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About The Oregon daily journal. (Portland, Or.) 1902-1972 | View Entire Issue (March 25, 1917)
THE SUNDAY FICTION MAGAZINE, MARCH 25, 1917. THE MAN (Continued from Page 5) His wife is there and 'heir son, C. V. T. Jr., who finds news comment about the future Princeton fullback more enthrall ing than the stock list. Miss Winona Hedricks is engrossed in serious mental gymnastics. It ii Wednesday, and her task of deciding where her matinee box shall be ordered is piteously taxing. Now she gains a ' temporary respite, for father approaches and she surrenders the paper. She kisses him and holds up the folded print with headlines of Miss Mariott's suicide flar ing prominently from the first column. , "Look, papa," she says, "isn't it aw ful? And I was going to see her play this afternoon!" Mr. Hedricks of the steel trust is a man of parts. He has more equipoise than young Von Fredricksl Mechanically, he returns his daughter's kiss and me chanically" he forgets 'to bestow one on his wife. He sits down and reads the account of Maxine Mariott's death. He reads her farewell to the world and to the MAN. Though he preserves his out ward calm, his heart beats furiously to the note of tragic appeal and expiation, for he is the MAN! Yet, how can he be? For there is young Von Fredricks! Mr. Carlton Rathbone is looking out of the nineteenth story window of a dingy office near Brooklyn Bridge. The roof over Mr. Rathbone's bead is a glit tering dome. At times it seems to this young attorney that all the gold in the world must have been used to effect this gaudy covering, for there Is none left for him. The perils of propinquity are surpassed only by their aggravations. If we are . brought in contact with a beautiful woman whom we can never possess her proximity Is not so menacing as annoy ing. So the nearness of this shining tln- sel is as a thorn in the side of our young counselor. If fortune has ever smiled at -him it must have been in a moment of willful flirtation, for she has not made good. sr MR. RATHBONE fairly languishes in the lap of misfortune. A fair com petence, so he thinks, is all that stands between him and complete possession of a beautiful woman an actress, to be sure, but so idolized by the public that it would be a feather in any man's cap to capture her. She is good looking, enter taining, sympathetic and fich. In the brief interval of their acquaintance she has been as a saving grace to Mr. Rath- . bone. She has reconstructed the tottering ' pillar of his self-esteem. There is no ques tion that his comparative poverty is the only drawback to an affaire d'amour, or even matrimony. "Amour fait beaucoup, mais argent fait tout" Love starts some thing, but money brings home the bacon. Yet for all his poverty this satellite of the gay white way has shown her un mistakable regard, and has even offered financial aid, which, to Mr. Rathbone's credit, we must admit he has declined. Having, in his trip downtown, been prey to the delights of a Bacchanalian convalescence, Mr. Rathbone has made no attempt to read the morning papers, so he telephones now to the news stand in the rotunda and asks that his favorite 1 chronicler of the day's events be sent up to him. One glance at the first page and he collapses into his lone chair. H has read what all the metropolis has read before him the suicide of Maxine Mariott. He glances hurriedly through her note of abjuration and wrings his hands in dismay at the tragedy of its now futile appeal. If he had only known! Only realized the fatality of his abnegation, he might have buried even his pride, ac cepted her aid and repaid her with a ful fillment of her cherished dream. He is the MAN to whom she penned her hopeless lines, and the curse of pov erty stands emblazoned now in carmine on the dome of gold! Exit, Mr. Counselor! For can we for get the fair Von Fredricks and the fault less Hedricks? ' ' " . Now come we to another. He lias neither the charm of an Apollo, the wealth of a Croesus, nor the conceit of a A novice. In fact, he seems, but an ordl nary man In exemplary if mediocre cur- ' ' rounding. His is an apartment on the : West Side, too, but not on the drive. A maid, whom but for the niceties of the times we might term a servant girl, Tarings his coffee and rolls; there may be also some, plebeian bacon and eggs. " He leaves them untouched as he stares fixedly at his morning paper and at the flaring headlines that tell of Maxine ' MariotCf death. His face is pale, but It portrays none of the fatuous self-condemnation of Von Fredricks, " Hedricks, or the impecunious Rathbone. His wife enters the room softly, and coming to his side, kisses him. He kisses "her. . J" There is in her embrace the enduring ( tenderness of a trustful love, and in his ' but we are interrupted. There come now the faltering steps of a baby, and -she, too, stands ready to bestow her por tion of childish affection. The man -stoops and takes her in his arms. Surely, this is not THE man! Copyright. 117, by J. Kecley) OUR "REPORTERS IN MODERN LITERATURE WHEN AlphonsQ Daudet was once asked by a highly unintelligent " and equally uninformed woman the nature of his profession, he replied: , ""Madam, I am a reporter." The eminent Frenchman might have given himself a great variety of titles, but he chose the simplest and what was to his mind the most effective label' to at tach to his own profession. As a matter of fact, if you could probe into the consciousness of, most of the men and women who have, made litera ture these past hundred years you would find th"at with the possible exception of thpse who dwelt and ahivered amid the " lofty end rarefied altitudes of philosophy the great majority were merely glorified journalists and proud to be kriwn as such. In no other country in the world does the American reporter, this once despised ' tminion of the press," exert so wide an influence or play such a modern part in the creation of literature. The roster of authorship behind the "best sellers" is merely the record of men and women who not only served their apprenticeship in "city rooms of newspapers but who brought to their more ambitious work the vast fund of experience, the Intimate knowledge of life and character, the fa cility of style and expression born out of days and nights keeping step with the swift march of events. Of course there are two kinds of re porters. One is the type of man who be comes a sort ' of chronic reproducer of bald facta as he finds them. He remains an ordinary chronicler of events. In a ' word, he is the photographer. On the other hand you have the re porter who transmutes facts through the alchemy of his own personality. He be comes the maker of literature. This is art- - " Seriously, any study of contemporary fiction must reveal the extraordinary in fluence of straight reportorial work upon the making of books. Richard Harding Davis was a great reporter, and that was one of the main reasons why he became a very successful writer of short stories and novels. Everything he wrote, from "Van Bibber" down to "Somewhere,ln France," was a slice t life snatched from the scenes of Broadway or the flaming battle line of actual war. Upton , Sinclair's book, ."The Jungle," was a remarkable piece of reporting. The amazing thing about it was that it was second-hand reporting. By Jhis I mean that he did not even get all his facts at first hand. He obtained most of the Information about conditions in the packing-houses from the Slav workers themselves. But so vivid was their ac count and so intense their recital that he made of i almost . a literal transcript from life. This, of course, makes Sin clair's performance all the more unusual. 