II.
AS THE TWIG IS BENT
Edwards’ earliest attempt at fiction was a dramatic effort. The play was in three acts, was entitled “Roderigo, the Pirate Chief,” and was written at the age of 12. The young playwright was Roderigo, the play was given in the loft of the Edwards barn, and twenty-five pins was the price of admission (thirty if the pins were crooked). The neighborhood suffered a famine in pins for a week after the production of the play. The juvenile element clamored to have the performance repeated, but the patrons’ parents blocked the move by bribing the company with a silver dollar. It was cheaper to pay over the dollar than to buy back several thousand pins at monopoly prices.
In 1881 “Simon Girty; or, The Border Boys of the West” was offered. The first performance (which was also the last) was given in Ottawa, Kansas, and the modest fee of admission was 5 cents. The play was very favorably received and might have had an extended run had not the mothers of the “border boys” discovered that they were killing Indians with blank cartridges. Gathering in force, the mothers stormed the barn and added a realistic climax to the fourth act by spanking Simon Girty and disarming his trusty “pards.”
Shortly after this, the musty records show that Edwards turned from the drama to narrative fiction, and endeavored successfully to get into print. The following, copied from an engraved certificate, offers evidence of his budding aspirations:
Frank Leslie's BOYS' AND GIRLS' WEEKLY. Award of Merit. This is to certify that John Milton Edwards, Ottawa, Kansas, has been awarded Honorable Mention for excellence in literary composition. New York, Oct. 30, 1882. Frank Leslie.
This “honorable mention” from the publisher of a paper, which young Edwards looked forward to from week to week and read and re-read with fascination and delight, must have inoculated him for all time with the fiction virus. Forthwith he began publishing a story paper on a hektograph. Saturday was the day of publication, and the office of publication was the loft of the Edwards’ barn. Even at that early day the author understood the advantage of holding “leave-offs”[*] in serial work. He was altogether too successful with his leave-offs, for his readers, gasping for the rest of the story and unable to wait for the next issue of the paper, mobbed the office and forced him, with a threat of dire things, to tell them the rest of the yarn in advance of publication. After that, of course, publication was unnecessary.
[* “Leave-off” – the place where a serial is broken, and the words “To be continued in our next” appear. Mr. Matthew White, Jr., Editor of the Argosy, is supposed to have coined the expression. At any rate, Mr. White has a great deal to do with “leave-offs” and ought to know what to call them.]
It was a problem with young Edwards, about this time, to secure enough blank paper for his scribbling needs. Two old ledgers, only partly filled with accounts, fell into his hands, and he used them for his callow essays at authorship. He has those ledgers now, and derives considerable amusement in looking through them. They prove that he was far from being a prodigy, and reflect credit on him for whipping his slender talents into shape for at least a commercial success in later life. Consider this:
Scene III.
J.B. – We made a pretty good haul that time, Jim.
B.J. – Yes, I’d like to make a haul like that every night. We must have got about $50,000.
J.B. – Now we will go and get our boots blacked, then go and get us a suit of clothes, and then skip to the West Indies.
Here a $50,000 robbery had been committed and the thieves were calmly discussing getting their boots blacked and replenishing their wardrobe (one suit pf clothes between them seems to have been enough) before taking to flight. Shades of Sherlock, how easily a boy of 12 makes business for the police department!
Or consider this gem from Act II. The aforesaid “J.B.” and “B.J.” have evidently been “pinched” while getting their boots blacked or while buying their suit of clothes:
J.B. – We’re in the jug at last, Jim, and I’m afraid we’ll be sentenced to be shot.
B.J. – Don’t be discouraged, Bill.
Enter Sleek, the detective.
Sleek. – We’ve got you at last, eh?
J.B. – You’ll never get the money, just the same.
Sleek. – We’ll shoot you if you don’t tell where it is like a dog.
Then here’s something else which seems to prove that young Edwards occasionally fell into rhyme:
Oh, why cut down those forests, Our forests old and grand? And oh, why cheat the Indians Out of all their land? Enclosed by civilization, Surrounded they by towns, Calmly when this life is done They seek their hunting-grounds!
