greeted _The Metropolis_, the critics declared that it was less easy to
find out about “society” than about the stockyards. But the truth is
that I had not the slightest trouble in going among New York’s smart set
at this time. Many authors had stepped up the golden ladder, and my feet
were on it. My radical talk didn’t hurt me seriously; it was a novelty,
and the rich--especially the young ones--object to nothing but boredom.
Also there are some of the rich who have social consciences, and are
aware that they have not earned what they are consuming. You will meet a
number of such persons in the course of this story.
The reason why _The Metropolis_ is a poor book is not that I did not
have the material but that I had too much. Also, I wrote it in a hurry,
under most unhappy circumstances. The career of a novelist is enough for
one man, and founding colonies and starting reform organizations and
conducting political campaigns had better be left to persons of tougher
fiber. It took me thirty years to learn that lesson thoroughly; meantime
I lost the reading public that _The Jungle_ had brought me.
I did my writing about smart society in a shack that had walls full of
bedbugs. I made cyanogen gas, a procedure almost as perilous to me as to
the bugs. I worked through the spring and summer, and when the New York
_Herald_ offered me my own price to make another investigation of the
stockyards, I resisted the temptation and turned the job over to Ella
Reeve Bloor. The result was a great story “killed,” as I have previously
mentioned.
I was having my customary indigestion and headaches, the symptoms of
overwork that I would not heed. Also, in the middle of the summer,
Corydon suffered an attack of appendicitis that very nearly ended the
troubles between us. A country doctor diagnosed her illness as
menstrual, and when, after several days, I called a surgeon from New
York, he said it was too late to operate. So there lay my youthful dream
of happiness, at the gates of death for a week or two. I had then an
experience that taught me something about the powers of suggestion,
which are so close to magical; I saved Corydon’s life, and she knew it,
and told me so afterward.
I literally pulled her back through those gates of death. She was lying
in a semistupor, completely worn out by pain that had lasted more than a
week; she had given up, when she heard my voice. I did not pray for
her--I did not know how to do that--but I prayed to her, urging her to
live, to keep holding on; and that voice came to her as something
commanding, stirring new energies in her soul. When modern
psychotherapists state that we die because we want to die, I understand
exactly what they mean.
Corydon was taken to the Battle Creek Sanitarium to recuperate,
accompanied by her mother and an elderly surgeon friend. How easy it is
for human beings to accumulate needs! Four summers back Corydon and
Thyrsis had lived with their baby in a tent in the woods and had thought
themselves fortunate to have an income of thirty dollars a month assured
them; but now Corydon needed sixty dollars a week to stay at a
leisure-class health resort, and half as much for her mother’s board,
and a private physician into the bargain. The child had to have a
nursemaid, and a relative to take care of him in the Point Pleasant
cottage; while the father had to flee to the Adirondack wilderness to
get away from the worry and strain of it all! Such is success in
America, the land of unlimited possibilities.
VII
To one of the most remote lakes in the Adirondacks I portaged a canoe,
found a deserted open camp, stowed my duffle, and set to work to finish
_The Metropolis_. My only companions were bluejays and squirrels by day,
and a large stout porcupine by night. I lived on rice, beans, prunes,
bacon, and fish--no fresh fruit or vegetables--and wondered why I
suffered from constipation and headaches. I was beginning to grope
around in the field of diet reform and decided that beans, rice, and
prunes were not the solution to my problem!
To the lake came a party of young people, a dozen of them, evidently
wealthy, with guides and expensive paraphernalia. They had a campfire
down the shore and sang songs at night, and the lonely writer would
paddle by and listen in the darkness, and think about his sick wife, who
also sang. Then one afternoon several of the young men came calling; one
of the party had got into a bee’s nest and was badly stung. Did I have
anything to help? They invited me to join them at their campfire. I did
so, and met a jolly party, and chatted with several pretty girls. One
of them, sitting next to me, asked what I did, and I admitted that I
wrote books. That always interests people; they think it is romantic to
be a writer--not knowing about the constipation and the headaches.
I always tried to avoid giving my name, because I had come to know all
possible things that people would say to the author of _The Jungle_. But
these people asked the name, and when I gave it, I became aware of some
kind of situation; there was laughing and teasing, and finally I learned
what I had blundered into--the girl at my side was a daughter of the
head of J. Ogden Armour’s legal staff!
