Samuel Hopkins Adams’s Success is a novel about ambition, journalism, and the price of getting what one wants, published in the early 1920s and set largely in New York City, with its opening act in the California desert. Its protagonist is a young railroad station-agent, Banneker, whose solitary reading life at a lonely desert stop is interrupted by a train wreck, a runaway heiress, and a restless hunger to matter in the world. The book follows him from the desert to a metropolitan newsroom and up through the compromises of a newspaper career, testing what “success” actually means and what it costs the man who pursues it.
“The lonely station of Manzanita stood out, sharp and unsightly, in the keen February sunlight.”
The novel’s real architecture is a three-part movement—Enchantment, The Vision, Fulfillment—and the titles are almost a thesis in themselves. Enchantment is the desert: the cactus blooms after rare rains, the station of Manzanita, the strange spell cast by a place and a person. The Vision is the city and the newspaper, where Banneker learns what he wants and what the machinery of a great daily will and will not let him have. Fulfillment is the long, ambiguous arrival—power, position, and the reckoning that comes with them.
From the Desert Station to the City Desk
The Station at Manzanita
The book opens at a lonely desert station in February sunlight, a mile from a town whose single street dissolves into blooming cactus after rare rains. The young, fair-haired station-agent sets a chair in the sun and opens the Sears-Roebuck catalogue, treating it less as a shopping list than as an oracle to be consulted at random. He lingers over a guitar he once bought on its promise of self-mastery and abandoned after three days, though a Mexican-American girl named Carlotta later taught him the instrument and rather more of life. He considers a telescope for signaling Miss Camilla Van Arsdale, who lives up the forest trail, and reflects on the portable house he bought a year before. Two tramps arrive—a grizzled older man and a vicious boy of eighteen. The agent, whose name is Banneker, reads them at a glance, supplies ointment for the man’s blistered feet and tobacco for the boy, and jokes that he may someday run for Governor on the hobo ticket.
The Wreck of Number Three
A wire reports Number Three, the finest train on the continent, nearly on schedule. Banneker passes it through, then hears from Rock Cut a quivering shriek repeated—the engine yelling for help. The dispatcher gives him charge of the disaster. He locks the office, sets the block signal, equips himself from his portable house with first-aid kit and sash-cord, and covers three miles in under half an hour. A bleeding man mumbles that he will sue for ten thousand dollars; Banneker binds the hand and takes his name. At the wreck a Pullman lies on its side against a jagged boulder, flame sputtering, seven dead inside and a dozen badly hurt. Two women and a fat, white-bearded old man tend the wounded; the old man denies being a doctor, though his whiskers are blotched with red and green. Banneker supplies his packet, sends a lank young man running with a dispatch, and supervises moving the wounded into the cars. An elderly lady who had offered camphor and iodine dies smiling as she is lifted. The young man returns within the hour with patent medicines, having won twenty dollars at faro, and reveals the old man is his uncle, who thinks him useless. He asks about a black-haired girl with initials I. O. W. who fled the ditched Pullman, dazed. Relief arrives; the dispatcher sends Banneker back to Manzanita with curt approval.
The Intruder at the Window
That night Banneker hears a hand fumbling at his window. He crouches below the sill, then flashes his light on a diamond-and-ruby ring and seizes the wrist. A soft voice pleads, “Don’t hurt me—some one did.” He draws a girlish figure inside out of the rain, finds a leaden-blue wale behind her temple, heats water, bandages it, and cuts the hair around the wound. She is Cressey’s missing I.O.W. He gives her tea and crackers, restricts how much she eats, and offers his room above the station, claiming night duty with tactful invention. At the door he asks her name for the company; troubled, she defers it to tomorrow. He writes through the night in his “Letters to Nobody” file, closing with the line that the breast of the world rises and falls with her breathing—twenty-four years old, with the untainted soul of a boy of sixteen.
