2 Youth
I
Childhood lasted long, and youth came late in my life. I was taught to avoid the subject of sex in every possible way; the teaching being done, for the most part, in Victorian fashion, by deft avoidance and anxious evasion. Apparently my mother taught me even too well; for once when I was being bathed, I persisted in holding a towel in front of myself. Said my mother: “If you don’t keep that towel out of the way, I’ll give you a spank.” Said I: “Mamma, would you rather have me disobedient, or immodest?”
The first time I ever heard of the subject of sex, I was four or five years old, playing on the street with a little white boy and a Negro girl, the child of a janitor. They were whispering about something mysterious and exciting; there were two people living across the street who had just been married, and something they did was a subject of snickers. I, who wanted to know about everything, tried to find out about this; but I am not sure my companions knew what they were whispering about; at any rate, they did not tell me. But I got the powerful impression of something strange.
It was several years later that I found out the essential facts. I spent a summer in the country with a boy cousin a year or two younger than I, and we watched the animals and questioned the farmhands. But never did I get one word of information or advice from either father or mother on this subject; only the motion of shrinking away from something dreadful. I recollect how the signs of puberty began to show themselves in me, to my great bewilderment; my mother and grandmother stood helplessly by, like the hens that hatch ducklings and see them go into the water.
Incredible as it may seem, I had been at least two years in college before I understood about prostitution. So different from my friend Sam De Witt, socialist poet, who told me that he was raised in a tenement containing a house of prostitution, and that at the age of five he and other little boys and girls played brothel as other children play dolls, and quarrelled as to whose turn it was to be the “madam”! I can remember speculating at the age of sixteen whether it could be true that women did actually sell their bodies. I decided in the negative and held to that idea until I summoned the courage to question one of my classmates in college.
The truth, finally made clear, shocked me deeply, and played a great part in the making of my political revolt. Between the ages of sixteen and twenty I explored the situation in New York City, and made discoveries that for me were epoch-making. The saloonkeeper, who had been the villain of my childhood melodrama, was merely a tool and victim of the big liquor interests and politicians and police. The twin bases of the political power of Tammany Hall were saloon graft and the sale of women. So it was that, in my young soul, love for my father and love for my mother were transmuted into political rage, and I sallied forth at the age of twenty, a young reformer armed for battle. It would be a longer battle than I realized, alas!
II
Another factor in my life that requires mentioning is the Protestant Episcopal Church of America. The Sinclairs had always belonged to that church; my father was named after an Episcopal clergyman, the Reverend Upton Beall. My mother’s father was a Methodist and took the Christian Herald, and as a little fellow I read all the stories and studied all the pictures of the conflicts with the evil one; but my mother and aunts had apparently decided that the Episcopal Church was more suited to their social standing, and therefore my spiritual life had always been one of elegance. Not long ago, seeking local color, I attended a service in Trinity Church; it was my first service in more than thirty years, yet I could recite every prayer and sing every hymn and could even have preached the sermon.
In New York, no matter how poor and wretched the rooms in which we lived, we never failed to go to the most fashionable church; it was our way of clinging to social status. When we lived at the Weisiger House, we walked to St. Thomas’ on Fifth Avenue. When we lived on Second Avenue, we went to St. George’s. When we moved uptown, we went to St. Agnes’. Now and then we would make a special trip to the Church of St. Mary the Virgin, which was “high” and had masses and many candles and jeweled robes and processions and genuflections and gyrations. Always I wore tight new shoes and tight gloves and a neatly brushed little derby hat—supreme discomfort to the glory of God. I became devout, and my mother, determined upon making something special of me, decided that I was to become a bishop. I myself talked of driving a hook-and-ladder truck.
We moved back to the Weisiger House, and I was confirmed at the Church of the Holy Communion, just around the corner; the rector, Doctor Mottet, lived to a great age. His assistant was the Reverend William Wilmerding Moir, son of a wealthy old Scotch merchant; the young clergyman had, I think, more influence upon me than any other man. My irreverent memory brings up the first time I was invited to his home and met his mother, who looked and dressed exactly like Queen Victoria, and his testy old father, who had a large purple nose, filled, I fear, with Scotch whisky. The son took me aside. “Upton,” he said, “we are going to have chicken for dinner, and Father carves, and when he asks you if you prefer white meat or dark, please express a preference, because if you say that it doesn’t matter, he will answer that you can wait till you make up your mind.”
Will Moir was a young man of fashion, but he had gone into the church because of genuine devoutness and love of his fellowmen. Spirituality is out of fashion at the moment and open to dangerous suspicion, so I hasten to say that he was a thoroughly wholesome person; not brilliant intellectually, but warm-hearted, loyal, and devoted. He became a foster father to me, and despite all my teasing of the Episcopal Church in The Profits of Religion and elsewhere, I have never forgotten this loving soul and what he meant at the critical time of my life. My quarrel with the churches is a lover’s quarrel; I do not want to destroy them, but to put them on a rational basis, and especially to drive out the money changers from the front pews.
