The Sunday Gentleman (21 page)

I miss Burton Holmes, as do his audiences, I am sure, just as we all miss Count Leo Tolstoi, Admiral Dewey, the Emperor Meiji, who peopled that other day when life was simpler and safer and the world still kept its secrets from the Many. I recall that when Burton Holmes died in 1958,
Life
magazine offered him a two-page pictorial obituary. There we saw the man who had been so much a part of our younger days, and was no more—Burton Holmes, Vandyke and all, immersed in a Japanese bathtub. Burton Holmes in Seoul wearing Korean traditional mourning attire, Burton Holmes dressed as a Greek soldier in Athens.

Without this Burton Holmes, I fear the travelogue will not survive this generation. And it is not the loss of Holmes himself or the expansion of television that may sound the death knell, but the contraction of the planet on which we live.

Before the Second World War, the world was still large, and its marvels—the pyramids of Egypt, the Colosseum of Rome, the Acropolis of Athens, sacred Fujiyama of Japan—were still faraway. Most men could enjoy them, and their promise of adventure and romance, only secondhand, through reading or viewing films or listening to tales spun by the travelogue lecturer. And so millions of persons paid money to escape their workaday worlds and enjoy vicariously the more exotic worlds offered by the travelogue lecturer. As a result, the Burton Holmeses flourished.

After the Second World War, most of this changed. During the war, the sons and daughters of the Burton Holmes audiences had been uprooted from their insular existence and transported to the aged cities of Europe, to the sands of Africa, to the islands of the Pacific, and they had seen these faraway places through the cynical eyes of reality. They had been where the travelogue lecturers had been, and what these young people had seen and lived was, for the majority, neither romantic nor adventurous. Disillusioned, they had returned home, and for a long time after, most of them had little patience with glossed-over narratives delivered by professionals, or with the crusted credulity of their parents who did not know better.

By the 1950’s, the faithful old audience of the travelogue lecturer was dying off. Its heirs had not been converted to this form of escapism, and the new generation appeared more interested in a do-it-yourself philosophy, since a revolution in transportation had made this possible. Members of the new generation and their growing offspring had little inclination to listen to adventures related from a platform or to do their sightseeing by watching colored celluloid, when, in little more time than it took to attend a travelogue, they could visit in person, by jet-propelled aircraft, and often at cut-rate prices, the Mosque of St. Sophia in Istanbul, the Blue Grotto on Capri, or the Parsee Towers of Silence in Bombay. The wonders of the world were suddenly accessible to anyone with a small savings account or an active credit card.

In short, I am suggesting that an international war and the turbojet, added to free television and the absence of a Big Personality, may be the graveyard of the travelogue as it was invented and popularized by Burton Holmes.

Happily, this was not to be Burton Holmes’s graveyard. He lived long, but he died soon enough—certainly soon enough to avoid the ignominious end of fading into obscurity. Burton Holmes did not outlive his audience, and so he escaped the cruel fate of becoming an anachronism. Instead, like Nellie Bly, he became an American legend, and as a legend, if not as a corporation, he will enjoy immortality.

6

Paragon of the

Paperbacks

It is unlikely that you will find Gilbert Patten’s name in many biographical dictionaries, or serious studies of literary criticism. Yet his pen, perhaps the most prolific in the whole of American authorship, was inspired to create a character whose name became part of our living language and whose feats encouraged a great proportion of today’s eminent male Americans to strive for success.

Gilbert Patten, who rarely wrote under his own name and never received a penny in royalties for most of his 648 published books, died a half-dozen years ago, a forgotten man at seventy-eight. But the character he created lives on, immortal, for Gilbert Patten gave birth to Frank Merriwell. And it was through the fictional Frank Merriwell, exponent of the clean life and chivalrous act, master of the ninth-inning home run, that Patten made his indelible imprint on American thought and action, by influencing countless leaders who today direct and guide American life.

Christy Mathewson, Woodrow Wilson, and Babe Ruth were early and fanatic Frank Merriwell followers. O. O. Mclntyre, Al Smith, Floyd Gibbons, and Wendell Willkie worshipfully regarded Merriwell as a beacon for good, ranking behind only Church and Mother.

