity and integrity, his dreams and

his critical skill, he managed to center about him an entire band of

seeking young writers, artists, poets, playwrights, aspiring musicians;

an amusing and as interesting a group as I have ever seen. Their points

of rendezvous appeared to be those same shabby quick-lunches in back

streets or even on the principal thoroughfares about Times Square, or

they met in each other's rooms or my office at night after I had gone,

giving me as an excuse that they had work to do. And during all this

time the air fairly hummed with rumors of new singers, dancers, plays,

stories being begun or under way, articles and essays contemplated;

avid, if none too well financed frolics or bohemian midnight suppers

here and there. Money was by no means plentiful, and in consequence

there was endless borrowing and "paying up" among them. Among the most

enthusiastic members of this circle, as I had begun to note, and finally

rather nervously, were my art-director, a valiant knight in Bohemia if

ever there was one, and she of Bryn Mawr-Wellesley standards. My makeup

editor, as well as various contributors who had since become more or

less closely identified with the magazine, were also following him up

all the time.

If not directly profitable it was enlivening, and I was fairly well

convinced by now that from the point of view of being "aware," "in touch

with," "in sympathy with" many of the principal tendencies and

undercurrents which make for a magazine's success and precedence, this

group was as valuable to me as any might well be. It constituted a

"kitchen cabinet" of sorts and brought hundreds of interesting ideas to

the surface, and from all directions. Now it would be a new and hitherto

unheard-of tenor who was to be brought from abroad and introduced with

great noise to repute-loving Americans; a new sculptor or painter who

had never been heard of in America; a great actor, perhaps, or poet or

writer. I listened to any quantity of gossip in regard to new movements

that were ready to burst upon the world, in sculpture, painting, the

scriptic art. About the whole group there was much that was exceedingly

warm, youthful, full of dreams. They were intensely informative and full

of hope, and I used to look at them and wonder which one, if any, was

destined to have his dreams realized.

Of L---- however I never had the least doubt. He began, it is true, to

adopt rather more liberal tendencies, to wish always to be part and

parcel of this gayety, this rushing here and there; and he drank at

times--due principally, as I thought, to my wildling art-director, who

had no sense or reserve in matters material or artistic and who was all

for a bacchanalian career, cost what it might. On more than one occasion

I heard L---- declaring roundly, apropos of some group scheme of

pilgrimage, "No, no! I will not. I am going _home_ now!" He had a story

he wanted to work on, an article to finish. At the same time he would

often agree that if by a certain time, when he was through, they were

still at a certain place, or a second or third, he would look them up.

Never, apparently, did his work suffer in the least.

And it was about this time that I began to gather the true source and

import of his literary predisposition. He was literally obsessed, as I

now discovered, with Continental and more especially the French

conception of art in writing. He had studied the works as well as the

temperaments and experiences (more especially the latter, I fear) of

such writers as de Maupassant, Flaubert, Baudelaire, Balzac, de Musset,

Sand, Daudet, Dumas junior, and Zola, as well as a number of the more

recent writers: Hervieu, Bourget, Louys and their contemporaries. Most

of all, though, he was impressed, and deeply, by the life and art of de

Maupassant, his method of approach, his unbiased outlook on life, his

freedom from moral and religious and even sentimental predisposition. In

the beginning of his literary career I really believe he slaved to

imitate him exactly, although he could not very well escape the American

temperament and rearing by which he was hopelessly conditioned. A

certain Western critic and editor, to whom he had first addressed his

hopes and scribblings before coming to me, writing me after L----'s

death in reference to a period antedating that in which I had known him,

observed, "He was crazy about the _fin de siecle_ stuff that then held

the boards and from which (I hope the recording angel will put it to my

credit) I steered him clear." I think so; but he was still very much

interested in it. He admired Aubrey Beardsley, the poster artists of

France, Verlaine, Baudelaire, Rops, the Yellow Book, even Oscar Wilde,

although his was a far more substantial and plebeian and even radical

point of view.

Unfortunately for L----, I have always thought, there now thrust himself

forward the publisher and owner of the magazine, who from previously

having been content to see that the mercantile affairs of the magazine

were in good order, had decided that since it was attracting attention

he should be allowed to share in its literary and artistic prestige,

should indeed be closely identified with it and recognized as its true

source and inspiration--a thing which in no fashion had been

contemplated by me when I went there. From having agreed very distinctly

with me that no such interference would at any time be indulged in, he

now came forward with a plan for an advisory council which was to

consist of himself and the very members of the staff which I had

created.

