Читать книгу The World Does Move - Booth Tarkington - Страница 8

Table of Contents

THUS an unsuccessful young man, painfully engaged in the pursuit of letters, had one of the earliest opportunities afforded in this country to become a golfer instead of a writer. This might well have been a temptation, because having no career at all, nor any visible business, profession, or employment, was never a way to popular esteem among the descendants of the hardy Western pioneers. In the remote, decadent East, where the Anglomania of the later ’Eighties still had sway, there were known to be, here and there, gentlemen of leisure; but west of the Alleghanies only tramps were fully comprehended as representatives of such a class.

Moreover, the parents and relatives of a persistently rejected writer have the constant embarrassment of trying to explain his occupation to inquirers; nothing could be more difficult, nor, when the inquirer is of an especially practical turn of mind, more mortifying. Therefore, as time passed and passed—and continued to pass—an effort to display something more plausible than an exhaustive collection of printed rejection slips from magazine offices, as proof of actual labour, seemed more and more advisable. Unfortunately, this young man had now so thoroughly acquired the habit of collecting these slips that he seemed to have become unfitted for anything else.

In this strait an old family friend favoured him with an encouraging talk. This was an elderly gentleman, professionally a lawyer, but one of a varied career. He had done extraordinary writing and important soldiering, though he had interrupted his writing, for a time, to become our ambassador to a European power. As a soldier, he had fought his way in war to a Major General’s epaulets; and as a writer he had published a novel that found as near a universal reading as any print may well attain.

“What are you doing?” he asked one day. “You seem to spend most of your time driving a pair of trotters to a red-wheeled runabout.”

“That’s only in the afternoons. I work at night.”

“What for?” the General asked.

“Well, it’s quieter and it draws less attention to the fact that I’m trying to learn to write. I—I don’t get on very well, General.”

“So,” he said, “I suppose you think you’d get on better if you got something printed?”

“Well, yes,” I answered. “At least it would be a sign that I was getting somewhere. It would be a sort of justification for the embarrassment I’m causing my relatives and friends when they try to explain me, wouldn’t it?”

“I’m not so sure of that,” he said. “In fact, I somewhat doubt it. We are a very practical people, and, though it’s considered pretty disgraceful not to do anything, every community has a few loafers and is accustomed to see them hanging around the saloons or pool rooms, borrowing tobacco and drifting down to the station to sit languidly on packing-boxes when the trains go by. Our people look down on them, of course, but understand them, because laziness and drink easily account for them. It’s a type that developed even among the early settlers, and we’ve always had it among us. But the fact is that although for some reason we are a reading people and comprehend the reading of books, we don’t understand anybody’s writing ’em except peculiar strangers from far away. We can’t imagine one of ourselves writing a book unless there’s something idiotic or ridiculous about him.”

“But, General, there’s Mr. Riley. Surely he——”

“Yes,” the General admitted. “The whole state has a great tenderness for James Whitcomb Riley, that’s true; it even brags of him, but always with a note of indulgence, the sort of chuckle with which one mentions a whimsical character whose drolleries make one laugh. Listen to any public orator extolling the great men of the state. You’ll hear our ex-President’s name bellowed, and the names of a dozen senators, governors and industrial magnates; but you won’t hear Riley’s—not if the orator considers himself a serious man speaking seriously. You’ll find the same thing in the newspaper editorials. As for myself, the publication of my first novel was almost enough to ruin my law practice. Whenever I took a case into court for a jury trial, the opposing lawyer knew that all he had to do was to mention my authorship and I was demolished. He would rise with an air of solemn waggery and address the jury: ‘I trust that I may be permitted to lay tribute at the feet of literary ambition,’ he would say. ‘I trust I may bring my wreath of laurel to be placed upon the poetic brow it should rightfully adorn. You may not know this, but it is a fact, gentlemen, that the learned counsel upon the other side has become an author. Yes, gentlemen, you are in the presence of an author! Yes, gentlemen, my learned brother has written a novel——’ But that was about all he needed to say. As soon as the jury of farmers and village merchants heard the word ‘novel’ they uttered hearty guffaws, and after that I had no weight with them whatever. When I addressed them their eyes bulged with derisive merriment, no matter what I said. Merely to look at me roused an inward hilarity that flushed their cheeks and bedewed their foreheads. I might as well have appeared in court dressed as a circus clown.”

“But after you had written Ben Hur, General——”

“Oh, yes,” he said. “The church people approved of that, and I’m taken seriously on other accounts, no doubt. Also, our fellow citizens are more liberal than they were at the time when I wrote The Fair God. Nevertheless, they are not wholly changed in their feeling that an author, to be highly respectable and of some importance, ought to spring from a distant community. If he is an American, he should come from New England; but if he is English, he will impress us more. If he is French, we will be almost ready to believe him a great man; while if he is Russian, we will be sure that he is. Russia is so very, very far away; but an author here at home——No, don’t be discouraged because you can’t prove by print that you are one. And, as for the embarrassment of your relatives about you, don’t be unduly troubled; their difficulty might be worse. Remember, a great many of our fellow citizens would rather have a loafer in the family than a writer.”

Undoubtedly this talk with General Wallace helped, and so did the light, red-wheeled rubber-tired runabout and the pair of lively young trotting horses. Being young helped, too—though the young seldom know how much their youth helps them—and it was a pleasant and easy time, historically, to be young. There was a cheerful placidity in American life then. The “free-silver scare” had passed and the issue was dead; Europe was so far away that it still seemed an adventure to voyage there; Asia was infinitely remote; all the world that we knew was at peace, and a great many enlightened people were sure there would never be another war of any consequence. It was a quiet world, a respectable world, completed, unhurried, unpuzzled, unrebellious.