withheld from circulation--the same trick they played upon Theodore
Dreiser, but never upon Upton Sinclair, you can wager! If there should
ever be another crop of muckrakers in America, here is a tip they will
find useful: put a clause into your contract to the effect that if at
any time the publisher fails to keep the book in print and sell it to
all who care to buy it, the author may have the right to the use of the
plates, and print and sell an edition of his own. That makes it
impossible for the publisher to “sell you out”; the would-be buyer, when
he reads that clause, will realize that he is buying nothing.
A day in Ogden, Utah, with a horseback ride up the canyon; and one in
Reno, Nevada, walking for hours among the irrigation ditches in the
hills, and then, in the evening, watching the gambling--it was a
wide-open town even in those days. A curious two-faced little city,
with a fine state university, and a fashionable tone set by several
hundred temporary residents from the East, seeking divorces. The
Catholics and the fundamentalists of America have combined to force men
and women to live together when they want to part; so here were the
lawyers and the politicians of this little mining town getting rich, by
selling deliverance to the lucky few who could afford a few weeks’
holiday. Corydon was talking of joining this divorce colony, so I looked
the ground over with personal interest.
II
A day’s journey on the little railroad that runs behind the Sierras,
through the red deserts of Nevada. In the little town of Bishop,
California, the Wilshires met me, and we rode saddle horses up to the
mine, eighteen miles in the mountains. A high valley with Bishop Creek
running through, towering peaks all about, and cold, clear lakes--the
first snows of the year were falling, and trout had quit biting, but I
climbed the peaks, and ate large meals in the dining room with the
miners. The camp was run on a basis of comradeship, with high wages and
plenty of socialist propaganda; we slept in a rough shack and in the
evenings discussed the mine with the superintendent and foreman and
assayer. These were old-time mining men, and they were of one accord
that here was the greatest gold mine in America. You could see the vein,
all the way up the mountainside, and down in the workings you could
knock pieces off the face and bring them up and have them assayed before
your eyes.
But alas, there were complications in quartz mining beyond my
understanding. Most of the vein was low-grade, and it could only be made
to pay if worked on a large scale. Wilshire did not have the capital to
work it in that way, and in the effort to get the money, he bled himself
and thousands of readers of his magazine who had been brought to share
his rosy hopes. I stood by him through that long ordeal, and know that
he did everything--except to turn the mine over to some of the big
capitalist groups that sought to buy it and freeze out the old
stockholders. Ultimately, of course, the big fellows got it.
Socialists ought not to fool with money-making schemes in capitalist
society. I have heard that said a hundred times, and I guess it is
right; but there is something to be noted on the other side. The
socialists of America have never been able to maintain an organ of
propaganda upon a national scale; the country is too big, and the amount
of capital required is beyond their resources. The _Appeal to Reason_
was a gift to them from a real-estate speculator with a conscience, old
J. A. Wayland--may the managers of the next world be pitiful to him.
(His enemies set a trap for him, baited with a woman; he crossed a state
line in her company, which is a prison offense in our pious America, and
when he got caught, he blew out his brains.) _Wilshire’s Magazine_ was a
gift from a billboard advertising man with a sense of humor. So long as
his money lasted, we all took his gift with thanks; if his gold-mining
gamble had succeeded, we would all have made money, and had a still
bigger magazine, and everything would have been lovely. But my old
friend Gay died in a hospital in New York, all crippled up with
arthritis. I missed his fertile mind and his sly, quiet smile.
III
On to Carmel, a town that boasts more scenery to the square mile than
any other place I know; a broad beach, bordered by deep pine woods and
flanked by rocky headlands; at one side a valley, with farms, a river
running through it and mountains beyond. Fifty years ago the place was
owned by a real-estate speculator of the Bohemian Club type; that is to
say, a person with the art bug who would donate a lot to any celebrity
who would confer the honor of his presence. Needless to say, George
Sterling, the Bohemian Club’s poet laureate, had his pick of lots, and a
bungalow on a little knoll by the edge of a wood remote from traffic and
“boosting.”
