Теодор Драйзер - Twelve Men

M―'s idea, as he always said, was to spend and to live, only it wasn't. He merely induced others so to do. One of his customs (and it must have impressed L― very much, innocent newcomer that he was) was to have one or another of his hirelings announce his passing from one "important" meeting to another, within or without his own building, telephone messages being "thrown in" on his line or barred out, wherever he happened to be at the moment and when, presumably, he was deep in one of those literary conferences or confidences with one employee or another or with a group, for which he rapidly developed a passion. Another of his vanities was to have his automobile announced and he be almost forced into it by impetuous secretaries, who, because of orders previously given, insisted that he must be made to keep certain important engagements. Or he would send for one of his hirelings, wherever he chanced to be—club, restaurant, his home—midnight if necessary, to confer with him on some subject of great moment, and the hireling was supposed to call a taxi and come post haste in order that he might not be kept waiting.

"God!" L― once remarked in my presence. "To think that a thinking being has to be beholden to a thing like that for his weekly income! Somebody ought to tap him with a feather–duster and kill him!"

But the manner in which L― developed in this atmosphere! It was interesting. At first, before the magazine became so significant or well–organized, it was a great pleasure for me to associate with him outside office hours, and a curious and vivid companion he made. He was so intensely avid of life, so intolerant of the old, of anything different to that which he personally desired or saw, that at times it was most difficult to say anything at all for fear of meeting a rebuff or at least a caustic objection. As I was very pleased to note, he had a passion for seeing, as all youth should have when it first comes to the great city—the great bridges, the new tunnels just then being completed or dug, the harbor and bay, Coney Island, the two new and great railway terminals, then under construction. Most, though, he reveled in different and even depressing neighborhoods—Eighth Avenue, for instance, about which he later wrote a story, and a very good one ("A Quiet Duet"); Hell's Kitchen, that neighborhood that lies (or did), on the West Side of Manhattan, between Eighth and Tenth Avenues, Thirty–sixth and Forty–first Streets; Little Italy, the region below Delancey and north of Worth Street on the East Side; Chinatown; Washington Street (Syria in America); the Greeks in Twenty–seventh and –eighth Streets, West Side. All these and many more phases of New York's multiplex life took his full and restless attention. Once he said to me quite excitedly, walking up Eighth Avenue at two in the morning—I was showing him some rear tenement slums in the summertime—"God, how I hate to go to bed in this town! I'm afraid something will happen while I'm asleep and I won't see it!" That was exactly how he felt all the time, I am sure.

And in those days he was most simple, a very Spartan of a boy. He hadn't the least taste for drink, lived in a small hall–bedroom somewhere—Eighth Avenue, I believe—and took his meals in those shabby little quick–lunch rooms where the characters were more important to him than the food. (My hat—my hat is in my hand!) Intellectually he was so stern and ambitious that I all but stood in awe of and reverence before him. Here, I said to myself, is one who will really do; let him be as savage as he pleases. In America he probably needs to be.

And during this short time, what scraps of his early life he revealed! By degrees I picked up bits of his early deprivations and difficulties, if such they might be called. He had been a newspaper reporter, or had tried to be, in Kansas City, had worked in the college restaurant and laundry of the middle–West State university from which he had graduated, to help pay his way. Afterward he had assisted the janitor of some great skyscraper somewhere—Kansas City, I believe—and, what was most pleasing to me, he in nowise emphasized these as youthful difficulties or made any comment as to their being "hard." Neither did he try to boastingly minimize them as nothing at all—another wretched pose. From him I learned that throughout his youth he had been carried here and there by the iron woman who was his mother and whom he seemed to adore in some grim contentious way, smothering his comments as though he disliked to say anything at all, and yet describing her at times as coarse and vulgar, but a mother to him "all right," someone who had made marked sacrifices for him.

She had once "run" a restaurant in a Western mining camp, had then or later carried him as a puling baby under her shawl or cloak across the Mojave Desert, on foot a part of the way. Apparently he did not know who his father was, and he was not very much concerned to know whether she did or not. His father had died, he said, when he was a baby. Later his mother, then a cook in some railroad hotel in Texas, had sent him to school there. Later still she had been a "bawler out," if you know what that means, an employee of a loan shark and used by him to compel delinquent, albeit petty and pathetic, creditors to pay their dues or then and there, before all their fellow–workers, be screamed at for their delinquency about the shop in which they worked! Later she became a private detective! an insurance agent—God knows what—a kind of rough man–woman, as she turned out to be, but all the while clinging to this boy, her pet, no doubt her dream of perfection. She had by turns sent him to common and high school and to college, remitting him such sums of money as she might to pay his way. Later still (at that very time in fact) she was seeking to come to New York to keep house for him, only he would not have that, perhaps sensing the need of greater freedom. But he wrote her regularly, as he confessed to me, and in later years I believe sent her a part of his earnings, which were to be saved by her for him against a rainy day. Among his posthumous writings later I found a very lovely story ("His Mother"), describing her and himself in unsparing and yet loving terms, a compound of the tender and the brutal in his own soul.

The thing that always made me hope for the best was that at that time he was not at all concerned with the petty little moralic and economic definitions and distinctions which were floating about his American world in one form and another. Indeed he seemed to be entirely free of and even alien to them. What he had heard about the indwelling and abiding perfections of the human soul had gone, and rightly so, in one ear and out the other. He respected the virtues, but he knew of and reckoned with die antipathetic vices which gave them their reason for being. To him the thief was almost as important as the saint, the reason for the saint's being. And, better still, he had not the least interest in American politics or society—a wonderful sign. The American dream of "getting ahead" financially and socially was not part of him—another mark royal. All life was fascinating, acceptable, to be interpreted if one had the skill; it was a great distinction to have the skill—worth endless pains to acquire it.

But how unwilling would the average American of his day have been, stuffed as he was and still is with book and picture drivel about artists and art, to accept L― as anything more than a raw, callow yokel, presuming to assail the outer portals of the temple with his muddy feet! A romping, stamping, irritable soul, with more the air of a young railroad brakeman or "hand," than an artist, and with so much coarse language at times and such brutality of thought as to bar him completely, one might say, from having anything to do with great fiction, great artistic conceptions, or the temple of art. What, sit with the mighty!—that coarse youth, with darkish–brown hair parted at one side and combed over one ear, in the manner of a grandiose barber; with those thick–soled and none too shapely brown shoes, that none too well–made store suit of clothes, that little round brown hat, more often a cap, pulled rather savagely and vulgarly, even insultingly, over one eye; that coarse frieze overcoat, still worn on cold spring days, its "corners" back and front turned up by the damp and from being indifferently sat on; that brash corn–cob pipe and bag of cheap tobacco, extracted and lit at odd moments; what, that youth with the aggressive, irritating vibrant manner—almost the young tough with a chip on his shoulder looking for one to even so much as indicate that he is not all he should be! Positively, there was something brutal and yet cosmic (not comic) about him, his intellectual and art pretensions considered. At times his waspishness and bravado palled even on me. He was too aggressive, too forceful, too intolerant, I said. He should be softer. At other times I felt that he needed to be all that and more to "get by," as he would have said. I wanted to modify him a little—and yet I didn't—and I remained drawn to him in spite of many irritating little circumstances, all but infuriating at times, and actually calculated, it seemed, with a kind of savage skill to reduce what he conceived to be my lofty superiority. At times I thought he ought to be killed—like a father meditating on an unruly son—but the mood soon passed and his literary ability made amends for everything.