6 Utopia
I
Three winters spent upon an isolated farm had taken all the romance out of the back-to-nature life for a young author. The roads were either deep with mud or cut with the tracks of sleighs, so that the only place to walk was up and down in a field, along the lee side of a fence. Also, four summers had taken the romance out of agriculture as an avocation for a literary man. The cows broke into the pear orchard and stuffed themselves and died; the farmhands who were brought from the city got drunk and sold the farm produce for their own benefit. “Away from nature!” became the slogan.
The young writer, who had been close to starving for the past five or six years, now had thirty thousand dollars, in hand or on the way, and it was burning holes in all his pockets. He had never heard of such a thing as investing money, and would have considered it an immoral thing to contemplate. He wanted to spend his money for the uplifting of mankind, and it was characteristic of him that even in the matter of getting a home he tried to combine it with the solving of a social problem, and with setting an example to his fellowmen.
As a socialist Thyrsis of course believed in co-operation, and regarded the home as the most ancient relic of individualism. Every person had, or sought to have, his own home, and there lived his own little selfish life, wasteful, extravagant, and reactionary. It did not occur to Thyrsis that not every home might be as unhappy as his own; if anyone had suggested the idea to him, he would have said that no one should be happy in a backward way of life, and he would have tried to make them unhappy by his arguments.
His plan was to establish a co-operative home, to demonstrate its practicability and the wider opportunities it would bring. There was nothing revolutionary about this idea; it was being practiced in many parts of America—only people were doing it without realizing what they were doing. Up in the Adirondacks were clubs where people owned the land in common and built individual cabins, or rented them from the club, and had a common kitchen and dining room; they ran their affairs, as all clubs are run, on a basis of equality and democracy. Only the members didn’t use these radical phrases and made no stir in the newspapers.
Thyrsis, for his part, had to make a stir in the papers, else how could he find anybody to go into a club with him? He knew but few persons, and only two or three of these were ready for the experiment. How could others be found? It might have been done by personal inquiry, but that would have been a slow process; when Thyrsis wanted anything, he wanted it at once. Being a modern, up-to-date American, he shared the idea that the way to get something was to advertise. So he wrote an article for the Independent (June 4, 1906), outlining his plan for a “home colony” and asking to hear from all persons who were interested. Soon afterward he rented a hall, and announced in the newspapers that a series of discussion and organization meetings would be held.
II
Many persons came; some of them serious, some of them cranks, some of them both. The process of sorting them out was a difficult one, and was not accomplished without heart-burning. There is no standard test for cranks, and there were some with whom Thyrsis could have got along well enough but who were not acceptable to the rest of the group. There were some who quietly withdrew—having perhaps decided that Thyrsis was a crank.
Anyhow, the new organization came into being. A company was formed, stock issued, and the world was invited to invest. In this, as in other reform schemes, Thyrsis found that it was possible to raise about one tenth of the money, and necessary to put up the rest out of one’s own pocket. A search was begun for a suitable building; and real-estate agents came swarming, and broken-down hotels were inspected and found unsuitable. Finally there came better tidings; some members of the committee had stumbled upon a place with the poetical name of Helicon Hall.
It stood on the heights behind the Palisades, overlooking Englewood, New Jersey, just above the Fort Lee ferry from New York. It had been a boys’ school, and there was a beautiful building planned by an aesthetic-minded pedagogue who hoped that boys could be civilized by living in dignified surroundings and by wearing dress suits every evening for dinner. There were two or three acres of land, and the price was $36,000, all but ten thousand on mortgage. Thyrsis, of course, knew nothing about real estate, what it was worth, or how one bought it; but the sellers were willing to teach him, and in a day or two the deal was made.
So, from November 1, 1906, to March 7, 1907 (at three o’clock in the morning, to be precise), the young dreamer of Utopia lived according to his dreams. Not exactly, of course, for nothing ever turns out as one plans. There were troubles, as in all human affairs. There was a time when the co-operative mothers of the Helicon Home Colony charged that the head of the children’s department had permitted the toothbrushes to get mixed up; there was a time when the manager in charge of supplies forgot the lemons, and it was necessary for Thyrsis to drive to town and get some in a hurry. But in what home can a writer escape such problems?
