it completely naked. There were big lots, and there were little lots;
there were corner lots--these had higher value for residences, but did
they have more oil under them? Cliques were formed, and tempers
blazed--they never quite came to blows, but almost. And there sat a
novelist, watching, listening, and storing away material for what he
knew was going to be a great long novel. He listened to the lawyers and
to the oilmen who came to make offers; they told their troubles. They
wanted the lease as cheaply as possible, and they had no idea they were
going to be in a novel with the title _Oil!_--including the exclamation
point. The book was going to be taken by a book club, translated into
twenty-seven languages, and read all over the world--but all they wanted
was to get that lease more cheaply.
One of them offered in exchange a goat ranch somewhere down to the
south, and so we drove there; I looked at the hills, and the goats, and
the people who raised them. A crude country fellow, he too was going to
be translated into twenty-seven languages, of which he had never even
heard the names.
I told Craig what I was doing, of course; and it pleased her because it
would keep me out of mischief for a year. She got tired of the oil game
herself and sold her lots for ten thousand dollars each.
Into the novel I put not merely the oil business but Hollywood, where
the wealthy playboys go; also the labor struggle, which is all over
America. It made a long novel, 527 closely printed pages; when it was
published, a kind Providence inspired the chief of police of Boston to
say that it was indecent, and to bar it from the city. After that, of
course, the publishers couldn’t get the books printed fast enough; and
they besieged me to go to Boston and make a fight. “Would you trade on
the indecency of your book?” demanded Craig; and I answered that I
wished to trade on its decency. So she let me go.
In Grand Central Station when I took the train for Boston, I learned
that the bookstand there couldn’t keep a supply of the books; everyone
bound for Boston took copies for his friends. When I reached the city, I
interviewed the chief of police, an elderly Catholic gentleman who told
me which passages he objected to. I had those passages blacked out in
some copies and sold them on the street--the fig-leaf edition, a rare
collector’s item now. What shocked the Catholic gentleman most was the
passage in which an older sister mentions the subject of birth control
to a younger brother. I recall the soft voice of the old chief,
pleading: “Now surely, Mr. Sinclair, nobody should write a thing like
that.” I told him I earnestly wished that someone had done me that favor
when I was young. I believed in birth control, and practiced it, and I
am sure that the salvation of the human race will depend on it--and
soon.
XII
During my stay in Boston I paid a visit to Bartolomeo Vanzetti, who had
been in prison at that time for about six years, and whom I had visited
not long after his arrest. He was one of the wisest and kindest persons
I ever knew, and I thought him as incapable of murder as I was. After he
and Nicola Sacco had been executed, I returned to Boston and gathered
material for a two-volume novel dealing with their case.
I had developed what the doctor called a plantar wart under one heel, so
it was hard for me to walk; but I got myself into a Pullman car, and
when I reached Boston I hobbled around the streets with a crutch,
talking with everyone who had been close to the case.
I had a story half formed in my mind. Among Mrs. Gartz’s rich friends I
had met an elderly lady, socially prominent in Boston; Mrs. Burton was
her name, and she enjoyed telling me odd stories about the tight little
group of self-determined aristocrats who ruled the social life of the
proud old city. Judge Alvan T. Fuller and President A. Lawrence Lowell
of Harvard belonged to that group--and Bartolomeo Vanzetti didn’t. Mrs.
Burton had come to California, seeking a new life, and I delighted her
by saying that she would be my heroine--“the runaway grandmother,” I
would call her.
For my story I needed to know not merely the Italian laborers, who were
easy to meet, but the aristocrats, who were difficult. Soon after my
arrival, still on a crutch, I read that the proprietor of a great Boston
industry had died and was to be buried from his home. It was a perfect
setup: a great mill in a valley, the cottages of the workers all about
it, and the mansion of the owner on the height above. I went to that
mansion and followed the little river of guests into the double parlor
for the funeral service. When one of the sons of the family came up to
me, I told him I had great respect for his father, and he said I was
welcome. So I watched the scene of what I knew would be my opening
chapter.
