sands looking for Toole. I did not really expect to see him, and I had
no reason to believe he was in Ramsgate, but I thought if Providence
were kind to him it might throw him in my way. I wanted to do him a good
turn. I had written a three-act farcical comedy at the request of an
amateur dramatic club. I had written out all the parts, and I think
there were rehearsals. But the play was never produced. In the light of
after knowledge I suspect some of those actors must have been of quite
professional calibre. You understand, therefore, why my thoughts turned
to Toole. But I could not find Toole. Instead, I found on the sands a
page of a paper called _Society_. It is still running merrily at a
penny, but at that time it had also a Saturday edition at threepence.
On this page was a great prize-competition scheme, as well as details of
a regular weekly competition. The competitions in those days were always
literary and intellectual, but then popular education had not made such
strides as to-day.
[Illustration: Drawing with signature below:
I. Zangwill]
I sat down on the spot, and wrote something which took a prize in the
weekly competition. This emboldened me to enter for the great stakes.
[Illustration: I SAT DOWN AND WROTE SOMETHING]
There were various events. I resolved to enter for two. One was a short
novel, and the other a comedietta. The '5_l._ humorous story'
competition I did not go in for; but when the last day of sending in
MSS. for that had passed, I reproached myself with not having despatched
one of my manuscripts. Modesty had prevented me sending in old work, as
I felt assured it would stand no chance, but when it was too late I was
annoyed with myself for having thrown away a possibility. After all I
could have lost nothing. Then I discovered that I had mistaken the last
date, and that there was still a day. In the joyful reaction I selected
a story called 'Professor Grimmer,' and sent it in. Judge of my
amazement when this got the prize (5_l._), and was published in serial
form running through three numbers of _Society_. Last year, at a Press
dinner, I found myself next to Mr. Arthur Goddard, who told me he had
acted as Competition Editor, and that quite a number of now well-known
people had taken part in these admirable competitions. My painfully
laboured novel only got honourable mention, and my comedietta was lost
in the post.
But I was now at the height of literary fame, and success stimulated me
to fresh work. I still marvel when I think of the amount of rubbish I
turned out in my seventeenth and eighteenth years, in the scanty leisure
of a harassed pupil-teacher at an elementary school, working hard in the
evenings for a degree at the London University to boot. There was a
fellow pupil-teacher (let us call him Y.) who believed in me, and who
had a little money with which to back his belief. I was for starting a
comic paper. The name was to be _Grimaldi_, and I was to write it all
every week.
'But don't you think your invention would give way ultimately?' asked Y.
It was the only time he ever doubted me.
'By that time I shall be able to afford a staff,' I replied
triumphantly.
[Illustration: ARTHUR GODDARD]
Y. was convinced. But before the comic paper was born, Y. had another
happy thought. He suggested that if I wrote a Jewish story, we might
make enough to finance the comic paper. I was quite willing. If he had
suggested an epic, I should have written it.
So I wrote the story in four evenings (I always write in spurts), and
within ten days from the inception of the idea the booklet was on sale
in a coverless pamphlet form. The printing cost ten pounds. I paid five
(the five I had won), Y. paid five, and we divided the profits. He has
since not become a publisher.
[Illustration: IT WAS HAWKED ABOUT THE STREETS]
My first book (price one penny nett) went well. It was loudly denounced
by those it described, and widely bought by them; it was hawked about
the streets. One little shop in Whitechapel sold 400 copies. It was even
on Smith's bookstalls. There was great curiosity among Jews to know the
name of the writer. Owing to my anonymity, I was enabled to see those
enjoying its perusal, who were afterwards to explain to me their horror
and disgust at its illiteracy and vulgarity. By vulgarity vulgar Jews
mean the reproduction of the Hebrew words with which the poor and the
old-fashioned interlard their conversation. It is as if English-speaking
Scotchmen and Irishmen should object to 'dialect' novels reproducing the
idiom of their 'uncultured' countrymen. I do not possess a copy of my
first book, but somehow or other I discovered the MS. when writing
'Children of the Ghetto.' The description of market-day in Jewry was
transferred bodily from the MS. of my first book, and is now generally
admired.
What the profits were I never knew, for they were invested in the second
of our publications. Still jealously keeping the authorship secret, we
published a long comic ballad which I had written on the model of 'Bab.'
