1 Childhood
I
My first recollection of life is one that my mother insisted I could not possibly have, because I was only eighteen months old at the time. Yet there it is in my mind: a room where I have been left in the care of a relative while my parents are taking a trip. I see a little old lady, black-clad, in a curtained room; I know where the bed is located, and the oilstove on which the cooking is done, and the thrills of exploring a new place. Be sure that children know far more than we give them credit for; I hear fond parents praising their precious darlings, and I wince, noting how the darlings are drinking in every word. Always in my childhood I would think: “How silly these grownups are! And how easy to outwit!”
I was a toddler when one day my mother told me not to throw a piece of rag into a drain. “Paper dissolves, but rag doesn’t.” I treasured up this wisdom and, visiting my Aunt Florence, remarked with great impressiveness, “It is all right to throw paper into the drain, because it dissolves, but you mustn’t throw rags in, because they don’t dissolve.” Wonder, mingled with amusement, appeared on the face of my sweet and gentle relative. My first taste of glory.
Baltimore, Maryland, was the place, and I remember boardinghouse and lodginghouse rooms. We never had but one room at a time, and I slept on a sofa or crossways at the foot of my parents’ bed; a custom that caused me no discomfort that I can recall. One adventure recurred; the gaslight would be turned on in the middle of the night, and I would start up, rubbing my eyes, and join in the exciting chase for bedbugs. They came out in the dark and scurried into hiding when they saw the light; so they must be mashed quickly. For thrills like this, wealthy grown-up children travel to the heart of Africa on costly safaris. The more bugs we killed, the fewer there were to bite us the rest of the night, which I suppose is the argument of the lion hunters also. Next morning, the landlady would come, and corpses in the washbasin or impaled on pins would be exhibited to her; the bed would be taken to pieces and “corrosive sublimate” rubbed into the cracks with a chicken feather.
My position in life was a singular one, and only in later years did I understand it. When I went to call on my father’s mother, a black-clad, frail little lady, there might be only cold bread and dried herring for Sunday-night supper, but it would be served with exquisite courtesy and overseen by a great oil painting of my grandfather in naval uniform—with that same predatory beak that I have carried through life and have handed on to my son. Grandfather Sinclair had been a captain in the United States Navy and so had his father before him, and ancestors far back had commanded in the British Navy. The family had lived in Virginia, and there had been slaves and estates. But the slaves had been set free, and the homestead burned, and the head of the family drowned at sea in the last year of the Civil War. His descendants, four sons and two daughters, lived in embarrassing poverty, but with the consciousness, at every moment of their lives, that they were persons of great consequence and dignity.
II
Being interested in the future rather than the past, I always considered ancestors a bore. All I knew about mine were a few anecdotes my mother told me. Then my friend Albert Mordell, who was writing a paper for a historical magazine, came upon my great-grandfather. He wrote me: “The life of your ancestors is a history of the American navy.” It amused him to discover that a notorious “red” had such respectable forefathers, and he had a manuscript called The Fighting Sinclairs, which may someday be published. Meanwhile, since every biography is required to have ancestors, I quote a summary that Mr. Mordell kindly supplied. Those not interested in ancestors are permitted to skip.
Commodore Arthur Sinclair, the great-grandfather of Upton, fought in the first American naval battle after the Revolution, he being a midshipman on the Constellation, when it fought the Insurgente, in 1798. He was also in the latter part of the war with Tripoli. He was on the Argus in the first cruise of the War of 1812, and captured many prizes. He fought in the leading battle of Lake Ontario under Commander Chauncey. The battle was between the Pike, on which he was captain, and the Wolf. He also a little later had command of the entire squadron on the upper lakes. He commanded the Congress in its cruise to South America in 1818, carrying the commissioners to investigate conditions, and on its cruise was born the Monroe Doctrine, for the commissioner’s report led to the promulgation of the Doctrine. He also founded a naval school at Norfolk. When he died in 1831, the flags of all the ships were ordered at half-mast, and mourning was ordered worn by the officers for thirty days. He was an intimate friend of practically all the naval heroes in the War of 1812.
