Plum Pudding by Christopher Morley

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The club proceeded and found itself in a little eddy of pure
Scotland. The _Columbia_ was just in from Glasgow--had docked only
an hour before. The doctor became very Scots in a flash. "Aye,
bonny!" was his reply to every question asked him by Mr. Green, the
diligent secretary. The secretary was addressed as "lad." A hat now
became a "bonnet." The fine stiff speech of Glasgow was heard on
every side, for the passengers were streaming through the customs.
Yon were twa bonny wee brithers, aiblins ten years old, that came
marching off, with bare knees and ribbed woollen stockings and
little tweed jackets. O Scotland, Scotland, said our hairt! The wund
blaws snell frae the firth, whispered the secretary to himself,
keeking about, but had not the courage to utter it.

Here the secretary pauses on a point of delicacy. It was the purpose
of the club to visit Capt. David W. Bone of the _Columbia_, but the
captain is a modest man, and one knows not just how much of our
admiration of him and his ship he would care to see spread upon the
minutes. Were Mr. Green such a man as the captain, would he be
lowering himself to have any truck with journalists and such petty
folk? Mr. Green would not. Mark you: Captain Bone is the master of
an Atlantic liner, a veteran of the submarine-haunted lanes of sea,
a writer of fine books (have you, lovers of sea tales, read "The
Brassbounder" and "Broken Stowage"?) a collector of first editions,
a man who stood on the bridge of the flagship at Harwich and watched
the self-defiled U-boats slink in and come to a halt at the
international code signal MN (Stop instantly!)--"Ha," said Mr.
Green, "Were I such a man, I would pass by like shoddy such pitifuls
as colyumists." But he was a glad man no less, for he knew the
captain was bigger of heart. Besides, he counted on the exquisite
tact of the doctor to see him through. Indeed, even the stern
officials of the customs had marked the doctor as a man exceptional.
And as the club stood patiently among the outward flux of authentic
Glasgow, came the captain himself and welcomed them aboard.

Across immaculate decks, and in the immortal whiff, indefinable, of
a fine ship just off the high seas, trod the beatified club. A ship,
the last abiding place in a mannerless world of good old-fashioned
caste, and respect paid upward with due etiquette and discipline
through the grades of rank. The club, for a moment, were guests of
the captain; deference was paid to them. They stood in the captain's
cabin (sacred words). "Boy!" cried the captain, in tones of command.
Not as one speaks to office boys in a newspaper kennel, in a voice
of entreaty. The boy appeared: a curly-headed, respectful stripling.
A look of respect: how well it sits upon youth. "Boy!" said the
captain--but just what the captain said is not to be put upon vulgar
minutes. Remember, pray, the club was upon British soil.

In the saloon sat the club, and their faces were the faces of men at
peace, men harmonious and of delicate cheer. The doctor, a seafaring
man, talked the lingo of imperial mariners: he knew the right things
to say: he carried along the humble secretary, who gazed in
melodious mood upon the jar of pickled onions. At sea Mr. Green is
of lurking manners: he holds fast to his bunk lest worse befall; but
a ship in port is his empire. Scotch broth was before them--pukka
Scotch broth, the doctor called it; and also the captain and the
doctor had some East Indian name for the chutney. The secretary
resolved to travel and see the world. Curried chicken and rice was
the word: and, not to exult too cruelly upon you (O excellent
friends!), let us move swiftly over the gooseberry tart. There was
the gooseberry tart, and again, a few minutes later, it was not
there. All things have their appointed end. "Boy!" said the captain.
(Must I remind you, we were on imperial soil.) Is it to be said that
the club rose to the captain's cabin once more, and matters of
admirable purport were tastefully discussed, as is the habit of us
mariners?

"The drastic sanity of the sea"--it is a phrase from a review of one
of the captain's own books, "Merchantmen-at-Arms," which this club
(so it runs upon the minutes), as lovers of sea literature,
officially hope may soon be issued on this side also. It is a
phrase, if these minutes are correct, from a review written by H.M.
Tomlinson, another writer of the sea, of whom we have spoken before,
and may, in God's providence, again. "The drastic sanity of the sea"
was the phrase that lingered in our mind as we heard the captain
talk of books and of discipline at sea and of the trials imposed
upon shipmasters by the La Follette act. (What, the club wondered
inwardly, does Mr. La Follette know of seafaring?) "The drastic
sanity of the sea!" We thought of other sailors we had known, and
how they had found happiness and simplicity in the ordered combat
with their friendly enemy. A virtue goes out of a ship (Joseph
Conrad said, in effect) when she touches her quay. Her beauty and
purpose are, for the moment, dulled and dimmed. But even there, how
much she brings us. How much, even though we do not put it into
words, the faces and accents of our seafaring friends give us in the
way of plain wisdom and idealism. And the secretary, as he stepped
aboard the hubbub of a subway train, was still pondering "the
drastic sanity of the sea."

