Back Bay Landfall

I

JUST as the nineteenth century was about to make way for the twentieth that master of imagery and phrase, John Jay Chapman, tossed off a picture of Boston on a bright June day: ‘Charming town this on a day like this — all smiling, gay, cheap, and cheerful, like Emerson in a straw hat on a steamboat landing.'

So it was that Boston looked. The trees, the streets, the people, the ponds and tidal waters, all shone for the visitor in a gleaming light. It was during and just before the nineties that, as a newcomer from Pennsylvania and Rhode Island, I was making my earliest acquaintance with the place. Its outward aspects, to a voyager first landing on its shores, shine back to him now very much as Chapman depicted them. There were besides the inward aspects, represented by persons, interests, and ways of life. New friends and paths that have become familiar grew by degrees into precious possessions. As a local neophyte I had much to learn, and I began to learn it in the editorial office of the lamented Youth’s Companion.

It was to Horace E. Scudder, editor of the Atlantic Monthly, prompted by Professor Child of Harvard, that I owed my introduction to what Louise Imogen Guiney used to call ' the star-bright Companion of my Youth.’ Mr. Scudder must have looked upon my five years of apprenticeship there as a sufficient preparation for service in his own office. Almost at the moment of his asking me to join him, a similar invitation came from the Harpers office in New York. Richard Harding Davis, a classmate at Lehigh, then associated with the Harper publications, was the bearer of it. My conversion into a Bostonian must have been well under way by that time. Had I yielded to the siren voice of New York, perhaps not so persuasive to the young of fifty years ago as it has since become, I wonder what would have befallen me. Who can guess what would come home to any man’s business and bosom if at any parting of the ways he had chosen the path he did not take? I have had every reason to be thankful for staying where circumstances had placed me.

Before my entrance into the office of Houghton, Mifflin and Company, it was necessary to have a clinching interview with Henry O. Houghton, the head of the firm. He seemed to me venerable and formidable beyond words. It happened that he had just returned from lunch in the state of somnolence to which men of seventy are subject at such a moment. This was a bad time for one whose speech was never too fluent and under embarrassing conditions might suffer intervals of complete suspension. In one of these intervals, when my future employer was waiting for my next word, I was horrified to observe that he had fallen asleep. Here was a predicament indeed. Should the first motion of an Industrious Apprentice take the form of waking up a nodding Master? Should one cough, or drop a book, or utter any cry for help? Luckily I held my peace, could soon say to myself, ' Listen, the mighty Being is awake,’ and depart in assurance of a salary I was glad to accept.

My new chief, Horace E. Scudder, was one of the best, and busiest, of men, the soul of kindness to his helpers and contributors, including especially the aspiring young, and a very model of ceaseless industry. I had not been long in the room at 4 Park Street adjoining his own when he entered it one day heavily laden with unbound books bulging from his arms. These he disposed on the top of my desk — one of those ‘roll-top’ affairs now on the way to becoming curiosities — and said, ‘Here are eleven volumes of a new edition of Thoreau. I always like to keep a little knitting-work on hand — and here is some for you. In your odd moments please make a general index for these volumes.’ A more congenial chore was the production every month of a considerable portion of the department ‘Comment on New Books,’ consisting of miniature reviews. There was, of course, the constant reading of manuscripts, solicited or volunteered. There were no such moments of gayety as the more naive offerings to the Companion had provided; but Sarah Orne Jewett, ‘Charles Egbert Craddock,’ Margaret Deland, Gilbert Parker, William Wetmore Story, St. Loe Strachey, and a host of others soon joined my growing company of manuscript acquaintances, and some of them, especially Miss Jewett, became much more.

I cannot forget the surprise with which I looked first upon the receptacle used by Mr. Scudder for manuscripts awaiting publication. It was nothing more or less than a tin breadbox, a striking emblem of contrast between the long-range provision of the Youth’s Companion, with its vast cabinets, and the methods of a magazine aiming at the immediate interest of thoughtful readers. In place, moreover, of the staff of more than twenty editors, there were, concerned primarily with the magazine, only Mr. Scudder, the amazingly erudite and conservative Miss Susan M. Francis, firm in the traditions of previous editors, and myself. It would have taken an uncommonly stupid youngster to learn nothing from this situation.

