talking largely about devoting myself to French Revolutionary history.
If this wasn’t that, what was? But there was something else. This man
had pulled France out of the slough where she lay when Madame Roland
lost her head. I had a terrific need of seeing the thing through, France
on her feet. Napoleon had for a time set her there and brought back
decency, order, common sense.
I would try, I told Mr. McClure, at his expense, but I should have to go
back at once to Paris. Where else could I get sufficient material? That
idea of getting to Paris encouraged me to try, but first we all agreed I
must go to Washington and talk with Mr. Hubbard, look over the
collection. Promptly an invitation came from Mrs. Hubbard to come at
once to their summer home out Chevy Chase way on Woodley Lane not far
from the Rock Creek Zoo. President and Mrs. Cleveland had their summer
home on the Lane, and the Maclean place, where Admiral Dewey was to go
when he returned the conquering hero from the Philippines, was across
the way. Twin Oaks, as the Hubbard place was called from two big oaks
just in front of the house, was the finest country estate in the
Washington district, as well as the most beautiful home into which I had
ever been admitted. Mrs. Hubbard herself was a woman of rare taste and
cultivation, a really great lady, and what she was showed from end to
end of that lovely sunny house. Maids, butler, gardener, all took on
something of her dignity and gentleness.
Mr. Hubbard was a man of some seventy years then, wiry, energetic,
putting in every moment of his time serving his friends and family and
in worshiping Mrs. Hubbard. I think he tried her preference for quiet
and dignity and for people of her own kind. It must have made her a
little uneasy to have a strange woman with a meager wardrobe and a
preoccupied mind drop into her carefree, gaily bedecked society; but she
took it all in the best nature and with unvarying kindness and
understanding. I liked her particularly for the way she accepted Mr.
McClure in the days to come. He would burst unexpectedly into the house
at any moment which suited his convenience, his bag loaded with proofs
of the Napoleon prints, and almost before he had made his greeting the
bag was open and the proofs spread helter-skelter over the carpet. Being
very much on my good behavior I was a little horrified myself, and then
I did so want them to like and appreciate Mr. McClure. When I tried to
apologize for the dishevelment he wrought Mrs. Hubbard laughed. “That
eagerness of his is beautiful,” she said, “I am accustomed to geniuses.”
And so she was, as I was to find.
It did not take me long to discover that there was plenty of material in
Washington for the Napoleon sketch. Mr. Hubbard had the latest books and
pamphlets. It was easy to arrange that I have proofs from Paris of two
or three volumes of reminiscences that had been announced. In the State
Department I found the full Napoleonic correspondence published by the
order of the French Government. Files of all the leading French
newspapers of the period were in one library or another. In the
Congressional Library there was a remarkable collection of books
gathered by Andrew D. White when he was minister to Germany from 1879 to
1881, the bulk of them in German, French, and English. An item of this
collection not to be duplicated was some fifty volumes of pamphlets in
several different languages made in Germany during the Revolution and
covering the Napoleonic era. They were for the most part the hasty
agitated outbreaks of _vox populi_—protests, arguments, prophecies,
curious personal adventures—but among them were rare bits. Taken as a
whole they reflected the contemporary state of mind of the people of
Europe as did nothing I had ever seen.
Convinced of the adequacy of material, I reluctantly gave up Paris and
settled down to work in the Congressional Library. It was not so easy to
find a writing table there in the early nineties, and it took some
persuasion to convince the ruler of the place, Ainsworth Spofford, that
I was worth the effort, that is that I was there to use his books day in
and day out until my task was done. Certain of that, he tucked me in,
though stacks of books rising from floor to ceiling had to be moved to
find room.