George was at this time forty, but showed no signs of age. He was tall
and spare, built like an Indian, with a face whose resemblance to Dante
had often been noted. When he was with the roistering San Francisco crew
he drank, but when he was alone he lived the life of an athlete in
training; he cut wood, hunted, walked miles in the mountains, and swam
miles in the sea. A charming companion, tenderhearted as a child, bitter
only against cruelty and greed; incidentally a fastidious poet, aloof
and dedicated.
His friend Arnold Genthe gave me the use of a cottage, and there I lived
alone for two or three months of winter, in peace and happiness unknown
to me for a long time. I had been reading the literature of the health
cranks, and had resolved upon a drastic experiment; I would try the
raw-food diet, for which so much was promised. I ate two meals a day, of
nuts, fruits, olives, and salad vegetables; the only cooked food being
two or three shredded-wheat biscuits or some graham crackers. The diet
agreed with me marvelously, and for the entire period I never had an
ache or pain. So I was triumphant, entirely overlooking the fact that I
was doing none of the nerve-destroying labor of creative writing. I was
reading, walking, riding horseback, playing tennis, meeting with George
and other friends; if I had done that all my life I might never have had
an ache or pain.
In Oakland was the Ruskin Club, an organization of socialist
intellectuals, who wanted to give a dinner and hear me make a speech.
George and I went up to town, and George stopped in the Bohemian Club,
and stood in front of the bar with his boon companions; I stood with him
and drank a glass of orange juice, as is my custom. Then we set out for
the ferry, George talking rapidly, and I listening in a strange state of
uncertainty. I couldn’t understand what George was saying, and I
couldn’t understand why. It wasn’t until we got to Oakland that I
realized what was the matter; my California Dante was drunk. When we got
to the dinner, someone who knew him better than I took him off and
walked him around the block and fed him bromo-seltzers; the socialist
poem he had written for the occasion had to be read by someone else.
I went back to Carmel alone, feeling most sorrowful. I was used to my
poor old father getting drunk, and some of my other men relatives, but
this was the first time I had ever seen a great mind distorted by
alcohol. I wrote George a note, telling him that I was leaving Carmel
because I could not be happy there. George came running over to my place
at once, and with tears in his eyes pleaded forgiveness. He swore that
he had had only two drinks; it was because he had taken them on an empty
stomach. But I knew that sort of drinker’s talk, and it did not move
me. Then he swore that if I would stay, he would not touch another drop
while I was in California. That promise I accepted, and he kept it
religiously. Many a time I have thought my best service to letters might
have been to stay right there the rest of my days!
That Ruskin Club dinner was a quaint affair. Frederick Irons Bamford,
assistant librarian of the Oakland Public Library, had organized the
group and ran it with a firm hand. I think he must have been a
Sunday-school superintendent before he came into the socialist movement;
he shepherded the guests in just that way, telling us exactly what to do
at each stage, and we did it with good-natured laughter. There were
songs printed for us to sing, each at the proper moment; there were
speeches, poems, announcements in due order. “And now,” said our
shepherd, “we will have ten minutes of humor. Will some one kindly tell
a funny story?”
A man arose, and said, “I will tell you a story that nobody can
understand.” The two or three hundred banqueters pricked up their ears,
of course, and prepared to meet the challenge. I have tried out this
“story that nobody can understand” on several audiences, and it always
“goes,” so I give you a chance at it. Said the man at the banquet: “I
wish to explain that this is not one of those silly jokes where you look
for a point but there is no point. This is a really funny story, and you
would laugh heartily if you could understand it, but you can’t. I will
ask you, if you are able to see the point, to raise your hand, so that
we can count you.” He told the story, and a silence followed; all the
people craned their necks to see if there was any hand up. Finally
several did go up, I forget how many. We all had a good laugh, and it
was really ten minutes of humor. The story was as follows:
Mrs. Jones goes into her grocer’s and asks for a dozen boxes of matches.
Says the grocer: “Why, Mrs. Jones, you had a dozen boxes of matches
yesterday!” Says Mrs. Jones: “Oh, yes, but you see, my husband is deaf
and dumb, and he talks in his sleep.”
Raise your hand!
