THE _Republic_ was in a tumbledown old building in a fairly deserted
neighborhood in that region near the waterfront from which the city
proper had been steadily growing away for years. This paper, if I am not
mistaken, was founded in 1808.
The office was so old and rattletrap that it was discouraging. The
elevator was a slow and wheezy box, bumping and creaking and suggesting
immediate collapse. The boards of the entrance-hall and the city
editorial room squeaked under one’s feet. The city reportorial room,
where I should work if I secured a place, was larger than that of the
_Globe_ and higher-ceiled, but beyond that it had no advantage. The
windows were tall but cracked and patched with faded yellow copy-paper;
the desks, some fifteen or twenty all told, were old, dusty,
knife-marked, smeared with endless ages of paste and ink. There was
waste paper and rubbish on the floor. There was no sign of either paint
or wallpaper. The windows facing east looked out upon a business court
or alley where trucks and vans creaked all day but which at night was
silent as the grave, as was this entire wholesale neighborhood. The
buildings directly opposite were decayed wholesale houses of some
unimportant kind where in slimsy rags of dresses or messy trousers and
shirts girls and boys of from fourteen to twenty worked all day, the
girls’ necks in summer time open to their breasts and their sleeves
rolled to their shoulders, the boys in sleeveless undershirts and
tight-belted trousers and with tousled hair. What their work was I
forget, but flirting with each other or with the reporters and printers
of this paper occupied a great deal of their time.
The city editor, H. B. Wandell, was one of those odd, forceful
characters who because of my youth and extreme impressionability perhaps
and his own vigor and point of view succeeded in making a deep
impression on me at once. He was such a queer little man, so different
from Mitchell and McCullagh, nervous, jumpy, restless, vigorous, with
eyes so piercing that they reminded one of a hawk’s and a skin so
swarthy that it was Italian in quality and made all the more emphatic by
a large, humped, protruding nose pierced by big nostrils. His hands were
wrinkled and claw-like, and he had large yellowish teeth which showed
rather fully when he laughed. And that laugh! I can hear it yet, a cross
between a yelp and a cackle. It always seemed to me to be a mirthless
laugh, insincere, and yet also it had an element of appreciation in it.
He could see a point at which others ought to laugh without apparently
enjoying it himself. He was at once a small and yet a large man
mentally, wise and incisive in many ways, petty and even venomous in
others, a man to coddle and placate if you were beholden to him, one to
avoid if you were not, but on the whole a man above the average in
ability.
And he had the strangest, fussiest, bossiest love of great literature of
any one I have ever known, especially in the realm of the newspapers.
Zola at this time was apparently his ideal of what a writer should be,
and after him Balzac and Loti. He seemed to know them well and to admire
and even love them, after his fashion. He was always calling upon me to
imitate Zola’s vivid description of the drab and the gross and the
horrible if I could, assuming that I had read him, which I had not, but
I did not say so. And Balzac’s and Loti’s sure handling of the sensual
and the poignant! How often have I heard him refer to them with
admiration, giving me the line and phrase of certain stark pictures, and
yet at the same time there was a sneaking bending of the knee to the
middle West conventions of which he was a part, a kind of horror of
having it known that he approved of these things. He was a Shriner and
very proud of it, as he was of various other local organizations to
which he belonged. He had the reputation of being one of the best city
editors in the city, far superior to my late master. Previously he had
been city editor of the _Globe_ itself for many years and was still
favorably spoken of in that office. After I left St. Louis he returned
to the _Globe_ for a time and once more became its guide in local news.
But that is neither here nor there save as it illustrates what is a
cardinal truth of the newspaper world: that the best of newspaper men
are occasionally to be found on the poorest of papers, and vice versa.
Just at this time, as I understood, he was here because the _Republic_
was making a staggering effort to build itself up in popular esteem,
which it finally succeeded in doing after McCullagh’s death, becoming
once more the leading morning paper as it had been before the _Globe_,
under McCullagh, arose to power. Just now, however, in my despondent
mood, it seemed an exceedingly sad affair.
Mr. Wandell, as I now learned, had heard of me and my recent _faux pas_,
as well as some of the other things I had been doing.
“Been working on the _Globe_, haven’t you?” he commented when I
approached him. “What did they pay you?”
I told him.
“When did you leave there?”
“About a week ago.”
“Why did you leave?”
“Perhaps you saw those notices of three shows that didn’t come to town?
I’m the man who wrote them up.”
“Oho! ho! ho!” and he began eyeing me drily and slapping his knee. “I
saw those. Ha! ha! ha! Ha! ha! ha! Yes, that was very funny—very. We had
an editorial on it. And so McCullagh fired you, did he?”
