Literary Memories

by FRANKLIN P. ADAMS

1

IN Chicago in 1896, I was a student at Armour Institute, 33rd Street and Armour Avenue. Chicago has grown stylish since those days, for the Institute, founded by Philip Danforth Armour, the side-whiskered packer, had the Avenue — now, forsooth, Federal Street — named for him too. And the once redolent South Water Street — which smelled prettier than a dozen Washington Markets — is now Wacker Drive, named for Mr. Wacker, who in my day was a partner in the Wacker & Birk Brewing and Malting Company.

Armour Institute — now Illinois Institute of Technology — was about a mile and a half from our house on Grand Boulevard, a tough walk in the winter, a few minutes’ ride on my Barnes White Flyer in the autumn and spring.

At Armour, from 1895 to 1899, we had four years of Latin, four of mathematics, lots of chemistry and physics — lectures and laboratory work — four years of German, and three months of English, devoted to Chaucer.

So I read at home. Years before, when I was still in grammar school (Douglas) I had read, in the following order, all of Harry Castlemon, Horatio Alger, Jr., Oliver Optic, and G. A. Henty. But by 1895, in my early simultaneous quadratic period, I began to read the so-called — so called by my father — standard works.

On our library table, next to our beautiful yellowglobed kerosene lamp, were Owen Meredith’s Lucile and The Rime of the Ancient Mariner with the Dore illustrations. Of those pictures, one made me happy: “The Bridegroom’s doors are opened wide, and I am next of kin” — a wedding feast picture. But one frightened me even more than “The albatross about my neck was hung.” That was “Yea, slimy things did crawl with legs upon the slimy sea. ” It still frightens me.

But far worse, when I was fifteen, was a book whose title — if it had any — I forget. It was given away, I imagine, as an advertisement for Dr. Pierce’s Golden Medical Discovery. One picture showed “The effects of alcohol on the human stomach. ” We used to have a bottle of claret on the dinner table, and I was allowed to have a medicine dropper of it in a glass, diluted with water and sugar. After reading the Dr. Pierce book, I became a teetotaler for five years. And I pictured my father’s stomach — a horrible-looking affair. Not only was he Crazed with Wine, but also his intestinal tract was slowly rotting. I would sneak to the sideboard and drink maple syrup neat, from a silver pitcher that we kept the syrup in. We had pancakes Wednesday mornings. Sundays — my father was born in Boston — we had alternately codfish balls and baked beans, and scraped steak with a lot of raw eggs on top. It makes me hungry now to write of those Sunday breakfasts. My current Sunday breakfast comprises canned grapefruit juice and corn flakes.

What frightened me most, however, about Old Dr. Pierce’s “No Detention from Business — Throw Away That Truss” book was the long article about Angina Pectoris. I was — perhaps like most boys — open to suggestion. Little did I know that the patent medicine book was based on the psychology of fear, so I went to the doctor to ask him to tell me the truth about my angina. He laughed at the idea that a fifteen-year-old boy could have it, but he gave me a stethoscopic examination — I doubt that the cardiograph was used in the nineties. Well, I didn’t have it, and I was grateful to him for not asking how I had got that strange idea.

I abandoned the book, but Mr. Charles Eseman, our grocer, gave us The Life of U. S. Grant. I read it, skipping, and I recall none of it. But under the library table were two large books, The Soldier in Our Civil War. I remember many of the photographs of officers — Elmer E. Ellsworth with the Zouaves, John A. Logan, Ambrose E. Burnside, George Brinton McClellan, Braxton Bragg, John A. McClernand, James Ewell Brown Stuart, Buell, Pickett, Admirals Porter and Farragut and Dahlgren — I wonder what became of those fascinating books. Also we had a book of Civil War songs, many of which I knew, for we used to march around Room 22 singing “Marching Through Georgia” and “Tramp, Tramp, Tramp.” Little did I dream then that I would have children whose maternal great-grandfather, George F. Root, had written not only “Tramp, Tramp, Tramp” but also “The Battle Cry of Freedom,” “The Vacant Chair,” and “Just Before the Battle, Mother.” I still remember the words and music of those war songs. In Room 15 — Miss Laura E. Hull’s Room 15 — we had a song whose authorship I never knew. But it seems to me now that we sang it often. It ran: —

And in September, at the opening of school, we sang “Robin Redbreast,” by William Ailingham. The song began “Good-by, Good-by to Summer!” and ended: —

And it seems to me that most of the kids giggled at the lines: —

I never heard that tune again until, at Ann Arbor, many years later, I heard the students sing: —

and then I discovered that it was an old French marching song, called “I’m a Soldier Now, Lizette. ”

2

ANOTHER book that was prominently displayed on the library table was Bryant’s Library of Poetry and Song. It was divided into categories — Sentiment and Reflection, Nature, and so forth. The only department I read, and reread, was the Humorous and Satirical. It had Bret Harte; it had Gilbert’s “The Yarn of the Nancy Bell.” I have read in books of reminiscence about those Friday afternoon school recitations; that must have been Before My Time. At any rate, we didn’t have ‘em, nor were we nurtured on McGuffey. No, we had Appleton’s Readers, from the First to the Fifth inclusive; Swinton’s Word Book, which was light blue; Robinson’s Arithmetic, which was maroon; and Barnes’s History of the United States, which was light brown with gilt letters, and the ostentatious carrying of which told all the school kids that you incontrovertibly were in the eighth grade. At graduation we sang “The breaking waves dashed high on a stern and rock-bound coast.” It was “The Landing of the Pilgrim Fathers.” I sang bass; and it wasn’t until one of my children sang it at school that I knew what the air was. We basses sang so loud that we couldn’t hear the sopranos.

