A QUESTION OF PLUMAGE

Kenneth Stockton was a man of letters, and correspondingly poor.  He was the literary editor of a leading metropolitan daily; but this job only netted him fifty dollars a week, and he was lucky to get that much.  The owner of the paper was powerfully in favour of having the reviews done by the sporting editor, and confining them to the books of those publishers who bought advertising space.  This simple and statesmanlike view the owner had frequently expressed in Mr. Stockton’s hearing, so the latter was never very sure how long his job would continue.

But Mr. Stockton had a house, a wife, and four children in New Utrecht, that very ingenious suburb of Brooklyn.  He had worked the problem out to a nicety long ago.  If he did not bring home, on the average, eighty dollars a week, his household would cease to revolve.  It simply had to be done.  The house was still being paid for on the installment plan.  There were plumbers’ bills, servant’s wages, clothes and schooling for the children, clothes for the wife, two suits a year for himself, and the dues of the Sheepshead Golf Club—­his only extravagance.  A simple middle-class routine, but one that, once embarked upon, turns into a treadmill.  As I say, eighty dollars a week would just cover expenses.  To accumulate any savings, pay for life insurance, and entertain friends, Stockton had to rise above that minimum.  If in any week he fell below that figure he could not lie abed at night and “snort his fill,” as the Elizabethan song naively puts it.

There you have the groundwork of many a domestic drama.

Mr. Stockton worked pretty hard at the newspaper office to earn his fifty dollars.  He skimmed faithfully all the books that came in, wrote painstaking reviews, and took care to run cuts on his literary page on Saturdays “to give the stuff kick,” as the proprietor ordered.  Though he did so with reluctance, he was forced now and then to approach the book publishers on the subject of advertising.  He gave earnest and honest thought to his literary department, and was once praised by Mr. Howells in Harper’s Magazine for the honourable quality of his criticisms.

But Mr. Stockton, like most men, had only a certain fund of energy and enthusiasm at his disposal.  His work on the paper used up the first fruits of his zeal and strength.  After that came his article on current poetry, written (unsigned) for a leading imitation literary weekly.  The preparation of this involved a careful perusal of at least fifty journals, both American and foreign, and I blush to say it brought him only fifteen dollars a week.  He wrote a weekly “New York Letter” for a Chicago paper of bookish tendencies, in which he told with a flavour of intimacy the goings on of literary men in Manhattan whom he never had time or opportunity to meet.  This article was paid for at space rates, which are less in Chicago than in New York.  On this count he averaged about six dollars a week.