“JUNGLE’S” AUTHOR EJECTED
And in the detailed story which followed it was set forth that I had also been employed as a steward on Howard Gould’s yacht. The concluding sentence read:
He says that he was ready to leave, inasmuch as he already had absorbed the salient features of Newport culture.
Now there are three or four main press-agencies whereby news from New York goes out to the rest of the world. I have shown how in the case of the “condemned meat industry” these news-channels became a concrete wall. Here suddenly this concrete wall collapsed and became a channel. In Vancouver and Buenos Aires, in Johannesburg and Shanghai and Auckland, people read next morning that the author of “The Jungle” had been listening at the keyhole on board the private yacht of an American millionaire. I wrote an indignant letter to the “Morning Telegraph,” denouncing the story and demanding that they should publish a retraction. They published it—in an obscure corner. I took the trouble myself to forward this letter to all the press agencies which had sent out the story; but the news channels had again become concrete walls.
To show what our press has done to my literary work, let me say that in small countries such as Norway and Denmark and New Zealand I have more readers than in the whole of the United States. A single book of mine, “Sylvia’s Marriage,” which in America sold two thousand copies in five years, sold in Great Britain forty-three thousand copies in two years. And sometimes I wonder what all these people abroad must think about me, after fifteen years’ operation of the news channel and concrete wall!
I wonder—and then there comes to me the memory of an incident which happened in Holland. I had rented the home of a peasant-family in the country, and was much troubled by fleas, due to a custom of the Hollanders of keeping their cattle and goats in the rear portions of their homes during the winter. I tried insect powders and sulphur fumes in vain, and finally decided upon a desperate remedy. I went to an apothecary and told him that I wanted five pounds of cyanide of potassium and a couple of quarts of sulphuric acid. I remember well his look of dismay. “My dear sir! What—what—” I told him that I was aware of the danger, and would seal up the house for several days, and take all due precautions. They are a polite people, these Hollanders, the most considerate I have ever met, and the apothecary’s comment was a beautiful combination of terseness and tact. “Here in Holland,” said he, “we should say that was a characteristically American procedure.”—And so I suppose it must be with my readers abroad. They would not expect a European author to go prying at key-holes on board a private yacht; but when they read it in a dispatch from New York, they say what the Dutch chemist said about cyanogen gas as a remedy for fleas.
The charge has been made so many times that “The Metropolis” is a book of servants’ gossip that it might be well to state that there is no detail in the book which was derived in any such way. The newspapers which labored so desperately to discredit the book pointed out that while it was possible for anyone to go into the Stockyards and see what was going on, it was not possible for anyone to go into “society.” They saw fit to overlook the fact that I myself had been brought up in what is called “society”—or at least on the edge of it, with the right to enter whenever I chose. My earliest boyhood recollections have to do with young ladies being prepared for début parties or for weddings, discussing the material for costumes, and the worldly possessions of various “eligible” young men, and whether so and so’s grandfather was a grocer. I cannot remember the time that I was too young to abhor “society,” its crass materialism, its blindness to everything serious and truly sacred in life.
Also, contrary to the general impression, it is not in the least difficult to meet the New York “smart set,” if you happen to be a celebrity. As the late John L. Sullivan remarked about Grover Cleveland: “A big man is a big man. It don’t matter if he is a prize-fighter or a president.” I remember once asking Arthur Brisbane how he managed to hobnob with the Long Island “smart set,” when he was attacking their financial interests so frequently. He answered that they esteemed success, and cared very little how it had been gained.
You must understand that the members of this “smart set” are bored most of the time. They go hunting wild animals all over the world; they fly in airplanes, and break their necks chasing imitation foxes; they collect porcelains and postage stamps, Egyptian scarabs and Japanese prints; they invite prize-fighters and vaudeville artists and European noblemen—anything in the world to escape boredom. Do you suppose they would resist the temptation of a novelist whose bloody horrors had sent shudders along their spines?
You have read how hunters on the plains are accustomed to draw antelope to them. They stand on their heads and kick their heels in the air, and the timid, curious creatures peer wonderingly, and come nearer and nearer to gaze at the startling spectacle. And precisely so it was with me; after “The Jungle” came out, and even after it was known that I was writing “The Metropolis,” I used to see the sharp ears and soft brown eyes of timid and curious society antelopes peering at me through the curtained windows of Fifth Avenue mansions and Long Island country-places. All I had to do was to go on kicking my heels in the air, and they would come out of their hiding-places and draw nearer and nearer—until at last I might leap to my feet and seize my rifle and shoot them.