Transcriber’s Note: Italics are enclosed in _underscores_.
JOYCE KILMER
POEMS, ESSAYS
AND LETTERS
IN TWO VOLUMES
VOLUME ONE: MEMOIR AND POEMS
[Illustration:
© _Underwood and Underwood_
JOYCE KILMER, AGE 30
LAST CIVILIAN PORTRAIT]
JOYCE KILMER
EDITED WITH A MEMOIR
BY ROBERT CORTES HOLLIDAY
VOLUME ONE
MEMOIR AND POEMS
NEW YORK
GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY
Copyright, 1914, 1917, 1918
By George H. Doran Company
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
TO THE MEMORY OF
JOYCE KILMER
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
Many persons have contributed exceedingly valuable service to the
preparation of these volumes. Credit has been gratefully acknowledged,
wherever feasible, in the course of the text. To make anything like
a full record, however, of the names of that remarkable society,
the ardent and devoted friends of Joyce Kilmer, would require a
chapter. Though particular reference should be made in this place to
the invaluable assistance of: Kilmer’s life-long friend and lawyer,
Louis Bevier, Jr.; his especial friend, Thomas Walsh; and his office
associate, John Bunker.
Permission has been most cordially granted by the editors of the
following magazines for the reprinting of the poems from France:
_Scribner’s Magazine_, _Good Housekeeping_, _The Saturday Evening
Post_, _America_, and _The Bookman_. Essays and miscellaneous pieces
have been gathered, with the warm approval of the editors of these
publications, from these sources: _The Bookman_, _The New York Times
Sunday Magazine_, _The Bellman_, _The Catholic World_, _Poetry: A
Magazine of Verse, he Smart Set_, _Munsey’s Magazine_ and _Puck_--a
curiously assorted company, highly expressive of the catholicity of the
mind these pages reflect.
The article on Hilaire Belloc, originally one of Kilmer’s lectures, was
first printed in the American edition of Belloc’s “Verses.” The early
poems have been chosen from Kilmer’s first book, “A Summer of Love,”
now out of print, rights to which are held by Mrs. Aline Kilmer. Poems
not otherwise credited have been reprinted from the volumes already
published by George H. Doran Company.
R. C. H.
New York, 1918.
CONTENTS VOLUME ONE
PAGE
MEMOIR 17
POEMS FROM FRANCE
ROUGE BOUQUET 105
THE PEACEMAKER 108
PRAYER OF A SOLDIER IN FRANCE 109
WHEN THE SIXTY-NINTH COMES BACK 110
MIRAGE DU CANTONMENT 113
POEMS AT HOME
WARTIME CHRISTMAS 117
MAIN STREET 118
ROOFS 120
THE SNOWMAN IN THE YARD 122
A BLUE VALENTINE 124
HOUSES 127
IN MEMORY 128
APOLOGY 131
THE PROUD POET 133
LIONEL JOHNSON 137
FATHER GERARD HOPKINS, S.J. 138
GATES AND DOORS 139
THE ROBE OF CHRIST 142
THE SINGING GIRL 145
THE ANNUNCIATION 146
ROSES 147
THE VISITATION 149
MULTIPLICATION 150
THANKSGIVING 152
THE THORN 153
THE BIG TOP 154
MID-OCEAN IN WAR-TIME 157
QUEEN ELIZABETH SPEAKS 158
IN MEMORY OF RUPERT BROOKE 159
THE NEW SCHOOL 160
EASTER WEEK 163
THE CATHEDRAL OF RHEIMS 165
KINGS 169
THE WHITE SHIPS AND THE RED 170
THE TWELVE-FORTY-FIVE 174
PENNIES 178
TREES 180
STARS 181
OLD POETS 183
DELICATESSEN 185
SERVANT GIRL AND GROCER’S BOY 190
WEALTH 192
MARTIN 193
THE APARTMENT HOUSE 194
AS WINDS THAT BLOW AGAINST A STAR 196
ST. LAURENCE 197
TO A YOUNG POET WHO KILLED HIMSELF 198
MEMORIAL DAY 200
THE ROSARY 201
VISION 202
TO CERTAIN POETS 203
LOVE’S LANTERN 205
ST. ALEXIS 206
FOLLY 208
MADNESS 210
POETS 211
CITIZEN OF THE WORLD 212
TO A BLACKBIRD AND HIS MATE WHO DIED IN THE SPRING 213
THE FOURTH SHEPHERD 215
EASTER 218
MOUNT HOUVENKOPF 219
THE HOUSE WITH NOBODY IN IT 220
DAVE LILLY 223
ALARM CLOCKS 226
WAVERLEY 227
EARLY POEMS
IN A BOOK-SHOP 231
SLENDER YOUR HANDS 232
SLEEP SONG 233
WHITE BIRD OF LOVE 234
TRANSFIGURATION 236
BALLADE OF MY LADY’S BEAUTY 237
FOR A BIRTHDAY 239
WAYFARERS 242
PRINCESS BALLADE 244
LULLABY FOR A BABY FAIRY 246
A DEAD POET 248
THE MAD FIDDLER 249
THE GRASS IN MADISON SQUARE 251
SAID THE ROSE 252
METAMORPHOSIS 254
FOR A CHILD 255
THE CLOUDED SUN (TO A. S.) 256
THE POET’S EPITAPH 259
BEAUTY’S HAIR 260
THE WAY OF LOVE 262
CHEVELY CROSSING 267
THE OTHER LOVER 270
ILLUSTRATIONS
JOYCE KILMER, AGE 30 _Frontispiece_
PAGE
FAC-SIMILE OF AUTOGRAPH MANUSCRIPT OF “THE PEACEMAKER” 108
JOYCE KILMER, AGE 21 240
MEMOIR
It is the felicity of these pages that they cannot be dull. It is
their merit, peculiar in such a memoir, that they cannot be sad. It
is their novelty that they can be restricted in appeal only by the
varieties of the human species. It is their good fortune that they can
be extraordinarily frank. It is their virtue that they cannot fail to
do unmeasurable good. And it is their luck to abide many days.
