Excellent Parson Adams, in "Joseph Andrews," is not the only literary
man who has lamented the difficulty of ransoming a manuscript for
immediate cash. It will be remembered that Mr. Adams had in his
saddlebag nine volumes of sermons in manuscript, "as well worth a
hundred pounds as a shilling was worth twelve pence." Offering one of
these as a pledge, Parson Adams besought Mr. Tow-Wouse, the innkeeper,
to lend him three guineas but the latter had so little stomach for a
transaction of this sort that "he cried out, 'Coming, sir,' though
nobody called; and ran downstairs without any fear of breaking his
neck."
As a whimsical essayist (with whom I have talked over these matters)
puts it, the business of literature is imperfectly coordinated with
life.
Almost any other kind of property is hockable for ready cash. A watch, a
ring, an outworn suit of clothes, a chair, a set of books, all these
will find willing purchasers. But a manuscript which happens not to meet
the fancy of the editors must perforce lie idle in your drawer though it
sparkle with the brilliants of wit, and five or ten years hence
collectors may list it in their catalogues. No mount of piety along
Sixth Avenue will accept it in pawn, no Hartford Lunch will exchange it
for corned beef hash and dropped egg. This is a dismal thing.
This means that there is an amusing and a competent living to be gained
by a literary agent of a new kind. Think how many of the most famous
writers have trod the streets ragged and hungry in their early days.
There were times when they would have sold their epics, their novels,
their essays, for the price of a square meal. Think of the booty that
would accumulate in the shop of a literary pawnbroker. The early work of
famous men would fill his safe to bursting. Later on he might sell it
for a thousand times what he gave. There is nothing that grows to such
fictitious value as manuscript.
Think of Francis Thompson, when he was a bootmaker's assistant in
Leicester Square. He was even too poor to buy writing materials. His
early poems were scribbled on scraps of old account books and wrapping
paper. How readily he would have sold them for a few shillings. Or Edgar
Poe in the despairing days of his wife's illness. Or R.L.S. in the fits
of depression caused by his helpless dependence upon his father for
funds. What a splendid opportunity these crises in writers' lives would
offer to the enterprising buyer of manuscripts!
Be it understood, of course, that the pawnbroker must be himself an
appreciator of good things. No reason why he should buy poor stuff, even
though the author of it be starving. Richard Le Gallienne has spoken
somewhere of the bookstores which sell "books that should never have
been written to the customers who should never have been born." Our
pawnbroker must guard himself against buying this kind of stuff. He will
be besieged with it. Very likely Mr. Le Gallienne himself will be the
first to offer him some. But his task will be to discover new and true
talent beneath its rags, and stake it to a ham sandwich when that homely
bite will mean more than a dinner at the Ritz ten years later.
The idea of the literary pawnbroker comes to me from the (unpublished)
letters of John Mistletoe, author of the "Dictionary of Deplorable
Facts," that wayward and perverse genius who wandered the Third Avenue
saloons when he might have been fêted by the Authors' League had he
lived a few years longer. Some day, I hope, the full story of that
tragic life may be told, and the manuscripts still cherished by his
executor made public. In the meantime, this letter, which he wrote in
1908, gives a sad and vivid little picture of the straits of unadmitted
genius:
"I write from Connor's saloon. Paunchy Connor has been my best--indeed
my only--friend in this city, when every editor, publisher, and critic
has given me the frozen mitt. Of course I know why ... the author of
'Vermin' deserves not, nor wants, their hypocritical help. The book was
too true to life to please the bourgeois and yet not ribald enough to
tickle the prurient. I had a vile pornographic publisher after me the
other day; he said if I would rub up some of the earlier chapters and
inject a little more spice he thought he could do something with it--as
a paper-covered erotic for shop-girls, I suppose he meant. I kicked him
downstairs. The stinking bounder!
"Until to-day I had been without grub for sixty hours. That is literally
true. I was ashamed of sponging on Paunchy, and could not bring myself
to come back to the saloon where he would willingly have fed me. I did
get a job for two days as a deckhand on an Erie ferryboat, but they
found out I did not belong to the union. I had two dollars in my
pocket--a fortune--but while I was dozing on a doorstep on Hudson
Street, waiting for the cafés to open (I was too done to walk half a
dozen blocks to an all-night restaurant), some snapper picked my
pocket. That night I slept in a big drain pipe where they were putting
up a building.
"Why isn't there a pawnshop where one could hang up MSS. for cash? In my
hallroom over Connor's saloon I have got stuff that will be bid for at
auctions some day (that isn't conceit, I know it), but at this moment,
July 17, 1908, I couldn't raise 50 cents on it. If there were a literary
mount of piety--a sort of Parnassus of piety as it were--the uncle in
charge might bless the day he met me. Well, it won't be for long. This
cancer is getting me surely.
"This morning I'm cheerful. I've scrubbed and swept Paunchy's bar for
him, and the dirty, patchouli-smelling hop-joint he keeps upstairs,
bless his pimping old heart. And I've had a real breakfast: boiled red
cabbage, stewed beef (condemned by the inspector), rye bread, raw
onions, a glass of Tom and Jerry, and two big schooners of the amber.
I'm working on my Third Avenue novel called 'The L.'
"I shan't give you my right address, or you'd send someone down here to
give me money, you damned philanthropist.... Connor ain't the real name,
so there. When I die (soon) they'll find Third Avenue written on my
heart, if I still have one...."
It is interesting to recall that the MS. of his poems "Pavements, and
Other Verses" was bought by a private collector for $250 last winter.
Will not some literary agent think over this idea?