In these days no man of genius need starve. The following story of my
friend Bruce may be taken as proof of this assertion. Nearly sixty when
I first knew him, he must have written already some fifteen books,
which had earned him the reputation of ‘a genius’ with the few who
know. He used to live in York Street, Adelphi, where he had two rooms
up the very shaky staircase of a house chiefly remarkable for the fact
that its front door seemed always open. I suppose there never was a
writer more indifferent to what people thought of him. He profoundly
neglected the Press--not with one of those neglects which grow on
writers from reading reviews of their own works--he seemed never to
read criticism, but with the basic neglect of ‘an original,’ a nomadic
spirit, a stranger in modern civilisation, who would leave his attics
for long months of wandering and come back there to hibernate and write
a book. He was a tall, thin man, with a face rather like Mark Twain’s,
black eyebrows which bristled and shot up, a bitten, drooping grey
moustache, and fuzzy grey hair; but his eyes were like owl’s eyes,
piercing, melancholy, dark brown, and gave to his rugged face the
extraordinary expression of a spirit remote from the flesh which had
captured it. He was a bachelor, who seemed to avoid women; perhaps they
had ‘learned’ him that; for he must have been very attractive to them.
The year of which I write had been to my friend Bruce the devil,
monetarily speaking. With his passion for writing that for which his
age had no taste--what could he expect? His last book had been a
complete frost. He had undergone, too, an operation which had cost
him much money and left him very weak. When I went to see him that
October I found him stretched out on two chairs, smoking the Brazilian
cigarettes which he affected--and which always affected me, so black
and strong they were, in their yellow maize-leaf coverings. He had a
writing-pad on his knee, and sheets of paper scattered all around. The
room had a very meagre look. I had not seen him for a year and more,
but he looked up at me as if I’d been in yesterday.
“Hallo!” he said. “I went into a thing they call a cinema last night.
Have you ever been?”
“Ever been? Do you know how long the cinema has been going? Since about
1900.”
“Well! What a _thing_! I’m writing a skit on it!”
“How--a skit?”
“Parody--wildest yarn you ever read.”
He took up a sheet of paper and began chuckling to himself.
“My heroine,” he said, “is an Octoroon. Her eyes swim, and her lovely
bosom heaves. Everybody wants her, and she’s more virtuous than words
can say. The situations she doesn’t succumb to would freeze your blood;
they’d roast your marrow. She has a perfect devil of a brother, with
whom she was brought up, and who knows her deep dark secret and wants
to trade her off to a millionaire who also has a deep dark secret.
Altogether there are four deep dark secrets in my yarn. It’s a corker.”
“What a waste of your time!” I said.
“My time!” he answered fiercely. “What’s the use of my time? Nobody
buys my books.”
“Who’s attending you?”
“Doctors! They take your money, that’s all. I’ve got no money. Don’t
talk about me!” Again he took up a sheet of manuscript; and chuckled.
“Last night--at that place--they had--good God!--a race between a train
and a motor-car. Well, I’ve got one between a train, a motor-car, a
flying machine, and a horse.”