Part 2
So far as I am aware, no eyes but mine have ever glanced at _The Key to the Universe_, which occupied me all of one summer. It was not that I was exceptionally secretive; it was that I had discovered that few people in this matter-of-fact world, even among those closest to one, are interested in seeing poems, and especially long poems, unless out of curiosity, or because they are impressed by something quite apart from the work itself, such as the prospect of gain, or the trailing effulgence of some chance honor. Like everyone, I want to have my work read and appreciated; but in my later years, as in my earlier, I have found the writing of poetry a lonely, a very lonely task; in my later years, as in my earlier, I have never shown my work to anyone who did not ask to see it (my wife and editors alone excepted); and it rarely happens that anyone does ask to see it.
When just under seventeen, I saw the first glimmerings of what looked to me like success. I say “looked” like success, for appearances are more illusory than I, in my juvenile ardor, could have realized. An essay in rhymed couplets, entered in a state-wide contest for High School students, won me a free trip to the Yosemite Valley (a trip which, for reasons I need not enter into here, I was unable to take); and this was the more extraordinary since I had never seen the Yosemite, although I wrote in glowing terms about “this masterpiece of nature’s art.” The prize-winning offering, so far as I can recall it, was an execrable concoction in which words like “grand,” “superb,” “majestic,” “splendid,” and “magnificent” took the place of poetry; but I was elated at the recognition, and did not realize that recognition of itself is a bubble, prizes are bubbles, and are apt in the end to mock you, unless your work itself is good--in which case you need no prizes.
Nevertheless, that prize did give a spur to my spirits and at the same time it offered my father and others about me their first faint hope that perhaps after all the young scapegrace of a poet was not altogether a squanderer of time. But I doubt whether it had any more effect than an April shower upon my future.
This was, indeed, the only encouragement I was to have for a long, long time. Instead, I took my tuition in the form of slaps in the face. One of the hardest came during my second year in college, when for the first time I did meet a real poet--Leonard Bacon, a tall, waggish reed of a man, then much less known than later, though he had some real poetry to his name, and was available where you could actually see and talk with him; in fact, he was a member of the staff of the English Department. Even if he was no older and no more bearded than my one-time acquaintance Mr. Spring (or Springer), I had by now lost some of my romantic ideas as to the required looks of poets. What I did have was a high aspiration to enter Bacon’s class in verse-writing, a class limited to fifteen members. With unabashed temerity, I submitted what I regarded as my best poems--in all probability, my most bombastic; and confidently awaited the word of the great man. In due time, this word came--and like unexpected thunder, it left me stunned. I was refused! This in itself would have been devastating enough; but still worse was Mr. Bacon’s comment when he returned my manuscripts. “If you want to write soporifics for the entertainment of your friends, by all means go on. Otherwise, I’d advise you to turn to some other line of work.”
This advice, like much other good counsel I have received, was not taken; and a time was to come, as we shall see, when Mr. Bacon would soften his verdict. Looking back today, however, I cannot doubt that his opinion was justified by the possibly facile but quite unillumined verses I had submitted. But at the time, his decree pounded me like a sledgehammer. Had it not been that even sledgehammers could not break my tie to poetry, I might truly have turned to some less difficult subject, like mathematics or astrophysics.
Other blows also were in store for me. In the beginning, I had written just in order to write--in order to fulfill some vague and nameless but powerful impulse, which caused me to take strange satisfaction in smooth-flowing words and lines and in the rhythmical expression of the thoughts surging over me. To write was enough! The possible fate of the output was something I did not even consider. But in time a new element was to be injected. And the date, as nearly as I can place it, was sometime after my eighteenth birthday.
At the beginning of the second semester of my second college year, a great change came into my life. To an outsider, the difference would have seemed a routine one; yet it was as if the fabled magic carpet had taken me to new continents on that day when I left my uncle and aunt in Oakland, and came to live in Berkeley, where I shared a room and sleeping porch with my cousin Stanley. Stanley, a clever and kindly youth about three and a half years my senior (now a lawyer in Los Angeles) had something of a penchant for leadership; and one of the ways in which this penchant manifested itself was in connection with my poetry. Now I have no reason to suppose that he had then, or at any time, any interest whatever in poetry as such; but he did show an interest in _my_ poetry, at least to the extent of trying to market it. What he did was to constitute himself, in a sense, my literary agent, though I doubt if either of us had ever heard this term. I typed out the poems (having just received from my father the gift of a reconditioned typewriter, for which I was more grateful than if it had been the wealth of Croesus). And Stanley compiled a list of periodicals, and sent my none-too-skillful typescripts to most of the leaders of the day: the _Atlantic_, _Scribners_, _Harpers_, the _Century_, the _North American Review_, the _Forum_, and other magazines, many of them now long departed from this mortal life.
With the publication fever thus aroused, I eagerly awaited the results. Poor deluded hopeful! I did not yet know that even with the most accomplished work, and the arduous labors of a practiced hand, the road to editorial favor is often long, sinuous, and spiny. And with verse as amateurish as mine--well, the outcome was inevitable. When my treasures started coming back, I was disappointed, and disappointed again, and disappointed once more, and so on and on, scores of times. I could not believe that the editors, _all editors_, were too shortsighted to see the merits so luminously evident to me. To be sure, their printed slips were invariably worded politely: they “had had pleasure in reading the submissions,” rejection “did not necessarily imply any lack of merit,” and the author was thanked for “his courtesy” in permitting the editors to turn down his work. Sometimes the rejection slips even invited further submissions--with the result that I would acquire duplicate slips, soliciting still further submissions. But not a single penned or pencilled line suggested that editors were human! I began to doubt if they were.
What Stanley thought of the debacle I do not know; in the end, when he saw that his efforts brought nothing but a waste of time and postage stamps, he probably told himself that his verse-writing cousin would do well to cease his scribblings and settle down to some good, solid occupation, like that of a schoolteacher or a filing clerk.
Still, to my own way of thinking, the score was not quite absolute zero. One of the final submissions did bring me a ray of hope. No, more than a ray! a blaze! The poems, submitted to a Boston literary magazine, came back exactly in the way of their predecessors, but this was not because they were not good--oh, not at all, said the glowing letter that accompanied them, on an imposing letterhead, with a subheading that particularly impressed me, _Books in Belles Lettres_. The return of my “splendid poems” was greatly regretted by Mr. Scottfield, the editor, and was due only to the unhappy fact that he was overstocked. However, if I had poems enough to make a book, he would be glad to recommend the manuscript to the consideration of the other editors associated with him in The Poet-Craft Publishing Company.
The fact that I had never heard before of the Poet-Craft Publishing Company made no difference whatever. I pictured it as an immense concern, occupying the whole of some noble building in downtown Boston, where a learned knot of editors and scores of able assistants were devoted to the uplifting task of giving poetry to the world.
Riding cloud-high on the wings of such thoughts, I let my eyes range again and again over those magical lines. If I had poems enough to make a book! To think that my work was wanted by that great publishing house, the Poet-Craft Company! So then all the editors who had returned my work had been wrong! Of course! I had known that from the beginning! And now those eminent authorities at Poet-Craft would prove it by publishing my book! That they actually would publish it I did not doubt--all that was necessary was for me to pick out my best, and send them to Mr. Scottfield.
Having dispatched the manuscript, which contained most of the poems that Stanley had sent out with such unanimous lack of success, I could hardly wait for the letter that would tell me when Mr. Scottfield would publish the book. But the suspense was not to be long, considering that there were no air mails in those days. Hardly two weeks had passed before the postman delivered a long blue envelope whose upper left-hand corner bore that enchanted inscription, _The Poet-Craft Publishing Company_. My fingers trembled as, during that breathless instant, I tore open the envelope.
The first lines brought me a thrill: Mr. Scottfield was “delighted” with my poems! His fellow editors agreed with him in recommending publication. The book would be printed on a “special laid paper” and bound in “antique boards.” (I had, to be sure, no idea what laid paper or antique boards might be, but they sounded magnificent.) A publication date could be set almost immediately, and I would have proofs in a few weeks, dependent, however, upon one small condition.
By the time I had read this far, my pulse was beating fast, but my heart was beginning to sink. The “one small condition” did not look small to me: it was that I must forward to Mr. Scottfield “the nominal sum of $575.”
He might as well have asked “the nominal sum” of five hundred and seventy-five millions. Not that I would not have paid the money, and eagerly, if I had had it; but in my impecunious student’s life, in which a dollar looked as large as a pumpkin, an item of five or six hundred dollars surpassed my wildest dreams of wealth. Some fantastic ideas did, indeed, flit through my head: I might borrow the money. But nobody whom I knew had that much money to lend, except possibly a certain uncle, who ran a retail clothing store and was regarded as the rich man of the family. However, he was not known to be so free-handed as to throw money away (which, I had just sense enough to realize, would be how he would look upon the proposed investment). No, I had nowhere to turn, nowhere at all! I must give up the dream--my book would never be published, on laid paper and with antique boards, by that distinguished concern, the Poet-Craft Publishing Company!
Little did I realize the shoals I was avoiding! I have often thought how unfortunate it would have been if some obliging relative, with more money than literary judgment, had come forward to provide Mr. Scottfield with the requested sum. Surely, it would not have been easy to live down the appearance between boards (even antique boards!) of the _juvenilia_ that I regarded as poetry.
CHAPTER THREE
Incentives and Lucky Shots
Curious notions have taken root in some minds as to the poet’s aims and ambitions. Most people do not, indeed, have the illusion that the average verse-writer expects to get rich--no, poets are still popularly associated with rags and garrets. On the other hand, it is often assumed that the poet goes about trailing after glittering spangles of immortal glory, eager to forfeit the bread of today for the fame of a posthumous tomorrow. There may, for all I know, be poets with such super-mundane ideas, but I am not aware of having met any, though I do remember one well-known rhymester who modestly hoped that some small sheaf of all his writings would be read a hundred years after he died; while I have seen others, like Mr. Spring or Springer, whose sense of present frustration has led them to dream of a golden post-mortem renown.
To me the important thing has always been the work itself; I have always found something a little ridiculous, not to say amusing, in the man who pictures himself dancing a splendid rigadoon before the eyes of posterity. Posterity doubtless will have its own interests and preoccupations; and if it has a small amount of time to spare for any of us now alive, that will be exclusively its own concern, since presumably we will no longer know or care. This does not mean that the poet does not wish his work to be read and appreciated. Of course he does! Its very purpose in being is to be read and appreciated; and, besides, the greater the attention given to any of his poems, the easier the path for his subsequent work.
It may seem strange, but if you were to ask me why I have written verse--and this applies to my latest no less than to my earliest--the most accurate answer I could give would be, “For the joy of creation.” Yes, for that same joy in creation which the sculptor finds in carving a bust, the composer in constructing a sonata, or the architect in designing a monument. There is not only the satisfaction which any artist takes in the completed product; there is the glow, the passion, the ecstasy of composition, in which one virtually enters a different sphere of being.
There are, it seems to me, two levels on which rhymes may be put together or other writings produced: the first, the same superficial level that suffices for ordinary activities, may be adequate for a jingle in which the chief feat is the rhyming of “house” with “mouse.” But this level, apparently the only one ever reached by many rhymesters, is not the fountainhead of poetry or of any inspired writing. The spirit of the writer, amid the absorption of composition, is withdrawn from the world; it is as if a veil had been pulled down between it and mundane concerns and it had sunk into some realm of deeper apprehension in which the facts of ordinary existence are screened from view, while it draws upon insights and intuitions, sources of knowledge and facilities of invention foreign to its everyday experience. Literally, it is as if the creator has entered into a trance--a trance in which thoughts and images and even completed expressions may flash before him with a speed, a vividness, and an aptness impossible on the ordinary plane of consciousness.
In such a trance, moreover, his awareness of the external world may be blunted or disconnected. Just how deep this creative isolation may be, and how it may literally switch one off from contact with common affairs, may be illustrated by an incident of many years ago. Late one afternoon I was in my third-floor New York apartment, composing a poem, and in the midst of the creative effort I was vaguely aware of a thumping noise from outside, followed by a confusion of sounds. But these came to me remotely, and as if from far away, and I went on uninterruptedly with the poem, while the sounds gradually died down. Not until the next day did I learn that our janitor, trying to get into the fifth-floor window of an apartment not far from mine, had fallen to the cement court, and been killed.
I do not mean to imply that one’s absorption is always as deep as this, although it is ordinarily so intense that the buzzing of a doorbell, the clanging of the telephone, or even the entry of another person into the room will come as a shock, after which it will be difficult and in some cases impossible to return to the creative mood. But the state of creation, when not unnaturally interrupted, is an experience from which one may emerge with something like rapture, the sense of having touched the fringes of heaven and been brushed by angels’ wings. Maybe it is all only a sort of drugging effect, like that of opium or hashish; but it has always been my view that only during creation is one most alive, most able to reach out to the full length and depth of one’s own personality.
Behind the imperfect offerings of youth, as behind the skilled productions of maturity, the same overmastering creative spirit may lie. Let me give an example. One day, during the early years of the First World War, I was idling over a college textbook, when for some reason my thoughts were diverted to the innumerable war dead. Immediately the book was forgotten; in a trance-like detachment, I seemed to see the disembodied warriors moving protestingly in uncountable legions across a stormy sky. And out of this vision, a sonnet had birth. I quote the opening lines:
I saw an army of the newly dead Come stalking by like clouds before the blast. More numerous than autumn leaves they passed, With War, their slayer, marching at their head.
The impulse behind this was real, quite as much so as if the poem had been more accomplished. In later years, I would have known better than to have presented the picture so starkly and obviously; I would have recognized that mention of “the newly dead” and of “War, their slayer” was superfluous; I would have tried to think of a more original image than “autumn leaves”; and I would have concentrated more on the picture, from which the reader would more powerfully have received the intended dread impression. But these are matters of technique, which come with study and practice.