On my way back on a streetcar I was recognized by a reporter from the
_Evening Transcript_, the paper then read by everybody who was anybody
in and about Boston. He had come to write up the funeral, and he
included me. I shall never forget the horror on the face of a proper
Boston couple when I told them of my attendance at that funeral. Maybe
it will shock the readers of this book. I can only say that if you are a
novelist you think about “copy” and not about anybody’s feelings, even
your own. If I were talking to you about that scene, I wouldn’t say,
“Was it a proper thing to do?” I would say, “Did I get that scene
correct?” When I went back to the little beach cottage, I wrote a
two-volume novel in which all the scenes were correct; and the novel
will outlive me.
On the way home I stopped at Denver for a conference with Fred Moore,
who had been the original attorney for Sacco and Vanzetti, and had been
turned away when one of the Boston aristocracy, W. G. Thompson,
consented to take over the appeals. Fred was bitter about it, of course,
and it might be that this had influenced his opinion. He told me he
thought there was a possibility that Sacco was involved in the payroll
holdup. He thought there was less chance in the case of Vanzetti. There
were anarchists who called themselves “direct actionists,” and Fred knew
of things they had done. I pointed out to him that if Sacco had been
guilty and Vanzetti innocent it meant that Vanzetti had given his life
to save the life of some comrade.
Of course, I did not know and could only guess. I wrote the novel that
way, portraying Vanzetti as I had known him and as his friends had known
him. Some of the things I told displeased the fanatical believers; but
having portrayed the aristocrats as they were, I had to do the same
thing for the anarchists. The novel, _Boston_, ran serially in _The
Bookman_ and was published in two handsome volumes that went all over
the world.
Just recently I had the honor of a visit from Michael Musmanno, who as a
young lawyer came late into the Sacco-Vanzetti case and gave his heart
as well as his time and labor to an effort to save the lives of those
two men. Being Italian himself, he felt that he knew them, and he became
firmly assured of their innocence. Now he has become a much-respected
justice of the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania; but he still feels as he
did, and poured out his soul as if he were addressing the jury of a
generation ago. The bitter old Boston judge and the grim governor and
the cold-hearted president of Harvard all came to life, and I found
myself sitting again in the warden’s reception room at Charlestown
prison, in converse with the wise and gentle working-class philosopher
named Bartolomeo Vanzetti. I had sent him several of my books, and he
had been permitted to have them; I wish that I could have had a
phonograph to take down his groping but sensitive words.
_12_
_More Causes--and Effects_
I
We had made too many friends and incurred too many obligations in
Pasadena; so we found a cottage down on the ocean front at Alamitos Bay,
Long Beach, and moved there. During both of my trips to Boston, Craig
stayed alone in the little beach cottage and never minded it. Somehow
she felt safe, and the waves on the other side of the boardwalk lulled
her to sleep. She had become fascinated with the problem of her own
mind, and studied it with the help of scores of books that I had got for
her. I still have more than a hundred volumes on psychology and
philosophy and psychic research that she read and marked--Bergson,
William James, William McDougall, Charcot, Janet--a long list of the
best. She had had psychic experiences herself in her girlhood and was
tormented with the desire to understand these hidden forces of the mind.
All the time that I was writing _Oil!_ and _Boston_, I was also helping
her to find out what her gift actually was--and to guess what it meant.
The result was the book called _Mental Radio_.
The procedure we adopted was the simplest possible: I would make half a
dozen drawings on slips of paper and put each inside an envelope. Then I
would bring them to Craig, who was lying on her couch. She would lay one
of them over her solar plexus--having read somewhere that this might be
the center of the unknown forces. We didn’t know whether that was so or
not; but the solar plexus was as good as any other place. I would sit
quietly and keep watch so as to be able to say that she did not
cheat--although, of course, I knew that she had never cheated in her
life. She had only one obsession--she wanted to know for certain if
these forces were _real_.
She would decide that something that had come into her mind was _the_
reality, and she would take pencil and pad and make a drawing. Then we
would open the envelope and compare the two. The results were amazing to
us both.
