Tales of a Literary Agency, II

...For all I know these may have cost you pains, but they are the sort of thing I should have thought anybody could write with ease, whereas you can write some things which nobody else perhaps could write with any amount of pains...

...For all they told you, they might have just returned from a bus ride to Dorking, and, but for their complexions, they looked the kind of men who had never done anything more desperate than that...

...Each of them wrote one very good, full and profound novel—so good and so clustered with ideas and thought, that they gave certain promise not only of a string of novels to come but of attaining by those novels the sealed success of a uniform edition...

...They sent the kindly letters one would expect them to send to a youthful beginner...

...He knew just what he wanted, and he knew how to get it from his contributors...

...I print it here because it is characteristic of his gentle melancholy, and because the reproof may serve as a lesson to other importunate authors: I only write criticism at the rate of (about) 25/—a thousand words, so anything I say to you can't be criticism...

...There were five wines...

...Had he survived the war, he might, like his literary brother, W. H. Hudson, who also spent the greater part of his life in the cold, have been carried by his friends to his rightful position...

...But he was in no state to listen...

...Men of my age will remember the abortive Russian revolution of 1905...

...All through this frantic, political, police and press search for him, he was living quietly incognito in the home of G. H. Perris, and any morning he might have been seen walking on Tooting Common...

...they are too good to lose...

...William Heinemann published Shackleton's books...

...His second book made a sensational success, and we received, all at once, cheques for his English serial rights, American serial rights, English book advance, American book advance and an option on his dramatic rights...

...He wants to see that 10 percent earned, and forgets that it was earned years ago when the agent was putting in months of unrewarded labor on that author's work...

...Some readers may remember those novels: Fenella by Henry Longan Stuart, and The Shrine of Sebekh by a man whose real name I suppress because he chose to write under the name of Ignatius Phayre...

...He gives no consideration to the years of labor that the first agent has had in talking about his early work, and urging it upon publishers and editors, and he resents the agent's taking 10 percent upon work that can, as a result of his (the agent's) labors, be placed without trouble...

...Yet both of these disappeared...

...Through G. H. Perris the agency was brought into contact with a good deal of revolution and war-like pacifism...

...This particular place was a small villa at— Tooting...

...He was living in a cellar at Montparnasse...

...He was beautiful to look at, and his voice was beautiful to hear...

...For him, surely the mildest-mannered man that ever tried to overturn a monarchy—our office-boy named him, not rudely but affectionately, Father Christmas—for him we handled Fields, Factories, and Workshops, The Conquest of Bread, and The Memoirs of a Revolutionist...

...Our agency was a serious agency, and it expected that its clients would be equally serious...

...I admired very much and still do...

...Excuse this letter if you find it needs excuse...

...The pieces I like least are . . . and...

...He was lurking in the slums of Warsaw...

...He was a man of great charm, and you had to know him intimately before you perceived also the great power beneath the charm...

...Douglas has the most fully-charged and fully-active brain of any writer I have met...

...The cheques totaled £4,000...

...On the return of the Nimrod, he gave a lunch, with Shackleton as the guest of honor, by way of advance publicity for his book...

...For instance, there was the case of Father Gapon...

...He was in Siberia...

...Others handled their own affairs, and made a mess of them...

...He had been home but four days, and during those four days he had been publicly lunched and dined and suppered until he must have been, and I know was, sick of the sight and smell of food...

...I remember that his paper, Freedom, the reddest of all Communist papers at that time, was edited in a room over a green-grocer's shop in St...

...He had been seen in the alleys of Cracow...

...and I still have a copy of the menu of that lunch...

...He was in Hamburg...

...Austin Harrison, I further remember, also was given the first offer of George Meredith's very last poems: a literary treasure that many editors were holding out hands for...

...Anyway, whether I print them or not, I have seen to it that they are not utterly lost...

...We sent him the cheque, less our usual commission—£400...

...I have said that authors, as seen by their agents, are, in the majority, anything but agreeable people...

...That is editorship...

...His appearance was austere and intellectual—in the pure sense of that now clotted word...

...I keep them alive by verbal circulation...

...My earliest verses appeared in the English Review, when Ford Hueffer (now Ford Madox Ford) first started it, and my first stories appeared in it when Austin Harrison was running it, with Norman Douglas as a kind of consultant...

