THIS world of newspaper men who now received me on terms of social
equality, who saw life from a purely opportunistic, and yet in the main
sentimentally imaginative, viewpoint broadened me considerably and
finally liberated me from moralistic and religionistic qualms. So many
of them were hard, gallant adventurers without the slightest trace of
the nervousness and terror of fortune which agitated me. They had been
here, there, everywhere—San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York, Calcutta,
London. They knew the ways of the newspaper world and to a limited
extent the workings of society at large. The conventional-minded would
have called them harsh, impracticable, impossible, largely because they
knew nothing of trade, that great American standard of ability and
force. Most of them, as I soon found, were like John Maxwell, free from
notions as to how people were to act and what they were to think. To a
certain extent they were confused by the general American passive
acceptance of the Sermon on the Mount and the Beatitudes as governing
principles, but in the main they were nearly all mistrustful of these
things, and of conventional principles in general.
They did not believe, as I still did, that there was a fixed moral order
in the world which one contravened at his peril. Heaven only knows where
they had been or what they had seen, but they misdoubted the motives,
professed or secret, of nearly every man. No man, apparently, was
utterly and consistently honest, that is, no man in a powerful or
dominant position; and but few were kind or generous or truly
public-spirited. As I sat in the office between assignments, or
foregathered with them at dinner or at midnight in some one of the many
small restaurants frequented by newspaper men, I heard tales of all
sorts of scandals: robberies, murders, fornications, incendiarisms, not
only in low life but in our so-called high life. Most of these young men
looked upon life as a fierce, grim struggle in which no quarter was
either given or taken, and in which all men laid traps, lied,
squandered, erred through illusion: a conclusion with which I now most
heartily agree. The one thing I would now add is that the brigandage of
the world is in the main genial and that in our hour of success we are
all inclined to be more or less liberal and warm-hearted.
But at this time I was still sniffing about the Sermon on the Mount and
the Beatitudes, expecting ordinary human flesh and blood to do and be
those things. Hence the point of view of these men seemed at times a
little horrific, at other times most tonic.
“People make laws for other people to live up to,” Maxwell once said to
me, “and in order to protect themselves in what they have. They never
intend those laws to apply to themselves or to prevent them from doing
anything they wish to do.”
There was a youth whose wife believed that he did not drink. On two
occasions within six weeks I was sent as envoy to inform his wife that
he had suddenly been taken ill with indigestion and would soon be home.
Then Maxwell and Brady would bundle him into a hack and send him off,
one or two of us going along to help him into his house. So solemnly was
all this done and so well did we play our parts that his wife believed
it for a while—long enough for him to pull himself together a year later
and give up drinking entirely. Another youth boasted that he was
syphilitic and was curing himself with mercury; another there was whose
joy it was to sleep in a house of prostitution every Saturday night, and
so on. I tell these things not because I rejoice in them but merely to
indicate the atmosphere into which I was thrown. Neither sobriety nor
virtue nor continence nor incontinence was either a compelling or
preventive cause of either success or failure or had anything to do with
true newspaper ability; rather men succeeded by virtue of something that
was not intimately related to any of these. If one could do anything
which the world really wanted it would not trouble itself so much about
one’s private life.
Another change that was being brought about in me was that which related
to my personal opinion of myself, the feeling I was now swiftly
acquiring that after all I amounted to something, was somebody. A
special or two that I wrote, thanks largely to Maxwell’s careful
schooling, brought me to the forefront among those of the staff who were
writing for the Sunday supplement. A few news stories fell to my lot and
I handled them with a freedom which won me praise on all sides. Not that
I felt at the time that I was writing them so well or differently as
that I was most earnestly concerned to state what I saw or felt or
believed. I even essayed a few parables of my own, mild, poetic
commentaries on I scarcely recall what, which Maxwell scanned with a
scowling eye at first but later deigned to publish, affixing the
signature of Carl Dreiser because he had decided to nickname me “Carl.”
This grieved me, for I was dying to see my own name in print; but when
they appeared I had the audacity to call upon the family and show them,
boasting of my sudden rise in the world and saying that I had used the
name Carl as a compliment to a nephew.
