FullReads

“I write from Connor’s saloon. Paunchy Connor has been my best–indeed my only–friend in this city, when every editor, publisher, and critic has given me the frozen mitt. Of course I know why … the author of ‘Vermin’ deserves not, nor wants, their hypocritical help. The book was too true to life to please the bourgeois and yet not ribald enough to tickle the prurient. I had a vile pornographic publisher after me the other day; he said if I would rub up some of the earlier chapters and inject a little more spice he thought he could do something with it–as a paper-covered erotic for shop-girls, I suppose he meant. I kicked him downstairs. The stinking bounder!

“Until to-day I had been without grub for sixty hours. That is literally true. I was ashamed of sponging on Paunchy, and could not bring myself to come back to the saloon where he would willingly have fed me. I did get a job for two days as a deckhand on an Erie ferryboat, but they found out I did not belong to the union. I had two dollars in my pocket–a fortune–but while I was dozing on a doorstep on Hudson Street, waiting for the cafes to open (I was too done to walk half a dozen blocks to an all-night restaurant), some snapper picked my pocket. That night I slept in a big drain pipe where they were putting up a building.

“Why isn’t there a pawnshop where one could hang up MSS. for cash? In my hallroom over Connor’s saloon I have got stuff that will be bid for at auctions some day (that isn’t conceit, I know it), but at this moment, July 17, 1908, I couldn’t raise 50 cents on it. If there were a literary mount of piety–a sort of Parnassus of piety as it were–the uncle in charge might bless the day he met me. Well, it won’t be for long. This cancer is getting me surely.

“This morning I’m cheerful. I’ve scrubbed and swept Paunchy’s bar for him, and the dirty, patchouli-smelling hop-joint he keeps upstairs, bless his pimping old heart. And I’ve had a real breakfast: boiled red cabbage, stewed beef (condemned by the inspector), rye bread, raw onions, a glass of Tom and Jerry, and two big schooners of the amber. I’m working on my Third Avenue novel called ‘The L.’

“I shan’t give you my right address, or you’d send someone down here to give me money, you damned philanthropist…. Connor ain’t the real name, so there. When I die (soon) they’ll find Third Avenue written on my heart, if I still have one….”

It is interesting to recall that the MS. of his poems “Pavements, and Other Verses” was bought by a private collector for $250 last winter.

Will not some literary agent think over this idea?