Irene Welland
In the morning she reports her head sore but slept like the dead, and recalls running in confusion to a deserted cabin, prowling rather than knocking because she feared ghosts. She insists on paying her way, refuses to have her name reported, and gives only “Io” in confidence. A rider approaches: Miss Van Arsdale, who questions the girl, learns she stayed in Banneker’s room while he worked, and says it won’t do. The girl introduces herself as Irene Welland, traveling alone to join friends on the coast. Banneker proposes an extra cot so Miss Van Arsdale can stay; Io rebels, threatens the hotel, and is warned of crawly things and big, hungry ones. She agrees to stay the night. Riding, she tells Miss Van Arsdale she came West to be married—not to Delavan Eyre, but to Carter Holmesley, a prospective duke, drunk the first time she met him, with the wedding to be stage-managed by his uncle, the new British Ambassador. Miss Van Arsdale calls it advertisement and criticizes coldly; Io retorts about a sensation fifteen years ago. She mentions her mother was an Olney, cousin of Mrs. Willis Enderby; Miss Van Arsdale says, “I remember now,” and at the mention of Judge Enderby says “Please!” Io reveals the bump settled her brain—she will not marry Holmesley either, and may return to Del.
The Reporter at the Lodge
Gardner, a reporter, tells Banneker he could get into a paper by writing. Banneker objects that he has no experience; Gardner answers that a metropolitan paper prefers a fresh man it can train, and that Banneker has natural ability. Gardner asks where Miss Van Arsdale lives, and Banneker turns defensive. Gardner explains he wants to find Io Welland, describing her as a brilliant figure of the younger Four Hundred—”a newspaper beauty,” “copy,” “news”—especially since she vanished for weeks after a railroad wreck and her supposed fiancé, heir to a dukedom, gave himself away to the papers. Banneker retorts that if she hasn’t done these things, the story is libel. Gardner says she isn’t safe news until identified and offers newspaper photos; Banneker declines. Gardner produces a letter from the Division Superintendent asking Banneker to further his inquiry. Banneker calls it official, then says “The company can go to hell” and refuses to take him to Miss Van Arsdale’s. Gardner says he’ll find someone in the village to guide him. Banneker threatens him, then apologizes, admitting the unsoundness of his protective rage; Gardner says he’ll go unless shot. Gardner accepts lodging for the night; a gust of wind dissuades him from going that evening. They part at the village hotel, and Banneker confers privately with Mindle the “teamer,” who takes a hand car loaded with a strange burden into the storm. Banneker wires Stanwood for a relief the next day, selects compact food, hides it under his poncho, saddles his horse, and rides to the Van Arsdale lodge.
The Escape Plan
Io sees his flashlight and meets him; she can be ready in fifteen minutes. He says it is an all-night trip and asks if she can swim; she says for hours. Camilla Van Arsdale protests the plan to reach Miradero, on the Southwestern and Sierra, sixty miles over trailless desert. Banneker says they will go by water—Dry Bed Arroyo, running bank-full, where his boat waits. Camilla calls it terribly dangerous; Io agrees to go if Ban says so. Banneker cites Old Streatham, who made the run seven years ago in a bark canoe on a hundred-dollar bet, and says he has Streatham’s map; the Arroyo leads to the Little Bowleg, which empties into the Rio Solano. He predicts moonlight within two hours. Camilla offers to ride over and bring back the pony; she urges Io to let the reporter come and offers to keep him away. Io refuses, saying she must get away sooner or later and prefers this way as “more of a pattern.” She says “_Che sará, sará_” and trusts him. Ban prepares horses with Pedro, sworn to secrecy.
The Women’s Talk
Camilla asks how much Io is hurting Ban; Io is startled. Camilla says he won’t realize until she has gone. Io says she fears what is coming to her. Camilla dismisses her as having compensations and resources; Io asks whether he hasn’t. Camilla asks what he will do when he wakes to an empty world; Io suggests he will write. Camilla says he will think it empty and that she is sorry for him. Io pleads to be pitied for the best part of herself she leaves behind. Camilla calls it “a pleasantly vivid dream,” and her waking “a sachet-powder sorrow.” Camilla asks why a feverish, sensation-loving, artificial girl should be charmed by Ban; Io says her world was too dressed up, and he is “as easy as an animal,” with an “impassioned sense of the gladness of life,” like a young god or faun, unaware of his own power. Camilla accuses her of wanting to tempt him into a world where he’d be a wretched misfit; Io says she’d rather keep him in mind as “a happy eremite,” “a restrained pagan,” indefinable—”He’s Ban.” Asked what she’ll do back in the world, she says she won’t send for him, and twice says “I wonder.”