With this we determined to launch out in style, and so we had gorgeous
advertisement posters printed in three colours, which were to be stuck
about London to beautify that great dreary city. Y. saw the black-hair
of Fortune almost within our grasp.
One morning our headmaster walked into my room with a portentously
solemn air. I felt instinctively that the murder was out. But he only
said, 'Where is Y.?' though the mere coupling of our names was ominous,
for our publishing partnership was unknown. I replied, 'How should I
know? In his room, I suppose.'
He gave me a peculiar sceptical glance.
[Illustration: A POLICEMAN TOLD HIM TO GET DOWN]
'When did you last see Y.?' he said.
'Yesterday afternoon,' I replied wonderingly.
'And you don't know where he is now?'
'Haven't an idea--isn't he in school?'
'No,' he replied in low, awful tones.
'Where then?' I murmured.
'_In prison!_'
'In prison!' I gasped.
'In prison; I have just been to help bail him out.'
It transpired that Y. had suddenly been taken with a further happy
thought. Contemplation of those gorgeous tricoloured posters had turned
his brain, and, armed with an amateur paste-pot and a ladder, he had
sallied forth at midnight to stick them about the silent streets, so as
to cut down the publishing expenses. A policeman, observing him at work,
had told him to get down, and Y., being legal-minded, had argued it out
with the policeman _de haut en bas_ from the top of his ladder. The
outraged majesty of the law thereupon haled Y. off to the cells.
Naturally the cat was now out of the bag, and the fat in the fire.
To explain away the poster was beyond the ingenuity of even a professed
fiction-monger.
Straightway the committee of the school was summoned in hot haste, and
held debate upon the scandal of a pupil-teacher being guilty of
originality. And one dread afternoon, when all Nature seemed to hold its
breath, I was called down to interview a member of the committee. In his
hand were copies of the obnoxious publications.
I approached the great person with beating heart. He had been kind to me
in the past, singling me out, on account of some scholastic successes,
for an annual vacation at the seaside. It has only just struck me, after
all these years, that, if he had not done so, I should not have found
the page of _Society_, and so not have perpetrated the deplorable
compositions.
In the course of a bad quarter of an hour, he told me that the ballad
was tolerable, though not to be endured; he admitted the metre was
perfect, and there wasn't a single false rhyme. But the prose novelette
was disgusting. 'It is such stuff,' said he, 'as little boys scribble
upon walls.'
I said I could not see anything objectionable in it.
'Come now, confess you are ashamed of it,' he urged. 'You only wrote it
to make money.'
'If you mean that I deliberately wrote low stuff to make money,' I
replied calmly, 'it is untrue. There is nothing I am ashamed of. What
you object to is simply realism.' I pointed out that Bret Harte had been
as realistic; but they did not understand literature on that committee.
'Confess you are ashamed of yourself,' he reiterated, 'and we will look
over it.'
'I am not,' I persisted, though I foresaw only too clearly that my
summer's vacation was doomed if I told the truth. 'What is the use of
saying I am?'
The headmaster uplifted his hands in horror. 'How, after all your
kindness to him, he can contradict you--!' he cried.
[Illustration: SUCH STUFF AS LITTLE BOYS SCRIBBLE UPON WALLS]
'When I come to be your age,' I conceded to the member of the committee,
'it is possible I may look back on it with shame. At present I feel
none.'
In the end I was given the alternative of expulsion or of publishing
nothing which had not passed the censorship of the committee. After
considerable hesitation I chose the latter.
This was a blessing in disguise; for, as I have never been able to
endure the slightest arbitrary interference with my work, I simply
abstained from publishing. Thus, although I still wrote--mainly
sentimental verses--my nocturnal studies were less interrupted. Not till
I had graduated, and was of age, did I return to my inky vomit. Then
came my next first book--a real book at last.
In this also I had the collaboration of a fellow-teacher, Louis Cowen by
name. This time my colleague was part-author. It was only gradually that
I had been admitted to the privilege of communion with him, for he was
my senior by five or six years, and a man of brilliant parts who had
already won his spurs in journalism, and who enjoyed deservedly the
reputation of an Admirable Crichton. What drew me to him was his mordant
wit (to-day, alas! wasted on anonymous journalism! If he would only
reconsider his indetermination, the reading public would be the richer!)
Together we planned plays, novels, treatises on political economy, and
contributions to philosophy. Those were the days of dreams.
