Down went McGinty to the bottom of the sea;He must be very wet,For they haven’t found him yet,Dressed in his best suit of clothes.
Down went McGinty to the bottom of the sea;He must be very wet,For they haven’t found him yet,Dressed in his best suit of clothes.
Down went McGinty to the bottom of the sea;He must be very wet,For they haven’t found him yet,Dressed in his best suit of clothes.
These young men would take me to see the circus parade, which went up Broadway on the evening prior to the opening of Barnum and Bailey’s. Young Mr. Lee would hold me on his shoulder a whole evening for the sake of hearing my whoops of delight at the elephants and the gorgeous ladies in spangles and tights. I remember a trick they played on one of these parade evenings. Just after dinner they offered me a quarter if I would keep still for five minutes by the watch, and they sat me on the big table in the office for all the world to witness the test. A couple of minutes passed, and I was still as any mouse; until one of the young men came running in at the front door, crying, “The parade is passing!” I leaped up with a wail of despair.
As a foil to this, let me narrate the most humiliating experience of my entire life. Grown-up people do not realize how intensely children feel, and what enduring impressions are made upon their tender minds. The story I am about to tell is as real to me as if it had happened last night.
My parents had a guest at dinner, and I was moved to another table, being placed with old Major Waterman and two young ladies. The venerable warrior started telling of an incident that had taken place that day. “I was walking along the street and I met Jones. ‘Come in and have a drink,’ said he, and I replied, ‘No, thank you’—”
What was to be the end of that story I shall never know in this world. “Oh, Major Waterman!” I burst out, and there followed an appalled silence. Terror gripped my soul as the old gentleman turned his bleary eyes upon me. “What do you mean, sir? Tell me what you mean.”
Now, if this had been a world in which men and women spoke the truth to one another, I could have told exactly what I meant. I would have said, “I mean that your cheeks are inflamed and your nose has purple veins in it, and it is difficult to believe that you ever declined anyone’s invitation to drink.” But it was not a world in which one could say such words; all I could do was tosit like a hypnotized rabbit, while the old gentleman bored me through. “I wish to have an answer, sir! What did you mean by that remark?” I still have, as one of my weaknesses, the tendency to speak first and think afterwards; but the memory of Major Waterman has helped me on the way to reform.
The pageant of America gradually revealed itself to my awakening mind. I saw political processions—I remember the year when Harrison defeated Cleveland, and our torchlight paraders, who had been hoping to celebrate a Democratic triumph, had to change their marching slogan at the last minute. “Four, four, four years more!” they had expected to shout; but they had to make it four months instead. The year was 1888, and my age was ten.
Another date that can be fixed: I remember the excitement when Corbett defeated the people’s idol, John L. Sullivan. Corbett was known as Gentleman Jim, and I told my mother about the new hero. “Of course,” said the haughty Southern lady, “it means that he is a gentleman for a prize-fighter.” But I assured her, “No, no, he is a real gentleman. The papers all say so.” This was in 1892, and I was fourteen, and still believed the papers.
There was a Spanish dancer called Carmencita and a music hall, Koster and Bial’s; I never went to such places, but I heard the talk. There was a book by the name ofTrilby, which the ladies blushed to hear spoken of. I did not read it until later, but I knew it had something to do with feet, because thereafter my father always called them “trilbies.” There were clergymen denouncing vice in New York, and editors denouncing the clergymen. I heard Tammany ardently defended by my father, whose politics were summed up in a formula: “I’d rather vote for a nigger than for a Republican.”
I recall another of his sayings—I must have heard it a hundred times—that Inspector Byrnes was the greatest detective chief in the world. I now know that Inspector Byrnes ran the detective bureau of New York upon this plan: local pickpockets and burglars and confidence men were permitted to operate upon two conditions—that they would keep out of the Wall Street andFifth Avenue districts, and would report to Byrnes all outside crooks who attempted to invade the city. Another of my father’s opinions—this one based upon knowledge—was that you should never argue with a New York policeman, because of the danger of getting your skull cracked.
What was the size and flavor of Blue Point oysters as compared with Lynnhaven Bay’s? Why was it impossible to obtain properly cooked food north of Baltimore? What was the wearing quality of patent-leather shoes as compared with calfskin? Wherein lay the superiority of Robert E. Lee over all other generals of history? Was there any fusel oil in whisky that was aged in the wood? Were the straw hats of next season to have a higher or a lower brim? Where had the Vanderbilts obtained the fifty-thousand-dollar slab of stone that formed the pavement in front of their Fifth Avenue palace? Questions such as these occupied the mind of my little, fat, kindhearted father and his friends. He was a fastidious dresser, as well as eater, and especially proud of his small hands and feet—they were aristocratic; he would gaze down rapturously at his tight little shoes, over his well-padded vest. He had many words to describe the right kind of shoes and vests and hats and gloves; they were “nobby,” they were “natty,” they were “neat”—such were the phrases by which he sold them to buyers.
