Part 23

For my story I needed to know not merely the Italian laborers, who were easy to meet, but the aristocrats, who were difficult. Soon after my arrival, still on a crutch, I read that the proprietor of a great Boston industry had died and was to be buried from his home. It was a perfect setup: a great mill in a valley, the cottages of the workers all about it, and the mansion of the owner on the height above. I went to that mansion and followed the little river of guests into the double parlor for the funeral service. When one of the sons of the family came up to me, I told him I had great respect for his father, and he said I was welcome. So I watched the scene of what I knew would be my opening chapter.

On my way back on a streetcar I was recognized by a reporter from the _Evening Transcript_, the paper then read by everybody who was anybody in and about Boston. He had come to write up the funeral, and he included me. I shall never forget the horror on the face of a proper Boston couple when I told them of my attendance at that funeral. Maybe it will shock the readers of this book. I can only say that if you are a novelist you think about “copy” and not about anybody’s feelings, even your own. If I were talking to you about that scene, I wouldn’t say, “Was it a proper thing to do?” I would say, “Did I get that scene correct?” When I went back to the little beach cottage, I wrote a two-volume novel in which all the scenes were correct; and the novel will outlive me.

On the way home I stopped at Denver for a conference with Fred Moore, who had been the original attorney for Sacco and Vanzetti, and had been turned away when one of the Boston aristocracy, W. G. Thompson, consented to take over the appeals. Fred was bitter about it, of course, and it might be that this had influenced his opinion. He told me he thought there was a possibility that Sacco was involved in the payroll holdup. He thought there was less chance in the case of Vanzetti. There were anarchists who called themselves “direct actionists,” and Fred knew of things they had done. I pointed out to him that if Sacco had been guilty and Vanzetti innocent it meant that Vanzetti had given his life to save the life of some comrade.

Of course, I did not know and could only guess. I wrote the novel that way, portraying Vanzetti as I had known him and as his friends had known him. Some of the things I told displeased the fanatical believers; but having portrayed the aristocrats as they were, I had to do the same thing for the anarchists. The novel, _Boston_, ran serially in _The Bookman_ and was published in two handsome volumes that went all over the world.

Just recently I had the honor of a visit from Michael Musmanno, who as a young lawyer came late into the Sacco-Vanzetti case and gave his heart as well as his time and labor to an effort to save the lives of those two men. Being Italian himself, he felt that he knew them, and he became firmly assured of their innocence. Now he has become a much-respected justice of the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania; but he still feels as he did, and poured out his soul as if he were addressing the jury of a generation ago. The bitter old Boston judge and the grim governor and the cold-hearted president of Harvard all came to life, and I found myself sitting again in the warden’s reception room at Charlestown prison, in converse with the wise and gentle working-class philosopher named Bartolomeo Vanzetti. I had sent him several of my books, and he had been permitted to have them; I wish that I could have had a phonograph to take down his groping but sensitive words.

_12_

_More Causes--and Effects_

I

We had made too many friends and incurred too many obligations in Pasadena; so we found a cottage down on the ocean front at Alamitos Bay, Long Beach, and moved there. During both of my trips to Boston, Craig stayed alone in the little beach cottage and never minded it. Somehow she felt safe, and the waves on the other side of the boardwalk lulled her to sleep. She had become fascinated with the problem of her own mind, and studied it with the help of scores of books that I had got for her. I still have more than a hundred volumes on psychology and philosophy and psychic research that she read and marked--Bergson, William James, William McDougall, Charcot, Janet--a long list of the best. She had had psychic experiences herself in her girlhood and was tormented with the desire to understand these hidden forces of the mind. All the time that I was writing _Oil!_ and _Boston_, I was also helping her to find out what her gift actually was--and to guess what it meant. The result was the book called _Mental Radio_.

The procedure we adopted was the simplest possible: I would make half a dozen drawings on slips of paper and put each inside an envelope. Then I would bring them to Craig, who was lying on her couch. She would lay one of them over her solar plexus--having read somewhere that this might be the center of the unknown forces. We didn’t know whether that was so or not; but the solar plexus was as good as any other place. I would sit quietly and keep watch so as to be able to say that she did not cheat--although, of course, I knew that she had never cheated in her life. She had only one obsession--she wanted to know for certain if these forces were _real_.

She would decide that something that had come into her mind was _the_ reality, and she would take pencil and pad and make a drawing. Then we would open the envelope and compare the two. The results were amazing to us both.

