The Best-Loved Dog Stories of Albert Payson Terhune

PART ONE

TO THE BEST OF MY MEMORY

AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY

To the Best of My Memory

Selections from TO THE BEST OF MY MEMORY and Two Very Real People in PROVING NOTHING.¹

MY FATHER was the Rev. Dr. Edward Payson Ter-hune, a clergyman who was also a Man. They used to say in his family that he inherited his vast muscular strength and his physical courage from his grandfather, Abram Terhune, of Washington’s bodyguard, whom he resembled greatly in looks and figure.

(You can see a portrait of Abram Terhune in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, or in any school book which contains a copy of the painting of Washington Crossing the Delaware. Abram is pulling starboard bow oar, nearest the onlooker. The artist got his description of the picture from him, and painted him in the same position he occupied that December night in Washington’s scow. Abram was only a young giant of twenty at the time of the crossing and had not yet attained his lieutenancy. In those days he could stand at one side of a tall horse and make a standing jump over the animal’s back without touching the saddle.)

My father was a clergyman of the old school, brought up in a rigid atmosphere of piety and scholarship. He read Latin and Greek and Hebrew as fluently as English. It was a matter of pained wonder to him that none of his children had the remotest liking or talent for any of the mighty dead languages, nor any of his own high claim to classic scholarship.

He was a New Jersey man, as had been his ancestors for two centuries. But when he was graduated from Rutgers and from its Theological Seminary, he went to Virginia to take charge of his first church.

It was there he met my mother.

May I introduce my mother to you, also, as briefly as may be? She is worth your meeting, for she was almost as great in her own way as my father.

When she was fourteen my mother wrote a story, called Marrying Through Prudential Motives. She sent it to a fifty-dollar prize contest that was waging in Godey’s Lady’s Book. This was in 1845, an era when respectable young girls were no more supposed to write for publication than they were supposed to go into the prize ring.

She did not wish to disgrace her family by writing the tale under her own name, on the off chance that it might be printed and her shame blazoned to the world. So she hit on the pen name that thereafter was hers. Her name was Mary Hawes—Mary Virginia Hawes. She kept the initials of her first and last names and used them for a nom de plume which would sound as much as possible like the original without betraying her identity. Hence she evolved from Mary Hawes the pseudonym Marion Harland.

My mother did not send her address with the story. Six months later she saw in Godey’s Lady’s Book an announcement that Marion Harland had won the contest’s first prize of fifty dollars, and a request that she send her address.

My grandmother lectured her severely and weepingly on the criminal unwomanliness of writing stories, and besought her never again to yield to such an unworthy temptation. For two solid years my mother was so oppressed with a sense of guilt that she did not write another word. She told me those were the two unhappiest years of her life. The strain told on her health. In a moment of confidence she confessed to her father the sinful yearning of her heart to go on writing, and she asked him how best to overcome it.

He demanded that she hunt up any of her stories she might still have kept and show them to him. He spent a whole evening reading them. Late that night he finished the heap of scribbled manuscripts and went up to her room with them. She woke to see him standing at the foot of her bed.

Daughter, said the grim old Presbyterian, you can serve God and mankind as worthily with a gift like yours as you could by going as a missionary to the heathen. God gave you the rare power to write. You would be ungrateful to Him if you neglected it. Go on with your work.

When she was eighteen she finished her first novel, Alone. In Richmond, in the late 1840’s, novel-reading was done in secret, for the most part. Trembling, my mother took Alone to a local publisher. He rejected it. She sent it to a Northern publisher, who sent it back almost by return mail.

Then she told her father what she had done. He read the manuscript all of one business day and late into the night. Next morning he took it to the Richmond publisher who had refused it and bade him issue a goodly edition of it and to send him the bill. My mother told me she lay awake all that night, wondering if her father would get back a penny of his wild investment.

The novel passed the hundred thousand mark, in an age when large book sales were pitiably few. Longfellow and young Aldrich and Whittier and N. P. Willis wrote glowingly congratulatory letters about it to the unknown girl, letters she treasured all her long life.

She and my father met at a dinner in Richmond. Each was twenty-four. Each disliked the other at sight. My father said he had a contempt for women who wrote books. My mother heard of this. She had said she would sooner die than marry a clergyman, and that my father had the ugliest jaw she had seen on a man. (That was nearly twenty years before I was born with a jaw that matched it, line for line.) Kind friends carried this absurd speech to him.

