Zig-Zag-and-Swirl: Alfred W. Lawson's Quest for Greatness

1. Childhood Days

1 CHILDHOOD DAYS "Well, this is getting back to Nature. Now 1 have to depend upon a horse to work with instead of the electrical engine, which 1 invented in England." With this ponderous and improbable utterance , Lawson's father, Robert Henry Lawson, begins a brief soliloquy presented immediately after the curtain rises on Lawson 's play, Childhood Days of Alfred Lawson . The setting for the scene is the small farm outside of Detroit to which the Lawson family has moved from Windsor, Ontario . Resting his pitchfork against the barn, Lawson senior continues his musings about life down on the farm, letting the audience know that farming is neither his occupational preference nor the principal calling which brought him and his family from Canada to the United States: "I wonder what that devil of a Bishop meant when he told me that this would be a nice easy Diocese for me to build up. He must have thought that 1 was a gorilla." Then comes the peroration, redolent of the anguish felt by many a man whose life has not met the expectations of his younger years: "What would my aristocratic associates at Oxford think of me now, with nine children and a horse, cow and a goat to feed?" Into these infelicitous lines Lawson squeezed the principal claims which he made in many other places about his father 's background: that the elder Lawson had studied at Oxford, was at first a mechanical engineer, had subsequently be- CHILDHOOD DAYS come a minister of the gospel, and throughout, was an inventor, who had an early "electrical engine" to his credit. In a speech made very late in life, Lawson made another entry in his father's resume, now averring that the father had also been a successful Shakespearean actor. As a condition for marriage, however, Mary Anderson demanded that Robert Henry Lawson give up acting and put his theatrical talents to better use as a preacher. It was then, if Lawson's account is accepted, that Lawson senior, in order to meet this condition, prepared for a new career. He "studied at Oxford University," from which institution he "received a diploma." However, alumni records today reveal no one named Robert Henry Lawson having ever been a student at Oxford University. If the educational and professional background of Lawson's father remains quite uncertain today, at least Lawson's claim that his father broke new career ground when he became a farmer in the United States seems plausible. It also is likely that farming really did not suit his taste, because a year later, according to Lawson, the family moved into Detroit, where the father-again, by Lawson's account-opened a one-man factory for the weaving of rag carpets. Lawson always added "in order to earn an honest living," as if to imply that the elder Lawson still remained far from the occupation and style of life to which his attainments entitled him. Lawson recorded that his father also preached occasionally as an assistant minister in a Disciples of Christ church in Detroit. Doubtless, however, those former "aristocratic associates at Oxford" would have continued to arch their eyebrows in contemplation of Robert Henry Lawson's final station in the New World. But for young Alf, as he was then called, there was much in his childhood circumstances which he later recalled as having been a blessing. In particular, he thought, the necessity to play his part from the age of four in his large family's struggle for existence gave him good work habits, a wide practical experience, and a well-grounded understanding that all honest work is honorable. Lawson frequently ticked off with pride the varied jobs of his childhood and adolescence; included were newsboy, bootblack, "chief mechanic" in his father's carpet factory, painter in a furniture factory, stave-maker, farm hand, SEEDTIME OF A SELF-MADE MAN hotel bellhop, blacksmith's assistant, and door-to-door sewing machine salesman. This work also helped to build up Lawson's body. "So at the age of fifteen he was like a young race horse and more powerful in muscular development than most men," he later wrote. Even more important in formative effect, however, was the clean living which the circumstances of his youth supplied. Although Lawson lived in a city which eventually became huge, he always stressed that in his days there, Detroit was only a...