Chapter XVII: A Place to End 172 (1)

Introduction

During my entire adult life and even back into the vivid, brooding days of adolescence, one subject has had for me a light, an allurement, and a loveliness beyond all others. And as this subject happens to be that of poetry and hence is apt to be regarded as something of an eccentricity if not an aberration by the steel-hard practical world, I believe that some facts about my preoccupation may be worth explaining, less to my fellow poets than to those general readers who wonder how that strange creature from another world, the writer of verse, thinks and functions.

None of us, no matter what our field, find it easy to break through the dimness of misunderstanding that settles between man and man. But the mists are deeper and harder to penetrate when the subject is so remote from the usual experience as poetry. Myths are in danger of flashing to view like toadstools, and of being swallowed whole by those without access to the truth; and myths have actually, I sometimes suspect, come down to us beneath the label of history in the case of more poets than one. I have had reason to observe how even I, though surely much less victimized than persons more widely known, have been the target of reports which, if not always unflattering, have seldom erred on the side of reasonableness.

In one statement, published years ago in a small magazine, I was made the proud owner of a summer mansion in California and a winter villa in Florida (a State which, on my nearest approach, I once glimpsed remotely from a ship at sea). In another assertion, I was honored with counting Lord Dunsany as assistant editor of my magazine _Wings_ (a bit of information which would have surprised Dunsany as much as it did me). In still another report, it was related that every afternoon, having obtained my mail at the post office in Mill Valley, I would hike with it into the hills and there proceed to answer it (the account did not state whether or not I carried a typewriter in my vest pocket). And in a somewhat less amusing instance, after a reporter for a newspaper in a small city had spent an hour interviewing me, I had the dubious pleasure of seeing myself awarded a doctor’s degree without benefit of any university, while several years were added to my age (a minor matter, to be sure), and the writer invented for me a statement implying that my lifelong objection to extremism in verse was a case of sour grapes gathered in later life. Doubtless other pronouncements, of an equally preposterous nature, have been circulated where I have not heard and never will hear them, though they could crop up at any time as parts of an “authentic” story.

From the larger point of view, of course, it may not matter what tales are told about anyone: all that counts about a writer is his work; by this he must rise or fall. Nevertheless, being in some measure subject to the ancient bias in favor of truth, I should like to set the record straight, insofar as I am able. One thing I do know, and can state unequivocally: no one, no one at all, not even my closest friend, knows much of what has happened to me, and particularly what has happened inside me. Whether this is worth knowing is another question entirely; but for whatever incidental interest it may have, and to the extent that is humanly possible, I should like to set down a plain report of the facts. I am the more anxious to do so, not because I regard the personal element as important, but because of the stand I have taken in poetry, the cause to which I have devoted much of my life--a stand which has earned murmurs of encouragement and even shouts of cheer in certain quarters, but has been misunderstood in others, and has been the source of misrepresentation, ridicule, abuse, and even personal vilification in a battle already more than three decades old. I am certain that nothing I say will bring clarity to those, if there be any such, who are determined not to see clearly; but to the great majority, who come with open minds, these pages may tell something of why one of that dwindling tribe, the tribe of poets, has written verse and prose, hoped and despaired, clutched at invisible barricades, and fought for what seemed to be the light, amid a world so wide-awake on the superficial levels that it realized little and cared little about those depths wherein all art, all creation, and all inspiration have found strength and sustenance.

CHAPTER
ONE

“I Pant for the Music Which Is Divine”

Seated in a rocking-chair in the upper story of an old high-ceilinged house in San Francisco’s “Western Addition,” a mild-looking, bespectacled woman of thirty-four was reading to a boy of eight. He followed her with an absorbed gaze as, bending her near-sighted eyes close to the book, she let her tongue roll over the lines of _The Children’s Hour_, _The Wreck of the Hesperus_, and other poems more popular in a former generation than today. Years later the lines of some of those poems--“Between the dark and the daylight,” “Grave Alice and laughing Allegra,” etc.--were to remain in the boy’s mind.

“These are all by a man named Longfellow,” said the woman, turning to the child with a smile. “He was a great poet and died a long time ago.”

The name impressed the boy--he thought of someone very tall and thin, a sort of walking two-legged pole.

“Did all great poets die a long time ago, Mamma?” asked the boy.

The woman smiled again.

“I don’t know. But I don’t think we have any Longfellow today.”

At this she sighed, ever so slightly.

Instantly a resolution formed itself in the boy’s mind. Looking up with the blissful confidence possible only to the very young, he clenched his small fists and promised, “You wait, Mamma! You wait! When I grow up, I’ll be a poet--just like Longfellow!”

The years were to pass, and the boy’s ambition to become Longfellow the Second was to be forgotten amid more exciting desires: for example, the aspiration to be the motorman of a streetcar, or, better still, a locomotive engineer. And the woman, who had only five years remaining of her busy life, was not to see the day when her eldest son was to put pen to his first crude verses. But in after years the thought was often to come to him that the poems he wrote, though hardly such as Longfellow would have produced, would have brought her an immense satisfaction.

