In Coconut Grove, as in Carmel, there was a “literary colony.” I met some of them, but remember only one: a figure who walked the white shell roads with me, tall, athletic, brown, and handsome as a Greek statue—Witter Bynner, the poet. Corydon, smiling, remarked, “Bynner is a winner.” That compliment, from a qualified expert, I pass on to him, in exchange for the many fine letters he has written to me about my books. He is eighty now—and I am eighty-four.
I think it was during these six weeks that I wrote The Machine, the play that forms a sequel to The Moneychangers. An odd sort of trilogy—two novels and a play! But it was the best I could do at the time. I saw a vision of myself as a prosperous Broadway dramatist, a licensed court jester of capitalism. But the vision proved to be a mirage.
VI
For the summer of 1909 I rented a cottage on the shore at Cutchogue, near the far end of Long Island; beautiful blue water in front of us, and tall shade trees in the rear. I was carrying on with my raw-food diet, and my family also was giving it a trial. To aid and abet us we had a household assistant and secretary who was an even less usual person than myself. Dave Howatt was his name. He was fair-haired and rosy-cheeked and he nourished his great frame upon two handfuls of pecans or almonds, two dishes of soaked raw prunes, and a definite number of ripe bananas every day—it may have been a dozen or two, I cannot remember. This blond Anglo-Saxon monkey romped with my son, oversaw his upbringing, typed my letters, and washed and soaked the family prunes. A youth after my own heart—vegetarian, teetotaler, nonsmoker, pacifist, philosophical anarchist, conscientious objector to capitalism, dreamer, and practitioner of brotherhood—Dave had been at Bernarr Macfadden’s Physical Culture City, and had known Harry Kemp since boyhood. Now Dave is living in Cuba, and at last report was loving it.
But alas for idealistic theories and hopes—the diet that had served me so marvelously on the shore of the Pacific played the dickens with me on the shore of the Atlantic. The difference was that now I was doing creative writing, putting a continuous strain upon brain and nerves, and apparently not having the energy to digest raw food. Dave Howatt, in his role of guide and mentor, thought my indigestion was due to my evil habit of including cooked breadstuff in the diet, so for a while I changed from a squirrel to a monkey. Then he thought I ate too much, so I cut the quantity in half, which reduced the size of the balloon inside me; but it left me hungry all the time, so that when I played tennis, I would have to stop in the middle and come home and get a prune.
Under these trying conditions I wrote another book, endeavoring to put the socialist argument into a simple story, which could carry it to minds that otherwise would never get it. I aimed at the elemental and naïve, something like The Vicar of Wakefield or Pilgrims Progress. The border line between the naïve and the banal is difficult to draw, and so authorities differ about Samuel the Seeker. Some of my friends called it a wretched thing, and the public agreed with them. But on the other hand, Frederik van Eeden, great novelist and poet in his own language, wrote me a letter of rapture about Samuel, considering it my best. Robert Whitaker, pacifist clergyman who committed the crime of taking the sixth commandment literally and spent several months in a Los Angeles jail during World War I, came on a copy of the book at that time, and he also judged it a success. The publishing firm of Bauza in Barcelona, desiring to issue an edition of my novels, saw fit to lead off with Samuel Busca la Verdad. So perhaps in the days of the co-operative commonwealth the pedagogues will discover a new classic, suitable for required reading in high schools!
VII
By the end of the summer my health was too bad to tell about, and I had got my thoughts centered on a new remedy, a fast cure. I had been reading Physical Culture magazine, and I wrote to Bernarr Macfadden, who was then running a rival institution to the Battle Creek Sanitarium. He invited me to bring my family and let him have a try at my problem.
Athlete, showman, lecturer, editor, publisher, and health experimenter—I could make B. M. the subject of an entertaining essay, but there is not space here. To the high-brows he was a symbol of the vulgarity and cheapness of America. And it won’t help for me to defend him, because I may also be on that list. I merely state what Macfadden did for me—which was to teach me, free, gratis, and for nothing, more about the true principles of keeping well and fit for my work than all the orthodox and ordained physicians who charged me many thousands of dollars for not doing it. Believe me, I went to the best there were in every field, and while some of them had mercy on a writer, others treated me like a millionaire. I number many doctors among my friends, and the better they know me, the more freely they admit the unsatisfactory state of their work. Leo Buerger, a college mate who became a leading specialist in New York, summed the situation up when I mentioned the osteopaths, and remarked that they sometimes made cures. Said my eminent friend: “They cure without diagnosing, and we diagnose without curing.”
My visit to Macfadden took place in 1909—back in the dark ages, before the words “preventive medicine” had ever been joined together. I had asked doctor after doctor to advise me how to keep well, and not one of them seemed to know what I was talking about; they attempted to cure my sickness, and then they sent me away to go on doing the things that had brought the sickness on. The secrets of natural living were the property of a little group of adventurous persons known as “health cranks”; and it has been my pleasure to watch the leading ideas of these “cranks” being rediscovered one by one by medical authority, and so made known to the newspapers and the public. It was not Dr. Auguste Rollier of Switzerland who invented the sun cure; no indeed, the semilunatics of Physical Culture City were going around in breechclouts, men and women getting themselves arrested by rural constables, before ever the word Nacktkultur was imported.