A Year to Remember Read online

  Many people did lose a lot of money. But was it real money? Was it capital on the interest of which a way of life was built? I have heard men and women now in their fifties talk of being ‘children of the depression’. What exactly does that mean? A holiday to Europe cancelled; a move into a smaller flat; a mortgage closed; payments not kept up on a car or house? I have heard stories of the unemployed riding on freight cars across the country. There were queues for the soup kitchens in Times Square. There were the apples for the unemployed on sale at five cents a piece. Janet Post used to put them on her cocktail tray with canapés stuck into them on toothpicks. One of her friends said ‘Should you be doing that? Aren’t they for the unemployed?’ But then there were the unemployed in England. There was the march of the Welsh miners. Usually someone was having a bad time somewhere and the social conscience had not yet got adjusted to a feeling that everyone was entitled to a good time: that poverty was not a misfortune but a crime committed by the state. But mainly, primarily, the distinctive feature about the depression in New York in January 1931 was that it was not depressing. It was dramatic, to be discussed eagerly, with voices raised if need be.

  It was hard to tell how serious was its effect upon the book trade. In the previous summer Farrar and Rinehart and one or two other publishers had made the experiment of issuing new novels in hard covers at a dollar. The experiment did not work and was soon abandoned. But did it involve Farrar and Rinehart in a heavy loss? ‘One thing breaks even with another,’ was John’s view of it. Was it a case of Chinese profit – the Chinese merchant who complains that he has had a wretched year; that he has lost a million dollars. He had expected his trading to show a profit of seven million dollars. He has only shown one of six.

  The theatre in New York – as happens so often in difficult times – was doing well, and there were some fine plays on the boards. Green Pastures, Once in a Lifetime, Grand Hotel, Private Lives, The Greeks had a Word for It, Tomorrow and Tomorrow, Lysistrata, On the Spot. Magazines were not paying the high prices that they had three years before, and editors were tending to use the stories that they had in their inventories. But there were a great many magazines on the market. A reasonable story found a purchaser. Most of the writers I was meeting were managing well enough. But the great thing about it all was the dramatic tension that New York always manages to produce. Whenever I go there, I feel that I am having my batteries recharged. People are interested in what their friends are doing. You become interested in your own work again. It is probably because of our climate, that we English wear a defensive armour of apathy. You lay elaborate plans for a garden party, for a cricket match, a picnic. At the moment of writing this section I am laying plans so that I shall watch the Test Match at Lord’s in June 1975, but it is pointless of me to get excited over it: as likely as not the match will be spoilt by rain as were the matches against Australia in 1964, and 1968. The English have to be phlegmatic. In New York where the climate swings from one extreme to another, only a mercurial temperament can stand the strain. You have to let yourself swing. That was the thing about the depression in New York. It was not depressing.

  Prohibition added to the dramatic atmosphere of the day’s routine. Every drink was an adventure; every drink was a protest against an outrageous imposition of authority. There was a growing feeling too that authority was beginning to doubt the wisdom of the Volstead Act. When the stock market was booming, it was not illogical to attribute prosperity to prohibition. There were no black Mondays nowadays. A man did a full week’s work, and anyhow prohibition was better than no drink at all. But now there was not enough work to keep a man occupied for half a week; gangsters were in control of civic management; bootleggers were running the country; the young were ruining their health. Protests grew stronger. Voices of hope were raised.

  The New Yorker’s ‘Talk of the Town’ reported that ‘a cordial letter, lying open on our desk from Berry Bros. & Co. of 3 St James’s Street, London, has been responsible for the low fever we’ve been running all week. The letter says that Berry Bros, have noticed that changes were taking place in the Prohibition law over here and that they hope in a few years wines will be restored to American cellars. With that in mind they wonder if we wouldn’t like to buy some wines and whiskys to be kept in England until they could be legally imported. Rarely has our spirit been swept upward higher in the realms of pure fancy. In fact we were so carried away that we began making all sorts of plans, including the presentation of a bottle of synthetic gin to the museum of the City of New York.’

  Each highball was not only a gesture of defiance, but a symbol of imminent victory. With the economy in the condition that it was, the country could not afford prohibition, and episodes like the St Valentine’s Day Massacre were getting the country a bad name. A great deal of one’s talk turned on alcohol. One after another the guests at an evening party would embark on a saga of their previous evening’s drinking. ‘First of all, we went to that Italian place on W 48. You know the one, between 7th and 8th. We had a couple of daiquiris, but Jack said they were too sweet, so we went a block across to Tony’s and they certainly were drier there. So we had a couple then Maggie said she was feeling hungry, but Frank said No, they must try Mario’s first.’

