On the Club Itself

Unlike my friend the Ph.D. in Old High German, who takes all the magazines because the advertisements amuse him, by periodicals in general I am bored. Although at our Club auction I bid in the handsomely illustrated Scrarpentury Magazine, it is only in order that my sister-inlaw may cut out and frame in passepartout the green and yellow sunsets and children. When the Atlantic comes to me, however, I turn in haste to the last pages, as though it were Chinese. For months I have been studying the personality of the Contributors. Their passion for outspoken frankness fascinates me. It would black-ball them from any other club. What other good society indulges in confidences, dares to be personal, proclaims its likes and, more often, its dislikes ? For the Contributors find fault so aggressively that I often think of the epithets applied in the tale of La Main Malheureuse, to the ill-tempered cow — “ dure de pied et terriblement bien encornée” — “a kicker and a butter,” say the notes. Imagine a composite contributor. What a negative! No clock, no calendar, no time-table, no fiction, no “ precision,” no opinions. What a time of it his wife would have! No pleasant little railway trips together, — that method is “not really traveling, but simply leaving and arriving at places.” No exhilarating automobile ride for them, — that is “ not even a human experience, but merely a hiatus.” He never takes her to see Irving or Julia Marlowe, — the stage settings are too beautiful; nor to hear Wagner, — it is always Mozart. He ruins her gowns by huge pockets. She cannot console herself with a garden, because he knows so many “disagreeable people who have loved plants.” She cannot collect autographs, nor go to rummage sales, nor join women’s clubs. Instead, she must serve him as amanuensis, — he will not use a typewriter. She cannot have a washday, — it is too depressing; so she must lead her handmaidens to the brook, and there poetically douse his union suits and outing shirts. She cannot send him to the grocer’s for a tinfoil yeast cake, but must bring liquid by the pitcherful from a brewery. (Will she then retain that “diabolic desire to have been the descendant of a Milwaukee beer brewer ? ”) Though they live in a New York flat, instead of the “ delectable farmhouse ” that he would prefer, they must have a wood - shed where he can hunt for string. And all the while she knows that he is not satisfied, with her or with life; that he is wishing he had married her in haste so that he could repent at leisure. She knows that he is miserably longing for “that amputated joy of being, — that old wild joy of swinging by a tail from bough to bough, where the cocoanuts grow, and the parrots scream.” O, go there, my Composite, — that is the only fit place for you!

But courage! the Composite exists not! And as individuals, the Contributors have redeeming qualities. They are delicately humorous, daringly original, subtly analytic, to the point of discriminating gray from grey. They have a literary timbre of their own. To them are traceable signs of a new school of essayists, a school untrammeled by the precedent of Bacon’s stately dignity or Lamb’s gentle sentiment. Though they never say what they mean, they always mean what they say. I long to hear more of their opinions. I take a friendly interest in them. I want to know whether Applebarrel has had another poem accepted, whether the harried matron has read The Quiet Life yet, and who is the successor of Johann Rübernek of Prague. How sociable it would be to see a contribution with the significant signature “Compressed Yeast,” “New Zealand,” “Pilgrim Father,” or “Camera Obscura.”

It is my pride and consolation that I belong to the Contributors’ Club, — at least in the Emersonian sense. My offerings may be rejected, but in spirit I am a contributor. By companions in the flesh I am snubbed, patronized, avoided, called intellectual, — what o’ that ? We contributors are of the aristocracy.

When I am in Boston I walk softly up Park Street, gaze secretly at the sign “ Editorial Rooms — Upstairs.” If it only said, “ Walk upstairs! ” When a wearisome little journey conducts me from the South to the North station; when my nerves, strung up on an Elevated platform or entombed in the Subway, are being crushed beneath endless hideous roaring wheels, if then my throbbing eyeballs turn mayhap to a magazine stand, there they meet, among the gaudy covers, the familiar front; plain, even homely; yellow “like ripe corn,” — rather, like pumpkin pie in that spiced custard state before it enters the oven, — the color of harvest, suggesting rich intellectual sheaves; a cheering reminder to the traveler that this awful transit may end in time, and life once more, in some quiet library, sparkle with the wit and glow with the wisdom of the Contributors’ Club.

For comment on the contributors to this number, see advertising pages 31 and 32.