Memoirs of an Editor, by Edward P. Mitchell.
Twice Thirty, by Edward W. Bok.
The River of Life, by J. St. Loe Strachey.
Joseph Pulitzer, His Life and Letters, by Don C. Seitz.
Editors and publishers of powerful newspapers have unique opportunity to make their lives interesting. Many of them do. Some of them, like Henry Watterson, Wickham Steed and Georges Clémenceau write about their experiences, when they no longer take the world’s pulse, shape public opinion and re-order society. Their memoirs and lives are of the most entertaining of all biographic literature; they know the art of writing; all their lives, they have been observing and studying character, heralding and shaping events; it has been their self-imposed duty to sit in judgment and the self-advancement urge of their fellows brings them into intimate contact with the important persons of their period. Small wonder they write entertainingly when their sun begins to set.
Few have reviewed their experiences more delightfully than Edward P. Mitchell, for many years Editor-in-Chief of The New York Sun.
When I read Mr. Mitchell’s Memoirs of an Editor every page made firmer the conviction that I was companioning a great mind and a kindly heart. I recalled something that Mark Twain said of Anson Burlingame: “His outlook upon the world and its affairs was as wide as the horizon, and his speech was of a dignity and eloquence proper to it. It dealt in no commonplaces, for he had no commonplace thoughts. He was a kindly man, and most lovable. He wrought for justice and humanity. All his ways were clean; all his motives were high and fine.” That is Edward P. Mitchell if I may estimate him from his autobiography. If he has any fault, it is that he is too affable. He is a tiny bit too polite. There have been proprietors of the New York Sun within the memory of man who did not have all the virtues, but no one would suspect it from Mr. Mitchell’s book. The Sun that he writes about most entertainingly and instructively is the Sun for which Charles A. Dana got all the credit. Mr. Mitchell does not hint that the credit was unjustly allotted, but no one can read the chapters “How I Went to the Sun” and “The Newspaperman’s Newspaper” without being convinced that it was. The Sun could not have been what it was in the days of its ascendency: a beacon light of newspaperdom, a stimulus and a joy to thousands, a scourge to scores, had it not been for Francis P. Church, Fitz Henry Warren, and William D. Bartlett.
But it is not the story of the Sun that Mr. Mitchell set out to write. His colleague Frank M. O’Brien did that, and any one who believes he could improve on it would be as daring or demented as the artist who believes he can improve on the Mona Lisa. O’Brien’s story reflected the spirit of that newspaper as the portrait mentioned above reflected the soul of her who reminded Pater of Leda. However, Mr. Mitchell could scarcely tell us of himself without telling the story of the Sun too.
The volume is replete with personality studies of sages and cranks, philosophers and buffoons, experts and amateurs. Any one who is interested in the spirit of the Puritan, the pioneer, the pathfinder; any one who is intrigued by guessing at the truth, will be helped by reading the pages on Goldwin Smith. Any one who would like to clarify his hazy notions of paranoia will be aided by perusal of the pages on George Francis Train; any one who would make the acquaintance of a critic of letters to whom his countrymen should have accorded the esteem that the French accorded Rémy de Gourmont and the British George Saintsbury, should read what Mr. Mitchell says of Mayo W. Hazeltine; any one who would learn of the forces that did more than anything else to deliver us as a nation from the spirit of parochialism should read his pages on Bunan-Varilla, the French engineer, who made possible the Panama Canal.
It is a book for a rainy day and a starry night; a book to be read in Watchapey and Washington; to accompany one on Lake Louise or the Atlantic. The author’s wish has come true. It was that here and there some kind friends unknown might find in his book something as interesting for them to read as it was for him to remember. If he had as much pleasure in writing it as they have reading it, Edward P. Mitchell is a giant joy-creator.
Mr. Mitchell is a modest man. That can scarcely be said of Mr. Edward W. Bok. He is proud of his accomplishment as editor, prouder of his success as uplifter and proudest of the masterfulness which he displayed in piloting his ship of life through troubled waters and adverse currents to a safe port and serene haven. A few years ago he told about these various successes in a fat volume entitled The Americanisation of Edward Bok. Now he rewrites his autobiography and calls it Twice Thirty: Some Short and Simple Annals of the Road. Simple is a more appropriate adjective than short. Mr. Bok is pleased with himself. He was well born; he is of a nation that has been a parent in most things. It invented golf; it was the founder of the modern school of music; it furnished us with our fundamental institutions; our Federal Constitution; the Declaration of Independence; our State constitutions; our freedom of religion; our free public schools; our free press; our written ballot; our town, county and state system of self-government; the system of recording deeds and mortgages; the germinal idea of the Ladies Home Journal, New York City and the Hudson River. In fact, it would be difficult to name anything or any one save the Ku Klux Klan and Mayor Hylan that the Netherlands did not originate. And it contributed a man who never knew fear: Mr. Bok.
