[In the following essay, Neuman outlines Cobb's methods of writing.]

Those who look upon the writing profession as an easy thing meet with little encouragement from Irvin S. Cobb. The famous scribe once said that he could write "a million words about a pin," but he did not indicate it would be an easy undertaking. Some persons gather from the remark that the only requirements for literary work are pencil and paper. He says it is a toilsome business and must be learned like any other profession.

"You would not expect to become a lawyer, a doctor or a painter without a good many years of study, both in broad fundamentals and in technique," he said in advising beginners to go at it seriously. "Professional writing is not one whit less difficult to master than law, or medicine, or painting. The preparation is different, but no less arduous."

His stories, constituting a distant addition to the world's imaginative literature, have for years been an unfailing reservoir upon which earnest writers have drawn for plot, incident, and method. There is that indescribable touch about his artistry that instantly stamps him as a genius. Like a magic wand, his pen turns everyday things into romance and adventure. More of his short stories have been reproduced in anthologies and symposiums than can be said of any other living American. In one year eleven different published compilations carried as many stories by Mr. Cobb, attesting the wide favor of his creations.

Writing in the American Magazine for August, 1925, on the theme "How to Begin at the Top and Work Down," Mr. Cobb gave his theory of short story writing. "It sometimes seems to me," he commented, "that every man, woman and child in the United States wants to write and is certain he or she can write. 'You know,' a young fellow remarks offhandedly, I think I'll become a writer. Why I wrote an essay the other day, and everybody told me it was wonderful. I think I'll send it to one of the big magazines.'"

Mr. Cobb is amused at the way aspiring writers contemplate the forum of letters. He has frequently remarked that "easy writing makes hard reading" and marvels at the loose methods employed by juvenile writers who consider speed the prime asset. Although the author of more than three hundred short stories, he avers none of them was dashed off at white heat.

"You should see me some morning when I'm in the mood for dashing off the stuff," said the wordsmith. "There I sit, dashing it off at the rate of about an inch and a half an hour, and using sweat for punctuation. I'm the sort of impetuous dasher that the Muir Glacier is. And so is every other writer who is getting away with it. They say Thackeray worked three weeks over a single paragraph, and then threw it away and started in all over again. Every smooth, easy, graceful line means another furrow in the head of its maker. Nearly every recorded statement which deals with verities means study, research, and patient inquiry."

Continuing, the author elucidated his remarks. "That expression, 'dash off a story,' gives me the pip!" he said, with less regard for elegance than force. "I never dashed off a story in my life, and in my opinion any story that is dashed off is bound therefore to be worthless. A story is like a loaf of bread; if the ingredients are slapped together and the dough is kneaded hastily, the bread is full of raw and indigestible and unsavory lumps; but if it is kneaded and kneaded and kneaded with painstaking care, the bread comes out sweet and smooth and vitalized."

The writer probably disparages himself a bit here, for his friend, Robert H. Davis, once wrote that Mr. Cobb was the only person he knew who could write a short story and carry on a conversation at the same time. The ability to do such a thing is unusual. Julius Caesar is said to have added two columns of figures at a time and Napoleon directed three officers in the same breath. In the case of Mr. Cobb, the feat may be ascribed to the many years he spent in newspaper offices, where both lobes of the brain are frequently called upon for a joint session. Ordinary noises do not distract from his train of thought, for he is accustomed to the roar and hubbub of the big city. Even the thunder of cannon at the battle front did not disturb his equanimity. But on the other hand, the cry of a child, or any distressing or unusual sound is annoying and commands his attention.

Like the late Arthur Brisbane, the prolific Kentuckian often utilizes his time while traveling to revise and make corrections in his work, but he does most of his actual composition at home. It may be in the drawing room of a fast-moving train en route to a speaking engagement that he pulls a manuscript from his pocket for final consideration, or in the quiet of a hotel room following the address where he can glance over what has been written.

Unlike many writers, Mr. Cobb does not prosecute his literary tasks during the late hours of night nor in the early morning. He goes to his workroom about eight-thirty o'clock in the morning and generally works till twelve-thirty. The practice of morning work was inbred during his newspaper days on evening papers, where following a hurried breakfast he rushed to the office and turned out his major copy before noon. Fannie Hurst follows a similar practice, turning out her important work before midday, as did also Rousseau.