I could not object and it did not disturb me so much personally. For

some time I had been sensing that the thing was for me no end in itself,

but an incident. This same I felt to be true for L----, who had been

taking more and more interest in the magazine's technical composition.

At the same time I saw no immediate way of arranging my affairs and

departing, which left me, for a very little while, more or less of a

spectator. During this time I had the dissatisfaction of noting the

growth of an influence with L---- which could, as I saw, prove only

harmful. M---- was no suitable guide for him. He was a brilliant but

superficial and very material type who was convinced that in the having

and holding of many things material--houses, lands, corporation stocks,

a place in the clubs and circles of those who were materially

prosperous--was really to achieve all that was significant in the now or

the hereafter. Knowing comparatively nothing of either art or letters,

or that subtle thing which makes for personality and atmosphere in a

magazine or in writing (and especially the latter), that grateful

something which attracts and detains one, he was nevertheless convinced

that he did. And what was more, he was determined not only to make

friends with and hold all those whom I might have attracted, providing

they could prove useful to him, but also a number of a much more

successful group in these fields, those who had already achieved repute

in a more commonplace and popular way and were therefore presumably

possessed of a following and with the power to exact a high return for

their product, and for the magazine, regardless of intrinsic merit. His

constant talk was of money, its power to attract and buy, the

significance of all things material. He now wanted the magazine to be

representative of this glowing element, and at the same time,

paradoxical as it might seem, the best that might be in literary and

artistic thought.

Naturally the thing was impossible, but he had a facile and specious

method of arguing, a most gay and in some respects magnetic personality,

far from stodgy or gross, which for a time attracted many to him. Very

briskly then indeed he proceeded to make friends with all those with

whom I had surrounded myself, to enter into long and even private

discussions with them as to the proper conduct of the magazine, to hint

quite broadly at a glorious future in which all, each one particularly

to whom he talked, was to share. Curiously, this new and (as I would

have thought) inimical personality of M---- seemed to appeal to L----

very much.

I do not claim that the result was fatal. It may even, or at least

might, have had value, combined with an older or slightly more balanced

temperament. But it seemed to me that it offered too quickly what should

have come, if at all, as the result of much effort. For in regard to the

very things L---- should have most guarded against--show and the shallow

pleasures of social and night and material life in New York--M---- was

most specious. I never knew a more intriguing and fascinating man in

this respect nor one who cared less for those he used to obtain his

unimportant ends. He had positive genius for making the gaudy and the

unworthy seem worthy and even perfect. During his earlier days there,

L---- had more than once "cursed him out" (in his absence, of course),

to use his own expressive phrase, for his middle-West trade views, as he

described them, his shabby social and material ideals, and yet, as I

could plainly see, even at that time the virus of his theories was

working. For it must be remembered that L---- was very new to New York,

very young, and never having had much of anything he was no doubt

slightly envious of the man's material facility, the sense of

all-sufficiency, exclusiveness and even a kind of petty trade grandeur

with which he tried to surround himself.

Well, that might not have proved fatal either, only L---- needed some one

to keep him true to himself, his individual capabilities, to constantly

caution and if possible sober him to his very severe taste, and as it

was he was all but surrounded by acolytes and servitors.

A little later, having left M----'s and assumed another editorial

position, and being compelled to follow the various current magazines

more or less professionally, I was disturbed to note that there began to

appear in various publications--especially M----'s, which was

flourishing greatly for the moment--stories which while exhibiting much

of the deftness and repression as well as an avidity for the true color

of things, still showed what I had at first feared they might: a decided

compromise. That curse of all American fiction, the necessarily happy

ending, had been impressed on him--by whom? To my sincere

dissatisfaction, he began writing stories, some at least, which

concerned (1), a young woman who successfully abandoned art dreams for

advertising; (2), a middle-aged charmer, female, who attempted

_libertinage_ and was defeated, American style; (3), a Christmas picture

with sweetness and light reigning on every hand (Dickens at his

sentimentalest could have done no worse); (4), a Broadway press agent

who, attempting to bring patronage to a great hotel via chic vice,

accidentally and unintentionally mates an all-too-good young society man

turned hotel manager to a grand heiress. And so on and so on, not ad

infinitum but for a period at least--the ten years in which he managed

to live and work.