In my Junior year in college, I was honored with the privilege I had previously sought in vain: admission into Leonard Bacon’s verse-writing class. Sometimes I have wondered at the temerity that led me to try again, after having been so signally rebuffed; and I have also wondered whether my acceptance was not due to something extraneous: the fact that the members of my class, aside from myself, consisted of two males and twelve females--not that I suspect Mr. Bacon of any prejudice against the distaff side, merely that I suppose that he had a sense of proportion, or of disproportion.
Now, in any case, I was in! And being in, I received, for the first time, some schooling in verse-writing. I also met, for the first time, another youth with whom to discuss poetry--a genial, raw-boned Scotsman named MacMorrow, with whom my acquaintance was to be unhappily brief: not long afterwards, he left to be a volunteer ambulance driver in the European War, and neither I, nor any of my fellows, so far as I know, ever had word from him again. I have always hoped that he remained something more than a ghost.
As for the instructor--the tall, angular Leonard Bacon, perpetually working his mobile face into contortions, perpetually bubbling over with ideas, was interesting not only as a poet and teacher but as a man. Later, when under his guidance I wrote my Master’s thesis on _The Poetic Revival in America_, I was to know him somewhat better; but for the present he was redeeming himself in my eyes for that insulting rejection of my work a year earlier; at the semester’s end, he expressed the idea that “if I worked like the devil”--the words may not be precisely his, but the thought is--I “might possibly be able to get somewhere.”
If there be any down-looking powers with eyes for us poor versifying mortals, they know that I assuredly _have_ worked, though perhaps not exactly “like the devil”; but whether I have been able to “get somewhere”--ah, that is another matter entirely!
I am sure that Mr. Bacon would not have conceded that I had gotten anywhere at all at the time when the first magazines wasted good space on my rhymes. The earliest of them all was a small Eastern religious sheet, which a preacher of my acquaintance had recommended; I have forgotten its name, but let us call it _The Biblical Visitor_. Lo and behold, one day I received several free copies (I had, of course, never even thought of the possibility of other compensation), and had the charming experience of seeing my own name beneath a beautifully framed poem, under whose title I read the surprising line, “Written especially for _The Biblical Visitor_.” Of course, it had _not_ been written especially for _The Biblical Visitor_, whose very existence had been unknown to me at the time of composition! But little difference that made to the budding author who stood there bemused before the sight of his own words and his own name in print. Ah, never again in all later life that same pure rapturous joy!
To be sure, the world went on its accustomed way, quite as if nothing revolutionary had happened. The sun shone just about as usual, and the birds twittering in the trees seemed to have no idea at all of the great transformation. The doors of fame, which I saw just faintly beginning to sway on their hinges, were visible to me alone.
My next published poems, likewise, seemed to make no indentation at all on the stolid world. They appeared in the college monthly, _The Occident_, though not before I had reached my Senior year. And never think that this did not strike me as an accomplishment; more than a few of my previous offerings had entered the doors of that august publication, from which they had ignominiously made the return journey to my drawer. Not one, however, but a whole succession of my verses did take up space in _The Occident_ under the editorship of Genevieve Taggart--then an engagingly lovely, animated creature, looking every inch the poetess that she was.
But fame, as represented by a gateway to Parnassus such as _The Occident_, had its pangs as well as its satisfactions. I remember one particular pang, when one of my sonnets made its bow beneath a byline such as “Jenny J. Robinson,” while--crowning insult!--my own byline was appended to a poem that was not mine at all. Knowing what I do today of the printing process, I realize that this could have been due to the mere transposition of two lines of type; but at that time, I did not understand. I was desolated. I felt disgraced, then and forever. The worst was not to have my poem accredited to Jenny J. Robinson; the worst was to have _her_ poem ascribed to me. It was like seeing somebody else introduced as yourself. Not that Miss Robinson’s poem was any worse than mine; it may have been much the better of the two; and I have no doubt that she felt equally aggrieved.
But having long ago lived down this disaster, I have learned that sadder confusions and surprises await the adventurer along literary byways. I had quite forgotten this unhappiness when, a year or two later, the high gods of Olympus stooped down to bless me. Ending the long, long run of rejections from the larger publications, the New York _Times_ accepted _To A German War Helmet_--a bit of blank verse which, beginning “Ironic censor of the ways of men!”, expressed something of the revulsion always aroused in me by everything connected with war. And not only did the _Times_ give space to my creation; a still greater surprise awaited me. One evening, thumbing over the magazines at a newsstand in the Ferry Building in San Francisco, I opened the pages of _Current Opinion_ to the section devoted to reprints of poetry. And there--wonder of wonders!--I saw my own name! My own poem from the _Times_! I could hardly believe it. The same poem in two national publications! I had ascended the pinnacles!