I had been reading about telepathy and clairvoyance since my youth. At Columbia I had studied with James Hyslop, who had been a patient psychic researcher; then there was the Unitarian minister who had performed my first marriage--Minot J. Savage--who told me he had seen and talked with a ghost who said that he had just been drowned off the coast of Britain. The results in Craig’s case settled the matter for us, and settles it for anyone who is unwilling to believe that we are a pair of imbeciles as well as cheats. There is no other alternative, for we took every possible precaution against any blunder, and there is no way to account for what happened except to say that a drawing completely invisible to the eyes can make an impression on the mind by some other means.

It was not merely from my drawings that Craig got these impressions. She got them from the mind of a professional medium, whom she employed to experiment with her. I have given the details in _Mental Radio_. I printed several thousand copies of the book, and the experiments it describes have stayed unexplained now for thirty years. It is worth noting also that _Mental Radio_ has just been reissued--this time by a publisher of scientific books exclusively. This is significant.

Professor William McDougall, who had been head of the department of psychology first at Oxford and then at Harvard, wrote a preface to the book. When he came to see us at the little beach cottage, he told us that he had just accepted a position as head of the department of psychology at Duke University; he had a fund at his disposal and proposed to establish a department of parapsychology to investigate these problems. He said he had taken the liberty of bringing several cards in his pocket, and he would like to be able to say that Craig had demonstrated her power to him.

Craig, always a high-strung person, hated to be submitted to tests because they made her nervous; but her respect for McDougall was great, and she said she would do her best. She sat quietly and concentrated. Then she said that she had an impression of a building with stone walls and narrow windows, and the walls were covered with something that looked like green leaves. McDougall took from an inside pocket a postcard of a building at Oxford University covered with ivy. There were two or three other successes that I have forgotten. The outcome was that McDougall said he was satisfied, and would go to Duke and set up the new department. He did so, with results that all the world knows.

I was interested to observe the conventional thinker’s attitude toward a set of ideas that he does not wish to accept. _Mental Radio_ contained 210 examples of successes in telepathy--partial successes and complete successes. To the average orthodox scientist, the idea was inconceivable, and it just wasn’t possible to tell him anything that he knew in advance couldn’t have happened. On the other hand, the lovely personality of Mary Craig is shown all through the book, and I cannot recall that any scientist ever accused her of cheating. He would go out of his way to think of something that _might_ have happened, and then he would assume that it _had_ happened; it _must_ have happened, and that settled the matter. He would entirely overlook the fact that I had mentioned that same possibility and had stated explicitly that it _hadn’t_ happened; that we had made it absolutely impossible for it _to have_ happened.

I won’t be unkind enough to name any scientist. One suggested solemnly that it might have been possible for Mary Craig to have gotten an idea of the drawing by seeing the movements of my hand at a distance. But in the book I plainly stated that I never made the drawing without going into another room and closing the door. That kind of oversight has been committed again and again by the critics.

* * * * *

While I am on this subject I will venture to slip ahead for several years and tell of one more experiment. Arthur Ford, the medium, was paying a visit to Los Angeles, and I asked him to come out to our home and see if his powers had waned. (He had never refused an invitation from us--and he had never let us pay him a dollar.) He said he would come, and Craig was so determined to make a real test that she wouldn’t even let me invite our friends by telephone. Our line might be tapped! She wrote a letter to Theodore Dreiser, and one to Rob Wagner, editor of _Script_, who was a skeptic but wanted to be shown.

When evening came, my orders were to wait outside for Arthur and take him around behind the house so that he might not see who came in. This I faithfully did; so there were Dreiser and his wife, and Rob Wagner and his wife, and Craig’s sister, Dolly, and her husband. They were seated in a semidark room; and when I brought Arthur in, he went straight to the armchair provided, leaned back in it with his eyes toward the ceiling, and covered his eyes with a silk handkerchief, which is his practice.

Presently came the voice that Ford calls Fletcher. “Fletcher” speaks quietly and without a trace of emotion. He said there was a spirit present who had been killed in a strange accident. He had been crossing a street when a team of runaway horses came galloping, and the center pole had struck him in the chest. And then there was a spirit victim of another strange accident. This man had been in a warship when one of the guns had somehow backfired and killed him. And then there was a newspaperman and quite a long conversation about various matters that I have forgotten. I told the full details in an article for the _Psychic Observer_ but do not have a copy at hand.

At that point in the séance there came a tap on the door, and Mrs. Gartz came in with one of her nephews. She had known nothing about the séance; being highly antagonistic, she had not been invited. Fletcher said, “There is a strong Catholic influence here, but there will be a divorce.”

That ended the affair, possibly because of Mrs. Gartz’s hostile attitude. The lights were turned up, and the various guests spoke in turn. Bob Irwin, Craig’s brother-in-law, said that his young brother had been killed by exactly such a runaway team; Rob Wagner said that his brother had been killed in the Navy in a gun accident. Theodore Dreiser had been a journalist, but he denied that he had ever known such a man or heard of any such events as had come out in the séance. Mrs. Gartz’s nephew said that he was a Catholic, but there would surely not be any divorce.

