Nothing Soothes Grief Like Sterling Old Books--How the
Sudden Death of an Only Son Proved the Value of the
Reading Habit. For the thirty years that I have spoken weekly to many hundreds of readers of
The Chronicle through its book review columns, it has been my constant aim to preach the doctrine of the importance of cultivating the habit of reading good books, as the chief resource in time of trouble or sickness. This doctrine I enforced, because for many years reading has been my principal recreation, and I have proved its usefulness in broadening one's view of life and in storing up material from the world's greatest writers which can be recalled at will. But it never occurred to me that this habit would finally come to mean the only thing that makes life worth living. When one passes the age of forty he begins to build a certain scheme for the years to come. That scheme may involve many things--domestic life, money-getting, public office, charity, education. With me it included mainly literary work, in which I was deeply interested, and close companionship with an only son, a boy of such lovable personal qualities that he had endeared himself to me from his very childhood. Cut off as I have been from domestic life, without a home for over fifteen years, my relations with my son Harold were not those of the stern parent and the timid son. Rather it was the relation of elder brother and younger brother.
Hence, when only ten days ago this close and tender association of many years was broken by death--swift and wholly unexpected, as a bolt from cloudless skies--it seemed to me for a few hours as if the keystone of the arch of my life had fallen and everything lay heaped in ugly ruin. I had waited for him on that Friday afternoon until six o'clock. Friday is my day off, my one holiday in a week of hard work, when my son always dined with me and then accompanied me to the theater or other entertainment. When he did not appear at six o'clock in the evening I left a note saying I had gone to our usual restaurant. That dinner I ate alone. When I returned in an hour it was to be met with the news that Harold lay cold in death at the very time I wrote the note that his eyes would never see.
When the first shock had passed came the review of what was left of life to me. Most of the things which I had valued highly for the sake of my son now had little or no worth for me; but to take up again the old round of work, without the vivid, joyous presence of a companion dearer than life itself, one must have some great compensations; and the chief of these compensations lay in the few feet of books in my library case--in those old favorites of all ages that can still beguile me, though my head is bowed in the dust with grief and my heart is as sore as an open wound touched by a careless hand.
For more than a dozen years in the school vacations and in my midsummer holidays my son and I were accustomed to take long tramps in the country. For five of these years the boy lived entirely in the country to gain health and strength. Both he and his older sister, Mary, narrowly escaped death by pneumonia in this city, so I transferred them to Angwin's, on Howell Mountain, an ideal place in a grove of pines--a ranch in the winter and a summer resort from May to November. There the air was soft with the balsam of pine, and the children throve wonderfully. Edwin Angwin was a second father to them both, and his wife was as fond as a real mother. For five years they remained on the mountain. Mary developed into an athletic girl, who became a fearless rider, an expert tennis player and a swimmer, who once swam two miles at Catalina Island on a foolish wager. She proved to be a happy, wholesome girl, an ideal daughter, but marriage took her from me and placed half the continent between us. Harold was still slight and fragile when he left the country, but his health was firmly established and he soon became a youth of exceptional strength and energy.
Many memories come to me now of visits paid to Angwin's in those five years. Coming home at three o'clock on winter mornings after a night of hard work and severe nervous strain, I would snatch two or three hours' sleep, get up in the chill winter darkness and make the tedious five-hour journey from this city to the upper Napa Valley, in order to spend one day with my boy and his sister. The little fellow kept a record on a calendar of the dates of these prospective visits, and always had some dainty for me--some bird or game or choice fruit which he knew I relished.
Then came the preparatory school and college days, when the boy looked forward to his vacations and spent them with me in single-minded enjoyment that warmed my heart like old wine. By means of constant talks and much reading of good books I labored patiently to develop his mind, and at the same time to keep his tastes simple and unspoiled. In this manner he came to be a curious mixture of the shrewd man of the world and the joyous, care-free boy. In judgment and in mental grasp he was like a man of thirty before he was eighteen, yet at the same time he was the spontaneous, fun-loving boy, whose greatest charm lay in the fact that he was wholly unconscious of his many gifts. He drew love from all he met, and he gave out affection as unconsciously as a flower yields its perfume.
In college he tided scores of boys over financial straits; his room at Stanford University was open house for the waifs and strays who had no abiding-place. In fact, so generous was his hospitality that the manager of the college dormitory warned him one day in sarcastic vein that the renting of a room for a term did not include the privilege of taking in lodgers. His friends were of all classes. He never joined a Greek letter fraternity because he did not like a certain clannishness that marked the members; but among Fraternity men as well as among Barbarians he counted his close associates by the score. He finished his college course amid trying circumstances, as he was called upon to voice the opinion of the great body of students in regard to an unjust ruling of the faculty that involved the suspension of many of the best students in college. And through arbitrary action of the college authorities his degree was withheld for six months, although he had passed all his examinations and had had no warnings of any condemnation of his independent and manly course as an editor of the student paper. Few boys of his age have ever shown more courage and tact than he exhibited during that trying time, when a single violent editorial from his pen would have resulted in the walking out of more than half the university students.