John Milton Edwards has always had a place in his heart for the red man, and another for his countr’s vanishing timber. He is to be congratulated on his youthful sentiments if not on the way they were expressed.
In 1882 the Edwards family removed to Chicago. There were but three in the family – the father, the mother, and John Milton. The boy was taken from the Ottawa high school and, as soon as they were all comfortably settled in the “Windy City,” John Milton made what he has since believed to be the mistake of his career. His father offered him his choice of either a university or a business education. He chose to spend two years in Bryant & Stratton’s Business College. His literary career would have been vastly helped had he taken the other road and matriculated at either Harvard or Yale. He had the opportunity and turned his back on it.
He was writing, more or less, all the time he was a student at Bryant & Stratton’s. The school grounded him in double-entry bookkeeping, in commercial law, and in shorthand and typewriting.
When he left the business college he found employment with a firm of subscription book publishers, as stenographer. There came a disagreement between the two partners of the firm, and the young stenographer was offered for $1,500 the retiring partner’s interest. The elder Edwards, who would have had to furnish the $1,500, could not see anything alluring in the sale of books through agents, and the deal fell through. Two years later, while John Milton was working for a railroad company as ticket agent at $60 a month, his old friend of the subscription book business dropped in on him and showed him a sworn statement prepared for Dun and Bradstreet. He had cleared $60,000 in two years! Had John Milton bought the retiring partner’s interest he would have been worth half a million before he had turned thirty.
The fiction bee, however, was continually buzzing in John Milton’s brain. He had no desire to succeed at anything except authorship.
Leaving the railroad company, he went to work for a boot and shoe house as bill clerk, at $12 a week. The death of his father, at this time, came as a heavy blow to young Edwards; not only that, but it brought him heavy responsibilities and led him seriously to question the advisibility of ever making authorship – as he had secretly hoped – a vocation. His term as bill clerk was a sort of probation, allowing the young man time, in leisure hours, further to try out his talent for fiction. He was anxious to determine if he could make it a commercial success, and so justify himself in looking forward to it as a life work.
The elder Edwards had been a rugged, self-made man with no patience for anything that was not strictly “business.” He measured success by an honorable standard of dollars and cents. For years previous to his death he had been accustomed to see his son industriously scribbling, with not so much as a copper cent realized from all that expenditure of energy. Naturally out of sympathy with what he conceived to be a waste of time and effort, Edwards, Sr., did not hesitate to express himself forcibly. On one ocassion he looked into his son’s room, saw him feverishly busy at his desk and exclaimed, irascibly, “Damn the verses!”
Young Edwards’ mother, on the other hand, was well educated and widely read; indeed, in a limited way, she had been a writer herself, and had contributed in earlier life to Harper’s Magazine. She could see that perhaps a pre-natal influence was shaping her son’s career, and understood how he might be working out his apprenticeship. Thus she became the gentle apologist, excusing the boy’s unrewarded labors, on the one hand, and the father’s cui bono ideas, on the other.
The Chicago Times, in its Sunday edition, used a story by young Edwards. It was not paid for but it was published, and the elder Edwards surreptitiously secured many copies of the paper and sent them to distant friends. Thus, although he would not admit it, he showed his pride in his son’s small achievement.
From the boot and shoe house young Edwards went back to the railroad company again; from there, when the railroad company closed its Chicago office, he went to a firm of wholesalers in coke and sewer-pipe; and, later, he engaged as paymaster with the firm of contractors. Between the coke and sewer pipe and the pay-rolls he wedged in a few days of reporting for The Chicago Morning News; and on a certain Friday, the last of February, he got married, and was back at his office desk on the following Monday morning.
The first story for which Ewards received payment was published in The Detroit Free Press, Sept. 19, 1889. The payment was $8.
