Although his novel was laid in 367 B.C., Craig deliberately aimed his shaft at twentieth-century Communism. While the tale was a drama of ancient times, it was the perfect transmitting agent for Craig’s deepest inner feelings about the spreading ideas of Marx and Engels. The novel was published shortly after Craig’s second wedding anniversary. The reviewers welcomed it as a minor classic, one told with controlled wit, magnificent irony, and bursts of passion. But its setting, so remote in time, and its subtle allegory had little appeal to the mass of readers. There were two printings, totalling 7,500 copies, and there were no more. Craig had his literary foothold, his cult, and his meagre savings account.
It took Craig two years to produce his second book, because he was constantly stopping and starting again, forced to write formula short stories in between, to keep Harriet and himself alive. The second novel was The Savage. Again, Craig embellished a factual character and incident. The novel was set in 1782, and the hero was Simon Girty, a fierce and angry American frontiersman, who abandoned his people to become a white Indian and an Indian chief and to lead Shawnee redskins on raids through Ohio, Kentucky, Pennsylvania, and Virginia. History knew Girty for a brutal renegade. Craig saw him as something more, as a nonconformist and a defender of a lost cause. When he wrote of Girty, Craig was writing of all men, in all times, but especially in his own time, who invite crucifixion by crusading against injustice.
With this book, Craig did not make his point at all. His agent, his publisher, his reviewers, his readers, could not see what he was driving at. They saw only the surface story-an exciting, roughneck hero, an action plot, a slice of Americana, a superior Western-and that was more than enough. The novel sold 22,000 copies in hardback; it sold for a modest sum to a new paperback reprinter; it sold for $50,000 to a major motion picture studio.
The total income from The Savage was not a fortune, but even after taxes, it was sufficient to liberate Craig from the tiresome short stories. Creatively, he was bursting with projects. One, especially, appealed to him. If he could carry it off, he knew it would be a tour de force. He called it The Black Hole, and lunching at the Twenty-One club, he told it to his publisher. The framework, he explained, was historically accurate. In 1756, India rose up against the British. The new Indian ruler, nineteen-year-old Siraj-ud-daula, too young to be merciful, captured 146 English fugitives from the garrison and imprisoned them in a Calcutta military cell only 18 by 14 feet in size. In his novel, Craig wanted to dramatize the hell of that one June night in the Black Hole of Calcutta, what the calvary did to men’s characters and souls, why 23 survived the night, and how they survived it, and why 123 did not survive it, and how they died. This much Craig related to his publisher, and no more. What he withheld was the theme that lurked behind the mask of history: a polemic against colonialism and white superiority. The publisher’s enthusiasm knew no bounds, and the advance he offered was a generous one.
The Girty windfall had freed Craig from magazines; the current advance freed him from New York. Both Harriet and he had grown weary of New York, and both were filled with new life, she with the embryo of their child that she did not wish to raise in the city, and he with the new novel that had grown in his mind. Also, he had become tired of his New York literary set. He had finally agreed with George Bernard Shaw’s remark to John Galsworthy that ‘literary men should never associate with one another, not only because of their cliques and hatreds and envies, but because their minds inbreed and produce abortions.’
For months, he and Harriet had spoken wistfully of a town in Wisconsin, once visited while driving to Madison to see Harriet’s sister Leah at the university. After four years in New York, Miller’s Dam seemed the fairest paradise. When the money from The Black Hole came in, the Craigs impulsively pulled up stakes and moved back to their Midwestern beginnings.
Miller’s Dam was situated sixty miles north-west of Milwaukee. Riding inland from Lake Michigan, the countryside rose and fell gracefully, like long, lazy ocean swells. This was rich earth, rural earth, and every hillock seemed alive with small living things unseen. The actual landscape that year was bright, clear, and unvaried, except for the occasional billboards and road signs pointing to a petrol station or hamburger shack that erupted among the endless windmills and red barns, yellow haystacks, fields of bending cornstalks, and herds of speckled cows grazing indolently on the dry green slopes.
Suddenly, homesteads filled the landscape, and they were in Miller’s Dam (pop. 1,475), a cluster of shops, a drugstore, a sheriff’s station, a hotel, a bank, a pool hall, a theatre, all bisected by the little-travelled cement highway. The town was worked in, but not lived in, except for the familiar travelling salesmen in the hotel and the few old couples who dwelt in the rear of their stores. Almost everyone lived on the fringes of the town, where vacant land was plentiful, in two-storey flats or bungalows with front porches, or farther out, on parcels of worked farmland. Harriet and Andrew Craig conformed, and were glad to do so because they wanted space. They bought the Hartog house, a big stucco-and-frame structure, on two acres, located three miles north of Main Street on Wheaton Road.
From the first day, they felt that they belonged in this isolated, idyllic place, and their feeling of having come home again survived even the pain of Harriet’s second miscarriage in her fifth month. Not long after that heartbreak, the routine was once more pleasant and productive. Craig wrote furiously on his typewriter in the mornings, and again after lunch until two o’clock in the afternoon. Then he would read in the back garden, or hit golf balls, or snip at his hedges and plant in his gardens. Often, he would drive into town to pass the time with Lucius Mack, or look in on Randolph ’s pool hall to learn the baseball scores from Chicago or play a game of snooker, or pick up Dr. Marks and go for a swim at Lawson Lake. Harriet joined the Ladies’ Aid Society, and exchanged visits with the faculty wives at Joliet, and sometimes she worked with the summer repertory company at Lawson Lake in Marquette County. They belonged to the Lawson Country Club, and faithfully attended the Friday night dances, and when they wanted more excitement, they spent their weekends in Milwaukee or Chicago.
Until Harriet’s parents moved to California, they came up frequently from Springfield. Eventually, they were supplanted by Harriet’s sister Leah, who had graduated from Wisconsin University and was teaching in a school on Chicago ’s North Side. In the four years of Leah’s comings and goings, Craig was hardly aware of her. He knew that she was in awe of him as a professional writer. He knew that she worshipped her sister. He did not know, until Harriet told him, that she was unhappy. She disliked teaching. She disliked her life in Chicago. She disliked being single, yet could not make up her mind to marry the diffident, shy young man, Harry Beazley, a teacher also, to whom she had been engaged for one year.