Chapter V

As a literary lecturer and a reader of his own poems before secular audiences his success was no less abundant. In “the only combination of its kind since Bill Nye and James Whitcomb Riley,” as the circular of the J. B. Pond Lyceum Bureau stated it, “the young American Poet” and the author of “Pigs is Pigs” contributed considerably to the lightening of the rigours of existence by an extended repetition of “a joint evening of readings from their works.” Ellis Parker Butler, in a letter before me, writes of his partner on the programme:

He was a most charming travelling companion and an ideal
team-mate for the purpose we had in mind. I would not have
thought of going “on tour” if I had not met Kilmer. My idea was
never to “go on tour” but, after I had met Kilmer, to “go on
tour with Kilmer.” He was altogether lovable and loved.

It would be a decidedly false estimate of Kilmer which failed to note, even with some emphasis, that he was an excellent man of business. He “played the game,” in the exceedingly difficult job of earning a thoroughly competent living at the literary profession, with a dexterity which, it was frequently apparent, was at once an inspiration and a despair to those who sought to rival him. The Kilmer cult which grew apace was considerably accelerated by a rich Kilmerian strategy. And he delivered to the little world of intensely intense literary societies and blue-nosed salons which hung upon his lips the pure milk of the word with a strongly humorous consciousness of the feat as a part of the immense sport of living.

Kilmer’s “act” as it was observed from behind the scenes is excellently presented by an associate in the office of the _New York Times_. This writer says in the _Philadelphia Press_:

Our editor analysed him into three distinct manners: Kilmer,
the literary man; Kilmer, the lecturer; and Kilmer, himself.
His first appearance in the office would give you the cue to
him for the day. If he came in grinning with his pipe drawing
well, we would know that nothing was to be feared; he was
himself. When he got his “literary” manner on, the symptom
was a tapping of his eyeglass, with his right hand on the
fingers of his left. When he appeared in his cutaway coat and
a particularly pastoral necktie, we knew that on that day
the elderly ladies of This Literary Club or the young ladies
of That Academy were to be treated to a discourse on certain
aspects of Victorian verse.

One day he came in, obviously decked out for a lecture. Without
his having said a word about it, the assistant Sunday editor
spoke up: “Let’s cut out work this afternoon and hear Kilmer
lecture.” A look of horror overspread his face. “For heaven’s
sake, don’t,” he said. “I couldn’t go through with it.” I don’t
believe any of us ever did hear him.

A thing which I found very singular was that, in manner Kilmer was apt, in the two or three later years of his life, to give strangers on their first meeting the impression of being somewhat too dignified for so young a man, of being, as his office associate John Bunker in an admirable, even a remarkable, portrait of him at this period published in _America_, says, “in fact just a trifle pompous.” Mr. Bunker continues: “This was due partly to his physical appearance, and also, insofar as it had any basis in reality, to that protective instinct which quickly teaches a sensitive and imaginative spirit to cast a veil between itself and the outer world.”

I myself think this effect had its origin in the same perverse instinct which causes you, immediately after talking with a deaf person, to speak very loud to your next auditor whom you very well know can hear perfectly; that is, it was the result of being keyed up to appearing on an elevated platform before a curious throng. He one time astonished me by the declaration that it was only by, quite early in his life, drastically schooling himself to the task, one then exceedingly trying and hateful to him, that he became able to rise and “speak” at all. The most entertaining recollection, by the way, that I have of the Kilmerian pontifical manner is of a time when he generously invited me to have my shoes polished with him, thrust his hand deep into his pocket to pay the boy, paused, and with a very large gesture directed him to call in again later in the day.

There is first-rate perspicacity in the remark of one of Kilmer’s friends, Laurence J. Gomme, that at one score and ten he was, in the amount that he had lived, about seventy years old. Something of the force and sharpness of Mr. Bunker’s evocation of the man as he was at last resides, I think, in the circumstance that here is no blending in the mind of the flower and the bud. He says: “When I first met Kilmer he had just passed his thirtieth year, but he gave me the impression of being somewhat older. I afterwards spoke of this to him, and it was his theory that newspaper work had served to age him. The truth was that it was due not merely to his newspaper work, but generally to the incessant and intense mental activity, the extraordinary and flaming energy, whereby he crowded into ten years the experiences of several ordinary lifetimes.” And this touch of the slight Bunker portrait is, I feel, essential to any fuller picture:

