Stranger Than Truth

by Vera Caspary

  He was discovered four days later, insensible, in the room of an angry whore, and told that his wife had killed herself. Her family would not let him come to the funeral, locked their doors and crossed to the other side when they met him on the street. For the next two years he worked intermittently and drank steadily. It amused him to torment his respectable mother-in-law, to ring her bell at odd hours, bring strumpets to her elegant drawing room, and to cause a semi-annual scandal by suing for the custody of his daughter. In September, 1923, he brought himself to the attention of his wife’s family by being discovered unconscious on the steps of the State Capitol where he had fallen into sodden slumber. When he had recovered from pneumonia, they shipped him off to Arizona.

  The doctors who ran this sanitarium were less interested in curing patients than in keeping paying guests. Barclay’s recovery was too rapid to prove a good investment; so the doctors supplied a daily dosage of bathtub gin which enabled them, conscientiously, to send his relations a monthly bill for room, board, treatment and extras. Had it not been for Homer Peck, they would have kept Barclay in the sanitarium until his liver rotted.

  Noble Barclay was Peck’s pet guinea pig. Barclay was desolate, lonely, guilt-ridden and grateful for a kind word. Peck told him about the new method, read him passages from Confession and Suggestion. In the dim room with curtains drawn against the desert sun, the quiet so intense that it almost had substance, Barclay lay on Peck’s bed, repeating the formula until his great body began to writhe, his lips to twist as he began to pour out the secrets of his tortured soul.

  They were pitifully commonplace and sordid, the sort of thing the normal boy writes on a back fence. But Barclay’s mother had named him Noble. In a room hung with Watts and Burne-Jones reproductions, she read to him from Idylls of the King and told him that the darkest of all sins is concupiscence.

  She called it “that beastly thing.”

  When the boy arrived at puberty and joined the fellows in the alley, he listened wretchedly to their boasting. Enormous, gawky, muscular, but shyer than a village maiden, he wished his mother had named him Lust. Until he was eighteen he remained, miserably, a virgin and initiation convinced him that his mother had been correct in calling it beastly. This knowledge did not cool his blood and he became convinced that he was a sort of Jekyll-Hyde alternating between nobility and bestiality. In his first year of college he discovered alcohol.

  Four colleges expelled Noble Barclay. He left Dartmouth only just ahead of the sheriff who wanted him on a rape charge, which was ironic, since the woman was a well-known prostitute. If the business had not been so tragic, it would have provided material for a hilarious comedy. This great swaggering Don Juan, so handsome that women on the street stared wistfully after him, was as ignorant of love as a Victorian babe. Believing the act beastly, he behaved like a beast. He had never attended a class in sex hygiene, nor read a book about it; had consistently played hooky from physiology classes and could not look at a skeleton without blushing.

  A miracle was in order. Barclay was too convinced of his inherently evil nature to be cured by any simple explanation of the origins of his sins. Peck’s method was tailored for his needs. It was the self-centered man’s creed, a tidy inexpensive religion that did not bother itself with God.

  And it worked. In Barclay’s room the bottles of gin accumulated, untouched and undesired. Without alcohol’s aid Barclay took into his bed a sensible, lusty nurse who considered it a privilege to assist in the education of the handsome patient.

  Barclay’s gratitude was enormous. No sacrifice would, at that time, have been too great for the expression of his devotion. Long after he was well enough to leave the sanitarium he lingered beside his friend. With no less eagerness than the author’s, Barclay awaited the news that Confession and Suggestion had found a publisher. Barclay was a true believer; his tongue was never in his cheek; more than Peck, he believed the world was waiting for this great message.

  At last Peck’s patience was spent. Extravagantly he telephoned to the girl’s boarding house in New York. The same landlady who had swept the ashes of his book into her dustpan informed Homer that the girl had married and gone off to Paris where, in the landlady’s opinion, her sort belonged. Peck was stricken. He had never asked for the girl’s devotion but he had believed her vows of love, and he was bitterly hurt at the discovery that she had treated his work with such flagrant irresponsibility.