[Illustration]

INITIATION

Allured by the published transactions of the club, our friend Lawton
presented himself at the headquarters toward lunch time and
announced himself as a candidate for membership. An executive
session was hastily convened. Endymion broke the news to the
candidate that initiates in this select organization are expected to
entertain the club at luncheon. To the surprise of the club, our
genial visitor neither shrank nor quailed. His face was bland and
his bearing ambitious in the extreme. Very well, he said; as long as
it isn't the Beaux Arts cafe.

The itinerary of the club for this day had already been arranged by
the secretary. The two charter members, plus the high-spirited
acolyte, made their way along West Street toward the Cortlandt
Street ferry. It was plain from the outset that fortune had favoured
the organization with a new member of the most sparkling quality.
Every few yards a gallant witticism fell from him. Some of these the
two others were able to juggle and return, but many were too
flashing for them to cope with. In front of the ferry house lay a
deep and quaggish puddle of slime, crossable only by ginger-footed
work upon sheets of tin. Endymion rafted his tenuous form across
with a delicate straddle of spidery limbs. The secretary followed,
with a more solid squashing technique. "Ha," cried the new member;
"grace before meat!" Endymion and the secretary exchanged secret
glances. Lawton, although he knew it not, was elected from that
moment.

The ritual of the club, while stern toward initiates, is not brutal.
Since you are bursar for the lunch, said the secretary, I will buy
the ferry tickets, and he did so. On the boat these carefree men
gazed blithely upon the shipping. "Little did I think," said Lawton,
"that I was going for a sea voyage." "That," said the club, "is the
kind of fellows we are. Whimsical. As soon as we think of a thing,
we don't do it."

"Is that the _Leviathan_ up there?" said one of the members,
pointing toward a gray hull on the Hoboken horizon. No one knew, but
the secretary was reminded of an adventure during the war. "One time
I was crossing on this ferry," he said, "and the _Leviathan_ passed
right by us. It was just at dusk and her camouflage was wonderful.
Her blotches and stripes were so arranged that from a little
distance, in the twilight, she gave the impression of a much smaller
vessel, going the other way. All her upper works seemed to fade out
in the haze and she became a much smaller ship." "That would be a
wonderful plan for some of these copious dowagers one sees," said
the irreverent Lawton. "Yes," we said; "instead of a stout lady
going in to dinner, you would see a slim flapper coming out."

Something was then said about a good friend of the club who had at
one time worked for the Y.M.C.A. "What is he doing now?" asked one.
"He's with Grace and Company," said the secretary. The candidate was
unabashed. "Think," he said, "of a Y.M.C.A. man getting grace at
last."

The club found the Jersey City terminal much as usual, and to our
surprise the candidate kept up his courage nobly as he was steered
toward the place of penance, being the station lunch counter. The
club remembered this as a place of excellent food in days gone by,
when trains from Philadelphia stopped here instead of at the Penn.
Station. Placing the host carefully in the middle, the three sat
down at the curving marble slab. The waiters immediately sensed that
something unusual was toward. Two dashed up with courteous
attentions. It was surmised by the club that the trio had happened
to sit at a spot where the jurisdictions of two waiters met. Both
the wings of the trio waved the waiters toward the blushing novice,
making it plain that upon him lay all responsibility. "It is
obvious," remarked the secretary, "that you, Lawton, are right on
the boundary line where two waiters meet. You will have to tip them
both."

The new member was game. "Well," he said, without a trace of
nervousness; "what'll you have?" The choice fell upon breast of
lamb. The secretary asked for iced tea. Endymion, more ruthless,
ordered ginger ale. When the ginger ale came, Lawton, still waggish,
observed the label, which was one of the many imitations of a
well-known brand. "The man who invented the diamond-shaped label,"
said Lawton, "was certainly a pathfinder in the wilderness of the
ginger ale business. This ginger ale," said Lawton, tasting it, "is
carefully warmed, like old claret."

