Always have I been on the lookout for the Impossible, always on the trail of the Unattainable. Someday, perhaps, I shall find a sleeping-car with a name that means something, an intelligent West Indian hallboy in a New York apartment building, a boardinghouse whose inmates occasionally smile, a man born in Manhattan, a 60-cent table d’hôte that serves six oysters the portion instead of four, a Southerner who leaves you in doubt as to his birthplace longer than ten minutes after the introduction, and myself writing a Christmas story. But that will happen ten days after the millennium, and as the millennium is to be magazineless—
Every June I am asked to write a Christmas story. Every August I promise, vow, insist, swear that it shall be ready in two weeks. And every November I protest that I am sorry, but I couldn’t think of anything new and—well, next year, sure. It was so last year and the year before. It was so this year. And I said to myself that next year it would not be so. I would spend Christmas Eve looking about me. I would get copy from a cop, material from a mater, plot from a messenger boy. And behold! it was Christmas Eve.
It was Christmas Eve, to give a synopsis of preceding chapters. I will fine-toothcomb the town for an idea next summer, quoth I. And so I walked, rode and taxi-cabbed. I spoke to waiters, subway guards, chauffeurs and newsboys and tried to draw from them some bit of life, some experience that might make a story, a Christmas story, COD, at twenty cents a word. But there was not a syllable in the silly bunch, not a comma in the comatose lot.
-And then I wandered into Grand Street and I saw that which made me instinctively clutch my fountain pen. A man, unswept, unmoneyed and unstrung, was about to hurl a brick into a pawnbroker’s window. His arm was raised and he was as deliberate as Mr. Tri-Digital Brown of Chicago trying to lessen the average of Mr. John P. Hanswagner of Pittsburgh. (I always spell Pittsburgh with the final “h”; it’s a final h of a town.)
+And then I wandered into Grand Street and I saw that which made me instinctively clutch my fountain pen. A man, unswept, unmoneyed and unstrung, was about to hurl a brick into a pawnbroker’s window. His arm was raised and he was as deliberate as Mr. Tri-Digital Brown of Chicago trying to lessen the average of Mr. John P. Hanswagner of Pittsburgh. (I always spell Pittsburgh with the final “h”; it’s a final h of a town.)
“Here, Bill,” I aid, “I wouldn’t do that.”
“Oh, yes, you would,” he responded.
Which was my chance. “Let us withdraw to yonder inn,” I said, like a head chorus-man whose object is to “get ’em off,” “and we can discuss things.”
diff --git a/src/epub/text/a-sacrifice-hit.xhtml b/src/epub/text/a-sacrifice-hit.xhtml index b7d98f7..a1ab547 100644 --- a/src/epub/text/a-sacrifice-hit.xhtml +++ b/src/epub/text/a-sacrifice-hit.xhtml @@ -23,7 +23,7 @@As the writer stepped inside the door on his way to the elevator a potato masher flew through the hall, wrecking Slayton’s hat, and smashing the glass of the door. Closely following in the wake of the utensil flew the janitor, a bulky, unwholesome man, suspenderless and sordid, panic-stricken and breathless. A frowsy, fat woman with flying hair followed the missile. The janitor’s foot slipped on the tiled floor, he fell in a heap with an exclamation of despair. The woman pounced upon him and seized his hair. The man bellowed lustily.
Her vengeance wreaked, the virago rose and stalked triumphant as Minerva, back to some cryptic domestic retreat at the rear. The janitor got to his feet, blown and humiliated.
“This is married life,” he said to Slayton, with a certain bruised humour. “That’s the girl I used to lay awake of nights thinking about. Sorry about your hat, mister. Say, don’t snitch to the tenants about this, will yer? I don’t want to lose me job.”
-Slayton took the elevator at the end of the hall and went up to the offices of the Hearthstone. He left the MS. of Love Is All with the editor, who agreed to give him an answer as to its availability at the end of a week.
+Slayton took the elevator at the end of the hall and went up to the offices of the Hearthstone. He left the MS. of Love Is All with the editor, who agreed to give him an answer as to its availability at the end of a week.
Slayton formulated his great winning scheme on his way down. It struck him with one brilliant flash, and he could not refrain from admiring his own genius in conceiving the idea. That very night he set about carrying it into execution.
Miss Puffkin, the Hearthstone stenographer, boarded in the same house with the author. She was an oldish, thin, exclusive, languishing, sentimental maid; and Slayton had been introduced to her some time before.