...Young authors, I know, imagine that the really established authors can sell everything they write...

...He was imprisoned in the fortress of Saint Peter and Saint Paul...

...I often thought that if Christ were to take form in the modern world he would have something of the appearance of Edward Thomas...

...They will also remember the frantic search made for him by both the secret police and the European press...

...An agent will work for months, even years— we often did—in establishing an author, and, once he is established, he either takes his business to another agent, who promises to do better for him, or thinks that he can manage it himself...

...I do not know...

...Austin Harrison and Norman Douglas, like the partners of our agency, were an opposite pair who made a piquant whole...

...Austin Harrison belongs, I think, in the front rank of editors...

...He arrived on our doorstep next morning before the office was open...

...Austin Harrison did not think they were very good Meredith, and back they came...

...Prince Kropotkin came into this class...

...I saw him go out, and dudgeon was just what he looked like...

...Most of these were of no importance, and neither their coming nor their going had any significance...

...They did talk, but they told you about the journey in the smiling tones that a man might use who had had to ride inside when he wanted to ride outside the bus...

...Edward Thomas was a frequent caller, and his entry into the office was to me the entry of some rare presence...

...They will also remember the strange, mystical creature who was its inspiration: Father Gapon...

...In short, he was everywhere except where he was...

...with a burden of "£400," "£400...

...He had been caught at Odessa, and secretly hanged...

...He shuddered...

...I saw a lot of dudgeon in that office...

...Among the items were Bisque d'£crevisses, Supreme de Penguins a la Hoosh, and Caille Royale a la Nimrod...

...He was in Cyprus...

...and one would have thought that the review which had launched him, and had gained so much by launching him, would have been jealous of allowing any line of his to appear in any other periodical...

...Some of the other poems have a feeling for the raw country edges of London which I can sympathize with...

...if they were not, if they became petty, the chief was quite willing to bid them good-day...

...Nobody has yet used that feeling with any great success, an I hope you will do so some day...

...Others—many others—ceased to have any value for any agent...

...One of the many authors for whom we had for some time labored unfruitfully left us immediately our labors became fruitful, just because we took our legitimate commission on the moneys that our labors had earned for him...

...And then both stopped...

...The address seemed to fit him, as contrasts often do...

...At that time this revolutionary and exile, the centre of a movement that was working in secret places all over Europe, was living in a small villa, in a road of similar small villas, at Muswell Hill...

...The metre is beautiful, and has never been hackneyed...

...When he went in to see the chief he was almost speechless...

...For some reason he did not like these lyrics, and—sent them back...

...He was so much in the air that a single verse of his was, as the phrase goes, anybody's money...

...I have heard nothing of either of them since...

...We handled all Shackleton's literary work arising from his different polar expeditions...

...His scholarship alone October 22, 1930 THE COMMONWEAL 633 is extraordinary, and when to that is added his control of style and his Voltairian wit, he seems to have more gifts than any one man should have...

...Four months back the mere thought of a kipper or a plate of tripe and onions had been a delicious torment...

...When I was at the agency, and when I was twenty, I gave my vanity a birthday present by having a thin volume of somewhat thin poems printed—twenty-five copies...

...The chief pointed out the many months that had been spent in introducing his work to publishers, and the fact that an agency had to live on luck—to make something on its successes to pay for its unrewarded work on failures...

...His colleagues, Marston and Wild— the only two I met—were also like that...

...Pancras, and the combination of vegetables and philosophic anarchism made an agreable marriage...

...Douglas was so far in advance of the intellectuals...

...You do not soil it at all...

...For nearly three weeks the news agencies and newspaper correspondents of Europe tracked him and, individually, found him...

...I wish I could reproduce some of those comments...

...He was in an Atlantic tramp steamer, on his way to America...

...But you have to be seventy-five or eighty before they do that for you...

...They lunched like that twenty-one years ago...

...And I wonder why such highly gifted men stopped, and why their example (deplorable in them) did not snrparl tn fiftv other nf our authors...

...I think it is high time that our leading men of letters made a deputation to the Home Office to get an order compelling this ornament of English letters to return to us...

...It was very kind of you to send me your book, but not to ask me for my opinion...

...He was typical of many...

