Books: Holy Horatio

STRUGGLING UPWARD AND OTHER WORKS —Horatio Alger Jr.—Crown Publishers ($3).

Nothing recedes like success. In the field of juvenile literature, Horatio Alger Jr., four of whose novels have just been reissued in this volume, was once regarded as the most successful writer who ever lived. Directly or indirectly he influenced the life of every U.S. town boy born between 1870 and 1900. Farm boys had less time and money for fiction, but if they did read stories, they read Alger; thousands of them imitated his heroes by going to Manhattan to seek their fortunes. But Alger’s books lost most of their public during World War I and the rest of it during the ’20s. In the Capone or quick-money era, boys were not attracted by titles like Plan and Prosper, Slow and Sure, Work and Win.

Until Struggling Upward and Other Works reappeared this week, the Alger books had completely vanished from the bookstores. They had also vanished from the circulation departments of public libraries, from Sunday schools where they were formerly given as prizes, from newsboys’ homes of which Alger used to be a patron saint, and from the bookshelves of forward-looking children. Of the man and author, little was remembered except his name, around which had gathered a series of misconceptions. Some of them:

¶ Alger wrote about poor boys who became millionaires. (His heroes rose from poverty to riches but by contemporary standards they did not rise to the top—their fortunes usually averaged $10,000.)

¶ Alger heroes acquired their wealth by honesty, enterprise and patience. (They acquired it chiefly by meeting kind old merchants who became their guardians or adoptive fathers.)

¶ Alger himself made a fortune by the mass production of novels. (Never a shrewd businessman, Alger sold most of his works outright at moderate prices. At the height of his reputation, he had to piece out his literary earnings by tutoring schoolboys in French and Latin. One of his pupils: the future Supreme Court Justice Benjamin N. Cardozo.)

¶ Alger was “the most widely read author of the ages”—according to his only biographer, Herbert R. Mayes (TIME, May 7, 1928). (Not one of Alger’s novels ever appeared near the top of any bestseller list.)

¶ Alger was the most prolific writer who ever lived. (He published about 130 books for boys, at least two novels for girls and several books of bad poetry, besides some earlier pamphlets. But most of the books were short, averaging 55,000 words by actual count; his total production was about 7,000,000 words. Frederick Dey, author of most of the “Nick Carter” series, ground out more than 21,000,000 words.)

Successful Failure. Although he was a great success by popular standards, the real Alger was a failure by his own, and his father’s rules. Horatio Sr., a Unitarian clergyman in Chelsea, Mass., wanted his oldest son to become a great Boston preacher like Dr. William Channing or Edward Everett Hale. He made the boy read Plato and Josephus (in translation) at the age of eight, and taught him Latin at nine. When parishioners called, Father Alger would ask, “What are you going to be, Horatio?” Horatio Jr. would stutter: “I shall be a t-teacher of the ways of God, a p-preach-er of His commandments, a wiberal thinker, a woyal citizen.” Schoolmates called him “Holy Horatio.”

At Harvard, Horatio was the smallest man (5 ft. 2) in the class of 1852, ranked eighth in his studies and wrote the class ode. As a senior, Horatio noted in his diary: “Am reading Moby Dick, and find it exciting. What a thrilling life the literary must be! … Would it be desirable for me to take up writing as a life work? The satisfaction resulting from a beautiful story must be inspiring—a story that rouses readers to a new sense of the fine things of life.” From that moment his ambition was fixed: he would write the great American novel.

Father Complex. Horatio Alger never even wrote an outline for the novel, although he was still dreaming about it when he died (1899). In fact, Alger never succeeded in freeing himself from his father’s domination, never quite grew up. At the age of 50, he still liked to play with blocks. He sometimes disguised himself in a long cape and a tousled wig and went wandering through Manhattan’s streets — in search of material, he said. He preferred the company of bootblacks and match boys to that of adults. He liked to beat the big drum in the band that was organized at the Newsboys’ Lodging House, where he spent most of his leisure hours.

The emotions Alger describes in his stories are eminently restrained and proper, but according to Biographer Mayes, there were three great passions in Alger’s life.

His first mistress, a cabaret singer, he met during a visit to Paris. She lured him to her door and, when Alger hesitated to enter, stamped her foot and snapped: “Don’t stand here talking.” (Horatio stopped talking.) Mistress No. 2 was an English harpy who abducted him from Mistress No. 1, then treated him cruelly. Alger ran away from her. Mistress No. 3 did not appear until 20 years later. When Alger showed her a list of the furniture he intended to buy, she asked, “Why two beds, Horatio?”

Looking for Father. Every popular novel retells some ancient fairy tales. The Alger novel for boys, which is really one book with 130 different titles, is no exception. But the fairy story it repeats is not Jack the Giant Killer, which Alger read in his own boyhood — the eternal fable of the bright boy who made good.

It is the Greek myth of Telemachus, the supposed orphan who found his father (Ulysses) and thus came into his kingdom.

Horatio’s hero is always a prince in disguise, playing the part of a fiddler, a bootblack, a hired boy, but with at tractive, cheerful and resolute features under the dirt. His mother, always a widow, is tormented by the village squire, who plays the joint role of Penelope’s suitors. The hero meets a stranger and rescues his child from drowning (or from a mad dog or a runaway horse). The stranger turns out to be a rich merchant, who gives the boy new clothes, then sends him on a mission, a sort of knightly quest. On his triumphant return, the merchant adopts him as a son or ward, discomfits the wicked suitor and settles a little fortune on the hero. Moralists used to complain that this fortune was gained by pure luck. On the contrary, it was gained by the hero’s discovery of the place and parentage that were his by right.

Punishing Papa. Alger, who was never freed from emotional bondage to his own father, found a sort of compensation in telling this one story over & over. In each of his novels he punished his father three times. He killed him before the story opened by making the hero an orphan; he gave Horatio Sr.’s worst traits to the villainous squire; and finally he provided the hero with a new father to cherish him.

Struggling Upward, which gives its name to the present volume, is the absolute dead mean and average of all the Alger books. It contains his stock characters, settings and incidents, leading to his stock conclusion. “You need be under no anxiety about Luke and his prospects,” says the rich merchant to the hero’s widowed mother. “I shall make over to him $10,000 at once, constituting myself his guardian, and will see that he is well started in business.”

Ragged Dick, the second of the four novels now reprinted, was the first of Alger’s books (1868) to reach a wide public. It is a moral but lively story dealing with the rise to respectability of a homeless bootblack.

Phil, the Fiddler is a memorial to a successful crusade that Alger led against the padrone system, by which hundreds of little street musicians, brought to Manhattan from Italy, were kept as virtual slaves. The story deals with one boy who escaped and was adopted by a rich doctor.

Jed, the Poorhouse Boy also was written with a purpose—to help the paupers —and its early chapters bear a secondhand resemblance to Oliver Twist.