Thomas Carlyle wrote that he could get a far more penetrating insight of a writer’s personality from a portrait of the man, photographic or oleographic, than from his writing. I was never convinced that the sage of Chelsea was in the right until I saw the frontispiece in the book under consideration. It is labelled “At Twice Thirty.” The legend could be replaced by “Self-Satisfaction” and beneath it, this quotation from the text might be pasted: “I have had too distinct a leaning toward looking for and discovering the faults in persons and then of becoming possessed with a mad desire to correct those faults.” But neither from gazing at the portrait nor from reading the text am I moved to objurgation similar to that of the Apostle: Mr. Bok is not a hypocrite; though he believes it is the beam that is in his brother’s eye and the mote that is in his own. Nevertheless it will occur to some that at times he goes dangerously close to hypocrisy; for instance, “This book is written for my two sons.” If Mr. Bok’s pineal gland were opened and the day book diary of his soul extracted, it is safe to assume that the magician who could read it would find there an entry, “October 9th, 1924. Decided to publish Twice Thirty so that the world might have my four pages of biographical data from a reliable source.” Then there is that chapter entitled “My Most Unusual Experience,” in which Mr. Bok relates how he rescued a young American girl from the jaws of the lion and dragged her from the Coliseum, the jaws being a salacious Frenchman and the coliseum the promenade of the Empire in London. The beau geste reflects great credit on Mr. Bok, and he intended it should. That is the reason he published it. There can be no other. He does not cotton to axioms even though they are of divine origin. His right hand has always known just what his left was doing.
Mr. Bok quotes Henry Ward Beecher as saying to him that wisdom comes at sixty, not before. Job said it before Beecher. Storing up treasure in Heaven has always been considered an indication of wisdom. Even in Heaven, I fancy, you can’t have your cake and eat it. You can not insist upon having your reward now and also having it put to your credit in the hereafter. In fact we have the word of the Master to that effect.
I recall some years ago when I was in London Mr. Bok was much concerned about the street walkers of the Strand. A more vulturesome variety swarmed in Piccadilly Circus, but if my memory serves me it was those addicted to London’s most famous street that engaged his reformatory urge at the time. I have looked in vain for some account of it in this book and in the “Americanisation.” I am disappointed, for it would make an interesting companion chapter to “My Most Unusual Experience.” The same title might have been used were the prefix lopped from the third word.
This matter of hypocrisy and Edward Bok intrigues me; indeed I may say it engrosses me, for the moment. In one of the most naïf chapters that adult ever penned, the author points out that the Edward Bok, Editor of the Ladies Home Journal, and Edward W. Bok, “creator of the American Peace Award of $100,000, Donator of a window in The Nieuwe Kerk at Delft, and Knight of the Netherland Lion” are two different personalities. The tastes, outlook, and manner of looking at things of the former were totally at variance with those of the latter. In fact, the two personalities waged incessant warfare. “My chief difficulty was to abstain from breaking through the Editor and revealing my real self. Several times I did so, and each time I saw how different was the effect from that when the editorial Edward Bok had been allowed sway. Little by little I learned to subordinate myself and let him have full rein.”
Mr. Bok (the present one, for Editor Bok “has passed out of being as completely as if he had never been”) says it was a case of dual personality, and cites the notorious Miss Beauchamp sponsored by Dr. Morton Prince to support his contention. It won’t wash. Edward W. Bok knew that the things that Editor Bok did were oftentimes cheap, sensational, undignified, unworthy of his heritage, birth, nationality, accomplishments, ideals. But he knew also that when the Bok that was worthy of them dominated the Ladies Home Journal for six months and its sales dropped eighty thousand, that it was up to him to let some yellow into his lily white character, or else lose his job. And he turned on the saffron spigot. No, Mr. Edward W. Bok, that is not dual personality, and I who say it gave as many years to the study of double personality and cognate subjects as you did to journalism. Some will say it was hypocrisy. I say it was expediency, and it was your contribution to popular hedonism. You and another great journalist, Dr. Frank Crane, had found out what “the people” want and you gave it to them good and plenty. By so doing, you and he have set back the clock of culture in this country about a hundred years.
The average reader, with a mind of his own as to what constitutes good and bad literature, does not have to be warned as to the danger of books like Mr. Bok’s Twice Thirty. As a matter of fact, it is so unmeaning as to leave the reading public indifferent, but there is a latent danger in taking such writings indifferently. The same can be said of Dr. Crane’s books. They are harmless in themselves, but the public is already too much inclined to take short cuts to every goal of life; short cuts to fortune, to health, to taste and to culture. It is the duty of the critics to show the hollowness and the danger of taking Mr. Bok’s Twice Thirty seriously; of taking Dr. Crane’s Talks as guides in life; and of taking radios, victrolas and pianolas as forms of high art. Feeding the public what it wants is not always working for its best interest.
