Twelve Men. Theodore Dreiser
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“My boy,” he assured me, “you are too thin-skinned. You can’t take life that way. It’s all good to me, whatever happens. We’re here. We’re not running it. Why be afraid to look at it? The chemistry of a man’s body isn’t any worse than the chemistry of anything else, and we’re eating the dead things we’ve killed all the time. A little more or a little less in any direction—what difference?”
Apropos of this same a little later—to shock me, of course, as he well knew he could—he assured me that in eating a dish of chop suey in a Chinese restaurant, a very low one, he had found and eaten a part of the little finger of a child, and that “it was very good—very good, indeed.”
“Dog!” I protested. “Swine! Thou ghoula!” but he merely chuckled heartily and stuck to his tale!
But if I paint this side of him it is to round out his wonderful, to me almost incredible, figure. Insisting on such things, he was still and always warm and human, sympathetic, diplomatic and cautious, according to his company, so that he was really acceptable anywhere. Peter would never shock those who did not want to be shocked. A minute or two or five after such a discourse as the above he might be describing some marvelously beautiful process of pollination among the flowers, the history of some medieval trade guild or gazing at a beautiful scene and conveying to one by his very attitude his unspoken emotion.
After spending about two or three years in Philadelphia—which city came to reflect for me the color of Peter’s interests and mood—he suddenly removed to Newark, having been nursing an arrangement with its principal paper for some time. Some quarrel or dissatisfaction with the director of his department caused him, without other notice, to paste some crisp quotation from one of the poets on his desk and depart! In Newark, a city to which before this I had paid not the slightest attention, he found himself most happy; and I, living in New York close at hand, felt that I possessed in it and him an earthly paradise. Although it contained no more than 300,000 people and seemed, or had, a drear factory realm only, he soon revealed it to me in quite another light, because he was there. Very swiftly he found a wondrous canal running right through it, under its market even, and we went walking along its banks, out into the woods and fields. He found or created out of an existing boardinghouse in a back street so colorful and gay a thing that after a time it seemed to me to outdo that one of Philadelphia. He joined a country club near Passaic, on the river of that name, on the veranda of which we often dined. He found a Chinese quarter with a restaurant or two; an amazing Italian section with a restaurant; a man who had a $40,000 collection of rare Japanese and Chinese curios, all in his rooms at the Essex County Insane Asylum, for he was the chemist there; a man who was a playwright and manager in New York; another who owned a newspaper syndicate; another who directed a singing society; another who was president of a gun club; another who owned and made or rather fired pottery for others. Peter was so restless and vital that he was always branching out in a new direction. To my astonishment he now took up the making and firing of pottery for himself, being interested in reproducing various Chinese dishes and vases of great beauty, the originals of which were in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. His plan was first to copy the design, then buy, shape or bake the clay at some pottery, then paint or decorate with liquid porcelain at his own home, and fire. In the course of six or eight months, working in his rooms Saturdays and Sundays and some mornings before going to the office, he managed to produce three or four which satisfied him and which he kept, plates of real beauty. The others he gave away.
A little later, if you please, it was Turkish rug-making on a small scale, the frame and materials for which he slowly accumulated, and then providing himself with a pillow, Turkish-fashion, he crossed his legs before it and began slowly but surely to produce a rug, the colors and design of which were entirely satisfactory to me. As may be imagined, it was slow and tedious work, undertaken at odd moments and when there was nothing else for him to do, always when the light was good and never at night, for he maintained that the coloring required the best of light. Before this odd, homely, wooden machine, a combination of unpainted rods and cords, he would sit, cross-legged or on a bench at times, and pound and pick and tie and unravel—a most wearisome-looking task to me.
“For heaven’s sake,” I once observed, “couldn’t you think of anything more interestingly insane to do than this? It’s the slowest, most painstaking work I ever saw.”
“That’s just it, and that’s just why I like it,” he replied, never looking at me but proceeding with his weaving in the most industrious fashion. “You have just one outstanding fault, Dreiser. You don’t know how to make anything out 01 the little things of life. You want to remember that this is an art, not a job. I’m discovering whether I can make a Turkish carpet or not, and it gives me pleasure. If I can get so much as one good spot of color worked out, one small portion of the design, I’ll be satisfied. I’ll know then that I can do it, the whole thing, don’t you see? Some of these things have been the work of a lifetime of one man. You call that a small thing? I don’t. The pleasure is in doing it, proving that you can, not in the rug itself.” He clacked and tied, congratulating himself vastly. In due course of time three or four inches were finished, a soft and yet firm silky fabric, and he was in great glee over it, showing it to all and insisting that in time (how long? I often wondered) he would complete it and would then own a splendid carpet.
It was at this time that he built about him in Newark a structure of friendships and interests which, it seemed to me, promised to be for life. He interested himself intensely in the paper with which he was connected and although he was only the cartoonist, still it was not long before various departments and elements in connection with it seemed to reflect his presence and to be alive with his own good will and enthusiasm. Publisher, editor, art director, managing editor and business manager, were all in friendly contact with him. He took out life insurance for the benefit of the wife and children he was later to have! With the manager of the engraving department he was working out problems in connection with copper-plate engraving and printing; with the official photographer, art photography; with the art director, some scheme for enlarging the local museum in some way. With his enduring love of the fantastic and ridiculous it was not long before he had successfully planned and executed a hoax of the most ridiculous character, a piece of idle drollery almost too foolish to think of, and yet which eventually succeeded in exciting the natives of at least four States and was telegraphed to and talked about in a Sunday feature way, by newspapers all over the country, and finally involved Peter as an actor and stage manager of the most vivid type imaginable. And yet it was all done really to amuse himself, to see if he could do it, as he often told me.
This particular hoax related to that silly old bugaboo of our boyhood days, the escaped and wandering wild man, ferocious, blood-loving, terrible. I knew nothing of it until Peter, one Sunday afternoon when we were off for a walk a year or two after he had arrived in Newark, suddenly announced apropos of nothing at all, “Dreiser, I’ve just hit upon a great idea which I am working out with some of the boys down on our paper. It’s a dusty old fake, but it will do as well as any other, better than if it were a really decent idea. I’m inventing a wild man. You know how crazy the average dub is over anything strange, different, ‘terrible.’ Barnum was right, you know. There’s one born every minute. Well, I’m just getting this thing up now. It’s as good as the sacred white elephant or the blood-sweating hippopotamus. And what’s more, I’m going to stage it right here in little old Newark—and they’ll all fall for it, and don’t you think they won’t,” and he chuckled most ecstatically.
“For heaven’s sake, what’s coming now?” I sighed.
“Oh, very well. But I have it all worked out just the same. We’re beginning to run the preliminary telegrams every three or four days—one from Ramblersville, South Jersey, let us say, another from Hohokus, twenty-five miles farther on, four or five days later. By degrees as spring comes on I’ll bring him north—right up here into Essex County—a genuine wild man, see, something fierce and terrible. We’re giving him long hair like a bison, red eyes, fangs, big hands and feet. He’s entirely naked—or will be when he gets here. He’s eight feet tall. He kills and eats horses, dogs, cattle, pigs, chickens. He frightens men and women and children. I’m having him bound across lonely roads, look in windows at night, stampede cattle and drive tramps and peddlers out of