Springtime came at last, and the Fairy Glen was carpeted with flowers. The little brook in front of the door sang songs to me, and I to it:
I ask you where in your journeyYou see so fair a sight,That you have joy and singingAll through the winter night.
I ask you where in your journeyYou see so fair a sight,That you have joy and singingAll through the winter night.
I ask you where in your journeyYou see so fair a sight,That you have joy and singingAll through the winter night.
The sunrise over the lake was a daily miracle, and the great winds that lashed the forest trees were brothers to my soul. Again and again that ecstasy came to me—no one to interfere with it now—and I labored days and nights on end to catch it and imprison it in words.
There were comical incidents in my hermithood, of course. Wild things came to steal the butter that I kept in the spring; I set a trap, and behold, it was nothing more romantic than a skunk. The little devil ruined a pair of trousers for me—I not knowing his ways. I left the trousers to soak in the stream for a week, but all in vain. Worse yet, my drinking place was ruined for the entire summer.
Also, I must mention the French-Canadian family that lived up on the mountain side and sent me fresh milk and eggs and butter by a little ragged boy. I tried out my homemade French on them, and themèreof the household paid me a high compliment. “Oh, you speakFrenchFrench!” Now and then she would write me notes, in homemade spelling, and one of these deserves a wider audience. She explained that she would not be able to send milk on the morrow because she was going to the town—“ilme faut faire arracher dedans.” The vision of the poor woman having herself “pulled out inside” disturbed me greatly, until I realized that she meantsome teeth(des dents).
Summer came, and the city boarders. Halfway to town was a golf links—a new game, then coming in. I saw able-bodied men driving a little white ball about a field all day, and it seemed to me more than ever necessary that they should have a new ideal. I was impatient of every form of human vanity and stupidity, and if I have become less so with the passage of the years, it has been merely to spare my digestion.
The summer brought my mother and some friends, including the girl with whom I was to fall in love. But that is a story I’ll save for the next chapter; here, I am dealing with the book. I labored over it, sometimes five or six hours without moving from my seat, and for days at a time without seeing a soul or thinking about anything else. The human organism is not made to stand such strain, and I began to notice stomach trouble. It grew worse and plagued me for years—until I humbled my stubborn pride and learned mother nature’s lesson—to limit the number of hours of brainwork, and get some exercise and recreation every day. Many years later I came upon a saying of old John Burroughs, which came home to me as truth immortal and ultimate. “This writing is an unnatural business; it makes your head hot and your feet cold, and it stops the digestion of your food.”
On the first of August the owner of my fairy cabin took it for her own use, and I moved up to a lonely farmhouse on the mountainside, where I became the sole and solitary boarder. I would go out into the woods—sugar-maple trees they were, and for breakfast I had their juice in a thick dark syrup, freshly melted. I always have to have a place to walk up and down while I am working out my stories, and in that sugar-maple forest I wore a path six inches deep—back and forth, back and forth, for hours on end every day.
There were mosquitoes, almost as annoying to me as human beings, and when they found me, I would go out and sit in the middle of a field of clover hay and do my writing. The crickets hopped over my manuscript, and the fieldmice nibbled at my shoes; and then came the mowers to destroy my hiding place. I remember one little French-Canadian whom I engaged in conversation, and how he rolled up his sleeves and boasted of the power of his stringy muscles. “You want to mow avec me, il you faut très strong bras!” I remember also walking miles down the road in the morning to meet the mail carrier; I had sent the first part of my great novel to a publisher and was hoping for a reply, but none came. It was the beginning of an agony that lasted many weary years. My curses upon those publishers who let manuscripts pile up on their desks unread!
September came, and an invitation from my clergyman friend, Mr. Moir, who now had a camp at Lake Placid. He asked me to visit him for a couple of weeks. I was so near the end of my story, I ventured out of hiding; but I found it was a mistake, because I could do no work at all when I had to fit myself to the meal hours and other habits of the world. I tried in vain for a week or two; I remember that I read the letters of Robert Louis Stevenson in this interval—and very thin and poor they seemed in comparison with what filled my soul.
At last, in desperation, because cold weather was coming fast, I went out on one of the islands of Lake Placid and found a little “cook house”—a tiny cabin with no windows and no furniture but a stove. I rented it for the sum of five dollars, and spread a couple of blankets; and with the brown leaves falling in showers about me, and the cries of blue jays and the drumming of partridges in the air, I wrote the closing scenes of my tragedy. I later used that little cook house inThe Journal of Arthur Stirling. Also I used the siege of the publishers that was still to come. But of that I had no vision as I bundled up my belongings and returned to New York, a conquering hero in my own fantasy. I was carrying in my suitcase the great American novel for which all the critics of those days were waiting on tiptoe!
I believe that marriage can be studied as a science, and practiced as an art; that like every other natural phenomenon, it has its laws, psychological, moral, and economic. At present it would seem that many others hold this belief. We have seen the rise of marriage counselors, and I have heard that marriage is even the subject of courses in college. But when I was young, it was generally taken for granted that marriages had to be ill-assorted and that married couples had to quarrel and deceive each other. Here is a case record, an example of what happens when marriage is entered into in utter ignorance of all its practical problems.
The story was told inLove’s Pilgrimage, with the variation of a few details. In ancient Greek pastorals, Corydon and Thyrsis were two shepherds; but the lines in Milton’s “L’Allegro” caught my fancy:
Where Corydon and Thyrsis metAre at their savory supper set,Of herbs and other country messes.
Where Corydon and Thyrsis metAre at their savory supper set,Of herbs and other country messes.
Where Corydon and Thyrsis metAre at their savory supper set,Of herbs and other country messes.
And so I said, “For purposes of this tale let Corydon be a girl.”
In writing the book, I told the story as the girl wanted it told. If it seemed to her that the manuscript failed to give a sufficiently vivid account of the hardheadedness and unreasonableness of Thyrsis, I would say, “You write it the way it ought to be.” So Corydon would write a paragraph, or maybe a page or a scene,and in it would go. I was so sorry for the fate of women that I found it hard to contend with them.
The marriage of Corydon and Thyrsis was dominated by the most pitiful ignorance. Both parties had been taught very little, and most of that was wrong. Corydon had lived the solitary life of a child of the city nomads; her father had been a newspaper reporter, then deputy clerk of a court, and she had been moved about from boardinghouses to apartments; and in the course of twenty years of life she had picked up one intimate girl friend, a poor stenographer dying of tuberculosis, and no men friends whatever. As for Thyrsis, he had, besides Corydon, one girl friend.
Let not Laura Stedman fail of her due place in this story: little Laura, golden-haired and pretty, prim and precise. She was the granddaughter of Edmund Clarence Stedman, the poet, and happened to live in the apartment house next to me for two or three years. We had our childish “scrap,” and I vaguely remember pulling her pigtail, or something brutal like that. Later, at the age of fifteen or so, I would go to call upon her, and experience tumultuous thrills; I recall one occasion when I purchased a new hat, of a seductive pearl gray, and went walking with Laura in this regalia, so excited that my knees would hardly hold me up.