One minor incident gave clear enough proof that the youngster in me survived the proper bounds of time. At the entrance to the office at Number 4 (reduced much later to 2) Park Street, there was a black book, with vertical rulings in which every employee of the firm was expected to enter the hours of his arrival in the morning, his exit and entrance at lunchtime, his departure in the afternoon — merely an anticipation of the factory time clock. The demon of impudence prompted me one day to turn the blank page at the beginning of this book into a title page, on which I made bold to wrrite, ‘The Short but Simple Annals of the Poor.’ Somehow I suffered no penalty for this performance, but, if my memory is not at fault, the book of hours passed before long out of use.

II

There was a short-lived club of this period of which I must make a brief, and perhaps the only, record. My Harvard classmate George P. Baker, beginning his teaching career in the English Department at Harvard, brought it into being, as the earliest token, I believe, of his lifelong devotion to the drama. Its name, the Mermaid Club, suggested its purpose — to cultivate a serious interest in the stage. George Santayana, Norman Hapgood, Robert Herrick, H. T. Parker, Jefferson B. Fletcher, and George R. Carpenter were among its few members. We met at Baker’s rooms in Gray’s Hall, and gave ear to each other’s papers and talks. I was guilty myself of two little offerings — pale in comparison with a paper on Ibsen by Carpenter, whose untimely death not many years later was to cut short his brilliant career at Columbia. I believe this paper, printed in Scribner ‘s Magazine for April 1889, was the first conspicuous American recognition of the great Norwegian — even as an article of Baker’s in the Harvard Monthly of June 1887 had appeared as the first important study of George Meredith in America. The young editors of the Monthly, as nearly all the Mermaiders had once been, were wide-awake to the ‘newness’ of their time.

The Longwood Cricket Club afforded the exercise of tennis. For a while there was the Papyrus Club, which took its bohemianism a little too seriously, and the Puritan Club, which did the same with its youthful respectability: I learned about Boston from them. Simultaneously with entering the Atlantic office came the good fortune of election to the Tavern Club, which has been for nearly fifty years the focus of masculine society and friendship to which I owe more of what President Eliot liked to call ' durable satisfaction’ than any other social organization of its kind could have afforded.

Not restricting myself to the nineties, let me speak of a few of the friends who made the Tavern Club, when I was first coming to know it, so engaging a place. Among them was Winthrop Ames. In this club, between his undergraduate experience of Hasty Pudding Club theatricals in Cambridge and his professional beginnings as manager of the Castle Square Theatre in Boston, he put his talent for the stage to lively uses. Before and ever since Ames was secretary of the Club, it has always applied itself with some seriousness to the production of plays, usually written by members. Under the management of Winthrop Ames the prologue preceding and the play following the Christmas dinner took on a beauty and distinction which have always seemed to those of us who had anything to do with them vivid foreshadowings of what our gifted and fascinating friend was yet to contribute to the New York theatre. His later success excited no vestige of surprise in the Tavern Club, even in its most stageminded member, George Baker, then of Harvard, later of Yale.

A few of us who used to outstay the rest of the company at Tavern Club dinners acquired a name of Ames’s coinage — the Aurora Club. This little band came to have dinners of its own, and one of them I recall especially by reason of my reluctant absence from it. Shortly before the dinner hour I had to send word that a sudden attack of laryngitis must keep me at home. Late in my unexciting evening in Brimmer Street, my doorbell rang. Answering its summons, I found on the doorstep a messenger bearing a large lemon bedecked with bright ribbons. The boy announced that it had been sent to me from the Tavern Club, adding that he had just made a mistake in ringing the bell of the house next door. A large man had opened it, he said, and had expressed surprise and indignation at the offer of such a tribute so late at night. ‘That,’ he declared with scorn, ‘must be meant for Mr. Howe, at Number 26.’

