For years now we have heard a great deal about mental troubles caused by sex repression; we have heard little about the complexes that may be caused by sex indulgence. But my observation has been that those who permit themselves to follow every sexual impulse are quite as miserable as those who repress them. I remember saying to a classmate in college, “Did it ever occur to you to stop and look at your own mind? Everything that comes to you is turned into sex.” He looked surprised, and I saw that it was a new idea to him; he thought it over and said, “I guess you are right.”
This problem of the happy mean in sex matters would require a volume for a proper discussion. As it happens, I have written such a volume, The Book of Life, and it is available to those who are interested. So I pass on.
XII
I was becoming less and less satisfied with college. It had become an agony for me to sit and listen to the slow recitation of matters that I either knew already or did not care to know. I was enraged by professors whose idea of teaching was to catch me being inattentive to their dullness. At the same time, I had to have my degree because I was still planning to study law. I fretted and finally evolved a scheme; I made application to the faculty for two months’ leave of absence, on the ground that I had to earn some money—which was true. They gave me the leave, and I earned the money writing stories, and spent the rest of my time in a hall bedroom reading Shelley, Carlyle, and Emerson. I forced myself to read until one or two in the morning, and many a time I would wake at daybreak and find that I had sunk back on my pillow and slept with my book still open and the gaslight burning—not a very hygienic procedure.
It was the lodginghouse on West 23rd Street, kept by a Mrs. Carmichael, whose son also was a would-be genius—only he was a religious mystic and found his thrills in church music. We used to compare notes, each patronizing the other, of course—two young stags in the forest, trying out their horns. I remember that Bert went up to display his musical skill to a great composer, Edward MacDowell, of whom I thus heard for the first time. The youth came back in excitement to report that the composer had praised him highly and offered him free instruction. But after the first lesson, Bert was less elated, for his idol had spoken as follows: “Mr. Carmichael, before you come again, please have your hair cut and wash your neck. The day of long-haired and greasy musicians is past.”
I went back to college, made up my missing studies in a week or two, and was graduated without distinction, exactly in the middle of my class. I remember the name of the man who carried off all the honors, and I look for that name in Who’s Who, but do not find it. I won some sort of prize in differential calculus, but that was all; nothing in literature, nothing in oratory, philosophy, history. Such talents as I had were not valued by my alma mater, nor would they have been by any other alma mater then existing in America so far as I could learn. I was so little interested in the college regime that I did not wait for commencement, but went off to the country and received my diploma by mail.
I had sold some jokes and stories, and I now spent a summer writing more, while drifting about in a skiff among the Thousand Islands in the upper St. Lawrence River. I caught many black bass and ate them; read the poems of Walter Scott and the novels of Thackeray and George Eliot, made available in the Seaside Library, which I purchased wholesale for eight cents a copy. The life I got from those classics is one reason why I believe in cheap books and have spent tens of thousands of dollars trying to keep my own books available to students.
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.