He had three sons, Arthur, George T., and Dr. William B., all of whom became officers in the old navy and resigned in 1861 to join the Confederacy. Arthur, who is Upton’s grandfather, was with Perry in Japan in the early fifties. He also commanded a ship in the late fifties—the Vandalia—and was compelled to destroy a village of cannibals on an island in the Pacific.
His brother, George T., was in the famous voyage of the Potomac around the world in the early thirties, which went to attack a town in the Malay Islands for some ravages upon an American ship. He also was with Commander Elliott, the Lake Erie hero, on the Constitution in the Mediterranean. He was in the famous Wilkes exploring expedition around 1840, when they discovered the Antarctic continent; and, like the rest of the officers, he had trouble with Wilkes, whom they had court-martialed. He also served in the African Squadron hunting slavers in the early fifties, and later in the home squadron in the Wabash under Commander Paulding. It was on this ship that the famous filibuster, William Walker, who made himself dictator of Nicaragua, surrendered to Paulding.
The third brother, Dr. William B. Sinclair, was in the Mediterranean Squadron with Commander Isaac Hull about 1840. He was also in the African Squadron. All these three brothers were in the Mexican waters during the war, but saw no active service there. At the opening of the Civil War, they became officers in the Confederate Navy and saw various services.
Arthur was compelled to burn his ship the Mississippi at the battle of New Orleans to prevent its falling into the hands of his friend (now his enemy) Farragut. He was drowned on a blockade runner when leaving Liverpool toward the end of the war. George built a ship in England for the Confederacy, but it was never taken over by them because the English took hold of it. Dr. Sinclair served as physician in the Confederate Navy.
These three men also had four sons who became officers in the Confederate Navy. Arthur had two sons in this navy—Arthur, Jr., and Terry. Arthur, Jr., an uncle of Upton, was in the battle between the Monitor and the Merrimac, and wrote an account of it. He served two years on the Alabama, and was in the famous fight with the Kearsarge, and left a book about his experiences: Two Years on the Alabama.
His brother, Terry, also an uncle of Upton, was on the Confederate Cruiser Florida, the most important ship next to the Alabama, for two years. This was captured unlawfully, and Terry was made a prisoner of war, but was soon released. He left a magazine article about his experience. George T.’s son, William H., commanded a prize ship taken by the Alabama. Dr. William B.’s son, William B., Jr., was drowned at the age of eighteen from the Florida because he gave his oar to a shipmate who could not swim.
III
My father was the youngest son of Captain Arthur Sinclair and was raised in Norfolk. In the days before the war, and after it, all Southern gentlemen “drank.” My father became a wholesale whisky salesman, which made it easy and even necessary for him to follow the fashion. Later on he became a “drummer” for straw-hat manufacturers, and then for manufacturers of men’s clothing; but he could never get away from drink, for the beginning of every deal was a “treat,” and the close of it was another. Whisky in its multiple forms—mint juleps, toddies, hot Scotches, egg-nogs, punch—was the most conspicuous single fact in my boyhood. I saw it and smelled it and heard it everywhere I turned, but I never tasted it.
The reason was my mother, whose whole married life was poisoned by alcohol, and who taught me a daily lesson in horror. It took my good and gentle-souled father thirty or forty years to kill himself, and I watched the process week by week and sometimes hour by hour. It made an indelible impression upon my childish soul, and is the reason why I am a prohibitionist, to the dismay of my “libertarian” friends.
It was not that my father could not earn money, but that he could not keep it. He would come home with some bank notes, and the salvation of his wife and little son would depend upon the capture of this treasure. My mother acquired the habit of going through his pockets at night; and since he never knew how much he had brought home, there would be arguments in the morning, an unending duel of wits. Father would hide the money when he came in late, and then in the morning he would forget where he had hidden it, and there would be searching under mattresses and carpets and inside the lining of clothing—all sorts of unlikely places. If my mother found it first, you may be sure that my father was allowed to go on looking.