Of course the ironic gift had sprung from the imagination of Winthrop Ames, who would have taken vastly more pleasure in his idea if he could only have known in advance that the lemon would be offered first to my neighbor, the Reverend Father Van Allen, Rector of the Church of the Advent. I have always been reconciled to missing that particular dinner. Before long I had to get used to missing Winthrop Ames himself. An occasional meeting in New York, rewarding as it always was, did not begin to compensate one for his quitting Boston, where, to be sure, there is no blinking the fact that he could never have made the career he achieved in New York.

He was not a member of the Tavern Club when I made my timid entrance to it, much impressed by the figures that met for lunch and dinner at its round table. Reverend seniors they seemed to me, though few of them could have got beyond forty — Robert Grant, Barrett Wendell, Russell Sullivan, a number of doctors in the apostolic succession in which Harvey Cushing and Hans Zinsser were to take their later places, about an equal number of architects, soon to be joined by that best of friends, Henry Forbes Bigelow, the Adamowski brothers and other musicians, Gaugengigl and other painters. I thought them an extraordinary galaxy, and in all their number none seemed more extraordinary than Richard Hodgson, the voluble, warm-hearted Australian-English bachelor who had exposed Madame Blavatsky in India, and then, as the American representative of the English Society of Psychical Research, was holding and reporting those sessions with the spiritistic medium, Mrs. Piper, with which Boston was for the moment agog. The Tavern Club was a centre for the resulting talk, pro and con — as it became also of the controversy which ended so unhappily for Boston in the lodgment of MacMonnies’s ’Bacchante’ in Brooklyn instead of in the courtyard of the new Public Library on Copley Square.

I wish I could record the rallying of all the more influential members of the Club to the only sensible side of that tempestuous issue in the Boston teapot. Where Hodgson stood in this matter I do not remember, but I am sure he held a positive opinion and expressed it emphatically. Vigor in all things was his distinctive quality. In summer he was addicted to long swims, in winter to the game of handball. Playing it one December afternoon of 1905 at the Union Boat Club, ignoring as usual the intimations of an ailing heart, he dropped dead. The Tavern Club had been so much his home that its officers — the nearest counterpart in America to a family of his own — decided to hold his funeral in the upper room of the Club, where he had himself enjoyed the blessing of so much pleasure, both given and received. The rector of a neighboring Episcopal church read the service, members of the Club sang, as a sort of requiem, the club song, ‘ Meum est propositum in taberna mori.’ It was a masculine farewell to the manliest of men — a service which no participant in it could ever forget.

III

The Boston Breakfast-Table of Dr. Holmes was, so to speak, on its last legs when my conversion into a Bostonian began. Of its surviving equivalents I had some experience before joining the clubs I have mentioned. There were no ‘quick’ or ‘strong-arm’ lunches in those days — and no drugstores with books and food in their pharmacies. Only the opulent could frequent hotels and the few restaurants of the better sort. There was, however, a small room known as the ‘Hole-in-the-Ground,’ under an apartment house on Mt. Vernon Street near Charles, where William Dixon, a Negro, magnified in our eyes as the brother of a prize-fighting ‘Coffee-Cooler,’ provided what Calverley called ‘ light and salutary meals.’ With my brother Wallis, beginning the study and practice of architecture, I lodged for several years over Clough and Shackley’s drugstore, then on Charles Street just behind its present location, and to the ‘Hole-in-theGround’ we resorted for sustenance.