Poetry was to mean little to the boy (whose identity the reader will have guessed) during his remaining years of childhood. You might, in fact, have judged that it never would mean anything, if you had known how he felt about certain verses he was forced to memorize at school. Of these, the only ones I still remember are those often-quoted lines of Scott,

Breathes there the man with soul so dead
Who never to himself hath said,
“This is my own, my native land,”
Whose heart within him ne’er hath burned
As home his footsteps he hath turned
From wandering on a foreign strand.

How I detested this passage! It was enough to give me a permanent bias against Scott, and an anti-poetic impulse that might have been lifelong. Doubtless, never having been so much as a hundred miles from my birthplace, I was not ideally fitted to appreciate the sentiments of a man just returning “from a foreign strand.” Besides, perhaps my earliest bit of unconscious literary criticism was not wholly misguided--either that, or the blind spot of childhood is still with me, as I remain unable to warm to these lines.

A few years later, when I was thirteen and had the assignment of writing a ballad in High School, you would have been sure that I was a pre-destined non-poet. How I struggled with this _magnum opus_! all the more so as I knew no more of the principles of meter than of the laws of spherical geometry. That might not be deemed a disadvantage nowadays, when ignorance enacts its role beneath the banners of freedom, and when the writer daunted by form need but strike a pose, and proclaim the merits of formlessness. But since, in those pristine days, a ballad was expected to sound more like a ballad than like a news report, I found myself face to face with a problem, as did all my fellow students. I have no reason to suppose that I was any less unsuccessful than any of the others.

How was it then that, a mere two years later, I was making spontaneous efforts at poetry? Had this not been the beginning of a lifelong habit--a bad habit, many will say--you might consider it but that adolescent poetic burgeoning which marks so many youths of both sexes before life calls them into more sober fields. Looking back, I should say that adolescence awakens the impulses and potentialities of the deeper self; summons out of hiding profound spiritual forces that have no place in childhood. To me it is inconceivable that the reading at my mother’s knee, though encouraging an interest in poetry, could have created that interest as it was later to develop; many another child, I feel safe in assuming, has listened to similar readings, and grown up to be a good stockbroker, grain merchant, or realtor.

Even after all the years, it is easy for me to trace the source of my first attempted poem. The death of my mother, a few months after I reached thirteen, had brought me shockingly close to life’s everlasting problems; had made it inevitable that I should wonder as to the end and aim of existence--a problem that did not seem answered by religion as it had been taught to me. Then one day I read some lines by Robert Ingersoll--ringing, oratorical lines whose exact wording I no longer recall, though the general meaning is that man is a traveler between two great darknesses. And the result was that I burst forth into verse which was little more than a paraphrase of Ingersoll, though not for a moment did it occur to me that it was not original. Understanding no more of the laws of blank verse than I had known of ballad writing two years before, I set out boldly to wield one of the greatest and most difficult of the English meters. While the completed product has (fortunately) been lost, my memory retains the opening lines:

A boundless ocean of eternity
Stretches on all sides of a tiny isle.
The island is called life; the sea is death;
From its broad bosom mortal ne’er returns.

Not exactly an unusual thought, nor a distinguished expression of that thought! But like most writers, even of the most execrable trash, I had the illusion that my work was good--an illusion no doubt necessary to keep up one’s spirits if more and perhaps less incompetent work is to be produced. In any case, more work was indeed forthcoming, much more--and I wish I could be so confident as to believe most of it less incompetent. But for several years, I am sure, the greater part of it was on exactly the same level of banality and unaccomplishment. Yes, even those lines which I doted upon in my teen-aged zeal, and assumed to be on so high a poetic plane!--

On the sunny isle of wishes,
On the mountain peaks of hope....

I could not have known that a time would come when I would blush even to repeat this doggerel. I quote the lines now only because of the marvelous fact--and it _does_ seem marvelous--that I should ever have thought them good. If tastes and perceptions change with age, the ways in which they change are sometimes a little saddening--saddening, at least, when we observe how mistaken the clear, pure fervor of youth may be. I am happy, in any case, to report that you would search in vain for the rest of the masterpiece about the “sunny isle of wishes”--the two quoted lines are the only two that somehow, perversely, have clung to my memory, and the written copies have gone to a deserved limbo.

Ah, long and hard, and with many turns and windings, and dips no less than rises, and devotions and heartbreaks beyond my imagining, was to be the path that led toward poetry! But this I could not have foreseen nor imagined in my sanguine, halcyon youth.