Moir specialized in training young boys in the Episcopal virtues, with special emphasis upon chastity. He had fifty or so under his wing all the time. We met at his home once a month and discussed moral problems; we were pledged to write him a letter once a month and tell him all our troubles. If we were poor, he helped us to find a job; if we were tempted sexually, we would go to see him and talk it over. The advice we got was always straightforward and sound. The procedure is out of harmony with this modern age, and my sophisticated friends smile when they hear about it. The problem of self-discipline versus self-development is a complicated one, and I can see virtues in both courses and perils in either extreme. I am glad that I did not waste my time and vision “chasing chippies,” as the sport was called; but I am sorry that I did not get advice and aid in the task of finding a girl with whom I might have lived wisely and joyfully.
III
I became a devout little Episcopalian, and at the age of fourteen went to church every day during Lent. I taught a Sunday-school class for a year. But I lost interest because I could not discover how these little ragamuffins from the tenements were being made better by learning about Jonah and the whale and Joshua blowing down the walls of Jericho. I was beginning to use my brains on the Episcopalian map of the universe, and a chill was creeping over my fervor. Could it possibly be that the things I had been taught were merely the Hebrew mythology instead of the Greek or the German? Could it be that I would be damned for asking such a question? And would I have the courage to go ahead and believe the truth, even though I were damned for it?
I took these agonies to my friend Mr. Moir, who was not too much troubled; it appeared that clergymen were used to such crises in the young. He told me that the fairy tales did not really matter, he was not sure that he believed them himself; the only thing of importance was the resurrection of Jesus Christ and the redemption by his blood. So I was all right for a time—until I began to find myself doubting the resurrection of Jesus Christ. After all, what did we know about it? Were there not a score of other martyred redeemers in the mythologies? And how could Jesus have been both man and God at the same time? As a psychological proposition, it meant knowing everything and not knowing everything, and was not that plain nonsense?
I took this also to Mr. Moir, and he loaded me up with tomes of Episcopalian apologetics. I remember the Bampton Lectures, an annual volume of foundation lectures delivered at Oxford. I read several volumes, and it was the worst thing that ever happened to me; these devout lectures, stating the position of the opposition, suggested so many new doubts that I was completely bowled over. Literally, I was turned into an agnostic by reading the official defenses of Christianity. I remind myself of this when I have a tendency to worry over the barrage of attacks on socialism in the capitalist press. Truth is as mighty now as it was then.
I told my friend Mr. Moir what had happened, but still he refused to worry; it was a common experience, and I would come back. I felt certain that I never would, but I was willing for him to keep himself happy. I no longer taught Sunday school, but I remained under my friend’s sheltering wing, and told him my troubles—up to the time when I was married. Marriage was apparently regarded as a kind of graduation from the school of chastity. My friend did not live to see me as a socialist agitator; he succumbed to an attack of appendicitis—due, no doubt, to his habit of talking Christianity all through dinner and, just before the butler came to remove his plate, bolting his food in a minute or two.
For a time my interest was transferred to the Unitarian Church. I met Minot J. Savage of the Church of the Messiah, now the Community Church; his arguments seemed to me to possess that reasonableness that I had missed in the Bampton Lectures. I never joined his church, and have never again felt the need of formal worship; from the age of sixteen it has been true with me that “to labor is to pray.” I have prayed hard in this fashion and have found it the great secret of happiness.
An interesting detail about Dr. Savage: he was the first intellectual man I ever met who claimed to have seen a ghost. Not merely had he seen one, he had sat up and chatted with it. I found this an interesting idea, and find it so still. I am the despair of my orthodox materialistic friends because I insist upon believing in the possibility of so many strange things. My materialistic friends know that these things are a priori impossible; whereas I assert that nothing is a priori impossible. It is a question of evidence, and I am willing to hear the evidence about anything whatever.
The story as I recall it is this. Savage had a friend who set out for Ireland in the days before the cable; at midnight Savage awakened and saw his friend standing by his bedside. The friend stated that he was dead, but Savage was not to think that he had known the pangs of drowning; the steamer had been wrecked on the coast of Ireland, and the friend had been killed when a beam struck him on the left side of his head as he was trying to get off the ship. Savage wrote this out and had it signed by witnesses, and two or three weeks later came the news that the ship had been wrecked and the friend’s body found with the left side of his head crushed.
If such a case stood alone, it would of course be nothing. But in Edmund Gurney’s two volumes, Phantasms of the Living, are a thousand or so cases, carefully documented. There is another set of cases, collected by Dr. Walker Franklin Prince, of the Boston Society for Psychical Research in Bulletin XIV of that society. I no longer find these phenomena so difficult of belief, because my second wife and I demonstrated long-range telepathy in our personal lives. Later on, I shall be telling about our book, Mental Radio.
IV
In my class in college there was a Jewish boy by the name of Simon Stern, whom I came to know well because we lived in the same neighborhood and often went home together. Simon wrote a short story, and one day came to class in triumph, announcing that this story had been accepted by a monthly magazine published by a Hebrew orphans’ home. Straightway I was stirred to emulation. If Simon could write a story, why could not I? Such was the little acorn that grew into an oak, with so many branches that it threatens to become top-heavy.
I wrote a story about a pet bird. For years it had been my custom every summer to take young birds from the nest and raise them. They would know me as their only parent, and were charming pets. Now I put one of these birds into an adventure, making it serve to prove the innocence of a colored boy accused of arson. I mailed the story to the Argosy, one of the two Munsey publications in those early days, and the story was accepted, price twenty-five dollars. You can imagine that I was an insufferable youngster on the day that letter arrived; especially to my friend Simon Stern, who had not been paid for his story.
