David Graham Phillips affords an interesting illustration of the power of bourgeois criticism to suppress and abolish those writers who threaten its ideology. He was by all odds the greatest novelist of the period in which he wrote, a sturdy and vigorous personality, who looked at the world about him with his own eyes and really had something to say. He was worth a dozen of the imitation novelists who were acclaimed as great during the first ten years of the century. But Phillips was a “muck-rake man,” a prophet and a satirist; therefore the critics patronized him, and since his death they have forgotten him. No biography has been published, and a new generation will have to make the discovery that he wrote the biggest piece of American fiction of his time.
Phillips was eleven years older than myself, but we arrived upon the literary scene together, and I used to meet him now and then in New York. I have an idea that I annoyed him; he was generous in praising my books, but that did not satisfy me—I wanted to make a Socialist out of him, and he would not have it! He was the genuine old-fashioned American, the wearer of square-toed shoes and a string tie. I do not mean that I ever saw him in that costume, but that his view of human society was derived from that period. He came from the Middle West, and believed in the simple, small-town democracy he had there known. A man of common sense, he hated all forms of social pretense and finickyness. Like a good American, he respected money and the power of money, but he wanted the people who had this power to behave like sensible human beings, and he was infuriated because they took to putting on “side,” getting English butlers and five footmen in livery.
He blamed this especially on the women. He loathed the modern parasitic female, to the extent of some twenty volumes, exposing every aspect of her foolishness and empty-headedness. She it was who dragged men to ruin, she caused the corruption of government and a general riot of greed, in order that she might have silk stockings and jewels and servants. She had spurned the jobs ofcooking and sewing and making home, without ever having taken the trouble to learn to do these efficiently. Now she couldn’t do even her foolish society job; she couldn’t run a rich man’s household and be an intelligent companion, she couldn’t bear healthy children, or raise them to be anything but shirkers.
Proper people were shocked by Phillips because he talked so plainly, and fastidious people considered him coarse. As a matter of fact, he was a man of tender heart and true refinement, who put on an aspect of rough common sense as a matter of principle. Cut out all this nonsense, he seems to say to his readers; you know we all want money, we all like comfort, we are all selfish creatures; you women especially are making silly pretenses, you know you have to be kept, and you prefer a man who is self-willed and masterful, a fighting man. So he recorded “The Fashionable Adventures of Joshua Craig,” and irritated many fine ladies. So in “Old Wives for New” he preaches the common sense idea, that if a woman is lazy and sluttish and refuses to work at her job as wife, her husband is justified in getting rid of her and marrying a young and attractive woman. In “The Hungry Heart” he deals with the eternal triangle, and shows a husband forgiving an erring wife—which you would think was good Christian doctrine, but which is contrary to fancy notions of sexual implacability. In “The Husband’s Story” he portrays a wife who marries a man because she believes he will succeed; she helps him to succeed, and they rise high, but finding that the higher they get, the less interest there is in life.
Phillips was not content with preaching in his novels; he wrote a book, a general scolding at “The Age of Gilt.” Here you see the old-fashioned gentleman from Indiana, an individualist, but a hater of monopoly and privilege, a modern Isaiah denouncing graft and greed. The “Cosmopolitan Magazine” lured him into writing a series of articles about the gang which was selling out our government; “The Treason of the Senate,” the articles were called, and they made an enormous uproar. Theodore Roosevelt made a speech denouncing “muck-rake men,” which was very plainly aimed at Phillips. Afterwards, in his character as Mr. Facing-Bothways, Roosevelt made an attempt to get information from Phillips, for use in hisfight against the Senate. Let me testify that only a few weeks before Roosevelt made this “muck-rake” speech, I sat at his dinner-table in the White House and heard him call the roll of these very same senators, naming them according to the interests they served—the senator from the Steel Trust, the senator from the Copper Trust, and so on. I recall the description of Hale of Maine, the senator from the Shipping Trust: “the most innately and essentially malevolent scoundrel that God Almighty ever put on earth!”
The entire writing life of Phillips was barely ten years, and in that period he worked incessantly, rewriting and revising with painful conscientiousness. His stories were successful as serials, and I remember once teasing him because they were always of the right length for the purpose; I wished that mine would behave in that convenient way. The jest apparently troubled him, for he referred to it on several occasions. He did not tell me that for ten years he had been working in secret upon a novel of three hundred thousand words!
He left that when he died, and it waited five years for a magazine to get up the courage to print extracts from it. We have it now in two volumes, “Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise.” Its heroine is a girl who bears the brand of illegitimacy, and runs away from home to escape it; but they bring her back and marry her off to an elderly farmer, and the picture of her bridal night is one of the unforgettable scenes of American fiction. Susan is ignorant of the world, a flower in the mud. Groping for light, she escapes again, and tries to earn her living in a box factory, and undergoes all the horrors of tenement life. Starved out, she takes to the streets in Cincinnati, and we see the graft and cruelty of city government. She is taken up as the mistress of a politician and travels with him in Europe. But always she is reaching toward something better; her spirit remains untarnished, and in the end she becomes a successful actress.
