Recollections of a Varied Life Part 32

[Sidenote: The Authors Club]

It was not long after that that the Authors Club secured quarters of its own in Twenty-fourth Street, and became an established social organization. For it was never a literary club, but always strictly a social one, having a literary basis of eligibility to membership. From the beginning we refused to read papers at each other, or in any other way to "improve our minds" on club evenings by any form of literary exercise. As the carpenter, who dresses lumber and drives nails and miters joints for his daily bread does not seek his evening recreation by doing those things for amus.e.m.e.nt, so we who were all hard-working men of letters, earning our living with the pen, had no mind to do as amateurs that which we were daily and hourly doing as professionals.

In the same way we decided at the outset to eschew every form of propagandism. The club has had no cause to advocate, no doctrine to promulgate, no "movement" to help or hinder. It has been and still is strictly a social club composed of men of letters, and having for its guests interesting men of all other professions. Hence it has prospered and its members have become intimates with no trace or suggestion of friction between them. I think I am safe in saying that no other organization has done so much for the amelioration of the literary life, the removal of prejudices and bitternesses and spites and jealousies, and for the upbuilding of cordial friendship among writers. I think there is no man in the club who doesn't count every other man there his friend.

The point emphasized above--that the club is a social, not a literary organization--is important. Neglect of it has led to a good deal of ill-informed and misdirected criticism. At the very beginning, on the night of the club's organization, we made up a list of somewhat more than a score of literary men who should be made members upon the invitation of our Executive Council without the formality of proposal and election.

From that list we excluded--by unanimous vote--one man whose literary work abundantly qualified him for membership, but whose cantankerous self-satisfaction rendered him, in the general opinion, a man not "clubbable." The trouble with him was not so much that he regarded himself, as he once avowed in company that he did, as "a greater than Shakespeare," but that he was disposed to quarrel with everybody who failed to recognize the a.s.sumption as a fact.

If ours had been a literary club, he must have been admitted to membership without question. As it was a social club, we didn't want him, and three several efforts that he afterwards made to secure admission failed. The like has happened in the cases of two or three other men whose literary work rendered them eligible, but whose personal peculiarities did not commend them.

Chiefly, however, the club has been criticised for its failure to admit women to membership. Paul Leicester Ford said to me on that subject one day:

"I'll have nothing to do with your club. You arrogantly refuse to admit women, though women are doing quite as much as men in American literature."

[Sidenote: Why Women Are Not Eligible]

I explained several things to him. I reminded him that the Authors Club set up no pretension to be completely representative of American literary activity; that it was merely a club formed by gentlemen who felt the need of it, for the purpose of bringing literary men together for social intercourse over their pipes and sandwiches; that the admission of women would of necessity defeat this solitary purpose, and that their exclusion was no more a slight than that which he put upon his nearest friends whenever he gave a dinner or a theater party to which he could not invite everybody on his eligible list. Then I pointed out another difficulty and a supreme one. If we should admit women on the same terms of eligibility that we insisted upon in the case of men, a host of writing women would become eligible, while our own wives and daughters would in most cases be ineligible. If, in order to cover that difficulty we should admit the wives and daughters of male members, we should be obliged to admit also the husbands, sons, and fathers of our female members, so that presently we should become a mob of men and women, half or more of whom were ineligible under our original conception of the club and its reason for being. There is also the consideration that every club must and does exclude more than it includes; that in requiring New England birth or descent for membership, the New England Society excludes perhaps nine-tenths of the people of New York, while without that requirement the Society would lose its distinctive character and be no New England Society at all.

Mr. Ford was so far convinced that he authorized me to propose his name for membership, but before I had opportunity to do so, the tragedy that ended his life had befallen.

The club has found ways of marking its appreciation of the literary equality of women without destroying its own essential being. In February and March of each year it gives four afternoon receptions to women. In so far as it can find them out, the club's Executive Council invites to all of these receptions, besides the wives and daughters of its own members, every woman in the land whose literary work would render her eligible to membership if she were a man. In addition to this, every member of the club has the privilege of inviting any other women he pleases.

I do not think the club is deficient in gallantry, nor do I find any such thought prevalent among the pleasing throng of gentlewomen who honor us by accepting our invitations.

Our first quarters were meagerly furnished, of course. It took every dollar we had to furnish them even in the plainest way. There was neither a sofa nor an upholstered chair in our rooms. Cheap, straight-backed, cane-seated chairs alone were there. One night when General Sherman was a guest, some one apologized for our inability to offer him a more comfortable seat. The st.u.r.dy old soldier always had an opinion ready made to suit every emergency.