At this time I did not know any poet; and it did not occur to me that I ever could know anyone so far above the plodding, commonplace world--one of those divine creatures whom I imagined as having been born old and gray-bearded, with a great shock of grizzled, unkempt hair, blazing eyes, and perhaps long, trailing, patriarchal robes. But there came a day when I would meet a poet in the flesh. And what a disillusionment! Why, he seemed not to be beyond his twenties! And he had no beard--in fact, not even a mustache; he talked and looked like any ordinary man! And he had some unromantic name like Harold Spring--or Springer, I forget exactly which. The place of our meeting was not one of the palisades of Parnassus, but my father’s insurance office, which he had entered not with the purpose of spreading his wings, but of selling his book. In this he evidently succeeded, through what arts of salesmanship I cannot imagine, since I cannot remember my father ever investing in another book of verse, though he did have many books of other kinds. I know that the slim volume was in our possession for some time, and that I eagerly perused it, but all I can recall of the contents is that there was one poem with a rousing anapestic rhythm, in which the author, looking for a rhyme for “golden,” ingeniously enlarged “days of old” into “days of olden”--a combination that especially struck me, as I had never seen it before, just as I have never encountered it since.

“Mr. Spring,” remarked my father--or maybe it was “Springer”--“says that he is unappreciated today, but monuments will be raised to him a hundred years after he dies.” Ah, the perennial hope of so many!--I did not then realize the pathos of it; I was confident that the day would come when the name of Spring--or Springer--would be honored beside those of Keats and Tennyson.

Keats and Tennyson and Coleridge and some others, but Shelley more than any of the rest, had spun their magic about me before I was out of High School. I use the term “magic” advisedly; no other word so fully conveys the enchantment I felt, the feeling of being uplifted, illuminated, and transported to some world which was not that of our common earth of streets and houses, but was more real, more vivid, more radiant. Not only the thought and the imagery but the ring and rhythms of the lines, the mellifluousness and sonorousness of the words bewitched me. I would repeat over and over to myself passages from _The Cloud_, or some melodious stanza like this from _To Night_:

Swiftly walk o’er the western wave,
Spirit of Night!
Out of thy misty eastern cave,
Where all the long and lone daylight
Thou wovest dreams of joy and fear,
Which make thee terrible and dear,--
Swift be thy flight!

With Shelley, I would have said that “I pant for the music which is divine.” But sound effects and sorcery do not begin to express the awards I looked for in poetry; I also sought, sought with a passionate intensity, for something that may be called consolation. “Consolation for what?” you will ask. That, however, is something not to be answered as definitely as the question, “What is a brick wall?” I do not know if the experience is a general one, but I do know that for years during my adolescence I was obsessed with strange nostalgic longings, a vague sadness as for something irrecoverably lost long before, a sense of doom and of pain and parting in some far shadowy past. These feelings were with me particularly in the loneliness that fell upon me when, just before my seventeenth birthday, I went to live with an aunt and uncle in Oakland while attending the University at Berkeley. Then I would linger with relish over lines such as

Like the ghost of a dear friend dead
Is Time long past,

and,

Rarely, rarely cometh thou,
Spirit of Delight!
Wherefore hast thou left me now
Many a day and night?

and,

Unfathomable sea, whose waves are years,
Ocean of Time, whose waters of deep woe
Are brackish with the salt of human tears!

In these serener later days, poetry of this sort has lost much of its attraction for me; it strikes me as somewhat morbid. Moreover, there was nothing in my life so tragic as to justify concentration upon bleakness, sorrow, and longing. But I mention my feelings as a psychological fact; perhaps they were merely part of the melancholy so frequently associated with youth. Sometimes, however, I have liked to speculate--though this can never, of course, be more than speculation--that what I felt was a vague upsurging of recollection: recollection of some former life of sorrow and separation, which came dimly back to me through the mists of distance before the swift current of years had drowned it.

My special consolation, when I was lonely or depressed, was a huge anthology found in few homes nowadays: Bryant’s _A Library of Poetry and Song_, an inheritance from my mother, a compilation which, issued in 1870, and divided into sections such as “Poems of the Affections,” “Poems of Sorrow and Adversity,” “Poems of Nature,” “Poems of Peace and War,” contained hundreds of selections from the standard poets along with not a few by once popular but now little-remembered writers such as Felicia Hemans and Jean Ingelow.

Over the pages of this book I would linger for hours, making new friends and resuming acquaintance with old ones, in whom I found a companionship of thought and mood which, especially during the difficult period just after I left home, I did not meet anywhere in the human world about me.

CHAPTER
TWO

Path of Stones and Thorns

Early in my apprenticeship to poetry, I was to learn that the path was not entirely one of daisies and primroses, but was beset with stones, thorns, and pitfalls--a tortuous trail, where you had to sweat and strain in order to satisfy yourself even for a time.

There may be those whose inspiration needs no afterthought; who can dash off poems with a perfection that would make revision as superfluous as an attempt to paint the sky blue. But I have met no such super-gifted persons, and have seen no evidence that they ever existed; on the contrary, I have observed proof of the meticulous and often radical revisions made by many, including Milton, Gray, Coleridge, Tennyson, Browning, Swinburne, Fitzgerald and others. Possibly now and then a poem does spring forth full-fledged, like fabled Minerva from the head of Jove; I can even testify from experience that this does occur, though I make no claim as to the quality of the product. But this is the rare exception; usually the poet must labor with a chisel. After all, the words of the English language are so many, their combinations so innumerable, the shades and nuances of thought so varied, and the possibilities of technical adjustments and figurative embellishments so rich! Surely, only by a rare intuitive stroke could a poet immediately pick the truest and best phrasing! The original impulse, which may be too urgent to allow the writer to debate with himself over the sound of a syllable or the choice of an adjective before the thought has been caught on paper, would not be well-served if the poet strove for instant perfection. Let the essence of the poem be caged in words before its fragile and delicate substance vanishes; then let the details be strengthened, rearranged, and purified.

