Читать книгу Set Down in Malice: A Book of Reminiscences онлайн

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At the end of the passage, near the windows where French papers are displayed, I found a crowd of a dozen excited men, all talking and gesticulating. The rest of the Café was empty, as one would expect at that time of the day. In the middle of the small crowd was Harris, who caught my eye almost at once. He came to me, and I saw that he was rather agitated.

“Come and sit over here, Cumberland,” he said. “I’ve just been through a beastly quarter of an hour.”

It appeared that a well-known and very distinguished littérateur had quarrelled with him in the Café.... Blows had been exchanged....

We talked of money—an ever-absorbing topic both to Harris and to me. He told me his books had brought him practically nothing. For The Bomb, if I remember correctly, he received fifty pounds—certainly not more than one hundred pounds.

“If I had been compelled to live by what my books ssss1 have brought me,” he said, “I should have starved. Yet it is not long ago that Arnold Bennett assured me that I should be able to earn five thousand pounds a year if I gave my whole time to fiction. But Bennett is wrong. My books, ever since Elder Conklin was published, have been enthusiastically praised, but they have not had large sales. Most authors must find book-writing the most unremunerative work in the world. I put an enormous amount of labour into The Bomb, as I do into all my books, and the labour was not made any the less from the fact that much of the earliest part of the book is autobiographical. In my young manhood I worked as a labourer, deep under water, at the foundations of Brooklyn Bridge; it is all described in my book.”