When Winter Comes to Main Street Part 12

"It is also true that he stacked up more libel suits than a newspaper of limited capital with a staff of local attorneys could handle before he moved to Louisville, where, for three years, he was staff correspondent of The Evening Post. It was here that Cobb discovered how far a humorist could go without being invited to step out at 6 a.m. and rehea.r.s.e 'The Rivals' with real horse-pistols.

"The first sobering episode in his life occurred when the Goebel murder echoed out of Louisville. He reported this historic a.s.sa.s.sination and covered the subsequent trials in the Georgetown court house. Doubtless the seeds of tragedy, which mark some of his present work, were sown here.

Those who are familiar with his writings know that occasionally he sets his cap and bells aside and dips his pen into the very darkness of life.

We find it particularly in three of his short stories ent.i.tled 'An Occurrence Up a Side Street,' 'The Belled Buzzard,' and 'Fishhead.'

Nothing better can be found in Edgar Allan Poe's collected works. One is impressed not only with the beauty and simplicity of his prose, but with the tremendous power of his tragic conceptions and his art in dealing with terror. There appears to be no phase of human emotion beyond his pen.

Without an effort he rises from the level of actualities to the high plane of boundless imagination, invoking laughter or tears at will.

"After his Louisville experience Cobb married and returned to Paducah to be managing editor of The Democrat. Either Paducah or The Democrat got on his nerves and, after a comparison of the Paducah school of journalism with the metropolitan brand, he turned his face (see Evening World half-tone) in the direction of New York, buoyed up by the illusion that he was needed there along with other reforms.

"He arrived at the gates of Manhattan full of hope, and visited every newspaper office in New York without receiving encouragement to call again. Being resourceful he retired to his suite of hall bedrooms on 57th Street West and wrote a personal note to every city editor in New York, setting forth in each instance the magnificent intellectual proportions of the epistolographer. The next morning, by mail, Cobb had offers for a job from five of them. He selected The Evening Sun.

"At about that time the Portsmouth Peace Conference convened, and The Sun sent the Paducah party to help cover the proceedings. Upon arriving at Portsmouth, Cobb cast his experienced eye over the situation, discovered that the story was already well covered by a large coterie of competent, serious-minded young men, and went into action to write a few columns daily on subjects having no bearing whatsoever on the conference. These stories were written in the ebullition of youth, inspired by the ecstasy which rises from the possession of a steady job; a perfect deluge from the well springs of spontaneity. There wasn't a single fact in the entire series, and yet The Sun syndicated these stories throughout the United States. All they possessed was I-N-D-I-V-I-D-U-A-L-I-T-Y.

"At the end of three weeks, Cobb returned to New York, to find that he could have a job on any newspaper in it. This brings him to The Evening World, the half-tone engraving, which was the first glimpse I had of him, and the dawn of his subsequent triumphs. For four years he supplied the evening edition and The Sunday World with a comic feature, to say nothing of a comic opera, written to order in five days. The absence of a guillotine in New York State accounts for his escape for this latter offence. Nevertheless, in all else his standard of excellence ascended. He reported the Thaw trial in long-hand, writing nearly 600,000 words of testimony and observation, establis.h.i.+ng a new style for reporting trials, and gave further evidence of his power. That performance will stand out in the annals of American journalism as one of the really big reportorial achievements.

"At about this juncture in his career Cobb opened a door to the past, reached in and took out some of the recollections of his youth. These he converted into 'The Escape of Mr. Trimm,' his first short fiction story.

It appeared in The Sat.u.r.day Evening Post. The court scene was so absolutely true to life, so minutely perfect in its atmosphere, that a Supreme Court judge signed an unsolicited and voluntary note for publication, in which he said that Mr. Cobb had reported with marvelous accuracy and fulness a murder trial at which His Honour had presided.

"Gelett Burgess, in a lecture at Columbia College, said that Cobb was one of the ten great American humourists. Cobb ought to demand a recount.

There are not ten humourists in the world, although Cobb is one of them.

The extraordinary thing about Cobb is that he can turn a burst of laughter into a funeral oration, a snicker into a shudder and a smile into a crime.

He writes in octaves, striking instinctively all the chords of humour, tragedy, pathos and romance with either hand. Observe this man in his thirty-ninth year, possessing gifts the limitations of which even he himself has not yet recognised.

"In appraising a genius, we must consider the man's highest achievement, and in comparing him with others the verdict must be reached only upon consideration of his best work. For scintillant wit and unflagging good humour, read his essays on the Teeth, the Hair and the Stomach. If you desire a perfect blending of all that is essential to a short story, read 'The Escape of Mr. Trimm' or 'Words and Music.' If you are in search of pure, unadulterated, boundless terror, the gruesome quality, the blackness of despair and the fear of death in the human conscience, 'Fishhead,' 'The Belled Buzzard' or 'An Occurrence Up a Side Street' will enthrall you.

"Thus in Irvin Cobb we find Mark Twain, Bret Harte and Edgar Allan Poe at their best. Reckon with these potentialities in the future. Speculate, if you will, upon the sort of a novel that is bound, some day, to come from his pen. There seem to be no pinnacles along the horizon of the literary future that are beyond him. If he uses his pen for an Alpine stock, the Matterhorn is his.

"There are critics and reviewers who do not entirely agree with me concerning Cobb. But they will.

"As I write these lines I recall a conversation I had with Irvin Cobb on the hurricane deck of a Fifth Avenue 'bus one bleak November afternoon, 1911. We had met at the funeral of Joseph Pulitzer, in whose employ we had served in the past.

"Cobb was in a reflective mood, chilled to the marrow, and not particularly communicative.