We fought our battles over again, and I learned, either from this girl
or from someone in the party, that Mr. Armour had been shut up with his
lawyers for the greater part of three days and nights, insisting upon
having me indicted for criminal libel, and hearing the lawyers argue
that he could not “stand the gaff.” I suppose that must have happened in
more than one office since I started my attack on American big business.
The secret is this: you must be sure that the criminal has committed
worse crimes than the ones you reveal. I have been sued for libel only
once in my life, and that was when an eccentric lady pacifist named
Rosika Schwimmer took exception to my playful account of her activities;
this incident I will tell about later.
_The Metropolis_ was done, and the manuscript shipped off to Doubleday,
Page and Company. Meantime I went over into Keene Valley and paid a
visit of a week or two to Prestonia Mann Martin, wealthy utopian, who
for many years had turned her Adirondack camp into a place of summer
discussions--incidentally making her guests practice co-operation in
kitchen and laundry. Her husband was an Englishman, one of the founders
of the Fabian Society. When I met them, they were both on the way toward
reaction; Prestonia was writing a book to prove that we had made no
progress in civilization since the Greeks.
Both she and her husband became good, old-fashioned tories; the last
time I met him was just before World War I, and we got into an argument
over the results to be expected from woman suffrage. “Anyhow,” said he,
“it’s not worth bothering about, because neither you nor I will ever see
it.” I offered to wager that he would see it in New York State within
ten years, and John Martin thought that was the funniest idea he had
ever heard. But he saw it in about five years.
At this camp was James Graham Stokes, then president of our
Intercollegiate Socialist Society. World War I came, and he began
drilling a regiment in one of the New York armories, preparing to kill
any of his former comrades who might attempt an uprising. His wife, Rose
Pastor, at one time a cigar worker in New York, had tried with gentle
patience to fit herself into the leisure-class world. When the war came,
she gave it up and became a Bolshevik, and her marriage went to wreck.
Also at the camp was Harriet Stanton Blatch, suffragist, and Edward E.
Slosson, whom I had met as one of the editors of the _Independent_. He
became a well-known popularizer of science and started the Science
Service. We had much to argue about.
VIII
Doubleday, Page and Company declined _The Metropolis_. They said it
wasn’t a novel at all and urged me to take a year to rewrite it. I had
further sessions with Walter H. Page and observed that amiable gentleman
again believing what other people told him. The bright young men in his
business office were certain that New York society wasn’t as bad as I
portrayed it; when I told them what I knew, I observed a certain chill.
I attributed it to the fact that their magazine, the _World’s Work_, was
edited and published in New York, and its revenue came from the
advertising of banks and trust companies that I exposed in my book. It
was one thing to tell about graft in Chicago, a thousand miles away, and
another to tell about it in one’s own financial family. Doubleday, Page
had made a fortune out of _The Jungle_ and used it to become rich and
reactionary. I bade them a sad farewell.
The _American Magazine_, then owned and run by reformers, read the
manuscript and agreed to feature parts of it as a serial. I left the
book manuscript with Moffat, Yard and Company, and went out to join my
wife at the Battle Creek Sanitarium. I stayed there for three weeks or
so and tried their cure. I listened to Dr. W. K. Kellogg set forth the
horrors of a carnivorous diet, and as a result I tried vegetarianism
for the next three years. I felt better while I was taking treatments at
the “San,” so I thought I had solved my problem of how to overwork with
impunity.
Michael Williams, one of our Helicon Hall colonists, now out of a job,
came out to the “San” to write it up for some magazine, and he and I saw
a great deal of each other at this time. Mike was a Canadian of Welsh
descent who had had a hard life, beginning as porter in a big department
store, and contracting both tuberculosis and the drink habit. He had
cured himself of the latter and was trying to cure himself of the former
by Battle Creek methods. Incidentally, he was an ardent socialist, and a
writer of no little talent; I thought he would serve the cause and was
glad to help him. We devised a brilliant scheme for a vacation and a
book combined; we would get a couple of covered wagons and take our two
families across the continent on a tour, living the outdoor life and
seeing America close at hand. A “literary caravan” we would call it,
“Utopia on the Trek.” The _American Magazine_ fell violently for the
idea and promised to make a serial out of our adventures.
