Corydon and her baby were staying with her parents; while Thyrsis lived
in a lodginghouse, this time up in Harlem. He was not permitted to see
his wife whom he could not support. He had not seen his son for six
months, and was naturally, anxious to know what that son looked like. It
was arranged between the young parents that the Negro maid who took care
of the child should wheel the baby carriage to a certain spot in Central
Park at a certain hour of the afternoon, and Thyrsis would be there and
watch the little one go by. The father kept the appointed tryst, and
there came a Negro nursemaid, wheeling a baby carriage, and the father
gazed therein and beheld a horrifying spectacle--a red-headed infant
with a flat nose and a pimply skin. The father went away, sick at
soul--until he had the inspiration to send a telegram, and received an
answer informing him that the nursemaid had been prevented from coming.
The lodginghouse where Thyrsis had a room was kept by an elderly widow
who had invested her little property in United States Steel common and
had seen it go down to six dollars. As fellow lodgers, there was the
father of Thyrsis, who was drinking more and more; and that Uncle Harry
who had almost reached the stage where he put a bullet through his
brain. Meanwhile, the uncle considered it his duty to give worldly-wise
advice to a haggard young author who refused to “go to work.” The mother
of Thyrsis, distracted, kept repeating the same formula; half a dozen
other occupants of the lodginghouse, broker’s clerks, and other
commercial persons, took an interest in the problem and said their say.
Such was the life of a would-be prophet in a business world! So that
winter I wrote the most ferocious of my stories, _A Captain of
Industry_, which became a popular item in the list of the State
Publishing House of Soviet Russia. The manuscript was submitted to the
Macmillans, and the president of that concern was kind enough to let me
see the opinion of one of his readers. “What is the matter with this
young author?” was the opening sentence. The answer of course was that
the young author was unable to get enough to eat.
Critics of _Arthur Stirling_ and of _Love’s Pilgrimage_ complain of the
too-idealistic characters portrayed, the lack of redeeming weaknesses in
the hero. Let the deficiency be supplied by one detail--that during that
dreadful winter I discovered my vice. Living in these sordid
surroundings, desperate, and utterly without companionship, I was now
and then invited to play cards with some of my fellow lodgers. I had
played cards as a boy, but never for money; now I would “sit in” at a
poker game with the young broker’s clerks and other commercial persons
with whom fate had thrown me.
So I discovered a devastating emotion; I was gripped by a dull, blind
frenzy of greed and anxiety, and was powerless to break its hold. The
game was what is called penny ante, and the stakes were pitifully small,
yet they represented food for that week. I cannot recall that I ever
won, but I lost a dollar or two on several occasions. I remember that on
Christmas Eve I started playing after dinner, and sat at a table in a
half-warmed room gray with tobacco smoke until two or three in the
morning; the following afternoon I began playing again and played all
night. So it appeared that I was an orthodox Southern gentleman, born to
be a gambler! After that Christmas experience I took a vow, and have
never played cards for money since that time.
X
Not all the humiliation, rage, and despair could keep new literary plans
from forming themselves, colossal and compelling. Now it was to be a
trilogy of novels, nothing less. Ecstasy was taking the form of battles,
marches, and sieges, titanic efforts of the collective soul of America.
_Manassas_, _Gettysburg_, and _Appomattox_ were to be the titles of
these mighty works, and by contemplation of the heroism and glory of the
past, America was to be redeemed from the sordidness and shame of the
present. The problem was to find some one capable of appreciating such a
literary service, and willing to make it possible.
I went up to Boston, headquarters of the culture that I meant to
glorify. I stayed with my cousin, Howard Bland, then a student at
Harvard, and devoted myself to the double task of getting local color
and an endowment. I succeeded in the first part only. Thomas Wentworth
Higginson had read _Springtime and Harvest_, and he introduced me to
what was left of the old guard of the abolitionists; I remember several
visits to Frank B. Sanborn and one to Julia Ward Howe. I went to a
reunion of a Grand Army post and heard stories from the veterans--though
not much of this was needed, as the Civil War has been so completely
recorded in books, magazines, and newspapers. I inspected reverently the
Old Boston landmarks and shrines; for I had exchanged my Virginia ideals
for those of Massachusetts and was intending to portray the Civil War
from the Yankee point of view.
