The New Hegira

DEEMS TAYLOR

Concerning New York City's Artistic Emigrés and What It Is That Makes Them Emigrate

I WRITE this in a second-story room of an aged and somewhat careworn house on Hunting Ridge, Connecticut. The district is a rural one, and the day is profoundly silent save for the wind and the remarks of the birds, and the sounds produced by several citizens who are pursuing their various vocations within my gates. At the rear of the house Mr. H. I. Dann is laying the cement floor of a garage that Messrs. Sears, Roebuck and Company obligingly left there last week. Mr. Herman Arnow, having removed large numbers of shingles from the side of the house, is now busy replacing them with a nursery porch. In the cellar Mr. John Marcel is connecting a maze of obviously reluctant steam pipes, while in an adjoining room Mr. Charles Bloomer raises his voice to request a second helping of plaster from some distant person named Jim. Inaudible in the middle distance is Mr. Lowell Burow, spraying apple trees with a mysterious chemical warranted to make several thousand small caterpillars wish they hadn't come. What time I weary of literature I can, by having recourse to mathematics, figure out that these professional friends of mine are costing me just 13.333 cents a minute.

SOME two miles away, in North Stamford are Miss Peggy Wood, Miss Violet Heming, and Miss Mary Servoss. Westward, by the Hudson, is Miss Katharine Cornell; to the north, in the Berkshires, is Miss Edna St. Vincent Millay. Southward, on Long Island, are Miss June Walker, Mr. Geoffrey Kerr, and Mr. Ring Lardner. Eastward, out Westport way, are Messrs. John Held, Jr., Webb Waldron, Henry James Forman, Lucian Cary, and Franklin P. Adams. All these, and dozens of others, are at this moment doubtless on their more or less recently acquired ancestral estates, ostensibly at work and in reality bossing workmen, reading seed and mail-order catalogues, and wondering whether the old car is going to last another season.

For five or six years past, New York's practitioners of the beaux arts have steadily been emigrating, and in such numbers that their centrifugal movement has by now assumed the characteristics of a stampede. Scores of her writers, painters, playwrights, and actors have bought houses as far away from the city as conditions permit. Some are on Long Island; others are on the right and left banks of the Hudson. They are scattered all over Connecticut, and a few have gone as far north as Massachusetts. These people have not merely bought summer homes. Most of them live in the country the year round, coming into the city only when their business affairs make it absolutely necessary to do so. Even the actors, who must of necessity be in town every night, frequently ride fifty or sixty miles after the theatre in order to spend a few hours of daylight away from the sight and sound of taxicabs.

It is not altogether easy to arrive at the causes of this hegira. Ask one of the emigres why he did what he did, and he is likely to produce no better explanation than a vague, "Oh, I wanted a place in the country." But why did he want a place in the country? And why now, rather than ten years ago?

His first cause is, I think, largely economic. Generally speaking, the practitioner of the arts in America must, particularly while his career is in the making, be in or near New York. For New York is—and the fact is neither for New York's nor the country's good—the artistic market-place of America. It is in New York that the plays are produced, that the magazines are edited, that music and books are published, that pictures and sculpture are bought and sold. Try to imagine an actor achieving a successful career in Cleveland, Ohio, or a composer selling operas in Denver, Colorado, and you will have an idea of the extraordinary centralization of the commercial side of art in America. The movies alone have their origin outside of New York.

On the other hand, the artist, even a moderately successful one, is beginning to discover the alarming fact that it is virtually impossible for him to live in New York. It is too uncomfortable, for one thing. A few of his fellows achieve a certain measure of quiet by living along the recently reclaimed regions of the far East Side or in the inaccessible fastnesses of Riverside Drive. But as a type he is an extremist, and when he is not communing with nature is likely to be an incorrigible cockney, with a strong aversion to living where he cannot walk to his work. So he settles down, as a rule, in the so-called heart of things, in the midtown forties and fifties, where he can lie awake nights listening to the roar of the elevated, the squawk of unnumbered taxis, and the crash and rattle of the provision trucks coming in from the Long Island truck farms. He spends his days answering the scores of telephone calls that the New York Telephone Company relays to him with pitiless efficiency, and in imbibing the smells and coal dust of what must be by now one of the six dirtiest cities in the world. In time, of course, his nerves begin to go, and he flees.