As to his physical aspect, he was stockily built and about
medium height, and his habit of body was what I should call
plump, though later, under the stress of military drill, he
changed somewhat in this last respect. I noted at once that
he had a remarkable head--well rounded, with broad and high
forehead and a very pronounced bulge at the back, covered
thickly with dark, reddish-brown hair. But his eyes were his
most remarkable feature. They were of the unusual colour of
red, and they had a most peculiar quality which I can only
inadequately suggest by saying that they literally glowed. It
actually seemed as if there were a fire behind them, not a
leaping and blazing fire, but a steady and unquenchable flame
which appeared to suffuse the whole eyeball with a brooding
light. This characteristic was so striking that I cannot help
dilating on it. And I observed later on that this glow, this
brooding and somewhat sombre light, never left his eyes even in
his most weary or most care-free moments, so that they gave the
impression of what I believe was the fact--the impression of a
brain behind them which was working intensely and perhaps even
feverishly every hour of the waking day.

The better poet Kilmer became, as his friend Richardson Wright says in his admirable “Appreciation” in _The Bellman_, the less like a poet he acted. And after he grew up, he would about as soon have æstheticised, off the platform, as he would have forged a check. Whenever he did refer to poetry as related to himself he, as the slang term has it, took it smiling. One of Kilmer’s most pronounced pet aversions was the phrase, utterly mawkish to him, about “prostituting” one’s talent. He one time explained to me, with considerable apparent pride, that he used every idea three times: in a poem, in an article, and in a lecture.

Charles Willis Thompson, an editorial writer of the _New York Times_, and to whom belongs the credit of first taking, as editor of the _Sunday Magazine_ and _Book Review_, Kilmer’s “stuff” in any amount, inspired, so to say, the poem “Delicatessen,” in this way. Mr. Thompson happened to remark to Kilmer that of course there were a lot of things which couldn’t be treated in poetry. Kilmer declared he would like to know what they were. Mr. Thompson cast about in his mind for the most ridiculous theme for a poem he could think of, and finally proclaimed that no one could possibly write a poem about such a thing as a delicatessen shop. “I’ll write a poem about a delicatessen shop,” Kilmer promptly replied. “It will be a long poem. I’ll sell it to a high-brow magazine. It will be much admired. And it will be a good poem.” He insisted on betting on this the sum of several dollars.

The origin of “The Twelve-Forty-Five” I do not exactly know. But I remember shortly before that poem was written, sitting disgusted and miserable with Kilmer in that horrible “Jersey City shed” waiting for the midnight train. Taking out of his mouth that villainously large, fifty-cent pipe (mentioned in all genuine appreciations) Kilmer, with a fervour almost violent, suddenly exclaimed: “I certainly do like railroad stations! They are fine places!” The very famous poem “The White Ships and The Red” (a poem so wonderfully effective that it was at once reprinted all over the country and in Europe) was a newspaper assignment. He rather liked the poem when he saw it in the paper; though, with his feet cocked up on his desk, he spoke apologetically of what he felt to be the failure of the latter stanzas to link up perfectly with the first, explaining that a luncheon appointment, at which he chatted for an hour or two, had split the writing of it into two sittings. That the author of this “Lusitania” poem thoroughly felt and meant what he said, is, I fancy, sufficiently proven by the event to permit of this being told.

The point is, that Kilmer was a poet, an artist of a high order, a perfectly conscious master of what he was doing. The febrile gush of emotion he loathed. He knew finely that:

It is stern work, it is perilous work, to thrust your hand in the sun
And pull out a spark of immortal flame to warm the hearts of men.

There was nothing accidental about the effect of his own verse, any more than there was “luck” in his worldly success. He achieved the one as he did the other by a masculine heart and mind. And while all things were necessary and joyous, it was impossible not to feel that, after all, throughout his day “the rhymer’s honest trade” was his primary concern.

He was sufficiently grounded in literature to feel, as Mr. Le Gallienne says, no “weariness with those literary methods which had sufficed for Chaucer and Shakespeare and Milton, or Catullus or Bion, or François Villon--content, with reverent ambition, to tread that immortal path.”