To be sure, I may smile now to recall how zealously I toiled to improve lines that not even the genius of a Milton could have redeemed from the waste basket. I may smile, also, to think of the epic in heroic couplets, which, sometime during my High School days, I started to confide to a notebook; it had a fabulous Spenserian theme, as allegorical as _The Faerie Queene_, and eventually met its deserts, and was lost to sight. Similarly, I may smile to think of the still longer poem on which I embarked somewhat later, under the egregious title, _The Key to the Universe_--which will doubtless sound as funny to the reader as it does to me today, though it was not actually so presumptuous as the wording might indicate. I really did not imagine that I had the key to the universe; on the contrary, I was impressed then, as today, by the fathomless and awesome mystery of all created things; and in pursuance of this feeling of wonder and bewilderment, the poem dealt with a man who merely _sought_ the objective mentioned in the title. I recall that I wrote this would-be masterpiece during one of my summer school vacations: in the heat of the Stockton days, when 100 degrees in the shade was not unusual, creative work was impossible; and therefore, in order to find the necessary coolness as well as uninterrupted quiet, I would go at about seven every morning to my father’s office on the fifth floor of a downtown building, where I would be undisturbed until his arrival at eight-thirty or nine--at which time, creation would end. But by then I had ordinarily completed about fifty lines of blank verse, which I would revise later in the day.

So far as I am aware, no eyes but mine have ever glanced at _The Key to the Universe_, which occupied me all of one summer. It was not that I was exceptionally secretive; it was that I had discovered that few people in this matter-of-fact world, even among those closest to one, are interested in seeing poems, and especially long poems, unless out of curiosity, or because they are impressed by something quite apart from the work itself, such as the prospect of gain, or the trailing effulgence of some chance honor. Like everyone, I want to have my work read and appreciated; but in my later years, as in my earlier, I have found the writing of poetry a lonely, a very lonely task; in my later years, as in my earlier, I have never shown my work to anyone who did not ask to see it (my wife and editors alone excepted); and it rarely happens that anyone does ask to see it.

When just under seventeen, I saw the first glimmerings of what looked to me like success. I say “looked” like success, for appearances are more illusory than I, in my juvenile ardor, could have realized. An essay in rhymed couplets, entered in a state-wide contest for High School students, won me a free trip to the Yosemite Valley (a trip which, for reasons I need not enter into here, I was unable to take); and this was the more extraordinary since I had never seen the Yosemite, although I wrote in glowing terms about “this masterpiece of nature’s art.” The prize-winning offering, so far as I can recall it, was an execrable concoction in which words like “grand,” “superb,” “majestic,” “splendid,” and “magnificent” took the place of poetry; but I was elated at the recognition, and did not realize that recognition of itself is a bubble, prizes are bubbles, and are apt in the end to mock you, unless your work itself is good--in which case you need no prizes.

Nevertheless, that prize did give a spur to my spirits and at the same time it offered my father and others about me their first faint hope that perhaps after all the young scapegrace of a poet was not altogether a squanderer of time. But I doubt whether it had any more effect than an April shower upon my future.

This was, indeed, the only encouragement I was to have for a long, long time. Instead, I took my tuition in the form of slaps in the face. One of the hardest came during my second year in college, when for the first time I did meet a real poet--Leonard Bacon, a tall, waggish reed of a man, then much less known than later, though he had some real poetry to his name, and was available where you could actually see and talk with him; in fact, he was a member of the staff of the English Department. Even if he was no older and no more bearded than my one-time acquaintance Mr. Spring (or Springer), I had by now lost some of my romantic ideas as to the required looks of poets. What I did have was a high aspiration to enter Bacon’s class in verse-writing, a class limited to fifteen members. With unabashed temerity, I submitted what I regarded as my best poems--in all probability, my most bombastic; and confidently awaited the word of the great man. In due time, this word came--and like unexpected thunder, it left me stunned. I was refused! This in itself would have been devastating enough; but still worse was Mr. Bacon’s comment when he returned my manuscripts. “If you want to write soporifics for the entertainment of your friends, by all means go on. Otherwise, I’d advise you to turn to some other line of work.”

This advice, like much other good counsel I have received, was not taken; and a time was to come, as we shall see, when Mr. Bacon would soften his verdict. Looking back today, however, I cannot doubt that his opinion was justified by the possibly facile but quite unillumined verses I had submitted. But at the time, his decree pounded me like a sledgehammer. Had it not been that even sledgehammers could not break my tie to poetry, I might truly have turned to some less difficult subject, like mathematics or astrophysics.

