CHAPTER 35
John Fleming Wilson
I must down to the seas again to the vagrant gypsy life,
To the gull's way, and the whale's way where the wind 's like a whetted knife;
And all I ask is a merry yarn from a laughing fellow-rover,
And a quiet sleep and a sweet dream when the long trick's over.
john masefield.
John FLEMING WILSON once wrote a sea story, most of the action of which took place on board a ship off its course. So prolonged was the voyage over distant wastes of the Pacific Ocean that i t seemed the com munity life formed b y the few passengers would g o on forever. The main characters were a dour Scotch man and his young wife, a missionary girl returning t o b e married, and a n adventurer. Day after day, with helpless dissatisfaction, the Scotchman observed the friendship between his wife and the adventurer, the latter’s face “ever ruddied b y his love for her”; and ever, a s these two came into her presence, the mis sionary girl “held her left hand i n her right that n o breath o f this fiery passion might touch her engage ment ring”. Style h e had, and mastery o f the subjec tive, though h e wrote objective stories, and often i n his writings there are memorable passages—with a registry, eloquent and re-echoing, upon the apprecia tion, o f the kind that marks genuine literature and makes classics. I n addition t o numerous boys' stories and sea stories still uncollected i n magazines, h e was the author o f the following books: The Land Claimers, 1911; Across the Latitudes, 1911; The Man Who Came Back, 1912; The Princess o f Sorry Valley, 1913; Tad Sheldon, Boy Scout, 1913; Tad Sheldon's Fourth o f July, 1913; The Master Key, 1915; Dough Candles, 1919; Scouts of the Desert, 1920; Somewhere at Sea, and Other Tales, 1923.
When he was first wanting to be a writer in Portland there was a newspaper man in the city who was kind to beginners and who, amidst all the tangibilities of journalism, retained an eager response to what might touch the hearts of men. He had a sure judg ment for what was good; he was one of the first to see the merits of the poetry of Bert Huffman of Pendle ton and of the stories of John Fleming Wilson. He was Joe Levinson, at that time Sunday editor of the Oregonian. In an interview in 1922 he gave his recol lections of Wilson’s early literary work in Portland:
Perhaps few of our own people know that Wilson wrote his first story while he was a reporter doing assignments on the Oregonian and the Telegram. He broke into print as a story teller in 1905 when I was Sunday editor of the Ore gonian and bought the story. Soon afterwards he submitted his second story, with a setting at the mouth of the Colum bia River.
It is not possible that he spent more than two years at sea but he was as well acquainted with the Pacific Ocean as Bret Harte was with the mining towns of the California Sierras. He would call at my office about the middle of the after noon and ask whether I could use a 2,000-word story. By 11 o'clock that night he would have it on my desk, and it would be an absolutely perfect piece of work which he had hammered out on the typewriter without an interlineation Or CraSure. He perfected every sentence before he typed the first word of i t . He must have had the very finest o f English training i n his preparatory school and a t Princeton. A bril liant style like Wilson's can never b e “picked up”, and i t never comes “just naturally”. He was the son of Joseph Rogers Wilson, for 25 years principal of the old Portland Academy. He was born in Erie, Pennsylvania, on February 22, 1877, and so was 28 when he sold his first story to Joe Levinson. He died at 45 but during those seventeen years he embraced literature with enough energy so that he left $90,000 in earnings from his books and stories. That money, with the Saturday Evening Post pattern and other patterns required in its making, is one reason why his work has not survived. He is mostly remembered now in Oregon because thousands have read in school his Yaquina Bay juvenile book, Tad Sheldon, Boy Scout.
He attended Parsons College, Iowa, and transferred to Princeton, where he was graduated in 1900. He went to sea and taught school during the next two years. Then for three years he did newspaper work in Portland, going to San Francisco in 1906 to edit the Argonaut. He returned to Portland to become editor for a while of the Pacific Monthly. In 1907 he married a stenographer in the offices of the magazine—Lulu Burt, who had come to Portland from Lincoln County, where, soon after their marriage, they went to live. While their home was at Newport he secured background for The Land Claimers, a novel of the Siletz country; and for Tad Sheldon, Boy Scout, and Tad Sheldon’s Fourth of July, two collections of boy stories of Yaquina Bay. He spent the winter of 1910 at Long Beach, Washington, working on his manuscripts. He then went to San Francisco and later to New York, settling on a small farm that he owned near the city.
He had made his way rapidly to popularity in literature, but in seven years time his domestic happiness had come to ruin. The following news story was printed in the Oregonian on September 10, 1914:
Word was received in Portland yesterday telling of the arrest at New York of John Fleming Wilson, writer of sea stories and moving picture scenarios, who formerly lived in Portland, on a charge of being about to leave the state before answering his wife's suit for divorce and alimony. Not procuring $750 in bail, as ordered by the court, he was sent to the Ludlow Street jail. . . . Alleging that her husband's income is $12,000 a year, Mrs. Wilson asks that she be allowed $50 a week by the author.
There may have been some sort of reconciliation after this incident, for an announcement that the divorce had been granted, and referring back to the troublous New York days of 1914, was printed in the Oregonian of February 7, 1920:
Toledo, Or., Feb. 7.—A degree of divorce was granted to Mrs. Lulu E. Wilson from John Fleming Wilson, Portland author and playwright, in circuit court here this week. Mr. and Mrs. Wilson were married at Portland in 1907 and soon after came to Newport to live. Mrs. Wilson alleged that Wilson drank heavily. . . . In 1914, while residing in New York City, she said he assaulted her upon the street. Mrs. Wilson was granted $130 per month permanent alimony and $200 attorney fees.
From 1917 to 1919 he served with the Canadian forces in France, where he was wounded several times. Returning from the War, he went to Los Angeles to regain his health, and later did scenario writing in that city. At Venice, a beach suburb, he died from burns on March 4, 1922. While shaving, a heavy dressing gown caught fire from a gas heater, causing his death a few hours later. He left an estate of $90,022.34, nearly all of which was bequeathed to Mary Ashe Miller, "a friend for a score of years". To his parents he gave his personal belongings, including his library. Nothing went to his divorced wife, "the reason given being that a property settlement had been made prior to the drawing up of the will."
That settlement she had and, much more than that, the recollection of several happy years, happy for him as well as for her. She married him when he was 30, five years after Joe Levinson had printed his first story in the Oregonian. Together they had worked in the editorial rooms of the Pacific Monthly, and she had pictured Lincoln County so seductively that he wished to go there, eager only to write and wanting only her companionship. She has testified to the gladness of those days and he has left the following testimony in the Foreword to The Land Claimers:
Foreword: To My Wife
We've emerged from the old Ellsworth Trail upon the windy uplands of the Coast for the last time. The forest has closed over the life that we used to know along the Siletz, and our friends have all "packed out". But from the Atlantic to the Pacific, the Land Claimers—scattered forever—remember the days when the pack trains made the trail from the Agency to Otter Rock, when the settler's ax echoed down the canyons. Now the forest ranger, from the high ridges, looks down on deserted cabins and shrinking clearings, and knows each place by its old name, but does not know, nor care, where the settler has gone. So I have brought some of us back, once more, in this book, to live over again for a little the life we knew along the Siletz River.
SAN FRANCISCO, JULY 1, 1910.