A year later he and she were married.

They came to New Jersey to live—to Newark, which in that day was well-nigh as strait-laced as Richmond.

There, almost at once, my father fell foul of the blue-law folk of his own and other congregations. Not for any sin he committed, but for his belief that a clergyman could be a devout Christian and also a Man. He was a crack shot, an inspired fly-fisherman, a born rider and driver.

He loved fast horses and hunting-dogs, and he kept several of both. One of his church elders felt called upon to reprove the young preacher for his taste for thoroughbred horses and his fondness for fast moving. He said it was unbecoming in a clergyman.

I think I can drive to heaven as well behind a fast horse as behind a slow one, was my father’s good-tempered reply. "Besides, I can bring down my whip or my fist in front of the nose of any horse of mine, and he won’t flinch. He never has been struck. I noticed your horse flung his head up in terror when you reached your hand out to tie him at my gate just now. Perhaps God is as well pleased with a kind horseman who drives fast as with a brutal horseman who drives slowly."

For all his love of athletics and horses and billiards and fishing and shooting, there was nothing of the sensationalist in his sermons. When he entered the pulpit he ceased to be the dashing man-of-the-world and became a sincere and severely zealous preacher.

It was when I was still a small child that my mother’s lungs broke down and we went to Europe to stay for several years. She went there expecting to die. Every doctor said so, and on that ground they had advised my father against taking her thither. Stubbornly he had insisted, declaring he was going to bring her back alive and well. His forecast came true. She returned to America at last in splendid health and she remained so for another forty years.

It was before her health broke down that she won another battle in regard to her writing. She was the best housekeeper—except my own wife—that I have ever known. This in a day when cookbooks were few and semi-useless, and when new housewives perforce turned to their elders for culinary lore.

She decided to write a cookbook which could be understood and followed by the newest bride or the stupidest servant. She wrote it. She called it Common Sense in the Household. (I have been told that something close to a half-million copies of it have been sold, first and last.)

Then came the struggle to get it published. Long since, her novels had found a ready and growing market. But this was a different matter. Her own publishers would not touch the venture. They and other experts said there was no possible sale for a cookbook, and that the volume must be a lamentable failure. (I had the same experience, in a lesser way, when I tried to get my first dog-book published, more than fifty years afterward.)

At length she took the unwanted book to Charles Scribner, Sr. He accepted it—not, as he confessed to her later on, that he had any idea it could sell a dozen copies, but in the hope that his publishing of it would induce her to let him bring out her next novel. At once Common Sense in the Household justified her belief in it. It did more. It condemned its author to be known henceforth as a writer on domestic topics instead of a novelist.

Two more successful battles, on a smaller scale, marked her after-life. At seventy-three she broke her right wrist. Never did it mend enough for her to write again by hand, except for a few scrawling words at a stretch. At that age, for the first time, she bought and mastered a typewriting machine, presently using it as fast and as well as many a professional typist, and learning to compose on it as readily as once she had written by hand.

At ninety she went blind. She hired a secretary and taught herself to dictate. She dictated an entire novel and numberless household articles in the remaining eighteen months of her life. She outlived my father by fifteen years, though always she had declared most positively that he would outlive her. Less than a year before his death he and she celebrated their golden wedding at Sunnybank, the home they had bought and built and loved in the early days of their married life; the home that now is mine.

I was born in Newark, N. J., December 21, 1872. At Sunnybank, twenty miles away, my father taught me to fish and to shoot, when I was barely able to cast a fly or to hold steady a gun. Here he taught me to ride, when my stubby toes could not stick themselves into the topmost straps of the stirrup-leather; and to row a boat when I had to stand up to get a sweeping stroke on the oars. Here he taught me forestry and weather-signs and the rotation of crops and the ways of wild animals and birds. There were plenty of real-life examples to study from.

In school-and-college days my friends and I found Sunnybank a vacation paradise. I remember, in freshman year at Columbia, I came out for the Thanksgiving three-day vacation, with Brainerd and Howell and Amzi Steele. That Sunday—it was bitter cold—we went for a thirty-mile tramp through the mountains. We reached home, half-starved, just at nightfall.