The club sought to keep their host's mind off the painful topic of
viands. "Sitting here makes one feel as though he ought to be going
to take a train somewhere," said one. "Yes, the express for
Weehawken," said the vivacious host. From this it was only a step to
speaking of Brooklyn. The secretary explained that the club had
outlined a careful itinerary in that borough for proximate pursuit.
Lawton told that he had at one time written an essay on the effect
of Brooklyn on the dialogue of the American drama. "It is the butt
end of Long Island," he cried, with cruel mirth. Lovers of Brooklyn
in the club nearly blackballed him for this.

With ice cream and cottage pudding, the admirable menu proceeded.
The waiters conferred secretly together. They carefully noted the
cheerful carving of the host's brow. They will know him again. A man
who bursts in suddenly upon a railroad lunch counter and pays for
three such meals, here is an event in the grim routine! But perhaps
the two charter members were feeling pangs of conscience. "Come,"
they said, "at least let us split the ginger ale checks." But
Lawton was seeing it through. Not a drum was heard, not a funeral
note, as our host to the cashier we hurried. The secretary bought a
penny box of matches and lit the great man's cigarette for him.
Endymion, equally stirred, ran to buy the ferry tickets for the
return voyage. "This time," he said, "I will be the ferry
godmother."

On the homeward passage a little drowse fell upon the two charter
members. They had lunched more richly than was their wont. "Oh,
these distressing, heavy lunches!" as Aldous Huxley cries in one of
his poems. But Lawton was still of bright vivacity. At that time the
club was perturbed by the coming Harding-Cox election. "Which of the
vice-presidents are you going to vote for?" he cried, and then said:
"It looks to me like Debs or dubs."

Endymion and the secretary looked at each other solemnly. The time
had come. "I, Endymion," said the chairman, "take thee, Lawton, to
have and to hold, as a member of the club."

And the secretary tenderly pronounced the society's formula for such
occasions: "There is no inanition in an initiation."

[Illustration]

CREED OF THE THREE HOURS FOR LUNCH CLUB

It has been suggested that the Three Hours for Lunch Club is an
immoral institution; that it is founded upon an insufficient respect
for the devotions of industry; that it runs counter to the form and
pressure of the age; that it encourages a greedy and rambling humour
in the young of both sexes; that it even punctures, in the bosoms of
settled merchants and rotarians, that capsule of efficiency and
determination by which Great Matters are Put Over. It has been said,
in short, that the Three Hours for Lunch Club should be more
clandestine and reticent about its truancies.

Accordingly, it seems good to us to testify concerning Lunches and
the philosophy of Lunching.

There are Lunches of many kinds. The Club has been privileged to
attend gatherings of considerable lustre; occasions when dishes of
richness and curiosity were dissected; when the surroundings were
not devoid of glamour and surreptitious pomp. The Club has been
convened in many different places: in resorts of pride and in
low-ceiled reeky taphouses; in hotels where those clear cubes of
unprofitable ice knock tinklingly in the goblets; in the brightly
tinted cellars of Greenwich Village; in the saloons of ships. But
the Club would give a false impression of its mind and heart if it
allowed any one to suppose that Food is the chief object of its
quest. It is true that Man, bitterly examined, is merely a vehicle
for units of nourishing combustion; but on those occasions when the
Club feels most truly Itself it rises above such considerations.

The form and pressure of the time (to repeat Hamlet's phrase) is
such that thoughtful men--and of such the Club is exclusively
composed: men of great heart, men of nice susceptibility--are
continually oppressed by the fumbling, hasty, and insignificant
manner in which human contacts are accomplished. Let us even say,
_masculine_ contacts: for the first task of any philosopher being to
simplify his problem so that he can examine it clearly and with less
distraction, the Club makes a great and drastic purge by sweeping
away altogether the enigmatic and frivolous sex and disregarding it,
at any rate during the hours of convivial session. The Club is
troubled to note that in the intolerable rabies and confusion of
this business life men meet merely in a kind of convulsion or horrid
passion of haste and perplexity. We see, ever and often, those in
whose faces we discern delightful and considerable secrets, messages
of just import, grotesque mirth, or improving sadness. In their
bearing and gesture, even in hours of haste and irritation, the Club
(with its trained and observant eye) notes the secret and rare sign
of Thought. Such men are marked by an inexorable follow-up system.
Sooner or later their telephones ring; secretaries and go-betweens
are brushed aside; they are bidden to appear at such and such a time
and place; no excuses are accepted. Then follow the Consolations of
Intercourse. Conducted with "shattering candour" (as one has said
who is in spirit a member of this Club, though not yet, alas,
inducted), the meetings may sometimes resolve themselves into a
ribaldry, sometimes into a truthful pursuit of Beauty, sometimes
into a mere logomachy. But in these symposiums, unmarred by the
crude claim of duty, the Club does with single-minded resolve pursue
the only lasting satisfaction allowed to humanity, to wit, the
sympathetic study of other men's minds.