"Comfortable?" he responded. "Why, what do you call these chairs if they are not comfortable? I don't believe in cushions. They are unnatural; they are devices of self-indulgence and luxury. The law ought to forbid their existence. They make men limp and flabby when they ought to be strong and vigorous and virile. The best chair in the world is one with a raw bull's hide for a seat, and with leathern thongs to tighten it with when it stretches. Next best is the old-fashioned, wooden-bottomed kitchen chair that cost forty cents when I was a boy. I don't suppose they make 'em now. People are too luxurious to know when they are well off."

Presently some one spoke to him of his "March to the Sea," and he instantly replied:

"It's all romantic nonsense to call it that. The thing was nothing more nor less than a military change of base--a thing familiar to every student of tactics; but a poet got hold of it, nicknamed it the 'March to the Sea,' and that's what everybody will call it, I suppose, till the crack of doom, unless it is forgotten before that time."

Perhaps the hard-fighting veteran's appreciation of the romantic aspect of great achievements was less keen than that of a company of creative writers. Perhaps his modesty got the better of him.

[Sidenote: The First "Watch Night"]

It happened early in the history of the Authors Club that the regular meeting night fell one year on the thirty-first of December. At first it was suggested that the date be changed, but some one remembered the old custom of the Methodists who held "Watch Night" meetings, seeing the old year out and the new year in with rejoicing and fervent singing. Why shouldn't we have a "Watch Night" after our own fashion? The suggestion was eagerly accepted. No programme was arranged, no order of exercises planned. Nothing was prearranged except that with friendship and jollity and the telling of stories we should give a farewell to the old year and a welcome to the new.

Fortunately, Mark Twain was called upon to begin the story telling, and he put formality completely out of countenance at the very outset.

Instead of standing as if to address the company, he seized a chair, straddled it, and with his arms folded across its back, proceeded to tell one of the most humorous of all his stories. Frank Stockton followed with his account of the "mislaid corpse" and before the new year had an hour or two of age, there had been related enough of exquisitely humorous incident--real or fanciful--to make the fortune of two or three books of humor.

At midnight we turned out the gas and sang a stanza or two of "Auld Lang Syne" by way of farewell to the old year. Then, with lights all ablaze again, we greeted the new year in the familiar "He's a jolly good fellow."

Max O'Rell was my guest on one of these occasions, and in one of his later books he gave an account of it. After recording the fact that "at precisely twelve o'clock the lights are turned out," he added a footnote saying in solemn fashion: "A clock is _borrowed for the occasion_."

I saw a good deal of that witty Frenchman during his several visits to America. I wrote an introduction to the American edition of his "John Bull, Jr.," and it served to protect that work with a copyright entry.

He never paid me a cent for the service.

That was because I refused to accept the remuneration he pressed upon me.

I offer that as a jest which he would have appreciated keenly.

He was a man of generous mind, whose humor sometimes impressed others as cynical, a judgment that I always regarded as unjust, for the reason that the humorist must be allowed a certain privilege of saying severer things than he really feels, if he is to be a humorist at all. When Max O'Rell says of a certain type of stupid British boy of the "upper cla.s.s," that he ultimately enters the army and fights his country's enemies, and then adds: "And whether he kills his country's enemy or his country's enemy kills him, his country is equally benefited," he does not really mean what he says. He once confessed to me that he had had an abiding affection for every such boy, but that the temptation to make a jest at his expense was irresistible in the case of a writer whose bread and b.u.t.ter were dependent upon his ability to excite smiles.

In the same way, as everybody must have observed, the humor that has made the reputation of many newspaper editors is largely leveled at women in their various relations with men and at the sacred things of life. Much of it would be cruelly unjust if it were seriously meant, as ordinarily it is not.

I have sometimes wondered whether the injustice did not outweigh the humor--whether the smile excited by the humor was worth the wound inflicted by the injustice.

[Sidenote: Habitual Humorists]

The professional humorist, whether with pen, pencil, or tongue, is the victim of a false perspective. He is so intent upon his quip or quibble or jest, that he loses sight of more serious things. He does not hesitate to sacrifice even truth and justice, or the highest interest of whatever sort, for the sake of "making his point." He perhaps mistakenly believes that his reader or the person studying his caricature will regard his jest lightly and without loss of respect for the more serious things that lie behind. As a matter of fact, this rarely happens. The reader of the jest accepts it as a setting forth of truth, or at any rate is affected by it in some such fashion.

