“Oh, I like you. You’ve got horse sense and see through the whole
blamed show. You think I’m an ass, and I am. I have to be. I nearly
starved trying to be a man, so I became an emasculated backboneless
poseur to please the passionless women and the timid publishers of
the United States. To please the sort of American woman who makes the
success of a novelist--the faddist and the gusher--you must tickle
her with the idea that she is a superior being because she has no
passion and that you are creating a literature which only she can
appreciate--she with a refinement and a bleached and laundried set of
tastes which have made her a tyrannical middle-class enthusiast for all
that is unreal and petty in art!”
“Oh!” I said, “Oh!”
“I wish I had been born an Englishman,” he pursued viciously. “To be
great in English literature you’ve only to be dull; but to be great in
American literature you’ve got to be a eunuch.”