This grandfather, Valentin Nieting, was a man whom everybody respected and admired. He had spent ten years in London as a master tailor, had acquired a beautiful English accent there, and always spoke affectionately of the English. He said the were a civilized people. All his life he retained many English mannerisms. His crony, whom he met on Saturday nights at a saloon on Second Avenue, run by my Uncle Paul, was a skinny, fiery sort of man named Mr. Crow, an Englishman from Birmingham. No one in our family liked Mr. Crow, except grandfather. The reason was that Mr. Crow was a Socialist. He was always making speeches, too, and full of vitriol. My grandfather, whose memory extended back to the days of ‘48, relished and applauded these speeches. He too was against the bosses. And of course against the military. It’s strange, when I think back, what an unholy fear the word Socialism inspired in those days. None of our family would have anything to do with a man calling himself a Socialist; he was worse than a Catholic or a Jew. America was a free country, the land of opportunity, and it was one’s duty to become successful and rich. My father, who hated his own boss—a bloody, blimey Englishman, he always called him—was soon to become a boss tailor himself. My grandfather had to accept work from my father. But he never lost that dignity, that assurance and integrity which always made him a trifle superior to my father. Before long all the boss tailors were to become woefully impoverished, forced to band together to share expenses, to keep in steady employment a small crew of workmen. The wages of the workmen—cutter, bushelman, coat maker, pants maker—would continue to rise, would represent more per week than the boss’s own share.
Eventually—last act in the drama—these little workmen, all foreigners, usually despised, but envied too sometimes, would be lending the bosses money in order to keep their businesses going. Maybe all this was the result of those pernicious Socialist doctrines which agitators like Mr. Crow had sponsored. Maybe not. Maybe there was something inherently disastrous in that Get-Rich-Quick Wallingford doctrine with which the young men of my generation had been inoculated.
My grandfather died before the first World War broke out. He left a sizeable estate, as did the other emigres in that old neighborhood, all of whom had come to America at the same time and from all parts of Europe. They did far, far better in this glorious land of the free than did their sons and daughters. They had started from scratch, like that butcher boy from Germany, my namesake—Henry Miller the cattle king—who ended by owning an enormous slice of California. It’s true, there may have been more opportunity in those days, but there was also the fact that these men were made of sterner stuff, that they were more industrious, more persevering, more resourceful, more disciplined. They began in some humble trade—butcher, carpenter, tailor, shoemaker—and the money they saved they earned by the sweat of their brow. They lived modestly always, and quite comfortably, despite the absence of all the comforts, all the labor-saving devices now deemed indispensable.
I remember the toilet in my grandfather’s home. First it was just an outhouse in the yard; later he had a cubbyhole built in upstairs. But even after gas had been introduced there was no illumination in that toilet except for a little taper floating in sweet oil. My grandfather would never have considered it of importance to have a gas light in the toilet. His children ate well and were clothed; they were taken to the theatre occasionally, they went with him to outings and picnics—glorious affairs!—and they sang with him when he attended the reunions of the Saengerbund. A simple, wholesome life, and far from dull. In winter, when the snow and ice came, he would sometimes take them for a ride in an open sleigh drawn by horse. He himself would go ice-boating occasionally. And in Summer there would be those unforgettable trips, by excursion boat, to places like Glen Island, for example, or New Rochelle. I can think of nothing offered the child today which can rival those outings. Nor can I think of anything to rival the magical festival grounds of Glen Island. The only thing approaching it is the atmosphere of certain paintings of Renoir and Seurat. Here again we have that golden ambiance, that gayety and ripeness, that plushy, carnal opulence so characteristic of the somnolescent, yawning, indolent period between the end of the Franco-Prussian war and the outbreak of the first World War. Undoubtedly it was a bourgeois efflorescence, infected with the taint of a rotting order, but the men who epitomized it, the men who glorified it in word and pigment, were not tainted. I can never think of my grandfather as being tainted, nor can I think of Renoir and Seurat in that way. I think that my grandfather, in his way of life, had more affinities with Seurat and Renoir than with the new American way of life which was then germinating. I think he would have understood these men and their art, had he been permitted. My parents never. Nor the boys I grew up with in the street.
I ramble on, touched by memories of old. It was thus my mind wandered as I made the rounds of the old haunts. No wonder the days were so full, so savoury. Starting out for Glendale I would finish up in the old neighborhood. Couldn’t resist walking by the old ancestral house again. Wouldn’t dream, however, of calling on my relatives, who still lived there. On the other side of the street I would take a stand—look up to the third floor where we once lived, try to recreate the image of the world I had known as a boy of five or six. That front window, where I used to sit, will go with me into the beyond, will frame the memories which I shall relive while waiting to be born into a new body. I recall the panic and terror that invaded me when my mother first forced me to wash the windows for her; sitting on the sill, my body hanging outside, three stories from the pavement—an immense height to a child of seven or eight—my knees gripping the sill for dear life. The window rested on my legs like a leaden weight. Fear of raising the window, fear of losing my grip. My mother insisting that there were still some specks of dirt to be washed off. (Later, when quite grown up, my mother would tell me how I loved to wash the windows for her. Or how I loved to hang the awnings. How I loved this, how I loved that … All bloody lies!)
Standing there in a deep reverie, I wonder to myself if perhaps I hadn’t been a bit of a sissy in those days. No boy in the neighborhood was better dressed than I. No one had better manners. No one was more alert and intelligent. I won all the prizes, got all the applause. So certain were they that I knew how to take care of myself, it never dawned on my parents that my playmates were already steeped in sin and vice. Even the fondest mother should have been able to detect in little Johnnie Ludlow the makings of a criminal. Even the most negligent parent should have been able to discern that little Alfie Betcha was already a gangster and a hoodlum. The pride of the Sunday School, such as I was, always chose for his boon companions the worst urchins in the neighborhood. Wasn’t my darling mother aware of this? Able to recite the catechism backwards, intelligent little monkey that I was, I had also, when with my comrades, a tongue that could reel off such filth, abuse and malediction as would do honor to a gallows bird. It was the older boys who instructed us, to be sure. Not overtly or deliberately either. We were always hanging about, listening in on their arguments and disputes. They were not so much older than us, either, when I think of it. Twelve years