Our family fortunes happened to be at a low ebb just then, so I fell to digging in this new gold mine. I found several papers that bought children s stories at low prices; also, before long, I discovered another gold mine—writing jokes for the comic papers. At seventeen, jokes were my entire means of support. My mother and I spent that winter on West 23rd Street, near the river. My weekly budget was this: for a top-story hallroom in a lodginghouse, one dollar twenty-five; for two meals a day at an eating house, three dollars; and for a clean collar and other luxuries, twenty-five cents. It seems a slender allowance, but you must remember that I had infinite riches in the little room of the college library.
The quantity production of jokes is an odd industry, and for the aid of young aspirants I will tell how it is done. Jokes are made up hind end forward, so to speak; you don’t think of the joke, but of what it is to be about. There are tramp jokes, mother-in-law jokes, plumber jokes, Irishman jokes, and so on. You decide to write tramp jokes this morning; well, there are many things about tramps that are jokable; they do not like to work, they do not like to bathe, they do not like bulldogs, and so on. You decide to write about tramps not liking to bathe; very well, you think of all the words and phrases having to do with water, soaps, tubs, streams, rain, etc., and of puns or quirks by which these words can be applied to tramps.
I have a scrapbook in which my mother treasured many of the jokes for which I was paid one dollar apiece, and from this book, my biographer, Floyd Dell, selected one, in which a tramp calls attention to a sign, “Cleaning and Dyeing,” and says he always knew those two things went together. Out of this grew a joke more amusing than the one for which I was paid. My enterprising German publishers prepared a pamphlet about my books, to be sent to critics and reviewers in Germany, and they quoted this joke as a sample of my early humor. The Germans didn’t think it was very good. And no wonder. The phrase in translation appeared as “Waescherei und Faeberei,” which, alas, entirely destroys the double meaning of “Dyeing.” It makes me think of the Irishman on a railroad handcar who said that he had just been taking the superintendent for a ride, and had heard a fine conundrum. “What is the difference between a railroad spike and a thief in the baggage room? One grips the steel and the other steals the satchels.”
My jokes became an obsession. While other youths were thinking about “dates,” I was pondering jokes about Scotchmen, Irishmen, Negroes, Jews. I would take my mother to church, and make up jokes on the phrases in the prayer book and hymnbook. I kept my little notebook before me at meals, while walking, while dressing, and in classes if the professor was a bore. I wrote out my jokes on slips of paper, with a number in the corner, and sent them in batches of ten to the different editors; when the pack came back with one missing, I had earned a dollar. I had a bookkeeping system, showing where each batch had been sent; jokes number 321 to 330 had been sent to Life, Judge, and Puck, and were now at the Evening Journal.
I began taking jokes to artists who did illustrating. They would pay for ideas—if you could catch them right after they had collected the money. It was a New York bohemia entirely unknown to fame. Dissolute and harum-scarum but good-natured young fellows, they were, inhabiting crudely furnished “studios” in the neighborhood of East 14th Street. I will give one glimpse of this artist utopia: I entered a room with a platform in the center and saw a tall lanky Irishman standing on it, bare-armed and bare-legged, a sheet wrapped around him, and an umbrella in his hand, the ferule held to his mouth. “What is this?” I asked, and the young artist replied, “I am doing a set of illustrations of the Bible. This is Joshua with the trumpet blowing down the walls of Jericho.”
V
The editor of Argosy who accepted my first story was Matthew White, Jr., a genial little gentleman, who had been the great Munsey’s associate from the earliest days, when that future master of magazine merchandising and chain grocery stores had sat in a one-room office in his shirt sleeves and kept his own accounts. White invited me to call on him, and I went, and we had a delightful chat; at any rate, I found it so. Finally the editor asked me if I would not like to see the “plant,” whereupon he led me through two or three rooms full of bookkeepers and office girls stamping envelopes, and then paused casually at the elevator and rang the bell. So I learned that an author is not so great a novelty to an editor as an editor is to an author. The device of “showing the plant” is one which I have employed many times with callers who fail to realize that I am more of a novelty to them than they are to me.
I wrote other stories for the Argosy, and also odds and ends for Munsey’s. They had a department called “Fads,” and I racked my imagination for new ones that could be humorously written up; each one would be a meal ticket for a week. In the summer—1895, I think it was—my mother and I went to a hotel up in a village called Pawlet, Vermont, and Matthew White, a bachelor, came to join us for his vacation. My experience at that hotel requires considerable courage to tell.
My father was drinking, and we were stranded. Rather than be dependent upon our relatives, I had answered an advertisement for a hotel clerk, and there I was, the newly arrived employee of this moderately decent country establishment. I was supposed to do part-time work to earn the board of my mother and myself, and the very first night of my arrival, I discovered that one of the duties of the so-called clerk was to carry up pitchers of ice water to the guests. I refused the duty, and the outcome of the clash of wills was that the proprietor did it instead. I can see in my mind’s eye this stoop-shouldered, elderly man, with a long brown beard turning gray; he was kindhearted, and doubtless saw the kind of decayed gentlefolk he had got on his hands. He was sorry for my mother, and did not turn us away.