I heard much of these last-named essential persons, but cannot recall ever seeing one. They were Jews, or countrymen, and the social lines were tightly drawn; never would my father, even in the midst of drink and degradation, have dreamed of using his aristocratic Southern wife to impress his customers. Nor would he use his little son, who was expected to grow up to be a naval officer like his ancestors. “The social position of a naval officer is the highest in the world,” pronounced my father. “He can go anywhere, absolutely anywhere; he can meet crowned heads as their equals.” And meantime the little son was reaching out into a strange world of books; reading things of which the father had never heard. “What are you reading?” he would ask, and the son would reply, none too generously, “A book.” The father got used to this answer. “Reading a book!” he would say, with pathetic futility. The chasm between the two was widening, never to be closed in this world.
I was ten years old before I went to school. The reason was that some doctor told my mother that my mind was outgrowing my body, and I should not be taught anything. When finally I was taken to a public school, I presented the teachers with a peculiar problem; I knew everything but arithmetic. This branch of learning, so essential to a commercial civilization, had shared the fate of alcohol and tobacco, tea and coffee; my mother did not use it, so neither did I.
The teachers put me in the first primary grade, to learn long division; promising that as soon as I caught up in the subject, I would be moved on. I was humiliated at being in a class with children younger than myself, so I fell to work and got into the grammar school in less than a month, and performed the unusual feat of going through the eight grammar grades in less than two years. Thus at the age of twelve I was ready for the City College—it was called a college, but I hasten to explain that it was in reality only a high school.
Unfortunately the college was not ready for me. No one was admitted younger than fourteen; so there was nothing for me to do but to take the last year of grammar school all over again. I did this at old Number 40, on East 23rd Street; my classmates were the little “toughs” of the East Side tenements. An alarming experience for a fastidious young Southerner, destined for the highest social circles—but I count it a blessing hardly to be exaggerated. That year among the “toughs” helped to save me from the ridiculous snobbery that would otherwise have been my destiny in life. Since then I have been able to meet all kinds of humans and never see much difference; also, I have been able to keep my own ideals and convictions, and “stand the gaff,” according to the New York phrase.
To these little East Side “toughs” I was, of course, fully as strange a phenomenon as they were to me. I spoke a language that they associated with Fifth Avenue “dudes” wearing silk hats and kid gloves. The Virginia element in my brogue was entirely beyond their comprehension; the first time I spoke of a “street-cyar,” the whole class broke into laughter. They named meChappie, and initiated me into the secrets of a dreadful game called “hop, skip, and a lepp,” which you ended, not on your feet, but on your buttocks; throwing your legs up in the air and coming down with a terrific bang on the hard pavement. The surgeons must now be performing operations for floating kidney upon many who played that game in boyhood.
The teacher of the class was a jolly old Irishman, Mr. Furey; he later became principal of a school, and I would have voted for his promotion without any reservation. He was a disciplinarian with a homemade method; if he observed a boy whispering or idling during class, he would let fly a piece of chalk at the offender’s head. The class would roar with laughter; the offender would grin, pick up the chalk, and bring it to the teacher, and get his knuckles smartly cracked as he delivered it, and then go back to his seat and pay attention. From this procedure I learned that pomposity is no part of either brains or achievement, and I have never in my life tried to impress anyone by being anything but what I am.
One feature of our school was the assembly room, into which we marched by classes to the music of a piano, thumped by a large dark lady with a budding mustache. We sang patriotic songs and listened to recitations in the East Side dialect, a fearful and wonderful thing. This dialect tried to break into the White House in the year 1928, and the rest of America heard it for the first time. Graduates of New York public schools who had made millions out of paving and contracting jobs put up the money to pay for radio “hookups,” and the voice of Fulton Fish Market came speaking to the farmers of the corn belt and the fundamentalists of the bible belt. “Ladies and genn’lmun, the foist thing I wanna say is that the findin’s of this here kimittee proves that we have the woist of kinditions in our kimmunity.” I sat in my California study and listened to Al Smith speaking in St. Louis and Denver, and it took me straight back to old Number 40, and the little desperados throwing their buttocks into the air and coming down with a thump on the hard pavement.
As I read the proofs of this book I have returned from a visit to New York after thirty years. The old “El” roads are gone, and many of the slum tenements have been replaced by sixty-story buildings. The “micks” and the “dagos” have been replaced by Negroes and Puerto Ricans, who have taken possession of Harlem.
Behold me now, a duly enrolled “subfreshman” of the College of the City of New York; a part of the city’s free educational system, not very good, but convenient for the son of a straw-hat salesman addicted to periodical “sprees.” It was a combination of high school and college, awarding a bachelor’s degree after a five-year course. I passed my entrance examinations in the spring of 1892, and I was only thirteen, but my public-school teacher and principal entered me as fourteen. The college work did not begin until September 15, and five days later I would be of the required age, so really it was but a wee little lie.
