THIS change from insecurity to being an accredited newspaper man was
delightful. For a very little while, a year or so, it seemed to open up
a clear straight course which if followed energetically must lead me to
great heights. Of course I found that beginners were very badly paid.
Salaries ranged from fourteen to twenty-five dollars for reporters; and
as for those important missions about which I had always been reading,
they were not even thought of here. The best I could learn of them in
this office was that they did exist—on some papers. Young men were still
sent abroad on missions, or to the West or to Africa (as Stanley), but
they had to be men of proved merit or budding genius and connected with
papers of the greatest importance. How could one prove oneself to be a
budding genius?
Salary or no salary, however, I was now a newspaper man, with the
opportunity eventually to make a name for myself. Having broken with the
family and with my sister C——, I was now quite alone in the world and
free to go anywhere and do as I pleased. I found a front room in Ogden
Place overlooking Union Park (in which area I afterwards placed one of
my heroines). I could walk from here to the office in a little over
twenty minutes. My route lay through either Madison Street or Washington
Boulevard east to the river, and morning and night I had ample
opportunity to speculate on the rancid or out-at-elbows character of
much that I saw. Both Washington and Madison, from Halsted east to the
river, were lined with vile dens and tumbledown yellow and gray frame
houses, slovenly, rancorous, unsolved and possibly unsolvable misery and
degeneracy, whole streets of degraded, dejected, miserable souls. Why
didn’t society do better by them? I often asked of myself then. Why
didn’t they do better by themselves? Did God, who, as had been drummed
into me up to that hour was all wise, all merciful, omnipresent and
omnipotent make people so or did they themselves have something to do
with it? Was government to blame, or they themselves? Always the
miseries of the poor, the scandals, corruptions and physical
deteriorations which trail folly, weakness, uncontrolled passion
fascinated me. I was never tired of looking at them, but I had no
solution and was not willing to accept any, suspecting even then that
man is the victim of forces over which he has no control. As I walked
here and there through these truly terrible neighborhoods, I peered
through open doors and patched and broken windows at this wretchedness
and squalor, much as a man may tread the poisonous paths of a jungle,
curious and yet fearsome.
It was this nosing and speculative tendency, however, which helped me
most, as I soon found. Journalism, even in Chicago, was still in that
discursive stage which loved long-winded yarns upon almost any topic.
Nearly all news stories were padded to make more of them than they
deserved, especially as to color and romance. All specials were being
written in imitation of the great novelists, particularly Charles
Dickens, who was the ideal of all newspaper men and editors as well as
magazine special writers (how often have I been told to imitate Charles
Dickens in thought and manner!). The city editors wanted not so much
bare facts as feature stories, color, romance; and, although I did not
see it clearly at the time, I was their man.
Write?
Why, I could write reams upon any topic when at last I discovered that I
could write at all. One day some one—Maxwell, I suppose—hearing me speak
of what I was seeing each day as I came to or went from the office to my
room, suggested that I do an article on Chicago’s vilest slum, which lay
between Halsted and the river, Madison and Twelfth streets, for the next
Sunday issue, and this was as good as meat and drink for me. I visited
this region a few times between one and four in the morning, wandering
about its clattering boardwalks, its dark alleys, its gloomy mire and
muck atmosphere. Chicago’s wretchedness was never utterly tame,
disconsolate or hang-dog, whatever else it might be; rather, it was
savage, bitter and at times larkish and impish. The vile slovens,
slatterns, prostitutes, drunkards and drug fiends who infested this
region all led a strident if beggarly or horrible life. Saloon lights
and smells and lamps gleaming smokily from behind broken lattices and
from below wooden sidewalk levels, gave it a shameless and dangerous
color. Accordions, harmonicas, jew’s-harps, clattering tin-pan pianos
and stringy violins were forever going; paintless rotting shacks always
resounded with a noisy blasphemous life between twelve and four; oaths,
foul phrases; a Hogarthian shamelessness and reconciliation to filth
everywhere—these were some of the things that characterized it. Although
there was a closing-hour law there was none here as long as it was
deemed worth while to keep open. Only at four and five in the morning
did a heavy peace seem to descend, and this seemed as wretched as the
heavier vice and degradation which preceded it.
In the face of such a scene or picture as this my mind invariably paused
in question. I had been reared on dogmatic religious and moral theory,
or at least had been compelled to listen to it all my life. Here then
was a part of the work of an omnipotent God, who nevertheless tolerated,
apparently, a most industrious devil. Why did He do it? Why did nature,
when left to itself, devise such astounding slums and human muck heaps?
Harlots in doorways or behind windows or under lamp-posts in these
areas, smirking and signaling creatures with the dullest or most
fox-like expression and with heavily smeared lips and cheeks and
blackened eyebrows, were ready to give themselves for one dollar, or
even fifty cents, and this in the heart of this budding and prosperous
West, a land flowing with milk and honey! What had brought that about so
soon in a new, rich, healthy, forceful land—God? devil? or both working
together toward a common end? Near at hand were huge and rapidly
expanding industries. The street-cars and trains, morning and evening,
were crowded with earnest, careful, saving, seeking, moderately
well-dressed people who were presumably anxious to work and lay aside a
competence and own a home. Then why was it that these others lived in
such a hell? Was God to blame? Or society?
I could not solve it. This matter of being, with its differences, is
permanently above the understanding of man, I fear.
I smiled as I thought of my father’s attitude to all this. There he was
out on the west side demanding that all creatures of the world return to
Christ and the Catholic Church, see clearly, whether they could or not,
its grave import to their immortal souls; and here were these sows and
termagants, wretched, filthy, greasy. And the men low-browed, ill-clad,
rum-soaked, body-racked! Mere bags of bones, many of them, blue-nosed,
scarlet-splotched, diseased—if God should get them what would He do with
them? On the other hand, in the so-called better walks of life, there
were so many strutting, contentious, self-opinionated swine-masters
whose faces were maps of gross egoism and whose clothes were almost a
blare of sound.
I think I said a little something of all this in the first newspaper
special I ever wrote. It seemed to open the eyes of my superiors.
“You know, Theodore,” Maxwell observed to me as he read my copy the next
morning between one and three, “you have your faults, but you do know
how to observe. You bring a fresh mind to bear on this stuff; anyhow I
think maybe you’re cut out to be a writer after all, not just an
ordinary newspaper man.” He lapsed into silence, and then at periods as
he read he would exclaim: “Jesus Christ!” or “That’s a hell of a world!”
Then he would fall foul of some turgid English and with a kind of
malicious glee would cut and hack and restate and shake his head
despairingly, until I was convinced that I had written the truckiest rot
in the world. At the close, however, he arose, dusted his lap, lit a
pipe and said: “Well, I think you’re nutty, but I believe you’re a
writer just the same. They ought to let you do more Sunday specials.”
And then he talked to me about phases of the Chicago he knew,
contrasting it with a like section in San Francisco, where he had once
worked.
“A hell of a fine novel is going to be written about some of these
things one of these days,” he remarked; and from now on he treated me
with such equality that I thought I must indeed be a very remarkable
man.
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