I SAT in a restaurant in New York thinking of my friends George and
Marco in Chicago. We had been lads together and I remembered an evening
of our young manhood when we all went out to walk together. We had
stopped at a bridge and stood leaning over and I remembered that Marco
had said something, expressive at the moment of what we had all felt.
“The time’ll come, I’ll bet you what you please the time’ll come when
I’ll be making my hundred and twenty-five every month,” he had said.
Well, Marco’s remark had expressed something more than a desire to make
money. Later all of us had made money and then when youth was gone
we had all tried something else. Marco wrote poetry and George and I
wrote stories. None of us knew much of our crafts but we had struggled
together with them and in the evenings had sat about talking. What we
had all wanted was the leisure money might bring. We had all wanted to
go to New York and live among men who knew more of the crafts we were
trying to practice than we felt we would ever know.
And now I had come to New York and was sitting I in a restaurant where
the more successful of the practitioners of the arts congregated. What
did I want? I wanted to hear men of my own craft, who loved the craft,
speak of it. I remembered how as a boy in mid-western towns before the
factories came in so thick the carpenters, wheelwrights, harness-makers
and other craftsmen often gathered about to speak of their work and how
I loved to be among them at such times. The factories had brushed such
fellows aside. Had the same thing happened in the more delicate crafts?
Were the great publishing houses of the city and the magazines but
factories and were the writers and picture makers who worked for them
but factory hands now?
If that had happened I thought I understood the men among whom I had
now come. The older craftsmen had thought little on the subject of
wages and had never talked on the subject when they gathered in groups
in the evenings but the factory hands among whom I later worked had
talked of little else. They had talked of how much money might be
made and had boasted interminably of their potency in sex. Were the
practitioners of the more delicate crafts becoming like them?
In the New York restaurant was a room filled with people, all in some
way practitioners of the arts. Near me at a table sat three men and
two women. They were talking in rather loud tones and seemed conscious
that everything they said was of importance. One had a queer sense of
their separateness from each other. Why, when one of them spoke, did he
not look at his fellows? Instead he glanced about the room, as though
saying to himself, “Is anyone looking at me?”
And now one of these men arose and walked across the room. There was
something strange about his walk. I was puzzled and then the truth
came to me. All the men and women in the room were obviously aware of
what they thought of as their own importance. No man spoke naturally,
walked naturally.
The man who had got up from the table to go speak to someone at another
table did not want really to speak to him. He wanted to walk across
the room for the same reason that I am told, nowadays, it is almost
impossible to do anything with actors as they all want to get into one
spot on the stage--upstage where the light is the clearest.
What a ghastly separation from life! I sat in the New York restaurant
fully aware that what was true of the men and women about me was true
also of myself. The people in the restaurant, the actors, painters and
writers, had made themselves what the public thought it wanted from its
artists, and had been well paid for doing so. What I felt in New York I
might have felt with even more terrible certainty in Hollywood.
I fled from the restaurant and at a street corner stopped and laughed
at myself. I remembered that at the moment I had on a pair of socks and
a neck-scarf, either of which might have been seen for a mile. “At any
rate you’re not such a blushing violet yourself,” I said, grinning with
myself at myself.