lables Mr. Joyce had ruined their own chances to be shocking, or for the less metaphysical reason that the fellow had come to a measure of popularity and sales. Today, Joyce is more passé than James Russell Lowell. The disciples snap that here in the Dôme at this moment are at least seven fictionists who can excrete prose more turgid, more illegible, and generally more distinguished than his. To admire him is to be a provincial and even-most withering of condemnations at the Dôme-to be a person who does not live on the Left Bank but in the Philistine sunshine and air of the ChampsÉlysées.

From the disciples I had a bacchic glint of the new beauty which was to be bootlegged into America and save it from radios and the Saturday Evening Post. As an Iowa newspaperman I had learned that a "penman"-so we yearningly called them there, in a literary society unbibulous but otherwise astoundingly like the Dôme—a penman must be patriotic, pure, and reverent toward the Hebrew God, but nasty toward the Hebrews. Now, at the Dôme, I acquired a whole new code of Duties:

(1) Literature must be absolutely untrammeled, uncensored, and unimitative.

(2): All literature must be imitative of (a) Joyce; (b) Gertrude Stein; (c) Ezra Pound; (d) André Gide; (e) Jean Cocteau; (f) Sherwood Anderson; (g) Waldo Frank; (h) Marcel Proust. You are permitted, by the ruling of the International Convention of 1925, to choose any one of these

models or to mix all of them, but any writing which does not obviously proceed from these Eternal Prototypes is to be censored.

(3) is the same as 2, except that the eight Prototypes are sharply condemned as old-fashioned, and their names are replaced by those of any eight acquaintances of the person intoning the code.

(4): You must write about a thing called "the American Scene."

(5): You must never, since all Americans are dubs, write about the American Scene, but only about the Left Bank of the Seine.

(6): You must not write about any scene whatever, since that is Merely Pictorial. Your characters must wriggle through a void, to the sound of Wagnerian overtures played on tin whistles and jews'-harps.

(7): The judges in this match shall be Ernest Boyd, Gilbert Seldes, Ezra Pound, Albert Nock, Paul Rosenfeld, Cuthbert Wright, Harold Stearns, and Djuna Barnes. No person shall be considered a competent writer unless this committee agree upon him, unanimously, and as that has never happened and by no miracle could happen, a great deal of liveliness is added to the sport of literary competition.

III

I had listened-I had learned-I had striven to keep myself from writing with cheerfulness; but came a night, as Mr. Wells is fond of saying, when

a native cussedness stirred in me. I fell from grace, I left the Dôme, and as I wandered in such unsanctioned portions of Paris as the Rue Royale and the Grand Boulevards, I was sore-laden with a notion that the patronizing observations about other writers made by the geniuses at the Dôme weren't papal bulls, but merely damned impertinence on the part of young literary bounders. At that moment I craved the company of the most lowbrow magazine star who booms that he is a "real he-guy and not one of these knitting champions," who volunteers that he merely scribbles enough to make a living, in between his real duties as a man and a citizen-fishing, poker, addressing hard-boiled press clubs, teaching his seven sons to play golf, and mixing cocktails on the Italian terrace of his new $200,000 country residence-all the domestic delights whereby he proves that a Stout Fellow who has been properly trained in "the newspaper game" can produce literature and yet remain as sane and strong and pure as a Y.M.C.A. secretary or a prizefighter.

I contemplated the valiance of these Stout Fellows as I sat melancholy and alone before a lemon soda at the Café Napolitain. I remembered one of them who used to warn me against reading the contemporary English writers because they were, by "taking all these dirty cracks at decency," contaminating an erstwhile innocent world; and who revealed to me that it was all bunk to say that this guy Conrad was a high-grade author, because he

knew absolutely that Mary Roberts Rinehart and Irv Cobb and Pete Kyne got more per story than this Conrad bird ever heard of. Himself, he had a pretty foresight for market values, and while his rivals were blindly sticking to the Prizefight Story (how the Yale Junior defeats the world's champion, but only in the sixteenth round), he would perceive a public tend toward inner nobility, and switch overnight to the Domestic Story (how grandmother saves the flapper from gin).

I recalled a dinner of the more opulent literary gentlemen, ample and pleasant gentlemen whose names are forever on the magazine covers, and not one of whom, save myself, weighed less than two hundred and ten pounds or had a literary distinction of less than fifteen hundred dollars a story. I remembered their easy talk-free from all the precosities of the Dôme-about their motors, their investments, and their annual pilgrimages to Europe, consisting of a week of seeing the smuttier Parisian reviews and helping their daughters buy frocks, a motor trip along the Riviera, and a fortnight in such Italian hotels as were guaranteed free of all Wops, Frogs, Huns, Hunkies, and Yids. I remembered how their large blandness of world-survey, unprejudiced as the politics of a banker, untrammeled as the biology of a Baptist, gracious as a motorcycle cop, flowed over me and engulfed me and left me desirous of becoming a chiropractor and having done with it.

The diners referred with nausea to the "little

literary lice," whereby they indicated the very crossword-puzzle geniuses of the Dôme who that night seemed too much with me, late and soon. But meditating thus over my root beer at the Napolitain, I perceived that these Stout Fellows, the major generals and heavyweights of story-manufacturing, bestsellers and saviors of morality and lovers of the perilous sport of watching baseball, were not less but considerably more self-conscious and egocentric than the children at the Dôme.

Certainly men and women who have done fine and distinguished things do appear at the Dôme and its allied colleges, on the Left Bank, in Chelsea, in Greenwich Village. All the chattering lads in those retreats, however competently they may lie to themselves about the actual amount of work they do, however superciliously they look down on Thackeray and Hawthorne, are yet authentically alive to a revolt against the Mark Twain-O. Henry-Saturday Evening Post-Hearst-Munsey tradition that, to avoid pedantry and effeminacy, a writer must have the oral vocabulary of a truck-driver and the inescapable joviality of a pool-room; and that however he may hate sitting in puddles, he must go fishing.

Even the scorn for all places outside the grubbier alleys of the Latin Quarter (or Greenwich Village) which one finds so irritating in these new self-conscious Bohemians is generally to be explained by a proud recent arrival from the silo belt, or by poverty. The lads who cannot afford sunshine and privacy