CHAPTER I_A Book About Myself

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A BOOK ABOUT MYSELF

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BOOKS BY

THEODORE DREISER

SISTER CARRIE

JENNIE GERHARDT

THE FINANCIER

THE TITAN

THE GENIUS

A TRAVELER AT FORTY

A HOOSIER HOLIDAY

PLAYS OF THE NATURAL AND SUPERNATURAL

THE HAND OF THE POTTER

FREE AND OTHER STORIES

TWELVE MEN

HEY RUB-A-DUB-DUB

A BOOK ABOUT MYSELF

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A BOOK ABOUT MYSELF

THEODORE DREISER

Boni and Liveright

Publishers New York

Boni and Liveright, Inc.

——————

First edition November, 1922

Second edition December, 1922

Printed in the United States of America

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A BOOK ABOUT MYSELF

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A BOOK ABOUT MYSELF

CHAPTER I

DURING the year 1890 I had been formulating my first dim notion as to

what it was I wanted to do in life. For two years and more I had been

reading Eugene Field’s “Sharps and Flats,” a column he wrote daily for

the Chicago _Daily News_, and through this, the various phases of life

which he suggested in a humorous though at times romantic way, I was

beginning to suspect, vaguely at first, that I wanted to write, possibly

something like that. Nothing else that I had so far read—novels, plays,

poems, histories—gave me quite the same feeling for constructive thought

as did the matter of his daily notes, poems, and aphorisms, which were

of Chicago principally, whereas nearly all others dealt with foreign

scenes and people.

But this comment on local life here and now, these trenchant bits on

local street scenes, institutions, characters, functions, all moved me

as nothing hitherto had. To me Chicago at this time seethed with a

peculiarly human or realistic atmosphere. It is given to some cities, as

to some lands, to suggest romance, and to me Chicago did that hourly. It

sang, I thought, and in spite of what I deemed my various troubles—small

enough as I now see them—I was singing with it. These seemingly drear

neighborhoods through which I walked each day, doing collecting for an

easy-payment furniture company, these ponderous regions of large homes

where new-wealthy packers and manufacturers dwelt, these curiously

foreign neighborhoods of almost all nationalities; and, lastly, that

great downtown area, surrounded on two sides by the river, on the east

by the lake, and on the south by railroad yards and stations, the whole

set with these new tall buildings, the wonder of the western world,

fascinated me. Chicago was so young, so blithe, so new, I thought.

Florence in its best days must have been something like this to young

Florentines, or Venice to the young Venetians.

Here was a city which had no traditions but was making them, and this

was the very thing that every one seemed to understand and rejoice in.

Chicago was like no other city in the world, so said they all. Chicago

would outstrip every other American city, New York included, and become

the first of all American, if not European or world, cities.... This

dream many hundreds of thousands of its citizens held dear. Chicago

would be first in wealth, first in beauty, first in art achievement. A

great World’s Fair was even then being planned that would bring people

from all over the world. The Auditorium, the new Great Northern Hotel,

the amazing (for its day) Masonic Temple twenty-two stories high, a

score of public institutions, depots, theaters and the like, were being

constructed. It is something wonderful to witness a world metropolis

springing up under one’s very eyes, and this is what was happening here

before me.

Nosing about the city in an inquiring way and dreaming half-formed

dreams of one and another thing I would like to do, it finally came to

me, dimly, like a bean that strains at its enveloping shell, that I

would like to write of these things. It would be interesting, so I

thought, to describe a place like Goose Island in the Chicago River, a

mucky and neglected realm then covered with shanties made of upturned

boats sawed in two, and yet which seemed to me the height of the

picturesque; also a building like the Auditorium or the Masonic Temple,

that vast wall of masonry twenty-two stories high and at that time

actually the largest building in the world; or a seething pit like that

of the Board of Trade, which I had once visited and which astonished and

fascinated me as much as anything ever had. That roaring, yelling,

screaming whirlpool of life! And then the lake, with its pure white

sails and its blue water; the Chicago River, with its black, oily water,

its tall grain elevators and black coal pockets; the great railroad

yards, covering miles and miles of space with their cars.

How wonderful it all was! As I walked from place to place collecting I

began betimes to improvise rhythmic, vaguely formulated word-pictures or

rhapsodies anent these same and many other things—free verse, I suppose

we should call it now—which concerned everything and nothing but somehow

expressed the seething poetry of my soul and this thing to me. Indeed I

was crazy with life, a little demented or frenzied with romance and

hope. I wanted to sing, to dance, to eat, to love. My word-dreams and

maunderings concerned my day, my age, poverty, hope, beauty, which I

mouthed to myself, chanting aloud at times. Sometimes, because on a

number of occasions I had heard the Reverend Frank W. Gunsaulus and his

like spout rocket-like sputterings on the subjects of life and religion,

I would orate, pleading great causes as I went. I imagined myself a

great orator with thousands of people before me, my gestures and

enunciation and thought perfect, poetic, and all my hearers moved to

tears or demonstrations of wild delight.