The writer’s daring and self-sacrificing project was this: He knew that the editor of the Hearthstone relied strongly upon Miss Puffkin’s judgment in the manuscript of romantic and sentimental fiction. Her taste represented the immense average of mediocre women who devour novels and stories of that type. The central idea and keynote of Love Is All was love at first sight—the enrapturing, irresistible, soul-thrilling feeling that compels a man or a woman to recognize his or her spirit-mate as soon as heart speaks to heart. Suppose he should impress this divine truth upon Miss Puffkin personally!—would she not surely endorse her new and rapturous sensations by recommending highly to the editor of the Hearthstone the novelette Love Is All?
diff --git a/src/epub/text/the-plutonian-fire.xhtml b/src/epub/text/the-plutonian-fire.xhtml index 2a8519f..521265a 100644 --- a/src/epub/text/the-plutonian-fire.xhtml +++ b/src/epub/text/the-plutonian-fire.xhtml @@ -11,7 +11,7 @@There are a few editor men with whom I am privileged to come in contact. It has not been long since it was their habit to come in contact with me. There is a difference.
They tell me that with a large number of the manuscripts that are submitted to them come advices (in the way of a boost) from the author asseverating that the incidents in the story are true. The destination of such contributions depends wholly upon the question of the enclosure of stamps. Some are returned, the rest are thrown on the floor in a corner on top of a pair of gum shoes, an overturned statuette of the Winged Victory, and a pile of old magazines containing a picture of the editor in the act of reading the latest copy of Le Petit Journal, right side up—you can tell by the illustrations. It is only a legend that there are waste baskets in editors’ offices.
Thus is truth held in disrepute. But in time truth and science and nature will adapt themselves to art. Things will happen logically, and the villain be discomfited instead of being elected to the board of directors. But in the meantime fiction must not only be divorced from fact, but must pay alimony and be awarded custody of the press despatches.
-This preamble is to warn you off the grade crossing of a true story. Being that, it shall be told simply, with conjunctions substituted for adjectives wherever possible, and whatever evidences of style may appear in it shall be due to the linotype man. It is a story of the literary life in a great city, and it should be of interest to every author within a 20-mile radius of Gosport, Ind., whose desk holds a MS. story beginning thus: “While the cheers following his nomination were still ringing through the old courthouse, Harwood broke away from the congratulating handclasps of his henchmen and hurried to Judge Creswell’s house to find Ida.”
+This preamble is to warn you off the grade crossing of a true story. Being that, it shall be told simply, with conjunctions substituted for adjectives wherever possible, and whatever evidences of style may appear in it shall be due to the linotype man. It is a story of the literary life in a great city, and it should be of interest to every author within a 20-mile radius of Gosport, Ind., whose desk holds a MS. story beginning thus: “While the cheers following his nomination were still ringing through the old courthouse, Harwood broke away from the congratulating handclasps of his henchmen and hurried to Judge Creswell’s house to find Ida.”
Pettit came up out of Alabama to write fiction. The Southern papers had printed eight of his stories under an editorial caption identifying the author as the son of “the gallant Major Pettingill Pettit, our former County Attorney and hero of the battle of Lookout Mountain.”
Pettit was a rugged fellow, with a kind of shamefaced culture, and my good friend. His father kept a general store in a little town called Hosea. Pettit had been raised in the pine-woods and broom-sedge fields adjacent thereto. He had in his gripsack two manuscript novels of the adventures in Picardy of one Gaston Laboulaye, Vicompte de Montrepos, in the year 1329. That’s nothing. We all do that. And some day when we make a hit with the little sketch about a newsy and his lame dog, the editor prints the other one for us—or “on us,” as the saying is—and then—and then we have to get a big valise and peddle those patent air-draft gas burners. At $1.25 everybody should have ’em.
I took Pettit to the redbrick house which was to appear in an article entitled “Literary Landmarks of Old New York,” some day when we got through with it. He engaged a room there, drawing on the general store for his expenses. I showed New York to him, and he did not mention how much narrower Broadway is than Lee Avenue in Hosea. This seemed a good sign, so I put the final test.
diff --git a/src/epub/text/the-rubaiyat-of-a-scotch-highball.xhtml b/src/epub/text/the-rubaiyat-of-a-scotch-highball.xhtml index 7e3c66f..f684056 100644 --- a/src/epub/text/the-rubaiyat-of-a-scotch-highball.xhtml +++ b/src/epub/text/the-rubaiyat-of-a-scotch-highball.xhtml @@ -21,7 +21,7 @@Now, Babbitt had a home and a wife—but that is another story. And I will tell you that story, which will show you a better habit and a worse story than you could find in the man who invented the phrase.
It began away up in Sullivan County, where so many rivers and so much trouble begins—or begin; how would you say that? It was July, and Jessie was a summer boarder at the Mountain Squint Hotel, and Bob, who was just out of college, saw her one day—and they were married in September. That’s the tabloid novel—one swallow of water, and it’s gone.