III
The most obvious success was with the children. There were fourteen in the colony, and the care they received proved not merely the economics of co-operation but also its morals; our children lived a social life and learned to respect the rights of others, which does not always happen in an individual home. There was a good-sized theater in the building, and this became the children’s separate world. They did most of their own work and enjoyed it; they had their meals in a dining room of their own, with chairs and tables that fitted them, food that agreed with them and was served at proper hours. Now and then they assembled in a children’s parliament and discussed their problems, deciding what was right and what wrong for them. There was a story of a three-year-old popping up with “All in favor say aye!”
There was one full-time employee in this children’s department, the rest of the time being contributed by the various mothers at an agreed rate of compensation. Many persons had laughed at the idea that mothers could co-operate in the care of children, but as a matter of fact our mothers did it without serious trouble. There were different ideas; we had some believers in “libertarian” education, but when it came to the actual working out of theories from day to day, we found that everyone wanted the children to have no more freedom than was consistent with the happiness and peace of others.
I recall only one parent who was permanently dissatisfied. This was a completely respectable and antisocialistic lady from Tennessee, the wife of a surgeon, who was sure that her darlings had to have hot bread every day. So she exercised her right to take them to an individual home. She also took her husband, and the husband, in departing, tried to take our dining room maid as his mistress, but without success. This, needless to say, occasioned sarcastic remarks among our colonists as to socialist versus capitalist “free love.”
It was generally taken for granted among the newspapermen of New York that the purpose for which I had started this colony was to have plenty of mistresses handy. They wrote us up on that basis—not in plain words, for that would have been libel—but by innuendo easily understood. So it was with our socialist colony as with the old-time New England colonies—there were Indians hiding in the bushes, seeking to pierce us with sharp arrows of wit. Reporters came in disguise, and went off and wrote false reports; others came as guests, and went off and ridiculed us because we had beans for lunch.
I do not know of any assemblage of forty adult persons where a higher standard of sexual morals prevailed than at Helicon Hall. Our colonists were for the most part young literary couples who had one or two children and did not know how to fit them into the literary life; in short, they were persons with the same problem as myself. Professor W. P. Montague, of Columbia, had two boys, and his wife was studying to be a doctor of medicine. Maybe, as the old-fashioned moralists argued, she ought to have stayed at home and taken care of her children; but the fact was that she wouldn’t, and found it better to leave the children in care of her fellow colonists than with an ignorant servant.
But it was hard on Montague when persons came as guests, attended our Saturday-night dances, and went off and described him dancing with the dining-room girl. It happened that this was a perfectly respectable girl from Ireland who had been a servant at our farm for a year or two; she was quiet and friendly and liked by everybody. Since none of the colony workers were treated as social inferiors, Minnie danced with everybody else and had a good time; but it didn’t look so harmless in the New York gutter press, and when Montague went to Barnard to lecture the young ladies on philosophy, he was conscious of stern watchfulness on the part of the lady dean of that exclusive institution. Minnie, now many times a grandmother, lives in Berkeley, California, and writes to me now and then.
Montague came to us innocent of social theories and even of knowledge. But presently he found himself backed up against our four-sided fireplace, assailed by ferocious bands of socialists, anarchists, syndicalists, and single taxers. We could not discover that we made any dent in his armor; but presently came rumors that in the Faculty Club of Columbia, where he ate his lunch, he was being denounced as a “red” and finding himself backed up against the wall by ferocious bands of Republicans, Democrats, and Goo-goos (members of the Good Government League). Of course the palest pink in Helicon Hall would have seemed flaming red in Columbia.
IV
There were Professor William Noyes, of Teacher’s College, and his wife, Anna, who afterward conducted a private school. There were Edwin Björkman, critic, and translator of Strindberg, and his wife, Frances Maule, a suffrage worker. There were Alice MacGowan and Grace MacGowan Cooke, novelists. There was Michael Williams, a young writer, who became editor of the Commonweal, the Catholic weekly. I count a total of a dozen colonists who were, or afterward became, well-known writers.