[Illustration: LIFE IN BETHNAL GREEN]
One afternoon he came to me with quivering sides, and told me that an
idea for a little shilling book had occurred to him. It was that a
Radical Prime Minister and a Conservative working man should change into
each other by supernatural means, and the working man be confronted with
the problem of governing, while the Prime Minister should be as
comically out of place in the East End environment. He thought it would
make a funny 'Arabian Nights' sort of burlesque. And so it would have
done; but, unfortunately, I saw subtler possibilities of political
satire in it, nothing less than a _reductio ad absurdum_ of the whole
system of Party Government. I insisted the story must be real, not
supernatural, the Prime Minister must be a Tory, weary of office, and it
must be an ultra-Radical atheistic artisan bearing a marvellous
resemblance to him who directs (and with complete success) the
Conservative Administration. To add to the mischief, owing to my
collaborator's evenings being largely taken up by other work,
seven-eighths of the book came to be written by me, though the leading
ideas were, of course, threshed out and the whole revised in common, and
thus it became a vent-hole for all the ferment of a youth of twenty-one,
whose literary faculty had furthermore been pent up for years by the
potential censorship of a committee. The book, instead of being a
shilling skit, grew to a ten-and-sixpenny (for that was the unfortunate
price of publication) political treatise of over sixty long chapters and
500 closely printed pages. I drew all the characters as seriously and
complexly as if the fundamental conception were a matter of history; the
outgoing Premier became an elaborate study of a nineteenth-century
Hamlet; the Bethnal Green life amid which he came to live was presented
with photographic fulness and my old trick of realism; the governmental
manoeuvres were described with infinite detail; numerous real
personages were introduced under nominal disguises; and subsequent
history was curiously anticipated in some of the Female Franchise and
Home Rule episodes. Worst of all, so super-subtle was the satire, that
it was never actually stated straight out that the Premier had changed
places with the Radical working man, so that the door might be left open
for satirically suggested alternative explanations of the metamorphosis
in their characters; and as, moreover, the two men re-assumed their
original _rôles_ for one night only with infinitely complex effects,
many readers, otherwise unimpeachable, reached the end without any
suspicion of the actual plot--and yet (on their own confession) enjoyed
the book!
[Illustration: 'WE SENT IT ROUND']
In contrast to all this elephantine waggery the half-dozen chapters near
the commencement, in which my collaborator sketched the first adventures
of the Radical working man in Downing Street, were light and sparkling,
and I feel sure the shilling skit he originally meditated would have
been a great success. We christened the book. 'The Premier and the
Painter,' ourselves J. Freeman Bell, had it type-written, and sent it
round to the publishers in two enormous quarto volumes. I had been
working at it for more than a year every evening after the hellish
torture of the day's teaching, and all day every holiday, but now I had
a good rest while it was playing its boomerang prank of returning to me
once a month. The only gleam of hope came from Bentleys, who wrote to
say that they could not make up their minds to reject it; but they
prevailed upon themselves to part with it at last, though not without
asking to see Mr. Bell's next book. At last it was accepted by Spencer
Blackett, and, though it had been refused by all the best houses, it
failed. Failed in a material sense, that is; for there was plenty of
praise in the papers, though at too long intervals to do us any good.
The _Athenæum_ has never spoken so well of anything I have done since.
The late James Runciman (I learnt after his death that it was he) raved
about it in various uninfluential organs. It even called forth a leader
in the _Family Herald_(!), and there are odd people here and there, who
know the secret of J. Freeman Bell, who declare that I. Zangwill will
never do anything so good. There was a cheaper edition, but it did not
sell much then, though now it is in its third edition, issued uniformly
with my other books by Heinemann, and absolutely unrevised. But not only
did 'The Premier and the Painter fail with the great public at first, it
did not even help either of us one step up the ladder; never got us a
letter of encouragement nor a stroke of work. I had to begin journalism
at the very bottom and entirely unassisted, narrowly escaping canvassing
for advertisements, for I had by this time thrown up my scholastic
position, and had gone forth into the world penniless and without even a
'character,' branded as an Atheist (because I did not worship the Lord
who presided over our committee) and a Revolutionary (because I refused
to break the law of the land).
I should stop here if I were certain I had written the required article.