Diligent, careful reading of Twice Thirty has sufficed to convince me that Mr. Bok has never done anything that merited his disapproval. He may be sorry that he had a big head when he was born for it cost his mother a year on crutches, but he is not sorry he has one now. He is as satisfied with himself, his accomplishments and potentialities as was Nick Bottom, the weaver of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. In truth Mr. Bok reminds me of Mr. Bottom. He could play Pyramus, and Thisby, and the roaring lion, and like Bottom he can take pains, be perfect.
There is a certain amount of irony in the quotations Mr. Bok has chosen to put at the head of each chapter, possibly to give the book an atmosphere of culture. The most irrelevant one, the least à propos, is Plutarch’s sentence, “Oh, that men would learn that the true speaker is he who speaks only when he has something to say.” If Mr. Bok had written this as an epitome at the beginning of his book, and if he had meditated the advice of Plutarch and applied it to his own case, we would certainly have been spared Twice Thirty.
Occasionally, an amusing experience, an interesting anecdote, or a touching remembrance form a high spot in the book, but they are few and far apart. What interest or originality is there in “There must be a to-day before there is a to-morrow.” “Life may depart, but the source of life is constant.” Or, “To-day I can and do sleep the clock around once and sometimes twice a week”? Most of the incidents in his book are of the sort that ask to be forgotten, and when they are related with a lack of style which makes them flat, with a lack of humour which makes them pathetic, and when they all tend to moralise and preach—the case is hopelessly lost. In fact, it may be true to say that, had Mr. Bok a spark of humour or a particle of wit, he would never have written Twice Thirty, nor would he have published the “Letter that his father slipped Tom when he left his mother for 'Somewhere in France.’” This letter is the most ludicrous and ridiculous thing that ever was done in a sober mood. It is meant of course to be touching, elevating, inspiring and to serve as a vade mecum to the young soldier, as an exorcism in time of temptation, and as a reminder of the “home-spirit” when the flesh should show itself weaker than the will. As it is, coming seven years after the end of the War, when the memories of the way in which the American soldiers understood the meaning of the word “leave” and the way in which they got acquainted with “life” is not yet gone, it is the most out of place document in the book.
It must be a satisfaction to know that, throughout his life, with only one exception, he has stood on the right side of it; that he has pointed out the right way; that he has been the good Samaritan to abandoned women, the successful prophet in his dealings with Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, the man of good judgment in his editorship of the Ladies Home Journal, the paragon of domestic qualities and the ideal father; yet, for our part, we feel that although Mr. Bok may be sincere in what he says, he does not say all, and what he does not say is exactly what we would like to know. There again we can point to the lack of harmony between his quotations and his achievement. “The author,” wrote Tolstoi, “who succeeds in his work is he who describes the interesting and significant things which it has been given him to observe and experience in his own life.” But the successful author is also he who reveals a soul to his readers, and that is where Mr. Bok fails lamentably. He reveals well enough the man a photograph would reveal, providing the photograph were taken at a time when he was ready to moisten his lips and look pleasant.
Mr. Bok has recorded his struggles and successes with evident veracity and truthfulness, but how much more interesting they would have been to us if he had transplanted them a notch higher in the field of the emotional and intellectual efforts. The price he paid for the plot of land on which his house stands, and the seven bath-rooms he had built in it mean much less than the development of his ego from the point when a ride on a truck which saved him a five-cent fare constituted happiness for him, to that he reached later when he wanted the best of everything and was in a position to demand it. It is a common occurrence to be born in poverty and it is an achievement to rise above it, especially when the advance has been made honestly and in the open; but the soul should develop in proportion as the opportunities afforded by better connections and associations increase, and that is just what Mr. Bok does not reveal in his book; his mind is still on the same level as that of the young messenger boy in the Telegraph Company and his soul is still contented with a ride on a truck, as it were.
Bok’s motto was “The good that I would I do; but the evil which I would not, that I do not,” a drastic revision of Paul’s confession.
The last chapter of Twice Thirty bears the heading, “Is It Worth While?” “Scarcely,” is the answer, “if Twice Thirty is the antecedent of the pronoun.”
A few years ago it would have been said that a career such as Joseph Pulitzer’s could not have been staged anywhere save in this country. M. Coty, Lord Rothmere, Sig. Bergamini are examples of similar careers in France, England and Italy. Joseph Pulitzer galvanised the New York World into life, made it a power in the land and gathered about him a group of clever men, one of whom has written his life.