  On and on it went and the audience would be genuinely interested, interjecting appropriate comments and enquiries; then when one saga was rounded off, the next member of the party would start in with ‘Well, I’ll tell you what happened to me. . . .’ After the last traveller had told his story, the comparison of hangovers would begin. Was it best to take a prairie oyster before you went to sleep or start right in next morning with a pick-me-up? Everyone drank a great deal too much and much of it was deleterious stuff. During my last days Elinor said to me, ‘I’m glad that you are leaving next week.’ It was a shock. I had hoped that she would miss me. ‘If you stayed on here, drinking all this bootleg gin, you’d have a stomach ulcer by September,’ and indeed not so many of the men I drank with then are still around, and those that are, are, for the most part, alcoholics anonymous.

  A large proportion of The New Yorker magazine jokes turned on alcohol. The New Yorker was in its sixth year. It was the new thing and its vitality and originality added considerably to the gaiety of New York life. How eagerly I went out each Friday morning to the bookstalls. It was presenting to the public a whole group of new writers and artists who were making a more powerful impact as a team than they had as individuals – Ogden Nash, Thurber, Wolcott Gibbs, John O’Hara, Peter Arno, Soglow, Helen Hokinson. There was a family atmosphere about the magazine. Dorothy Parker was sitting in on the drama page for Robert Benchley who was in Hollywood. At the end of her column she would include in italics, Personal Robert Benchley. Please come home. Nothing is forgiven, or, R.B. Please come home. A joke’s a joke. When The New Yorker was making such blithe fun of the current scene, it was impossible to take the depression too seriously. Garrett Price’s picture of the city tycoon saying to a meek petitioner ‘When you are asking for a raise now, you are attacking American business. You wouldn’t attack American business, would you, Smith?’ contrasted with Helen Hokinson’s club-woman’s squeak, ‘A baby right here on Park Avenue. What an amazing city.’

  Wolcott Gibbs in an obituary paragraph on Helen Morgan, which he printed later in Season in the Sun, said how her death brought back ‘all the dark illicit little rooms we used to sit in full of love for our fellow law-breakers, full of large theories about nothing, full of juniper berries and glycerine.’ He would, he said, be ‘missing her songs, just as we have long missed all the other things that went with them, the chained and mysterious door, the proprietor reputed to be a celebrated gunman.’

  There was a genuine romance about those speakeasies. But oddly enough the speakeasy of which I have the warmest memories is one that had no ritual of chains and protective gunmen. It stood wide open to the street. It was called then, as it is called today, the Passy, and its appearance has not changed; though in those days it ha
d no canopy. You walked straight in, without being questioned. It served good cocktails, good wine and a variety of liqueurs. When Michael Arlen visited New York in 1931, it was there that I invited him to meet Elinor Sherwin, and Selma Robinson, then publicity greyhound for the Literary Guild, who is still (I am glad to say) very much around. I never knew how the place was protected. When I returned in 1936 it was to find the same brisk head waiter there.

  In the middle of January I began a lecture tour under the auspices of W. Colston Leigh. The belief was generally held, in England in the ’20s, that there was a great deal of money to be made on the lecture platform in the U.S.A. There may have been in the early ’20s, but by the end of the decade English lecturers had ruined the market by their casualness and patronising manners. Certainly there was not much left in 1931; at any rate for me. I was at Leigh’s behest for ten weeks. He paid me an advance of $1,000. He took half of the fee that he received from the society to which I lectured. He paid my travel expenses, first class. But not my hotel bills. He arranged seven or eight lectures for me. I went as far west as Grand Rapids and as far north as Portland, Maine. The highest fee I received was $200 from the English Club in Rhode Island; the lowest $50 from a public library in Kansas. It would not have paid Leigh to send me there for $25 but I was lecturing at Grand Rapids the next day. My fees did not earn the advance of $1,000. But I suppose that Leigh just broke even on the deal.

  It would not have paid me to cross the Atlantic and spend ten weeks in the country for $1,000. It only paid me because I wanted to see more of the country. In 1960 and 1963 I undertook two quite ambitious tours for Colston Leigh. I was then, as the author of Island in the Sun, very much better known than I had been in 1930. They were coast to coast tours, lasting three months, with thirty-five engagements each. The fees were higher by then, with $500 at the Library of Congress as the highest. The terms were the same, the agency paying for my transport, and taking half the fees. My share of the profits worked out at some $4,500. But my hotel expenses cut that figure down by half. I paid tax on a sum of $2,500 – not a very large return for three months’ work, as the lectures needed preparing in advance. Moreover, a tour leaves one exhausted, in need of a holiday. A lecture tour is really only worthwhile if you like lecturing, which as a matter of fact I do.

  A lecture tour is, moreover, a break in one’s routine. It is an equivalent for the practice of rotating crops. One comes fresher to writing after a few weeks on the platform. Moreover, there are certain indirect emoluments. One enlarges one’s public. One gets publicity for one’s books. My 1960 tour coincided with the publication of my novel Fuel for the Flame and my 1963 tour with that of my first autobiography. Some members of my audiences must have bought my books or at least asked for them at their local library. But it is very easy to over-rate the extent of such returns. There were one or two writers who specialised on the lecture field. John Mason Brown was one, and between the wars the English-man S. K. Ratcliffe. But for the average reasonably established writer, lecturing is one of several irons in the fire. It really boils down to this. ‘Do you or don’t you get a kick out of it?’ I did.

  An average lecture engagement would run like this: you would have spent the night in the train. A great many people do not like trains. I happen to, and sleep well on them. You arrive at the city where you are to lecture round about ten o’clock. You are met at the station by the secretary. She is far from resembling a Helen Hokinson caricature of the Club Woman. She is usually an elegant, well produced, personable matron in her middle forties or fifties. She will outline your morning’s programme. Your talk is to start at two o’clock. At twelve thirty there will be a lunch at the Country Club. After the talk there will be a tea. Your train leaves at nine forty-five. One of the committee has suggested that you would like to have dinner with her family. It will give you an opportunity to see an American home. In the meantime she would suggest a drive round the town; after which perhaps you would like to read over your notes.

  It is a strenuous programme, and your actual lecture is the least exhausting feature of it. You are on parade, and all the time you are fulfilling an ambassadorial function, since quite a few people are going to judge your country by your behaviour. The English had not got themselves a good reputation in the U.S.A. during the 1920s – not only on the lecture platform but as self-appointed guests. They had abused the hospitality they had invited, by running up bills, borrowing cars and charging up the petrol. Perhaps in some cases Americans had brought this treatment on themselves by boasting about ‘the almighty dollar’; but a great many minor English socialites overplayed their hands on the strength of an accent and well-cut clothes. In 1927 they had jokes in Pebble beach - ‘How many bills did the Leytons leave behind? Is that all, you were lucky. The Fergusons took us for a genuine ride.’ They could afford to laugh about it when the stock market was booming. It was less funny now. In the club car of the first train in which I crossed America, I read in Harper's Bazaar a story by Charles Hanson Towne called Much Adieu about Nothing in which a supercilious and patronising British novelist was taught a lesson. It certainly taught me one. I resolved that I would do my best to counteract that impression.

  My role as a lecturer was not made any the easier by prohibition. I was not, at the age of thirty-two, as dependent upon alcohol as I am today, but even then I should have found the lunch parties that preceded my talks very much easier if they had been accompanied by a glass or two of wine. I never travelled without a hip flask but I was chary of resorting to it during the half hour when I was ‘going over my notes’. Vodka was not available in those days and I did not want to breathe synthetic gin over the committee.

  I was conscious that my lectures in 1960 and 1963 went a great deal better than had those that I delivered in 1931. I do not know if the lectures were any better. They may have been. But the presence of wine at meals and cocktails at receptions made, as I had suspected that they would, a considerable difference to the general atmosphere. There was another difference, which in 1931 I had not anticipated. In 1931 when I was thirty-two years old I was facing an audience most of whose members were quite a little older than myself. In 1960, when I was sixty-two, I was addressing women between the ages of forty and fifty-five, the ages which I found then particularly seductive. I felt myself to be facing an herbaceous border, privileged to be in the presence of such attractive females. I exerted myself to entertain them. They recognised that I was stimulated by them. There was in consequence on their side an instantaneous response. I got a definite kick out of my lectures.

  As I have already told, I had brought out with me from London the manuscript of a book of short stories, entitled Most Women. Illustrated by Lynd Ward it was to be a companion volume to Hot Countries. In the course of my New York chapter, I sketched my own routine there.

  ‘There are very few interruptions to my day,’ I wrote. ‘New York may contain as many idle people as London does. But I have not met them. Nobody rings me up to tell me about a headache. Such necessary interruptions as may come can be dealt with easily. I have usually got through two thousand words before the Chanin Building has begun to hang high over Lexington its patches of oblong light. . . . No doubt for the person for whom New York is a home, the manipulation of acquaintances and friends is as complicated a business as it is in London; with engagement diaries black with dates a fortnight off. But possibly because of a certain improvised quality in New York life, but in a greater degree, I think, because of the American’s great readiness to hospitality, the foreigner with a few real friends and a number of acquaintances does not need to plan his amusements far ahead. I know that I who have never found it possible to get any solid work done in London, should never have believed it possible that in a big city one could get through so much work at a time when one was having so much fun. Nor that leading a town life one could feel so astonishingly well.’

  I wrote that in mid-December. It had ceased to be true by mid-January when I started lecturing. My acquaintan
ce had quadrupled. Each party had led to another party. The two parties became four parties, and the four eight. Carl Brandt was then strenuously courting a rival agent Carol Hill to whom he was to be married the following summer. One friend became two friends. I had barely met during the summer Stanley Rinehart’s brother Alan. He had ceased to occupy an office in the family firm. He was at work upon a play. He had a wife as wealthy as she was beautiful whose father had once held post at the Court of St James. He was to become a real copain of mine. Claud Cockburn was currently courting Francis Hope Hale who, a year later, was to become his wife. My diary grew blacker. I became a courtier of Mrs Delano Roosevelt. I took her to see Private Lives. Her voice deepened when she said of Noël Coward and Gertrude Lawrence, ‘I think they must be in love, don’t you?’ Charles Hanson Towne gave a lunch party where I met three of his favourite hostesses. One of them, Mollie Potter, became one of mine. Langdon Post was often away on political assignments, leaving Janet at a loose end in the evenings. I met her father, Rollin Kirby. There was a constant going and coming in her apartment. I had brought out with me from England letters of introduction to Carl van Vechten and Edward Wasserman (later Waterman). One of Farrar and Rinehart’s most important authors was Katherine Brush, whose Young Man of Manhattan had been one of the best sellers of the previous year. The Farrars and the Rineharts were often giving ‘teas’ for their new books. A number of Englishmen paid brief visits including Michael Arlen and Henry Williamson. Then there was Emma Mills, who was to become a very good friend of mine. She was a Helen Hokinson caricature, of medium height, thin, ageless, with encasing garments and hats that were, I am sure, expensive but looked as though they had been acquired at a jumble sale. She organised a series of Book and Authors mornings and lunches at the Biltmore, which were attended by a loyal group of affluent upper-crust women. The lunches would be attended by a number of prominent writers, six or seven of whom Miss Mills would introduce by name, and two or three of whom would make short speeches. The mornings lasted for an hour. Coffee and bouillon were served. Miss Mills would talk about contemporary books and she would introduce to her audience a couple of well known writers who would speak for ten to five minutes each. She was not an eloquent speaker herself, she was not humorous, but she deeply cared for books and writers, and her audience had confidence in her. They followed her advice. I cannot think how she ever got started. No lecture agent could have thought ‘This is the woman for my list.’ She was an ardent anglophil. Every summer she came over to England. She learnt what was in the air. She found out which writers were coming to New York in the winter. They promised her that they would speak at one of her lunches or her mornings. She had a number of quite rich friends, one of whom would give a lunch party after the morning session. These were lively occasions. That was how I met André Maurois, Oliver La Farge and Stephen Vincent Benet. Another of her friends had a box at the Metropolitan. It would have been easy to make fun of Emma Mills, and several people did, but she was a warm, dear person. She did a lot for writers, and she was on the right side: by that I mean that when an ‘avant-garde’ book or play was being discussed, she would warn her audience. ‘I am not sure that all of you will like this book, but I do believe that in thirty years’ time, young people will be saying to you “Now how did you feel about Joseph in Jeopardy when it first came out?”’ I became very fond of her, and my friendship with her.considerably added to the entries in my diary. In addition to all of this, I found myself involved in a love affair of which I have the happiest memories.