i don’t know why, but for many years there has been (and i am told there still is) a kind of silent conspiracy to keep out of fleet street as many aspirants to journalism as possible. they are discouraged by extravagant stories of the fierce competition that reigns there, by tragic yarns of men of great gifts who walk about the street in rags. i myself was discouraged in this way and i found myself, on the verge of middle age, still hesitating in manchester. it is true, i did not enter journalism until i was in my thirties, and i did not know the ropes. i did not know london either. also, i was married and had children to educate and could not afford to take risks and make of life the grand adventure i have, in my heart, always known it to be.
so i hung on in manchester, writing musical criticism for the manchester courier and contributing occasional articles and verses to the academy, the contemporary review, the cornhill, the english review, the musical times, and many other magazines, and there is scarcely a london daily of repute for which at one time or another i did not write. but still i could find no opening in fleet street. the truth is, there is no regular means of finding openings in fleet street. if an editor is in want of a dramatic critic, a musical critic, a leader writer, or a descriptive reporter, he never advertises for one. he always knows someone who knows somebody else who is just the man for the job.
so one day i said to myself: “i will go to london at all 103costs. i will take a room in bloomsbury and risk it.” by a happy accident i received, a few days later, a note from rutland boughton, the well-known composer, telling me that he was relinquishing his post as musical critic of the daily citizen, that ill-fated paper so courageously edited by frank dilnot. boughton suggested i should apply for the vacancy. i did apply. i wrote to dilnot and received no answer. i chafed a fortnight and then telegraphed, prepaying a reply. “no vacancy at present” was the message i received. so i took the next train to london and bearded dilnot in his den. “yes, i’ll take you,” he said, “if you’ll come for two pounds a week. but, if you’re the real stuff, you’ll receive much more.” as i knew that i was, indeed, the real stuff, “i’ll come,” said i. “when can i start?”
i went back to manchester and saw w. a. ackland, the managing editor of the manchester courier and the kindest of men, expecting to receive from him a cold douche. but no! to my amazement, he encouraged me most heartily, and kept me on his staff, bidding me write a weekly article for him from london. this i did till the outbreak of the war, writing a lot of material also for his london letter.
during my first year in london i made six hundred and forty pounds. and i spent it. i spent it in eager examination of, and participation in, the many activities that the life of a great metropolis affords. very soon—within six months—i found myself in the happy position of being able to refuse work that was offered me, for i did not wish to work all my waking hours. i wanted to play. i did play. i made many friendships. i talked a great deal, played the piano two or three hours a day, caroused, ragged in chelsea, and lived every hour of my life.
it may be thought that six hundred and forty pounds per annum is no great sum. nor is it. but does a doctor, a barrister, a solicitor, or any other professional man earn so much, without capital or influence, during his first year 104in london? or in his second? or third? money-making in fleet street up to about seven hundred and fifty pounds a year is the easiest thing in the world for a man who has any talent at all for writing, especially if that talent be combined with versatility. the journalist is rarely intellectual; as a rule, he is merely ready and glib. i am ready and glib myself.
so i am not among those who feel inclined to discourage him who hankers after fleet street. no matter if you live in the waste regions of sutherland, if you have proved yourself by inducing a number of editors of repute to take your stuff, go in and win! really, it is very easy.
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the men of fleet street are the best fellows in the world. roughly, they may be divided into two classes: those who “go steady,” with their eye always on the main chance, with every faculty strained to enable them to “get on” in the world; and those happy-go-lucky people who make money easily and spend it recklessly, so excited by life that they cannot pause to contemplate life, so happy in their labour and in their play that they cannot conceive a day may come when work will be irksome and playing a half-forgotten dream. there are, of course, other divisions into which journalists may be separated. there is, for example, the devoted band of brilliant young men who work for orage in the new age—a paper that cannot, i am sure, pay high rates. (what those rates are i do not know, for i could never induce orage to print a single thing i wrote for him.) then there are the hangers-on of journalism: people who review books in the time spared from their labours as university professors, struggling barristers, parish priests and so on. many of these people, led by vanity or some other concealed motive, offer to work without payment.