We discoursed learnedly about the books we were reading, among theseRomola, a “classic.” First there is a Greek seducer named Tito Melema, and I remarked sapiently that I considered him “magnificent.” Laura flushed and exclaimed, “I think he is a perfect beast!” I had to explain that I was speaking from the technical point of view; the character was well drawn. So then the little lady from New England consented to forgive me.
Between Corydon and Thyrsis the determining factor, as in nine tenths of marriages, was propinquity. Corydon came to the place where Thyrsis was writing his great novel; she visited the romantic cabin in the Fairy Glen; and since someone had to read the manuscript, she carried it off, and came back flushed with the discovery that this hateful, egotistical, self-centered youth whom she had known and disliked for ten years or morewas a hothearted dreamer, engaged in pouring out a highly romantic love story destined soon to be recognized as the great American novel. “Oh, it is wonderful!” she exclaimed; and the rest of the scene tells itself. Literary feelings turned quickly into personal ones, and the solitary poet had a companion and supporter.
But, oh, the grief of the parents on both sides of this ill-assorted match! Quite literally, if a bomb had exploded in the midst of their summer vacation, it could not have discommoded them more. A clamor of horrified protests broke out. “But you are crazy! You are nothing but children! And you have no money! How can people get married without a cent in the world!” The two mothers fell to disagreeing as to which of their offspring was the more to blame, and so an old-time friendship passed into temporary eclipse. Corydon was hastily spirited away to another summer resort; but not until she had taken a solemn vow—to learn the German language more rapidly than Thyrsis had learned it!
At the end of October the poet returned to New York with an invisible crown on his brow and inaudible trumpets pealing in his ears. He and Corydon proceeded to spend all day and half the night reading Goethe’sIphigenia in Taurisand practicing Mozart’s sonatas for violin and piano. But there developed grave obstacles to this program. Corydon’s family was inconvenienced if Thyrsis arrived at the apartment before breakfast; also, the mother of Thyrsis adhered stubbornly to the idea that Corydon ought not to play the piano later than eleven in the evening, and should be taken home before her family went to bed. There was only one way in the world to escape such fetters—by means of a marriage license.
Thyrsis had only ten or fifteen dollars, but was wealthy in the certain future of his masterpiece. So the young couple went to the study of the Reverend Minot J. Savage at the Church of the Messiah and were pronounced man and wife. By this step, as Thyrsis quickly discovered, he had deprived himself of the last chance of getting help in his literary career. With one accord, all relatives and friends now agreed that he must “go to work.” And by this phrase they did not mean eight hours a day of Goethe plus six of Mozart; they did not mean even the writing of great Americannovels; they meant getting a job with a newspaper, or perhaps with a bonding company.
Something happened that the author ofSpringtime and Harvesthad not dreamed of in his most pessimistic moment; a publisher rejected the novel. Several publishers rejected it, one after another! The Macmillans were first, and Scribner’s second; Brander Matthews kindly read the manuscript and passed it on to W. C. Brownell, literary adviser of Scribner’s, and I went to see this soft-spoken, gray-bearded critic, who explained his opinion that the book was not one that would sell. What that had to do with the matter was not clear to me. Again and again those in authority had to explain that they were representing businessmen who had capital invested in the publishing of books and who desired to receive dividends on that capital. I could understand such a business fact; what I couldn’t understand was how men employed for such a purpose could consider themselves critics, and be solemnly discussed as critics by other critics like themselves.
Professor Matthews saw me at his home—very fashionable, on West End Avenue, the walls of the study lined with rare editions and autographed pictures and such literary trophies. He was sorry, he said, but he had no further suggestions to offer. When I asked about the possibility of publishing the book myself, he advised strongly against it; there would be no way to market the book. When I suggested that I might market it to everybody I knew, a chill settled over the conversational atmosphere. “Of course, if you are willing to do anything likethat—” When I persisted in talking about it, I completely lost caste with my “man of the world” professor, and never regained it.
I wrote a potboiler, and earned a couple of hundred dollars, and borrowed another two hundred from my uncle, and went downtown and shopped among printers until I found one who would make a thousand copies of a cheap and unattractive-looking little red volume, such as my ascetic notions required. The book contained a preface, telling how it had been written and what a wonderful book it was. This preface was made intoa pamphlet and sent to everybody I knew—not so very many, but by dint of including my father’s friends and my mother’s, there were several hundred names. The price of the book was one dollar; about two hundred copies were sold, just enough to pay back the debt to my uncle.
The pitiful little book with its pitiful little preface was sent to all the New York newspapers; two of them, theTimesand theAmerican, sent a reporter to see the author. Hopes mounted high, but next morning they dropped with a thud. All the picturesque details about the young poet and his wife were there, but not one word of the wonderful message he hoped to deliver to mankind. Incidentally, the author learned the value of personal publicity in the marketing of literature. As a result of a column apiece in the two largest morning papers of New York, he sold two copies ofSpringtime and Harvest. He knew—because they were the only two copies sold to strangers.
Corydon and Thyrsis were now fast in the “trap” of marriage; living in one crowded room, opening on an airshaft, in a flat belonging to the mother and father of Thyrsis. The would-be creative artist was writing potboilers in order to pay the board of his wife and himself; incidentally, he was learning the grim reality behind those mother-in-law jokes he had written so blithely a few years back! The mother of Thyrsis did not like Corydon; she would not have liked a female angel who had come down to earth and taken away her darling son, until recently destined to become an admiral, or else a bishop, or else a Supreme Court judge. Neither did the mother of Corydon like Thyrsis; she would not have liked a male angel who had taken a daughter without having money to take proper care of her.
The idea of a marriage that involved no more than the reading of German and the playing of violin and piano duets had been broken up by an old family doctor, who insisted that it was not in accordance with the laws of physiology. He made Thyrsis acquainted with the practice of birth control; but alas, it turned out that his knowledge had not been adequate; and now suddenly the terrified poet discovered the purpose of the trap into which mother nature had lured him. Corydon was going to have a baby; and so the reading of German and the playing of violin and piano duets gave place to visiting other doctors, who professed to know how to thwart the ways of nature; then rambling about in the park on chilly spring days, debating the problem of “to be or not to be” for that incipient baby.
These experiences were harrowing and made indelible scars upon two young and oversensitive souls. Aspects of life that should have been full of beauty and dignity became freighted with a burden of terror and death. Under the law, what the young couple contemplated was a state-prison offense, and the fact that it is committed by a million American women every year does not make it any the less ghastly. Thyrsis saw himself prisoned in a cage, the bars being made not of steel but of human beings; everybody he knew was a bar, and he hurled himself against one after another, and found them harder than steel.
Springtime and Harvesthad been sent to the leading book reviews, and now came a letter from Edward J. Wheeler, editor of theLiterary Digest. His attention had been caught by the preface; he had read the novel, and, strange to say, agreed with the author’s high opinion of it. Would the author come to see him? The outcome was a proposition from Funk and Wagnalls to take over the book, put it into type again, and issue it under a new title, with illustrations and advertisements and blurbs and other appurtenances of the great American novel.
