Part 15

My rest came to an end, because a stock company in San Francisco proposed to put on my dramatization of _Prince Hagen_, and the newspaper reporters came and wrote up my “squirrel diet” and my views on love and marriage, duly “pepped up”--though I don’t think we had that phrase yet. I thought there ought to be a socialist drama in America, and I sat down and wrote three little one-act plays, which required only three actors and no scenery at all. Feeling so serene in my new-found health, I resolved to organize a company and show how it could be done. I made a deal with the head of a school of acting to train my company, going halves with him on the profits; and for two or three weeks I had all the comrades of the Bay cities distributing handbills, announcing our world-beating dramatic sensation.

One of these plays was _The Second-Story Man_. It was later published in one of the Haldeman-Julius Little Blue Books; every now and then some actor would write and tell me it was “a wonder,” and would I let him do it in vaudeville? He would get it ready, and then the masters of the circuit would say nix on that radical stuff. The second play was a conversation between “John D” and “the Author” on a California beach, having to do with socialism and John D’s part in bringing it nearer--by putting all the little fellows out of business. The third play, _The Indignant Subscriber_, told about a newspaper reader who lures the editor of his morning newspaper out in a boat in the middle of a lake, makes him listen for the first time in his life, and ends by dumping him overboard and swimming away. In production, the “boat” was made by two chairs tied at opposite ends of a board; the editor sat in one chair, and the indignant subscriber in the other, and the oars were two brooms. The comedy of rowing out into the middle of an imaginary lake while admiring the imaginary scenery was enjoyed by the audience, and when the editor was dumped overboard, a thousand social rebels whooped with delight.

The plays were given seven or eight times, and the theaters were packed; the enterprise was, dramatically speaking, a success; but, alas, I had failed to investigate the economics of my problem. The company had engagements for only two or three nights in the week, whereas the actors were getting full salaries. Distances were great, and the railway fares ate up the receipts. If I had started this undertaking in the Middle West where the company could have traveled short distances on trolley cars, and if I had done the booking in advance so as to have a full schedule, there is no doubt that we could have made a success. As it was, the adventure cost me a couple of thousand dollars.

V

Letters from Corydon informed me that our son had celebrated his winter in New York by being laid up with tonsillitis; also, Corydon herself had not found joy in freedom, and was ready to live according to her husband’s ideas for a while. David Belasco was promising to produce _The Millennium_ in the following autumn, so I telegraphed Corydon to join me in Miami, Florida. I took a train to Galveston, Texas, and from there a steamer to Key West.

My squirrel diet was difficult to obtain on trains, and perhaps I had overworked on my dramatic enterprise--anyhow, on the steamer across the Gulf of Mexico I developed a fever. I remember a hot night when it was impossible to sleep in the stateroom. I went out on deck and tossed all night in a steamer chair, having for company a member of the fashionable set of one of our big cities--I forget which, but they are all alike. A man somewhat older than I, he had just broken with his wife and was traveling in order to get away from her; he had a bottle in his pocket, and the contents of others inside him, enough to unlimber his tongue.

He told me about his quarrel with his wife, every word that she had said and every word that he had said; he told me every crime she had ever committed, and some of his own; he poured out the grief of being rich and fashionable in a big American city; he told me about the fornications and adulteries of his friends--in short, I contemplated a social delirium with my own half-delirious mind. The element of phantasmagoria that you find in some of my books may be derived from that night’s experience, in which fragments of fashionable horror wavered and jiggled before my mind, vanished and flashed back again, loomed colossal and exploded in star showers, like human faces, locomotives, airplanes, and skyscrapers in a futurist moving-picture film.