This story, of course, shocked the orthodox and respectable. It was a new kind of romanticism, familiar enough to Europe, but not to us. Could a woman’s soul remain pure while her body was sullied? The critics denied it; but, as it happens, several women of that sort have made their appearance since Phillips wrote—forexample, the author of “Madeleine,” who had equally degrading experiences to tell, and yet kept her soul, and is working to help the downtrodden part of her sex.
Nothing offends bourgeois respectables more than the statement that women are driven to prostitution by economic forces. They like to believe that the women of the poor are naturally depraved; also, they don’t want working girls made discontented with their lot, and they don’t want social reformers poking their noses into box factories and department-stores. So they call “Susan Lenox” an immoral book, and it is taboo in libraries and reviews.
But as a matter of fact, David Graham Phillips shows himself in this book a thoroughly bourgeois person, safely and wholesomely “American” in his whole-hearted acceptance of the doctrine that a woman cannot and ought not try to live without comfort. Susan’s experience in the box factory is brief; she suffers, both in mind and body, but not so deeply that she cannot bear to leave the working class, and rise above it, and win fame and fortune by entertaining the master class, in that kind of prostitution known as the capitalist theatre. It does not occur to her to conceive a passionate ideal of sisterhood with all the oppressed factory workers; to hang on to her job with them, and teach and organize them, and lead them in a strike for better working conditions and higher wages.
That, you see, is another method by which a heroine could develop a beautiful soul; another path by which she could break into the world of intellect and power—the way of class-consciousness and solidarity. But David Graham Phillips did not understand the revolutionary psychology, and could not have imparted it to his heroine; he was bound by the limitations of a small-town man from Indiana, a graduate of Princeton University, a city editor of capitalist newspapers. I read the scant records of his life, and find a leading critic praising him because he had “no panaceas”; meaning that the critic liked him because his thinking was as muddled as the critic’s.
The old-fashioned American has preached us a tremendous and moving sermon, putting his whole heart into it; and it would be pleasant to be able to express for it the same unquestioning reverence as Mr. Robert W. Chambers, who writes the introduction to the book. But truthrequires me to point out that Phillips avoids having his heroine contract venereal disease—something which might decidedly have affected the beauty of her soul. Also, she manages to preserve her beauty, in spite of the part which getting men drunk plays in the life of a street-walker. In other words, he idealizes prostitution as a career for women, in order to give it the advantage over the box factory.
It is very significant that he fails to take us into this factory and show us the work; all we get is Susan’s interviews with the boss in his office. We do not meet the other women, except the one with whom Susan starves in her tenement room. So we fail to realize that Susan’s solution of her problem is not the solution for all women. There have to be boxes, as well as sex gratification, in the capitalist world; and thousands of women must hold their box-making jobs. They lose their hair and teeth, sometimes their fingers, and always their beauty; but they acquire class-consciousness; and here and there a genius among them, by incredible heroic labors, gets a bit of knowledge and becomes a leader. So, out of the whole mass-misery results organization, and that labor movement which is the germ of the new society, taking form, according to the wondrous process of nature, inside the shell of the old.
But of all this we get no hint in “Susan Lenox”; a middle-class story, written by a middle-class man about a middle-class girl who descends for a short period into the inferno of working-class life, and then magically rises out of it again. If David Graham Phillips had written the story of a working-class girl, who stayed with the working class and learned working-class lessons—why then all critics would have indicted him for the crime of having a “panacea,” and “Susan Lenox” would have waited, not five years, but fifty years, for publication in a popular magazine!
The short story writer who signed the pen name O. Henry burst like a meteor upon the magazine world of New York. His first stories appeared in 1902, when he had only eight years of life before him. In that time hebecame the recognized king of the craft; everybody read him, high and low, those skilled in writing as well as the plain people with whose fates he dealt. He poured out his stories at the rate of one or two every week, and if he did not get the highest prices ever heard of, it was because he cared nothing about money and did not trouble to claim his own.
He was a strange, reserved man, deeply loved by his few friends, but hard to get at, and resentful of the intrusion of lion hunters. He had the tenderness and sentimentality of the Southern gentleman, combined with a secretiveness which puzzled the denizens of his Bagdad-on-the-Subway. Only a few facts about his life were known; that he had lived on a ranch in Texas, had been a drugstore clerk, had written for papers in New Orleans, had traveled in Central America, and was a widower and had a young daughter—that was all his best friends knew. There was a gap in his life, and no one ventured to question him. But several years after his death a biography was published, and the disclosure was made that America’s short story king had served three years and three months as a federal prisoner in the Ohio penitentiary. That was where he had begun his career as a story writer; that was where he had got his intimate knowledge of gentle grafters and chivalrous highwaymen; that was where he had acquired the pathos and the heart-break.
