Plum Pudding

Plum Pudding, by Christopher Morley,

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Title: Plum Pudding Of Divers Ingredients, Discreetly Blended & Seasoned
Author: Christopher Morley
Release Date: May 7, 2005 [eBook #15794]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
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PLUM PUDDING
Of divers Ingredients, Discreetly Blended & Seasoned
by
CHRISTOPHER MORLEY
And merrily embellished by WALTER JACK DUNCAN
Printed at Garden City, New York, by Doubleday, Page & Co'y and are to be sold by All Worthy Booksellers, together with Other Works by the Same Author, thus modestly offered to your Attention
1921
Copyright, 1921, by Doubleday, Page & Company
All Rights Reserved, Including That Of Translation Into Foreign Languages, Including The Scandinavian
Copyright, 1910, by Public Ledger Company Copyright, 1920, 1921, by the New York Evening Post, Inc. Copyright, 1920, by the Outlook Company Copyright, 1921, By the Atlantic Monthly Company
Printed at Garden City, N.Y., U.S.A.
First Edition

* * * * *
BOOKS BY CHRISTOPHER MORLEY
PARNASSUS ON WHEELS THE HAUNTED BOOKSHOP SHANDYGAFF MINCE PIE PIPEFULS KATHLEEN TALES FROM A ROLLTOP DESK SONGS FOR A LITTLE HOUSE THE ROCKING HORSE HIDE AND SEEK CHIMNEYSMOKE TRAVELS IN PHILADELPHIA PLUM PUDDING

* * * * *

THIS BOOK IS DEDICATED TO
DAVID WILLIAM BONE DON MARQUIS SIMEON STRUNSKY
MEMBERS OF THE THREE HOURS FOR LUNCH CLUB

[Illustration]
Almost all these sketches were originally published in the New York Evening Post and the Literary Review. One comes from The Outlook, one from The Atlantic Monthly, one from the Haverford Alumni Quarterly, and one from the Philadelphia Evening Public Ledger. The author is indebted to these publishers for permission to reprint.
Roslyn, Long Island July, 1921

[Illustration]

CONTENTS
The Perfect Reader
The Autogenesis of a Poet
The Old Reliable
In Memoriam, Francis Barton Gummere
Adventures at Lunch Time
Secret Transactions of the Three Hours for Lunch Club
Initiation
Creed of the Three Hours for Lunch Club
A Preface to the Profession of Journalism
Fulton Street, and Walt Whitman
McSorley's
A Portrait
Going to Philadelphia
Our Tricolour Tie
The Club of Abandoned Husbands
West Broadway
The Rudeness of Poets
1100 Words
Some Inns
The Club in Hoboken
The Club at Its Worst
A Suburban Sentimentalist
Gissing
A Dialogue
At the Gasthof zum Ochsen
Mr. Conrad's New Preface
The Little House
Tadpoles
Magic in Salamis
Consider the Commuter
The Permanence of Poetry
Books of the Sea
Fallacious Meditations on Criticism
Letting Out the Furnace
By the Fireplace
A City Note-Book
Thoughts in the Subway
Dempsey vs. Carpentier
A Letter to a Sea Captain

PLUM PUDDING

[Illustration]

THE PERFECT READER
On Christmas Eve, while the Perfect Reader sits in his armchair immersed in a book--so absorbed that he has let the fire go out--I propose to slip gently down the chimney and leave this tribute in his stocking. It is not a personal tribute. I speak, on behalf of the whole fraternity of writers, this word of gratitude--and envy.
No one who has ever done any writing, or has any ambition toward doing so, can ever be a Perfect Reader. Such a one is not disinterested. He reads, inevitably, in a professional spirit. He does not surrender himself with complete willingness of enjoyment. He reads "to see how the other fellow does it"; to note the turn of a phrase, the cadence of a paragraph; carrying on a constant subconscious comparison with his own work. He broods constantly as to whether he himself, in some happy conjuncture of quick mind and environing silence and the sudden perfect impulse, might have written something like that. He is (poor devil) confessedly selfish. On every page he is aware of his own mind running with him, tingling him with needle-pricks of conscience for the golden chapters he has never written. And so his reading is, in a way, the perfection of exquisite misery--and his writing also. When he writes, he yearns to be reading; when he reads, he yearns to be writing.
But the Perfect Reader, for whom all fine things are written, knows no such delicate anguish. When he reads, it is without any arri��re pens��e, any twingeing consciousness of self. I like to think of one Perfect Reader of my acquaintance. He is a seafaring man, and this very evening he is in his bunk, at sea, the day's tasks completed. Over his head is a suitable electric lamp. In his mouth is a pipe with that fine wine-dark mahogany sheen that resides upon excellent briar of many years' service. He has had (though I speak only by guess) a rummer of hot toddy to celebrate the greatest of all Evenings. At his elbow is a porthole, brightly curtained with a scrap of clean chintz, and he can hear