On Writing for the Club

THE CONTRIBUTORS’ CLUB.

I CONTINUE to note with great gratification in my reading of the Atlantic Monthly that there is a place left over in it, at the very end of the magazine, for Pleasant-Suppressed People. I turn to these people first, generally. They seem to me very companionable. Almost any one would be willing to be suppressed a little, I should think, to be one of them.

I am far from flattering myself that I would fit, exactly, in this gentle company, but I am in the way of having a good many anonymous sorts of things on my mind from time to time. I could do the anonymous part of it. And more than once I have caught myself wondering if The Club would not let me, also — be anonymous awhile. Then that is the end of it. Or rather it looks as if it were the end of it. But every now and then something starts me up. Before I know it, I get to feeling pleasantly suppressed about something, and sit down and write it out for The Club, promptly, — as one ought, — and put it in a drawer. I (and The Other One) enjoy the drawer, some, — probably more than we ought. The Other One every little while tries edging me along with one of these bits toward the great public precipice. Not infrequently one of them really gets a chance — an almost chance, not to be wanted for The Club. I lift it over as far as the envelope, but before I quite know what has happened it is back in the drawer again, softly appreciating itself, like all my other things. The Other One looks at me half-superior, half-rebuking. When she has things, “little things like this,” she says she “sends them right in ” (almost before she has them). Many and many a time, kind people who have read as far as this have heard her saying out in the open — things from under my bushel. Things I thought of and threw away, or as good as threw away, she has had checks for in these columns, and glory, the pleasant furtive glory that seems to come with this corner, from the right people, — people who have a right to you and who guess who you are, and who are not always guessing who you are not, and would not be for the world.

The way some people go blundering about The Contributors’ Club with their minds — people who seem to think they have a private latch-key to nearly everybody’s soul — is one of the things we have had to learn in our family. We are gradually getting used to it. The latest principle we have arrived at is, that one is really exposed more, exposed to more people for not signing things than one is for signing them. One cannot help feeling when the latest copy of the Atlantic has come in, and people are talking about it, as if one’s soul might be let out to almost anybody. It makes The Other One almost wish she had never had a soul, sometimes, anonymous or not. Often it is the other way. I will find her going about the house for days with some celebrated soul that does n’t belong to her. She will be almost bewilderingly agreeable. But it ’s a little monotonous. I like her better with just her own, even though it ’s a bit wearing at times, and I must say (and I have told her) that with some souls she gets (and likes) and goes about the house with, she makes a perfect spiritual guy of herself.

But of course this is strictly apropos of “Clubs.” She has been about to become the author of a book lately, and has retired from this little trysting place for the time being, and she has been living strictly in her own soul so long that both the pleasures and pains of anonymousness in our family just now take hold as mere memories. But the facts remain (and are not herewith suppressed). Next the book. Next time you see or suspect The Other One, in her old place, Gentle Reader, in this duly loved and doted-on corner of the literary earth, I hope that you will have read It, and that you will not have guessed who she is.