But that was a summer plan, and it was now November. We decided to take
our families to Bermuda for the winter, and there write a book about our
health experiences. Moffat, Yard were very keen about _The Metropolis_
and its prospects; I, remembering the advice of my newspaper friend that
I should “learn to charge,” extracted an advance of five thousand
dollars on royalty account. So the path of life stretched rosy before
Mike and me. We would have a two-family utopia amid the coral reefs of
Bermuda; I would pay the bills, and Mike would repay me out of his
future earnings. “It will be a debt of honor,” he said, proudly, and
repeated it every now and then.
We went to New York, the first stage of our journey, just in the wake of
a great event. Wall Street had been in the midst of a frenzy of
speculation, but “somebody asked for a dollar,” and there was the panic
of 1907. I have told in _The Brass Check_ the peculiar circumstances
under which I came to get the inside story of this event. Suffice it
here to say that I had the biggest news story ever sprung in America,
certainly at any rate in my time. I was able not merely to charge but to
prove that the elder Morgan had deliberately brought on that panic as a
means of putting the independent trust companies out of business. The
_American Magazine_ editors wanted the story and signed a contract for
it, but in the course of two or three weeks they got cold feet and
begged me to let them off, which I did.
IX
Behold Mike and me in a fairyland set with jewels, in the remotest part
of the Bermudas, far from the maddening crowd of tourists. The house is
white limestone, set upon a rocky shore overlooking a little bay, behind
which the sun sets every evening. Out on a point in front of us stands
an old ruin of a mansion, deserted, but having a marvelous mahogany
staircase inside so that we can assure the children it was once the home
of a pirate chief. The water is brilliant azure, shading to emerald in
the shallows; over it flies the man-o’-war bird, snow-white, with a long
white feather trailing like a pennant. The sun shines nearly always.
There is a tennis court, surrounded by a towering hedge of oleanders in
perpetual blossom. There are roses, and a garden in which a colored boy
raises our vegetarian vegetables. The house is wide and rambling, with
enough verandas so that both halves of this two-family utopia can sleep
outdoors.
Mike is working on his autobiographical novel--it was published under
the title of _The High Romance_. I am writing _The Millennium_, a play,
and we write our health book together--I won’t tell you the name of
that, having changed my ideas to some extent. I have brought a secretary
with me, and Mike has half her time, the salary being added to that
“debt of honor” of which we keep a careful account. There is a Swedish
governess who takes care of my son and the two Williams children
impartially; also Mike’s wife has an elderly friend to assist her. There
is Minnie to do the housework for all of us--Irish Minnie who danced
with the college professors at Helicon Hall. Our utopia contains a total
of twelve persons, and my five thousand dollars exactly suffices for the
fares and the six months’ expenses.
Then _The Metropolis_ is published and sells eighteen thousand copies,
barely justifying the advance; so there are no more royalties, and I am
stuck in a strange land, without money to get the family home! Mike
volunteers to go to New York and find a publisher for the health book,
our common property; he will get an advance and remit me half. He goes,
and places the book with the Frederick A. Stokes Company; he collects an
advance and puts it all into his own pocket--and I am stuck again!
I borrow money from somebody and come home. Mike and his family go to
California, and he takes up his old drinking habits and gets another
hemorrhage; the next thing I hear, he has sought refuge in the religion
of his childhood. He told all that in _The High Romance_; Saint Theresa
came to him, and proved her presence by making him smell a rose as he
was walking down the street. That was a miracle, and by it Mike knew he
was one of the elect. That any hypnotist could have worked a hundred
such miracles--could have caused Mike to smell all the flowers that
bloom in the spring, tra-la-la--that had nothing to do with the case.
X
So ended my attempt to raise up and train a new socialist writer. It is
an ugly story to tell on a man--the only mean story in this amiable
book, you may note. Nothing could hire me to tell it--except for a later
development, which you have still to hear.