IV
Tramping the hills and forests and beaches of Carmel, riding horseback
over the Seventeen Mile Drive, there began to haunt my brain a vision
of a blank-verse tragedy; the story of a child of the coal mines who is
adopted by rich people and educated, and finally becomes a leader of
social revolution. The first act was set in the depths of the mine, a
meeting between the rich child and the poor one, a fairy scene haunted
by the weird creatures who people the mine boy’s fancy as he sits all
day in the darkness, opening and closing a door to let the muleteams
through. The second act was to happen in utopia, being the young hero’s
vision of a world in which he played the part of a spiritual leader. The
third act was in the drawing room of a Fifth Avenue mansion, whose
windows looked out upon the street where the hero leads the mob to his
own death.
The verses of this to me marvelous drama would come rolling through my
mind like breakers on the Carmel strand; but in the interest of health I
put off writing them, and soon they were gone forever. I suppose it is
natural that I should think of this drama as the greatest thing I ever
had hold of--on the principle that the biggest fish is the one that got
away. Curiously enough, the main feature of the second act was to be an
invention whereby the hero was to be heard by the whole world at once.
Such was my concept of utopia; and now, more than half a century later,
the people of my home town sit all evening and listen to the wonders of
the Hair-Again Hair Restorer, and the bargains in Two-Pants Suits at
Toots, the Friendly Tailor; every now and then there is a “hookup” of a
hundred or two stations, whereby all America sees and hears the
batterings of two bruisers; or maybe the Jazz-Boy Babies, singing; or
maybe the “message” of some politician seeking office.
My rest came to an end, because a stock company in San Francisco
proposed to put on my dramatization of _Prince Hagen_, and the newspaper
reporters came and wrote up my “squirrel diet” and my views on love and
marriage, duly “pepped up”--though I don’t think we had that phrase yet.
I thought there ought to be a socialist drama in America, and I sat down
and wrote three little one-act plays, which required only three actors
and no scenery at all. Feeling so serene in my new-found health, I
resolved to organize a company and show how it could be done. I made a
deal with the head of a school of acting to train my company, going
halves with him on the profits; and for two or three weeks I had all
the comrades of the Bay cities distributing handbills, announcing our
world-beating dramatic sensation.
One of these plays was _The Second-Story Man_. It was later published in
one of the Haldeman-Julius Little Blue Books; every now and then some
actor would write and tell me it was “a wonder,” and would I let him do
it in vaudeville? He would get it ready, and then the masters of the
circuit would say nix on that radical stuff. The second play was a
conversation between “John D” and “the Author” on a California beach,
having to do with socialism and John D’s part in bringing it nearer--by
putting all the little fellows out of business. The third play, _The
Indignant Subscriber_, told about a newspaper reader who lures the
editor of his morning newspaper out in a boat in the middle of a lake,
makes him listen for the first time in his life, and ends by dumping him
overboard and swimming away. In production, the “boat” was made by two
chairs tied at opposite ends of a board; the editor sat in one chair,
and the indignant subscriber in the other, and the oars were two brooms.
The comedy of rowing out into the middle of an imaginary lake while
admiring the imaginary scenery was enjoyed by the audience, and when the
editor was dumped overboard, a thousand social rebels whooped with
delight.
The plays were given seven or eight times, and the theaters were packed;
the enterprise was, dramatically speaking, a success; but, alas, I had
failed to investigate the economics of my problem. The company had
engagements for only two or three nights in the week, whereas the actors
were getting full salaries. Distances were great, and the railway fares
ate up the receipts. If I had started this undertaking in the Middle
West where the company could have traveled short distances on trolley
cars, and if I had done the booking in advance so as to have a full
schedule, there is no doubt that we could have made a success. As it
was, the adventure cost me a couple of thousand dollars.
V
Letters from Corydon informed me that our son had celebrated his winter
in New York by being laid up with tonsillitis; also, Corydon herself had
not found joy in freedom, and was ready to live according to her
husband’s ideas for a while. David Belasco was promising to produce _The
Millennium_ in the following autumn, so I telegraphed Corydon to join me
in Miami, Florida. I took a train to Galveston, Texas, and from there a
steamer to Key West.
