Page:The Borzoi 1920.djvu/63

GEORGE JEAN NATHAN and hypocrisy. In close association with him for more than twelve years, I have yet to catch him in a lie against himself, or in a compromise with his established faiths. There have been times when we have quarrelled and times, I dare say, when we have hated each other: but when we have met again it has been always on a ground of approval and friendship made doubly secure and doubly substantial by the honesty of his point of view (however wrong I have held it), by the wholesomeness of his hatred, and by his frank and ever self-doubting conduct at our several Appomattoxes.

Perhaps no man has ever been more accurately mirrored by his writings than this man. He has never, so far as I know, written a single line that he hasn't believed. He has never sold a single adjective—and there have been times when opulent temptations have dangled before him. And on certain of these occasions he could have used the money. There may be times when he is wrong and when his opinions are biased—I believed that there are not a few such times—yet if he is wrong, he is wrong honestly, and if he is biased, he neither knows it in his own mind nor feels it in his own heart. He is the best fighter I have ever met. And he is the fairest, the cleanest, and the most relentless.

But does he accept himself with forefinger to temple, with professorial wrinkles, as an Uplifting Force, a Tonic Influence? Not on your ball-room socks! No critic has ever snickered at him as loudly and effectively as he snickers at himself. "What do you think of your new book?" I usually ask him when he has finished one. And his reply generally is, "It's got some good stuff in it—and a lot of cheese. What the hell's the use of writing such a book, anyway? My next one ..."

Life to him is a sort of Luna Park, and he gets the same sort of innocent, idiotic fun out of it. He would rather drink a glass of good beer than write; he would rather talk to a