FLEET STREET
I don’t know why, but for many years there has been (and I am told
there still is) a kind of silent conspiracy to keep out of Fleet Street
as many aspirants to journalism as possible. They are discouraged by
extravagant stories of the fierce competition that reigns there, by
tragic yarns of men of great gifts who walk about The Street in rags. I
myself was discouraged in this way and I found myself, on the verge of
middle age, still hesitating in Manchester. It is true, I did not enter
journalism until I was in my thirties, and I did not know the ropes.
I did not know London either. Also, I was married and had children to
educate and could not afford to take risks and make of life the grand
adventure I have, in my heart, always known it to be.
So I hung on in Manchester, writing musical criticism for _The
Manchester Courier_ and contributing occasional articles and verses to
_The Academy_, _The Contemporary Review_, _The Cornhill_, _The English
Review_, _The Musical Times_, and many other magazines, and there is
scarcely a London daily of repute for which at one time or another
I did not write. But still I could find no opening in Fleet Street.
The truth is, there is no regular means of finding openings in Fleet
Street. If an editor is in want of a dramatic critic, a musical critic,
a leader writer, or a descriptive reporter, he never advertises for
one. He always knows someone who knows somebody else who is just the
man for the job.
So one day I said to myself: “I will go to London at all costs. I will
take a room in Bloomsbury and risk it.” By a happy accident I received,
a few days later, a note from Rutland Boughton, the well-known
composer, telling me that he was relinquishing his post as musical
critic of _The Daily Citizen_, that ill-fated paper so courageously
edited by Frank Dilnot. Boughton suggested I should apply for the
vacancy. I did apply. I wrote to Dilnot and received no answer. I
chafed a fortnight and then telegraphed, prepaying a reply. “No vacancy
at present” was the message I received. So I took the next train to
London and bearded Dilnot in his den. “Yes, I’ll take you,” he said,
“if you’ll come for two pounds a week. But, if you’re the real stuff,
you’ll receive much more.” As I knew that I was, indeed, the real
stuff, “I’ll come,” said I. “When can I start?”
I went back to Manchester and saw W. A. Ackland, the managing editor of
_The Manchester Courier_ and the kindest of men, expecting to receive
from him a cold douche. But no! To my amazement, he encouraged me most
heartily, and kept me on his staff, bidding me write a weekly article
for him from London. This I did till the outbreak of the war, writing a
lot of material also for his London letter.
During my first year in London I made six hundred and forty pounds. And
I spent it. I spent it in eager examination of, and participation in,
the many activities that the life of a great metropolis affords. Very
soon—within six months—I found myself in the happy position of being
able to refuse work that was offered me, for I did not wish to work all
my waking hours. I wanted to play. I did play. I made many friendships.
I talked a great deal, played the piano two or three hours a day,
caroused, ragged in Chelsea, and lived every hour of my life.
It may be thought that six hundred and forty pounds per annum is no
great sum. Nor is it. But does a doctor, a barrister, a solicitor,
or any other professional man earn so much, without capital or
influence, during his first year in London? Or in his second? Or
third? Money-making in Fleet Street up to about seven hundred and fifty
pounds a year is the easiest thing in the world for a man who has any
talent at all for writing, especially if that talent be combined with
versatility. The journalist is rarely intellectual; as a rule, he is
merely ready and glib. I am ready and glib myself.
So I am not among those who feel inclined to discourage him who hankers
after Fleet Street. No matter if you live in the waste regions of
Sutherland, if you have proved yourself by inducing a number of editors
of repute to take your stuff, go in and win! Really, it is very easy.
* * * * *
The men of Fleet Street are the best fellows in the world. Roughly,
they may be divided into two classes: those who “go steady,” with
their eye always on the main chance, with every faculty strained to
enable them to “get on” in the world; and those happy-go-lucky people
who make money easily and spend it recklessly, so excited by life that
they cannot pause to contemplate life, so happy in their labour and
in their play that they cannot conceive a day may come when work will
be irksome and playing a half-forgotten dream. There are, of course,
other divisions into which journalists may be separated. There is,
for example, the devoted band of brilliant young men who work for
Orage in _The New Age_—a paper that cannot, I am sure, pay high rates.
(What those rates are I do not know, for I could never induce Orage to
print a single thing I wrote for him.) Then there are the hangers-on
of journalism: people who review books in the time spared from their
labours as university professors, struggling barristers, parish priests
and so on. Many of these people, led by vanity or some other concealed
motive, offer to work without payment.