There came to tend our furnaces and do odd jobs two runaway students from Yale named Sinclair Lewis and Allan Updegraff; we educated them a lot better than Yale would have done you may be sure. “Hal” and “Up” both wrote novels, but Up was better known as a poet. Hal became the most successful novelist of his time. When he came to Helicon Hall, he was very young, eager, bursting with energy and hope. He later married my secretary at the colony, Edith Summers, a golden-haired and shrewdly observant young person whose gentle voice and unassuming ways gave us no idea of her talent. She eventually became Mrs. Edith Summers Kelly, author of the novel Weeds; and after the tumult and shouting have died, this is one of the books that students will be told to read as they are now told to read Evangeline and Hermonn and Dorothea. I corresponded with Hal Lewis to the end of his life, but I saw him only once in his later years—sad ones, ruined by alcohol.
We had a rule among our busy workers that nobody came to any other person’s room except by invitation; so everyone had all the privacy he wanted. When your work was done, and you felt like conversation, there was always someone by the four-sided fireplace or in the billiard room. In the evenings there were visitors, interesting persons from many parts of the world. John Dewey came occasionally, as the guest of Montague. Dewey was perhaps the best-known professor at Columbia in my time, and he exercised tremendous influence upon American education, though his ideas have often been misunderstood to the point of caricature. Personally, he was a most kind and gracious gentleman. Another visitor was William James, who was perhaps the greatest of American psychologists and certainly the ablest of that time. He was open-minded and eager in the investigation of psychic phenomena, and I remember vividly sitting with him at a table watching an old lady with a ouija board. I had never seen this object before, but the old lady held it for a good and trusted friend. She held a pencil or pen in her hand and went into a sort of trance, while some force moved her hand over the board from letter to letter. In Dewey’s presence her hand moved and spelled out the sentence “Providence child has been carried to bed.” We took this sentence to our faithful member named Randall, who owned a small business in Providence, Rhode Island, and had a wife and child there. He went to the telephone immediately and was told that the child was ill with pneumonia.
Another guest I remember was John Coryell, an anarchist, who earned his living in the strangest way—he was Bertha M. Clay, author of the sentimental romances that all servant maids then read, and may still read. Sadakichi Hartmann, the art critic came and was one of the few who were not welcome; he sent a postcard in advance, “Sadakichi Hartmann will arrive at six P.M.” and there he was, on time, but unfortunately drunk, and his companion, Jo Davidson, the sculptor, was not able to control him. When the time came for departure, he didn’t want to depart but insisted on sleeping on the cushioned seats in front of our fireplace. We had to turn him out in the snow, and the next day he wrote a letter to the papers about us, and there was quite a furor.
During these months at the colony I wrote The Industrial Republic, a prophecy of socialism in America. I have never reprinted this book because of the embarrassing fact that I had prophesied Hearst as a radical president of the United States. He really looked like a radical then, and I was too naïve to imagine the depths of his cynicism and depravity. When in the effort to become governor of New York he made a deal with Tom Murphy, the boss of Tammany, whom he had previously cartooned in prison stripes, I wanted to tear up my book. Incidentally, I had prophesied socialism in America in the year 1913; instead we had two world wars and the Russian Revolution—and I fear that more world wars and more revolutions stand between us and a truly democratic and free society. The world is even worse than I was able to realize; but I still cling to my faith in the methods of democracy.
V
The Helicon Home Colony came to an end abruptly, at three o’clock on a Sunday morning. The first warning I received of its doom was a sound as of enormous hammers smashing in the doors of the building. I was told afterward that it was super-heated air in plastered walls, blowing out sections of the walls. I smelled smoke and leaped out of bed.
My sleeping room was in a tower, and I had to go down a ladder to my study below; there was a door, leading to a balcony, which ran all the way around the inside of a court, three stories above the ground. I opened the door, and a mass of black smoke hit me—it seemed really solid, with heavy black flakes of soot. I shouted fire, and ran out on the balcony and up to the front, where there was a studio made over into sleeping quarters for eight or ten of our colony workers. I ran through this place, shouting to awaken the sleepers, but got no response; apparently everybody had got out—without stopping to warn me! The next day, I learned that one man had been left behind—a stranger who had been working for us as a carpenter; he had been drinking the night before and paid for it with his life.
