The Harbor
BOOK I
CHAPTER VII
Then I found Joe Kramer.
He had "queered" himself at the beginning in college. I had barely known
him. He belonged to no fraternity, and except on the athletic field he
kept out of all our genial life. And this life of ours, for all its
thoughtlessness, was so rich in genuine friendships, so filled and
bubbling over with the joy of being young, that we could not understand
how any decent sort of chap could deliberately keep out of it. We put
Joe Kramer down as a "grouch."
But now that I too was "queering" myself, our queerness drew us
together, or rather, Joe's drew mine. In the ten years that have gone
since then I have never met any man who drew me harder than he did, than
he is drawing me even still—and this often in spite of my efforts to
shake him off, and later of his quite evident wish to be rid of me. For
Joe had what is so hard to find among us comfortable mortals, a
sincerity so real and deep that it absolutely ruled his life, that it
kept him exploring into things, kept him adventuring always.
In long tramps over the neighboring hills, on our backs in the grass
staring up at the clouds, or in winter hugging a bonfire in the shelter
of a boulder, or back in college over our beer or over countless pipes
in our rooms, together we adventured through books and long hungry talks
down into life—and of the paths we discovered I see even now no end.
Joe was tall and lean, with heavy shoulders stooping slightly. He was
sallow, he never took care of himself.[Pg 60] He ate his meals at all hours at
a small cheap restaurant, where he bought a bunch of meal tickets each
week. His face was obstinate, honest, kindly, his features were as blunt
as his talk. He was the first to understand what I was so vaguely
looking for, and to say, "All right, Kid, you come right along." And as
he was farther along than I, he pulled me after him on the hunt after
what he called "the genuine article" in this bewildering modern life.
His own life, to begin with, was a tie with this real modern world that
had forced itself on me long ago through the harbor. For Joe had been
"up against it" hard. Though blunt and frank about most things he talked
little about himself, but I got his story bit by bit. "Graft" had come
into it at the start. In a town of the Middle West his father had been a
physician with a good practice, until when Joe was eleven years old a
case of smallpox was discovered. Joe's father vaccinated about a score
of children that week. The "dope" he used was mailed to him by a drug
firm in Chicago. It was "rotten." Over half the children were
desperately ill and seven of them died. Joe's father, his mother and
both older sisters did duty as nurses day and night. After that they
left town, moved from town to town, that story always following, and
finally both parents died. Since then Joe had been a teamster, a clerk
in a hardware store, a brakeman, a telegrapher, and last, the assistant
editor of a paper in a small town. He had scraped and slaved and studied
throughout with the idea of coming East to college. He had come at
twenty-two, beating his way on freight trains. On the top of a car one
night he had fallen asleep and been knocked on the head by a steel beam
jutting down under a bridge. Then, after two weeks on a hospital bed, he
had arrived at college.
Here he had earned a meager way by writing football and baseball news
for a string of western papers. Here he had looked for an education, and
here "a bunch of[Pg 61] dead ones" had handed him "news from the graveyard"
instead.
I can still see him in classroom, head cocked to one side, grimly
watching the prof. And once during a Bible course lecture I heard his
voice blandly ironic behind me:
"Will somebody ask Mister Charley Darwin to be so good as to step this
way?"
"We've been cheated, Bill," he told me. "We've been cheated right along.
Take history, for instance, the kind of stuff we were handed in school.
I got onto it first when I was fourteen. It was a rainy Saturday and my
mother told me to go and clean out an old closet up in the attic. Well,
I found my German grandfather's diary there, written when he was in
college in Leipsic, in 1848. The way those kids jumped into things! The
way they got themselves mixed up in the Revolution of Forty Eight! To
hear my young grandfather talk, that year was one of the biggest times
in European history. Our school history gave it five pages and then
druled on about courts and kings. 'I'll go to college,' I made up my
mind. 'College will put me next to the truth.' So I saved my little
nickels and came. But college," he added moodily, "ain't advanced as far
as it was in my young grandfather's time."
"Do you know who's to blame for this stuff?" he said. "It's not the
profs, I've nothing against them, all they need is to be kicked out. No,
it's us, because we stand for their line of drule. If we got right up on
our honkeys and howled, all of us, for a real education, we'd get it by
next Saturday night. But we don't care a damn. Why don't we? Are we all
of us dubs? No we're not. Go down to the football field and see. There's
as much brains in figuring out those plays as there is in mathematics.
Would we stand for coaches like our profs? But that's just it. It's the
thing to be alive in athletics and a dub in everything else. And because
it's the thing, every fellow fits in. On the whole," he added
reflectively, "I think[Pg 62] it's this 'dear old college' feeling that's to
blame for it all."
"My God, Joe!" This was high treason!
"Sure it is," he retorted. "It is your god and the god of us all. This
dear old college feeling. It's got us all stuck together so close that
nobody dares to be himself and buck against its standards."
This from Joe Kramer! How often, in a football game, have I seen him on
the reporter's bench, his sallow face now all a-scowl, now beaming
satisfaction as he pounded his neighbor on the back.