This is clumsily said: but we have seen moments when eager and
honourable faces round the board explained to us what we mean. There
is but one indefeasible duty of man, to say out the truth that is in
his heart. The way of life engendered by a great city and a modern
civilization makes it hard to do so. It is the function of the Club
to say to the City and to Life Itself: "Stand back! Fair play! We
see a goodly matter inditing in our friend's spirit. We will take
our ease and find out what it is."

For this life of ours (asserts the Club) is curiously compounded of
Beauty and Dross. You ascend the Woolworth Building, let us say--one
of man's noblest and most poetic achievements. And at the top, what
do you find, just before going out upon that gallery to spread your
eye upon man's reticulated concerns? Do you find a little temple or
cloister for meditation, or any way of marking in your mind the
beauty and significance of the place? No, a man in uniform will
thrust into your hand a booklet of well-intentioned description (but
of unapproachable typographic ugliness) and you will find before you
a stall for the sale of cheap souvenirs, ash trays, and hideous
postcards. In such ways do things of Beauty pass into the custody of
those unequipped to understand them.

The Club thinks that the life of this city, brutally intense and
bewildering, has yet a beauty and glamour and a secret word to the
mind, so subtle that it cannot be closely phrased, but so important
that to miss it is to miss life itself. And to forfeit an attempt to
see, understand, and mutually communicate this loveliness is to
forfeit that burning spark that makes men's spirits worth while. To
such halting meditations the Club devotes its aspirations
undistressed by humorous protest. If this be treason...!

[Illustration]

A PREFACE TO THE PROFESSION OF JOURNALISM

(BEING AN ANSWER TO A LETTER FROM A COLLEGE STUDENT,
ASKING ADVICE AS TO TAKING UP WRITING AS A CAREER)

Your inquiry is congenial, and I feel guilty of selfishness in
answering it in this way. But he must be a poor workman, whether
artisan or artist, who does not welcome an excuse now and then for
shutting out the fascinating and maddening complexity of this
shining world to concentrate his random wits on some honest and
self-stimulating expression of his purpose.

There are exceptions to every rule; but writing, if undertaken as a
trade, is subject to the conditions of all other trades. The
apprentice must begin with task-work; he must please his employers
before he can earn the right to please himself. Not only that, he
must have ingenuity and patience enough to learn _how_ editors are
pleased; but he will be startled, I think, if he studies their
needs, to see how eager they are to meet him half way. This
necessary docility is in the long run, a wholesome physic, because,
if our apprentice has any gallantry of spirit, it will arouse in him
an exhilarating irritation, that indignation which is said to be the
forerunner of creation. It will mean, probably, a period--perhaps
short, perhaps long, perhaps permanent--of rather meagre and stinted
acquaintance with the genial luxuries and amenities of life; but
(such is the optimism of memory) a period that he will always look
back upon as the happiest of all. It is well for our apprentice if,
in this season, he has a taste for cheap tobacco and a tactful
technique in borrowing money.

The deliberate embrace of literature as a career involves very real
dangers. I mean dangers to the spirit over and above those of the
right-hand trouser pocket. For, let it be honestly stated, the
business of writing is solidly founded on a monstrous and perilous
egotism. Himself, his temperament, his powers of observation and
comment, his emotions and sensibilities and ambitions and
idiocies--these are the only monopoly the writer has. This is his
only capital, and with glorious and shameless confidence he proposes
to market it. Let him make the best of it. Continually stooping over
the muddy flux of his racing mind, searching a momentary flash of
clearness in which he can find mirrored some delicate beauty or
truth, he tosses between the alternatives of self-grandeur and
self-disgust. It is a painful matter, this endless self-scrutiny. We
are all familiar with the addled ego of literature--the writer whom
constant self-communion has made vulgar, acid, querulous, and vain.
And yet it is remarkable that of so many who meddle with the
combustible passions of their own minds so few are blown up. The
discipline of living is a fine cooling-jacket for the engine.