Then came his short business life, full of eager, enthusiastic work for the former college associate who had offered him a position on the Board of Fire Underwriters. Even in this role he did not work so much for himself as to "make good," and thus justify the confidence of the dear friend who stood sponsor for him. Among athletes of the Olympic Club he numbered many warm friends; hundreds of young men in professional and business life greeted him by the nickname of "Mike," which clung to him from his early freshman days at Stanford. The workers and the idlers, the studious and the joy-chasers, all gave him the welcome hand, for his smile and his gay speech were the password to all hearts. And yet so unspoiled was he that he would leave all the gayety and excitement of club life to spend hours with me, taking keen zest in rallying me if depressed or in sharing my delight in a good play, a fine concert, a fierce boxing bout or a spirited field day. Our tastes were of wide range, for we enjoyed with equal relish Mascagni's "Cavalleria," led by the composer himself, or a championship prize-fight; Margaret Anglin's somber but appealing Antigone or a funny "stunt" at the Orpheum.
Harold's full young life was also strongly colored by his close newspaper associations. The newspaper life, like the theatrical, puts its stamp on those who love it, and Harold loved it as the child who has been cradled in the wings loves the stage and its folk. Ever since he wore knickerbockers he was a familiar figure in the
The Chronicle editorial rooms. He knew the work of all departments of the paper, and he was a keen critic of that work. He would have made a success in this field, but he felt the work was too exacting and the reward too small for the confinement, the isolation and the nervous strain. After the fire he rendered good service when competent men were scarce, and in the sporting columns his work was always valued, because he was an expert in many kinds of sports and he was always scrupulously fair and never lost his head in any excitement. The news of his death caused as deep sorrow in
The Chronicle office as would the passing away of one of the oldest men on the force.
Now that this perennial spirit of youth is gone out of my life, the beauty of it stands revealed more clearly. Gone forever are the dear, the fond-remembered holidays, when the long summer days were far too short for the pleasure that we crowded into them. Gone are the winter walks in the teeth of the blustering ocean breezes, when we "took the wind into our pulses" and strode like Berserkers along the gray sand dunes, tasting the rarest spirit of life in the open air. Gone, clean gone, those happy days, leaving only the precious memory that wets my eyes that are not used to tears.
And so, in this roundabout way, I come back to my library shelves, to urge upon you who now are wrapped warm in domestic life and love to provide against the time when you may be cut off in a day from the companionship that makes life precious. Take heed and guard against the hour that may find you forlorn and unprotected against death's malignant hand. Cultivate the great worthies of literature, even if this means neglect of the latest magazine or of the newest sensational romance. Be content to confess ignorance of the ephemeral books that will be forgotten in a single half year, so that you may spend your leisure hours in genial converse with the great writers of all time. Dr. Eliot of Harvard recently aroused much discussion over his "five feet of books." Personally, I would willingly dispense with two-thirds of the books he regards as indispensable. But the vital thing is that you have your own favorites--books that are real and genuine, each one brimful of the inspiration of a great soul. Keep these books on a shelf convenient for use, and read them again and again until you have saturated your mind with their wisdom and their beauty. So may you come into the true Kingdom of Culture, whose gates never swing open to the pedant or the bigot. So may you be armed against the worst blows that fate can deal you in this world.
Who turns in time of affliction to the magazines or to those books of clever short stories which so amuse us when the mind is at peace and all goes well? No literary skill can bind up the broken-hearted; no beauty of phrase satisfy the soul that is torn by grief. No, when our house is in mourning we turn to the Bible first--that fount of wisdom and comfort which never fails him who comes to it with clean hands and a contrite heart. It is the medicine of life. And after it come the great books written by those who have walked through the Valley of the Shadow, yet have come out sweet and wholesome, with words of wisdom and counsel for the afflicted. One book through which beats the great heart of a man who suffered yet grew strong under the lash of fate is worth more than a thousand books that teach no real lesson of life, that are as broken cisterns holding no water, when the soul is athirst and cries out for refreshment.
This personal, heart-to-heart talk with you, my patient readers of many years, is the first in which I have indulged since the great fire swept away all my precious books--the hoarded treasures of forty years. Against my will it has been forced from me, for I am like a sorely wounded animal and would fain nurse my pain alone. It is written in the first bitterness of a crushing sorrow; but it is also written in the spirit of hope and confidence--the spirit which I trust will strengthen me to spend time and effort in helping to make life easier for some poor boys in memory of the one dearest boy who has gone before me into that "undiscovered country," where I hope some day to meet him, with the old bright smile on his face and the old firm grip of the hand that always meant love and tenderness and steadfast loyalty.
Among men of New England strain like myself it is easy to labor long hours, to endure nervous strain, to sacrifice comfort and ease for the sake of their dear ones; but men of Puritan strain, with natures as hard as the flinty granite of their hillsides, cannot tell their loved ones how dear they are to them, until Death lays his grim hand upon the shoulder of the beloved one and closes his ears forever to the words of passionate love that now come pouring in a flood from our trembling lips.
San Francisco, October 9, 1910. [The end]
George Hamlin Fitch's essay: Comfort Found In Good Old Books