At Key West I was taken off the steamer and deposited in a private hospital, where I stayed for a week; then, somewhat tottery, I met Corydon and our son at Miami, and we found ourselves a little cottage in a remote settlement down the coast, Coconut Grove. It was April, and hot, and I basked in the sunshine; I took long walks over a white shell road that ran straight west into a flaming sunset, with a forest of tall pine trees on each side. Incidentally, I slapped innumerable deer flies on my face and hands and legs. I do not know if they call them that in Florida--maybe they don’t admit their existence; but deer fly was the name in the Adirondacks and Canada for those little flat devils, having half-black and half-white wings, and stinging you like a needle.

We went swimming in a wide, shallow bay, warm as a bathtub; you had to walk half a mile to get to deep water, and on the soft bottom lay great round black creatures that scooted away when you came near. I wondered if it would be possible to catch one, but fortunately I did not try, for they were the disagreeable sting rays or stingarees. (Having become a loyal Californian, it gives me pleasure to tell about the entomological and piscatorial perils of Florida.) The owner of a big beach-front place tried to sell it to us for five or six thousand dollars, and we talked of buying it for quite a while. I suppose that during the postwar boom the owner sold it for a million or two, and it is now the site of a twenty-story office building full of tenants.

In Coconut Grove, as in Carmel, there was a “literary colony.” I met some of them, but remember only one: a figure who walked the white shell roads with me, tall, athletic, brown, and handsome as a Greek statue--Witter Bynner, the poet. Corydon, smiling, remarked, “Bynner is a winner.” That compliment, from a qualified expert, I pass on to him, in exchange for the many fine letters he has written to me about my books. He is eighty now--and I am eighty-four.

I think it was during these six weeks that I wrote _The Machine_, the play that forms a sequel to _The Moneychangers_. An odd sort of trilogy--two novels and a play! But it was the best I could do at the time. I saw a vision of myself as a prosperous Broadway dramatist, a licensed court jester of capitalism. But the vision proved to be a mirage.

VI

For the summer of 1909 I rented a cottage on the shore at Cutchogue, near the far end of Long Island; beautiful blue water in front of us, and tall shade trees in the rear. I was carrying on with my raw-food diet, and my family also was giving it a trial. To aid and abet us we had a household assistant and secretary who was an even less usual person than myself. Dave Howatt was his name. He was fair-haired and rosy-cheeked and he nourished his great frame upon two handfuls of pecans or almonds, two dishes of soaked raw prunes, and a definite number of ripe bananas every day--it may have been a dozen or two, I cannot remember. This blond Anglo-Saxon monkey romped with my son, oversaw his upbringing, typed my letters, and washed and soaked the family prunes. A youth after my own heart--vegetarian, teetotaler, nonsmoker, pacifist, philosophical anarchist, conscientious objector to capitalism, dreamer, and practitioner of brotherhood--Dave had been at Bernarr Macfadden’s Physical Culture City, and had known Harry Kemp since boyhood. Now Dave is living in Cuba, and at last report was loving it.

But alas for idealistic theories and hopes--the diet that had served me so marvelously on the shore of the Pacific played the dickens with me on the shore of the Atlantic. The difference was that now I was doing creative writing, putting a continuous strain upon brain and nerves, and apparently not having the energy to digest raw food. Dave Howatt, in his role of guide and mentor, thought my indigestion was due to my evil habit of including cooked breadstuff in the diet, so for a while I changed from a squirrel to a monkey. Then he thought I ate too much, so I cut the quantity in half, which reduced the size of the balloon inside me; but it left me hungry all the time, so that when I played tennis, I would have to stop in the middle and come home and get a prune.

Under these trying conditions I wrote another book, endeavoring to put the socialist argument into a simple story, which could carry it to minds that otherwise would never get it. I aimed at the elemental and naïve, something like _The Vicar of Wakefield_ or _Pilgrims Progress_. The border line between the naïve and the banal is difficult to draw, and so authorities differ about _Samuel the Seeker_. Some of my friends called it a wretched thing, and the public agreed with them. But on the other hand, Frederik van Eeden, great novelist and poet in his own language, wrote me a letter of rapture about _Samuel_, considering it my best. Robert Whitaker, pacifist clergyman who committed the crime of taking the sixth commandment literally and spent several months in a Los Angeles jail during World War I, came on a copy of the book at that time, and he also judged it a success. The publishing firm of Bauza in Barcelona, desiring to issue an edition of my novels, saw fit to lead off with _Samuel Busca la Verdad_. So perhaps in the days of the co-operative commonwealth the pedagogues will discover a new classic, suitable for required reading in high schools!

