VII
Corydon went to spend the summer with her parents in the Catskills, and Thyrsis went back alone to Leek Island, which seemed home to him because it was full of memories of the previous summer. He put up the tent on the same spot, and sailed the same little skiff, older and still leakier, across the stormy channel. He had gone too early, because of a new book that was clamoring to be written, and the icy gales blowing through the tent almost froze him in his chair. He built the fire too hot in the little round drum of a stove, and set fire to his tent, and had to put it out with the contents of his water pail. For several days the channel could not be crossed at all, and the author lived on dried apples and saltine crackers. The fish would not bite, and the author went hunting, but all he could get was a crow, which proved to have a flesh of deep purple, as strong in texture as in flavor.
From the library of Columbia University, the author had taken a strange German book called Also Sprach Zarathustra. While waiting for the muse to thaw out, the author lay wrapped in blankets reading this volume. He put an account of it into his new work, The Journal of Arthur Stirling, which helped to launch the Nietzsche cult in America. The vision revealed in Zarathustra is close to the central doctrine of all the seers, and in a chapter on Nietzsche in Mammonart I pointed out its curious resemblance to the beatitudes. My friend Mencken, reviewing the book, declared that nothing could be more absurd than to compare Jesus and Nietzsche. My friend Emanuel Haldeman-Julius took up the cudgels, declaring that Mencken was an authority on Nietzsche to whom I should bow—overlooking the fact that Arthur Stirling was published in 1903, and Mencken’s book on Nietzsche in 1908. I could not induce either Mencken or his champion to publish the words from Zarathustra that are so curiously close to the beatitudes.
Arthur Stirling was written in six weeks of intense and concentrated labor; that harrowing, fourteen-hour-a-day labor that is destroying to both mind and body. Of course, my stomach went on strike; and I went to consult a country doctor, who explained a new scientific discovery whereby I could have my food digested for me by the contents of the stomach of a pig. This appealed to me as an advanced idea, and for several weeks I took after each meal a spoonful of pink liquid containing pig pepsin. But gradually its magic wore off, and I was back where I was before. So began a long siege, at the end of which I found it necessary to become my own doctor and another kind of “crank.”
Arthur Stirling was sent to a publisher, and I went into the Adirondacks, on the Raquette River, and spent several weeks in the company of hunters and lumbermen. I was a reasonably good hunter for the first ten minutes of any hunt; after that, I would forget what I was doing and be a thousand miles away in thought; a deer would spring up in front of me, and I would see a flash of white tail over the top of the bushes. The reader, having been promised laughter, is invited to contemplate the spectacle of a young author lying on the edge of a mountain meadow in November, watching for deer at sunset, wrapped in a heavy blanket against the cutting frost—and reading a book until the deer should arrive! The deer must have come up and smelled the back of my neck; anyhow, there was a crash five or ten feet behind me, and a deer going twenty feet at a leap, and me pulling the trigger of an uncocked gun!