Other blows also were in store for me. In the beginning, I had written just in order to write--in order to fulfill some vague and nameless but powerful impulse, which caused me to take strange satisfaction in smooth-flowing words and lines and in the rhythmical expression of the thoughts surging over me. To write was enough! The possible fate of the output was something I did not even consider. But in time a new element was to be injected. And the date, as nearly as I can place it, was sometime after my eighteenth birthday.

At the beginning of the second semester of my second college year, a great change came into my life. To an outsider, the difference would have seemed a routine one; yet it was as if the fabled magic carpet had taken me to new continents on that day when I left my uncle and aunt in Oakland, and came to live in Berkeley, where I shared a room and sleeping porch with my cousin Stanley. Stanley, a clever and kindly youth about three and a half years my senior (now a lawyer in Los Angeles) had something of a penchant for leadership; and one of the ways in which this penchant manifested itself was in connection with my poetry. Now I have no reason to suppose that he had then, or at any time, any interest whatever in poetry as such; but he did show an interest in _my_ poetry, at least to the extent of trying to market it. What he did was to constitute himself, in a sense, my literary agent, though I doubt if either of us had ever heard this term. I typed out the poems (having just received from my father the gift of a reconditioned typewriter, for which I was more grateful than if it had been the wealth of Croesus). And Stanley compiled a list of periodicals, and sent my none-too-skillful typescripts to most of the leaders of the day: the _Atlantic_, _Scribners_, _Harpers_, the _Century_, the _North American Review_, the _Forum_, and other magazines, many of them now long departed from this mortal life.

With the publication fever thus aroused, I eagerly awaited the results. Poor deluded hopeful! I did not yet know that even with the most accomplished work, and the arduous labors of a practiced hand, the road to editorial favor is often long, sinuous, and spiny. And with verse as amateurish as mine--well, the outcome was inevitable. When my treasures started coming back, I was disappointed, and disappointed again, and disappointed once more, and so on and on, scores of times. I could not believe that the editors, _all editors_, were too shortsighted to see the merits so luminously evident to me. To be sure, their printed slips were invariably worded politely: they “had had pleasure in reading the submissions,” rejection “did not necessarily imply any lack of merit,” and the author was thanked for “his courtesy” in permitting the editors to turn down his work. Sometimes the rejection slips even invited further submissions--with the result that I would acquire duplicate slips, soliciting still further submissions. But not a single penned or pencilled line suggested that editors were human! I began to doubt if they were.

What Stanley thought of the debacle I do not know; in the end, when he saw that his efforts brought nothing but a waste of time and postage stamps, he probably told himself that his verse-writing cousin would do well to cease his scribblings and settle down to some good, solid occupation, like that of a schoolteacher or a filing clerk.

Still, to my own way of thinking, the score was not quite absolute zero. One of the final submissions did bring me a ray of hope. No, more than a ray! a blaze! The poems, submitted to a Boston literary magazine, came back exactly in the way of their predecessors, but this was not because they were not good--oh, not at all, said the glowing letter that accompanied them, on an imposing letterhead, with a subheading that particularly impressed me, _Books in Belles Lettres_. The return of my “splendid poems” was greatly regretted by Mr. Scottfield, the editor, and was due only to the unhappy fact that he was overstocked. However, if I had poems enough to make a book, he would be glad to recommend the manuscript to the consideration of the other editors associated with him in The Poet-Craft Publishing Company.

The fact that I had never heard before of the Poet-Craft Publishing Company made no difference whatever. I pictured it as an immense concern, occupying the whole of some noble building in downtown Boston, where a learned knot of editors and scores of able assistants were devoted to the uplifting task of giving poetry to the world.

Riding cloud-high on the wings of such thoughts, I let my eyes range again and again over those magical lines. If I had poems enough to make a book! To think that my work was wanted by that great publishing house, the Poet-Craft Company! So then all the editors who had returned my work had been wrong! Of course! I had known that from the beginning! And now those eminent authorities at Poet-Craft would prove it by publishing my book! That they actually would publish it I did not doubt--all that was necessary was for me to pick out my best, and send them to Mr. Scottfield.

Having dispatched the manuscript, which contained most of the poems that Stanley had sent out with such unanimous lack of success, I could hardly wait for the letter that would tell me when Mr. Scottfield would publish the book. But the suspense was not to be long, considering that there were no air mails in those days. Hardly two weeks had passed before the postman delivered a long blue envelope whose upper left-hand corner bore that enchanted inscription, _The Poet-Craft Publishing Company_. My fingers trembled as, during that breathless instant, I tore open the envelope.

The first lines brought me a thrill: Mr. Scottfield was “delighted” with my poems! His fellow editors agreed with him in recommending publication. The book would be printed on a “special laid paper” and bound in “antique boards.” (I had, to be sure, no idea what laid paper or antique boards might be, but they sounded magnificent.) A publication date could be set almost immediately, and I would have proofs in a few weeks, dependent, however, upon one small condition.