In his religious mysticism a trace, and more than a trace, has been found of Crashaw, of Vaughan, of Herbert, and of Belloc and Chesterton. And there is no difficulty at all about finding in Kilmer hints of Patmore, and there may be easily recognised something of the accents of A. E. Housman and of Edwin Arlington Robinson. He did, indeed, to put it in a racy phrase, have the drop on those who do not know that all art that endures must have its roots in a constant interrogation of the “unimpeachable testimony” of the ages. His song was as old as the hills, and as fresh as the morning. Precisely in this, in fact, is his remarkableness, his originality, as a contemporary poet; and in this will be, I think, his abiding quality. “Simple and direct, yet not without subtle magic,” wrote Father James J. Daly, S.J., in a review of “Trees and Other Poems,” printed in _America_, his verse “seems artlessly naïve, yet it possesses deep undercurrents of masculine and forceful thought; it is ethical in its seriousness, and yet as playful and light-hearted as sunlight and shadows under summer oaks.” And this admirable summing up of Kilmer’s talent leaves little more in the way of direct criticism to be said.

Mr. Le Gallienne with felicitous tact of phrase has touched upon this, that “no young poet of our time has so reverently, on so many pages, in so many different ways, so playfully at times, as in that masterpiece of playful reverence, ‘A Blue Valentine,’ woven through the texture of his song the love of his lady--that lady ‘Aline,’ whose name will be gently twined about his as long as the printed word endures.” A misquotation in the _Ladies’ Home Journal_ led to an interesting tribute to the author of “Trees.” Many readers of the _Journal_ were somewhat startled to find the editor attributing to John Masefield the lines:

A tree that looks at God all day
And lifts her leafy arms to pray.

The following issue of the magazine contained this correction and acknowledgment by Mr. Bok:

I am free to confess that I did not know the correct author. I
had been reading John Masefield that morning and unconsciously
wrote his name as the author of these lines. A number of
friends have pointed to the error and supplied the knowledge.
The author is Joyce Kilmer, and to him I owe, and here express,
my sense of deep apology. The exquisite lines were worthy of
John Masefield, but that does not make them less worthy of
their rightful author, as all will agree who read his beautiful
work in his book “Trees and Other Poems.”

As one, somewhat effusive commentator has remarked, “Trees” just could not be confined within the covers of a book. At once reprinted in newspapers throughout the United States (and still being so reprinted) it was crowned in that warmest of all ways in which a work of literature can be honoured, by being cut out by the world and pasted in its hat. In one version it reads, in part, in this way:

Cuando contemplo un arbol pienso: nunca vere un poema tan bello
y tan intenso.

Un arbol silencioso que con ansia se aferra a la dulce y jugosa
entrans de la tierra.

Un arbol que mirando los cielos se extansia y en oracion
levanta los brazos noche y dia.

Many of Kilmer’s poems have been translated into Spanish by Salomon de la Selva, Enriquez Urenia and others, and have appeared in a number of prominent South American papers.

In a letter from France to Edward W. Cook, who in quest of material for a book on contemporary poets had written Kilmer asking several questions, Kilmer commented, among other things, on his “earlier efforts in poetry” (as the questionnaire apparently had put it), in a manner which is evidence again of how perfectly well he knew what he was about. “If what I nowadays write is considered poetry,” he announced, “then I became a poet in November, 1913.” Admirable for hard-headedness, directness and precision, it is a statement which leaves the critic no point upon which to take issue. His early poems “were only the exercises of an amateur, imitations, useful only as technical training.” The peculiar thing about these highly skilful experiments in various forms of craftsmanship is that they were so very much better as poems than the derivative efforts usually written at this period of apprenticeship, “so free,” as Mr. Le Gallienne notes, “from those artistic immaturities which have made many old great poets angrily denounce unlicensed reprinters of their ‘first editions.’” And in this fact they have a decided, and a perfectly legitimate, interest for the observer of the development of his talent--though Kilmer declared “they were worthless, that is, all of them which preceded a poem called ‘Pennies,’ which you will find in my book ‘Trees and Other Poems.’” He added, “I want all of my poems written before that to be forgotten.”

He was writing, one remembers, to a gentleman with whom he was so slightly acquainted that he addressed him as “Dear Mr. Cook,” with the measure of whose sympathy and critical acumen, it is to be inferred, he was not conversant, and who presumably was about to estimate (with what perspective he could not perceive) his earliest productions. It were better to head off any uncertainty in the matter. Also, we all know, one’s hot impatience with one’s strivings of yesterday is mellowed by time into an amiable and appreciative tolerance of one’s earnest efforts of twenty years ago. It is difficult to think that Kilmer at fifty would have had an unjust scorn of those charming exercises on the poetic scales he wrote at twenty-one.