With their subject how could it be otherwise? They make not a wreath,
but a chronicle, and in their assembled facts tell a bright chapter
in the history of our time. If there is one word which more than any
other should be linked with the name of this gallant figure now claimed
(and rightly) by so many elements of the nation, that word certainly
is “American.” A character and a career so racy, typical of all that
everybody likes to believe that at our best we are, can hardly be
matched, I think, outside of stories.
I
Joyce Kilmer was reported in the papers as having said, just before
he sailed for France, that he was “half Irish,” and that was why he
belonged with the boys of the Sixty-ninth. His birth was not exactly
eloquent of this fact. Though, indeed, he was, as will appear, a much
more ardent Irishman than many an Irishman born--that is, in the sense
of keenly savouring those things which are fine in the Irish character,
and with characteristic gusto feeling within himself an affinity with
them. Later, in a letter from France to his wife, he was more explicit
on this point:
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 contrary to this.
He also, in a letter from France, quoted with much relish the remark
of Father Francis P. Duffy that he was “half German and half human.”
English and Scotch strains made up another half or three quarters. The
English goes straight back to one Thomas Kilburne, church warden at
Wooddilton, near Newmarket, in Cambridgeshire, who came to Connecticut
in 1638. The “e” was lost apparently in Massachusetts, and the word
became, as in his mother’s maiden name, Kilburn.
Soldier blood, too, flowed in his veins--though it is likely that this
fact for the first time occurred to him, if at all, when his nature
rose white-hot to arms. He was, so to say, a Colonial Dame on both
sides, as members of both his father’s and his mother’s family fought
in the American Revolution; and members of his father’s family in the
French and Indian wars.
Alfred Joyce Kilmer (as he was christened) was born at New Brunswick,
New Jersey, December 6, 1886, son of Annie Kilburn and Frederick
Kilmer. Though he seems always to have been, in familiar address and
allusion, called Joyce, the Alfred did not disappear from his address
and signature until he began, as more or less of a professional
writer, to publish his work, when it went the way of the Newton in Mr.
Tarkington’s name, and the Enoch in Mr. Bennett’s. Then “Joyce Kilmer”
acquired a fine humorous disdain for what he regarded as the florid
note in literary signatures of three words (or, worse still to his
mind, the A. Joyce kind of thing); and he enjoyed handing down, with
much relish of the final and judicial character of his utterance, the
opinion that the proper sort of a trademark, so to say, for success
in letters was something short, pointed, easy to say and to remember,
such as Rudyard Kipling, Mark Twain, O. Henry, Joseph Conrad, and so on
through illustrations carried, at length, to intentionally infuriating
numbers.
As a small boy, Kilmer is described by those who knew him then as the
“funniest” small boy they ever saw, by which is meant, apparently, that
he was an odd spectacle. And this, of course, is so altogether in line
with literary tradition that it would have been odd if he had not been
an oddity in the way of a spectacle. He wore queer clothes, it seems,
ordinary stockings with bicycle breeches, and that sort of thing. He
didn’t altogether fit in somehow, couldn’t find himself, was somewhat
of an outsider among the juvenile clans; he was required to fight other
boys a good deal; he evidenced a pronounced inability to comprehend
anything at all of arithmetic; and somewhere between eight and twelve
(so the report goes) he contracted a violent passion for a lady, of
about thirty-five, who was his teacher at school; a passion which
endured for a considerable time, and became a hilarious legend among
the youth about him of jocose humour.
It is told that at “Prep” school, when this goal seemed rather unlikely
of his attainment, he made up his mind to stand at the head of his
class; and with something like the later Kilmerian exercise of will he
accomplished his purpose.
Kilmer was graduated from Rutgers College in 1904, and received his
A. B. from Columbia in 1906. His University life seems to have been,
in outward effect, fairly normal. There is no ready evidence that he
“shone” particularly, and none that he failed to “shine.” He was not
deported by the authorities, and he was not unanimously hailed the idol
of his classmates. He became a member of Delta Upsilon fraternity: and
he was, of course, active in college journalism. Then as always he
appears to have been zestful in living well, to have counted sufficient
to the day the excellence thereof, and to have been too warm with
life to be calculating in expenditures. He retained in the years that
followed--and it seems to have been the college memory he retained most
distinctly--a humorous recollection of his consuming his allowance on
an abundance of rich viands during the first few days of each month,
and being reduced to the necessity of living precariously on a meagre
ration of crackers and sandwiches thereafter--until next income day.