It was characteristic of America that there should have been a great fuss over this disclosure. There was the daughter, and also a new wife, and these thought that the dreadful secret so long hidden should have stayed hidden. Likewise some editors and reviewers thought it. Here was a man who was assumed to belong to the ages, and here was a story more moving and more instructive than any volume O. Henry had published; but they wanted to bury it in his grave—because, forsooth, America is the land of respectability, and the deepest tragedies of the human soul are of no consequence compared with the desire of two ladies to escape humiliation in a matter for which neither was in any way to be blamed.
It appears that O. Henry was a teller of a bank in Texas, the affairs of which were very loosely handled. Something over a thousand dollars was missing; somebody else got it, and O. Henry got the trouble. He wason his way to stand trial, when he fell into a panic; he could not face the ordeal, and ran away to Honduras. But then, learning that his wife was dying of tuberculosis, he could not stand that either, and came home. His wife died, and he went through his trial in a daze of shame, and went to prison, to witness that infinity of horrors which America heaps upon those who have threatened its property interests.
While in Honduras “Bill” Porter—that was his real name—had made a strange acquaintance, Al Jennings, a train-bandit much wanted by Wells-Fargo detectives. The two men came back to America and fate brought them to the same penitentiary. Jennings has since reformed, and has given us the story of himself and his literary friend in a book called “Through the Shadows with O. Henry.” So we are privileged to see the raw material out of which the stories were made, and to watch the maker at his work.
He had become the drug clerk of the prison, and in his spare hours he wrote incessantly, in order to forget the human anguish about him. He would take the outlaw stories of Jennings, the stories of all varieties of offenders in the prison, and transform them to his own uses. Outside was his little daughter, carefully kept in ignorance as to her father’s whereabouts; he must have money to send her a Christmas present, and so he ground out manuscripts and mailed them to magazines.
And so once more, as in the case of Mark Twain, we see the spirit of bourgeois America, embodied in the personality of a woman, engaged in remodeling the soul of a genius. Here was a mass of material, palpitating with life, and ready to be shaped into one of the great tragic records of the ages. And here was a loving and tender-hearted, humorous and blundering Southern gentleman, with no grasp of social forces and no understanding of what had happened to him, engaged in sentimentalizing and feminizing that mass of material.
Take one example, the story of “Jimmy Valentine,” the most popular character O. Henry created. This story was made into a play, which had enormous success both in America and England; it was stolen and dramatized several times in France and Spain; it was the source of a new stage variety, what is known as the “crook play.” The story tells about a little child who is locked by accident in a bank vault, and will be suffocated in a few hours. A famous safe-cracker learns of her plight and opens the safe, and thereby reveals himself to a detective who has been hunting him. But the detective, being a magazine detective, is kind-hearted and easily moved to tears; he foregoes the glory and reward of capturing a famous crook, and the crook retires to be good and happy ever afterwards in the company of the little child. Such is the underworld according to American magazine mythology.
And now, what was the true story of “Jimmy Valentine”? There was a great scandal in the state of Ohio; some high-class crooks, of the kind who never go to the penitentiary, had stolen millions of dollars, and locked all the papers in a vault and escaped. These papers must be had, and it was not possible to blow open the vault with dynamite, for fear of destroying them. So the governor applied to the penitentiary for a competent safe-cracking artist. A man came forward. He had been a gutter-rat, starving in childhood, like Al Jennings, who tells his story. At the age of eleven, a “ravenous little rag-picker,” he had broken into a box-car and stolen ten cents worth of crackers, and had been sent to a “reformatory,” and turned out a master-crook, at eighteen. A year later they had sent him to the penitentiary for life—an “habitual criminal.” Now he was dying of tuberculosis, and his old mother was dying of grief, because she had not been permitted to see her son, or even to hear from him for sixteen years.
This man had a method of opening safes, which consisted of filing his finger-nails off, so that with the quivering raw flesh he could feel the dropping of the “tumblers,” as he turned the dial of the lock. He was promised his liberty if he would open the vault for the great state of Ohio. He did it in ten seconds; and then the promise was broken, and he went back to die in prison. When his coffin was carted out, there was his old heart-broken mother in the slush and snow, toddling along with streaming eyes and stretched-out hands behind the cart.
That was a real story, you see; and O. Henry was in the prison when it happened, he felt the thrill of horror and fury that ran through the place when the pardon was denied. But, you see, if he had written that story, hewould not have had any Christmas gifts to send to his little daughter, nor would he have been invited to Bagdad-on-the-Subway to be crowned the short story king. So unwilling was he to face reality that he did not even use the detail about Jimmy Valentine’s filing off his finger-nails. No, the crook in his story has to open the safe with a special fancy set of tools!