After a time I ventured to commit some of these things to paper,

scarcely knowing what they were, and in a fever for self-advancement I

bundled them up and sent them to Eugene Field. In his column and

elsewhere I had read about geniuses being occasionally discovered by

some chance composition or work noted by one in authority. I waited for

a time, with great interest but no vast depression, to see what my fate

would be. But no word came and in time I realized that they must have

been very bad and had been dropped into the nearest waste basket. But

this did not give me pause nor grieve me. I seethed to express myself. I

bubbled. I dreamed. And I had a singing feeling, now that I had done

this much, that some day I should really write and be very famous into

the bargain.

But how? How? My feeling was that I ought to get into newspaper work,

and yet this feeling was so nebulous that I thought it would never come

to pass. I saw mention in the papers of reporters calling to find out

this, or being sent to do that, and so the idea of becoming a reporter

gradually formulated itself in my mind, though how I was to get such a

place I had not the slightest idea. Perhaps reporters had to have a

special training of some kind; maybe they had to begin as clerks behind

a counter, and this made me very somber, for those glowing business

offices always seemed so far removed from anything to which I could

aspire. Most of them were ornate, floreate, with onyx or chalcedony wall

trimmings, flambeaux of bronze or copper on the walls, imitation

mother-of-pearl lights in the ceilings—in short, all the gorgeousness of

a sultan’s court brought to the outer counter where people subscribed or

paid for ads. Because the newspapers were always dealing with signs and

wonders, great functions, great commercial schemes, great tragedies and

pleasures, I began to conceive of them as wonderlands in which all

concerned were prosperous and happy. I painted reporters and newspaper

men generally as receiving fabulous salaries, being sent on the most

urgent and interesting missions. I think I confused, inextricably,

reporters with ambassadors and prominent men generally. Their lives were

laid among great people, the rich, the famous, the powerful; and because

of their position and facility of expression and mental force they were

received everywhere as equals. Think of me, new, young, poor, being

received in that way!

Imagine then my intense delight one day, when, scanning the “Help

Wanted: Male” columns of the Chicago _Herald_, I encountered an

advertisement which ran (in substance):

Wanted: A number of bright young men to assist in the business

department during the Christmas holidays. Promotion possible.

Apply to Business Manager between 9 and 10 a.m.

“Here,” I thought as I read it, “is just the thing I am looking for.

Here is this great paper, one of the most prosperous in Chicago, and

here is an opening for me. If I can only get this my fortune is made. I

shall rise rapidly.” I conceived of myself as being sent off the same

day, as it were, on some brilliant mission and returning, somehow,

covered with glory.

I hurried to the office of the _Herald_, in Washington Street near Fifth

Avenue, this same morning, and asked to see the business manager. After

a short wait I was permitted to enter the sanctuary of this great

person, who to me, because of the material splendor of the front office,

seemed to be the equal of a millionaire at least. He was tall, graceful,

dark, his full black whiskers parted aristocratically in the middle of

his chin, his eyes vague pools of subtlety. “See what a wonderful thing

it is to be connected with the newspaper business!” I told myself.

“I saw your ad in this morning’s paper,” I said hopefully.

“Yes, I did want a half dozen young men,” he replied, beaming upon me

reassuringly, “but I think I have nearly enough. Most of the young men

that come here seem to think they are to be connected with the _Herald_

direct, but the fact is we want them only for clerks in our free

Christmas gift bureau. They have to judge whether or not the applicants

are impostors and keep people from imposing on the paper. The work will

only be for a week or ten days, but you will probably earn ten or twelve

dollars in that time——” My heart sank. “After the first of the year, if

you take it, you may come around to see me. I may have something for

you.”

When he spoke of the free Christmas gift bureau I vaguely understood

what he meant. For weeks past, the _Herald_ had been conducting a

campaign for gifts for the poorest children of the city. It had been

importuning the rich and the moderately comfortable to give, through the

medium of its scheme, which was a bureau for the free distribution of

all such things as could be gathered via cash or direct donation of

supplies: toys, clothing, even food, for children.

“But I wanted to become a reporter if I could,” I suggested.

“Well,” he said, with a wave of his hand, “this is as good a way as any

other. When this is over I may be able to introduce you to our city

editor.” The title, “city editor,” mystified and intrigued me. It

sounded so big and significant.

This offer was far from what I anticipated, but I took it joyfully. Thus

to step from one job to another, however brief, and one with such

prospects, seemed the greatest luck in the world. For by now I was

nearly hypochondriacal on the subjects of poverty, loneliness, the want

of the creature comforts and pleasures of life. The mere thought of

having enough to eat and to wear and to do had something of paradise

about it. Some previous long and fruitless searches for work had marked

me with a horror of being without it.