Characteristic of the vehement manner in which he went after life, as
a Sophomore Kilmer became engaged to Miss Aline Murray, of New Jersey,
a step-daughter of Henry Mills Alden, editor of _Harper’s Magazine_.
Upon leaving Columbia he took up the business of making a living in the
way of an elder American intellectual tradition, by teaching school in
a (more or less) rural community. He returned to New Jersey and began
his career as instructor of Latin at Morristown High School. So slight
a lad he was, even several years after this time, that it is difficult
to picture him in the disciplinary adventures of the classic figure
of this calling. His problems at Morristown doubtless were dissimilar
to those of his early, Hoosier, prototype. He married and became a
householder. His son, Kenton, was born. In religion he had been bred
an Episcopalian, and during this period in New Jersey (it is told) he
acted as a lay reader in this church.
He soon concluded, apparently, that pedagogy was, so to say, no life
for a boy. At the conclusion of a year’s teaching he tore up the roots
he had planted, and, together with the young lady he had married, and
the son born to them, and with a few youthful poems in his pocket, he
advanced upon the metropolis, even in the classic way, on the ancient
quest of conscious talent.
The rapidity and brilliance of Joyce Kilmer’s success has altogether
obscured his very democratic beginnings. As his initial occupation
in New York, he obtained, by a lucky chance, employment as editor
of a journal for horsemen, though of horses he had no particular
knowledge--to be exact, no such knowledge whatever. Here finding little
to do, and discovering one day in a desk drawer a bulky manuscript, he
decided--as he was editor--to edit it. This, apparently, he did with
youthful energy. The little job he mentioned with some satisfaction
to his employer, a fine portly sportsman with a crimson face and an
irascible temper. The young editor explained that the manuscript
evidently had been written by a man familiar with horses, but one
apparently innocent of the art of literary composition. “Young man,”
bellowed his employer, “I would have you understand I have been through
the best veterinary college in the world, and I have been a veterinary
myself for over forty years.” His wife, he added, was his amanuensis,
and he guessed she knew something about writing. The editorship came to
an abrupt termination.
Then followed a brief sojourn, at a salary of (I think) eight dollars
a week, as retail salesman in the book store of Charles Scribner’s
Sons, a dignity which the young littérateur wore with humorous dignity
for exactly two weeks. A distinct mental impression of him of this
time presents him as decidedly like an Eton boy in general effect, and
it seems that a large white collar and a small-size high hat should
have gone with him to make the picture quite right. One who met him
then felt at once a gracious, slightly courtly, young presence. He
gave forth an aroma of excellent, gentlemanly manners. He frequently
pronounced, as an indication that he had not heard you clearly, the
word “Pardon?”--with a slight forward inclination of his head, which,
altogether, was adorable. His smile, never far away, when it came was
winning, charming. It broke like spring sunshine, it was so fresh and
warm and clear. And there was noticeable then in his eyes a light,
a quiet glow which marked him as a spirit not to be forgotten. So
tenderly boyish was he in effect that his confreres among the book
clerks accepted with difficulty the story that he was married. When it
was told that he had a son they gasped their incredulity. And when one
day this extraordinary elfin sprite remarked that at the time of his
honeymoon he had had a beard they felt (I remember) that the world was
without power to astonish them further.
As a retail salesman, however, this exceedingly interesting young
man did not make a high mark. One’s general impression of him “on
the floor” is a picture of a happy student, standing, entranced,
frequently with his back to the door (which theoretically he should
have been watching for incoming customers), day after day engrossed
in perusing a rare edition of “Madame Bovary.” One sensational feat
of business he did as a clerk perform. Misreading, in his newness
to these hieroglyphics, the cypher in which in stores the prices of
books are marked on the fly leaves of the volumes, he sold to a lady a
hundred-and-fifty-dollar book for a dollar and a half. This transaction
being what is termed a “charge sale,” not a “cash sale,” and amid some
excitement the matter being immediately rectified, disaster for the
amateur salesman was averted.
At Scribner’s a close friendship was, almost at once, formed between
the youthful poet and another then unpublished writer acting at that
time in the same capacity of clerk--a friendship which was never
diminished by the numerous shiftings of Kilmer’s fields of activity,
the multitudinous, diverse and ardent interests which he acquired
in an ever-mounting measure, and the steady addition of numberless
friends of all classes who eagerly yielded him their devotion. It
was rather a friendship which was continually cemented by increasing
and closer bonds. It was a part of Kilmer’s spirit to make his first
friend in his literary life a sharer as far as was possible in each
new success of his own. One among many, innumerable, instances of
this was his contriving, by his influence with the editor (at that
time another intimate, Louis H. Wetmore), to work his friend into a
position somewhat rivaling his own at the period (1912–1913) when he
was the bright and shining star reviewer for the _New York Times Review
of Books_. The regular Tuesday lunching together of these two friends
when their offices were widely separated became, at least in their own
fancy, an American literary institution. The two were united in all
the symbols of affection between men. And at seasons of rejoicing and
adversity the Kilmer house was to his friend as his own. It is to this
one who among all of Joyce Kilmer’s friends owes him the greatest debt
of friendship has come the supreme trust of writing, within the power
of his many and conscious limitations, this Memoir, and editing these
volumes.
