The Jessica Letters Part 1

The Jessica Letters: An Editor's Romance.

by Paul Elmer More and Corra Harris.

I

PHILIP TO JESSICA

NEW YORK, April 20, 19--.

MY DEAR MISS DOANE:

You will permit me to address you with this semblance of familiarity, I trust, for the frankness of our conversation in my office gives me some right to claim you as an acquaintance. And first of all let me tell you that we shall be glad to print your review of _The Kentons_, and shall be pleased to send you a long succession of novels for a.n.a.lysis if you can always use the scalpel with such atrocious cunning as in this case. I say atrocious cunning, for really you have treated Mr. Howells with a touch of that genial "process of vivisection" to which it pleases him to subject the lively creatures of his own brain.

"Mr. Howells," you say, "is singularly gifted in taking to pieces the spiritual machinery of unimpeachable ladies and gentlemen"; and really you have made of the author one of the good people of his own book! That is a malicious revenge for his "tedious accuracy," is it not? And you dare to speak of his "hypnotic power of illusion which is so essentially a freak element in his mode of expression that even in portraying the tubby, good-natured, elderly gentleman in this story he refines upon his vitals and sensibilities until the wretched victim becomes a sort of cataleptic."

Now that is a "human unfairness" from a critic whom the most ungallant editor would be constrained to call fair!

I forget that I am asked to sit as adviser to you in a question of great moment. But be a.s.sured neither you nor your perplexing query has really slipped from my memory. Often while I sit at my desk in this dingy room with the sodden uproar of Printing House Square besieging my one barricadoed window, I recall the eagerness of your appeal to me as to one experienced in these matters: "Can you encourage me to give my life to literature?" Indeed, my brave votaress, there is something that disturbs me in the directness of that question, something ominous in those words, _give my life_. Literature is a despised G.o.ddess in these days to receive such devotion.

Naked and poor thou goest, Philosophy,

as Petrarch wrote, and as we may say of Literature. If you ask me whether it will pay you to employ the superfluities of your cleverness in writing reviews and sketches and stories,--why, certainly, do so by all means. I have no fear of your ultimate success in money and in the laughing honours of society. But if you mean literature in any sober sense of the word, G.o.d forbid that I should encourage the giving of your young life to such a consuming pa.s.sion. Happiness and success in the pursuit of any ideal can only come to one who dwells in a sympathetic atmosphere. Do you think a people that lauds Mr. Spinster as a great novelist and Mr. Perchance as a great critic can have any knowledge of that deity you would follow, or any sympathy for the follower?

It has been my business to know many writers and readers of books. I have in all my experience met just four men who have given themselves to literature. One of these four lives in Cambridge, one is a hermit in the mountains, one teaches school in Nebraska, and one is an impecunious clerk in New York. They are each as isolated in the world as was ever an anchorite of the Thebaid; they have accomplished nothing, and are utterly unrecognised; they are, apart from the lonely solace of study, the unhappiest men of my acquaintance. The love of literature is a jealous pa.s.sion, a self-abnegation as distinct from the mere pleasure of clever reading and clever writing as the religion of Pascal was distinct from the decorous wors.h.i.+p of Versailles. The solitude of self-acknowledged failure is the sure penalty for pursuing an ideal out of harmony with the life about us. I speak bitterly; I feel as if an apology were due for such earnestness in writing to one who is, after all, practically a stranger to me.

Forgive my nave zeal; but I remember that you spoke to me on the subject with a note of restrained emotion which flatters me into thinking I may not be misunderstood. And, to seek pardon for this personal tone by an added personality, it distresses me to imagine a life like yours, with which the world must deal bountifully in mere grat.i.tude for the joy it takes from you,--to imagine a life like yours, I say, sacrificed to any such grim Moloch. Write, and win applause for gay cleverness, but do not consider literature seriously. Above all, write me a word to a.s.sure me I have not given offence by this very uneditorial outburst of rhetoric.

Sincerely yours, PHILIP TOWERS.

II

JESSICA TO PHILIP

MORNINGTOWN, GEORGIA, April 27, 19--.

MY DEAR MR. TOWERS:

Since my return home I have thought earnestly of my visit to New York.