You see, O. Henry simply could not face the pain of life; he did not know what to do about it, and so he dodged it—just like the magazine writers and the magazine public of his period. He could not even face his own disgrace; his heart was dead in that prison, even the thought of freedom was a terror, because of the awful secret he would carry. Jennings quotes him: “The prison label is worse than the brand of Cain. If the world once sees it, you are doomed. It shall not see it on me. I will not become an outcast.”
Understand, he knew himself to be innocent; and yet he took the position of an ex-convict, crouching and trembling. There were other men who went to prison, for example, ‘Gene Debs, who also knew himself to be innocent; he came out a warrior and a saint. But O. Henry accepted the social system as permanent, identical with destiny.
He was often compared to Maupassant, and that hurt his feelings, for he said that he had never written a filthy line in his life, and he did not wish to be compared to a filthy writer. You see here the limitations of his understanding; morality means sex, and he is revolted by Gallic brutality, and practices sentimental Southern reticence. But in a more fundamental way his point of view is identical with that of Maupassant; for to both writers class greed has taken the place of God in control of the universe. The French writer jeers and hates, while the American smiles and weeps; but each finds the point of his story in the incongruities and absurdities which this artificial economic fate inflicts upon its helpless and uncomprehending victims.
Strike through the pathos and the tragedy of O. Henry at any point, and what do you find? Everywhere and inevitably one thing, the Big Business system of America. Here is a waitress in a restaurant with white porcelain walls and glass-topped tables and a ceaseless clatter ofcrockery. Yes, it is pathetic for a girl to carry loads of crockery all day, and try to keep virtuous on a starvation wage. Then close the O. Henry book, and consult Moody’s Manual of Corporations, and you discover that the great chain of restaurants has been bought by Standard Oil; America’s “great clamorer for dividends” has doubled the prices of the food without improving its quality, and has failed to raise wages to keep pace with the cost of living.
Or take James Turner, who presses hats all day and has to stand on his feet, which makes them sore; he finds his escape in reading Clark Russell’s sea-tales, and having got a copy, he is happy even in jail. Consult a study of the sweated trades, and you note that hat pressing is a secondary and parasitic industry, incapable of being organized; therefore the poor devil has no one to protect his sore feet. A part of his equipment is a jeering scorn for those who are striving to enlighten him. “Say,” he asks, “do I look like I’d climbed down one of them missing fire-escapes at Helicon Hall?” That is his way of saying that he has no vision of a better world; it is O. Henry’s idea of being a sociologist. (If you have any curiosity concerning Helicon Hall and its fire-escapes, the story is in “The Brass Check.”)
The obscure and exploited masses of New York, the waitresses and hat-pressers and soda-jerkers and bums and taxi drivers and policemen, O. Henry’s Four Million, adopted him as their favorite writer, because he knew their lives, he loved them, and they felt that love under the cover of his laughter. And in truth it is a pleasant thing when you are in trouble to find a heart which feels with you; but it is an even more important thing to find a head which understands the causes of your trouble and can help you to escape it. The Four Million will have to look elsewhere than to O. Henry for that head.
There was an essential fact about him which his official biographer fails to mention; he was a true Southern gentleman in another respect—that he drank too much. Al Jennings records that he was half drunk when Jennings encountered him, sitting in front of the American consulate in the little town of Trujillo, Honduras. They proceeded to get all the way drunk, and to celebrate the Fourth of July by shooting up the place. And there ismuch other drinking scattered through the story. In the prison O. Henry was in charge of certain supplies, and he found that contractors were robbing the prison, and he wanted to expose them; but Jennings showed him that if he did so, he would get himself thrown into the hole, and beaten to death by the prison powers who were sharing in the graft. So our poor Southern gentleman kept silence, and received large presents of wine and liquor. When he came to New York, this habit had him in its grip, and never let him go.
So here is a point about the O. Henry stories; they are alcoholic stories, and take the alcoholic attitude toward life. The friends of O. Henry, who spent their time trying to save him, will understand what all of us know who have had to do with Southern gentlemen of the old school: that a victim of alcohol can weep with pity and can mingle laughter with his tears; he can be charming and beautiful, gentle and kind; but one thing he can rarely have, and that is a firm grasp of the realities about him; another thing he can never by any possibility have, and that is an attitude of persistent and unflinching resolve. Yet these are exactly the qualities which the Four Million will have to develop before they can escape from their slavery in Bagdad-of-the-Traction-Trust.
We come now to the first of the writers of our time who was born of the working class, and carried his working-class consciousness into his literary career. He was the true king of our story tellers, the brightest star that flashed upon our skies. He brought us the greatest endowment both of genius and of brain, and the story of what America did to him is a painful one.
