world war. He was, of course, the same in fibre then as before. Only
then was known to him and visible to others what was latent in his
heart. And in this sense it was, I think, that it was clear to him that
he did not become, but had always been a Catholic, though he had not
earlier realised it. He tried all things and held fast to that which he
found good. He was inwardly driven to seek until his spirit found its
home. That only the time of his conversion was, in a sense, accidental,
and that the conversion itself was inevitable, must be evident in the
fact that he was never really himself before he became, as we say, a
convert. Then his fluid spirituality, his yearning sense of religion,
was stabilized. What is the “secret,” as we say, of all that has been
told of his ability? His courage, his mental and physical energy, were,
manifestly, unusual. But his character, in the faith that he embraced,
found its tempered spring. His talent was a wingéd seed which in the
rich soil which had mothered so much art found fructification.
It is not an unsupported assertion to say that he was in his time and
place the laureate of the Catholic Church. His sentiments as to the
function of a Catholic poet he has expressed very positively in his
essays and lectures. He joyed in the new proof given by Helen Parry
Eden “that piety and mirth may comfortably dwell together.” “A convert
to Catholicism,” he wrote of Mr. Yeats on Lionel Johnson, “is not a
person who wanders about weeping over autumn winds and dead leaves,
mumbling Latin and sniffing incense.” Nor is it necessary to lay
æsthetic hands on the church’s treasures, “and decorate rhymes with
rich ecclesiastical imagery and the fragrant names of the saints.”
But in Faith one may find “that purity and strength which are the
guarantees of immortality.”
And, once a Catholic, there never was any possibility of mistaking
Kilmer’s point of view: in all matters of religion, art, economics and
politics, as well as in all matters of faith and morals, his point of
view was obviously and unhesitatingly Catholic. Considerable as were
his gifts and skill as a politician in the business of his career, the
veriest zealot could not say that he did not do the most unpolitic
things in the service of his faith. A very positive figure, he laboured
tirelessly, alternating from one field to another, for the Catholic
Church.
As a brilliant interpretative critic of Catholic writers, such as
Crashaw, Patmore, Francis Thompson, Lionel Johnson and Belloc, he
brought, I think I may venture to say, an altogether new touch into
Catholic journalism in America, a striking and distinguished blend of
“piety and mirth,” which had the rare and highly effective quality
of being both engaging and highly illuminating even to, as Kilmer
would amiably have said, the Pagan. Impetus, of course, was given
to his style in this by his admiration for the brilliant school of
English Catholic journalists, an impetus doubtless accelerated by the
personal acquaintance with Belloc, the Chestertons and the Meynells
he gained in a flying visit to England in 1914 to rescue his mother
from war difficulties in London; when, during a few odd moments before
his return, he established a lively connection with the Northcliffe
papers and _T. P.’s Weekly_. Even so, Kilmer almost, or quite, alone
transplanted this particular spark; and his note of witty common sense
and spiritual sensibility was particularly Kilmerian, too.
One day about four years ago the village Post Office at Mahwah did a
totally unprecedented and most extraordinary business in outgoing mail,
and Kilmer was again multiplied manifold. The neat circulars which
he had printed and with which he stuffed the mail box announced that
the author of “Trees,” a member of the staff of the _New York Times_,
etc., etc., “offered the following lectures for the coming season.” The
result may best be epitomised in the parable of the gentleman who cast
his bread upon the waters to have it come back to him in the form of
sardine sandwiches. The rapid development of Kilmer’s lecture business,
which soon assumed the proportions of no mean career in itself,
immensely extended his force as a quickening influence in the Catholic
world. Before societies and educational institutions in many places,
frequently travelling as far as Notre Dame, Indiana, and Prairie du
Chien, Wisconsin, he flung his bright portraits of “seekers after that
real but elusive thing called beauty, a thing which they found in their
submission to her who is the mother of all learning, all culture, and
all the arts, the Catholic Church.”