So once more Thyrsis was swept up to the skies, and it became possible for a baby to be born into the world. All the editors and readers and salesmen and officeboys of a great publishing firm were sure thatKing Midaswould be a best seller; and anyhow it did not matter, since a new novel, still more brilliant, was gestating in the writer’s brain. It was springtime again, and the apron of mother nature was spilling flowers. Corydon and Thyrsis boarded a train for the Thousand Islands, and on one of the loveliest and most remote of these they built a wooden platform, and set up a small tent, and began the back-to-nature life.
This canvas home contained two tables and two sets of shelves built of boards by an amateur carpenter, who could saw straight if he kept his mind upon it, but seldom did. It contained two canvas cots, a bundle of bedding, a little round drum of a stove, afrying pan, a couple of saucepans, and a half a dozen dishes. Outside there swung two hammocks, one close to the tent for the young expectant novelist. The tent stood on an exposed point, for the sake of the scenery and the avoidance of mosquitoes; it commanded an uninterrupted sweep of Lake Erie, and the gales would seize the little structure and shake it as with a giant’s hand, a raging and tireless fury that lasted for days at a time.
The regime of this literary household was of primordial simplicity. Drinking water was dipped from the mighty St. Lawrence. Waste was thrown into the stream a little farther down. Soiled dishes were not washed in hot water but taken to the shore and filled with sand and scrubbed round and round. Black bass and yellow perch could be caught from the rocky point, and now and then, when strange cravings of pregnancy manifested themselves, a pine squirrel or a yellowhammer could be shot in the interior of the island. There may have been game laws, but Thyrsis did not ask about them; this Leek Island was on the Canadian side, the nearest town many miles away, and the long arm of Queen Victoria did not reach these campers.
The post office was on Grindstone Island, on the American side, and thither the young author sailed in a leaky little skiff, purchased for fifteen dollars. He bought groceries, and from a nearby farmhouse, milk and butter. The farmer’s wife quickly made note of Corydon’s condition and was full of sympathy and anecdotes. An odd freak this gypsy camper must have seemed, wearing a big straw hat, such as are made for haymakers, with a bit of mosquito netting wound about it for decoration.
It was a place of sudden and terrific thunderstorms, and the sight of scores of lightning flashes playing about the wide bay and the pine-tree covered islands was inspiring or terrifying according to one’s temperament. Thyrsis was standing by the opening of the tent watching the spectacle, his arm upraised, holding onto the tentpole, when there came a sudden flash, an all-enveloping mass of light, and an all-enveloping crash of sound; the upraised hand was shaken as by some huge vibrating machine and fell numb to the side. Lightning had struck one of the pine trees to which the tent was anchored, and the tree crashed to the ground.
After the storm there was found in the tree a nest of the red-eyed vireo, a silent little forest bird that you see bending under twigs and picking tiny green worms from the undersides. Two of the young birds were alive, and the campers took them in and raised them by hand—most charming pets. They would gulp down big horny grasshoppers and then regurgitate the hard shells in solid lumps; on this rather harsh diet they throve, and it was amusing to see them refuse to heed their own proper parents and fly to their fosterparents instead. At sundown they would be taken into the tent, and flying swiftly about, they would clean from the walls every fly, mosquito, spider, and daddy longlegs. They would sit on the boom of the skiff during the crossing of the channel, and on the heads of their fosterparents during the trip to the post office—something that greatly interested the village loungers, also the village cats. Now and then fishing parties would land on the island, and be surprised to have two full-grown birds of the forest fly down and alight on their hats.
The product of that summer’s activities was the novelPrince Hagen, story of a Nibelung, grandson of the dwarf Alberich, who brings his golden treasures up to Wall Street and Fifth Avenue, and proves the identity between our Christian civilization and his own dark realm. The tale was born of the playing of the score ofDas Rheingoldto so many squirrels and partridges in the forests of the Adirondacks and in the Fairy Glen on the Quebec lake. The opening chapter was sent to Bliss Perry, editor of theAtlantic Monthly, who wrote that he was delighted with it and wished to consider the completed work as a serial. The hopes of the little family rose again; but alas, when the completed work was read, it was adjudged too bitter and extreme. “We have a very conservative, fastidious, and sophisticated constituency,” wrote the great editor, and the disappointed young author remarked sarcastically that one could have that kind of thing in Boston. The truth was that the story was not good enough; the writer was strong on emotions but weak on facts.
King Midashad failed wholly to produce the hoped-for effect; it had sold about two thousand copies and brought its author two or three hundred dollars. So now the publishers were not interested inPrince Hagen, and no other publishers were interested; they would take the manuscript and promise to read it, and then manifest annoyance when a hungry young writer came back after two or three weeks to ask for a decision.
Thus occurred the painful incident of Professor Harry Thurston Peck, told with much detail inThe Journal of Arthur Stirling. Besides being professor of Latin at Columbia, Peck was editor of theBookmanand literary adviser to Dodd, Mead and Company. He readPrince Hagenfor his former pupil and called it a brilliant and original work, which he would recommend to the firm. Then began a long siege—six weeks or more—the culmination of which was the discovery that the firm had never seen the manuscript they were supposed to be reading.
The cries of rage and despair of the young author will not be repeated here. Poor Harry Peck has long been in a suicide’s grave; President Butler kicked him out of Columbia after some widow had sued him for breach of promise and given his sweetish love letters to the press. Perhaps the reason he neglected the young author’s manuscript was that he was busy with that widow, or with some other one. Harry was a devotee of decadent literature, and he broke the one law that is sacred—he got caught.
That dreadful winter Corydon went back to her parents, while Thyrsis lived in a garret room, and haunted publishers and editors, and wrote potboilers that he could not sell. He did sell a few jokes and a few sketches, book reviews for theLiterary Digest, and articles for theIndependent. He wrote a blank-verse narrative calledCaradrion, portions of which are inLove’s Pilgrimage; also a novelette,The Overman, an attempt to portray ecstasy and speculate as to its source. Many critics have quarreled with Thyrsis because of so much “propaganda” in his books; but here was a work with no trace of this evil, and the critics never heard of it, and it existed only in the Haldeman-Julius five-cent books.
The literary editor of theIndependent, who had the saying of thumbs up or thumbs down on book reviews, was Paul Elmer More, of whom Thyrsis saw a great deal before the days of More’s repute. A man of very definite viewpoint—as oddly different from his young contributor as the fates could have contrived. Thyrsis, always eager to understand the other side, was moved to a deep respect for his cold, calm intelligence, akin to godhead, subsequently revealed to the world in the series ofShelburne Essays. More never made propaganda, nor carried on controversy; he spoke once, and it was the voice of authority. The hothearted young novelist would go off and ponder and wish he could be like that; but there were too many interesting things in the world, and too many vested evils.
There are two factors in the process of growth that we call life; the expanding impulse and the consolidating and organizing impulse. In the literary world these impulses have come to be known, somewhat absurdly, as romanticism and classicism. Both impulses are necessary, both must be present in every artist, and either without the other is futile. Paul Elmer More spoke for the classical tradition and carried it to the extreme of condemning everything in his own time that had real vitality. Many times I pointed out to him that his favorite classical authors had all been rebels and romantics in their own day; but that meant nothing to him. He had understood and mastered these writers, so to him they meant order and established tradition; whereas the new things were uncomprehended and therefore disturbing. It was amusing to see More publish essays in appreciation of writers like Thoreau and Whitman, the revolutionists of their time. What would he say about the same sort of writers of our own day? The answer was, he never mentioned them, he never read them, or even heard of them.
