Twelve Men

by Theodore Dreiser

  “Very well, Mr. White,” said the Court, “it shall be as you request.”

  Without replying, the old gentleman turned and led the supplicant away.

  Everything went peacefully now for a number of years, until finally Uncle Bobby, having grown so feeble with age that he feared he was soon to die, came to his friend and asked him to promise him one thing.

  “What is it?” asked the latter.

  By way of replying, the supplicant described an old oak tree which grew in the yard of the Baptist Church some miles from Danville, and said:

  “I want you to promise that when I am dead, wherever I happen to be at the time, that you will see that I am buried under that tree.” He gave no particular reason save that he had always liked the tree and the view it commanded, but made his request a very secret matter and begged to be assured that Mr. White would come and get his body and carry it to the old oak.

  The latter, always a respecter of the peculiarities and crotchets of his friends, promised. After a few years went by, suddenly one day he learned that Uncle Bobby was not only dead but buried, a thing which astonished him greatly. No one locally being supposed to know that he was to have had any special form of burial, the old patriarch at once recalled his promise.

  “Where is his body?” he asked.

  “Why, they buried it under the old white oak over at Mt. Horeb Church,” was the answer.

  “What!” he exclaimed, too astonished to think of anything save his lost privilege of mercy, “who told them to bury him there?”

  “Why, he did,” said the friend. “It was his last wish, I believe.”

  “The confounded villain,” he shouted, amusingly enough. “He led me to believe that I was the only one he told. I alone was to have looked after his burial, and now look at him—going and having himself buried without a word. The scoundrel! Would you believe that an old friend like Uncle Bobby would do anything like that? However,” he added after a time, “I think I know how it was. He got so old and feeble here of late that he must have lost his mind—otherwise he would never have done anything like that to me.”

  And with this he was satisfied to rest and let bygones be bygones.

  De Maupassant, Junior

  He dawned on me in the spring of 1906, a stocky, sturdy, penetrative temperament of not more than twenty-four or -five years of age, steady of eye, rather aloof and yet pervasive and bristling; a devouring type. Without saying much, and seeming to take anything I had to say with a grain of salt, he managed to impress himself on me at once. Frankly, I liked him very much, although I could see at a glance that he was not so very much impressed with me. I was an older man than he by, say, ten years, an editor of an unimportant magazine, newly brought in (which he did not know) to turn it into something better. In order to earn a few dollars he had undertaken to prepare for the previous editor a most ridiculous article, some silly thing about newspaper writing as a career for women. It had been ordered or encouraged, and I felt that it was but just that it should be paid for.

  “Why do you waste your time on a thing like that?” I inquired, smiling and trying to criticize and yet encourage him at one and the same time, for I had been annoyed by many similar assignments given out by the old management which could not now be used. “You look to me to have too much force and sense for that. Why not undertake something worth your time?”

  “My time, hell!” he bristled, like a fighting sledge-dog, of which by the way he reminded me. “You show me a magazine in this town that would buy anything that I thought worthy of my time! You’re like all the rest of them: you talk big, but you really don’t want anything very important. You want little things probably, written to a theory or down to ‘our policy.’ I know. Give me the stuff. You don’t have to take it. It was ordered, but I’ll throw it in the waste basket.”

  “Not so fast! Not so fast!” I replied, admiring his courage and moved by his contempt of the editorial and book publishing conditions in America. He was so young and raw and savage in his way, quite animal, and yet how interesting! There was something as fresh and clean about him as a newly plowed field or the virgin prairies. He typified for me all the young unsophisticated strength of my country, but with more “punch” than it usually manifests, in matters intellectual at least. “Now, don’t get excited, and don’t snarl,” I cooed. “I know what you say is true. They don’t really want much of what you have to offer. I don’t. Working for some one else, as most of us do, for the dear circulation department, it’s not possible for us to get very far above crowd needs and tastes. I’ve been in your position exactly. I am now. Where do you come from?”

  He told me—Missouri—and some very few years before from its state university.

  “And what is it you want to do?”

  “What’s that to you?” he replied irritatingly, with an ingrowing and obvious self-conviction of superiority and withdrawing as though he highly resented my question as condescending and intrusive. “You probably wouldn’t understand if I told you. Just now I want to write enough magazine stuff to make a living, that’s all.”

  “Dear, dear!” I said, laughing at the slap. “What a bravo we are! Really, you’re interesting. But suppose now you and I get down to brass tacks. You want to do something interesting, if you can, and get paid for it. I rather like you, and anyhow you look to me as though you might do the things I want, or some of them. Now, you want to do the least silly thing you can—something better than this. I want the least silly stuff I can get away with in this magazine—genuine color out of the life of New York, if such a thing can be published in an ordinary magazine. Roughly, here’s the kind of thing I want,” and I outlined to him the probable policy of the magazine under my direction. I had taken an anaemic “white-light” monthly known as The Broadway (!) and was attempting to recast it into a national or international metropolitan picture. He thawed slightly.