I performed such duties as were consistent with my notion of my own dignity, but they were not many. Among them was copying out the dinner menus every day; that brought me into clash with the cooks of the establishment—they were husband and wife, and had a notion of their importance fully equal to my own. I would sometimes fail to copy all the fancy French phrases whereby they sought to glorify their performances. Ever since then, I lose my appetite when I hear of “prime ribs of beef au jus.”
I remember that among the guests was the painter, J. G. Brown, famous for depicting newsboys and village types. I took long walks with him and learned his notion of art, which was that one must paint only beautiful and cheerful things, never anything ugly or depressing. His children were not so democratic as their father and refused to overlook my status as an employee. His oldest daughter was named Mabel, and all the young people called her that. I, quite innocently, did the same—until she turned upon me in a fury and informed me that she was “Miss Brown.”
Yet my status as a college student apparently kept me in the amateur class, for I was on the tennis team that played matches with other hotels in the neighborhood. I remember a trip we made, in which I received a lesson in table manners as practiced in this remote land of the Yankees. It was the custom to serve vegetables in little bird bathtubs, which were ranged in a semicircle about each plate, five or six of them. The guests finished eating, and I also finished; all the other plates were cleared away, but mine remained untouched, and I did not know why. The waitress was standing behind me, and I remarked gently, “I am through”—the very precise language that my mother had taught me to use; never “I am done,” but always, “I am through.” But this waitress taught me something new. Said she, in a voice of icy scorn: “Stack your dishes!”
VI
The venerable faculty of the College of the City of New York, who had charge of my intellectual life for five years, were nearly all of them Tammany appointees, and therefore Catholics. It was the first time I had ever met Catholics, and I found them kindly, but set in dogma, and as much given to propaganda as I myself was destined to become.
For example, there was “Herby.” Several hours a week for several years I had “Herby,” the eminent Professor Charles George Herbermann, editor of the Catholic Encyclopedia and leading light of the Jesuits. He was a stout, irascible old gentleman with a bushy reddish beard. “Mr. Sinclair,” he would roar, “it is so because I say it is so!” But that did not go with me at all; I would say, “But, Professor, how can it be so?” We would have a wrangle, pleasing to other members of the class, who had not prepared their lessons and were afraid of being called upon. (We learned quickly to know each professor’s hobbies, and whenever we were not prepared to recite, we would start a discussion.)
“Herby” taught me Latin, “Tizzy” taught me Greek, and Professor George Hardy taught me English. He was a little round man of the Catholic faith, and his way of promoting the faith was to set a class that was sixty per cent Jewish to learning Catholic sentimentality disguised as poetry. I remember we had to recite Dobson’s “The Missal,” and avenged ourselves by learning it to the tune of a popular music-hall ditty of the hour, “Ta-ra-ra-boom-de-ay.” Hardy was a good teacher, except when the Pope came in. He told us that Milton was a dangerous disturber of the peace of Europe, and that it was a libel to say that Chaucer was a Wycliffite. What a Wycliffite was nobody ever mentioned.
Our professor of history had no dogma, so I was permitted to learn English and European history according to the facts. I was interested, but could not see why it was necessary for me to learn the names of so many kings and dukes and generals, and the dates when they had slaughtered so many human beings. In the effort to keep them in my mind until examination day, I evolved a memory system, and once it tripped me in a comical way. “Who was Lord Cobden?” inquired the professor; and my memory system replied: “He passed the corncob laws.”
But the prize laugh of my history class had to do with a lively witted youngster by the name of Fred Schwed, who afterward became a curb broker. Fred never prepared anything and never paid attention, but trusted to his gift of the gab. He was suddenly called upon to explain the origin of the title, Prince of Wales. Said the grave Professor Johnston: “Mr. Schwed, how did it happen that an English prince, the son of an English king, was born on Welsh soil?” Fred, called suddenly out of a daydream or perhaps a game of crap shooting, gazed with a wild look and stammered: “Why—er—why, you see, Professor—his mother was there.”
VII
Also, I remember vividly Professor Hunt, who taught us freehand drawing, mechanical drawing, and perspective. A lean gentleman with a black mustache and a fierce tongue, he suffered agonies from bores. You may believe that in our class we had many; and foreigners struggling with English were also a trial to him. I recall a dumb Russian by the name of Vilkomirsson; he would gaze long and yearningly, and at last blurt out some question that would cause the class to titter. In perspective it is customary to indicate certain points by their initials; the only one I recall now is “V.P.,” which means “vanishing point.” The poor foreigner could never get these abbreviations straight, and he would take a seat right in front of the professor in the hope of being able to ask help without disturbing the rest of the class. “Professor, I don’t understand what you mean when you say that the V.P. is six inches away.” “Mr. Vilkomirsson,” demanded the exasperated teacher, “if I were to tell you that the D.F. is six feet away, what would you understand me to mean?”
Our freehand drawing was done in a large studio with plaster casts all around the room. We took a drawing board and fastened a sheet of paper to it, and with a piece of charcoal proceeded to make the best possible representation of one of the casts; Professor Hunt in the meantime roamed about the room like a tiger at large, taking a swipe with his sharp claws at this or that helpless victim. That our efforts at “free” art were not uniformly successful you may judge from verses that I contributed to our college paper portraying the agony of mind of a subfreshman who, forgetting what he was drawing, took his partly completed work from the rack and wandered up and down in front of a row of plaster casts, exclaiming: “Good gracious, is it Juno, or King Henry of Navarre?”
