THE FRUIT OF FAME
To the Editor of The Idler.
Dear Sir: I have told many strange and distressing stories in my time; tales of struggle, of suffering, of sorrow and of bitter disappointment; for I, Sir, am an author, and the telling of tales has long been my vocation. But of all the tales which I have spun from the thread of my inner consciousness, there is none, I believe, more strange or more filled with disillusionment than the true story which I am about to tell you now.
I began writing at an early age. Indeed, I was writing short stories while yet in the high school and selling them before I had done with college. The history of my younger years does not differ greatly from that of most young authors; it is the history of an existence which would have been inexpressibly sordid had it not been glorified by youthful hope andambition. I married young and was forced to write constantly in order to make both ends meet. The years went slipping by almost unnoticed until suddenly one day I awoke to find myself upon the verge of middle age and realized that for years I had been postponing the writing of my first real book, meanwhile falling unconsciously into the habit of giving all of my attention to the market value of what I wrote and growing more and more indifferent to the question of its literary merit. I had, in fact, become a confirmed hack-writer.
The discovery shocked me into action. I determined then and there that I would write a novel worthy of my powers if I had to give to that task the time which should be employed in rest and sleep. I had never taken many holidays; now I took none at all. Every odd moment was employed on the great task which should lift me out of the rut and transform me from a mere fiction machine into a creative artist. I shall not bore you with the details of that work; how I toiled far into the night and arose before daybreak to finish achapter or retouch a paragraph; how I struggled with my style which had become corrupted and florid from the writing of sensational stories of adventure; how I tossed in my bed when I should have been sleeping, made wakeful by the excitement under which I labored. Suffice it to say, through infinite pains and toil I finally wrote the last line ofThe Pin-headed Girl, and sent it off to Messrs. Buckram and Sons with a high heart. It was accepted.
The publishers, according to their usual custom, offered me a royalty of ten per cent.; for you must know, Sir, that it is only the established and successful author who can make his own terms. We poor devils who are appearing in cloth for the first time must be content with what is offered, for no publisher considers a meritorious manuscript a recommendation in any way equal to a well-known name. The book of a famous author, like a notorious brand of soap, is supposed to sell itself, whereas, in the case of an unknown scribbler, a demand for the work must be created by advertising. Nowit is an axiom with publishers that a modern novel, unless it happen to be a story of extraordinary vitality, is dead in six months. With the birth of the autumn list, the spring list dies, which is to say, when the books which appear in the autumn are thrown upon the market, the demand for those which appeared in the spring is immediately checked and often dies out altogether. In six months novels areold; good only for bargain sales, second-hand stores and circulating libraries. It is therefore necessary that a book achieve a good sale in the first six months if it is to enjoy such a sale at all.
Realizing this and taking into consideration the fact thatThe Pin-headed Girlwas the work of a literary nobody, my publishers set industriously to work to create a reputation for me. I will say for them that they spared no expense in making my name familiar to the public. It was flaunted on every side, so that no man could ride in the subway, pick up a magazine or open a theater program without being made acquainted with the fact thatHackett A. Long was the author ofThe Pin-headed Girl. No man could read a literary supplement or a monthly review without learning that I took coffee with my breakfast; had a fondness for Russian boar-hounds (never having owned one); preferred reading opera scores to hearing the singers; did most of my work between the hours of three and five in the afternoon; disliked Bohemian restaurants; bought my cigarettes by the hundred; wore a wing collar; and many other things, some of which were true and some not. If you glanced at any of the illustrated papers at that time, you must have seen me riding in my six-cylinder roadster (loaned for the occasion by the obliging publisher), sitting upon the stoop of my cottage by the sea, or seated, pen in hand, at my desk in the very act of producing literature. I assure you, Sir, your correspondent was no inconsiderable figure in the public eye at that time.
This activity upon the part of my publishers was not without results. The first person to show the effect of my sudden leap into notorietywas my wife. She assured me that as a well-known author I must pay some heed to appearances. I must no longer lodge in a third-class apartment-house without hall-boys or elevators. When my fellow celebrities sought me out to offer me congratulations upon my masterpiece, they must find me in a suitable environment. We must have an apartment fitting for an author already notable and soon to take a well-deserved place among the foremost writers of the day; an apartment which should be expensive without being pretentious, furnished in such a fashion that any one could discern at a glance the touch of the man of taste and refinement, the natural aristocrat, the man of temperament; in a word, the artist. Having settled the question of the apartment, she next turned her attention to my wardrobe, which was, I confess, sadly in need of attention. I must no longer go about in ready-made clothing. I must patronize a fashionable tailor, I must dress for dinner, I must buy me a soft hat with a bow at the back. I must cease my writing of lurid short storiesand hair-raising serials; to do pot-boilers for cheap monthlies and weeklies was beneath the dignity of an author of recognized standing. You may well believe that this unaccustomed notoriety was not without its effect upon me, but I was not so carried away by it as was my optimistic mate. I hung back a little; I protested.
“It is all very well, my dear,” said I, “to talk so glibly of giving up my short stories and my serials, but we must consider that they have been, and still are, my chief if not my only source of revenue. They are nothing to be proud of, I admit. They are cheap, shoddy, stupid and entirely unworthy of the pen that wroteThe Pin-headed Girl. But, my dear, theypay.”
