Part 3
True, there was a slight fly in the ointment. The proofreaders for _Current Opinion_ had been a little careless, and the phrase “Who was this man?” had become “Why was this man?” This was by no means the last typographical error I was to suffer from, nor the worst, but it did rub a bit of the bloom from that miraculous discovery.
At about the same time, an even sweeter whiff of success blew to my nostrils. Shortly after the Armistice of November 11, 1918, the San Francisco _Chronicle_ offered a number of prizes for poems on peace, and I made several submissions, including a quatrain on _The Day That Brought Peace_, the idea of which had come to me on a sudden one noon when I was having a solitary lunch at a Berkeley cafeteria:
Blest is this day, past any other day The world has ever seen; yet must we pray The world hereafter may so blesséd be Never another day like this to see.
If I were writing this today, I should try to avoid the inversions in sentence structure, particularly in the last two lines. But inversions or no inversions, I did not think much of the quatrain when I wrote it, particularly as it had taken me only about five minutes to compose it; I merely happened to add it to my other entries because it could travel conveniently in the same envelope. Picture, then, my surprise a few weeks later, when a letter from the _Chronicle_ informed me that _The Day That Brought Peace_ had won the third prize of twenty-five dollars in the Peace Poem Contest!
This, surely, was but one of the lucky flukes that sometimes influence a career. The first result, though perhaps not the greatest, was that it enabled me, after some personal solicitation, to obtain work reviewing books for a long-established San Francisco weekly, _The Argonaut_. And this work put me in touch with many new books in the realm of poetry. One such was Amy Lowell’s _Tendencies in Modern American Poetry_, one of the first symbols of the revolt that was to turn poetry in America upside down; still another was John G. Neihardt’s engrossing rhymed narrative, _The Song of Three Friends_; and a third was a volume of verses by Ezra Pound, my first acquaintance with this writer, from which I formed the impressions that subsequent experience was to confirm: that here was merely a poseur, a pseudo-sophisticate, an exhibitionist whose interest was not in poetry but in self-display.
Another effect of that four-line lucky shot in the _Chronicle_ was an event of the sort supposed to happen only in fiction. One day a letter reached me from the San Francisco _Examiner_, bearing the signature of its managing editor, Edmond D. Coblentz (no relation of mine, despite his name). He mentioned the poem in the _Chronicle_, and stated that if I should drop into his office sometime when I happened to be in the vicinity, he would be pleased to meet me.
Needless to say, it was not long before I “happened to be” in the vicinity. But when I stepped in to visit Mr. Coblentz, it was with more trepidation than joy. I was greeted by a round-faced middle-aged man, more than half bald, with a genial smile and a rather business-like manner; he was something of a legend in the city, and was much liked by his associates, among whom he was familiarly known as “Cobby.” He received me pleasantly, and after a brief talk, asked my plans and purposes upon my graduation from college. I acknowledged that my plans and purposes were a little hazy, except that I intended to follow a writing career after getting my Master’s degree in English at the Summer Session at Berkeley. Meanwhile, however, some of my relations were trying to induce me to take up teaching as a means of support, but the idea fired me with no great eagerness.
“Cobby” smiled.
“Well, you go on, finish your schooling--get your degree,” he advised. “Then, if you’re looking for a job, step in here again--we’ll see what we can do for you.”
The telephone rang; he snapped up the receiver, and mumbled into it. Someone came in with a rush, and slapped a paper down on his desk. Through the half-open door, the city editor could be heard bawling at a reporter. “Cobby” had barely put down the receiver when the telephone started clanging again. I could do no more than snatch at his hand, mutter a word of thanks, and leave.
But I left in a dazed and altered world. The walls about me were reeling; flashes of unexpected brilliance dazzled my eyes.
CHAPTER FOUR
A Tale of Two Eyes
While I was still at college, a situation arose which would affect my whole life, and would cast its reflections across my writing and particularly over my poetry. It is something that I hesitate to speak of, as I tend to squirm at recitals of personal ailments, in which there may be an element either of morbidness or of self-pity, if not of both. However, in this case the facts must be told if the story is to be kept in perspective. While in most ways I have been blessed with excellent health all my life, in one respect the record has been less than perfect: with regard to my eyes. Indeed, the facts have, I can say without exaggeration, been unusual.
