Pulitzer_ A Life in Politics, Print, and Power - James McGrath Morris [205]
“I cannot get over the fact that this man is rendering the most conspicuous service to the country, in his brilliant bold crusade against Imperialism,” said Pulitzer, dictating detailed instructions to Phillips. “I think the work he has done in this cause is inestimable, simply in arousing and aligning the entire Democratic party against what is, after all, the burning danger and evil, the first step on the path to ruin.”
Phillips was to end his reporting tour by visiting Bryan in Nebraska. “I want you to write up Bryan at home, the real man; his real force, his character, influence et cetera. At the same time I want you to be kind to him, tell all the truth possible, strictly and exactly, but from a kindly rather than antipathetic point of view.” Phillips was already a Bryan man, and Pulitzer was becoming one.
With the arrival of winter and his travels at an end, Phillips resumed work on his novel The Great God Success. His protagonist Howard was rising to power and fame as an editor and then as a publisher, following the same principles Pulitzer had used; as Howard put it, “Catch the crowd, to interest it, to compel it to read, and so to lead it to think.” Phillips based Howard’s days as a reporter on his own life, but he modeled the character’s time as a publisher on Pulitzer’s. If there was anyone in Pulitzer’s entourage who had been close enough to him to see the transformation in the onetime idealistic reformer, it was Phillips. Pulitzer—blind, in misery with real and imagined ailments, and incapable of acknowledging the suffering of others—had become entirely self-absorbed. His cause was himself. Phillips recognized the angst in Pulitzer and gave it to his fictional character.
“He could not deceive himself, nor can any man with the clearness of judgement necessary to great achievement,” wrote Phillips about Howard. “He was well aware that he had shifted from the ideal of use to his fellow-beings to the ideal of use of his fellow-beings, from the ideal of character to the ideal of reputation. And he knew that the two ideals cannot be combined and that he not only was not attempting to combine them but had no desire so to do. He despised his former ideals; but also he despised himself for despising them.”
Over time, Howard sells out—first to a coal trust and then for a political appointment. As the book draws to a close, melancholy envelops him. “And he fell to despising himself for the kind of exultation that filled him, its selfishness, its sordidness, the absence of all high enthusiasm,” wrote Phillips. “Why was he denied the happiness of self-deception? Why could he not forget the means, blot it out, now that the end was attained?
“The answer came—because in those days, in the days of his youth, he had had beliefs, high principles; he had been incapable of slavery to appearances, to vain show, incapable of this passion for reputation regardless of character. His weaknesses were then weaknesses only, and not, as now, the laws of his being controlling his every act.
“He smiled cynically at the self of such a few years ago—yet he could not meet those honest, fearless eyes that looked out at him from the mirror of memory.”
Chapter Twenty-Six
FLEEING HIS SHADOW
Muffled sounds of screaming woke Kate in the late-night hours of January 8, 1900. They came from directly underneath the window of her second-floor bedroom in the house on East Fifty-Fifth Street in New York. Through glass and heavy draperies, she made out the terrifying word “Fire!” One of their nearly two dozen household servants had seen flames at the rear of the house and was yelling for everyone