We had footnotes in the history. One was to the effect that Ethan Allen at Ticonderoga said, “In the name of the Great Jehovah and the Continental Congress. ” It remained for a comparatively recent investigator, Mr. Stewart Holbrook, in Ethan Allen, to tell what he actually said at the Fort, which was “Open up, you British sons of bitches!” Also t hat Allen’s last words were, when a minister came to him and said, “General, the angels are waiting,” “God damn ‘em, let ‘em wait.”

The big bookcase had four glass doors, and in it were many sets of books, and some then current novels, my mother being a reader of same. Among them were Jessie Fothergill’s The First Violin, du Maurier’s Trilby, Margaret Deland’s John Ward, Preacher, Sienkiewicz’s Quo Vadis?, E. L. Voynich’s The Gadfly, and I don’t know how many more. Our sets were Dickens, Thackeray, Balzac, Hawthorne, Bret Harte, and George Eliot. Not to add the Waverley novels. I read all the Scott novels in the order of their appearance in the bookcase; all of Dickens except The Mystery of Edwin Drood. I know I couldn’t have read that, for I am reading it now, and it is all new. I was too young for Thackeray.

I read Black Beauty, and I was certain for a month or two that all the horses that passed our house on Grand Boulevard were driven by cruel, selfish men.

As I have said, in my grammar school days I had read Harry Castlemon’s books — Frank Before Vicksburg, Frank on a Gunboat, and Frank on the Lower Mississippi; also the Sportsman’s Club series and the Rocky Mountain series. But my first heroes were Frank Nelson and his cousin Archie Winters. Castlemon’s name was Fosdick, and his nephews, Harry Emerson Fosdick and Raymond B. Fosdick; and in Westfield, Chautauqua County, New York, where the Fosdicks lived, Harry Castlemon was a writer of stories for boys, which wasn’t so far above the strolling player of the seventeenth century. “He refused to go to church,” said Raymond Fosdick. “As I recall him after all these years, I think perhaps he was the most human specimen our family has produced.”

After Castlemon I read Horatio Alger, Jr., and Oliver Optic, with rapt attention. I never dreamed that they were written on a formula, the formula of Cinderella materialism: that if you were truthful, honest, and shined the rich man’s shoes, sold him papers, or carried his grip — “‘Smash your baggage, sir?’ The speaker was a bright boy of fourteen years of age.” Almost always the hero was from one to five years older than the reader. I liked every one of them.

I bought the Alger books — Street & Smith published them at 15 cents a volume — for my children: Ragged Dick, Tattered Tom, Phil, the Fiddler. They soon were bored. “Pa, they’re all alike.” So they listened to even more infantile stuff, with more obvious and cheaper thrills in one radio program than there are for them in the whole of Alger. In the childhood when my older boys, now finding no thrill at all at college, found no fun in Alger, they were listening to “Dick Tracy and “Junior G-Men.”

Another book we had was Kings of the Platform and Pulpit. I never read any of the sermons of H. W. Beecher or Thomas De Witt Talmage. But I thought that the excerpts of Josh Billings, Artemus Ward, Eli Perkins, and B. P. Shillaber were highly comical. I have feared to reread any of them, but I have a notion that Billings and Ward had something a trifle imperishable about them.

The bookcase was in the front parlor. We had perhaps 800 books, most of which I read. Nowadays I have about 8000 books, and all the bookcases are open, and my children are welcome to read any or all. Their literary tastes are better than mine was. Last month, for example, Tim, nineteen, was reading Thackeray’s Yellowplush Papers. His comment was, “Hey, reminds me a little of Ring Lardner. ”

Today I couldn’t reread Scott. I can, and do, reread Dickens. I don’t remember ever having read any of Thackeray except Pendennis, which at fifteen I didn’t finish reading.

My children can’t read Dickens. They say that he’s too verbose. But they went to the movie of David Copperfield; and now that my young daughter has seen the film Great Expectations twice, she is fascinated by the book, and tells me that they left out a lot of stuff in the movie.

Children don’t read Scott, except when Ivanhoe is required in the eighth grade, as Silas Marner is in some year or other of secondary school.

Well, although Scott has completely vanished from our own and most other private libraries, Ivanhoe (it may have been an excerpt in one of those Appleton’s Readers) — some of it — returns. Forsan et haec olim meminisse juvabit: —

“My grandsire drew a good bow at Hastings.”

“The foul fiend on thy grandsire and all his generation. ”

“In the clout, in the clout! A Hubert forever!”

Who said I don’t remember?