“That,” said my wife, “is a consideration which had some weight before the publication of your novel, but an author so well known as you now are can certainly have no need to depend upon such puerile compositions for his income.”
I thereupon called her attention to the factthat my contract with the publishers called for a semi-annual accounting and settlement, and that under this agreement, no matter how much money might be due me, I could not hope to collect any of it until six months after the date of publication. To which she replied, truthfully enough, that it would be easy for me to obtain anything we might want on credit. The upshot of it was, Sir, that I yielded to her persuasion and began to live in a manner which was little short of princely as compared with our previous hand-to-mouth existence. I stopped writing pot-boilers and set to work upon my second novel which I named, very aptly as I then thought,Out of the Woods. Where my first novel had been three years in the making, my second was finished in five months, for I now had plenty of time at my disposal, and I sent it off confidently enough to Buckram and Sons, and with it, a letter in which I made it clear that I would expect a larger share of the profits upon my second story than I had been content to accept in the case ofThe Pin-headed Girl. For, asI pointed out to them, whereas the author ofThe Pin-headed Girlhad been an unknown scribbler, the author ofOut of the Woodswas a well-known novelist who possessed thenamewhich had been wanting in the first instance.
You can, perhaps, fancy my surprise and consternation when I received a letter from Buckram and Sons enclosing their statement of the sales ofThe Pin-headed Girland a check for seventy-two dollars and fifty cents in full payment of all royalties to date.In spite of the money expended in advertising, the sale of the book had not exceeded five hundred copies.The letter further stated that Messrs. Buckram and Sons regretted to inform me that they were returning the manuscript ofOut of the Woods, as they could not consider publishing another of my books upon the heels of such a failure asThe Pin-headed Girl.
This sudden collapse of my castles in Spain left me completely demoralized, but it had no such effect upon my wife. She was astonished at the failure of the book, but she held firmlyto her position that whatever the fate of the book might be, the fact remained that I was now a celebrated man. I could not be blamed, she argued, because the book had proved a failure. It was my part of the business to write the book, it was the publisher’s part to sell it. I had performed my part, but Buckram and Sons had most lamentably failed to perform theirs. If they could not sell a book which had been so well advertised asThe Pin-headed Girl, that simply went to show that they had a very poor selling organization, and the very fact that they had spent so much money in advertising a book which afterward proved a failure, was in itself a proof that they were no business men. In short, the only thing for me to do was to find a new publisher forOut of the Woods; preferably some energetic young man who would not only make a success of the second book, but who would realize something from the advertising expended upon the first.
This unanswerable argument encouraged me a little and I submitted the second book toFranklin Format who, although a young man and a new man to the business, already had several “best sellers” to his credit. A few days later he sent for me and when I was seated in his office, he told me that he had read my manuscript with interest and had found it most entertaining, but before making me any offer, he would like to know if the book had been submitted to my regular publishers. His was a young house, he said, and he could not afford to antagonize so influential a firm as Buckram and Sons by stealing away one of its authors. I replied that the book had been offered to them but that they had refused to publish it. He raised his eyebrows at this and asked the reason for their refusal. In my innocence I answered truthfully that Buckram and Sons did not want my second book because they had been unable to sell my first. On hearing this he remarked sympathetically that it had been a very bad season for novels and that several on his own list had fallen quite flat. Indeed, his own losses had been so great that he had been looking about for some author with a“selling name” to help him out of his difficulties. Under the circumstances, however, it would be rank folly, not only upon his part, but upon mine, to issue another novel bearing my name at a time when the memory of my first ill-starred book was still fresh in the minds of the booksellers; for while the public might know nothing of the failure, the booksellers would most certainly recall it upon seeing my name on a wrapper, and without orders from the booksellers one might as well burn a book in manuscript as to let it die more expensively in covers. The best thing for me to do would be to wait a year or two until the memory ofThe Pin-headed Girlhad completely faded from their minds. In two years’ time it would certainly be as completely forgotten as if it had never been written, and I then might venture, with some hope of success, upon another novel.
And there, Sir, the matter rests. In some mysterious way the word has been passed around among the publishers thatThe Pin-headed Girlwas a disastrous investment andnot one of them will touchOut of the Woods. My wife threatens to leave me if I abandon novel-writing and go back to my pot-boilers; she says she could not bear the disgrace of acknowledged failure and that I must maintain my present position as a celebrated author at all hazards. I have applied to several editors of my acquaintance for editorial positions and they have all replied that they had nothing to offer me which would be worth my consideration or worthy of my talents. My first novel has left me with a reputation, a two-years lease of an expensive apartment, a load of debts, an angry wife, a scrap-book filled with favorable reviews, an unsalable manuscript and a prospect of bankruptcy.
This, Sir, is the true story of a writer who achieved his ambition of becoming a well-known novelist. If any reader of your journal, now engaged in hack-writing and enjoying comfortable obscurity, cherishes an ambition like mine, let him be warned by my example, lest through the blighting touch of the publicity agent he be forced, as I am, to choosebetween beginning life anew under an assumed name or slowly starving to death in the midst of luxury.
I am, sir,Hackett A. Long.