  In his hour of need Peck was comforted by his disciple. One week later Noble Barclay set out for New York with two hundred dollars of Homer Peck’s money and the carbon copy of his book.

  3.

  When he boarded the eastbound train, it was Barclay’s purpose to find a publisher, arrange terms that would profit Peck and to spread the good word. In gratitude for his salvation Barclay had offered to act as Peck’s representative, and when Homer talked of a percentage, Barclay winced.

  Like all new converts Barclay was possessed of the zeal to proselytize. This was spring and the eastbound train carried its quota of semi-invalids, homeward bound after a winter in the sunshine. While gentlemen told dirty stories in the smoker, the observation car was filled with ladies confiding to one another the subtleties of their various ailments.

  This was fertile ground for Barclay. He had a way with ladies. Even in his unregenerate days, they had stared after him in the street. Now, healthy and buoyant, tanned by the sun, his waving black hair silver-frosted, he had only to tilt an eyelash and the strongest woman weakened. “If any other man had spoken with such lack of modesty, I should have screamed for help,” wrote Miss Hannah Maierdorf (several years later) of the adventure on the train. “But Noble Barclay was more like a preacher than an adventurer. He told us the story of his wicked, wicked life without mincing words. All the ladies were moved and several of us spoke of matters which we had hitherto guarded as a Mason guards the secrets of the Shrine.”

  Miss Maierdorf was well qualified to speak in this manner as her brother was a popular Shriner of Mansfield, Ohio. For years Miss Maierdorf had been a victim of insomnia. “Neither the pills nor sleeping potions recommended by world-famous physicians nor the desert’s deep quiet could bring me the tonic of sleep,” she further confessed. “But that night, in spite of the shriek of the train whistle, the puffing of the locomotive, the jerks and starts, I slept like a baby.” There was also on the train, according to Miss Maierdorf, an invalid tortured by asthma. “She quit wheezing then and there and has been a vigorous woman ever since.”[2]

  So impressed was Mrs. Horatio Beach of Kansas City that she implored the young man to stop over for a few days and help her get rid of sciatica. After considering the matter Barclay decided that a few days’ delay would not injure Homer Peck, whereas the patronage of a wealthy convert might help him. Moreover, the dowager had an impressionable daughter with a name like a summer resort, Rosetta Beach.

  The Beaches lived in a Norman castle set in a garden in which iron stags and marble goddesses were distributed generously among clipped box and privet hedges. The house was filled with mahogany, walnut, silver, ivory, ebony and teakwood. Standing before an imperial Chinese screen whose panels were embroidered with the symbols of Buddhism, Noble spoke to a select audience of Homer Peck, of the book that was to shake the world, and of his own mistakes, his misery, the suffering of his poor mother, his young wife’s death, his relations with women, his drunkenness and degradation and finally of his regeneration. The frankness with which he spoke of the latter subjects so titillated Mrs. Beach’s friends that many begged for private consultation. In all justice let it be recorded that Barclay’s intentions were therapeutic rather than aphrodisiac. He could not help it if some of the women seemed “actually to stop breathing.”[3]

  As his experience increased and his technique improved, Barclay could not help noticing the contrast between the ladies’ apathy when he paid tribute to Peck and their excitement when he told his own story. It was only natural that he began pruning those paragraphs of appr
eciation until presently his tribute to Homer Peck was as brief as it was perfunctory.

  Rosetta Beach was the first to notice this. Once, when she was angry, she mentioned it. Barclay had spent an evening giving aid to one of Rosetta’s best friends, a neurotic but handsome debutante.

  “Presently, Noble, you’ll leave Peck out of it completely and say you were the one who discovered Truth-Sharing.”

  He recoiled. “You misunderstand me.”

  “You hardly mention him anymore.”

  “I have never and shall never neglect to acknowledge my debt to my benefactor.”

  A few days later Barclay decided that he had dallied long enough in Kansas City. The time had not been wasted, for in putting Peck’s theories into practice, Barclay had discovered certain weaknesses. “No wonder the book hasn’t been published. It still needs a lot of work,” he told Rosetta as, repentantly, she drove him to the station. “I intend to little more lecturing, work out a few more experiments before I bring it to a publisher.