On the whole, therefore, I cannot help regarding the confirmed humorist in literature or art as a detrimental force.

I do not mean to include in this condemnation such genial literary humorists as Charles Battell Loomis, and Frank R. Stockton, and Charles Dudley Warner, who made things funny merely by looking at them with an intellectual squint that deceived n.o.body and misled n.o.body. I refer only to the habitual jokers of the newspapers and the like,--men who, for a wage, undertake to make a jest of everything that interests the popular mind, and who, for the sake of their jest, would pervert the Lord's Prayer itself to a humorous purpose. These people lose all sense of propriety, proportion, perspective, and even of morality itself. They make their jests at so much per line, and at all hazards of truth, justice, and intelligence.

In literature these mountebanks impress me as detrimental impertinents--in conversation they seem to me nuisances. I cannot forget one occasion on which the late Bishop Potter and a distinguished judge of the Supreme Court were discussing a question of the possibility of helpful reform in a certain direction. There was a humorist present--a man whose sole idea of conversation was sparkle. He insisted upon sparkling. He interrupted the gravest utterances with his puns or his plays upon words, or his references to humorous things remembered. The thing became so intolerable that some one present slipped his arms into those of the Bishop and the Judge, and led them away with the suggestion that there was a quiet corner in the club where he would like to seat them and hear the rest of their conversation. As they turned their backs on the humorist and moved away, the Bishop asked:

"What did you say the name of that mountebank is?"

The Judge replied:

"I knew at the time. I'm glad to have forgotten it."

"It is just as well," answered the Bishop. "There are many things in this life that are better forgotten than remembered."

There is one thing worthy of note in connection with the Authors Club.

Almost from the hour of its inception it has furnished the country with a very distinguished proportion of its most eminent diplomats and statesmen. To mention only a few: James Russell Lowell, Andrew D. White, David Jayne Hill, William L. Wilson, Carl Schurz, General Horace Porter, John Hay, Theodore Roosevelt, Oscar S. Straus, Edward M. Shepard, and a dozen others easily mentioned, may be cited as ill.u.s.trations of the extent to which a club of only about 180 members in all has been drawn upon by the national government for its needs in diplomacy and statesmanship.

The Authors Club idea of a watch night meeting has been borrowed by a number of other organizations, but I think in none of them has it become so well recognized an event of the year. At any rate, it throngs our rooms to the point of suffocation on the night of every thirty-first of December.

Another habit of the club has been for a considerable number of members and guests to linger after its regular meetings until the small hours of the morning, telling stories or discussing matters of intellectual interest. This has become a feature of the club meetings since Charles Henry Webb--better known in literature as "John Paul"--said one night at two o'clock:

"Upon my soul, the Authors Club is one of the very pleasantest places I know--_after_ the authors have gone home."

[Sidenote: "Liber Scriptorum"]

Soon after the club took its quarters in Twenty-fourth Street, three of us--Rossiter Johnson, John D. Champlin, and myself--were impressed with the need of more funds and better furnishings. We suggested the publication of a unique book, as a means of securing the funds and providing the furnishings. Our plan contemplated a sumptuous volume, in an edition limited to two hundred and fifty-one copies--one for the club, and the rest for sale at one hundred dollars a copy. We proposed that the members of the club should furnish the poems, stories, and essays needed; that each of them should agree never to publish his contribution elsewhere, and that each poem, story, or essay should be signed by its author in pen and ink in each copy of the book.

We were met with prompt discouragement on every hand. The older men among the members of the club were confident that we could never secure the papers desired. Our friends among the publishers simply knew in advance and positively, that even if we could make the book, we could never sell it. Mr. Joe Harper offered to bet me a hat that we could never sell twenty-five of the two hundred and fifty copies. I lived to wear that hat and rejoice in it, for we not only made the book--"Liber Scriptorum"--but we realized something more than twenty thousand dollars on its sale, as a fund with which to provide leather-covered morris chairs, soft rugs, handsome bookcases, and other luxuries for our friends the doubters to rejoice in.

Authors are supposed to be an unbusinesslike set, who do not know enough of affairs to manage their personal finances in a way to save themselves from poverty. Perhaps the judgment is correct. But the Authors Club is the only club I know in New York which has no dollar of debt resting upon it, and has a comfortable balance to its credit in bank.

The case is not singular. It has been written of William Pitt that while he was able to extricate the British exchequer from the sorest embarra.s.sment it ever encountered, he could not keep the duns from his own door.