“No, sir,” I replied indignantly. “I quit. I thought he might want to,
and I put a letter on his desk and left.”
“Ha! ha! ha! Quite right! That’s very funny! I know just how they do
over there. I was city editor there myself once. They write them up in
advance sometimes. We do here. Where do you come from?”
I told him. He meditated awhile, as though he were uncertain whether he
needed any one.
“You say you got thirty dollars there? I couldn’t pay anybody that much
here—not to begin with. We never give more than eighteen to begin with.
Besides, I have a full staff just now, and it’s summer. I might use
another man if eighteen would be enough. You might think it over and
come in and see me again some time.”
Although my spirits fell at so great a drop in salary I hastened to
explain that I would be glad to accept eighteen. I needed to be at work
again.
“Whatever you would consider fair would suit me,” I said.
He smiled. “The newspaper market is low just now. If your work proves
satisfactory I may raise you a little later on.” He must have seen that
he had a soft and more or less unsophisticated boy to deal with.
“Suppose you write me a little article about something, just to show me
what you can do,” he added.
I went away insulted by this last request. In spite of all he said I
could feel that he wanted me; but I had no skill in manipulating my own
affairs. To drop from thirty dollars as dramatic editor to eighteen as a
mere reporter was terrible. With a grain of philosophic melancholy I
faced it, however, feeling that if I worked hard I might yet get a start
in some way or other. I must work and save some money and if I did not
better myself I would leave St. Louis. My ability must be worth
something somewhere; it had been on the _Globe_.
I went home and wrote the article (a mere nothing about some street
scene), went back to the office and left it. Next day I called again.
“All right,” he said. “You can go to work.”
I went back into that large shabby room and took a seat. In a few
minutes the place filled up with the staff, most of whom I knew and all
of whom eyed me curiously—reporters, special editors, the city editor
and his assistant, Mr. Williams of blessed memory, one-eyed, sad,
impressive, intelligent, who had nothing but kind things to say of what
I wrote and who was friendly and helpful until the day I left.
In a little while the assignment book was put out, with the task I was
to undertake. Before I left I was called in and advised concerning it. I
went and looked into it (I have forgotten what it was) and reported
later in the day. What I wrote I turned over to Mr. Williams, and later
in the day when I asked him if it was all right he said: “Yes, quite all
right. It reads all right to me,” and then gave me a kindly, one-eyed
smile. I liked him from the first day; he was a better editor than
Wandell, with more taste and discrimination, and later rose to a higher
position elsewhere.
Meanwhile I strolled about thinking of my great fall. It seemed as
though I should never get over this. But in a few days I was back in my
old reportorial routine, depressed but secure, convinced that I could
write as well as ever, and for any newspaper.
For the romance of my own youth was still upon me, my ambitions and my
dreams coloring it all. Does the gull sense the terrors of the deep, or
the butterfly the traps and snares of the woods and fields? Roaming this
keen, new, ambitious mid-Western city, life-hungry and love-hungry and
underpaid, eager and ambitious, I still found so much in the worst to
soothe, so much in the best to torture me. In every scene of ease or
pleasure was both a lure and a reproach; in every aspect of tragedy or
poverty was a threat or a warning. I was never tired of looking at the
hot, hungry, weary slums, any more than I was of looking at the glories
of the mansions of the west end. Both had their lure, their charm; one
because it was a state worse than my own, the other because it was a
better—unfairly so, I thought. Amid it all I hurried, writing and
dreaming, half-laughing and half-crying, with now a tale to move me to
laughter and now another to send me to bottomless despairs. But always
youth, youth, and the crash of the presses in the basement and a fresh
damp paper laid on my desk of a morning with “the news” and my own petty
achievements or failures to cheer or disappoint me; so it went, day in
and day out.
The _Republic_, while not so successful as the _Globe-Democrat_, was a
much better paper for me to work on. For one thing, it took me from
under the domination of Mr. Mitchell (one can hate some people most
persistently), and placed me under one who, whatever may have been his
defects, provided me with far greater opportunities for my pen than ever
the _Globe_ had and supplied a better judgment as to what constituted a
story and a news feature. Now that I think of him, Wandell was far and
away the best judge of news, from a dramatic or story point of view, of
any for whom I ever worked.