The men who “go steady” are the editors, the leader-writers, the news
editors, the literary editors, etc. For the most part they are men who
have to keep late hours and clear heads, for important news may reach
the office at midnight and instant decisions regarding the policy that
the paper has to assume in regard to that news have to be made. A great
political speech may be made in Edinburgh; a startling murder trial may
close in Liverpool; a famous man may die in Paris; a strike may break
out in the Potteries: in short, anything may happen. What attitude is
the paper going to take up? What precise shade of opinion is going to
be expressed about that political speech? What is to be said about the
degree of justice that the workers in the Potteries can claim for their
action? These matters have to be decided instantly, for they have to be
written about instantly, and perhaps you who read the leading article
next morning rarely stop to consider the conditions—the incredibly
difficult conditions—under which it has been written. For this kind
of work real, genuine ability is required: a very wide and accurate
knowledge of affairs, rapidity of thought, a fluent and eloquent pen
and a mind so sensitive that it can, without effort, reflect to a
nicety the precise policy of the paper upon whose work it is engaged.
There is a story, and I think the story is true, of a new and
inexperienced reporter who was given a trial on the staff of a very
famous “halfpenny” paper. He was not a success, for he bungled
everything that was given him to do, and he had not an idea in his head
concerning the invention and manufacture of stunts. So he was tried as
a book-reviewer, and again failed miserably. They made a sub-editor of
him, and once more he was slow and inaccurate. Said the news editor
to the editor-in-chief: “I’m afraid I shall have to get rid of Jones;
he’s tried almost everything and failed.” “Oh! has he?” returned the
editor-in-chief. “Well, put him on to writing leaders.”
But even the halfpenny Press has, in recent years, come to regard its
leader columns as one of the most important parts of its papers. Of
this kind of work I have had little experience. A position as writer of
“leaderettes” was offered me on _The Globe_, but I was not a success,
for I was at the same time writing a great deal of stuff for _The Daily
Citizen_, and, as both papers were equally violent in antagonistic
political and social fields, I soon found myself writing solidly and
regularly against my own convictions. It is true that a journalist,
like a barrister, is generally but a hireling paid to express certain
views, but there are few men so intellectually backboneless and
ethically flabby that they can, day after day, say both yes and no to
the various problems that face them.
* * * * *
I suppose there are few professions in which one learns more about
the seamy side of human nature than one does in journalism. The one
appalling vice of eminent men is vanity. Musicians, actors, authors,
politicians—even judges and preachers—appear to be so constituted that
they cannot live and be happy without publicity. From what source, do
you think, originate those chatty little paragraphs concerning famous
men and women that you find in every evening newspaper and in many
weeklies? They originate from the fountain-head. If the novelist does
not himself send the paragraph to the paper, his publisher does; if
the actor has not written that “snappy” par., he has given his manager
the material for it. At one time I wrote a weekly column of theatrical
gossip for a well-known daily, and I can, without exaggeration, say
that most of our famous actors and actresses did my work for me. I used
scissors and paste, corrected their grammatical errors (and mistakes in
spelling!), coloured the whole with my personality—and there the column
was ready for the printer! Sometimes I would receive letters from
notorious mimes expostulating with me because I had not mentioned their
names for a month or two. Others wrote and thanked me for praising
them. One lady whom I have never seen, either on the stage or off,
sent me a silver pencil-case, with a letter containing the material for
a very personal sketch. I put the pencil in my pocket and the sketch in
the newspaper. Quite recently I was shown an article signed by a famous
lady, containing a bogus account of how she had received a strange
proposal of marriage. The article had been invented and written by an
acquaintance of mine, but the signature was the lady’s.
But more egregious than the vanity of actors is the vanity of
fashionable preachers. To them notoriety is the very breath of their
nostrils. They have no “agents,” so they are compelled to advertise
themselves without camouflage. And they do it shamelessly. I will not
mention names, but at least half the fashionable preachers in London,
no matter what their denomination, are guilty of constant and most
resourceful self-advertisement. A little, a very little, jesuitical
reasoning is sufficient to satisfy their consciences that this is
done, not out of vanity, but from a desire to bring a still larger
congregation to the fount of wisdom itself.... They are the fount of
wisdom.
On only two occasions have I approached an author with a request for
an interview and been refused. But I have taken care never to approach
such men as Thomas Hardy, John Galsworthy and a few others who regard
their profession with too much respect to lend themselves to a practice
which, at its best, is undignified, and which, at its worst, is a
method of mean self-glorification.
* * * * *
Of “ghosting” I have done a little and seen much. I know well a
very prosperous musical composer of talent who has paid me to write
many articles that he has signed with his own name. You call me an
accomplice? But then it was nothing to me what he did with my articles
when I had written them. Believe me, the practice is very common.
