Part 6
Still another writer granted permission with this peculiar warning: “Don’t under any circumstances write to my publishers to confirm this consent, though you should, of course, print the usual acknowledgment to them. This letter is sufficient and final.” It was indeed sufficient and final; neither in this case, nor in any other connected with any of the four anthologies I have compiled, has any person challenged my right of inclusion.
An anthologist, I found, has to be nothing so much as a letter-writer; my correspondence was voluminous, far more so than I could have foreseen, and seemed never-ending. Letters began coming in from all variety of sources, along with manuscripts, magazines, and books of poems with suggestions for inclusion. But how did this happen? Did I advertise for material? Naturally not. Nevertheless, a sort of underground publicity campaign was at work, and one not of my deliberate making. When I wrote, for example, to poet Phil Brown asking permission to reprint his sonnet _Midsummer_, Phil might be so elated that--with no thought at all of advertising my forthcoming compilation--he would mention my letter to his verse-writing friends Joe Thompson and Ed Williams; and Joe and Ed, seeing no reason to go unrepresented when Phil was to be included, would write me nominating themselves as candidates for anthologizing, and would send quantities of their work in support of the nomination, in some cases whole floods of volumes. The result was not, I am sorry to say, a vast increase in acceptable material; the result was an immense addition to my own labors, since most of the volunteered material was of poor quality, some of it atrociously bad. Already, I fear, though I had set out with the best of intentions, I was making enemies among poets--the editor’s inevitable lot, since no way yet has been invented of making every submitted manuscript acceptable.
Errors of judgment in selection do, of course, occur, and must occur, though no two persons may agree as to what the particular mistakes have been. Other errors, too, as I learned with deep pain, may creep in, though there was nothing to parallel the case of one of my own subsequent printed poems, in which “flashing reel” became converted into “fishing reel.” But things seemed bad enough when an author wrote me with a justifiable sense of injury that her sonnet had appeared in thirteen lines. This, indeed, was true, as I confirmed upon consulting the book; and it hardly helped matters that, so far as the sequence of ideas was concerned, the poem seemed not to have lost by the omission of the line. I did not know, and do not know to this day, whether the fault lay in an inexcusable error in proofreading, or in the careless last-minute dropping out of a bar of type by the printer, who was unaware that sonnets should come in fourteen lines; in any event, that error, though corrected in later editions, probably tormented me as much as it did the author.
There were actually two subsequent printings of _Modern American Lyrics_ as such, in addition to a joint printing with _Modern British Lyrics_, which first appeared in 1925. In connection with the combined volume--whose year of publication I cannot readily determine, since I lent my only copy to a friend, who never returned it--an incident occurs to me, doubtless a little irrelevant to the present discussion, but perhaps worth telling. One summer several years after the birth of the two anthologies, I was browsing in a bookstore in San Francisco; and my eyes fell upon a volume entitled _Modern Lyrics_. Automatically I picked it up, and lo and behold! I saw my own name as compiler! What was that? Did I suffer from acute amnesia, causing forgetfulness of my own actions? How could I be the editor of an anthology that I did not even know I had compiled?
A hasty examination, however, showed that the book was nothing more nor less than _Modern American Lyrics_ and _Modern British Lyrics_ united under a single cover. But what was this firm of Loring and Mussey, whose name I read on the title page? A combine of pirates?
Considerably confused, I wrote to Earle Balch, and in the normal course received the explanation. His firm had sold the reprint rights to Loring and Mussey, as it was entitled to do by contract, but had forgotten to notify me of the deal. In due time, I would receive my share of the returns, as provided by our agreement.
As I look back over the preface of _Modern American Lyrics_, I find that same effort to distinguish poetry from pseudo-poetry which, rightly or wrongly, has remained one of my preoccupations throughout the years. In referring to pseudo-poetry, I was chiefly concerned, then as now, with certain innovators who, it seemed to me, were abandoning poetry for the sake of novelty, were turning out transparently disguised prose, and so were spreading confusion over the poetic world, and tending to make all poetry look ridiculous. Referring to certain modern compilations then recommended as good, I remarked:
Page after page ... is devoted to formless effusions whose music is less than the music of dignified prose; page after page is filled with the sordid things of everyday, with kitchen sinks and bathtubs and cobblestones and loveless adulteries. And if in the interlude--as frequently occurs--one comes across a glowing sentiment or memorable melody or flash of imagination that reveals wide vistas of the sun-tinged storm-clouds or of the starry night-skies, then one is likely to be plunged in the next page into the monologue of a real estate agent if not into an epic of the hog-pens.
If I were to write this in regard to the anthologies of today, there would not be a word I would have to reconsider, except that the phrase “as frequently occurs” might now seem an overstatement.
Even before the appearance of _Modern American Lyrics_, I had made my bid for recognition in a collection, _The Thinker and Other Poems_. Doubtless I was as proud of this as most writers are of their first published masterpieces; but let me hasten to add that I am proud of it no longer, nor have I been for many a year. I would perhaps not go so far as one poet I once heard of, who offered a handsome price for copies of his first book; and having retrieved quite a few at considerable cost and trouble, disposed of them all in one great bonfire, in the hope of thus extirpating all trace of his youthful folly. But if I would not seek to emulate this holocaust, the reason is that I see no need for the poet himself to weed out what time is certain to obliterate. I will not say that _The Thinker_ does not truthfully embody much of the thought, feeling, and imagination of my youth. But in glancing back over the poems (a form of self-chastisement I rarely submit myself to), I find few if any that I would not present in different garments were I writing them today. Then why do I not revise them? Because life goes on to new impulses and expressions, and it would be as difficult to return to the mood and outlook of yesterday as to go back to the haunts of one’s childhood.
I must not give the impression that any publisher was waiting with outstretched hands for this early darling of my heart. Then, as now, no publisher was enthusiastic about the chance to lose money; then, as now, it was difficult to find a market for poetry, though markedly less so than it has since become. Even while in California, I had been in contact with the firm of James T. White and Company, which issued occasional books of verse, though its chief publication, if I remember rightly, was an encyclopedia of American biography (which, I believe, it still issues). One day sometime after my arrival in New York, I stepped into the offices of the firm at 70 Fifth Avenue, and saw Mr. White, a thin, aged, learned-looking man, whose hair matched his name; and also met his amiable editor, James B. Kenyon, probably then in his late sixties--the author of no less than nine books of verse and three of prose not unfamiliar to an earlier day, though I suspect that few nowadays remember him. The tone of his poems, which were not without quality even though lacking that supreme element which makes one poet soar above a thousand and surmount the generations, is indicated by these lines from _Reed Voices_ (James T. White, 1917):
’Mid the dusk reeds that fledge the twilight streams, Nature’s wild troubadours, the breezes, make Such strange sweet songs as echo through our dreams, And haunt our baffled memories when we wake.
To Mr. Kenyon, who received me in a friendly way, I showed some of my own poems; and his approval, while perhaps over-generous, naturally led to a discussion of the possible publication of a collection. It was some time before a way could be worked out; but finally it was decided that, if I could dispose of a certain number of copies, the firm would undertake the publication. Do not suppose that there was anything unusual or degrading about such an arrangement; it was then and has since become even more decisively the rule among first books of verse, most of which would otherwise never see the light--and if the first book does not see the light, what of the second, and the third? As a matter of fact, I did not stand to lose much (nor was I financially able to lose much), for I knew where I could dispose of numbers of copies, even though I did not yet realize that many acquaintances who will buy a first book out of good will or curiosity would no sooner purchase a second than they would subscribe for shares in a company dedicated to raising white elephants. I did not, of course, personally solicit sales; but the company circularized a list of names provided by me. Bookstore sales counted for little if anything; but there was one store that did sell quite a few copies--a store such as, I would hazard a guess, has rarely if ever, before or since, dealt in books of verse. A cousin of mine, a bright and literate woman who was always especially kind to me, ran a sort of emporium of ladies’ goods on Washington Heights; and what should be added to the stock in trade but _The Thinker and Other Poems_! Recommended by the sagacious proprietor, this book went off into more than one home where poems were ordinarily in no great demand.
But already I was learning some of the trials of the young author. In my inexperience, I had given no thought to so important a matter as the size of the type to be used; and when I saw the proofs, I observed with a shock that the print was minute (actually, eight point, whereas nowadays I would approve nothing less than eleven or twelve point). So hard was the book to peruse that its author, after it came out, could never read more than a poem or two at a time, and rarely subjected his eyes to this much strain. You may say that this had the advantage of keeping down the number of readers, but I am sure no such precaution was necessary. It may have been the small type, or it may have been mere ineptitude that caused me to miss a number of errors; one of them, in particular, seems considerably more amusing to me now than when I originally discovered it: my poem of tender sentiment, _On My Mother’s Photograph_, had come out, “On My Mother’s Phonograph.”
Despite the small print, despite the typographical errors, despite the amateurishness of many of the poems, _The Thinker_ was extensively and on the whole favorably reviewed; I received a gratifying wealth of clippings from papers ranging from New York to Puget Sound. I mention this, however, not with any sense of personal triumph, but because similar good luck does not befall books of verse by unknown writers today; a traditional collection such as mine, issued without advertising and under the imprint of a relatively obscure publisher, could now be certain to be ignored altogether outside the author’s home town, or at most would be honored by one or two three- or four-line notices from secondary organs. In this difference one can measure the extent to which poetry, in the course of several decades, has fallen in critical and general esteem.
CHAPTER NINE
Blood Brother to the Epic
Certain writers, such as Poe and Baudelaire, have contended that there is no such thing as a long poem. And these writers, consistently, have never written any long poems--that is to say, compositions running to many hundreds or thousands of lines; the cynical critic might, indeed, accuse them of sharing the common blindness of men to accomplishments beyond the scope of their own aptitudes. In any event, the case for the long poem need not be argued, for it has been proved in action by not a few writers, including Homer, Virgil, Dante, Ariosto, Camoëns, Chaucer, Spenser, Milton, Goethe, and many others. An extended theme, after all, requires extended expression; and it is hard to see why a long poem may not bear the same relationship to a short one, as a novel does to the short story or a full-length play to a skit or a sketch.
That long poems are unpopular nowadays is another matter; (what else can be expected in a day when all poetry is unpopular?). But the question of popularity never entered my head when I launched into more than one composition whose lines could be numbered in four figures. Truly, I wrote what I wanted to write, and naturally hoped for the best, but never gave much thought to the possible reception of the work (which might show the impractical nature of poets, if their impracticality were not already proved by the fact that they write verse at all). Nevertheless, what joy to pick a theme on which you might sail away into gorgeous cloud-lands, filling page after page with the ever-expanding story, setting down in succinct rhymed lines your views on life and on man, and creating something which (to you, at least) is vivid and living where previously nothing at all has been! Characters that arise out of the mist to take on flesh and blood! Scenes and places that assume visible outlines, though to be found nowhere on earth except in one poet’s imagination! And the rhymes themselves--they were a challenge and a delight: the challenge of problems to master, and a delight when they seemed deftly to say just what you wanted, even if sometimes you had not known you wished to say precisely this until the words formed themselves in your mind!
Day after day, I learned, one can invoke the necessary mood of detachment. Indeed, this mood comes the more easily for being sought regularly, and sought at about the same time each day, seven days a week; an interruption of even a day or two will make it more difficult to regain. I found this to be the case when engaged, all one carefree summer, in putting together the first of my long poems ever to see print. This composition, _The Lone Adventurer_, was written mostly in California, where Flora and I had gone in July and August of 1926 to visit my father in the hot but delightfully green and spacious city of Stockton. The preceding months had been among the most painful and wearing in my experience: Flora’s father had died; she herself had undergone a major operation; and I had been subjected to long-drawn torments of dental surgery. And so the writing of the poem, “For him who would forget awhile the noise / Of careworn cities, drenched in sweat and steam,” constituted an inexpressible relief, though I would not use the word “escape,” since to be in a quiet California town, with its long elm-shaded streets, its unfenced gardens, and its walnut, fig, and oleander trees, was to enjoy all the escape the city-wounded wanderer needed.
Morning after morning, while I lay stretched out with pen and paper on the lawn of the unfrequented block-square city park at Eldorado and Acacia Streets, looking up at the palm trees or down at the robins and sparrows hopping inquisitively about the grass, I spun out the seven-line stanzas of the poem, which told of the search of Prince Lodalga for the magical pool:
High on the highest peak of all the range, In a chill fastness far from human sight, Walled from the ruinous touch of Time and Change, There is a pool that sparkles mirror-bright. And he who peers in it, and sees aright, May catch a phantom gleam, a flash of wings, And read the hidden meaning of all things.
While I lay on the lawn in a far-off mood, letting the lines of the poem tumble into my mind, Flora sat near me with a book. But her presence caused no distraction; though not a poet herself, she had an understanding of the needs of creation and never broke in with an unnecessary remark. Ah, patient wife of a poet, who could restrain herself and contentedly walk the ways of silence, when others less sensitive would have burst out in irrelevant and destructive speech!
It was a rare morning when I did not put out seven, eight, nine, or ten stanzas, which would be revised at my leisure later in the day (and then revised again and again before their final typing). Hence it is not surprising that the end of the summer saw the completion of the poem, well over two thousand lines in all.
Having written _Finis_, I naturally thought of finding a publisher. This might seem impossible in these later days, when many publishers frankly proclaim that they are not interested in poetry of any type, while others, apparently on the theory that if poetry must be endured at all it had better be taken in small doses, throw up their hands hopelessly at the very thought of a _long_ poem.--Even if _Paradise Lost_ were to be submitted, or _Prometheus Unbound_, or _The Eve of St. Agnes and Other Poems_, the verdict would be the same, without benefit of one stray glance at the unpromising manuscript. But back in the pristine days of 1926, the situation was different--at least, if I may judge by the results. _The Lone Adventurer_ was not ready for submission before my return to New York in September; and I do not recall, nor do any records inform me, what publishers, if any, during the next month or two, declined with thanks the privilege of adding it to their responsibilities. But what I do know is that, as early as December, publishing arrangements had been made.
One day I invaded the offices of the newly founded Unicorn Press, on West Forty-Second Street (not to be confused with the entirely unrelated more recent establishment of the same name). There I had the opportunity of interviewing the young proprietors, Messrs. Kline and Blum; and having entrusted them with the precious manuscript, I was delighted--what poet would not have been?--to learn of the eventual acceptance of my _magnum opus_. My joy, I should add, sprang largely from the fact that the Unicorn Press was not--at least, not so far as my own experience taught me--one of the so-called vanity publishers, which act as purveyors of books financed by their authors. It was a legitimate royalty house--too bad, therefore, that I did not foresee the knots and tangles into which such a house can entrap an author!
Obviously, one reason for the acceptance of _The Lone Adventurer_ was that the new and unknown Unicorn Press needed writers--prose writers much more than poets. The following may seem a little apart from our main theme, though there is a connection: within three or four months, Kline and Blum offered me a contract for a long book dealing with the history of warlike methods, of which at that time I had written only about fifty pages. The title was to be _Marching Men, The Story of War_, and I had to face a deadline only a few months ahead--a deadline which I met after a concentrated seven-day-a-week effort that need not be described here. Alas for an author’s hopes! the book was indeed issued, in a handsome format, nearly five hundred pages of it, embellished with copious illustrations by Arthur Zaidenberg; and it was a book which, I was informed by persons in a position to know, should have had a wide sale. But even before it was in print, events of which I was then unaware were casting the shadow of disaster.
The owners of the Unicorn Press, as I was subsequently told, were mired in deep financial straits. So desperately did they need immediate cash that they committed the unpardonable, the ruinous act of selling over a thousand copies of my book at reduced rates to used-book dealers even before it had been placed on the regular market or reviewers had had a chance to see a copy (they could afford to do this, since they had omitted the formality of paying the printers). No book could survive such a calamity; the least of my losses was that I received none of the expected royalties. No other publisher would handle a book whose market had been so undermined, though more than one told me that he would have published it had it been submitted to him originally (actually, one small publisher did offer me a contract for the book several years later, but financial difficulties prevented him from carrying out the agreement); while long afterwards, in 1946, an offer to reissue the work came to me out of the void from a New York reprint publisher; but the plates having been destroyed, the deal was never consummated.
All of this may seem like a digression, but it will indicate what sort of a publisher I had found for _The Lone Adventurer_. Blithely unaware of anything less than perfect in my new connection, I saw the book appear, appropriately green-covered, with an appealing red and black jacket, and large type; and if a poet’s chief aim is a published volume, I had at least one satisfaction. The months went by; there were reviews, comments from friends, and letters from readers (though not many letters); but as in the later case of _Marching Men_, never a penny in royalties. I am not suggesting that the sales were great enough to pay for a steam yacht or a mansion on Fifth Avenue; but large or small, I was treated to no definite report. The most that I could obtain, after some unhappy sessions with Kline and Blum, was a document signing all rights to the poem back to me. But sometime later, I had reason to be glad even for this concession; chancing to observe the books on the bargain counter of a large New York drug store, I was astonished to see a familiar face: _The Lone Adventurer_, in a new edition, with the original type and paper, but a reduced page-size and a reduced price!
On inquiry, I was able to unravel the mystery. The cheap edition had been put forth by the binders, who, being in possession of 500 or 1000 unbound copies which they had seized in partial satisfaction of the debts owed by the Unicorn Press, had bound these at their own expense and thrown them on the market. The last person to be considered, of course, was the author; but as the author happened also to be the copyright owner, he wrote to the binders, pointing out that they had committed a copyright violation by an unauthorized act of publication; and the binders, conceding the point, agreed to pay a royalty on the books they had sold. Thus I came into possession of a small sum, no more than fifty or a hundred dollars--the only case I have ever known in which a poet, after going unpaid by his publisher, received royalties from the publisher’s binders.
But perhaps all the above will further explain why I sought my living by other forms of writing than poetry.