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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.