Part 5

I would get a cab and take him--no longer home, for we could not handle him; he would be delirious, and there would be need of strong-armed attendants and leather straps and iron bars. I would take him to St. Vincent’s Hospital, and there, with crucified saviors looking down on us, I would pay twenty-five dollars to a silent, black-clad nun, and my father would be entered in the books and led away, quaking with terror, by a young Irish husky in white ducks. A week or two later he would emerge, weak and unsteady, pasty of complexion but full of moral fervor. He would join the church, sign pledges, vote for Sunday closing, weep on my shoulder and tell me how he loved me. For a week or a month or possibly several months he would struggle to build up his lost business and pay his debts.

X

My liberal friends who read _The Wet Parade_ found it sentimental and out of the spirit of the time. To them I made answer that the experiences of my childhood were “reality,” quite as much so as the blood and guts of the Chicago stockyards or the birth scene in _Love’s Pilgrimage_. It is a fact that I have been all my life gathering material on the subject of the liquor problem. I know it with greater intimacy than any other theme I have ever handled. The list of drunkards I have wrestled with is longer than the list of coal miners, oil magnates, politicians, or any other group I have known and portrayed in my books.

My experiences with my father lasted thirty years; during this period several uncles and cousins, and numerous friends of the family, Southern gentlemen, Northern businessmen, and even one or two of their wives were stumbling down the same road of misery. Later on, I ran into the same problem in the literary and socialist worlds: George Sterling, Jack London, Ambrose Bierce, W. M. Reedy, O. Henry, Eugene Debs--a long list. I have a photograph of Jack and George and the latter’s wife, Carrie, taken on Jack’s sailboat on San Francisco Bay; three beautiful people, young, happy, brilliant--and all three took poison to escape the claws of John Barleycorn. And then came a new generation, many of whom I knew well: Sinclair Lewis, Edna Millay, Eugene O’Neill, Dylan Thomas, Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Theodore Dreiser, William Faulkner.

The experience with my father of course made me prematurely serious. I began questioning the world, trying to make out how such evils came to be. I soon traced the saloon to Tammany and blamed my troubles on the high chieftains of this organization. I remember writing of Richard Croker that “I would be willing with my own hands to spear him on a pitchfork and thrust him into the fires of hell.” A sound evangelical sentiment! I had not yet found out “big business”--and of course I would not, until I had outgrown E. L. Godkin of the _Evening Post_ and Charles A. Dana of the _Sun_.

It was my idea at this time that the human race was to be saved by poetry. Men and women were going to be taught noble thoughts, and then they would abandon their base ways of living. I had made the acquaintance of Shelley and conceived a passionate friendship for him. Then I became intimate with Hamlet, Prince of Denmark; he came to the library of my Uncle Bland, in Baltimore, where I spent the Christmas holidays, and we had much precious converse. I too was a prince, in conflict with a sordid and malignant world; at least, so I saw myself, and lived entirely in that fantasy, very snobbish, scornful, and superior. Any psychiatrist would have diagnosed me as an advanced case of delusion of grandeur, messianic complex, paranoia, narcissism, and so to the end of his list.

XI

Along with extreme idealism, and perhaps complementary to it, went a tormenting struggle with sexual desire. I never had relations with any woman until my marriage at the age of twenty-two; but I came close to it, and the effort to refrain was more than I would have been equal to without the help of my clergyman friend. For a period of five years or more I was subject to storms of craving; I would become restless and miserable and wandering out on the street, look at every woman and girl I passed and dream an adventure that might be a little less than sordid. Many of the daughters of the poor, and more than once a daughter of the rich, indicated a “coming-on disposition”; there would begin a flirtation, with caresses and approaches to intimacy. But then would come another storm--of shame and fear; the memory of the pledge I had given; the dream of a noble and beautiful love, which I cherished; also, of course, the idea of venereal disease, of which my friend Moir kept me informed. I would shrink back and turn cold; two or three times, with my reformer’s impulse, I told the girl about it, and the petting party turned into a moral discourse. I have pictured such a scene in _Love’s Pilgrimage_, and it affords amusement to my “emancipated” radical friends.

What do I think about these experiences after sixty-five years of reflection? The first fact--an interesting one--is that I am still embarrassed to talk about them. My ego craves to be dignified and impressive and is humiliated to see itself behaving like a young puppy. I have to take the grown-up puppy by the back of the neck and make him face the facts--there being so many young ones in the world who have the same troubles. Frankness about sex must not be left to the cynical and morally irresponsible.