Dropping the very small bird which he held in his hand in the way of
a secure salary, the spectacular bookseller, somewhat to twist the
figure, plunged again into uncharted seas, and became a lexicographer,
as an editorial assistant in the work of preparing a new edition of
the Standard Dictionary. He blithely began his Johnsonian labours by
defining ordinary words assigned to him, at a pay of five cents for
each word defined. This is a very different thing indeed from receiving
a rate of five cents a word for writing. It is a task at which you
can obtain an average of perhaps ten or twelve dollars a week, though
some weeks “stickers” will hold you back. It soon became apparent,
evidently, that it was advisable to put this very capable pieceworker
on a salary; and he was rapidly promoted, with corresponding increases
in remuneration (reaching an amount of something like four times his
initial earnings), to more advanced phases of the work: research into
dates of birth (involving correspondence with living celebrities);
research into the inception of inventions (as, for example, the
introduction of the barrier into horse racing); together with the
defining of words of contemporary origin, in, for instance, the
nomenclature of aviation. In this last mentioned department, it was
his office to call upon authorities, such as the Wright brothers, and
upon presentation of his credentials to receive precise information. He
interviewed famous tobacco importers, and coffee merchants; compiled in
the New York Public Library material about fans; unearthed for use as
an illustration a picture of a strange bird; or was assigned to collect
for this purpose designs of ancient mouldings.
If lexicography was Kilmer’s venerable occupation, by political faith
he was at the time, this very young, young man, a socialist. He
subscribed for and frequently contributed to the _Call_ newspaper.
And the height of his effervescence was in addressing meetings of the
proletariat. He was, it must be said, a burning “young radical.” He
frequented, to some extent, a club of that name. And with a joyous
consciousness of being in the character of his surroundings he ate
meals at the Rand School of Social Science. He rapidly acquired a
wonderful string of queer acquaintances, in whose idiosyncrasies he
took immense delight. Some, not of the persuasion, fancied that as
an adherent of the socialist party he was merely enamoured of an
intellectual idea. At any rate, whenever in conversation he spoke
of socialism, as he frequently did, his graceful, amiable young
features assumed a very firm and earnest aspect. Exactly the point
of transition, if there was any decided point, I cannot recall, but
from the proletariat he passed to the literati. A “man of letters”
became a great word with him. And he looked rather proudly about as
he said it, as a Scot might speak of the doughty deeds of the Scotch.
He was wont to refer, too, to the “intellectual aristocracy.” His
luncheon engagements were now mostly with this order of humanity, and
his anecdotes featured such figures as Richard Le Gallienne and Bliss
Carman--men whose personalities delighted his heart beyond measure.
How absurdly juvenile he looked. But you would have noted, as you
observed him, that he had a very fine head, something like that of
Arthur Symons (without the moustache), I thought; or, according to
Mr. Le Gallienne’s sympathetic picture in _The Bookman_: “Though the
resemblance was perhaps only a spiritual expression, his then thin,
austere young face, with those strangely strong and gentle eyes (eyes
that seemed to have an independent, dominating existence), reminded me
of Lionel Johnson, for whom he had already a great admiration, and
whose religion he was afterwards to embrace.” Or, again, he seemed as
if he might be a comely youth out of ancient Greece. I think that what
I mean is that he was so unlike all other young men anyone had ever
seen walking about, so much brighter and purer, or some indescribable
thing, that he did not seem altogether real. A feeling which I think
was shared by many, and which I have never quite been able to make
articulate, Mr. Le Gallienne has most happily expressed with his own
easy charm; that is the “hint of destiny” in this “very concentrated,
intense young presence--masculine intense, not feminine:”
We have all met young people who give us that--beautiful,
brilliant, lovely natured, so superabundant in all their
qualities (and particularly perhaps in some quality of
emanating light)--as to make them suggest the supernatural, and
touched, too, with the finger of a moonlight that has written
“fated” upon their brows. Probably our feeling is nothing more
mysterious than our realisation that temperaments so vital and
intense must inevitably tempt richer and swifter fates than
those less wild winged.
Above all, this young gentleman was the portrait of a poet, even (in
those days) of the type of literary sophistication which is (or was)
called decadent! There was about him a perceptible aroma of literary
self-consciousness. He had begun to contribute to magazines and
newspapers the verses which he soon gathered into a first volume, “A
Summer of Love” (an “author’s book,” as the trade term has it), verses
patently derivative in character (as whose early verses are not?),
showing the influences of various masters.
He had already become a bit of a celebrity, arriving at twenty-five
in _Who’s Who_. In conversation he spoke with striking fluency and
precision, and a rather amusing effect of authority; all of which,
together with a ready command, rather incongruous for his years, of
very apt words little employed in speech, gave a general impression, I
fancy, of something of an infant prodigy. He wrote in a letter of this
time of the poems of Coventry Patmore:
I have come to regard them with intense admiration. Have you
read them? Patmore seems to me to be a greater poet than
Francis Thompson. (Kilmer, had by the way, just given a lecture
at Columbia University on Francis Thompson.) He has not the
rich vocabulary, the decorative erudition, the Shelleyan
enthusiasm, which distinguish the “Sister Songs” and the “Hound
of Heaven,” but he has a classical simplicity, a restraint and
sincerity which make his poems satisfying. Some of his shorter
poems, such as “Alexander and Lycon” and “The Toys,” approach
Landor in their Greek economy. Of course, the “Angel in the
House,” and many other of his poems, are marred by Tennysonian
influences. But the “Unknown Eros” is a work of stupendous
beauty. It is certainly supreme among modern religious poems.