When he was not under the influence of the Demon Rum, the little “drummer” dearly loved his family; so the thirty years during which I watched him were one long moral agony. He would make all sorts of pledges, with tears in his eyes; he would invent all sorts of devices to cheat his cruel master. He would not “touch a drop” until six o’clock in the evening; he would drink lemonade or ginger ale when he was treating the customers. But alas, he would change to beer, in order not to “excite comment”; and then after a week or a month of beer, we would smell whisky on his breath again, and the tears and wranglings and naggings would be resumed.
This same thing was going on in most of the homes in Maryland and Virginia of which I had knowledge. My father’s older brother died an inebriate in a soldiers’ home. My earliest memory of the home of my maternal grandfather is of being awakened by a disturbance downstairs, and looking over the banisters in alarm while my grandfather—a Methodist deacon—was struggling with his grown son to keep him from going out when he was drunk. Dear old Uncle Harry, burly and full of laughter, a sportsman and favorite of all the world—at the age of forty or so he put a bullet through his head in Central Park, New York.
IV
Human beings are what life makes them, and there is no more fascinating subject of study than the origin of mental and moral qualities. My father’s drinking accounted for other eccentricities of mine besides my belief in prohibition. It caused me to follow my mother in everything, and so to have a great respect for women; thus it came about that I walked in the first suffrage parade in New York, behind the snow-white charger of Inez Milholland. My mother did not drink coffee, nor even tea; and so, when I visited in England, I made all my hostesses unhappy. No lady had ever been known to smoke in Baltimore—only old Negro women with pipes; therefore I did not smoke—except once. When I was eight years old, a big boy on the street gave me a cigarette, and I started it; but another boy told me a policeman would arrest me, so I threw the cigarette away, and ran and hid in an alley, and have never yet recovered from this fear. It has saved me a great deal of money, and some health also, I am sure.
The sordid surroundings in which I was forced to live as a child made me a dreamer. I took to literature, because that was the easiest refuge. I knew practically nothing about music; my mother, with the upbringing of a young lady, could play a few pieces on the piano, but we seldom had a piano, and the music I heard was church hymns, and the plantation melodies that my plump little father hummed while shaving himself with a big razor. My mother had at one time painted pictures; I recall a snow scene in oils, with a kind of tinsel to make sparkles in the snow. But I never learned this wonderful art.
My mother would read books to me, and everything I heard I remembered. I taught myself to read at the age of five, before anyone realized what was happening. I would ask what this letter was, and that, and go away and learn it, and make the sounds, and very soon I was able to take care of myself. I asked my numerous uncles and aunts and cousins to send me only books for Christmas; and now, three quarters of a century later, traces of their gifts are still in my head. Let someone with a taste for research dig into the Christmas books of the early eighties, and find a generous broad volume, with many illustrations, merry rhymes, and a title containing the phrase “a peculiar family.” From this book I learned to read, and I would ask my mother if she knew any such “peculiar” persons; for example, the “little boy who was so dreadfully polite, he would not even sneeze unless he asked you if he might.” He sneezed by accident, and “scared all the company into the middle of next week.”
While arguments between my father and my mother were going on, I was with Gulliver in Lilliput, or on the way to the Celestial City with Christian, or in the shop with the little tailor who killed “seven at one blow.” I had Grimm and Andersen and The Story of the Bible, and Henty and Alger and Captain Mayne Reid. I would be missing at a party and be discovered behind the sofa with a book. At the home of my Uncle Bland there was an encyclopedia, and my kind uncle was greatly impressed to find me absorbed in the article on gunpowder. Of course, I was pleased to have my zeal for learning admired—but also I really did want to know about gunpowder.