I thought Boston ought to be interested and warm-hearted. Why was Boston
so cold? Perfectly polite, of course, and willing to invite a young
novelist to tea and listen to his account of the great work he was
planning; but when the question was broached, would anyone advance five
hundred dollars to make possible the first volume of such a trilogy,
they all with one accord began to make excuses. Among those interviewed
I remember Edwin D. Mead, the pacifist, and Edwin Ginn, the schoolbook
publisher, a famous philanthropist. Mr. Ginn explained that he had
ruined the character of a nephew by giving him money, and had decided
that it was the worst thing one could do for the young. In vain I sought
to persuade him that there might be differences among the young.
It was in New York that a man was found, able to realize that a writer
has to eat while writing. George D. Herron was his name, and he happened
to be a socialist, a detail of great significance in the young writer’s
life. But that belongs to the next chapter; this one has to do with the
fate of Corydon and Thyrsis, and what poverty and failure did to their
love. Suffice it for the moment to say that the new friend advanced a
couple of hundred dollars and promised thirty dollars a month, this
being Thyrsis’ estimate of what he would need to keep himself and wife
and baby in back-to-nature fashion during the year it would take to
write _Manassas_. The place selected was Princeton, New Jersey, because
that university possessed the second-largest Civil War collection in the
country--the largest being in the Library of Congress. So in May 1903
the migration took place, and for three years and a half Princeton was
home.
XI
On the far side of a ridge three miles north of the town, a patch of
woods was found whose owner was willing to rent it as a literary
encampment. The tent had been shipped from Canada, and a platform was
built, and an outfit of wooden shelves and tables. Also there was a
smaller tent, eight feet square, for the secret sessions with Clio, muse
of history. Both canvas structures were provided with screen doors,
against the inroads of the far-famed Jersey mosquito. Water was brought
in pails from a farmer’s well, and once a week a horse and buggy were
hired for a drive to town--to purchase supplies, and exchange one load
of books about the Civil War for another load.
_Manassas: A Novel of the War_--so ran the title; the dedication said:
“That the men of this land may know the heritage that is come down to
them.” The young historian found himself a stamping ground in the woods,
a place where he could pace back and forth for hours undisturbed, and
there the scenes of the dreadful “new birth of freedom” lived themselves
over in his mind. The men of that time came to him and spoke in their
own persons, and with trembling and awe he wrote down their actions and
words.
His method of working had evolved itself into this: he would go through
a scene in his imagination, over and over again, until he knew it by
heart, before setting down a word of it on paper. An episode like the
battle scene of _Manassas_, some ten thousand words in length, took
three weeks in gestation; the characters and incidents were hardly out
of the writer’s mind for a waking moment during that time, nor did the
emotional tension of their presence relax. And in between these bouts of
writing there was reading and research in the literature of sixty years
past: newspapers, magazines, pamphlets, works of biography and
reminiscence. The writing of _Manassas_ must have entailed the reading
of five hundred volumes, and the consulting of as many more.
In the meantime Corydon took care of the baby, a youngster of a year
and a half, who seemed to know exactly what he wanted and would yell
himself purple in the face to get it; the inexperienced young parents
sometimes wondered whether he would kill himself by such efforts. During
his incarceration in the city the child had suffered from rickets, and
now a “child specialist” had outlined an extremely elaborate diet, which
took hours of the young mother’s time to prepare. Under it the infant
throve and became yet more aggressive.
Corydon and Thyrsis had wanted nothing but to be together; and now they
had what they wanted--almost too much of it. Now and then they met the
farmer and his wife, a gentle old couple; when they drove to Princeton,
they met the clerks in the stores and in the college library; they met
no one else. Possibly some women could have stood this long ordeal, but
Corydon was not of that tough fiber. While her husband went apart to
wrestle with his angel, she stayed in the tent to wrestle with demons.
She suffered from depression and melancholy, and it was impossible to
know whether the trouble was of the mind or of the body.