The Night Journey
The two women and the man ride silently through the night, trusting their horses on the woods trail. The rain has ceased. On the open desert Banneker consults a compass under his poncho, giving the station a wide berth in case Gardner returned; Io rides abreast, smiling. They follow telegraph poles beyond the station. The clouds thin; they dismount at a clifflet above the black current. Io calls the water “beckoning”; Banneker says they must wait for light. Camilla asks if Io will trust herself to it; Io says “Anywhere!” with exaltation, calling the danger “the thrill,” the river “unknown; so secret and lawless,”
The Supper After the Première
At a late-night supper after the play opens, Banneker sits among Miss Raleigh’s party—Laurence the playwright, critics, Marrineal, and the cast. He notices the players drink sparingly, since “condition” is their stock in trade, and decides it should be his as well. Betty Raleigh asks him to get her into the coming police investigation, especially when he is on the stand, joking that she wants to bring his première good luck as he brought hers. Early editions arrive, and Betty reads Gurney’s Ledger review, which praises her and the cast but satirizes Laurence as a “sartorial playwright” and “tailor-made” craftsman. Betty calls it mean and shameful; her leading man notes he is well treated; the manager Bezdek says it will help sell out the house and lifts favorable lines out of context for advertising. Banneker calls the procedure “crooked,” and Marrineal probes his opinions. The company debates whether Gurney’s criticism is honest, and Banneker allows that Gurney may honestly have disliked the play. Asked what Gurney told him, Banneker recalls the critic’s praise of the comedy’s sincerity but answers only that Gurney said the play and actress suited each other, concealing the rest. Bezdek calls Gurney “crooked as a corkscrew’s hole”; Banneker presses him to say whether he means bribery or favoritism, and the elderly first-nighter suggests Gurney is “more the writer than the critic,” carried away by the felicitous phrase. Betty says he would rather be funny than fair; Laurence calls this the curse of journalism—the temptation to be effective at the expense of honesty. Marrineal keeps asking Banneker’s opinion because he suspects Banneker brings a fresh mind. Betty, anxious, tells Banneker not to mind unless it is true, and to remember the investigation and avoid a matinée day.
The Investigation and the “Eban” Sketches
Betty attends several sessions of the investigation, which takes a sensational course with Banneker as chief figure—ready, self-possessed, good-humored under heckling by a politician lawyer representing police clients. A complete city-government overturn is foreshadowed; Judge Enderby might head or control the movement, though nobody knows his political wishes. Banneker repeatedly sees in the lawyer’s face an elusive likeness flickering from the past. His role keeps him in headlines; even The Ledger can only minimize, not suppress, it.
As a “space-man” paid by columns, Banneker is disciplined with petty assignments—obituaries, small police items, tipsters’ yarns, ship news, minor courts—or kept idle; one week he earns only twenty-eight dollars. He bears this with Western poise. He turns Miss Westlake’s typed sketches in as “Sunday stuff”; Gordon has him sign them “Eban” and runs them on the editorial page. He then writes light editorials at ten dollars a column, though some vanish into the scrap-basket. Living at the Regalton on fifty dollars a week proves harder than fifteen at Mrs. Brashear’s; he discovers he is a natural spender and sets a mark of a hundred dollars weekly. Greenough’s assignments remain unfavorable; colleagues protest, and Tommy Burt wants to refer the matter to Gordon, but Banneker advises minding his own business, predicting “the Joss” will stick his foot in a gopher hole.
Sam Corpenshire’s Obituary and the Letter from Io
Banneker’s chance comes with the obituary of old builder Sam Corpenshire at Corlears Hook. Welcomed by the dead man’s congeners with ceremonial whiskey, he gathers their tributes—shrewd dealings, good-will, ripe judgment, sly charities, a thwarted romance—and writes a rounded column rather than a two-stick obit. Greenough congratulates him; Mr. Gaines of The New Era monthly writes, having identified the “Eban” style, asking him to call. But a French-stamped envelope arrives containing a clipping about the pier battle, marked in pencil: “Do you remember practicing, that day, among the pines? I’m so proud! Io.” He feels dizzy, as if she had reclaimed him, and tears envelope and clipping to fragments. By linked memory he recalls where he saw Willis Enderby before: the face in the photograph Camilla Van Arsdale had turned to when death approached her.
