IN NEW YORK'S "FLEET STREET"
The inexperienced free lance who attempts to invade New York, as we did,
with no magazine reputation and no friends at court among the experts of
the periodical market, may be assured that he will receive a surprising
amount of courtesy. But this courtesy is likely to be administered to
help soften the blows of a series of disappointments. Anybody but a
genius or one of fortune's darlings may expect that New York, which has
a deep and natural distrust of strangers, will require that the newcomer
earn his bread in blood-sweat until he has established a reputation for
producing the goods. Dear old simple-hearted Father Knickerbocker has
been gold-bricked so often that a breezy, friendly manner puts him
immediately on his guard.
Most of the editors with whom you will have to deal are home folks, like
yourself, from Oskaloosa and Richmond and Santa Barbara and Quincy. Few
are native-born New Yorkers, and scarcely any of them go around with
their noses in the air in an "upstage Eastern manner." Most of them are
graduates of the newspaper school, and remnants of newspaper cynicism
occasionally appear in their outspoken philosophy. But be not deceived
by this, for even in the newspaper office the half-baked cub who is
getting his first glimpses of woman's frailties and man's weak will is
the only cynic who means all he says. All reporters who are worth their
salt mellow with the years; and editors who amount to much usually are
ex-reporters trained to their jobs by long experience. The biggest
editors and the ones with the biggest hearts have the biggest jobs. Most
of the snubs you will receive will come from little men in little jobs,
trying to impress you with a "front." The biggest editors of the lot are
plain home folks whom you would not hesitate to invite to a dinner in a
farmhouse kitchen.
What you ought to know when you invade New York without much capital and
no reputation to speak of is that you are making a great mistake to move
there so early, and that most of the editors to whom you address
yourself know you are making a mistake but are too soft-hearted to tell
you so.
Like most other over-optimistic free lances, we invaded New York with an
expeditionary force which was in a woeful state of unpreparedness.
In a street of brownstone fronts in mid-town Manhattan, a hurdy-gurdy
strummed a welcome to us in the golden November sunlight, and a canary
in a gilt cage twittered ecstatically from an open window. This moment
is worthy of mention because it was the happiest that was granted to us
for a number of months thereafter. We rented a small furnished room, top
floor rear, and went out for a stroll on Broadway, looking the city over
with the appraising eyes of conquerors. We were joyously confident.
One reason why we thought we would do well here was that the latter
months of the period preceding our supposedly triumphal entry had seen
me arrive at the point of earning almost as much money at free lancing
as I could have made as a reporter. Meantime, I had thrilled to see my
name affixed to contributions in _Collier's_, _Leslie's_, _Outlook_ and
_Outing_, not to mention a few lesser magazines. I thought I knew a
"story" when I saw one. I knew how to take photographs and prepare a
manuscript for marketing, and New York newspapers and magazines had been
treating me handsomely. What we did not realize was that while the New
York markets were hospitable enough to western material, they required
no further assistance in reporting the activities of Manhattan Island.
We had moved away from our gold mine.
Our home and workshop now was a cubbyhole so small that every piece of
furniture in the place was in close proximity to something else. My
battered desk was jam against my roommate's drawing table, and his chair
backed against a bed. Then, except for a narrow aisle to the door, there
was a chair which touched another bed, which touched a trunk; the trunk
touched ends with a washstand, which was jam against a false mantel
pasted onto the wall, and the mantel was in juxtaposition with a bureau
which poked me in the back. The window looked south, and adjacent
buildings allowed it to have sunlight for almost half an hour a day.
Yet it would have been a cheerful enough place if our mail had not been
so depressing. Everything we sent out came right back with a bounce,
sometimes on the same day that we posted it. With indefatigable zeal we
wrote feature "stories" about big topics in America's biggest city and
furnished illustrations for the text. But the manuscripts did not sell.
For two bitter months we kept at it before we discovered what was wrong.
You may wonder how we could have been so blind. But there was no one to
tell us what to do. We had to find out by experience.
In November our income was $60.90, all of it echoes from the past for
material written in the west.
"How that crowd in the old office would laugh at us when we trailed back
home, defeated!"
That was the thought which was at once a nightmare and a goad to further
desperate effort. Day after day the Art Department and the kodak and I
explored New York's highways and centers of interest. The place was ripe
with barrels and barrels of good "feature stories," and I knew it; and
the markets were not unfriendly, for by mail I had sold to them before.
But now we could not "land."
On Christmas Day there was a dismal storm. Our purses were almost flat,
and my box from home failed to arrive. To get up an appetite for dinner
that night we went for a walk in a joy killing blizzard. I wanted to die
and planned to do so. The only reason I did not jump off of a pier was
the providential intervention of several stiff cocktails. (I am
theoretically a prohibitionist, but grateful to the enemy for having
saved my life.) The black cloud that shut out all sunlight was our
measly total for December--$18.07.
One glimmer of hope remained in a growing suspicion that perhaps some of
the "stories" we had submitted had seen print shortly before we
arrived. Possibly some other free lances--I would now estimate the
number as somewhere between nine hundred and a thousand--had gone over
the island of Manhattan with a fine tooth comb? I began haunting the
side streets to seek out the most hidden possibilities, and ended in
triumph one afternoon in a little uptown bird store.