It was at Dixon’s little restaurant that ‘Cope’ — the appellation I have always maintained for Charles Townsend Copeland against the mounting tide of ‘Copcy’ — first crossed my path. He seemed then as far away from the Boylston Professorship of Rhetoric and Oratory at Harvard as another irregular patron of the ‘Hole-in-the-Ground,’ a young lawyer named Louis D. Brandeis, seemed from the Supreme Court of the United States. There were other young men of interest and obvious promise, among them Brandeis’s law partner, George R. Nutter. It was Copeland, however, who seemed most nearly unique. Perhaps he would have been a revelation to anyone in his twenties whose friends had conformed in general with conventional patterns. Certainly he was a revelation to me, falling heir as I did to an intimacy he established first with my brother Wallis. ’Babble on, sweet child,’ he used to say to that beginner in architecture whose witty observations were the more amusing to him for the hesitating speech which made brothers of us in more than the common sense.

Copeland at this time was associated with the Boston Post, which then divided with the still ‘respectable daily,’ the Advertiser (‘good for a week back’), the attention of intelligent readers of the morning papers. The editor, Edwin M. Bacon, was a man of learning and cultivation, and maintained a column, ‘The Taverner,’ to which Copeland was a frequent contributor. His chief task was that of a literary and dramatic critic. New books and plays held naturally a large place in his talk, and tickets for opening nights, with this exciting companion, were frequently in his gift. There was at least one young representative of feminine Boston who was so little bound by the conventions of the time and place that he could secure her company for ‘the play,’ as he liked to call it, more often than my brother’s or my own. Through this early knowledge of him, my wife-that-was-to-be discovered his gift for reading aloud, and it is only fair to credit her with having assembled, in her parents’ house on Charles Street, the first audience for one of those ‘Copeland Readings’ which were later to become classic institutions at Harvard and elsewhere.

The wholehearted friend and good companion of Copeland’s journalistic days is the ‘Cope’ that I like especially to recall. Late at night my name would sometimes ring out from the sidewalk below the window of my lodgings on Mt. Vernon Street. When I thrust out my head the voice which has been so often — and often so badly — imitated would issue its summons: ‘Come down to the Adams House and eat things.’ To my reply, ‘Too late, Cope, I must go to bed,’ I can hear now the melancholy rejoinder, ‘You do not love me any more!’ There was good reason to wonder what the neighbors made of this tragic parting word. His desire to ‘eat things,’ especially at hours impossible for any worker at an office desk, won him my nickname of ‘Edax Rerum.’ Perhaps some of the neighbors, even in Boston, would have wondered at that also. Nor could they have guessed what capacities of friendship, what wells of feeling, moved about Beacon Hill in the person of the slowly perambulating Copeland.

IV

While I was coming thus to form one friendship that was to stretch far into the future, another, terminated only by the death of Robert A. Woods in 1925, was beginning. Precisely how and where my path first crossed his I do not remember. He had graduated at Amherst in the class corresponding with mine at Lehigh, had studied theology at. Andover, and, greatly influenced by the teachings of Dr. William J. Tucker, afterwards president of Dartmouth, had gone to London and spent a life-directing year of apprenticeship in ‘settlement work ‘ under Canon Barnett at Toynbee Hall. This, in the late eighties, was the pioneer enterprise of its kind — the forerunner of Hull House in Chicago, the Henry Street Settlement in New York, and Andover House (now for many years the South End House) in Boston. Woods was establishing Andover House when I first came to know him. He impressed me at once as the most sincere and genuine of lay priests in the religion of human relations. Both he and the path he was blazing appealed so strongly to my imagination that he had little difficulty in persuading me to pay evening visits to ‘the House’ as a helper in its various activities.

Except for inducing one or two others to join me in this undertaking —especially MacGregor Jenkins of the Atlantic Monthly and my brother Wallis — I am afraid I contributed pitifully little to the conduct of the boys’ clubs, the dramatics, and other bridges between the neighborhood and its invaders. One distinction I may claim as a consequence of the association with Robert Woods. This was that he gave to his first, book about social settlements the title The City Wilderness, acknowledged in his preface as borrowed from a review of Hull House Maps and Papers in the Atlantic Monthly for January 1896, written by me and headed ‘Settlers in the City Wilderness.’