the men who “go steady” are the editors, the leader-writers, the news editors, the literary editors, etc. for 105the most part they are men who have to keep late hours and clear heads, for important news may reach the office at midnight and instant decisions regarding the policy that the paper has to assume in regard to that news have to be made. a great political speech may be made in edinburgh; a startling murder trial may close in liverpool; a famous man may die in paris; a strike may break out in the potteries: in short, anything may happen. what attitude is the paper going to take up? what precise shade of opinion is going to be expressed about that political speech? what is to be said about the degree of justice that the workers in the potteries can claim for their action? these matters have to be decided instantly, for they have to be written about instantly, and perhaps you who read the leading article next morning rarely stop to consider the conditions—the incredibly difficult conditions—under which it has been written. for this kind of work real, genuine ability is required: a very wide and accurate knowledge of affairs, rapidity of thought, a fluent and eloquent pen and a mind so sensitive that it can, without effort, reflect to a nicety the precise policy of the paper upon whose work it is engaged.
there is a story, and i think the story is true, of a new and inexperienced reporter who was given a trial on the staff of a very famous “halfpenny” paper. he was not a success, for he bungled everything that was given him to do, and he had not an idea in his head concerning the invention and manufacture of stunts. so he was tried as a book-reviewer, and again failed miserably. they made a sub-editor of him, and once more he was slow and inaccurate. said the news editor to the editor-in-chief: “i’m afraid i shall have to get rid of jones; he’s tried almost everything and failed.” “oh! has he?” returned the editor-in-chief. “well, put him on to writing leaders.”
but even the halfpenny press has, in recent years, come to regard its leader columns as one of the most important 106parts of its papers. of this kind of work i have had little experience. a position as writer of “leaderettes” was offered me on the globe, but i was not a success, for i was at the same time writing a great deal of stuff for the daily citizen, and, as both papers were equally violent in antagonistic political and social fields, i soon found myself writing solidly and regularly against my own convictions. it is true that a journalist, like a barrister, is generally but a hireling paid to express certain views, but there are few men so intellectually backboneless and ethically flabby that they can, day after day, say both yes and no to the various problems that face them.
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i suppose there are few professions in which one learns more about the seamy side of human nature than one does in journalism. the one appalling vice of eminent men is vanity. musicians, actors, authors, politicians—even judges and preachers—appear to be so constituted that they cannot live and be happy without publicity. from what source, do you think, originate those chatty little paragraphs concerning famous men and women that you find in every evening newspaper and in many weeklies? they originate from the fountain-head. if the novelist does not himself send the paragraph to the paper, his publisher does; if the actor has not written that “snappy” par., he has given his manager the material for it. at one time i wrote a weekly column of theatrical gossip for a well-known daily, and i can, without exaggeration, say that most of our famous actors and actresses did my work for me. i used scissors and paste, corrected their grammatical errors (and mistakes in spelling!), coloured the whole with my personality—and there the column was ready for the printer! sometimes i would receive letters from notorious mimes expostulating with me because i had not mentioned their names for a month or two. others wrote and thanked me for praising them. one 107lady whom i have never seen, either on the stage or off, sent me a silver pencil-case, with a letter containing the material for a very personal sketch. i put the pencil in my pocket and the sketch in the newspaper. quite recently i was shown an article signed by a famous lady, containing a bogus account of how she had received a strange proposal of marriage. the article had been invented and written by an acquaintance of mine, but the signature was the lady’s.
but more egregious than the vanity of actors is the vanity of fashionable preachers. to them notoriety is the very breath of their nostrils. they have no “agents,” so they are compelled to advertise themselves without camouflage. and they do it shamelessly. i will not mention names, but at least half the fashionable preachers in london, no matter what their denomination, are guilty of constant and most resourceful self-advertisement. a little, a very little, jesuitical reasoning is sufficient to satisfy their consciences that this is done, not out of vanity, but from a desire to bring a still larger congregation to the fount of wisdom itself.... they are the fount of wisdom.
on only two occasions have i approached an author with a request for an interview and been refused. but i have taken care never to approach such men as thomas hardy, john galsworthy and a few others who regard their profession with too much respect to lend themselves to a practice which, at its best, is undignified, and which, at its worst, is a method of mean self-glorification.