I had been reading about telepathy and clairvoyance since my youth. At
Columbia I had studied with James Hyslop, who had been a patient psychic
researcher; then there was the Unitarian minister who had performed my
first marriage--Minot J. Savage--who told me he had seen and talked with
a ghost who said that he had just been drowned off the coast of Britain.
The results in Craig’s case settled the matter for us, and settles it
for anyone who is unwilling to believe that we are a pair of imbeciles
as well as cheats. There is no other alternative, for we took every
possible precaution against any blunder, and there is no way to account
for what happened except to say that a drawing completely invisible to
the eyes can make an impression on the mind by some other means.
It was not merely from my drawings that Craig got these impressions. She
got them from the mind of a professional medium, whom she employed to
experiment with her. I have given the details in _Mental Radio_. I
printed several thousand copies of the book, and the experiments it
describes have stayed unexplained now for thirty years. It is worth
noting also that _Mental Radio_ has just been reissued--this time by a
publisher of scientific books exclusively. This is significant.
Professor William McDougall, who had been head of the department of
psychology first at Oxford and then at Harvard, wrote a preface to the
book. When he came to see us at the little beach cottage, he told us
that he had just accepted a position as head of the department of
psychology at Duke University; he had a fund at his disposal and
proposed to establish a department of parapsychology to investigate
these problems. He said he had taken the liberty of bringing several
cards in his pocket, and he would like to be able to say that Craig had
demonstrated her power to him.
Craig, always a high-strung person, hated to be submitted to tests
because they made her nervous; but her respect for McDougall was great,
and she said she would do her best. She sat quietly and concentrated.
Then she said that she had an impression of a building with stone walls
and narrow windows, and the walls were covered with something that
looked like green leaves. McDougall took from an inside pocket a
postcard of a building at Oxford University covered with ivy. There were
two or three other successes that I have forgotten. The outcome was that
McDougall said he was satisfied, and would go to Duke and set up the new
department. He did so, with results that all the world knows.
I was interested to observe the conventional thinker’s attitude toward a
set of ideas that he does not wish to accept. _Mental Radio_ contained
210 examples of successes in telepathy--partial successes and complete
successes. To the average orthodox scientist, the idea was
inconceivable, and it just wasn’t possible to tell him anything that he
knew in advance couldn’t have happened. On the other hand, the lovely
personality of Mary Craig is shown all through the book, and I cannot
recall that any scientist ever accused her of cheating. He would go out
of his way to think of something that _might_ have happened, and then he
would assume that it _had_ happened; it _must_ have happened, and that
settled the matter. He would entirely overlook the fact that I had
mentioned that same possibility and had stated explicitly that it
_hadn’t_ happened; that we had made it absolutely impossible for it _to
have_ happened.
I won’t be unkind enough to name any scientist. One suggested solemnly
that it might have been possible for Mary Craig to have gotten an idea
of the drawing by seeing the movements of my hand at a distance. But in
the book I plainly stated that I never made the drawing without going
into another room and closing the door. That kind of oversight has been
committed again and again by the critics.
* * * * *
While I am on this subject I will venture to slip ahead for several
years and tell of one more experiment. Arthur Ford, the medium, was
paying a visit to Los Angeles, and I asked him to come out to our home
and see if his powers had waned. (He had never refused an invitation
from us--and he had never let us pay him a dollar.) He said he would
come, and Craig was so determined to make a real test that she wouldn’t
even let me invite our friends by telephone. Our line might be tapped!
She wrote a letter to Theodore Dreiser, and one to Rob Wagner, editor of
_Script_, who was a skeptic but wanted to be shown.
When evening came, my orders were to wait outside for Arthur and take
him around behind the house so that he might not see who came in. This I
faithfully did; so there were Dreiser and his wife, and Rob Wagner and
his wife, and Craig’s sister, Dolly, and her husband. They were seated
in a semidark room; and when I brought Arthur in, he went straight to
the armchair provided, leaned back in it with his eyes toward the
ceiling, and covered his eyes with a silk handkerchief, which is his
practice.