I wonder if students in the United States know how much they owe to this
man. He gave his life to making a library first to serve Congress, for
he held the firm conviction that Congressmen generally needed educating,
and that books handy in which he could find materials for their
committee work and their speeches would contribute to the process. He
made it his first business to provide them as near on the instant as
possible with what he thought they needed. In return for this service he
used every opportunity to wheedle, shame, beg money from them, money for
books, equipment, an increased staff, and always for better
accommodations; for Mr. Spofford had a great vision of a national
library, educating not only Congress but the people. To realize that
vision he had become what he was when I knew him, a devoted,
domineering, crabbed czar of his realm. He worked incessantly, doing
everything, knowing everything. He paid little attention to the
irritated criticisms of those who saw only the inconveniences and dust
and overcrowding of the old rooms, and who charged him with inefficiency
and tyranny. His mind was on the arrangement and administration of the
marble pile already under way across the square. This was what he had
been working for—a worthy place for books. His sharp, irritated, “There,
maybe you can find something in that,” banging a dusty volume on my
table, has often sounded in my ears as in later years I worked at the
commodious desks of the library he had dreamed, and which to my mind is
a monument to him more than to any other man—naturally enough since he
was the only man I ever knew who had anything to do with its existence.
Six weeks, and I had my first installment ready. I had done it with my
tongue in my cheek. Impudence, it seemed to me, to write biography on
the gallop. I had kept myself to it by repeating in moments of disgust:
“Well, a cat may look at a king. I’ll sketch it in, and they can take or
leave it.” But Mr. Hubbard liked what I had done, and that meant Mr.
McClure hurried it to the printers while I in hot haste went ahead with
my sketching.
I expected nothing for myself from it more than the forty dollars a
week, and the inner satisfaction of following the thrilling drama from
the terror of ’93 down to St. Helena. That satisfied me. But to my
surprise I did get the last thing in the world I had expected, the
approval of a few people who knew the field. John C. Ropes wrote me he
liked the treatment: “Come and lunch with me when you are in Boston and
see my Napoleon collection.” I couldn’t believe my eyes. Of course I
went.
Charles Bonaparte, the grandson of Jerome Bonaparte, and Mrs. Bonaparte
invited Mr. Hubbard and me to lunch with them in Baltimore to see their
collection. Curious the little things one remembers of long-ago
experiences! Out of that visit I recall only that Mrs. Bonaparte told me
that in the garret when she came into the house where Jerome and his
American wife, Elizabeth Patterson, had lived, there were literally
barrels of string, short lengths neatly rolled, accumulated by the
sister-in-law of Napoleon. Why remember that when the home was full of
treasures on my subject? Probably because I have never been able to
throw away a string without a pang.
Something better worth remembering was the startling resemblance to
Napoleon in a certain pose of Charles Bonaparte. As he stood talking
unconsciously, hands behind his back, slightly stooped, he was the
counterpart of Raffet’s Napoleon, the most natural of them all.
A bit of consolation for my hasty work came from the last source I would
have expected: William Milligan Sloane, the author of an elaborate
study, the outcome of years of research, recently published by the
_Century Magazine_. That was the way biography should be written, I told
myself: years of research, of note-taking, of simmering and saturation.
Then you had a ripened result. I said something of this once to Mr.
Sloane.
“I am not so sure,” he replied, “that all the time you want to take, all
the opportunity to indulge your curiosity and run here and there on
bypaths, to amuse yourself, to speculate and doubt, contribute to the
soundness or value of a biography. I have often wished that I had had,
as you did, the prod of necessity behind me, the obligation to get it
out at a fixed time, to put it through, no time to idle, to weigh, only
to set down. You got something that way—a living sketch.”
I couldn’t have listened to more consoling comment. There must have been
something in his characterization of “living,” for now, over forty years
since it first appeared in book form, I still receive annually a small
royalty check for my “pot-boiling” Napoleon!
What really startled me about that sketch was the way it settled things
for me, knocked over my former determinations, and went about shaping my
outward life in spite of me. It weakened my resolve never again to tie
myself to a position, to keep myself entirely footloose; it shoved Paris
into the future and substituted Washington. It was certainly not alone a
return to the security of a monthly wage, with the possibility that the
wage would soon grow, that turned my plans topsy-turvy, though that had
its influence. Chiefly it was the sense of vitality, of adventure, of
excitement, that I was getting from being admitted on terms of equality
and good comradeship into the McClure crowd.