Ten years passed, and Mike was all but forgotten. I started a magazine
and in it published _The Profits of Religion_, dealing with the churches
by the method of economic interpretation. Mike, being now a champion of
Roman Catholicism--his publishers were introducing him as “one of the
most influential lay Catholics of America”--sallied forth to destroy my
book. That was all right; I grant every man a right to disagree with
me--the more the merrier, it is all advertising. But Mike found his task
difficult, for the reason that my statements in _The Profits of
Religion_ are derived from Catholic sources--devotional works, papal
decrees, pastoral letters, editorials in church papers--everything with
the holy imprimatur, _nihil obstat_.
So, instead of attacking the book, Mike chose to attack its author. He
accused me of being a writer for gain, and headed his review with the
title “A Prophet for Profit”! I have heard that charge many times, but
it did seem to me there was one person in America who was barred from
making it--and that was my old friend and pensioner, Michael Williams.
Since he made it, and published it, it seems to me that the consequences
are upon his own head. And that is why I tell the story here. I never
saw him again, and never will--for he is dead.
XI
The satiric comedy _The Millennium_, which I had in my suitcase, made a
hit with the leading stage impresario of that time, David Belasco. He
agreed to produce it on an elaborate scale in the course of the coming
winter. He was fighting the “trust” and had two big theaters in New
York, where he put on two big productions every year. But after keeping
me waiting for a year, and making many promises, he suddenly made peace
with his enemies; he then wanted small shows that could be put on the
road, so he threw over _The Millennium_ and produced _The Easiest Way_,
by Eugene Walter, which had only eight characters. So vanished one more
of those dreams that haunted me for ten years or more--earning a lot of
money and starting another colony.
I got an advance from a publisher, and took my family to Lake Placid in
the Adirondacks, rented a little camp, and settled down to the task of
weaving into a novel my story of how the elder J. P. Morgan had caused
the panic of the previous autumn. _The Moneychangers_ was the title. It
was to be a sequel to _The Metropolis_. I was planning a trilogy to
replace the one that had died with _Manassas_. My plans were still
grandiloquent.
When I was gathering material for the book, Lincoln Steffens introduced
me to two of my most valuable informants: Samuel Untermyer and James B.
Dill. Dill had been the most highly paid corporation lawyer in Wall
Street, and had recently been appointed Chief Justice of the Supreme
Court in New Jersey. So he was free and could talk; and the stories he
told me you wouldn’t believe. I will tell only one. He took me out to
his home in New Jersey to spend the night, and when we came into the
dining room, he said, “Make a note of this table and that window with
the double French doors, I will tell you a story about them.”
This was the story. There was a lawsuit involving several million
dollars, and Dill came into possession of a document that would decide
the case. He wanted to make certain that this document could not be
stolen. He was certain that a desperate attempt would be made to steal
it, so he put two or three typists to work all day, and they made a
total of twenty-one copies; he sent his office employees out to rent
safe-deposit boxes in various banks in and around Wall Street. He sealed
the copies in twenty-one envelopes, and one of them contained the
original document. He alone knew which bank got the original. He took
one of the copies out to his home that evening and said to his butler,
“The house will be burglarized tonight, but don’t pay any attention to
it. I want them to get what they come for.”
He set the sealed envelope on the corner of his dining-room table; sure
enough, the next morning he found that the French windows had been
opened and the envelope taken.
When he reached his office in the morning he called up the firm of the
other side in the case and said, “By now you know what we have; our
terms are two and one-half million dollars”--or whatever the amount
was--and they settled on that basis. I used the story in one of my
novels and, of course, everybody said it was preposterous; but it was
told to me by James B. Dill.
_The Moneychangers_ did not come up to my hopes, mainly because of the
unhappy situation in which I was living. My health made continuous
application impossible. I beg the reader’s pardon for referring to these
matters, but they are a factor in the lives of authors. I am fortunate
in being able to promise a happy ending to the story--I mean that I have
solved the problem of doing my work and keeping entirely well. I will
tell the secrets in due course--so read on!
For recreation I climbed the mountains, played tennis, and swam in the
lake. I slept in an open camp under the pine trees and conformed to all
the health laws I knew. We had Irish Minnie with us, and also a woman
friend of Corydon’s, a young student whom she had met at Battle Creek,
very religious, a Seventh-day Adventist. Corydon was trying various
kinds of mental healing, and I was hoping for anything to keep her happy
while I went on solving the problems of the world.