Presently came the voice that Ford calls Fletcher. “Fletcher” speaks
quietly and without a trace of emotion. He said there was a spirit
present who had been killed in a strange accident. He had been crossing
a street when a team of runaway horses came galloping, and the center
pole had struck him in the chest. And then there was a spirit victim of
another strange accident. This man had been in a warship when one of the
guns had somehow backfired and killed him. And then there was a
newspaperman and quite a long conversation about various matters that I
have forgotten. I told the full details in an article for the _Psychic
Observer_ but do not have a copy at hand.
At that point in the séance there came a tap on the door, and Mrs. Gartz
came in with one of her nephews. She had known nothing about the séance;
being highly antagonistic, she had not been invited. Fletcher said,
“There is a strong Catholic influence here, but there will be a
divorce.”
That ended the affair, possibly because of Mrs. Gartz’s hostile
attitude. The lights were turned up, and the various guests spoke in
turn. Bob Irwin, Craig’s brother-in-law, said that his young brother had
been killed by exactly such a runaway team; Rob Wagner said that his
brother had been killed in the Navy in a gun accident. Theodore Dreiser
had been a journalist, but he denied that he had ever known such a man
or heard of any such events as had come out in the séance. Mrs. Gartz’s
nephew said that he was a Catholic, but there would surely not be any
divorce.
So ended the evening; but the day after the next there came to Craig a
letter from Helen Dreiser saying that she was embarrassed to tell us
that Theodore had been drinking and had slept through the séance and not
heard a word. When she had repeated to him the various statements, he
admitted that he knew such a man and that the events mentioned had
occurred.
The predicted divorce did not occur until a month or two later, when the
wife of the Gartz nephew divorced him.
And now all the skeptics can put their wits to work and find out how
Arthur Ford got all those facts about people he had never met, and about
whom we had made such efforts at secrecy. I don’t like to be fooled any
more than the next man, but I agree with Professor McDougall and
Professor Rhine that it is the duty of science to investigate such
events and find out what are the forces by which they are brought about.
Just by way of fun, I will add that Professor McDougall established his
department of parapsychology, and Professor Rhine has carried it on; one
of the things they have proved is that when Negroes shooting craps snap
their fingers and cry “Come seven! Come eleven!” they really are
influencing the dice. Rhine’s investigators have caused millions of dice
to be thrown mechanically, and observers have willed certain numbers to
come, and the numbers have come. The chances for the successes having
happened accidentally are up in the billions. Most embarrassing--but it
happens!
II
Much of the story of my life is a story of the books I wrote. I read a
great many, too, and among those I found interesting was a history of
ancient Rome--because of the resemblance between the political and
economic circumstances of two thousand years ago and those I knew so
well in my native land. So I wrote _Roman Holiday_, the story of a rich
young American who amuses himself driving a racing automobile. He meets
with an accident and wakes up in the days when he had been driving
horses in a chariot race in the arena of ancient Rome. Everything is
familiar to him, and he goes back and forth between the two ages of
history, equally at home in both. This novel was a foreshadowing of my
tragic drama, _Cicero_--although, rather oddly, this realization did not
come to me until just recently, when _Cicero_ was produced.
III
My next book handled the problem of prohibition, of special interest to
me ever since I had seen my father and two of my uncles die as
alcoholics. The whole country was boiling with excitement over the
struggle between the “wets” and the “drys,” so I put my youthful self
into a long novel, with all the characters I had known and the battles I
had fought against the saloon-keepers and the crooked politicians. _The
Wet Parade_ I called it. It was made into a very good motion picture,
with an illustrious cast that included Robert Young, Walter Huston,
Myrna Loy, Lewis Stone, and Jimmie Durante as the comic prohibition
agent.