VII

By the end of the summer my health was too bad to tell about, and I had got my thoughts centered on a new remedy, a fast cure. I had been reading _Physical Culture_ magazine, and I wrote to Bernarr Macfadden, who was then running a rival institution to the Battle Creek Sanitarium. He invited me to bring my family and let him have a try at my problem.

Athlete, showman, lecturer, editor, publisher, and health experimenter--I could make B. M. the subject of an entertaining essay, but there is not space here. To the high-brows he was a symbol of the vulgarity and cheapness of America. And it won’t help for me to defend him, because I may also be on that list. I merely state what Macfadden did for me--which was to teach me, free, gratis, and for nothing, more about the true principles of keeping well and fit for my work than all the orthodox and ordained physicians who charged me many thousands of dollars for not doing it. Believe me, I went to the best there were in every field, and while some of them had mercy on a writer, others treated me like a millionaire. I number many doctors among my friends, and the better they know me, the more freely they admit the unsatisfactory state of their work. Leo Buerger, a college mate who became a leading specialist in New York, summed the situation up when I mentioned the osteopaths, and remarked that they sometimes made cures. Said my eminent friend: “They cure without diagnosing, and we diagnose without curing.”

My visit to Macfadden took place in 1909--back in the dark ages, before the words “preventive medicine” had ever been joined together. I had asked doctor after doctor to advise me how to keep well, and not one of them seemed to know what I was talking about; they attempted to cure my sickness, and then they sent me away to go on doing the things that had brought the sickness on. The secrets of natural living were the property of a little group of adventurous persons known as “health cranks”; and it has been my pleasure to watch the leading ideas of these “cranks” being rediscovered one by one by medical authority, and so made known to the newspapers and the public. It was not Dr. Auguste Rollier of Switzerland who invented the sun cure; no indeed, the semilunatics of Physical Culture City were going around in breechclouts, men and women getting themselves arrested by rural constables, before ever the word _Nacktkultur_ was imported.

The same thing is true of vitamins, and of the evils of denatured foods, and the importance of bulk in the diet--we knew all that before Sir Arbuthnot Lane ever addressed a medical congress. As to fasting, I stood the ridicule of my medical friends for twenty years, and then in the files of the _Journal of Metabolism_ I found the records of laboratory tests upon humans as well as dogs proving that the effect of a prolonged fast is a permanent increase in the metabolic rate--which is the same thing as rejuvenation, and exactly what we “health cranks” have claimed.

VIII

At Macfadden’s institution in Battle Creek were perhaps a hundred patients, faithfully trying out these eccentricities. They fasted for periods long or short; I met one man who went to fifty-five days, attempting a cure for locomotor ataxia--he was beginning to walk, in spite of all the dogmas. Later I met a man who weighed nearly three hundred pounds, who fasted over ninety days, which is the record so far as I know. This was before suffragettes and hunger strikes, and it was the accepted idea that a human being would starve to death in three or four days.

After the fast we went on a thing known as a milk diet, absorbing a glass of fresh milk every half hour, and sometimes every twenty minutes, until we had got up to eight quarts a day. The fasters sat around, pale and feeble in the sunshine, while the milk drinkers swarmed at the dairy counter, and bloomed and expanded and swapped anecdotes--it was a laboratory of ideas, and if you had a new one, no matter how queer, you could find somebody who had tried it, or was ready to try it forthwith. When you came off the milk diet, you might try some odd combination such as sour milk and dates. In the big dining room you were served every sort of vegetarian food. There were dark rumors that the smell of beefsteaks was coming from Macfadden’s private quarters. I asked him about it, and he told me he was trying another experiment.

