Chapter VI

It seems rather a misnomer, and something of an absurdity, to say that Kilmer was ever neutral in anything. But in the political sense he was a neutral, and, if it may be put that way, neutral to a pronounced degree, preceding the entrance of the United States into the war. His keen feeling for the sturdy virtues and robust customs of Old England, Merrie England, was of course, patent. His delight in London, and the English countryside, which he knew from a child, was manifest. The pillars of his fairly large literature were, of course, English. His profound sense of integrity was violently jolted by the violation of Belgium. As the war went on, however, he developed an attitude which was quite capable of being interpreted as Pro-German, by anyone interested in so interpreting it. The explanation of this attitude is simple enough. Instinctively a combative character intellectually, his humorous essays, which expressed him so intimately, almost without exception found their spring in his running counter to some current idea. As he one time remarked, he was “bored by feminism, futurism, free love;” and, too, he was invariably for the under dog. It may seem rather grotesque to present Germany by implication as an under dog in the early years of the war; the point is, the force of the argument was so overwhelmingly against Germany that Kilmer reacted to this in a characteristic fashion, stood boldly against the current, and was, in fact, a neutral--until the sinking of the Lusitania. All reports agree, including even reports from sources of strong anti-English feeling where Kilmer’s inclination to see what could be said for Germany was coveted, that from this point on his manner was altogether hostile to Germany. Outside of his Lusitania poem he did not, so far as I know, denounce the deed; but the unanimity and the precision with which the change in him is fixed by all who observed him is striking.

Kilmer’s successive literary passions were a curious medley. He seemed to have been born with a great love for Scott, and he held stoutly to Sir Walter throughout the years. In his burly days he found a humorous sport in defending, with jovial emphasis, the old-fashioned chivalrous romance against the scientific modern novel. In his æsthetic period he had a touch, hardly more, of Oscar Wilde, though early in his literary career he experienced a rather severe case of Swinburneitus. Some time shortly after this he was very much intrigued by the Celtic revival. Shaemas O’Sheel, a friend dating back to Columbia days, bears testimony that an early boast of Kilmer’s was that an ancestor of his had been hanged for taking a rebel’s part in ’ninety-eight. And though as we know, Kilmer’s immediate ancestry was not Irish, a Gaelic enthusiast who has made a specialty of the Irish language, suggests in his ardour, that the name Kilmer is a derivation of Mac Gilla Mor. At any rate, an affection for Ireland--her literature, her lore, her traditions, and her people--was indeed natural with him.

In his Yeats period Kilmer had about chosen “Nine Bean Rows” as the name of his house then in the course of construction, though it was not altogether “of clay and wattles made.” The thing which deterred him from this decision was that persons unacquainted with the poem “Innisfree,” to whom he spoke of the matter, conceived his address as Number Nine Beanrose Avenue. What a funny street, they said, that is. Literary merely, of course, that; and though a part of the whole, remote from later, deeper and graver things. Something inherently Irish in Kilmer undoubtedly was felt by many, Irish themselves and very much so, who, in some cases, are “quite certain” that the fact of their being Irish was the reason why he regarded them and their work as writers with friendship. He did, indeed, like all manner of Irish. He liked the Irish fairies, he liked Lady Gregory, he liked most decidedly the poor Irish people who went to the Catholic church, and (as he later showed), of all soldiers, Irish soldiers he liked best.

Romantic Ireland is not old;
For years untold her youth will shine,
Her heart is fed on Heavenly bread,
The blood of martyrs is her wine.

Everything chivalrous and sacrificial appealing to his deepest instincts, he felt noble “delight in hopes that were vain.” It is not at all improbable that had he been an Irishman born and resident in Ireland he would have been among the martyrs of Easter Week. In certain qualities of his soul a kinship with these spirits may readily be traced. Some of them, I have been told, he knew personally; and his reverence for Plunkett he has written.

There is no rope can strangle song,
And not for long death takes his toll;
No prison bars can dim the stars,
Nor quicklime eat the living soul.

And all that Kilmer wrote, every line of it, he wrote in two ways; he wrote it in words, and he wrote it in his acts. When the idea of the Poets’ Meeting to express the sympathy of American poets with the three Irish martyred poets of Easter Week, Pearse, MacDonough and Plunkett, first occurred to Eleanor Rogers Cox, she asked Kilmer’s advice about it over the telephone. And he said, “Go ahead, I’ll back you up,” with the result that the meeting, a success, took place in Central Park, with Edwin Markham presiding, Kilmer, Margaret Widdemer, Miss Cox, Louis Untermeyer, and many other representative poets taking part.

When you say of the making of ballads and songs that it is a woman’s
work,
You forget all the fighting poets that have been in every land.
There was Byron, who left all his lady-loves, to fight against the Turk,
And David, the singing king of the Jews, who was born with a sword in his
hand.
It was yesterday that Rupert Brooke went out to the Wars and died,
And Sir Philip Sidney’s lyric voice was as sweet as his arm was strong;
And Sir Walter Raleigh met the axe as a lover meets his bride,
Because he carried in his soul the courage of his song.