Jack London was born in San Francisco, in 1876, which made him two years my senior. We took to exchanging our first books, and a controversy started between us, which lasted the rest of his life; the last letter I received from him was an invitation to come up to the ranch and continue it. “You and I ought to have some ‘straight from the shoulder’ talk with each other. It iscoming to you, it may be coming to me. It may illuminate one or the other or both of us.” I answered that I was finishing a job of writing; but that as soon as the job was done I would come and “stand the gaff.” And then I read that he was dead!
It was the old question, several times stated in this book, of self-discipline versus self-indulgence; or, as Jack would have put it, asceticism versus self-expression. Which way will a man get the most out of life? Believing in his own nature and giving it rein, living intensely and fast; or distrusting his nature, all nature, stooping to mean cautions and fears, imposing a rule upon his impulses—and so cutting himself off from his joyful fellows, and exposing himself to painful sneers?
I see Jack vividly, as he was at our first meeting, when he came to New York in 1904 or 1905. At that time he was in the full glory of his newly-won fame, and we young Socialists had got up a big meeting for him at Grand Central Palace. Our hero came on a belated train from Florida, arriving when our hearts were sick with despair; he came, radiant and thrilling, in spite of an attack of tonsilitis, and strode upon the platform amid the waving of red handkerchiefs, and in a voice of calm defiance read to the city of New York his essay, “Revolution.”
New York did not like it, needless to say. But I liked it so well that I was prepared to give my hero the admiration of a slave. But we spent the next day together, chatting of the things we were both absorbed in; and all that day the hero smoked cigarettes and drank—I don’t remember what it was, for all these red and brown and green and golden concoctions are equally painful to me, and the sight of them deprives me of the control of my facial muscles. Jack, of course, soon noted this; he was the red-blood, and I was the mollycoddle, and he must have his fun with me, in the mood of the oyster pirate and roustabout. Tales of incredible debauches; tales of opium and hashish, and I know not what other strange ingredients; tales of whisky bouts lasting for weeks! I remember a picture of two sailor boys at sea in a small boat, unable to escape from each other, conceiving a furious hatred of each other, and when they got ashore, retiring behind the sand-dunes to fight. They fought until theycould hardly walk—and then they repaired to town to heal their bruises with alcohol.
The next time we met was six or eight years later; and this time the controversy was more serious. For now Jack had read “Love’s Pilgrimage,” and was exasperated by what seemed to him a still less excusable form of asceticism, that of sex. Here was a so-called hero, a prig of a poet, driving a young wife to unhappiness by notions born in the dark corners of Christian monkeries. I am not sure just how I defended poor Thyrsis; I am not sure how clearly I myself saw at that time the peculiar working of sex-idealism which had manifested itself in that novel; the impulse a man has to be ashamed of advantages given to him by nature and society, and so to put himself chivalrously under the feet of a woman—raising her, an image of perfection, upon a pedestal of his own self-reproach. Sometimes she refuses to stay upon this pedestal; and so results a comical plight for a too-imaginative ascetic!
The argument between Jack and myself was handicapped on that occasion by the fact that his voice was almost entirely gone because of a sore throat. He was trying the alcohol treatment; my last picture of him in the flesh was very much of the flesh, alas!—with a flask of gin before him, and the stumps of many cigarettes in his dinner-plate, and his eyes red and unwholesome-looking. He has told the story of his travels in the Kingdom of Alcoholia himself, told it bravely and completely, so I am not obliged to use any reserve in speaking of this aspect of his life. I went away, more than ever confirmed as a mollycoddle!
But Jack London was a man with a magnificent mind, and a giant’s will. He fought tremendous battles in his own soul—battles in despite of his own false philosophy, battles which he was fighting even while he was quarreling at other men’s self-restraint. He went on a trip around the Horn, which lasted several months, and drank nothing all that time; also, he wrote that shining book, “John Barleycorn,” one of the most useful and most entertaining ever penned by a man.
It was our habit to send each other our new books, and to exchange comments on them. When I read “John Barleycorn” I wrote that the book had made me realize anew aspect of the drink problem, a wrong it did to men who never touched it—in depriving them of companionship, making them exiles among their fellows. So much of men’s intercourse depends upon and is colored by drinking! I, for example, had always felt that my friendship with Jack London had been limited by that disharmony.
He wrote in reply that I was mistaken; it was especially with my attitude towards sex that he disagreed. We exchanged some letters about the matter, and mentally prepared ourselves for that duel which will never be fought. In concluding the subject of alcohol, let me point out that Jack himself settled the controversy by voting for “California Dry” at the election held a few days before his death. His explanation was that while he enjoyed drinking, he was willing to forego that enjoyment for the sake of the younger generation; and it would indeed be a graceless ascetic who asked more than that!