When I came back from the studio to the balcony, the flames were sweeping over it in a furious blast. If I live to be a hundred, I shall never forget that sensation; it was like a demon hand sweeping over me—it took all the hair from one side of my head and a part of my nightshirt. I escaped by crouching against the wall, stooping low, and running fast. Fortunately the stairs were not yet in flames, so I got down into the central court, which was full of broken glass and burning brands, not very kind to my bare feet. I ran to the children’s quarters and made sure they were all out; then I ran outside, and tried to stop the fall of two ladies who had to jump from windows of the second story. Harder to stop the fall of human bodies than I would have imagined!
We stood in the snow and watched our beautiful utopia flame and roar, until it crashed in and died away to a dull glow. Then we went into the homes of our fashionable neighbors, who hadn’t known quite what to make of us in our success but were kind to us in our failure. They fitted us out with their old clothes—for hardly anyone had saved a stitch. I had the soles of my feet cleaned out by a surgeon, and was driven to New York to stay with my friends, the Wilshires, for a couple of days. An odd sensation, to realize that you do not own even a comb or a tooth-brush—only half a nightshirt! Some manuscripts were in the hands of publishers, so I was more fortunate than others of my friends.
Two or three days later I was driven back to Englewood to attend, on crutches, the sessions of the coroner’s jury. So I learned what the outside world had been thinking about our little utopia. They not only thought it a “free-love nest,” but the village horse doctor on the jury thought we had set fire to it ourselves, to get the insurance. Also, and worse yet, they thought we had arranged our affairs in such a way that we could beat the local tradesmen out of the money we owed them. It was a matter for suspicion that we had got ropes, to serve as fire escapes, shortly before the fire; they blamed us for this, and at the same time they blamed us because we had made insufficient preparations—although they had made no objection to the same conditions existing in a boys’ school for many years. In short, we did not please them in any way, and everything they said or insinuated went on to the front pages of the yellow newspapers of the country.
Every dollar of the debts of the Helicon Home Colony was paid as soon as my feet got well, which was in a week or two. Likewise all those persons who were left destitute were aided. I bought myself new clothes and looked around to decide what to do next. If I had had the cash on hand, I would have started the rebuilding of Helicon Hall at once; but we had long negotiations with insurance companies before us, and in the meantime I wanted to write another novel. I took my family to Point Pleasant, New Jersey, rented a little cottage, and went back to the single-family mode of life. It was like leaving modern civilization and returning to the dark ages. I felt that way about it for a long time, and made efforts at another colony in spite of a constantly increasing load of handicaps.
VI
We employed an honest lawyer and made an honest statement of the value of our property. The insurance companies then cut it by one third and told us that if we were not satisfied, we could sue, which would mean waiting several years for our money. I learned too late that this is their regular practice; to meet it, you double the value of your claim. You must have a dishonest lawyer.
We could not afford to wait, for many persons were in distress, and I was unwilling to see them suffer even though they had no legal claim upon me or the company. We settled the insurance matters and sold the land for what it would bring; after the mortgage holders were paid, I had a few thousand dollars left from the thirty thousand The Jungle had earned. My friend Wilshire was in trouble with his gold mine just then, and as he had loaned me money several times, I now loaned some to him; that is, I invested it in his mine, and he wrote me a letter agreeing to return it on demand. But his affairs thereafter were in such shape that I never did demand it. And that was the end of my first “fortune.”
However, I did not worry; I was going to make another at once—so I thought. Having portrayed the workers of America and how they lived, I was now going to the opposite end of the scale—to portray the rich, and how they lived. There had come many invitations to meet these rich; there were intelligent ones among them, like “Robbie” Collier, Mrs. “Clarrie” Mackay, and Mrs. “Ollie” Belmont; there were some who were moved by curiosity and boredom, and some even with a touch of mischief. The suggestion that I should write The Metropolis came first from a lady whose social position was impregnable; she offered me help and kept her promise, and all I had to do in return was to promise never to mention her name.
I refer to this matter because, in the storm of denouncement that greeted The Metropolis, the critics declared that it was less easy to find out about “society” than about the stockyards. But the truth is that I had not the slightest trouble in going among New York’s smart set at this time. Many authors had stepped up the golden ladder, and my feet were on it. My radical talk didn’t hurt me seriously; it was a novelty, and the rich—especially the young ones—object to nothing but boredom. Also there are some of the rich who have social consciences, and are aware that they have not earned what they are consuming. You will meet a number of such persons in the course of this story.