“A good story, is it?” I can see him smirking and rubbing his hands
miser or gourmet fashion, as over a pot of gold or a fine dish. “She
said that, did she? Ha! ha! That’s excellent, excellent! You saw him
yourself, did you? And the brother too? By George, we’ll make a story of
that! Be careful how you write that now. All the facts you know, just as
far as they will carry you; but we don’t want any libel suits, remember.
We don’t want you to say anything we can’t substantiate, but I don’t
want you to be afraid either. Write it strong, clear, definite. Get in
all the touches of local color you can. And remember Zola and Balzac, my
boy, remember Zola and Balzac. Bare facts are what are needed in cases
like this, with lots of color as to the scenery or atmosphere, the room,
the other people, the street, and all that. You get me?”
And quite truly I got him, as he was pleased to admit, even though I got
but little cash out of it. I always felt, perhaps unjustly, that he made
but small if any effort to advantage me in any way except that of
writing. But what of it? He was nearly always enthusiastic over my work,
in a hard, bright, waspish way, nearly always excited about the
glittering realistic facts which one might dig up and which he was quite
determined that his paper should present. The stories! The scandals!
That hard, cruel cackle of his when he had any one cornered! He must
have known what a sham and a fake most of these mid-Western pretensions
to sanctity and purity were, and yet if he did and was irritated by them
he said little to me. Like most Americans of the time, he was probably
confused by the endless clatter concerning personal perfection, the
Christ ideal, as opposed to the actual details of life. He could not
decide for himself which was true and which false, the Christ theory or
that of Zola, but he preferred Zola when interpreting the news. When
things were looking up from a news point of view and great realistic
facts were coming to the surface regardless of local sentiment, facts
which utterly contradicted all the noble fol-de-rol of the puritans and
the religionists, he was positively transformed. In those hours when the
loom of life seemed to be weaving brilliant dramatic or tragic patterns
of a realistic, Zolaesque character he was beside himself with gayety,
trotting to and fro in the local room, leaning over the shoulders of
scribbling scribes and interrupting them to ask details or to caution
them as to certain facts which they must or must not include, beaming at
the ceiling or floor, whistling, singing, rubbing his hands—a veritable
imp or faun of pleasure and enthusiasm. Deaths, murders, great social or
political scandals or upheavals, those things which presented the rough,
raw facts of life, as well as its tenderer aspects, seemed to throw him
into an ecstasy—not over the woes of others but over the fact that he
was to have an interesting paper tomorrow.
“Ah, it was a terrible thing, was it? He killed her in cold blood, you
say? There was a great crowd out there, was there? Well, well, write it
all up. Write it all up. It looks like a pretty good story to me—doesn’t
it to you? Write a good strong introduction for it, you know, all the
facts in the first paragraph, and then go on and tell your story. You
can have as much space for it as you want—a column, a column and a half,
two—just as it runs. Let me look at it before you turn it in, though.”
Then he would begin whistling or singing, or would walk up and down in
the city room rubbing his hands in obvious satisfaction.
And how that reportorial room seemed to thrill or sing between the hours
of five and seven in the evening, when the stories of the afternoon were
coming in, or between ten-thirty and midnight, when the full grist of
the day was finally being ground out. How it throbbed with human life
and thought, quite like a mill room full of looms or a counting house in
which endless records and exchanges are being made. Those reporters,
eighteen or twenty of them, bright, cheerful, interesting, forceful
youths, each bent upon making a name for himself, each working hard,
each here bending over his desk scratching his head or ear and thinking,
his mind lost in the mazes of arrangement and composition.
Wandell had no tolerance for any but the best of newspaper reporters and
would discharge a man promptly for falling down on a story, especially
if he could connect it with the feeling that he was not as good a
newspaper man as he should be. He hated commonplace men, and once I had
become familiar with the office and with him, he would often ask me in a
spirit of unrest if I knew of an especially good one anywhere with whom
he could replace some one else whom he did not like; a thought which
jarred me but which did not prevent me from telling him. Somehow I had
an eye and a taste for exceptional men myself, and I wanted his staff to
be as good as any. So it was not long before he began to rely on me to
supply him with suitable men, so much so that I soon had the reputation
of being a local arbiter of jobs, one who could get men in or keep them
out—a thing which made me some enemies later. And it really was not true
for I could not have kept any good man out.
In the meantime, while he was trying me out to suit himself, he had been
giving me only routine work: the North Seventh Street police station
afternoons and evenings, where one or two interesting stories might be
expected every day, crimes or sordid romances of one kind or another. Or
if there was nothing much doing there I might be sent out on an
occasional crime story elsewhere. Once I had handled a few of these for
him, and to his satisfaction, I was pushed into the topnotch class and
given only the most difficult stories, those which might be called
feature crimes and sensations, which I was expected to unravel,
sometimes single-handed, and to which always I was expected to write the
lead. This realistic method of his plus a keen desire to unload all the
heavy assignments on me was in no wise bad for me. He liked me, and this
was his friendly way of showing it.