The college was situated in an old brick building on the corner of Lexington Avenue and 23rd Street. It was a firetrap, but I did not know it, and fortunately never had to learn it. There were about a thousand students in its four or five stories, and we trooped from one classroom to another and learned by rote what our bored instructors laid out for us. I began Latin, algebra, and solid geometry, physics, drawing, and a course called English, which was the most dreadful ordeal I ever had to endure. We had a list of sentences containing errors, which we were supposed to correct. The course was necessary for most of the class because they were immigrants or the sons of immigrants. For me it was unnecessary, but the wretched teacher was affronted in his dignity, and would set traps for me by calling on me when my mind had wandered.
The professor of chemistry and physics was R. Ogden Doremus, a name well known to the public because he testified as an expert in murder trials. He had snowy white mustaches, one arm, and a peppery temper. His assistant was his son, whom he persisted in referring to as Charlie, which amused us, because Charlie was a big man with a flourishing black beard. I managed early in the course to get on the elderly scientist’s nerves by my tendency to take the physical phenomena of the universe without due reverence. The old gentleman would explain to us that scientific caution required us to accept nothing on his authority, but to insist upon proving everything for ourselves. Soon afterward he produced a little vial of white powder, remarking, “Now,gentlemen, this vial contains arsenic, and a little pinch of it would be sufficient to kill all the members of this class.” Said I, “Youtry that, Professor!”
Really, he might have joined in the laugh. But what he did was to call me an “insolent young puppy,” and to predict that I was going to “flunk” his course, in which event he would see to it that I did not get promoted to the next class. This roused my sporting spirit, and I decided to “flunk” his course and get such high marks in all the other courses that I could not be held back. This I did.
The top floor of our building was a big auditorium, where we met every morning for chapel. Our “prexy” read a passage from the Bible, and three of us produced efforts in English composition, directed and staged by a teacher of elocution, who had marked our manuscripts in the margin with three mystic symbols:rg,lg, andgbh. The first meant a gesture with the right hand, the second a gesture with the left hand, and the third a gesture with both hands—imploring the audience, or in extreme emergencies lifted into the air, imploring the deity. In a row, upstage, facing the assembled students, sat our honorable faculty, elderly gentlemen with whiskers, doing their best not to show signs of boredom. Our “prexy” was a white-bearded Civil War veteran, General Webb; and when it was my turn to prepare a composition, I made my debut as a revolutionary agitator with an encomium of my fathers favorite hero, Robert E. Lee. My bombshell proved a dud, because General Webb, who had commanded a brigade at Gettysburg, remarked mildly that it was a good paper, and Lee had been a great man. Soldiers, I learned, take a professional attitude to their jobs, and confine their fighting to the field of battle.
The year I started at this college, we lived in a three-or four-room flat on West 65th Street. Mother did the cooking, and father would put an apron over his little round paunch and wash the dishes; there was much family laughter when father kissed the cook. When the weather was fair, I rode to college on a bicycle; when the weather was stormy, I rode on the Sixth Avenue Elevated and walked across town. I took my lunch in a little tinbox with a strap: a couple of sandwiches, a piece of cake, and an apple or banana. The honorific circumstances of college life were missing. In fact, so little did I know about these higher matters that when I was sounded out for a “frat,” I actually didn’t know what it was, and could make nothing of the high-sounding attempts at explanation. If the haughty upperclassman with the correct clothes and the Anglo-Saxon features had said to me in plain words, “We want to keep ourselves apart from the kikes and wops who make up the greater part of our student body,” I would have told him that some of the kikes and wops interested me, whereas he did not.
About two thirds of the members of my class were Jews. I had never known any Jews before, but here were so many that one took them as a matter of course. I am not sure if I realized they were Jews; I seldom realize it now about the people I meet. The Jews have lived in Central Europe for so long, and have been so mixed with the population, that the border line is hard to draw. Since I became a socialist writer, half my friends and half my readers have been Jews. I sum up my impression of them in the verse about the little girl who had a little curl right in the middle of her forehead, and when she was good she was very, very good, and when she was bad she was horrid.
About this time, I threw away another chance for advancement. My uncle, Terry Sinclair, who was an “old beau” in New York and therefore met the rich and had some influence, brought to his bright young nephew the offer of an appointment to the Annapolis Naval Academy. This was regarded as my birthright, but I declined it. I had made up my mind that I wanted to be a lawyer, having come to the naïve conclusion that the law offered a way to combine an honorable living with devotion to books. This idea I carried through college and until I went up to Columbia University, where I had an opportunity to observe the law-school students.
My Saturdays and holidays I spent racing about the streets and in my playground, Central Park. In the course of these years I came to know this park so well that afterward, when I walked init, every slope and turn of the winding paths had a story for me. I learned to play tennis on its grass courts; I roller-skated on its walks and ice-skated on its lakes—when the flag with the red ball went up on top of the “castle,” thrilling the souls of young folks for miles around. I played hare and hounds, marking up the asphalt walks with chalk; we thought nothing of running all the way around the park, a distance of seven miles.