The man who signs the articles furnishes the ideas: the ghost merely
expresses them.
The same musical composer was commissioned a few years ago to write an
orchestral work for an important musical festival. We will call him
Birket. Either Birket was too busy to write the work or he felt he had
not the ability to do it; whatever the reason, he went to a friend
of mine—a man of far superior gifts to his more famous colleague—and
offered him a certain sum to do the work for him. My friend—Foster
will do for his name—consented, and the work was duly performed at the
festival, conducted by Birket, and I attended in my capacity as musical
critic.
How eminent men who are not writers do itch to see themselves in print!
It is not enough that their speeches are reported, their paintings and
musical compositions criticised, their sentences recorded by every
daily newspaper, their acting, singing and what not lauded to the
skies: they must themselves write: or, if they cannot write, it must
appear to the public that they have written. Why? Just vanity. That
word “vanity” will explain nine-tenths of the seemingly inexplicable
things in the conduct of most of our public men. A man accepts a
knighthood because, as a rule, he is vain; he refuses it for the same
reason; he advertises that he has refused it because he is vain; and,
because he is vain, he refuses to advertise that he has refused it.
* * * * *
A great deal has been written about the romance of Fleet Street.
But romance is in a man’s mind and heart, and it is true that many
romantically minded men go to Fleet Street. Fleet Street gives us a
sense of importance, a sense of too much importance. We like to feel
that we are powerful, but only a mere handful of men in The Street
have power that is worth while. What we of the rank and file write is
soon forgotten, for newspaper readers are, for the most part, people
who devour print greedily, neither masticating nor assimilating the
things they devour. Newspapers confuse the mind and bring it to a
state of drugged apathy. Did you ever meet a really voracious reader
of newspapers who possessed the gift of sifting and weighing evidence,
or one who had an accurate memory, or one who could think clearly and
logically, or one who was not bewildered and befogged by mere words?
But even if we men in Fleet Street have no real power, we have what
is much the same thing: we have the illusion of power. We come into
close contact with people much more important than ourselves, and some
of these people fawn on us, for we are the necessary intermediaries
between themselves and the public.
But romance? Why is Fleet Street romantic? Well, as I have already
said, it is because so many journalists themselves are romantic....
But I wonder if that really _is_ the reason, and as I wonder I begin
to think that though it is true one meets adventurous, talented and
original people by the score in newspaper offices, yet, after all, it
is not they who make journalism seem full of savour, of rich delight,
of unexpectedness and excitement, of high romance. No; it is writing
itself that is romantic: mere words and the colour and music of words;
the smell of printers’ ink; the wet feel of a paper fresh from the
press; the sounds of telephone bells and of machinery; the joy of
expressing oneself; the lovely, great joy of signing one’s name to
an article and knowing that in twenty-four hours it will have been
read or glanced at by perhaps half-a-million people.... But it seems
to me as I write that I am utterly failing to communicate to you
who read the romantic nature of journalism. To you it is, perhaps,
merely a slipshod profession, a profession in which there is something
sordid and vulgar and as unromantic as Monday morning. To me a man
who writes with distinction is the most interesting creature in the
world: I cannot know too much about him; I can never tire of his
talk. Actors bore me. So do politicians, lawyers, men of science,
those who are professionally religious, doctors, musicians. But
writers and financiers—especially Jewish financiers—are to me full of
subtlety; their souls are elusive, and their minds are cunning past all
reckoning. It is frequently said that the art of writing is possessed
by most people. The art of writing correctly may be, but the “correct”
writer is frequently not a writer at all, for he cannot compel people
to read him. A writer without readers is not a writer; he is simply a
man who murmurs to himself very laboriously. But the writer who can
claim thousands of readers—I mean even such writers as Mr Charles
Garvice and the lady who invented _The Rosary_—are in essentials more
highly endowed with the true writer’s gifts than many mandarins who
live cloistered in Oxford and Cambridge. And I say this in spite of
the fact that I have never been able to read more than ten consecutive
pages of any book of Mr Garvice’s that I have picked up, and that _The
Rosary_ seems to me a story of such amazing flapdoodleism that——
* * * * *
Arnold Bennett says somewhere that living in the theatrical world is
like living a story out of _The Arabian Nights_. To me Fleet Street
is more amazing than the bazaars of Cairo, more mysterious than the
hermaphroditic Sphinx. And perhaps one of the most amazing things about
Fleet Street is the easy way in which many men earn money.
Some years ago I was on the staff of a paper where I had for a
colleague a dark blue-eyed young man who was our crime specialist.
