In my class in college there was a Jewish boy by the name of Simon Stern, whom I came to know well because we lived in the same neighborhood and often went home together. Simon wrote a short story, and one day came to class in triumph, announcing that this story had been accepted by a monthly magazine published by a Hebrew orphans’ home. Straightway I was stirred to emulation. If Simon could write a story, why could not I? Such was the little acorn that grew into an oak, with so many branches that it threatens to become top-heavy.
I wrote a story about a pet bird. For years it had been my custom every summer to take young birds from the nest and raise them. They would know me as their only parent, and were charming pets. Now I put one of these birds into an adventure, making it serve to prove the innocence of a colored boy accused of arson. I mailed the story to the Argosy, one of the two Munsey publications in those early days, and the story was accepted, price twenty-five dollars. You can imagine that I was an insufferable youngster on the day that letter arrived; especially to my friend Simon Stern, who had not been paid for his story.
Our family fortunes happened to be at a low ebb just then, so I fell to digging in this new gold mine. I found several papers that bought children s stories at low prices; also, before long, I discovered another gold mine—writing jokes for the comic papers. At seventeen, jokes were my entire means of support. My mother and I spent that winter on West 23rd Street, near the river. My weekly budget was this: for a top-story hallroom in a lodginghouse, one dollar twenty-five; for two meals a day at an eating house, three dollars; and for a clean collar and other luxuries, twenty-five cents. It seems a slender allowance, but you must remember that I had infinite riches in the little room of the college library.
The quantity production of jokes is an odd industry, and for the aid of young aspirants I will tell how it is done. Jokes are made up hind end forward, so to speak; you don’t think of the joke, but of what it is to be about. There are tramp jokes, mother-in-law jokes, plumber jokes, Irishman jokes, and so on. You decide to write tramp jokes this morning; well, there are many things about tramps that are jokable; they do not like to work, they do not like to bathe, they do not like bulldogs, and so on. You decide to write about tramps not liking to bathe; very well, you think of all the words and phrases having to do with water, soaps, tubs, streams, rain, etc., and of puns or quirks by which these words can be applied to tramps.
I have a scrapbook in which my mother treasured many of the jokes for which I was paid one dollar apiece, and from this book, my biographer, Floyd Dell, selected one, in which a tramp calls attention to a sign, “Cleaning and Dyeing,” and says he always knew those two things went together. Out of this grew a joke more amusing than the one for which I was paid. My enterprising German publishers prepared a pamphlet about my books, to be sent to critics and reviewers in Germany, and they quoted this joke as a sample of my early humor. The Germans didn’t think it was very good. And no wonder. The phrase in translation appeared as “Waescherei und Faeberei,” which, alas, entirely destroys the double meaning of “Dyeing.” It makes me think of the Irishman on a railroad handcar who said that he had just been taking the superintendent for a ride, and had heard a fine conundrum. “What is the difference between a railroad spike and a thief in the baggage room? One grips the steel and the other steals the satchels.”
My jokes became an obsession. While other youths were thinking about “dates,” I was pondering jokes about Scotchmen, Irishmen, Negroes, Jews. I would take my mother to church, and make up jokes on the phrases in the prayer book and hymnbook. I kept my little notebook before me at meals, while walking, while dressing, and in classes if the professor was a bore. I wrote out my jokes on slips of paper, with a number in the corner, and sent them in batches of ten to the different editors; when the pack came back with one missing, I had earned a dollar. I had a bookkeeping system, showing where each batch had been sent; jokes number 321 to 330 had been sent to Life, Judge, and Puck, and were now at the Evening Journal.
I began taking jokes to artists who did illustrating. They would pay for ideas—if you could catch them right after they had collected the money. It was a New York bohemia entirely unknown to fame. Dissolute and harum-scarum but good-natured young fellows, they were, inhabiting crudely furnished “studios” in the neighborhood of East 14th Street. I will give one glimpse of this artist utopia: I entered a room with a platform in the center and saw a tall lanky Irishman standing on it, bare-armed and bare-legged, a sheet wrapped around him, and an umbrella in his hand, the ferule held to his mouth. “What is this?” I asked, and the young artist replied, “I am doing a set of illustrations of the Bible. This is Joshua with the trumpet blowing down the walls of Jericho.”
V
The editor of Argosy who accepted my first story was Matthew White, Jr., a genial little gentleman, who had been the great Munsey’s associate from the earliest days, when that future master of magazine merchandising and chain grocery stores had sat in a one-room office in his shirt sleeves and kept his own accounts. White invited me to call on him, and I went, and we had a delightful chat; at any rate, I found it so. Finally the editor asked me if I would not like to see the “plant,” whereupon he led me through two or three rooms full of bookkeepers and office girls stamping envelopes, and then paused casually at the elevator and rang the bell. So I learned that an author is not so great a novelty to an editor as an editor is to an author. The device of “showing the plant” is one which I have employed many times with callers who fail to realize that I am more of a novelty to them than they are to me.
I wrote other stories for the Argosy, and also odds and ends for Munsey’s. They had a department called “Fads,” and I racked my imagination for new ones that could be humorously written up; each one would be a meal ticket for a week. In the summer—1895, I think it was—my mother and I went to a hotel up in a village called Pawlet, Vermont, and Matthew White, a bachelor, came to join us for his vacation. My experience at that hotel requires considerable courage to tell.