The Upper West Side was mostly empty lots, with shanties of “squatters” and goats browsing on tin cans—if one could believe the comic papers. Blasting and building were going on, and the Italian laborers who did this hard and dangerous work were the natural prey of us young aborigines. We snowballed them from the roofs of the apartment houses, and when there was no snow, we used clothespins. When they cursed us we yelled with glee. I can still remember the phrases—or at any rate what we imagined the phrases to be. “Aberragotz!” and “Chingasol!”—do those sounds mean anything to an Italian? If they do, it may be something shocking, perhaps not fit to print. When these “dagos” chased us, we fled in terror most delightful.
Sometimes we would raid grocery stores on the avenue and grab a couple of potatoes, and roast them in bonfires on the vacant lots. I was a little shocked at this idea, but the other boys explained to me that it was not stealing, it was only “swiping,” and the grocers took it for granted. So it has been easy for me to understand how young criminals are made in our great cities. We manufacture crime wholesale, just as certainly and as definitely as we manufacture alcohol in a mash of grain. And just as we can stop getting alcohol by not mixing a mash, so we can stop crime by not permitting exploitation and economic inequality.
But that is propaganda, and I have sworn to leave it out of this book. So instead, let me tell a story that illustrates the police attitude toward these budding criminals. In my mature days when I was collecting material about New York, I was strolling on the East Side with an elderly police captain. It was during a reform administration, and the movement for uplift had taken the form of a public playground, with swings and parallel bars. The young men of the tenements were developing their muscles after a day’s work loading trucks, and I said to the captain, what a fine thingthey should have this recreation. The elderly cynic snorted wrathfully: “Porch climbers! Second-story work!”
The Nietzscheans advise us to live dangerously, and this advice I took without having heard it. The motorcar had not yet come in, but there were electric cars and big two-horse trucks, and my memory is full of dreadful moments. Riding down Broadway to college, the wheel of my bicycle slipped into the wet trolley slot, and I was thrown directly in front of an oncoming car. Quick as a cat, I rolled out of the way, but the car ran over my hat, and a woman bystander fainted. Again, skating on an asphalt street, I fell in the space between the front and rear wheels of a fast-moving express wagon, and had to whisk my legs out before the rear wheels caught them. When I was seventeen, I came to the conclusion that Providence must have some special purpose in keeping me in the world, for I was able to reckon up fourteen times that I had missed death by a hairbreadth. I had fallen off a pier during a storm; I had been swept out to sea by a rip tide; I had been carried down from the third story of the Weisiger House by a fireman with a scaling ladder.
I do not know so much about the purposes of Providence now as I did at the age of seventeen, and the best I can make of the matter is this: that several hundred thousand little brats are bred in the great metropolis every year and turned out into the streets to develop their bodies and their wits, and in a rough, general way, those who get caught by streetcars and motorcars and trucks are those who are not quite so quick in their reactions. But when it comes to genius, to beauty, dignity, and true power of mind, I cannot see that there is any chance for them to survive in the insane hurly-burly of metropolitan life. If I wanted qualities such as these in human beings, I would surely transfer them to a different environment. And maybe that is what Providence was planning for me to understand and to do in the world. At any rate, it is what I am trying to do, and is my final reaction to the great metropolis of Mammon.
Childhood lasted long, and youth came late in my life. I was taught to avoid the subject of sex in every possible way; the teaching being done, for the most part, in Victorian fashion, by deft avoidance and anxious evasion. Apparently my mother taught me even too well; for once when I was being bathed, I persisted in holding a towel in front of myself. Said my mother: “If you don’t keep that towel out of the way, I’ll give you a spank.” Said I: “Mamma, would you rather have me disobedient, or immodest?”
The first time I ever heard of the subject of sex, I was four or five years old, playing on the street with a little white boy and a Negro girl, the child of a janitor. They were whispering about something mysterious and exciting; there were two people living across the street who had just been married, and something they did was a subject of snickers. I, who wanted to know about everything, tried to find out about this; but I am not sure my companions knew what they were whispering about; at any rate, they did not tell me. But I got the powerful impression of something strange.
It was several years later that I found out the essential facts. I spent a summer in the country with a boy cousin a year or two younger than I, and we watched the animals and questioned the farmhands. But never did I get one word of information or advice from either father or mother on this subject; only the motion ofshrinking away from something dreadful. I recollect how the signs of puberty began to show themselves in me, to my great bewilderment; my mother and grandmother stood helplessly by, like the hens that hatch ducklings and see them go into the water.
Incredible as it may seem, I had been at least two years in college before I understood about prostitution. So different from my friend Sam De Witt, socialist poet, who told me that he was raised in a tenement containing a house of prostitution, and that at the age of five he and other little boys and girls played brothel as other children play dolls, and quarrelled as to whose turn it was to be the “madam”! I can remember speculating at the age of sixteen whether it could be true that women did actually sell their bodies. I decided in the negative and held to that idea until I summoned the courage to question one of my classmates in college.
