America and Americans and Selected Nonfiction (7 page)

When the stunning news of the Hitler-Stalin pact was printed, I came on one of my Communist friends in the street. He began shouting before I got near him: “Don't ask me. I don't know, God damn it. They didn't tell us.” As it turned out, the Kremlin didn't tell the American Communists anything. Someone told me later they didn't trust them.

Except for the field organizers of strikes, who were pretty tough monkeys and devoted, most of the so-called Communists I met were middle-class, middle-aged people playing a game of dreams. I remember a woman in easy circumstances saying to another even more affluent: “After the revolution even we will have more, won't we, dear?” Then there was another lover of proletarians who used to raise hell with Sunday picnickers on her property.

I guess the trouble was that we didn't have any self-admitted proletarians. Everyone was a temporarily embarrassed capitalist. Maybe the Communists so closely questioned by investigation committees were a danger to America, but the ones I knew—at least they claimed to be Communists—couldn't have disrupted a Sunday-school picnic. Besides they were too busy fighting among themselves.

During the early years of the Thirties, my literary experience was unfortunate, but not unique. Every time a publisher accepted one of my books, he went bankrupt. One book was accepted by one publisher, printed by a second and issued under a third. But it didn't sell anyway. I began to feel like the Typhoid Mary of the literary world. But as the Thirties progressed, a little solvency began to creep in on me. I remember when a story of mine called The Red Pony was bought by the now defunct North American Review. They paid ninety dollars for it. I didn't believe there was that much money in the world. The pure sparkling affluence of it went to my head for weeks. I couldn't bear to cash the check, but I did.

By 1936 the country must have been on the upgrade. When a writer does well, the rest of the country is doing fine. A book of mine which had been trudging wearily from publisher to publisher was finally bought and brought out by Pat Covici. It sold well enough so that it was bought for motion pictures for three thousand dollars. I had no conception of this kind of dough. It was like thinking in terms of light-years. You can't.

The subsequent history of that book is a kind of index of the change that was going on. The studio spent a quarter of a million dollars having my book rewritten before they abandoned it. Then they fired the man who had bought it in the first place. He bought it back for three thousand and later sold it for ninety thousand dollars. It shows how values change. But I still think of that original three thousand dollars as about as much money as there is in the world. I gave a lot of it away because it seemed like too much to be in private hands. I guess I wasn't cut out for a capitalist. I even remained a Democrat.

During the Depression years and the slow recovery, the world of gadgets called science had passed us by in Pacific Grove. One of our friends owned a Model T Ford, high ceiling, cut-glass vases, a fairly dangerous vehicle since its brake band was gone and the reverse band had been moved over to the high-low-forward drum. It could be used for emergencies if we could come by a quart of gasoline.

I had at one time come by a radio, tickler and crystal affair with headphones. But sitting tapping my foot to music or laughing at jokes no one else could hear caused my wife to threaten divorce. Now in my growing affluence I bought a magnificent secondhand radio for fifteen dollars. Architecturally it was a replica of the Cathedral of Notre Dame, lacking only gargoyles. The set itself was good and still is. Now we had access to the great world of music and particularly to news. We gathered close to the speaker because a nearby X-ray machine had a way of coming on at the most vital times. On this set we heard Mr. Roosevelt's fireside chats, listened to the doom tones of Gabriel Heatter and the precise, clipped reporting of H. V. Kaltenborn. But also we heard the recorded voice of Hitler, a hoarse screaming and the thundering Heils of his millions. Also we listened with horror to the mincing sneers of Father Coughlin. One night we got Madison Square Garden, a Nazi meeting echoing with shrill hatred and the drilled litany of the brown-shirted audience. Then a dissenter's voice broke through and we could hear the crunch of fists on flesh as he was beaten to the floor and flung from the stage. America First came through our speaker and it sounded to us very like the Nazi approach. Lindbergh was proposed to ride the White Horse, which must have saddened him. We had also heard the trial of the man who had stolen and murdered his baby.

