THE things which most contributed to my want of newspaper success in New
York and eventually drove me, though much against my will and
understanding, into an easier and more agreeable phase of life were,
first, that awe of the grinding and almost disgusting forces of life
itself which I found in Spencer and Huxley and Balzac and which now
persistently haunted me and, due possibly to a depressed physical
condition at this time, made it impossible for me to work with any of
the zest that had characterized my work in the West. Next, there was
that astounding contrast between wealth and poverty, here more sharply
emphasized than anywhere else in America, which gave the great city a
gross and cruel and mechanical look, and this was emphasized not only by
the papers themselves, with their various summaries of investigations
and exposures, but also by my own hourly contact with it—a look so harsh
and indifferent at times as to leave me a little numb. Again, there was
something disillusioning in the sharp contrast between the professed
ideals and preachments of such a constantly moralizing journal as the
_World_ and the heartless and savage aspect of its internal economy. Men
such as myself were mere machines or privates in an ill-paid army to be
thrown into any breach. There was no time off for the space-men, unless
it was for all time. One was expected to achieve the results desired or
get out; and if one did achieve them the reward was nothing.
One day I met an acquaintance and asked about an ex-city editor from St.
Louis who had come to New York, and his answer staggered me.
“Oh, Cliff? Didn’t you hear? Why, he committed suicide down here in a
West Street hotel.”
“What was the trouble?” I asked.
“Tired of the game, I guess,” he replied. “He didn’t get along down here
as well as he had out there. I guess he felt that he was going
downhill.”
I walked away, meditating. He had been an excellent newspaper man, as
brisk and self-centered as one need be to prosper. The last time I had
seen him he was in good physical condition, and yet, after something
like a year in New York, he had killed himself.
However, my mood was not that of one who runs away from a grueling
contest. I had no notion of leaving New York, whatever happened,
although I constantly speculated as to what I should do when all my
money was gone. I had no trade or profession beyond this reporting, and
yet I was convinced that there must be something else that I could do.
Come what might, I was determined that I would ask no favor of my
brother, and as for my sister, who was now a burden on my hands, I was
determined that as soon as this burden became too great I would take up
her case with my brother Paul, outline all that had been done and ask
him to shoulder the difference until such time as I could find myself in
whatever work I was destined to do.
But what was it?
One of the things which oppressed me was the fact that on the _World_,
as well as on the other papers, were men as young as myself who were
apparently of a very different texture, mentally if not physically. Life
and this fierce contest which I was taking so much to heart seemed in no
wise to disturb them. By reason of temperament and insight perhaps,
possibly the lack of it, or, what was more likely, certain fortunate
circumstances attending their youth and upbringing, they were part of
that oncoming host of professional optimists and yea-sayers, chorus-like
in character, which for thirty years or more thereafter in American life
was constantly engaged in the pleasing task of emphasizing the
possibilities of success, progress, strength and what not for all, in
America and elsewhere, while at the same time they were humbly and
sycophantically genuflecting before the strong, the lucky, the
prosperous. On the _World_ alone at this time, to say nothing of the
other papers, were at least a dozen, swaggering about in the best of
clothes, their manners those of a graduate of Yale or Harvard or
Princeton, their minds stuffed with all the noble maxims of the
uplifters. There was nothing wrong with the world that could not be
easily and quickly righted, once the honest, just, true, kind,
industrious turned their giant and selected brains to the task. This
newest type of young newspaper man was to have no traffic with evil in
any form; he was to concern himself with the Good, the True, the
Beautiful. Many of these young men pretended to an intimate working
knowledge of many things: society, politics, finance and what not else.
Several had evidently made themselves indispensable as ship reporters,
interviewers of arriving and departing celebrities, and these were now
pointed out to me as men worthy of envy and emulation. One of them had,
at the behest of the _World_, crossed the ocean more than once seeking
to expose the principals in a growing ship-gambling and bunco scandal.
There were those who were in the confidence of the mayor, the governor,
and some of the lights in Wall Street. One, a scion of one of the best
families, was the paper’s best adviser as to social events and scandals.
The grand air with which they swung in and out of the office set me
beside myself with envy.
And all the time the condition of my personal affairs tended to make me
anything but optimistic. I was in very serious financial straits. I
sometimes think that I was too new to the city, too green to its
psychology and subtlety, to be of any use to a great metropolitan daily;
and yet, seeing all I had seen, I should have been worth something. I
was only five years distant from the composition of _Sister Carrie_, to
say nothing of many short stories and magazine articles. Yet I was
haunted by the thought that I was a misfit, that I might really have to
give up and return to the West, where in some pathetic humdrum task I
should live out a barren and pointless life.
With this probable end staring me in the face, I began to think that I
must not give up but must instead turn to letters, the art of
short-story writing; only just how to do this I could not see. One of
the things that prompted me to try this was the fact that on the _World_
at this time were several who had succeeded—David Graham Phillips, James
Creelman, then a correspondent for the paper in the war which had broken
out between China and Japan, to say nothing of George Cary Eggleston and
Reginald de Koven, the latter on the staff as chief musical critic.
There was another young man, whose name I have forgotten, who was
pointed out to me as a rapidly growing favorite in the office of the
_Century_. Then there were those new arrivals in the world of letters:
Kipling, Richard Harding Davis, Stephen Crane and some others, whose
success fascinated me.
All this was but an irritant to a bubbling chemistry which as yet had
found no solution, and was not likely to find one for some time to come.
My reading of Spencer and Huxley in no wise tended to clarify and impel
my mind in the direction of fiction, or even philosophy. But now, in a
kind of ferment or fever due to my necessities and desperation, I set to
examining the current magazines and the fiction and articles to be found
therein: _Century_, _Scribner’s_, _Harper’s_. I was never more
confounded than by the discrepancy existing between my own observations
and those displayed here, the beauty and peace and charm to be found in
everything, the almost complete absence of any reference to the coarse
and the vulgar and the cruel and the terrible. How did it happen that
these remarkable persons—geniuses of course, one and all—saw life in
this happy roseate way? Was it so, and was I all wrong? Love was almost
invariably rewarded in these tales. Almost invariably one’s dreams came
true, in the magazines. Most of these bits of fiction, delicately
phrased, flowed so easily, with such an air of assurance, omniscience
and condescension, that I was quite put out by my own lacks and defects.
They seemed to deal with phases of sweetness and beauty and success and
goodness such as I rarely encountered. There were so many tales of the
old South reeking with a poetry which was poetry and little more (George
W. Cable; Thomas Nelson Page). In _Harper’s_ I found such assured
writers as William Dean Howells, Charles Dudley Warner, Frank R.
Stockton, Mrs. Humphry Ward, and a score of others, all of whom wrote of
nobility of character and sacrifice and the greatness of ideals and joy
in simple things.
But as I viewed the strenuous world about me, all that I read seemed not
to have so very much to do with it. Perhaps, as I now thought, life as I
saw it, the darker phases, was never to be written about. Maybe such
things were not the true province of fiction anyhow. I read and read,
but all I could gather was that I had no such tales to tell, and,
however much I tried, I could not think of any. The kind of thing I was
witnessing no one would want as fiction. These writers seemed far above
the world of which I was a part. Indeed I began to picture them as
creatures of the greatest luxury and culture, gentlemen and ladies all,
comfortably housed, masters of servants, possessing estates, or at least
bachelor quarters, having horses and carriages, and received here, there
and everywhere with nods of recognition and smiles of approval.
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