So far as concerns the matter of sex, the test of a man’s philosophy is that at the age of forty he has kept his belief in womankind, in the joy and satisfaction that true love may give. Where the philosophy of “self-expression” had led Jack London was known to many who heard him tell of a book he planned to write, giving the whole story of his experiences with women. He meant to write it with the same ruthless honesty he had used in “John Barleycorn”; revealing his tragic disillusionment, and his contempt for woman as a parasite, a creature of vanity and self-indulgence.
Jack’s conquests among the sex had been many, and too easy, it would seem; like most fighters, he despised an unworthy antagonist. The women who threw themselves at his head came from all classes of society, drawn to him as moths to a flame; but it is evident that his philosophy was to blame for the fact that there were so few among them he could respect. There were surely many able to hold the interest of a great man, who did not share his philosophy, and therefore remained unnoticed by him.
It is not generally the custom to write of these things in plain words; but in the case of Jack London it would be futile to do otherwise, because he spoke of them freely, and would have written of them in the same way. His whole attitude was a challenge to truth-telling, a call forfrankness, even to the point of brutality. The book he planned was to be published under some such name as “Jack Liverpool”—which you must admit would hardly have been a very adequate disguise. I have heard one of his best friends say that he is glad Jack never lived to write it.
For my part, believing as I do that the salvation of the race depends upon unmasking the falsehoods of our class-morality—the institution which I call “marriage plus prostitution”—I cannot but sigh for this lost story. What an awakening it would have brought to the mothers of our so-called “better classes,” if Jack London had ever given to the world the true story of his experiences with their daughters! As a school boy in Oakland, for example, with the young girls of the comfortable classes in that city! He and his companions, sons of workingmen and poor people, looking up to the great world above them inquiringly, made the strange discovery that these shining, golden-haired pets of luxury, guarded at home and in their relations with their social equals by the thousand sleepless eyes of scandal, found it safe and pleasant to repair to secret rendezvous among the willow thickets of Lake Merritt, and there play the nymph to handsome and sturdy fauns of a class below the level ever reached by the thousand sleepless eyes!
When you listened to a narrative such as that, you realized the grim meaning that Jack London put into his essay, “What Life Means to Me,” telling of the embitterment that came to him when he, the oyster pirate and roustabout, broke into the “parlor floor of society”:
Where they were not alive with rottenness, quick with unclean life, they were merely the unburied dead.... The women were gowned beautifully, I admit; but to my naive surprise I discovered that they were of the same clay as all the rest of the women I had known down below in the cellar.... It is true these beautifully gowned, beautiful women prattled sweet little ideals and dear little moralities; but, in spite of their prattle, the dominant key of the life they lived was materialistic. And they were so sentimentally selfish! They assisted in all kinds of sweet little charities and informed one of the fact, while all the time the food they ate and the beautiful clothes they wore were bought out of dividends stained with the blood of child labor, and sweated labor, and prostitution itself.
Where they were not alive with rottenness, quick with unclean life, they were merely the unburied dead.... The women were gowned beautifully, I admit; but to my naive surprise I discovered that they were of the same clay as all the rest of the women I had known down below in the cellar.... It is true these beautifully gowned, beautiful women prattled sweet little ideals and dear little moralities; but, in spite of their prattle, the dominant key of the life they lived was materialistic. And they were so sentimentally selfish! They assisted in all kinds of sweet little charities and informed one of the fact, while all the time the food they ate and the beautiful clothes they wore were bought out of dividends stained with the blood of child labor, and sweated labor, and prostitution itself.
Jack London had a dream of another kind of love; the dream of a strong, free, proud woman, the mate for astrong, free, proud man. This dream came into his writings at the start; into “A Daughter of the Snows,” his third novel—the very name of it, you perceive. This story, published in the second year of the present century, was crude and boyish, but it had the promise of his dawning greatness, and was the occasion of my first letter to him, and the beginning of our friendship. Afterwards he told this same dream of the perfect mating, over and over again; he continued to tell it long after he had ceased to believe in it.
This necessity of writing about sex in a way that was utterly insincere must have been the main cause of that contempt for his own fiction which London was so swift and vehement to proclaim. The expression of this contempt was the most startling thing about him, to any one who admired his work. “I loathe the stuff when I have done it. I do it because I want money and it’s an easy way to get it. But if I could have my choice about it I never would put pen to paper—except to write a Socialist essay, to tell the bourgeois world how much I despise it.” I remember trying to persuade him that he must have enjoyed writing the best of his stories—“The Sea Wolf” and “The Call of the Wild”; but he would not have it so. He was a man of action; he liked to sail a boat, to run a ranch, to fight for Socialism.
