It is difficult for us to tell how accurately Philip Gibbs has pictured
Fleet Street in his novel _The Street of Adventure_; for, externally at
least, there is little resemblance to Park Row. We cite, for instance, a
description of the city room of _The Star_ as Francis Luttrell found it
on his first day:
"It was a large room, with a number of desks divided by glass partitions
and with a large table in the center. At the far end of the room was a
fire burning brightly in the grate, and in front of it were two men and
a girl, the men in swing chairs with their legs stretched out, the girl
on the floor in the billows of a black silk skirt, arranging chestnuts
on the first bar of the grate."
There isn't any grate in our city room and we have no roasting parties.
There have been days in mid-July when it might have been possible to fry
eggs on the skylight of our city room, but we don't remember that
anybody ever tried it. Nor is our memory stirred to any local
reminiscences by the description of _The Star_ office just before press
time, when "silence reigned in the room except for the scratching of
pens." Probably there are not more than half a dozen pens in all Park
Row and four of them are on _The Evening Post_.
* * *
We find the difference in spirit not so great. There is a great deal
about the terrific strain of newspaper work and how a brutal city editor
will drive a finely tempered reporter until he has had the best of his
brains and then toss him aside like a withered violet.
"Fleet Street," says Gibbs, who tells the story partly in the first
person, "would kill you in a year--it is very cruel, very callous to the
sufferings of men's souls and bodies."
Again, the heroine, who is a press woman, complains: "We women wear out
sooner. Five years in Fleet Street withers any girl. Then she gets
crow's feet round her eyes and becomes snappy and fretful, or a fierce
creature struggling in an unequal combat with men. I am just reaching
that stage."
An even more terrifying picture is painted of the book reviewer. He was,
according to Gibbs, "A young, anemic-looking man with fair, wavy hair,
going a little gray, and a pale, haggard, clean-shaven face, seated,
with his elbows on the desk, a novel opened before him and six other
novels in a pile at his elbow. He was smoking a cigarette, and the third
finger of his left hand was deeply stained with nicotine. As Luttrell
entered he groaned slightly and pushed back a lock of his fair hair from
his forehead."
We would like to find something personal in that portrait or at least to
hope that we might be like that after a few years more of this terrific
strain. But we doubt it. Despite eleven years of unremitting toil we
have been unable to wear ourselves gray or conspicuously haggard or
clean shaven. It is not easy. To be sure, we have heard many newspaper
men picturing themselves as butterflies broken on the wheel, but always
with a melancholy gusto. Moreover, that was in the days when Jack's and
Joel's were open all night.
We can't speak with authority about Fleet Street, nor even pretend to be
infallible about Park Row, but it is our impression that newspaper work
is easier than any of the other professions except the ministry. And the
easiest sort of newspaper work is dramatic criticism or book reviewing.
If you are not sure of your facts you can just leave them out, and even
if they get in wrong it doesn't matter much. There is a certain amount
of work to be done in the first two or three years, but by that time the
critic should have a particular pigeonhole in his brain for practically
every book or play which comes along. Upon seeing "I'll Say It Is" in
1922 all he has to do is to remember what he said about "Have Another"
in 1920. Once or twice a year a book or play comes along which doesn't
fit into any pigeonhole, but that can be dismissed in one paragraph as
"queer" and allowed to go at that.