It is essential for our apprentice to remember that, though he begin
with the vilest hack-work--writing scoffing paragraphs, or
advertising pamphlets, or freelance snippets for the papers--that
even in hack-work quality shows itself to those competent to judge;
and he need not always subdue his gold to the lead in which he
works. Moreover, conscience and instinct are surprisingly true and
sane. If he follows the suggestions of his own inward, he will
generally be right. Moreover again, no one can help him as much as
he can help himself. There is no job in the writing world that he
cannot have if he really wants it. Writing about something he
intimately knows is a sound principle. Hugh Walpole, that greatly
gifted novelist, taught school after leaving Cambridge, and very
sensibly began by writing about school-teaching. If you care to see
how well he did it, read "The Gods and Mr. Perrin." I would propose
this test to the would-be writer: Does he feel, honestly, that he
could write as convincingly about his own tract of life (whatever it
may be) as Walpole wrote about that boys' school? If so, he has a
true vocation for literature.

The first and most necessary equipment of any writer, be he
reporter, advertising copy-man, poet, or historian, is swift,
lively, accurate observation. And since consciousness is a rapid,
shallow river which we can only rarely dam up deep enough to go
swimming and take our ease, it is his positive need (unless he is a
genius who can afford to let drift away much of his only source of
gold) to keep a note-book handy for the sieving and skimming of this
running stream. Samuel Butler has good advice on this topic. Of
ideas, he says, you must throw salt on their tails or they fly away
and you never see their bright plumage again. Poems, stories,
epigrams, all the happiest freaks of the mind, flit by on wings and
at haphazard instants. They must be caught in air. In this respect
one thinks American writers ought to have an advantage over English,
for American trousers are made with hip-pockets, in which a small
note-book may so comfortably caress the natural curvature of man.

Fancy is engendered in the eyes, said Shakespeare, and is with
gazing fed. By fancy he meant (I suppose) love; but imagination is
also so engendered. Close, constant, vivid, and compassionate gazing
at the ways of mankind is the laboratory manual of literature. But
for most of us we may gaze until our eyeballs twitch with weariness;
unless we seize and hold the flying picture in some steadfast
memorandum, the greater part of our experience dissolves away with
time. If a man has thought sufficiently about the arduous and
variously rewarded profession of literature to propose seriously to
follow it for a living, he will already have said these things to
himself, with more force and pungency. He may have satisfied himself
that he has a necessary desire for "self-expression," which is a
parlous state indeed, and the cause of much literary villainy. The
truly great writer is more likely to write in the hope of expressing
the hearts of others than his own. And there are other desires, too,
most legitimate, that he may feel. An English humorist said recently
in the preface to his book: "I wrote these stories to satisfy an
inward craving--not for artistic expression, but for food and
drink." But I cannot conscientiously advise any man to turn to
writing merely as a means of earning his victual unless he
should, by some cheerful casualty, stumble upon a trick of the
You-know-me-Alfred sort, what one might call the Attabuoyant style.
If all you want is a suggestion as to some honest way of growing
rich, the doughnut industry is not yet overcrowded; and people will
stand in line to pay twenty-two cents for a dab of ice-cream smeared
with a trickle of syrup.

To the man who approaches writing with some decent tincture of
idealism it is well to say that he proposes to use as a trade what
is, at its best and happiest, an art and a recreation. He proposes
to sell his mental reactions to the helpless public, and he proposes
not only to enjoy himself by so doing, but to be handsomely
recompensed withal. He cannot complain that in days when both
honesty and delicacy of mind are none too common we ask him to bring
to his task the humility of the tradesman, the joy of the sportsman,
the conscience of the artist.

And if he does so, he will be in a condition to profit by these
fine words of George Santayana, said of the poet, but applicable to
workers in every branch of literature:

"He labours with his nameless burden of perception, and wastes
himself in aimless impulses of emotion and reverie, until finally
the method of some art offers a vent to his inspiration, or to such
part of it as can survive the test of time and the discipline of
expression.... Wealth of sensation and freedom of fancy, which make
an extraordinary ferment in his ignorant heart, presently bubble
over into some kind of utterance."

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