So ended the evening; but the day after the next there came to Craig a letter from Helen Dreiser saying that she was embarrassed to tell us that Theodore had been drinking and had slept through the séance and not heard a word. When she had repeated to him the various statements, he admitted that he knew such a man and that the events mentioned had occurred.

The predicted divorce did not occur until a month or two later, when the wife of the Gartz nephew divorced him.

And now all the skeptics can put their wits to work and find out how Arthur Ford got all those facts about people he had never met, and about whom we had made such efforts at secrecy. I don’t like to be fooled any more than the next man, but I agree with Professor McDougall and Professor Rhine that it is the duty of science to investigate such events and find out what are the forces by which they are brought about.

Just by way of fun, I will add that Professor McDougall established his department of parapsychology, and Professor Rhine has carried it on; one of the things they have proved is that when Negroes shooting craps snap their fingers and cry “Come seven! Come eleven!” they really are influencing the dice. Rhine’s investigators have caused millions of dice to be thrown mechanically, and observers have willed certain numbers to come, and the numbers have come. The chances for the successes having happened accidentally are up in the billions. Most embarrassing--but it happens!

II

Much of the story of my life is a story of the books I wrote. I read a great many, too, and among those I found interesting was a history of ancient Rome--because of the resemblance between the political and economic circumstances of two thousand years ago and those I knew so well in my native land. So I wrote _Roman Holiday_, the story of a rich young American who amuses himself driving a racing automobile. He meets with an accident and wakes up in the days when he had been driving horses in a chariot race in the arena of ancient Rome. Everything is familiar to him, and he goes back and forth between the two ages of history, equally at home in both. This novel was a foreshadowing of my tragic drama, _Cicero_--although, rather oddly, this realization did not come to me until just recently, when _Cicero_ was produced.

III

My next book handled the problem of prohibition, of special interest to me ever since I had seen my father and two of my uncles die as alcoholics. The whole country was boiling with excitement over the struggle between the “wets” and the “drys,” so I put my youthful self into a long novel, with all the characters I had known and the battles I had fought against the saloon-keepers and the crooked politicians. _The Wet Parade_ I called it. It was made into a very good motion picture, with an illustrious cast that included Robert Young, Walter Huston, Myrna Loy, Lewis Stone, and Jimmie Durante as the comic prohibition agent.

Of course, the “wet paraders” I knew, headed by H. L. Mencken, had all kinds of fun with me. But many of my oldest and best friends have been caught in that parade, and I have had to watch them go down to early graves. Jack London was one of them. I have told of his appearance and his rousing speech at a mass meeting in New York City back in the days when we were launching the Intercollegiate Socialist Society. The next day I had lunch with him. The occasion was completely spoiled for me because Jack was drinking and I wasn’t, and he amused himself by teasing me with his exploits--the stories he afterward put into his book, _John Barleycorn_. Later, when I went to live in Pasadena, Jack urged me now and again to come up to Glen Ellen, his wonderful estate. I did not go because George Sterling told me that Jack’s drinking had become tragic. Jack took his own life at the age of forty.

And, alas, George Sterling followed his example. Shortly before George’s death, Mencken, who was in California, told me that he had seen George at the Bohemian Club in San Francisco and that he was in a terrible state after another of his drinking bouts. A day or two later George took poison--but Mencken learned nothing from that dreadful episode.

On one of my trips to New York I was asked to make a funeral speech over the body of a kind and generous publisher, Horace Liveright. I remember his weeping, black-clad mother and, sitting apart from her, the lovely young actress who had been living in his home in Hollywood when my wife and I went there to dinner, and who had taken drink for drink with him. I remember walking downtown with Theodore Dreiser after the funeral. We discussed the tragedy of drinking, and I knew the anguish that Theodore’s wife was suffering. But he learned nothing from the funeral or from my arguments.

IV

As I write there comes the news of the death of Ernest Hemingway. He received an almost fatal wound in World War I, and this apparently centered all his mind upon the idea of death. It became an obsession with him--something not merely to write about but to inflict upon living creatures. His idea of recreation was to kill large wild animals in Africa, and half-tame bulls in Mexico, and small game in America, and great fish in the sea. He wrote about all these experiences with extraordinary vividness and became the most popular writer in America, and perhaps in the world. When he died, the _Saturday Review_ gave thirty pages to his personality and his writings, almost two thirds of the reading matter in that issue. I read a good part of it, and found myself in agreement with just one paragraph, by a contributor:

To the present critic, who is amazed by and genuinely admires the lean virtuosity of Mr. Hemingway, the second most astonishing thing about him is the narrowness of his selective range. The people he observes with fascinated fixation and then makes live before us are real, but they are all very much alike: bullfighters, bruisers, touts, gunmen, professional soldiers, prostitutes, hard drinkers, dope fiends.