Anyhow, no man can, by decree or otherwise, obliterate his past; both the good and the bad that he has done continue to pursue him. Ten times thrice happy is he, rarest of men, who, like Kilmer, never penned a line or said a word or did a deed that can arise to bring confusion to those that love him. The world does not willingly let die those verses on which glistens the dew of his tender youth. They are brought forth for praise by no mean critics in tribute to his memory. And in conformity with the wishes of those most jealous of his good name as a poet a representative selection of his early poems is reprinted in these volumes.

He that lives by the pen shall perish by the pen, saith the wisdom of James Huneker. For a sapling poet, within a few short years and by the hard business of words, to attain to a secretary and a butler and a family of, at length, four children, is a modern Arabian Nights Tale. Equally impossible is it, seemingly, to accomplish another thing, which is a remarkable part of Kilmer’s distinction. From first to last, from the verses contributed to _Moods_ in 1909 to the last poem he wrote, “The Peacemaker,” printed in the _Saturday Evening Post_ in October, 1918, Kilmer was a poet’s poet. “A pretty good poet,” said such a poet (shaking his head at his conviction of the truth of this) as Bliss Carman. His poems were repeatedly adjudged high places among the best poems read before the Poetry Society. Among competitive honours, under the name of “John Langdon” he won easily enough with his poem, “The Annunciation,” first prize in the Marian Poetry contest conducted by _The Queen’s Work_, in July, 1917, an award competed for by a great number of poets, including many in other countries. He was a poet’s poet who declared (with considerable vehemence, I remember) that he certainly wished he had written “Casey At The Bat.” He one time said in praise of a book of essays that it was “that kind of glorified reporting which is poetry.” As a singer of the simpler annals of humanity his place will draw closer and closer, I think, to that of the most widely loved poet of our own era. Only the name of James Whitcomb Riley expresses in greater measure the rich gift of speaking with authentic song to the simplest hearts. A man who believes that churches are devices of the devil and literature a syrup for crack-brained females can enjoy, with profit to his soul, “The House With Nobody In it,” “Dave Lilly” and “The Servant Girl and the Grocer’s Boy” equally with “The Old Swimmin’-Hole” and “Little Orphant Annie.”

If Colonel Roosevelt had never done anything other than what he has done in writing, he would undoubtedly be highly esteemed as an American man of letters. And people have made very creditable reputations as humourists who never wrote anything like as humorous essays as those of Joyce Kilmer. They fairly reek with the joy of life. They explode with intellectual robustness. They are fragrant in fancy, richly erudite in substance, touch-and-go in manner, poetic in feeling, rocking with mirth, and display an extraordinary _flair_ for style. If it should seem that I am not here measuring my words I suggest a reference to a piece of documentary evidence called “The Gentle Art of Christmas Giving,” a “Sunday story” in the _New York Times_, here reprinted. Writing at top-notch speed, never looking again at what he had written, intentionally producing a readily marketable commodity, from which profit must be realised quickly, Kilmer was an exceedingly rare bird in America; that is, a belletristic journalist. There is always the touch to his work of a man of letters. Decidedly Bellocian, Chestertonian, certainly his humorous essays are. But that it was a good deal more an affinity of mind with, than an imitation of, those splendidly humorous English philosophers is borne out by this: Joyce Kilmer did not talk poetry, but he did talk exactly like his essays, which admirably present the brave humorous wisdom of the man as his intimate friends knew him.

Official critical authority did not dampen his verve. As a contributing editor of “Warner’s Library of the World’s Best Literature,” he supplied the articles on Madison Cawein, John Masefield, William Vaughn Moody and Francis Thompson. He contributed prefaces to various volumes of standard authors. Excellent examples of this department of his activity are his Introduction to Thomas Hardy’s “The Mayor of Casterbridge” in the Modern Library, his introduction to the American edition of the “Verses” of Hilaire Belloc, and the introduction to the volume “Dreams and Images,” his anthology of Catholic poets. The Introduction to this Anthology is dated 165th Regiment, Camp Mills, Mineola, N. Y., August, 1917, just a year before Sergeant Kilmer’s death in battle. Doubtless few know that at one time Kilmer had drawn a contract to write a “Life” of Father Tabb. Because of peculiar complications in the situation this enterprise, most unfortunately, fell through. In 1916 Kilmer was called to the faculty of the School of Journalism of New York University, in succession to Arthur Guiterman, to lecture on “Magazine and Newspaper Verse.” The object of the course, which was open to outsiders as well as to those enrolled in the School of Journalism, was to familiarise the students with the practical side of writing verse for publication.