I met him again when he was sixty; still of the same experimental disposition, he wanted to know what I had learned in twenty years. He then owned a string of magazines and newspapers, I don’t know how many, and I would not venture to imagine how many millions they brought him every year, or the number of his blooming daughters--I think there were eight in a photograph on his desk. He still had his muscles of steel, and would take two packs of cards, put them together, and tear them in half before your eyes. He had been a weakling in his youth, had built up that powerful frame, and would put on bathing trunks and come out on a platform and show it to people; very vulgar, of course--no “ethical” medico would dream of doing it. But it caused great numbers of men and women to take an interest in their health, and it set up resistance to those forces of modern civilization that were destroying the body.

My personal experience has been told in a book, _The Fasting Cure_, so I will merely say that I took a fast of ten or twelve days, and then a milk diet of three weeks, and achieved a sense of marvelous well-being. My wife did the same, and we became enthusiasts. I took a second fast of a week or so, and when I left the place I had gained about twenty pounds, which I needed. But I did not keep it, for as soon as I left the sanitarium I started on a new book.

IX

Harry Kemp came to see us in Battle Creek; he was on his way back to college after a summer’s work on the oreboats of the Great Lakes. He had a suitcase full of manuscripts, an extra shirt, and a heart bubbling over with literary excitements. He met Corydon for the first time and found her interesting; Corydon, for her part, was maternal to a forlorn poet.

The fates wove their webs, unguessed by any of us. It happened that at the Kellogg Institution, just down the street, there was a young lady from the Delta district of Mississippi--she had accompanied her mother and a cousin who were undergoing treatment. Mary Craig Kimbrough was the name of the young lady, and one day when she was walking with her cousin, the cousin remarked, “Would you like to meet an author? There goes Upton Sinclair with his wife.” Said the haughty young lady, “I don’t think he would interest me.” But the cousin insisted. “Oh, come on, I met him the other day, and he’s not so bad as he looks.”

She called the author from across the street, introductions were exchanged, and we chatted for a few minutes. The propagandist author, being just then excited over fasting, and having no manners or tact or taste or anything of that sort, informed an extremely proud young Southern belle that she was far too thin and needed a fast and a milk diet. It was the first time in her whole life that a man had ever addressed her except in the Southern mode of compliment.

I invited her and her cousin and her mother to come over to Macfadden’s that evening, where I was to give an outdoor talk. They came; and I was in a jovial mood, telling of the many queer ideas I had tried out in my search for health. The audience rocked with laughter when I set forth how, in the course of my first fast, I had walked down a hill from the institution, and then didn’t have the strength to climb back. No one was more amused than the young lady from Mississippi.

I remember that we took a walk up and down the piazza of the sanitarium, while this most sedate and dignified person--then twenty-five years of age--confided to me that she was troubled in her mind and would appreciate my advice. She revealed that she found herself unable to believe what she had been taught about the Bible. This was a source of great distress to her, and she didn’t know quite what to think of herself. Had I ever heard of anyone similarly afflicted?

I assured her with all necessary gravity that I had heard of such cases. This was a relief to her; there were few such persons in the Mississippi Delta, she declared. The development of her faithlessness had become a cause of anguish to her family; her mother would assemble the ladies of all the local churches in her drawing room, and the straying sheep would be called in and compelled to kneel down with them, while one after another they petitioned the Deity for the salvation of her soul. When they had finished, they would look at the fair sheep, and wait to see the effect of their labors; but so far the medicine had failed.

I assured the young lady that I also was a lost soul, and gave her the names of an assortment of books--T. H. Huxley’s essays among them. She duly bought them all, and when she got home, a brother discovered her reading them and took them away to his law office, where only men could be corrupted by them. He himself soon gave up his faith.