His real attitude towards woman was expressed in “Martin Eden,” his most autobiographical novel, whose hero gives his final conclusion about life by dropping himself out of the porthole of an ocean steamer at night. This hero is a working boy, who makes a desperate struggle to rise from poverty; but the girl of the world of culture, whom he idealizes and worships, proves a coward and fails him in his need. That is one wrong an uncomprehending woman can do to a man; and yet another is to comprehend his weaker part too well. I have heard friends of London’s boyhood tell how he came back from the Klondike with the flush of his youthful dream upon him—the dream of the primitive female, the “mate” of the strong and proud and free man; and how a shrewd young woman saw her chance and proceeded to play the primitive female in drawing-rooms, leaping over tables and chairs, and otherwise exhibiting abounding energy. But when this game had accomplished its purpose she didno more leaping, but “settled down,” as the phrase is; and so came a divorce.
This “Martin Eden” is assuredly one of Jack London’s greatest works; he put his real soul into it, and the fact that it was so little known and read, must have been of evil significance to him. It taught him that if an American writer wants to earn a living with his pen—especially an extravagant living—it is necessary that he should avoid dealing in any true and vital way with the theme of sex. Either he must write over and over again the dream of primitive and perfect mating, a phenomenon unreal and unconvincing to people who are not primitive, but who have intellects as well as bodies to mate; or else, if he deals with modern life, he must give us details of the splendid and devastating passions of the prosperous—the kind of perfumed poison now all the rage. One saw the beginning of that in “The Little Lady of the Big House,” and I count this book the most sinister sign in the life of Jack London. A man can hardly have a thirty-six thousand dollar a year contract with the Hearst magazines and still keep his soul alive!
I would say to myself, mournfully, that America had “got” Jack London, just as it “got” Mark Twain! But then something would happen to show me that I had given up hope too soon. Jack had a mind which worked unceasingly, and impelled him irresistibly; he had a love of truth that was a passion, a hatred of injustice that burned volcanic fires. He was a deeply sad man, a bitterly, cruelly suffering man, and no one could tell what new vision he would forge in the heat of his genius. If I write of him here severely it is because I believe in the rigid truth, which he himself preached; but I would not leave anyone with the idea that I do not appreciate his greatness, both as a writer and a man.
There were many among his friends and mine who gave him up. He went to Hawaii, and the “smart set” there made a lion of him, and he condescended to refer appreciatively to their “sweet little charities” on behalf of the races they were exploiting. He went to Mexico, and fell under the spell of the efficiency of oil engineers, and wrote for “Collier’s Weekly” a series of articles which caused radicals to break out in rage. Jack was a boy to the end, and must make new discoveries and have newenthusiasms. If a naval officer took him over a battleship, he would perceive that it was a marvelous and thrilling machine; but then in the quiet hours of the night he would see the pitiful white faces of the stokers, to whom as a guest of an officer he had not been introduced!
Yes, for he had been in the place of these stokers, and their feelings had been stamped upon his soul. He might set up to be a country gentleman, and fall into a fury with his “hands” for their stupidity and incompetence; but if you said to him, “How about the class war?” instantly he would be there with his mind. “Yes, of course, I know how they feel; if I were in their place I would never do a stroke of work I did not have to.” It is a stressful thing to have an imagination, and to see many sides of life at once!
Jack had a divine pity, he had wept over the East End of London as Jesus wept over Jerusalem. For years afterwards the memories of this stunted and debased population haunted him beyond all peace; the pictures he wrote of them in “The People of the Abyss” will be read by posterity with horror and incredulity, and recognized as among the most powerful products of his pen. Those, with his vivid and intensely felt Socialist essays, constitute him one of the great revolutionary figures of our history. I know that he kept a spark of that sacred fire burning to the very end, for a little over a year before his death I tried him with the bulky manuscript of “The Cry for Justice.” The preface he wrote for it is one of the finest things he ever did, and some of it will be carved upon his monument:
It is so simple a remedy, merely service. Not one ignoble thought or act is demanded of any one of all men and women in the world to make fair the world. The call is for nobility of thinking, nobility of doing. The call is for service, and such is the wholesomeness of it, he who serves all best serves himself.
It is so simple a remedy, merely service. Not one ignoble thought or act is demanded of any one of all men and women in the world to make fair the world. The call is for nobility of thinking, nobility of doing. The call is for service, and such is the wholesomeness of it, he who serves all best serves himself.
That is what life had taught him at the end. But it was not easy for him to learn such a lesson, for he had an imperious nature, fierce in its demands, and never entirely to be tamed. The struggle between individualism and Socialism was going on in his whole being all the time. In the copy of “Martin Eden” which he sent me he wrote: “One of my motifs in this book was an attack on individualism (in the person of the hero). I must havebungled for so far not a single reviewer has discovered it.” After reading the book I replied that it was easy to understand the befuddlement of the critics; for he had shown such sympathy with his hard-driving individualist hero that it would hardly occur to anyone to take the character as a warning and a reproach.