Nowadays, every disciple of Freud in Greenwich Village would know what
to tell her. But this was in the days before the invention of the
Freudian demonology. Birth control, as explained by a family doctor, had
failed, and could not be trusted; since another pregnancy would have
meant the death of the young writer’s hopes, there was no safety but in
returning to the original idea of brother and sister. Since caressing
led to sexual impulse, and therefore to discontent, it was necessary
that caressing should be omitted from the daily program, and love-making
be confined to noble words and the reading aloud of Civil War
literature. Thyrsis could do that, being completely absorbed in his
vision. Whether Corydon could do it or not was a superfluous
question--since Corydon _had_ to do it. This was, of course, a cruelty,
and prepared the way for a tragedy.
XII
_Prince Hagen_, after having been declined by seventeen magazines and
twenty-two publishing houses, had been brought out by a firm in Boston
and, as usual, disappointed its author’s hopes. But there came one or
two hundred dollars in royalties, almost enough to pay for the building
of a house. An old carpenter and his son drove from the village, and
Thyrsis worked with them and learned a trade. In two or three weeks they
built a cabin on the edge of the woods, sixteen feet by eighteen, with a
living room across the front and a tiny bedroom and kitchen in the back.
It was roofed with tar paper, and the total cost was two hundred and
fifty-six dollars. Ten per cent of this price was earned by the device
of writing an article about the homemade dwelling and selling it to the
_World’s Work_, for the benefit of other young authors contemplating
escape from civilization. The baby, now two years old, watched the
mighty men at work, and thereafter the problem of his upbringing was
solved; all that was necessary was to put him out of doors with a block
of wood, a hammer, and a supply of nails, and he would bang nails into
the wood with perfect contentment for hours.
But the problem of the young mother was less easy of solution. Winter
came howling from the north and smote the little cabin on the exposed
ridge. Snow blocked the roads, and walking became impossible for a woman
tired by housework. She could get to town in a sleigh, but there was no
place to stay in town with a baby; and what became of the woman’s
diversion of shopping, when the family had only thirty dollars a month
to live on? There occurred the episode of the turkey-red table cover. It
was discovered as a bargain in a notion store, price thirty cents, and
Corydon craved it as one pitiful trace of decoration in their home of
bare lumber. She bought it, but Thyrsis was grim and implacable,
insisting that it be folded up and taken back. Thirty cents was a day’s
food for a family, and if they ran up bills at the stores, how would the
soul of America be saved?
Sickness came, of course. Whether you were rich or poor in America in
those days, you were subject to colds and sore throats, because you knew
nothing about diet, and ate denatured foods out of packages and cans.
Corydon had obscure pains, and doctors gave obscure opinions about “womb
trouble.” She paid a dollar a bottle for Lydia Pinkham’s Vegetable
Compound, which was supposed to remedy “female complaints,” and did
so--by the method of dulling the victim’s sensations with opium. The
time came when Thyrsis awakened one winter night and heard his wife
sobbing, and found her sitting up in bed in the moonlight, with a
revolver in her hand, something she kept for protection while her
husband was working in the college library. She had been trying for
hours to get up courage to put a bullet into her head, but did not have
that courage.
XIII
The grip of dreadful winter was broken, and it was possible to walk once
more. Flowers blossomed in the woods, and also in the two tormented
souls. For the great novel had been completed, and this time it was
promptly accepted. The great firm of Macmillan called it a distinguished
piece of fiction, paid five hundred dollars advance upon it, and agreed
to publish it in the autumn. So it was possible for the little family to
buy a turkey-red table cover, and also a vase to fill with woodland
flowers, and to get the horse and buggy more frequently--one dollar per
afternoon--and drive to town and ramble about the campus and listen to
the students singing their songs at twilight.
A town full of handsome young college men was a not disagreeable place
of residence for the girl-wife of a solitary genius, condemned by grim
fate to celibacy. It was not long before Corydon had met a young
instructor of science who lived only a mile or two away on the ridge. He
came to call; having horse and buggy, he took Corydon driving, and she
would come back from these drives refreshed and enlivened. Life became
still more promising.
Presently the time came when she told her preoccupied husband a quaint
and naïve story of what had happened. The young instructor had admitted,
shyly and humbly, that he was falling somewhat in love with her. It was
innocent and idyllic, quite touching; and Thyrsis was moved--he could
understand easily how anyone might fall in love with Corydon, for he had
done so himself. He was glad it was so noble and high-minded; but he
suggested, very gently, that it would be the part of wisdom not to go
driving with the young man any more. Corydon was surprised and pained by
this; but after a few more drives she admitted that it might indeed be
wiser.