The truth, finally made clear, shocked me deeply, and played a great part in the making of my political revolt. Between the ages of sixteen and twenty I explored the situation in New York City, and made discoveries that for me were epoch-making. The saloonkeeper, who had been the villain of my childhood melodrama, was merely a tool and victim of the big liquor interests and politicians and police. The twin bases of the political power of Tammany Hall were saloon graft and the sale of women. So it was that, in my young soul, love for my father and love for my mother were transmuted into political rage, and I sallied forth at the age of twenty, a young reformer armed for battle. It would be a longer battle than I realized, alas!
Another factor in my life that requires mentioning is the Protestant Episcopal Church of America. The Sinclairs had always belonged to that church; my father was named after an Episcopal clergyman, the Reverend Upton Beall. My mother’s father was a Methodist and took theChristian Herald, and as a little fellow I read all the stories and studied all the pictures of the conflicts with the evil one; but my mother and aunts had apparently decided that the Episcopal Church was more suited to their social standing, and therefore my spiritual life had always been one ofelegance. Not long ago, seeking local color, I attended a service in Trinity Church; it was my first service in more than thirty years, yet I could recite every prayer and sing every hymn and could even have preached the sermon.
In New York, no matter how poor and wretched the rooms in which we lived, we never failed to go to the most fashionable church; it was our way of clinging to social status. When we lived at the Weisiger House, we walked to St. Thomas’ on Fifth Avenue. When we lived on Second Avenue, we went to St. George’s. When we moved uptown, we went to St. Agnes’. Now and then we would make a special trip to the Church of St. Mary the Virgin, which was “high” and had masses and many candles and jeweled robes and processions and genuflections and gyrations. Always I wore tight new shoes and tight gloves and a neatly brushed little derby hat—supreme discomfort to the glory of God. I became devout, and my mother, determined upon making something special of me, decided that I was to become a bishop. I myself talked of driving a hook-and-ladder truck.
We moved back to the Weisiger House, and I was confirmed at the Church of the Holy Communion, just around the corner; the rector, Doctor Mottet, lived to a great age. His assistant was the Reverend William Wilmerding Moir, son of a wealthy old Scotch merchant; the young clergyman had, I think, more influence upon me than any other man. My irreverent memory brings up the first time I was invited to his home and met his mother, who looked and dressed exactly like Queen Victoria, and his testy old father, who had a large purple nose, filled, I fear, with Scotch whisky. The son took me aside. “Upton,” he said, “we are going to have chicken for dinner, and Father carves, and when he asks you if you prefer white meat or dark, please express a preference, because if you say that it doesn’t matter, he will answer that you can wait till you make up your mind.”
Will Moir was a young man of fashion, but he had gone into the church because of genuine devoutness and love of his fellowmen. Spirituality is out of fashion at the moment and open to dangerous suspicion, so I hasten to say that he was a thoroughly wholesome person; not brilliant intellectually, but warm-hearted, loyal, and devoted. He became a foster father to me, and despite all my teasing of the Episcopal Church inThe Profits of Religionand elsewhere, I have never forgotten this loving soul and what he meant at the critical time of my life. My quarrel with the churches is a lover’s quarrel; I do not want to destroy them, but to put them on a rational basis, and especially to drive out the money changers from the front pews.
Moir specialized in training young boys in the Episcopal virtues, with special emphasis upon chastity. He had fifty or so under his wing all the time. We met at his home once a month and discussed moral problems; we were pledged to write him a letter once a month and tell him all our troubles. If we were poor, he helped us to find a job; if we were tempted sexually, we would go to see him and talk it over. The advice we got was always straightforward and sound. The procedure is out of harmony with this modern age, and my sophisticated friends smile when they hear about it. The problem of self-discipline versus self-development is a complicated one, and I can see virtues in both courses and perils in either extreme. I am glad that I did not waste my time and vision “chasing chippies,” as the sport was called; but I am sorry that I did not get advice and aid in the task of finding a girl with whom I might have lived wisely and joyfully.
I became a devout little Episcopalian, and at the age of fourteen went to church every day during Lent. I taught a Sunday-school class for a year. But I lost interest because I could not discover how these little ragamuffins from the tenements were being made better by learning about Jonah and the whale and Joshua blowing down the walls of Jericho. I was beginning to use my brains on the Episcopalian map of the universe, and a chill was creeping over my fervor. Could it possibly be that the things I had been taught were merely the Hebrew mythology instead of the Greek or the German? Could it be that I would be damned for asking such a question? And would I have the courage to go ahead and believe the truth, even though I were damned for it?
I took these agonies to my friend Mr. Moir, who was not too much troubled; it appeared that clergymen were used to such crises in the young. He told me that the fairy tales did not really matter, he was not sure that he believed them himself; the onlything of importance was the resurrection of Jesus Christ and the redemption by his blood. So I was all right for a time—until I began to find myself doubting the resurrection of Jesus Christ. After all, what did we know about it? Were there not a score of other martyred redeemers in the mythologies? And how could Jesus have been both man and God at the same time? As a psychological proposition, it meant knowing everything and not knowing everything, and was not that plain nonsense?