  “Well, maybe with that sort of idea behind it, it might come to something. I don’t know. It’s possible that you may be the one to do it.” He emphasized the “possible.” “At any rate, it’s worth trying. Judging by the snide editors and publications in this town, no one in America wants anything decent.” His lip curled. “I have ambitions of my own, but I don’t expect to work them out through the magazines of this town; maybe not of this country. I didn’t know that any change was under way here.”

  “Well, it is,” I said. “Still, you can’t expect much from this either, remember. After all, it seeks to be a popular magazine. We’ll see how far we can go with really interesting material. And now if you know of any others like yourself, bring them in here. I need them. I’ll pay you for that article, only I’ll include it in a better price I’ll give you for something else later, see?”

  I smiled and he smiled. His was a warmth which was infectious when he chose to yield, but it was always a repressed warmth, cynical, a bit hard; heat chained to a purpose, I thought. He went away and I saw him no more until about a week later when he brought me his first attempt to give me what I wanted.

  In the meantime I was busy organizing a staff which should if possible, I decided after seeing him, include him. I could probably use him as a salaried “special” writer, provided he could be trained to write “specials.” He looked so intelligent and ambitious that he promised much. Besides, the little article which he had left when he came again, while not well organized or arranged as to its ideas or best points, was exceedingly well written from the point of mere expression.

  And the next thing I had given him to attempt was even better. It was, if I recall correctly, a stirring picture of the East Side, intended to appeal to readers elsewhere than in the city, but while in the matter of color and definiteness of expression as well as choice of words it was exceptional, it was lacking in, quite as the first one had been, the arrangement of its best points. This I explained to him, and also made it clear to him that I could show him how if he would let me. He seemed willing enough, quite anxious, although always with an a
ir of reserve, as if he were accommodating himself to me in this much but no more. He grasped the idea of order swiftly, and in a little while, having worked at a table in an outer room, brought me the rearranged material, almost if not quite satisfactory. During a number of weeks and months thereafter, working on one “special” and another in this way with me, he seemed finally to grasp the theory I had, or at least to develop a method of his own which was quite as satisfactory to me, and I was very much pleased. A little later I employed him at a regular salary.

  It was pathetic, as I look at it now, the things we were trying to do and the conditions under which we were trying to do them—the raw commercial force and theory which underlay the whole thing, the necessity of explaining and fighting for so much that one should not, as I saw it then, have to argue over at all. We were in new rooms, in a new building, filled with lumber not yet placed and awaiting the completion of partitions which, as some one remarked, “would divide us up.” Our publisher and owner was a small, energetic, vibrant and colorful soul, all egotism and middle-class conviction as to the need of “push,” ambition, “closeness to life,” “punch,” and what not else, American to the core, and descending on us, or me rather, hourly as it were, demanding the “hows” and the “whyfors” of the dream which the little group I was swiftly gathering about me was seeking to make real.

  It was essential to me, therefore, that something different should be done, some new fresh note concerning metropolitan life and action be struck; the old, slow and somewhat grandiose methods of reporting and describing things dispensed with, at least in this instance, and here was a youth who seemed able to help me do it. He was so vigorous, so avid of life, so anxious to picture the very atmosphere which this magazine was now seeking to portray. I felt stronger, better for having him around. The growth of the city, the character and atmosphere of a given neighborhood, the facts concerning some great social fortune, event, condition, crime interested him intensely; on the other hand he was so very easy to teach, quick to sense what was wanted and the order in which it must be presented. A few brief technical explanations from me, and he had the art of writing a “special” at his fingertips, and thereafter gave me no real difficulty.

  But what was more interesting to me than his success in grasping my theory of “special” writing was his own character, as it was revealed to me from day to day in intimate working contact with him under these conditions. Here, as I soon learned, and was glad to learn, was no namby-pamby scribbler of the old happy-ending, pretty-nothing school of literary composition. On the contrary he sounded, for the first time in my dealings with literary aspirants of every kind, that sure, sane, penetrating, non-sentimental note so common to the best writers of the Continent, a note entirely free from mush, bravado and cant. He had a style as clear as water, as simple as rain; color, romance, humor; and if a little too much of vanity and self-importance, still one could forgive him for they were rather well-based. Already used to dealing with literary and artistic aspirants of different kinds in connection with the publications of which I had been a part, this one appealed to me as being the best of them all and a very refreshing change.

  One day, only a few weeks after I had met him, seeing that I was alert for fiction, poetry and short essays or prose phantasies, all illustrative of the spirit of New York, he brought me a little poem entitled “Neuvain,” which interested me greatly. It was so brief and forceful and yet so delicate, a double triolet of the old French order, but with the modernity and flavor of the streets outside, the conduit cars, hand-organs and dancing children of the pavements. The title seemed affected, seeing that the English word “Spring” would have done as well, but it was typical of his mood at the time, his literary adorations. He was in leash to the French school of which de Maupassant was the outstanding luminary, only I did not know it at the time.

  “Charming,” I exclaimed quite enthusiastically. “I like this. Let me see anything else you have. Do you write short stories?”

  For answer he merely stared at me for a little while in the most examining and arrogant and contemptuous way, as much as to say, “Let me see if you are really worth my time and trouble in this matter,” or “This sad specimen of alleged mentality is just beginning to suspect that I might write a short story.” Seeing that I merely smiled most genially in return, he finally deigned to say, “Sure, I write short stories. What do you think I’m in the writing game for?”