But those July days!
-Let the exclamation point expound it, for I shall not. For particulars you might read up on “Romeo and Juliet,” and Abraham Lincoln’s thrilling sonnet about “You can fool some of the people,” etc., and Darwin’s works.
+Let the exclamation point expound it, for I shall not. For particulars you might read up on “Romeo and Juliet,” and Abraham Lincoln’s thrilling sonnet about “You can fool some of the people,” etc., and Darwin’s works.
But one thing I must tell you about. Both of them were mad over Omar’s Rubaiyat. They knew every verse of the old bluffer by heart—not consecutively, but picking ’em out here and there as you fork the mushrooms in a fifty-cent steak à la Bordelaise. Sullivan County is full of rocks and trees; and Jessie used to sit on them, and—please be good—used to sit on the rocks; and Bob had a way of standing behind her with his hands over her shoulders holding her hands, and his face close to hers, and they would repeat over and over their favorite verses of the old tentmaker. They saw only the poetry and philosophy of the lines then—indeed, they agreed that the Wine was only an image, and that what was meant to be celebrated was some divinity, or maybe Love or Life. However, at that time neither of them had tasted the stuff that goes with a sixty-cent table d’hôte.
Where was I? Oh, they married and came to New York. Bob showed his college diploma, and accepted a position filling inkstands in a lawyer’s office at $15 a week. At the end of two years he had worked up to $50, and gotten his first taste of Bohemia—the kind that won’t stand the borax and formaldehyde tests.
They had two furnished rooms and a little kitchen. To Jess, accustomed to the mild but beautiful savor of a country town, the dreggy Bohemia was sugar and spice. She hung fish seines on the walls of her rooms, and bought a rakish-looking sideboard, and learned to play the banjo. Twice or thrice a week they dined at French or Italian tables d’hôte in a cloud of smoke, and brag and unshorn hair. Jess learned to drink a cocktail in order to get the cherry. At home she smoked a cigarette after dinner. She learned to pronounce Chianti, and leave her olive stones for the waiter to pick up. Once she essayed to say la, la, la! in a crowd but got only as far as the second one. They met one or two couples while dining out and became friendly with them. The sideboard was stocked with Scotch and rye and a liqueur. They had their new friends in to dinner and all were laughing at nothing by 1 a.m. Some plastering fell in the room below them, for which Bob had to pay $4.50. Thus they footed it merrily on the ragged frontiers of the country that has no boundary lines or government.
diff --git a/src/epub/text/the-sparrows-in-madison-square.xhtml b/src/epub/text/the-sparrows-in-madison-square.xhtml index 3d4b414..b3ae5d2 100644 --- a/src/epub/text/the-sparrows-in-madison-square.xhtml +++ b/src/epub/text/the-sparrows-in-madison-square.xhtml @@ -18,7 +18,7 @@And then the early morning people began to pass through the square to their work—sullen people, with sidelong glances and glum faces, hurrying, hurrying, hurrying. And I got my theme cut out clear from the bird notes, and wrought it into a lesson, and a poem, and a carnival dance, and a lullaby; and then translated it all into prose and began to write.
For two hours my pencil traveled over my pad with scarcely a rest. Then I went to the little room I had rented for two days, and there I cut it to half, and then mailed it, white-hot, to the Sun.
The next morning I was up by daylight and spent two cents of my capital for a paper. If the word “sparrow” was in it I was unable to find it. I took it up to my room and spread it out on the bed and went over it, column by column. Something was wrong.
-Three hours afterward the postman brought me a large envelope containing my MS. and a piece of inexpensive paper, about 3 inches by 4—I suppose some of you have seen them—upon which was written in violet ink, “With the Sun’s thanks.”
+Three hours afterward the postman brought me a large envelope containing my MS. and a piece of inexpensive paper, about 3 inches by 4—I suppose some of you have seen them—upon which was written in violet ink, “With the Sun’s thanks.”
I went over to the square and sat upon a bench. No; I did not think it necessary to eat any breakfast that morning. The confounded pests of sparrows were making the square hideous with their idiotic “cheep, cheep.” I never saw birds so persistently noisy, impudent, and disagreeable in all my life.
By this time, according to all traditions, I should have been standing in the office of the editor of the Sun. That personage—a tall, grave, white-haired man—would strike a silver bell as he grasped my hand and wiped a suspicious moisture from his glasses.
“Mr. McChesney,” he would be saying when a subordinate appeared, “this is Mr. Henry, the young man who sent in that exquisite gem about the sparrows in Madison Square. You may give him a desk at once. Your salary, sir, will be $80 a week, to begin with.”