My cruise in the salmon boat lasted a week, and I returned ready to enter
the university. During the week's cruise I did not drink again. To
accomplish this I was compelled to avoid looking up old friends, for as
ever the adventure-path was beset with John Barleycorn. I had wanted the
drink that first day, and in the days that followed I did not want it.
My tired brain had recuperated. I had no moral scruples in the matter.
I was not ashamed nor sorry because of that first day's orgy at Benicia,
and I thought no more about it, returning gladly to my books and studies.
Long years were to pass ere I looked back upon that day and realised its
significance. At the time, and for a long time afterward, I was to think
of it only as a frolic. But still later, in the slough of brain-fag and
intellectual weariness, I was to remember and know the craving for the
anodyne that resides in alcohol.
In the meantime, after this one relapse at Benicia, I went on with my
abstemiousness, primarily because I didn't want to drink. And next, I
was abstemious because my way led among books and students where no
drinking was. Had I been out on the adventure-path, I should as a matter
of course have been drinking. For that is the pity of the
adventure-path, which is one of John Barleycorn's favourite stamping
grounds.
I completed the first half of my freshman year, and in January of 1897
took up my courses for the second half. But the pressure from lack of
money, plus a conviction that the university was not giving me all that I
wanted in the time I could spare for it, forced me to leave. I was not
very disappointed. For two years I had studied, and in those two years,
what was far more valuable, I had done a prodigious amount of reading.
Then, too, my grammar had improved. It is true, I had not yet learned
that I must say "It is I"; but I no longer was guilty of a double
negative in writing, though still prone to that error in excited speech.
I decided immediately to embark on my career. I had four preferences:
first, music; second, poetry; third, the writing of philosophic,
economic, and political essays; and, fourth, and last, and least, fiction
writing. I resolutely cut out music as impossible, settled down in my
bedroom, and tackled my second, third, and fourth choices simultaneously.
Heavens, how I wrote! Never was there a creative fever such as mine from
which the patient escaped fatal results. The way I worked was enough to
soften my brain and send me to a mad-house. I wrote, I wrote
everything--ponderous essays, scientific and sociological short stories,
humorous verse, verse of all sorts from triolets and sonnets to blank
verse tragedy and elephantine epics in Spenserian stanzas. On occasion I
composed steadily, day after day, for fifteen hours a day. At times I
forgot to eat, or refused to tear myself away from my passionate
outpouring in order to eat.
And then there was the matter of typewriting. My brother-in-law owned a
machine which he used in the day-time. In the night I was free to use
it. That machine was a wonder. I could weep now as I recollect my
wrestlings with it. It must have been a first model in the year one of
the typewriter era. Its alphabet was all capitals. It was informed with
an evil spirit. It obeyed no known laws of physics, and overthrew the
hoary axiom that like things performed to like things produce like
results. I'll swear that machine never did the same thing in the same
way twice. Again and again it demonstrated that unlike actions produce
like results.
How my back used to ache with it! Prior to that experience, my back had
been good for every violent strain put upon it in a none too gentle
career. But that typewriter proved to me that I had a pipe-stem for a
back. Also, it made me doubt my shoulders. They ached as with
rheumatism after every bout. The keys of that machine had to be hit so
hard that to one outside the house it sounded like distant thunder or
some one breaking up the furniture. I had to hit the keys so hard that I
strained my first fingers to the elbows, while the ends of my fingers
were blisters burst and blistered again. Had it been my machine I'd have
operated it with a carpenter's hammer.
The worst of it was that I was actually typing my manuscripts at the same
time I was trying to master that machine. It was a feat of physical
endurance and a brain storm combined to type a thousand words, and I was
composing thousands of words every day which just had to be typed for the
waiting editors.
Oh, between the writing and the typewriting I was well a-weary. I had
brain and nerve fag, and body fag as well, and yet the thought of drink
never suggested itself. I was living too high to stand in need of an
anodyne. All my waking hours, except those with that infernal
typewriter, were spent in a creative heaven. And along with this I had
no desire for drink because I still believed in many things--in the love
of all men and women in the matter of man and woman love; in fatherhood;
in human justice; in art--in the whole host of fond illusions that keep
the world turning around.
But the waiting editors elected to keep on waiting. My manuscripts made
amazing round-trip records between the Pacific and the Atlantic. It
might have been the weirdness of the typewriting that prevented the
editors from accepting at least one little offering of mine. I don't
know, and goodness knows the stuff I wrote was as weird as its typing. I
sold my hard-bought school books for ridiculous sums to second-hand
bookmen. I borrowed small sums of money wherever I could, and suffered
my old father to feed me with the meagre returns of his failing strength.
It didn't last long, only a few weeks, when I had to surrender and go to
work. Yet I was unaware of any need for the drink anodyne. I was not
disappointed. My career was retarded, that was all. Perhaps I did need
further preparation. I had learned enough from the books to realise that
I had only touched the hem of knowledge's garment. I still lived on the
heights. My waking hours, and most of the hours I should have used for
sleep, were spent with the books.