Readers of my novels know that I have one favorite theme, the contrast between the social classes; there are characters from both worlds, the rich and the poor, and the plots are contrived to carry you from one to the other. The explanation is that as far back as I can remember, my life was a series of Cinderella transformations; one night I would be sleeping on a vermin-ridden sofa in a lodginghouse, and the next night under silken coverlets in a fashionable home. It all depended on whether my father had the money for that week’s board. If he didn’t, my mother paid a visit to her father, the railroad official in Baltimore. No Cophetua or Aladdin in fairy lore ever stepped back and forth between the hovel and the palace as frequently as I.
V
When The Metropolis was published in 1908, the New York critics said it was a poor novel because the author didn’t know the thing called “society.” As a matter of fact, the reason was exactly the opposite; the author knew “society” too well to overcome his distaste for it. Attempting to prove this will of course lay me open to the charge of snobbery; it is not good form to establish your own social position. But, on the other hand, neither is it good form to tell about your drunken father, or the bedbugs in your childhood couch; so perhaps one admission will offset the other. What I am doing is explaining a temperament and a literary product, and this can be done only by making real to you both sides of my double life—the bedbugs and liquor on the one hand, the snobbery on the other.
My maternal grandfather was John S. Harden, secretary-treasurer of the Western Maryland Railroad. I remember going to his office and seeing rows of canvas bags full of gold and silver coin that were to go into pay envelopes. I remember also that the president of the road lived just up the street from us and that I broke one of his basement windows with a ball. I was sent to confess my crime and carry the money to pay for it.
Grandfather Harden was a pillar of the Methodist Church, which was not fashionable; but even so, the leaders of Baltimore’s affairs came to his terrapin suppers, and I vividly recall these creatures—I mean the terrapin—crawling around in the backyard, and how a Negro man speared them through the heads with a stout fork, and cut off their heads with a butcher knife. Apparently it was not forbidden for a Methodist to serve sherry wine in terrapin stew—or brandy, provided it had been soaked up by fruitcake or plum pudding.
I recall the long reddish beard of this good and kindly old man and the large bald spot on the top of his head. It did not occur to me as strange that his hair should grow the wrong way; but I recall that I was fascinated by a mole placed exactly on the top, like a button, and once I yielded to a dreadful temptation and gave it a slap. Then I fled in terror to the top story of the house. I was brought down by my shocked mother and aunts, and ordered to apologize. I recollect this grandfather carving unending quantities of chickens, ducks, turkeys, and hams; but I cannot to save me recall a single word that he spoke. I suppose the reason the carving stands out in my mind is that I was the youngest of the family of a dozen or so and therefore the last to get my plate at mealtimes.
I recall even better my maternal grandmother, a stout, jolly old lady, who made delightful ginger cookies and played on the piano and sang little tunes to which I danced as a child:
Here we go, two by two,
Dressed in yellow, pink and blue.
Mary Ayers was her maiden name, and someone who looked up her family tree discovered that she could lay claim to several castles in Ireland. The family got in touch with the Irish connections, and letters were exchanged, with the result that one of the younger sons came emigrating—a country “squire,” six feet or more, rosy-cheeked, and with a broad brogue. He told us about his search for a job and of the unloving reception he met when he went into a business place. “‘Git oot,’ said the man, and so I thought I’d better git oot.” Not finding anything in Baltimore, our Irish squire wound up on the New York police force—a most dreadful humiliation to the family. My mother, of a mischievous disposition, would wait until her fashionable niece and nephew were entertaining company, and then inquire innocently: “By the way, whatever became of that cousin of ours who’s a policeman up in New York?”
My mother’s older sister married John Randolph Bland, named for John Randolph, the Virginia statesman. This Uncle Bland, as I called him, became one of the richest men in Baltimore. Sometime before his death, I saw him scolded in a country club of his home city because of his dictatorial ways. The paper referred to him as “the great Bland”—which I suppose establishes his position. He knew all the businessmen of the city, and they trusted him. So he was able to sell them shares in a bonding concern he organized. I remember walking downtown with him one day when I was a child. We stopped at a big grocery store while he persuaded the owner to take shares in the company he was founding. Its name was the United States Fidelity and Guaranty Company, and of course he became its president. You have probably heard of it because it has branches all over America and in many of the world’s capitals.