For two hours the young woman who was the proprietor of the store
submitted to a searching interview, and I emerged with enough material
for a full page spread. Then, taking no chances of being turned down
because the contribution was too long, I condensed the "story" into a
column. The manuscript went to the Sunday Editor of the New York _Sun_,
with a letter pleading that "just this once" he grant me the special
favor of a note to explain why he would not be able to use what I had to
offer.
"Well enough written," he scribbled on the rejection slip, "but Miss
Virginia has been done too many times before."
With that a great light dawned. Further investigation discovered that we
had run into the same difficulty on numerous other occasions. We
newcomers had no notion of how thoroughly and often the city had been
pillaged for news. We could not tell old stuff from new. Manhattan
Island is, indeed, the most perilous place in all America for the green
and friendless free lance to attempt to earn a living. There is a
wonderful abundance of "stories," but nearly all of them that the eye of
the beginner can detect have been marketed before. Any other island but
Manhattan! When dog days came around, I took a vacation on Bois Blanc in
the Straits of Mackinac, and found more salable "stories" along its
thinly populated shores than Manhattan had been able to furnish in three
months. Everything I touched on Bois Blanc was new, and all my own.
Anything on Manhattan is everybody's.
But to return to our troubles in New York. The only hope I could see was
to create a line of writing all our own. This determination resulted in
a highly specialized type of "feature" for which we found a market in
the morning New York _World_. It combined novelty with the utmost
essence of timeliness. For example, precluding any possibility of being
anticipated on the opening of Coney Island's summer season, we wrote
early in February:
"If reports from unveracious employees of Coney Island are to be
trusted, the summer season of 1910 is going to bring forth thrilling
novelties for the air and the earth and the tunnels beneath the earth."
We listed then the Biplane Hat Glide (women were wearing enormous hats
that season) and Motor Ten Pins--get in a motor car and run down
dummies which count respectively, a child, ten points; a blind man,
five; a newsboy, one. Then the Shontshover. We explained the Shontshover
in detail because it was supposed to have a particularly strong appeal
to the millions who ride in the subway:
"New York's good-natured enjoyment of its inadequate subway service is
responsible for the third novelty of the season. In honor of a gentleman
who once took a ride in one of his own subway cars during the rush hour,
the device has been named the 'Shontshover' (from 'Shonts' and
'shover'). It is the sublimation of a subway car, a cross between a
cartridge and a sardine can. The passengers are packed into the shell
with a hydraulic ram, then at high speed are shot through a pneumatic
tube against a stone wall. Because of the great number of passengers the
Shontshover can carry in a day, the admission price to the tube is to be
only twenty-five cents."
We suggested on other occasions that new churches should have floors
with an angle of forty-five degrees, on account of the prevailing
fashion of large hats among women; that City Hall employees were
outwitting Mayor Gaynor's time clock by paying the night watchman to
punch it for them at sunrise, and that beauty had become a bar to a job
as waitress in numerous New York restaurants. (O shades of George
Washington, forgive us that one, at least!) These squibs did nobody any
harm, and did us on the average, the good of the price of a week's room
rent. We never meant them to be taken seriously or ever supposed that
any one in the world would swallow them whole. But among our readers was
a square-headed German; and one of the most absurd of our imaginings
turned out, as a result, to be a physical possibility.
"Ever since it was announced, a few days ago, that hazing in a modified
modernized form is to be permitted at West Point," we related, "a
reporter for the _World_ has been busily interviewing people of all ages
and interests to find the latest ideas on the subject.... Some small
boys in Van Cortlandt Park yesterday afternoon, diabolo experts,
suggested 'plebe diabolo.' It is simply diabolo for grown-ups. A rope
takes the place of the customary string and a first year man is used for
a spool. Any one can see at a glance what a great improvement this would
be over the old-fashioned stunt of tossing the plebe in a blanket."
A few months later I picked up a copy of the _Scientific American_ and
chortled to read the account of a German acrobat who was playing in
vaudeville as the "Human Diabolo."
But this sort of thing was merely temporizing, and we finally had to
abandon it for subjects more substantial. By a slow and harrowing
process we learned our specialties and made a few helpful friends in New
York's Fleet Street. The fittest among the many manuscripts turned out
by our copy mill survived to teach us that the surest way into print is
to write about things closest to personal knowledge--simple and homely
themes close to the grass roots. We turned again to middle western
topics and the magazines opened their doors to us. We plugged away for
six months and cleared a profit large enough to pay off all our debts
and leave a little margin. Then we felt that we could look the west in
the face again, and go home, if we liked, without a consciousness of
utter defeat. For though we had not won, neither had we lost. Our books
struck a balance.
When the Wanderlust began calling again in May, I sat many an evening in
the window of our little room, gazing down into the backyard cat arena
or up at the moon, and dragging away at a Missouri corncob pipe in a
happy revery. Some of my manuscript titles of editorial paragraphs
contributed to _Collier's_ trace what happened next:
Longings at the Window.
Packing Up.
A Mood of Moving Day.
From Cab to Taxi.
Outdoor Sleeping Quarters.
Shortcake.
Which is to say that it was sweet to see the home folks again, to eat
fried chicken and honest homemade strawberry shortcake and to slumber on
a sleeping porch. Our forces had beat a strategic retreat, but the
morale was not gone. Our determination was firm to assault New York
again at the first favorable opportunity. Meanwhile, we had learned a
thing or two.