Indeed, with a ruthless inconsiderateness, as I then thought, he piled
on story after story, until I was a little infuriated at first, seeing
how little I was being paid. When nothing of immediate importance was to
be had, he proceeded to create news, studying out interesting phases of
past romances or crimes which he thought might be worth while to work up
and publish on Sunday, and handing them to me to do over. He even
created stories when the general news was dull, throwing me into the
most delicate and dangerous fields of arson, murder, theft, marital
unhappiness, and tragedies of all kinds, things not public but which by
clever detective work could be made so, and where libel and other suits
and damages lurked on either hand. Without cessation, Sunday and every
other day, he called upon me to display sentiment, humor or cold, hard,
descriptive force, as the case might be, quoting now Hugo, now Balzac,
now Dickens, and now Zola to me to show me just what was to be done. In
a little while, despite my reduced salary and the fact that I had lost
my previous place in disgrace and was not likely to get a raise here
soon, I was as much your swaggering newspaper youth as ever, strolling
about the city with the feeling that I was somebody and looking up all
my old friends, with the idea of letting them know that I was by no
means such a failure as they might imagine. Dick and Peter of course,
seeing me ambling in on them late one hot night, received me with open
arms.
“Well, you’re a good one!” yelped Dick in his high, almost falsetto
voice when I came in. I could see that he had been sitting before his
open window, which commanded Broadway, where he had been no doubt
meditating—your true romancer. “Where the hell have you been keeping
yourself? You’re a dandy? We’ve been looking for you for weeks. We’ve
been down to your place a dozen times, but you wouldn’t let us in.
You’re a dandy, you are! McCord has some more of those opera cartoons
done. Why didn’t you ever come around, anyhow?”
“I’m working down on the _Republic_ now,” I replied, blushing, “and I’ve
been busy.”
“Oho!” laughed Dick, slapping his knees. “That’s a good one on you! I
heard about it. Those shows written up, and not one in town! Oho! That’s
good!” He coughed a consumptive cough or two and relaxed.
I laughed with him. “It wasn’t really all my fault,” I said
apologetically.
“I know it wasn’t. Don’t I know the _Globe_? Didn’t Carmichael get me to
work the same racket for him? Ask Hazard. It wasn’t your fault. Sit
down. Peter’ll be here in a little while; then we’ll go out and get
something.”
We fell to discussing the attitude of the people on the _Globe_ after I
had left. Wood insisted that he had not heard much. He knew
instinctively that Mitchell was glad I was gone, as he might well have
been. Hartung had reported to him that McCullagh had raised Cain with
Mitchell and that two or three of the boys on the staff had manifested
relief.
“You know who they’d be,” continued Wood. “The fellows who can’t do what
you can but would like to.”
I smiled. “I know about who they are,” I said.
We talked about the world in general—literature, the drama, current
celebrities, the state of politics, all seen through the medium of youth
and aspiration and inexperience. While we were talking McCord came in.
He had been to his home in South St. Louis, where he preferred to live
in spite of his zest for Bohemia, and the ground had all to be gone over
with him. We settled down to an evening’s enjoyment: Dick went for beer;
Peter lit a rousing pipe. Accumulated short stories were produced and
plans for new ones recounted. At one point Peter exclaimed: “You know
what I’m going to do, Dreiser?”
“Well, what?”
“I’m going to study for the leading rôle in that opera of yours. I can
play that, and I’m going to if you don’t object—do you?”
“Object? Why should I object?” I replied, doubtful however of the wisdom
of this. Peter had never struck me as quite the actor type. “I’d like to
see you do it if you can, Peter.”
“Oh, I can, all right. That old rube appeals to me. I bet that if I ever
get on the stage I can get away with that.” He eyed Dick for
confirmation.
“I’ll bet you could,” said Dick loyally. “Peter makes a dandy rube. Oh,
will you ever forget the time we went down to the old Nickelodeon and
did a turn, Peter? Oho!”
Later the three of us left for a bite and I could see that I was as high
in their favor as ever, which restored me not a little. Peter seemed to
think that my escapades and mishaps, coupled with the attention and
discussion which my name evoked among local newspaper men, were doing me
good, making me an interesting figure. I could scarcely believe that but
I was inclined to believe that I had not fallen as low as at first I had
imagined.
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