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.”