He had just come from the provinces, and had not even a rudimentary
notion of how to write. He knew he couldn’t write; he boasted of it.
And he cared nothing for newspapers or books or anything even remotely
connected with literature. But he had an amazing talent for sniffing
out crime. I remember a great jewel robbery which he got wind of
half-a-day before anyone else, and, in a way known only to himself, he
obtained full particulars of the affair, writing a half-column “story”
before any other paper in the kingdom even knew there was a story to
write. He entertained me vastly, and I used to go with him sometimes
at night when he called at Scotland Yard for news. Scotland Yard never
gives away news unless it is in its own interest to do so. But I am
very much inclined to believe that it was somewhere in Scotland Yard
that he obtained his most valuable information. We would walk down wide
corridors there together, sit ten minutes in a waiting-room, interview
an official who invariably said: “Nothing doing to-night,” and come
away. But that was quite enough for my friend. “I must go to Poplar
straight away,” he would say, as we came away; or perhaps: “I can just
catch the last train to Guildford”; or “There is nothing at all in the
rumour of that murder in Battersea.” I used to look at him in amazement
and exclaim: “But how do you _know_?” “Ah!” he would reply; “they say
that walls have ears. But much more frequently they have tongues.”
This man was paid three pounds a week by our editor. Three times out
of four he was ahead of every other paper in his news, and I was not
in the least surprised when one day, after he had been in London only
two months, he came to me and said: “Next week I am leaving you. I am
going to _The Morning Trumpet_; they’re giving me five hundred pounds a
year.” Five months later he was getting a thousand pounds a year from a
paper that never hesitates to pay handsomely for “stunts.”
I caught fire from my friend’s enthusiasm, and late one night, just
when I had finished a long notice of a new play, I overheard the night
editor regretting to one of the sub-editors that news of a particularly
horrible murder in Stepney had just reached the office when all the
reporters were out on duty. “Let me go!” I urged. “But you are in
evening dress,” he objected. “Never mind; send me off.” And ten minutes
later I was being rushed in a taxi-cab at full speed to Stepney. I
found the scene of the murder—a mean little house in a mean little
street. Outside the house was a crowd of eager loafers, a score of
reporters, and as many policemen, who, refusing to be bribed, kept us
all in the street without news. However, such was my enthusiasm that I
alone of all the reporters got into the house and into the cellar where
the wretched woman had been butchered to death three hours earlier. I
drew a hasty plan of the underground floor, interviewed a sister of the
murdered woman, obtained full particulars, and then jumped into the
taxi-cab to return to the office. Within an hour of leaving my desk I
was back again, and in another twenty minutes I had ready as vivid and
thrilling a “story” as ever I hope to write. Knowing that the paper
was on the point of going to press, I did not, as I ought to have
done, hand my copy to one of the sub-editors, but took it straight to
the machines. Whilst I was waiting for a proof, I was summoned to my
editor’s room. He was frowning, and he looked very much perturbed.
“By the merest chance, Cumberland,” he said, sternly, “I have been the
means of saving the paper from heavy penalties for contempt of court.”
He paused and bit his lip. “I suppose you think your murder story a
most brilliant piece of work.”
“Well, I certainly was under that impression, sir,” I began, “but it
would seem——”
“_Seem!_” he thundered. “You’ve got the facts, it’s true, but then all
my reporters have to get the facts. The gross blunder you’ve made is,
first of all, in saying that the suspected man has spent practically
all his life in prison—contempt of court of the vilest description.
Secondly, you’ve said——” He enumerated no fewer than five blunders I
had made. “But, worst of all,” he concluded, “you took it upon yourself
to give your copy direct to the printers after midnight, thus breaking
the strictest rule of this office.”
It was true. In my exciting enthusiasm I had forgotten this Persian
rule.
“Fortunately, I came in just in time to stop your stuff. You’d better,
I think, confine yourself exclusively to your dramatic criticism.”
Nevertheless, he offered me, two days later, ten pounds a week to give
up my dramatic criticism and general articles (for which I was at that
time getting only five pounds) and devote myself to reporting—an offer
which I refused, as the work would have exhausted all my time.
* * * * *
It was at about this time that the idea occurred to me that a certain
monthly magazine for which I had been writing regularly might, if
asked, pay me at a higher rate than that which, till then, they had
been giving me. So I dressed myself very carefully (clothes _do_ help,
don’t they?) and drove up to the office in a smart hansom.