Nowhere in the thirty pages did I find any mention of the fact that all this extraordinary writing was done under the stimulus of alcohol. A decade or so ago there was published in _Life_ an article by a staff man who had been permitted to accompany Hemingway and a well-known motion picture actress about the city of New York for a couple of typical days. The writer described Hemingway as unable to go for an hour without a drink of liquor. As a result of this practice his health broke, and after a long siege in hospitals he put himself out of his misery by putting both barrels of his beautiful shotgun into his mouth and blowing off the top of his head.

V

And then the mail brings a volume containing 867 pages and weighing several pounds. It is _Sinclair Lewis: An American Life_, by Mark Schorer. I have known about the preparation of this “monumental study” for several years. It is a Book-of-the-Month-Club selection, and so will be widely read; the story of a man whom I knew for almost half a century, whom I admired and helped when I could, whose books I praised when I could, and whose tragic ending I mourned because I had tried to prevent it and failed.

I have told how Hal Lewis showed up as a runaway student from Yale, expecting to find our Helicon Home Colony more interesting. He met there, not in an academic way but socially, such people as William James and John Dewey; Jo Davidson, the sculptor, who was later to do his bust; and Sadakichi Hartmann, art authority, whom Lewis had to help put out because he (not Lewis) was drunk. Also I remember that Professor W. P. Montague of Columbia University taught Lewis how to play billiards, and Professor William Noyes of Teachers College taught him how to tend the furnace. Edwin Björkman, translator of Strindberg, told him about that strange playwright, and Edwin’s wife, a suffragette and editor, later became Lewis’ boss. As I have already noted, Edith Summers, my secretary, became Lewis’ sweetheart at Helicon Hall.

It was all quite different from what he would have gotten at Yale, and he learned a lot about the modern world and modern ideas. He left us after several months and wrote us up in the New York _Sun_. That was going to be the way of his life for the rest of his sixty-six years. He would wander over America and Europe, then settle down somewhere and write stories, long stories or short ones, about the people he had met and what he imagined about them.

Everywhere he went, both at home and in Europe, he ran into what is called “social drinking,” and his temperament was such that whatever he did he did to extremes. He became one of those drinking geniuses whose talents blossom and fade.

I have known two kinds of drink victims. There are the melancholy drinkers who weep on your shoulder and ask you to help them. You try to, but you can’t. Such a man was my kind father, whom I watched from earliest childhood and whom I remember introducing to Hal Lewis at Helicon Hall--shortly before my father’s pitiful ending. The other kind is the fighting drunk, and Hal became one of those; you may read the painful details in Professor Schorer’s book. Hal would throw his liquor into the face of the man who had offended him. He would use vile language and rush away--and rarely apologize later.

I never saw him in that condition; I was careful never to be around. That is why my friendship with him was carried on mostly by mail. I called on him once in New York, and found that he had to revise the manuscript of a play for rehearsal that afternoon; having been through that kind of thing myself, I excused myself quickly. He brought his first wife to my home in Pasadena, and he had not been drinking, so Craig and I spent a pleasant evening with them.

I have included ten of his letters in _My Lifetime in Letters_. Professor Schorer has quoted a long one in which Hal scolds me for what I had written about one or two of his least worthy novels. I am sorry to report that his biographer has left out what I did to help my old friend at the time when he was publishing his greatest novel--one that I could praise without reservation. Hal had told me about _Babbitt_ during his visit in Pasadena, and he wrote me from New York, “I have asked Harcourt, Brace and Company to shoot you out a copy of _Babbitt_ just as soon as possible.” I read the book at once, and sent them an opinion to which they gave display in their first advertisement:

I am now ready to get out in the street and shout hurrah, for America’s most popular novelist has sent me a copy of his new book, _Babbitt_. I am here to enter my prediction that it will be the most talked-about and the most-read novel published in this country in my life-time.

The book became probably the best-selling novel of the decade.

Later, when Lewis received the Nobel Prize and made his speech before the king and the notables in Stockholm, he named me as one of the American writers who might as well have been chosen for the prize. That was as handsome as anything a man could do for a colleague, and it was enough to keep me grateful to him up to the end. But I have to tell the tragic story of his “decline” and his “fall”--these two words are Schorer’s labels for large sections of the biography. “Decline” occupies 103 of the book’s pages, and “Fall” occupies the last 163 pages. “Decline” and “Fall” together comprise one third of the volume; and, oddly enough, when I figured up the years covered by those two sections, they cover one third of Lewis’ life (22 out of 66 years).