If I gave little to ‘the House’ and to what Woods liked humorously to call ‘the work,’ I got much from it, chiefly through the extension of my social sympathies. This came to pass most of all through my spending approximately the first three months of 1893 as a resident of the House, quitting entirely for the time the slopes of Beacon Hill but continuing my daytime labors in the office of the Youth’s Companion. Soon after Woods’s death I contributed to the South End Sun of February 27, 1925 a brief article about him, upon which I draw for the three paragraphs immediately following.

There were some half-dozen of us at the Andover House, graduates of Amherst, Princeton, and other colleges, who, on the face of it, appeared to have little in common. But there was Woods — not yet thirty, and probably as old as any of us — as the unifying leader of the little band. What one remembers most clearly about him is the quietly dominating religious spirit in which all his work was done. The tokens of this spirit, were in no wise obtrusive, yet reminding you by this or that manifestation that it was his controlling impulse. You simply felt it without a word or deed of reminder. Within the house the ‘quaint companions’ in residence, with their austere New England housekeeper, looked upon him not only as the mainspring of their daily effort in a common cause but also as the connecting link with all the world of neighbors about them. He was entering into their lives as into ours, and in a real sense making one thing of it all. The neighbors must have realized it as clearly as we did, though neither they nor we were putting it into words.

The activities of the House that winter were rudimentary in comparison with those of later years. We who devoted our evenings to these enterprises must remember what, the benign, humorous, friendly, understanding presence of Robert Woods contributed to every gathering ho joined.

But it was in the more intimate circle of the residents, particularly in talk at the table or when the day’s work was done, that the real man most truly revealed himself. The immediate problem of the moment never blinded him to the greater problems of the future. Dealing constantly with questions pressing for answers on the spot, he kept the great generalization to which every answer must relate itself constantly before him. From the first he represented that best type of idealist whose chief and permanent concern is with the deepest realities.

The social settlement, with all its familiar attempts at give-and-take in the life of huddled communities, is now so much a matter of course that the novelty of it fifty years ago is hard to recapture. The strangeness of it then is suggested by one memory that has remained with me. While Woods and I were seeing much of each other he went with me to Bristol in the early nineties for a summer week-end under my father’s roof. Then about eighty-five, my father was in many habits of mind essentially a pre-Civil War man. Of course he recognized the goodness, intelligence, and, I may say, consecration of my friend. Taking me aside, however, he asked me to explain just what Woods was doing in Boston. I made it as clear as I could, only to have my father, quite baffled, respond, ‘And you say he is not a minister of the gospel? I don’t understand — I don’t understand.’ I shudder to think what he would have made of thc social, economic, and religious views of some of his grandchildren, to say nothing of his sons, could he have looked ahead as clearly as he could look back. Woods himself was always looking ahead. ’I work by the decade,’ he once wrote, ‘not by the year.’

V

The few months at Andover House preceded immediately my entering the Atlantic office. I was nearing the end of my twenties, and the future looked reasonably bright. The editor under whom I went to work gave me before long a small publication of his own, An English Interpreter, a Sketch of Frederic James Shields, on the flyleaf of which he wrote in his beautiful script, ‘H. E. Scudder to his Understudy.’ There were other encouragements. Before the end of 1893 I produced a small pamphlet, privately printed, which for me possesses two distinctions. To bibliophiles the greater of these will appear the fact that it stands Number 2 on the long list of imprints of D. B. Updike, which were soon to give the Merrymount Press its world-wide fame. (Time seemed to have swung full circle when, forty-six years after this first venture, the latest of my many books, Holmes of the Breakfast-Table, stands high, numerically, in the hundreds of books on the Merrymount Press list.)