So again she was lonely for a while; until it happened that in the
course of her search for health, she encountered a high-minded and
handsome young surgeon, a Scotchman. Strangely enough, the same thing
happened again; the surgeon admitted, shyly and humbly, that he was
falling somewhat in love with his patient; this time he himself
suggested that it would be wiser if he did not see her any more. Corydon
told Thyrsis all about it, and it was excellent material for a would-be
novelist who lived a retired life and had few experiences of romantic
emotions. But in the end, the novelty wore off--it happened too many
times.
_5_
_Revolt_
I
Floyd Dell, contemplating his biography of myself, which was published
in 1927, asked me to explain the appearance of a social rebel in a
conventional Southern family. I thought the problem over and reported my
psychology as that of a “poor relation.” It had been my fate from
earliest childhood to live in the presence of wealth that belonged to
others.
Let me say at once that I have no idea of blaming my relatives. They
were always kind to me; their homes were open to me, and when I came, I
was a member of the family. Nor do I mean that I was troubled by
jealousy. I mean merely that all my life I was faced by the contrast
between riches and poverty, and thereby impelled to think and to ask
questions. “Mamma, why are some children poor and others rich? How can
that be fair?” I plagued my mother’s mind with the problem, and never
got any answer. Since then I have plagued the ruling-class apologists of
the world with it, and still have no answer.
The other factor in my revolt--odd as it may seem--was the Protestant
Episcopal Church. I really took the words of Jesus seriously, and when I
carried the train of Bishop Potter in a confirmation ceremony in the
Church of the Holy Communion, I thought I was helping to glorify the
rebel carpenter, the friend of the poor and lowly, the symbol of human
brotherhood. Later, I read in the papers that the bishop’s wife had had
fifty thousand dollars’ worth of jewels stolen, and had set the police
to hunting for the thief. I couldn’t understand how a bishop’s wife
could own fifty thousand dollars’ worth of jewels, and the fact stuck in
my mind, and had a good deal to do with the fading away of my churchly
ardor.
From the age of perhaps seventeen to twenty-two, I faced our
civilization of class privilege absolutely alone in my own mind; that is
to say, whatever I found wrong with this civilization, I thought that I
alone knew it, and the burden of changing it rested upon my spirit. Such
was the miracle that capitalist education had been able to perform upon
my young mind during the eleven or twelve years that it had charge of
me. It could not keep me from realizing that the rule of society by
organized greed was an evil thing; but it managed to keep me from
knowing that there was anybody else in the world who thought as I did;
it managed to make me regard the current movements, Bryanism and
Populism, which sought to remedy this evil, as vulgar, noisy, and
beneath my cultured contempt.
I knew, of course, that there had been a socialist movement in Europe; I
had heard vaguely about Bismarck persecuting these malcontents. Also, I
knew there had been dreamers and cranks who had gone off and lived in
colonies, and that they “busted up” when they faced the practical
problems of life. While emotionally in revolt against Mammon worship, I
was intellectually a perfect little snob and tory. I despised modern
books without having read them, and I expected social evils to be
remedied by cultured and well-mannered gentlemen who had been to college
and acquired noble ideals. That is as near as I can come to describing
the jumble of notions I had acquired by combining John Ruskin with
Godkin of the New York _Evening Post_, and Shelley with Dana of the New
York _Sun_.
It happened that I knew about anarchists because of the execution of the
Haymarket martyrs when I was ten years old. In the “chamber of horrors”
of the Eden Musée, a place of waxworks, I saw a group representing these
desperados sitting round a table making bombs. I swallowed these bombs
whole, and shuddered at the thought of depraved persons who inhabited
the back rooms of saloons, jeered at God, practiced free love, and
conspired to blow up the government. In short, I believed in 1889 what
ninety-five per cent of America believes in 1962.