I took this also to Mr. Moir, and he loaded me up with tomes of Episcopalian apologetics. I remember the Bampton Lectures, an annual volume of foundation lectures delivered at Oxford. I read several volumes, and it was the worst thing that ever happened to me; these devout lectures, stating the position of the opposition, suggested so many new doubts that I was completely bowled over. Literally, I was turned into an agnostic by reading the official defenses of Christianity. I remind myself of this when I have a tendency to worry over the barrage of attacks on socialism in the capitalist press. Truth is as mighty now as it was then.
I told my friend Mr. Moir what had happened, but still he refused to worry; it was a common experience, and I would come back. I felt certain that I never would, but I was willing for him to keep himself happy. I no longer taught Sunday school, but I remained under my friend’s sheltering wing, and told him my troubles—up to the time when I was married. Marriage was apparently regarded as a kind of graduation from the school of chastity. My friend did not live to see me as a socialist agitator; he succumbed to an attack of appendicitis—due, no doubt, to his habit of talking Christianity all through dinner and, just before the butler came to remove his plate, bolting his food in a minute or two.
For a time my interest was transferred to the Unitarian Church. I met Minot J. Savage of the Church of the Messiah, now the Community Church; his arguments seemed to me to possess that reasonableness that I had missed in the Bampton Lectures. I never joined his church, and have never again felt the need of formal worship; from the age of sixteen it has been true with me that “to labor is to pray.” I have prayed hard in this fashion and have found it the great secret of happiness.
An interesting detail about Dr. Savage: he was the first intellectual man I ever met who claimed to have seen a ghost. Not merely had he seen one, he had sat up and chatted with it. I found this an interesting idea, and find it so still. I am the despair of my orthodox materialistic friends because I insist upon believing in the possibility of so many strange things. My materialistic friends know that these things area prioriimpossible; whereas I assert that nothing isa prioriimpossible. It is a question of evidence, and I am willing to hear the evidence about anything whatever.
The story as I recall it is this. Savage had a friend who set out for Ireland in the days before the cable; at midnight Savage awakened and saw his friend standing by his bedside. The friend stated that he was dead, but Savage was not to think that he had known the pangs of drowning; the steamer had been wrecked on the coast of Ireland, and the friend had been killed when a beam struck him on the left side of his head as he was trying to get off the ship. Savage wrote this out and had it signed by witnesses, and two or three weeks later came the news that the ship had been wrecked and the friend’s body found with the left side of his head crushed.
If such a case stood alone, it would of course be nothing. But in Edmund Gurney’s two volumes,Phantasms of the Living, are a thousand or so cases, carefully documented. There is another set of cases, collected by Dr. Walker Franklin Prince, of the Boston Society for Psychical Research in Bulletin XIV of that society. I no longer find these phenomena so difficult of belief, because my second wife and I demonstrated long-range telepathy in our personal lives. Later on, I shall be telling about our book,Mental Radio.
In my class in college there was a Jewish boy by the name of Simon Stern, whom I came to know well because we lived in the same neighborhood and often went home together. Simon wrote a short story, and one day came to class in triumph, announcing that this story had been accepted by a monthly magazine published by a Hebrew orphans’ home. Straightway I was stirred to emulation. If Simon could write a story, why could not I? Suchwas the little acorn that grew into an oak, with so many branches that it threatens to become top-heavy.
I wrote a story about a pet bird. For years it had been my custom every summer to take young birds from the nest and raise them. They would know me as their only parent, and were charming pets. Now I put one of these birds into an adventure, making it serve to prove the innocence of a colored boy accused of arson. I mailed the story to theArgosy, one of the two Munsey publications in those early days, and the story was accepted, price twenty-five dollars. You can imagine that I was an insufferable youngster on the day that letter arrived; especially to my friend Simon Stern, who had not been paid for his story.
Our family fortunes happened to be at a low ebb just then, so I fell to digging in this new gold mine. I found several papers that bought children s stories at low prices; also, before long, I discovered another gold mine—writing jokes for the comic papers. At seventeen, jokes were my entire means of support. My mother and I spent that winter on West 23rd Street, near the river. My weekly budget was this: for a top-story hallroom in a lodginghouse, one dollar twenty-five; for two meals a day at an eating house, three dollars; and for a clean collar and other luxuries, twenty-five cents. It seems a slender allowance, but you must remember that I had infinite riches in the little room of the college library.