By the time I had read this far, my pulse was beating fast, but my heart was beginning to sink. The “one small condition” did not look small to me: it was that I must forward to Mr. Scottfield “the nominal sum of $575.”

He might as well have asked “the nominal sum” of five hundred and seventy-five millions. Not that I would not have paid the money, and eagerly, if I had had it; but in my impecunious student’s life, in which a dollar looked as large as a pumpkin, an item of five or six hundred dollars surpassed my wildest dreams of wealth. Some fantastic ideas did, indeed, flit through my head: I might borrow the money. But nobody whom I knew had that much money to lend, except possibly a certain uncle, who ran a retail clothing store and was regarded as the rich man of the family. However, he was not known to be so free-handed as to throw money away (which, I had just sense enough to realize, would be how he would look upon the proposed investment). No, I had nowhere to turn, nowhere at all! I must give up the dream--my book would never be published, on laid paper and with antique boards, by that distinguished concern, the Poet-Craft Publishing Company!

Little did I realize the shoals I was avoiding! I have often thought how unfortunate it would have been if some obliging relative, with more money than literary judgment, had come forward to provide Mr. Scottfield with the requested sum. Surely, it would not have been easy to live down the appearance between boards (even antique boards!) of the _juvenilia_ that I regarded as poetry.

CHAPTER
THREE

Incentives and Lucky Shots

Curious notions have taken root in some minds as to the poet’s aims and ambitions. Most people do not, indeed, have the illusion that the average verse-writer expects to get rich--no, poets are still popularly associated with rags and garrets. On the other hand, it is often assumed that the poet goes about trailing after glittering spangles of immortal glory, eager to forfeit the bread of today for the fame of a posthumous tomorrow. There may, for all I know, be poets with such super-mundane ideas, but I am not aware of having met any, though I do remember one well-known rhymester who modestly hoped that some small sheaf of all his writings would be read a hundred years after he died; while I have seen others, like Mr. Spring or Springer, whose sense of present frustration has led them to dream of a golden post-mortem renown.

To me the important thing has always been the work itself; I have always found something a little ridiculous, not to say amusing, in the man who pictures himself dancing a splendid rigadoon before the eyes of posterity. Posterity doubtless will have its own interests and preoccupations; and if it has a small amount of time to spare for any of us now alive, that will be exclusively its own concern, since presumably we will no longer know or care. This does not mean that the poet does not wish his work to be read and appreciated. Of course he does! Its very purpose in being is to be read and appreciated; and, besides, the greater the attention given to any of his poems, the easier the path for his subsequent work.

It may seem strange, but if you were to ask me why I have written verse--and this applies to my latest no less than to my earliest--the most accurate answer I could give would be, “For the joy of creation.” Yes, for that same joy in creation which the sculptor finds in carving a bust, the composer in constructing a sonata, or the architect in designing a monument. There is not only the satisfaction which any artist takes in the completed product; there is the glow, the passion, the ecstasy of composition, in which one virtually enters a different sphere of being.

There are, it seems to me, two levels on which rhymes may be put together or other writings produced: the first, the same superficial level that suffices for ordinary activities, may be adequate for a jingle in which the chief feat is the rhyming of “house” with “mouse.” But this level, apparently the only one ever reached by many rhymesters, is not the fountainhead of poetry or of any inspired writing. The spirit of the writer, amid the absorption of composition, is withdrawn from the world; it is as if a veil had been pulled down between it and mundane concerns and it had sunk into some realm of deeper apprehension in which the facts of ordinary existence are screened from view, while it draws upon insights and intuitions, sources of knowledge and facilities of invention foreign to its everyday experience. Literally, it is as if the creator has entered into a trance--a trance in which thoughts and images and even completed expressions may flash before him with a speed, a vividness, and an aptness impossible on the ordinary plane of consciousness.

In such a trance, moreover, his awareness of the external world may be blunted or disconnected. Just how deep this creative isolation may be, and how it may literally switch one off from contact with common affairs, may be illustrated by an incident of many years ago. Late one afternoon I was in my third-floor New York apartment, composing a poem, and in the midst of the creative effort I was vaguely aware of a thumping noise from outside, followed by a confusion of sounds. But these came to me remotely, and as if from far away, and I went on uninterruptedly with the poem, while the sounds gradually died down. Not until the next day did I learn that our janitor, trying to get into the fifth-floor window of an apartment not far from mine, had fallen to the cement court, and been killed.

I do not mean to imply that one’s absorption is always as deep as this, although it is ordinarily so intense that the buzzing of a doorbell, the clanging of the telephone, or even the entry of another person into the room will come as a shock, after which it will be difficult and in some cases impossible to return to the creative mood. But the state of creation, when not unnaturally interrupted, is an experience from which one may emerge with something like rapture, the sense of having touched the fringes of heaven and been brushed by angels’ wings. Maybe it is all only a sort of drugging effect, like that of opium or hashish; but it has always been my view that only during creation is one most alive, most able to reach out to the full length and depth of one’s own personality.