In pursuit of "a real education" we got into the habit of spending
almost every evening in the college library, where except at examination
times there was nobody but a few silent "polers."
I grew to love this place. It was so huge and shadowy, with only shaded
lights here and there. It had such tempting crannies. I loved its deep
quiet, so pleasantly broken now and then by a step, a whisper, the sound
of a book being moved from its shelf where perhaps it had stood unread
for years, or occasional voices passing outside or snatches of song from
the campus. And here I thought I was finding myself. That French prof
had introduced me to Voltaire, Hugo, Balzac, Maupassant and others who
were becoming my new idols. This was art, this was beauty and truth,
this was getting at life in a way that thrilled.
But now and then looking up from my book I would see Joe prowling about
the place, taking down a book, then shoving it back and scowling as he
ran his eyes along whole rows of titles.
"This darned library shut its doors," he would growl to himself, "just
as the real dope was coming along. But there's been such a flood of it
ever since that some leaked in in spite of 'em."
Joe would search and search until he found "it" on back shelves or stuck
away in corners. Angrily he would[Pg 63] blow off the dust and then settle
himself with a sigh to read. There was always something wistful to me in
the way Joe opened each new book. But what a joy when he found
"it"—Darwin, Nietzsche, Henry George, Walt Whitman, Zola, Samuel
Butler. What a sudden sort of glee the night he discovered Bernard Shaw!
When the library closed we adjourned for beer and a smoke, and often we
would argue long about what we had been reading. Joe had little use for
the stuff I liked. Beauty and form were nothing to him, it was "the
meat" he was after. My mother's idols he laid low.
"The first part was big," he said one night of a recent English novel.
"But the last part was the kind of thing that poor old Thackeray might
have done."
In an instant I was up in arms, for to my mother and me the author of
"Pendennis" had been like a great lovable patron saint, a refuge from
all we abhorred in the harbor. To slight him was a sacrilege. But
reverence to Joe Kramer was a thing unknown. "Show me," he said, in
reply to my outburst, "a single thing he ever wrote that wasn't
sentimental bosh!" And we went at it hammer and tongs.
It was so in all our talks. Nothing was too sacred. Joe always insisted
on "being shown."
He had a keen liking but little respect for the nation built by our
fathers. From his own father's tragedy, caused by graft, his own hard
struggles in the West and the Populist doctrines he had imbibed, he had
come East with a deep conviction that "things in this country are one
big mess with the Constitution sitting on top." And when the term
"muckraker" came into use, I remember his deep satisfaction. "Now I know
my name," he said.
He was equally hard on the church. How he kicked against our compulsory
chapel. "Broad, isn't it, scientific," he growled, "to yank a man out of
bed every morning, throw him into his seat in chapel and tell him,
'Here.[Pg 64] This is what you believe. Be good now, take your little dose and
then you can go to breakfast.'"
"I'm no atheist," he remarked. "I'm only a poor young fellah who asks,
'Say, Mister, if you are up there why is it that no big scientist has
brains enough to see you?'"
"Look here, J. K., that isn't so!"
"Isn't it? Show me!" And we would start in. I had a deep repugnance for
his whole materialistic view. But I liked the way he jarred me.
"What I want to do," he said, "is to bust every hold that any creed ever
had on me. I don't mean only creeds in churches, I mean creeds in
politics, business and everywhere else. I want to get 'em all out of my
eyes so I can see what's really here—because I'm so sure there's an
awful lot here and an awful lot more that's coming. If I make a noise
like a knocker at times you don't want to put me down as any
Schopenhauer fan. None of that pessimistic dope for little Joey Kramer.
I never open a new book without hoping I'll find the real stuff I want,
and I never open a paper without hoping that some more of it will be
right here in the news of the day. Kid," he ended intensely, "you can
take it from me there are going to be big doings soon in this little old
world, big doings and great big ideas, as big as what caused the Civil
War and a damn sight more scientific. And the thing for you and me to do
is to get ourselves in some kind of shape so we can shake hands with 'em
when they arrive, and say, 'Hello, fellahs, come right in. You're just
what we've been waiting for.'"
When Joe gave up college at the end of the junior year, he left a small
group of us behind. "The Ishmaelites," we called ourselves. For though
most of us "couldn't quite go Joe," we had all "queered" ourselves in
college through the influence on us he had had.
There are thousands of Joe Kramers now in colleges scattered all over
the land. Each year their numbers grow, each year more deep their vague
conviction that[Pg 65] somehow they've been cheated, more harsh and insistent
every year their questioning of all "news from the graveyard," whether
it comes from old fogey professors or from parents or preachers, eminent
lawyers or business men, great politicians or writers of books. Arrogant
and sweeping, sparing nothing sacred—young. Ignorant, confused and
groping, almost wistful—new. They are becoming no insignificant part in
this swiftly changing national life.
Joe Kramer was one of the pioneers.[Pg 66]