After I had taken up my residence in Pasadena, he made a tour of the country to become acquainted with the agents of his company; he gave a banquet to those in southern California. There must have been two hundred of them, for they filled the biggest private dining room of our biggest hotel. His muckraker-nephew was invited to partake of this feast and listen to the oratory—but not to be heard, you may be sure! We all sang “Annie Laurie” and “Nellie Gray” and other songs calculated to work up a battle spirit and send us out to take away the other fellow’s business.
In my childhood, I lived for months at a time at Uncle Bland’s. He and his family lived in one of those brick houses—four stories high, with three or four white marble steps—which are so characteristic of Baltimore and were apparently planned and built by the block. Uncle Bland’s daughter married an heir of many millions, and through the years of her young ladyhood I witnessed dances and parties, terrapin suppers, punch, dresses, gossip—everything that is called “society.” Prior to that came the debut and wedding of my mother’s younger sister, all of which I remember, even to the time when she woke my mother in the middle of the night, exclaiming, “Tell me, Priscie, shall I many him?” For the benefit of the romantically minded, let me say that she did and that they lived happily until his death.
Let me picture for you the training of a novelist of social contrasts! My relatives were intimate with the society editor of Baltimore’s leading newspaper; a person of “good family,” no common newspaperman, be it understood. His name was Doctor Taylor, so apparently he was a physician as well as a writer. I see him, dapper, blond, and dainty, with a boutonniere made of one white flower in a ring of purple flowers; he was one of those strange, half-feminine men who are accepted as sexless and admitted to the boudoirs of ladies in deshabille to help drape their dresses and design their hats. All the while he kept up a rapid-fire chatter about everybody who was anybody in the city. I sat in a corner and heard the talk—whose grandfather was a grocer and whose cousin eloped with a fiddler. I breathed that atmosphere of pride and scorn, of values based upon material possessions preserved for two generations or more, and the longer the better. I do not know why I came to hate it, but I know that I did hate it from my earliest days. And everything in my later life confirmed my resolve never to “sell out” to that class.
VI
Nor were the members of my father’s family content to remain upon a diet of cold bread and dried herring. My father’s older sister had lovely daughters, and one of them married a landed estate in Maryland. In 1906, in the days of The Jungle, when I went to Washington to see Theodore Roosevelt, I visited this cousin, who was now a charming widow and was being unsuccessfully wooed by Senator Albert J. Beveridge of Indiana. Later she became the wife of General George Barnett, who commanded the United States Marine Corps in France. This marriage gave rise much later to a comic sequence, which required no change to be fitted into one of my novels. I will tell it here—even though it requires skipping thirty years ahead of my story.
It was at the height of the White Terror, after World War I, and one of the cities of which the American Legion had assumed control was Santa Barbara, California. I was so unwise as to accept an invitation to address some kind of public-ownership convention in that city, and my wife and I motored up with several friends, and learned upon our arrival that the Legion chiefs had decreed that I was not to be heard in Santa Barbara.
In the effort to protect ourselves as far as possible, we registered at the most fashionable hotel, the Arlington—shortly afterward destroyed by an earthquake. Upon entering the lobby, the first spectacle that met our anxious eyes was a military gentleman in full regalia: shiny leather boots, Sam Browne belt, shoulder straps and decorations—I don’t know the technical names for these things, but there was everything to impress and terrify. “He is watching you!” whispered my wife, and so he was; there could be no doubt of it, the stern military eye was riveted upon my shrinking figure. There has always been a dispute in the family as to whether I did actually try to hide behind one of the big pillars of the hotel lobby. My wife said it was so, and I was never permitted to spoil her marital stories.