Today, John L. Collyer, president of the B. F. Goodrich Company, admits that he went to college, and on to success in industry, because of encouragement found in reading Frank Merriwell. James Knott founded his chain of hotels, Jed Harris became a renowned Broadway producer, and Eddie Eagen gave up professional pugilism for Yale and fame, all because of the early inspiration derived from Gilbert Patten’s hero. It was Frank Merriwell “who shaped my ambitions for clean living and athletic supremacy,” Eagen confessed in his autobiography. “Merriwell’s superhuman virtues were to me precedents far more impressive than the Ten Commandments.” In much the same vein, Jess Willard, Jack Dempsey, Rudy Vallee, Franklin P. Adams, Fredric March, and even a congressman from Maine publicly admitted their debt to the paragon of the paperbacks.

In the fifty-five years of his make-believe life, Frank Merriwell has served the citizenry tirelessly and well in an entertainment decathlon of dime novels, magazines, syndicated columns, comic strips and radio. Today, in Hollywood, a major producing company, the Frank Merriwell Enterprises, assisted by Patten’s surviving son, will soon project the perpetual Frank on television—and a whole new generation of red-blooded Americans, who no longer read his books, will derive from him the same inspiration their fathers did and will in turn strive ever Onward and Upward.

Clearly, Frank Merriwell has become as much a part of our national heritage as Huck Finn, Paul Bunyan, Tarzan, and Mickey Mouse. But even as his fame is renewed, the name of his creator recedes with passing years. Yet, to know Merriwell, one must know his genesis, must know the long-neglected, colorful hack who conceived and developed him under fantastic pressure.

William Gilbert Patten was born in Maine, during 1866, the son of ardent pacifists. His father, who was six feet four and had met Lincoln, hoped Gilbert would become a carpenter; his mother hoped he would become a minister. In a literary sense, Gilbert became both. He hated school, where his teachers regarded him as somewhat retarded, but he read omnivorously at home, especially Dickens and Hawthorne. He wanted to write a novel as great as
The Scarlet Letter
, and, at sixteen, started a baseball novel which he soon laid aside. Actually, he was led into this early sedentary life by his stature and his parents’ pacifistic convictions. A gangling six-footer, he was not permitted to fight the other boys. His sole diversion, beyond pushing a pencil, was managing the Camden baseball team, a member of the Knox County League, to a pennant. In wet-nursing these bush-leaguers, Patten incubated at least a half-dozen players for the major leagues—as well as the peerless Merriwell.

While still in his adolescence, Patten started a weekly newspaper.
The Corinna Owl
, and within a year had acquired $900 in debts. Fortunately, his weekly had cut into the circulation of a rival paper, and when they offered to buy him out, he grabbed. Still eager to write, he talked about freelancing. His father gave him a month to put up or shut up. Challenged, young Patten, in four frenzied days, wrote two short stories—“A Bad Man” and “The Pride of Sandy Flat”—and sold them to a New York weekly for three dollars each. Elated, he finished his old baseball novel, sold it for fifty dollars, and followed it with another which brought seventy-five dollars. After that, he forgot about college, married a Corinna girl friend who had helped him with his grammar, and was soon earning $2,700 a year grinding out dime-novel detective and western stories.

Raising his sights, he went to Broadway to become a playwright. He wrote a drama about a nagging wife,
Men of Millions
, which opened and closed in New Haven, hissed into oblivion by Yale students. This catastrophe invited others. After being evicted from his walk-up for nonpayment of rent, and finding himself suddenly burdened by an invalided father and mother, in addition to a wife. Patten reluctantly returned to dime novels. He did not mean to stay in the field; he just wanted a few easy dollars to tide him over. He scribbled western after western for Beadle and Adams, under the name of Wyoming Will, at $150 an epic. Quitting the Beadle firm over an argument involving a ten-dollar advance, be turned to doing boys’ adventures for Street & Smith.

Patten’s new publishers liked his work and suggested a juvenile series built around a single character who “should have a catchy name, such as Dick Lightheart, Jack Hark-away, Gay Dashleigh.” The publishers suggested that the hero become involved in escapades while attending a military academy, then inherit a “considerable sum of money” and temporarily leave school. “A little love element would also not be amiss,” the publishers wrote Patten. “When the hero is once projected on his travels, there is an infinite variety of incident to choose from. After we run through twenty or thirty numbers of this, we would bring the hero back and have him go to college—say, Yale University, thence we could take him on his travels again to the South Seas or anywhere.”