That part of it devoted to Eros and Psyche is remarkably
daring and remarkably fine. Psyche symbolizes the soul, and
Eros the love of God. Their amour is described with realistic
minuteness, even with humorous flippancy, and yet the whole
poem is alive with religious feeling.
The finding of Patmore, by the way, was what might be called a
finger-post in Kilmer’s life. The fortunate introduction was performed
by, it is my impression, Kilmer’s friend Thomas Walsh.
If in cold print to-day there is a slightly preposterous didactic
quality in these remarks of this youthful character, it should be
instantly noted as a tribute to the charm that was his that in the
presence of so much handsomeness and grace, combined with so much
flexibility of mind and agile humour, even this was an engaging thing.
There was to Kilmer nothing whatever dry-as-dust about the erudite
business of lexicography; instead his impressionable nature found among
his co-workers a rich, a colourful, an exciting school of humanity. He
glowed continually with affectionate amusement at the motley band of
literary adventurers, intellectual soldiers of fortune, who apparently
were his colleagues. One, the most motley perhaps of all (the long
cherished dream of whose ancient bachelor life it was one day to write
a popular song), touched, for the first time, I think, the deepest
spring of his song--his profound and wide-ranging humanity.
Some people ask: “What cruel chance
Made Martin’s life so sad a story?”
Martin? Why, he exhaled romance,
And wore an overcoat of glory.
II
And then, lo! the aesthete became a churchman. After a couple of
years or so of lexicographic employment, work on the dictionary was
completed, and Kilmer entered what, with immense gusto, he described as
“religious journalism.” He became literary editor of _The Churchman_.
He had completed a very thorough course in uptown New York apartment
house life (living, I think, in rapid succession in some half dozen
specimens of “the great stone box cruelly displayed severe against the
pleasant arc of sky”); and now removing to the suburban village of
Mahwah, New Jersey, in the Ramapo foothills, he entered upon his career
as one of the world’s most accomplished commuters. He used to say, with
a spacious gesture of the arm and a haughty inflation of the chest,
that it was no life at all, no life at all, for a man not to swing
around an orbit of at least sixty miles a day between his office and
his home. His home, even so!
I never have seen a vagabond who really liked to roam
All up and down the streets of the world and not to have a home.
What more exhilarating experience than the owning of a home! And one
paid one’s installments on the building loan with the fine pride of a
man exercising a noble prerogative. Yes, he often walked to Suffern
along the Erie track, and meditated on “what a house should do, a house
that has sheltered life,”
That has put its loving wooden arms around a man and his wife,
A house that has echoed a baby’s laugh and held up his stumbling feet.
As became a churchman, he began to hold forth to his companion on the
train to and from the city on the fascinations of the Anglican poets.
Either his enthusiasm for the subject resulted in a series of articles
on the theme, or an assignment for such a series of articles resulted
in his enthusiasm, I don’t know which. The significant point is that it
was just as like to have been either way about. “Passon Hawker”--Robert
Stephen Hawker--Vicar of Morwenstow, a coast life-guard in a
cassock--who can recite off hand the deeds of his piety and his valour?
Well, on the Erie smoker he became one of the most romantic figures of
story. Robert Herrick, in a manner of speaking, went home many a night
on the Twelve-Forty-Five (Robert Herrick, that is, with his “Unbaptized
Rhimes” left out), and Bishop Coxe returned on the Seven-Fifty-Six in
the morning.
Kilmer had already done a few book reviews for _The Nation_ and for the
_New York Times_; but at _The Churchman_ he acquired such a proficiency
at this exercise that he was able, jocularly, to regard Arnold Bennett,
as a literary journalist, as a “mere amateur.” The real reward of
“religious journalism,” however, it soon developed, was the opportunity
of writing a feature which the secular might call an editorial, but
the proper name of which this editor pronounced, in the tone and with
the manner of one who was consciously engaged in something grand,
gloomy and peculiar, as a “meditation.”
The real meditations of Joyce Kilmer, however, were not “meditations”
so called, and partook in no wise of the nature of editorials. He had
been, in the main, a graceful troubadour who thrummed pleasant things
to his lady-love, and had a bright eye to his singing robes. He had
thought it rather fine, too, that refrain in imitation of Richepin:
May booze be plenty, bulls be few,
The poet is the beggars’ king.
He had even been much taken, artistically, with the thought of absinthe:
O little green god in your crystal shrine,
Your heavenly dream-shower shed!
It was when his business took him near to God, when his exploring
spirit, upon a peak in Darien, beheld that:
Poems are made by fools like me,
But only God can make a tree,
that he began to be a poet. “Trees,” which more than all the rest he
had written put together made his reputation, appeared in _Poetry. A
Magazine of Verse_ in August, 1913.
At about this period it was that he was altogether born again. Then,
doubtless in castigatory reaction against his own aesthetic and
“decadent” wild oats, entered into his fibre that sovereign disdain for
the intellectual flub-dub which later gave such a delightful note of
“horse-sense” to all his humorous thought--the Johnsonian sting (“and
don’t you think you were an ass?”) which found its earliest biting
expression in the verses “To a Young Poet Who Killed Himself.”