The military gentleman disappeared, and a few minutes later came a bellboy. “Are you Mr. Sinclair?” I pleaded guilty, and was told: “There is a lady who wishes to speak to you in the reception room.” “Is it an ambush?” I thought. I had been warned not to go anywhere alone; there were rumors that the Ku Klux Klan was after me, as well as the Legion. (This proved not to be true; I was shortly afterward invited to join the Klan!)
In the reception room sat a lady, none other than my cousin Lelia, somewhat plump, but as lovely as any lady can be with the help of both nature and art. How glad we were to see each other! And how much gossip we had to exchange after sixteen years! “You must meet my hubby,” she said, and led me into the lobby—and who should “hubby” be but the stern-eyed general! Whatever displeasure he may have felt at having a revolutionary cousin-in-law he politely concealed, and we discussed the weather of southern California in the most correct booster spirit.
Presently the general reminded his wife that the military machine of the United States Government was awaiting his arrival in San Francisco; they had some three hundred and fifty miles to drive that night. But the Southern beauty shook her proud head (you see I know the language of chivalry) and said, “I haven’t seen my cousin for sixteen years.” So the general paced the lobby in fierce impatience for two hours, while Lelia chatted with my wife and my socialist bodyguard—a millionaire woman friend of my wife, about whom I shall have much to tell later on. Did I remember the time when I was romping with Kate, and put a pillow on Kate’s head and sat on it, and when they pulled me off she was black in the face? Yes, I remembered it Kate was married to a civil engineer, Walter was ill—and so on.
At last I saw my childhood playmate off in a high-powered military car, with a chauffeur in khaki and a guard to ride at his side, both with holsters at their belts; most imposing. It was fine local color for a novelist—and incidentally it was a knockout for the American Legion chiefs of Santa Barbara. Since I was cousin-in-law to the commander in chief of this military district, it was impossible to prevent my speaking in favor of the public ownership of water power in California!
VII
To return to childhood days: my summers were spent at the country home of the Bland family or with my mother at summer resorts in Virginia. My father would be “on the road,” and I remember his letters, from which I learned the names of all the towns in Texas and the merits of the leading hotels. If my father was “drinking,” we stayed in some low-priced boardinghouse—in the city in winter and in the country in summer. On the other hand, if my father was keeping his pledges, we stayed at one of the springs hotels. My earliest memory of these hotels is of a fancy-dress ball, for which my mother fixed me up as a baker, with a white coat and long trousers and a round cap. That was all right, except that I was supposed to carry a wooden tray with rolls on it, which interfered with my play. Another story was told to me by one of the victims, whom I happened to meet. I had whooping cough, and the other children were forbidden to play with me; this seemed to me injustice, so I chased them and coughed into their faces, after which I had companions in misery. I should add that this early venture in “direct action” is not in accordance with my present philosophy.
I remember one of the Virginia boardinghouses. I would ask for a second helping of fried chicken, and the little Negro who waited table would come back and report, “’Tisn’ any mo’.” No amount of hungry protest could extract any words except, “’Tisn’ any mo’, Mista Upton, ’tisn’ any mo’.” At another place the formula ran, “Will you have ham or an egg?” I went fishing and had good luck, and brought home the fish, thinking I would surely get enough to eat that day; but my fish was cooked and served to the whole boardinghouse. I recall a terrible place known as Jett’s, to which we rode all day in a bumpy stagecoach. The members of that household were pale ghosts, and we discovered that they were users of drugs. There was an idiot boy who worked in the yard, and gobbled his food out of a tin plate, like a dog.
My Aunt Lucy was with us that summer, and the young squires of the country came calling on Sunday afternoons, vainly hoping that this Baltimore charmer with the long golden hair might consent to remain in rural Virginia. They hitched their prancing steeds to a rail in the yard, and I, an adventurer of eight or ten years, would unhitch them one by one and try them out. I rode a mare to the creek, her colt following, and let them both drink; then I rode back, and can see at this hour the expedition that met me—the owner of the mare, my mother and my aunt, many visitors and guests, and farmhands armed with pitchforks and ropes. There must have been a dozen persons, all looking for a tragedy—the mare being reputed to be extremely dangerous. But I had no fear, and neither had the mare. From this and other experiences I believe that it is safer to go through life without fear. You may get killed suddenly, but meantime it is easier on your nerves.