  “But you might be interested in novels only or plays, or poetry.”

  “No,” he returned after a pause and with that same air of unrelieved condescension, “the short story is what I want to specialize in.”

  “Well,” I said to myself, “here is a young cub who certainly has talent, is crowded with it, and yet owing to the kind of thing he is starting out to do and the fact that life will give him slaps and to spare before he is many years older, he needs to be encouraged. I was like that myself not so long ago. And besides, if I do not encourage this type of work financially (which is the best way of all), who will?”

  About a week later I was given another and still more gratifying surprise, for one day, in his usual condescending manner, he brought to me two short pieces of fiction and laid them most gingerly on my desk with scarcely a word—“Here was something I might read if I chose,” I believe. The reading of these two stories gave me as much of a start as though I had discovered a fully developed genius. They were so truly new or different in their point of view, so very clear, incisive, brief, with so much point in them (The Second Motive; The Right Man). For by then having been struggling with the short-story problem in other magazine offices before this, I had become not a little pessimistic as to the trend of American short fiction, as well as long—the impossibility of finding any, even supposing it publishable once we had it. My own experience with “Sister Carrie” as well as the fierce opposition or chilling indifference which, as I saw, overtook all those who attempted anything even partially serious in America, was enough to make me believe that the world took anything even slightly approximating the truth as one of the rankest and most criminal offenses possible. One dared not “talk out loud,” one dared not report life as it was, as one lived it. And one of the primary warnings I had received from the president of this very organization—a most eager and ambitious and distressing example of that American pseudo-morality which combines a pirate-like acquisitiveness with an inward and absolute conviction of righteousness—was that while he wanted something new in fiction, something more virile and life-like than that “mush,” as he characterized it, to be found in the current magazines, still (1), it must have a strong appeal for the general reader (!); and (2), be very compelling in fact and clean, as the dear general reader would of course understand that word—a solid little pair of millstones which would unquestionably end in macerating everything vital out of any good story.

  Still I did not despair; something might be done. And though I sighed, I hoped to be able to make my superior stretch a point in favor of the exceptional thing, or, as the slang phrase went, “slip a few over on him,” but that of course meant nothing or something, as you choose. My dream was really to find one or many like this youth, or a pungent kind of realism that would be true and yet within such limits as would make it usable. Imagine, then, my satisfaction in finding these two things, tales that I could not only admire genuinely but that I could publish, things that ought to have an interest for all who knew even a little about life. True, they were ironic, cruel, but still with humor and color, so deftly and cleanly told that they were smile-provoking. I called him and said as much, or nearly so—a mistake, as I sometimes think now, for art should be long—and bought them forthwith, hoping, almost against hope, to find many more such like them.

  By this time, by the way, and as I should have said before, I had still further enlarged my staff by one art director of the most flamboyant and erratic character, a genius of sorts, volatile, restless, emotional, colorful, a veritable Verlaine-Baudelaire-Rops soul
, who, not content to arrange and decorate the magazine each month, must needs wish to write, paint, compose verse and music and stage plays, as well as move in an upper social world, entree to which was his by birth. Again, there was by now an Irish-Catholic makeup editor, a graduate of some distinguished sectarian school, who was more interested in St. Jerome and his Vulgate, as an embodiment of classic Latin, than he was in getting out the magazine. Still he had the advantage of being interesting—“and I learned about Horace from him.” Again, there was a most interesting and youthful and pretty, if severe, example of the Wellesley-Mt. Holyoke-Bryn Mawr school of literary art and criticism, a most engagingly interesting intellectual maiden, who functioned as assistant editor and reader in an adjoining room, along with the art-director, the makeup editor and an office boy. This very valuable and in some respects remarkable young woman, who while holding me in proper contempt, I fear, for my rather loose and unliterary ways, was still, as I had suspected before employing her, as keen for something new and vital in fiction and every other phase of the scriptic art as any one well could be. She was ever for culling, sorting, eliminating—repression carried to the N-th power. At first L---- cordially hated her, calling her a “simp,” a “bluff,” a “la-de-da,” and what not. In addition to these there was a constantly swelling band of writers, artists, poets, critics, dreamers of reforms social, and I know not what else, who, holding the hope of achieving their ends or aims through some really forceful magazine, were by now beginning to make our place a center. It fairly swarmed for a time with aspirants; an amusing, vivid, strident world.

  As for L----, all this being new to him, he was as interested, fascinated even, as any one well might be. He responded to it almost gayly at times, wondering whether something wonderful, international, enduring might not be made to come of it. He rapidly developed into one of the most pertinacious and even disconcerting youths I have ever met. At times he seemed to have a positive genius for saying and doing irritable and disagreeable things, not only to me but to others. Never having heard of me before he met me here, he was convinced, I think, that I was a mere nothing, with some slight possibilities as an editor maybe, certainly with none as a writer or as one who could even suggest anything to writers. I had helped him, but that was as it should be. As for my art-director, he was at first a fool, later a genius; ditto my makeup man.