Having burned my ship, I plunged into writing. I am afraid I always was
an extremist. Early and late I was at it--writing, typing, studying
grammar, studying writing and all the forms of writing, and studying the
writers who succeeded in order to find out how they succeeded. I managed
on five hours' sleep in the twenty-four, and came pretty close to working
the nineteen waking hours left to me. My light burned till two and three
in the morning, which led a good neighbour woman into a bit of
sentimental Sherlock-Holmes deduction. Never seeing me in the day-time,
she concluded that I was a gambler, and that the light in my window was
placed there by my mother to guide her erring son home.
The trouble with the beginner at the writing game is the long, dry
spells, when there is never an editor's cheque and everything pawnable is
pawned. I wore my summer suit pretty well through that winter, and the
following summer experienced the longest, dryest spell of all, in the
period when salaried men are gone on vacation and manuscripts lie in
editorial offices until vacation is over.
My difficulty was that I had no one to advise me. I didn't know a soul
who had written or who had ever tried to write. I didn't even know one
reporter. Also, to succeed at the writing game, I found I had to unlearn
about everything the teachers and professors of literature of the high
school and university had taught me. I was very indignant about this at
the time; though now I can understand it. They did not know the trick of
successful writing in the years 1895 and 1896. They knew all about "Snow
Bound" and "Sartor Resartus"; but the American editors of 1899 did not
want such truck. They wanted the 1899 truck, and offered to pay so well
for it that the teachers and professors of literature would have quit
their jobs could they have supplied it.
I struggled along, stood off the butcher and the grocer, pawned my watch
and bicycle and my father's mackintosh, and I worked. I really did work,
and went on short commons of sleep. Critics have complained about the
swift education one of my characters, Martin Eden, achieved. In three
years, from a sailor with a common school education, I made a successful
writer of him. The critics say this is impossible. Yet I was Martin
Eden. At the end of three working years, two of which were spent in high
school and the university and one spent at writing, and all three in
studying immensely and intensely, I was publishing stories in magazines
such as the "Atlantic Monthly," was correcting proofs of my first book
(issued by Houghton, Mifflin Co.), was selling sociological articles to
"Cosmopolitan" and "McClure's," had declined an associate editorship
proffered me by telegraph from New York City, and was getting ready to
marry.
Now the foregoing means work, especially the last year of it, when I was
learning my trade as a writer. And in that year, running short on sleep
and tasking my brain to its limit, I neither drank nor cared to drink.
So far as I was concerned, alcohol did not exist. I did suffer from
brain-fag on occasion, but alcohol never suggested itself as an
ameliorative. Heavens! Editorial acceptances and cheques were all the
amelioratives I needed. A thin envelope from an editor in the morning's
mail was more stimulating than half a dozen cocktails. And if a cheque
of decent amount came out of the envelope, such incident in itself was a
whole drunk.
Furthermore, at that time in my life I did not know what a cocktail was.
I remember, when my first book was published, several Alaskans, who were
members of the Bohemian Club, entertained me one evening at the club in
San Francisco. We sat in most wonderful leather chairs, and drinks were
ordered. Never had I heard such an ordering of liqueurs and of highballs
of particular brands of Scotch. I didn't know what a liqueur or a
highball was, and I didn't know that "Scotch" meant whisky. I knew only
poor men's drinks, the drinks of the frontier and of sailor-town--cheap
beer and cheaper whisky that was just called whisky and nothing else. I
was embarrassed to make a choice, and the steward nearly collapsed when I
ordered claret as an after-dinner drink.