The “Napoleon” had given the magazine, now in its second year, the
circulation boost it needed. My part in it was not exaggerated by the
office or by me. We all agreed that it was the pictures that had done
it, but the text had framed the pictures, helped bring out their value,
and it had been done at a critical moment.
The success of the “Napoleon” sketch did me a good turn with the
Scribners, who had had my manuscript of “Madame Roland” for some time.
They were hesitating about publishing it. There was no popular appeal. I
was entirely unknown, but the “Napoleon” work gave me sufficient backing
to persuade them. At least that was the explanation the literary head of
the concern, William C. Brownell, gave me. Thus my first book was my
second to appear. My reward for writing it came from my interest in
doing it, what I learned about how to go at a serious biographical
study, certainly not in royalties. My first check was for forty-eight
cents. I had used up my share of the small sales in corrections of the
proofs and gift copies.
I must stay with them, declared Mr. McClure. And the more I saw of Mr.
McClure and his colleagues, the more I wanted to stay. Of my first
impression of S. S. McClure in Paris I have spoken. Closer views
emphasized and enlarged that impression. He was as eager as a dog on the
hunt—never satisfied, never quiet. Creative editing, he insisted, was
not to be done by sitting at a desk in a comfortable office. It was only
done in the field following scents, hunts. An omnivorous reader of
newspapers, magazines, books, he came to his office primed with ideas,
possibilities, and there was always a chance that among them was a
stroke of genius. He hated nothing so much in the office as settled
routine, wanted to feel stir from the door to the inner sanctum. And he
had great power to stir excitement by his suggestions, his endless
searching after something new, alive, startling, and particularly by his
reporting.
He stood in awe of no man, but dashed back and forth over the country,
back and forth to Europe interviewing the great and mighty. He brought
back from his forays contracts with Stevenson, Conan Doyle, Anthony
Hope, Kipling. It was something to find yourself between the covers of a
book printing a Jungle story. They all came out in _McClure’s_ in those
years and were followed by “Captains Courageous” and “Stalky” as well as
many of the greatest of the short stories and poems—“The Ship That Found
Herself,” “The Destroyers,” the “Recessional”—things that left you
breathless and gave to a number the touch of genius for which the office
searched and sweated.
Mr. McClure was always peering over the Edge of the Future. It was this
search for what was on the way that brought to _McClure’s_ the first
article in an American magazine on radium, the X-ray, Marconi’s
wireless, Lilienthal’s and Octave Chanute’s gliders, Langley’s
steam-driven air-runner and in time the first article on the Wrights’
flying machine.
In my field of biography and history the Edge of the Future meant to Mr.
McClure the “unpublished” or the so poorly published that its
reappearance was equal to a first appearance. The success of a feature
spurred him to effort to get more of it, things which would sharpen and
perpetuate the interest. He was ready to look into any suggestion,
however unlikely it might seem to the cautious-minded. He was never
afraid of being fooled, only of missing something.
His quick taking of a hint, his warm reception of new ideas, new facts,
had its drawbacks. If they were dramatic and stirring Mr. McClure was
impatient of investigation. He wanted the fun of seeing his finds
quickly in print. At one point in the publication of the Napoleon he
caused me real anxiety by his apparent determination to print a story
for which I could find no authority.
Among the contributors to the Syndicate at that time was a picturesque
European with a title and an apparently endless flow of gossip. He
pretended to have been a member of the Court of Napoleon III and in the
confidence of the Emperor. This relation accounted for his having been
invited to join a strange secret party made up by the Emperor, who was
worried over a rumor that the body of Napoleon I did not lie under the
dome of the Invalides. It was not known who did lie there or what had
become of Napoleon. To reassure himself the Emperor decided to go with a
few chosen friends and open the tomb. They gathered in the dead of
night. The tomb was opened. There lay Napoleon, unchanged. The Emperor’s
mind was at rest. He swore the group to secrecy, but took affidavits to
be used in case of political necessity. The fall of the Empire seems to
have made the gentleman feel that his oath was no longer binding, and
that he could cash in on his adventure.