II
Upon my return to New York in the autumn of 1902, after the writing of
_Arthur Stirling_, I met in the office of the _Literary Digest_ a tall,
soft-voiced, and gentle-souled youth by the name of Leonard D. Abbott;
he was a socialist, so he told me, and he thought I might be interested
to know something about that movement. He gave me a couple of pamphlets
and a copy of _Wilshire’s Magazine_.
It was like the falling down of prison walls about my mind; the amazing
discovery, after all those years, that I did not have to carry the whole
burden of humanity’s future upon my two frail shoulders! There were
actually others who understood; who saw what had gradually become dear
to me, that the heart and center of the evil lay in leaving the social
treasure, which nature had created and which every man has to have in
order to live, to become the object of a scramble in the market place, a
delirium of speculation. The principal fact the socialists had to teach
me was that they themselves existed.
One of the pamphlets I read was by George D. Herron; it moved me to deep
admiration, and when I took it to my editor and critic, Paul Elmer More,
it moved him to the warmest abhorrence. I wrote to Herron, telling him
about myself, and the result was an invitation to dinner and a very
curious and amusing experience.
I was in no condition to dine out, for my shoes were down at the heel,
and my only pair of detachable cuffs were badly frayed; but I supposed
that a socialist dinner would be different, so I went to the address
given, a hotel on West Forty-fourth Street. I found myself in an
apartment of extreme elegance, with marble statuary and fine paintings;
I was received by a black-bearded gentleman in evening dress and Windsor
tie--a combination I had never heard of before--and by an elegant lady
in a green velvet Empire gown with a train. One other guest appeared, a
small man with a black beard and mustache trimmed to sharp points, and
twinkling mischievous eyes--for all the world the incarnation of
Mephistopheles, but without the tail I had seen him wearing at the
Metropolitan Opera House. “Comrade Wilshire,” said my host, and I
realized that this was the editor of the magazine I had been reading.
We four went down into the dining room of the hotel, and I noted that
everybody in the room turned to stare at us, and did not desist even
after we were seated. Dinner was ordered, and presently occurred a
little domestic comedy that I, the son of an extremely proper mother,
was able to comprehend. The waiter served our meat, set the vegetables
on the table, and went away to fetch something else. I saw my host look
longingly at a platter of peas that lay before him; I saw his hand start
to move, and then he glanced at his wife, and the wife frowned; so the
hand drew back, and we waited until the waiter came and served us our
peas in proper fashion.
Before long I learned the tragic story of my new friend. A
Congregational clergyman of Grinnell, Iowa, he had converted a rich
woman to socialism, and she had endowed a chair in Grinnell College for
him. Being an unhappily married man, he had fallen in love with the rich
woman’s daughter, and had refused to behave as clergymen were supposed
to behave in such a crisis. Instead, he had behaved like a resident of
Fifth Avenue and Newport; that is to say, he had proposed to his wife
that she divorce him and let him marry the woman he loved. There ensued
a frightful scandal, fanned red hot by the gutter press, and Herron had
to give up his professorship. Here he was in New York, with his new wife
and her mother, preaching to the labor movement instead of to the
churches and the colleges.
An abnormally sensitive man, he had been all but killed by the fury of
the assault upon him, and before long I persuaded him to go abroad and
live and do his writing. He went, but not much writing materialized.
During World War I he swallowed the British propaganda as I did, and
became a confidential agent of Woodrow Wilson in Switzerland, and made
promises to the Germans that Wilson did not keep; so poor Herron died
another death. His book, _The Defeat in the Victory_, told the story of
his despair for mankind.
He was a strange combination of moral sublimity and human frailty. I
won’t stop for details here, but will merely pay the personal tribute
that is due. I owe to George D. Herron my survival as a writer. At the
moment when I was completely exhausted and blocked in every direction,
I appealed to him; I gave him _Arthur Stirling_ and the manuscript of
_Prince Hagen_, and told him about _Manassas_, which I wanted to write.
I had tried the public and got no response; I had tried the leading
colleges and universities, to see if they would give a fellowship to a
creative writer; I had tried eminent philanthropists--all in vain. Now I
tried a socialist, and for the first time found a comrade. Herron
promised me money and kept the promise--altogether about eight hundred
dollars. How I could have lived and written _Manassas_ without that
money I am entirely unable to imagine.
III