There are dangers in puritanism, and there are compensations. My chastity was preserved at the cost of much emotional effort, plus the limitation of my interests in certain fields. For example, I could not prosecute the study of art. In the splendid library of Columbia University were treasures of beauty, costly volumes of engravings; and in my usual greedy fashion I went at these, intending to learn all there was to know about Renaissance art in a week or two. But I found myself overwhelmed by this mass of nakedness; my senses reeled, and I had to quit. I might have gone back when I was mature; but alas, I was by then too busy trying to save the world from poverty and war. This confession resembles Darwin’s--that his concentration upon the details of natural science had the effect of atrophying his interest in music and other arts.

What did I get in return for this? I got intensity and power of concentration; these elements in my make-up were the product of my efforts to resist the tempter. I learned to work fourteen hours a day at study and creative effort because it was only by being thus occupied that the craving for woman could be kept out of my soul. I told myself the legend of Hercules and recited the wisdom attributed to Solomon: “He that ruleth his spirit is greater than he that taketh a city.”

For years now we have heard a great deal about mental troubles caused by sex repression; we have heard little about the complexes that may be caused by sex indulgence. But my observation has been that those who permit themselves to follow every sexual impulse are quite as miserable as those who repress them. I remember saying to a classmate in college, “Did it ever occur to you to stop and look at your own mind? Everything that comes to you is turned into sex.” He looked surprised, and I saw that it was a new idea to him; he thought it over and said, “I guess you are right.”

This problem of the happy mean in sex matters would require a volume for a proper discussion. As it happens, I have written such a volume, _The Book of Life_, and it is available to those who are interested. So I pass on.

XII

I was becoming less and less satisfied with college. It had become an agony for me to sit and listen to the slow recitation of matters that I either knew already or did not care to know. I was enraged by professors whose idea of teaching was to catch me being inattentive to their dullness. At the same time, I had to have my degree because I was still planning to study law. I fretted and finally evolved a scheme; I made application to the faculty for two months’ leave of absence, on the ground that I had to earn some money--which was true. They gave me the leave, and I earned the money writing stories, and spent the rest of my time in a hall bedroom reading Shelley, Carlyle, and Emerson. I forced myself to read until one or two in the morning, and many a time I would wake at daybreak and find that I had sunk back on my pillow and slept with my book still open and the gaslight burning--not a very hygienic procedure.

It was the lodginghouse on West 23rd Street, kept by a Mrs. Carmichael, whose son also was a would-be genius--only he was a religious mystic and found his thrills in church music. We used to compare notes, each patronizing the other, of course--two young stags in the forest, trying out their horns. I remember that Bert went up to display his musical skill to a great composer, Edward MacDowell, of whom I thus heard for the first time. The youth came back in excitement to report that the composer had praised him highly and offered him free instruction. But after the first lesson, Bert was less elated, for his idol had spoken as follows: “Mr. Carmichael, before you come again, please have your hair cut and wash your neck. The day of long-haired and greasy musicians is past.”

I went back to college, made up my missing studies in a week or two, and was graduated without distinction, exactly in the middle of my class. I remember the name of the man who carried off all the honors, and I look for that name in _Who’s Who_, but do not find it. I won some sort of prize in differential calculus, but that was all; nothing in literature, nothing in oratory, philosophy, history. Such talents as I had were not valued by my alma mater, nor would they have been by any other alma mater then existing in America so far as I could learn. I was so little interested in the college regime that I did not wait for commencement, but went off to the country and received my diploma by mail.

I had sold some jokes and stories, and I now spent a summer writing more, while drifting about in a skiff among the Thousand Islands in the upper St. Lawrence River. I caught many black bass and ate them; read the poems of Walter Scott and the novels of Thackeray and George Eliot, made available in the Seaside Library, which I purchased wholesale for eight cents a copy. The life I got from those classics is one reason why I believe in cheap books and have spent tens of thousands of dollars trying to keep my own books available to students.

XIII

I still meant to be a lawyer, but first I wanted a year of literature and philosophy at Columbia University. “If you do that, you’ll never be a lawyer,” said some shrewd person to me--and he was right. But to Columbia I would go, and how was I to live meantime? I went back to New York to solve this problem and called upon the Street and Smith editor who had once suggested a serial story to Simon Stern and myself. Now I reaped the reward of persistence, obtaining a meal ticket for the next three years of my life.

The name of this editor was Henry Harrison Lewis, and he later became editor of one of the fighting organs of the openshop movement. I remember expounding to him my views of life and my destiny therein, and how he protested that it was not normal for a youth to be so apocalyptic and messianic. My evil career was assuredly not Mr. Lewis’ fault.

He showed me proofs of the _Army and Navy Weekly_, a five-cent publication with bright red and blue and green and yellow covers, which the firm was just starting. The editor himself was to write every other week a story of life at the Annapolis Naval Academy and wanted someone to write in alternate weeks, a companion story of life at the West Point Military Academy. Would I like to try that job? My heart leaped with excitement.