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of “ghosting” i have done a little and seen much. i know well a very prosperous musical composer of talent who has paid me to write many articles that he has signed with his own name. you call me an accomplice? but then it was nothing to me what he did with my articles when i had written them. believe me, the practice is 108very common. the man who signs the articles furnishes the ideas: the ghost merely expresses them.
the same musical composer was commissioned a few years ago to write an orchestral work for an important musical festival. we will call him birket. either birket was too busy to write the work or he felt he had not the ability to do it; whatever the reason, he went to a friend of mine—a man of far superior gifts to his more famous colleague—and offered him a certain sum to do the work for him. my friend—foster will do for his name—consented, and the work was duly performed at the festival, conducted by birket, and i attended in my capacity as musical critic.
how eminent men who are not writers do itch to see themselves in print! it is not enough that their speeches are reported, their paintings and musical compositions criticised, their sentences recorded by every daily newspaper, their acting, singing and what not lauded to the skies: they must themselves write: or, if they cannot write, it must appear to the public that they have written. why? just vanity. that word “vanity” will explain nine-tenths of the seemingly inexplicable things in the conduct of most of our public men. a man accepts a knighthood because, as a rule, he is vain; he refuses it for the same reason; he advertises that he has refused it because he is vain; and, because he is vain, he refuses to advertise that he has refused it.
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a great deal has been written about the romance of fleet street. but romance is in a man’s mind and heart, and it is true that many romantically minded men go to fleet street. fleet street gives us a sense of importance, a sense of too much importance. we like to feel that we are powerful, but only a mere handful of men in the street have power that is worth while. what we of the rank and file write is soon forgotten, for newspaper readers are, for 109the most part, people who devour print greedily, neither masticating nor assimilating the things they devour. newspapers confuse the mind and bring it to a state of drugged apathy. did you ever meet a really voracious reader of newspapers who possessed the gift of sifting and weighing evidence, or one who had an accurate memory, or one who could think clearly and logically, or one who was not bewildered and befogged by mere words?
but even if we men in fleet street have no real power, we have what is much the same thing: we have the illusion of power. we come into close contact with people much more important than ourselves, and some of these people fawn on us, for we are the necessary intermediaries between themselves and the public.
but romance? why is fleet street romantic? well, as i have already said, it is because so many journalists themselves are romantic.... but i wonder if that really is the reason, and as i wonder i begin to think that though it is true one meets adventurous, talented and original people by the score in newspaper offices, yet, after all, it is not they who make journalism seem full of savour, of rich delight, of unexpectedness and excitement, of high romance. no; it is writing itself that is romantic: mere words and the colour and music of words; the smell of printers’ ink; the wet feel of a paper fresh from the press; the sounds of telephone bells and of machinery; the joy of expressing oneself; the lovely, great joy of signing one’s name to an article and knowing that in twenty-four hours it will have been read or glanced at by perhaps half-a-million people.... but it seems to me as i write that i am utterly failing to communicate to you who read the romantic nature of journalism. to you it is, perhaps, merely a slipshod profession, a profession in which there is something sordid and vulgar and as unromantic as monday morning. to me a man who writes with distinction is the most interesting creature in the world: i 110cannot know too much about him; i can never tire of his talk. actors bore me. so do politicians, lawyers, men of science, those who are professionally religious, doctors, musicians. but writers and financiers—especially jewish financiers—are to me full of subtlety; their souls are elusive, and their minds are cunning past all reckoning. it is frequently said that the art of writing is possessed by most people. the art of writing correctly may be, but the “correct” writer is frequently not a writer at all, for he cannot compel people to read him. a writer without readers is not a writer; he is simply a man who murmurs to himself very laboriously. but the writer who can claim thousands of readers—i mean even such writers as mr charles garvice and the lady who invented the rosary—are in essentials more highly endowed with the true writer’s gifts than many mandarins who live cloistered in oxford and cambridge. and i say this in spite of the fact that i have never been able to read more than ten consecutive pages of any book of mr garvice’s that i have picked up, and that the rosary seems to me a story of such amazing flapdoodleism that——
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arnold bennett says somewhere that living in the theatrical world is like living a story out of the arabian nights. to me fleet street is more amazing than the bazaars of cairo, more mysterious than the hermaphroditic sphinx. and perhaps one of the most amazing things about fleet street is the easy way in which many men earn money.