I bustled about to the _Herald’s_ Christmas Annex, as it was called, a

building standing in Fifth Avenue between Madison and Monroe, and

reported to a brisk underling in charge of the doling out of these

pittances to the poor. Without a word he put me behind the single long

counter which ran across the front of the room and over which were

handled all those toys and Christmas pleasure pieces which a loud

tomtoming concerning the dire need of the poor and the proper Christmas

spirit had produced.

Life certainly offers some amusing paradoxes at times, and that with

that gay insouciance which life alone can muster and achieve when it is

at its worst anachronistically. Here was I, a victim of what Socialists

would look upon as wage slavery and economic robbery, quite as worthy, I

am sure, of gifts as any other, and yet lined up with fifteen or twenty

other economic victims, ragamuffin souls like myself, all out of jobs,

many of them out at elbows, and all of them doling out gifts from

eight-thirty in the morning until eleven and twelve at night to people

no worse off than themselves.

I wish you might have seen this chamber as I saw it for eight or nine

days just preceding and including Christmas day itself. (Yes; we worked

from eight a.m. to five-thirty p.m. on Christmas day, and very glad to

get the money, thank you.) There poured in here from the day the bureau

opened, which was the morning I called, and until it closed Christmas

night, as diverse an assortment of alleged poverty-stricken souls as one

would want to see. I do not say that many of them were not deserving; I

am willing to believe that most of them were; but, deserving or no, they

were still worthy of all they received here. Indeed when I think of the

many who came miles, carrying slips of paper on which had been listed,

as per the advice of this paper, all they wished Santa Claus to bring

them or their children, and then recall that, for all their pains in

having their minister or doctor or the _Herald_ itself visé their

request, they received only a fraction of what they sought, I am

inclined to think that all were even more deserving than their reward

indicated.

For the whole scheme, as I soon found in talking with others and seeing

for myself how it worked, was most loosely managed. Endless varieties of

toys and comforts had been talked about in the paper, but only a few of

the things promised, or vaguely indicated, were here to give—for the

very good reason that no one would give them for nothing to the

_Herald_. Nor had any sensible plan been devised for checking up either

the gifts given or the persons who had received them, and so the same

person, as some of these recipients soon discovered, could come over and

over, bearing different lists of toys, and get them, or at least a part

of them, until some clerk with a better eye for faces than another would

chance to recognize the offender and point him or her out. Jews, the

fox-like Slavic type of course, and the poor Irish, were the worst

offenders in this respect. The _Herald_ was supposed to have kept all

applications written by children to Santa Claus, but it had not done so,

and so hundreds claimed that they had written letters and received no

answer. At the end of the second or third day before Christmas it was

found necessary, because of the confusion and uncertainty, to throw the

doors wide open and give to all and sundry who looked worthy of whatever

was left or “handy,” we, the ragamuffin clerks, being the judges.

And now the clerks themselves, seeing that no records were kept and how

without plan the whole thing was, notified poor relatives and friends,

and these descended upon us with baskets, expecting candy, turkeys,

suits of clothing and the like, but receiving instead only toy wagons,

toy stoves, baby brooms, Noah’s Arks, story books—the shabbiest mess of

cheap things one could imagine. For the newspaper, true to that canon of

commerce which demands the most for the least, the greatest show for the

least money, had gathered all the odds and ends and left-overs of toy

bargain sales and had dumped them into the large lofts above, to be

doled out as best we could. We could not give a much-desired article to

any one person because, supposing it were there, which was rarely the

case, we could not get at it or find it; yet later another person might

apply and receive the very thing the other had wanted.

And we clerks, going out to lunch or dinner (save the mark!), would seek

some scrubby little restaurant and eat ham and beans, or crullers and

coffee, or some other tasteless dish, at ten or fifteen cents per head.

Hard luck stories, comments on what a botch the _Herald_ gift bureau

was, on the strange characters that showed up—the hooded Niobes and

dusty Priams, with eyes too sunken and too dry for tears—were the order

of the day. Here I met a young newspaper man, gloomy, out at elbows, who

told me what a wretched, pathetic struggle the newspaper world

presented, but I did not believe him although he had worked in Chicago,

Denver, St. Paul.

“A poor failure,” I thought, “some one who can’t write and who now

whines and wastes his substance in riotous living when he has it!”

So much for the sympathy of the poor for the poor.

But the _Herald_ was doing very well. Daily it was filling its pages

with the splendid results of its charity, the poor relieved, the

darkling homes restored to gayety and bliss.... Can you beat it? But it

was good advertising, and that was all the _Herald_ wanted.

Hey, Rub-a-dub! Hey, Rub-a-dub-dub!

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