Of course, the “wet paraders” I knew, headed by H. L. Mencken, had all
kinds of fun with me. But many of my oldest and best friends have been
caught in that parade, and I have had to watch them go down to early
graves. Jack London was one of them. I have told of his appearance and
his rousing speech at a mass meeting in New York City back in the days
when we were launching the Intercollegiate Socialist Society. The next
day I had lunch with him. The occasion was completely spoiled for me
because Jack was drinking and I wasn’t, and he amused himself by teasing
me with his exploits--the stories he afterward put into his book, _John
Barleycorn_. Later, when I went to live in Pasadena, Jack urged me now
and again to come up to Glen Ellen, his wonderful estate. I did not go
because George Sterling told me that Jack’s drinking had become tragic.
Jack took his own life at the age of forty.
And, alas, George Sterling followed his example. Shortly before George’s
death, Mencken, who was in California, told me that he had seen George
at the Bohemian Club in San Francisco and that he was in a terrible
state after another of his drinking bouts. A day or two later George
took poison--but Mencken learned nothing from that dreadful episode.
On one of my trips to New York I was asked to make a funeral speech over
the body of a kind and generous publisher, Horace Liveright. I remember
his weeping, black-clad mother and, sitting apart from her, the lovely
young actress who had been living in his home in Hollywood when my wife
and I went there to dinner, and who had taken drink for drink with him.
I remember walking downtown with Theodore Dreiser after the funeral. We
discussed the tragedy of drinking, and I knew the anguish that
Theodore’s wife was suffering. But he learned nothing from the funeral
or from my arguments.
IV
As I write there comes the news of the death of Ernest Hemingway. He
received an almost fatal wound in World War I, and this apparently
centered all his mind upon the idea of death. It became an obsession
with him--something not merely to write about but to inflict upon living
creatures. His idea of recreation was to kill large wild animals in
Africa, and half-tame bulls in Mexico, and small game in America, and
great fish in the sea. He wrote about all these experiences with
extraordinary vividness and became the most popular writer in America,
and perhaps in the world. When he died, the _Saturday Review_ gave
thirty pages to his personality and his writings, almost two thirds of
the reading matter in that issue. I read a good part of it, and found
myself in agreement with just one paragraph, by a contributor:
To the present critic, who is amazed by and genuinely admires the
lean virtuosity of Mr. Hemingway, the second most astonishing thing
about him is the narrowness of his selective range. The people he
observes with fascinated fixation and then makes live before us are
real, but they are all very much alike: bullfighters, bruisers,
touts, gunmen, professional soldiers, prostitutes, hard drinkers,
dope fiends.
Nowhere in the thirty pages did I find any mention of the fact that all
this extraordinary writing was done under the stimulus of alcohol. A
decade or so ago there was published in _Life_ an article by a staff man
who had been permitted to accompany Hemingway and a well-known motion
picture actress about the city of New York for a couple of typical days.
The writer described Hemingway as unable to go for an hour without a
drink of liquor. As a result of this practice his health broke, and
after a long siege in hospitals he put himself out of his misery by
putting both barrels of his beautiful shotgun into his mouth and blowing
off the top of his head.
V
And then the mail brings a volume containing 867 pages and weighing
several pounds. It is _Sinclair Lewis: An American Life_, by Mark
Schorer. I have known about the preparation of this “monumental study”
for several years. It is a Book-of-the-Month-Club selection, and so will
be widely read; the story of a man whom I knew for almost half a
century, whom I admired and helped when I could, whose books I praised
when I could, and whose tragic ending I mourned because I had tried to
prevent it and failed.
I have told how Hal Lewis showed up as a runaway student from Yale,
expecting to find our Helicon Home Colony more interesting. He met
there, not in an academic way but socially, such people as William James
and John Dewey; Jo Davidson, the sculptor, who was later to do his bust;
and Sadakichi Hartmann, art authority, whom Lewis had to help put out
because he (not Lewis) was drunk. Also I remember that Professor W. P.
Montague of Columbia University taught Lewis how to play billiards, and
Professor William Noyes of Teachers College taught him how to tend the
furnace. Edwin Björkman, translator of Strindberg, told him about that
strange playwright, and Edwin’s wife, a suffragette and editor, later
became Lewis’ boss. As I have already noted, Edith Summers, my
secretary, became Lewis’ sweetheart at Helicon Hall.