University of Virginia Library

A PEN PICTURE OF BRANN

IT is hard for me to realize that Brann is dead. It seems only yesterday night that he sat opposite me at table, and talked of his plans and projects and spoke so hopefully, so boyishly of the future that he was never to realize.

For a long time I had a curiosity to see Brann, of the ICONOCLAST. His pyrotechnic vocabulary, his strange admixture of erudition and slang, his almost womanly sympathy and the more than Apache ferocity with which he pursued his enemies, the tender and poetic metaphor that gemmed his iron prose, and the singular blending of optimism and pessimism that characterized most of his work suggested an anomaly that appealed to the imagination, and I was anxious to see what Brann looked like.

I had an opportunity when he came here to lecture. I knew his business manager, Mr. Ward, who figured in the dreadful duel in which he lost his life, and who was, at that time, arranging his lecture dates. Ward is a big Texan, over six feet high, and I suppose he weighs all of two hundred pounds. He is a lawyer who drifted into journalism years ago, and under a somewhat rough-and-ready exterior there is not much trouble in finding the gentleman and the scholar. Well, Ward introduced me to Brann, and after a while the three of us foregathered in a private room of a down-town café, and stayed there for several hours that I remember with unmixed delight.

Looking back at the episode, I have difficulty in framing

my impressions of the famous Texan editor. I think the principal thing that struck me was his lack of pose and affection. All through his talk, and he was in high spirits and talked a great deal, there were sparks of delightful naïveté.

"I want to pull out of the ICONOCLAST as much as I can," he said. "And since we have made enough money to do so, I have bought a great many outside contributions. My idea," he continued, "is this: As long as I wrote most everything in the publication myself it was strictly a one-man paper; and if anything should have happened to me it would have been worth nothing to my wife and family. What I am trying to do now is to organize a corps of contributors who can keep it up if I should be taken away."

Had he any suspicion of the prophecy that lurked in these words? Perhaps he had; for when I suggested to him the advisability of leaving Waco, with its petty local dissensions and the personal dangers incident to them, he shook his head.

"I got together $11,000 not long ago," he said, "and put it into a house. It is the first money worth talking about that I ever had, and I feel that the investment ties me, more or less, to Waco. But aside from that," he went on to say, "I am a little afraid that the ICONOCLAST would lose its characteristic flavor if I moved it to one of the big Eastern cities. You will remember that that experiment was tried with the Arkansas Traveller, which was moved from Little Rock to Chicago, and promptly fell flat. The same thing happened to the Texas Siftings, when it was taken from Austin to New York. I am inclined to believe that a publication acquires a savor of the soil in which it springs, and it is a mighty risky business to try to transplant it."

He told me of Col. Gerald, who had killed the Harris brothers only a few weeks before. "Gerald is a wonderful old man," he said. "He is over sixty, but he is as straight as a pine. He has a light mustache and chin beard, and eyes the color of the blue you see in old china. He don't know what fear is. He thinks it is some kind of a disease like smallpox or appendicitis, and only know that he has never had it." Between talk we ate oysters and drank a little beer. Brann impressed me as being a very temperate man.

The conversation drifted frequently to his plans for the future. "I've been roasted a good deal for the go-as-you-please style of the ICONOCLAST," he said, "and, between ourselves, wish I could have refined its style a trifle. But if I had done so we would never have gone over the 100,000 mark as we did last week. However, I'm tired of it," he said slowly, "most infernally tired. I am anxious next year to devote myself to a higher class of work. I have a novel about half done, and also a play, and I am very hopeful that they may both succeed."

It was long after midnight when we parted. He said that he expected to be back "one of these days."

Poor Brann! It sickens one's soul to think of the value of such a life as his as against that of his slayer. Good God! His little finger was worth all the Texas pot-house politicians and Baylor University pharisees that could be lined up between her and Orion.—O. H. S., in the Looking Glass.