  “This,” he added earnestly, “will be my small way of paying my debt to Homer.”

  4.

  When, two years later, Peck’s old girl-friend returned, a divorcee, from Paris, she wrote a repentant letter, asking Homer to forgive her weakness in protecting him from the knowledge that no publisher would have his book. The letter was returned. On the envelope in blackest ink was written, “No longer with us.”

  Perhaps Barclay had also written to Peck at the sanitarium; perhaps his letter had been returned with the funereal scrawl; perhaps he believed Peck dead. It is charitable to assume that this is what prompted Barclay to sign the book with his own name, and it was indeed Peck’s assumption when he discovered the fraud.

  At that time the book had been out for more than a year and had sold three-quarters of a million copies. Peck had not heard of it because he had made a full retreat from the world. Disappointed by the girl’s desertion, heartbroken when he failed to receive good news from Barclay, he had gone deeper into the desert. The sanitarium doctors had been glad to get rid of this troublesome patient who cured profitably incurable patients. Perhaps their wanton treatment of Peck’s mail was the doctors’ revenge; or since their place had always been sloppy and inefficient, it might merely have been carelessness that caused “No longer with us” to be written on all envelopes addressed to Homer Peck.

  He had moved to New Mexico, lived in a lonely house on the desert and was attended by an Indian servant who was said to be a witch. One day on one of his infrequent visits to Albuquerque, he bought a copy of The American Mercury. Reading it in bed that night he came upon an article by J. S. D. Blankfort called The Strange Phenomenon of Noble Barclay.

  Early the next morning his ancient Ford rattled to a stop before the bookstore and Peck hurried inside to ask an astonished clerk to order a copy of My Life Is Truth. The clerk had merely to stretch out his hand and take from a counter piled high with them a copy of Barclay’s book. For the rest of the morning Peck sat in his parked car and read.

  Barclay’s best-seller was, substantially, Homer Peck’s Confession and Suggestion. There were a few changes. Peck’s apologetic, quasi-scientific, quasi-humorous foreword had been deleted. There was left no word of credit to scientists and faith-healers, and none of Peck’s sly humor. The humor had been Peck’s greatest error. Who could follow a facetious Messiah? One good laugh and Confession and Suggestion would fail at the first belch.

  For Peck’s foreword, Barclay had substituted that sensational Introduction which told the full story of his youth, his sins, his fall and his regeneration. From the text as well as the foreword all humor had been cut away. The jolly prose had become solemn. But the book had authority. Jerry-built foundations had become solid; the bastard had been legitimatized. And Noble Barclay was the father. With the richest, roundest adjectives he acknowledged himself the author of the book, the founder of the school of thought, the benefactor of mankind. Peck’s timid, imitative title had been dropped and the name of his philosophy changed, simply and dramatically, to Truth-Sharing.[4]

  As an erstwhile success peddler, a reformed racketeer of dreams, Peck recognized the improvements. Barclay’s changes not only exalted Truth but served it up in a spicy dish flavored with the plums of evil and the almonds of sex revelation. There were no apologies, no evasions. There in Goudy old-style was the naughty word, and if while reading it, you were irritated by the slightest sense of shame, you had only to turn to Pages 10 and 11 of the Introduction and, like Noble Barclay, could blame your parents for failing to tell you that life is beautiful.

  My Life Is Truth had not been put on the market by any old established publisher. Ordmann & Company, incorporated under the laws of the State of Maryland, was owned jointly by Noble Barclay (forty per cent) and the family of Henry Ordmann (sixty per cent). Before the Nineteenth Amendment, Ordmann had been in the distilling business. A man of stern conscience, he refused to evade the law of the country by manufacturing any of those substitutes such as pepsin-flavored wine (for stomach disorders) or unfermented grape beverage (do not expose to air as the mixture will ferment, which is forbidden by law). His daughter Janet had persuaded him that publishing was not only a legitimate but also a lucrative business. This was four weeks after she had heard Noble Barclay lecture in a small salon at the Bellevue-Stratford in Philadelphia, and three days before their elopement.

