WHY THIS BOOK WAS WRITTEN

A friend came to visit me. We were seated in the visitors’ room at Sing Sing. It was the first time we had met since that fateful day when the structure I had spent a lifetime in rearing, crashed down upon me and buried me beneath the ruins. I told him something of my life in prison; the dreary monotony of it, the loneliness, the hours of bitter regret, the long nights of solitude, the heartache, the desolation.

In the new life in which I found myself there were duties to be performed during the day, or I must have gone mad with the morbid thoughts that were always surging through my brain. But there were the long evenings and longer nights, sleepless nights in a cell that is no bigger than a dead man’s grave.

I told my friend that I had sought distraction in books. I had plenty of time for reading and more than twelve thousand volumes to choose from. Books were almost my only companions. But sometimes I would read for an hour without retaining a word and frequently I would have to turn back and read the pages again, for I had read only with my eyes; my mind was focused elsewhere. Thoughts of that dreadful tragedy were ever running between the lines of the printed pages. Ofttimes something I read would bring memories and a flood of tears. For even a felon can weep. Oscar Wilde, in the most sorrowful story I have ever read, De Profundis, into which the imprisoned poet poured the tears of his tortured soul, wrote these lines:

“When a day comes that a man in prison does not weep, it is not when he is happy but when his heart is hard.” And yet there are men who argue that imprisonment is not an adequate punishment. They have never tried it.

“Why don’t you turn to writing during some of your leisure hours,” suggested my friend. “Why don’t you write a book?”

“About what?”

“Write an autobiography.”

“I haven’t that much egotism left.”

“Tell the story of your forty years as a newspaper man.”

That night in my cell my thoughts kept me awake. Forty years a newspaper man! Memories began to crowd in upon me. It seemed as if even the smallest events of my life were flashing through a kinetoscope. Whatever else had happened to me, my memory was unimpaired. Events and persons and names through all my forty years of newspaper activity came back to me as vividly as if they had been crowded into the past few months. Thoughts come quickly in the solitude of a prison cell.

Forty years! Looking forward, with the inexperienced eyes of youth, forty years seems a long stretch of time, the span of a life of fullness. Looking backward, when one is sixty and is at the end of his journey, forty years is but a succession of yesterdays that multiplied so rapidly they were come and gone almost without realization. How much action was crowded into those forty years. How much happiness, how much sorrow; what ambitious hopes, what bitter disappointments. Sometimes achieving success, often humiliated by failure. Striving always for fame and riches, acquiring a fleeting glimpse of both, and in the end cast upon the scrap heap of humanity, abandoned and forgotten, dead yet alive.

There is no self-pity in what I write. My heart may be torn with anguish, my mind tormented with regret, but there has never been one moment since I came to prison that I have pitied myself or permitted the pity of others to depress me. I know why I am here and what brought it about. I know that if I were not here I should not be living. I know that if I had died and the dear one I loved had survived she would be suffering greater privation than I ever can. Nothing else matters.

The day after my friend suggested that I write a book, I chanced to read a bit of philosophy that was written by Samuel Smiles. “It is good for men to be roused into action by difficulty, rather than to slumber away their lives in useless apathy and indolence,” wrote this fine philosopher. In the same essay he expressed this thought: “There are natures which blossom and ripen amidst trials that would only wither and decay in an atmosphere of ease and comfort.”

Solitude drives some men mad; it sharpens the wits of others. There are many instances of courageous men who have turned confinement in prison into a great personal achievement. More faint-hearted ones, crushed and defeated by self-pity, drifted quickly into a condition of impotent inertia. Hopeless and without ambition, they withered and died.

Some of the greatest books in all literature were written in the solitude of confinement, written by men who suffered greater hardships than I shall perhaps ever know, for they were in prison in the days when men were treated with inhuman cruelty, before the searchlight of publicity had penetrated into the loathsome dungeons where they were chained and tortured. They are long since dead. What they wrote still lives and will endure as long as books are read. Thoughts expressed in words are imperishable.

When I realized what had been achieved by such illustrious men as Cervantes and Dante and John Bunyan and Defoe and Lovelace and Cooper and Campanella and countless others, I was lifted out of despondent lethargy and fired with ambition to try and do something besides cry. It is so easy to cry in prison.

I began to write. In memory I lived my life over again. My manuscript grew into many pages and the occupation of mind it gave often lifted me out of myself and my gloomy surroundings. I think it may have saved me from the worst possible fate that could have befallen me. I wrote on from day to day without fixed purpose. I had no thought of ever publishing my story. I was content that it gave me something to do and that in doing it the iron within was rising to crush out morbid thoughts.

About the time my story was nearing completion, Major Lewis E. Lawes came to Sing Sing as Warden, a man of heart and understanding, the right man in a big job. Because I had previously had experience in newspaper making, he asked me to become editor of the institutional paper, the Sing Sing Bulletin. A request from the Warden is equivalent to an order and it was my duty to comply as obediently as if I had been ordered to duty on the coal dump. Major Lawes did not make his order compulsory. He simply pointed out that it might be an opportunity for me to do something useful, something that might be of lasting benefit to others. It is fine to make believe that one is still of some use in the world, even though he fails.

I published the first chapter of my autobiography in our prison paper and some of my associates here urged me to continue it. My good friend Basil King, who wrote that wonderful story, The City of Comrades, read my manuscript. His advice prompted me to send it to a publisher. That is how my story now comes to you.

C. E. C.

Sing Sing, May, 1920.