The Delavan Eyre Assignment
While the police inquiry is afoot, Banneker is often late reporting; on a Thursday, after conferring with Judge Enderby, he reaches the office after two. Mallory gives him an assignment: a tip that the Delavan Eyres have separated and divorce is impending. He is to seek Archie Densmore, Mrs.
Banneker’s Theory of Journalism
Banneker lays out his theory of the craft through three men. Edmonds treats journalism as a vocation and a rostrum, a pulpit from which to call sinners to repentance—there is, Banneker tells him, a good deal of the stern evangelist about him. Banneker casts himself as the pedagogue, one who would marshal men’s minds as a generalissimo marshals armies. When Miss Van Arsdale asks whether this would be within the bonds of his own discipline, he answers that to chain a mind would make him the most splendid tyrant of history, but that the free leadership of the free is good enough.
Marrineal he calls a priest of Baal—not of The Patriot but of Publicity, of which the paper is merely the instrument. In Marrineal’s creed, civilized Americans fear and love print: they fawn on it for what it may do for them and dread what it may do to them, for it confers glory and launches shame, and its victims have no appeal. Miss Van Arsdale calls this rubbish; Banneker retorts that she has nothing to ask or fear from Baal, though even she would use it for her musical preachment. Edmonds asks whether Baal’s other names are Bribery and Blackmail. Banneker says there has been no hint of illegitimate use, but Marrineal plainly means the paper as an instrument of power—perhaps the deeper power to make and unmake politicians. A showdown over a new basis of finance is days away.
The Tight-Rope and the Dream
Banneker marvels at feeling pinched on fifty thousand a year when he did well at Manzanita on sixty a month. Miss Van Arsdale calls his rise a fairy-tale; he calls it a feat of balancing, a tight-rope stunt on a gilded rope, failure on one side and debt on the other. She asks what the work is making of him. Edmonds answers: a power—the empire of words leaves a residue of thought and conviction. She fears cynicism, sweeping her hand over the blaring, glaring issue on the desk. Edmonds, thirty years in the business, says the froth and sensationalism offend taste but do not matter; behind it is the big thing, enlisting the ignorant and helpless and teaching them to be less so. The Patriot is an institution now, made by him and Ban, too strong for Marrineal to alter. She murmurs that Frankenstein once said something like that. Alone amid the pulsing print, Banneker dreams his untainted dream: a newspaper potent enough to move all, free of silencing and control, a religion of seven days a week.
Bland’s Gospel of Salesmanship
The platitudinous Bland writes a column arguing that Americans are natural merchandisers who care less for making a thing than for selling it, and that salesmanship is the great American game. Severance observes with an ironic smile that the Booblewarbler has given away the game—he thinks he is praising when he is damning. Banneker is disturbed, but the flood of letters hails Bland as the Messiah of the holy creed of Salesmanship. Banneker follows with editorials and hires authors to glorify the salesman’s smartness and ruthless trickery; salesmen nationwide rise up to call him blessed. Personal-success pieces follow—the Mayor on running a city, a pugilist on his mother’s influence—and above the composite clamor rises Banneker’s voice, clear and compelling, and he takes his pay for it, deeming it well earned.
Marrineal’s Offer
Banneker has become a person of consequence, courted by representative people, his only intimate Russell Edmonds. He has found Io again, and has risen to the most conspicuous position on Park Row without conscious compromise. His bank account lags behind his earnings. Marrineal and Haring have done expert figuring: circulation has become a luxury, the paper isn’t making money, and Banneker is swallowing the profits. Marrineal cites the cigarette editorial and the Honest Label Bill, which offend tobacco and medical advertisers. Banneker insists the paper pays his salary. Marrineal proposes profit-sharing—fifteen per cent of net earnings for three years—and mentions the Mid-West syndicate’s offer of forty thousand. Banneker asks whether he would have a free hand with his editorials. Surely that will arrange itself, says Marrineal. Precisely what I fear, says Banneker.
The Veridian Mills and Io’s Counsel
Banneker confronts Marrineal about the Veridian mills and learns Marrineal’s mother is the principal owner. Marrineal claims a man has been sent to stop the shootings, but Banneker has already told McClintick The Patriot will carry the story if verified. Marrineal deflects into the mayoralty campaign.