The quantity production of jokes is an odd industry, and for the aid of young aspirants I will tell how it is done. Jokes are made up hind end forward, so to speak; you don’t think of the joke, but of what it is to be about. There are tramp jokes, mother-in-law jokes, plumber jokes, Irishman jokes, and so on. You decide to write tramp jokes this morning; well, there are many things about tramps that are jokable; they do not like to work, they do not like to bathe, they do not like bulldogs, and so on. You decide to write about tramps not liking to bathe; very well, you think of all the words and phrases having to do with water, soaps, tubs, streams, rain, etc., and of puns or quirks by which these words can be applied to tramps.
I have a scrapbook in which my mother treasured many of the jokes for which I was paid one dollar apiece, and from this book, my biographer, Floyd Dell, selected one, in which a tramp callsattention to a sign, “Cleaning and Dyeing,” and says he always knew those two things went together. Out of this grew a joke more amusing than the one for which I was paid. My enterprising German publishers prepared a pamphlet about my books, to be sent to critics and reviewers in Germany, and they quoted this joke as a sample of my early humor. The Germans didn’t think it was very good. And no wonder. The phrase in translation appeared as “Waescherei und Faeberei,” which, alas, entirely destroys the double meaning of “Dyeing.” It makes me think of the Irishman on a railroad handcar who said that he had just been taking the superintendent for a ride, and had heard a fine conundrum. “What is the difference between a railroad spike and a thief in the baggage room? One grips the steel and the other steals the satchels.”
My jokes became an obsession. While other youths were thinking about “dates,” I was pondering jokes about Scotchmen, Irishmen, Negroes, Jews. I would take my mother to church, and make up jokes on the phrases in the prayer book and hymnbook. I kept my little notebook before me at meals, while walking, while dressing, and in classes if the professor was a bore. I wrote out my jokes on slips of paper, with a number in the corner, and sent them in batches of ten to the different editors; when the pack came back with one missing, I had earned a dollar. I had a bookkeeping system, showing where each batch had been sent; jokes number 321 to 330 had been sent toLife,Judge, andPuck, and were now at theEvening Journal.
I began taking jokes to artists who did illustrating. They would pay for ideas—if you could catch them right after they had collected the money. It was a New York bohemia entirely unknown to fame. Dissolute and harum-scarum but good-natured young fellows, they were, inhabiting crudely furnished “studios” in the neighborhood of East 14th Street. I will give one glimpse of this artist utopia: I entered a room with a platform in the center and saw a tall lanky Irishman standing on it, bare-armed and bare-legged, a sheet wrapped around him, and an umbrella in his hand, the ferule held to his mouth. “What is this?” I asked, and the young artist replied, “I am doing a set of illustrations of the Bible. This is Joshua with the trumpet blowing down the walls of Jericho.”
The editor ofArgosywho accepted my first story was Matthew White, Jr., a genial little gentleman, who had been the great Munsey’s associate from the earliest days, when that future master of magazine merchandising and chain grocery stores had sat in a one-room office in his shirt sleeves and kept his own accounts. White invited me to call on him, and I went, and we had a delightful chat; at any rate, I found it so. Finally the editor asked me if I would not like to see the “plant,” whereupon he led me through two or three rooms full of bookkeepers and office girls stamping envelopes, and then paused casually at the elevator and rang the bell. So I learned that an author is not so great a novelty to an editor as an editor is to an author. The device of “showing the plant” is one which I have employed many times with callers who fail to realize that I am more of a novelty to them than they are to me.
I wrote other stories for theArgosy, and also odds and ends forMunsey’s. They had a department called “Fads,” and I racked my imagination for new ones that could be humorously written up; each one would be a meal ticket for a week. In the summer—1895, I think it was—my mother and I went to a hotel up in a village called Pawlet, Vermont, and Matthew White, a bachelor, came to join us for his vacation. My experience at that hotel requires considerable courage to tell.
My father was drinking, and we were stranded. Rather than be dependent upon our relatives, I had answered an advertisement for a hotel clerk, and there I was, the newly arrived employee of this moderately decent country establishment. I was supposed to do part-time work to earn the board of my mother and myself, and the very first night of my arrival, I discovered that one of the duties of the so-called clerk was to carry up pitchers of ice water to the guests. I refused the duty, and the outcome of the clash of wills was that the proprietor did it instead. I can see in my mind’s eye this stoop-shouldered, elderly man, with a long brown beard turning gray; he was kindhearted, and doubtless saw the kind of decayed gentlefolk he had got on his hands. He was sorry for my mother, and did not turn us away.
I performed such duties as were consistent with my notion of my own dignity, but they were not many. Among them was copying out the dinner menus every day; that brought me into clash with the cooks of the establishment—they were husband and wife, and had a notion of their importance fully equal to my own. I would sometimes fail to copy all the fancy French phrases whereby they sought to glorify their performances. Ever since then, I lose my appetite when I hear of “prime ribs of beef au jus.”
I remember that among the guests was the painter, J. G. Brown, famous for depicting newsboys and village types. I took long walks with him and learned his notion of art, which was that one must paint only beautiful and cheerful things, never anything ugly or depressing. His children were not so democratic as their father and refused to overlook my status as an employee. His oldest daughter was named Mabel, and all the young people called her that. I, quite innocently, did the same—until she turned upon me in a fury and informed me that she was “Miss Brown.”