But as 'The Premier and the Painter' was not entirely _my_ first book, I
may perhaps be expected to say something of my third first book, and the
first to which I put my name--'The Bachelors' Club.' Years of literary
apathy succeeded the failure of 'The Premier and the Painter.' All I did
was to publish a few serious poems (which, I hope, will survive _Time_),
a couple of pseudonymous stories signed 'The Baroness Von S.' (!), and a
long philosophical essay upon religion, and to lend a hand in the
writing of a few playlets. Becoming convinced of the irresponsible
mendacity of the dramatic profession, I gave up the stage, too, vowing
never to write except on commission (I kept my vow and yet was played
ultimately), and sank entirely into the slough of journalism (glad
enough to get there), _inter alia_ editing a comic paper (not
_Grimaldi_, but _Ariel_) with a heavy heart. At last the long apathy
wore off, and I resolved to cultivate literature again in my scraps of
time. It is a mere accident that I wrote a pair of 'funny' books, or put
serious criticism of contemporary manners into a shape not understood in
a country where only the dull are profound and only the ponderous are
earnest. 'The Bachelors' Club' was the result of a whimsical remark made
by my dear friend, Eder of Bartholomew's, with whom I was then sharing
rooms in Bernard Street, and who helped me greatly with it, and its
publication was equally accidental. One spring day, in the year of grace
1891, having lived unsuccessfully for a score of years and seven upon
this absurd planet, I crossed Fleet Street and stepped into what is
called 'success.' It was like this. Mr. J. T. Grein, now of the
Independent Theatre, meditated a little monthly called _The Playgoers'
Review_, and he asked me to do an article for the first number, on the
strength of some speeches I had made at the Playgoers' Club.
[Illustration: MR. ZANGWILL AT WORK]
[Illustration: EDITING A COMIC PAPER]
When I got the proof it was marked, 'Please return at once to 6 Bouverie
Street.' My office boy being out, and Bouverie Street being only a few
steps away, I took it over myself, and found myself, somewhat to my
surprise, in the office of Henry & Co., publishers, and in the presence
of Mr. J. Hannaford Bennett, an active partner in the firm. He greeted
me by name, also to my surprise, and told me he had heard me speak at
the Playgoers' Club. A little conversation ensued, and he mentioned that
his firm was going to bring out a Library of Wit and Humour. I told him
I had begun a book, avowedly humorous, and had written two chapters of
it, and he straightway came over to my office, heard me read them, and
immediately secured the book. (The then editor ultimately refused to
have it in the 'Whitefriars' Library of Wit and Humour,' and so it was
brought out separately.) Within three months, working in odds and ends
of time, I finished it, correcting the proofs of the first chapters
while I was writing the last; indeed, ever since the day I read those
two chapters to Mr. Hannaford Bennett I have never written a line
anywhere that has not been purchased before it was written. For, to my
undying astonishment, two average editions of my real 'first book' were
disposed of on the day of publication, to say nothing of the sale in New
York. Unless I had acquired a reputation of which I was totally
unconscious, it must have been the title that 'fetched' the trade. Or,
perhaps, it was the illustrations by my friend, Mr. George Hutchinson,
whom I am proud to have discovered as a cartoonist for _Ariel_.
So here the story comes to a nice sensational climax. Re-reading it, I
feel dimly that there ought to be a moral in it somewhere for the
benefit of struggling fellow-scribblers. But the best I can find is
this: That if you are blessed with some talent, a great deal of
industry, and an amount of conceit mighty enough to enable you to
disregard superiors, equals and critics, as well as the fancied demands
of the public, it is possible, without friends, or introductions, or
bothering celebrities to read your manuscripts, or cultivating the camp
of the log-rollers, to attain, by dint of slaving day and night for
years during the flower of your youth, to a fame infinitely less
widespread than a prizefighter's, and a pecuniary position which you
might with far less trouble have been born to.
[Illustration: A FAME LESS WIDESPREAD THAN A PRIZEFIGHTER'S]
[Illustration: Drawing signed E. M. Jessop with signature below:
Morley Roberts]
'_THE WESTERN AVERNUS_'
BY MORLEY ROBERTS
Certainly no one was more surprised than myself when I discovered that I
could write decent prose, and even make money out of it, for during many
years my youthful aspirations had been to rival Rossetti, or get on a
level with Browning, rather than to make a living out of literature as a
profession. But when I did start a book, I went through three years of
American experience like fire through flax, and wrote 'The Western
Avernus,' a volume containing ninety-three thousand words, in less than
a lunar month.
