495
This magazine was originally the organ of pure literature, the only one in the United States of any 
authority. Unfortunately, the editor --- and to all intents and purposes the proprietor --- was Mr 
George Sylvester Viereck. At the outbreak of the war, he transformed the character of The 
International, introduced pro-German propaganda and thus ruined its reputation. It was now on the 
black list in Canada and refused admission by the postal authorities of the colony. Its best friends 
had withdrawn their support; its circulation had dwindled almost to nothing, and it staggered on 
mechanically from month to month without heart or hope. In eight months I pulled it up so 
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successfully that it became saleable. It was bought by Professor Keasbey, who issued one number so 
dreary, unintelligible and futile that it died on the spot. 
Keasbey had been professor of institutional history in the University of Austin, Texas. He was a 
charming and cultured man, but full of cranky notions about socialism, which he held with arrogant 
obstinacy. His literary style, on which he prided himself, as would have been ridiculous in Ruskin or 
Walter Pater, was turgid, convoluted, incoherent, over-loaded, redundant and beyond the wit of 
the most earnest and expert reader to comprehend. He was not far behind William Howell Williams, 
elsewhere mentioned, in his power to baffle inquiries. Frank Harris agreed on this point, no less 
than all the other people to whom I put it. He told me with amazement that he had been badgered 
into printing a half-page article of Keasbey's in "Pearson's", of which he was then treasurer, able, 
therefore, to put pressure on the editor. This number came under the censure of Burleon. He had 
gone to Washington to justify himself. Burleon had shown him the copy which had been submitted 
to the censors. Keasbey's article was marked as objectionable by all three pencils. Harris exploded. 
"You can't understand it," he raged. "I can't understand it. I don't believe there's any man alive who 
could make head or tail of a single sentence. How can it do any harm?" 
Keasbey's social opinions had cost him his chair at Austin. He had read and admired some of my 
work, and sought me out in my cottage by Lake Pasquaney. We spent three delightful days without 
even stopping talking, bar odd snatches of sleep. In conversation, he was delightful, breezy and 
instructive. Our acquaintance had ripened into something like friendship. He behaved very strangely 
in this matter of The International. He professed the warmest friendship for me, spent sometime 
almost every day in my office chatting; we lunched and dined together quite often, but he never 
breathed one word of his intention to buy The International, and when the transaction became 
public, he went one better. He asked me to continue my contributions and even suggested that I 
should work jointly with him, yet all the time, his idea was to oust me altogether. He refused to 
print a single line from my pen, and that, although he was in despair about filling the number. He 
must too have known that the success of the paper was entirely due to my personality; he knew 
that I had written nearly everything myself, and that the only other important elements had been 
given to me by their authors purely as a token of their personal admiration and friendship for me. I 
suppose he was utterly blinded by his conceit, which he possessed to a degree to which I can recall 
no parallel. However that may be, the result was that the May number was a monument of 
incomprehensible, worthless and unreadable rubbish, and that he found himself in his brand new 
and portentous offices, monarch of all he surveyed, with his overlaid infant a corpse at his feet. The 
episode is excellently mirthful. 
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I shall describe in its due place the course of my friendship with Maitland Ambrose Payne. One day 
he told me of a Singalese joint on 8th Avenue where they made real curry. I began to frequent it 
and thus met the lady who appears, in "The Urn", as the "Dog-headed Hermes or Anubis". She was a 
Pennsylvanian Dutch girl, the only member of her family not actually insane. We joined forces and 
took a furnished apartment in a corner house on Central Park West near its northern limit at 110th 
Street. From the bow window of the drawing-room trees only were to be seen. They rested and 
rejoiced my spirit. I could forget New York, although within half an hour from my office. 
My salary was twenty dollars a week; two dollars more than that of my typist. Life had taught me to 
enjoy outrages of this kind. It gave me pleasure to contrast my own generosity with the meanness of