The reason why The Metropolis is a poor book is not that I did not have the material but that I had too much. Also, I wrote it in a hurry, under most unhappy circumstances. The career of a novelist is enough for one man, and founding colonies and starting reform organizations and conducting political campaigns had better be left to persons of tougher fiber. It took me thirty years to learn that lesson thoroughly; meantime I lost the reading public that The Jungle had brought me.
I did my writing about smart society in a shack that had walls full of bedbugs. I made cyanogen gas, a procedure almost as perilous to me as to the bugs. I worked through the spring and summer, and when the New York Herald offered me my own price to make another investigation of the stockyards, I resisted the temptation and turned the job over to Ella Reeve Bloor. The result was a great story “killed,” as I have previously mentioned.
I was having my customary indigestion and headaches, the symptoms of overwork that I would not heed. Also, in the middle of the summer, Corydon suffered an attack of appendicitis that very nearly ended the troubles between us. A country doctor diagnosed her illness as menstrual, and when, after several days, I called a surgeon from New York, he said it was too late to operate. So there lay my youthful dream of happiness, at the gates of death for a week or two. I had then an experience that taught me something about the powers of suggestion, which are so close to magical; I saved Corydon’s life, and she knew it, and told me so afterward.
I literally pulled her back through those gates of death. She was lying in a semistupor, completely worn out by pain that had lasted more than a week; she had given up, when she heard my voice. I did not pray for her—I did not know how to do that—but I prayed to her, urging her to live, to keep holding on; and that voice came to her as something commanding, stirring new energies in her soul. When modern psychotherapists state that we die because we want to die, I understand exactly what they mean.
Corydon was taken to the Battle Creek Sanitarium to recuperate, accompanied by her mother and an elderly surgeon friend. How easy it is for human beings to accumulate needs! Four summers back Corydon and Thyrsis had lived with their baby in a tent in the woods and had thought themselves fortunate to have an income of thirty dollars a month assured them; but now Corydon needed sixty dollars a week to stay at a leisure-class health resort, and half as much for her mother’s board, and a private physician into the bargain. The child had to have a nursemaid, and a relative to take care of him in the Point Pleasant cottage; while the father had to flee to the Adirondack wilderness to get away from the worry and strain of it all! Such is success in America, the land of unlimited possibilities.
VII
To one of the most remote lakes in the Adirondacks I portaged a canoe, found a deserted open camp, stowed my duffle, and set to work to finish The Metropolis. My only companions were bluejays and squirrels by day, and a large stout porcupine by night. I lived on rice, beans, prunes, bacon, and fish—no fresh fruit or vegetables—and wondered why I suffered from constipation and headaches. I was beginning to grope around in the field of diet reform and decided that beans, rice, and prunes were not the solution to my problem!
To the lake came a party of young people, a dozen of them, evidently wealthy, with guides and expensive paraphernalia. They had a campfire down the shore and sang songs at night, and the lonely writer would paddle by and listen in the darkness, and think about his sick wife, who also sang. Then one afternoon several of the young men came calling; one of the party had got into a bee’s nest and was badly stung. Did I have anything to help? They invited me to join them at their campfire. I did so, and met a jolly party, and chatted with several pretty girls. One of them, sitting next to me, asked what I did, and I admitted that I wrote books. That always interests people; they think it is romantic to be a writer—not knowing about the constipation and the headaches.
I always tried to avoid giving my name, because I had come to know all possible things that people would say to the author of The Jungle. But these people asked the name, and when I gave it, I became aware of some kind of situation; there was laughing and teasing, and finally I learned what I had blundered into—the girl at my side was a daughter of the head of J. Ogden Armour’s legal staff!
We fought our battles over again, and I learned, either from this girl or from someone in the party, that Mr. Armour had been shut up with his lawyers for the greater part of three days and nights, insisting upon having me indicted for criminal libel, and hearing the lawyers argue that he could not “stand the gaff.” I suppose that must have happened in more than one office since I started my attack on American big business. The secret is this: you must be sure that the criminal has committed worse crimes than the ones you reveal. I have been sued for libel only once in my life, and that was when an eccentric lady pacifist named Rosika Schwimmer took exception to my playful account of her activities; this incident I will tell about later.