Yet my status as a college student apparently kept me in the amateur class, for I was on the tennis team that played matches with other hotels in the neighborhood. I remember a trip we made, in which I received a lesson in table manners as practiced in this remote land of the Yankees. It was the custom to serve vegetables in little bird bathtubs, which were ranged in a semicircle about each plate, five or six of them. The guests finished eating, and I also finished; all the other plates were cleared away, but mine remained untouched, and I did not know why. The waitress was standing behind me, and I remarked gently, “I am through”—the very precise language that my mother had taught me to use; never “I am done,” but always, “I am through.” But this waitress taught me something new. Said she, in a voice of icy scorn: “Stack your dishes!”
The venerable faculty of the College of the City of New York, who had charge of my intellectual life for five years, were nearly all of them Tammany appointees, and therefore Catholics. It was the first time I had ever met Catholics, and I found them kindly,but set in dogma, and as much given to propaganda as I myself was destined to become.
For example, there was “Herby.” Several hours a week for several years I had “Herby,” the eminent Professor Charles George Herbermann, editor of theCatholic Encyclopediaand leading light of the Jesuits. He was a stout, irascible old gentleman with a bushy reddish beard. “Mr. Sinclair,” he would roar, “it is so because Isayit is so!” But that did not go with me at all; I would say, “But, Professor, howcanit be so?” We would have a wrangle, pleasing to other members of the class, who had not prepared their lessons and were afraid of being called upon. (We learned quickly to know each professor’s hobbies, and whenever we were not prepared to recite, we would start a discussion.)
“Herby” taught me Latin, “Tizzy” taught me Greek, and Professor George Hardy taught me English. He was a little round man of the Catholic faith, and his way of promoting the faith was to set a class that was sixty per cent Jewish to learning Catholic sentimentality disguised as poetry. I remember we had to recite Dobson’s “The Missal,” and avenged ourselves by learning it to the tune of a popular music-hall ditty of the hour, “Ta-ra-ra-boom-de-ay.” Hardy was a good teacher, except when the Pope came in. He told us that Milton was a dangerous disturber of the peace of Europe, and that it was a libel to say that Chaucer was a Wycliffite. What a Wycliffite was nobody ever mentioned.
Our professor of history had no dogma, so I was permitted to learn English and European history according to the facts. I was interested, but could not see why it was necessary for me to learn the names of so many kings and dukes and generals, and the dates when they had slaughtered so many human beings. In the effort to keep them in my mind until examination day, I evolved a memory system, and once it tripped me in a comical way. “Who was Lord Cobden?” inquired the professor; and my memory system replied: “He passed the corncob laws.”
But the prize laugh of my history class had to do with a lively witted youngster by the name of Fred Schwed, who afterward became a curb broker. Fred never prepared anything and never paid attention, but trusted to his gift of the gab. He was suddenly called upon to explain the origin of the title, Prince of Wales. Said the grave Professor Johnston: “Mr. Schwed, how didit happen that an English prince, the son of an English king, was born on Welsh soil?” Fred, called suddenly out of a daydream or perhaps a game of crap shooting, gazed with a wild look and stammered: “Why—er—why, you see, Professor—his mother was there.”
Also, I remember vividly Professor Hunt, who taught us freehand drawing, mechanical drawing, and perspective. A lean gentleman with a black mustache and a fierce tongue, he suffered agonies from bores. You may believe that in our class we had many; and foreigners struggling with English were also a trial to him. I recall a dumb Russian by the name of Vilkomirsson; he would gaze long and yearningly, and at last blurt out some question that would cause the class to titter. In perspective it is customary to indicate certain points by their initials; the only one I recall now is “V.P.,” which means “vanishing point.” The poor foreigner could never get these abbreviations straight, and he would take a seat right in front of the professor in the hope of being able to ask help without disturbing the rest of the class. “Professor, I don’t understand what you mean when you say that the V.P. is six inches away.” “Mr. Vilkomirsson,” demanded the exasperated teacher, “if I were to tell you that the D.F. is six feet away, what would you understand me to mean?”
Our freehand drawing was done in a large studio with plaster casts all around the room. We took a drawing board and fastened a sheet of paper to it, and with a piece of charcoal proceeded to make the best possible representation of one of the casts; Professor Hunt in the meantime roamed about the room like a tiger at large, taking a swipe with his sharp claws at this or that helpless victim. That our efforts at “free” art were not uniformly successful you may judge from verses that I contributed to our college paper portraying the agony of mind of a subfreshman who, forgetting what he was drawing, took his partly completed work from the rack and wandered up and down in front of a row of plaster casts, exclaiming: “Good gracious, is it Juno, or King Henry of Navarre?”
I contributed a number of verses and jokes to this college paperand to a class annual that we got up. I have some of them still in my head, and will set down the sad story of “an imaginative poet” who