In April, the same year, the Free Press inaugurated a serial story contest. Edwards entered two stories, one under a nom de plume. Neither won a prize, but both were bought and published. For the first, published in 1891, he was paid $75 on Feb. 2, 1890; and for the second, published a year later, he was paid $100.
With the opening installment of the first serial the Free Press published a photograph of the author over a stickful of biography. On another page appeared a paragraph in boldface type announcing the discovery of a new star in the literary heavens.
The spirit of John Milton Edwards swelled within him. He feasted his eyes on his printed picture (the rapid newspaper presses had made a smudge of it), he read and re-read his lean biography (lean because not much had happened to him at that time) and he gloried over the boldface type with its message regarding the new star (he was to learn later that many similar stars are born to blush unseen) and he felt himself a growing power in the world of letters.
Verily, a pat on the back is a thing to conjure with. It is more ennobling, sometimes, than a kingly tap with a swordpoint accompanied by the words, “I dub thee knight.” To the fine glow of youthful enthusiasm it opens broad vistas and offers a glimpse of glittering heights. Even though that hand-pat inspires dreamy never to be realized, who shall say that a little encouragement, bringing out the best in us, does not result in much good?
And in this place John Milton Edwards would make a request of the reader of fiction. If you are pleased with a story, kindly look twice at the author’s name so you may recall it pleasantly if it chances to come again under your eye. If you are a great soul, given to the scattering of benefactions, you might even go a little farther: At the expense of a postage stamp and a little time, address a few words of appreciation to the author in care of his publisher. You wist not, my beloved, what weight of gold your words may carry!
From the summer of ‘89 to the stmimer of ‘93 Edwards wrote many stories and sketches for The Detroit Free Press, Puck, Truth, The Ladies’ World, Yankee Blade, Frank Leslie’s Popular Monthly, Chatter, Saturday Night, and other periodicals. In 1890 he was receiving $10 a month for contributions to a little Chicago weddy called Figaro; and, during the same year, he found a market which was to influence profoundly a decade of work and his monetary returns; James Elversen paid him $75 for a serial to be used in Saturday Night.
Undoubtedly it was this serial that pointed Edwards toward the sensational story papers. A second serial, sold to Saturday Night, Oct. 21, 1891, brought $150; while a third, paid for July 20, 1893, netted a like amount. These transactions carried the true ring of commercial success. Apart from myth and fable, there is no more compelling siren song in history than the chink of silver. Edwards, burdened with responsibilities, gave ear to it.
The serial story, published in the Free Press in 1891, had made friends for Edwards. Among these friends was Alfred B. Tozer, editor of The Chicago Ledger. Through Mr. Tozer, Edwards received commissions for stories covering a period of years. The payment was $1.50 a thousand words – modest, indeed, but regular and dependable.[*]
[* In these later times, with other hands than those of Mr. Tozer at the helm, The Chicago Ledger seems to have become the Sargasso Sea of the popular fictionist – a final refugre for story derelicts. The craft that grows leaky and water-logged through much straining and wearisome beating about from port to port, has often and often come to anchor in the columns of the Ledger.]
From 1889 to 1893 Edwards was laboring hard – all day long at his clerical duties and then until midnight in his Fiction Factory. The pay derived from his fiction output was small, (the Ladies’ World gave him $5 for a 5,000-word story published March 18, 1890, and The Yankee Blade sent him $13 on Jan. 10, 1891, for a story of 8,500 words), but Edwards was prolific, and often two or three sketches a day came through his typewriter.
Early in 1893, however, he saw that he was at the parting of the ways. He could no longer serve two masters, for the office work was suffering. He realized that he was not giving the contracting firm that faithful service and undivided energy which they had the right to expect, and it was up to him to do one line of work and one only.
“Slips and Tips”
One of Mr. White’s authors who had never been in Europe set out to write a story of a traveller who determined to get along without tipping. The author described his traveller’s horrible plight while being shown around the Paris Bastille – which historic edifice had been razed to the ground some two centuries before the story was written! The author received a tip from Mr. White on his tipping story, a tip never to do it again.