The Metropolis was done, and the manuscript shipped off to Doubleday, Page and Company. Meantime I went over into Keene Valley and paid a visit of a week or two to Prestonia Mann Martin, wealthy utopian, who for many years had turned her Adirondack camp into a place of summer discussions—incidentally making her guests practice co-operation in kitchen and laundry. Her husband was an Englishman, one of the founders of the Fabian Society. When I met them, they were both on the way toward reaction; Prestonia was writing a book to prove that we had made no progress in civilization since the Greeks.
Both she and her husband became good, old-fashioned tories; the last time I met him was just before World War I, and we got into an argument over the results to be expected from woman suffrage. “Anyhow,” said he, “it’s not worth bothering about, because neither you nor I will ever see it.” I offered to wager that he would see it in New York State within ten years, and John Martin thought that was the funniest idea he had ever heard. But he saw it in about five years.
At this camp was James Graham Stokes, then president of our Intercollegiate Socialist Society. World War I came, and he began drilling a regiment in one of the New York armories, preparing to kill any of his former comrades who might attempt an uprising. His wife, Rose Pastor, at one time a cigar worker in New York, had tried with gentle patience to fit herself into the leisure-class world. When the war came, she gave it up and became a Bolshevik, and her marriage went to wreck.
Also at the camp was Harriet Stanton Blatch, suffragist, and Edward E. Slosson, whom I had met as one of the editors of the Independent. He became a well-known popularizer of science and started the Science Service. We had much to argue about.
VIII
Doubleday, Page and Company declined The Metropolis. They said it wasn’t a novel at all and urged me to take a year to rewrite it. I had further sessions with Walter H. Page and observed that amiable gentleman again believing what other people told him. The bright young men in his business office were certain that New York society wasn’t as bad as I portrayed it; when I told them what I knew, I observed a certain chill. I attributed it to the fact that their magazine, the World’s Work, was edited and published in New York, and its revenue came from the advertising of banks and trust companies that I exposed in my book. It was one thing to tell about graft in Chicago, a thousand miles away, and another to tell about it in one’s own financial family. Doubleday, Page had made a fortune out of The Jungle and used it to become rich and reactionary. I bade them a sad farewell.
The American Magazine, then owned and run by reformers, read the manuscript and agreed to feature parts of it as a serial. I left the book manuscript with Moffat, Yard and Company, and went out to join my wife at the Battle Creek Sanitarium. I stayed there for three weeks or so and tried their cure. I listened to Dr. W. K. Kellogg set forth the horrors of a carnivorous diet, and as a result I tried vegetarianism for the next three years. I felt better while I was taking treatments at the “San,” so I thought I had solved my problem of how to overwork with impunity.
Michael Williams, one of our Helicon Hall colonists, now out of a job, came out to the “San” to write it up for some magazine, and he and I saw a great deal of each other at this time. Mike was a Canadian of Welsh descent who had had a hard life, beginning as porter in a big department store, and contracting both tuberculosis and the drink habit. He had cured himself of the latter and was trying to cure himself of the former by Battle Creek methods. Incidentally, he was an ardent socialist, and a writer of no little talent; I thought he would serve the cause and was glad to help him. We devised a brilliant scheme for a vacation and a book combined; we would get a couple of covered wagons and take our two families across the continent on a tour, living the outdoor life and seeing America close at hand. A “literary caravan” we would call it, “Utopia on the Trek.” The American Magazine fell violently for the idea and promised to make a serial out of our adventures.
But that was a summer plan, and it was now November. We decided to take our families to Bermuda for the winter, and there write a book about our health experiences. Moffat, Yard were very keen about The Metropolis and its prospects; I, remembering the advice of my newspaper friend that I should “learn to charge,” extracted an advance of five thousand dollars on royalty account. So the path of life stretched rosy before Mike and me. We would have a two-family utopia amid the coral reefs of Bermuda; I would pay the bills, and Mike would repay me out of his future earnings. “It will be a debt of honor,” he said, proudly, and repeated it every now and then.
We went to New York, the first stage of our journey, just in the wake of a great event. Wall Street had been in the midst of a frenzy of speculation, but “somebody asked for a dollar,” and there was the panic of 1907. I have told in The Brass Check the peculiar circumstances under which I came to get the inside story of this event. Suffice it here to say that I had the biggest news story ever sprung in America, certainly at any rate in my time. I was able not merely to charge but to prove that the elder Morgan had deliberately brought on that panic as a means of putting the independent trust companies out of business. The American Magazine editors wanted the story and signed a contract for it, but in the course of two or three weeks they got cold feet and begged me to let them off, which I did.