VIII
When I was eight or nine, my father was employed by a New York firm, so we moved north for the winter, and I joined the tribe of city nomads, a product of the new age, whose formula runs: “Cheaper to move than to pay rent.” I remember a dingy lodginghouse on Irving Place, a derelict hotel on East Twelfth Street, housekeeping lodgings over on Second Avenue, a small “flat” on West 65th Street, one on West 92nd Street, one on West 126th Street. Each place in turn was home, each neighborhood full of wonder and excitement. Second Avenue was especially thrilling, because the “gangs” came out from Avenue A and Avenue B like Sioux or Pawnees in war paint, and well-dressed little boys had to fly for their lives.
Our longest stay—several winters, broken by moves to Baltimore—was at a “family hotel” called the Weisiger House, on West 19th Street. The hotel had been made by connecting four brownstone dwellings. The parlor of one was the office. The name sounds like Jerusalem; but it was really Virginia, pronounced Wizziger. Colonel Weisiger was a Civil War veteran and had half the broken-down aristocracy of the Old South as his guests; he must have had a sore time collecting his weekly dues.
I learned much about human nature at the Weisiger House, observing comedies and tragedies, jealousies and greeds and spites. There was the lean Colonel Paul of South Carolina, and the short Colonel Cardoza of Virginia, and the stout Major Waterman of Kentucky. Generals I do not remember, but we had Count Mickiewicz from Poland, a large, expansive gentleman with red beard and booming voice. What has become of little Ralph Mickiewicz, whom I chased up and down the four flights of stairs of each of those four buildings—sixteen flights in all, quite a hunting ground! We killed flies on the bald heads of the colonels and majors, we wheedled teacakes in the kitchen, we pulled the pigtails of the little girls playing dolls in the parlor. One of these little girls, with whom I quarreled most of the time, was destined to grow up and become my first wife; and our married life resembled our childhood.
Colonel Weisiger was large and ample, with a red nose, like Santa Claus; he was the judge and ultimate authority in all disputes. His son was six feet two, quiet and reserved. Mrs. Weisiger was placid and kindly, and had a sister, Miss Tee, who made the teacakes—this pun is of God’s making, not of mine. Completing the family was Taylor Tibbs, a large black man, who went to the saloon around the corner twice every day to fetch the Colonel’s pail of beer. In New York parlance this was known as “rushing the growler,” and you will find Taylor Tibbs and his activities all duly recorded in my novel The Wet Parade. Later in life I would go over to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer to see him in the “talkie” they were making of the novel.
IX
In those days at the Weisiger House I was one of Nature’s miracles, such as she produces by the millions in tenement streets—romping, shouting, and triumphant, entirely unaware that their lot is a miserable one. I was a perpetual explosion of energy, and I cannot see how anybody in the place tolerated me; yet they all liked me, all but one or two who were “mean.” I have a photograph of myself, dressed in kilts; and my mother tells me a story. Some young man, teasing me, said: “You wear dresses; you are a girl.” Said I: “No, I am a boy.” “But how do you know you are a boy?” “Because my mother says so.”
My young mother would go to the theater, leaving me snugly tucked in bed, in care of some old ladies. I would lie still until I heard a whistle, and then forth I would bound. Clad in a pair of snow-white canton-flannel nighties, I would slide down the banisters into the arms of the young men of the house. What romps I would have, racing on bare feet, or borne aloft on sturdy shoulders! We never got tired of pranks; they would set me up in the office and tell me jokes and conundrums, teach me songs—it was the year of McGinty, hero of hilarity:
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 to sit 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.
X
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 of Trilby, 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 and Fifth 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.
XI
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 me Chappie, 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.
XII
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, “You try 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, and gbh. 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.
XIII
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 tin box 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.
XIV
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 in it, 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 thing they 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.