I did not believe the story, but when I expressed my doubt all I could
get out of Mr. McClure was a severe, “What a pity you do not know
something about Napoleon!” No new idea to me, since it was the first
thing I was thinking every morning when I went to work. What I did not
know, as I worried over the possible publication of what I believed a
fake, was that in spite of his quick and enthusiastic acceptance of a
good story, S. S. McClure cared above all for the soundness, the
truthfulness of the magazine. Good stories—yes. But they must hold
water, stand the scrutiny of those who knew. Moreover, he knew what I
did not as yet, that he could go the limit in his enthusiasms since he
had at his side a partner on whom he counted more, I think, than he then
realized to balance his excitements.
This happened now. The story was in type, scheduled. Mr. McClure was
going to Europe. “While you’re over there, Sam,” said his partner
quietly, “you better verify that Napoleon story. We’ll hold it until we
hear from you.”
A few weeks later came a laconic postal card. “Don’t publish the story
of the opening of Napoleon’s tomb. It wasn’t opened.”
I never heard the matter referred to after that. By the time he returned
he had forgotten what to me was a near tragedy, to him a joyful bit of
editorial adventure.
I came later to feel that this quick kindling of the imagination, this
untiring curiosity, this determination to run down every clue until you
had it there on the table, its worth or worthlessness in full view, was
one of Mr. McClure’s greatest assets; but it was an asset that would
have landed him frequently in hot water if it had not been for the
partner who had saved him from the Napoleon hoax, John S. Phillips—J. S.
P. as he was known in the office.
Living in Washington as I had been doing, I had seen little of Mr.
Phillips, only heard of him, for his name was the one oftenest on Mr.
McClure’s tongue. His calm and tactful handling of the “General,” as the
office called Mr. McClure, in the ticklish Napoleon story delighted me.
“Here’s a man,” I told myself, “who has a nose for humbugs as well as
one who knows the power of patience when dealing with the impatient.”
[Illustration:
_At her desk in the McClure’s office, 1898_
]
As time went on and I spent more and more of it in New York, finally
settling there at the end of the decade, I had better opportunities to
watch Mr. Phillips in action. I was not long in learning that he was the
focus of every essential factor in the making of the magazine:
circulation, finance, editing. Into the pigeonhole of his old-fashioned
roll-top desk went daily reports of bank balances, subscriptions
received, advertising contracts to be signed, books sold. I doubt if he
ever went home at night without having a digest of those reports in his
head. He knew their relation to the difficult problem of putting the
undertaking on its feet.
It was largely Mr. Phillips’ love of fine printing and his habit of
keeping track of the advances in printing processes that led _McClure’s_
late in the nineties to set up its own plant. It included all of the new
miraculous self-feeding machines, automatic presses, folders, binders,
stitchers.
It was the first magazine plant of the kind in the country and had many
visitors. Among them was Mark Twain. Mr. Phillips tells an amusing story
of his visit. As they stood watching the press perform, a sheet went
awry on the bed. The press at once stopped and rang a bell calling for
the pressman, who immediately came and helped the big automat out of its
plight.
“My God, man!” cried Mark Twain, “That thing ought to vote.”
It did more than cast votes for _McClure’s_. It saved the money which
finally balanced the budget—and then some.
To those of us on the inside it was always a marvel that John Phillips
found time to be an editor, as well as a focusing center for everything
that went on. At the bottom of his constant editorial supervision was, I
think, a passion for the profession. He was unmistakably the most
intellectual, as well as the best intellectually trained, person in the
office. After graduating at Knox College in Illinois he had taken a
degree at Harvard and later spent two years studying literature and
philosophy in the University of Leipzig. When he came to the magazine he
put all his training into the professional problem.
He was an invaluable aid to the group of staff writers the magazine was
building up. He was no easy editor. He never wheedled, never flattered,
but rigidly tried to get out of you what he conceived to be your best,
taking it for granted that you wanted to make the most of your piece and
it was his business to help you. I never had an editor who so quickly
and unerringly spotted weaknesses, particularly in construction. He had
a fine feeling, too, for the right word, took the trouble to search for
it, often bringing in a penciled memo of suggestions long after you had
decided to let it go as it was. He knew the supreme value of
naturalness, detested fake style. “A kind of disease,” I have heard him
say, quoting somebody.