My squirrel diet was difficult to obtain on trains, and perhaps I had
overworked on my dramatic enterprise--anyhow, on the steamer across the
Gulf of Mexico I developed a fever. I remember a hot night when it was
impossible to sleep in the stateroom. I went out on deck and tossed all
night in a steamer chair, having for company a member of the fashionable
set of one of our big cities--I forget which, but they are all alike. A
man somewhat older than I, he had just broken with his wife and was
traveling in order to get away from her; he had a bottle in his pocket,
and the contents of others inside him, enough to unlimber his tongue.
He told me about his quarrel with his wife, every word that she had said
and every word that he had said; he told me every crime she had ever
committed, and some of his own; he poured out the grief of being rich
and fashionable in a big American city; he told me about the
fornications and adulteries of his friends--in short, I contemplated a
social delirium with my own half-delirious mind. The element of
phantasmagoria that you find in some of my books may be derived from
that night’s experience, in which fragments of fashionable horror
wavered and jiggled before my mind, vanished and flashed back again,
loomed colossal and exploded in star showers, like human faces,
locomotives, airplanes, and skyscrapers in a futurist moving-picture
film.
At Key West I was taken off the steamer and deposited in a private
hospital, where I stayed for a week; then, somewhat tottery, I met
Corydon and our son at Miami, and we found ourselves a little cottage in
a remote settlement down the coast, Coconut Grove. It was April, and
hot, and I basked in the sunshine; I took long walks over a white shell
road that ran straight west into a flaming sunset, with a forest of tall
pine trees on each side. Incidentally, I slapped innumerable deer flies
on my face and hands and legs. I do not know if they call them that in
Florida--maybe they don’t admit their existence; but deer fly was the
name in the Adirondacks and Canada for those little flat devils, having
half-black and half-white wings, and stinging you like a needle.
We went swimming in a wide, shallow bay, warm as a bathtub; you had to
walk half a mile to get to deep water, and on the soft bottom lay great
round black creatures that scooted away when you came near. I wondered
if it would be possible to catch one, but fortunately I did not try, for
they were the disagreeable sting rays or stingarees. (Having become a
loyal Californian, it gives me pleasure to tell about the entomological
and piscatorial perils of Florida.) The owner of a big beach-front place
tried to sell it to us for five or six thousand dollars, and we talked
of buying it for quite a while. I suppose that during the postwar boom
the owner sold it for a million or two, and it is now the site of a
twenty-story office building full of tenants.
In Coconut Grove, as in Carmel, there was a “literary colony.” I met
some of them, but remember only one: a figure who walked the white shell
roads with me, tall, athletic, brown, and handsome as a Greek
statue--Witter Bynner, the poet. Corydon, smiling, remarked, “Bynner is
a winner.” That compliment, from a qualified expert, I pass on to him,
in exchange for the many fine letters he has written to me about my
books. He is eighty now--and I am eighty-four.
I think it was during these six weeks that I wrote _The Machine_, the
play that forms a sequel to _The Moneychangers_. An odd sort of
trilogy--two novels and a play! But it was the best I could do at the
time. I saw a vision of myself as a prosperous Broadway dramatist, a
licensed court jester of capitalism. But the vision proved to be a
mirage.
VI
For the summer of 1909 I rented a cottage on the shore at Cutchogue,
near the far end of Long Island; beautiful blue water in front of us,
and tall shade trees in the rear. I was carrying on with my raw-food
diet, and my family also was giving it a trial. To aid and abet us we
had a household assistant and secretary who was an even less usual
person than myself. Dave Howatt was his name. He was fair-haired and
rosy-cheeked and he nourished his great frame upon two handfuls of
pecans or almonds, two dishes of soaked raw prunes, and a definite
number of ripe bananas every day--it may have been a dozen or two, I
cannot remember. This blond Anglo-Saxon monkey romped with my son,
oversaw his upbringing, typed my letters, and washed and soaked the
family prunes. A youth after my own heart--vegetarian, teetotaler,
nonsmoker, pacifist, philosophical anarchist, conscientious objector to
capitalism, dreamer, and practitioner of brotherhood--Dave had been at
Bernarr Macfadden’s Physical Culture City, and had known Harry Kemp
since boyhood. Now Dave is living in Cuba, and at last report was loving
it.