You feel that same thing in all his books—in “The Sea Wolf,” and especially in “The Mutiny of the Elsinore”; the Nietzschean world-conqueror has conquered London’s imagination, in spite of his reason and his conscience. If I have written here with cruel frankness about the personal tragedies of his life, it is because I would not have posterity continue in the misunderstanding of which he complained in the case of “Martin Eden.” No, do not make that mistake about his life and its meaning; most certainly it is not a glorification of the red-blooded superman, trampling all things under his feet, gratifying his imperious desires. Rather is it a demonstration of the fact that the world-conquering superman, trampling all things under his feet and gratifying all his desires, commits suicide by swallowing laudanum at the age of forty, because pleasure and wealth and fame have turned to ashes on his lips. Jack’s friends say that the cause was a desire for two women at the same time; but I don’t believe that a mature, intellectual man will kill himself for such a reason, unless his moral forces have been sapped by years of self-indulgence.
It was the “Martin Eden” ending, which had haunted Jack London all his life, and which in the end he made a reality. What a shame, and what a tragedy to our literature, that capitalist America, the philosophy of individualist greed and selfishness, should have stolen away the soul of this man, with all his supreme and priceless gifts! He had seen so clearly our vision of fellowship and social justice—how clearly, let him tell you in his own words, the last words he wrote upon ethical matters:
He, who by understanding becomes converted to the gospel of service, will serve truth to confute liars and make them truth-tellers; will serve kindness so that brutality will perish; will serve beauty to the erasement of all that is not beautiful. And he who is strong will serve the weak that they may become strong. He will devote his strength not to the debasement and defilement of his weaker fellows, but to the making of opportunity for them to make themselves into men rather than into slaves and beasts.
He, who by understanding becomes converted to the gospel of service, will serve truth to confute liars and make them truth-tellers; will serve kindness so that brutality will perish; will serve beauty to the erasement of all that is not beautiful. And he who is strong will serve the weak that they may become strong. He will devote his strength not to the debasement and defilement of his weaker fellows, but to the making of opportunity for them to make themselves into men rather than into slaves and beasts.
These words are from “The Cry for Justice,” “this humanist Holy Book,” as London called it. Such words, and actions based upon them, make precious his memory, and will preserve it as long as anything in American literature is preserved. Perhaps the best thing I can add to this chapter is a statement of what I personally owed to him—the utmost one writer can owe to another. When he was at the height of his fame, and I was unknown, I sent him proofs of “The Jungle,” explaining that I had been unable to find a publisher, and wished to raise money to publish the book myself. There are many jealousies in the literary world; some who win its laurels by bitter struggle are not eager to raise up rivals. But Jack was not one of these; he wrote a letter about the book, hailing it as “The ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin’ of Wage Slavery,” and rallying the Socialist movement as by a bugle-call to its support. If that book went all over the world, it was Jack London’s push that started it; and I am only one of a score of authors who might tell the same story of generous and eager support.
While I am writing this book death swings his scythe, and two more artists enter the ghostly marathon of Fame.
The first of them is Joseph Conrad. Away back in my early days someone sent me from England a copy of his first novel, “Almayer’s Folly,” and after that I kept watch, and managed somehow to get hold of “Heart of Darkness” and “Lord Jim” and “Youth.” I used to rave about these books to everyone I knew; but when at last Conrad became famous I had a secret resentment—he had been mine for so long that I did not like to give him up to those who did not understand him! In his later writings he deteriorated, as many old men do, and I saw the critics giving to these inferior books the praise which belonged to the earlier ones.
Conrad’s death has been the occasion for much discussion of the “romanticism” of his novels. The fact is that he was as realistic as he knew how to be. The reason he seems “romantic” is because the scenes and characters of his stories are remote and strange to us. But they were not at all strange to Conrad; he had sailed these Eastern seas and met these people, and their tragic fates were as commonplace to him as street-car traffic to us.
One other thing the obituary reviews agree upon—that he was the perfect type of the “pure” artist, who gave us immortal fiction without trace of purpose. And that I call a joke for the ages: Joseph Conrad being as grim and determined a propagandist as ever used fiction for a medium. Most of the time he carries on this propaganda with the Olympian calm of one who is sure of his thesis and fears no dispute. But now and then he stumbles upon some personality or point of view which seems to threaten his doctrine; and then suddenly the front of Jove becomes wrinkled, and the eyes of Jove shoot flames, and we discover the great Olympian in a venomous fury.
The strangest fact about this master of English prose is that he was born in Poland, and began life as a sailor, shipping on French craft in the Mediterranean. He was born in 1857 and came to England at the age of twenty-one; he rose in the British merchant service to become a captain, and was nearly forty before his first novel was published.
This man paces the quarter-deck through the long night watches in lonely silent seas. He reflects upon life, and comes to a conclusion about it. But it is not the conclusion officially recommended by his native countrymen; this merchant captain does not pray to the Virgin Mary for the safety of his ship and the souls of those on board; neither does he accept the official formula of his adopted country, in whose churches the congregations implore: