local paper. My nearest and dearest played nervously with their bread when my novel was mentioned at dinner. A relative in a distant continent troubled himself to inform me that the book was fragmentary and absolutely worthless. The broader-minded merely wished that I had never written the book. The discreet received it in silence. One innocent person, for whom I have the warmest regard, thought that my novel might be a suitable birthday present for his adolescent son. By chance he perused the book himself on the birthday eve. I was told that neither on that night nor on the next did he get a wink of sleep. His adolescent son certainly never got my book.
Most authors, I have learnt on inquiry, have to suffer from this strange lack of appreciation in the very circle where appreciation should be kindest; if one fault isn’t found, another is; but they draw a veil across that dark aspect of the bright auctorial career. I, however, am trying to do without veils, and hence I refer to the matter.
X
My chief resigned his position on the paper with intent to enliven other spheres of activity. The news of his resignation was a blow to me. It often happens that when an editor walks out of an office in the exercise of free-will, the staff follows him under compulsion. In Fleet Street there is no security of tenure unless one is ingenious enough to be the proprietor of one’s paper.
“I shall never get on with any one as I have got on with you,” I said to the chief.
“You needn’t,” he answered. “I’m sure they’ll have the sense to give you my place if you ask for it.” “They” were a board of directors.
And they had the sense; they even had the sense not to wait until I asked. I have before remarked that the thumb of my Fate has always been turned up. Still on the glorious side of thirty, still young, enthusiastic, and a prey to delightful illusions, I suddenly found myself the editor of a London weekly paper. It was not a leading organ, but it was a London weekly paper, and it had pretensions; at least I had. My name was inscribed in various annuals of reference. I dined as an editor with other editors. I remember one day sitting down to table in a populous haunt of journalists with no less than four editors. “Three years ago,” I said to myself, “I should have deemed this an impossible fairy tale.” I know now that there are hundreds of persons in London and elsewhere who regard even editors with gentle and condescending toleration. One learns.
I needed a sub-editor, and my first act was to acquire one. I had the whole world of struggling lady journalists to select from: to choose was an almost sublime function. For some months previously we had been receiving paragraphs and articles from an outside contributor whose flair in the discovery of subjects, whose direct simplicity of style and general tidiness of “copy,” had always impressed me. I had never seen her, and I knew nothing about her; but I decided that, if she pleased, this lady should be my sub-editor. I wrote desiring her to call, and she called. Without much preface I offered her the situation; she accepted it.
“Who recommended me to you?” she asked.
“No one,” I replied, in the role of Joseph Pulitzer; “I liked your stuff.”
It was a romantic scene. I mention it because I derived a child-like enjoyment from that morning. Vanity was mixed up in it; but I argued—If you are an editor, be an editor imaginatively. I seemed to resemble Louis the Fifteenth beginning to reign after the death of the Regent, but with no troublesome Fleury in the background.
“Now,” I cried, “up goes the circulation!”
But circulations are not to be bullied into ascension. They will only rise on the pinions of a carefully constructed policy. I thought I knew all about journalism for women, and I found that I knew scarcely the fringe of it. A man may be a sub-editor, or even an assistant-editor, for half a lifetime, and yet remain ignorant of the true significance of journalism. Those first months were months of experience in a very poignant sense. The proprietary desired certain modifications in the existing policy. O that mysterious “policy,” which has to be created and built up out of articles, paragraphs, and pictures! That thrice-mysterious “public taste” which has to be aimed at in the dark and hit! I soon learnt the difference between legislature and executive. I could “execute” anything, from a eulogy of a philanthropic duchess to a Paris fashion letter. I could instruct a fashion-artist as though I knew what I was talking about. I could play Blucher at the Waterloo of the advertisement-manager. I could interview a beauty and make her say the things that a beauty must say in an interview. But to devise the contents of an issue, to plan them, to balance them; to sail with this wind and tack against that; to keep a sensitive cool finger on the faintly beating pulse of the terrible many-headed patron; to walk in a straight line through a forest black as midnight; to guess the riddle of the circulation-book week by week; to know by instinct why Smiths sent in a repeat-order, or why Simpkins’ was ten quires less; to keep one eye on the majestic march of the world, and the other on the vagaries of a bazaar-reporter who has forgotten the law of libel: these things, and seventy-seven others, are the real journalism. It is these things that make editors sardonic, grey, unapproachable.
Unique among all suspenses is the suspense that occupies the editorial mind between the moment of finally going to press and the moment of examining the issue on the morning of publication. Errors, appalling and disastrous errors, will creep in; and they are irremediable then. These mishaps occur to the most exalted papers, to all papers, except perhaps the Voce della Verita, which, being the organ of the Pope, is presumably infallible. Tales circulate in Fleet Street that make the hair stand on end; and every editor says: “This might have happened to me'.' Subtle beyond all subtleties is the magic and sinister change that happens to your issue in the machine-room at the printers. You pass the final page and all seems fair, attractive, clever, well-designed. . . . Ah! But what you see is not what is on the paper; it is the reflection of the bright image in your mind of what you intended! When the last thousand is printed and the parcels are in the vans, then you gaze at the unalterable thing, and you see it coldly as it actually is. You see not what you intended, but what you have accomplished. And the difference! It is like the chill, steely dawn after the vague poetry of a moonlit night.
There is no peace for an editor. He may act the farce of taking a holiday, but the worm of apprehension is always gnawing at the root of pleasure. I once put my organ to bed and went off by a late train in a perfect delirium of joyous anticipation of my holiday. I was recalled by a telegram that a fire with a strong sense of ironic humour had burnt the printing office to the ground and destroyed five-sixths of my entire issue. In such crises something has to be done, and done quickly. You cannot say to your public next week: “Kindly excuse the absence of the last number, as there was a fire at the printers’." Your public recks not of fires, no more than the General Post Office, in its attitude towards late clerks, recognizes the existence of fogs in winter. And herein lies, for the true journalist, one of the principal charms of Fleet Street Herein lies the reason why an editor’s life is at once insufferable and worth living. There are no excuses. Every one knows that if the crater of Highgate Hill were to burst and bury London in lava to-morrow, the newspapers would show no trace of the disaster except an account of it. That thought is fine, heroic, when an editor thinks of it.
And if an editor knows not peace, he knows power. In Fleet Street, as in other streets, the population divides itself into those who want something and those who have something to bestow; those who are anxious to give a lunch, and those who deign occasionally to accept a lunch; those who have an axe to grind, and those who possess the grindstone. The change from the one position to the other was for me at first rather disconcerting; I could not understand it; there was an apparent unreality about it; I thought I must be mistaken; I said to myself: “Surely this unusual ingratiating affability has nothing to do with the accident that I am an editor.” Then, like the rest