He likes to write on Sundays and holidays. Gloomy days have no effect on his output. On the contrary, he turns out some of his liveliest yarns when clouds hang low. He is not a stickler for dismal weather, as was O. O. McIntyre; but given a pen and a clean sheet of paper, his mind is quickly relieved of the elements.

Like the old masters, Mr. Cobb writes all his copy in longhand. "When I turned to authorship I came to the conclusion that speed at which one writes with pen or pencil is the speed at which a mind under proper control can function best," the writer told Lee Shippey, columnist for the Los Angeles Times, in a chat in 1935. "I have tried dictation, but then the words stumbled all over one another." He does his literary work with a fountain pen, writing from three hundred to two thousand words a morning. His average is close to fifteen hundreds words.

The penman wears a French smock while at work and is usually puffing a typically masculine cigar, just as James Fenimore Cooper habitually chewed gum drops while in the throes of creative effort. The afternoons at home are often given to reading and correspondence, or making changes in manuscript.

He often maps out literary plans in some far-off retreat. Speaking of Mr. Cobb's mental activities on a camping trip in the north, Robert H. Davis says in Canada Cavalcade (1937):

I remember the first season of the two that Irvin Cobb bivouacked at Ojuk and laid out a series of short stories, several of them Judge Priest tales and others equally well known. Parked in a hammock, a long cigar in his teeth and the prospect of good night fishing with a plug, the Paducah boy could do more thinking of a profitable sort at Ojuk Island than any man who ever set foot upon its golden strand.

Mr. Cobb says that writing a story is like reporting something. He maps out a fiction story just as he would a long newspaper article, holding that there is not a great deal of difference between news writing and fiction writing. He takes a plot from anything and tries to imagine the story as he would like to have it happen in real life if he were writing for a newspaper. Defoe's Journal of the Plague Year, Thackeray's Vanity Fair, and Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn are examples of good reporting, he avers.

The writer says newspaper work offers a fine basis for story writing but often tends to hurtful speed. "Newspaper training is good in one way—it brings experience to a fiction writer better and quicker than any other occupation," says Mr. Cobb, seventeen years of whose dramapacked life were spent in newspaper offices. "It's bad in another way, for it tends to too much speed in writing and too much carelessness of the finer points."

Mr. Cobb alternates humor with his serious writing, according to the mood. "I do not disapprove of gloom," he says, claiming it is one of his standbys and often saves the day when he is trying to write something funny. "After I have spent several days trying to write something that will pass as humor, I know of no better way of chirking up than to sit down and write something full of shadows and skulls, smelling of the tomb and dripping the dark blood of sudden and mysterious death. If a character won't crack a Main Street quip for me, I drag him away to a Southern swamp and write up his tragic demise and subsequent decay. And this system works just as well with the reverse English on it. If I find that what I am writing fails to be as gloomy as it should, I bound back to the comic."

His workshop, or study, on the Pacific coast is a large upstairs room at the front from which one might view the ocean but for tall eucalyptus and bamboo trees. Yet from this coign he does not see the things about him but reaches far away for the background of stories destined to fill magazines and eventuate in outstanding books. This is his forte, his sanctuary, his kingdom.

Hundreds of books beckon from shelves of the large library. While the bulk of his literary treasures are in the study, stray volumes lie with delightful abandon in all parts of the house. The drawing room vies with the mental workshop above for its share of big books and little books, old books and new books. There are more than four thousand of them.

His favorite authors, "outside of Will Rogers and myself," are Robert Louis Stevenson, Kipling, Mark Twain, Anatole France, Abe Lincoln, Voltaire, Keats, Shakespeare, Lewis Carroll and Hans Christian Anderson.

The study, or his office, as he prefers to call it, is packed with things made by Indians, from a Navajo rug which practically covers the floor to the last Flathead buffalo spear crowded against the ceiling. At his feet also lies the pelt of a black bear, which, like the moose-head over the mantelpiece in the drawing room is a trophy of his chase for wild game. When he quits his workroom he is as likely to lay his smock on top of a Pawnee papoosecarrier as to hang it over a Sioux tomahawk decorated with a scalplock.

