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