The “Call Me Bob” Button
Banneker’s editorial travels faster than any correction could. Within a day, Mayor Laird’s supposed boast to his wife is current political history: messenger boys greet one another as “Dearie, Mr. Masters calls me Bob,” brokers on ’Change inquire after pet names, and street vendors sell buttons reading “Call me Bob but Vote for Marrineal.” Judge Enderby’s press statement—calling the story a cheap fabrication and demanding The Patriot cite its authority—does nothing to repair the damage. Horace Vanney crosses a room to congratulate Banneker on “a master-stroke” and invites him to lunch. At The Retreat, Poultney Masters confronts Banneker, concedes the idea “did the work,” and advises him with contempt always to seek the highest bidder before selling; stared down for the first time in his life, Banneker walks away followed by a scornful hoot.
Io asks Willis Enderby the truth of the Laird-Masters story. He says it was made up “out of whole cloth,” passed on to Banneker rather than invented by him, yet he cannot exculpate Banneker, since such a story should never have been published without fullest investigation. Io admits Banneker never told her his authority; she has trusted him absolutely. On election day Laird is badly beaten, running far behind Marrineal; Halloran, the ring candidate, is elected—“Banneker did it.” What sickens Banneker most is not Masters’s insult but Vanney’s soft-palmed gratulation.
Marrineal’s Respectability and the Suppressed Strike
Ambition makes Marrineal moderate The Patriot’s blatant features for respectability, aiming at a career reaching Washington’s Pennsylvania Avenue; his influence quietly improves the news columns’ tone without changing their sensational specialty, and Capron is curbed and tabooed words listed. Severance, drunk at Delmonico’s, defends the “rotten” Territon story as intended, arguing the danger lies in not going far enough; he resigns, revealing the story’s subject is Maud Territon, whom he had loved. With Halloran’s accession the strike revives; papers suppress or minimize it. Io witnesses mounted police charging girl-strikers, rescues a fainting eighteen-year-old Lithuanian blonde, and goes to police court, where Enderby appears for the strikers as President of the Law Enforcement Society. The Patriot headlined Io but omitted the police brutalities. Edmonds suggests Enderby may be a logical anti-Marrineal candidate. Banneker promises to print the strikers’ rejected advertisement as editorial; the proof is blue-penciled “Killed” by Haring on Marrineal’s orders, replaced by a pure-milk piece under the Milton quotation. Marrineal hints at knowledge of The Searchlight and Io, chilling Banneker; Edmonds resigns. Enderby advises Banneker and may oppose Marrineal for the governorship. After Delavan Eyre’s death Io is aloof; Banneker’s polo injury yields new “Vagrancies”; Marrineal offers Banneker control of The Patriot if elected governor, depending on eliminating Enderby. A telegram: “D. died this morning. Will write. I.” Learning Camilla Van Arsdale is very ill, Banneker prepares to go; Io insists she will go instead.
The Cruellest Lies
Banneker debates whether to warn Io that Enderby is in danger. Her respect for privacy might stay her hand, but her passion will compel her to send for him. Self-interest argues that if Ely Ives’s spies discover it, Enderby will be blackmailed into retiring, Marrineal will be elected, control of The Patriot will pass to Banneker, The Searchlight will be held at bay, and he will marry Io and remake the paper honestly. No treachery is required—only minding his own business. Unsettled, he reads Stevenson’s “Virginibus Puerisque,” where the line “The cruellest lies are often told in silence” scorches him. He springs from bed, writes an urgent line to Io, and ensures it reaches the Western mail, resolving not to climb to safety over the bodies of a loved friend and an honored foe.
Mail takes four days to reach Manzanita. Banneker receives Io’s letter on Saturday evening: she has written to Enderby to come. Her letter crossed his. He telephones Judge Enderby’s house, but the servant refuses to disturb the Judge, whose orders were absolute. Banneker composes a telegram, has trouble locating the operator, and gets it sent by nearly ten o’clock. The next morning he learns it was delivered twenty minutes after Enderby left for his train.