X

For the winter I took my family to the single-tax colony at Fairhope, Alabama, on Mobile Bay. Since I could not have a colony of my own, I would try other people’s. Here were two or three hundred assorted reformers who had organized their affairs according to the gospel of Henry George. They were trying to eke out a living from poor soil and felt certain they were setting an example to the rest of the world. The climate permitted the outdoor life, and we found a cottage for rent on the bay front, remote from the village. Dave Howatt was with us again; having meantime found himself a raw-food wife, he lived apart from us and came to his secretarial job daily.

I was overworking again; and when my recalcitrant stomach made too much trouble, I would fast for a day, three days, a week. I was trying the raw-food diet, and failing as before. I was now a full-fledged physical culturist, following a Spartan regime. In front of our house ran a long pier, out to the deep water of the bay. Often the boards of this pier were covered with frost, very stimulating to the bare feet, and whipped by icy winds, stimulating to the skin; each morning I made a swim in this bay a part of my law. (Says Zarathustra: “Canst thou hang thy will above thee as thy law?”)

Among the assorted philosophies expressed at Fairhope was the cult of Dr. J. H. Salisbury, meat-diet advocate; I read his book. Let me remind you again that this was before the days of any real knowledge about diet. Salisbury was one of the first regular M.D.’s who tried experiments upon himself and other human beings in order to find out how particular foods actually affect the human body. He assembled a “poison squad” of healthy young men, fed them on various diets, and studied the ailments they developed. By such methods he thought to prove that excess of carbohydrates was the cause of tuberculosis in humans. His guess was wrong--yet not so far wrong as it seems. It is my belief that denatured forms of starch and sugar are the predisposing cause of the disease; people live on white flour, sugar, and lard, and when the body has become weakened, the inroads of bacteria begin.

Anyhow, Salisbury would put his “poison squad” on a diet of lean beef, chopped and lightly cooked, and cure them of their symptoms in a week or two. He had a phrase by which he described the great health error, “making a yeastpot of your stomach.” That was what I had been doing, and now, to the horror of my friend Dave Howatt, I decided to try the Salisbury system. I remember my emotions, walking up and down in front of the local butchershop and getting up the courage to enter. To my relief, I caused no sensation. Apparently the butcher took it quite as a matter of course that a man should purchase a pound of sirloin.

I had been a practicing vegetarian--and what was worse, a preaching one--for a matter of three years; and now I was a backslider. My socialist comrade, Eugene Wood, happened to be spending the winter in Fairhope, and he wrote a jolly piece about “America’s leading raw-food advocate who happens just now to be living upon a diet of stewed beefsteaks.” I had to bow my head, and add crow to my menu!

XI

In Fairhope was the Organic School, invention of Mrs. Marietta Johnson. It was then a rudimentary affair, conducted in a couple of shacks, but has since become famous. Our son, David, then eight years old, attended it. His education had been scattery, with his parents moving from a winter resort to a summer resort. But he had always had the world’s best literature and had done the rest for himself. Fairhope he found to his taste; we had a back porch and a front porch to our isolated cottage, and he would spread his quilt and pillow on the former, and I would spread mine on the latter, and sleep outdoors every night on the floor. I asked if he minded the hard surface, and his reply belongs to the days of the world’s divine simplicity. “Oh, Papa, it’s fine! I like to wake up in the night and look at the moon, and listen to the owl, and pee!”

I tried the experiment of fasting while doing my writing; a marvelous idea, to have no stomach at all to interfere with creative activity! A comedy sprang full-grown into my brain, and I wrote it in two days and a half of continuous work--a three-act play, _The Naturewoman_. I record the feat as a warning to my fellow writers--don’t try it! During a fast you are living on your nerves and cannot stand the strain of creative labor. When I finished, I could hardly digest a spoonful of orange juice.