“I’ve been leading a rather active life, for several days,” was with
a gay salute of the hand, a frequent Kilmerian remark. In 1912 the
direction of the _New York Times Review of Books_ fell into the hands
of a high-spirited young man, a Max-Beerbohmian character, with a
decided taste for gaiety in reviews, Mr. Wetmore, who conducted that
organ through what is known in New York journalistic tradition as its
“meteoric period.” Mr. Wetmore’s wit perceived in Kilmer his happiest
rocket. Not only given his head but egged on by his editor to strive
for sublime heights of fantasy, this fairly unknown contributor shot
in a series of reviews which for readability was, the applause now
indicated, an altogether new thing in the book pages of an American
newspaper. “This is a bad book, a very bad book, indeed,” so ran the
style. “It is bad because it makes this reviewer feel old and fat
and bald.” If, together with their humorous assumption of a jovial
cocksureness of manner, the literary judgments expressed were, of
necessity, snap-shot judgments, there was nothing snap-shot nor assumed
about a certain quality in them which in general effect was the most
striking of all, namely, the reflection in a very positive way of a
radiantly clean and wholesome young nature, abounding in mental and
spiritual health.
As one of the general prime movers in, and for a number of years
Corresponding Secretary of The Poetry Society of America, Kilmer
engaged on the side in activities which for many another would have
been in themselves almost a whole job. A fervent Dickensonian, he was
for a long period president and (one felt) the animating principle
of the American Dickens Fellowship. He accumulated offices to such
an extent that I am doubtful if anyone but himself knew exactly how
many employments he had altogether, or at any one moment. He conducted
the Poetry department of _The Literary Digest_ for something like
nine years, an obligation which he continued to fulfill even from
Camp Mills, Long Island, to the time when he sailed for France. For a
time he conducted a similar department in _Current Literature_, and
also did a quarterly article on poetry for, I think, the _Review of
Reviews_. Among his earlier essays in the lecture field was a paper on
“The Drama as an Instrument of Sex Education,” read before a regular
meeting of the Society of Sanitary and Moral Prophylaxis held at the
New York Academy of Medicine, in December, 1913. The society with the
playful name, I recollect, got seriously interested in the matter of
sex education as then expounded. Their views on the drama in this
connection were enlarged by acquisition of the idea that though “‘The
Great Love’ is, in my opinion, one of the most skilfully constructed
plays presented on the New York stage for many a year, I am quite
serious in saying that as a factor in sex education, it is a thousand
times inferior to ‘Bertha the Beautiful Cloak Model.’”
As Kilmer was always decidedly what is termed a ready writer, what I
should attempt to describe as a natural writer (a startling exception
to the rule that easy writing makes hard reading), so he appeared to
have the gift of speaking readily in public. On frequent occasions,
at any rate in his early talks, he neglected altogether to prepare
any outline beforehand, and even sometimes to choose a subject. Every
now and then, I have known him repeatedly to say to his companion at
dinner, without, however, any trace at all of nervousness: “Now, look
here: Put your mind on this. Stop all that gossip. Tell me what I’m to
talk about. I have to begin” (looking at his watch) “in twenty-five
minutes.”
He was particularly active in the affairs of the Authors’ Club, and was
a member of the Vagabonds, the Columbia University Club and the Alianza
Puertorriguena. In 1913 he ceased, officially, to be a churchman.
For a brief period he contemplated the prospect of a professorship,
lecturing on English Literature at the University of the South,
Sewanee, Tennessee. Then, to his great delight, he became a newspaper
man--as he continually put it, with much relish in the part, “a hard
newspaper man.” He became a special writer for the _New York Times
Sunday Magazine_. I am sure he saw himself in fancy as one of those
weather-beaten characters bred in the old-time newspaper school of
booze, profanity and hard knocks, his only text-book the police-court
blotter and the moulder of his youth a particularly brutal night
city-editor. He maintained, with humorous arrogance against opposing
argument, the thesis that every great writer had got his “training”
as a newspaper man. He delighted to point, as illustrations of this,
to Dickens, to Thackeray, and to a lot more, who, in any strict sense
of the word, were not “newspaper men” at all. Hard pressed, he even
stood ready to make some such hilariously sweeping assertion as that
George Eliot, Shakespeare, Tennyson and Robert Browning were, properly
perceived, “newspaper men.”
At any rate, this hard newspaper man had to begin with a comical
equipment for his task: he would never learn to typewrite and he knew
nothing of shorthand. Or rather, he was remarkably well equipped, as
one of the outstanding traits of his character was the fearless zest
with which, so to say, he took the hurdles of life, and a peculiar
faculty in triumphing over such obstacles as his own limitations. He
rapidly invented a curious system of abbreviations and marks to remind
him of points, which served him as an interviewer as effectively as any
knowledge of stenography could have done. He energetically entered upon
his occupation as a feature writer with the customary themes of the
“Sunday story.” He interviewed, figuratively speaking, the man who had
discovered the missing link, and he got from the latest inventor of
perpetual motion all the arresting details of his machine. And a lively
part of the early Sunday morning ritual at his home was the advance
calculating with a tape measure of the week’s income from space writing.
