WHEN I lived in Chicago and had first begun to write stories an
American critic who had seen some of my work had been very kind about
securing the publication of the stories but once, when he was annoyed
with me for writing a story he did not like, he wrote me a scolding
letter. “You are, after all, nothing but an advertising writer who
would like to be something else and can’t make it,” he said and after I
had got to New York and had walked about a little looking at the tall
arrogant buildings and at the smart alert-looking people in the streets
I thought I had better, for the time at least, stay away from the
people whose work and whose minds I admired. “They might find out how
really little I know,” I said to myself shrewdly.
I was however not too lonely, having plenty of people at whom I could
look, to whom I could listen. My brother, who lived in New York, took
me to the Salmagundi Club where I saw any number of successful painters
and my boyhood friend Mr. John Emerson took me to the Players and Lambs
and also, with other men and women I knew, I penetrated into the life
of Greenwich Village.
How many strings to grasp! How many things I wanted of the city that
was, I had no doubt, the artistic and intellectual capital of the
country! The city’s wealth did not impress me too much, as I had been
in other wealthy places. One could make money as fast in Chicago as in
New York, although it could probably not be spent with quite as much
style. What I wanted most was the men who would help me solve certain
problems connected with the craft to which I was devoted. Could I find
such fellows? Would they do it?
The bitter truth was that of the actors I saw and heard talk none
seemed much interested in the craft of the actor and of the painters
the same lack of interest in what seemed to me so essential was
apparent, and surely we scribblers were no better. The successful men
of the arts talked of the market and little else. Writers even went
into bookstores to see what kind of books were selling well in order
to know what kind of books to write, actors talked of salaries paid
and of getting some part that would bring them into prominence and the
painters followed the same bent.
Were the successful practitioners of the arts much less decent fellows
than the laborers and business men of the Middle West among whom my
life had been spent? I was forced to ask myself that question too.