Behind the imperfect offerings of youth, as behind the skilled productions of maturity, the same overmastering creative spirit may lie. Let me give an example. One day, during the early years of the First World War, I was idling over a college textbook, when for some reason my thoughts were diverted to the innumerable war dead. Immediately the book was forgotten; in a trance-like detachment, I seemed to see the disembodied warriors moving protestingly in uncountable legions across a stormy sky. And out of this vision, a sonnet had birth. I quote the opening lines:

I saw an army of the newly dead
Come stalking by like clouds before the blast.
More numerous than autumn leaves they passed,
With War, their slayer, marching at their head.

The impulse behind this was real, quite as much so as if the poem had been more accomplished. In later years, I would have known better than to have presented the picture so starkly and obviously; I would have recognized that mention of “the newly dead” and of “War, their slayer” was superfluous; I would have tried to think of a more original image than “autumn leaves”; and I would have concentrated more on the picture, from which the reader would more powerfully have received the intended dread impression. But these are matters of technique, which come with study and practice.

In my Junior year in college, I was honored with the privilege I had previously sought in vain: admission into Leonard Bacon’s verse-writing class. Sometimes I have wondered at the temerity that led me to try again, after having been so signally rebuffed; and I have also wondered whether my acceptance was not due to something extraneous: the fact that the members of my class, aside from myself, consisted of two males and twelve females--not that I suspect Mr. Bacon of any prejudice against the distaff side, merely that I suppose that he had a sense of proportion, or of disproportion.

Now, in any case, I was in! And being in, I received, for the first time, some schooling in verse-writing. I also met, for the first time, another youth with whom to discuss poetry--a genial, raw-boned Scotsman named MacMorrow, with whom my acquaintance was to be unhappily brief: not long afterwards, he left to be a volunteer ambulance driver in the European War, and neither I, nor any of my fellows, so far as I know, ever had word from him again. I have always hoped that he remained something more than a ghost.

As for the instructor--the tall, angular Leonard Bacon, perpetually working his mobile face into contortions, perpetually bubbling over with ideas, was interesting not only as a poet and teacher but as a man. Later, when under his guidance I wrote my Master’s thesis on _The Poetic Revival in America_, I was to know him somewhat better; but for the present he was redeeming himself in my eyes for that insulting rejection of my work a year earlier; at the semester’s end, he expressed the idea that “if I worked like the devil”--the words may not be precisely his, but the thought is--I “might possibly be able to get somewhere.”

If there be any down-looking powers with eyes for us poor versifying mortals, they know that I assuredly _have_ worked, though perhaps not exactly “like the devil”; but whether I have been able to “get somewhere”--ah, that is another matter entirely!

I am sure that Mr. Bacon would not have conceded that I had gotten anywhere at all at the time when the first magazines wasted good space on my rhymes. The earliest of them all was a small Eastern religious sheet, which a preacher of my acquaintance had recommended; I have forgotten its name, but let us call it _The Biblical Visitor_. Lo and behold, one day I received several free copies (I had, of course, never even thought of the possibility of other compensation), and had the charming experience of seeing my own name beneath a beautifully framed poem, under whose title I read the surprising line, “Written especially for _The Biblical Visitor_.” Of course, it had _not_ been written especially for _The Biblical Visitor_, whose very existence had been unknown to me at the time of composition! But little difference that made to the budding author who stood there bemused before the sight of his own words and his own name in print. Ah, never again in all later life that same pure rapturous joy!

To be sure, the world went on its accustomed way, quite as if nothing revolutionary had happened. The sun shone just about as usual, and the birds twittering in the trees seemed to have no idea at all of the great transformation. The doors of fame, which I saw just faintly beginning to sway on their hinges, were visible to me alone.

My next published poems, likewise, seemed to make no indentation at all on the stolid world. They appeared in the college monthly, _The Occident_, though not before I had reached my Senior year. And never think that this did not strike me as an accomplishment; more than a few of my previous offerings had entered the doors of that august publication, from which they had ignominiously made the return journey to my drawer. Not one, however, but a whole succession of my verses did take up space in _The Occident_ under the editorship of Genevieve Taggart--then an engagingly lovely, animated creature, looking every inch the poetess that she was.

But fame, as represented by a gateway to Parnassus such as _The Occident_, had its pangs as well as its satisfactions. I remember one particular pang, when one of my sonnets made its bow beneath a byline such as “Jenny J. Robinson,” while--crowning insult!--my own byline was appended to a poem that was not mine at all. Knowing what I do today of the printing process, I realize that this could have been due to the mere transposition of two lines of type; but at that time, I did not understand. I was desolated. I felt disgraced, then and forever. The worst was not to have my poem accredited to Jenny J. Robinson; the worst was to have _her_ poem ascribed to me. It was like seeing somebody else introduced as yourself. Not that Miss Robinson’s poem was any worse than mine; it may have been much the better of the two; and I have no doubt that she felt equally aggrieved.