  All of this Peck had learned from the Blankfort article. That night he wrote Barclay a letter. It was a stupid move, but Peck, like so many clever men, was generous in his estimate of others. He could not believe Barclay had intended to defraud him. Extenuating circumstances were not hard to find. No mail had been forwarded from the sanitarium.

  Peck’s letter was fair. It acknowledged Barclay’s contributions to the book as well as his labor in its exploitation, and suggested a division of profits. Moreover, Peck wished to see his name on the jacket. In spite of that fatal sense of humor, Peck was proud of the book. It was a success and the aching for success still burned in the grown-up Alger boy.

  Eight nervous days passed. On the ninth he received a letter on stationery engraved with the name of Noble Barclay. The original letter has been lost, but as Peck remembered, it ran something like this:

  My dear Mr. Peck:

  In reference to your communication of the 28th ult., let me assure you Mr. Barclay regrets that the press of business, out-of-town lecture engagements, etc., prevent him from replying personally. For your own sake, let the undersigned add that it is fortunate for you that Mr. Barclay is thus engaged. Were he to seek the advice of his counselors in regard to that letter, you would indeed find yourself in an unfortunate position.

  Mr. Barclay has, however, forbidden me to make the accusation of fraud or blackmail. He does not wish to apprise Postal authorities of your action, since that would lead inevitably to consequences which it would be better for all concerned to avoid.

  Mr. Barclay does not deny having been acquainted at one time with a person called Homer Peck. Mr. Barclay even remembers that on one or two occasions he discussed with this Mr. Peck the precepts which he later elaborated in his immortal work, My Life Is Truth. He might even have asked Mr. Peck’s advice in regard to a triviality. Mr. Barclay adds, regretfully, that Mr. Peck’s suggestions were usually too facetious to be taken seriously.

  Mr. Barclay’s slight acquaintance with Mr. Peck and the facts stated above do not, however, give substance to your absurd claims. It is hardly possible for you to be the same Mr. Homer Peck with whom Mr. Barclay had these discussions, inasmuch as the aforementioned Mr. Peck has passed on.

  It is my personal opinion that Mr. Barclay has been more than liberal in his attitude toward your claim, and it is my suggestion that, for your own sake, you refrain from further pursuit thereof. In case you are not aware of it, the Post Office Department extracts heavy penalties of those who use the mails to defraud.

  Yours very truly,

  EDWARD EVERETT MUNN

  Secretary
to Noble Barclay

  There was but one answer possible for a man of Homer’s temperament. He knew that Mark Twain would have winked at the plagiarism when he wired: THE REPORT OF MY DEATH HAS BEEN GROSSLY EXAGGERATED WHAT DO YOU OFFER YOU PHARISEE.

  The next morning he received a reply signed by Munn: DO NOT ACKNOWLEDGE YOUR CLAIM ARRIVING MONDAY TO DISCUSS SITUATION DO NOTHING UNTIL THEN.

  The next three days were given to plans for battle. Peck did not hire a lawyer. Truth was on his side and he believed that truth would prevail. He studied My Life Is Truth, recalled conversations with Barclay, made copious notes with which to confront Barclay’s representative.

  Late on Monday afternoon a stranger knocked at the door of Peck’s bungalow. The stranger was a tall man with the high, bony legs of a stork, but he was mean and shifty-looking, a stork who leaves babies at the wrong houses. His name, engraved on a new calling card, introduced Edward Everett Munn.

  “I have come in the interests of Mr. Noble Barclay.”

  “What’s your proposition, Mr. Munn?”

  “There’s no reason why we should offer a proposition. Your claims are groundless.”

  “Except that I wrote the book.”

  “Mr. Barclay is grateful because you listened while he read certain portions of the manuscript aloud, and later discussed the ideas with him. As he has been successful with the book and is an extremely generous man, he would like to have you share in his good fortune. For your small services at the time, Mr. Barclay is willing to pay you what I consider a most generous amount. I, personally, advised against it, but…”