My first experience in the gathering of local color! I got from Mr. Moir a letter of introduction to an army officer at West Point, and went up and stayed at a cheap hotel in the village. I roamed about the grounds and watched the cadets, and made copious notes as to every detail of their regimen. I recollect being introduced to a stern and noble-looking upperclassman. I revealed to him what I was there for, and said that I needed a hero. “Well, why not use me?” inquired this cadet. “I am president of the senior class, I am captain of the football team, and I have made the highest records in this and that,” and so on. I looked into the man’s face for any trace of a smile, but there was none. He stays in my memory as a type of the military mind. Doubtless he is a great general by now.

I went back to New York, and under the pen name of Lieutenant Frederick Garrison, USA, produced a manuscript of some twenty-five or thirty thousand words, a rollicking tale of a group of “candidates” who made their appearance at the academy to start their military career. The Mark Mallory stories they were called, and they were successful, so I was definitely launched upon a literary career. I was paid, I believe, forty dollars per story; it was a fortune, enough to take care of both my mother and myself. The local color was found satisfactory. Lewis told me that Smith, head of the firm, asked if that new writer had been through West Point. “Yes,” replied Lewis, “he went through in three days.”

XIV

This episode of my hack writing I find always interests people, so I may as well finish it here, even though it involves running ahead of my story. After I had been doing the work for a while, the firm needed Mr. Lewis’ services for more editing, and he asked me if I could do his stint as well as my own. I always thought I could do everything, so I paid a visit to Annapolis, haunted by the ghosts of my grandfathers. I went through this place also in three days. Thereafter I was Ensign Clarke Fitch, USN, as well as Lieutenant Frederick Garrison, USA. I now wrote a novelette of close to thirty thousand words every week, and received forty dollars a week.

Shortly after that, Willie Hearst with his New York _Evening Journal_ succeeded in carrying the United States into a war with Spain. (“You make the pictures, and I’ll make the war,” cabled Willie to Frederick Remington in Cuba.) So my editor sent for me and explained that the newsboys and messenger boys who followed the adventures of Mark Mallory and Clif Faraday would take it ill if these cadets idled away their time in West Point and Annapolis while their country was bleeding; I must hurry up and graduate them, and send them to the battlefield.

No sooner said than done. I read a book of Cuban local color and looked up several expletives for Spanish villains to exclaim. I remember one of them, “Carramba!” I have never learned what it means, but hope it is not too serious, for I taught it to all the newsboys and messenger boys of the eastern United States. When I hear people lamenting the foolishness of the movies, I remember the stuff I ground out every week, which was printed in large editions.

From that time on my occupation was killing Spaniards. “What are you going to do today?” my mother would ask, and the answer would be, “I have to kill Spaniards.” I thought nothing of sinking a whole fleet of Spanish torpedo boats to make a denouement, and the vessels I sank during that small war would have replaced all the navies of the world. I remember that I had my hero explode a bomb on a Spanish vessel and go to the bottom with her; in the next story I blandly explained how he had opened a porthole and swum up again. Once or twice I killed a Spanish villain, and then forgot and brought him to life again. When that occurred, I behaved like President Coolidge and Governor Fuller and President Lowell, and the other great ones of Massachusetts--I treated my critics with silent contempt.

I was never told how my product was selling; that was the affair of my masters. But they must have been satisfied, for presently came another proposition. There was a boom in war literature, and they were going to start another publication--I think the title was the _Columbia Library_--to be issued monthly and contain fifty-six thousand words. Could I add this to my other tasks? I was a young shark, ready to devour everything in sight. So for some months I performed the feat of turning out eight thousand words every day, Sunday included. I tell this to literary men, and they say it could not be done; but I actually did it, at least until the end of the Spanish-American War. I kept two stenographers working all the time, taking dictation one day and transcribing the next. In the afternoon I would dictate for about three hours, as fast as I could talk; in the evening I would revise the copy that had been brought in from the previous day, and then take a long walk and think up the incidents of my next day’s stunt. That left me mornings to attend lectures at Columbia University and to practice the violin. I figured out that by the time I finished this potboiling I had published an output equal in volume to the works of Walter Scott.

What was the effect of all this upon me as a writer? It both helped and hurt. It taught me to shape a story and to hold in mind what I had thought up; so it fostered facility. On the other hand, it taught me to use exaggerated phrases and clichés, and this is something I have fought against, not always successfully. Strange as it may seem, I actually enjoyed the work while I was doing it. Not merely was I earning a living and putting away a little money; I had a sense of fun, and these adventures were a romp. It is significant that the stories pleased their public only so long as they pleased their author. When, at the age of twenty-one, I became obsessed with the desire to write a serious novel, I came to loathe this hackwork, and from that time on I was never able to do it with success, even though, driven by desperate need, I several times made the effort. It was the end of my youth.