IX
Behold Mike and me in a fairyland set with jewels, in the remotest part of the Bermudas, far from the maddening crowd of tourists. The house is white limestone, set upon a rocky shore overlooking a little bay, behind which the sun sets every evening. Out on a point in front of us stands an old ruin of a mansion, deserted, but having a marvelous mahogany staircase inside so that we can assure the children it was once the home of a pirate chief. The water is brilliant azure, shading to emerald in the shallows; over it flies the man-o’-war bird, snow-white, with a long white feather trailing like a pennant. The sun shines nearly always. There is a tennis court, surrounded by a towering hedge of oleanders in perpetual blossom. There are roses, and a garden in which a colored boy raises our vegetarian vegetables. The house is wide and rambling, with enough verandas so that both halves of this two-family utopia can sleep outdoors.
Mike is working on his autobiographical novel—it was published under the title of The High Romance. I am writing The Millennium, a play, and we write our health book together—I won’t tell you the name of that, having changed my ideas to some extent. I have brought a secretary with me, and Mike has half her time, the salary being added to that “debt of honor” of which we keep a careful account. There is a Swedish governess who takes care of my son and the two Williams children impartially; also Mike’s wife has an elderly friend to assist her. There is Minnie to do the housework for all of us—Irish Minnie who danced with the college professors at Helicon Hall. Our utopia contains a total of twelve persons, and my five thousand dollars exactly suffices for the fares and the six months’ expenses.
Then The Metropolis is published and sells eighteen thousand copies, barely justifying the advance; so there are no more royalties, and I am stuck in a strange land, without money to get the family home! Mike volunteers to go to New York and find a publisher for the health book, our common property; he will get an advance and remit me half. He goes, and places the book with the Frederick A. Stokes Company; he collects an advance and puts it all into his own pocket—and I am stuck again!
I borrow money from somebody and come home. Mike and his family go to California, and he takes up his old drinking habits and gets another hemorrhage; the next thing I hear, he has sought refuge in the religion of his childhood. He told all that in The High Romance; Saint Theresa came to him, and proved her presence by making him smell a rose as he was walking down the street. That was a miracle, and by it Mike knew he was one of the elect. That any hypnotist could have worked a hundred such miracles—could have caused Mike to smell all the flowers that bloom in the spring, tra-la-la—that had nothing to do with the case.
X
So ended my attempt to raise up and train a new socialist writer. It is an ugly story to tell on a man—the only mean story in this amiable book, you may note. Nothing could hire me to tell it—except for a later development, which you have still to hear.
Ten years passed, and Mike was all but forgotten. I started a magazine and in it published The Profits of Religion, dealing with the churches by the method of economic interpretation. Mike, being now a champion of Roman Catholicism—his publishers were introducing him as “one of the most influential lay Catholics of America”—sallied forth to destroy my book. That was all right; I grant every man a right to disagree with me—the more the merrier, it is all advertising. But Mike found his task difficult, for the reason that my statements in The Profits of Religion are derived from Catholic sources—devotional works, papal decrees, pastoral letters, editorials in church papers—everything with the holy imprimatur, nihil obstat.
So, instead of attacking the book, Mike chose to attack its author. He accused me of being a writer for gain, and headed his review with the title “A Prophet for Profit”! I have heard that charge many times, but it did seem to me there was one person in America who was barred from making it—and that was my old friend and pensioner, Michael Williams. Since he made it, and published it, it seems to me that the consequences are upon his own head. And that is why I tell the story here. I never saw him again, and never will—for he is dead.
XI
The satiric comedy The Millennium, which I had in my suitcase, made a hit with the leading stage impresario of that time, David Belasco. He agreed to produce it on an elaborate scale in the course of the coming winter. He was fighting the “trust” and had two big theaters in New York, where he put on two big productions every year. But after keeping me waiting for a year, and making many promises, he suddenly made peace with his enemies; he then wanted small shows that could be put on the road, so he threw over The Millennium and produced The Easiest Way, by Eugene Walter, which had only eight characters. So vanished one more of those dreams that haunted me for ten years or more—earning a lot of money and starting another colony.