His former workshop at "Rebel Ridge" near New York City was an abandoned ice house one hundred and fifty feet from the home. The morning sun came in at the east windows and was reflected in a small pool beside which the brick structure sat. In its remodeled state the workshop resembled a hunting cabin or lodge. Notable among literary productions in these quarters were such books as Life Among the Abandoned Farmers and J. Poindexter, Colored. In all, he wrote about fifty stories at "Rebel Ridge."

Chief among the stories written while the Cobbs lived at the Algonquin Hotel in New York City may be mentioned "Red Handed." The humorous volume One Third Off was also written there. When a limner drew caricatures of New York's literary and play writing grandees for the hotel's celebrity corner, Mr. Cobb was asked to autograph the burlesque of himself. At the jutting crevice of his mouth, he wrote: "What a place to throw old razor blades!"

From 1907 to 1913 the writer and his family lived at Park Hill, Yonkers, where he produced the early Judge Priest yarns and, in the field of humor, Cobb's Bill of Fare and Cobb's Anatomy. He had just turned out these humorous classics when he returned to New York City to make his home and was greeted at the station by reporters who questioned him as to why he made the change. "I have nothing to say against Yonkers," he replied, "but I believe New York has a future." Later, and until moving to California, the Cobbs maintained an apartment on Park Avenue for winter.

Philosophizing again on hasty story writing, the phrasemaker cited his own observations. "I have seen a good many manuscripts of would-be authors," he mused, "and what impresses me about them is the extraordinary slovenliness and lack of care they show. There are stupid inconsistencies; facts do not check up; a character is called Marion in one place, and Miriam in another, and Mary Ann in a third; punctuation is careless, and typewriting is often abominable. I can safely say I have never seen an amateur story that shows one-tenth the care and thought that I, or any other professional writer, think it essential to put on a story before I show it to an editor. And if that care and thought are necessary for an accepted writer with a waiting market, how much more necessary are they for the beginner entering the field and expecting to fight the enormous competition waiting there!"

During an interview at his suburban home, the writer disclosed the origin of most of his short stories. He said the things he visions in his working hours are the scenes of his past living and the people he has known. For many years he had no definite idea as to the source of fiction material, but agrees now that his younger days are the dormant caches that supply most of his short story data.

His first short story was "The Escape of Mr. Trimm," which was suggested by the trial of a high-flying financier. He covered it as a reporter for the New York Evening World.

"That was more than twenty-five years ago," Mr. Cobb recently recalled. "The next winter I met Arnold Bennett, who told me that a successful writer must get his background, his basic material, from things that he thought, or felt, or did before he was thirty-five years old. I was approaching that age, and despite the sources of my first story, I didn't believe entirely in his statement. But I've thought about it since, and I've arrived at the conviction that Bennett was correct. All of my characters and most of the incidents are the result of my looking backward, sometimes unconsciously, over the memories of my experiences with life."

"Of course," he explained, "no single character is the counterpart of an individual, but everyone is made up of characteristics that I've observed in people that I've known. The trick is in selecting those characteristics which blend so harmoniously as to give the reader a vivid impression of actuality.

"So I'm sure that writing fiction is not really one of the creative arts. It's darn hard work; but it's merely the piecing together, the building up, of things a fellow's seen and heard, and the emotions he felt, into a unified form. That is the way all of my best work was done. Now I realize that Arnold Bennett knew what he was talking about, and that his remark set me to looking for material in the right direction—back over the life I have lived and the memories of the people I have known."

The happy marriage of sound and sense known as style of writing is simply a matter of good taste, in the opinion of Mr. Cobb. Jonathan Swift defined style the same way when he said it consists of "proper words in proper places," for the construction and application of words with due regard to clearness and variety determine the mode of expression. The English historian Green said Addison's style was "but a reflection of himself," which connotes Mr. Cobb's statement as regards taste.