Multitudes, particularly among students, are known to suffer from optical complaints; therefore, when my eyes began to bother me I had no reason to suspect anything out of the ordinary. There had, it is true, been some disagreement among specialists as to the source of the complaint: one had prescribed glasses for far-sightedness, and another had, confusingly, ordered lenses for near-sightedness. But the disturbances did not become acute until my first graduate year, when, at my father’s urging, I was studying law (which I was to abandon with a sigh of relief that I can almost hear even now). I would have the alarming experience of walking down a street at night and seeing a lamp-post split into two. Or I would stare at a man, and he would divide into twins. True, the twins would always be reassociated, after some queer shifting, wavering, and dancing. No! do not suspect that I had been drinking; my headiest beverage was milk. The gift of double sight was, however, annoying, though perhaps little more than annoying; what was more alarming was that, at the same time, I was developing an inability to do close work. Pains would shoot through my eyeballs; the muscles would quiver and flicker and refuse to focus on the page; there came a time when I could not so much as glance at the morning paper. College work was, of course, now out of the question, though by special dispensation I was permitted to take my examinations on the typewriter, which I could use with but little eye-strain.
Several oculists, consulted in swift succession, attempted different remedies. One did the obvious, and prescribed new glasses; another ordered eye exercises; a third recommended prisms--lenses of a special type, which, I was told, would act as crutches for my eyes. But nothing was of any avail. During an entire summer, since I could not read, I worked at my father’s behest as a life insurance agent (a vocation for which I showed an incapacity that was all but total, though I did have many delightful conversations with interesting people, none of whom had any intention whatever of ordering policies). When the summer was over, and my eyes gave more cause for concern than ever, a Stockton physician told my father of a specialist in San Francisco who might help me. And thus it came about that, accompanied by my parent, I paid my first visit to Dr. O (whose full name I withhold, for reasons that will soon be apparent).
Dr. O was a square-faced, beefy-cheeked man of about forty, who wore glasses, just like every other eye doctor I have ever seen. He lost no time in diagnosing my case, and appalled me with the announcement, “Young man, you are suffering from exophoria.”
“X O what?” I asked, my heart sinking.
“Exophoria. It’s what the man on the street knows as being wall-eyed.”
In other words, my eyes were not working together; they were diverging from each other, or turning outward, and at times each formed a separate image, which accounted for my seeing double. But what was the remedy? There was only one possibility, unless I wished the malady to get worse and worse until I had virtually lost the use of one eye. The cure--which should be applied as soon as possible--was an operation or series of operations to draw the muscles together; for this Dr. O had developed a special technique, which he often applied with entire success.
The prospect of getting back the full use of my eyes, the hope of being able to read again, was something for which I would have pawned my future, if anyone would have put up money on so doubtful a commodity. And so, after some deliberation, Dr. O was commissioned to perform the operations.
I need not go into the details. The first of the series was scheduled at a hospital, to which I hopefully walked one morning after a hearty breakfast (no one had advised me that the very worst thing to do before an operation is to eat, or that the resulting digestive disturbances would cause me more distress than the after-symptoms of the incision itself). During the operation something seemed to go wrong, or it may be that the local anaesthetic was not far-reaching enough, for at one point it felt exactly as if the surgeon was trying to pull off the top of my head. However, this was but a momentary sensation; finally, to my vast relief, the operation was over; and subsequently two other operations were carried out, one of them a minor one, performed at Dr. O’s office.
In general, as I can thankfully testify, Dr. O did achieve his objective. The “exophoria” was sharply reduced; the long hoped-for, long-coveted time did arrive when I could once more concentrate on a book. But just at this point fate, with sly secret wiles, had her little trick in store for me.
As I sat in a college classroom not long after the bandages of the last operation were removed, the frosted lamps above began to hurt my eyes. Yet these lights were not particularly bright; they were, in fact, of a kind I had long been used to and had never noticed before. This was my first intimation that my eyes could no longer endure direct exposure to ordinary artificial light. But the knowledge was to grow upon me in the days and months that followed. Somewhere, somehow, something had gone wrong in one of the operations; Dr. O had cut too deeply into the muscles; had ruined their delicate natural balance, and impaired forever their accommodation to light and motion.
This was proved not only by the marked new sensitiveness to light; it was shown by the fact that my eyes could not adjust to rapid movements, as of a bird darting before my face; while light in motion, and especially flickering light, could cause me acute pain. It may seem strange to those who have not had the experience, but I have never since been able to see a match struck half a block away without a prick of pain; no one (unless I am forewarned and have closed my eyes) can switch on a light, nor pull a shade up or down without making it feel as if little hands tear and clutch at my eye-muscles; flickering candles at a dinner party may cause me pain in the eyeballs and partial inability to use my eyes for as much as two weeks; the spurt of a flashlight or the glare of automobile headlamps may stab me like daggers; while bright lights of any kind are a torture. Thus, though I lived in New York for years, I avoided all artificially illuminated streets whenever possible, and my definition of hell was Broadway at night--this was, indeed, not the least of my reasons for exchanging New York in 1938 for the wood-lanes of a small California suburban town.