For myself I had good company that summer; a man whom I had met two
years before, at the time _The Jungle_ was published. An Englishman
twelve years older than I, he had come to New York and sent me a letter
of introduction from Lady Warwick, our socialist countess. H. G. Wells
was the traveler’s name, and I had been obliged to tell him that I had
never heard of him. He sent me his _Modern Utopia_, inscribing it
charmingly, “To the most hopeful of Socialists, from the next most
hopeful.” I found it a peerless book, and wrote him a letter that he
accepted as “a coronation.” I had him with me that summer in the
Adirondacks by the magic of eight or ten of his early romances, the most
delightful books ever made for a vacation. _Thirty Strange Stories_ was
one title, and I smiled patronizingly, saying that a man could write one
strange story or maybe half a dozen--but thirty! Yet there they were,
and every one was strange, and I knew that I had met a great imaginative
talent. Since then I have heard the highbrow critics belittle H. G.
Wells; but I know that with Bernard Shaw he constituted a major period
in British letters.
_The Moneychangers_ was published, and my revelations made a sensation
for a week or two. The book sold about as well as _The Metropolis_, so I
was ahead again--just long enough to write another book. But it seemed
as if my writing days were at an end; I was close to a nervous
breakdown, and had to get away from a most unhappy domestic situation
and take a complete rest. Corydon wanted to have an apartment of her own
in New York, and solve her own problems. My friend Gaylord Wilshire now
had a gold mine, high up in the eastern slope of the Sierra mountains;
also George Sterling, the poet, was begging me to come to Carmel and
visit him; so I set out over the pathway of the argonauts in a Pullman
car.
_7_
_Wandering_
I
It was my first trip across the American continent; and I stopped first
in Chicago, to visit the stockyards after four years. There was a big
hall, and a cheering crowd--the socialists having got up a mass meeting.
In front of the platform sat a row of newspaper reporters, and I told
them of the New York _Herald_’s investigation of conditions in the
presumably reformed yards. The investigation had been made a year
before, and nothing about it had appeared in the Chicago press. A good
story, was it not?--I asked the reporters at the press tables, and they
nodded and grinned. Yes, it was a good story; but not a line about
either story or meeting appeared in any capitalist paper of Chicago next
morning.
The next stop was Lawrence, Kansas, to meet the coming poet of America,
as I considered him. He was a student at the state university, and I had
discovered his verses in the magazines and had written to him; he had
sent me batches of manuscript and poured out his heart. A real genius
this time--one who wrote all day and all night, in a frenzy, just as I
had done. He had gone to the university a bare-footed tramp, and now
slept in an attic over a stable, wrapped in a horse blanket. He was so
eager to meet me that he borrowed money, bought a railroad ticket, and
boarded my train a couple of hours before it reached Lawrence; we had
lunch in the diner--the first time in the poet’s life, he assured me.
When we got to town, I was escorted about and shown off, and begged to
talk to a group of the students and even a professor or two. It was a
great hour for the “box-car poet”; I being an object of curiosity, and
he being host and impresario. We went for a walk in the country, and he
told me his troubles. He had never had anything to do with a woman, but
here the girls flirted with him--none of them in earnest, because he was
a poor devil, and poetry was a joke compared with money. Now and then he
was on the verge of suicide, but he’d be damned if he’d give them that
much satisfaction. Such was Harry Kemp in his far-off day of glory; I
was thirty, and he twenty-five, and the future was veiled to us both. So
eager was he for my time that he borrowed more money and rode another
two or three hours on the train with me.
Denver, and Ben Lindsey, judge of the Children’s Court; a new idea and a
new man. I watched the court at work and sat in at a session of the
Judge’s friends in the YMCA. He was in the midst of one of those
political fights that came every year or two, until finally the “beast”
got him. He revealed to me that he had written an account of his war
with the organized corruption of Denver. I took the manuscript, read it
on the train, and telegraphed _Everybody’s Magazine_ about it; they sent
out Harvey O’Higgins and so got another big serial, “The Beast and the
Jungle.”