I got an advance from a publisher, and took my family to Lake Placid in the Adirondacks, rented a little camp, and settled down to the task of weaving into a novel my story of how the elder J. P. Morgan had caused the panic of the previous autumn. The Moneychangers was the title. It was to be a sequel to The Metropolis. I was planning a trilogy to replace the one that had died with Manassas. My plans were still grandiloquent.
When I was gathering material for the book, Lincoln Steffens introduced me to two of my most valuable informants: Samuel Untermyer and James B. Dill. Dill had been the most highly paid corporation lawyer in Wall Street, and had recently been appointed Chief Justice of the Supreme Court in New Jersey. So he was free and could talk; and the stories he told me you wouldn’t believe. I will tell only one. He took me out to his home in New Jersey to spend the night, and when we came into the dining room, he said, “Make a note of this table and that window with the double French doors, I will tell you a story about them.”
This was the story. There was a lawsuit involving several million dollars, and Dill came into possession of a document that would decide the case. He wanted to make certain that this document could not be stolen. He was certain that a desperate attempt would be made to steal it, so he put two or three typists to work all day, and they made a total of twenty-one copies; he sent his office employees out to rent safe-deposit boxes in various banks in and around Wall Street. He sealed the copies in twenty-one envelopes, and one of them contained the original document. He alone knew which bank got the original. He took one of the copies out to his home that evening and said to his butler, “The house will be burglarized tonight, but don’t pay any attention to it. I want them to get what they come for.”
He set the sealed envelope on the corner of his dining-room table; sure enough, the next morning he found that the French windows had been opened and the envelope taken.
When he reached his office in the morning he called up the firm of the other side in the case and said, “By now you know what we have; our terms are two and one-half million dollars”—or whatever the amount was—and they settled on that basis. I used the story in one of my novels and, of course, everybody said it was preposterous; but it was told to me by James B. Dill.
The Moneychangers did not come up to my hopes, mainly because of the unhappy situation in which I was living. My health made continuous application impossible. I beg the reader’s pardon for referring to these matters, but they are a factor in the lives of authors. I am fortunate in being able to promise a happy ending to the story—I mean that I have solved the problem of doing my work and keeping entirely well. I will tell the secrets in due course—so read on!
For recreation I climbed the mountains, played tennis, and swam in the lake. I slept in an open camp under the pine trees and conformed to all the health laws I knew. We had Irish Minnie with us, and also a woman friend of Corydon’s, a young student whom she had met at Battle Creek, very religious, a Seventh-day Adventist. Corydon was trying various kinds of mental healing, and I was hoping for anything to keep her happy while I went on solving the problems of the world.
For myself I had good company that summer; a man whom I had met two years before, at the time The Jungle was published. An Englishman twelve years older than I, he had come to New York and sent me a letter of introduction from Lady Warwick, our socialist countess. H. G. Wells was the traveler’s name, and I had been obliged to tell him that I had never heard of him. He sent me his Modern Utopia, inscribing it charmingly, “To the most hopeful of Socialists, from the next most hopeful.” I found it a peerless book, and wrote him a letter that he accepted as “a coronation.” I had him with me that summer in the Adirondacks by the magic of eight or ten of his early romances, the most delightful books ever made for a vacation. Thirty Strange Stories was one title, and I smiled patronizingly, saying that a man could write one strange story or maybe half a dozen—but thirty! Yet there they were, and every one was strange, and I knew that I had met a great imaginative talent. Since then I have heard the highbrow critics belittle H. G. Wells; but I know that with Bernard Shaw he constituted a major period in British letters.
The Moneychangers was published, and my revelations made a sensation for a week or two. The book sold about as well as The Metropolis, so I was ahead again—just long enough to write another book. But it seemed as if my writing days were at an end; I was close to a nervous breakdown, and had to get away from a most unhappy domestic situation and take a complete rest. Corydon wanted to have an apartment of her own in New York, and solve her own problems. My friend Gaylord Wilshire now had a gold mine, high up in the eastern slope of the Sierra mountains; also George Sterling, the poet, was begging me to come to Carmel and visit him; so I set out over the pathway of the argonauts in a Pullman car.