But having long ago lived down this disaster, I have learned that sadder confusions and surprises await the adventurer along literary byways. I had quite forgotten this unhappiness when, a year or two later, the high gods of Olympus stooped down to bless me. Ending the long, long run of rejections from the larger publications, the New York _Times_ accepted _To A German War Helmet_--a bit of blank verse which, beginning “Ironic censor of the ways of men!”, expressed something of the revulsion always aroused in me by everything connected with war. And not only did the _Times_ give space to my creation; a still greater surprise awaited me. One evening, thumbing over the magazines at a newsstand in the Ferry Building in San Francisco, I opened the pages of _Current Opinion_ to the section devoted to reprints of poetry. And there--wonder of wonders!--I saw my own name! My own poem from the _Times_! I could hardly believe it. The same poem in two national publications! I had ascended the pinnacles!

True, there was a slight fly in the ointment. The proofreaders for _Current Opinion_ had been a little careless, and the phrase “Who was this man?” had become “Why was this man?” This was by no means the last typographical error I was to suffer from, nor the worst, but it did rub a bit of the bloom from that miraculous discovery.

At about the same time, an even sweeter whiff of success blew to my nostrils. Shortly after the Armistice of November 11, 1918, the San Francisco _Chronicle_ offered a number of prizes for poems on peace, and I made several submissions, including a quatrain on _The Day That Brought Peace_, the idea of which had come to me on a sudden one noon when I was having a solitary lunch at a Berkeley cafeteria:

Blest is this day, past any other day
The world has ever seen; yet must we pray
The world hereafter may so blesséd be
Never another day like this to see.

If I were writing this today, I should try to avoid the inversions in sentence structure, particularly in the last two lines. But inversions or no inversions, I did not think much of the quatrain when I wrote it, particularly as it had taken me only about five minutes to compose it; I merely happened to add it to my other entries because it could travel conveniently in the same envelope. Picture, then, my surprise a few weeks later, when a letter from the _Chronicle_ informed me that _The Day That Brought Peace_ had won the third prize of twenty-five dollars in the Peace Poem Contest!

This, surely, was but one of the lucky flukes that sometimes influence a career. The first result, though perhaps not the greatest, was that it enabled me, after some personal solicitation, to obtain work reviewing books for a long-established San Francisco weekly, _The Argonaut_. And this work put me in touch with many new books in the realm of poetry. One such was Amy Lowell’s _Tendencies in Modern American Poetry_, one of the first symbols of the revolt that was to turn poetry in America upside down; still another was John G. Neihardt’s engrossing rhymed narrative, _The Song of Three Friends_; and a third was a volume of verses by Ezra Pound, my first acquaintance with this writer, from which I formed the impressions that subsequent experience was to confirm: that here was merely a poseur, a pseudo-sophisticate, an exhibitionist whose interest was not in poetry but in self-display.

Another effect of that four-line lucky shot in the _Chronicle_ was an event of the sort supposed to happen only in fiction. One day a letter reached me from the San Francisco _Examiner_, bearing the signature of its managing editor, Edmond D. Coblentz (no relation of mine, despite his name). He mentioned the poem in the _Chronicle_, and stated that if I should drop into his office sometime when I happened to be in the vicinity, he would be pleased to meet me.

Needless to say, it was not long before I “happened to be” in the vicinity. But when I stepped in to visit Mr. Coblentz, it was with more trepidation than joy. I was greeted by a round-faced middle-aged man, more than half bald, with a genial smile and a rather business-like manner; he was something of a legend in the city, and was much liked by his associates, among whom he was familiarly known as “Cobby.” He received me pleasantly, and after a brief talk, asked my plans and purposes upon my graduation from college. I acknowledged that my plans and purposes were a little hazy, except that I intended to follow a writing career after getting my Master’s degree in English at the Summer Session at Berkeley. Meanwhile, however, some of my relations were trying to induce me to take up teaching as a means of support, but the idea fired me with no great eagerness.

“Cobby” smiled.

“Well, you go on, finish your schooling--get your degree,” he advised. “Then, if you’re looking for a job, step in here again--we’ll see what we can do for you.”

The telephone rang; he snapped up the receiver, and mumbled into it. Someone came in with a rush, and slapped a paper down on his desk. Through the half-open door, the city editor could be heard bawling at a reporter. “Cobby” had barely put down the receiver when the telephone started clanging again. I could do no more than snatch at his hand, mutter a word of thanks, and leave.

But I left in a dazed and altered world. The walls about me were reeling; flashes of unexpected brilliance dazzled my eyes.

CHAPTER
FOUR

A Tale of Two Eyes

While I was still at college, a situation arose which would affect my whole life, and would cast its reflections across my writing and particularly over my poetry. It is something that I hesitate to speak of, as I tend to squirm at recitals of personal ailments, in which there may be an element either of morbidness or of self-pity, if not of both. However, in this case the facts must be told if the story is to be kept in perspective. While in most ways I have been blessed with excellent health all my life, in one respect the record has been less than perfect: with regard to my eyes. Indeed, the facts have, I can say without exaggeration, been unusual.