The young wife had her baby, and the young husband sat by and held her hand during the fourteen-hour ordeal. Soon afterward he converted the experience into seven thousand words of horrifying prose. He took these to Paul Elmer More, and the cold Olympian intelligence spoke briefly. “It is well done, supposing one wants to do that kind of thing. But it seems to me one shouldn’t. Anyhow, it is unpublishable, so there is no use saying any more.” Said the young writer: “It will be published, if I have to do it myself.” Eight or nine years later this material appeared as the birth scene inLove’s Pilgrimage, and for some reason the censors did not find out about it. Now, being half a century old, it is presumably a “classic,” and safe.
More gave thecongéto his tempestuous young contributor; after that I saw him only once, an accidental encounter in the subway at the height of the excitement overThe Jungle. I asked, “May I send you a copy?” The reply was, “Some time ago I made up my mind I was through with the realists.” So there was no more to say. Later, the stern critic was forced to return to the realists; in his book,The Demon of the Absolute, I found him condemning Sinclair Lewis and Theodore Dreiser. Myself he did not condescend to mention.
TheIndependentpublished my paper on “Teaching of Languages” (February 27, 1902) and a follow-up article, “Language Study: Some Facts” (June 19, 1902). I sent a questionnaire to a thousand college graduates, and discovered that among those who had been out ten years, practically none could read the languages they had studied in college. Another article was called “A Review of Reviewers” (February 6, 1902), occasioned by the odd contrast between the reviews ofSpringtime and Harvest, a pitiful, unattractive little volume published by the author, and the reviews of the same novel when it was issued under the name ofKing Midas, in conventional costume by an established publishing house. It was, quite unintentionally, a test of book reviewers and their independence of judgment.Springtime and Harvesthad a preface, which had crudity and inexperience written all over it; accordingly, the thirteen reviewers of the United States who found the little book worth mentioning employed such phrases as: “proofs of immaturity” ... “this tumult of young blood” ... “a crude one, showing the youth, the inexperience of the writer” ... “betrays the fact that he is a novice in literature” ... “considering his youth,” etc.
But then cameKing Midas, a stately volume illustrated by a popular artist and bearing the imprint of Funk and Wagnalls. It carried the endorsement of Edwin Markham, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Barrett Wendell, and George Santayana; also a rousing publisher’s blurb: “Full of power and beauty; an American story of today by a brilliant writer; no novel we have ever published equals this in the wonderful reception accorded to it,in advance of publication, in commendations from the critics and in advance orders from the trade.”
In the face of this barrage, what became of the crudity and inexperience? In the first eight weeks after publication, fifty reviews appeared; and setting aside half a dozen that connected the book withSpringtime and Harvest, only one critic noted crudity and inexperience! The “novice in literature” had come to display “the mind of a master”; the “tumult of young blood” had become “musical and poetic fervor, at times bordering on the inspired”; the “crude work” had become “a novel of tremendous power”; “the youth, the inexperience of the writer” had developed, according to theOutlook, into “workmanship that may be called brilliant ... sincerity as well as knowledge are apparent on every page”—and so on through a long string of encomiums. The article made amusing reading for the public but cannot have been very pleasing to the critics upon whom a young writer’s future depended.
Corydon went to spend the summer with her parents in the Catskills, and Thyrsis went back alone to Leek Island, which seemed home to him because it was full of memories of the previous summer. He put up the tent on the same spot, and sailed the same little skiff, older and still leakier, across the stormy channel. He had gone too early, because of a new book that was clamoring to be written, and the icy gales blowing through the tent almost froze him in his chair. He built the fire too hot in the little round drum of a stove, and set fire to his tent, and had to put it out with the contents of his water pail. For several days the channel could not be crossed at all, and the author lived on dried apples and saltine crackers. The fish would not bite, and the author went hunting, but all he could get was a crow, which proved to have a flesh of deep purple, as strong in texture as in flavor.
From the library of Columbia University, the author had taken a strange German book calledAlso Sprach Zarathustra. While waiting for the muse to thaw out, the author lay wrapped in blankets reading this volume. He put an account of it into hisnew work,The Journal of Arthur Stirling, which helped to launch the Nietzsche cult in America. The vision revealed in Zarathustra is close to the central doctrine of all the seers, and in a chapter on Nietzsche inMammonartI pointed out its curious resemblance to the beatitudes. My friend Mencken, reviewing the book, declared that nothing could be more absurd than to compare Jesus and Nietzsche. My friend Emanuel Haldeman-Julius took up the cudgels, declaring that Mencken was an authority on Nietzsche to whom I should bow—overlooking the fact thatArthur Stirlingwas published in 1903, and Mencken’s book on Nietzsche in 1908. I could not induce either Mencken or his champion to publish the words fromZarathustrathat are so curiously close to the beatitudes.
Arthur Stirlingwas written in six weeks of intense and concentrated labor; that harrowing, fourteen-hour-a-day labor that is destroying to both mind and body. Of course, my stomach went on strike; and I went to consult a country doctor, who explained a new scientific discovery whereby I could have my food digested for me by the contents of the stomach of a pig. This appealed to me as an advanced idea, and for several weeks I took after each meal a spoonful of pink liquid containing pig pepsin. But gradually its magic wore off, and I was back where I was before. So began a long siege, at the end of which I found it necessary to become my own doctor and another kind of “crank.”
Arthur Stirlingwas sent to a publisher, and I went into the Adirondacks, on the Raquette River, and spent several weeks in the company of hunters and lumbermen. I was a reasonably good hunter for the first ten minutes of any hunt; after that, I would forget what I was doing and be a thousand miles away in thought; a deer would spring up in front of me, and I would see a flash of white tail over the top of the bushes. The reader, having been promised laughter, is invited to contemplate the spectacle of a young author lying on the edge of a mountain meadow in November, watching for deer at sunset, wrapped in a heavy blanket against the cutting frost—and reading a book until the deer should arrive! The deer must have come up and smelled the back of my neck; anyhow, there was a crash five or ten feet behind me, and a deer going twenty feet at a leap, and me pulling the trigger of an uncocked gun!
For months I had been living in fancy with Arthur Stirling, and this poet had become as real to me as myself. Why not let this poet’s diary pass as a true story—as in the spiritual sense it was? In New York was a stenographer who had worked for me for several years, and he inserted in the New York papers a notice of the death by suicide of the poet Arthur Stirling. The reporters took it up, and published many biographical details about the unfortunate young man.
So now the firm of D. Appleton and Company was interested in the diary of this suicide. Their literary adviser was Ripley Hitchcock. He happened to be in the Adirondacks and we had a meeting. I told him the facts, and he made no objection to the hoax. It has always seemed to me a harmless one; but a few solemn persons, such as my old teacher, Brander Matthews, and my old employer, the New YorkEvening Post, held it a high crime against literature. The book appeared in February of 1903 and created a tremendous furor. Practically everybody accepted it as true—which did not surprise me at all, because, as I have said, it was true in the inner sense.