I contributed a number of verses and jokes to this college paper and to a class annual that we got up. I have some of them still in my head, and will set down the sad story of “an imaginative poet” who
Came to C.C.N.Y.
Dreaming of nature’s beauty
And the glories of the sky.
He learned that stars are hydrogen,
The comets made of gas;
That Jupiter and Venus
In elliptic orbits pass.
He learned that the painted rainbow,
God’s promise, as poets feign,
Is transverse oscillations
Turning somersaults in rain.
And so on to the sorrowful climax:
His poetry now is ruined,
His metaphors, of course;
He’s trying to square the circle
And to find the five-toed horse.
I will relate one other incident of these early days, in which you may see how the child is father to the man. The crowding in our ramshackle old school building had become a scandal, and an effort was under way to persuade the legislature to vote funds for new buildings uptown. No easy matter to persuade politicians to take an interest in anything so remote as higher education! We students were asked to circulate petitions, to be signed by voters; and I, in an excess of loyalty to my alma mater, gave my afternoons and Saturdays to the task for a month or two, and went the rounds of department stores and business houses. Not many of the persons invited to sign had ever heard of the matter, but it cost them nothing, and they were willing to take the word of a nice jolly lad that a free college was a good thing. I brought in some six or eight hundred signatures, and got my name in the college paper for my zeal. You see here the future socialist, distributing leaflets and making soapbox speeches—to the same ill-informed and indifferent crowd.
VIII
Simon Stern and I went into partnership and wrote a novel of many adventures about which I don’t remember a thing. Together we visited the office of Street and Smith, publishers of “thrillers” for boys, and met one of the editors, who was amused to hear two boys in short trousers announce themselves as joint authors of a novel. He read it, and did not accept it, but held out hopes and suggested that we write another novel, according to his needs. We agreed to do so and went away, and to the consternation of the editor came back in a week with the novel complete. I have since learned that you must never do that. Make the editor think you are taking a lot of time because that is one of his tests of excellence—despite the examples of Dumas and Balzac and Dickens and Dostoevski and other masters.
I am not sure what became of that story. All I remember is that during the ensuing summer I was working at a full-length novel of adventure, which I am ashamed to realize bore a striking resemblance to Treasure Island. The difference was that it happened on land, having to do with an effort to find buried gold hidden by some returning forty-niners before they were killed by Indians. The Prairie Pirates was the title, and I don’t know if the manuscript survives; but I recall having read it at some later date and being impressed by my idea of “sex appeal” at the age of seventeen. The hero had accompanied the beautiful heroine all the way from California and rescued her many times from Indian marauders and treacherous half-breeds. At the end he told her blushingly that he loved her, and then, having obtained permission, “he placed upon her forehead a holy kiss.”
I was working on that novel in some country boardinghouse in New Jersey, and I mounted my bicycle with a bundle of manuscript strapped upon it, and rode to New York and up the Hudson into the Adirondack mountains, to a farmhouse on Brant Lake. At this retreat I enjoyed the companionship of a girl who was later to be my wife; her mother and my mother had become intimate friends, and we summered together several times for that reason. She was a year and a half younger than I, and we gazed at each other across a chasm of misunderstanding. She was a quiet, undeveloped, and unhappy girl, while I was a self-confident and aggressive youth, completely wrapped up in my own affairs. To neither of us did fate give the slightest hint of the trick it meant to play upon us four years later.
That fall I was invited to visit my clergyman friend, William Moir, in his brother’s camp at Saranac Lake. I got on my bicycle at four o’clock one morning and set out upon a mighty feat—something that was the goal in life of all cycling enthusiasts in those far off eighteen-nineties. “Have you done a century?” we would ask one another, and it was like flying across the Atlantic later on. All day I pedaled, through sand and dust and heat. I remember ten miles or so up the Schroon River—no doubt it is a paved boulevard now, but in 1896 it was a ribbon of deep sand, and I had to plod for two or three hours. I remember coming down through a pass into Keene Valley—on a “corduroy road” made of logs, over which I bumped madly. In those days you used your foot on the front tire for a brake, and the sole of my shoe became so hot that I had to dip it into the mountain stream. I remember the climb out of Keene Valley, eight miles or so, pushing the wheel uphill; there was Cascade Lake at sunset, a beautiful spot, and I heard Tennyson’s bugles blowing—
The long light shakes across the lakes
And the wild cataract leaps in glory.
I came into the home of my friend at half past ten at night, and was disappointed of my hopes because the total had been only ninety-six miles. I had not yet “done a century.” I took the same ride back a couple of weeks later, and was so bent upon achievement that it was all my mother could do to dissuade me from taking an extra night ride from the farmhouse to the village and back so as to complete the hundred miles. From this you may see that I was soundly built at that age and looking for something to cut my teeth upon. If it should ever happen that a “researcher” wants something to practice on, he may consult the files of the New York Evening Post for the autumn of 1896 and find a column article describing the ride. I am not sure it was signed, but I remember that Mr. Moir, job-maker extraordinary, had given me a letter to the city editor of the Evening Post, and I had become a reporter for a week. I gave it up because the staff was too crowded, and all there was for this bright kid just out of knickerbockers was a few obituary notices, an inch or two each.
