The Day of Souls by Charles Tenney Jackson. Bobbs-Merrill (1910), 390 pp.
John Hamilton Arnold is a frequent and welcome visitor to the bars, restaurants and theaters of San Francisco’s raucous tenderloin district. Once a a college student then a soldier, he now works as an operative for the city’s corrupt political machine. Arnold has a wide circle of colorful friends and associates. Among them are fellow residents of Granny Granberry’s rooming house: disillusioned party girl Nella Free, lame but cheerful sales clerk Mary Mellody, slot-machine distributor Louis Ferrari, and frail and penurious Captain Calhoun, a Civil War veteran futilely waiting for his dead son to return from the Philippines. Arnold is successful, but the tawdriness of his life is getting him down. He hopes he can turn things around by marrying Sylvia Spring, a loyal and pure young heiress from the north woods. Only at the last moment does he decide that the love of a good woman won’t help him if he doesn’t love her in return. He then focuses his hopes for redemption on Grace Wayne, a sort of New Age sidewalk preacher with problems of her own.
Jackson’s picture of pre-earthquake San Francisco is vivid and variegated. Although he focuses on the more disreputable members of society, he makes it clear that they are part of a system that functions for the benefit of the rich and powerful. It also keeps people in place, so Arnold’s effort to extricate himself is believably difficult and complicated. Jackson creates a large cast of characters, each conflicted in some way, and manages to keep their many stories under control. More than that, he presents the charcters with a remarkable objectivity and lack of moralizing. (I was expecting Nella Free to die for her sins, as she would have in The Heart Line and most other novels of the period. Jackson, however, stays clear of phony retribution.) The Day of Souls ranks among the most important fictional accounts of San Francisco. Now readily available on demand and via download, it is essential reading for those interested in California history.