Prosperity had returned, leaving behind the warm and friendly associations of the dark days. Fierce strikes and retaliations raged in Detroit, race riots in Chicago: tear gas and night sticks and jeering picket lines and overturned automobiles. The ferocity showed how frightened both sides were, for men are invariably cruel when they are scared.

The Spanish War split America's emotions. The people we knew favored the Republic. We could not see how justice could be on the side armed and supplied by Hitler and Mussolini. We watched with dismay while our Government cut off supplies to the Loyalists and forced them to turn to the Russians for help. It was a crazy time that came to us through that great episcopal radio.

Shirley Temple, then a little girl, was denounced by the Dies Committee for sending money for medical aid to Loyalist Spain. And I had one hilarious experience because I also had contributed toward an ambulance. Everyone knows at least one telephone joker. Ours was a woman who loved to call the zoo and ask for Mr. Bear. One day I answered the phone (oh! yes, we had a telephone by now). I thought it was our joker because the voice said: “This is the Monterey Herald. You were denounced before the Dies Committee today. Would you care to comment?”

And I, still thinking it was the joker, replied: “What's good enough for Shirley Temple is good enough for me.”

But it was true. I had been denounced for giving money for medical aid to Spain. My reply got printed all over and apparently the committee didn't think it as funny as many others did. They wouldn't even answer my wire asking to be heard. But from then on I was a Communist as far as the Dies Committee was concerned. It was at this time that everyone was a Communist or a Fascist depending on where you stood.

My books were beginning to sell better than I had ever hoped or expected and while this was pleasing it also frightened me. I knew it couldn't last and I was afraid my standard of living would go up and leave me stranded when the next collapse came. We were much more accustomed to collapse than to prosperity. Also I had an archaic angry-gods feeling that made me give a great lot of my earnings away. I was a pushover for anyone or any organization asking for money. I guess it was a kind of propitiation. It didn't make sense that a book, a humble, hat-in-hand, rejected book, was now eagerly bought—even begged for. I didn't trust it. But I did begin to get around more.

I met Mr. Roosevelt and for some reason made him laugh. To the end of his life, when occasionally he felt sad and burdened, he used to ask me to come in. We would talk for half an hour and I remember how he would rock back in his chair behind his littered desk and I can still hear his roars of laughter.

One night at John Gunther's apartment in New York I met Wendell Willkie, who was running for the Presidency. I liked him very much, although I was opposed to him politically. He seemed a warm and open man. Very late at night after a number of whiskies I brought up something that had always interested me. I asked him why he wanted to be President. It seemed the loneliest and most punishing job in the world. He rolled his highball glass slowly between his palms and stared into it. And finally he said: “You know—I haven't the slightest idea.”

I liked him even more then. He didn't give me any bull.

The strange parade of the Thirties was drawing toward its close and time seemed to speed up. Imperceptibly the American nation and its people had changed, and undergone a real revolution, and we were only partly aware of it while it was happening.

Now war was coming. You didn't have to be an expert to know that. It was patent in every news report, in the clanging steps of goose-stepping Nazis. It had been in the cards since the first German put on his brown-shirted uniform. The practice wars—Ethiopia, Spain, the Ruhr, the Czech border—we had watched with paralyzed attention. At any early moment it could have been stopped—or could it? America knew it was coming even while we didn't believe it. We watched the approach of war as a bird helplessly watches an approaching rattlesnake. And when it came, we were surprised as we always are.

But the strange designlike quality of the Thirties continued to the end. It was as though history had put up markers, dramatic milestones at either end of the decade. It started with the collapse not only of financial structure, but of a whole way of thought and action. It ended with perhaps the last Great War.

 

A few weeks ago I called on a friend in a great office building in midtown New York. On our way out to lunch he said, “I want to show you something.”

