All in the Day's Work: An Autobiography

by Ida M. Tarbell

I couldn’t have listened to more consoling comment. There must have been something in his characterization of “living,” for now, over forty years since it first appeared in book form, I still receive annually a small royalty check for my “pot-boiling” Napoleon!

What really startled me about that sketch was the way it settled things for me, knocked over my former determinations, and went about shaping my outward life in spite of me. It weakened my resolve never again to tie myself to a position, to keep myself entirely footloose; it shoved Paris into the future and substituted Washington. It was certainly not alone a return to the security of a monthly wage, with the possibility that the wage would soon grow, that turned my plans topsy-turvy, though that had its influence. Chiefly it was the sense of vitality, of adventure, of excitement, that I was getting from being admitted on terms of equality and good comradeship into the McClure crowd.

The “Napoleon” had given the magazine, now in its second year, the circulation boost it needed. My part in it was not exaggerated by the office or by me. We all agreed that it was the pictures that had done it, but the text had framed the pictures, helped bring out their value, and it had been done at a critical moment.

The success of the “Napoleon” sketch did me a good turn with the Scribners, who had had my manuscript of “Madame Roland” for some time. They were hesitating about publishing it. There was no popular appeal. I was entirely unknown, but the “Napoleon” work gave me sufficient backing to persuade them. At least that was the explanation the literary head of the concern, William C. Brownell, gave me. Thus my first book was my second to appear. My reward for writing it came from my interest in doing it, what I learned about how to go at a serious biographical study, certainly not in royalties. My first check was for forty-eight cents. I had used up my share of the small sales in corrections of the proofs and gift copies.

I must stay with them, declared Mr. McClure. And the more I saw of Mr. McClure and his colleagues, the more I wanted to stay. Of my first impression of S. S. McClure in Paris I have spoken. Closer views emphasized and enlarged that impression. He was as eager as a dog on the hunt—never satisfied, never quiet. Creative editing, he insisted, was not to be done by sitting at a desk in a comfortable office. It was only done in the field following scents, hunts. An omnivorous reader of newspapers, magazines, books, he came to his office primed with ideas, possibilities, and there was always a chance that among them was a stroke of genius. He hated nothing so much in the office as settled routine, wanted to feel stir from the door to the inner sanctum. And he had great power to stir excitement by his suggestions, his endless searching after something new, alive, startling, and particularly by his reporting.

He stood in awe of no man, but dashed back and forth over the country, back and forth to Europe interviewing the great and mighty. He brought back from his forays contracts with Stevenson, Conan Doyle, Anthony Hope, Kipling. It was something to find yourself between the covers of a book printing a Jungle story. They all came out in McClure’s in those years and were followed by “Captains Courageous” and “Stalky” as well as many of the greatest of the short stories and poems—“The Ship That Found Herself,” “The Destroyers,” the “Recessional”—things that left you breathless and gave to a number the touch of genius for which the office searched and sweated.

Mr. McClure was always peering over the Edge of the Future. It was this search for what was on the way that brought to McClure’s the first article in an American magazine on radium, the X-ray, Marconi’s wireless, Lilienthal’s and Octave Chanute’s gliders, Langley’s steam-driven air-runner and in time the first article on the Wrights’ flying machine.

In my field of biography and history the Edge of the Future meant to Mr. McClure the “unpublished” or the so poorly published that its reappearance was equal to a first appearance. The success of a feature spurred him to effort to get more of it, things which would sharpen and perpetuate the interest. He was ready to look into any suggestion, however unlikely it might seem to the cautious-minded. He was never afraid of being fooled, only of missing something.

His quick taking of a hint, his warm reception of new ideas, new facts, had its drawbacks. If they were dramatic and stirring Mr. McClure was impatient of investigation. He wanted the fun of seeing his finds quickly in print. At one point in the publication of the Napoleon he caused me real anxiety by his apparent determination to print a story for which I could find no authority.

Among the contributors to the Syndicate at that time was a picturesque European with a title and an apparently endless flow of gossip. He pretended to have been a member of the Court of Napoleon III and in the confidence of the Emperor. This relation accounted for his having been invited to join a strange secret party made up by the Emperor, who was worried over a rumor that the body of Napoleon I did not lie under the dome of the Invalides. It was not known who did lie there or what had become of Napoleon. To reassure himself the Emperor decided to go with a few chosen friends and open the tomb. They gathered in the dead of night. The tomb was opened. There lay Napoleon, unchanged. The Emperor’s mind was at rest. He swore the group to secrecy, but took affidavits to be used in case of political necessity. The fall of the Empire seems to have made the gentleman feel that his oath was no longer binding, and that he could cash in on his adventure.