The papers had long articles about the book, and some of them were deeply felt. The best was written by Richard LeGallienne. Having nobody to advise me about the customs of the world, I debated anxiously whether it would be proper for me to write a letter of thanks to a man who had praised my book. I decided that it would seem egotistical, tending to make personal something that was purely a matter of art.
The hoax did not last very long. A shrewd critic pointed out the resemblances in style betweenKing MidasandArthur Stirling, and that was the end of it. I wrote a manifesto on the subject of starving poets and their wrongs, and how I was going to make it my life task to save them from ignominy in the future. “I, Upton Sinclair, would-be singer and penniless rat”—so began this war whoop published in theIndependent, May 14, 1903. I looked this up, intending to quote some of it, but I found that I could not even read it without pain.
My friend and biographer, Floyd Dell, read the manuscriptofArthur Stirlingin 1927, and complained that “it fails to do justice to a very interesting person.” He explained his feeling: “It is too unsympathetic to its hero—strange as that may seem! It is only in spots that you lend complete imaginative sympathy to the younger Upton Sinclair.” Later in his letter, he remarked: “I suspect that I am more interested in Upton Sinclair as a human being than you are.” So here I give my friend a chance to discuss this unusual essay and what it meant to him. He says:
Reading your MS., I came upon a few words from one of your youthful manifestoes—“I, Upton Sinclair, would-be singer and penniless rat”—and it made me remember what that article meant to me when I was sixteen. I too was a would-be singer and penniless rat—and your manifesto stirred me like a trumpet call. It sang itself into my heart. I really think it is one of America’s great poems. I think that in that prose poem you achieved the greatness as a poet which you missed in your rhymes. I think it is a pity that it is not in all the anthologies. I do not know how many other youths it affected as it did me. Perhaps many of them have forgotten, as I did till I re-read it just now. But that prose poem gave me the courage to face an ugly and evil world; it gave me courage in my loneliness; it made me spiritually equal to the burden of being a dreamer in an alien world. It is no small thing to give strength to youth. Perhaps it is the greatest thing that literature can do.I think it was in the following year that I found you again, in theAppeal to Reason; in the meantime, like you, I had found it impossible to wage war on the world alone, and I had identified my cause with that of the workers of the world. It is true that there are not in America at present many young people who can as readily identify their own hurts and aims with yours as I could; but there are many all through the world, and there will be more. And to all these you will be a person of great importance for that deeply personal reason. If you will not think I am mocking you, I will say that you will be in a true sense their saint. A saint, you know, in the true sense, is one who has suffered as we have suffered, and triumphed as we hope to triumph. One man’s saint is often no use to the next man; each of us must have a saint of his own. And the real difficulty with a good deal of your fiction is that your heroes do not suffer enough nor sin at all. That is why your life is more edifying in some respects than your novels.But you are not yet in the frame of mind to confess your sins—you are still self-defensively persuaded that some of the worst of them were virtues. That is why many people don’t like you—who, indeed,could possibly like anybody who was half as good as you have always been persuaded that you were? But inThe Journal of Arthur StirlingandLove’s Pilgrimage, you gave yourself away. It is no wooden doll who walks through those pages—it is a living, suffering bundle of conceit, cruelty, selfishness and folly, such as we know ourselves to be. And you make us feel the nobility and generosity that lies behind all that conceit, cruelty, selfishness and folly—you make us feel that we, too, may, with all our faults, achieve something for mankind. I do not value greatly your present wisdom, which suits you better than it would me—I have a wisdom that I shouldn’t trade for yours if you threw that of the Seven Wise Men of Greece in with it. I do value your power as an imaginative artist, as you know, greatly. But just as Keats’ life has for us a value in addition to his poetry, so has yours.To put it in the simplest terms, all over the world there are young people who wish sincerely to devote their lives to revolutionary betterment of the world; and those same young people will probably fall in love with the wrong people, and suffer like hell, and believe this and that mistaken idea about themselves and the other sex and love; and while Upton Sinclair cannot prevent that, nor tell them what to do about it when it happens (or be believed when he tells them), he can do them good by letting them know that he went through some of the same things. Among these “same things” I include asceticism—a commoner youthful sin than you seem to think. Many grown people are horribly ashamed of their youthful asceticism. It would do them good to have you confess yours, admitting all you lost by it (and knowing really just what you lost), but explaining the apparently frightful terms upon which “freedom” was offered to youth, and the impossibility of accepting it upon such terms; and explaining the way in which the ascetic life came to be associated with everything that was good—and again with a full recognition of the deceitfulness of the combination, and the years of pain and struggle ahead before the tangle of falsehood could be unraveled.
Reading your MS., I came upon a few words from one of your youthful manifestoes—“I, Upton Sinclair, would-be singer and penniless rat”—and it made me remember what that article meant to me when I was sixteen. I too was a would-be singer and penniless rat—and your manifesto stirred me like a trumpet call. It sang itself into my heart. I really think it is one of America’s great poems. I think that in that prose poem you achieved the greatness as a poet which you missed in your rhymes. I think it is a pity that it is not in all the anthologies. I do not know how many other youths it affected as it did me. Perhaps many of them have forgotten, as I did till I re-read it just now. But that prose poem gave me the courage to face an ugly and evil world; it gave me courage in my loneliness; it made me spiritually equal to the burden of being a dreamer in an alien world. It is no small thing to give strength to youth. Perhaps it is the greatest thing that literature can do.
I think it was in the following year that I found you again, in theAppeal to Reason; in the meantime, like you, I had found it impossible to wage war on the world alone, and I had identified my cause with that of the workers of the world. It is true that there are not in America at present many young people who can as readily identify their own hurts and aims with yours as I could; but there are many all through the world, and there will be more. And to all these you will be a person of great importance for that deeply personal reason. If you will not think I am mocking you, I will say that you will be in a true sense their saint. A saint, you know, in the true sense, is one who has suffered as we have suffered, and triumphed as we hope to triumph. One man’s saint is often no use to the next man; each of us must have a saint of his own. And the real difficulty with a good deal of your fiction is that your heroes do not suffer enough nor sin at all. That is why your life is more edifying in some respects than your novels.
But you are not yet in the frame of mind to confess your sins—you are still self-defensively persuaded that some of the worst of them were virtues. That is why many people don’t like you—who, indeed,could possibly like anybody who was half as good as you have always been persuaded that you were? But inThe Journal of Arthur StirlingandLove’s Pilgrimage, you gave yourself away. It is no wooden doll who walks through those pages—it is a living, suffering bundle of conceit, cruelty, selfishness and folly, such as we know ourselves to be. And you make us feel the nobility and generosity that lies behind all that conceit, cruelty, selfishness and folly—you make us feel that we, too, may, with all our faults, achieve something for mankind. I do not value greatly your present wisdom, which suits you better than it would me—I have a wisdom that I shouldn’t trade for yours if you threw that of the Seven Wise Men of Greece in with it. I do value your power as an imaginative artist, as you know, greatly. But just as Keats’ life has for us a value in addition to his poetry, so has yours.