[Illustration: BEFORE THE MAST]
I had been in Australia years before, coming home before the mast as an
A.B. in a Blackwall liner, but my occasional efforts to turn that
experience into form always failed. Once or twice, I read some of my
prose to friends, who told me that it was worse even than my poetry.
Such criticism naturally confirmed me in the belief that I must be a
poet or nothing, and I soon got into a fair way to become nothing, for
my health broke down. At last, finding my choice lay between two kinds
of tragedies, I chose the least, and went off to Texas. On February 27,
1884, I was working in a Government office as a writer; on March 27, I
was sheep-herding in Scurry County, North-west Texas, in the south of
the Panhandle. This experience was the opening of 'The Western Avernus.'
[Illustration: I MARRIED THEM ALL OFF AT THE END]
But I should never have written the book if it had not been for two
friends of mine. One was George Gissing, and the other W. H. Hudson, the
Argentine naturalist. When I returned from the West, and yarned to them
of starvation and toil and strife in that new world, they urged me to
put it down instead of talking it. I suppose they looked on it as good
material running to verbal conversational waste, being both writers of
many years' standing. Now I understand their point of view, and carry a
note-book, or an odd piece of paper, to jot down motives that crop up in
occasional talk, but then I was ignorant, and astonished at the wild
notion of writing anything saleable. However, in desperation, for I had
no money, I began to write, and went ahead in the same way that I have
so far kept to. I wrote it without notes, without care, without
thought, save that each night the past was resurgent and alive before
and within me, just as it was when I worked and starved between Texas
and the great North-west. Each Sunday I read what I had done to George
Gissing; at first with terror, but afterwards with more confidence when
he nodded approval, and as the end approached I began to believe in it
myself.
[Illustration: AN AMERICAN SAW-MILL WHERE MR. ROBERTS WORKED]
It is only six years since the book was finished and sent to Messrs.
Smith, Elder, & Co., but it seems half a century ago, so much has
happened since then; and when it was accepted and published and paid
for, and actually reviewed favourably, I almost determined to take to
literature as a profession. I remembered that when I was a boy of eleven
I wrote a romance with twenty people, men and women, in it. I married
them all off at the end, being then in the childish mind of the most
usual novelist who believes, or pretends to believe, or at any rate by
implication teaches, that the interesting part of life finishes then
instead of beginning. I recalled the fact that I wrote doggerel verse at
the age of thirteen when I was at Bedford Grammar School, and that an
ardent, ignorant Conservatism drove me, when I was at Owens College,
Manchester, to lampoon the Liberal candidates in rhymes, and paste them
up in the big lavatory; and under the influence of these memories I
began to think that perhaps scribbling was my natural trade. I had tried
some forty different callings, including 'sailorising,' saw-mill work,
bullock-driving, tramping, and the selling of books in San Francisco,
with indifferent financial success, so perhaps my _métier_ was the
making of books instead. So I went on trying, and had a very bad time
for two years.
Having written 'The Western Avernus' in a kind of intuitive, instructive
way, it came easy enough to me, but very soon I began to think of the
technique of writing, and wrote badly. I had to look back at the best
part of that book to be assured I could write at all. For a long time it
was a consolation and a distress to me, for I had to find out that
knowledge must get into one's fingers before it can be used. Only those
who know nothing, or who know a great deal very well, can write
decently, and the intermediate state is exceedingly painful. Both the
public and private laudation of my American book made me unhappy then. I
thought I had only that one book in me.
Some of the letters I received from America, and, more particularly,
British Columbia, were anything but cheerful reading. One man, of whom I
had spoken rather freely, said I should be hanged on a cottonwood tree
if I ever set foot in the Colony again. I do not believe there are any
cottonwoods there, but he used a phrase common in American literature.
Another whilom friend of mine, who had read some favourable criticisms,
wrote me to say he was sure Messrs. Smith & Elder had paid for them. He
had understood it was always done, and now he knew the truth of it,
because the book was so bad. I almost feared to return to British
Columbia: the critics there might use worse weapons than a sneering
paragraph. In England the worst one need fear is an action for criminal
libel, or a rough and tumble fight. There it might end in an inquest. I
wrote back to my critics that if I ever came out again, I would come
armed, and endeavour to reply effectually.