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.
_3_
_Genius_
I
Was it really genius? That I cannot say. I only know it seemed like it,
and I took it at its face value. I tell the story here as objectively as
possible, and if the hero seems a young egotist, do not blame me,
because that youth is long since dead.
The thing I believed was genius came to me first during one of those
Christmas holidays I spent in Baltimore, at the home of my Uncle Bland.
I had always enjoyed these holidays, having a normal boy’s fondness for
turkey and plum pudding and other Christmas delights. I used to say that
anybody might wake me at three o’clock in the morning to eat ice cream;
my Aunt Lelia Montague, mother of the general’s wife, declared that the
way to my heart was through a bag of gingersnaps.
But on this particular Christmas my uncle’s home meant to me a shelf of
books. I read Shakespeare straight through during that holiday and,
though it sounds preposterous, I read all of Milton’s poetry in those
same two weeks. Literature had become a frenzy. I read while I was
eating, lying down, sitting, standing, and walking; I read everywhere I
went--and I went nowhere except to the park to read on sunshiny days. I
averaged fourteen hours a day, and it was a routine matter to read all
of Shakespeare’s comedies in two or three days, and all his tragedies in
the next two or three, and the historical plays over the weekend. In my
uncle’s library reposed beautiful volumes, untouched except by the hand
of the parlormaid; now I drew them forth, with love and rapture, and
gave them a reason for being. Some poet said to a rich man, “You own the
land and I own the landscape.” To my kind uncle I said, “You own the
books and I own the literature.”
My mind on fire with high poetry, I went out for a walk one night. A
winter night, with hard crunching snow on the ground and great bright
lights in the sky; the tree branches black and naked, crackling now and
then in the breeze, but between times silence, quite magical
silence--and I walking in Druid Hill Park, mile on mile, lost to the
world, drinking in beauty, marveling at the mystery of life. Suddenly
this thing came to me, startling and wonderful beyond any power of words
to tell; the opening of gates in the soul, the pouring in of music, of
light, of joy that was unlike anything else and therefore not to be
conveyed in metaphors. I stood riveted to one spot, and a trembling
seized me, a dizziness, a happiness so intense that the distinction
between pleasure and pain was lost.
If I had been a religious person at this time, no doubt I would have had
visions of saints and holy martyrs, and perhaps developed stigmata on
hands and feet. But I had no sort of superstition, so the vision took a
literary form. There was a campfire by a mountain road, to which came
travelers who hailed one another and made high revelry there without
alcohol. Yes, even Falstaff and Prince Hal were purified and refined,
according to my teetotal sentiments! There came the melancholy Prince of
Denmark, and Don Quixote--I must have been reading him at this time.
Also Shelley--real persons mixed with imaginary ones, but all equal in
this realm of fantasy. They held conversation, each in his own
character, yet glorified, more so than in the books. I was laughing,
singing with the delight of their company; in short, a perfect picture
of a madman, talking to myself, making incoherent exclamations. Yet I
knew what I was doing, I knew what was happening, I knew that this was
literature, and that if I could remember the tenth part of it and set it
down on paper, it would be read.
The strangest part about this ecstasy is the multifarious forms it
assumes, the manifold states of consciousness it involves, all at one
time. It is possible to be bowed with grief and transported with
delight; it is possible to love and to hate, to be naïve and
calculating, to be hot and cold, timid and daring--all contradictions
reconciled. But the most striking thing is the conviction that you are
in the hands of a force outside yourself. Without trace of a
preconception, and regarding the thing as objectively as you know how,
the feeling is that something is taking hold of you, pushing you along,
sweeping you away. To walk in a windstorm and feel it beating upon you
is a sensation of the body no more definite and unmistakable than this
windstorm of the spirit, which has come to me perhaps a hundred times in
my life. I search for a metaphor and picture a child running, with an
older and swifter person by his side taking his hand and lifting him off
the ground, so that his little leaps become great leaps, almost like
flying.
You may call this force your own subconscious mind, or God, or cosmic
consciousness--I care not what fancy name you give; the point is that it
is there, and always there. If you ask whether it is intelligent, I can
only say that you appear to be the intelligence, and “it” appears to be
the cause of intelligence in you. How anything unintelligent can be the
cause of intelligence is a riddle I pass by. Life is built upon such
antinomies.
