Page:History of Oregon Literature.djvu/670

618 1919; Scouts of the Desert, 1920; Somewhere at Sea, and Other Tales, 1923.

When he was first wanting to be a writer in Portland there was a newspaper man in the city who was kind to beginners and who, amidst all the tangibilities of journalism, retained an eager response to what might touch the hearts of men. He had a sure judg ment for what was good; he was one of the first to see the merits of the poetry of Bert Huffman of Pendle ton and of the stories of John Fleming Wilson. He was Joe Levinson, at that time Sunday editor of the Oregonian. In an interview in 1922 he gave his recol lections of Wilson’s early literary work in Portland: Perhaps few of our own people know that Wilson wrote his first story while he was a reporter doing assignments on the Oregonian and the Telegram. He broke into print as a story teller in 1905 when I was Sunday editor of the Ore gonian and bought the story. Soon afterwards he submitted his second story, with a setting at the mouth of the Colum bia River.

It is not possible that he spent more than two years at sea but he was as well acquainted with the Pacific Ocean as Bret Harte was with the mining towns of the California Sierras. He would call at my office about the middle of the after noon and ask whether I could use a 2,000-word story. By 11 o'clock that night he would have it on my desk, and it would be an absolutely perfect piece of work which he had hammered out on the typewriter without an interlineation Or CraSure. He perfected every sentence before he typed the first word of i t. He must have had the very finest o f English training i n his preparatory school and a t Princeton. A bril liant style like Wilson's can never b e “picked up”, and i t never comes “just naturally”.