That was the first time I was ever far beyond the community boundaries of some Methodist church in Georgia. I think I mentioned to you that my father is an itinerant preacher. But for one brief day I was a small and insignificant part of the life in your great city, unnoted and uncla.s.sified. And you cannot know what that sensation means, if you were not brought up as a whole big unit in some small village. The sense of irresponsibility was delightful. I felt as if I had escaped through the buckle of my father's creed and for once was a happy maverick soul in the world at large, with no prayer-meeting responsibilities. I could have danced and glorified G.o.d on a curbstone, if such a manifestation of heathen spirituality would not have been unseemly.

But the chief event of that sensational day was my visit to you. Of course you cannot know how formidable the literary editor of a great newspaper appears to a friendless young writer. And from our brief correspondence I had already pictured you grim and elderly, with huge black brows bunched together as if your eyes were ready to spring upon me miserable. I even thought of adding a white beard,--you do use long graybeard words sometimes, and naturally I had a.s.sociated them with your chin. You can imagine, then, my relief as I entered your office, with the last legs of my courage tottering, and beheld you, not in the least ferocious in appearance, and not even _old_! The revulsion from my fears and anxieties was so swift and complete that, you will remember, I gave both hands in salutation, and had I possessed a miraculous third, you should have had that also.

I am so pleased to have you confirm my judgment of Howells's novel; and that I am to have more books for review. I doubt, however, if Mr. Howells will ever reap the benefit of my criticisms, for not long since I read a note from him saying that he never looked into _The Gazette_. You must already have given offence by doubting his literary infallibility.

But on the whole you question the wisdom of my ambition to "give my life to literature." As to that I am inclined to follow Ellen Thorneycroft Fowler's opinion: "Writing is like flirting,--if you can't do it, n.o.body can teach you; and if you can do it, n.o.body can keep you from doing it."

With a certain literary aspirant I know, writing is even more like flirting than that,--an artful folly with literature which will never rise to the dignity of a wedding sacrifice. She could no more give herself seriously to the demands of such a profession than a Southern mockingbird can take a serious view of music. He makes it quite independently of mind, gets his inspiration from the fairies, steals his notes, and dedicates the whole earth to the sky every morning with a green-tree ballad, utterly frivolous. Such a performance, my dear Mr. Towers, can never be termed a "sacrifice"; rather it is the wings and tail of humour expressed in a song. But who shall say the dear little wag has no vocation because his small feather-soul is expressed by a minuet instead of an anthem?

Therefore do not turn your editorial back upon me because I am incapable of the more earnest sacrifice. Even if I only chirrup a green-tree ballad, I shall need a chorister to aid me in winning those "laughing honours of society." And your supervision is all the more necessary, since, as you said to me, I live in a section where the literary point of view is more sentimental than accurate. This is accounted for, not by a lack of native wit, but by the fact that we have no scholars.h.i.+p or purely intellectual foundations. We are romanticists, but not students in life or art. We make no great distinctions between ideality and reality because with us existence itself is one long cheerful delusion. Now, while I suffer from these limitations more or less, my ignorance is not invincible, and I could learn much by disagreeing with you! Your letters would be antidotal, and thus, by a sort of mental allopathy, beneficial.

Sincerely, JESSICA DOANE.

III

PHILIP TO JESSICA

MY DEAR MISS DOANE:

There can be no doubt of it. Your reply, which I should have acknowledged sooner, gives substance to the self-reproach that came to me the moment my letter to you was out of my hands. All my friends complain that they can get nothing from me but "journalistic correspondence"; and now when once I lay aside the hurry and constraint of the editorial desk to respond to what seemed a personal demand in a new acquaintance, I quite lose myself and launch out into a lyrical disquisition which really applies more to my own experience than to yours. Will you not overlook this fault of egotism?

Indeed I cannot quite promise that, if you receive many letters from me in the course of your reviewing, you may not have to make allowances more than once for a note of acrid personality, or egotism, if you please, welling up through the decorum of my editorial advisings. "If we shut nature out of the door, she will come in at the window," is an old saying, and it holds good of newspaper doors and windows, as you see.