And, what was more, during this new period I heard and occasionally saw

discouraging things in connection with him from time to time. True to

his great promise, for I sincerely think M---- had a genuine fondness

for his young protege, as much of a fondness as he could well have for

anything, he guaranteed him perhaps as much as three thousand a year;

sent him to Stockholm at the age of twenty-four or -five to meet and

greet the famous false pole discoverer, Doctor Cook; allowed him to go

to Paris in connection with various articles; to Rome; sent him into the

middle and far West; to Broadway for dramatic and social studies. Well

and good, only he wanted always in what was done for him the "uplift"

note, the happy ending--or at least one not vulgar or low--whereas my

idea in connection with L----, gifted as he was, was that he should

confine himself to fiction as an art and without any regard to theories

or types of ending, believing, as I did, that he would definitely

establish himself in that way in the long run. I had no objection of

course to experiences of various kinds, his taking up with any line of

work which might seem at the moment far removed from realistic writing,

providing always that the star of his ideal was in sight. Whenever he

wrote, be it early or late, it must be in the clear, incisive,

uncompromising vein of these first stories and with that passion for

revelation which characterized him at first, that same unbiased and

unfettered non-moral viewpoint.

But after meeting with and working for M---- under this new arrangement

and being apparently fascinated for the moment by his personality, he

seemed to me to gradually lose sight of his ideal, to be actually taken

in by the plausible arguments which the latter could spin with the ease

that a spider spins gossamer. In that respect I insist that M---- was a

bad influence. Under his tutelage L---- gradually became, for instance,

an habitue of a well-known and pseudo-bohemian chop-house, a most

mawkish and naively imitative affair, intended frankly to be a copy or

even the original, forsooth, of an old English inn, done, in so far as

its woodwork was concerned, in smoked or dark-stained oak to represent

an old English interior, its walls covered with long-stemmed pipes and

pictures of English hunting and drinking scenes, its black-stained but

unvarnished tables littered with riding, driving and country-life

society papers, to give it that air of _sans ceremonie_ with an upper

world of which its habitues probably possessed no least inkling but most

eagerly craved. Here, along with a goodly group of his latter-day

friends, far different from those by whom he had first been

surrounded--a pretentious society poet of no great merit but

considerable self-emphasis, a Wall Street broker, posing as a club man,

_raconteur_, "first-nighter" and what not, and several young and

ambitious playwrights, all seeking the heaven of a Broadway success--he

began to pose as one of the intimates of the great city, its bosom child

as it were, the cynosure and favorite of its most glittering

precincts--a most M-----like proceeding. His clothes by now, for I saw

him on occasion, had taken on a more lustrous if less convincing aspect

than those he had worn when I first knew him. The small round hat or

rakish cap, typical of his Western dreams, had now given way to a most

pretentious square-topped derby, beloved, I believe, of undertakers and

a certain severe type of banker as well as some clergymen, only it was a

light brown. His suit and waistcoat were of a bright English tweed,

reddish-brown or herring-bone gray by turns, his shoes box-toed

perfections of the button type. He carried a heavy cane, often a bright

leather manuscript case, and seemed intensely absorbed in the great and

dramatic business of living and writing. "One must," so I read him at

this time, "take the pleasures as well as the labors of this world with

the utmost severity." Here, with a grand manner, he patronized the

manager and the waiters, sent word to his friend the cook, who probably

did not know him at all, that his chop or steak was to be done just so.

These friends of his, or at least one of them (the poet) he met every

day at five for an all-essential game of chess, after which an evening

paper was read and the chop ordered. Ale--not beer--in a pewter mug was

_comme il faut_, the only thing for a gentleman of letters, worthy of

the name, to drink.

I am sorry to write so, for after all youth must have its fling. Still,

I had expected better of L----, and I was a little disappointed to see

that earlier dream of simplicity and privation giving way to an

absolutely worthless show. Besides, twenty or thirty such stories as

"The Right Man," "Sweet Dreams," "The Man With the Broken Fingers," "The

Second Motive," would outweigh a thousand of the things he was getting

published and the profits of which permitted him these airs.

Again, during the early days of his success with M----, he had

Дата добавления: 2015-11-14