some years ago i was on the staff of a paper where i had for a colleague a dark blue-eyed young man who was our crime specialist. he had just come from the provinces, and had not even a rudimentary notion of how to write. he knew he couldn’t write; he boasted of it. and he cared nothing for newspapers or books or anything even remotely connected with literature. but he had an 111amazing talent for sniffing out crime. i remember a great jewel robbery which he got wind of half-a-day before anyone else, and, in a way known only to himself, he obtained full particulars of the affair, writing a half-column “story” before any other paper in the kingdom even knew there was a story to write. he entertained me vastly, and i used to go with him sometimes at night when he called at scotland yard for news. scotland yard never gives away news unless it is in its own interest to do so. but i am very much inclined to believe that it was somewhere in scotland yard that he obtained his most valuable information. we would walk down wide corridors there together, sit ten minutes in a waiting-room, interview an official who invariably said: “nothing doing to-night,” and come away. but that was quite enough for my friend. “i must go to poplar straight away,” he would say, as we came away; or perhaps: “i can just catch the last train to guildford”; or “there is nothing at all in the rumour of that murder in battersea.” i used to look at him in amazement and exclaim: “but how do you know?” “ah!” he would reply; “they say that walls have ears. but much more frequently they have tongues.”
this man was paid three pounds a week by our editor. three times out of four he was ahead of every other paper in his news, and i was not in the least surprised when one day, after he had been in london only two months, he came to me and said: “next week i am leaving you. i am going to the morning trumpet; they’re giving me five hundred pounds a year.” five months later he was getting a thousand pounds a year from a paper that never hesitates to pay handsomely for “stunts.”
i caught fire from my friend’s enthusiasm, and late one night, just when i had finished a long notice of a new play, i overheard the night editor regretting to one of the sub-editors that news of a particularly horrible murder in 112stepney had just reached the office when all the reporters were out on duty. “let me go!” i urged. “but you are in evening dress,” he objected. “never mind; send me off.” and ten minutes later i was being rushed in a taxi-cab at full speed to stepney. i found the scene of the murder—a mean little house in a mean little street. outside the house was a crowd of eager loafers, a score of reporters, and as many policemen, who, refusing to be bribed, kept us all in the street without news. however, such was my enthusiasm that i alone of all the reporters got into the house and into the cellar where the wretched woman had been butchered to death three hours earlier. i drew a hasty plan of the underground floor, interviewed a sister of the murdered woman, obtained full particulars, and then jumped into the taxi-cab to return to the office. within an hour of leaving my desk i was back again, and in another twenty minutes i had ready as vivid and thrilling a “story” as ever i hope to write. knowing that the paper was on the point of going to press, i did not, as i ought to have done, hand my copy to one of the sub-editors, but took it straight to the machines. whilst i was waiting for a proof, i was summoned to my editor’s room. he was frowning, and he looked very much perturbed.
“by the merest chance, cumberland,” he said, sternly, “i have been the means of saving the paper from heavy penalties for contempt of court.” he paused and bit his lip. “i suppose you think your murder story a most brilliant piece of work.”
“well, i certainly was under that impression, sir,” i began, “but it would seem——”
“seem!” he thundered. “you’ve got the facts, it’s true, but then all my reporters have to get the facts. the gross blunder you’ve made is, first of all, in saying that the suspected man has spent practically all his life in prison—contempt of court of the vilest description. secondly, 113you’ve said——” he enumerated no fewer than five blunders i had made. “but, worst of all,” he concluded, “you took it upon yourself to give your copy direct to the printers after midnight, thus breaking the strictest rule of this office.”
it was true. in my exciting enthusiasm i had forgotten this persian rule.
“fortunately, i came in just in time to stop your stuff. you’d better, i think, confine yourself exclusively to your dramatic criticism.”
nevertheless, he offered me, two days later, ten pounds a week to give up my dramatic criticism and general articles (for which i was at that time getting only five pounds) and devote myself to reporting—an offer which i refused, as the work would have exhausted all my time.
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it was at about this time that the idea occurred to me that a certain monthly magazine for which i had been writing regularly might, if asked, pay me at a higher rate than that which, till then, they had been giving me. so i dressed myself very carefully (clothes do help, don’t they?) and drove up to the office in a smart hansom.