"At the junction of Fifth Avenue and Forty-second Street we were held up by congested traffic. After a little manoeuvring on the part of a mounted policeman, the Fifth Avenue tide flowed through and onward again.

"'It reminds me of a river,' said Cobb, 'into which all humanity is drawn.

Some of these people think because they are walking up-stream they are getting out of it. But they never escape. The current is at work on them.

Some day they will get tired and go down again, and finally pa.s.s out to sea. It is the same with real rivers. They do not flow uphill.'

"He lapsed into silence.

"'What's on your mind?' I inquired.

"'Nothing in particular,' he said, scanning the banks of the great munic.i.p.al stream, 'except that I intend to write a novel some day about a boy born at the headwaters. Gradually he floats down through the tributaries, across the valleys, swings into the main stream, and docks finally at one of the cities on its banks. This particular youth was a great success--in the beginning. Every door was open to him. He had position, brains, and popularity to boot. He married brilliantly. And then The Past, a trivial, unimportant Detail, lifted its head and barked at him. He was too sensitive to bark back. Thereupon it bit him and he collapsed.'

"Again Cobb ceased talking. For some reason--indefinable--I respected his silence. Two blocks further down he took up the thread of his story again:

"'--and one evening, just about sundown, a river hand, sitting on a stringpiece of a dock, saw a derby hat bobbing in the muddy Mississippi, floating unsteadily but surely into the Gulf of Mexico.'

"As is his habit, Cobb tugged at his lower lip.

"'What are you going to call this novel?'

"'I don't know. What do you think?'

"'Why not "The River"?'

"'Very well, I'll call it "The River."'

"He scrambled from his seat. 'I'm docking at Twenty-seventh Street.

Good-bye. Keep your hat out of the water.'

"Laboriously he made his way down the winding staircase from the upper deck, dropped flat-footed on the asphalt pavement, turned his collar up, leaned into the gust of wind from the South, and swung into the cross-current of another stream.

"I doubt if he has any intention of calling his story 'The River.' But I am sure the last chapter will contain something about an unhappy wretch who wore a derby hat at the moment he walked hand in hand with his miserable Past into the Father of Waters.

"For those who wish to know something of his personal side, I can do no better than to record his remarks to a stranger, who, in my presence, asked Irvin Cobb, without knowing to whom he was speaking, what kind of a person Cobb was.

"'Well, to be perfectly frank with you,' replied the Paducah prodigy, 'Cobb is related to my wife by marriage, and if you don't object to a brief sketch, with all the technicalities eliminated, I should say in appearance he is rather bulky, standing six feet high, not especially beautiful, a light roan in colour, with a black mane. His figure is undecided, but might be called bunchy in places. He belongs to several clubs, including The Yonkers Pressing Club and The Park Hill Democratic Marching Club, and has always, like his father, who was a Confederate soldier, voted the Democratic ticket. He has had one wife and one child and still has them. In religion he is an Innocent Bystander.'

"Could anything be fuller than this?"

=iv=

It was Mr. Davis, also, who in the New York Herald of April 23, 1922, made public the evidence for the following box score:

1st 2nd

Best Writer of Humour Cobb ---- Best All-Round Reporter Cobb ---- Best Local Colourist Cobb ---- Best in Tales of Horror Cobb ---- Best Writer of Negro Stories ---- Cobb Best Writer of Light Tarkington Cobb and Humorous Fiction Harry Leon Wilson Best Teller of Anecdotes Cobb Cobb

"Not long ago a group of ten literary men--editors, critics, readers and writers--were dining together. Discussion arose as to the respective and comparative merits of contemporaneous popular writers. It was decided that each man present should set down upon a slip of paper his first, second and third choices in various specified but widely diversified fields of literary endeavour, and that then the results should be compared. Admirers of Cobb's work will derive a peculiar satisfaction from the outcome. It was found that as a writer of humour he had won first place; that as an all round reporter he had first place; that as a handler of local colour in the qualified sense of a power of apt, swiftly-done, journalistic description, he had first place. He also had first place as a writer of horror yarns. He won second place as a writer of darkey stories. He tied with Harry Leon Wilson for second place as a writer of light humorous fiction, Tarkington being given first place in this category. As a teller of anecdotes he won by acclamation over all contenders. Altogether his name appeared on eight of the ten lists."

Cobb lives at Ossining, New York. He describes himself as lazy, but convinces no one. He likes to go fis.h.i.+ng. But he has never written any fish stories.

BOOKS BY IRVIN S. COBB

BACK HOME COBB'S ANATOMY THE ESCAPE OF MR. TRIMM COBB'S BILL OF FARE ROUGHING IT DE LUXE EUROPE REVISED PATHS OF GLORY OLD JUDGE PRIEST FIBBLE, D.D.

SPEAKING OF OPERATIONS LOCAL COLOR SPEAKING OF PRUSSIANS THOSE TIMES AND THESE THE GLORY OF THE COMING THE THUNDERS OF SILENCE THE LIFE OF THE PARTY FROM PLACE TO PLACE "OH, WELL, YOU KNOW HOW WOMEN ARE!"

THE ABANDONED FARMERS SUNDRY ACCOUNTS A PLEA FOR OLD CAP COLLIER ONE THIRD OFF EATING IN TWO OR THREE LANGUAGES J. POINDEXTER, COLORED STICKFULS

Plays: FUNABAs.h.i.+ BUSYBODY BACK HOME SERGEANT BAGBY GUILTY AS CHARGED UNDER SENTENCE

SOURCES ON IRVIN S. COBB

Who's Who in America.

Who's Cobb and Why? Booklet published by GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY.