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Title: Joyce Kilmer: poems, essays and letters in two volumes. Volume 2, prose works
Author: Kilmer, Joyce
Language: English
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*** Start of this Doctrine Publishing Corporation Digital Book "Joyce Kilmer: poems, essays and letters in two volumes. Volume 2, prose works" ***
LETTERS IN TWO VOLUMES. VOLUME 2, PROSE WORKS ***
Transcriber’s Note: Italic text is enclosed in _underscores_.
Additional notes will be found near the end of this ebook.
JOYCE KILMER
POEMS, ESSAYS
AND LETTERS
IN TWO VOLUMES
VOLUME TWO: PROSE WORKS
[Illustration:
SERGEANT JOYCE KILMER
165TH INFANTRY (69TH NEW YORK),
A. E. F., FRANCE, MAY, 1918
]
JOYCE KILMER
EDITED WITH A MEMOIR
BY ROBERT CORTES HOLLIDAY
VOLUME TWO
PROSE WORKS
NEW YORK
GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY
Copyright, 1914, 1917, 1918
By George H. Doran Company
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
CONTENTS--VOLUME TWO
PAGE
ESSAYS
HOLY IRELAND 11
THE GENTLE ART OF CHRISTMAS GIVING 26
A BOUQUET FOR JENNY 39
THE INEFFICIENT LIBRARY 49
THE POETRY OF HILAIRE BELLOC 62
THE CATHOLIC POETS OF BELGIUM 78
LETTERS
TO CHARLES WILLIS THOMPSON 101
TO SHAEMAS O’SHEEL 101
TO LOUIS BEVIER, JR. 103
TO SARA TEASDALE FILSINGER 104
TO KATHERINE BRÉGY 105
TO AMELIA JOSEPHINE BURR 107
TO HOWARD W. COOK 108
TO THOMAS WALSH 111
TO ROBERT CORTES HOLLIDAY 114
TO REVEREND EDWARD F. GARESCHÉ, S.J. 116
TO REVEREND JAMES J. DALY, S.J. 119
TO HIS MOTHER 144
TO KENTON KILMER 163
TO DEBORAH KILMER 165
TO HIS WIFE 166
MISCELLANEOUS PIECES
A BALLAD OF NEW SINS 227
WAR SONGS 230
“TRY A TIN TO-DAY:” A SHORT STORY 233
SOME MISCHIEF STILL: A PLAY IN ONE ACT 252
ILLUSTRATIONS
SERGEANT JOYCE KILMER _Frontispiece_
PAGE
JOYCE KILMER, AGE 5 120
JOYCE KILMER’S GRAVE 222
ESSAYS
HOLY IRELAND
We had hiked seventeen miles that stormy December day--the third of a
four days’ journey. The snow was piled high on our packs, our rifles
were crusted with ice, the leather of our hob-nailed boots was frozen
stiff over our lamed feet. The weary lieutenant led us to the door of a
little house in a side street.
“Next twelve men,” he said. A dozen of us dropped out of the ranks and
dragged ourselves over the threshold. We tracked snow and mud over a
spotless stone floor. Before an open fire stood Madame and the three
children--a girl of eight years, a boy of five, a boy of three. They
stared with round frightened eyes at _les soldats Americains_, the
first they had ever seen. We were too tired to stare back. We at once
climbed to the chill attic, our billet, our lodging for the night.
First we lifted the packs from one another’s aching shoulders; then,
without spreading our blankets, we lay down on the bare boards.
For ten minutes there was silence, broken by an occasional groan, an
oath, the striking of a match. Cigarettes glowed like fireflies in a
forest. Then a voice came from the corner.
“Where is Sergeant Reilly?” it said. We lazily searched. There was no
Sergeant Reilly to be found.
“I’ll bet the old bum has gone out after a pint,” said the voice. And
with the curiosity of the American and the enthusiasm of the Irish we
lumbered downstairs in quest of Sergeant Reilly.
He was sitting on a low bench by the fire. His shoes were off and his
bruised feet were in a pail of cold water. He was too good a soldier to
expose them to the heat at once. The little girl was on his lap and the
little boys stood by and envied him. And in a voice that twenty years
of soldiering and oceans of whisky had failed to rob of its Celtic
sweetness, he was softly singing “Ireland isn’t Ireland any more.” We
listened respectfully.
“They cheer the King and then salute him,” said Sergeant Reilly.
“A regular Irishman would shoot him,” and we all joined in the chorus,
“Ireland isn’t Ireland any more.”
“Ooh, la, la!” exclaimed Madame, and she and all the children began to
talk at the top of their voices. What they said Heaven knows, but the
tones were friendly, even admiring.
“Gentlemen,” said Sergeant Reilly from his post of honor, “the lady who
runs this billet is a very nice lady indeed. She says yez can all take
off your shoes and dry your socks by the fire. But take turns and don’t
crowd or I’ll trun yez all upstairs.”
Now Madame, a woman of some forty years, was a true _bourgeoise_, with
all the thrift of her class. And by the terms of her agreement with the
authorities she was required to let the soldiers have for one night the
attic of her house to sleep in--nothing more; no light, no heat. Also,
wood is very expensive in France--for reasons that are engraven in
letters of blood on the pages of history. Nevertheless--
“Assez-vous, s’il vous plait,” said Madame. And she brought nearer to
the fire all the chairs the establishment possessed and some chests and
boxes to be used as seats. And she and the little girl, whose name was
Solange, went out into the snow and came back with heaping armfuls of
small logs. The fire blazed merrily--more merrily than it had blazed
since August, 1914, perhaps. We surrounded it, and soon the air was
thick with steam from our drying socks.
Meanwhile Madame and the Sergeant had generously admitted all eleven
of us into their conversation. A spirited conversation it was, too, in
spite of the fact that she knew no English and the extent of his French
was “du pain,” “du vin,” “cognac” and “bon jour.” Those of us who knew
a little more of the language of the country acted as interpreters for
the others. We learned the names of the children and their ages. We
learned that our hostess was a widow. Her husband had fallen in battle
just one month before our arrival in her home. She showed us with
simple pride and affection and restrained grief his picture. Then she
showed us those of her two brothers--one now fighting at Salonica, the
other a prisoner of war--of her mother and father, of herself dressed
for First Communion.
This last picture she showed somewhat shyly, as if doubting that we
would understand it. But when one of us asked in halting French if
Solange, her little daughter, had yet made her First Communion, then
Madame’s face cleared.
“Mais oui!” she exclaimed. “Et vous, ma foi, vous etes Catholiques,
n’est-ce pas?”
At once rosary beads were flourished to prove our right to answer this
question affirmatively. Tattered prayer-books and somewhat dingy
scapulars were brought to light. Madame and the children chattered
their surprise and delight to each other, and every exhibit called for
a new outburst.
“Ah, le bon S. Benoit! Ah, voilà, le Conception Immacule! Ooh la la, le
Sacre Coeur!” (which last exclamation sounded in no wise as irreverent
as it looks in print).
Now other treasures, too, were shown--treasures chiefly photographic.
There were family groups, there were Coney Island snapshots. And Madame
and the children were a gratifyingly appreciative audience. They
admired and sympathized; they exclaimed appropriately at the beauty
of every girl’s face, the tenderness of every pictured mother. We had
become the intimates of Madame. She had admitted us into her family and
we her into ours.
Soldiers--American soldiers of Irish descent--have souls and hearts.
These organs (if the soul may be so termed) had been satisfied. But
our stomachs remained--and that they yearned was evident to us. We had
made our hike on a meal of hardtack and “corned willy.” Mess call would
sound soon. Should we force our wet shoes on again and plod through
the snowy streets to the temporary mess-shack? We knew our supply
wagons had not succeeded in climbing the last hill into town, and that
therefore bread and unsweetened coffee would be our portion. A great
depression settled upon us.
But Sergeant Reilly rose to the occasion.
“Boys,” he said, “this here lady has got a good fire going, and I’ll
bet she can cook. What do you say we get her to fix us up a meal?”
The proposal was received joyously at first. Then someone said:
“But I haven’t got any money.” “Neither have I--not a damn sou!” said
another. And again the spiritual temperature of the room fell.
Again Sergeant Reilly spoke:
“I haven’t got any money to speak of, meself,” he said. “But let’s have
a show-down. I guess we’ve got enough to buy somethin’ to eat.”
It was long after pay-day, and we were not hopeful of the results of
the search. But the wealthy (that is, those who had two francs) made
up for the poor (that is, those who had two sous). And among the coins
on the table I noticed an American dime, an English half-crown and a
Chinese piece with a square hole in the center. In negotiable tender
the money came in all to eight francs.
It takes more money than that to feed twelve hungry soldiers these
days in France. But there was no harm in trying. So an ex-seminarian,
an ex-bookkeeper and an ex-street-car conductor aided Sergeant Reilly
in explaining in French that had both a brogue and a Yankee twang that
we were hungry, that this was all the money we had in the world, and
that we wanted her to cook us something to eat.
Now Madame was what they call in New England a “capable” woman. In a
jiffy she had the money in Solange’s hand and had that admirable child
cloaked and wooden-shod for the street, and fully informed as to what
she was to buy. What Madame and the children had intended to have for
supper I do not know, for there was nothing in the kitchen but the
fire, the stove, the table, some shelves of dishes and an enormous bed.
Nothing in the way of a food cupboard could be seen. And the only other
room of the house was the bare attic.
When Solange came back she carried in a basket bigger than herself
these articles: 1, two loaves of war-bread; 2, five bottles of red
wine; 3, three cheeses; 4, numerous potatoes; 5, a lump of fat; 6, a
bag of coffee. The whole represented, as was afterward demonstrated,
exactly the sum of ten francs, fifty centimes.
Well, we all set to work peeling potatoes. Then, with a veritable
French trench-knife Madame cut the potatoes into long strips. Meanwhile
Solange had put the lump of fat into the big black pot that hung by a
chain over the fire. In the boiling grease the potatoes were placed,
Madame standing by with a big ladle punched full of holes (I regret
that I do not know the technical name for this instrument) and keeping
the potato-strips swimming, zealously frustrating any attempt on their
part to lie lazily at the bottom of the pot.
We forgot all about the hike as we sat at supper that evening. The
only absentees were the two little boys, Michel and Paul. And they
were really absent only from our board--they were in the room, in the
great built-in bed that was later to hold also Madame and Solange.
Their little bodies were covered by the three-foot thick mattress-like
red silk quilt, but their tousled heads protruded and they watched us
unblinkingly all the evening.
But just as we sat down, before Sergeant Reilly began his task of
dishing out the potatoes and starting the bottles on their way, Madame
stopped her chattering and looked at Solange. And Solange stopped
her chattering and looked at Madame. And they both looked rather
searchingly at us. We didn’t know what was the matter, but we felt
rather embarrassed.
Then Madame began to talk, slowly and loudly, as one talks to make
foreigners understand. And the gist of her remarks was that she was
surprised to see that American Catholics did not say grace before
eating like French Catholics.
We sprang to our feet at once. But it was not Sergeant Reilly who saved
the situation. Instead, the ex-seminarian (he is only temporarily an
ex-seminarian, he’ll be preaching missions and giving retreats yet if
a bit of shrapnel doesn’t hasten his journey to Heaven) said, after
we had blessed ourselves: “Benedicite: nos et quae sumus sumpturi
benedicat Deus, Pater et Filius et Spiritus Sanctus. Amen.”
Madame and Solange, obviously relieved, joined us in the Amen, and we
sat down again to eat.
It was a memorable feast. There was not much conversation--except on
the part of Madame and Solange--but there was plenty of good cheer.
Also there was enough cheese and bread and wine and potatoes for all of
us--half starved as we were when we sat down. Even big Considine, who
drains a can of condensed milk at a gulp and has been known to eat an
apple pie without stopping to take breath, was satisfied. There were
toasts, also, all proposed by Sergeant Reilly--toasts to Madame, and
to the children, and to France, and to the United States, and to the
Old Grey Mare (this last toast having an esoteric significance apparent
only to _illuminati_ of Sergeant Reilly’s circle).
The table cleared and the “agimus tibi gratias” duly said, we sat
before the fire, most of us on the floor. We were warm and happy and
full of good food and good wine. I spied a slip of paper on the floor
by Solange’s foot and unashamedly read it. It was an accounting for the
evening’s expenditures--totaling exactly ten francs and fifty centimes.
Now when soldiers are unhappy--during a long, hard hike, for
instance--they sing to keep up their spirits. And when they are happy,
as on the evening now under consideration, they sing to express their
satisfaction with life. We sang “Sweet Rosie O’Grady.” We shook the
kitchen-bedroom with the echoes of “Take Me Back to New York Town.” We
informed Madame, Solange, Paul, Michel, in fact, the whole village,
that we had never been a wanderer and that we longed for our Indiana
home. We grew sentimental over “Mother Machree.” And Sergeant Reilly
obliged with a reel--in his socks--to an accompaniment of whistling
and hand-clapping.
Now, it was our hostess’s turn to entertain. We intimated as much. She
responded, first by much talk, much consultation with Solange, and
finally by going to one of the shelves that held the pans and taking
down some paper-covered books.
There was more consultation, whispered this time, and much turning of
pages. Then, after some preliminary coughing and humming, the music
began--the woman’s rich alto blending with the child’s shrill but sweet
notes. And what they sang was “Tantum ergo Sacramentum.”
Why she should have thought that an appropriate song to offer this
company of rough soldiers from a distant land I do not know. And why
we found it appropriate it is harder still to say. But it did seem
appropriate to all of us--to Sergeant Reilly, to Jim (who used to drive
a truck), to Larry (who sold cigars), to Frank (who tended a bar on
Fourteenth Street). It seemed, for some reason, eminently fitting. Not
one of us then or later expressed any surprise that this hymn, familiar
to most of us since our mothers first led us to the Parish Church down
the pavements of New York or across the Irish hills, should be sung to
us in this strange land and in these strange circumstances.
Since the gracious Latin of the Church was in order and since the
season was appropriate, one of us suggested “Adeste Fideles” for
the next item on the evening’s program. Madame and Solange and our
ex-seminarian knew all the words and the rest of us came in strong with
“Venite, adoremus Dominum.”
Then, as if to show that piety and mirth may live together, the ladies
obliged with “Au Clair de la Lune” and other simple ballads of old
France. And after taps had sounded in the street outside our door, and
there was yawning, and wrist-watches were being scanned, the evening’s
entertainment ended, by general consent, with patriotic selections.
We sang--as best we could--the _Star Spangled Banner_, Solange and
her mother humming the air and applauding at the conclusion. Then we
attempted _La Marseillaise_. Of course we did not know the words.
Solange came to our rescue with two little pamphlets containing the
song, so we looked over each other’s shoulders and got to work in
earnest. Madame sang with us, and Solange. But during the final stanza
Madame did not sing. She leaned against the great family bedstead and
looked at us. She had taken one of the babies from under the red
comforter and held him to her breast. One of her red and toil-scarred
hands half covered his fat little back. There was a gentle dignity
about that plain, hard-working woman, that soldier’s widow--we all felt
it. And some of us saw the tears in her eyes.
There are mists, faint and beautiful and unchanging, that hang over the
green slopes of some mountains I know. I have seen them on the Irish
hills and I have seen them on the hills of France. I think that they
are made of the tears of good brave women.
Before I went to sleep that night I exchanged a few words with Sergeant
Reilly. We lay side by side on the floor, now piled with straw.
Blankets, shelter-halves, slickers and overcoats insured warm sleep.
Sergeant Reilly’s hard old face was wrapped round with his muffler. The
final cigarette of the day burned lazily in a corner of his mouth.
“That was a pretty good evening, Sarge,” I said. “We sure were in luck
when we struck this billet.”
He grunted affirmatively, then puffed in silence for a few minutes.
Then he deftly spat the cigarette into a strawless portion of the
floor, where it glowed for a few seconds before it went out.
“You said it,” he remarked. “We were in luck is right. What do you
know about that lady, anyway?”
“Why,” I answered, “I thought she treated us pretty white.”
“Joe,” said Sergeant Reilly, “do you realize how much trouble that
woman took to make this bunch of roughnecks comfortable? She didn’t
make a damn cent on that feed, you know. The kid spent all the money we
give her. And she’s out about six francs for firewood, too--I wish to
God I had the money to pay her. I bet she’ll go cold for a week now,
and hungry, too.
“And that ain’t all,” he continued, after a pause broken only by an
occasional snore from our blissful neighbours. “Look at the way she
cooked them pomme de terres and fixed things up for us and let us sit
down there with her like we was her family. And look at the way she and
the little Sallie there sung for us.
“I tell you, Joe, it makes me think of old times to hear a woman sing
them Church hymns to me that way. It’s forty years since I heard a hymn
sung in a kitchen, and it was my mother, God rest her, that sang them.
I sort of realize what we’re fighting for now, and I never did before.
It’s for women like that and their kids.
“It gave me a turn to see her a-sitting their singing them hymns. I
remembered when I was a boy in Shangolden. I wonder if there’s many
women like that in France now--telling their beads and singing the old
hymns and treating poor traveling men the way she’s just after treating
us. There used to be lots of women like that in the Old Country. And I
think that’s why it was called ‘Holy Ireland.’”
THE GENTLE ART OF CHRISTMAS GIVING
If a dentist stuck a bit of holly in his cap and went through the
streets on Christmas morning, his buzzing drill over his shoulder and
his forceps in his hand, stopping at the houses of his friends to
give their jaws free treatment, meanwhile trolling out lusty Yuletide
staves--if he were to do this, I say, it would be said of him, among
other things, that he was celebrating Christmas in a highly original
manner. Undoubtedly there would be many other adjectives applied to his
manner of generosity--adjectives applied, for instance, by the children
whom, around their gayly festooned tree, he surprised with his gift of
expert treatment. But the adjective most generally used (not perhaps in
adulation) would be “original.” And the use of this adjective would be
utterly wrong.
The holly bedecked dentist would not be acting in an original manner.
He would not be following the suggestion of his own philanthropic
heart. He would be acting in accordance with tradition, a particularly
annoying tradition, the evil and absurd superstition that a gift should
be representative of the giver rather than of the recipient.
Now, I am aware that there is high literary authority for the dentist’s
Christmas morning expedition. The dentist himself would be the first
to disclaim having originated the idea; if you were to question him he
would tell you, as he deftly adjusted his rubber dam in your mouth,
that the credit belonged to the late Ralph Waldo Emerson.
“Emerson,” the dentist would say as he sharpened the point of his
drill, “said that a gift was meaningless unless it was a genuine
expression of the giver; it would be unfitting, for instance, for a
poet to give his friend a house and lot, and a painter, his friend, a
diamond necklace. The poet should give a poem and the painter should
give a painting. Therefore it naturally follows that a minister should
give a sermon and a school teacher should bestow upon his expectant
pupils an extra page of mathematical problems. This,” the dentist would
say, “is the gift most expressive of my personality.” And the drill
would seek its goal.
Now, there is much to be said in favour of the Emersonian theory of
giving. Certainly it has the advantages of cheapness and convenience.
Many a poet could more easily give his friend a whole ode or a
sequence of sonnets or a bale of vers libre than he could give a box
of cigars, or a cigar. Many a painter could more easily cover his
children’s Christmas tree with his own cubist canvases than with
peppermint canes and toy locomotives and dolls and little trumpets. A
storekeeper or a manufacturer of any sort can more easily select his
gifts from his own stock than he can select them elsewhere. Should
a brewer, for instance, desire to help make Mr. Bryan’s Christmas
happy, it would be a simpler matter for him to put in that gentleman’s
stocking a case of beer than a case of grape juice.
But cheapness and convenience are not the chief reasons for this sort
of giving. A poet who gives a poem when he should give a pair of fur
gauntlets, a painter who gives a painting when he should give a doll,
does so, it often happens, in spite of the fact that he has thousands
of dollars in the bank and lives within a block of a department store,
which he much enjoys visiting. He gives the gifts that he does give
because of his selfishness and conceit. He gives his own wares because
they advertise his talent.
The poet knows that his friend will not say, to inquiring admirers of
his fur gauntlets, “These were given me by Ezra Dusenbury, author of
‘Babylonian Bleatings’ and other Lyrics: Smith, Parker & Co., $1 net.”
The painter knows that the infant he has enriched will not say to her
young companions: “‘Bettina’ was given me by the illustrious Gaspar
Slifestein whose incomprehensiblist canvases are now on exhibition at
the Microscopic Mania Gallery, 249 Fifth Avenue, New York City.” These
gentlemen take a violent interest in their own work, and when they give
presents of that work they are trying to force their friends to share
that interest and to extend it to all the world. They are trying to
force their friends to become their press agents.
Of course there are exceptions to the rule that a giver should not
give his own wares. Any man who deals in wares that are universally
delightful may express himself in his gifts to his heart’s content
and no one will criticise him. So let no brewer or cigar-maker or
money-changer of my acquaintance puzzle his head long in the effort to
discover in the marts of the world something appropriate to my peculiar
tastes. These honest citizens may be as Emersonian in their giving as
they wish.
As I said, there is much to recommend the idea that inspired the
hypothetical dentist on his Yuletide denting; there is much to
recommend the gift-expressing-the-giver theory. It is convenient, it is
cheap, it is satisfying to the giver’s conceit. It is in many respects
excellent. But it does not happen to be suited to Christmas Day. It is
suited to the celebration of Emerson’s birthday, if any one knows the
date of that festival.
You see, unselfishness is supposed to be a characteristic of Christmas
giving. And unselfishness, true unselfishness, was known to the
philosophy of the Transcendentalists as little as it is known to
that of the Nietzscheans. He who gives really in accordance with
the spirit of the feast gives not to express his own personality,
to call attention to his own prowess as a painter or a poet or a
candlestick-maker, but to make his friend happy. If his friend
remembers him when he enjoys the gift, so much the better. But the
essential thing is that he shall enjoy the gift.
James Russell Lowell represented the Founder of the Feast of Christmas
as saying: “Who gives himself in his gift feeds three; himself, his
suffering neighbour and me.” But in Lowell’s mind when he wrote this
was no idea of justifying the poet who thrusts poems into his friends’
Christmas stocking and tips the elevator man with a villanelle. He
was thinking of sacrificial giving, of giving which necessitates
a sacrifice on the part of the giver rather than on that of the
recipient. And it is no sacrifice for a poet to give his poem or his
book of poems. James Russell Lowell’s distinguished kinswoman, now
living in Boston, knows this. If Miss Amy Lowell really loves you
she will give you for Christmas an automobile or one of her Keats
manuscripts, rather than an autographed copy of “Sword Blades and Poppy
Seeds,” or “Men, Women, and Ghosts.”
Few Bishops resemble Mark Twain. But there once was a Bishop who
resembled Mark Twain in this respect (and in no other)--he is known to
many thousands who do not know his real name. Mark Twain has thousands
of friends who never heard of Samuel Langhorne Clemens. And hundreds of
thousands of children yearly are gladdened by Santa Claus, yet have no
association whatever with the name of Saint Nicholas of Bari.
Yet the amiable Nicholas (who is the patron of sailors, of prisoners,
and of children) is the benefactor of humanity caricatured during
December in every shop window and on every eleemosynary corner. His
mitre has degenerated into a hat trimmed with doubtful fur; his
embroidered cope has become a red jacket. But (except when he rings
a little bell and begs for alms) he has retained his extra-episcopal
function of giving. Saint Nicholas was a master of the art of giving;
and since we have taken him so seriously as to transmogrify him into
Santa Claus, we should profit by his illustrious example and model our
giving upon his.
How and what did Saint Nicholas give? Well, he gave tactfully and
opportunely and appropriately. There was the nobleman of Lucia whose
three daughters were starving to death. Saint Nicholas gave them
marriage portions, throwing purses of gold in at the window at night.
When he was in Myra he gave to the poor people all the wheat that
was in the ships in the harbour, promising the owners that when they
arrived at the port for which they were bound their ships would still
be full of wheat; and so it came about. To a drowned sailor and to
children who had been killed by a cannibal he gave the gift of life.
And to innocent men accused of treason and imprisoned he gave freedom.
His first gift, you see, was money, his second life, his third freedom.
And thus he set an example to all the world. Now, it may not be
convenient for us to celebrate Christmas by throwing money through
the windows of apartments wherein repose dowerless young women. Nor
are life and freedom gifts for our bestowal. But it is at any rate
possible for us to imitate Saint Nicholas’s manner of giving; to give
tactfully, opportunely, and appropriately. There was nothing especially
characteristic of his episcopal functions in the gifts that Saint
Nicholas gave. Nor did he worry about whether or not they reflected his
personality. Let us make Santa Claus resemble Saint Nicholas as closely
as we can.
This business of expressing one’s personality by one’s gifts has been
carried to extraordinary lengths of late years. There are people who
actually select for all their friends and relatives things that they
themselves would like. If they consider themselves to be dainty--as
all women do--they give dainty presents, disregarding the fact that
the recipient may suffer acute physical pain at the mere thought of
daintiness.
They wish their beneficiaries to say on Christmas morning, “How
characteristic of Mrs. Slipslop to give me this exquisite Dresden china
chewing-gum holder,” instead of “How generous and discerning of Mrs.
Slipslop to give me this pair of rubber boots or this jar of tobacco or
this hypodermic syringe!” But what every child and every grown person
wants to receive is a gift suited to his tastes and habits; it is a
matter of indifference whether or not it expresses the personality of
the giver. Perhaps it will in his eyes supply the giver with a new and
charming personality.
You have hitherto regarded Mr. Blinker, the notorious efficiency
engineer, with disfavour. You have regarded him as a prosaic theorist,
a curdled mass of statistics. On Christmas morning you find that he has
presented you, not with an illuminated copy of “Rules for Eliminating
Leisure,” or a set of household ledgers or an alarm clock, but with
a cocktail set or a pool table or an angora kitten or some other
inefficient object.
At once your opinion of Mr. Blinker changes for the better. He assumes
a new and radiant personality. Your Sunday school teacher has always
exhibited to you virtues which you respect but do not enjoy; she has
seemed to you lacking in magnetism. If she gives you for Christmas
a Bible or a tale of juvenile virtue, you will write her a graceful
letter of thanks (at your mother’s dictation), but your affection for
the estimable lady will not be materially increased. But if your Sunday
school teacher gives you a bowie knife or a revolver or a set of the
Deadwood Dick novels! then how suddenly will the nobility of your
Sunday school teacher’s nature be revealed to you!
To elevator men, janitors, domestic servants, newspaper deliverers,
and other necessary evils we always give something appropriate--money.
And money does not express the personalities of most of us. We--that
is, the general public, the common people, the populace, the average
man, the great washed and the rest of us--do our duty in this matter,
following religiously the admirable tradition of the Christmas box. But
our retainers--if they will permit us thus picturesquely to address
them--do not. They serve us during the year, and are duly paid for it,
but they do nothing picturesque and extraordinary at Christmas time to
justify our gifts to them.
As a matter of fact, they are not upholding their part of the
tradition. It is not enough for them to bow, and say, “Thank you,”
while they feverishly count the money. They should revel romantically,
as did their predecessors who established the custom by which they
profit. The elevator boys should sing West Indian carols under our
windows--especially if our apartment is in the twentieth story. The
janitor and his family should enact in the basement a Christmas miracle
play.
It is pleasant to think of the janitor attired as a shepherd or as
a Wise Man, with his children as angels or as sheep, to picture the
Yule log on the janitorial hearth, and to hear in fancy, rising up the
dumbwaiter shaft, the strains of “The Carnal and the Crane,” or of the
excellent carol which begins:
The shepherd upon a hill he sat;
He had on him his tabard and his hat,
His tarbox, his pipe and his flagat;
His name was called Joly Joly Wat,
For he was a gud herdes boy.
Ut hoy!
For in his pipe he made so much joy!
In some places the newspaper deliverers and the telegraph boys
feebly support this tradition by writing, or causing to be written,
a “carrier’s address” and leaving printed copies of it with their
customers. It would be better, of course, if they were to sing or
to recite these verses, but even the printed address is better than
nothing. It is a pity to see even this slight concession to tradition
disappearing. In bygone days some of the most distinguished of our
poets were glad to write these addresses--the late Richard Watson
Gilder wrote one for the newspaper carriers of Newark.
And then there are the numerous public servants who nowadays receive
from the public no special Christmas benefaction--How gracefully they
might obtain it by infusing into their occupations a little Yuletide
pageantry! As it is, the subway guards celebrate the golden springtime
by donning white raiment. Let them on Christmas day be wreathed with
mingled holly and mistletoe, and let them chant, in lusty chorus:
God rest you, merry gentlemen!
Let nothing you dismay.
Please slip us some coin, you’ve got money to boin,
And this is Christmas day.
Few subterranean voyagers could resist this appeal.
And the street cleaners, how comes it that they are unrewarded of the
public? Their predecessors, the crossing sweepers of London fifty
years ago, exacted tribute from pedestrians not only at Christmas
time, but on every day of the year. Let our street cleaners assume
holiday garb and manner, let them expect Christmas gifts, but give in
turn a Christmas spectacle. Methods of doing this will readily suggest
themselves--an appropriate thing would be for them to procure mediæval
attire at any theatrical costumer’s, and build great bonfires at such
points of vantage as Columbus Circle, Times Square, Madison Square,
and Union Square. Over these bonfires boars’ heads should be roasted
and great bowls of steaming punch should hang. From passersby who
partook of their hospitality the street cleaners, through one of their
number dressed as an almoner, should request a golden remembrance.
These things may yet come to pass. They are not so archaic as seemed in
nineteen-thirteen a worldwide war. And the municipal Christmas trees
are a good beginning.
But to return to our muttons, or, rather, to our geese and plum
puddings, the most important thing for us to remember in the selection
of Christmas presents is their suitability to the person for whom they
are intended. We may like books, but let us not therefore feel obliged
to sustain our literary reputation by giving books to our neighbour
who wants a box of cigars or a jumping-jack. We have the precedent,
furnished by Saint Nicholas, and we have a higher precedent still.
For the first great Christmas gift to humanity was what humanity most
needed, and always needs--a child.
A BOUQUET FOR JENNY
So far as I know, in no other library but mine is to be found a book
illustrated by Jenny Hand. Therefore, more than much vellum and crushed
levant, more than first editions and association copies bearing famous
signatures, do I prize a certain fat volume, a foxed and dog-eared and
battered volume, which was published by Grigg and Elliot (God rest
them!) in Philadelphia at number nine North Fourth Street in 1847. This
is a book of poetry, but it is no slender little pamphlet of a thing,
the shelter of one bardling’s lyrical ejaculations. Five full-grown
poets, two of them men of noble girth, comfortably share this stately
tenement. The book’s solid and imposing name is “The Poetical Works of
Rogers, Campbell, J. Montgomery, Lamb and Kirk White.”
A detailed consideration of this volume might, to the profit of the
reading public, fill all of one issue of any book-review supplement or
literary, so to speak, section printed in America. But for the moment
I would write, not of the excellencies of the volume in general, but
of the distinguishing feature of my copy--its unique virtue, which
gives me the right to pity all other bibliophiles now rejoicing in this
illustrious Grigg and Elliot imprint. I refer to the illustrations by
Jenny Hand.
Messrs. Grigg and Elliot illustrated, to the best of their ability,
every copy of this work. They illustrated it with what they doubtless
termed “elegant steel engravings.” These steel engravings are indeed
“elegant,” also they are “appropriate,” also they are “chaste.” Take
down from its shelf your copy of “The Poetical Works of, etc.,” and you
will find, facing page ninety-four, a representation of “Morning among
the Alps,” painted, the legend tells you, by T. Doughty, and engraved
by George W. Hatch. The sun is rising, much as Mr. Belasco might
direct, and upon a pleasant little pond in the foreground are three of
those famous Alpine early birds known as swan. This picture is designed
to accompany Samuel Rogers’ “The Alps at Daybreak,” lines which I may
recall to your memory by saying that they begin, “The sunbeams streak
the azure skies.” The picture was not intended by the artists to be
Alpine in character, but it is a nice picture, very harmonious with the
text.
Furthermore, the generous Messrs. Grigg and Elliot, being greatly moved
by those lines of the ingenious Kirke White which begin: “Behold the
shepherd boy, who homeward tends, Finish’d his daily labour.--O’er his
path, Deep overhung with herbage, does he stroll With pace irregular;
by fits he runs, Then sudden stops with vacant countenance, And picks
the pungent herb”--being greatly moved, I say, by these lines, they
determined to give them a supplementary embellishment. Therefore they
caused one O. Pelton to engrave on steel a picture first “Drawn by
Cristall” (as who should say “Painted by Raphael”). This shows us
a plump youth, with the vacant countenance celebrated by the poet,
standing upon the side of Vesuvius, carrying over his shoulder a large
spade, and in his left hand a basket of potatoes. In their sensational
journalistic way, Messrs. Grigg and Elliot affixed to this picture the
caption, “The Shepherd Boy,” and forthwith the poem was illustrated.
But while you will take pleasure, if you are a worthy possessor of this
volume, in these altogether admirable engravings, you will look through
your copy in vain for expressions of the genius of Jenny Hand. The
Jenny Hand illustrations are two in number, and they are to be found
only in my copy.
One of the advantages of illustrating a book with steel engravings
is that it necessitates the inclusion of blank pages. When a steel
engraving occupies one side of a page, there may be nothing whatever
printed on the reverse.
There may be nothing printed, I said, on the reverse. But on the
reverse anything in the world may be drawn or written. Therein we see
the origin of the entertaining practice of extra-illustration. To the
eager pencil of Jenny Hand, these virginal white pages, oases among
pages of dry verse, offered irresistible opportunities. And my library
is therefore the richer.
This book never belonged to Jenny Hand, except so far as anything
belongs to one who makes it more beautiful and interesting and useful.
The book belonged to Jenny’s sister, Esther. On the fly-leaf is written
“Mifs E. C. Hand, with regards of C. F. Q.” Obviously E. C. stands for
Esther Conway. Obviously, also, Esther did not herself draw pictures
on the beautiful volume of poesy (with gold scroll work all over the
cover) which the amorous and tasteful Mr. C. F. Q. presented to her.
This delightful work was done by Esther’s younger sister, who in 1847
was aged perhaps thirteen, and should have been and probably was named
Jenny. C. F. Q. stands for Charles Francis Quigley. This is not a
random guess; it is a wholly logical deduction from the portrait of
the gentleman drawn by Jenny, who knew him well.
It was one summer afternoon in 1847 that Jenny first began to improve
“The Poetical Works of Rogers, Campbell, J. Montgomery, Lamb and
Kirke White.” At three o’clock Jenny had been out playing--keeping
the porch and the front gate well in sight, for she knew that not for
nothing had Esther put on her pearl necklace and her blue sash and
spent three-quarters of an hour over her hair. Jenny’s suspicions were
justified and her vigilance rewarded. At four o’clock the front gate
clicked and the gravel walk resounded under a manly tread. Charlie
Quigley, in a high stock, a flowered waistcoat, a long black coat,
tight blue trousers and a tall silk hat, came to call on Esther. And he
brought a gift. Was it a box of candy? If so Jenny would, as a dutiful
sister, help to entertain the company. She would wait--Esther was
unwrapping the present. No, it was not a box of candy--it was a book.
And it was not even a novel, it was a book of poetry, of all things in
the world! How could that Charlie Quigley be so silly?
Well, Jenny lost interest in Charlie and his gift for a while. She
rolled her hoop and played with the puppy while Esther and Charlie
sat on the porch and looked at the foolish book. When Jenny came up
on the porch, toward sunset, they had gone into the parlour. They had
left the book open face downward on a bench, open to Thomas Campbell’s
“Song,” beginning “Oh, how hard it is to find The one just suited to
our mind”--certain lines of which Charlie had roguishly underscored.
Jenny turned the pages of the book, but found therein little
entertainment. At length, however, she came upon “Morning in the Alps,”
with its blank and inviting reverse. Among the jackstones in her pocket
was the stub of a pencil, and soon that pencil was at its predestined
task of depicting the event of the afternoon--for my edification some
threescore years later.
Jenny drew a side view of the broad stone steps, with a little of the
railings and Grecian pillars. She drew the locust tree, and since she
knew that there was a robin’s nest in it, she outlined two little birds
against the skyey background. She drew Esther, grand in her hoopskirts,
necklace, curls and blue sash--no, it wasn’t blue, it was green plaid,
and the fabric was satin, for, as I live, there is a faded corner of
it in this very book, sentimentally cut off and placed there by Esther
herself! Why was Esther so particular about saving a fragment of that
sash? Was this really a momentous afternoon? Was this the sash that
Charlie’s black broadcloth sleeve surrounded when Esther consented to
become Mrs. Quigley? And were they married, and did Charlie’s friends
all make flat jokes about his claiming the hand of Hand?
And were all these things going on while the artistic Jenny was busy
on the porch? Possibly. Probably. But with such conjectures the author
of this serious essay in art criticism has no concern. To return to
the account of the picture--Jenny drew next the renowned Charles
Francis Quigley. But now her pencil was dipped in a mild solution of
venom--imparted to it, I fear, when she thoughtfully placed its point
between her small lips. For those same lips had desired chocolates--and
the chocolates had turned out to be nothing but poesy. Therefore she
sacrificed realism to satire, and made Charlie (really a very nice
fellow, whom she came to like very much in later years) something
of a fop. She made the cut of his coat too extreme, his hair too
curly, his mustache too obviously waxed. She deliberately gave his
eye a sentimental expression; she smiled derisively as she padded his
pictured sleeve.
And then she gave her drawing its crowning charm--she put in the
“selbst-portrait.” She drew the little cedar tree that flanked the
porch, and she drew herself kneeling beside it--seeing, but not seen
by, the rapt Esther and Charlie. Far from being ashamed of this act of
sisterly espionage, she gloried in it, and brought all her art to the
task of immortalising it.
So in my book the locust tree is forever in leaf and two little birds
poise always against the summer sky. And always Charlie, hat in hand,
presents to the radiant Esther “The Poetical Works of Rogers, Campbell,
J. Montgomery, Lamb and Kirke White.” And always the little artist,
with long curls hanging over her white frock, laughs at the lovers from
behind her cedar tree.
The light was fading now, but Jenny had found another blank page--that
preceding the section devoted to Kirke White’s verses. Supper wouldn’t
be ready for fifteen minutes, so she started on a picture more
difficult than the simple incident just drawn. She chose for her scene
Riley’s Riding Academy, where she and Esther spent every Wednesday
morning. There was Esther, seated with the sedateness appropriate to
her eighteen years, upon the tamest of nags. And there was Jenny, in
her fetching habit, perilously poised upon her wildly careering steed.
With enthusiastic pencil did Jenny depict her own brave unconcern, and
Esther’s timorousness. How firmly Esther clutches the reins of her
mild beast, how startled is her face as she looks upon her daring and
nonchalant younger sister!
Did the Quigleys and the Hands, I wonder, shed tears over Mr. Southey’s
“Account of the Life of Henry Kirke White”? Did they know Francis
Boott, of Boston, the young American gentleman who placed, Mr. Southey
tells us, a tablet to Henry’s memory in All Saints Church, Cambridge?
Were they moved by James Montgomery’s “Prison Amusements; Written
during nine months confinement in the Castle of York, in the years of
1795 and 1796”? Mr. Montgomery tells us in the prefatory advertisement,
“they were the transcripts of melancholy feelings--the warm effusions
of a bleeding heart.” Did they read “Gertrude of Wyoming,” “Theodric; a
Domestic Tale,” and the “Pleasures of Hope”?
Did they read the memoirs prefaced to the various selections? If so, I
hope they found them as delightful as I do. There is the inexhaustibly
fascinating “Memoirs of Charles Lamb,” in which the anonymous critic
improves the occasion by reproving sternly the Lake Poets, or the
“Lakers,” as he calls them. “The thousand Songs,” he tells us, “of our
writers in verse of past time dwell on all tongues, with the melodies
of Moore. But who learns or repeats the cumbrous verses of Wordsworth,
which require an initiation from their writer to comprehend?” Later
this gentleman has occasion to refer to “Another School of Poetry,”
which “arose in opposition to that of the Lakers.” “Their talents,” he
writes, “are before the world. To this new school belonged the late
poet Shelley, whose lofty powers are unquestionable; Keats, also now
deceased; and Leigh Hunt.” Keats, also now deceased! What porridge fed
the writer of this memoir?
Well, my concern is not with the poor hack who edited this book and
wrote the memoirs. I hope Messrs. Grigg and Elliot paid him well.
And as for Charlie and Esther and Jenny and the robins in the locust
tree--well, Charlie Quigley’s dust and his good sword’s rust, and his
soul is with the saints, I trust. I hope Esther married him. I’m glad
he brought her “The Poetical Works of Rogers, Campbell, J. Montgomery,
Lamb and Kirke White,” even if Jenny was disappointed. For if she’d
made her drawings on the cover of a candy box they would not now be in
my library.
THE INEFFICIENT LIBRARY
There are young gentlemen whose delight it is to tell their married and
established and venerable friends how to form libraries. Generally,
these young gentlemen wear spectacles rimmed with tortoise shell, and
the condensed milk of their alma mater is yet wet upon their lips.
They peer at your laden shelves and say: “It is better to have one
good book than a dozen bad ones. Of any standard work you should have
the definitive edition--not necessarily a rare imprint or something
in fine binding, but the most modern and comprehensive edition. It is
better to have one good anthology than a shelfful of third-rate poets.
Go through your shelves and throw away all the rubbish; buy sets of the
classics, a volume at a time, and in this way you will gradually build
up a useful and really representative library, something appropriate
and coherent.”
When a young gentleman talks to you in this wise, the only thing to
do is to lead him gently away from the bookshelves and make him sit
in a comfortable corner and talk to you about hockey or socialism or
some other of his boyish sports. He knows absolutely nothing about
libraries. Probably he lives in the shadow of Washington Arch, and his
own library--on the bureau--consists of the “Life of General Ulysses S.
Grant,” inscribed “To dearest Teddy, from Aunt Mag., Xmas, 1916,” and a
copy of the New Republic for last August, containing a letter in which
he took exception to an editorial on the relation between pragmatism
and Freud’s second theory of the semi-subconscious. To-morrow he will
sell General Grant to a second-hand book dealer for fifteen cents, and
thereby diminish his library by one half. What right has he to tell you
what books you shall keep and what you shall destroy?
Now, it would not be so bad if this raving about a library was
confined to young persons like him I have mentioned. But the trouble
is, there are people of means and reputation for intelligence who are
actually putting into practice the evil theories he advances, who are
deliberately “building up libraries,” instead of surrounding themselves
with books they like. Against this pernicious heresy it is the duty of
every honest bibliophile to protest.
We need waste no words on the purchaser of “subscription sets”
and many-volumed collections of “Kings and Queens of Neo-Cymric
Realism and Romance,” and “The Universalest of All Libraries of
Super-extraordinary Fiction,” in forty-eight volumes, fifteen dollars
down and five dollars a month until the purchaser is summoned to a
Better Land. Either these people want books for mere shelf-furniture,
or else they are the victims of voracious book agents, and deserve a
tear of sympathy rather than a rebuke. Our concern, the concern of
those who have at heart the good name of printed literature and the
liberty of the individual householder of literary tastes, is with
the person who is highly literate and possessed of an account with a
bookseller, and is abusing his talent and privilege by “efficiently”
building up a library.
When efficiency confined itself to the office and the factory, it was
bad enough. When it (loathsome animal that it is!) crawled up a leg of
the table and began to preach to us about our food, babbling obscenely
of proteids and carbohydrates, we felt that the limit of endurance
had been reached. But no sooner do we cuff efficiency from the dining
table than it pops up in the library. And this is not to be endured.
Efficiency must be plucked down, kindly, of course, but resolutely,
from the bookshelves, and put in a covered basket to await the coming
of the wagon which shall convey it to the lethal of the S. P. C. A.
Except for an efficient family, what could be less interesting than an
efficient library? Think of the sameness of it--every study in a block
of houses containing the “Oxford Dictionary” and “Roget’s Thesaurus”
and the “Collected Essays of Hamilton Wright Mabie” and similar works
of reference, with a few standard fictions such as Arnold Bennett’s
“Your United States,” and Owen Wister’s “The Pentecost of Calamity”!
There would be no adventures among books possible in such libraries.
Indeed, efficiency in the library would soon reduce it, if logically
developed, to a collection of anthologies and reference books, and
possibly some such practical jokes as ex-President Eliot’s “Five Foot
Shelf.”
An advocate of the efficient library, a spectacled young gentleman
of the type already described, once engaged in some ignoble literary
task--book-reviewing I believe it was called--while a guest at my
house. The volume of which he was writing a criticism had to do with
a single-tax experiment in New Zealand, and therefore he wished to
include in his review a quotation from the “Life of Benvenuto Cellini.”
He did not find the “Life of Benvenuto Cellini” on my shelves, and
therefore reproached me, and made my library the object of his callow
disapproval.
I reasoned with him. He had read Benvenuto, I said, and Benvenuto
was waiting for him in the public library if he desired to renew his
acquaintance with him. Here, I said, are many volumes of biography
and autobiography in place of the one for which you cry. Here is a
book entitled “The Life and Labours of Henry W. Grady, his Speeches,
Writings, etc., Being in Addition to a Graphic Sketch of His Life, a
Collection of His Most Remarkable Speeches and Such of His Writings
as Best Illustrate His Character and Show the Wonderful Brilliancy of
His Intellect, also Such Letters, Speeches, and Newspaper Articles in
connection with His Life and Death as Will Be of General Interest.”
Here, I said, is “Colonel Thomas Blood, Crown Stealer,” by Wilbur
Cortez Abbott, a highly entertaining book. Here, I continued, as a
preface to this collection of the “Essays in Prose and Verse of J.
Clarence Mangan,” is an illuminating biographical essay by Mr. C. P.
Meehan, together with Mr. J. Wilson’s “Phrenological Description of
Mangan’s Head,” and “The Poet’s Own Recipe to Make Tar Water.” Here
is--
But my friend rudely interrupted my well-meant remarks, and went
in quest of Cellini to the south-west corner of Fifth Avenue and
Forty-second Street, where he found a library more suited to his
efficient tastes. In doing this he was perfectly justified. Public
Libraries should be efficient. They are places to which you go to get
useful but uninteresting information. But there is no more reason for
your own library to resemble a public library than there is for your
study to resemble your office, or for your dining-room to resemble the
Automat, or for every bedroom in your house to bear on its door printed
directions to ring twice for your wife to bring you hot water and three
times for a clean collar.
The crowning virtue of the successful private library is inefficiency.
As an example closely approaching the ideal, as a model to householders
who have been allowed a closet or vault in which to keep books, I
respectfully present my own library. And in order that the radiance of
its inefficiency may be as penetrating as possible, I wish my library
to be considered in comparison with its efficient rivals.
Let us therefore assume that the spectacled young gentleman already
several times celebrated in this treatise has, without acquiring
more sense, got married, and perhaps thereby acquired a sufficient
competency to warrant his establishing a library. Let us begin our
survey of his books with the shelves of poetry. Where is there a good
basis for comparison? Ah, here we have it--here is Milton in the
efficient library, and here the long-winded old gentleman is found
again in my own! Is any comparison between these volumes possible?
Would any real bibliophile hesitate a moment in making his choice
between the two? The efficient Milton is a tall, sombre-looking volume
with a long biographical preface by a man who used to be a poet before
he became a college professor, a preface which proves that Milton
never went blind, lived in Wales rather than in England, had only one
daughter and knew no Latin. At the foot of every page there is a thick
sprinkling of notes conveying unnecessary information. There is an
appendix of variant readings and an exhaustive, monumental bibliography.
Could anything be more depressing? The only illustration in the book
is John himself, in a black cloak, with what seems to be a baby’s bib
under his chin, and this picture can scarcely be called a decoration.
My “Milton’s Poetical Works,” which was published in New York in
1857 and purchased by me from a stall on Twenty-third Street for a
quarter, is more entertaining in every respect. In the first place,
it has no notes--which alone makes it worth the price of admission.
In the second place, the only biographical introduction is “The Life
of Milton, by His Nephew, Edward Philips,” a most estimable piece of
writing, which begins, “Of all the several parts of history, that which
sets forth the lives, and commemorates the most remarkable actions,
sayings or writings of famous and illustrious persons, whether in war
or peace--whether many together, or any one in particular--as it is not
the least useful in itself, so it is in the highest vogue and esteem
among the studious and reading part of mankind.” Doesn’t a biography of
this sort promise more flavours and exciting things than one written by
a college professor, and beginning, “John Milton was born in London,
England, December 9th, 1608”?
Furthermore, my Milton is bound in black cloth, with stars and wreaths
and baskets of flowers stamped in gold all over it. Furthermore,
my Milton has all sorts of highly entertaining steel engravings,
most delightfully 1857--Lycidas being shipwrecked on St. Michael’s
Mount, and the Warring Angels mustering for battle, and skeletons
and devils and angels and “wood nymphs, deck’d with daisies trim,”
keeping “their merry wakes and pastimes,” and Melancholy, who looks
like Queen Victoria in her old age, and the “Goddess fair and free,
in heaven yclep’d Euphrosyne,” wearing a very becoming white frock.
Furthermore, my Milton was “Presented to Mifs Ellen R. Baxter, by Her
Resp’t’l friend, J. Stuart, Oswego, May 4, 1859”--so the violet ink
inscription on the flyleaf tells me. And some one has drawn in pencil a
very attractive cat on the blank page opposite the opening of “Samson
Agonistes.” The efficient library’s copy of Milton lacks all these
amiable associations.
My efficient friend possesses a Byron, it is true. But not to be
mentioned in the same breath with the volume which stands in my study
between Witter Bynner and Bliss Carman. My Byron contains eight
contemporary memoirs of the poet, by distinguished fellow-craftsmen,
and sixteen pictures--himself, his birthplace, his Newfoundland dog,
his daughter, and a dozen landscapes which the publisher happened to
have on hand. Also, in the preface of my Byron I find this sentence:
“Thus died Lord Byron at the early age of thirty-seven, leaving behind
him a name second only to that of the renowned Emperor, Napoleon
Bonaparte, and a memory which the sublime effusions of his muse will
endear to all posterity.” My friend’s Byron has nothing to compare with
this.
The trouble with my friend’s library is that it has no surprises. Any
one who has seen his waistcoat--the V of which is edged with heavy
white cord--and his cuff links--which are oval and bear, engraven on
their golden surfaces, his initials--could describe his library to a
volume. It is obvious; its obviousness is a part of its efficiency.
I suppose Benvenuto Cellini is on a shelf of the efficient library.
He must be, since he is in the public library. Probably my efficient
friend has also Benjamin Franklin’s “Autobiography” and the “Complete
Works of Mrs. Humphry Ward.” He has a limp-leather tissue-paper
encyclopedia, and an obese dictionary, and a magnificent atlas. And in
a corner of his study he has a map of the world in the form of a great
globe on a pivot.
I envy him this last possession, for one may amuse himself by spinning
a geographical globe, as one entertains himself by spinning a piano
stool. But aside from this, there is nothing in my friend’s library
that I desire. And my own triumphantly inefficient library--what
treasures it contains!
You mention French literature. Do I overwhelm you with a sumptuous
Voltaire, or sicken you with a sentimentally illustrated “Paul et
Virginie”? I do not. I exhibit to you yellow-back volumes of the later
verse of Francis Jammes--which are supposed to be going to be bound
one of these days--or I show you a play or two of Rostand’s. If you
desire to have further dealings with the literature of France, the
French department of the university is, for a consideration, at your
service. You mention Fraser’s “Golden Bough”? I show you something
equally informing and more entertaining, comfortable volumes in which
the mythology of Ireland is narrated to us by Jeremiah Curtin and by
Seumas MacManus, and I show you a stray volume of Louis Ginzberg’s “The
Legends of the Jews.”
I should not try to make the possessors of efficient libraries unhappy.
But I do it for their own good, in the hope that I may eventually
reform them. And when I look upon my two volumes of “The Evergreen,” a
quarterly published in Edinburgh some twenty years ago, numbering among
its contributors Fiona MacLeod, Nora Hopper, Douglas Hyde, Standish
O’Grady and Rosa Mulholland, and “The Squire’s Recipes,” by Kendall
Banning, and “Scottish Heraldry Made Easy,” and Shaemas O’Sheel’s
“The Dear Old Lady of Eighty-sixth Street,” and a bound volume of
The Gentleman’s Magazine for 1761 and “L. Annsei Senecae et Aliorum
Tragoediae (Amsterodami, Apud Guiljel: Ians: Caesium)” and a battered
edition of Scott’s “Marmion,” enriched by the comments of a Louise
Cogswell who owned it in 1810 and wrote approvingly, “and very well
told too” under the sub-title “A Tale of Flodden Field,” and Joseph
Forster’s “Studies in Black and Red” (very ghastly), and both of Ernest
Dowson’s novels and his translations from the French, as well as his
poems, and “The American Annual of Photography” for 1916, and “Miss
Thackeray’s Works,” complete in one volume, and Layton Crippen’s “Clay
and Fire,” and Bithell’s “Contemporary Belgian Poetry,” and Sir Francis
Burnand’s “More Happy Thoughts,” and a volume containing “The Poetical
Works of Rogers, Campbell, J. Montgomery Lamb, and Kirke White,” and
an inscribed copy of Palmer Cox’s “The Brownies, Their Book”--when I
contemplate, among the more commonplace inhabitants of my shelves,
these books, then I cannot keep from feeling a sense of superiority to
all those who have laboriously “built up” their libraries in accordance
with the mandates of strict utility.
My library is inefficient and impractical, entertaining and unexacting.
Its members have come to me by chance and by momentary inclination.
For if a man’s books are to be, as the old phrase has it, his friends,
they must be allowed to him because of some fitness on his part subtly
felt by them. A man does not deliberately select his friends; there
must be a selection by them as well as by him. Unless he is applying
the principles of efficiency to friendship. And in that case he has no
friends at all.
THE POETRY OF HILAIRE BELLOC
Far from the poets being astray in prose-writing (said Francis
Thompson), it might plausibly be contended that English prose, as an
art, is but a secondary stream of the Pierian fount, and owes its very
origin to the poets. The first writer one remembers with whom prose
became an art was Sir Philip Sidney. And Sidney was a poet.
This quotation is relevant to a consideration of Hilaire Belloc,
because Belloc is a poet who happens to be known chiefly for his
prose. His _Danton_ and _Robespierre_ have been read by every
intelligent student of French history, his _Path to Rome_, that most
high-spirited and engaging of travel books, has passed through many
editions, his political writings are known to all lovers--and many
foes--of democracy, his whimsically imaginative novels have their
large and appreciative audience, and his exquisite brief essays are
contemporary classics. And since the unforgetable month of August of
the unforgetable year 1914, Hilaire Belloc has added to the number
of his friends many thousands who care little for _belles lettres_
and less for the French Revolution--he has become certainly the most
popular, and by general opinion the shrewdest and best informed, of all
chroniclers and critics of the Great War.
There is nothing, it may be said, about these achievements to indicate
the poet. How can this most public of publicists woo the shy and
exacting Muse? His superabundant energy may now and again overflow in
little lyrical rivulets, but how can he find time to turn it into the
deep channels of song?
Well, what is the difference between a poet who writes prose and a
prose-writer who writes verse? The difference is easy to see but hard
to describe. Mr. Thomas Hardy is a prose writer. He has forsaken the
novel, of which he was so distinguished a master, to make cynical
little sonnet portraits and to pour the acid wine of his philosophy--a
sort of perverted Presbyterianism--into the graceful amphora of poetic
drama. But he is not a poet. Thackeray was a prose-writer, in spite of
his delicious light verse. Every novelist writes or has written verse,
but not all of them are poets.
Of course, Sir Walter Scott was first of all a poet--the greatest poet
who ever wrote a novel. And no one who has read _Love in the Valley_
can hesitate to give Meredith his proper title. Was Macaulay a poet? I
think so--but perhaps I am in a hopeless minority in my belief that the
author of _The Battle of Naseby_ and _The Lays of Ancient Rome_ was the
last of the great English ballad makers.
But this general truth cannot, I think, honestly be denied; there have
been many great poets who have devoted most of their lives to writing
prose. Some of them have died without discovering their neglected
talent. I think that Walter Pater was one of these; much that is
annoyingly subtle or annoyingly elaborate in his essays needs only
rhyme and rhythm--the lovely accidents of poetry--to become graceful
and appropriate. His famous description of the Mona Lisa is worthless
if considered as a piece of serious æsthetic criticism. But it would
make an admirable sonnet. And it is significant that Walter Pater’s two
greatest pupils--Lionel Johnson and Father Gerard Hopkins, S.J.,--found
expression for their genius not in prose, the chosen medium of their
“unforgetably most gracious friend,” but in verse.
From Walter Pater, that exquisite of letters, to the robust Hilaire
Belloc may seem a long journey. But there is, I insist, this
similarity between these contrasting writers, both are poets, and both
are known to fame by their prose.
For proof that Walter Pater was a poet, it is necessary only to
read his _Renaissance Studies_ or his interpretations--unsound but
fascinating--of the soul of ancient Greece. Often his essays, too
delicately accurate in phrasing or too heavily laden with golden
rhetoric, seem almost to cry aloud for the relief of rhyme and rhythm.
Now, Hilaire Belloc suggests in many of his prose sketches that he is
not using his true medium. I remember a brief essay on sleep which
appeared in _The New Witness_--or, as it was then called, _The Eye
Witness_--several years ago, which was not so much a complete work in
itself as it was a draft for a poem. It had the economy of phrase, the
concentration of idea, which is proper to poetry.
But it is not necessary in the case of Hilaire Belloc, as it is in
that of Walter Pater, to search pages of prose for proof that their
author is a poet. Now and then--all too seldom--the idea in this man’s
brain has insisted on its right, has scorned the proffered dress of
prose, however fine of warp and woof, however stiff with rich verbal
embroidery, and has demanded its rhymed and rhythmed wedding garments.
Therefore, for proof that Hilaire Belloc is a poet it is necessary only
to read his poetry.
II
Hilaire Belloc is a poet. Also he is a Frenchman, an Englishman,
an Oxford man, a Roman Catholic, a country gentleman, a soldier, a
democrat, and a practical journalist. He is always all these things.
One sign that he is naturally a poet is that he is never deliberately a
poet. No one can imagine him writing a poem to order--even to his own
order. The poems knock at the door of his brain and demand to be let
out. And he lets them out, carelessly enough, setting them comfortably
down on paper simply because that is the treatment they desire. And
this happens to be the way all real poetry is made.
Not that all verse makers work that way. There are men who come upon a
waterfall or mountain or an emotion and say: “Aha! here is something
out of which I can extract a poem!” And they sit down in front of that
waterfall or mountain or an emotion and think up clever things to say
about it. These things they put into metrical form, and the result they
fondly call a poem.
There’s no harm in that. It’s good exercise for the mind, and of it
comes much interesting verse. But it is not the way in which the sum of
the world’s literature is increased.
Could anything, for example, be less studied, be more clearly marked
with the stigmata of that noble spontaneity we call inspiration,
than the passionate, rushing, irresistible lines “To the Balliol Men
Still in Africa”? Like Gilbert K. Chesterton and many another English
democrat, Hilaire Belloc deeply resented his country’s war upon the
Boers. Yet his heart went out to the friends of his university days who
were fighting in Africa. They were fighting, he thought, in an unjust
cause; but they were his friends and they were, at any rate, fighting.
And so he made something that seems (like all great writing) an
utterance rather than a composition; he put his love of war in general
and his hatred of this war in particular, his devotion to Balliol and
to the friends of his youth into one of the very few pieces of genuine
poetry which the Boer War produced. Nor has any of Oxford’s much-sung
colleges known praise more fit than this
“House that armours a man
With the eyes of a boy and the heart of a ranger,
And a laughing way in the teeth of the world,
And a holy hunger and thirst for danger.”
But perhaps a more typical example of Hilaire Belloc’s wanton genius is
to be found not among those poems which are, throughout, the beautiful
expressions of beautiful impressions, but among those which are
careless, whimsical, colloquial. There is that delightful, but somewhat
exasperating _Dedicatory Ode_. Hilaire Belloc is talking--charmingly,
as is his custom--to some of his friends, who had belonged, in their
university days, to a youthful revolutionary organisation called the
Republican Club. He happens to be talking in verse, for no particular
reason except that it amuses him to talk in verse. He makes a number of
excellent jokes, and enjoys them very much; his Pegasus is cantering
down the road at a jolly gait, when suddenly, to the amazement of
the spectators, it spreads out great golden wings and flashes like a
meteor across the vault of heaven! We have been laughing at the droll
tragedy of the opium-smoking Uncle Paul; we have been enjoying the
humorous spectacle of the contemplative freshman--and suddenly we come
upon a bit of astonishingly fine poetry. Who would expect, in all this
whimsical and jovial writing, to find this really great stanza?
“From quiet homes and first beginning
Out to the undiscovered ends,
There’s nothing worth the wear of winning
But laughter and the love of friends.”
Who having read these four lines, can forget them? And who but a poet
could write them? But Hilaire Belloc has not forced himself into this
high mood, nor does he bother to maintain it. He gaily passes on to
another verse of drollery, and then, not because he wishes to bring the
poem to an effective climax, but merely because it happens to be his
mood, he ends the escapade he calls an Ode with eight or ten stanzas of
nobly beautiful poetry.
There is something almost uncanny about the flashes of inspiration
which dart out at the astonished reader of Hilaire Belloc’s most
frivolous verses. Let me alter a famous epigram and call his light
verse a circus illuminated by lightning. There is that monumental
burlesque, the Newdigate Poem--_A Prize Poem Submitted by Mr. Lambkin
of Burford to the Examiners of the University of Oxford on the
Prescribed Poetic Theme Set by Them in 1893, “The Benefits of the
Electric Light.”_ It is a tremendous joke; with every line the reader
echoes the author’s laughter. But without the slightest warning Hilaire
Belloc passes from rollicking burlesque to shrewd satire; he has been
merrily jesting with a bladder on a stick, he suddenly draws a gleaming
rapier and thrusts it into the heart of error. He makes Mr. Lambkin say:
“Life is a veil, its paths are dark and rough
Only because we do not know enough:
When Science has discovered something more
We shall be happier than we were before.”
Here we find the directness and restraint which belong to really great
satire. This is the materialistic theory, the religion of Science,
not burlesqued, not parodied, but merely stated nakedly, without the
verbal frills and furbelows with which our forward-looking leaders of
popular thought are accustomed to cover its obscene absurdity. Almost
these very words have been uttered in a dozen “rationalistic” pulpits
I could mention, pulpits occupied by robustuous practical gentlemen
with very large eyes, great favourites with the women’s clubs. Their
pet doctrine, their only and most offensive dogma, is not attacked,
is not ridiculed; it is merely stated for them, in all kindness and
simplicity. They cannot answer it, they cannot deny that it is a
mercilessly fair statement of the “philosophy” that is their stock in
trade. I hope that many of them will read it.
III
Hilaire Belloc was born July 27, 1870. He was educated at the Oratory
School, Edgbaston, and at Balliol College, Oxford. After leaving school
he served as a driver in the Eighth Regiment of French Artillery at
Toul Meurthe-et-Moselle, being at that time a French citizen. Later he
was naturalised as a British subject, and entered the House of Commons
in 1906 as Liberal Member for South Salford. British politicians
will not soon forget the motion which Hilaire Belloc introduced one
day in the early Spring of 1908, the motion that the Party funds,
hitherto secretly administered, be publicly audited. His vigorous
and persistent campaign against the party system has placed him,
with Cecil Chesterton, in the very front ranks of those to whom the
democrats of Great Britain must look for leadership and inspiration.
He was always a keen student of military affairs; he prophesied, long
before the event, the present international conflict, describing with
astonishing accuracy the details of the German invasion of Belgium and
the resistance of Liège. Now he occupies a unique position among the
journalists who comment upon the War, having tremendously increased the
circulation of _Land and Water_, the periodical for which he writes
regularly, and lecturing to a huge audience once a week on the events
of the War in one of the largest of London’s concert halls--Queen’s
Hall, where the same vast crowds that listen to the War lectures used
to gather to hear the works of the foremost German composers.
IV
Hilaire Belloc, as I have said, is a Frenchman, an Englishman,
an Oxford man, a country gentleman, a soldier, a democrat, and a
practical journalist. In all these characters he utters his poetry. As
a Frenchman, he is vivacious and gallant and quick. He has the noble
English frankness, and that broad irresistible English mirthfulness
which is so much more inclusive than that narrow possession, a sense
of humour. Democrat though he is, there is about him something of the
atmosphere of the country squire of some generations ago; it is in his
heartiness, his jovial dignity, his deep love of the land. The author
of _The South Country_ and _Courtesy_ has made Sussex his inalienable
possession; he owns Sussex, as Dickens owns London, and Blackmore owns
Devonshire. And he is thoroughly a soldier, a happy warrior, as brave
and dexterous, no one can doubt, with a sword of steel as with a sword
of words.
He has taken the most severe risk which a poet can take: he has written
poems about childhood. What happened when the late Algernon Charles
Swinburne bent his energies to the task of celebrating this theme?
As the result of his solemn meditation on the mystery of childhood,
he arrived at two conclusions, which he melodiously announced to the
world. They were, first, that the face of a baby wearing a plush cap
looks like a moss-rose bud in its soft sheath, and, second, that
“astrolabe” rhymes with “babe.” Very charming, of course, but certainly
unworthy of a great poet. And upon this the obvious comment is that
Swinburne was not a great poet. He took a theme terribly great and
terribly simple, and about it he wrote ... something rather pretty.
Now, when a really great poet--Francis Thompson, for example--has
before him such a theme as childhood, he does not spend his time making
far-fetched comparisons with moss-rose buds, or hunting for words that
rhyme with “babe.” Childhood suggests Him Who made childhood sacred, so
the poet writes _Ex Ore Infantium_, or such a poem as that which ends
with the line:
“Look for me in the nurseries of Heaven.”
A poet may write pleasingly about mountains, and cyclones and battles,
and the love of woman, but if he is at all timid about the verdict of
posterity he should avoid the theme of childhood as he would avoid the
plague. For only great poets can write about childhood poems worthy to
be printed.
Hilaire Belloc has written poems about children, and they are worthy to
be printed. He is never ironic when he thinks about childhood; he is
gay, whimsical, with a slight suggestion of elfin cynicism, but he is
direct, as a child is direct. He has written two dedicatory poems for
books to be given to children; they are slight things, but they are a
revelation of their author’s power to do what only a very few poets can
do, that is, to enter into the heart and mind of the child, following
that advice which has its literary as well as moral significance, to
“become as a little child.”
And in many of Hilaire Belloc’s poems by no means intended for
childish audiences there is an appealing simplicity that is genuinely
and beautifully childish, something quite different from the adult
and highly artificial simplicity of Professor A. E. Housman’s _A
Shropshire Lad_. Take that quatrain _The Early Morning_. It is as clear
and cool as the time it celebrates; it is absolutely destitute of
rhetorical indulgence, poetical inversions or “literary” phrasing. It
is, in fact, conversation--inspired conversation, which is poetry. It
might have been written by a Wordsworth not painfully self-conscious,
or by a Blake whose brain was not as yet muddled with impressionistic
metaphysics.
And his Christmas carols--they are fit to be sung by a chorus of
children. Can any songs of the sort receive higher praise than that?
Children, too, appreciate _The Birds_ and _Our Lord and Our Lady_. Nor
is that wonderful prayer rather flatly called _In a Boat_ beyond the
reach of their intelligence.
Naturally enough, Hilaire Belloc is strongly drawn to the almost
violent simplicity of the ballad. Bishop Percy would not have enjoyed
the theological and political atmosphere of _The Little Serving Maid_,
but he would have acknowledged its irresistible charm. There is that
wholly delightful poem _The Death and Last Confession of Wandering
Peter_--a most Bellocian vagabond. “He wandered everywhere he would:
and all that he approved was sung, and most of what he saw was good.”
Says Peter:
“If all that I have loved and seen
Be with me on the Judgment Day,
I shall be saved the crowd between
From Satan and his foul array.”
Hilaire Belloc has seen much and loved much. He has sung lustily the
things he approved--with what hearty hatred has he sung the things he
disapproved!
V
Hilaire Belloc is not the man to spend much time in analysing his own
emotions; he is not, thank God, a poetical psychologist. Love songs,
drinking songs, battle songs--it is with these primitive and democratic
things that he is chiefly concerned.
But there is something more democratic than wine or love or war. That
thing is Faith. And Hilaire Belloc’s part in increasing the sum of the
world’s beauty would not be the considerable thing that it is were it
not for his Faith. It is not that (like Dante Gabriel Rossetti) he is
attracted by the Church’s pageantry and wealth of legend. To Hilaire
Belloc the pageantry is only incidental, the essential thing is his
Catholic Faith. He writes convincingly about Our Lady and Saint Joseph
and the Child Jesus because he himself is convinced. He does not delve
into mediæval tradition in quest of picturesque incidents, he merely
writes what he knows to be true. His Faith furnishes him with the theme
for those of his poems which are most likely to endure; his Faith gives
him the “rapture of an inspiration.” His Faith enables him, as it has
enabled many another poet, to see “in the lamp that is beauty, the
light that is God.”
And therein is Hilaire Belloc most thoroughly and consistently a
democrat. For in this twentieth century it happens that there is on
earth only one genuine democratic institution. And that institution is
the Catholic Church.
THE CATHOLIC POETS OF BELGIUM
At a recent meeting of the English Poetry Society, Mlle. Coppin,
a distinguished Belgian poetess, who now, like so many of her
compatriots, is a refugee in London, said: “I believe we have been
too prosperous, too fond of pleasure. We are being purged, and in our
adversity we have found our nationality. If ever England, France, and
Russia make a new Belgium, we shall be more simple and hard-working.”
Those of us who believe that the character of a nation is, to a great
extent, revealed in its literature cannot doubt that Mlle. Coppin’s
words are true. Surely the sick fancies of Maurice Maeterlinck (to
mention the most conspicuous of Belgian men of letters) could come
into being only in a land suffering from over-much civilisation, in
a land whose citizens are too sophisticated for common and wholesome
delights. Even more than the elaborate obscenities of Iwan Gilkin and
Albert Giraud, Maeterlinck’s morbid studies of mental, spiritual,
and physical degradation belong to that sort of literature which is
called “decadent.” And decadent literature usually is produced for and
by people who need to be, in Mlle. Coppin’s words, “more simple and
hard-working.”
That the great tragedy which has overtaken Belgium will have a
beneficial effect upon its literature is not to be doubted. Of course,
the first result is an almost total cessation of creative activity; one
cannot handle a rifle and a pen at the same time. But with the return
of peace must come the development of a new Belgian literature, a
literature which is not an echo of the salon-philosophies of Paris and
Berlin, but a beautiful expression of the soul of a strong and brave
race.
It is possible that when the poets of a re-created Belgium are singing
their clear songs, the world, comparing them with Gilkin, Giraud,
Maeterlinck, and the Verhaeren of _Les Débâcles_ and _Les Flambeaux
Noirs_, will say: “Now, for the first time, Belgian poetry deserves the
attention of those who are interested in other than the pathological
aspects of literature! Not until the land had been purified by blood
and flame did the Spirit of Beauty come to dwell in Flanders!”
But this criticism will be unjust. Great literary movements do not
spontaneously come into being; they develop slowly and surely through
the centuries. If all the poetry of Belgium were the work of charlatans
and vicious men, then, not even this tremendous war could stimulate
it into healthy life. The fame of Maeterlinck’s dismal dramas, and
of the least worthy poems of Emile Verhaeren, should not make us
oblivious of the fact that Belgium has, and has always had, its small,
but brilliant, company of sincere and gifted writers, men who have
not debased their art, but have held in honour the sacred traditions
of their high calling. He who, neglecting the productions of the
symbolists, decadents, and similar phantasists, turns his attention
to the authentic literature of the Belgian people, finds a strain of
poetry white and beautiful, and as fervently Catholic as the immortal
songs of Crashaw and Francis Thompson. It is not the disciples of
Baudelaire and Mallarmé who have planted the seeds of poetry that soon
shall burst into splendid bloom, but men like Thomas Braun and Georges
Ramaekers, men who, serving faithfully their Muse, have never wavered
in their allegiance to the Mistress of all the Arts, the Catholic
Church.
It must not be thought that these poets write only religious poems.
They have, indeed, produced such masterpieces of devotional verse as
Braun’s _Livre des Bénédictions_ and Ramaekers’ _Le Chant des Trois
Regnes_. But when their poetry is not religious it is not, at any rate,
irreligious; they “utter nothing base.” And surely even the lightest of
secular poems may do its author’s Catholicism no discredit. As Francis
Thompson said of poetry in the eloquent appeal to the “fathers of the
Church, pastors of the Church, pious laics of the Church” with which
his most famous essay begins, “Eye her not askance if she seldom sing
directly of religion: the bird gives glory to God though it sings only
of its own innocent loves.... Suffer her to wanton, suffer her to play,
so she play round the foot of the Cross!”
Indeed, what is true of much modern English verse is true also of that
of Belgium, there are Catholic poets who seldom in their work refer
directly to their faith, and there are infidel poets who have laid
impious hands on the Church’s treasures and decorate their rhymes with
rich ecclesiastical imagery and the fragrant names of the Saints. So we
find, for example, Emile Verhaeren using the first chapters of Genesis
as the theme of a poem that is anything but edifying, while that pious
Catholic, Thomas Braun, writes a volume of verses about postage stamps.
There are certain optimistic persons who believe that the general use
in literature of sacred names and traditions augurs well for the spread
of faith. A member of an Anglican religious order, who two years ago
delivered a series of lectures in New York City, prophesied a mighty
recrudescence of religion among the poets of England, and based his
prophecy, apparently, on the fact that Mr. Lascelles Abercrombie and
other brilliant young writers have made ballads out of some of the
most picturesque of the legends about the Saints. He did not see that
Mr. Abercrombie selected his themes solely because of their literary
value. There are many poets who eagerly avail themselves of the stores
which are the Church’s heritage, who introduce the name of the Blessed
Virgin into their verses exactly as they would introduce that of Diana,
or Venus or any creature of fable. Personally, I have never been able
to enjoy the recital, however skillful, of a sacred story by a poet
who did not believe in it, and therefore I cannot grow enthusiastic
over the knowledge that many Belgian poets, whose philosophies are
hostile to the Church, like to write about monstrances and chalices and
altars, and to tell ostentatiously “human” stories about sacred people
in general and St. Mary Magdalen in particular. I find Thomas Braun’s
poems about postage stamps more edifying.
The modern Catholic poets of Belgium may be roughly divided into two
groups, the mystics and the primitives. These terms are here used
merely for the purposes of this classification, and cannot perhaps
be justified by scientific criticism. Among the mystics I would
include such writers as Georges Ramaekers, the brilliant editor of _Le
Catholique_, and perhaps Max Elskamp, who use elaborate and complicated
symbols, and, in general, may be said to do in verse what the late
Joris Karl Huysmans, after his conversion to Catholicism, did in prose.
Among the primitives I would place such poets as Victor Kinon and
Thomas Braun, who look for their inspirations to the ancient religious
life of Flanders, in all its picturesque simplicity, and are more
concerned with celebrating the piety of simple Flemish peasants than
with endeavouring to penetrate high mysteries.
It is to that valued friend of Belgian letters, Mr. Jethro Bithell, of
Birbeck College, London, whose translation of Stefan Zweig’s book on
Verhaeren has recently earned him the gratitude of the English-speaking
public, that we owe this excellent version of Thomas Braun’s _The
Benediction of the Nuptial Ring_, taken from this poet’s _The Book of
the Benedictions_. The directness and sincerity of this poem suggest
the work of George Herbert.
THE BENEDICTION OF THE NUPTIAL KING
“_That she who shall wear it, keep faith unchanged with her husband and
ever live in mutual love._”
Almighty God, bless now the ring of gold
Which bride and bridegroom shall together hold!
They whom fresh water gave to You are now
United in You by the marriage vow.
The ring is of a heavy, beaten ore,
And yet it shall not make the finger sore,
But easefully be carried day and night,
Because its secret spirit makes it light.
Its perfect circle sings into the skin,
Nor hurts it, and the phalanx growing thin
Under its pressure molds itself ere long,
Yet keeps its agile grace and still is strong.
So love, which in this symbol lies, with no
Beginning more nor ending here below,
Shall, if You bless it, Lord, like gold resist,
And never show decay, nor flaw, nor twist,
And be so light, though solid, that the soul,
A composite yet indivisible whole,
Shall keep its tender impress to the last,
And never know the bonds that bind it fast.
In many of Thomas Braun’s poems is to be found a quality suggestive of
the folk song. Like the Verhaeren of _Les Flamandes_, Braun writes
of those huge, boisterous farmers and merchants who live for us on
the canvases of Brauwer and Jan Steen. But he writes of them, it need
scarcely be said, in a very different spirit. Verhaeren saw only their
gluttony, drunkenness, and coarseness; Braun sees their courage,
industry, good-nature, piety. In fact, Verhaeren saw their bodies,
Braun sees their souls.
In an essay on Verhaeren recently printed, I called attention to the
fact that while Verhaeren wrote of the Flemings with enthusiasm, and
with repulsively careful attention to detail, he did not write of them
with sympathy. He does not join in the revels about which he writes;
he is interested in his loud purple-faced peasants, but with his
interest is mingled a certain scorn. Thomas Braun, on the other hand,
is thoroughly in sympathy with the life of which he writes; the reader
feels that such a poem as _The Benediction of Wine_, for example, was
written by a man who is artist enough to share actually in the strong
simple piety of the keeper of the vineyard. The quaintness of Thomas
Braun’s poems, which is emphasized by the woodcuts made to accompany
them by his brother who is a Benedictine monk, is not an affectation,
it is a quality proper to the work of a man who, like Wordsworth, sees
beauty chiefly in simplicity. Like Coventry Patmore, he has “divine
frivolity,” he is acquainted with the mirth of the Saints. In his own
beautiful words, he knows how to play in the straw with the Child of
Bethlehem.
Georges Ramaekers is a poet whose verse is for the most part too
obscure to lend itself readily to translation. He will write a poem,
for example, on mushrooms, and the reader will think after several
minutes that he is being told merely about the common fungi. Then it
comes to him that it is the Tree of Life that these maleficent growths
are attacking; then they cover the columns of the Church and actually
reach the Host Itself. The poem is, it seems, a denunciation of certain
heresies, or of sloth, indifference, and other spiritual evils, but its
meaning cannot adequately be given in an English translation.
Here is a similar poem, which, in Mr. Bithell’s translation, shows
Georges Ramaeker’s symbolic method at its best and clearest.
THE THISTLE
Rooted on herbless peaks, where its erect
And prickly leaves, austerely cold and dumb,
Hold the slow, scaly serpent in respect,
The Gothic thistle, while the insects’ hum
Sounds far off, rears above the rock it scorns
Its rigid virtue for the Heavens to see.
The towering boulders guard it. And the bee
Makes honey from the blossoms on its thorns.
Victor Kinon, like that very different poet, Albert Giraud, the chief
Belgian disciple of Baudelaire, is of Walloon descent. Mr. Bithell
calls this poet a “fervent Roman Catholic,” but the poems which he has
selected for translation are entirely secular in theme and treatment.
They show, however, that their author is free from the vices of extreme
realism and hysteria, which afflict many of his contemporaries.
Sometimes it is fair to judge a poet’s whole attitude toward life from
his love poems. When decadence and feverish eroticism are in fashion,
it is refreshing to come upon a poet sane enough to write so honest and
delicate a poem as this of Victor Kinon.
HIDING FROM THE WORLD
Shall not our love be like the violet, Sweet,
And open in the dewy, dustless air
Its dainty chalice with blue petals, where
The shade of bushes makes a shy retreat?
And we will frame our daily happiness
By joining hearts, lips, brows in rapt caress
Far from the world, its noises and conceit.
Shall we not hide our modest love between
Trees wafting cool on flowers and grasses green?
In Victor Kinon’s poetry is shown a knowledge of nature like that
possessed by that American poet whose death the world of letters has
not ceased to mourn, Madison Cawein. He sketches a landscape in a few
vigorous lines, and the picture is vivid and true. This little poem
might be a lyrical rendition of a Monet painting.
THE SETTING SUN
The stainless snow and the blue,
Lit by a pure gold star,
Nearly meet, but a bar
Of fire separates the two.
A rime-frosted, black pinewood,
Raising, as waves roll foam,
Its lances toothed like a comb,
Dams the horizon’s blood.
In a tomb of blue and white
Nothing stirs save a crow,
Unfolding solemnly now
Its silky wing black as night.
It is difficult to resist the temptation to read into the Catholic
fold many Belgian poets who do not, perhaps, belong there. There is
scarcely a man of letters in Belgium who does not owe his introduction
to literature to the Catholic Church. The Catholic schools and
universities of Belgium have given a knowledge of art and poetry to
many a poet who now pays for the gift his little stanzas of abuse. But
some of them, and among them must be counted Emile Verhaeren, seem to
be thinking of their old faith, now that the need of faith has become
terribly apparent to them. Verhaeren, especially, seems to be about to
stop in his weary flight from the Hound of Heaven. For many years he
was a writer of poems that seemed to betray a mind absolutely diseased.
There were realistic studies of human vice that seemed like pages of
Zola done into verse, and there were extraordinary attempts (of which
Stefan Zweig speaks approvingly) to “chisel a new face of God.” But
since his retirement to his little cottage at Caillou-qui-Bique, he
has written poems that are for the most part exaltations of pure love,
as lofty in thought as they are finished in composition. Mr. Bithell’s
translation of this little song of wedded love shows that Verhaeren has
left far behind him the grossness of _Les Flamandes_ and the morbidness
of _Les Flambeaux Noirs_.
THIS IS THE GOOD HOUR WHEN THE LAMP IS LIT
This is the good hour when the lamp is lit.
All is calm, and consoling, and dear,
And the silence is such that you could hear
A feather falling in it.
This is the good hour when to my chair my love will flit
As breezes blow,
As smoke will rise,
Gentle, slow,
She says nothing at first--and I am listening;
I hear all her soul, I surprise
Its gushing and glistening,
And I kiss her eyes.
This is the good hour when the lamp is lit.
When hearts will say
How they have loved each other through the day.
And one says such simple things:
The fruit one from the garden brings;
The flower that one has seen
Opening in mosses green;
And the heart will of a sudden thrill and glow,
Remembering some faded word of love
Found in a drawer beneath a cast-off glove
In a letter of a year ago.
But the poem which indicates most clearly the tremendous change that
his nation’s tragedy has brought to Verhaeren, is that inspired by
the demolition of the Cathedral of Rheims. A year ago, it may be,
Verhaeren would have thought of this cathedral merely as a beautiful
piece of architecture, as an ancient and lovely landmark. Now that
it has suffered from the cannon of an invading army, he remembers
suddenly the high use for which it was intended, the destruction of the
sacred images and vessels reminds him, in spite of all his sophistry,
that these things were not mere works of art. Once more, as in those
far-away years when, with Georges Rodenbach, Charles Van Lerberghe, and
Maurice Maeterlinck, he learned of literature and life at the Jesuit
College of Sainte-Barbe, he is able to understand that most necessary
of all acts, worship. The poem is so significant, so important to all
who desire an insight into the psychology of Verhaeren and of literary
Belgium, that I venture to quote here my own translation of it. It by
no means does justice to the beauty of the original.
THE CATHEDRAL OF RHEIMS
He who walks through the meadows of Champagne
At noon in Fall, when leaves like gold appear,
Sees it draw near
Like some great mountain set upon the plain.
From radiant dawn until the close of day,
Nearer it grows
To him who goes
Across the country. When tall towers lay
Their shadowy pall
Upon his way,
He enters, where
The solid stone is hollowed deep by all
Its centuries of beauty and of prayer.
Ancient French temple! thou whose hundred kings
Watch over thee, emblazoned on thy walls,
Tell me, within thy memory-hallowed halls
What chant of triumph or what war-song rings?
Thou hast known Clovis and his Frankish train,
Whose mighty hand Saint Remy’s hand did keep,
And in thy spacious vault perhaps may sleep
An echo of the voice of Charlemagne.
For God thou hast known fear, when from His side
Men wandered, seeking alien shrines and new,
But still the sky was bountiful and blue
And thou wast crowned with France’s love and pride.
Sacred thou art, from pinnacle to base;
And in thy panes of gold and scarlet glass
The setting sun sees thousandfold his face;
Sorrow and joy in stately silence pass
Across thy walls, the shadow and the light;
Around thy lofty pillars, tapers white
Illuminate, with delicate sharp flames,
The brows of saints with venerable names,
And in the night erect a fiery wall.
A great but silent fervour burns in all
Those simple folk who kneel, pathetic, dumb,
And know that down below, beside the Rhine--
Cannon, horses, soldiers, flags in line--
With blare of trumpets, mighty armies come.
Suddenly, each knows fear;
Swift rumours pass, that every one must hear,
The hostile banners blaze against the sky
And by the embassies mobs rage and cry.
Now war has come and peace is at an end.
On Paris town the German troops descend.
They are turned back, and driven to Champagne.
And now as to so many weary men,
The glorious temple gives them welcome, when
It meets them at the bottom of the plain.
At once, they set their cannon in its way.
There is no gable now, nor wall
That does not suffer, night and day,
As shot and shell in crushing torrents fall.
The stricken tocsin quivers through the tower;
The triple nave, the apse, the lonely choir
Are circled, hour by hour,
With thundering bands of fire
And Death is scattered broadcast among men.
And then
That which was splendid with baptismal grace;
The stately arches soaring into space,
The transepts, columns, windows gray and gold,
The organ, in whose tones the ocean rolled,
The crypts, of mighty shades the dwelling places,
The Virgin’s gentle hands, the Saints’ pure faces,
All, even the pardoning hands of Christ the Lord
Were struck and broken by the wanton sword
Of sacrilegious lust.
O beauty slain, O glory in the dust!
Strong walls of faith, most basely overthrown!
The crawling flames, like adders glistening
Ate the white fabric of this lovely thing.
Now from its soul rose a piteous moan,
The soul that always loved the just and fair.
Granite and marble loud their woe confessed,
The silver monstrances that Popes had blessed,
The chalices and lamps and crosiers rare
Were seared and twisted by a flaming breath;
The horror everywhere did range and swell,
The guardian Saints into this furnace fell,
Their bitter tears and screams were stilled in death.
Around the flames armed hosts are skirmishing.
The burning sun reflects the lurid scene;
The German army, fighting for its life,
Rallies its torn and terrified left wing;
And, as they near this place,
The imperial eagles see
Before them in their flight,
Here, in the solemn night,
The old Cathedral to the years to be
Showing, with wounded arms, their own disgrace.
Of Verhaeren’s school-fellows at Sainte-Barbe, one, Maurice
Maeterlinck, is already enjoying a fame which exceeds his deserts and
is not likely to endure. Georges Rodenbach, who died in 1898, wrote,
like Verhaeren, of Flemish peasants, but he gave them a romantic
glamour which has alienated critics who admire naturalistic poetry.
Stefan Zweig has little use for him, and Jethro Bithell speaks of
his “weary Alexandrines,” and says that his reputation has waned
considerably since his death. But Charles C. Clarke, of the Sheffield
Scientific School, in the course of an illuminating article on Belgian
literature, says that Rodenbach’s poems have considerable vogue in
France. From his discussion of Rodenbach I quote this felicitously
phrased paragraph:
“Morbid and mystic like his prose, Rodenbach’s poetry has a
delicacy and a silvery tone that are inimitable. Out of almost
nothing it weaves thoughts and calls up memories of wonderfully
melancholy beauty. In it water is always stagnant, giving chill
reflections of the sky through trees; lights are dim, footsteps
noiseless; rooms are repositories of reminders of the past, where
silence speaks to the heart through sad aspects. The extent to
which Rodenbach uses such notes constitutes his originality. His
skill in avoiding every common formula and his delicate choice of
metaphors seem really inspiration. No one has imitated his poems
of gray tints and muffled sounds, his mourning designs of dull
filigree, without falling into monotony and trifling. It is not
enough praise for a poet to say of him that he was unapproachable
in picturing the accessories of melancholy; but Rodenbach deserves
no more, unless it be our gratitude for preserving in literature
something of ancient Flanders which battle and flame have destroyed
beyond material restoration.”
Another school-fellow of Verhaeren, Charles Van Lerberghe, can
scarcely, I believe, be called a Catholic poet, although, like Dante
Gabriel Rossetti, whose disciple he was, his verse is filled with
Catholic symbolism. In a country like Belgium, in which nearly all the
education is Catholic, and in which nearly every poet is, at any rate
nominally, a Catholic, it is sometimes difficult to distinguish between
writers who have a genuinely devotional spirit, and those who merely
like to play with mysticism. There are, for example, the amazing poems
of Max Elskamp. He writes simple and charming poems about the Blessed
Virgin and the Christ Child, and seems, indeed, to have the hardy faith
of his Flemish ancestors. But the simplicity of his poems is not always
convincing; the reader remembers that the late William Sharpe wrote, as
“Fiona MacLeod,” poems that seemed to flame with all the piety of the
Gael. And William Sharpe was, as he took care to let the world know,
a “pagan.” The feeling that Elskamp’s interest in religion is chiefly
literary is strengthened when we learn from Mr. Bithell that most of
the sacred names in his poems have a symbolic meaning, that the Blessed
Virgin means merely “the pure woman,” and the Christ Child simply “the
delicious infancy.” Intellectual caprices like this seldom accompany
genuine devotional feeling.
But at any rate there is nothing to disgust or pain the reader in
Elskamp’s verse; whether or not he believes in the sacred personages of
whom he writes, he does not treat them irreverently. His Catholicism,
however, is not so convincing as is that of Thomas Braun and Georges
Ramaekers.
It is good to find that in Belgium, a country the literature of which
must inevitably reflect from time to time the strange fashions of
Germany and France, there has been preserved through the years the
poetry of Catholic tradition. Belgian poetry must become more and more
spiritual; the poets have seen and felt things mighty and terrible,
and they can no longer concern themselves with erotic fancies and
the nuances of their own emotions. In days to come, historians of
literature will perhaps see that on the thought of Belgium as on the
thought of all Europe, this war has had a clarifying and strengthening
effect. Good still comes from evil, sweetness from force, and honeycomb
out of the lion’s carcass. Belgium may say, in the words of one of the
truest poets of our time:
Sweet Sorrow, play a grateful part,
Break me the marble of my heart
And of its fragments pave a street
Where, to my bliss, myself may meet
One hastening with piercèd feet.
LETTERS
_To Charles Willis Thompson_
THE NEW YORK TIMES.
November 1, 1914.
Dear Charlie--
Can you lend me $1.00? I wish to go to New Brunswick, N. J. Help me to
gratify this strange whim!
J. KILMER.
* * * * *
_To Shaemas O’Sheel_
Mahwah, N. J.
My dear Shaemas--
Aline and I are heartily glad of the splendid fortune that has come
to you and Blanche. I am sure you will enjoy Washington--it’s a very
lovely city as I remember it--I was there for two days at the age of
four.
With love from Mayor Gaynor, Cale Young Rice, Alfred Noyes, Madison
Cawein, B. Russell Hertz and Harriet Monroe,
I am,
Yours,
JOYCE.
* * * * *
THE NEW YORK TIMES.
February 12, 1916.
Dear Shaemas:
I have been thinking a good deal about you for the last day or so, and
might therefore have known that a message from you was on its way. The
Minaret is a fine adventure, and God knows Washington needs adventures
more than any other city in the United States. There is some beautiful
writing and some brave and direct thinking in the copies you sent me,
and of course I enclose my subscription for a year. I’d support any
enterprise of yours, so long as it wasn’t a scheme to make the Kaiser
Mayor of Mahwah, New Jersey. I also enclose a poem, with my blessing.
But why do you let your young collaborator--I suppose he is
responsible--be so damned vindictive! No poet has any right in the
world to knock the work of another poet who is honest. Vachel Lindsey
is, in my opinion, a sincere artist, whose work sometimes--as in “The
Chinese Nightingale”--glows with genius. That is of course only my
own opinion--but it is not merely a matter of opinion, but a matter
of absolute fact, that he is an honest man, consistently serving his
ideal, earnestly endeavouring to express the beauty that is in him.
And abuse is not what he should receive from his brother poet.
However, go ahead, and good luck to you. But lay off the hammer! Poets
have enough to suffer without being castigated by other poets. Keep out
of jail, and give my love to Blanche and Patrick Wilhelm.
Yours as always,
JOYCE KILMER.
* * * * *
_To Louis Bevier, Jr._
NEW YORK TIMES.
November 28, 1916.
My dear Louis:
I am sending you by this mail a copy of my book “The Circus and Other
Essays,” which our friend Laurence has just published. I had intended
to dedicate it to your father and yourself, but I suddenly discovered
that I had never dedicated a book to my own father. So I have dedicated
this one to him, and will dedicate to your father and yourself one
of the two books coming out in the Spring--either the poems or the
interviews.
At any time you wish, I will buy you a drink.
Yours sincerely,
JOYCE KILMER.
* * * * *
_To Sara Teasdale Filsinger_
NEW YORK TIMES.
February, 1916.
Dear Sara:
I don’t know that POETRY could use a Valentine poem, but if it could
do so, it ought by all means to use it long after Valentine’s day,
for timeliness, the greatest curse of our much cursed magazines, is
certainly not one of POETRY’S vices. And how do you like it? It’s the
first free verse I’ve written since free verse made a special label for
itself--it’s a highly artificial poem, and yet passionately sincere.
I’ve quit being a critic, thank God! I resigned from the _Bookman_ and
_Book News Monthly_, and I no longer review poetry for the _Times_. I
still run the _Digest’s_ “Current Poetry” department, but that’s not
criticism, it’s just an exhibition. I merely hold up for admiration the
best poetry I can find, saying nothing about inferior stuff. And I can
do that without losing my self-respect. But criticism of poetry is no
task for an enthusiastic poet, however little he may deserve the title.
Aline is still in hospital, impatient for the new baby. She likes to
receive letters.
Yours, JOYCE.
* * * * *
_To Katherine Brégy_
THE NEW YORK TIMES,
Times Square.
November 6, 1914.
My dear Miss Brégy:
It is delightful to find on my desk this morning your letter telling me
of the honour in store for me. Of course I am reading with enjoyment
the “Opera” in _America_; how valuable a friend Catholic poetry, that
is poetry, has in you!
A verse-maker, I suppose, is an unskillful critic of his own work. But
in reply to your question, I will say that I am greatly pleased when
people like “Trees,” “Stars” and “Pennies,” when they see that “Folly”
is a religious poem, when they praise the stanza fourth from the end
of “Delicatessen,” and understand stanza three of section four of “The
Fourth Shepherd.”
Before what Miss Guiney calls my “great leap into Liberty” I published
a book of verses called “Summer of Love”; but I do not think it would
interest you; it is, for the most part, a celebration of common themes.
If you have not a copy of “Trees and Other Poems” please tell me and I
will send you one. I will send also “Summer of Love” if you wish it,
for some of the poems in it, those inspired by genuine love, are not
things of which to be ashamed, and you, understanding, would not be
offended by the others.
Your sincerely,
JOYCE KILMER.
* * * * *
May 18th, 1917.
Dear Katherine:
Naturally I’m expecting to go to the Wars, being of appropriate age
and sex. I was going to Plattsburg to try for a commission, but for
many reasons--one of them being that I didn’t want to be an officer in
charge of conscripts (the democratic bluff again! says Katherine)--I
gave up the idea. So a month ago I enlisted as a private in the Seventh
Regiment, National Guard, New York. We were reviewed by your friend
Joffre--in 1824 we were reviewed by Lafayette. We go to training camp
in a week or so--where I don’t know--and then we are mustered into
Federal service. We may be sent to France, we may be sent to Russia, or
it may be Mexico or Cuba--nobody knows.
Please come to New York and let me take you to luncheon. And give Mrs.
Coates my love.
JOYCE.
* * * * *
_To Amelia Josephine Burr_
Headquarters Company, 165th Infantry,
A. E. F., France.
My dear Josephine:
That is a magnificent piece of knitting--I am delighted to own it.
Thanks ever so much! And I will thank you ever more for your book of
poetry, which you promise to send me. I enjoyed your recent poems in
the _Outlook_--you are one of the few American poets who should be
allowed to write war songs. Your letter came up to the specifications
of the order--it was highly entertaining and therefore genuinely
appreciated. I sympathise with you in your trials in addressing camp
audiences, though I don’t know as you deserve any sympathy. I think you
have a pretty good time. And I know the audiences do.
I wouldn’t be surprised to hear of you coming over here as a nurse or
something. Nice country, nice war. I wouldn’t be back in the States
having meatless, wheatless, boozeless, smokeless days for anything. I
am a Sergeant now. I spend my time working at Regimental Headquarters
while we are in reserve, and in training and when we are in action I
am an Observer in the Regimental Intelligence Section--very amusing
work. I had a fine time during the recent activities of our regiment,
activities of which you probably read in the papers. In the dug-out I
wrote a poem I think you’ll like--“Rouge Bouquet” is its name. I expect
to remain a Sergeant (unless I’m reduced), for to get a commission I’d
have to leave the Regiment and go to a training school for several
months and then I would be sent to some regiment other than this. And
I’d rather be a sergeant in the 69th than a lieutenant in any other
outfit.
Give my love to anybody you meet who would appreciate that commodity.
And write often to
Yours,
JOYCE.
* * * * *
_To Howard W. Cook_
Headquarters Company, 165th Infantry,
A. E. F., France.
June 28, 1918.
Dear Mr. Cook:
Your letter of May 31 has just arrived. I am afraid that such
information as I can send you will reach you too late to be of use, but
anyway I’ll do what I can.
You ask first for biographical details. All this material you will
find in Who’s Who in America, except the information that I am the
father of four children, named respectively Kenton Sinclair, Deborah
Clanton, Michael Barry and Christopher.
Second, you ask for comments on myself and something about my earlier
efforts in poetry. That’s harder to answer. How can I make comments on
myself? I’ll pass up that part of the questionnaire, if I may, but I’m
willing to write about my earlier efforts in poetry. They were utterly
worthless, that is, all of them which preceded a poem called “Pennies”
which you will find in my book “Trees and Other Poems.” I want all my
poems written before that to be forgotten--they were only the exercises
of an amateur, imitations, useful only as technical training. If what I
nowadays write is considered poetry, then I became a poet in November,
1913.
Now, as to your other questions. I’ll take them in order. 1. What has
contemporary poetry already accomplished? Answer--All that poetry can
be expected to do is to give pleasure of a noble sort to its readers,
leading them to the contemplation of that Beauty which neither words
nor sculptures nor pigments can do more than faintly reflect, and to
express the mental and spiritual tendencies of the people of the lands
and times in which it is written. I have very little chance to read
contemporary poetry out here, but I hope it is reflecting the virtues
which are blossoming on the blood-soaked soil of this land--courage,
and self-abnegation, and love, and faith--this last not faith in some
abstract goodness, but faith in God and His Son and the Holy Ghost, and
in the Church which God Himself founded and still rules. France has
turned to her ancient Faith with more passionate devotion than she has
shown for centuries. I believe that America is learning the same lesson
from the war, and is cleansing herself of cynicism and pessimism and
materialism and the lust for novelty which has hampered our national
development. I hope that our poets already see this tendency and
rejoice in it--if they do not they are unworthy of their craft.
2. What is American poetry’s influence to-day? Answer--This question
I am ill-prepared to answer, but I would venture to surmise that
the extravagances and decadence of the so-called “renascence of
poetry” during the last five years--a renascence distinguished by the
celebration of the queer and the nasty instead of the beautiful--have
made the poet seem as silly a figure to the contemporary American as he
seemed to the Englishman of the eighteen-nineties, when the “æsthetic
movement” was at its foolish height.
3. What of American poetry’s future? Answer--To predict anything of
American poetry’s future requires a knowledge of America’s future,
and I am not a student of political economy. But this much I will
tell you--when we soldiers get back to our homes and have the leisure
to read poetry, we won’t read the works of Amy Lowell and Edgar Lee
Masters. We’ll read poetry, if there is any for us to read, and I hope
there will be. I believe there will.
Sincerely yours,
JOYCE KILMER.
* * * * *
_To Thomas Walsh_
Headquarters Co., 165th Infantry,
A. E. F., France.
April.
Dear Tom:
Where will you be, I wonder, when this letter reaches you? Perhaps in
the Brooklyn sanctuary (this term is here used in a purely literary
sense) reading reviews of your newest book of verse--pleasant reading
indeed, judging by those I have seen. Perhaps you will be in your
Sabine farm at Lake Hopatkong--if that is the way that strange word is
spelled. Perhaps the postman will give it to you just as you parade
away from your home, and you will take it with you to the palatial
new Columbia University Club, and glance at it over your turtle soup
and sherry and steak and mushrooms and corn and sweet potatoes and
chaveis--but I’m breaking my heart describing this meal of yours.
Soon the mess call will sound and I’ll take my aluminum meat dish and
canteen cup, and wade through the mud to the mess-line. And I’ll get a
plate of stew and some milkless tea or coffee, and I’ll stand in the
mud or sit down in the mud and consume it.
Nevertheless, it’s a nice war and I’m enjoying most of it. Our time at
the front--of which the newspapers have by this time informed you--was
a wonderful experience. I had the privilege of spending a week as
observer in the Regimental Intelligence Section--lively and interesting
work. I’d love to see you at an observation post, Tom, you’d get as
thin as I now am.
Send me your book, will you, Tom? I enjoy poetry more now than ever
before--I suppose it is because I get it so seldom. When I’m writing
verse and reviewing verse and talking about verse and to verse-makers
all the time, I have not the enthusiasm for it I have over here, where
most of the poetry is unwritten and undiscussed.
Nevertheless, it’s a nice country. I’d like to buy you a litre of red
wine--for a franc and a half--with a dash of syrup in it. Also I could
introduce you to the results of the labours of a few accomplished
cooks, some of them soldiers, some of them French women.
Fr. O’Donnell quotes you to the effect that Louis is now in this land,
or on his way hither. I hope to see him. He ought to be sent to an
Officer’s Training School soon--I think that will happen. He is the
sort of fellow who ought to have a commission. I might possibly be
allowed to go to an Officer’s Training School, but I wouldn’t do so,
because if I did so I’d be sent--whether or not I got a commission--to
some Regiment other than this. And I take no pleasure in the thought
of soldiering in a regiment of strangers. I like the crowd in this
outfit very much and would rather be a sergeant--as I am--here than be
a lieutenant in any other Regiment.
If you are ever minded to send me papers, please let them be _Times_
Book Reviews or other sheets of a decidedly literary flavour.
Occasional copies of _The Bookman_ would be welcome. I like a bit of
concentrated literature now and then.
Remember me, please, to your sisters and brothers and to any of my
other friends whom you may meet. And believe me
Always yours sincerely,
JOYCE.
* * * * *
_To Robert Cortes Holliday_
Headquarters Co., 165th Inf.,
A. E. F., France.
May 7, 1918.
Dear Bob:
I have not the time now to write you the letter I’d like to
write--chiefly about your characteristic and delightful Tarkington
book, which I greatly enjoyed and expect to enjoy during many
re-readings. What I write now is merely a note in answer to your letter
of April 12. This you will please communicate to Mr. Doran and regard
as final.
The only way I can give you any material for a book is as I am doing
now--sending you every six months or so some verses or an introspective
essay which you can syndicate and eventually turn into a book. I
sent you a prose sketch “Holy Ireland” (which represents the best
prose writing I can do nowadays), another prose sketch, and (by way
of Aline) a poem, “Rouge Bouquet,” which you ought to be able to do a
good deal with. It is probably the best verse I have written. I never
planned doing war-correspondence work--if I had I’d have come over as
a correspondent instead of as a soldier. Many circumstances, including
the censorship, the rules governing a soldier’s conduct and other
things, prevent me from trying to make a consecutive narrative now,
even if I so desired. I am a poet at present trying to be a soldier.
The experience may naturally be expected to result in a book--of some
kind, at some time. I am not going to try to “cover” the war or my
Regiment’s share in it. But the title “Here and There With the Fighting
Sixty-ninth” may probably be taken as well as any other to cover what,
if I survive, I shall probably, in the course of time, write. My days
of hack writing are over, for a time at least.
To tell the truth, I am not at all interested in writing nowadays,
except in so far as writing is the expression of something beautiful.
And I see daily and nightly the expression of beauty in action
instead of words, and I find it more satisfactory. I am a Sergeant
in the Regimental Intelligence Section--the most fascinating work
possible--more thrills in it than in any other branch except possibly
aviation. And it’s more varied than aviation. Wonderful life! But I
don’t know what I’ll be able to do in civilian life--unless I become a
fireman!
Please give my love to Stella and believe me always your affectionate
and grateful friend
JOYCE.
* * * * *
_To Reverend Edward F. Garesché, S.J._
Hq. Co., 165th Inf.,
A. E. F.
Jan. 29, 1918.
My dear Father:
I have to thank you for three letters, for two poems, for the proof
sheets of your book and for your beautiful Christmas gift, which I
treasure and have with me always. The poem “To Rose in Heaven” is so
exquisite that I cannot write or speak all my deep appreciation of
it. But I know that it is not my personal feeling alone that makes me
consider it one of the noblest elegiac poems in our language. I wish
that I were still in the book-reviewing game--I’d like to express my
opinion of your new book. My column in the _Literary Digest_ is now
conducted by Mrs. Edwin Markham. However, I occasionally send in some
clippings and comment, and I’ll try to get some of your book quoted. I
congratulate you on your book; it is an achievement for which you must
be deeply grateful; of course none of us rhymers can really be proud
if we’re true to the traditions of our craft. You see, I’m not in “The
Proud Poet” mood now. I’m neither proud nor a poet--I’ve written only
one poem since I sailed, a little thing called “Militis Meditatio.”
We all are well and happy--I do not think that any one of us can
honestly say that he has not enjoyed this Winter. The trials and
hardships of the life are so novel as to be interesting. But I imagine
that one enjoys very little his tenth year of soldiering. It is
especially pleasant to be in France and the part of France that we are
in. I am surprised, I acknowledge, by the passionate Catholicity of the
people. Even “Holy Ireland” can scarcely be more Catholic than rural
France.
Tell my friends my address and urge them to write to me. Pray for me,
and believe me always
Yours sincerely,
JOYCE KILMER.
* * * * *
Headquarters Company, 165th Infantry,
A. E. F., France.
May 6, 1918.
My dear Father:
It is very comfortable to dwell in so genuinely Catholic a land as
this; to be reminded in every room of every house, and at every
cross-road of the Faith. I do not know when you last visited France,
and perhaps you are already familiar with conditions here, but I do
not cease to be surprised and delighted to see the number of people
receiving Holy Communion not only on Sunday, but every day. And you
will find soldiers of this Regiment in church whenever and wherever
there is a priest to say Mass. I think that most of us are better
Catholics now than when we were at home--certainly we should be.
My own work is growing steadily more interesting. For a while I
worked, as you know, in the Adjutant’s Office, having special charge
of recording and reporting statistics. But this I gave up recently to
enter (as a Sergeant) the Regimental Intelligence Section. This is much
better for me, since it is open-air work of an intensely interesting
kind, and I think that I am now more useful to the Regiment. My
newspaper training, you see, has made me a competent observer, and
that is what I am nowadays--an observer of the enemy’s activities. I
have already some strange stories to tell, but for telling them I must
await a time when censorship rules are abrogated. I have written very
little--two prose sketches and two poems since I left the States--but
I have a rich store of memories. Not that what I write matters--I have
discovered, since some unforgettable experiences, that writing is not
the tremendously important thing I once considered it. You will find me
less a bookman when you next see me, and more, I hope, a man.
Pray for me, my dear Father, that I may love God more and that I may be
unceasingly conscious of Him--that is the greatest desire I have.
Your affectionate friend,
JOYCE KILMER.
* * * * *
_To Reverend James J. Daly, S.J._
Cragmere, Mahwah, New Jersey.
Oct. 7, 1912.
My dear Father Daly:
I hope that I interpret your letter of September 20th correctly
in thinking that it means that you will permit me to write to you
occasionally, and that you will write me in return. Of course I know
that your work occupies much of your time, and that you have pleasanter
uses for your leisure than writing letters to some one you have not
seen. So do not feel obliged by courtesy to answer me at length.
I am glad that you like some of my work. My present occupation is that
of assistant editor of _The Churchman_, an Anglican weekly paper. It is
a Church Newspaper, with some literary features. Did Grey tell you that
I was not of your Communion? I hope that this knowledge will not shut
me out of your regard.
Your remarks, in your letter, on the fact that many of our most famous
writers to-day are anti-Christian, are certainly justified. Still, do
you not think that a reaction is coming? Already we have Chesterton,
and Belloc, and Bazin, and Miss Guiney, and Fr. Vincent McNabb,
and a number of other brilliant writers who not as theologians but
purely as literary artists express a fine and wholesome faith. People
are beginning to tire of cheap eroticism and “realism” and similar
absurdities.
Yours sincerely,
JOYCE KILMER.
[Illustration:
JOYCE KILMER, AGE 5
FROM A PHOTOGRAPH
IN THE POSSESSION OF
MRS. KILBURN KILMER
]
Dec. 14, 1912.
My dear Father Daly:
The cards are rather laconic, but they are supposed to convey the
information, as you thought, that my family is the larger by one. I
have already a little boy, who will be four next March. His name is
Kenton Sinclair. I married when I was twenty-one, immediately after
my graduation from Columbia. Then--since you have twice asked for
biographical information--I taught school in Morristown for a year,
came to New York, went to work on the Standard Dictionary, and after
three years took my present position on _The Churchman_.
Do you know the Rev. Michael Earls? I recently received a copy
of his book of verse. He is a member of your Society--I think he
is at Georgetown. The poems about children are very delicate and
sympathetic--one called, I believe, “An Autumn Rose-bush” is admirable.
I see Grey frequently--I hope to take breakfast with him to-morrow. A
number of us have the custom of breakfasting on Sunday mornings on the
excellent Irish bacon to be procured at Healy’s, on 91st St. When you
return to New York, you must join us. Do you know Thomas Walsh? He is
with us occasionally--you should know him, and his translations from
the Spanish, and his verse. I hope you are coming East soon.
Yours sincerely,
JOYCE KILMER.
* * * * *
Cragmere, Mahwah, N. J.
July 24, 1913.
Dear Father Daly:
I do not like to burden my friends with my troubles, but you have
certain opportunities that I lack, so I am asking you the greatest
favour. Please pray for the healing of my little daughter Rose. She is
dangerously ill with infantile paralysis. This is a disease that has
appeared among mankind only recently, and physicians are uncertain how
to treat it. She is staying in New York with her mother to be near the
doctor and I am staying here nights to take care of my other child.
Of course the maid is here during the day so the house is kept up.
But Rose cannot move her legs or arms--She was so active and happy
only last week--she cannot even cry--her voice is just a little
whimper--the danger is of its reaching her lungs and killing her. I
cannot write any more. You know how I feel. Pray for her.
JOYCE KILMER.
* * * * *
Aug. 30, 1913.
Dear Father Daly:
There is not, it seems, any danger of the death of Rose now. And she
has regained her strength. Her arms and legs have been left paralysed
but her hands and feet move. It will take a year’s time for us to know
whether or not this paralysis is permanent.
I am deeply grateful to you for your compliance with my request. I
know that your prayers were of value in keeping her alive. Apologies
for the brusqueness of my letter asking your aid, are, I think, not
necessary--you were the only man to whom I could appeal for the special
help needed, and I was in bitter grief and anxiety.
My wife asks me to express her sincere gratitude to you.
Now that the crisis is past, we have a strange tranquillity.
And we have acquired a humility that is, I think, good for us. Well,
these are things not readily expressed--accept our heart-felt thanks.
Yours sincerely,
JOYCE KILMER.
* * * * *
New York.
Oct. 6, 1913.
Dear Father Daly:
This is to express our gratitude for your prayers. They have helped us
in our trial--they are helping--and I know that in part to your efforts
Rose owes her life and we our peace of mind. For fifteen or sixteen
years she will, the doctors say, remain paralysed, unable to move her
arms or legs. But her mind is active and we will keep her happy. I
think that there are compensations, spiritual and mental, for the loss
of physical power.
My wife and I are studying Catholic doctrine and we hope to be received
this Autumn.
Yours sincerely,
JOYCE KILMER.
* * * * *
New York.
Dec. 5, 1913.
Dear Father Daly:
You may be amused by the circular which I enclose. You know, we have
been having a plague of white-slave plays in New York this season--“The
Lure,” “The Fight” and the rest; and now they are giving white-slave
moving pictures--“The Traffic in Souls” they are called. I think that
“The Drama as a Factor in Sex Education” is ridiculous--and I’m going
to say so. Most of the other people who are to speak at the Academy of
Medicine are very serious-minded settlement workers, ready to save the
world by means of eugenics and inexpensive divorce. So I don’t think
I’ll make myself very popular. But I hope to have a lot of fun.
My wife and I are very comfortable now that we are Catholics. I think
we rather disappointed Father Cronyn (the Paulist who received us) by
not showing any emotion during the ceremony. But our chief sensation
is simply comfort--we feel that we’re where we belong, and it’s a very
pleasant feeling.
I wonder if the enclosed verses will shock you. I am very much bored
by the praise of suicide so common in “æsthetic” circles. Many of
my friends like to think themselves “decadents” and they are most
enthusiastic over the work of such third-rate versifiers as the late
Richard Middleton, who killed himself at the age of thirty. It seems to
me that suicide is the most absurd of all sins. There is, undoubtedly,
pleasure in many sorts of evil; many crimes are reprehensible but not
ridiculous. But suicide is a stupid sort of sin--the criminal gets no
fun at all out of it. I have tried to put this idea into verse--and
you should have heard the criticisms when the poem was read aloud at a
meeting of the Poetry Society!
Yours sincerely,
JOYCE KILMER.
* * * * *
New York, Dec. 22, 1913.
Dear Father Daly:
I am grateful to you for your sound criticism of “To a Young Poet Who
Killed Himself.” It had previously been criticised by “pagans” who
thought that suicide was romantic and charming. You gave me just what I
needed--an analysis of its “philosophy.” Of course I’ll leave it out of
my new book of verse, or else, as you suggest, make it the utterance of
someone not myself.
You will be glad to hear of our Christmas present from Soeur Therese.
Rose can lift her left forearm. I know that you have been getting her
aid for us. Please tell us how to show our gratitude to her and to you.
A picture of Rose and her mother is going to you for Christmas. I hope
that it may be a mirthful feast for you. We can honestly say that we
have never before been so happy.
Yours sincerely,
JOYCE KILMER.
* * * * *
Mahwah, N. J.
Jan. 9, 1914.
Dear Father Daly:
At last I have leisure to thank you for your Christmas gifts. I did not
know that such beautiful cards were made. How is it that in Prairie du
Chien--a place of which the name suggests Indians and tomahawks and
Deadwood stage-coaches--you can procure better cards than I can get
in New York? The medals are highly valued--the workmanship on them is
admirable--they will be worn properly as soon as I can afford to buy
some silver chains--and that will be next Tuesday.
Of course you understand my conversion. I am beginning to understand
it. I believed in the Catholic position, the Catholic view of
ethics and æsthetics, for a long time. But I wanted something not
intellectual, some conviction not mental--in fact I wanted Faith.
Just off Broadway, on the way from the Hudson Tube Station to the Times
Building, there is a Church, called the Church of the Holy Innocents.
Since it is in the heart of the Tenderloin, this name is strangely
appropriate--for there surely is need of youth and innocence. Well,
every morning for months I stopped on my way to the office and prayed
in this Church for faith. When faith did come, it came, I think, by way
of my little paralysed daughter. Her lifeless hands led me; I think her
tiny still feet know beautiful paths. You understand this and it gives
me a selfish pleasure to write it down.
I was very glad of your criticism of “The Young Poet Who Killed
Himself.” I need some stricter discipline, I think, and it’s hard to
get it. I enjoy Father Cullem’s direction very much, he is a fine old
Irishman with no nonsense about him. But I need to be called a fool, I
need to have some of the conceit and sophistication knocked out of me.
I suppose you think this is “enthusiasm”--that much heralded danger of
converts. Perhaps it is, but I don’t think so. I know I’m glad I live
two miles from the Church, because it’s excellent for a lazy person
like myself to be made to exert himself for religion. And I wish I
had a stern mediæval confessor--the sort of person one reads about in
anti-Catholic books--who would inflict real penances. The saying of
Hail Marys and Our Fathers is no penance, it’s a delight.
Forgive this egotistical letter! I am praying that the New Year may
bring you much happiness.
Yours sincerely,
JOYCE KILMER.
* * * * *
Mahwah, N. J.
July 14, 1914.
Dear Father Daly:
If you read my “Some Mischief Still” I hope the strong language of my
janitor didn’t shock you. I’ve written to my long-suffering confessor
to ask whether or not I can let characters in my plays and stories
“cuss” when they feel so disposed. I fear that I introduced a new sin
to him--vicarious profanity.
You asked me several questions recently. Let me see if I can answer
them. In the first place, you asked me why I addressed the Holy Name
Society of Suffern, New York. The answer to that is, why not? I go
to Sacred Heart Church in Suffern. My parish church is in Ramsey, New
Jersey, but we Mahwah Catholics (those of us who go to Church) are
allowed to go to Suffern, which is much nearer. Ramsey has only a small
Mission Church, to which comes the priest from Hohokus.
Furthermore, I tolerate no levity on the name _Suffern!_ especially
from a dweller in Prairie du Chien (named after a ridiculous vermin)
who has been visiting a place called Pilsen (named after a beer) and
conducting a retreat in a place called Peoria (obviously a corruption
of Peruna, a patent medicine of ill repute).
You ask me if I know what a retreat is. I do, because long before I
was a Catholic, before I was a wild-eyed Socialistic revolutionary,
I was a ritualistic Anglican, and I went twice up to Holy Cross
Monastery at West Park. This is an Anglican institution, which observes
a modification of the Benedictine rule. And there I learned about
imitation retreats, anyway. I must go to a regular retreat sometime.
I don’t expect to take any vacation this Summer, but I’m going to spend
several Saturdays fishing. I hope you do not scorn that wholesome and
unliterary diversion. Most writers of my acquaintance consider it
lamentably base.
I hope you were satisfied with your efforts at Peoria. I did what you
asked. By the way, when you pray for the Kilmers, please include a new
Kilmer, who is coming, we hope, in October. He--or she--will have Barry
among his or her names, after the family from whom my wife is descended.
Yours affectionately,
JOYCE KILMER.
* * * * *
Mahwah, New Jersey.
Nov., 1914.
Dear Father Daly:
We are now back in Mahwah, thank God! It’s the chief thing I thank Him
for, of all the splendid things He’s given me--this home of mine. My
children are all well, and my wife. Prayer has given Rose the almost
normal use of one arm and the power to sit up. And prayer will do more.
Yours affectionately,
JOYCE.
This is a postscript, to say that the smug young person portrayed in
the _Citizen_ resembles me only “as the dew resembles the rain.” I
am fat and gross, and I have “elastic and rebellious hair,” like M.
Baudelaire’s cat. Someday I’ll have a decent picture and courageously
send it to you. In my young youth, I was slightly decorative. But now I
drink beer instead of writing about absinthe. And therefore--
* * * * *
June 15, 1915.
Dear Father James:
Your suggestion as to a lecture tour is characteristically kind. I am
already on the books of a lecture manager named Feakins, who manages
Chesterton, Barry Pain and other people. I’ll probably lecture before
Catholic organizations as well as secular ones, because I need the
money, but I don’t want to for reasons you will, I know, understand.
In the first place, I don’t want in any way to make money out of my
religion, to seem to be a “professional Catholic.” In the second place,
I have delight chiefly in talking veiled Catholicism to non-Catholics,
in humbly endeavouring to be an Apostle to Bohemia. I have no real
message to Catholics, I have Catholicism’s message to modern pagans. So
I want to lecture chiefly to Pagans.
The Prairie du Chien correspondent of the Police Gazette has cabled
that you are to read a paper at the St. Paul Educational Conference.
Congratulations! And I’ll try to help you to the extent of my
power--but you don’t need help as I do.
Yours affectionately,
JOYCE.
* * * * *
Good Samaritan Hospital,
Suffern, N. Y.
August 2, 1916.
Dear Father James:
I am sorry that you received exaggerated reports of my accident. All
that happened to me was the fracture of a couple of ribs, and I have
been very comfortable in a delightful hospital. My secretary comes out
several times a week, so I am keeping up with my work.
Remember me, if you please, to Mother Mercedes and Father O’Reilly.
Yours affectionately,
JOYCE.
* * * * *
Mahesh, N. J.
Aug. 10, 1916.
Dear Father James:
This is to say that I am rapidly recovering my health, and hope to
be in my office in a week. I had a fine time in the hospital, a
comfortable place run by particularly amiable Sisters of Charity. It
may interest you to know that I had received the Blessed Sacrament half
an hour before the train struck me, and that to this fact I attribute
my escape from death--since at the place where I was struck several men
have been killed, being thrown forward and under the wheels, instead
of, (as I was), to one side.
Affectionately,
JOYCE.
* * * * *
(Aug 8, 1917).
Monday.
Dear Father James:
Your letter was opened and read by one Private Kilmer, a hardened
military cuss, unused to literary activities. This is the first
literary labor he has essayed for a month, aside from studying Moss’s
Manual of Military Training and the art of shooting craps.
We’re still in New York--at the Armory from 9 A. M. to 4.30 P. M., but
we usually get home at night. Young Louis is in the same company as
myself. We probably will go to Spartansberg, North Carolina, about Aug.
17, but we may be here till October, or we may go to France to-morrow.
Nobody knows. I find that there are many Catholics in the Seventh. It’s
amusing that our training camp is in North Carolina--nothing to drink
and no Jesuits! Bishop is a Benedictine mitred abbott--it’s in Belmont
Abbey.
Before mobilisation I finished editing “Dreams and Images,” an
anthology of Catholic verse written since (but including) Patmore.
Terrible rush job, but pretty good book. Do you mind having it
dedicated to you? Wanted to include some of your stuff, but didn’t have
time to get any. Have dedicated it to you, but can change it, if you
wish. Don’t hesitate to say so! Can’t hurt my feelings! Hard military
character, seriously considering acquisition of habit of chewing
tobacco.
This is an absurd note, but I find myself very stupid at writing.
Perhaps after drill becomes easier, I’ll have more of a mind left
at night. Fr. Dwight honoured me by asking me for a sonnet on St.
Ignatius for _America_, but I fell down on the assignment. I could not
write even a limerick on St. Ignatius in my present mental state! But
it’s a comfortable life physically--mentally too, I guess, and as for
spiritually, why, pray for yours affectionately,
JOYCE.
* * * * *
(Sept., 1917).
Thursday.
Dear Fr. James:
I never expected to write to you on lined paper or Y. M. C. A.
paper--uses of adversity! The Y. M. C. A. gives us poor “dough boys”
the only place we have to sit down and read and write--so far the
Knights of Columbus have not been in evidence in this highly papistical
camp. I am, as you know, a member of the 165th Infantry, U. S.,
formerly the 69th New York. I have recently been transferred from Co.
H. to Headquarters Co., and exchanged my 8 hours a day of violent
physical exercise (most deadening to the brain, a useful anodyne for
me, coming as it did after my grief) for exacting but interesting
statistical work. I am called Senior Regimental Statistician, but in
spite of all these syllables still rank as a private. My work is under
the direction of the Regimental Chaplain, Fr. Francis Patrick Duffy.
The people I like best here are the wild Irish--boys of 18 or 20,
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 fine, a veritable
Irish-American folk-lore. Before I was transferred to Headquarters
Co., I slept in a tent with a number of these entertaining youths, and
enjoyed it tremendously. We sang every night from 9 to 9.30. Now I am
in more sophisticated but less amusing company--ambitious youths, young
office men, less simple and genial than my other friends.
I get to New York for part of Saturday and Sunday. Aline is staying
with her mother in New York. It is good that I am not with the 7th
Regiment in Spartanburg--as it is I can telephone to Aline every night.
I will send you a picture of Rose soon. Her death was a piercing blow,
but beautiful. It happened at the best time. Aline was there and I
and our parish priest. Rose was happy but did not want to get well.
“I’ll drink it in another house,” she said, when the nurse coaxed
her to take some broth. Perhaps she meant the new house in Larchmont
which we move to in October. And perhaps not. There was a Mission in
our parish-church, just a couple of blocks from the house, and while
Rose died the voices of the Sisters singing “O Salutaris Hostia”
could be heard in the room. I thank you for your letter, beautifully
interpretative. Certainly Rose makes Heaven dearer to us.
Yours affectionately,
JOYCE.
* * * * *
Headquarters Company, 165th U. S. Infantry,
Camp Albert E. Mills, New York.
October 28, 1917.
Dear Father James:
I hope you don’t mind being typewritten to by an unskillful typist. I
have learned all I know of this art since I became a soldier. It is
ridiculous for a newspaperman to learn typewriting in the army, but I
never had the time to learn it before--I found it better to have an
expert typist for a secretary and dictate my stuff to him. I used to
turn out four or five thousand words an hour when Watts was working
for me. I haven’t much speed as yet but I ought to be pretty good at
it when I get back. There are two things I always wanted to learn--how
to typewrite and how to serve Mass. I’m learning the one and I’m going
to get Fr. Duffy to let me pinch-hit for his orderly at Mass some
mornings. So I’ll be an accomplished cuss when I come back from the
Wars--I’ll know how to typewrite and to serve Mass and to sing the
Boston Burglar.
Numerous philanthropic citizens are sending cigarettes to soldiers, and
pipe-tobacco (in which last bounty I often share). But some enlightened
person should start a nation-wide campaign for sending cigars to
Senior Regimental Statistical Representatives. I am Senior Statistical
Representative of the 165th U. S. Infantry, I am!
Yours affectionately,
JOYCE.
* * * * *
Headquarters Company,
165th Infantry,
A. E. F., France.
April 5, 1918.
Dear Father James:
When I next visit Campion, I will teach you (in addition to “The Boston
Burglar”) an admirable song called “Down in the Heart of the Gas-House
District.” I sing it beautifully. Its climax is, “If you would meet
good fellows face to face, Just hang around Jimmy Cunningham’s place,
For it’s down in the heart of the Gas-house district, In Old New York.”
I received two most welcome letters from you recently. One had to do
with the case of ----. It contains excellent advice, and I am carrying
it in my pocket, intending to clip your name and the name of the
college from it and to give it to him. I am deeply grateful, my dear
Father, for your great and characteristic kindness in this matter. I
think we’ll yet see him practicing and teaching philosophy. You see,
in his veins is a dangerous mixture of bloods--like my own--German and
Irish, perhaps that accounts for his troubles. Gaelic impetuosity and
Teutonic romanticism--no, sentimentality--no, self-pity--no, what is it
that makes Germans German? I mean Sturm und Drang, Sorrows of Werther
and that sort of thing. Well, it doesn’t matter what it’s called. But
all people with any German blood have a bit of it. And highly diluted
it’s rather nice. Which reminds me that Father Duffy says I’m half
German and half human.
I wrote a poem called “Rouge Bouquet.” I’ll ask Aline to send you a
copy--it’s long--and you remind her. It will tell you of an incident
which will indicate to you that handling statistics in Regimental
Headquarters isn’t the dry task you imagine it. The statistics aren’t
dry--they’re wet--and red. Also, I’m attached to the Regimental
Intelligence Section, which is exciting. I had a very thrilling week
not long ago--I’m not allowed to write about it yet. I’ll tell you
about it some day. By the way, it was at that time--Feb. 26, that
you wrote to me. I wasn’t in the office then, I was out working as
an observer--finest job in the army! By the way, I’m a Sergeant now.
I’ll never be anything higher. To get a commission I’d have to go away
for three months to a school, and then--whether or not I was made
an officer--I’d be sent to some outfit other than this. And I don’t
want to leave this crowd. I’d rather be a Sergeant in the 69th than a
Lieutenant in any other regiment in the world. Get Aline to send you a
copy of “Holy Ireland”--it will explain, somewhat.
Please give my love to anybody who will accept it. Remember me with
special fervour to Sister Eugene and Sister Stanislaus. I enjoy reading
the Campion, and am glad to see the newspaper has become a reality.
You speak of French anti-clericals in your letter. They all must be in
Paris. I haven’t found any in my rather extensive wanderings around
France. As a common soldier, I have the privilege of intimacy with the
French peasants--and I find them edifyingly good Catholics. Pray for
me, dear Father James.
Affectionately,
JOYCE.
* * * * *
April 8, 1918.
My dear Father James:
I am sending you with this letter some verses that will, I think,
interest you. They are my first attempt at versification in a
dug-out--a dug-out not far from the event of which the verses tell. I
have sent a copy to Aline, but since the trans-Atlantic mails are so
uncertain, will you be so kind as to write to her asking if she has
received it?
Somewhere within a radius of five miles from where I write now slumbers
(for it’s long after bedtime for soldiers who keep regular hours) one
Drury Sheehan. Every day he meets someone from my outfit and asks after
me and says he’s coming to see me. And some days ago I--riding on a
truck--passed and was passed several times by his outfit. And I paged
him, so to speak, unavailingly. Also numerous letters from the States
tell me that young Father Charles O’Donnell is somewhere near. We’ll
have a great reunion one of these days. I wish you’d be in it! But one
of these nights I’ll jump off a freight at Prairie du Chien, break
a pane of glass in a basement window and go to sleep in the Bishop’s
room. The Brother will be aghast next morning at discovering a ragged
mustachioed shaven headed soldier in such a place--I’ll try to explain
to him that I’m an adopted alumnus of Campion--I’ll probably use French
in my excitement--and he will promptly shoot me. Then I’ll spend two
months in the Campion Infirmary, which is, I am told, a very nice place.
I am having a delightful time, but it won’t break my heart for the war
to end. I feel much comforted and strengthened by many prayers--those
of my wife and little children, those of many dear friends, mostly
priests and Sisters. I value highly my share in your Masses. Always
pray hard, my dear Father, for
Your affectionate friend,
JOYCE.
* * * * *
May 15, 1918.
Dear Father James:
I thought you’d like to see how I looked after six months of
soldiering. I’m having a lot of fun (I’m a Sergeant in the Regimental
Intelligence Section now, you remember) but I haven’t been to Mass for
_three weeks_! It so happened that I was away from churches (except the
ruins thereof) and from Fr. Duffy. So you’ll have to be praying doubly
hard for your affectionate friend,
JOYCE.
* * * * *
_To Mrs. Kilburn Kilmer_
TO MY MOTHER, ON HER BIRTHDAY, 1914,
WITH A BOOK OF POEMS
Gentlest of critics, does your memory hold
(I know it does) a record of the days
When I, a schoolboy, earned your generous praise
For halting verse and stories crudely told?
Over those boyish scrawls the years have rolled,
They might not bear the world’s unfriendly gaze,
But still your smile shines down familiar ways,
Touches my words and turns their dross to gold.
Dearer to-day than in that happy time
Comes your high praise to make me proud and strong.
In my poor notes you hear Love’s splendid chime
So unto you does this, my work, belong.
Take, then, this little book of fragile rhyme;
Your heart will change it to authentic song.
* * * * *
_To A. K. K._
AUGUST THE FOURTH
NINETEEN HUNDRED AND ELEVEN
Now the English larks are singing,
And the English meadows flinging
Scarlet flags of blazing poppies to the fragrant summer air,
And from every tower and steeple
All the wondering English people
Hear a chime of fairy music, though no bell-ringers are there.
What has caused this jubilation?
Days ago the coronation
Went with jewelled pomp and splendour to the country of the past.
Is the land some Saint’s Day hailing?
Or has some tall ship gone sailing
Through the hostile fleet to triumph, with the Union at her mast?
Nay, it is no warlike glory,
Nor pale saint, of ancient story,
That has made the island blossom into beauty rare and new.
We in this sea-severed nation,
Share with England our elation,
As we keep this feast, your birthday, and are glad with love for
you!
* * * * *
“WHITE HORSE” OF KILBURN
TO A. K. K. ON HER BIRTHDAY, 1912
Last night the beat of hoofs was heard upon the shaded street,
It broke the silent brooding of the peaceful countryside;
I looked and saw a horse that stamped its terrible white feet,
A giant horse, as white as flame, long maned and starry-eyed.
“Who is this monstrous visitant?” said I, “Bucephalus?
Or Rosinante, looking for another crazy Knight?
Or (not to be conceited) may it not be Pegasus?
This mighty horse, this glowing horse, so beautiful and white.”
He proudly tossed his noble head, and neighed, “Across the foam
My stable lies, with clouds for roof, and mountainous green walls;
I come to take your message unto Her, who near my home
Will hold her Birthday feast before another evening falls.”
“Go back, O Horse,” I said, “and seek your pleasant dwelling-place,
And here’s a gift for you to take, I trust it to your care;
Support this heavy load of love until you see her face,
Then humbly kneel before her feet and lay my homage there.”
Having English blood in her veins, Mrs. Kilburn Kilmer considers
herself something of a Yorkshire woman. The famous White Horse she
has climbed many times.
* * * * *
VALENTINE WRITTEN FOR MY MOTHER, 1913
I will send my heart to England, and will make it learn to act
Like a vacant minded vicar, or a curate full of tea;
I will make my heart talk Cambridgese, or Yorkshirish, in fact;
I will make it be as British as a human heart can be;
I will dress my heart in roses, roses red and ever gay;
I will steep my heart in scarletest of wine;
I will teach my heart to bow, and smile, and sing, and dance, and
play--
Just to make you take it for a Valentine.
* * * * *
BIRTHDAY POEM--1913
England! England! put your veil of mist away,
Dress in green, with poppies in your hair.
England! England! let your birds sing “Holiday,”
Let your lanes be jubilant and fair.
She is made of singing, therefore hail her with a song;
Strew her path with loveliness, and crown her with delight.
Golden hours of joy and beauty should to her belong.
Everything that lives to-day must own her gentle might.
England! England! now the jocund feast is here.
Now is time for frolicking and mirth.
England! England! now another turning year,
Brings the day that celebrates her birth.
* * * * *
VALENTINE TO MY MOTHER, 1914
The English meadows call her, and the streets of London Town,
And the pleasant little villages under the Yorkshire Hills.
She can see the roads, like ribbons white, that stretch across the
down,
And the great slow turning sails of sleepy mills.
She longs for stately mansions, in whose eaves the pigeons coo,
And she longs for yellow corn fields, where the scarlet poppies
shine,
She loves the folk of England, and, of course, they love her too,
But she lingers in America to be my Valentine.
Set to music by Mrs. Kilburn Kilmer and published in London in the
Spring of 1914.
* * * * *
TO AN ADVENTUROUS INFANT
ON HER BIRTHDAY, AUGUST, 1915
“England,” she said, “is surely England yet;
Therefore it is the place where I should be.
In spite of war, I know that tea is tea,
A cigarette is still a cigarette.
“Why should I worry over Wilhelm’s threat?”
And thereupon she said goodbye to me,
And gaily sailed across the dangerous sea,
To where, among the Zeppelins, tea was set.
What if the sea foam mountainously high
With waves that had in Hell their fiery birth?
What if black peril hover in the sky,
And bursting shell wound deep the trembling earth?
All evil things must harmlessly pass by
Her who doth bear the Talisman of Mirth.
* * * * *
BIRTHDAY POEM, 1915
TO MY MOTHER SINGING
Out of the golden valleys of old years,
You have recalled so many a lovely thing.
Forgotten splendours glimmer when you sing,
With their long vanished light of mirth and tears.
Gay lovers flout their love’s delicious fears.
The proud swords clash for Charles, the rightful King,
A woman weeps, and turns her “Silver Ring.”
The “Men of Harlech” charge with level spears.
Yet, I crowned with my crown of vanity,
Have been more happy when you sang and played
The songs wherein your art had succoured me.
As starry note on starry note was laid,
Then my chained rhymes, by your designs set free,
Flew Heavenward on the radiant wings you made.
* * * * *
TO MY MOTHER, OCTOBER, 1915
There fell a flood of devastating flame
On half the world, and all its joy was dead.
The sky was black, the troubled sea was red,
And from all mouths a lamentation came.
But you, in calm and hurricane the same,
Went with gay lips, brave heart and unbowed head.
What was the charm, from which all danger fled?
What did you say, what cabalistic name?
It was my love that sent its quickening breath
On all the waves that bore your ship along.
My love held out, against the flying death,
That clove the sea, a shield than steel more strong,
Bringing you back, where no war harrieth,
Stars in your eyes, and in your heart a song.
* * * * *
AUGUST FOURTH, NINETEEN SIXTEEN
The Berkshire Hills are gay
With a gladder tint to-day,
And Mount Graylock rears his mighty head in pride.
For the lady that they knew
Long ago, to them is true,
And has come within their shadow to reside.
And across the troubled sea,
Yorkshire hill and Cambridge lea,
Send their love to you by every wind that blows.
And a greater love than these
Hurries Northward on the breeze
From the little hills they call the Ramapos.
* * * * *
VALENTINE FOR MY MOTHER, 1917
If some day, as you idly turn the pages,
Whereon my verses are,
You find a flower where angry winter rages,
On the black earth a star;
If in dead words you come on something living,
Some fair and vibrant line--
It is the message that my heart is giving,
It is your Valentine.
* * * * *
March, 1918.
Dear Mother:
The sweater arrived, and it certainly is a magnificent specimen of
knitting, and the wristlets are wonderfully purled--whatever purling
may be. Probably I shall need both sweater and wristlets for many
weeks, for although it is Spring now, it often is cold.
Under separate cover I am sending you my warrant as Sergeant. I thought
you might like to have it framed to hang in the Old-Fashioned Room.
The “drafted” in the corner means that the regiment was drafted into
Federal Service; that is, made a part of the United States Army instead
of a part of the New York State National Guard.
I suppose that you have read in the newspapers of the Regiment’s
recent activities. Now we are taking it easy in a very pleasant little
town. I hope we may stay here at least a month, as it is hard to work
when the Regiment is moving about the country. I had a week’s respite
from office work some time ago and spent it doing what is called
“observation” work for the Regimental Intelligence Section. It was most
interesting.
Did Aline tell you of Kenton’s success in school? It seems that he won
a gold medal for being the best pupil in the school. I was delighted
to learn it. So nearly as I can remember, I was not an especially keen
student when I was his age, although I became one later.
There is practically no chance of my rising any higher in the Regiment
than Sergeant, and I am perfectly content. To become an officer I would
have to go to school away from the Regiment for several months, then if
I failed to pass my examinations and win a commission, I would be sent
to some other Regiment than this, and if I succeeded I would be sent as
an officer, not back to the 69th, but to some other outfit, and I want
very much to stay with the Regiment. I have many good friends here, and
I would feel lost in any other military organization.
I am looking forward to receiving the photographs you have had taken.
By this time you must have received the one I sent you. I hope you like
it.
Your letters are very gratefully received, and I am looking forward
specially to receiving the cake and the candy you sent me. Everything
else you have written of in your letters has arrived in good condition,
and a day or two ago I got five big jars of excellent tobacco from the
Dickens Fellowship ... a most intelligent gift.
Affectionately yours,
JOYCE.
* * * * *
May 15th, 1918.
Dear Mother:
As to your “War Mother” poem, I hesitate to tell you how much I like
it, because I am afraid you may think I am trying to flatter you. It
certainly is the best poem you ever wrote--beautiful, original and well
sustained. I have seen no recent war verse I like so well. There is no
question but what you will sell it to some good magazine. I certainly
congratulate you, and congratulate the magazine fortunate enough to
print your poem.
I am very glad to hear of the deserved success your songs made at
Lakewood, and in general of your triumphs at the Dickens Fellowship,
and elsewhere. I wish I could have witnessed them, but I will be seeing
more of the same sort next winter. That is what we like to hear about
over here--triumphs and celebrations, and in general the pleasant and
prosperous course of civilian life.
Of course we soldiers are undergoing hardships and privations--we
expect to, but we don’t spend our time advertising them. But in the
States when you find they must do without quite as much wheat, or meat,
or something of the sort, instead of just going without and keeping
their mouths shut, they advertise their remarkable abstention by having
“wheatless days” and “meatless days,” and all that sort of hysterical
rubbish, and fill the papers with the news, thereby disgusting us
soldiers and undoubtedly comforting the enemy. I think I will start a
“strawberryless, ice creamless, sodaless day” for the army. It would
be as sensible as what the people at home have been doing. If you (I
don’t mean you personally, of course) have to eat hardtack instead of
butter-raised biscuits, why eat the hardtack and shut up about it, but
don’t be such an ass as to have a “butter-raised biscuitless Monday,”
and don’t shut down on theatres and amusements; and don’t deprive
people of their honest drink. Merely making stay-at-homes dismal does
not help the soldiers a bit. England’s early “Business as Usual” scheme
was more practicable, and this is something of a concession for me to
make. There is quite a sermon on economics for you! Kindly read it to
my father, whom it will edify and instruct. A recent letter from him
shows that he utterly misunderstands my point of view on this subject,
the result of lamentably careless reading by him of one of my letters
in which I contrasted the gaiety and common-sense of the French,
through years of starvation and ruin, with the wail which a little
self-denial brought from the States.
Send your picture soon.
Affectionately yours,
JOYCE.
* * * * *
May 27th, 1918.
Dear Mother,
I presume by this time you have received the humorous photographs of
myself I sent you.
I am delighted to know of the Kilburn Hall project. By all means buy
the Hall; it will be an excellent investment. Property is now very
cheap in England, and prices will rise as soon as the war is over. I
hope to be able to spend my summers in France after the war, and I have
the place in mind--only about a day’s run from London. I am absolutely
in love with France, its people, its villages, its mountains,
everything about it. America would do well to copy its attitude in
the war. It has suffered tremendous hardships with dignity and humour
and kept its sanity and faith. America, to judge by the papers, grows
hysterical over a little self-denial; can’t do without an extra lump of
sugar in its tea without a band and speeches and “sugarless” Sundays.
It is funny and rather pathetic to us soldiers. But I honestly think,
although it may seem conceited to say so, that when we soldiers get
back from the war we will do the spiritual and intellectual life of the
States a lot of good. France has taught us lessons of infinite value.
I am having an absolutely Heavenly time since I joined the Intelligence
Section. I wouldn’t change places with any soldier of any rank in any
outfit. This suits me better than any job I ever had in civil life.
The cake is not yet here. I will soak it in wine all right, don’t worry
about that. Speaking of wine, enclosed find some flowers given me by a
very nice wine-shop girl in a city near here. “Madelon” is a perfectly
respectable song, but “Madelon” is not a gun or anything else of the
sort; it is the name of the girl who serves wine to the soldiers, as
the song clearly states.
Yours affectionately,
JOYCE.
* * * * *
June 14th, 1918.
Dear Mother:
There is a chance that I will be able to get to England on a seven
days’ leave in a few weeks. In that case I shall probably spend most
of my time in London, with a possible visit to Oxfordshire, where my
friend Mrs. Denis Eden lives. I wish there was something I could do for
you to expedite the purchase of Kilburn Hall, but since the Archbishop
of Yorkshire is in the States you should, yourself, be able to make a
deal with him. English real estate is a wise investment these days; it
will go up fifty per cent in a year’s time. I wish I could afford to
buy some property in this country. I certainly would like to live here.
If the States go “dry” I honestly think I will move my family over
here. I can write for American papers without living in America. Then
if you move to Kilburn Hall I will be only a day’s trip away from you,
and you will love rural France almost as much as you love rural England.
Learn to sing “Madelon.”
Affectionately yours,
JOYCE.
* * * * *
June 28, 1918.
Dear Mother:
I received three letters from you yesterday and to-day, the first I
have had from you in a long time. Your letters always come in bunches
like that. And this morning I received two admirable boxes of Mirror
Candy, in perfect condition. I certainly was delighted to get it, as
it is a long time since I have had any candy. My gratitude is so great
that I even will refer to it as “Sweets.”
I was also glad to get your picture, taken on shipboard. You must send
to Larchmont another copy of the picture of yourself looking at my
photograph, which you sent me some weeks ago, as I had to remove it
from its mount and cut it down to make it fit into my wallet. All the
rest of the fellows in the Intelligence Section (there are nine of
us, nearly all college graduates, and men of some standing--editors,
brokers, etc.), have pictures of their mothers, but none of them so
good looking as mine.
You would be amused at some of the scenes when your picture is
exhibited. Tired from a long hike from a stay in the trenches, I
am having an omelet, and some fried potatoes, and some vin rouge,
beau coup, le vin rouge in some French peasant’s little kitchen.
It is a cottage such as you and I often visited in Derbyshire and
Cambridgeshire; a low grey stone building with rose trees against
the wall, a tiny garden, and a geometrically neat path. The kitchen
floor is of stone, the table without a cloth, but shining from much
polishing. The only thing to distinguish it from the typical English
rural cottage is the crucifix on the wall, and the wooden shoes at
the door. (People wear sabots out of doors, cloth slippers in the
house, leather shoes on Sunday). Well, after such a repast as I have
described, I take out my wallet to pay my bill, and the sharp eyes of
little Marie, or little Pierre, intently watching this strange soldat
Americaine espy the picture. At once an inquisitive, but delighted,
infant is on my knee demanding a closer inspection of the picture;
the Maman must see it, and Grandpere, and Veuve Vatre from across the
street (the man of the house can’t see it; he is away from home on the
errand that brought me across the sea). Well, they all say “Elle est
jolie, ma foi, et jeune aussi.” These comments have been made on your
picture many times in many towns, which I will one day show you on a
map of France.
I have not much anxiety for my father, for I look on his condition as
a state of rest really necessary to a mind so constantly busy. But I
am glad that from you I have inherited the power of readily escaping
from worry and work; of entering with enthusiasm into whatever mirth I
find around me; in finding good and true and merry friends everywhere.
I think that some of this quality would have helped my father very
much, and increased his bodily and mental health. I worried grievously
about you for a while, and wished I could have been with you when my
father was taken ill, but I don’t worry now--you are too spirited and
courageous for anybody to worry about. I certainly admire you more
than ever, and look forward eagerly to regular banquets at Henri’s and
Rector’s with you.
I want you to meet all the Regimental Intelligence Section--a fine
bunch of brave men, and good comrades. We have taken big chances
together, and it has made us the best of friends. You will like them
all and they will like you.
Affectionately yours,
JOYCE.
* * * * *
_To Kenton Kilmer_
Headquarters Co.,
165th Infantry,
A. E. F.
Nov. 28, 1917.
My dear Kenton:
I hope that by this time you have entirely recovered from your illness.
I remember that I had whooping-cough when I was about your age. If you
are back in school, send me some of your monthly reports. The address
you must put on letters to me is just what you see at the top of this
sheet, except that you must put before it “Private Joyce Kilmer.”
There is a school in the building where I work, much like the school
you attend, except that there are no nuns here for teachers. When the
weather is wet, the children wear wooden shoes instead of rubbers. They
go to school at eight in the morning and don’t leave until five. You
wouldn’t like that, would you?
This letter ought to reach you about Christmas time. I am not sending
you anything at once, but I will later. And I know that your mother and
all your grandparents will give you things, and so will Saint Nicholas.
Be a good boy, and pray to St. Francis and Our Lady to help you. You
ought to go to Mass every morning, since you live so near the church.
Take care of Deborah and Christopher and Michael, and do all you can to
make things easy for your Mother.
From Your affectionate Dad.
* * * * *
_To Kenton Kilmer_
January 10, 1918.
My dear Kenton:
Your plan for ending the war is very good. I showed your letter to
Sergeant Russell, who fought in the Spanish-American war, long before
you were born, and he said that your plan was the one that the American
Army would adopt.
I am glad to see that you can write and typewrite so well. I hope that
you will get Fr. Morris to teach you how to serve Mass, we live so near
the church that you can easily serve his Mass and get your breakfast
and get to school on time, and if you are a priest when you grow up
you will be glad you had such practice when you were young.
Take care of Deborah and Michael and Christopher and your mother and
don’t forget to pray for
Your affectionate Dad.
* * * * *
_To Deborah Kilmer_
Headquarters Co.,
165th Inf.,
A. E. F., France.
May 27th, 1918.
My dear Deborah:
About a month ago, I sent you a rubber doll. If you didn’t get it, let
me know and I’ll send you another one.
Yesterday morning about six o’clock I climbed down the mountain to go
to Mass. And just outside the village where the church is, I met a
young lady and walking beside her was a pleasant young pig with a pink
nose.
“Bonjour, M’sieur!” said the young lady.
“Bonjour, Mam’selle!” I replied.
“Bonjour, M’sieur!” said the pig.
“Bonjour, M’sieur!” I replied.
And the young lady and the pig threw back their heads and laughed
heartily and went on to breakfast. And I went on to Mass.
Remember me to young Michael and young Christopher, and believe me
Your respectful Dad.
* * * * *
_To Mrs. Joyce Kilmer_
Nov. 11, 1917.
This is what is technically known as a hurried scrawl. It is to the
effect that I have arrived, in excellent health and spirits. I have
recently read the Censorship Regulations, and am in doubt about what
I can say--God help the people who have to interpret them! I mailed
a postcard two weeks ago, which you should now receive. Also I’ll
try to cable you soon, if it is allowed. I have not yet consulted
the adjutant on the subject, but so far as I have been able to find
from a diligent study of the censorship regulations, I am allowed
to say that I love you. Accordingly, I state it, with considerable
enthusiasm. Also, I have a certain regard for Kenton, Deborah, Michael
and even Christopher. I hope to write you again very soon. You know
my address--same as before, only American Expeditionary Forces. I
enclose some verses which may entertain you. The brief one is a
memory of the days when I used to drill. I don’t feel that way about a
typewriter--which instrument I now use with accuracy and speed. Send me
some magazines now and then, and _Times_ REVIEW OF BOOKS. And love me
exceedingly.
* * * * *
Headquarters Co.,
165th Infantry,
A. E. F.
Nov. 24, 1917.
I am having a delightful time out here--absolutely beautiful country
and very nice people. I am short of money, but I believe we’ll be paid
soon and I’ve borrowed 80 francs from Fr. Duffy. That isn’t as much
as it sounds--you get 5 francs and 70 centimes for a dollar at the
Y. M. C. A. I enclose a bill I received for two enormous boxes of cakes
I hired an old lady to make for me. I furnished the sugar--you know
there was a bag of it in the box of groceries my mother sent me just
before I left. I meant the cakes for dessert for Thanksgiving dinner,
but with the help of my friends I’ve already eaten most of it. There is
a rumour to the effect that we are to have duck for dinner to-morrow,
and the Regiment is much more excited about it than about the good
news of the War in yesterday’s paper. We get the Paris editions of
the London _Daily Mail_, New York _Herald_ and Chicago _Tribune_, and
before long I suppose we’ll see the magazines when the Y. M. C. A.
opens up its local tent. I never thought I’d regard the Y. M. C. A.
with such esteem--I wish the Knights of Columbus had a chance to do as
much work for us.
I haven’t written anything in prose or verse since I got here--except
statistics--but I’ve stored up a lot of memories to turn into copy when
I get a chance. The Colonel occasionally speaks of my historical work,
but I doubt if it will be feasible to publish any part of it except
some very general stuff until the war is over. I asked Thomas Hughes
Kelley to send me a history of the 69th published some years ago,
and another copy to you, to make sure. I think it will be useful in
preparing the introductory chapters.
I love you very much indeed and see you clearly always and have a
conviction that I will be with you soon--sooner than you expect.
* * * * *
Dec. 9th, 1917.
I was delighted to receive the other day (December 7th, the day after
my birthday) a batch of letters, including two from you. I am glad
Kenton is getting along well; I was worried about his illness. It is
fortunate you were able to get a good nurse.
You ought to be receiving some money from the government soon. I made
over half my pay to you, and the government is supposed to add to it
so much for you and so much for each youngster. The whole thing will
come to about $57 a month, I believe! I personally am not in need of
money--I am getting a book of traveller’s cheques from my father and
before I heard he was sending it I wrote to John Timpson Co., and asked
them to open an account for me in some Paris bank. Also we are paid in
francs, which makes us feel wealthy, as there are 5.70 of them in a
dollar. And I could live comfortably without any spending money--all
there is to buy is candy and canned stuff and wine and an occasional
meal when the business of my department takes me to a nearby town.
Fr. Garesché’s poem certainly is beautiful; by far the best thing he
has done. I am enclosing a letter from Sister ---- which I think you
will enjoy. Delightful old person, nearly blind, but tremendously
energetic. Harriet Monroe was one of her pupils. Probably you remember
her book on Fr. Tabb.
Your Christmas presents probably will reach you in time for Easter. I
hope to get a pair of wooden shoes for Deborah.
I am having a fine time. My statistical work occupies me in the evening
as well as all day, but it’s interesting, and will be increasingly
important, since the Statistical Department really is the only link
between the soldier and his family.
I hope as soon as we get settled I’ll be able to do some writing, I’ve
been too busy so far. I love you very much, and always think of you.
In your letters you spoke of sending me some stuff. Send anything you
think of as soon as you think of it--don’t wait to find out if I want
it, because the mails take too long. Just now I want snap-shots of you
and the children, especially Deborah, and tobacco. I love you.
* * * * *
December 17.
I hope you are getting the letters I send you from time to time.
I got one admirable batch of letters from you by way of birthday
present--they came on the day after my birthday. Perhaps I’ll get
another batch for Christmas--it’s December 17th now, and we should
receive another mail soon. I hope to send you a photograph soon. I
believe personal pictures may be sent through the mail. It will be a
beautiful sight. I got a Sing Sing haircut recently and am growing a
corsair moustache. This is the pleasantest war I ever attended--nothing
to do but fall in, fall out, pound a typewriter 13 hours a day and
occasionally hike across France and back carrying a piano. However, I
do really enjoy it, and the work is different in kind from newspaper
work, and so a rest from it. By the way, I sent you some time ago
a poem called “_Militis Meditatio_.” Please send a copy of it to a
magazine and tell them to send the check for it to you. I hope to be
able to do some writing as soon as we get settled and I get some of
my statistical work out of the way. You ought to get your allotment
this month, with additions from the Government (I hope you and the
children are not yet in the poorhouse, or at any rate that you have
struck a comfortable poorhouse). Send me pictures of yourself and the
children, especially Deborah. I have made a nuisance of myself telling
my bored friends about her intelligence in naming her doll “Hugh and
Mrs. Leamy.” Also send me some tobacco, enough to fill a bedsack (also
love me as intensely as possible; I love you more than ever before and
think of you all the while)....
* * * * *
Christmas Eve.
The enclosed clippings may amuse you--after you read them you’d better
send them to Bob Holliday. They came with a raft of letters a couple of
days ago. It’s very nice the way feasts seem to be marked--I last heard
from you just before my birthday, and I got three letters from you
by way of Christmas present. There must be a lot of parcels awaiting
me, judging from information in your letters and those of my father
and mother. We may get the packages to-night, in which case I’ll have
some hours hard work, for all the Adjutant’s office helps in assorting
mail. But I don’t think the packages will come until after Christmas. I
suppose that you and the children are in New Brunswick now, and will go
to Midnight Mass at St. Peter’s and pray for a vagrant verse-maker who
is trying to be a soldier. We may have a Midnight Mass in the church
here to-night. Fr. Duffy has had a choir practising for it, and we
possess a tenor soloist. He is an Italian, a barber when not singing or
soldiering.
I have allotted half my pay to you, and the Government’s addition to
that will bring it, I believe, up to about $60--enough to pay the
rent. But don’t worry if there is delay in receiving it. It takes a
long time, usually, to set things like that in motion. I recently read
that a veteran of the Civil War had just received a check for $12 from
Washington, representing his pay for his last month of service.
I am glad you are sending me some tobacco--I suppose it’s in the five
truck loads of Christmas packages said to be awaiting us at a town some
miles away. I have been able to get American tobacco, I am glad to say,
but not my favourite brand. Also I’ll be glad to get the cigars my
father has sent me--I have smoked all of Fr. Duffy’s. But be sure that
tobacco or anything else you send me, such as Michael and Deborah, is
very securely wrapped and tied, as the journey is hard on packages and
many of them go to pieces.
I am hoping to get more letters from you soon--write as often as you
can. I’d rather get a letter from you than anything else now possible.
(I love you more than ever before).
* * * * *
Jan. 18, 1918.
Virginia is an excellent State. One evening last week I met by chance a
Sergeant Interpreter named Nicholson Barney Adams. And he didn’t know
my name and I didn’t know his--he is not connected with the 69th. And
he said, “I see by the _Times_ that Joyce Kilmer has enlisted.” And
furthermore, thereafter, he put me up in his place--he and two other
fellows have a room together--and I had admirable things to eat and
drink, and slept in a bed, for the first time in over three months. And
he came from Lynchburg, Virginia.
You will find with this letter $50 in American Express checks. Put the
place and date in the upper right-hand corner when you cash them. You
see, I had written to John Timpson for some money before I got a book
of checks from my father, so I find myself having more money than I
need.
I wrote this letter--the first part of it--this afternoon. Now it is
evening, and five ambulance-loads of mail have arrived and I have
helped distribute it. I got a November _Harpers_ from my father and a
copy of Frances Huard’s “My Home In the Field of Mercy” from Doran.
To-morrow we get 14 more ambulance loads, they say--I hope I get some
packages, but I especially desire letters from you. My last letter
from you--dated Dec. 12--contained a very noble poem by you--“High
Heart.” I was delighted to get it, I felt admitted to a realer intimacy
than I had known since I crossed the ocean. Please send me all your
poems, sad or spirited. I cannot write verse, but enjoy reading it more
than ever before. And you happen to be my favourite poet.
I bought a copy of Conan Doyle’s new “Sherlock Holmes” book in a nearby
town recently, in the Conrad edition. A French publisher named Conrad
has taken over the Tauchnitz business--you remember the Tauchnitz
books, don’t you? Also I’ve been reading Harry Leon Wilson’s, “The
Spenders”--an entertaining imitation of Mr. Howells, and rereading “The
Cardinal’s Snuff Box”--most delightful.
I love you very much, and I am very sorry for you--you aren’t having
the amusing adventures I am having--but you’re able to write nice
things, and that’s a consolation. I hope to see you and your admirable
babies soon.
JOYCE KILMER.
* * * * *
Jan. 21, 1918.
Two or three days ago I received from you an admirable letter,
dated December 12, and yesterday arrived our long errant Christmas
mail--many trucks of it--and in it several letters from you dated about
Thanksgiving. It is strange that my letters take so long to reach you,
but you must have some of them by now. I certainly was glad to get ten
cans of tobacco from you, I have wanted a pipe full of that excellent
tobacco for months. I got a thousand stogies from Fr. Daly, a box of
cigars from my father, another from John B. Kennedy and another from
one Romaine Pierson, one of my father’s friends, who sent me also a
large can of tobacco. Also I got a lot of jelly and candy from my
mother and a little book of “Maxims of Fr. Faber” from Eleanor Rogers
Cox, and enough scapulars to sink a ship.
It certainly gives me the keenest delight to read your poetry. The
poem about the Christmas Tree has ---- backed off the map. Also “High
Heart” is very noble poetry. I envy you your power of writing poetry--I
haven’t been able to write a thing since I left the ship. Also I envy
you your power of being high hearted and, wholly legitimately, aware
of your own high heartedness. Not that I am low spirited--I am merely
busy and well-fed and contented. I am interested but not excited, and
excitement is supposed to be one of war’s few charms. The contentedness
is not absolute, of course, for I have, when away from you, always a
consciousness of incompleteness. But I have not had the painful and
dangerous times I expected to find as soon as we reached this country.
I am keenly interested in the novel you and Margaret are writing. But
don’t plunge too deep into occult studies in getting dope for it.
Don’t attend any seance of any kind or use Planchette or try automatic
writing or make any experiments of a supernatural kind. If you do, I
swear that if I do get shot I won’t haunt you--and I’m conceited enough
to think I can’t make a worse threat.
By the way, Kenton’s suggestion that you send me a checkerboard is
excellent. I’d like it very much.
I love you.
* * * * *
Feb 5, 1918.
I am enclosing a letter from Helen Parry Eden which should be put in
the autograph-letter file. A good way to keep author’s letters is
to paste special envelopes for them on the inside of the covers of
author’s books. Do not use the original envelopes for this purpose. But
probably this plan is unsafe in a library frequented by wild babies.
But at any rate try to get the stuff stowed away safely and neatly. Bob
Holliday could advise you intelligently as to the proper preservation
of autographed letters.
It is about a week now since I heard from you, and I am eagerly
awaiting to-day’s arrival of mail. I work in the place to which the
mail is brought for assortment, so I get my letters without much
delay--that is, delay after they reach the Regiment. The first delayed
batches of mail are still arriving--I get a November letter one day, a
January letter the next, a December the next.
Send me by all means all the verse you write--I find I enjoy poetry
more these days than I did when I made my living largely by making it
and writing and talking about it. But I wish I could make it as I used
to--I have not been able to write any verse at all except “_Militis
Meditatio_” which I sent you. I wrote a brief prose sketch which is
still in process of censuring--the censorship regulations may or may
not be so interpreted as to exclude it. I think I’ll be allowed to
print it, however, as it is really not a writing on military subjects,
but an introspective essay written by a sort of soldier. If it gets by,
it will go immediately to George H. Doran to be censored.
The second package of tobacco has arrived. The package containing it
was broken, but in the bottom of the mail bag I found all ten cans of
tobacco. I certainly am glad to get it--after ten years this kind still
seems to me to be the best tobacco in the world.
I am not especially delighted with the circumstances of my work just at
present. I am perfectly comfortable, have good meals and quarters and
my work is not at all hard. But I want to get into more interesting and
important work--perhaps it will be all fixed up by the time I write to
you again. I love you.
JOYCE KILMER.
* * * * *
February 22d, 1918.
My dear Aline:
It is a long time since I have heard from you--about three weeks. But
I suppose that I will receive a number of letters at once. I do not
yet know whether or not you have received the two batches of American
Express Company checks, amounting in all to $100.00, which I sent
you some time ago. But I am not worrying about it, if the checks are
lost it still is possible to recover the money. I sent you two lots of
prose and verse recently, and in the envelope containing this letter
is a quaint supplement to one of my little sketches--that called
“Breakfasts.” It is a letter to Kenton from the little girl who lives
in the house by the Fountain, where Farrell and Driscoll and I used to
eat every morning in our last station. I showed Solange (an excellent,
demure and pious infant) Kenton’s photograph, and told her that he
studied French in school. He is supposed to answer in French, tell
him--of course his French teacher must help him. I saved the censor
trouble by clipping from Solange’s letter the name of the town honoured
by her presence, but I guarantee (with St. Anthony’s aid) the safe
delivery to her of any epistle he may entrust to me.
The town we are in now has no Solange--or has revealed none to me as
yet--but in a certain Cafe which I much frequent is Antoine, aged two,
who can salute in the French manner, _comme ca_ (illustrated) or in the
American manner, _comme ca_, (illustrated). No, not with the left hand!
good Heavens, child! _Sacre bleu! nom d’um nom! Quelle dommage!_ Well,
if you are going to cry about it, you needn’t salute at all. Here, shut
up and drink the dregs of my _vin rouge et sirop_. _Fini, bebe!_
Also there is an admirable child named Jean who has six months. He
wears a lavender cloak with a hood attached. His home is a barber
shop, the most beautiful and extraordinary barber shop in the world.
His father the barber has gone to the Wars--remain madame, grandpere,
and M. Biebe. It is a very modern barber shop, with mirror-walls, and
powdered soap in silver salt cellars. Grandpere sits by the stove all
day long and says that there are many American soldiers in the town.
Madame exhibits le petit Jean and asks if it is ever as cold as this in
America. I shave with six razors if I desire, and wash in _beaucoup de
l’eau chaud_. And Madame deftly swinging le petit Jean over her left
shoulder opens a secret drawer under a mirror and proffers me a tiny
tube of _fixative_ for my moustache.
I have a delightful delusion now and then--I see you walk into the
Adjutant’s office, past the Sergeant Major’s desk, and to me. The
building in which we work was once a palace--but its inlaid floor never
supported a duchess (gold powdered though her hair were, and light her
laughter as champagne bubbles) so precious as this fleeting vision of
you.
JOYCE KILMER.
Note.--Three small, spirited pen drawings are incorporated into
this letter at the points indicated in the printed text.
* * * * *
A. E. F.
Dear Aline:
Sorry to use this absurd paper--but none other is accessible. I’m in a
hospital at present--been here for three days with a strained muscle.
It has been delightful to sleep between sheets again--I have rested up
beautifully, I go back to the regiment to-morrow.
I sent you two batches of copy recently--or three, rather. Hope you
get them--but if you don’t, I’ll write some more--like Caterina, you
know when she was defending her husband’s castle against the enemy. The
enemy took her six children as hostages. “Surrender the castle, or I’ll
kill the children!” said he. “Go ahead, kill ’em!” said Caterina. “I
can make more!”
As to your plan of renting a house at Shirley--wherever that is--for
the Summer, go ahead, if you must--I don’t think there is any chance
of my getting home this Summer. If I do come home, I’ll cable you in
time for you to get back to Larchmont before my arrival. Larchmont is
just about far enough from New York. Not for many a year will I consent
to spend a day in any place more rural. I have had enough of wildness
and rawness and primitiveness--the rest of my life, I hope, will be
spent in the effetest civilization. I don’t want to be more than an
hour’s distance from the Biltmore grill and the Knickerbocker bar. And
God preserve me from farms!
I love you.
JOYCE.
* * * * *
March 12, 1918.
Dear Aline:
I receive your letters frequently and regularly, and they are
delightful, stimulating, typical. To-day I returned from a week’s
sojourn in a charming hospital (a strained muscle, now healed, sent
me there) and I found two letters from you awaiting me, the latest
dated February 12. Let me congratulate you on your aviation poem--most
beautiful and true, the most intellectual poem you have made. By all
means put it in your book.
I received Francis Carlin’s wholly heavenly book just before I went
to the hospital, and have read it many times with delight. When you
see him, give him my homage. He should be walking goldener floors
than those of a mortal shop--he should rather be over here with us,
whatever his convictions may be. For it is wrong for a poet--especially
a Gael--to be listening to elevated trains when there are screaming
shells to hear, and to be sleeping soft in a bed when there’s a cot in
a dug-out awaiting him, and the bright face of danger to dream about,
and see.
I treasure your picture, and Christopher’s shadowy profile--send me
more photographs. Love me constantly, never let a day pass without
going to church for me.
JOYCE.
* * * * *
March 14, 1918.
Dear Aline:
I enclose some verses that you may like very much. That is, I think I
enclose them--I have yet to consult with our Regimental censor as to
whether or not I may send them. If the place name is cut out, put in
its stead any French proper name that rhymes and do with the poem as
you will. Perhaps the best thing to do with it will be to hand it to
Bob for publishing.
As to my book--why don’t worry about it--we all will live just as long
and just as happily and probably be just as wealthy--or poor--if it
is never written. I am cheerfully neglecting it, for many reasons.
One is, of course, the censorship, which prevents the sending out of
articles sufficiently topical and specific to be interesting. Another
is a military regulation which forbids an officer or enlisted man from
acting as a correspondent or writing for publication on a military
subject. This will not, I suppose, prevent the publication of such of
my verses and essays as are inspired by my experiences. But it will
prevent my making for serial publication any consecutive record of
events. What I will do will be to assemble, after the war is over,
or after I have returned from it, such random essays or rhymes as I
have made and bind them together with a thread of reminiscence--partly
introspective, partly--what is the word? extraspective? external, at
any rate. I shall write nothing that has any news value. I believe in
my vanity that it will be a most charming book, not without its high
lights of something more than charm. It really is the sort of book I’d
like greatly to read, and I think that it will reach a public tired of
the many war-narratives. And don’t think people won’t read it after the
war is over! They will! The only sort of book I care to write about the
war is the sort people will read after the war is over--a century after
it is over! And that is the sort of book I am going to make. A _journal
intime_, but as close to literature, as carefully thought and wrought
as I can do. It will be episodic--chaotic, perhaps--no glib tale, no
newspaper man’s work--but with God’s help, a work of art. So clamour
not for copy! My enclosures of some weeks ago may have pleased you, but
you’ll like this better.
Which for no reason brings me to the subject of growing middle-aged,
an experience which you are enjoying, I trust; I know I enjoy it.
What an advantage we have over our children! While they, to their
embarrassment, grow up--voices changing, legs and arms becoming
too obvious, self-consciousness and shallow romanticism seizing
them--we gracefully, comfortably, grow down. Perhaps it is as a
protective measure that I, a private soldier, grow vain--as snails
develop shells--but I confess it is with consummate pleasure that
I contemplate my senility and, may I say, mediævality. I picture
myself at forty, rotund but eminently presentable, moustache and
hair delicately grayed, tailored admirably, with the leisurely power
no young man may have. I picture myself at sixty, with a long white
moustache, a pale gray tweed suit, a very large Panama hat. I can see
my gnarled but beautifully groomed hands as they tremblingly pour out
the glass of dry sherry which belongs to every old man’s breakfast. I
cannot think of myself at seventy or eighty--I grow hysterical with
applause--I am lost in a delirium of massive ebony canes, golden
snuff-boxes, and daily silk hats.
And as for you! My God! what a vision! That dear autumnal hair
silvering--the mouth of my delight exquisitely etched with honourable
lines--each one the record of a year’s love--those eyes richer in
their mystery--but I cannot write of this--for the thought might give
me power to sweep away the years and make me find you, when I come
back from the Wars, becapped and tremulous and leaning on two sticks!
NO! I don’t want you to be old now--I want you to be the innocent
sophisticated young woman you are in the little picture I carry
(traditionally!) over my heart. But I want to watch you grow old--if I
can watch you and at the same time hold you in my arms.
JOYCE.
* * * * *
April 1, 1918.
Dear Aline:
This letter is written to you from a real town--written, in fact, above
ground. You may be surprised to know that recent letters to you were
not written in these conditions. They were written in a dug-out, but
I was not permitted to tell you so at the time. In a dug-out, also,
were written the verses I sent you some two weeks ago--you may remember
their damp-clayey flavour. I slept and worked (the latter sometimes for
twenty hours at a time) in this dug-out for a month, except for one
week when I was out on special work with the Regimental Intelligence
Section. You don’t begrudge me that week, do you? I cannot now describe
it, but it was a week of wonder--of sights and sounds essential, I
think, to my experience. For there are obligations of experience--or
experiences of obligation--to be distinguished from what I might call
experiences of supererogation or experiences of perfection--but what
rubbish this is! Let us rather consider my present great luxury,
and the marvels of which it is composed. In the first place, one
room (not a cot in a crowded barrack, not a coffin-like berth in a
subterranean chamber) but a real room, with windows and a large bed and
a table and chairs and a practical wash stand. The bed I share with
one L---- D----, an amiable gamin, about to be made a Corporal. I am
a Sergeant--with stripes some five days old. (It is the height of my
ambition, for to be commissioned I’d be sent to school for three months
and then, whether or not I succeeded, be assigned to another Regiment.
And I’d rather be a Sergeant in the 69th than lieutenant in any other
outfit.)
To continue--I also eat from a table excellent meals, with a napkin
on my knees. I have soldiered pretty hard for some months now, taking
everything as it came, and I think I’ve honestly earned my stripes.
Now I’m going to have an easier life--not working less hard, but not
seeking hardships. So I am paying seven francs a day for meals, and
six francs a week for my share in a bed-room. And it’s delightfully
refreshing. Also, I yesterday had a hot shower-bath--very much a
novelty!
This morning I received two letters from you, to my great joy. The
pictures of the children are excellent. I am glad to see Deborah’s
hair so long and lovely. Do, by all means, send me pictures of yourself
and Deborah in a leather case, as you promise. I can imagine no
possible gift I’d rather receive. Mail is coming here every day now, so
I look forward to frequent messages from you.
What a cheerless place the States must be these days! Don’t send me
American papers (except the _Times Book Review_) for they depress me,
showing me what a dismal land you live in. This meatless, wheatless
day business is very wearying. It can do no earthly good--it is merely
giving comfort to the enemy, who undoubtedly know all about it. I
wish--aside from the obvious greatest reasons--that you were here in
France--you’d like everything, but especially the gentle, kind, jovial,
deeply pious people. Time enough--to resume--for wheatless days when
the enemy takes your wheat. Until then, carpe diem!--that is, eat
buckwheat cakes with plenty of syrup.
I am disgusted with all I read in the American Magazines about the
Americans in France. It is all so hysterical and all so untrue. It
isn’t jealousy that makes me say this--I have no desire to compete with
newspaper-correspondents--but it annoys me to see the army to which
I belong and the country on and for whose soil we are fighting so
stupidly misrepresented.
I hope you received “Rouge Bouquet”--if you did receive it I know you
liked it. General ---- (I forgot, I mustn’t name generals lower in rank
than Major-Generals) had twelve copies of it made. I sent it to you
two weeks ago--you should be receiving it now. The newspapers by now
have re-revealed its meaning to you, if any explanation was needed. It
was read at an evening entertainment at one of our camps at the front.
Father Duffy read it, and taps was played on the cornet before and
after. I couldn’t get down to hear it--I was further front, at work in
the dug-out that night.
I think most of my war book will be in verse. I prefer to write verse,
and I can say in verse things not permitted to me in prose. You
remember--no, probably you don’t--Coventry Patmore and his confessor.
The confessor objected to the passionate explicitness of some of
Coventry’s devotional poems--they dealt with things esoteric, he said,
and should be set forth in Latin, not in the profane tongue. And
Coventry replied that for most people poetry was an incomprehensible
language, more hidden than Latin--or more hiding.
And speaking of Coventry Patmore, the best way to fry potatoes is to
have deep oil or butter violently boiling in a great pot, to slip the
slices of potatoes into it and stir them persistently, never letting
them touch the pot’s bottom, to lift them out (when they are golden
brown) by means of a small sieve, and to place them on paper so that
the grease may be absorbed.
The best news I’ve had since I reached France is about Kenton’s medal.
I’m going to write to-day and tell him so.
I love you,
JOYCE.
* * * * *
April 19, 1918.
Dear Aline:
My chief occupation at the present time is awaiting a letter from you.
It is several hours since I wrote the first paragraph of this letter.
I have been to supper (I am hitting the mess-line these days, for my
money gave out and I didn’t want to borrow any more) and ridden in a
motor-cycle-side car all over the countryside--through a dozen little
villages, every one full of French and American soldiers, with a
sprinkling of coolie labourers, in quest of a certain village which
holds two companies of a certain outfit with which I had to have a
conference. The village was hard to find (their names all sound alike,
and old French ladies, when interrogated as to direction, always point
in a direction in which there is no road and say something that sounds
like “Honk! honk! Ba! ba!”) and also the night was cold. I have enjoyed
many rides more. Returning to the office (I sleep in the same building)
half frozen and weary, I found that not two truck-loads, but two sacks
of letters had been delivered, and that I had received three letters.
I leaped at the letters--one was an invitation to a Ladies’ Day at the
Columbia University Club, another was from my mother, another from
Fr. Garesché. None from You! You accused me in one of your letters
of writing to you when I was depressed--well, I’m depressed now, all
right! I’ll wait until to-morrow morning to finish this letter, I
guess, or else I’ll give you real cause for complaint. Not that I blame
you, or think you haven’t written often--it’s the mail system’s fault.
Good night!
I hope Kenton has learned to serve Mass by this time. I wrote to him a
long time ago and told him to see Fr. Morris about it, but I fear that
he would be too shy to do this unless some pressure were brought to
bear. If you would ask Fr. Morris to teach him how to serve Mass, and
persuade him to ask Kenton to come to see him about it, so that the
initiative would seem to come from Fr. Morris, I think things would
work out well. I pray for Kenton to have the grace of a vocation to
the priesthood--I hope he may have a Jesuit vocation--and I think it
is good to do all we can toward the fulfillment of this desire--this
is, I think, a supplementary way to “sway the designs of God.” I think
of the children often and can visualise them well in spite of my long
absence from them, that is, all except young Christopher. I am aware of
Kenton’s gravity and of his thoughtful and radiant smile, of Deborah’s
vivacity and exquisite colouring (she is like one of her mother’s
gay thoughts), of Michael’s magnetic rotundity, of his blue eyes, of
his charming habit of toppling over like a toy tumbler of lead and
celluloid. And of Rose I am nearly always conscious, delightfully, when
I am awake and often when I am asleep, and especially when I am in the
church--which is twice every day, to receive Holy Communion immediately
after Reveille and to pray for a few minutes in the evening. We have a
magnificent old church in this town, as near to where I am now as the
church is to our house in Larchmont. And right by the tower-door is a
big statue of St. Nicholas of Bari, in his episcopal robes, and hopping
around his feet are two little bits of babies he saved and brought back
to life after they’d been cut up and pickled. Very nice! You’d like
it! Pray to St. Nicholas for me, and to St. Stephen, St. Brigid, St.
Michael, St. Christopher, St. Joseph, St. Anthony of Padua, St. Teresa,
and all our other good friends in Heaven, and love me.
JOYCE.
* * * * *
April 21, 1918.
Dear Aline:
I am glad of the auspicious beginning of Eleanor’s romance. I would
so regard it, for I cannot understand the interpretation which makes
marriage the termination instead of the beginning of a splendid
adventure. If there should ever be the perfect novel of love, it
would begin rather than end “And they were married.” Would the phrase
continue: “And lived happily ever after”? I doubt it--but that depends
upon the definition of happiness. I know that you dislike the symbolism
which is the basis of Coventry Patmore’s greatest poems, but I think
you will admit that there is this truth in his idea--the relationship
of man and wife is like that of God and the soul in that it must be
purified and strengthened by suffering. Also--to put it on a lower
plane--Eleanor is enough of a poet to take some enjoyment out of being
the wife of a soldier gone to the wars--or Irish enough, which is the
same thing.
As to the matter of my own blood (you mentioned this in a previous
letter) I did indeed tell a good friend of mine who edits the
book-review page of a Chicago paper that I was “half Irish.” But I have
never been a mathematician. The point I wished to make was that a large
percentage--which I have a perfect right to call half--of my ancestry
was Irish. For proof of this, you have only to refer to the volumes
containing the histories of my mother’s and my father’s families. Of
course I am American, but one cannot be pure American in blood unless
one is an Indian. And I have the good fortune to be able to claim,
largely because of the wise matrimonial selections of my progenitors
on both sides, Irish blood. And don’t let anyone publish a statement
contradictory to this.
Speaking of publishers, please be very careful that there is nothing
in the book you and Margaret wrote to offend, in the slightest
degree. I would go so far as to say that if the spirit of the book
is not obviously and definitely Catholic--readily so recognised by
Catholic readers--it would grieve me to see it published with your
name attached--grieve me deeply. I don’t want anyone to say of you,
“There is nothing about that novel to show she is a Catholic.” I
don’t think Catholic writers should spend their time writing tracts
and Sunday-school books, but I think that the Faith should illuminate
everything they write, grave or gay. The Faith is radiantly apparent in
your last poems. It is in Tom Daly’s clowning as it is in his loftier
moods. Of course anyone would rather write like Francis Thompson than
like Swinburne. But I can honestly say that I’d rather write like John
Ayscough than like William Makepiece Thackeray--infinitely greater
artist though Thackeray be. You see, the Catholic Faith is such a thing
that I’d rather write moderately well about it than magnificently
well about anything else. It is more important, more beautiful, more
necessary than anything else in life. You and I have seen miracles--let
us never cease to celebrate them. You know that this is not the first
fever of a convert’s enthusiasm--it is the permanent conviction of a
man who prayed daily for months for the Faith before that grace was
given him. The Faith has done wonderful things for you, but I think
since I have been in France it has done more for me. It has carried
me through experiences I could not otherwise have endured. I do not
mean that it has kept me from fear--for I have no fear of death or
wounding whatever. I mean that it has helped me to endure great and
continued hardships. These hardships are now past--they belong to
last December--but I cannot forget what made me live through them and
bear myself like a man. Therefore--for this and a multitude of other
reasons, among which let me put that it is my most earnest request--be
zealous in using your exquisite talent in His service of Whom, I am
glad to have said, Apollo was a shadow. If what you write does not
clearly praise the Lord and his Saints and Angels, let it praise such
types of Heaven as we know in our life--God knows they are numerous
enough.
Does this sound like the writing of the least desirable of your
aunts? Forgive me if it does, and heed my request even if it seem
unreasonable--the request, I mean, not to sign your name to the book if
it is not Catholic in spirit. I can honestly offer “Trees” and “Main
Street” to Our Lady, and ask her to present them, as the faithful work
of her poor unskilled craftsman, to her Son. I hope to be able to do
it with everything I write hereafter--and to be able to do this is to
be a good poet.
Speaking of Poetry, I have read with exquisite relish, several
times, the copy of the Bulletin you sent me. And always I stop
reading--prevented from continuing by irresistible mirth. God help us!
Let all the world, especially all of it that deals in thought, beat its
breast and repeat after me “God help us.” Here are young men battling
in a strange land to win back for the people of that land their
decent homes. Here are French peasants (old men, children and women)
kneeling at mass in a church with a yawning shell hole through the
tower. Among them are American soldiers. And other American soldiers
(God rest their brave young souls) rest in new graves by a fair road I
know. We hear the crash of shells, the tattoo of machine guns, we see
unearthly lights staining the black sky. And--Oh, God help us! Send me
more bulletins! I want to read more about Mr. ---- whose “mystic” (of
course!) poems, seem to ... “to challenge comparison with the works
of Tagore.” I want to read more about ... chaunting to crowds of old
ladies who stink of perfume and cold cream and gasoline, while a young
female shakes her shanks and “gives a visual embodiment of the poet’s
idea.” I want to read about A ... “What a privilege to be at once a
poet and a fairy godmother!” And I want to read about W ... going West
and--just being himself! God forgive me for being a Pharisee, and
keep me from judging others! But I do love to read about these things
and then go across the street and drink a large drink with Joe Brady,
meanwhile singing a coarse ballad entitled “The Old Gray Mare.”
We’re going to be paid to-morrow, I’m glad to say, so I’ll be able to
have a few meals indoors. This roadside picnic stuff is all right in
fair weather, but French weather is not always what it should be. I
hope your allotment is arriving, but I doubt it. I think we’ll collect
it in our old age. I read recently that a Civil War Veteran had just
succeeded in collecting some pay due him in 1862--perhaps we’ll be as
lucky. We’ll buy a carton of cigarettes for Christopher’s youngest son
with the first payment.
Your poem “Experience” has lodgment in my brain and heart and soul.
“She walks the way primroses go.” Simple--isn’t it? that line--to make
it nothing much was required--genius merely. Thank God there’s you in a
world of ----s and ----s. Do you mind being considered the “one just
man”? Figuratively I kiss your hand--it was absurd of me to preach to
you who are my mistress in the art of devotion as in the art of poetry.
JOYCE.
* * * * *
April 27th, 1918.
Dear Aline:
Some mail came to-day and in it was a package containing ten boxes
of tobacco, Merci bien! (when I get back I’ll talk just like ----
or ----.) I received a box of admirable cigars yesterday (they were
originally awarded to Father Daly in payment for a contribution to
_America_, and he kindly directed that they be sent to me).
We are in a new town now (new to us, that is) a little bit of a
place. We have been recently in a rather large town, where I lived
very comfortably. I am comfortable here (especially since yesterday
afternoon, when I had a hot shower bath and had my clothes sterilized)
but not luxurious. But I’m looking forward to a much easier and vastly
more interesting time for the rest of my stay in France. I have asked
to be relieved from my office job, and my request has been granted.
I hope on Monday (this is Saturday night) to become a member of the
Regimental Intelligence Section, and the Adjutant tells me I am to be
transferred as a Sergeant, although I was willing to give up my stripes
for the sake of getting into this work. So henceforth I’ll be peering
at the Germans through field glasses from some observatory instead of
toiling in a dug-out or crowded office. You wouldn’t want me to come
back round-shouldered and near-sighted, would you? Well, that would
be the result of keeping on this statistical job much longer. The
intelligence work is absolutely fascinating--you’ll be glad I took it
up.
You would have liked the gutter-babies in our last town. About a dozen
of them used to come out at meal times and besiege our mess-line.
They brought their dad’s canteens to be filled with coffee, and they
accepted, politely, bread and karo. They were very nice, and fat, as
all French babies are. I don’t know whether the French are so devoted
to my dear patron St. Nicholas of Bari, because they love children,
as he does, or are devoted to children because they love him. Anyway
they have the nicest children there are outside of Larchmont Manor and
Heaven (these words mean nearly the same thing) and they treat them
most enthusiastically. Large crowds of men and women stand for half
an hour in a busy city street watching a young baby learn to walk,
the baby being decorated, for the occasion, with his big sister’s
broad-brimmed hat. And also nearly every church has a statue or window
representation of St. Nicholas of Bari with the three babies he
restored to life. It helps me to feel at home. I hope you and Kenton
pray to him often, he is a very generous saint and has treated me
beautifully.
I had a quaint experience to-night. There is no priest now in this
town, but there is a fine old church, with God in it. Since there is
no priest, I can’t get my daily communion, but I go in occasionally to
say my prayers. Well, to-night there was a very old lady in the church.
She was so crippled with age and rheumatism that she could not kneel,
so she was huddled up on a bench near the rail. And she had a white cap
on, and she carried a tall staff with a crutch top such as witches use.
She was very pious, and prayed audibly, making pious ejaculations, like
an old Irish lady. For some time she didn’t know anyone else was in the
church. But when she found I was there, she waited until I had said
my beads and then she came over to me (rising with great difficulty
and putting on the heavy wooden shoes that lay beside her). Then she
extended to me her beads. The link between two of them was undone, and
she asked me to mend it. I tried to do so, but my clumsy fingers had
little success. So I gave her my rosary in exchange for hers--which I
can easily mend with a pair of pincers--and she was very grateful. But
I feel that I got the best of the bargain, for there may be a special
sort of a blessing attached to beads worn by the gnarled fingers of one
so near God. I could make a rhyme out of this experience, but it would
seem a profanation. You see some of the possible interpretations of it,
don’t you?
The news about D---- is interesting--well, he is trying to serve his
conscience, and I am trying to serve mine, and that’s all a gentleman
can do. And since we’re both suffering, I believe we’ve both followed
the right course. There are many ways to Heaven, but only one Lamp--as
I once said in some verses.
But as to suffering--don’t be pitying me! It’s you that are doing
the suffering, you with no exhilaration of star-shells and tattoo of
machine-guns, you without the adventure. I feel very selfish, often.
I love you and you are never away from me.
JOYCE.
* * * * *
April 29, 1918.
Dear Aline:
For Heaven’s sake, don’t tell me about how bad tea rooms are! I admit
that I used to scorn them. Now I could live in one, enthusiastically. I
wouldn’t mind at all the closeness, the bad service, the soiled table
linen. Why, Max’s Busy Bee sounds better to me now than Sherry’s used
to sound.
“She walks the way Primroses go” reechoes in my soul. What a delightful
poet you are! Send me some more poems, at once, please.
It’s time I heard from you again. Some mail came to-day, but I got
nothing from you. You should write me long letters often. _By all
means_ take up Fr. Hayes’ lecture offer. You can make your lectures
chiefly readings. Get Dr. Pallen to help you make a circular, and
put on it testimonials from whomever he suggests. Get Bob Holliday’s
advice as to form of circular. You will find valuable suggestions as to
engagements in my correspondence files, wherever they are.
(Here I paused to eat ten cakes purchased at the Y. M. C. A. for a
franc.)
Young ---- is in a nearby town--an amiable child indeed he is. I
saw him twice, and he presented me with a bag of cakes and a box of
cigars. He reminds me very much of Kenton, but is in many respects his
inferior. I’d like to see Kenton and Fr. Daly and Deborah and Michael
and Christopher and Sister Emerentia and some Bass’ Ale and some dry
sherry and a roast of lamb with mint sauce and Blackwood’s Magazine
and the bar in the Auditorium Hotel in Chicago and a straw hat and the
circus. And I really wouldn’t mind seeing you.
JOYCE.
* * * * *
May 15, 1918.
Dear Aline:
Your friends are a bit impertinent, I think. I don’t claim to be a
learned French scholar (although I have talked French every day for six
months). But I do claim to know the name of the place where I lived
in constant danger of death for six weeks, where many of my friends
gave their lives for their country. It is Rouge Bo_u_quet, not Rouge
Bo_s_quet. I’ll be deeply grieved if it appears in print incorrectly.
Also, I wish the grace in “Holy Ireland” to stand as I wrote it. It is
just as Frank Driscoll said it on that unforgettable night--it is the
grace used in Jesuit houses. Please see to this, and don’t let all
the world revise my mss. I rather expected you’d like the poem better,
but perhaps the reason the fellows in the Regiment liked it so much is
because we all felt keenly the event it memorizes.
I’ll write to you more to-morrow. I love you.
JOYCE.
* * * * *
The above is rather stern and brusque, isn’t it? Well I wrote it in
rather stirring times--now only memories. I am resting now, in a
beautiful place--on a high hilltop covered with pine and fir trees. I
never saw any mountain-place in America I thought better to look at or
from. I sleep on a couch made soft with deftly laid young spruce boughs
and eat at a table set under good, kind trees. A great improvement on
living in a dug-out and even (to my mind) an improvement on a room
with a bed in a village. I am not on a furlough, I am working, but
my work is of a light and interesting kind and fills only six out of
twenty-four hours. So I have plenty of time for writing, and have
started a prose-sketch (based on an exciting and colourful experience
of the last month) which I will send you soon. _Everything_ I write, I
think, in prose or verse, should be submitted to Doran first.
I wish I could tell you more about my work, but at present I cannot.
But there are advertised in the American magazines many books about the
Intelligence Service--get one of them and you’ll find why I like my
job. The work Douglas is doing is not allied to mine. Only I suppose
he’ll have a commission. I won’t work for one, because I don’t want to
leave this outfit. I love you more than ever, and long for the pictures
you promise me. You will be amused by the postcards I enclose.
JOYCE.
Say, the stuff about your not appreciating “Rouge Bouquet” was written
before I got your delightful letter of April 18, admirable critic!
* * * * *
Dear Aline:
I have just received your letters of April 1st and April 5th.
“Moonlight” is noble, like its author. As to being worried about you
because it expresses pain, why, I’d be worried only if you did not
sometimes feel and express pain. Spiritual pain (sometimes physical
pain) is beautiful and wholesome and in our soul we love it, whatever
our lips say. Do you not, in turn, worry because of my foolish letter
to you from the hospital. At that time I was just an office hack--now
I am a soldier, in the most fascinating branch of the service there
is--you’d love it! It is sheer romance, night and day--especially
night! And I am now therefore saner than when I wrote to you from the
hospital. I’ve had only a week of this work--but I’m already a much
nicer person.
“For Sergeant Joyce is three, and Oh,
He knows so much he did not know!”
As to the picture I sent you, why, surely I have a moustache, and not
a “morning pout.” _Mechante._ A long moustache I have (illustration
of moustache) _comme ca_. Also, I have thick hair which stands up
(illustration) _comme ci_. I had my head shaved last November, you
know, and it had a good effect. My letter is thrilling, isn’t it,
with all these martial details? A veritable cross-section of battle,
a flower from No Man’s Land. Well, I am sending some battling
picture-postcards soon which you will find amusing, I think--portraits,
in two striking histrionic poses, of myself. You know now, from my
previous letters, that I am no longer (I thank God!) doing statistics,
so gently, but widely and most firmly, correct the statement that I
have a bullet-proof job. I had one, but succeeded, after two months’
intriguing, in getting rid of it. It wasn’t a shell-proof job--nothing
in a real regiment is. (Such jobs are in the Ordnance or Supply
Departments, back of the lines.) It wasn’t shell-proof, I say, and if
I should be squashed by a shell, wouldn’t you hate to have it said
that I was nobly holding my post in the office, or bravely manning my
typewriter? Now, I’m doing work I love--and work you may be proud of.
None of the drudgery of soldiering, but a double share of glory and
thrills. But it is not so glorious and thrilling as you.
JOYCE.
* * * * *
May 24, 1918.
Dear Aline:
I don’t know just what kind of a mental picture you have of my present
life--to be accurate it would need to be rather kaleidoscopic, for
my activities and the spheres of them vary frequently and greatly.
But this afternoon you (or perhaps not you, but readers of Empey and
Private Peat and the rest of that mob of war writers--thank God, let me
Pharisaicly say, that I am not one of them--would do so) would have
been amazed at the martial picture before you, had you seen me. Just
outside the edge of the forest of firs and spruce in which we fourteen
men live is a lovely meadow. There, among the knee-high buttercups, lay
in the May sunshine all afternoon three warriors--myself being one.
Whiles we smoked and gazed at the lovely valley miles below us--whiles
we took turns in reading aloud from--what do you suppose? The Oxford
Book of English Verse! We read Gray’s Elegy, the first chorus from
Atalanta in Calydon, “They told me, Heraclitus,” that witch poem of
William Bell Scott, “Love in the Valley,” “Lake Isle of Innisfree,”
“Keith of Ravelston,” and half a dozen other poems, all of which
brought you most poignantly and beautifully before me. No, they didn’t
bring you before me--you are always before me and with me and in my
heart and brain--but it’s dangerous to write this--it draws so tight
the cords that bind me to you that they cut painfully into my flesh.
Well, we are to be together sometime, inevitably, and soon in terms of
eternity. For we are absolutely one, incomplete apart, and in Heaven is
completeness. How unhappy must lovers be who have not the gracious gift
of faith!
There is to be an Homeric banquet at our house one day--the day when
I exhibit to my comrades the glory of my life--yourself. You will like
them all--Watson (a gifted artist from Richmond, who is now at work on
a fine drawing which must accompany Rouge Bouquet in _Scribner’s_),
Bob Lee, Titterton (my especial friend), Beck, Mott, Kerrigan,
Levinson--say a prayer for them all, they’re brave men and good, and
splendid company. They are all men of education, and breeding, and
humour, and we have fine times. Dangers shared together and hardships
mutually borne develops in us a sort of friendship I never knew in
civilian life, a friendship clean of jealousy and gossip and envy
and suspicion--a fine hearty roaring mirthful sort of thing, like an
open fire of whole pine-trees in a giant’s castle, or a truly timed
bombardment with eight-inch guns. I don’t know that this last figure
will strike you as being particularly happy, but it would if you’d had
the delight of going to war.
Right here I had to pause to discuss theology with Watson, Titterton,
Levinson and Jongberg. Jongberg is up here for a brief spell; he is
a Swedish-Irishman, and now he is posing for St. Michael for Watson,
using a bayonet for a sword. Levinson (in full uniform, including belt
and helmet) is being model for the soldiers leaving Rouge Bouquet for
Heaven. He is a quaint little French-Jewish-American, with whom we have
a lot of fun. They all trooped into the room where Titterton and I sit
writing to our respective sweethearts, to ask about the style of St.
Michael’s sword and that of his halo. These questions settled, Watson
became enamoured of the idea of angels saluting, and devised a whole
manual of arms for angels--as “Angels, attention! Wings raised, by
the numbers. 1 up! 2 down! Wings flap! Hey you down there! what’s the
matter with you? Don’t you know enough to keep your hands down when you
flap your wings? Awkward squad for you to-morrow!” Then they went back
to their work.
Well, I don’t know how long the Intelligence Section is to stay in
this lovely summer resort of a place, but it’s certainly fine while it
lasts. And I am very fortunate to have such a crowd as this to work
with. I never was with so congenial a company in civilian life. Fr.
O’Donnell came up to see us yesterday--he is stationed not far away.
Fr. Duffy has an assistant--Fr. Kennedy--a Jesuit, thank God! I have
not met him yet. He is a brother of the publishers of Barclay Street. I
have a new stripe--an inverted chevron of bright gold on the left cuff
for six months service. Let you be proud of that too, please, and let
my children be proud of it. That is all the news except that I love you.
JOYCE.
* * * * *
Dear Aline:
To-day I was made very happy by receiving two nice little ridiculous
letters from you--one of which considered itself to be long. As to Sr.
Mary Leo--if you happen to be writing to her (you will be, for I told
her to ask you for “Rouge Bouquet”) ask her by all means to tell you
how her grandmother taught her geography. It’s an absolutely delightful
story, and she’s a delightful old saint.
You say Tad will go “in a few months.” I’m glad I’m not Tad. There
are many reasons for this, of course, but I mean I am especially glad
I’m not to go in a few months. I’m glad I’m a Sergeant in the 69th, a
volunteer regiment, the bravest and best regiment in the army. I’m glad
I have a golden service chevron on my left arm--that means six months
service in France, and is better than two bars on my shoulder, which
would mean only three months stay at Plattsburg. If I get an honorable
wound that will unfit me for soldiering but not for civilian work, that
civilian work will not be hack-writing. It may be straight reporting,
or editing, or writing (_Evening World_ at $80 a week, for instance)
a weekly essay-column, or dramatic criticism (this last appeals to me
strongly). Also I’ll do less lecturing and more oratory--bombastic,
thundering, literary, Henry Woodfin Grady oratory! It is exciting, and
lecturing isn’t, especially.
Meanwhile I find myself approving your plan of getting literary work,
although doing it makes me feel like a coloured man approving his
wife’s plan of taking in washing. You relieve my mind greatly by
your willingness to keep your name off the book. I thought I would
acknowledge to you the pleasure I got from “A Wind Rose in the Night.”
It is a holy and dear poem.
Please see that Kenton learns to serve Mass, won’t you? Sorry to keep
teasing you about this, but you never write anything about it.
Your poem “To a Sick Child” is beautiful, and “cookies” is the making
of it. I love you.
JOYCE.
* * * * *
May 18, 1918.
Dear Aline:
I didn’t get your letter expressing enthusiastic approval of “Rouge
Bouquet” until I had received two others just mentioning it. I
certainly am glad the poem “got” you, as it got me. The Regiment--and
soldiers outside the Regiment as high as a Brigadier General--are
wonderfully enthusiastic. The Brigadier General had twenty-four
copies made to send his friends. Of course we are especially moved
by it because the event is so close to us. But to appreciate it you
should have heard taps played and at a soldier’s funeral. P. C. ought
to know the distinction between peacemakers and pacifists. I wonder
he didn’t include St Michael in his catalogue of pacifists. We are
peace-makers, we soldiers of the 69th, we are risking our lives
to bring back peace to the simple, generous, gay, pious people of
France, whom anyone (knowing them as I have come to know them in the
last six months) must pity and admire and love. They are an invaded
people--and invaded people _always are right_. The careful study of
certain ghostly villages (I cannot forget them) has taught me where I
would have stood in the 60’s and that is on the side of the invaded
Southern States. God keep me from ever being ordered to take part in
an invasion of a peaceful land! So long as I am helping drive out the
invader, I know I’m right--and all questions of international politics
are of no importance whatever. Here are nice old ladies, fat babies,
jovial humorous men, and little girls just after making their First
Communions. They’ve been driven out of their pretty sleepy little
villages. They want to get back and mend the shell holes in the roof
and go to school and take their place drinking red wine of an evening
according to their tastes and ages. Well, we men of the 69th are
helping to give these people back their homes--and perhaps to prevent
our homes from one day being taken from us by the same Power--of whom
nothing at all worse need be said than that it is an invader. And St.
Patrick and St. Bridgid and St. Columkill and all the other Saints are
with us--they are no more pacifists than they are Roycrofters! And God
keep us from Washington Square! No Man’s Land is a damn sight healthier
place--I have tried both, and I know what I’m talking about.
And as for you, you young flippertigibbet, you won’t be middle-aged,
you say? Well, we’ll see about that! I’ll probably come back with
one eye, one arm, one leg and a horrible temper, and turn your hair
white in a day. Stop calling any child of ours “Billy.” When you
referred to “Billy” in previous letters I thought you meant some
rather unfortunately named dog or cat. Now I am annoyed to find out
you meant Michael. The habit of so designating him probably started
humorously--please stop it at once.
I have not read “The Tree of Heaven,” to which you refer in a recent
letter. But I have read Carnival--and if when I get back to the States
I find that you really think such books are “fine,” as you say in
your letter, I’ll grab a baby (probably young Michael) and start for
whatever South American Republic or other bellicose land has need of
the services of a ranting, roaring, slashing, dashing young Sergeant,
fresh from the ranks of the quarrelsome Irish, veteran of the Great War.
JOYCE.
* * * * *
May 27, 1918.
Dear Aline:
I enclose three bits of verse by various hands. “A Nun’s Prayer for a
Soldier” is by dear old Sister Mary Leo. The flattering sonnet was sent
to me by Sr. Mary Emerentia, having been copied from a paper published
by the girls of St. Mary’s College, Notre Dame, Indiana. I destroyed
Sr. Emerentia’s letter before I copied down the author’s name, so I
couldn’t write to thank her, unfortunately. “The Green Estaminet”
I want carefully preserved, for it must go in every anthology made
by you or me or anybody we know. I like it better than any war poem
I’ve read since I became a soldier, and I deeply regret that I didn’t
write it. Many and many a jovial evening I have spent in just such
bistrals as the poet describes. Dear old Madame--she always has that
“strange disease,” and she finds that white bread is good for it--and
in exchange for that white bread (from army kitchens) she gives the
delicious soft-crumbed brittle-crusted war-bread, better than any
bread in the States. “The great round songs begin”--they do, indeed!
“Bing Bang Bingen on the Rhine!” “Down in the Heart of the Gas House
District,” “Sidewalks of New York,” and always “Madelon,” in which the
French soldiers in the corner enthusiastically join. Cecil Chesterton
told me he always judged a country by its drinking-places. Well, here
are the merriest, bravest drinking places in the world. If the States
go dry, I’m going to bundle all you young critters over here to live--a
comfortable, humorous, Catholic country. Honestly, the only drawback to
living in this country is the absence of you and your gang. I’d like a
house on the very mountain top I now inhabit, and I know you’d enjoy
it tremendously. I’m perfectly serious about this, and look forward to
bringing you here.
Write oftener, and longer! I love you.
JOYCE.
* * * * *
June 1, 1918.
Dear Aline:
A terrible thing, this war, what with a pine forest to live in, all
the latest novels to read, and bridge every evening. And now I am
preparing for a short week-end in a certain nice small city, an hour’s
walk through the forest and across the mountains. It is a lovely forest
in which to wander of a June day--so deliberately European--a forest
whose tall evergreen trees and smooth brown floor suggest all the folk
tales I ever heard your dear voice beautify for our children’s delight.
Reaching this certain town, I have interesting things to do--to collect
my pay for one thing. To get mail--I hope from you. To go to confession
to Fr. Duffy or Fr. Kennedy, S. J., our new assistant chaplain, or to
some curé with thin hands and long white hair. To drink a bottle of
beer at the Sergeants’ Club--among my brother noncoms, French, Italian
and American, in horizon blue, green and olive drab respectively. To
mail to you this letter and a splendid drawing for “Rouge Bouquet,”
by Emmett Watson, of ours. To dine sumptuously on steak and fried
potatoes and Pinard at a merry bistral on a side-street, where Madame
la patronne will present me with a sprig of lilies of the valley, which
I (imagine a boutonierre with an American uniform!) will present to the
baby of the tailor’s daughter. To attend the movies--two sous! To sleep
between clean sheets in a hotel-bedroom--half a franc! And to-morrow to
be (gold service stripe flashing in the sunlight, trench-stick jauntily
swinging) a part of the many-coloured Sunday afternoon procession along
a certain broad avenue. Then back to my forest-lodge for supper.
I have written a long topical poem about a hike which I’ll send you
soon.
I love you.
JOYCE.
* * * * *
A. E. F., France.
Dear Aline:
So far, I have told about six people about your rejoicing in the
fact that the possession of a kitten justifies you in purchasing a
bird-cage. An absolutely delightful character-revelation--that is, the
revelation of a delightful character. And the most genuine sample of
you I have had since last November.
I am writing this letter in the end of one of our barracks, which
its partition cuts to make an airy office for the Supply Sergeant of
Headquarters Company. You’d like him very much--a very beautiful person
of about my age, a playwright by profession, educated in Paris. At the
other end of the long table sits a bridge party, of which the members
are the Supply Sergeant (Lemist Esler is his name), Howard Young (who
was a Marine before he became a fighting Irisher), Sergeant Kenneth
Russell (a wealthy and charming business man of very literary taste,
who knows most of the living poets we know and revels in the Oxford
Book of English Verse), and Tom O’Kelly, who has the most beautiful
tenor voice you ever heard. He is a professional singer from Dublin,
with very tightly curled close-cropped hair, a reddish brown face,
and the build of a prize-fighter. In the lulls of the game he sings
snatches of “Digging for Gould” and other nice ballads. Admirable
person.
[Illustration:
“HE LIES BURIED, ON THE RIGHT,
BESIDE LIEUTENANT OLIVER AMES,
AT THE EDGE OF A LITTLE COPSE
KNOWN AS THE WOOD OF THE
BURNED BRIDGE, CLOSE TO THE
PURLING OURCQ”
]
I am with the Regiment now--the Intelligence Section is back from its
Post, the beautiful place from which I wrote you many letters. Now
we are in very flat country, the flattest I ever saw. Very violent
flowers, chiefly scarlet poppies and small blue things, cornflowers, I
believe. Gloriously hot, with good swimming nearby, and the best sort
of shower-bath, obtainable by merely sitting under the spout of a pump
while an obliging friend turns the handle.
Your letter of May twenty-sixth came after I had received a June
letter. I am delighted to hear of Kenton’s confirmation and of his
choice of a name--St. Stephen is a gallant gentleman and a true friend
and does wonderful things for me.
I’m not very enthusiastic about that group picture of office-workers in
which I appear--I like myself better as I am now, a soldier instead of
a clerk, visiting the office only occasionally--to work on my history.
And I’m ever so much happier now than when the picture was taken.
Is Kenton serving Mass yet? _Please_ have him do so. And please send
me my Anthology--I believe restrictions no longer keep packages from
soldiers. I love you.
JOYCE.
MISCELLANEOUS PIECES
A BALLAD OF NEW SINS
PRELUDE
I am sick of the riotous roses of rapture,
Of sibilant serpentine lips,
Of the wine cup
And murder
And all that mid-Victorian stuff.
I will sin large purple sins
American
And new.
I
THE SIN OF SOUTH BEND
Clandestinely, by night,
I will board a train
And be borne, palpitant and eager, over the shuddering rails,
Until
In the chaste stillness of Sunday morning
I am hurled into the blushing station of South Bend, Indiana.
Thence I will speed to the Hotel Mortimer
And, leering with hot lips,
Rubbing with tremendous hand my rough jaws
(For this is the shameful signal,
Immemorial, inevitable),
I will ask the way to the barber shop.
The liveried menials will blench,
But one of them, hardened in crime,
Will feverishly seize my proffered gold,
And lead me, on tiptoe,
To the barber-shop’s secret door.
There, in a dim back room,
Screened, impenetrable,
A barber (artfully disguised in a black coat and no chewing gum)
Will (now and then peering nervously out beyond the screen, fearful
of spies and policemen)
Give to me, for twenty-five cents,
The forbidden delight
Of a Sunday morning shave.
II
THE WICKEDNESS OF WASHINGTON
What wickedness is more witchingly wonderful
Than the wickedness of Washington,
Where it is heinous to hock
And perilous to pawn?
I will go to Washington
And offer my watch to an usurer.
“Wait here,” he will whisper,
“And give me ten cents!”
Then will a messenger, winged like a swallow,
Carry my watch over meadow and hill
Over the riotous River Potomac
To the Virginian Shore;
He will return with a lavender ticket;
He will return with a five-dollar bill;
He will return (Oh, the logic of law!)
He will return with the watch
And the pawnbroker will lock it away.
III
THE IMMORALITY OF INDIANAPOLIS
I will go to Indianapolis,
And there sin strangely
By crossing the street catty-cornered
Instead of at the crossings,
And I shall be hanged.
WAR SONGS
I--WATER-COLOUR
Pushing my way through the chattering throng of my brown-clad mates to
the rail of the troop-ship, I look at still water, greasy and opaque.
A touch of sunlight makes it splendid with rainbows, a great prismatic
expanse, beautiful, more beautiful than clear water could be. Broken
oars shatter the rainbow, bringing a black, clumsy rowboat close to
our ship’s side. Around the black boat the rainbow settles. The rower
rests his oars and lifts graceful entreating arms. He wears pale blue
overalls. In the stern of his boat is a little girl in a cardinal
cloak. On her head is one of the caps that make the French sailors look
so gay and gentle, a flat, round, blue thing with a red pompom. She
claps her hands when cooks lean through the portholes and throw loaves
of bread to her father.
II--BREAKFAST
I may breakfast in either of two ways. I may, as I pass a steaming
field-kitchen, hold out by its long handle a shining aluminum basin.
John Wilkert will put into it a big ladleful of rice, and Leo Maher
will pour golden syrup over it. Also, before I leave the line I shall
have three long strips of broiled bacon and two thick slices of white
bread, and a canteen cup full of hot, sweet coffee. The breakfast room
is a meadow or the roadside across from the barracks. There is good
company, hungry and mirthful. And over our heads noisy battalions of
crows maneuver, advancing, retreating, hoarsely shouting down to us
news of what awaits us beyond the frozen hills.
Or I may go to the House by the Fountain. Pierre’s “permission” is
over, so he will not come in from the stable to smoke my tobacco and
tell me of life and death in the trenches. _Grandpere_ sits by the
fire, now and then blowing it to flame by forcing his scant old breath
upon it through a long hollow tube, and toasting for me a thick slice
of war-bread. Madame superintends the heating of the big iron pot of
this morning’s milk and the three-legged pot of coffee. Now my bowl--a
little precious sugar in the bottom--is filled with hot milk. Madame
deftly pours black coffee into it, and it becomes richly brown. I break
my toast into it and eat eagerly--more eagerly than does demure little
Francine, who sits opposite me, her school books beside her on the
bench. She has large innocent brown eyes like her father’s. Her hands
are so tiny that I am surprised at her dexterity with the large pewter
spoon. I am afraid that if I stare at her I shall embarrass her and
make her spill _cafe au lait_ on her immaculate pinafore. On the great
stone mantel over the fire are a spent seventy-five millimetre shell
curiously engraved with wreaths of roses, a pink china pig and a brass
crucifix. A bugle sounds by the barracks. I give Madame her half-franc.
I take my belt and rifle. “Bon jour, Monsieur,” says Madame, “A
demain!” Some day instead of “a demain” they will say “au revoir.”
“TRY A TIN TO-DAY”
“And now,” said John Potts, whirling around on the piano-stool and
throwing his lank forelock back with a jerk of his head, “we will
interpret Grace Mallon’s soul!”
“Oh, wait till she comes, John!” boomed the Rev. Morris Gildell. “She
was at the Karl Marx Forum in our parish-house last night, and she said
positively she’d be down here this afternoon.”
“Yes, do wait!” said Mrs. Anna Watkins Wilbur, placing her fat hands,
covered with rings set with semiprecious stones, over those of the
pianist. “Do wait! It will be wonderful for her to hear it!”
The host of the occasion was Edwin Marmaduke, painter. He was at
present engaged in spooning Arabian incense out of a cocoa-tin and
putting it into a large bronze thurible, which hung before a plaster
replica of Rodin’s “Le Baiser.” The incense caught fire, and dense
clouds of fragrant smoke filled the little studio. Then Marmaduke
turned his pale but agreeable face to his guests.
“No, do it now!” he commanded. “Perhaps you and Arthura will bring her
with it.”
So John Potts struck a few minor chords, and Arthura Lewis lifted her
pale-green mantle in both thin arms, smiled at the low ceiling, closed
her eyes, and danced. She did not really dance. She merely bent and
kicked and gestured, approximately in rhythm with the music.
She was not really Miss Arthura Lewis, either. Her first name, which
she had discarded as too usual, was Alice and her last name was Potts,
for she was the pianist’s wife. They were known to live together in the
little apartment across Patchin Place from Marmaduke’s studio, but the
fact of their marriage was scrupulously kept a secret from the other
members of their emancipated circle. No liaison was ever hidden from
the world more zealously than was the regularity and mid-Victorian
respectability of this seeming “free comradeship.”
So John Potts played and Arthura danced, and the theme they were
interpreting was Grace Mallon’s soul. Edwin Marmaduke’s eyes were
turned toward Arthura, but he did not see her. Nor did he see Grace’s
soul. He saw her eyes--very gray and lovely--and her hair, which was
golden-brown and had an indefinable air of mirth about it.
Marmaduke loved Grace better than cigarettes, or incense, or art;
better even than the school of painting of which he was the
acknowledged master, the school which proudly accepted a name first
derisively given it--the Incomprehensiblists. So, while Arthura twisted
and turned and John Potts hammered out discords, he thought of Grace’s
beauty and charm.
To do him justice, he did not think of her great wealth. In fact, he
did not like to think of her wealth, for that wealth came from her
father’s success in a most unesthetic business. Grace was the daughter
of “Try a Tin To-day” Mallon, who was known in the world of canned
goods as the Salmon King.
There was no vulgar hand-clapping after the artists had finished their
interpretation of Grace’s soul; but the Rev. Morris Gildell rattled his
spoon against the sides of his teacup, while Mrs. Anna Watkins Wilbur
sighed ecstatically and clanked her chain of heavy amber beads. Even in
the act of lighting a cigarette, John Potts started dramatically and
pointed toward the open window.
“La voilà!” he exclaimed. “We have summoned her! I hear the rumble of
her chariot-wheels.”
There did indeed come from the cobbles of Patchin Place the whir
and snort of an automobile. Soon the great gong on the wall clanged
viciously, causing Arthura Lewis to shudder and clasp her long, white
hands to her eyes. Edwin Marmaduke sped down the four flights of stairs
that intervened between his studio and the street door.
His deserted guests looked at one another expectantly.
“Dear Grace!” said Mrs. Anna Watkins Wilbur. “I hope she came alone. I
can’t stand that friend of hers--what is his name?--that Watson person.”
“He is a terrible bromid,” said Arthura Lewis, lighting a cigarette.
“He’s so very--so very, shall I say, salmony!”
This was said with humorous intent and received with kindly laughter.
“But what has Mr. Watson to do with salmon, anyway?” asked John Potts.
“Does he catch them, or what is it?”
“Nothing so exciting as that,” said the Rev. Morris Gildell, with
a great chuckle. “He merely celebrates them. He is the advertising
manager of the Mallon Salmon Company, and his chief claim to
immortality is that he invented the ‘Try a Tin To-day’ slogan. You know
those great pink pictures of ridiculous-looking fish that we see in
public vehicles and on the highways and byways, each one holding out a
can bearing the legend, ‘Try a Tin To-day’? Watson is responsible for
those mutilations of the landscape.”
“Does Watson paint them himself?” asked Mrs. Anna Watkins Wilbur. “He
looks capable of it.”
The Rev. Morris Gildell issued another of those shouts of laughter
which made the women’s clubs believe him masculine and hearty.
“Excellent!” he cried, putting an approving hand on Mrs. Anna Watkins
Wilbur’s fat, bare shoulder. “Oh, excellent! No, Watson doesn’t paint
them, but he does worse--he inspires them. He persuades some poor devil
of an artist to make these hideous caricatures of the truth. He is the
Mæcenas of the ‘Try a Tin To-day’ school of painting.”
After waiting for the murmur of amusement to die down, the Rev. Morris
Gildell continued:
“Grace brought Watson to the Feminist Conference at our church last
week, and several people asked me what a rare, free spirit like her
could see in such a clod. I suppose she feels that she must go around
with him occasionally because he is so useful to her father. But I hope
she doesn’t think of marrying him!”
“Marrying him!” exclaimed Mrs. Anna Watkins Wilbur, Arthura Lewis, and
John Potts in unison. “I hope not!”
“Why,” said Arthura Lewis, “it would be a tragedy for an emancipated
woman like Grace to marry at all! Not to speak of marrying such a
soulless, brainless animal as that David Watson! I’d as soon see her--”
But the conversation was interrupted by the opening of the studio door
and the entrance of Grace and their young host.
Edwin Marmaduke seemed somehow to look younger than before. He had lost
a little of his expression of languor and disdain; and Grace was the
very personification of radiant girlhood. In spite of her knowledge of
her own good looks and good clothes, she was charmingly deferential to
these people, whom she considered intellectuals. Her naively respectful
greeting to the Rev. Morris Gildell seemed for the moment to restore to
that drawing-room revolutionist some strange lost dignity.
Men and women alike greeted the young girl with genuine friendliness.
When her gray motor-cloak had been hung over the corner of an easel,
and she had been seated on one of the few real chairs the studio
boasted, and served with sweet biscuits, a cup of tea, and a cigarette,
then the great event of the afternoon occurred--the unveiling of
Marmaduke’s portrait of her.
The blinds were drawn--for the Incomprehensiblist painting is best
appreciated in semidarkness. The incense-pot received some new fuel;
John Potts played something “very golden” on the piano; and Edwin
Marmaduke reverently drew back the gay Indian scarf that covered his
masterpiece.
II
For a detailed description of Edwin Marmaduke’s “Soul Study in
B-Minor--for G. M.,” the reader is referred to the introduction to the
catalogue of the “Seven Rebels” exhibition at the Stein Galleries, or
to the admirable essay “Incomprehensiblism--a Step Forward,” which
appeared in that sprightly but short-lived weekly review, the _Ultimate
Democracy_. This at least was obvious--that the portrait was large and
mauve; this at least was generally agreed upon--that it was wonderful.
The Rev. Morris Gildell defiantly, Mrs. Anna Watkins Wilbur cooingly,
Arthura Lewis prayerfully, Grace Mallon respectfully, Edwin Marmaduke
himself modestly--all said it was wonderful. And after Mrs. Anna
Watkins Wilbur had embraced the young painter, and his other guests had
clasped his hand, and they had all said “Wonderfull” many, many times,
they clattered down the uncarpeted stairs to the street.
All, that is, but one--Grace Mallon. She still remained in the old
Italian chair, holding an empty cup and an unlighted cigarette. She
looked out of the window into dusty Patchin Place, and one slender,
unjeweled hand lay on the sill. It was an attractive hand although
the sun had turned it a shade darker than that of Edwin Marmaduke. It
seemed firm and soft at the same time.
Edwin was, after all, human, and therefore he seized it; but Grace
withdrew it from his grasp--not very abruptly, however.
“Now, Edwin,” she said, “you must be very proper and mid-Victorian and
all that sort of thing, since I’m being a reckless, forward young woman
and staying here in your studio all alone with you. Now sit down there
like a good boy and listen to me. Heavens! I wonder what David _would_
say if he knew I was doing this!”
“Why do you care what David Watson would say?” asked Edwin, gently
swinging the thurible to and fro before his goddess. “He’s busy with
his ‘Try a Tin To-day’ pictures. He isn’t thinking about you or
anything else that is beautiful.”
“Stop swinging that incense thing around. You make me nervous!” Grace
replied irrelevantly. “I hate that stuff; it makes me think about when
I had whooping-cough. Of course I don’t care about what David thinks,
silly! Last night he came up to the house, and he said something that
hurt me very much.”
She paused interrogatively. Edwin put the extinguished thurible on a
teakwood stand, dusted his fingers on a yellow silk handkerchief, and
sat down on a cushion at Grace’s feet.
“Well, what did he say?” he asked.
Grace’s colour had risen, making her more adorable than ever.
“Really, Edwin,” she said, “I sometimes think that you are almost too
skilful in repressing your emotions. I said he hurt me very much.”
Edwin threw his cigarette into the coal-scuttle with a despairing
gesture.
“My dear Grace,” he said, “what would you have me do? Challenge him to
a duel? Of course I’m tremendously sorry; but why do you talk to such
an animal as Watson?”
Grace looked at him with a rather cynical smile.
“You men are pretty much alike, after all,” she said. “What David said
that hurt me was just like what you are saying about him. He made fun
of you and your painting--of course, that hurt me terribly--and then
he actually had the nerve--the impudence to _forbid_ me to come to your
studio! Think of it! David Watson, whose only idea of art is a stupid
fish holding a tin of dad’s salmon and saying ‘Try a Tin To-day’--that
man to tell me what to do and what not to do! I’ll tell you what I did.
I forbade him ever to come to my home or to speak to me again! When I
came down here this afternoon, I stopped at dad’s office purposely. I
know David was watching me when I left, and I said to Leon, ‘Take me to
Mr. Marmaduke’s studio in Patchin Place’--loud, so he’d hear me!”
Edwin looked almost handsome as he smiled up at her from his cushion.
“That’s my brave little comrade!” he said. “And soon we shall be
married, sha’n’t we? Remember, you’ll keep your maiden name, and you
won’t promise to honour or obey me, or any of that cruel rubbish.
Gildell will use that lovely, ‘Polyrhythmic Ritual for a Free Mating,’
and there’ll be just the people we love best present. Arthura will
dance, and it will all be wonderful!”
Grace gripped the arms of her chair and moistened her lips nervously.
“Edwin,” she said, “I haven’t told you yet why I stayed here to-day. I
told dad to come here at six o’clock.”
“Mr. Mallon coming here at six o’clock!” said Edwin, rising to his
feet. “Why, it’s five minutes to six now!”
“Yes, he’s coming here right away. And, Edwin--he knows,” said Grace.
“You told him?” asked Edwin in unconcealed amazement.
“Yes, I told him, idiot!” said Grace, springing up from her chair. “How
else do you suppose he knows? Do you think he read my burning passion
written on my brow? Have some sense! Did you never hear of a girl
telling her own father that she was engaged?”
“Of course!” said Edwin. “Of course! I understand. But what did he say,
why is he coming here?”
“That’s just it,” said Grace, drawing on a white glove hurriedly and
splitting it in the process. “I told him last night, right after
David went away; and he said he didn’t like artists and didn’t like
you--don’t be angry, Edwin, he’s only seen you three times. I told him
you were really a great painter, and he said that he wanted me to be
happy, and that he’d have a talk with you and see what you were made
of.”
“See what I am made of!” said Edwin with a sneer. “Why, does he think--”
“Now, Edwin, please, please, _please_, don’t say anything bright!” said
Grace. “You know dad has had only me to talk to since mother died, and
he isn’t used to bright people. He doesn’t like them. Now be sensible,
and--here he comes now!”
They had not heard the great motor-car swing around the corner of
Jefferson Market and come to a stop at the entrance to Patchin Place;
but they heard the clang of the gong on the studio wall, and together
they went to the street-door and brought the Salmon King up the rickety
stairs to the studio.
III
James Mallon was what is called a captain of industry. That is, he was
one of those men who are always shown by the realistic cartoonists to
be grossly fat, with very small heads, tremendous cigars, and suits of
clothes covered with a chaste pattern of dollar-marks.
He no more looked the part, however, than you look the part of the
_Common People_. He was slender, graceful, and modestly dressed; he
had a neat, white mustache, thin gray hair, and a mildly humorous
expression. He loved his motherless daughter, his business, golf,
pinocle, Smithfield ham, buckwheat cakes and maple-sirup, dry Sauterne,
and detective-stories. He did not wear spats.
Mr. Mallon sat in the Italian chair, and after a brief survey of the
room, turned to his postulant son-in-law a puzzled but amiable face.
“Mr. Marmaduke,” he said, “don’t you think that you and I could talk
a little more comfortably if I sent this youngster of mine home? Run
away, Grace, and have Leon take you straight to the house. I’ll be back
in time for dinner.”
Grace gave her father that birdlike peck which is the traditional
filial kiss, and ran down-stairs in accordance with his directions.
She went to her car, and called Leon from his conversation with her
father’s chauffeur. There arose a rumble and a rasping roar, and her
car sped over the cobblestones to the corner and up Sixth Avenue.
Oh, woman, in our hours of ease, what a double-faced hussy you are,
anyway! Grace’s car went away--presumably home--but Grace stayed
behind. She had left the street-door of the house ajar. She tiptoed
up the stairs to the top floor, where her father and her lover were
engaged in important private discourse.
She came to a halt about three steps from the top, and perched in
the dust with her golden-brown head on a level with the broad streak
of light which marked the bottom of the studio door. A shameless
eavesdropper, she listened greedily.
First she heard her father’s voice:
“I have heard your paintings praised highly by critics whose opinions
I respect,” it said. “The fact that I myself fail to appreciate their
merit is by no means to your discredit. I am not a connoisseur, and I
am very old-fashioned in all my tastes. But I must say frankly that
your success as a painter of ultramodern pictures scarcely seems to me
to qualify you to marry my daughter.”
She half hoped, half feared, that Edwin would say:
“I love your daughter and she loves me. That makes our union necessary
and right.”
But instead he said, in a low, tense voice which she had never heard
him use before:
“But I may say without boasting that my art is not a failure, even
financially. I have sold six paintings since last May, and the smallest
check I received was for one hundred and twenty-five dollars.”
“Indeed?” her father replied courteously. “I am glad to hear it, Mr.
Marmaduke--very glad to hear it. I did not know that the public was
sufficiently fond of these new and unusual forms of art to invest
money in them. I see that I was wrong. But you must forgive me, Mr.
Marmaduke, if I say that in my opinion the demand for--what is it you
call them? I am getting old, and my memory is not what it was--ah, yes,
thank you--the demand for Incomprehensiblist paintings is not likely
to be of great duration. The public is fickle, sir; it has no use for
last year’s novelties. Can you expect to invent new methods of painting
yearly for its pleasure? You would have found it more profitable, in
the long run, to paint in the traditional manner.”
Edwin did not speak for several seconds. Then he said, with an air of
deliberation:
“No, Mr. Mallon. I think you are wrong. I tried painting in the
traditional manner, and I made much less money than I am making now.
Except for commercial work, the only sort of painting that pays to-day
is--well, what you would call freak painting.”
“Ah!” Grace heard her father say. “Exactly--except for commercial
work! There is a field for a young man! I cannot blame you for being
an idealist; but you wish to marry my daughter, and I confess
that I should prefer to see her married to a successful commercial
draftsman--say, an artist connected with some sound advertising
agency--than to--well, to an Incomprehensiblist.”
The listening girl smiled at her father’s words. Edwin Marmaduke and
advertisements! It was an amusingly fantastic combination.
She heard Edwin cross the room and open a door. Then he seemed to be
taking something from a closet. There was clattering and grating, as if
canvases were being moved about.
“Before I show you these,” he said, “I must ask you to promise to treat
this matter as strictly confidential.”
“Of course I promise, Mr. Marmaduke,” said her father. “But really I am
not competent to judge your work--”
Edwin made no oral answer. From the sounds that came to her Grace
conjectured that he was lifting and placing one of his paintings on an
easel. She wondered which one it was--certainly it could not be her
portrait!
“Good Lord!” she heard her father say. “Good Lord!”
Then came silence.
IV
Frantic with curiosity, Grace rose from the step and tried to look into
the room through the keyhole. The presence of a key made her effort
unavailing. She heard the rustle of pictures hastily turned, and her
father’s iteration of “Good Lord!”
Then Edwin spoke.
“Now,” he said, “you see that my work has some practical value, don’t
you? You recognise these drawings, don’t you?”
“Recognise them!” said Mr. Mallon. “I should say I did. Do you mean to
tell me--”
“Yes,” said Edwin. “They’re my work, all of them. Watson let the Parker
Company handle their campaign, and I’ve done all their high-class work
for the past three years.”
The Parker Company! Grace dimly remembered hearing that name. Yes,
David Watson had said something about the Parker Company.
“I don’t sign any of this stuff,” said Edwin, “but it’s all mine. I
originated that idea of the fish holding a can in his fin. I make all
the ‘Try a Tin To-day’ pictures.”
She was at first too stunned to move. Vaguely she heard her father’s
laugh, vaguely she heard him congratulating Edwin and inviting him
to the house. Then, with a sense of walking in her sleep, she found
herself at the foot of the stairs, fumbling at the catch of the
street-door. She walked all the way home.
But it was a composed and apparently happy young woman who entered
the Mallon house an hour later. Her father had already returned, and
not even the fact that dinner had been delayed by her tardiness could
account for his air of excitement.
“Grace,” he said, “I was pleasantly surprised by that young man, that
Edwin Marmaduke. He is no mere freak painter--he is a first-class
commercial artist. He doesn’t want it known, but--I should never have
guessed it, it is a tremendous joke on me--he is the man who originated
our ‘Try a Tin To-day’ posters! Did you know that?”
“Impossible!” said Grace. “Is dinner ready?”
“It’s a fact,” said her father. “He showed me the drawings. Of course,
that changes things. I told him to call this evening--how does that
strike you?”
Grace seemed passionately interested in her grapefruit. She looked
steadily at it as she answered.
“Well,” she said, “I’m afraid I won’t be in this evening. You see, I
met David Watson on the way home to-day, and he asked me to go to see
‘The Boomerang’ with him to-night, and I said I’d go.”
“Oh!” said her father. “Then I’d better telephone Marmaduke to come
to-morrow evening instead--or will you?”
“No,” said Grace serenely. “To-morrow night won’t do, either. David is
coming to call.”
Her father looked at her over his glasses. Then he took them off,
polished them with a small piece of chamois, replaced them, and looked
at her again.
“Oh!” he said.
SOME MISCHIEF STILL
CHARACTERS
MAXWELL JOHNSON
MRS. MAXWELL JOHNSON (_née_ HELEN WHITE)
LIONEL MORRIS
JOHN RYAN
A POLICEMAN
PLACE: _New York; the upper West Side_.
TIME: _The present_.
SCENE--_The living room of a six-room apartment. On one side is a
mahogany pianola; at the back is a doorway with a heavy portière, drawn
aside to show a portion of the hall with a wall telephone. At the right
of the doorway is a life size statue of a nude woman, the distance from
her feet to her waist being four times that from her waist to her head,
which is very small and has no features except a prominent nose. Her
arms are stretched out at right angles to her body, and she has been
painted a vivid purple._
_It is evening; the electric lamp is lit and there is a faint light in
the hall._
MAXWELL JOHNSON, _a man of about thirty, is lying in slippered ease
on a chaise-longue, smoking a cigar_. MRS. JOHNSON _is seated facing
him on the bench by the pianola. She is a very pretty young woman,
rather too highly coloured, wearing an extremely décolleté gown of
pale green charmeuse, a long string of large jade beads and a broad
silver bracelet. She has a profusion of bright yellow hair. One knee
is crossed over the other, revealing green silk stockings and silver
slippers._
MAXWELL
But Anarchists don’t ride in automobiles, do they, Nellie?
HELEN
Max, I do wish you wouldn’t tease me about things that are sacred. If
you don’t want to get an automobile, just say so, but don’t try to make
fun of things you can’t possibly understand!
MAXWELL
But, Nellie--
HELEN
It’s hard enough for me to put up with your staying home and lying
around and reading the paper while I go out night after night without
you, and wear myself out at the Settlement and the Ferrer School
and making speeches and addresses and everything in the subway and
back in it, and losing, all the elation and social consciousness
and everything, without having Anarchism and beauty and truth and
everything that really means anything to anybody who tries really to
think just made a joke of!
MAXWELL
Good heavens, Nellie, I’m perfectly willing to buy the automobile; and
I’m not criticising any of your hobbies! I--
HELEN
Hobbies! Does one wear one’s self out for a hobby? Does one die for
a hobby? Is the vote a hobby? Is the Woman’s Movement a hobby? Is
Futurism a hobby? Is the Church of the Social Revolution a hobby? Is
preaching the great truths of sex to one’s unborn children a hobby? Is--
MAXWELL
All right, all right; let me slip in a word, won’t you? I’m not
knocking any of your--devotions. I’ll get the automobile if you want
it. I simply want you to make up your mind whether you want me to get
it, or to use the two thousand for a bungalow at Amaranth, or wherever
that crazy summer colony is.
HELEN
It would be lovely to have our own place at Amaranth--though I suppose
you’d only come out for weekends--you know it’s the most wonderful
place, with the most wonderful scenery, and only really interesting
people are allowed there, poets and sculptors and people who really do
things; and there’s to be a pageant this summer and Lionel Morris says
he wants me to do my barefoot dance; but I do wish we had a car--it
would be wonderful just to get into one’s own car all the time and go
anywhere, and I could take parties of interesting people out on tours
to Ellis Island and the Night Court--
MAXWELL
The Night Court! Yes, I think if you run the car you will go on a tour
to the Night Court pretty soon, and you’ll have a special cop to take
care of you, too. But you decide to-night whether you want the car or
the bungalow, see? I’m game to spend two thousand dollars on one or
the other, but you’ve got to decide. (_From the dining room comes the
loud clink of the steam radiator._) There’s that radiator again! (_The
telephone bell rings._) And there’s the ’phone! (_He goes into the
dining room and is heard muttering and pounding at the radiator, which
continues to clink._ HELEN _goes to the telephone_.)
HELEN
Hello!... Yes; what is it?... Yes, I am Miss White. (_She turns and
looks nervously toward the dining room._) Yes, this is Mrs. Johnson,
Sam. It’s all right; I know what he wants. Tell Mr. Morris to come
right up. (HELEN _and_ MAXWELL _reënter the living room at the same
time. The radiator still clinks, but less loudly, with longer intervals
of silence._)
HELEN
Max, Mr. Morris is coming up to take me to the Mortons’ studio warming.
MAXWELL
Studio warming, hey? Well, I’m going down to get Ryan to come up and
arrange a dining room warming. It’s no use telephoning to him; he’ll
just promise to fix the radiator and then go back to his chair and
fall asleep. I’ll go down and drag him up by the throat. (_He goes out
through the hall door, and is heard to open the outer door and speak
to someone._) How are you, Mr. Morris? Walk right in! The madam’s
waiting for you.
LIONEL (_off stage_)
Ah, thank you, Mr. Johnson, thank you.
(_Enter_ LIONEL. _He is a handsome, slender young man, very pale, with
brown hair brushed straight back._)
LIONEL (_lifting both of_ MRS. JOHNSON’S _hands to his lips_)
Ah, Miss White! Dear Comrade White!
(_This hand-kissing and dearing business leads the audience to think
that_ MR. LIONEL MORRIS _is the villain of the play, a destroyer of
homes, a desperate character. As a matter of fact, he is nothing of
the sort. He is quite harmless, being a sociable young man of limited
education who likes to take part in those radical movements which
attract women. He writes obscene poetry and paints pictures and makes
sculptures that would be disgusting if they were not so funny. He is a
rather interesting hybrid, being part donkey and part tame cat._)
HELEN
Dear Comrade Lionel! See where I put your “Emancipation of Woman.”
(_She leads him to the purple statue._)
LIONEL
Ah! I never can interest myself in any of my work that is more than a
day old. A poem or a picture that I have made bores me when the first
flush of creation has passed. I feel toward it as I suppose a father
felt toward his children, in those mediæval days when one had children.
(_He touches the outstretched hand of the statue._) But, dear Comrade
White! Why do you make my “Emancipation of Woman” live with a Hiroshige
colour print? A Toyokune I can endure, but a Hiroshige absolutely
spoils the melody of her composition. Better the soft lyrical wall for
a background, or perhaps a simple hanging of passionate black satin. Do
you mind if I take this abomination down?
HELEN
Surely, surely; you are always so right about everything! Do change
anything and everything that will make it more comfortable for your
wonderful statue. She has meant so much to me since she came....
LIONEL
I know, dear comrade.
(_He has moved the pianola bench to the wall and is standing on it
taking down the Japanese print when_ MAXWELL _and_ JOHN RYAN _come
in_. RYAN _is a janitor, and looks like a janitor. He is in his shirt
sleeves and wears a battered black derby. He is smoking--no, not a
short clay pipe!--a cigarette. He takes off his hat when he sees_ MRS.
JOHNSON, _but instantly replaces it_.)
MAXWELL (_as he leads_ RYAN _to the dining room_)
Come in here, Ryan. Did you bring your monkey wrench with you?
(RYAN _mutters something unintelligible. They go out into the dining
room, from which come occasional murmurs of conversation and sounds of
hammering._)
LIONEL (_from the pianola bench_)
Do you know, I am not at all glad to see that man.
HELEN
Who? Max?
LIONEL
No, indeed! That dreadful janitor! Do you know, Miss White--that
janitor--
HELEN
Don’t talk so loud! Max doesn’t like me to be called “Miss White.” You
know he’s funny and old-fashioned, and though he’s willing for me to
be a Feminist and to give money to the cause and everything, it makes
him positively rage to hear me called “Miss White.” I tell him that
a woman doesn’t give up her soul and her name and everything like a
chattel mortgage just because she’s married, but he says that I’ve got
to be called “Mrs. Johnson” because I’m no more Miss White than he is.
LIONEL (_getting down from the bench and putting
the colour print on the pianola_)
Ah, well, he’ll wake up one of these days and learn what Feminism
really is. Even the business men must wake up some time. There was
a broker that marched beside me in the suffrage parade this year--a
broker or a pawnbroker, I never know which is which.
HELEN
But what about Ryan? Why don’t you like him?
LIONEL
That janitor! Do you know, he is simply a degenerate!
HELEN
A degenerate? Like Lombroso?
LIONEL
No. Worse than that. He actually has nine children! Last week when I
went around with Comrade May Robinson Dannenberg and Comrade Rebecca
Idleheimer selling “Plain Facts about a Great Evil” and working
up enthusiasm for the suffrage rally at the Church of the Social
Revolution, I made a special effort to interest the janitors and their
wives. We went into every basement from here to 125th Street, and we
saw some things that made my heart bleed. And in the basement of this
very house I saw this man Ryan rocking a cradle and drinking beer out
of a tin pail. His wife was cooking something disgusting on the gas
stove and nursing a baby with her left hand. Comrade May Robinson
Dannenberg was treated with absolute discourtesy by them; in fact, the
woman told her to “go to hell”!
HELEN
But then, those people, you know, they never do anything or read
anything or anything. They are just like animals.
LIONEL
Yes, but you and I have got to keep them from being animals! That’s
what Social Consciousness means. I won’t say duty--I hate the
word--but it’s your right to change the lives of those people and you
absolutely must exercise that right, just as you absolutely must vote.
There is that woman--a woman, the creature of all our dreaming--(_He
points to the statue._)--who might be out among the fields and the
trees and the brooks and the birds and all the great and beautiful
things of life, a sentient, social being; and what is she? What do we
find her doing? Having a baby in a coalhole!
HELEN
I see what you mean. That dreadful janitor! I know; I tried to get her
to come to my class in the Ferrer School, and she said she had too much
work to do.
LIONEL
Exactly! Too much work to do! The thing that has crushed the souls and
spirits and hearts of women throughout the generations! But we must
stop all this. You must stop it. You must speak to the man--to Ryan--
HELEN
I speak to Ryan? What shall I say to him? He won’t come to the Ferrer
School.
LIONEL
The Ferrer School must come to him! You must go to him and say: “Ryan,
woman is no longer your bond slave! You must have no more babies. You
are killing your wife with soul-deadening drudgery. No janitor should
have children; no janitor should have a wife. You must put Mrs. Ryan
in a model tenement somewhere, and let her lead a normal, intellectual
life. Society will care for the children. There are plenty of places
where they can go and be studied by scientists and develop, perhaps,
into useful members of the community. You will do your work as before,
but you must keep Mrs. Ryan away from this drudgery somewhere where she
can really live her life.” Will you do this?
HELEN
Why, yes, I suppose I ought to.... (_She picks up her cloak which has
been lying on a chair and puts it on, with_ LIONEL’S _assistance_.)
It’s time we started, isn’t it? But wait a minute! Max!
MAXWELL (_coming in from the dining room_)
Going? I hope you have a good time.
HELEN
Yes, we’re going, but, Max, I want you to do something for me. You
know Ryan better than I do and you can talk to him. Mr. Morris says
that he’s been abusing his wife, and he thinks we ought to get him to
put her into a model tenement where she can develop her soul. He’s been
overworking her and all that sort of thing, so you talk to him about
it, will you? Mr. Morris knows a place where she can go, and we can put
the children somewhere, and he can go on with his work, and it will be
better for everybody. So you talk to him about it, will you?
MAXWELL
Ryan? Abusing Mrs. Ryan? Good heavens, I had no idea of this. Of course
I’ll talk to him about it. I’ll put a stop to that, Nellie. Good-bye.
Enjoy yourself. And you talk over that plan of ours with Mr. Morris and
decide whether you want a bungalow or an automobile.
HELEN _and_ MAXWELL
Good-bye.
(_They go out._ RYAN _comes in from the dining room_.)
RYAN
I guess that radiator’ll be all right now, Mr. Johnson. There was a lot
of air in the pipe and the valve was rusted tight, so I had a little
trouble loosening it up.
(_He starts out._)
MAXWELL (_frowning and looking at the floor_)
Wait a minute, Ryan. I want to talk to you about something. (RYAN
_comes toward him and stands waiting_.) Ryan, I hear--don’t you
think--er--will you have a cigar?
RYAN
Why, yes, thanks.
(MAXWELL _goes into the dining room and brings out a humidor. He places
it by the lamp on the table and opens it. Both men take cigars and
light them._)
MAXWELL
Ryan, what I want to talk to you about is the way in which you--it’s
about what I hear about the way you--Sit down, sit down!
(_He sits on the chaise-longue and_ RYAN, _looking somewhat puzzled,
sits on a chair on the other side of the table_.)
RYAN
What was it you want to see me about, Mr. Johnson? Any complaint?
MAXWELL
Oh, no, not at all! Or, rather, yes, I have a complaint. It’s rather a
hard thing. I must say I’m surprised to hear about the way you treat
your wife.
RYAN (_rising from his chair_)
What are you trying to give me? You mind--
MAXWELL
Now, that’s all right, Ryan; I’m not trying to start anything. I’ve
lived in this apartment for five years and you know me. But they’ve
been telling me that you don’t treat your wife right, and I thought I’d
tell you about it.
RYAN
Anybody that told you that, Mr. Johnson, is a liar, I don’t care if
it’s man, woman or child.
MAXWELL
Now, Ryan, will you just listen to me for a minute? This thing was sort
of put up to me, and I’ve got to do it. Probably these people are all
wrong. Just sit down and talk to me a minute. Have a drink?
RYAN (_sulkily, sitting down again_)
Yes, thanks. (MAXWELL _brings in from the dining room a bottle, a
siphon and two glasses_.) Ain’t you got any ice?
MAXWELL
Oh, yes, that’s right.
(_He goes into the dining room again and comes back with a plate of
cracked ice. Meanwhile_ RYAN _pockets several cigars and pours a
generous portion of whiskey into the glasses_. MAXWELL _sits down
again, and as the men talk they drink, refilling their glasses from
time to time_.)
RYAN
Now just what did these fresh guys say about me, Mr. Johnson? You know
there’s such a thing as a libel law in these here United States.
MAXWELL
Well, I’ll tell you, Ryan. I don’t know whether there’s anything in it
or not, and these people may have it all wrong, but they said that you
were treating Mrs. Ryan very badly.
RYAN
I beat her up, I suppose?
MAXWELL
No, they didn’t say anything like that. It’s this way, Ryan: These
people are making a sort of special study of people that work hard for
a living, and they say--I don’t know whether they’re right or not--that
you’re not treating Mrs. Ryan right to make her work so hard and have
so many children and all that sort of thing.
RYAN
Mr. Johnson, if any man but you was talking to me like that, I’d
knock his block off, the big boob! Why, whose business is it how many
children I have? What do they expect she’s going to do? Lie on a couch
an’ have me bring her ice cream all day long? I been married thirteen
years next month, an’ if anybody wants to know how I treat my wife I
refer them to her, I do.
MAXWELL
Well, Ryan, as I said, I’m inclined to think that these people that
were talking to me were a bit hasty. But see here; listen to me a
minute. These people want to do you a good turn. You’ll admit, I
suppose, that it isn’t the finest life in the world for Mrs. Ryan to
be staying down there in the basement all day and all night washing
clothes and cooking meals and tending to the children. She’s sick every
now and then, isn’t she?
RYAN
Now and then.
MAXWELL
Well, the idea is this: These people are what they call
philanthropists--that is, they’re trying to make the world better, to
make people happier. Now, they’ve built a very nice tenement house;
it’s called a model tenement; it’s almost as good an apartment house
to live in as this one. What they say is, that you can put Mrs. Ryan
there, in a nice suite of rooms, with hot and cold water and a bathroom
and electric light and everything for very little money--say five
dollars a week. You can come there to sleep nights and you can get your
breakfast and supper there with her in what they call the community
dining room. You see, they do all the cooking for you and charge you
just what the food costs for the meals. Your wife won’t have any more
cooking to do, and they’ll give you better meals in that dining room
than you’ve ever had before, believe me.
RYAN
I see. What about the washing?
MAXWELL
Well, they have a big laundry in the place and do all your washing for
you for about half what a regular laundry would cost you. That sounds
like a pretty good thing, doesn’t it?
RYAN
A pretty good thing, and I suppose there’s nursemaids and governesses
for all the children, too, hey?
MAXWELL
Why, as a matter of fact there are--but not exactly in the way you
mean. You see, they run a sort of a boarding school, too, the people
that run this model tenement do, and they take care of all the children
there--keep ’em night and day, feed ’em and dress ’em and teach ’em
trades and all that sort of thing. They let them come to see you on
Sunday, but you’re relieved of all responsibility and your wife of all
the trouble.
RYAN
I see. But what’s to become of my job when I’m going off to this here
model tenement to sleep nights? Don’t you know that a janitor has to
sleep in the building he’s taking care of?
MAXWELL
Well, you’re not in love with your job, are you? You’d be willing to
do some other work where there was a chance of advancement and better
pay, wouldn’t you?
RYAN
Sure I would. Where am I going to get it?
MAXWELL
Why, as to that, I guess Mr. Morris or I could get you a job somewhere.
You’re a big husky fellow and pretty steady, I know. I could get you a
job in the shipping department of a factory I am interested in, if you
wanted it.
RYAN
What would the hours be?
MAXWELL (_laughing_)
Why, you’re going pretty fast, Ryan. I don’t know just what the hours
would be yet, but I suppose they’d be from half past eight to six or
something like that. That’s easier than your hours now, isn’t it?
RYAN
Much easier. Now, what has all this got to do with my wife having too
many children?
MAXWELL
Why, these people think that Mrs. Ryan has had too many children. Some
of these people are doctors, and they say it’s bad for a woman’s
health to have so many children.
RYAN
I see. Well, what would you like to have me do about it?
MAXWELL
About the model tenement?
RYAN
No, about my wife having any more children.
MAXWELL
Well, you know--you see I’m not--what they think is-- Oh, damn it, I
don’t know about this part of the thing, Ryan. It’s out of my line.
I’m not a philanthropist. I’m just talking for these people because
they know I know you. About that question you’ll have to talk to Mrs.
Dannenberg or Mr. Morris.
RYAN
Mr. Morris--he’s the little guy that was standing on a chair when I
came in to-night, ain’t he?
MAXWELL
Yes.
RYAN
Is he a doctor?
MAXWELL
No, I don’t think he is.
RYAN
He came into my place the other day selling some sort of a little
doctor book.
MAXWELL
I know; he does that because he’s a philanthropist.
RYAN
Do people make a living by being philanthropists?
MAXWELL
No--well, as a matter of fact, many people do make a pretty fat living
out of it, but Mr. Morris doesn’t. He’s a sculptor--a man that makes
statues, you know.
RYAN
Oh, I know what a sculptor is, all right. What statues did Mr. Morris
make?
MAXWELL
Why, he made that statue over in the corner, for one thing.
(RYAN _goes over and examines the purple statue_.)
RYAN
Do you like this statue, Mr. Johnson?
MAXWELL (_laughing_)
I’m not a judge of such things, Ryan. But people who know about art say
that it’s very good indeed.
RYAN
Is it a good likeness?
MAXWELL
It’s not supposed to be a portrait; it’s a sort of a fancy statue. It
represents the “Emancipation of Woman”--woman freed, you know.
RYAN
Freed from what?
MAXWELL
Why, from overwork, and excessive child-bearing and all that sort of
thing, you know.
RYAN
Well, that lady’s freed from child-bearing, all right. She’s perfectly
safe on that score. (_He goes back to his chair and pours out another
drink._) But now let’s get back to your friends’ proposition. I’m to
get a day job and come home nights--is that right?
MAXWELL
That’s right.
RYAN
The children are taken off my wife’s hands, and she doesn’t have to do
any more cooking or washing or anything, hey?
MAXWELL
That’s it, Ryan.
RYAN
And the place we’d live would be pretty much like this apartment, would
it?
MAXWELL
Just as comfortable, at any rate.
RYAN
My wife would have no work to do; I’d work in the daytime and come home
nights--there’d be no kids to take care of--it would be pretty much
like the life that you and your wife have, wouldn’t it, Mr. Johnson?
MAXWELL
Ah--why, yes, Ryan, pretty much the same. What do you think of the
proposition?
RYAN
Well, I’ll tell you. Of course I wouldn’t like to have the children
go away--though they are a lot of trouble--but I suppose they’d be
better taken care of than we could do, so, if that was all there was
to it, I’d say go ahead. And it’d be all right for me, too, if I was a
bachelor. But it’s on account of my wife that I feel I’ve got to say,
“Excuse me!”
MAXWELL
Why, you don’t begrudge your wife a little rest, do you, Ryan?
RYAN
Would I begrudge the old woman a little rest? Yes, by God, I would,
if a little rest meant having nothing to do all day except sit around
and talk to her friends and run around town. It’s just on that account
that I say nix to your whole proposition. Now you think I’m a slave
driver, I suppose. Well, I ain’t, Mr. Johnson, but I’ve lived with a
woman thirteen years, and what I’m telling you I didn’t get out of no
books--it’s facts!
Listen, Mr. Johnson. What you want us to do is to live just the sort
of life that you and your wife live--no children to take care of, no
washing nor cooking nor nothing. Well, what I say is, excuse me! That
may be all right for you and your wife--she don’t need no housework nor
children nor nothing to keep her busy. Her time is full of all sorts
of useful things--I know that. (MAXWELL _stirs uneasily and looks at
the floor_.) But with Annie, my wife, it’s a different proposition
altogether. She’s one of them women--and there’s a lot more of them
than you think--that can’t stand living in a nice regular apartment
with nothing to do. I know because we tried it when we was first
married. It’s like what the old fellow said: “Satan finds some mischief
still for idle hands to do”!
MAXWELL
True enough! And--
RYAN
Listen, Mr. Johnson. When we was first married, Annie was one of these
here idle hands they tell of. She was an idle hand for three years, and
Satan, as the old fellow said, certainly found some mischief for her to
do. Not anything real bad--there’s no real harm in Annie--but it was
mischief all right. For the first three years we was living in a nice
apartment in Brooklyn. I wasn’t a janitor, then; I was driving a truck.
I was out all day and I got home every night at six or seven o’clock.
All Annie has to do is to get my breakfast and supper and keep the
place clean. Does she do it? Sure she does, for the first four or five
weeks! Then she gets to making friends with other women in the building
and going out to matinees and vaudeville and all that sort of thing.
That’s all right--I can afford it--I don’t care if she has a good time;
but then what does she do? I give her two dollars in the morning to
go out and buy a good supper for me when I come home. I come home and
she ain’t in yet, and the lady in the next flat gives me the groceries
that she’s sent home. And what is they? A little chipped beef and a box
of Saratoga chips and some baker’s bread. About fifty-cent’s worth.
When she gets home I ask her where she’s been. Why, Mrs. Eindorfer has
took her to a spiritualist meeting, and she’s spent the rest of that
money to look into a glass ball or have her fortune told or some such
foolishness.
Now this goes on for nearly three years. It ain’t all spiritualists’
meetings; it’s all sorts of things. She makes all sorts of friends,
women and men, too; I had to beat a couple of ’em up. The flat wasn’t
kept up; I run into debt; my meals wasn’t cooked right or on time, and
Annie was half sick all the time just from running around entertaining
herself. I ain’t blaming her. She wasn’t to blame. And what was to
blame? The apartment house was to blame. When Peter was born, after
we’d been married three years, and I gave up trucking and moved out
of that apartment house and got a job as janitor, everything was all
right. And everything’s been all right ever since.
MAXWELL (_thoughtfully_)
And the apartment house was to blame?
RYAN
Believe me, Mr. Johnson, the only part of an apartment house to live in
is the basement, where you can have a regular home. I been a janitor
for ten years, and I seen these apartment houses do queer things
to families. They don’t seem to have no children when they live in
apartment houses, that’s one thing. And there ain’t no coal to bring
up and the washing goes out, and there ain’t nothing for them to do
but just make fools of themselves. And sometimes there’s a good many
divorces been caused by these here apartment houses. And there’d be a
good many more divorces if a lot of husbands knew what went on when
they was downtown at business.
Understand me, Mr. Johnson. I don’t mean you and your wife at all. You
ain’t that sort of people, but what I do say is for my wife, and for
a lot of women with more education and more money than she’s got, the
only sort of life is doing housework and taking care of children all
day long. So Annie and me will stay down in the basement, much obliged
to you, unless we go out of New York to live in a little house in the
country sometime. And Annie’ll have just as much work to do there.
She’s one of them women that wasn’t meant to be idle. And now I guess
I’ll go downstairs.
(_He rises and goes toward the door._ MAXWELL _sits silent for a moment
and then rises a little unsteadily. He holds out his hand to_ RYAN _for
a second and then drops it and starts_.)
MAXWELL
Ryan, I--er--why, I guess you’re right, after all. I’ll tell my friends
what you said.
RYAN
All right. No hard feelings, I hope.
MAXWELL
Not at all; that’s all right. Good night, Ryan.
RYAN
Good night, Mr. Johnson.
(_He goes out._)
MAXWELL
There’s a man that’s master in his own home, at any rate. (_He lights
a cigar and walks around the room with his hands in his trousers
pockets, coming to a halt in front of the purple statue. He looks at
it reflectively._) Satan finds some mischief still--(_A pause_)--for
idle hands to do. For idle hands to do. For idle hands to do. For idle
hands--
(_The doorbell is rung violently._ MAXWELL _starts and runs out into
the hall. He returns with_ HELEN, _who is very much out of breath.
As she runs into the room the combs drop from her hair, which falls
over her face and shoulders. She throws herself on the chaise-longue._
MAXWELL _sits beside her and tries to push her hair back from her
face_.)
Nellie! What’s the matter?
(HELEN _sobs without answering_.)
HELEN
It’s those nasty Martins and that nasty policeman and that nasty Lionel
Morris.
(_The bell rings again._ MAXWELL _goes to the door and admits_ LIONEL.)
LIONEL
Oh, I’m awfully glad you got back all right, Miss White. I jumped into
a taxi as soon as that brute of a policeman came, and then I met all
the rest of the crowd at the studio and everybody said, “Where’s Miss
White?” So I came right up here to find out if you’d got home.
MAXWELL
For God’s sake, will somebody tell me what’s happened?
LIONEL (_sitting on the pianola bench_)
Why, you see--
HELEN
Be still. You see, Max, we were all at the Mortons’ studio, and Adrian
Wolfe made a speech about those nasty striking miners in California
or wherever it is that everybody is wearing mourning for and parading
and all that and this--and Mr. Morris said: “Let’s walk up to Union
Square and hold an open air meeting to protest.” So we went up there
and I made a speech and there was a crowd and I saw a policeman there,
but I thought it would be all right, and then Mr. Morris made a speech
and he said something about trampling on a bloodstained flag, and the
policeman told him to stop, and he called the policeman a myrmidon,
and some more policemen came and broke up the meeting, and he ran away
and wouldn’t help me; and I ran down into the subway, and I don’t see
how he dares show his face in here!
MAXWELL
I’ll talk to him presently, but quiet down a little. You’d better go in
your room and fix up your hair.
(HELEN _rises to go out. She stops in the doorway and turns to_
MAXWELL.)
HELEN
I won’t go to that nasty Amaranth this summer, Maxwell.
MAXWELL
No, you won’t go to Amaranth.
HELEN
Then will you get an automobile?
MAXWELL
No, I won’t get an automobile.
HELEN
Then what--
MAXWELL
I am going to take that two thousand dollars and buy, with the
assistance of the building and loan association, a small house in a
city called Joplin, in the State of Missouri. It will not be a large
house, but I think that you will not find the time hanging heavy on
your hands. My brother has a wholesale grocery there, and I dare say he
will take me into the business, especially as I have a little money to
invest. And I’ll come home to luncheon every day. Missouri is a fertile
State. My brother has six children.
LIONEL
But, Miss White--Mr. Johnson!
(HELEN _goes down the hall to her room_. MAXWELL _walks up to_ LIONEL.)
MAXWELL
My wife’s name is not Miss White but Mrs. Johnson--Mrs. Maxwell
Johnson, of Joplin, Missouri. Get that? Do you know what keeps me from
dropping you down the elevator shaft?
LIONEL
What--what do you mean?
MAXWELL
It’s the janitor. Yes, Ryan, the fellow down in the basement with
nine children that you and Mrs. What’s-her-name wanted to segregate.
He told me all about you to-night. You’re nothing but a by-product!
The apartment house is the real devil in this pretty little play--the
apartment house is responsible for Feminism and Socialism and Anarchism
and Eugenics and pups like you. You’re just a sort of bad substitute
for the movies--that’s all you are. The apartment house breeds the
whole bunch of you--the apartment house and its artificial, lazy,
good-for-nothing life.
(LIONEL _starts toward the door hurriedly, but stops as if shot when
the telephone bell rings close to his ear. He comes back into the room
and_ MAXWELL _goes to the telephone_.)
MAXWELL
Hello!... What’s that?... Yes, this is Mr. Johnson.... No, I don’t
think so. Hold the wire and I’ll see. (_With his hand over the
transmitter he looks into the room._) Nellie!
HELEN (_coming into the living room with her hair
in a long braid, wearing a blue tea gown_)
Yes, Max?
MAXWELL
What is your name?
HELEN
Why, Helen, of course, stupid.
MAXWELL
Helen what?
HELEN
Helen Johnson.
MAXWELL
Not Miss Helen White?
HELEN
No! No! No!
MAXWELL (_smiling_)
Well, that’s all right, then. There’s a cop down-stairs with a
warrant for the arrest of a Miss Helen White and a Mr. Lionel Morris,
charged with making incendiary speeches in Union Square. They think
that Morris’s taxicab stopped at this building, and the policeman is
going through all the apartments. He’ll be here in a minute. (_In the
receiver._) All right, Sam, it’s all right. Thanks for tipping me off.
(MAXWELL _reënters the room and sits on the pianola bench_. HELEN
_reclines, with some dignity, on the chaise-longue_. LIONEL _crouches
behind the purple statue_.)
MAXWELL (_meditatively_)
Satan finds some mischief still--
HELEN
What are you saying, Max?
MAXWELL
Oh, I was just thinking of the janitor. I had quite a talk with him
after you left.
(_The doorbell rings, and_ MAXWELL _admits a large policeman_.)
POLICEMAN
Excuse me, sir; it’s just a matter of form. I’m looking for a couple of
them Anarchist-Suffrage-I. W. W. bugs. It’s just a matter of form. The
man’s name is Lionel Morris and the woman’s name is Helen White. Are
you Lionel Morris?
MAXWELL
No; my name is Maxwell Johnson. The janitor knows me, and so do a lot
of people in the building.
POLICEMAN
Thank you, sir. It’s just a matter of form. Now, madam--it’s just a
matter of form--are you Helen White?
HELEN
No, I am not Helen White. I am Mrs. Maxwell Johnson.
POLICEMAN
Thank you, madam, thank you; it’s just a matter of form. You see these
parties is incendiaries; they called me a mermaiden. Now, just two more
questions--it’s just a matter of form: Is Miss Helen White here?
HELEN
No, Helen White is not here.
MAXWELL
And I’m glad she isn’t here, officer.
POLICEMAN
You may well be that, sir; you may well be that. Now, is Lionel Morris
here?
(_There is a pause, during which the purple statue shakes slightly._)
MAXWELL
Well, what do you think about it, officer? Take a look around the
place. Want to look in the dumb waiter or down the kitchen sink?
POLICEMAN
Oh, I know he’s not here, Mr. Johnson, and I’m sorry to have troubled
you. Much obliged to you. Good night, sir.
MAXWELL
Have a drink before you go?
POLICEMAN
Well, I hadn’t ought to, but I guess I will, thanks.
(HELEN _pours the whiskey and_ MAXWELL _and the policeman lift their
glasses_.)
POLICEMAN
Well, here’s how, sir.
MAXWELL
Here’s Joplin!
HELEN
Oh, I’ll drink that.
(_She takes a sip from_ MAXWELL’S _glass_.)
POLICEMAN
What’s that, something new?
MAXWELL
No, it’s old as Adam and Eve.
POLICEMAN
Well, it’s a new one on me. Thank you, sir. Good night.
MAXWELL
Good night. (_The policeman goes out. After the door slams shut_,
LIONEL _stands up, but remains behind the purple statue_.) Hadn’t
you better go to some other apartment house? The cop’s gone down the
elevator. He’ll be gone by the time you get downstairs. (LIONEL _goes
out and as he turns he brushes against the purple statue, which topples
on its pedestal. He bangs the door shut after him violently, and the
statue falls to the floor and breaks into several pieces._ MAXWELL
_and_ HELEN _look at it for a moment and then turn to each other and
laugh_.)
HELEN
Oh, look what’s happened to the “Emancipation of Woman”!
CURTAIN
Transcriber’s Notes
Punctuation, hyphenation, and spelling were made consistent when a
predominant preference was found in the original book; otherwise they
were not changed.
Simple typographical errors were corrected; unbalanced quotation
marks were remedied when the change was obvious, and otherwise left
unbalanced.
Illustrations in this eBook have been positioned between paragraphs
and outside quotations. In versions of this eBook that support
hyperlinks, the page references in the List of Illustrations lead to
the corresponding illustrations.
*** End of this Doctrine Publishing Corporation Digital Book "Joyce Kilmer: poems, essays and letters in two volumes. Volume 2, prose works" ***