EVEN the iron-nerved have, sooner or later, to flee, in any case. For while New York may very well be a gold-mine for the actor, author, or playwright, its prices are likewise those of any other mining-camp. Just how many millionaires actually live in the metropolis, nobody, outside the Income Tax Bureau, can estimate. Whatever the number, it must be infinitely smaller than what New York shopkeepers seem to think it is. It takes only a few years to convince the practitioner of the arts that he will be wise to make his money in New York and spend it elsewhere. Otherwise, unless he hides his loot in some safely distant spot, it will be taken from him faster than he can accumulate it.

There is another, less obvious reason why the artist finds New York a difficult place in which to pursue a career. The American skyscraper has much to recommend it, both practically and aesthetically; but no one who has not lived in a skyscraper city can possibly realize the literally crushing spiritual effect of these monstrous buildings in the mass. Actors and musicians and painters are not noted for excessive modesty and diffidence— naturally enough, since a healthy amount of egotism is indispensable in anyone who would successfully practice any art. But it is impossible to feel even reasonably indispensable to society, or even useful, when one's days are spent at the bottom of a canyon. Our famous zoning laws do succeed in letting enough air into the streets to keep the inhabitants from suffocating; but otherwise they do not help much. The fact that a canyon's walls slope back at an angle of twenty-five degrees instead of being perpendicular may be important to a geometrician. To the man at the bottom it is none the less a canyon. Nor do the architectural beauties of the skyscrapers on, say, Fifth Avenue, do much to mitigate their depressing effect. A man in jail may derive some initial comfort from the fact that his cell has an exquisite cornice; but after a few days he finds that he is still in a cell.

The artist who settles in New York, therefore, has a hard time keeping up the pretence that he is a devil of a fellow. The loud boastings that you hear in Gotham's actor—and writer—clubs are in reality only the frantic struggles of artists who are fighting off an inferiority complex. In the end they either succumb, and go to Hollywood, or go to the country and save their souls.

IN the last analysis, soul-saving is probably the chief motive—even if an unconscious one—of our country-bound intelligentsia. The bohemian proclivities of artists are really largely mythical. Bohemia is a country largely inhabited either by the very young and selfdistrustful or the old and discouraged. Artistcolonies, as a rule, are a result of the huddleinstinct, the gathering together of people who are starving for mutual encouragement.

A youngster starts out to be, say, a painter or a poet. Naturally, unless he is a megalomaniac (in which case he is not likely to go very far), he is more than a little daunted by the magnitude of the task that he has undertaken. So, just as naturally, he frequents the haunts of other neophytes, in whose company he can—if he is good at interrupting—talk freely about himself without being laughed at and derive reassurance from the realization that he is not alone in his struggles. New York's Greenwich Village was not, as popularly assumed, a colony of conceited and immoral lunatics. It was an aggregation of frightened young mid-Westerners who wanted to be artists and who were afraid to go home in the dark. However ridiculous may be the antics and posturings of the inhabitants of the Latin Quarter, in Paris or no matter where, the instinct that created it is as unreasoning and right as the instinct that makes sheep huddle together in a snowstorm.

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But the grown-up artist—and by that I mean the artist who has gained the courage and skill to make some appreciable headway in his chosen field, regardless of his financial success—no longer needs reassurance. The better artist he is, the more he yearns to create art, and the less he desires to talk about it—or about himself. He finds that he has taken a job, a job that requires daily concentration and hours as regular as those of a steamfitter or a broker.

At that point of his career he finds that the city no longer has a place for him, save as a market or a playground. For the city simply cannot understand a regime that is not imposed from without. In the city, when you are working you are in an office, where there are telephones and stenographers and regular hours and conferences. When you are not in your office you are loafing. Anybody who deliberately locks himself in his own room under pretense of having work to do is either a fool or a poseur. If you are not working on someone else's time you are obviously not working at all.

And so the artist takes flight. He moves into the country, and stops worrying about the rent and begins to worry about the mortgage. But he has one great compensation. His friends are too busy and too far away to bother him except by appointment; and when he does meet them, they are more likely to discuss herbaceous borders than to talk about Art.