Years of My Youth

by William Dean Howells

I

Journalism was not my ideal, but it was my passion, and I was passionately a journalist well after I began author. I tried to make my newspaper work literary, to give it form and distinction, and it seems to me that I did not always try in vain, but I had also the instinct of actuality, of trying to make my poetry speak for its time and place. For the most part, I really made it speak for the times and places I had read of; but while Lowell was keeping my Heinesque verses among the Atlantic MSS. until he could make sure that they were not translations from Heine I was working at a piece of realism which when he printed it in the magazine our exchange newspapers lavishly reprinted. In that ingenuous time the copyright law hung loosely upon the journalistic consciousness and it was thought a friendly thing to reproduce whatever pleased the editorial fancy in the periodicals which would now frowningly forbid it, but with less wisdom than they then allowed it, as I think. I know that as its author the currency of The Pilot’s Story in our exchanges gave me a joy which I tried to hide from my senior in the next room; and I bore heroically the hurt I felt when some of the country papers printed my long, overrunning hexameters as prose. I had studied the verse not alone in Longfellow’s “Evangeline,” but in Kingsley’s “Andromeda,” and Goethe’s “Hermann and Dorothea,” while my story I had taken from a potentiality of our own life, and in the tragedy of the slave girl whose master gambles her away at monte on a Mississippi steamboat, and who flings herself into the river, I was at home with circumstance and scenery. I still do not think the thing was ill done, though now when I read it (I do not read it often) I long to bring it closer to the gait and speech of life. The popularity of the piece had its pains as well as pleasures, but the sharpest anguish I suffered was from an elocutionist who was proposing to recite it on the platform, and who came to me with it to have me hear him read it. He did not give it with the music of my inner sense, but I praised him as well as I could till he came to the point where the slave girl accuses her master with the cry of—

“Sold me! Sold me! Sold! And you promised to give me my freedom!”

when he said, “And here I think I will introduce a shriek.” “A shriek?” I faltered. “Yes, don’t you think it would fill the suspense that comes at the last word ‘Sold!’? Something like this,” and he gave a screech that made my blood run cold, not from the sensibility of the auditor, but the agony of the author. “Oh no!” I implored him, and he really seemed to imagine my suffering. He promised to spare me, but whether he had the self-denial to do so I never had the courage to inquire.

In the letters to my sister which I was so often writing in those Columbus years I find record of the constant literary strivings which the reader shall find moving or amusing as he will. “I have sold to Smith of the Odd Fellow’s Monthly at Cincinnati that little story I read to you early last summer. I called it ‘Not a Love Story.’ He gave me six dollars for it; and he says that as soon as I have time to dress up that translation which B. rejected he will buy that. At the rate of two dollars a page it will bring me sixteen or eighteen dollars. ‘Bobby’ ”—I suppose some sketch—“is going the rounds of the country papers. The bookseller here told our local editor that it was enough to make anybody’s reputation—that he and his family laughed prodigiously over it.... I have the assurance that I shall succeed, but at times I tremble lest something should happen to destroy my hopes. I think, though, that my adversity came first, and now it is prosperity lies before me. I am going to try a poem fit to be printed in the Atlantic. They pay Fullerton twenty-five dollars a page. I can sell, now, just as much as I will write.”

It was two years yet before that poem I was trying for the Atlantic was fit, and sold to the magazine for twenty-five dollars, though it was three pages long. I was glad of the pay, but the gain was nothing to the glory; and with the letter which Lowell wrote me about it in the pocket next my heart, and felt for to make sure of its presence every night and morning and throughout the day, I was of the potentiality of immeasurable success. I should have been glad of earning more money, for there were certain things I wished to do for those at home which I could not do on my salary of ten dollars a week, already beginning to be fitfully paid. Once, I find that I had not the money for the white gloves which it seems I expected myself to wear in compliance with usage at a certain party; and there were always questions of clothes. Dress-coats were not requisite then and there; the young men wore frock-coats for the evening, but I had ambitiously provided myself with the other sort upon the example of a friend who wore his all day; I wore mine outdoors once by day, and then presciently dedicated it to evening calls. The women dressed beautifully, to my fond young taste; they floated in airy hoops; they wore Spanish hats with drooping feathers in them, and were as silken balloons walking in the streets where men were apt to go in unblacked boots and sloven coats and trousers. The West has, of course, brushed up since, but in that easy-going day the Western man did not much trouble himself with new fashions or new clothes.