descendants. So I wish some of the
authors would confess and let us know which of them are doing it. It
would be jolly to know to whom we might confide the genial little items
of what-not and don't-let-this-go-farther that come the rounds. The
inside story of the literature of any epoch is best told in the diaries.
I'll bet Brander Matthews kept one, and James Huneker. It's a pity
Professor Matthews's was a bit tedious. Crabb Robinson was the man for
my money.

The diarists I would choose for the present generation on Grub Street
would be Heywood Broun, Franklin Adams, Bob Holliday, William McFee, and
maybe Ben De Casseres (if he would promise not to mention Don Marquis
and Walt Whitman more than once per page). McFee might be let off the
job by reason of his ambrosial letters. But it just occurs to me that of
course one must not know who is keeping the diary. If it were known, he
would be deluged with letters from people wanting to get their names
into it. And the really worthwhile folks would be on their guard.

But if all the writers wait until they are eighty years old and can
write their memoirs with the beautifully gnarled and chalky old hands
Joyce Kilmer loved to contemplate, they will have forgotten the comical
pith of a lot of it. If you want to reproduce the colors and collisions
along the sunny side of Grub Street, you've got to jot down your data
before they fade. I wish I had time to be diarist of such matters. How
candid I'd be! I'd put down all about the two young novelists who used
to meet every day in City Hall Park to compare notes while they were
hunting for jobs, and make wagers as to whose pair of trousers would
last longer. (Quite a desirable essay could he written, by the way, on
the influence of trousers on the fortunes of Grub Street, with the three
stages of the Grub Street trouser, viz.: 1, baggy; 2, shiny; 3, trousers
that must not be stooped in on any account.) There is an uproarious tale
about a pair of trousers and a very well-known writer and a lecture at
Vassar College, but these things have to be reserved for posterity, the
legatee of all really amusing matters.

But then there are other topics, too, such as the question whether
Ibanez always wears a polo shirt, as the photos lead one to believe. The
secret Philip Gibbs told me about the kind of typewriter he used on the
western front. I would be enormously candid (if I were a diarist). I'd
put down that I never can remember whether