“i have called about my articles,” i began, rather brusquely, to the editor, a scholarly man who knew far more about elizabethan literature than he did about human nature. “i have found just lately that i am so busy that i have resolved to give up some of my work. your magazine is one of those with which i am anxious to retain my connection, partly because my relationship with you has always been so pleasant.”
and i stopped. it is not everyone who knows the right place at which to stop in conversations of this kind. “my relationship with you has always been so pleasant” was, most indubitably, the right place.
he tried to force me into further talk by remaining 114silent himself. a clock ticked: a clock always does tick on these occasions. he coughed. i looked steadily towards the window. for a full minute there must have been silence: to me it seemed an hour; to him i have no doubt it seemed eternity.
“i think, mr cumberland, we shall be able to come to a satisfactory arrangement,” he said, when eternity had passed. “what do you say to such-and-such an amount?”
and he staggered me by mentioning a sum exactly treble the amount i had been receiving for the last two years.
as i walked into the strand, i felt a mean and disagreeable bargain-driver, but after i had lunched at simpson’s, i said to myself: “what a fool you were not to go to see him twelve months ago!”
but though many people equally as obscure as myself earn a thousand pounds a year by their pens, you must not imagine that all the men who are famous writers do likewise. by no means always does it happen that a man combines literary genius and the power of earning money, and there are many men rightly honoured in our own day whose earnings do not involve them in the payment of income tax. the faculty of making money, no matter whether it is made out of the sale of pills or poems, tripe or tragedies, is innate. no man by taking thought can add a thousand pounds a year to his income, for money is not made by thought but by intuition.
i know a man in chelsea who earns fifteen hundred pounds a year by writing what, in my schoolboy days, we called (and perhaps they are still called) “bloods.” he knocks off a cool five thousand words a day every day for three weeks, and then takes a week’s holiday—boys’ “bloods,” servant-girls’ novelettes, children’s fairy tales and newspaper serials. he is a cheerful, energetic man, whose hobbies are bull-dogs and shakespeare, and he has 115five different pen-names. for the matter of that, i use three different pseudonyms, my reason for doing this being that the editor of the spectator, say, might not accept my work if he knew i was writing at the same time for the english review (i have written for both publications), and i am doubtful if the morning post would have printed a single word of mine if the editor had been aware that i was having a thousand words a day printed in the daily citizen. some editors like what they call “versatility of thought,” others (i think rightly) distrust it.
but i can very well believe that this gossip about money appears to you very sordid. well, so it is. my final paragraph shall not be permitted to mention, or even hint at, hard cash.
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once again i return to my statement that fleet street is romantic because many of the people in it are romantic. but what is a romantic person? alas! i cannot define one. perhaps a romantic person is he whose soul is mysterious and elusive and whose mind is perturbed and exalted by a poetic vision of life. he must care little for the things that mr samuel smiles and the “get on or get out” school value so much.... no. that will not do at all, for a great many men and women who have cared a great deal for money and worldly power were romantic. nero, for example, and cleopatra, and shakespeare, and queen elizabeth, and lord verulam——
but though a romantic man may be difficult to define, he is very easy to recognise. ivan heald was incorrigibly romantic. but perhaps the most romantically minded man i met in fleet street was the journalist who went with me to athens in the very early spring of 1914. he had no right in fleet street, for he was essentially a man who preferred to do things rather than write about them. but half the men in london journalism have drifted there not so much because they have a natural aptitude for the 116work but because they are born adventurers, and the great adventure of fleet street is bound to cross the path of most roving men one day or another.
years ago there lived in london a man who wrote books and magazine stories under the name of julian croskey. he had been in the civil service in shanghai, had helped to finance and organise a rebellion, and had been turned out of china, whence he came to england to write. in 1901 i began a correspondence with croskey, who, in the meantime, had gone to canada and was living alone on a river island. though we corresponded for years, we never met, and after a time his letters began to show signs of megalomania. but there was such genius in his letters, such brooding energy, such hate of life, and, at times, such an uncanny suggestion of terrific power, that i treasured every word he wrote to me, and, when his letters ceased, something vital and something almost necessary to me passed out of my life. i do not like to believe that he ceased writing to me because i no longer interested him. i hope he still lives. i hope he will read this book. some day his letters must be published, for they constitute a problem in psychology at once fascinating, mysterious and demonic. and this man whom i never met remains to me the most romantic of all men i have met in the spirit.
