"The authors no longer live with the people about whom they write. Instead, they live with other authors. "Nowadays, an author achieves success by writing, we will say, about the people of his home in the Far West. Then he comes to New York. And instead of living with the sort of people about whom he writes, he lives with artists. That must have its effect upon his work." "But is not that what you yourself did?" I asked. "A New York apartment-house is certainly the last place in the world in which to look for the historian of _Pole Baker_!" Mr. Harben smiled. "But I don't live with artists," he said. "I try to live with the kind of people I write about. I resolved a long time ago to try to avoid living with literary people and to live with all sorts of human beings--with people who didn't know or care whether or not I was a writer. "So I have for my friends and acquaintances sailors, merchants--people of all sorts of professions and trade. And people of that sort--people who make no pretensions to be artists--are the best company for a writer, for they open their hearts to him. A writer can learn how to write about humanity by living with humanity, instead of with other people who are trying to write about humanity." "But at any rate you have left the part of the country about which you write," I said. "And wasn't that one of the things for which you condemned our hypothetical writer of Western tales?" "Not necessarily," said Mr. Harben. "It sometimes happens that an author can write about the scenes he knows best only after he has gone away from them. I know that this is true of myself. "It's in line with the old saws about 'distance lends enchantment' and 'emotion remembered in tranquillity,' you know. I believe that Du Maurier was able to write his vivid descriptions of life in the Latin Quarter of Paris because he went to London to do it. "You see, I absorbed life in Georgia for many years. And in New York I can remember it and get a perspective on it and write about it." "Then," I said, "you would go to Georgia, I suppose, if you wanted to write a story about life in a New York apartment?" Mr. Harben thought for a moment. "No," he said, slowly, "I don't think that I'd go to Georgia to write about New York. I think that a novel about New York must be written in New York--while a novel about Dalton, Georgia, must be written away from Dalton, Georgia." "How do you account for that?" I asked. "Well," said Mr. Harben, "for one thing there is something bracing about New York's atmosphere that makes it easier to write when one is here. Once I tried to write a novel in Dalton, and I simply couldn't do it. "And the reason why a novel about New York must be written in New York is because you can't absorb New York as you might absorb Georgia, so to speak, and then go away and express it. New York is so thoroughly artificial that there is nothing about it which a writer can absorb.