During this time I was taking a rather lofty hand with Alice because of
my great success, unmindful of the fact that I had been boasting for
months that I was connected with one of the best of the local papers and
telling her that I did not think it so wonderful. But now I began to
think that I was to be called to much higher realms, and solemnly asked
myself if I should ever want to marry. A number of things helped to
formulate this question in me. For one thing, I had no sooner been
launched into general assignments than one afternoon, in seeking for the
pictures of a group of girls who had taken part in some summer-night
festival, I encountered one who seemed to be interested in me, a little
blonde of about my own age, very sleek and dreamy. She responded to my
somewhat timid advances when I called on her and condescended to smile
as she gave me her photograph. I drew close to her and attempted a
flirtation, to which she was not averse, and on parting I asked if I
might call some afternoon or evening, hoping to crowd it in with my
work. She agreed, and for several Sundays and week-nights I was put to
my utmost resources to keep my engagements and do my work, for the
newspaper profession that I knew, tolerated neither week-days nor
Sundays off. I had to take an assignment and shirk it in part or
telephone that I was delayed and could not come at all. Thus early even
I began to adopt a cavalier attitude toward this very exacting work.
Twice I took her to a theater, once to an organ recital, and once for a
stroll in Jackson Park; by which time she seemed inclined to yield to my
blandishments to the extent of permitting me to put my arms about her
and even to kiss her, protesting always that I was wanton and forward
and that she did not know whether she cared for me so much or not.
Charming as she was, I did not feel that I should care for her very
much. She was beautiful but too lymphatic, too carefully reared. Her
mother, upon hearing of me, looked into the fact of whether I was truly
connected with the _Globe_ and then cautioned her daughter to be careful
about making new friends. I saw that I was not welcome at that house and
thereafter met her slyly. I might have triumphed in this case had I been
so minded and possessed of a little more courage, but as I feared that I
should have to undergo a long courtship with marriage at the end of it,
my ardor cooled. Because she was new to me and comfortably stationed and
better dressed than either Alice or N—— had ever been, I esteemed her
more highly, made invidious comparisons from a material point of view,
and wished that I could marry some such well-placed girl without
assuming all the stern obligations of matrimony.
During the second month of my work on the _Globe_ there arrived on the
scene a man who was destined to have a very marked effect on my career.
He was a tall, dark, broad-shouldered, slender-legged individual of
about forty-five or fifty, with a shock of curly black hair and a burst
of smuggler-like whiskers. He was truly your Bret Harte gold-miner type,
sloven, red-eyed at times, but amazingly intelligent and genial,
reminding me not a little of my brother Rome in his best hours. He wore
a long dusty, brownish-black frockcoat and a pair of black trousers
specked, gummed, shined and worn by tobacco, food, liquor and rough
usage. His feet were incased in wide-toed shoes of the old
“boot-leather” variety, and the swirl of Jovian locks and beard was
surmounted by a wide-brimmed black hat such as Kentucky colonels were
wont to affect. His nose and cheeks were tinted a fiery red by much
drinking, the nose having a veinous, bulbous, mottled and strawberry
texture.
This man was John T. McEnnis, a well-known middle-West newspaper man of
that day, a truly brilliant writer whose sole fault was that he drank
too much. Originally from St. Louis, the son of a well-known politician
there, he had taken up journalism as the most direct avenue to fame and
fortune. At forty-five he found himself a mere hanger-on in this
profession, tossed from job to job because of his weakness, his skill
equaled if not outrivaled by that of younger men! It was commonly said
that he could drink more and stand it better than any other man in
Chicago.
“Why, he can’t begin to work unless he’s had three or four drinks to
limber him up,” Harry Dunlap once said to me. “He has to have six or
seven more to get through till evening.” He did not say how many were
required to carry him on until midnight, but I fancy he must have
consumed at least a half dozen more. He was in a constant state of
semi-intoxication, which was often skillfully concealed.