What Banneker Wants, and What the Newspaper Wants
The novel’s central argument turns on a distinction its characters keep drawing between success and self-respect. Edmonds, the veteran reporter who becomes Banneker’s conscience, names the poison plainly: writing one way while believing another is a slow corruption, a form of “dirt-eating” that hurts not pride but self-respect. He knows whereof he speaks. His own history includes the Marna Corcoran scandal, a story he spiced up until the woman it named went insane, and the day he stuffed the paper into his city editor’s mouth and poured ink over him rather than repeat the crime. Journalism, in this book, is a trade that pays in anonymity—the reporter is “a lot of print,” as anonymous as an editorial writer—and asks in return that a man color his version to the policy of the paper, often without noticing he is doing it.
Against that, Banneker’s stubbornness reads as a kind of virtue and a kind of folly at once. He refuses to be a “routine man,” the reliable backbone of the office; he tears up a formulaic picnic story and writes what he actually saw and smelled, and it does not run. Then he writes the obituary of old Mynderse Verschoyle, a man who lived fifteen years in a silent house hating his wife and died because he had nothing left to center his life on, and the piece lands word for word. The lesson the book keeps pressing is that the paper wants effectiveness, not truth—Gurney would rather be funny than fair, the manager lifts favorable lines out of a hostile review to sell tickets, and a strike story with ten dead, including a woman and a six-year-old child shot running away, gets recast into something “unhonest” but not quite dishonest. Banneker’s rebellion is to insist that a newspaper might be a news exchange rather than a machine for flattering its advertisers, and the novel is honest about how lonely that position is.
Io, Camilla, and the Two Kinds of Enchantment
The women in the book carry its argument about what a person is for. Io Welland—Irene, the runaway bride of a prospective duke—is all appetite for sensation, a girl raised to want the world dressed up, who finds in Banneker something “as easy as an animal,” a young god or faun unaware of his own power. Camilla Van Arsdale, the desert neighbor, is her opposite: restrained, ironic, a woman who has put a world behind her and can see clearly what Io is doing to the man. Their long talk before the night journey down the flooded arroyo is the novel’s quiet center—Camilla calling Io’s feeling “a pleasantly vivid dream” and its ending “a sachet-powder sorrow,” Io pleading to be pitied for the best part of herself she leaves behind. Whether Io is a temptress or simply a young woman who knows she must go is left genuinely open, and the book is better for it.
Banneker himself is the third term in that argument. He is twenty-four with “the untainted soul of a boy of sixteen,” a reader of Burton and Browning and Lavengro who keeps a Sears-Roebuck catalogue as his private oracle, and who writes through the night in a file called “Letters to Nobody.” His ambition is real—he wants “a small noise of my own,” not to be a part of a big machine—but the novel keeps asking whether the city can use such a man without grinding the edge off him. The older newspaper men are the answer, or the warning: Akely, once “the Banneker of ten years ago,” now happy as a hopper-feeder cutting clippings and solving draughts problems; Burt, who urges “Get out of it, Ban” while admitting he lacks the nerve to leave himself. The turning-point, Burt says, is when the excitement of the game stops sustaining you and the monotony gets into your veins like clogging poison.
A Newspaper Novel About the Price of Arriving
Success belongs to the small shelf of American novels that take journalism seriously as a subject rather than a backdrop—books written by people who knew the city room, the rewrite man, the space rates, and the way an advertiser’s displeasure travels down through a managing editor to a reporter’s assignment sheet. Adams’s portrait of the trade has the texture of firsthand knowledge: the fifteen-dollar week, the eight-dollar column, the raise to twenty that surprises rather than gratifies, the “Park Row reputation written on glass with a wet finger.” What lifts it above mere expose is the moral seriousness it brings to a question that outlasts its period—whether a person can do good work inside an institution that rewards him for not doing his best, and what happens to the soul of a man who decides the game is worth beating anyway.
The book’s final movement, Fulfillment, earns its title ironically. Banneker gets his fulcrum—the leverage he asks for when he tells Marrineal to give him a place to stand—and the novel lets us watch what he builds with it and what it builds in him. Adams does not hand down a verdict so much as stage the question: the desert pagan who once quoted the Bacchae on wisdom and holding a hand uplifted over hate has become a man with a printing press and a public, and the reader is left to measure the distance. It is a novel about a young man’s education in the world’s terms, and its enduring interest lies in how stubbornly it refuses to pretend that education is free.