A recent incident may illustrate my predicament. Not long ago I attended a writers’ conference, which opened with a panel discussion in which I was expected to participate. But upon reaching the discussion room, I found it dominated from above by a flood-light like a locomotive headlamp, making it impossible for me to enter. My wife Flora, therefore, stepped in where I could not tread, and tried to explain the situation to the hostess; but the latter (like most people) failed to understand, and made no offer to dim the quite superfluous glare. Hence I had no choice but to absent myself from the meeting which I had come two thousand miles to attend.
Other incidents in a similar vein come back to mind. I remember, for example, the case of the usually considerate old lady who (at considerable cost to my eyes) decided to keep a purely ornamental blaze burning in her fireplace because “otherwise the fuel would be wasted.” Likewise, there was the case of the lady, a friend of many years’ standing, who had invited Flora and me to a Christmas Eve party, and who--though she well knew the state of my eyes--had decorated the table with lighted candles. I made no comment or request; but as we sat down at the table, I adjusted a pair of dark glasses, which would reduce though they would not eliminate the irritation. At this the hostess turned to me defensively. “Sorry, Stanton, you’ll have to get used to those candles. We just can’t put them out--it wouldn’t be the Christmas spirit.” I had occasion to wonder about her idea of the Christmas spirit during long subsequent evenings when I lay with closed eyes in a dark room.
Still another case--not injurious to my eyes, though it did not leave me quite unruffled--was that of the old friends, the Grillers, who had invited Flora and me to their home for the evening. All went well until Mary Griller remembered some moving pictures of last summer’s vacation trip. “I know Stanton can’t look at them,” she said, regretfully, “but I’m sure he wouldn’t want to deprive Flora of the opportunity.” Being foolishly polite, I admitted that I was not such a brute as to deny Flora anything so precious (she afterwards confessed to me that she could have missed the pictures without loss). The hostess then led me out to the only available room, the kitchen. And there, without even a book or paper to help while away the time, I passed a somewhat-less-than-sociable hour, in company with the colored maid, who glowered at me as if resenting this invasion of her private terrain, or as if wondering what offense I had committed to subject me to this peculiar punishment.
But did I make no efforts to overcome the ailment? Ah, yes, I made many efforts; eye specialists on both coasts have tried remedies, tests, and drugs without stint--and without success. Long ago, I resigned myself to the fact that the condition is one I must live with, though it has altered my life in little ways and great. It is a mere trifle that my house, unlike most others in the area, must do without a fireplace; it is likewise of no importance, though occasionally a source of embarrassment compelling my temporary withdrawal from a company, that I have been unable to face photographers’ flashlights. I do not too greatly regret that, for me, motion pictures and television are out of the question; nor that my inability to face headlights and sun-flashes has made it inadvisable to drive a car--though in the suburban town where I have lived ever since 1938 and where even the most impecunious family has at least one broken-down four-wheeler and most have two or three, the lack of a car is regarded, if not as a proof of miserliness, at least as an eccentricity that no one but a poet would commit.
However, these are mere minor deprivations. I have sometimes more deeply regretted the fact that I can go out at night only very sparingly, if at all; and that I am debarred from many literary and other gatherings. This has, inevitably, cut down my connections and contacts, and may even give the false impression that I am anti-social. But nothing, absolutely nothing, has seemed of any importance beside the fact that my eyes, with all their impairments, have served and are still serving my main life-purpose; for this I have been deeply thankful.
Moreover, I sometimes wonder if the balance is not on the positive side. I wonder if some overseeing power, planning to keep me on the track of my major interests and make it impossible to yield to frequent diversions, could have devised a more serviceable disability than mine. Many a night, lying in the dark in order to rest my eyes, perhaps listening to the soft music drifting to me from the phonograph or tape recorder, I have meditated on matters that have given rise to poems, poems I might not otherwise have written. And those poems have been created without the use of eyes, since I developed long ago an ability to compose as much as two sonnets in my mind without putting any word on paper, and can even revise the stanzas, which in many cases have not been jotted down until the next day.
And so it may be that that error, that unnoticed slip of the knife made long ago by Dr. O, has been my poetic salvation.
CHAPTER FIVE
Builders and Wreckers
It may not have been a part of the curriculum, but I was widening and deepening my knowledge of poets all during my years at college. I was borrowing books not only from the University library, but from the Berkeley Public Library, where exploring on the open shelves was possible. Thus I became aware of a great fervor of poetic activity in the United States, and in the course of time became acquainted with many writers, including Edna St. Vincent Millay, Edwin Arlington Robinson, Arthur Davison Ficke, George Sterling, John Hall Wheelock, Vachel Lindsay, Sara Teasdale, Jessie B. Rittenhouse, Clinton Scollard, Charles Hanson Towne, Dana Burnet, Margaret Widdemer, Hermann Hagedorn, Conrad Aiken, and many others, some of them now forgotten or almost forgotten, others still shining in a glitter of fame. In the course of time it came to me that these poets, in their combined strength, represented a resurgence of poetic power such as our country had not seen in a long while; and it was this realization that prompted me to write my Master’s thesis on _The Poetic Revival in America_.
Just now, for the first time in many years, I have glanced at this manuscript; and am startled by the similarity of many of its pronouncements to my more recent ones. Then, as now, I was convinced that there was a menace to poetry in those writers who, for the sake of seeming different or because they found it easier or lacked background or appreciation, were content to lapse into a formlessness that denied poetry’s basic principles and made verse virtually indistinguishable from prose. My attitude is expressed on page 3 of _The Poetic Revival_:
Now whether they realize it or not the _vers librists_ are perpetrating a tremendous joke. There is nothing they cannot stamp as poetry so long as they give it a “jagged appearance”; they have taken singularity of form as the chief poetic criterion, and there are many who accept this criterion without even a smile. I confess that it does not make all the difference in the world what a thing is called; that literature will not come to an end if we entitle prose poetry, and that the songs of Burns and the sonnets of Keats will survive unaffected even by the “polyphonic prose” of Amy Lowell and the imagistic ebullitions of Ezra Pound. Yet if a hoax is being perpetrated, I believe in exposing that hoax; and if a group of poetic charlatans are drawing attention to themselves by juggling cleverly with words, I consider it right to say that they are charlatans. And it seems that a whole school of poets is imitating on a larger scale the “Spectric Poems” of Mr. Bynner and Mr. Ficke, which were issued as a joke, and seriously commended by the critics.
Surprisingly, there is not one word of this that I would alter today. What, therefore, does this prove? That I am mulishly stubborn in my views, and have shown myself to be incapable of growth? That I early underwent a form of petrifaction? Perhaps. But let us suppose, just for the sake of argument, that I was justified in those ideas expressed in my early twenties. Then what excuse for changing them? Certainly, it is possible to argue that I _was_ justified, in view of later developments, which have resulted in a poetic disintegration far beyond anything I ever imagined in those hopeful days of youth, and have brought applause and honors to offerings of which an extreme example (but not the most extreme) is the piece by E. E. Cummings beginning:
&(all during the
dropsin king god my sic kly a thingish o crash dis appearing con ter fusion ror collap sing thatthis is whichwhat uell itfull o f cringewiltdrollery i mean really th underscream of sudde nly perishing eagerly everyw...
To work of this nature, though it postdates _The Poetic Revival_, I would apply every syllable of the passage quoted above. Work of this nature has always filled me a cold fury, which I experienced when I was twenty, and feel in like measure today. For work of this nature, now as then, strikes me as a profanation, a desecration, a deliberate mockery of the true and beautiful, a spewing of mud and filth upon things precious and holy. It is as if an obscene reveller came to the consecrated white doors of a temple, and spattered them with carrion and dung. What acolyte would not writhe at such abuse? And to me, a life-long worshipper before the shrine, poetry has indeed been a divinity; and nothing has been more painful than to see it flung down and its radiance trampled while idols of paste were exalted. Here, it has always seemed to me, there can be no compromise, any more than we can compromise clean water by mixing it with muddy and expect a pure drink. If we allow the profaners one inch, they will take a yard; if we permit them to enter the temple, they will never rest content until they have kicked down the very altar-stones.
This, however, was not a thing that I needed to debate with myself. It was a thing which I felt profoundly, with that deeper sense which is sometimes keener than logic; my attitude, for better or worse, was formed for me by the native shape of the personality I was born with. Poetry to me was a thing so dear, so precious that I could no more consciously have betrayed it than I could have contemplated treason against my own father and mother. To seek self-advancement, publication, prizes, notoriety by yielding here and there to the supposed tendencies of the times, though at the cost of poetry itself--I have since learned that this is possible to many, for I have seen many, oh, very many, who have surrendered to just this temptation. That I have taken a contrary direction indicates no special merit on my part; to many, indeed, it may merely prove my persistent wrong-headedness and folly. But I know that, whatever the cost, I could not help being as I am.
Thus, before my college days were over, I was planted solidly--too solidly, my critics will say--in the poetic attitudes that were to dominate my later years.
One thing I should explain. While I have always fought with whatever strength was in me against those innovators who conceal the tools of wreckers beneath the costumes of saviors or clowns, this has not implied opposition to change as such. I know that change is one of the laws of nature; that most things, unless they have stagnated or crystallized or are merely lying dormant, are in a state of fluctuation; that movements constantly occur in living matter, in the sky above and in the earth beneath; and that human productions, including those of art, must share in the universal law.