To put it in the simplest terms, all over the world there are young people who wish sincerely to devote their lives to revolutionary betterment of the world; and those same young people will probably fall in love with the wrong people, and suffer like hell, and believe this and that mistaken idea about themselves and the other sex and love; and while Upton Sinclair cannot prevent that, nor tell them what to do about it when it happens (or be believed when he tells them), he can do them good by letting them know that he went through some of the same things. Among these “same things” I include asceticism—a commoner youthful sin than you seem to think. Many grown people are horribly ashamed of their youthful asceticism. It would do them good to have you confess yours, admitting all you lost by it (and knowing really just what you lost), but explaining the apparently frightful terms upon which “freedom” was offered to youth, and the impossibility of accepting it upon such terms; and explaining the way in which the ascetic life came to be associated with everything that was good—and again with a full recognition of the deceitfulness of the combination, and the years of pain and struggle ahead before the tangle of falsehood could be unraveled.
The manifesto in theIndependenthad proclaimed my personal independence—“I having consummated a victory,” and so on. I really thought it meant something that the literary world had hailed my book with such fervor. But in the course of time the publishers reported less than two thousand copies sold, and called my attention to a tricky clause in the contract wherebythey did not have to pay any royalties until the book had earned its expenses—which, of course, it never did. This was before the authors of America had formed a league, and learned how contracts should be drawn.
So there were Corydon and Thyrsis, more fast in the trap than ever. Corydon and her baby were staying with her parents; while Thyrsis lived in a lodginghouse, this time up in Harlem. He was not permitted to see his wife whom he could not support. He had not seen his son for six months, and was naturally, anxious to know what that son looked like. It was arranged between the young parents that the Negro maid who took care of the child should wheel the baby carriage to a certain spot in Central Park at a certain hour of the afternoon, and Thyrsis would be there and watch the little one go by. The father kept the appointed tryst, and there came a Negro nursemaid, wheeling a baby carriage, and the father gazed therein and beheld a horrifying spectacle—a red-headed infant with a flat nose and a pimply skin. The father went away, sick at soul—until he had the inspiration to send a telegram, and received an answer informing him that the nursemaid had been prevented from coming.
The lodginghouse where Thyrsis had a room was kept by an elderly widow who had invested her little property in United States Steel common and had seen it go down to six dollars. As fellow lodgers, there was the father of Thyrsis, who was drinking more and more; and that Uncle Harry who had almost reached the stage where he put a bullet through his brain. Meanwhile, the uncle considered it his duty to give worldly-wise advice to a haggard young author who refused to “go to work.” The mother of Thyrsis, distracted, kept repeating the same formula; half a dozen other occupants of the lodginghouse, broker’s clerks, and other commercial persons, took an interest in the problem and said their say.
Such was the life of a would-be prophet in a business world! So that winter I wrote the most ferocious of my stories,A Captain of Industry, which became a popular item in the list of the State Publishing House of Soviet Russia. The manuscript was submitted to the Macmillans, and the president of that concern was kind enough to let me see the opinion of one of his readers.“What is the matter with this young author?” was the opening sentence. The answer of course was that the young author was unable to get enough to eat.
Critics ofArthur Stirlingand ofLove’s Pilgrimagecomplain of the too-idealistic characters portrayed, the lack of redeeming weaknesses in the hero. Let the deficiency be supplied by one detail—that during that dreadful winter I discovered my vice. Living in these sordid surroundings, desperate, and utterly without companionship, I was now and then invited to play cards with some of my fellow lodgers. I had played cards as a boy, but never for money; now I would “sit in” at a poker game with the young broker’s clerks and other commercial persons with whom fate had thrown me.
So I discovered a devastating emotion; I was gripped by a dull, blind frenzy of greed and anxiety, and was powerless to break its hold. The game was what is called penny ante, and the stakes were pitifully small, yet they represented food for that week. I cannot recall that I ever won, but I lost a dollar or two on several occasions. I remember that on Christmas Eve I started playing after dinner, and sat at a table in a half-warmed room gray with tobacco smoke until two or three in the morning; the following afternoon I began playing again and played all night. So it appeared that I was an orthodox Southern gentleman, born to be a gambler! After that Christmas experience I took a vow, and have never played cards for money since that time.
Not all the humiliation, rage, and despair could keep new literary plans from forming themselves, colossal and compelling. Now it was to be a trilogy of novels, nothing less. Ecstasy was taking the form of battles, marches, and sieges, titanic efforts of the collective soul of America.Manassas,Gettysburg, andAppomattoxwere to be the titles of these mighty works, and by contemplation of the heroism and glory of the past, America was to be redeemed from the sordidness and shame of the present. The problem was to find some one capable of appreciating such a literary service, and willing to make it possible.
I went up to Boston, headquarters of the culture that I meantto glorify. I stayed with my cousin, Howard Bland, then a student at Harvard, and devoted myself to the double task of getting local color and an endowment. I succeeded in the first part only. Thomas Wentworth Higginson had readSpringtime and Harvest, and he introduced me to what was left of the old guard of the abolitionists; I remember several visits to Frank B. Sanborn and one to Julia Ward Howe. I went to a reunion of a Grand Army post and heard stories from the veterans—though not much of this was needed, as the Civil War has been so completely recorded in books, magazines, and newspapers. I inspected reverently the Old Boston landmarks and shrines; for I had exchanged my Virginia ideals for those of Massachusetts and was intending to portray the Civil War from the Yankee point of view.
I thought Boston ought to be interested and warm-hearted. Why was Boston so cold? Perfectly polite, of course, and willing to invite a young novelist to tea and listen to his account of the great work he was planning; but when the question was broached, would anyone advance five hundred dollars to make possible the first volume of such a trilogy, they all with one accord began to make excuses. Among those interviewed I remember Edwin D. Mead, the pacifist, and Edwin Ginn, the schoolbook publisher, a famous philanthropist. Mr. Ginn explained that he had ruined the character of a nephew by giving him money, and had decided that it was the worst thing one could do for the young. In vain I sought to persuade him that there might be differences among the young.
It was in New York that a man was found, able to realize that a writer has to eat while writing. George D. Herron was his name, and he happened to be a socialist, a detail of great significance in the young writer’s life. But that belongs to the next chapter; this one has to do with the fate of Corydon and Thyrsis, and what poverty and failure did to their love. Suffice it for the moment to say that the new friend advanced a couple of hundred dollars and promised thirty dollars a month, this being Thyrsis’ estimate of what he would need to keep himself and wife and baby in back-to-nature fashion during the year it would take to writeManassas. The place selected was Princeton, New Jersey, because that university possessed the second-largest Civil War collection in the country—the largest being in the Library of Congress. So inMay 1903 the migration took place, and for three years and a half Princeton was home.