It was later that he created his own highly successful type of literary
interview. An intelligent perception of the business, a perception
which is not general, perhaps is required fully to appreciate the
fact that in this department of newspaper work he was an exceedingly
skillful journalist. The secret of his really brilliant success in this
field lay in large part in his instinct for luring the distinguished
subject of his interview into provocative statements, enabling him to
employ such heads as: “Is O. Henry a Pernicious Literary Influence?”
“Godlessness Mars Most Contemporary Poetry,” “Americans Lack Loyalty To
Their Writers,” “Shackled Magazine Editors Harm Literature,” “Declares
Our Rich Authors Make Cheap Literature” and “Says American Literature
Is Going To the Dogs.”
At the time of the death of James Whitcomb Riley, Kilmer hurried to
the Catskills for his interview with Bliss Carman. On his way back
to the city, by way of his home at Mahwah, he dashed with his usual
impetuosity in front of the moving train he was seeking to board, was
knocked down and hurled or dragged a considerable distance, and taken
to the Good Samaritan Hospital at Suffern, New York, with three ribs
fractured and other injuries; where, wiring immediately to New York
for his secretary, he dictated an interview as engaging and as full of
journalistic craft as any he ever wrote. He seemed much more intent
on his Sunday story, it is reported by H. Christopher Watts, who was
acting as his secretary at that time, than on his predicament.
I did not see Kilmer at this time myself, but I have an idea that,
when he had relieved his mind of the anxiety concerning his article,
he entered into the spirit of his experience with much relish. It
isn’t every day that one gets hit by a train, nor everybody that has
three ribs broken. Exhilarating kind of thing, when you see it that
way! I remember one time when I was practically in hospital myself he
went to a good deal of trouble to come to see me. He seemed to admire
my predicament very much, and, beaming upon me, remarked in high good
humour that it must be an entertaining thing to be so completely at the
mercy of circumstances over which you had no control. When shall we
look upon his like again!
III
I really doubt very much whether anybody ever enjoyed food more than
Kilmer. The slender youth had become a decidedly stocky young man,
who ate mammoth meals with prodigious satisfaction. He delighted upon
sitting down to breakfast to maintain, with almost savage earnestness
(such was the amusing effect), that the most fitting dish for that meal
was steak. As a matter of fact, however, his habit was to miss his
breakfast altogether through haste to catch his train, except for a cup
of coffee and a piece of buttered toast which, when he missed the ’bus,
he ate, a mouthful every dozen or so leaps, on his way down the hill
(almost a mountain) to the station. Sundays, however, with the whole
day at home, he apparently regarded among other things as a sort of
barbecue. Looking over the morning table it was his custom to inquire
with the air of a man making a fairly satisfactory beginning, what was
scheduled for dinner.
Kilmer never ate any lunch, as the ordinary world understands the
word--about the first hour of the afternoon he went (when his means
had become such that he could afford it) to a sort of Thanksgiving or
Christmas dinner every day. How proceeding directly to his office he
did any work afterward, was always considerable of a mystery to me. And
lunching alone he doubtless regarded as a misanthropic perversion. His
luncheons and his frequent dinners in town alone represented what many
would regard as a rather arduous social life, which however arduous,
however, never failed to include the weekly luncheon with his mother,
Mrs. Kilburn-Kilmer. As an epilogue, so to say, to his meal it was his
wont to have, speaking his order slowly so as to suck the full flavour
of the idea, “a large black cigar.”
One time being in the city with his family for a period after the birth
of one of his children, he gave a series of Sunday morning breakfasts
at a fashionable restaurant (it was a pleasant crotchet with him
that he was “a fashionable young man”), entertainments which were
distinguished by, first, the fact the guests so abundantly represented
the world of journalism that they filled a good portion of the room,
and, secondly, by the circumstance of their lingering at the board
until mid-day diners began to arrive.
How a poet could _not_ be a glorious eater, it was one of Kilmer’s
whims to say, he could not see; for the poet was happier than other
men by reason of his acuter senses, and as his eyes delighted in the
beauty of the world, so should his palate thrill with pleasure in the
taste of the earth’s bounteous yield for the sustenance of men. The
romance, too, of the things we eat he felt lustily.
Rich spices from the Orient,
And fruit that knew Italian skies.
He had another, and a decidedly quaint, notion of food. He firmly
believed that hearty eating was an adequate physical compensation for
loss of sleep. He was fond of declaring his faith in this fantastic
idea by means of a story of some “ancient receptive child” (friend of
his) who managed to bring up a family of seven (or so) children by
ill-paid hack-work occupying most of the day and night--a noble success
due entirely to noble meals.
* * * * *
This man has home and child and wife
And battle set for every day.
This man has God and love and life;
These stand, all else shall pass away.
And “this man’s” days were long, long days: Kilmer’s home, a place
of boundless week-end hospitality and almost equally boundless
domesticity (guests being obliged to exercise much agility in
clambering about toys with which the stairs were laden), was also year
after year a place of almost unbelievable literary industry. The trying
idiosyncrasies of the artistic temperament were about as discernible
in Kilmer as kleptomania. He was, as you may say, social and domestic
in his habits of writing to an amazing degree. Night after night he
would radiantly walk up and down the floor singing a lullaby to one of
his children whom he carried screaming in his arms while he dictated
between vociferous sounds to his secretary or wife--his wife frequently
driven by the drowsiness of two in the morning to take short naps with
her head upon the typewriter while the literally tireless journalist
filled and lighted his pipe.
This, however, was an atmosphere of cloistral seclusion compared with
Kilmer’s office at the _New York Times_. Here, where he regularly got
through each week enough hard work to hold down three or four fairly
capable young men, he maintained a sort of salon for a ludicrous
variety of picturesque characters with nothing in particular to do and
no place else to go, ranging from types of patrician leisure to stray
dogs of the literary world visibly out of a job.
The latter class, indeed, apparently regarded him as a kind of a
clearing house for employment. A singularly convincing commentary on
the radiating humanity of this brilliant young man was one rather
grotesque feature of his mail. In addition to a constant and copious
stream of requests from persons but slightly known, or quite unknown to
him, for advice as to how to succeed in letters, and for his personal
imprimatur on their enclosed manuscripts, he was apparently constantly
in receipt of innumerable epistolary stories of extraordinary distress,
suffered (generally) by elderly characters defeated in the lists of
literature. Though there was in Kilmer’s robust nature a decided
distaste, somewhat analogous to the innate aversion of the clean in
spirit to moral obliquity, for what he termed “ineffectual people,”
there was too an amusing strain of paternal feeling toward most of
those of all ages with whom he was in contact. And this feeling he did
not neglect, whenever the occasion arose, to translate into practical
effect.
He had a comical manner of terming his elders “young” So-and-So. I
was six years his senior, which at the period of life at which we
met represented a considerable difference in experience. And yet,
throughout our association, in spiritual force he was the oak, I the
clinging vine. And I know of cases where this was quite as much so when
the other man was something like fifteen years the elder. One such
instance, ludicrous in its contrast between the two men, was confessed
to me with deep feeling just the other day.
“So-long” or “good-bye” was seldom Kilmer’s parting word. It was rather
a word he continually used which will be thought of as peculiarly his
as long as his memory endures, the closing word of “Rouge Bouquet.” The
last time I saw him at his home, then at Larchmont Manor, New York,
my companion (in marriage) and I upon leaving almost missed our car,
which started a block or so from the Kilmer house. As the three of us
dashed after it, Kilmer stopped this car by what seemed to me something
like sheer force of his willing it to stop. Then, as he dropped away
from the race, there came from him high and clear out of the night (and
always shall I hear it ring) his benediction: “Farewell! Children.”
Yes, it is even so; as the spirit is measured and the frailties of
the soul are numbered, how many who knew this wondrous boy were his
“children”!
The wisdom of the maxim “A busy man is never too busy to do one thing
more” was indisputable in the spectacle of Kilmer. Though this was
not, so far as I recollect, a maxim he employed, he had one of his own
something like it, which admirably summed up his practical philosophy.
When confronted by some financial dilemma, he was fond of declaring:
“The demand creates the supply. A sound economic principle.” He seemed
to crave serious responsibilities and insistent obligations as some men
crave liquor; and he grew more rosy as these increased.
Thank God for the mighty tide of fears
Against me always hurled!
Thank God for the bitter and ceaseless strife,
And the sting of His chastening rod!
There was nothing incongruous to Kilmer about the incongruity expressed
in a communication written in 1916 to the Reverend Edward F. Garesché,
S. J.; a letter which began by saying, “I am sorry that your letter of
October 11 has been so long unanswered, but this has been the busiest
month of my life”; which then told of his looping the loop of the
country in lecture engagements; proceeded to discuss a matter which
had made a strong appeal to his heart, the founding of an Academy of
Catholic Letters to be called the Marian Institute; and concluded with
the remark, “I will gladly take on the work of acting secretary until
the members make their own selection.”
IV
In 1913, Kilmer’s daughter Rose, nine months of age, was stricken with
infantile paralysis. It was then, upon his bringing his family to town
to give his daughter the treatment of a specialist, when he came to my
house to tell me of this, that I first distinctly realised that this
young man was remarkable--in a manner far beyond mere talent. The idea
which he kept firmly before his mind was that it had been declared
there was no occasion to fear her death as a result of her affliction.
During the course of his stay with me that day he said several times,
“Well, there are lots of people worse off than I am.” This idea, too,
it was apparent, he felt he must hold before him. And then, with his
amazing and unconquerable _flair_ for life, he launched upon the
theme that this was a “very interesting disease,” and he elaborated
the thought that an infirmity of the body frequently resulted in an
increased vitality of the mind.
“I like to feel that I have always been a Catholic,” was a sentiment
frequently expressed by Kilmer. It has repeatedly been declared by
friends very close to him that his minute knowledge of pious customs
and practices of which a life-long Catholic might easily be ignorant
was a constant surprise to them, but that with respect to religion as
particularised in himself he kept silent, would never discuss the steps
that led to his conversion, and it was only by chance they discovered
he was a daily communicant. It was late in 1918 that Kilmer astonished
the little world that then comprised his family, his friends and
acquaintances by entering, with his wife, the Roman Catholic Church.
One afternoon not long after this occurrence he not so much invited as
directed me over the telephone to meet him that night for dinner at the
Columbia Club. His purpose soon became clear. This was the only solemn
hour I ever spent with Kilmer. I think it well to record here what he
deeply impressed upon me: that it was this searing test of his spirit
which had come upon him in the affliction of his daughter that fixed
his religion.