...I wonder where they are now...

...Revolutionaries, either by instinct or deliberation, always select a bourgeois setting for their activities...

...There were afternoon-tea meetings at the English Review office then, and they were interesting and amusing affairs...

...He said, "For the Lord's sake, when you talk to me don't say lunch, or dinner, or supper...

...During those years at the agency I began to find acceptance in the more serious papers...

...I could mention several cases where things written, without a commission, by really august names, were hawked about for a year before they were placed...

...but the letter from Thomas had, under its kindness, a note of reproof which was a lesson to me...

...I asked, "What's the matter...

...he was in that state which the nineteenth-century novelists called "dudgeon," and it is a very good word...

...In my green youth I had imagined that men who adventured to the poles must be externally marked from other men, and I suffered a shock when one morning of 1909, soon after the return of the first expedition, a quiet, gentlymoving, thick-set man, wearing a brown overcoat and a bowler hat, asked if Cazenove were in, and gave the name of Shackleton...

...It is a custom that has since been copied by some authors themselves—not, I need hardly say, serious authors...

...Perhaps they could not face the poverty of the early stages of authorship, and so turned, or by their responsibilities were compeled to turn, to more remunerative work...

...But some of them were men who were obviously born authors, and the sudden disappearance of these puzzled me...

...by the end of his first fortnight in England he was looking like a ripe old Pall Mall clubman, and furiously refusing any invitation that implied food...

...The faithful were few, and it happens that all our faithful clients are today soundly established, not because virtue is its own reward, but because the serious worker in any walk of life is usually serious in observing his moral obligations...

...It was Heinemann's custom, on the occasion of the issue of a really important book, to give a luncheon party to a group of distinguished and "useful" guests...

...The most outstanding trait that the agent perceives is their ingratitude...

...He also knew what he did not want...

...After talking with them I had to revise my conception of the adventurer as a tough, bluff and hearty fellow...

...But that was not Harrison's attitude: he allowed no considerations to interfere with his judgment...

...Some of the poems I had seen before, and . . . and...

...We had sent him, soon after the publication of The Widow in the Bye Street, two or three lyrics of Masefield's...

...I learned from this, and from other experience at the agency, that it is not so...

...But there were two men in whose case there was no question of poverty, since their books were successful and made their reputations...

...Among our clients were some mysterious, evanescent authors, who appeared among us, lived for a space, and then disappeared...

...What they went through they never told, nor did Shackleton ever tell, nor Scott...

...He had been seen at Nice...

...I think most agents will confirm me...

...It was headed "Emergency Rations," and it consisted of eight courses...

...and, indulging vanity even more deeply, I sent copies to Edward Thomas, Walter de la Mare, Herbert Trench and some others...

...Some of them came crawling back, asking for forgiveness...

...I was expecting an heroic figure, in the literary sense of heroic, and, but for his sea-blue eyes, the man I saw might have passed as a male nurse...

...Masefield's narrative poems had made not only Masefield but the English Review...

...I remember Shackleton's bored entry to the lunch...

...Like so many other writers, he came into his own after his death, when those who might have helped and comforted him in life (I know how often the serious weeklies and monthlies sent back his essays, when the few guineas that went with their acceptance would have meant so much to him) rushed forward with solemn "appreciations...

...They will further remember that while many of the leaders of the revolution were captured and, after tortures that Lenin and Trotzky never even thought of, executed, Father Gapon escaped...

...Unless you want your office to look like a Channel boat...

...I do not think the objects of them would mind—we know how un-self-conscious authors are— but Douglas might have delicate feelings on the matter...

...I am afraid I write so much about so many books that I often forget they also are God's creatures...

...Douglas was always good, whether he was writing or talking, or just smiling, and his comments on men whom the intellectual press was treating as gods were frequent and free...

...But he quickly found speech, and used it for half an hour, his principal keys being "unheard-of," "monstrous," "what have you done it for...

...I knew many of them at that time, and they were all living in places like Muswell Hill, Dulwich and Eltham...

...There are many commercial travelers much more tough, bluff and hearty than any of these men—at least to the eye...

...All his life he was poor...

...He came in one midday to see the chief, and I told him the chief was at lunch...

...I had always thought him a good editor, and one little event at that time convinced me...