The Topeka state journal. [volume] (Topeka, Kansas) 1892-1980, 1904-01-16
Three Western Writers Who
Are Known In New York.
What Opie Read Thinks Of the
Metropolis.
NOT LITERARY CENTER
No More Than Office Building Is
Home Of Art.
Gossip of Interest to Readers of
Books.

| A New York literary writer, Burton
T. Beach, in discussing the success of
western writers in the metropolis in a
| letter to the Chicago Post. says:
Three well known western men of LETT
ters have been operating in New York
of late with more or less activity-Gen-
| eral Lew Wallace, Opie Read and Ham
lin Garland. AS. Mr.. Read would say,
name them in the order Of their years
and virtues. General Wallace came
so the dispatches reported at the time
to undergo a surgical operation for one
OF the most popular and fashionable Of
modern maladies. But his ''war-worn,
| griZzled front" when I saw him, gave
never hint of troubles behind the
scenes, and no shrewd advertising sur
geon has figured in the local press as
yet in association with the verniform
appendix of the veteran author of
| Ben Hur."
| With the temporary abandonment of
the Klaw & Erlanger production of the
play based upon the novel, an abandon
ment made necessary by the Iroquois
theater disaster, General Wallace finds
a PactOlian stream of royalties sudden
~ running dry; but the sales of the
book are large, I am told, and he has
already made a handsome profit from
the dramatization.
| The cessation of royalties does not dis
turb him so much apparently as the
! discovery that the camel in the cast has
| OF late shown a hopeless disregard of
/ moral lesson, which General Wallace
originally stipulated should be kept at
all times as clearly in the managerial
| eyes as any vulgar consideration of
the box Office" The beast behaved out
rageously during the closing night of
the New York run; and General Wal
lace is understood to have admitted at
the Century association that, if he had
the book to write again, in the light of
what he has learned this winter about
camels, he would be satisfied with the
Roman tr1reme and would omit the
ship of the desert"
OPIE READ ON NEW YORK.
Opie Reads summary of his impress
sions of literary life in the metropolis
is the subject of a good deal of a COM
ment- New York he has declared,
is no more of literary center than
an office building is the home of art -
He comedies that the town is a great
mart for thought and a market house
for print, but he has not found a dis
tinctive literary set characteristic even
of a thin soil. The New Yorker as MIR
use American books, but, If forced to
do so, insists that they shall bear
Manhattan imprint.
He spoke, of course, of the average
| man, not of the representative man;
and for the average New Yorker he
has proclaimed in a clever article his
thorough-going contempt. There is
much wit and much truth in all this.
4L0I9 IL also, dS III every WITTY III
/ terance since the worlds beginning
much untruth and injustice. If the au-
thor of "A Kentucky Colonel had
lived longer in New York he would be
rid of several notions of the literary
/ quality of the average New Yorker
That individual does know something of
the west. That individual does not con-
fine himself to books written or pub
| lished abroad, or it books by foreign
writers published or printed in New
! York hof ind 4r1x
or assert that his city represents all
| there is in American letters.
Mr.. Read has been unfortunate In a
sincere Convictions when throwing out
/ these terse but inaccurate generaliza-
lions. He has made the mistake against
which Herbert Spencer was always warn
| ing the investigator of unfamiliar phe-
nomena-he has chosen a false type"
outside of the west are the western men
Of letters. more keenly appreciated. more
| highly valued, than by the average New
MIR. GARLAND FAR FROM HOME.
| For the winter at least Mr.. Garland will
make the best shift he can in what he
calls this crazy town." Occasionally I
to glimpse qaT from OF h tPs thSggh he he dis
habits in Morningside avenue, fronting
upon the slowly rising walls Of the Ca
ing structure the ruins of a church, ard
in the hill on which it stands big
trees though lean ones" and a little
green grass. and there he is ''holed up
for the cold weather in the 'quietest
Mr.. Read have Mr.. Garland and Mr.. Car
lands fiction in mind when he ragged or
sneered at the average New Yorker d?
To be candid, believe no mental disci-
pline could do more for an able, fearless,
| reckless westerner of the Read or Gar
land school than tnree months of each
| year passed on Manhattan island. This
town may be crazy" but-similia SINH
iibus curantur-it casteth out demons
And in literature Beelzebub, the prince
| of demons, is Drovincialisrn.