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time, that I had brains as well as guts and, given a start, could go anywhere. And, in his ironic, British way, he loved me too. And perhaps I better just clear up one point here and now, Horace. There was never anything of a sexual nature between me and Harvey. I know that he’d had several boy-friends at school in England and there was something between him and a house-boy we had in Chicago but I don’t know how far it went. But Harvey was very abstemious in his sexual habits and moreover he wasn’t just one sided. He liked women too as I discovered much later.
T HE Y EARS OF H IGH L IVING AND C HAMPAGNE
    I started off with meat, Horace, and I’ll tell you my reasoning. I’d been a marine. I knew how much chow a man doing military training could get through. Harvey said that America was going into the war. That meant there were going to be thousands, perhaps millions, of men to be fuelled. Then, over there, where the big armies were grinding each other to dust, the land was being neglected or ruined. Europe was going to be short of food. Any way you looked at it, Horace, I figured you couldn’t go wrong with meat, and in particular canned meat. And, of course, I’d been raised on a farm. I knew what a prime steer should look like.
    So I made my way to Chicago.
    It makes me shudder, Horace, to recollect it. I was so green I—the first week a con-man took me for five hundred bucks! The next week I—you swallowing this, Horace? Then you haven’t sized me up right at all! I’ll tell you how it really was:
    I spent three weeks in Chicago mooching around the stockyards,talking to anyone I could buttonhole, reading the trade newspapers and anything else that seemed useful. Then I went back South and had a long talk with Harvey. Then I went back to Chicago and bought a half-interest in a small meat-canning plant.
    And three years after that, we had the second biggest meat-canning operation in Chicago.
    Don’t ask me how I did it, Horace, because I can’t tell you. All I know is I never put a foot wrong. I did it naturally as a bird flies or a bomb explodes. I never had any hesitation. It was as if there was a voice inside me telling me what step to take next—what move to make.
    You see, Horace, I soon found that the pace of other men compared to mine was that of a sluggish crab to a dolphin. I skimmed round them spewing out golden bubbles while they crawled a painful step sideways. I could do a day’s work in an hour, a week’s work in a day. Why, I even got so infuriated with the labour of getting letters done—dictating to a slow-witted secretary, checking for errors, getting them retyped and so on—that I taught myself to type and whipped out my correspondence myself in a flash.
    For six years, I worked like a dynamo and at twenty-three I was the youngest self-made millionaire in the United States.
    But naturally I didn’t do it alone. There was Harvey. And, in the first years anyway, I wouldn’t have got anywhere without him. I had the power and the instinct but he had the experience and the judgement. We were, I guess, the ideal team. And I worshipped him.
    When he got his discharge, we set up together in a modest apartment out by the lake.
    Evenings I’d work or else take off into town and explore the evil places of Chicago. Harvey didn’t go out much. He mainly stayed at home and read books. Now here’s a crazy thing, Horace, it wasn’t for about three months that I really noticed Harvey reading. I guess the explanation is: I knew about books. I had to read some at school and I’d even read a couple of Westerns and things on my own. But I’d always just assumed that books belonged to people like Harvey—the kind of people who become officers and senators and lawyers. Books didn’t have a big part in the world of folk like me, except, of course, for the Bible. So when I’d come in—maybe a little boisterous and liquored—and Harvey would be plumped in a leather chair with a book in his hand, it