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.”
XIV
This episode of my hack writing I find always interests people, so I may as well finish it here, even though it involves running ahead of my story. After I had been doing the work for a while, the firm needed Mr. Lewis’ services for more editing, and he asked me if I could do his stint as well as my own. I always thought I could do everything, so I paid a visit to Annapolis, haunted by the ghosts of my grandfathers. I went through this place also in three days. Thereafter I was Ensign Clarke Fitch, USN, as well as Lieutenant Frederick Garrison, USA. I now wrote a novelette of close to thirty thousand words every week, and received forty dollars a week.
Shortly after that, Willie Hearst with his New York Evening Journal succeeded in carrying the United States into a war with Spain. (“You make the pictures, and I’ll make the war,” cabled Willie to Frederick Remington in Cuba.) So my editor sent for me and explained that the newsboys and messenger boys who followed the adventures of Mark Mallory and Clif Faraday would take it ill if these cadets idled away their time in West Point and Annapolis while their country was bleeding; I must hurry up and graduate them, and send them to the battlefield.
No sooner said than done. I read a book of Cuban local color and looked up several expletives for Spanish villains to exclaim. I remember one of them, “Carramba!” I have never learned what it means, but hope it is not too serious, for I taught it to all the newsboys and messenger boys of the eastern United States. When I hear people lamenting the foolishness of the movies, I remember the stuff I ground out every week, which was printed in large editions.
From that time on my occupation was killing Spaniards. “What are you going to do today?” my mother would ask, and the answer would be, “I have to kill Spaniards.” I thought nothing of sinking a whole fleet of Spanish torpedo boats to make a denouement, and the vessels I sank during that small war would have replaced all the navies of the world. I remember that I had my hero explode a bomb on a Spanish vessel and go to the bottom with her; in the next story I blandly explained how he had opened a porthole and swum up again. Once or twice I killed a Spanish villain, and then forgot and brought him to life again. When that occurred, I behaved like President Coolidge and Governor Fuller and President Lowell, and the other great ones of Massachusetts—I treated my critics with silent contempt.
I was never told how my product was selling; that was the affair of my masters. But they must have been satisfied, for presently came another proposition. There was a boom in war literature, and they were going to start another publication—I think the title was the Columbia Library—to be issued monthly and contain fifty-six thousand words. Could I add this to my other tasks? I was a young shark, ready to devour everything in sight. So for some months I performed the feat of turning out eight thousand words every day, Sunday included. I tell this to literary men, and they say it could not be done; but I actually did it, at least until the end of the Spanish-American War. I kept two stenographers working all the time, taking dictation one day and transcribing the next. In the afternoon I would dictate for about three hours, as fast as I could talk; in the evening I would revise the copy that had been brought in from the previous day, and then take a long walk and think up the incidents of my next day’s stunt. That left me mornings to attend lectures at Columbia University and to practice the violin. I figured out that by the time I finished this potboiling I had published an output equal in volume to the works of Walter Scott.
What was the effect of all this upon me as a writer? It both helped and hurt. It taught me to shape a story and to hold in mind what I had thought up; so it fostered facility. On the other hand, it taught me to use exaggerated phrases and clichés, and this is something I have fought against, not always successfully. Strange as it may seem, I actually enjoyed the work while I was doing it. Not merely was I earning a living and putting away a little money; I had a sense of fun, and these adventures were a romp. It is significant that the stories pleased their public only so long as they pleased their author. When, at the age of twenty-one, I became obsessed with the desire to write a serious novel, I came to loathe this hackwork, and from that time on I was never able to do it with success, even though, driven by desperate need, I several times made the effort. It was the end of my youth.