_3_

_Genius_

I

Was it really genius? That I cannot say. I only know it seemed like it, and I took it at its face value. I tell the story here as objectively as possible, and if the hero seems a young egotist, do not blame me, because that youth is long since dead.

The thing I believed was genius came to me first during one of those Christmas holidays I spent in Baltimore, at the home of my Uncle Bland. I had always enjoyed these holidays, having a normal boy’s fondness for turkey and plum pudding and other Christmas delights. I used to say that anybody might wake me at three o’clock in the morning to eat ice cream; my Aunt Lelia Montague, mother of the general’s wife, declared that the way to my heart was through a bag of gingersnaps.

But on this particular Christmas my uncle’s home meant to me a shelf of books. I read Shakespeare straight through during that holiday and, though it sounds preposterous, I read all of Milton’s poetry in those same two weeks. Literature had become a frenzy. I read while I was eating, lying down, sitting, standing, and walking; I read everywhere I went--and I went nowhere except to the park to read on sunshiny days. I averaged fourteen hours a day, and it was a routine matter to read all of Shakespeare’s comedies in two or three days, and all his tragedies in the next two or three, and the historical plays over the weekend. In my uncle’s library reposed beautiful volumes, untouched except by the hand of the parlormaid; now I drew them forth, with love and rapture, and gave them a reason for being. Some poet said to a rich man, “You own the land and I own the landscape.” To my kind uncle I said, “You own the books and I own the literature.”

My mind on fire with high poetry, I went out for a walk one night. A winter night, with hard crunching snow on the ground and great bright lights in the sky; the tree branches black and naked, crackling now and then in the breeze, but between times silence, quite magical silence--and I walking in Druid Hill Park, mile on mile, lost to the world, drinking in beauty, marveling at the mystery of life. Suddenly this thing came to me, startling and wonderful beyond any power of words to tell; the opening of gates in the soul, the pouring in of music, of light, of joy that was unlike anything else and therefore not to be conveyed in metaphors. I stood riveted to one spot, and a trembling seized me, a dizziness, a happiness so intense that the distinction between pleasure and pain was lost.

If I had been a religious person at this time, no doubt I would have had visions of saints and holy martyrs, and perhaps developed stigmata on hands and feet. But I had no sort of superstition, so the vision took a literary form. There was a campfire by a mountain road, to which came travelers who hailed one another and made high revelry there without alcohol. Yes, even Falstaff and Prince Hal were purified and refined, according to my teetotal sentiments! There came the melancholy Prince of Denmark, and Don Quixote--I must have been reading him at this time. Also Shelley--real persons mixed with imaginary ones, but all equal in this realm of fantasy. They held conversation, each in his own character, yet glorified, more so than in the books. I was laughing, singing with the delight of their company; in short, a perfect picture of a madman, talking to myself, making incoherent exclamations. Yet I knew what I was doing, I knew what was happening, I knew that this was literature, and that if I could remember the tenth part of it and set it down on paper, it would be read.

The strangest part about this ecstasy is the multifarious forms it assumes, the manifold states of consciousness it involves, all at one time. It is possible to be bowed with grief and transported with delight; it is possible to love and to hate, to be naïve and calculating, to be hot and cold, timid and daring--all contradictions reconciled. But the most striking thing is the conviction that you are in the hands of a force outside yourself. Without trace of a preconception, and regarding the thing as objectively as you know how, the feeling is that something is taking hold of you, pushing you along, sweeping you away. To walk in a windstorm and feel it beating upon you is a sensation of the body no more definite and unmistakable than this windstorm of the spirit, which has come to me perhaps a hundred times in my life. I search for a metaphor and picture a child running, with an older and swifter person by his side taking his hand and lifting him off the ground, so that his little leaps become great leaps, almost like flying.

You may call this force your own subconscious mind, or God, or cosmic consciousness--I care not what fancy name you give; the point is that it is there, and always there. If you ask whether it is intelligent, I can only say that you appear to be the intelligence, and “it” appears to be the cause of intelligence in you. How anything unintelligent can be the cause of intelligence is a riddle I pass by. Life is built upon such antinomies.

II

This experience occurred in unexpected places and at unpredictable times. It was associated with music and poetry, but still more frequently with natural beauty. I remember winter nights in Central Park, New York, and tree branches white with snow, magical in the moonlight; I remember springtime mornings in several places; a summer night in the Adirondacks, with moonlight strewn upon a lake; a summer twilight in the far wilds of Ontario, when I came over a ridge and into a valley full of clover, incredibly sweet of scent--one has to go into the North in summer to appreciate how deep and thick a field of red clover can grow and what overpowering perfume it throws upon the air at twilight.