The second distinction, in my own eyes, was the title, Rari Nantes. The Virgilian term might never have occurred to me but for my father’s frequent quoting of ‘Rari nantes in gurgite vasto’ as he ladled oysters out of a large soup tureen. Whatever its source, I have always thought this first title of mine — for a minuscular book of minor verses — a happy choice; and I held to this belief even when the lady to whom Rari Nantes was covertly dedicated liked in later years to designate it by her own ironic translation, ‘Rare Nuggets.’ The most cheering thing about it at the time was that the kind Mr. Scudder, my chief in Park Street, to whom I gave a copy of the pamphlet, countered with a photograph of himself, on the back of which he had written: —

Inscribed to the Author of Rari Nantes

Here indeed I could feel that I had a friend at court.

It was a time when the last of the older and more impressive figures in New England letters were disappearing. The younger writers who would have enjoyed stepping into their shoes were with a few exceptions, like Robert Grant and Barrett Wendell, a less authentic coinage of the Boston mint than their predecessors. The transient Howells and Aldrich had New York before and behind them. The Boston publishing houses were not maintaining that identification of interest between publisher and writer which had made the firm of Ticknor and Fields so vital a factor in the sustenance of letters, and the local authors were entrusting their fortunes more and more to New York publishers. The tradition of the older writers was nevertheless strong, and those whose tastes and standards were formed, like mine, under its influence could not but carry into the day that was dawning much from the day then waning. It was a little like receiving an education on both sides of the Atlantic, with its consequent tendency, for good or ill, to split the national infinitive. There are accidents of time as well as of place in such matters.

One of the happy accidents of this period resulted from Copeland’s addiction to making his younger friends known to his older. It was he who led me first to the hospitable door of Mrs. James T. Fields, the widow of the publisher whose generous ways promoted the cohesion that made the ‘New England group’ of writers so definite a unit. Fields himself had died about ten years before I first entered the house on Charles Street in which Mrs. Fields was continuing, in what Henry James called her ‘ waterside museum,’ the hospitalities for which it had long been famous. Copeland used to call her ‘Clytie’ — not to her autumnal face, which kept much of its springtime beauty — and indeed there was in her personality and its setting something of the Grecian quality which gave one to understand why Boston used to be culled an American Athens.

For Copeland, as a son of Maine, and for many others, the house in Charles Street held a second magnet in the person of Sarah Orne Jewett — who spent, with her alter ego Mrs. Fields, either in Boston or at Manchester-by-the-Sea, all the months in which she could separate herself from her own abode in South Berwick, Maine. In these two ladies the charms of the classical and the continuing New England were singularly united. Old England also was largely present in the books and manuscripts, the pictures on the walls, the dining-room chairs that once belonged to the Duke of Ormonde and were bought in London under the guidance of Charles Dickens. The American past was brought into what was then the present by Mrs. Fields’s habitual references to her friends of former days as ‘Mr. Emerson,’ ‘Mr. Longfellow,’ and all the rest—excepting possibly Hawthorne, whose name, as I recall her use of it, seemed never to need a handle. Besides these ghosts there were many living presences — Louise Imogen Guiney, Willa Cather, Madame Blanc (‘Th. Bentzon’), George Edward Woodberry, Thomas Bailey Aldrich, and such relative ancients as Charles Dudley Warner and that vigorous old Chicago parson, Robert Collyer.

The feminine segment of the circle may have been a little excessive, and there were grounds for a feeling that the precious and the rarefied did something to the atmosphere. Long before meeting Mrs. Fields I had heard from a Harvard classmate the profane breakfast-table story of her saying to her husband, when a crumb of toast lodged in his abundant beard, ‘Jamie, there is a gazelle in the garden.’ It would be a pity to lose such an anecdote, apocryphal, or deliberately jocose, as my later knowledge of Mrs. Fields, with her surely saving grace of humor, compels me to believe it. For, whatever of the feminine and the esoteric there may have been in all these surroundings, there was a full appreciation of masculine likings for the best of substantial food and pleasant wines, and above all there was the heartiest of constant, generous friendship.