It was the Post I read in the afternoon, and the Sun in the morning, and in my social ideas I was the haughtiest little snob that ever looked down upon mankind from the lofty turrets of an imitation-Gothic college. I can recollect as if it were yesterday my poor father—he was showing some signs of evolving into a radical, having been reading editorials by Brisbane in the Evening Journal, a sort of steam calliope with which Willie Hearst had just broken loose on Park Row. Oh, the lofty scorn with which I spurned my father! I would literally put my fingers into my ears in order that my soul might not be sullied by the offensive sounds of the Hearst calliope. I do not think my father ever succeeded in making me hear a word of Brisbane’s assaults upon the great and noble-minded McKinley, then engaged in having the presidency purchased for him by Mark Hanna.
IX
My poor father was no longer in position to qualify as an educator of youth. Every year he was gripped more tightly in the claws of his demon. He would disappear for days, and it would be my task to go and seek him in the barrooms that he frequented. I would find him, and there would be a moral battle. I would argue and plead and threaten; he would weep, or try to assert his authority—though I cannot recall that he ever even pretended to be angry with me. I would lead him up the street, and every corner saloon would be a new contest. “I must have just one more drink, son. I can’t go home without one more. If you only knew what I am suffering!” I would get him to bed and hide his trousers so that he could not escape, and mother would make cups of strong black coffee, or perhaps a drink of warm water and mustard.
Later on, things grew worse yet. My father was no longer to be found in his old haunts; he was ashamed to have his friends see him and would wander away. Then I had to seek him in the dives on the Bowery—the Highway of Lost Men, as I called it in Love’s Pilgrimage. I would walk for hours, peering into scores of places, and at last I would find him, sunk into a chair or sleeping with his arms on a beer-soaked table. Once I found him literally in the gutter—no uncommon sight in those days.
I would get a cab and take him—no longer home, for we could not handle him; he would be delirious, and there would be need of strong-armed attendants and leather straps and iron bars. I would take him to St. Vincent’s Hospital, and there, with crucified saviors looking down on us, I would pay twenty-five dollars to a silent, black-clad nun, and my father would be entered in the books and led away, quaking with terror, by a young Irish husky in white ducks. A week or two later he would emerge, weak and unsteady, pasty of complexion but full of moral fervor. He would join the church, sign pledges, vote for Sunday closing, weep on my shoulder and tell me how he loved me. For a week or a month or possibly several months he would struggle to build up his lost business and pay his debts.
X
My liberal friends who read The Wet Parade found it sentimental and out of the spirit of the time. To them I made answer that the experiences of my childhood were “reality,” quite as much so as the blood and guts of the Chicago stockyards or the birth scene in Love’s Pilgrimage. It is a fact that I have been all my life gathering material on the subject of the liquor problem. I know it with greater intimacy than any other theme I have ever handled. The list of drunkards I have wrestled with is longer than the list of coal miners, oil magnates, politicians, or any other group I have known and portrayed in my books.
My experiences with my father lasted thirty years; during this period several uncles and cousins, and numerous friends of the family, Southern gentlemen, Northern businessmen, and even one or two of their wives were stumbling down the same road of misery. Later on, I ran into the same problem in the literary and socialist worlds: George Sterling, Jack London, Ambrose Bierce, W. M. Reedy, O. Henry, Eugene Debs—a long list. I have a photograph of Jack and George and the latter’s wife, Carrie, taken on Jack’s sailboat on San Francisco Bay; three beautiful people, young, happy, brilliant—and all three took poison to escape the claws of John Barleycorn. And then came a new generation, many of whom I knew well: Sinclair Lewis, Edna Millay, Eugene O’Neill, Dylan Thomas, Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Theodore Dreiser, William Faulkner.
The experience with my father of course made me prematurely serious. I began questioning the world, trying to make out how such evils came to be. I soon traced the saloon to Tammany and blamed my troubles on the high chieftains of this organization. I remember writing of Richard Croker that “I would be willing with my own hands to spear him on a pitchfork and thrust him into the fires of hell.” A sound evangelical sentiment! I had not yet found out “big business”—and of course I would not, until I had outgrown E. L. Godkin of the Evening Post and Charles A. Dana of the Sun.
It was my idea at this time that the human race was to be saved by poetry. Men and women were going to be taught noble thoughts, and then they would abandon their base ways of living. I had made the acquaintance of Shelley and conceived a passionate friendship for him. Then I became intimate with Hamlet, Prince of Denmark; he came to the library of my Uncle Bland, in Baltimore, where I spent the Christmas holidays, and we had much precious converse. I too was a prince, in conflict with a sordid and malignant world; at least, so I saw myself, and lived entirely in that fantasy, very snobbish, scornful, and superior. Any psychiatrist would have diagnosed me as an advanced case of delusion of grandeur, messianic complex, paranoia, narcissism, and so to the end of his list.
XI
Along with extreme idealism, and perhaps complementary to it, went a tormenting struggle with sexual desire. I never had relations with any woman until my marriage at the age of twenty-two; but I came close to it, and the effort to refrain was more than I would have been equal to without the help of my clergyman friend. For a period of five years or more I was subject to storms of craving; I would become restless and miserable and wandering out on the street, look at every woman and girl I passed and dream an adventure that might be a little less than sordid. Many of the daughters of the poor, and more than once a daughter of the rich, indicated a “coming-on disposition”; there would begin a flirtation, with caresses and approaches to intimacy. But then would come another storm—of shame and fear; the memory of the pledge I had given; the dream of a noble and beautiful love, which I cherished; also, of course, the idea of venereal disease, of which my friend Moir kept me informed. I would shrink back and turn cold; two or three times, with my reformer’s impulse, I told the girl about it, and the petting party turned into a moral discourse. I have pictured such a scene in Love’s Pilgrimage, and it affords amusement to my “emancipated” radical friends.