On the far side of a ridge three miles north of the town, a patch of woods was found whose owner was willing to rent it as a literary encampment. The tent had been shipped from Canada, and a platform was built, and an outfit of wooden shelves and tables. Also there was a smaller tent, eight feet square, for the secret sessions with Clio, muse of history. Both canvas structures were provided with screen doors, against the inroads of the far-famed Jersey mosquito. Water was brought in pails from a farmer’s well, and once a week a horse and buggy were hired for a drive to town—to purchase supplies, and exchange one load of books about the Civil War for another load.
Manassas: A Novel of the War—so ran the title; the dedication said: “That the men of this land may know the heritage that is come down to them.” The young historian found himself a stamping ground in the woods, a place where he could pace back and forth for hours undisturbed, and there the scenes of the dreadful “new birth of freedom” lived themselves over in his mind. The men of that time came to him and spoke in their own persons, and with trembling and awe he wrote down their actions and words.
His method of working had evolved itself into this: he would go through a scene in his imagination, over and over again, until he knew it by heart, before setting down a word of it on paper. An episode like the battle scene ofManassas, some ten thousand words in length, took three weeks in gestation; the characters and incidents were hardly out of the writer’s mind for a waking moment during that time, nor did the emotional tension of their presence relax. And in between these bouts of writing there was reading and research in the literature of sixty years past: newspapers, magazines, pamphlets, works of biography and reminiscence. The writing ofManassasmust have entailed the reading of five hundred volumes, and the consulting of as many more.
In the meantime Corydon took care of the baby, a youngsterof a year and a half, who seemed to know exactly what he wanted and would yell himself purple in the face to get it; the inexperienced young parents sometimes wondered whether he would kill himself by such efforts. During his incarceration in the city the child had suffered from rickets, and now a “child specialist” had outlined an extremely elaborate diet, which took hours of the young mother’s time to prepare. Under it the infant throve and became yet more aggressive.
Corydon and Thyrsis had wanted nothing but to be together; and now they had what they wanted—almost too much of it. Now and then they met the farmer and his wife, a gentle old couple; when they drove to Princeton, they met the clerks in the stores and in the college library; they met no one else. Possibly some women could have stood this long ordeal, but Corydon was not of that tough fiber. While her husband went apart to wrestle with his angel, she stayed in the tent to wrestle with demons. She suffered from depression and melancholy, and it was impossible to know whether the trouble was of the mind or of the body.
Nowadays, every disciple of Freud in Greenwich Village would know what to tell her. But this was in the days before the invention of the Freudian demonology. Birth control, as explained by a family doctor, had failed, and could not be trusted; since another pregnancy would have meant the death of the young writer’s hopes, there was no safety but in returning to the original idea of brother and sister. Since caressing led to sexual impulse, and therefore to discontent, it was necessary that caressing should be omitted from the daily program, and love-making be confined to noble words and the reading aloud of Civil War literature. Thyrsis could do that, being completely absorbed in his vision. Whether Corydon could do it or not was a superfluous question—since Corydonhadto do it. This was, of course, a cruelty, and prepared the way for a tragedy.
Prince Hagen, after having been declined by seventeen magazines and twenty-two publishing houses, had been brought out by a firm in Boston and, as usual, disappointed its author’s hopes.But there came one or two hundred dollars in royalties, almost enough to pay for the building of a house. An old carpenter and his son drove from the village, and Thyrsis worked with them and learned a trade. In two or three weeks they built a cabin on the edge of the woods, sixteen feet by eighteen, with a living room across the front and a tiny bedroom and kitchen in the back. It was roofed with tar paper, and the total cost was two hundred and fifty-six dollars. Ten per cent of this price was earned by the device of writing an article about the homemade dwelling and selling it to theWorld’s Work, for the benefit of other young authors contemplating escape from civilization. The baby, now two years old, watched the mighty men at work, and thereafter the problem of his upbringing was solved; all that was necessary was to put him out of doors with a block of wood, a hammer, and a supply of nails, and he would bang nails into the wood with perfect contentment for hours.
But the problem of the young mother was less easy of solution. Winter came howling from the north and smote the little cabin on the exposed ridge. Snow blocked the roads, and walking became impossible for a woman tired by housework. She could get to town in a sleigh, but there was no place to stay in town with a baby; and what became of the woman’s diversion of shopping, when the family had only thirty dollars a month to live on? There occurred the episode of the turkey-red table cover. It was discovered as a bargain in a notion store, price thirty cents, and Corydon craved it as one pitiful trace of decoration in their home of bare lumber. She bought it, but Thyrsis was grim and implacable, insisting that it be folded up and taken back. Thirty cents was a day’s food for a family, and if they ran up bills at the stores, how would the soul of America be saved?
Sickness came, of course. Whether you were rich or poor in America in those days, you were subject to colds and sore throats, because you knew nothing about diet, and ate denatured foods out of packages and cans. Corydon had obscure pains, and doctors gave obscure opinions about “womb trouble.” She paid a dollar a bottle for Lydia Pinkham’s Vegetable Compound, which was supposed to remedy “female complaints,” and did so—by the method of dulling the victim’s sensations with opium. The time came when Thyrsis awakened one winter nightand heard his wife sobbing, and found her sitting up in bed in the moonlight, with a revolver in her hand, something she kept for protection while her husband was working in the college library. She had been trying for hours to get up courage to put a bullet into her head, but did not have that courage.
The grip of dreadful winter was broken, and it was possible to walk once more. Flowers blossomed in the woods, and also in the two tormented souls. For the great novel had been completed, and this time it was promptly accepted. The great firm of Macmillan called it a distinguished piece of fiction, paid five hundred dollars advance upon it, and agreed to publish it in the autumn. So it was possible for the little family to buy a turkey-red table cover, and also a vase to fill with woodland flowers, and to get the horse and buggy more frequently—one dollar per afternoon—and drive to town and ramble about the campus and listen to the students singing their songs at twilight.
A town full of handsome young college men was a not disagreeable place of residence for the girl-wife of a solitary genius, condemned by grim fate to celibacy. It was not long before Corydon had met a young instructor of science who lived only a mile or two away on the ridge. He came to call; having horse and buggy, he took Corydon driving, and she would come back from these drives refreshed and enlivened. Life became still more promising.
Presently the time came when she told her preoccupied husband a quaint and naïve story of what had happened. The young instructor had admitted, shyly and humbly, that he was falling somewhat in love with her. It was innocent and idyllic, quite touching; and Thyrsis was moved—he could understand easily how anyone might fall in love with Corydon, for he had done so himself. He was glad it was so noble and high-minded; but he suggested, very gently, that it would be the part of wisdom not to go driving with the young man any more. Corydon was surprised and pained by this; but after a few more drives she admitted that it might indeed be wiser.
So again she was lonely for a while; until it happened that inthe course of her search for health, she encountered a high-minded and handsome young surgeon, a Scotchman. Strangely enough, the same thing happened again; the surgeon admitted, shyly and humbly, that he was falling somewhat in love with his patient; this time he himself suggested that it would be wiser if he did not see her any more. Corydon told Thyrsis all about it, and it was excellent material for a would-be novelist who lived a retired life and had few experiences of romantic emotions. But in the end, the novelty wore off—it happened too many times.