Indeed, in the logical scheme of things (or, at any rate, in Joyce Kilmer’s scheme of things) the poet is a soldier, an idealist with the courage of his song; and, in a manner of speaking, all soldiers are poets, whether or not they ever pen a line, for they give supreme expression to the conviction of their soul. And then, as Christopher Morley has finely written in his tribute to Kilmer, “the poet must go where the greatest songs are singing.” To anyone who knew Kilmer it would have been perfectly dumfounding if, when war was declared between his country and Germany, he had _not_ done exactly as he did. It is inconceivable--to picture him moving about here, from restaurant to office, in this hour. Flatly, the thing can’t be done. With him, when he joined the army, it was only one fight more, the best, and as it proved, the last.

He hated many things, but I believe that of all things he hated most a pacifist--a pacifist in anything. He was a fighter. He fought for his home, stone by stone; he fought for his renown. His conception of the church was the Church Militant. His thoughts dwelt continually on warrior-saints. He believed in the nobility of war and the warrior’s calling, so long as the cause was holy, or believed to be holy. As he saw it, there was no question as to his duty. This I know, you might as well have asked Niagara Falls why it pours over its ledge, as have discussed with Kilmer the matter of his going to war. That was, in its way, just such another force of nature. As to what might happen to him, it is hardly necessary to remark that his faith told him that that would be all right, too. John Bunker was among the last to bid him farewell. There is the Kilmerian splendour in what he wrote:

You didn’t pose, self-conscious of your lot,
Or speak of what might be or might have been;
You always thought heroics simply rot,
And so you merely wore your old-time grin.

Kilmer had first joined the Officers’ Reserve Training corps. He soon resigned from this. In less than three weeks after the United States entered the war he enlisted as a private in the Seventh Regiment, National Guard, New York. His own statement was: “I haven’t time for Plattsburg: had too much work to finish, but I had to get in.” The Regiment was mustered into the Federal Service on July 15, 1917; and Kilmer expected to go to training camp somewhere in the South for a couple of months, then to be sent to “France, or Russia, or Cuba, or Mexico or somewhere else.” He had a great distaste for going to Russia, because he disliked cold climates. He one time expressed a decided aversion to a book commonly held to be quite good. When asked what was the matter with it, he denounced it as being about “one of those cold countries.” It would not, of course, have been Kilmer had he not found elation in the distinguished and picturesque character of the crack regiment to which he belonged. “We are the oldest outfit in the Guard--Lafayette reviewed us in 1824 and Joffre two weeks ago.” If you had not seen the dress uniform of “the Seventh” you heard all about it at lunch. And “hard newspaper man” as he was, he became even “harder” now. “Can’t hurt my feelings,” he wrote requesting a friend to be quite frank with him. “Hard military character, seriously considering acquisition of habit of chewing tobacco.”

Shortly before the Seventh left New York for Spartanburg, South Carolina, Kilmer was transferred, at his own request, to the 165th Infantry, U. S. A., formerly the famous old “Fighting Sixty-ninth,” New York, a unit of the Rainbow Division, assembled at Camp Mills, Mineola, Long Island. He was most particular to impress upon his friends the point that he had been transferred at his own volition. I do not know that he ever said so, in so many words, but I gathered from him the impression that a considerable part of his motive in having himself transferred was occasioned by his belief that the 165th would go sooner than the Seventh to the battlefield. Then, too, as we know, he was “half Irish”; and an Irish-American regiment doubtless was a powerful magnet to him. In the 165th the people he liked best of all were “the wild Irish boys who left Ireland a few years ago, some of them to escape threatened conscription, and travelled about the country in gangs, generally working on the railroads. They have delightful songs that have never been written down, but sung in vagabonds’ camps and country jails. I have got some of the songs down and hope to get more--‘The Boston Burglar’--‘Sitting in My Cell All Alone’--they are a fine, a veritable Irish-American folk-lore.”

Kilmer at this time was the father of four children, named respectively Kenton Sinclair, Rose, Deborah Clanton and Michael Barry. One day he appeared in my office on an errand of business relating to the handling of his literary property. He was, in outward effect, perfectly composed, an admirable picture of a young soldier. It was then, in what followed, that he displayed the most extraordinary, the most amazing, measure of spiritual stature that I ever observed in any man or ever read of in any human book. Settled, with his customary air, in my chair, he demanded some pipe tobacco. I had none. And for this he heartily damned me out. Then he said: “Bob, my affairs are somewhat in disarray.” Thinking that perhaps he wanted to borrow two dollars, or something like that, I asked: “What’s the matter, Joyce?” “Well,” he answered, quite in his ordinary way, “several days ago Rose died; yesterday my son, Christopher, was born; Kenton is with my wife at her mother’s; my family is, in fact, very much scattered; I’m expecting to go to France within a few days--and I have many other difficulties.” That was all he said as to this. He then talked excellent business. I went to the elevator with him. We shook hands more quietly than usual; he said, “Good-bye, Bob;” and the door of the car closed upon him, standing erect in his military overcoat, looking somewhat serious. That was all.

From Company H. Kilmer was transferred, within a short time, to Headquarters Company, and exchanged his eight hours a day of violent physical exercise (“most deadening to the brain, a useful anodyne for one, coming as it did after my grief,” he wrote in an intimate letter) for exacting but “interesting” statistical work. Though called Senior Regimental Statistician he continued to rank as a private. His work was under the direction of the Regimental Chaplain, Father Francis Patrick Duffy. He was thankful, he wrote from Mineola in a letter at this time, that he was not with the Seventh at Spartanburg, as from Mineola he could telephone to his wife every night, and he said: “I’ll be an accomplished cuss when I get back from the wars--I’ll know how to typewrite and to serve Mass and to sing the ‘Boston Burglar.’”