What do I think about these experiences after sixty-five years of reflection? The first fact—an interesting one—is that I am still embarrassed to talk about them. My ego craves to be dignified and impressive and is humiliated to see itself behaving like a young puppy. I have to take the grown-up puppy by the back of the neck and make him face the facts—there being so many young ones in the world who have the same troubles. Frankness about sex must not be left to the cynical and morally irresponsible.
There are dangers in puritanism, and there are compensations. My chastity was preserved at the cost of much emotional effort, plus the limitation of my interests in certain fields. For example, I could not prosecute the study of art. In the splendid library of Columbia University were treasures of beauty, costly volumes of engravings; and in my usual greedy fashion I went at these, intending to learn all there was to know about Renaissance art in a week or two. But I found myself overwhelmed by this mass of nakedness; my senses reeled, and I had to quit. I might have gone back when I was mature; but alas, I was by then too busy trying to save the world from poverty and war. This confession resembles Darwin’s—that his concentration upon the details of natural science had the effect of atrophying his interest in music and other arts.
What did I get in return for this? I got intensity and power of concentration; these elements in my make-up were the product of my efforts to resist the tempter. I learned to work fourteen hours a day at study and creative effort because it was only by being thus occupied that the craving for woman could be kept out of my soul. I told myself the legend of Hercules and recited the wisdom attributed to Solomon: “He that ruleth his spirit is greater than he that taketh a city.”
For years now we have heard a great deal about mental troubles caused by sex repression; we have heard little about the complexes that may be caused by sex indulgence. But my observation has been that those who permit themselves to follow every sexual impulse are quite as miserable as those who repress them. I remember saying to a classmate in college, “Did it ever occur to you to stop and look at your own mind? Everything that comes to you is turned into sex.” He looked surprised, and I saw that it was a new idea to him; he thought it over and said, “I guess you are right.”
This problem of the happy mean in sex matters would require a volume for a proper discussion. As it happens, I have written such a volume, The Book of Life, and it is available to those who are interested. So I pass on.
XII
I was becoming less and less satisfied with college. It had become an agony for me to sit and listen to the slow recitation of matters that I either knew already or did not care to know. I was enraged by professors whose idea of teaching was to catch me being inattentive to their dullness. At the same time, I had to have my degree because I was still planning to study law. I fretted and finally evolved a scheme; I made application to the faculty for two months’ leave of absence, on the ground that I had to earn some money—which was true. They gave me the leave, and I earned the money writing stories, and spent the rest of my time in a hall bedroom reading Shelley, Carlyle, and Emerson. I forced myself to read until one or two in the morning, and many a time I would wake at daybreak and find that I had sunk back on my pillow and slept with my book still open and the gaslight burning—not a very hygienic procedure.
It was the lodginghouse on West 23rd Street, kept by a Mrs. Carmichael, whose son also was a would-be genius—only he was a religious mystic and found his thrills in church music. We used to compare notes, each patronizing the other, of course—two young stags in the forest, trying out their horns. I remember that Bert went up to display his musical skill to a great composer, Edward MacDowell, of whom I thus heard for the first time. The youth came back in excitement to report that the composer had praised him highly and offered him free instruction. But after the first lesson, Bert was less elated, for his idol had spoken as follows: “Mr. Carmichael, before you come again, please have your hair cut and wash your neck. The day of long-haired and greasy musicians is past.”
I went back to college, made up my missing studies in a week or two, and was graduated without distinction, exactly in the middle of my class. I remember the name of the man who carried off all the honors, and I look for that name in Who’s Who, but do not find it. I won some sort of prize in differential calculus, but that was all; nothing in literature, nothing in oratory, philosophy, history. Such talents as I had were not valued by my alma mater, nor would they have been by any other alma mater then existing in America so far as I could learn. I was so little interested in the college regime that I did not wait for commencement, but went off to the country and received my diploma by mail.
I had sold some jokes and stories, and I now spent a summer writing more, while drifting about in a skiff among the Thousand Islands in the upper St. Lawrence River. I caught many black bass and ate them; read the poems of Walter Scott and the novels of Thackeray and George Eliot, made available in the Seaside Library, which I purchased wholesale for eight cents a copy. The life I got from those classics is one reason why I believe in cheap books and have spent tens of thousands of dollars trying to keep my own books available to students.
XIII
I still meant to be a lawyer, but first I wanted a year of literature and philosophy at Columbia University. “If you do that, you’ll never be a lawyer,” said some shrewd person to me—and he was right. But to Columbia I would go, and how was I to live meantime? I went back to New York to solve this problem and called upon the Street and Smith editor who had once suggested a serial story to Simon Stern and myself. Now I reaped the reward of persistence, obtaining a meal ticket for the next three years of my life.
