manager his little account had been overlooked.
Even if it isn’t more than five dollars, Martin thought to himself,
it will buy enough beans and pea-soup to enable me to write half a
dozen like it, and possibly as good.
Back came a cool letter from the editor that at least elicited
Martin’s admiration.
“We thank you,” it ran, “for your excellent contribution. All of
us in the office enjoyed it immensely, and, as you see, it was
given the place of honor and immediate publication. We earnestly
hope that you liked the illustrations.
“On rereading your letter it seems to us that you are laboring
under the misapprehension that we pay for unsolicited manuscripts.
This is not our custom, and of course yours was unsolicited. We
assumed, naturally, when we received your story, that you
understood the situation. We can only deeply regret this
unfortunate misunderstanding, and assure you of our unfailing
regard. Again, thanking you for your kind contribution, and hoping
to receive more from you in the near future, we remain, etc.”
There was also a postscript to the effect that though THE BILLOW
carried no free-list, it took great pleasure in sending him a
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complimentary subscription for the ensuing year.
After that experience, Martin typed at the top of the first sheet
of all his manuscripts: “Submitted at your usual rate.”
Some day, he consoled himself, they will be submitted at MY usual
rate.
He discovered in himself, at this period, a passion for perfection,
under the sway of which he rewrote and polished “The Jostling
Street,” “The Wine of Life,” “Joy,” the “Sea Lyrics,” and others of
his earlier work. As of old, nineteen hours of labor a day was all
too little to suit him. He wrote prodigiously, and he read
prodigiously, forgetting in his toil the pangs caused by giving up
his tobacco. Ruth’s promised cure for the habit, flamboyantly
labelled, he stowed away in the most inaccessible corner of his
bureau. Especially during his stretches of famine he suffered from
lack of the weed; but no matter how often he mastered the craving,
it remained with him as strong as ever. He regarded it as the
biggest thing he had ever achieved. Ruth’s point of view was that
he was doing no more than was right. She brought him the anti-
tobacco remedy, purchased out of her glove money, and in a few days
forgot all about it.
His machine-made storiettes, though he hated them and derided them,
were successful. By means of them he redeemed all his pledges,
paid most of his bills, and bought a new set of tires for his
wheel. The storiettes at least kept the pot a-boiling and gave him
time for ambitious work; while the one thing that upheld him was
the forty dollars he had received from THE WHITE MOUSE. He
anchored his faith to that, and was confident that the really
first-class magazines would pay an unknown writer at least an equal
rate, if not a better one. But the thing was, how to get into the
first-class magazines. His best stories, essays, and poems went
begging among them, and yet, each month, he read reams of dull,
prosy, inartistic stuff between all their various covers. If only
one editor, he sometimes thought, would descend from his high seat
of pride to write me one cheering line! No matter if my work is
unusual, no matter if it is unfit, for prudential reasons, for
their pages, surely there must be some sparks in it, somewhere, a
few, to warm them to some sort of appreciation. And thereupon he
would get out one or another of his manuscripts, such as
“Adventure,” and read it over and over in a vain attempt to
vindicate the editorial silence.
As the sweet California spring came on, his period of plenty came
to an end. For several weeks he had been worried by a strange
silence on the part of the newspaper storiette syndicate. Then,
one day, came back to him through the mail ten of his immaculate
machine-made storiettes. They were accompanied by a brief letter
to the effect that the syndicate was overstocked, and that some
months would elapse before it would be in the market again for
manuscripts. Martin had even been extravagant m the strength of
those on ten storiettes. Toward the last the syndicate had been
paying him five dollars each for them and accepting every one he
sent. So he had looked upon the ten as good as sold, and he had
lived accordingly, on a basis of fifty dollars in the bank. So it
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was that he entered abruptly upon a lean period, wherein he
continued selling his earlier efforts to publications that would
not pay and submitting his later work to magazines that would not
buy. Also, he resumed his trips to the pawn-broker down in
Oakland. A few jokes and snatches of humorous verse, sold to the
New York weeklies, made existence barely possible for him. It was
at this time that he wrote letters of inquiry to the several great
monthly and quarterly reviews, and learned in reply that they
rarely considered unsolicited articles, and that most of their
contents were written upon order by well-known specialists who were
authorities in their various fields.
CHAPTER XXIX
It was a hard summer for Martin. Manuscript readers and editors
were away on vacation, and publications that ordinarily returned a
decision in three weeks now retained his manuscript for three
months or more. The consolation he drew from it was that a saving
in postage was effected by the deadlock. Only the robber-
publications seemed to remain actively in business, and to them
Martin disposed of all his early efforts, such as “Pearl-diving,”
“The Sea as a Career,” “Turtle-catching,” and “The Northeast
Trades.” For these manuscripts he never received a penny. It is
true, after six months’ correspondence, he effected a compromise,
whereby he received a safety razor for “Turtle-catching,” and that
THE ACROPOLIS, having agreed to give him five dollars cash and five
yearly subscriptions: for “The Northeast Trades,” fulfilled the
second part of the agreement.
For a sonnet on Stevenson he managed to wring two dollars out of a
Boston editor who was running a magazine with a Matthew Arnold
taste and a penny-dreadful purse. “The Peri and the Pearl,” a
clever skit of a poem of two hundred lines, just finished, white
hot from his brain, won the heart of the editor of a San Francisco
magazine published in the interest of a great railroad. When the
editor wrote, offering him payment in transportation, Martin wrote
back to inquire if the transportation was transferable. It was
not, and so, being prevented from peddling it, he asked for the
return of the poem. Back it came, with the editor’s regrets, and
Martin sent it to San Francisco again, this time to THE HORNET, a
pretentious monthly that had been fanned into a constellation of
the first magnitude by the brilliant journalist who founded it.
But THE HORNET’S light had begun to dim long before Martin was
born. The editor promised Martin fifteen dollars for the poem,
but, when it was published, seemed to forget about it. Several of
his letters being ignored, Martin indicted an angry one which drew
a reply. It was written by a new editor, who coolly informed
Martin that he declined to be held responsible for the old editor’s
mistakes, and that he did not think much of “The Peri and the
Pearl” anyway.
But THE GLOBE, a Chicago magazine, gave Martin the most cruel
treatment of all. He had refrained from offering his “Sea Lyrics”
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for publication, until driven to it by starvation. After having
been rejected by a dozen magazines, they had come to rest in THE
GLOBE office. There were thirty poems in the collection, and he
was to receive a dollar apiece for them. The first month four were
published, and he promptly received a cheek for four dollars; but
when he looked over the magazine, he was appalled at the slaughter.
In some cases the titles had been altered: “Finis,” for instance,
being changed to “The Finish,” and “The Song of the Outer Reef” to
“The Song of the Coral Reef.” In one case, an absolutely different
title, a misappropriate title, was substituted. In place of his
own, “Medusa Lights,” the editor had printed, “The Backward Track.”
But the slaughter in the body of the poems was terrifying. Martin
groaned and sweated and thrust his hands through his hair.
Phrases, lines, and stanzas were cut out, interchanged, or juggled
about in the most incomprehensible manner. Sometimes lines and
stanzas not his own were substituted for his. He could not believe
that a sane editor could be guilty of such maltreatment, and his
favorite hypothesis was that his poems must have been doctored by
the office boy or the stenographer. Martin wrote immediately,
begging the editor to cease publishing the lyrics and to return