For dinner we had, among other things, an eighteen-pound turkey my mother had sent up here for us. We four didn’t leave enough of that noble fowl for breakfast hash. Then, after lounging in front of the library fire for an hour or so, we took a fast three-mile cross-country run, to settle our dinner and to make us sleepy. Such a feast and such exercise today would kill me out of hand.

When I was six years old, my father received a call to Springfield, Mass. We remained at Sunnybank for several months and then all went to Springfield to live, returning to New Jersey every summer.

I don’t know why I should look back on my five Springfield years with a smirking sense of happiness. For I got into more trouble there, of every kind, than during all the rest of my days, before or since. But it was one place where my fame lingered behind me after my departure. For instance:

I left Springfield when I was not quite twelve. When I was nearly twenty-three, my first book was published. The Springfield Homestead prefaced its review thereof by these two sentences:

Bert Terhune is remembered by the people of this city as the worst boy we ever had here. Now he has written a book.

It was during my early stay in Springfield that I made a sad discovery about myself. My mother had taken me to New York to be outfitted for winter clothes. On her return she said gloomily to my two shocked sisters:

"He’s only a little over six. And he wears ten-year sizes in everything!"

That was the keynote. That was the theme of a curse that has been mine ever since. At six I was wearing ten-year sizes. At twelve I was wearing sixteen-year sizes. From the time I was sixteen, I have never been able to wear any ready-made garments, except only underclothes, shoes, and hats. Everything else has had to be built to fit my oversized self.

Perhaps you think it must be a fine thing to stand six-feet-two-and-a-half in one’s bare feet, and to have a fifty-inch chest and piano-mover shoulders, and to weigh 220 pounds or more? Well, it is not. Take that from me. It is NOT! It is as inconvenient, sartorially, as it would be to have a hump on one’s back or only one arm.

In October 1884 my father became minister of the First Reformed Church in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. The church was an enormous red-brick edifice, as big as a young cathedral and with a congregation that could have been seated comfortably in the little red-brick lecture room at its rear.

My father went to Brooklyn at fifty-three—the strongest, most vigorous, most athletic, most sanguine of men. He left the church there in 1890—broken in health and in life; sick with the malady which later was to kill him; his buoyancy and athletic vigor forever gone. In six years he had aged by a quarter-century.

But he had achieved the task he had accepted. The church was free of debt and was on its feet. The pews were full. The revenues were high. He had changed an insolvent ecclesiastical corpse into a prosperous live one. He had fought the good fight. But it had smashed him.

It had been planned that I should go to Yale, if, by some minor miracle, I could pass the entrance examinations. But when college time came my sisters both were married and my father was often away from home. Thus my absence in New Haven would leave my mother alone. Accordingly, I went to Columbia. My two gods were Brander Matthews and George E. Woodberry. I attended every course, compulsory or elective, that either of them gave—from French dramatists of the nineteenth century to poets of the Lake School.

Columbia in my day occupied only the block bounded by 49th and 50th Streets and by Madison and Park Avenues. There was no dormitory system. Our athletics, by contrast to those of fully ten other institutions of the same numerical size, were negligible. Yet we had plenty of college spirit and many good times. Perhaps in our way we were as complete a unit as is the larger and roomier present-day Columbia.

After college I drifted through Europe for a while; then to the Near East. Egypt did not appeal to me, after a short sojourn. But Syria had a gripping hold on my imagination and on my heart as well.

I crossed the Syrian wilderness on horseback, and I swam the Jordan in flood; I swam in the almost unswimmable Dead Sea, where I bobbed about like an elongated cork and where the salt turned my hair and beard to the color of frost. I wandered into the Land of Moab; and for a space I went native and lived with the outlaw El Kanah tribe of Bedouins.

Then I came home to Sunnybank. Here, to ease the galling inactivity, I wrote my first book, Syria from the Saddle. It was a vainglorious record of part of my Near East wanderings. The book was full of conceit and cockiness, of gleesome egotism.

The manuscript was sent to twelve publishers. The twelfth accepted it. I received an advance of fifty dollars—an advance which the sales never wholly covered. Yet the book won more laudatory reviews than anything else I have written. Perhaps on the same principle which makes an audience applaud a play acted by high-school pupils and yawn at a better performance by professionals.

I had begun writing when I was nineteen, during my junior year at college. The Columbia Spectator offered a ten-dollar prize for the best short story written by an undergraduate. Brander Matthews was the judge. Mine was the only typed manuscript. Always I have had a morbid belief that that was why it won the ten-dollar award. For it was frightful drivel, even for a nineteen-year-old.