It always disturbed a few of us that nobody outside of the office knew
what an important part in the making of _McClure’s_ John Phillips
played. He had that rare virtue—the willingness and ability to keep out
of the picture if thereby he could make sure the picture was not spoiled
in the making.
The one member of the staff besides Mr. McClure whom I knew, when I
began to find myself so to speak absorbed, was already by virtue of his
unusual gift for comradeship a friend as well as a species of boss—that
was Auguste F. Jaccaci, a brilliant artist and art editor as well as one
of the most versatile and iridescent personalities I have ever known. I
first met Jac, as he was called by everybody, in Paris, when as an
advance agent of the new magazine he was sounding out possibilities for
writers and illustrators. He took me out to dinner and paid the
_addition_. We talked until late, then he simply put me on my omnibus
and let me go back to the Latin Quarter alone. Here was established the
_modus operandi_ for our frequent visiting in the future, in Paris, in
New York, in Washington—with one revision. After that first dinner I
paid my share of the check, save on special occasions when Jac, a
knowing epicure, selected the dinner and treated me.
It was he who showed me the first copy of _McClure’s_, that of August,
1893, showed it to me at five-thirty in the morning, at a café across
the square from the Gare Saint-Lazare where he had ordered me by
cablegram from London to meet him. For nobody in the world excepting a
member of my family should I have been willing at that hour to cross
Paris. But I couldn’t afford to show a lack of interest. Moreover, I
must confess that this preposterous order flattered me a little. It was
taking me man to man, I said to myself. And so I was there. He had to
bully the garçon to get a table out on the sidewalk and make us coffee.
All this was a good basis for a comradeship which lasted to his death.
It lives in my memory as something quite apart in my relations with men.
Jac had a certain superior appreciation and wisdom never quite put into
words, but which you felt. I for my part was always straining to
understand, never quite reaching it. Part of his charm was his
confidence in his own superiority and his anxiety lest we didn’t quite
realize it. And then there were his rages. They came and went like
terrible summer thundershowers. He would roar down the corridor of the
office while I sat and watched him enthralled. Those rages, whether
directed at me or somebody else, never made any other impression on me
than that of some unusual natural phenomenon.
Here then were the leaders in the crowd to which I had been admitted by
virtue of a hasty sketch of Napoleon Bonaparte done on order.
Thank God I had sense enough to realize that here were three rare
personalities, and that to miss such associations would be sheer
stupidity. Also to know that I was an unusually lucky woman to be
accepted.
Then there was the magazine they were making. There was something
youthful, gay, natural about it which captivated me. Often, too, it
achieved a most precious thing. Mr. Phillips called it a “lift.” To be
youthful, gay, natural with a “lift”—that was an achievement.
And then I found the place so warmly and often ridiculously human. Mr.
McClure was incapable of standing up before a hard-luck story, with the
result that he brought into that overcrowded office a string of
derelicts ranging from autocratic scrub ladies to indigent
editors—brought them in and left them for J. S. P. to place. But J. S.
P. was not far behind in his sympathy for those who were down and out. I
watched him more than once rescue an author who perhaps out of sheer
discouragement had taken to drink and landed in jail. Mr. Phillips saw
that he was bailed out, his debts paid, work given him. I never ceased
to wonder that these two men loaded with work and responsibility should
seemingly consider it part of their daily job to rescue the wastrel and
the disheartened.
There was reason enough for me to stay with _McClure’s_.
9
GOOD-BYE TO FRANCE
The Napoleon sketch had not been finished before Mr. McClure was urging
me into a new job—not writing this time, but editing, editing according
to his recipe. “Out with you—look, see, report.” Abraham Lincoln was the
subject. My heart fell. “If you once get into American history,” I told
myself, “you know well enough that will finish France. It will also
finish your determination to solve the woman question and determine the
nature of revolutions. They will go the way of the microscope and your
search for God. Are you to spend your life running, now here, now there,
never follow a path to its end?” Or was I taking my ambitions too
seriously? It seemed probable. However, I was to have five thousand a
year if I went along. There was no question in my mind but it was my
duty to earn that money.