But really, what I had in mind, or should have had in mind, was not the vague question whether you should "sacrifice your life to literature,"--that question you very properly answered in a tone of bantering sarcasm; but whether you should sacrifice your present manner of life to come and seek your fortune in this "literary metropolis"--Heaven save the mark! Let me say flatly, if I have not already said it, there is no literature in New York. There are millions of books manufactured here, and millions of them sold; but of literature the city has no sense--or has indeed only contempt. Some day I may try to explain what I mean by this sharp distinction between the making of books, or even the love of books, and the genuine aspiration of literature. The distinction is as real to my mind--has proved as lamentably real in my actual experience--as that conceived in the Middle Ages between the life of a _religiosus_, Thomas a Kempis, let us say, and of a faithful man of the world. But this is a mystery, and I will not trouble you with mysteries or personal experiences. You would write as your Southern mockingbird sings his "green-tree ballad"; the thought of that bird mewed in a city cage and taught to perform by rote and not for spontaneous joy, troubled me not a little. I am sending you by express several books....[1]

IV

PHILIP TO JESSICA

MY DEAR MISS DOANE:

I have said such harsh things about our present-day makers of books that I am going to send you, by way of palliative, a couple of volumes by living writers who really have some notion of literature. One is Brownell's _Victorian Prose Masters_, and the other is Santayana's _Poetry and Religion_. If they give you as much pleasure as they have given me, I know I shall win your grat.i.tude, which I much desire. It is a little disheartening and a justification of my pessimism that neither of these men has received anything like the same general recognition as our fluent Mr. Perchance, that interpreter of literature to the American _bourgeoisie_. I will slip in also a volume or two of Matthew Arnold, as a good touchstone to try them on. Now that you are becoming a professional weigher of books yourself, you ought to be acquainted with these gentlemen.

V

JESSICA TO PHILIP

MY DEAR MR. TOWERS:

Do not reproach yourself for having written me a "journalistic" letter. I always think of an editor as having only ink-bottle insides, ever ready to turn winged fancies into printed matter, or to enter upon a "lyrical disquisition" concerning them. Your distinction consists in a disposition to abandon the formalities of the editorial desk that you may "respond to the personal demands of a new acquaintance." And this humane amiability leads me to make a nave confession. There are some people whose demands are always personal. I think it is their limitation, resulting from a state of naturalness, more or less primitive, out of which they have not yet evolved. They do not appeal to your judgment or wisdom or even to your sympathy, but to _you_. Their very spirits are composed of a sort of sunflower dust that settles everywhere. And if they have what we term the higher life at all, it is expressed by a woodland call to some tree-top spirit in you. Thus, here am I, really desirous of an abstract, artistic training of the mind, already taking liberties with the sacred corners of your editorial dignity by impressing _personal_ demands.

And just so am I related to the whole of life,--even to the "publicans" in my father's congregation. Indeed, if the desire "to eat with sinners"

insured salvation, there would be less cause for alarm about my miraculous future state. The attraction, you understand, depends not upon the fact of their being sinners, but upon the sincerity of their mortality. The more una.s.sumingly these reprobates live in their share of the common flesh, far below spiritual pretences, the more does my wayward mind tip the scales of unregenerate humour in their direction. My instincts hobn.o.b with their dust. But do not infer that I have identified you with these undisciplined characters. When I was a child, out of the rancour of a well-tutored Southern imagination I honestly believed that every man the other side of Mason and Dixon's line had a blue complexion, thin legs, and a long tail.

And once when I was still very young, as I hurried from school through a lonely wood, I actually _saw_ one of these monsters quite plainly. And I thought I observed that his tail was slightly forked at the end! I have long since forgiven you these terrifying caudal appendages, of course, but, for all that, I keep a wary eye upon my heavenly bodies and at least one wing stretched even unto this day when my guardian angel introduces a Northern man. My patriotic instincts recommend at once the wisdom of strategy. And it is well the "personal demands" come from me to you; for, had the direction been reversed, by this time I should have sought refuge somewhere in my last ditch and run up a little tattered flag of rebellion to signify the state of my mind.