My father wanted me to be a clergyman. My mother had decreed, from the time I was a baby, that I was to be a lawyer. Being a normal youth, naturally I had decided that, whatever trade I might take up, I would not go into either law or the ministry. I did not realize how normal this resolution was, nor how it must have hurt my parents, until, many years later, my daughter resolved, very sensibly, that she did not care to fulfill my life-ambition for her by taking up writing as a profession.

While waiting for an opportunity to enter a publisher’s office, promised me in two weeks, I was told by Elizabeth Jordan that she could get me a cub reporter job on the New York Evening World. I thought a fortnight’s experience in a newspaper office might be of help to me as a publisher. During that fortnight, too, I might learn how to read proof—an accomplishment which seemed to go with the publishing business, and which, to this day, I have not mastered.

I went to work on the Evening World on Monday, November 12, 1894. There I stayed until Saturday, May 13, 1916. I did not like newspaper work. I loathed it. During my entire twenty-one-and-a-half years on the Evening World I never once ceased to detest my various jobs there and the newspaper game in general. But I discovered that I possessed a natural nose for news. I covered assignments, I boiled down morning-paper stories to a length of anywhere from a stick-and-a-half to three lines (fine practice in condensation), I wrote reviews, I read editorial and magazine page copy, I wrote jokes and verses to go with garish pictures, I edited Letters from the People and one or two other daily features, I handled the exchanges, and I made myself generally useful. Once in a while I was entrusted with the writing of a minor editorial.

Then they turned me loose on fiction serials. It was the kind of work one can do with one’s eyes shut. The formula was simple. Something exciting must happen at least once in every thousand words, and an installment must end on a big climax. These were the chief rules. It was fun to write them.

They were excessively terrible. But we received letters praising them highly. That kept the office from dropping them. I did not have to write those laudatory letters myself. Most of them were written by friends of mine.

I began working at fifteen dollars a week, but by 1898 was making thirty-five dollars. The good old crowd, however, who had been on the Evening World when I joined up in 1894, and who had made me so welcome and had helped me out in my first assignments, and with whom I had had such jolly evenings—most of them were gone. Some had died—men of our staff and perhaps in other newspaper offices used to die in bewilderingly large numbers—some had been fired or had gone to other cities to work; some had dropped out of the newspaper game.

I suppose the original Ghost Writer was the nameless man who wrote Shakespeare’s plays. But I was in the first flight of modern ghosts. I began ghosting as early as 1897. In that year, I think, the Evening World published a fiction serial in ten installments, written by Ten Beautiful Shopgirls. It was a department-store advertising trick.

I was the Ten Beautiful Shopgirls.

The stunt went so well that the paper printed a serial by Ten Popular Actresses. I was the Ten Popular Actresses. Followed a serial by Lillian Russell. I was Lillian Russell, though she was unkind enough to write to us:

I wish it to be understood by all my friends that I am not in any way responsible for the incoherent drivel appearing in your pages under my name.

Then, in a sterner mood, I became Jim Jeffries, in a prizefight serial. Then I was Terry McGovern in a sporting-page serial, How to Box to Win; and soon thereafter I was Jim Corbett in his helpful series on Muscle Building. These two athletic series were brought out in book form; I have a copy of the book in my library at Sunnybank.

On the same shelf I have a copy of the novelization of a play. The title reads: The Return of Peter Grimm, by David Belasco.

I was David Belasco.

At the same time I was Peck, of Peck’s Bad Boy fame. Peck was hired to write a series called Peck’s Bad Boy Grown Up, describing the adventures of the Bad Boy and his pal, the Groceryman, on a prolonged visit to New York. For some reason the deal fell through, though Paul West, who was editing that section of the paper, obtained the use of Peck’s name. Then West set me to ghosting the series.

The stuff was worse than ghostly. It was ghastly.

By 1899 I was making forty dollars a week from my Evening World job. My magazine work still was semi-negligible in profits. I had written two books since Syria from the Saddle. One was Columbia Stories. It was a failure, financially and in every other way. I glanced over a copy of it last year, and I understood why.

The other was a novel, Dr. Dale: A Story Without a Moral. I wrote this in collaboration with my mother, Marion Harland.