'Frank Norris is a conspicuous exam ple. He was a born reporter, with a Zolaesque eye for detail that' was little short of uncanny. His book, "McTeague," was as perfect a piece of reporting of San Francisco life as could be-found. Gauged by the same standard, "The Oc topus" was as faithful a reflection of ONE branch of the Scidmores had lived for generations in a neglected corner of the county, a district of scrub oaks and barren hills, among the peb bles of which were many flint heads of Indian arrows. All this wild waste was theirs. Outside the homestead there was only one thing in it the family treasured. The grove of white pines was some dis tance from the house. When you entered it you walked on the brown carpet more softly than you tiptoed in a cathedral; you breathed the keen and scented air as if it were incense; you looked reverently , about you in the sunshine that filtered through the trees. This was the shrine. To protect it had been a work of constant vigilance. The danger of fire was incessant, night and day. A fire road, separating the grove from the scrub oak plain, was fresh plowed each spring. The ravages of woodcutters and vandals were also hard to guard against. Almost every night of her life, for forty-five years since she had been left alone, a girl of 20, as the i last of the Scidmores, Miss Anne had gone the half mile from the house to the grove, to see that within its sacred pre cints all was well. "Miss Anne owned 10,000 acres, a large holding in the long settled East, and had no money. The land developer passed her by, for little of her land was near town or railroad, and the land swindler , she would not deal'with. Miss Anne did not have enough to eat most of the time; Iolitical conditions in southern Califor nia as if the publisher of the book had. sent him out on an assignment -to report the great fight between the Southern Pa cific Railroad and the wtfieat growers of the San Joaquin Valley. Then, too, there is Theodore Dreiser he of the book of multifarious word and incessant amorous desire. To be sure, he paints with a more or less passionate brush, but the bigger thing is that he doggedly and persistently colors human weakness as he sees It and as It actual ly exists. The finest example Cthe glorified re porter in American fiction, however, is presented by the eternally lamented David Graham Phillips. Here was a man whose first writing was as a re- me in the winter she had to split up her fences for firewood. Now, after forty-five years, she was near the breaking point. It had required all her resolution this afternoon to send away the representative of a big manu facturing plant who had offered her a large sum, half in cash, for her grove of white pines. 'Such a wood as hers was tremendously valuable these days. After he had gone Miss Anne lit her lamp, and taking from the shelf a little lacquered strong box, unlocked it and drew out her will. She read over again the clause by which the grove and all her other acres were- left to public use, with the provision that the state should see to it that the white pines were never felled, but should remain for the solace of oth ers as lonely and wearied of straggle as herself. Replaclngthe will in the box, she left the box unlocked on the table and put out the lamp. Then she threw -a shawl over her head and set out for the grove. . It was a December night, pleasantly cold, with many stars, which were blot ted out by the dark green shapes of the straight,; tall trees which. Miss Anno walked under. In spite ef the terrible pain of hunger unsatisfied for three days and nights, she kept her feet until she reached a small open space in the sanc tuary. Then she surrendered the little that death could take from her. The Sun.: : .' porter, and though he rose to be the ablest novelist of his day, he always re mained a reporter. But with this im- portant difference, he Interpreted life through his own big vision and imagina tion and stamped it with his individual ity. If American literature of the past -'-twenty-five years had produced no other , book but "The Story of Susan Lenox" It wouia nave vindicated the enormous debt that our fiction owes to the real Journalist. Phillips found human naturo . frank, realistic and unafraid, and he pic tured it with courage and conviction ; Whether it was life, society or Wall " Street It mattered little; Phillips always - proved himself to be a faithful historian ofactual conditions, illumined by the fire and flame of his splendid logic and rea son. . ..." The world that reads Is coming into Tm f.ner understanding of its obligation 'to the reporter. Gradually the special arti cle writers are invading the one-time im-' pregnable domain of the fictfonist Take :: the case of Ray Stannard Baker. Her v is a man whose magazine achievements " include an astonishing compass of sub- - ject. - . - The reporter who first laid bare the railway rebate evil is disclosed as the charming and intimate philosopher who for years wrote under the name of David ' Grayson. The "Adventures in Friend shiD and Contentment" am nnthin- mnn - thairosympathetlc interpretations, don -in an exquisitely attuned reportorial way, ' i piain, nomety, everyday lire, far from the tumult and traffic of the world's strenuous endeavor. H. G. Wells calls the average novelist ' reality itsem iisaac jr. Marcosaon in V New York Sun. - ,. DR. BROWN was a phlegmatic man who usually took his own time at . - - - - . O , wyi vus vft he bustled around In a great hurry. 1 ",Mrs, Weaver has sent for me her boy is sickj I must go at once,", he said. "What is the matter with the boyr'. asked the' doctor's wife. ' "I don't know." he said, "but Mrs. ' Weaver has a book on "What to Do Be-' fore the Doctor Comes,' and X must hurry : before she does it." . . -