"If you are ever going to be a writer, style is a thing which you laboriously must learn," the writer told a group of friends; "and then having acquired added wisdom you will forget part of it and chuck the rest of it out of the window and acquire a style of your own, which merely is another way of saying that if you have good taste to start with you will have what is called style in writing, and if you haven't got that sense of good taste you won't have style and nothing can give it to you.

"I think one of the banes of our young lives is being told what we should read to form our style. I'll begin my treason by saying that while Addison had a singularly clear style he didn't have anything else. If I had my childhood to live over I would tie a can to the essays of Charles Lamb and I would throw Bulwer-Lytton and his eighty-four pound works into the mill hole. The best I can say for George Eliot is that her works have all the glamour of antiquity. We are suffering from overreading of standard stuff. The world is full of people who have a magnificent style but nothing to wrap it around."

Mr. Cobb's style of writing is smooth and flowing, a pleasing combination of clear expression and force, euphony and beauty. Its unaffected movement gives truth to the assertion of William Wirt that "a simple style forms the best vehicle of expression." The sure rhythm and diction meet the precepts of Herbert Spencer in his essay on "The Philosophy of Style," by presenting ideas so they may be apprehended with the least possible mental effort. His rich vocabulary responds immediately to every demand, and he never has any difficulty in making himself clearly understood. Long and graceful sentences convey the writer's meaning with striking accuracy. Not only does he express his ideas perfectly, but he seems to achieve this result with apparent artlessness.

His metaphors and images are always fresh and new, and he never attempts a figure that is not complete. When he said a certain hazy individual had "as much sense of direction as an egg beater," the simile was absolute. The Cobb larder is heavily stocked with clever and pointed phrases—picturesque similes of a diverting and trenchant nature. The following are typical:

Sizz like skyrockets.
Noiseless as a mink.
Shine like a wet seal.
Pop like a bull-whip.
Pampered like invalids.
Skipped like ram goats.
As nutty as a fruit cake.
Stiff as a dried herring.
Sore as a mashed thumb.
Comfortable as an anvil.
Quivered like proud flesh.
Tumbling like shot rabbits.
Sags like a fisherman's hat.
Fleshless as a joint of cane.
As limber as a string of fish.
Cutting up like a trick mule.
Fluctuate like a demented hen.
Mixed together like jackstraws.
No more privacy than a goldfish.
Cuts loose like an avenging angel.
Had a breath like a brandy sauce.
He opened up like a family album.
As neutral as a stop and go signal.
Laced with red like a bloodshot eye.
As misshapen as a dropsical woman.
He has more kinfolk than a microbe.
He had a disposition like a hangnail.
Flew open like an engine-house door.
Folded up like a condensed time-card.
Snappy, like the click of a cash register.
As vocal as a tree full of mocking birds.
Trudging as steadily as a milkman's horse.
Complexion like a stalk of bleached celery.
He stiffened like a pointer on a warm scent.
Gurgling like the last pint of suds in a sink.
Crackled like the lightnings on Mount Sinai.
Brief as the Z column in a pocket dictionary.
Stands forth like carnival tags on a marquee.
As crooked as a churnful of coon chitterlings.
I had a tang in my mouth like an antique jug.
Dovetailed and mortised like good cabinetwork.
Sounds like a chapter out of a penny-dreadful.
Left a taste in his mouth like a tintype factory.
Imbibing his soup like a man bailing out a boat.
Intermittently, like the click of a blind man's cane.
As Southern as chicken gravy on a presiding elder's vest.
Braced and steady, like a game man facing a firing squad.
Riding on her speedboat was like being a jockey to a comet.
As much out of place as a bald-headed eagle in a pet store.
Tasted like rubber heels suffering from a brandy hang-over.
Boring in and out, like a stubby needle going through a tick.
Vandyked to a sharp point like evergreens in a cemetery.
A pleasant swishing sound like a soft-shoe dancer starting on a jig.
Groomed and polished, like a landed proprietor's blooded stock.
Tastes like a place where an indisposed carrot spent the night.
Dressed in white—all white, like a bride or a bandaged thumb.
Overflowing like a crock of salt-rising dough in a warm kitchen.
Make noises like a drunken Zulu trying to sing a Swedish folk song.
It was like a gumboil that wouldn't heal; not serious but annoying.
Busier than a boss canvasman when the show-train has been delayed by a washout.
All gashed with wrinkles and seamed with folds, like the jowls of an ancient squaw.