And he led me into a broker's office. One whole wall was a stock exchange trading board. Two young men moved back and forth swiftly filling in changes, rises, falls, buying, selling. Behind an oaken rail was a tight-packed, standing audience, clerks, stenographers, small businessmen. Most of them munched sandwiches as they spent their lunch hour watching the trading. Now and then they made notations on envelopes. And their eyes had the rapt, glazed look one sees around a roulette table.

NEW YORK IS the only city I have ever lived in. I have lived in the country, in the small town, and in New York. It is true I have had apartments in San Francisco, Mexico City, Los Angeles, Paris, and sometimes have stayed for months, but that is a very different thing. As far as homes go, there is only a small California town and New York. This is a matter of feeling.

The transition from small town to New York is a slow and rough process. I am writing it not because I think my experience was unique; quite the contrary. I suspect that the millions of New Yorkers who were not born here have had much the same experience—at least parallel experiences. Perhaps my account may remind them of all the painful, wonderful times in their own lives.

When I came the first time to New York in 1925 I had never been to a city in my life. (From Stanford University I had made undergraduate trips to San Francisco and thought naturally that I knew all about it, particularly as related to sin in my income bracket. I was twenty-three years old and my bracket was low.) I arrived on a boat, tourist, one hundred dollars. It was November. Besides my one hundred dollars, I had when I sailed out of San Francisco another hundred dollars to see me started in New York. If I had been a little richer, or a little more experienced, I wouldn't have taken the pretty girl around Havana in a carriage, nor been charmed and worldly about the broad rum drinks like tubs of soaking fruit. I don't know what I thought I was going to do with that very pretty girl once I got to New York—marry her, I guess, and take her into my penthouse on Park Avenue, where my guest list had no names but those of the famous, the beautiful and the dissolute. Anyway, it didn't pan out, and in the process my hundred dollars for New York was reduced to three.

From a porthole, then, I saw the city, and it horrified me. There was something monstrous about it—the tall buildings looming to the sky and the lights shining through the falling snow. I crept ashore—frightened and cold and with a touch of panic in my stomach. This Dick Whittington didn't even have a cat.

I wasn't really bad off. I had a sister in New York and she had a good job. She had a husband and he had a good job. Now, in California, when a relative visited, there was always a good bed—maybe under the eaves, but it was yours for as long as you wanted to stay. My sister had one of the really nice apartments. It consisted of one large room, a tiny bathroom and a screened alcove where the lightest of cooking could be done and wasn't. There wasn't any question of staying with her. One double studio couch that acted as a sitting place in the daytime was the total sleeping space. My brother-in-law loaned me thirty dollars and put me up at a hotel for the first night. The next day he got me a job as a laborer on a big construction job and I found a room three flights up in Fort Greene Place in Brooklyn. That is about as alone as you can get. The job was on Madison Square Garden, which was being finished in a hurry. There was time and a half and there was double time. I was big and strong. My job was wheeling cement—one of a long line—one barrow behind another, hour after hour. I wasn't that big and strong. It nearly killed me and it probably saved my life. I was too tired to see what went on around me.

Most of the men in the line were Negroes—stringy men who didn't look big and strong at all, but they dollied those 150-pound barrows along as though they were fluff. They talked as they went and they sang as they went. They never seemed to get tired. It was ten, fifteen, and sometimes eighteen hours a day. There were no Sundays. That was double time, golden time, two dollars an hour. If anybody slipped out of the line, there were fifty men waiting to take his place.

My knowledge of the city was blurred—aching, lights and the roar of the subway, climbing three flights to a room with dirty green walls, falling into bed half-washed, beef stew, coffee and sinkers in a coffeepot, a sidewalk that pitched a little as I walked, then the line of barrows again. It's all mixed up like a fever dream. There would be big salamanders of glowing coke to warm our hands and I would warm mine just for the rest, long after I couldn't feel my hands at all. I do remember a man falling from a scaffold up near the ceiling about ninety feet and landing about four feet from me. He was red when he hit and then the blood in his face drew away like a curtain and he was blue and white under the working lights.