II
This experience occurred in unexpected places and at unpredictable
times. It was associated with music and poetry, but still more
frequently with natural beauty. I remember winter nights in Central
Park, New York, and tree branches white with snow, magical in the
moonlight; I remember springtime mornings in several places; a summer
night in the Adirondacks, with moonlight strewn upon a lake; a summer
twilight in the far wilds of Ontario, when I came over a ridge and into
a valley full of clover, incredibly sweet of scent--one has to go into
the North in summer to appreciate how deep and thick a field of red
clover can grow and what overpowering perfume it throws upon the air at
twilight.
This experience, repeated, made me more of a solitary than ever. I
wanted to be free to behave like a lunatic, and yet not have anybody
think me one. I remember a highly embarrassing moment when I was walking
down a lane bordered with wild roses in June, and two little girls
seated on a fence, unnoticed by me, suddenly broke into giggles at the
strange sight of a man laughing and talking to himself. I became a
haunter of mountaintops and of deep forests, the only safe places.
I had something that other people did not have and could not
understand--otherwise, how could they behave as they were doing? Imagine
anyone wanting a lot of money, or houses and servants, or fine raiment
and jewels, if he knew how to be happy as I did! Imagine anyone becoming
drunk on whisky when he might become drunk on poetry and music, sunsets,
and valleys full of clover!
For a time it seemed to me that music was the only medium in which my
emotions could be expressed. I longed to play some instrument, and began
very humbly with a mandolin. But that was not enough, and presently I
took the plunge and paid seventy-five of my hard-earned dollars for a
violin. In my class at college had been Martin Birnbaum, a Bohemian lad,
pupil of a really great teacher, Leopold Lichtenberg. Martin played the
violin with an ease and grace that were then, and have remained ever
since, my life’s great envy. Each of us wants to do what he cannot.
With all my potboiling and my work at Columbia University, I could find
only limited time for practice in the winter. But in the summer I was
free--except for three or four days in each fortnight, when I wrote my
stories and earned my living. I took myself away to a summer hotel, near
Keeseville, New York, on the east edge of the Adirondacks, and I must
have seemed one of the oddest freaks ever seen outside of an asylum.
Every morning I got up at five o’clock and went out upon a hillside to
see the sunrise; then I came back for breakfast, and immediately
thereafter got my violin and a book of music and a stand and went out
into the forest and set up my stand and fiddled until noontime; I came
back to dinner, and then sallied out again and practiced another four
hours; then I came in and had supper, and went out on the hillside to
sit and watch the sunset; finally I went upstairs and shut myself in a
little room and practiced the violin by the light of an oil lamp; or, if
it was too hot in the room, I went down to the lake to watch the moon
rise behind the mountains.
The wild things of the forest got used to this odd invasion. The
squirrels would sit on the pine-tree branches and cock their heads and
chatter furiously when I made a false note. The partridges would feed on
huckleberries all about me, apparently understanding clearly the
difference between a fiddlebow and a gun. Foxes took an interest, and
raccoons and porcupines--and even humans.
The guests from the cities arrived on an early morning train and were
driven to the hotel in a big four-horse stage. One morning, one of these
guests arrived, and at breakfast narrated a curious experience. The
stage had been toiling up a long hill, the horses walking, and alongside
was an old Italian woman with a couple of pails, on her way to a day of
berry picking. She was whistling cheerily, and the tune was the
_Tannhäuser_ march. The new arrival, impressed by this evidence of
culture in the vicinity, inquired through the open window, “Where did
you learn that music?” The reply was, “Dey ees a crazy feller in de
woods, he play it all day long for t’ree weeks!”
III
I have got ahead of my story and must go back to the fall of 1897, when
I registered at Columbia University as a special student. This meant
that I was free to take any courses I preferred. As at the City College,
I speedily found that some of the teachers were tiresome, and that the
rules allowed me to drop their courses and begin others without extra
charge. Upon my declaring my intention to take a master’s degree, all
the tuition fees I paid were lumped together until they totaled a
hundred and fifty dollars, after which I had to pay no more. Until I had
completed one major and two minors, I was at liberty to go on taking
courses and dropping them with no extra expense.
The completing of a course consisted of taking an examination, and as
that was the last thing in the world I ever wanted to do, I never did
it; instead, I would flee to the country, and come back the next fall
and start a new set of courses. Then I would get the professors’ points
of view and the list of books to be read--and that was all there was to
the course. Four years in succession I did this, and figured that I had
sampled more than forty courses; but no one ever objected to my singular
procedure. The great university was run on the assumption that the
countless thousands of young men and women came there to get degrees.
That anyone might come merely to get knowledge had apparently not
occurred to the governing authorities.