“I have called about my articles,” I began, rather brusquely, to the
editor, a scholarly man who knew far more about Elizabethan literature
than he did about human nature. “I have found just lately that I am so
busy that I have resolved to give up some of my work. Your magazine is
one of those with which I am anxious to retain my connection, partly
because my relationship with you has always been so pleasant.”
And I stopped. It is not everyone who knows the right place at which
to stop in conversations of this kind. “My relationship with you has
always been so pleasant” was, most indubitably, the right place.
He tried to force me into further talk by remaining silent himself. A
clock ticked: a clock always does tick on these occasions. He coughed.
I looked steadily towards the window. For a full minute there must have
been silence: to me it seemed an hour; to him I have no doubt it seemed
eternity.
“I think, Mr Cumberland, we shall be able to come to a satisfactory
arrangement,” he said, when eternity had passed. “What do you say to
such-and-such an amount?”
And he staggered me by mentioning a sum exactly treble the amount I had
been receiving for the last two years.
As I walked into the Strand, I felt a mean and disagreeable
bargain-driver, but after I had lunched at Simpson’s, I said to myself:
“What a fool you were not to go to see him twelve months ago!”
But though many people equally as obscure as myself earn a thousand
pounds a year by their pens, you must not imagine that all the men who
are famous writers do likewise. By no means always does it happen that
a man combines literary genius and the power of earning money, and
there are many men rightly honoured in our own day whose earnings do
not involve them in the payment of income tax. The faculty of making
money, no matter whether it is made out of the sale of pills or poems,
tripe or tragedies, is innate. No man by taking thought can add a
thousand pounds a year to his income, for money is not made by thought
but by intuition.
I know a man in Chelsea who earns fifteen hundred pounds a year by
writing what, in my schoolboy days, we called (and perhaps they are
still called) “bloods.” He knocks off a cool five thousand words a
day every day for three weeks, and then takes a week’s holiday—boys’
“bloods,” servant-girls’ novelettes, children’s fairy tales and
newspaper serials. He is a cheerful, energetic man, whose hobbies are
bull-dogs and Shakespeare, and he has five different pen-names. For
the matter of that, I use three different pseudonyms, my reason for
doing this being that the editor of _The Spectator_, say, might not
accept my work if he knew I was writing at the same time for _The
English Review_ (I have written for both publications), and I am
doubtful if _The Morning Post_ would have printed a single word of
mine if the editor had been aware that I was having a thousand words a
day printed in _The Daily Citizen_. Some editors like what they call
“versatility of thought,” others (I think rightly) distrust it.
But I can very well believe that this gossip about money appears to you
very sordid. Well, so it is. My final paragraph shall not be permitted
to mention, or even hint at, hard cash.
* * * * *
Once again I return to my statement that Fleet Street is romantic
because many of the people in it are romantic. But what is a romantic
person? Alas! I cannot define one. Perhaps a romantic person is he
whose soul is mysterious and elusive and whose mind is perturbed and
exalted by a poetic vision of life. He must care little for the things
that Mr Samuel Smiles and the “get on or get out” school value so
much.... No. That will not do at all, for a great many men and women
who have cared a great deal for money and worldly power were romantic.
Nero, for example, and Cleopatra, and Shakespeare, and Queen Elizabeth,
and Lord Verulam——
But though a romantic man may be difficult to define, he is very easy
to recognise. Ivan Heald was incorrigibly romantic. But perhaps the
most romantically minded man I met in Fleet Street was the journalist
who went with me to Athens in the very early spring of 1914. He had
no right in Fleet Street, for he was essentially a man who preferred
to do things rather than write about them. But half the men in London
journalism have drifted there not so much because they have a natural
aptitude for the work but because they are born adventurers, and the
great adventure of Fleet Street is bound to cross the path of most
roving men one day or another.
Years ago there lived in London a man who wrote books and magazine
stories under the name of Julian Croskey. He had been in the Civil
Service in Shanghai, had helped to finance and organise a rebellion,
and had been turned out of China, whence he came to England to write.
In 1901 I began a correspondence with Croskey, who, in the meantime,
had gone to Canada and was living alone on a river island. Though we
corresponded for years, we never met, and after a time his letters
began to show signs of megalomania. But there was such genius in his
letters, such brooding energy, such hate of life, and, at times, such
an uncanny suggestion of terrific power, that I treasured every word
he wrote to me, and, when his letters ceased, something vital and
something almost necessary to me passed out of my life. I do not like
to believe that he ceased writing to me because I no longer interested
him. I hope he still lives. I hope he will read this book. Some day his
letters must be published, for they constitute a problem in psychology
at once fascinating, mysterious and demonic. And this man whom I never
met remains to me the most romantic of all men I have met in the spirit.