It must have been fully thirty years ago that Ellis Parker Butler, author of Pigs Is Pigs, came into my office in New York one day and asked me to cash a check for $150. He was from Kansas City. He explained to me that he wanted to break into the literary game, and someone had suggested to him that as the literary editor of Life I was the man to see.
Even during those days I had had a long and extensive experience with literary borrowers, but this young fellow coming out of the West looked like a genuine product of the soil, and I readily gave him the money, particularly as the check he presented was a draft on a New York bank.
He explained to me that he had a girl "back there" and he purposed to marry her as soon as possible -- after he had made his fortune as a writer. He had $150 in cold cash as a starter and asked me how far he could make it go. He was entirely alone and had never been East before.
I told him to get on a surface car going north and not to get off until he saw green. Unfortunately I had entirely overlooked Central Park. He obeyed my advice literally and when he saw green, got off in the park and wandered about among the swans, until he learned from a policeman where he was. Being afflicted with native intelligence, he surmised that a New York editor never got things right and that I probably meant farther on. So he got on another car, and rode and rode until he came to 180th Street. There was green there then. He got off, went to the nearest drug store and made inquiries about a boarding place. They gave him an address; he settled down there and started in to write. He didn't succeed at first.
For several years he submerged himself in a trade paper, acquiring valuable business experience and also a writing technique. He had a great sense of humor and a capacity for industry. The Pigs Is Pigs idea, as a short joke, had originally been printed in Punch. Butler seized upon it and gave it its proper setting in an American story of great natural humor.
Meanwhile, he had married the girl and was raising a family. He went to Paris on the proceeds of his book (a new edition of which by the way has just been issued -- the latest after twenty years) and lived there for a year. But he couldn't write in Paris. And so he came back, and hundreds of thousands of readers now know who he is and delight in his work.
During the last thirty years I have had under observation hundreds of lads and lassies who have attempted to break into the literary game, and I can almost always tell whether they are going to succeed or not in one interview. But in case anyone wants to know, I hasten to say in my own defense that I am much too busy to read long amateur manuscripts from strangers or to sit on any set of eggs furnished by budding geniuses. All I can do is to point the road to success and to show why failure is more or less inevitable. All I can do is to round up here the elements both of failure and success, and let you think it out for yourself; remembering, and indeed emphasizing, that there is as much bunk about the literary game as about any other game.
In strong contrast to the case of my friend Ellis Parker Butler is the case of a young man I now have under observation. Without giving his name, I mention him as a typical case of what I term maladjustment to environment.
This young man is an Englishman, twenty-five years old, an Oxford man. He had had a severance of friendly relationship with his father, a wealthy British subject, this boy being his only son. The boy told me, during the second interview I had with him, that so far as he could judge, American fathers understood their sons better than "at home."
I asked him just what he meant by that.
"Well," he replied, "we don't get on together. I never had a word with my governor. We simply didn't talk. He sent me about a good deal, but he ridiculed me when I was not present, and that wasn't cricket. He might send me a remittance and he might not."
This boy was born of literary antecedents. His uncle is one of the most distinguished novelists of the immediate past generations -- a "household word." He had traveled about a great deal -- the Orient, Europe generally, and so on.