Patten gave the assignment some thought. Then, in four days, he whipped out his first 20,000-word novel under the pseudonym of Burt L. Standish. The hero, introduced on the very first page—“His face was frank, open and winning, but the merry light that usually dwelt in his eyes was now banished by a look of scorn”—was none other than the one and only Frank Merriwell. The date was April 18, 1896.

“I took the three qualities I most wanted him to represent—frank and merry in nature, and well in body and mind—and made the name Frank Merriwell,” recalled Patten later. While the character was fictional, some of Merriwell’s more spectacular talents were carefully fashioned after the fabulous Indian athlete, Louie Sockalexis, who had played baseball under Patten in Maine and could dash one hundred yards in ten seconds in full uniform. Sockalexis, educated at Holy Cross, was signed by the big-league Cleveland Spiders, who thereafter became the Indians. Persuaded by well-wishers to forsake his milk diet for bourbon, the prototype of Merriwell was finally dropped by the major leagues for his extended bouts with alcohol. He wound up as a street beggar in Hartford.

Patten gave Frank Merriwell the Indian’s prowess, but none of his personal problems. Merriwell neither smoked nor drank. “I wanted,” said Patten, “a boy who had no vices, but who didn’t act as if he had no vices.” And again, “When I conceived Frank, I think I hit on approximately the boy that every kid would like to be. Not, mind you, the boy that every kid ought to be. That was the Horatio Alger idea—a moral in every story. But my boy pointed no moral; he was just every boy’s ideal picture of himself.”

Frank Merriwell was introduced to America as he stepped down from the train bringing him to Fardale, his prep school. In the opening paragraph, he saw a bully, Bart Hodge, kick a dog and cuff a young popcorn vendor. Promptly, Frank spoke his first of a million words to follow: “That was a cowardly blow!” The battle was under way. Merriwell floored the bully with a smashing right to the jaw. With that electric punch, all young America took Merriwell to its heart.

Like Byron, Merriwell woke up to find himself famous. The first nickel
Tip Top Weekly
, with its colored cover, featuring “Frank Merriwell; or, First Days at Fardale,” was a complete sellout. No sooner had young readers had a taste of Merriwell overcoming the heavy’s efforts to keep him out of Fardale, Merriwell rescuing the wealthy, brunette Inza Burrage from a mad dog, Merriwell escaping from a locked cemetery vault, than they loudly clamored for more. Within three months,
Tip Top Weekly
soared to a circulation of 75,000, then 100,000, and Patten estimated that actually over 500,000 boys were reading the stories every week. Hundreds of adults, after glimpsing the stories, hopefully named their newest offspring Frank Merriwell Smith or Inza Jones. Thousands of Rand McNally geography texts camouflaged Merriwell paperbacks in the country’s classrooms, causing one educator to remark wryly, “We’re now teaching readin’, writin’, ‘rithmetic, and Merriwell.”

Gilbert Patten, when he started the series, had hoped to devote no more than four or five days a week to the Merriwell potboilers, and give the rest of his time to more mature creative efforts. But the sudden popularity of the character, the public’s insatiable demand for more plots, characters, variety, overwhelmed him. Merriwell became a triple-threat Frankenstein’s monster, consuming all his waking hours and energy.

Patten was contracted, at $50 a week, to deliver a complete 20,000-word adventure every seven days. Seventeen years and twenty million words later, he was still delivering his weekly quota, though his salary had been upped to only $150. His pen name, his hero, his stories belonged solely to the publishers. Patten never collected a royalty during this literary marathon.

After two years of Merriwell, his fingers became calloused and cramped from the unceasing physical labor of writing, and Patten switched to dictating. During mornings and through lunch periods, he paced the equivalent of five miles as he dictated four hours daily to a stenographer; during afternoons he revised, researched, and jotted notes on new backgrounds. He plotted thirteen different Merriwell stories at a time. He had so many characters entering and exiting that he kept an index file of them. “Now and then I did forget a character and made a slip,” he once recalled, “and a thousand youngsters immediately jumped on me. Once I killed Inza Burrage’s father in Africa. I forgot to cross out his name in the card index. A year later, I brought him to life. Indignant letters flooded me. Luckily, I hadn’t described the scene in which her father was killed, so in my next story I was able to explain that it was all a mistake and he wasn’t dead after all.”