During my second month on the _Globe_ McEnnis was made city editor in
place of Sullivan, who had gone to a better paper. Later he was made
managing editor. I learned from Maxwell that he was well known in
Chicago newspaper circles for his wit, his trenchant editorial pen, and
that once he had been considered the most brilliant newspaper editor in
St. Louis. He had a small, spare, intellectual wife, very homely and
very dowdy, who still adored him and had suffered God knows what to be
permitted to live with him.
The first afternoon I saw him sitting in the city editorial chair I was
very much afraid of him and of my future. He looked raucous and uncouth,
and Maxwell had told me that new editors usually brought in new men. As
it turned out, however, much to my astonishment, he took an almost
immediate fancy to me which ripened into a kind of fatherly affection
and even, if you will permit me humbly to state a fact, a kind of
adoration. Indeed he swelled my head by the genial and hearty manner in
which almost at once he took me under his guidance and furthered my
career as rapidly as he could, the while he borrowed as much of my small
salary as he could. Please do not think that I begrudged this then or
that I do now. I owe him more than a dozen such salaries borrowed over a
period of years could ever repay. My one grief is, that I had so little
to give him in return for the very great deal he did for me.
The incident from which this burst of friendship seemed to take its rise
was this. One day shortly after he arrived he gave me a small clipping
concerning a girl on the south side who had run away or had been
kidnaped from one of the dreariest homes it has ever been my lot to see.
The girl was a hardy Irish creature of about sixteen. A neighborhood
street boy had taken her to some wretched dive in South Clark Street and
seduced her. Her mother, an old, Irish Catholic woman whom I found
bending over a washtub when I called, was greatly exercised as to what
had become of her daughter, of whom she had heard nothing since her
disappearance. The police had been informed, and from clews picked up by
a detective I learned the facts first mentioned. The mother wept into
her wash as she told me of the death of her husband a few years before,
of a boy who had been injured in such a way that he could not work, and
now this girl, her last hope——
From a newspaper point of view there was nothing much to the story, but
I decided to follow it to the end. I found the house to which the boy
had taken the girl, but they had just left. I found the parents of the
youth, simple, plain working people, who knew nothing of his
whereabouts. Something about the wretched little homes of both families,
the tumbledown neighborhoods, the poverty and privation which would ill
become a pretty sensuous girl, impelled me to write it out as I saw and
felt it. I hurried back to the office that afternoon and scribbled out a
kind of slum romance, which in the course of the night seemed to take
the office by storm. Maxwell, who read it, scowled at first, then said
it was interesting, and then fine.
“Carl,” he interpolated at one point as he read, “you’re letting your
youthful romantic mood get the best of you, I see. This will never do,
Carl. Read Schopenhauer, my boy, read Schopenhauer.”
The city editor picked it up when he returned, intending, I presume, to
see if there was any sign of interest in the general introduction;
finding something in it to hold him, he read on carefully to the end, as
I could see, for I was not a dozen feet away and could see what he was
reading. When he finished he looked over at me and then called me to
come to him.
“I want to say to you,” he said, “that you have just done a fine piece
of writing. I don’t go much on this kind of story, don’t believe in it
as a rule for a daily paper, but the way you have handled this is fine.
You’re young yet, and if you just keep yourself well in hand you have a
future.”
Thereafter he became very friendly, asked me out one lunch-time to have
a drink, borrowed a dollar and told me of some of the charms and wonders
of journalistic work in St. Louis and elsewhere. He thought the _Globe_
was too small a paper for me, that I ought to get on a larger one,
preferably in another city, and suggested how valuable would be a period
of work on the St. Louis _Globe-Democrat_, of which he had once been
city editor.
“You haven’t any idea how much you need all this,” he said. “You’re
young and inexperienced, and a great paper like the _Globe-Democrat_ or
the New York _Sun_ starts a boy off right. I would like to see you go
first to St. Louis, and then to New York. Don’t settle down anywhere
yet, don’t drink, and don’t get married, whatever you do. A wife will be
a big handicap to you. You have a future, and I’m going to help you if I
can.” Then he borrowed another dollar and left me.
------------------------------------------------------------------------