Joined in, like the wind, the wood and the brass of an orchestra obeying the baton of the leader.
Love is like a butterfly: it may hover over a flower garden, and then again it may light on the city dump.
Tasting a good deal like a blotting-pad that has seen hard usage in the timekeeper's office of a crude-oil refinery.
My butler is the kind you see on the stage, with little side whiskers on each side of his face, like brackets inclosing a blankspace; so ( ).

Piercy's Modern Writers at Work (1930), which reproduces "The Great Auk" as a model short story, quotes Mr. Cobb in the matter of keen discrimination in the use and arrangement of words. "I do not feel qualified to give others advice on how to write good English," Mr. Cobb said. "That is a job I constantly am striving to learn. Practice, hard work, reading the writings of real masterwriters—that's my system. In the face of my own constant failures to turn out copy which satisfies me, it still is the best system I know anything about—the sole one, in fact."

In the wide choice of Mr. Cobb's creations there is ready evidence of the facility with which his pen is adapted to every subject. The plots of stories are fascinating, often uncanny, and abound in clever twists. Each story is fresh and vital, not remote or shadowy as seen through several thicknesses of theatrical gauze tending to blur details. His deep pathos is tear-compelling. He is an eager student of mankind and with his photographic pen paints an accurate picture of life. Delving deep into the hearts of men and women, he brings to the surface their joys and sorrows, triumphs and failings, and moods and inward thoughts. What he sees with his eye he reflects through the mirror of sympathetic understanding, and this mirror he keeps polished by constant rubbing of elbows with the world. Fred Lewis Patton in The New American Literature (1930) notes that "in allusion, in vocabulary, in fictional fashions, in point of view, Mr. Cobb is always as up-to-date as a college orchestra."

Whether the story at hand is one of sentiment, tragedy or uproarious farce, it is characterized by an adequacy of expression and subtle analysis. Robert H. Davis says Mr. Cobb "writes in octaves, striking instinctively all the chords of humor, tragedy, pathos and romance with either hand."

As a descriptive writer, he has no peer among his contemporaries. Speaking of the Kentuckian's uncanny art of observing things and method of describing them, Ellis Parker Butler says: "Irvin S. Cobb writes of a person, describing the front of him, and you know instinctively that the man has one suspender button off in the back and that both loops of his suspenders are hooked on the remaining button."

His poetic utterances are as redolent as roses and offer a perpetual delight. There are whole chapters in Chivalry Peak and Red Likker, for instance, where the author woos like an angel. The flowing melody of his classic prose suggests "the music of bells falling in cadence sweet"; it is fluid and rippling, without a trace of effort. An effulgence of language gives perfection to the sentimental moods and finer moments.Some United States is strewn with tinseled phrases and jeweled periods. Page after page of All Aboard is filled with wild beauty and Both Sides of the Street, which records the author's visit to South America, is rich with rhetorical decoration. One is inclined to believe he was kissed by all the muses, as any subject he touches is adorned.

The periodical known as Word Beauty questioned Mr. Cobb among other well known Americans on what word in the English language seemed to be the most beautiful in sound. He selected "Chattanooga," a word of Indian origin.

When asked which book in the vast storehouse of literature he would rather have authored than any other, the Paducah sage chose Job, forty-two anonymous chapters written long before Christ was born. "I would rather have written it because in it, I think, there is more of majesty, of poetry, of imagery and drama than in any book of similar length known to me," Mr. Cobb said.

The judgment is well sustained, for the Book of Job is recognized as the greatest poem in the world's great literature. Victor Hugo called it "perhaps the greatest masterpiece of the human mind."

Awards for literary achievement do not always balance, the philosopher observed in his daily column upon reading that a man who wrote lovely verse died penniless. "I'd rather do a ballad or a tale which, for one fleeting hour, brought laughter or a thrill to a multitude, than turn out a so-called classic which through generations would moulder on the back rows of some library, hard by the Bulwer-Lytton shelf and handily adjacent to the late Charlotte Bronte," he declared.