But alas for idealistic theories and hopes--the diet that had served me
so marvelously on the shore of the Pacific played the dickens with me on
the shore of the Atlantic. The difference was that now I was doing
creative writing, putting a continuous strain upon brain and nerves, and
apparently not having the energy to digest raw food. Dave Howatt, in his
role of guide and mentor, thought my indigestion was due to my evil
habit of including cooked breadstuff in the diet, so for a while I
changed from a squirrel to a monkey. Then he thought I ate too much, so
I cut the quantity in half, which reduced the size of the balloon inside
me; but it left me hungry all the time, so that when I played tennis, I
would have to stop in the middle and come home and get a prune.
Under these trying conditions I wrote another book, endeavoring to put
the socialist argument into a simple story, which could carry it to
minds that otherwise would never get it. I aimed at the elemental and
naïve, something like _The Vicar of Wakefield_ or _Pilgrims Progress_.
The border line between the naïve and the banal is difficult to draw,
and so authorities differ about _Samuel the Seeker_. Some of my friends
called it a wretched thing, and the public agreed with them. But on the
other hand, Frederik van Eeden, great novelist and poet in his own
language, wrote me a letter of rapture about _Samuel_, considering it my
best. Robert Whitaker, pacifist clergyman who committed the crime of
taking the sixth commandment literally and spent several months in a Los
Angeles jail during World War I, came on a copy of the book at that
time, and he also judged it a success. The publishing firm of Bauza in
Barcelona, desiring to issue an edition of my novels, saw fit to lead
off with _Samuel Busca la Verdad_. So perhaps in the days of the
co-operative commonwealth the pedagogues will discover a new classic,
suitable for required reading in high schools!
VII
By the end of the summer my health was too bad to tell about, and I had
got my thoughts centered on a new remedy, a fast cure. I had been
reading _Physical Culture_ magazine, and I wrote to Bernarr Macfadden,
who was then running a rival institution to the Battle Creek Sanitarium.
He invited me to bring my family and let him have a try at my problem.
Athlete, showman, lecturer, editor, publisher, and health
experimenter--I could make B. M. the subject of an entertaining essay,
but there is not space here. To the high-brows he was a symbol of the
vulgarity and cheapness of America. And it won’t help for me to defend
him, because I may also be on that list. I merely state what Macfadden
did for me--which was to teach me, free, gratis, and for nothing, more
about the true principles of keeping well and fit for my work than all
the orthodox and ordained physicians who charged me many thousands of
dollars for not doing it. Believe me, I went to the best there were in
every field, and while some of them had mercy on a writer, others
treated me like a millionaire. I number many doctors among my friends,
and the better they know me, the more freely they admit the
unsatisfactory state of their work. Leo Buerger, a college mate who
became a leading specialist in New York, summed the situation up when I
mentioned the osteopaths, and remarked that they sometimes made cures.
Said my eminent friend: “They cure without diagnosing, and we diagnose
without curing.”
My visit to Macfadden took place in 1909--back in the dark ages, before
the words “preventive medicine” had ever been joined together. I had
asked doctor after doctor to advise me how to keep well, and not one of
them seemed to know what I was talking about; they attempted to cure my
sickness, and then they sent me away to go on doing the things that had
brought the sickness on. The secrets of natural living were the property
of a little group of adventurous persons known as “health cranks”; and
it has been my pleasure to watch the leading ideas of these “cranks”
being rediscovered one by one by medical authority, and so made known to
the newspapers and the public. It was not Dr. Auguste Rollier of
Switzerland who invented the sun cure; no indeed, the semilunatics of
Physical Culture City were going around in breechclouts, men and women
getting themselves arrested by rural constables, before ever the word
_Nacktkultur_ was imported.
The same thing is true of vitamins, and of the evils of denatured foods,
and the importance of bulk in the diet--we knew all that before Sir
Arbuthnot Lane ever addressed a medical congress. As to fasting, I stood
the ridicule of my medical friends for twenty years, and then in the
files of the _Journal of Metabolism_ I found the records of laboratory
tests upon humans as well as dogs proving that the effect of a prolonged
fast is a permanent increase in the metabolic rate--which is the same
thing as rejuvenation, and exactly what we “health cranks” have claimed.
VIII