The name of this editor was Henry Harrison Lewis, and he later became editor of one of the fighting organs of the openshop movement. I remember expounding to him my views of life and my destiny therein, and how he protested that it was not normal for a youth to be so apocalyptic and messianic. My evil career was assuredly not Mr. Lewis’ fault.
He showed me proofs of the Army and Navy Weekly, a five-cent publication with bright red and blue and green and yellow covers, which the firm was just starting. The editor himself was to write every other week a story of life at the Annapolis Naval Academy and wanted someone to write in alternate weeks, a companion story of life at the West Point Military Academy. Would I like to try that job? My heart leaped with excitement.
My first experience in the gathering of local color! I got from Mr. Moir a letter of introduction to an army officer at West Point, and went up and stayed at a cheap hotel in the village. I roamed about the grounds and watched the cadets, and made copious notes as to every detail of their regimen. I recollect being introduced to a stern and noble-looking upperclassman. I revealed to him what I was there for, and said that I needed a hero. “Well, why not use me?” inquired this cadet. “I am president of the senior class, I am captain of the football team, and I have made the highest records in this and that,” and so on. I looked into the man’s face for any trace of a smile, but there was none. He stays in my memory as a type of the military mind. Doubtless he is a great general by now.
I went back to New York, and under the pen name of Lieutenant Frederick Garrison, USA, produced a manuscript of some twenty-five or thirty thousand words, a rollicking tale of a group of “candidates” who made their appearance at the academy to start their military career. The Mark Mallory stories they were called, and they were successful, so I was definitely launched upon a literary career. I was paid, I believe, forty dollars per story; it was a fortune, enough to take care of both my mother and myself. The local color was found satisfactory. Lewis told me that Smith, head of the firm, asked if that new writer had been through West Point. “Yes,” replied Lewis, “he went through in three days.”
XIV
This episode of my hack writing I find always interests people, so I may as well finish it here, even though it involves running ahead of my story. After I had been doing the work for a while, the firm needed Mr. Lewis’ services for more editing, and he asked me if I could do his stint as well as my own. I always thought I could do everything, so I paid a visit to Annapolis, haunted by the ghosts of my grandfathers. I went through this place also in three days. Thereafter I was Ensign Clarke Fitch, USN, as well as Lieutenant Frederick Garrison, USA. I now wrote a novelette of close to thirty thousand words every week, and received forty dollars a week.
Shortly after that, Willie Hearst with his New York Evening Journal succeeded in carrying the United States into a war with Spain. (“You make the pictures, and I’ll make the war,” cabled Willie to Frederick Remington in Cuba.) So my editor sent for me and explained that the newsboys and messenger boys who followed the adventures of Mark Mallory and Clif Faraday would take it ill if these cadets idled away their time in West Point and Annapolis while their country was bleeding; I must hurry up and graduate them, and send them to the battlefield.
No sooner said than done. I read a book of Cuban local color and looked up several expletives for Spanish villains to exclaim. I remember one of them, “Carramba!” I have never learned what it means, but hope it is not too serious, for I taught it to all the newsboys and messenger boys of the eastern United States. When I hear people lamenting the foolishness of the movies, I remember the stuff I ground out every week, which was printed in large editions.
From that time on my occupation was killing Spaniards. “What are you going to do today?” my mother would ask, and the answer would be, “I have to kill Spaniards.” I thought nothing of sinking a whole fleet of Spanish torpedo boats to make a denouement, and the vessels I sank during that small war would have replaced all the navies of the world. I remember that I had my hero explode a bomb on a Spanish vessel and go to the bottom with her; in the next story I blandly explained how he had opened a porthole and swum up again. Once or twice I killed a Spanish villain, and then forgot and brought him to life again. When that occurred, I behaved like President Coolidge and Governor Fuller and President Lowell, and the other great ones of Massachusetts—I treated my critics with silent contempt.
I was never told how my product was selling; that was the affair of my masters. But they must have been satisfied, for presently came another proposition. There was a boom in war literature, and they were going to start another publication—I think the title was the Columbia Library—to be issued monthly and contain fifty-six thousand words. Could I add this to my other tasks? I was a young shark, ready to devour everything in sight. So for some months I performed the feat of turning out eight thousand words every day, Sunday included. I tell this to literary men, and they say it could not be done; but I actually did it, at least until the end of the Spanish-American War. I kept two stenographers working all the time, taking dictation one day and transcribing the next. In the afternoon I would dictate for about three hours, as fast as I could talk; in the evening I would revise the copy that had been brought in from the previous day, and then take a long walk and think up the incidents of my next day’s stunt. That left me mornings to attend lectures at Columbia University and to practice the violin. I figured out that by the time I finished this potboiling I had published an output equal in volume to the works of Walter Scott.
What was the effect of all this upon me as a writer? It both helped and hurt. It taught me to shape a story and to hold in mind what I had thought up; so it fostered facility. On the other hand, it taught me to use exaggerated phrases and clichés, and this is something I have fought against, not always successfully. Strange as it may seem, I actually enjoyed the work while I was doing it. Not merely was I earning a living and putting away a little money; I had a sense of fun, and these adventures were a romp. It is significant that the stories pleased their public only so long as they pleased their author. When, at the age of twenty-one, I became obsessed with the desire to write a serious novel, I came to loathe this hackwork, and from that time on I was never able to do it with success, even though, driven by desperate need, I several times made the effort. It was the end of my youth.