Floyd Dell, contemplating his biography of myself, which was published in 1927, asked me to explain the appearance of a social rebel in a conventional Southern family. I thought the problem over and reported my psychology as that of a “poor relation.” It had been my fate from earliest childhood to live in the presence of wealth that belonged to others.
Let me say at once that I have no idea of blaming my relatives. They were always kind to me; their homes were open to me, and when I came, I was a member of the family. Nor do I mean that I was troubled by jealousy. I mean merely that all my life I was faced by the contrast between riches and poverty, and thereby impelled to think and to ask questions. “Mamma, why are some children poor and others rich? How can that be fair?” I plagued my mother’s mind with the problem, and never got any answer. Since then I have plagued the ruling-class apologists of the world with it, and still have no answer.
The other factor in my revolt—odd as it may seem—was the Protestant Episcopal Church. I really took the words of Jesus seriously, and when I carried the train of Bishop Potter in a confirmation ceremony in the Church of the Holy Communion, I thought I was helping to glorify the rebel carpenter, the friend of the poor and lowly, the symbol of human brotherhood. Later, I read in the papers that the bishop’s wife had had fifty thousand dollars’ worth of jewels stolen, and had set the police to huntingfor the thief. I couldn’t understand how a bishop’s wife could own fifty thousand dollars’ worth of jewels, and the fact stuck in my mind, and had a good deal to do with the fading away of my churchly ardor.
From the age of perhaps seventeen to twenty-two, I faced our civilization of class privilege absolutely alone in my own mind; that is to say, whatever I found wrong with this civilization, I thought that I alone knew it, and the burden of changing it rested upon my spirit. Such was the miracle that capitalist education had been able to perform upon my young mind during the eleven or twelve years that it had charge of me. It could not keep me from realizing that the rule of society by organized greed was an evil thing; but it managed to keep me from knowing that there was anybody else in the world who thought as I did; it managed to make me regard the current movements, Bryanism and Populism, which sought to remedy this evil, as vulgar, noisy, and beneath my cultured contempt.
I knew, of course, that there had been a socialist movement in Europe; I had heard vaguely about Bismarck persecuting these malcontents. Also, I knew there had been dreamers and cranks who had gone off and lived in colonies, and that they “busted up” when they faced the practical problems of life. While emotionally in revolt against Mammon worship, I was intellectually a perfect little snob and tory. I despised modern books without having read them, and I expected social evils to be remedied by cultured and well-mannered gentlemen who had been to college and acquired noble ideals. That is as near as I can come to describing the jumble of notions I had acquired by combining John Ruskin with Godkin of the New YorkEvening Post, and Shelley with Dana of the New YorkSun.
It happened that I knew about anarchists because of the execution of the Haymarket martyrs when I was ten years old. In the “chamber of horrors” of the Eden Musée, a place of waxworks, I saw a group representing these desperados sitting round a table making bombs. I swallowed these bombs whole, and shuddered at the thought of depraved persons who inhabited the back rooms of saloons, jeered at God, practiced free love, and conspired to blow up the government. In short, I believed in 1889 what ninety-five per cent of America believes in 1962.
Upon my return to New York in the autumn of 1902, after the writing ofArthur Stirling, I met in the office of theLiterary Digesta tall, soft-voiced, and gentle-souled youth by the name of Leonard D. Abbott; he was a socialist, so he told me, and he thought I might be interested to know something about that movement. He gave me a couple of pamphlets and a copy ofWilshire’s Magazine.
It was like the falling down of prison walls about my mind; the amazing discovery, after all those years, that I did not have to carry the whole burden of humanity’s future upon my two frail shoulders! There were actually others who understood; who saw what had gradually become dear to me, that the heart and center of the evil lay in leaving the social treasure, which nature had created and which every man has to have in order to live, to become the object of a scramble in the market place, a delirium of speculation. The principal fact the socialists had to teach me was that they themselves existed.
One of the pamphlets I read was by George D. Herron; it moved me to deep admiration, and when I took it to my editor and critic, Paul Elmer More, it moved him to the warmest abhorrence. I wrote to Herron, telling him about myself, and the result was an invitation to dinner and a very curious and amusing experience.
I was in no condition to dine out, for my shoes were down at the heel, and my only pair of detachable cuffs were badly frayed; but I supposed that a socialist dinner would be different, so I went to the address given, a hotel on West Forty-fourth Street. I found myself in an apartment of extreme elegance, with marble statuary and fine paintings; I was received by a black-bearded gentleman in evening dress and Windsor tie—a combination I had never heard of before—and by an elegant lady in a green velvet Empire gown with a train. One other guest appeared, a small man with a black beard and mustache trimmed to sharp points, and twinkling mischievous eyes—for all the world the incarnation of Mephistopheles, but without the tail I had seen him wearing at the Metropolitan Opera House. “Comrade Wilshire,” said my host, and I realized that this was the editor of the magazine I had been reading.
We four went down into the dining room of the hotel, and I noted that everybody in the room turned to stare at us, and did not desist even after we were seated. Dinner was ordered, and presently occurred a little domestic comedy that I, the son of an extremely proper mother, was able to comprehend. The waiter served our meat, set the vegetables on the table, and went away to fetch something else. I saw my host look longingly at a platter of peas that lay before him; I saw his hand start to move, and then he glanced at his wife, and the wife frowned; so the hand drew back, and we waited until the waiter came and served us our peas in proper fashion.
Before long I learned the tragic story of my new friend. A Congregational clergyman of Grinnell, Iowa, he had converted a rich woman to socialism, and she had endowed a chair in Grinnell College for him. Being an unhappily married man, he had fallen in love with the rich woman’s daughter, and had refused to behave as clergymen were supposed to behave in such a crisis. Instead, he had behaved like a resident of Fifth Avenue and Newport; that is to say, he had proposed to his wife that she divorce him and let him marry the woman he loved. There ensued a frightful scandal, fanned red hot by the gutter press, and Herron had to give up his professorship. Here he was in New York, with his new wife and her mother, preaching to the labor movement instead of to the churches and the colleges.
An abnormally sensitive man, he had been all but killed by the fury of the assault upon him, and before long I persuaded him to go abroad and live and do his writing. He went, but not much writing materialized. During World War I he swallowed the British propaganda as I did, and became a confidential agent of Woodrow Wilson in Switzerland, and made promises to the Germans that Wilson did not keep; so poor Herron died another death. His book,The Defeat in the Victory, told the story of his despair for mankind.
He was a strange combination of moral sublimity and human frailty. I won’t stop for details here, but will merely pay the personal tribute that is due. I owe to George D. Herron my survival as a writer. At the moment when I was completely exhaustedand blocked in every direction, I appealed to him; I gave himArthur Stirlingand the manuscript ofPrince Hagen, and told him aboutManassas, which I wanted to write. I had tried the public and got no response; I had tried the leading colleges and universities, to see if they would give a fellowship to a creative writer; I had tried eminent philanthropists—all in vain. Now I tried a socialist, and for the first time found a comrade. Herron promised me money and kept the promise—altogether about eight hundred dollars. How I could have lived and writtenManassaswithout that money I am entirely unable to imagine.