The hospitalities of 148 Charles Street, now long demolished, and of ‘Thunderbolt Hill’ at Manchester led not only into warm personal relations with both Mrs. Fields and Miss Jewett, joined with editorial relations, but into stimulating and educative contacts with much that still survived from the authentic Boston which Mrs. Fields’s dear friend and one-time neighbor, Dr. Holmes, had made known to the world over his Breakfast-Table. It was in the house of Mrs. Fields, by the way, that I heard Rufus Choate’s daughter, Mrs. Bell, many of whose witty sayings have become classics in Boston, repeat a remark that Dr. Holmes had made to her: ‘The joke about my saying that the dome of the Boston State House is the hub of the solar system is not the saying itself, but the fact that I really believed it.’

When Mrs. Fields died in 1915, I remembered that she had spoken more than once, though somewhat vaguely, of leaving her papers to me. She had shown me from time to time a large cabinet in the reception room near the front door — a room, by the way, in which a landscape of Edward Lear’s adorned one of the walls. The cabinet was packed with letters from everybody who was anybody in the Victorian world, from Dickens and Browning in England, from Emerson, Holmes, and all the greater and lesser Victorians of America. In due time this cabinet was transferred from Charles to Brimmer Street, where I lived, and with it came many manuscript notebooks in which Mrs. Fields had depicted the varied daily life in which through some decades she had played a vividly observant part. The contents of the cabinet are now lodged in the Huntington Library at San Marino, California, the notebooks with the Massachusetts Historical Society; but they did not leave my hands till I had drawn from them a book, Memories of a Hostess (1922), in which I had observed Mrs. Fields’s wish that no biography of herself should be prepared. As a ‘Chronicle of Eminent Friendships’ it undertook to reproduce the panorama of scenes and personalities of which the talk of Mrs. Fields and Miss Jewett had given me so many retrospective glimpses. Thanks to the material entrusted to me for this use, and to the enduring interest in figures that emerge from it, the book, abundantly illustrated, made a public appeal surpassing that of any other that bears my name, and is still the subject of frequent letters of inquiry from students of American literature.

And here, finally, is a priceless letter written soon after the book was published but never sent to me, or seen by me, until some fifteen years had passed. I should not have seen it then had I not happened to become the biographer of John Jay Chapman. Among the mass of letters placed in my hands by his widow was one to her enclosing the following letter to me, written with an evident relish of amusement on Chapman’s part, but striking him, when written, as calculated to amuse his wife more than me. Here he was mistaken, as perhaps I was in yielding to Mrs. Chapman’s feeling that in my biography of her husband it would be a superfluous illustration of the pleasure he took in abusing his friends. Perhaps after all it does not belong so much to his story as to mine. Here, in any case, is the pertinent — or impertinent — greater portion of it. Since Chapman had the first word in this paper, let him have also the last.

November 28, 1922
DEAR MARK: -
... In endeavoring to lengthen out a lonesome meal I dipped into Mrs. Fields — and looked at the illustrations. Well, I must say, Mark, I never saw a book that on first glance seemed to have less venom in it. People will read more uninteresting facts about deceased authors than they can bear on any other subject — a weakness which you have preyed upon, you villain. Now please do what I say —and I’ll write a memoir of you. Get a big pine box and put in it the contents of your wastepaper basket the day you receive this (the mail of the master craftsman) also a piece of your shaving soap; photograph of the view from your back window; some verses you were ashamed — even you — to print — which were written by Thomas Bailey Aldrich on a pancake; this letter; anything you find on Brimmer Street on your walk to the Atlantic Monthly Press; a pen and ink drawing of Ellery Sedgwick posting a letter containing a cheque to a contributor (the cheque is indicated by Ellery’s heroic expression); a portrait of Arlo Bates; a visiting card left by a man you didn’t know — very old fashioned — this to be mounted on a full page and entitled How our ancestors did it — and — you see the idea; — but fill the box. I will write the letterpress. I think I should call the volume — [word scratched out and undecipherable] and O my! if I don’t give you a send off! ... I think I shall call the volume ‘Whiffs of literature.’ . . .
Yours affectionately,
JACK
P.S. It just occurs to me that the letterpress of your book may be good.