V
As a literary lecturer and a reader of his own poems before secular
audiences his success was no less abundant. In “the only combination of
its kind since Bill Nye and James Whitcomb Riley,” as the circular of
the J. B. Pond Lyceum Bureau stated it, “the young American Poet” and
the author of “Pigs is Pigs” contributed considerably to the lightening
of the rigours of existence by an extended repetition of “a joint
evening of readings from their works.” Ellis Parker Butler, in a letter
before me, writes of his partner on the programme:
He was a most charming travelling companion and an ideal
team-mate for the purpose we had in mind. I would not have
thought of going “on tour” if I had not met Kilmer. My idea was
never to “go on tour” but, after I had met Kilmer, to “go on
tour with Kilmer.” He was altogether lovable and loved.
It would be a decidedly false estimate of Kilmer which failed to note,
even with some emphasis, that he was an excellent man of business.
He “played the game,” in the exceedingly difficult job of earning
a thoroughly competent living at the literary profession, with a
dexterity which, it was frequently apparent, was at once an inspiration
and a despair to those who sought to rival him. The Kilmer cult which
grew apace was considerably accelerated by a rich Kilmerian strategy.
And he delivered to the little world of intensely intense literary
societies and blue-nosed salons which hung upon his lips the pure milk
of the word with a strongly humorous consciousness of the feat as a
part of the immense sport of living.
Kilmer’s “act” as it was observed from behind the scenes is excellently
presented by an associate in the office of the _New York Times_. This
writer says in the _Philadelphia Press_:
Our editor analysed him into three distinct manners: Kilmer,
the literary man; Kilmer, the lecturer; and Kilmer, himself.
His first appearance in the office would give you the cue to
him for the day. If he came in grinning with his pipe drawing
well, we would know that nothing was to be feared; he was
himself. When he got his “literary” manner on, the symptom
was a tapping of his eyeglass, with his right hand on the
fingers of his left. When he appeared in his cutaway coat and
a particularly pastoral necktie, we knew that on that day
the elderly ladies of This Literary Club or the young ladies
of That Academy were to be treated to a discourse on certain
aspects of Victorian verse.
One day he came in, obviously decked out for a lecture. Without
his having said a word about it, the assistant Sunday editor
spoke up: “Let’s cut out work this afternoon and hear Kilmer
lecture.” A look of horror overspread his face. “For heaven’s
sake, don’t,” he said. “I couldn’t go through with it.” I don’t
believe any of us ever did hear him.
A thing which I found very singular was that, in manner Kilmer was
apt, in the two or three later years of his life, to give strangers on
their first meeting the impression of being somewhat too dignified for
so young a man, of being, as his office associate John Bunker in an
admirable, even a remarkable, portrait of him at this period published
in _America_, says, “in fact just a trifle pompous.” Mr. Bunker
continues: “This was due partly to his physical appearance, and also,
insofar as it had any basis in reality, to that protective instinct
which quickly teaches a sensitive and imaginative spirit to cast a veil
between itself and the outer world.”
I myself think this effect had its origin in the same perverse instinct
which causes you, immediately after talking with a deaf person, to
speak very loud to your next auditor whom you very well know can hear
perfectly; that is, it was the result of being keyed up to appearing on
an elevated platform before a curious throng. He one time astonished
me by the declaration that it was only by, quite early in his life,
drastically schooling himself to the task, one then exceedingly trying
and hateful to him, that he became able to rise and “speak” at all.
The most entertaining recollection, by the way, that I have of the
Kilmerian pontifical manner is of a time when he generously invited
me to have my shoes polished with him, thrust his hand deep into his
pocket to pay the boy, paused, and with a very large gesture directed
him to call in again later in the day.
There is first-rate perspicacity in the remark of one of Kilmer’s
friends, Laurence J. Gomme, that at one score and ten he was, in the
amount that he had lived, about seventy years old. Something of the
force and sharpness of Mr. Bunker’s evocation of the man as he was at
last resides, I think, in the circumstance that here is no blending in
the mind of the flower and the bud. He says: “When I first met Kilmer
he had just passed his thirtieth year, but he gave me the impression
of being somewhat older. I afterwards spoke of this to him, and it was
his theory that newspaper work had served to age him. The truth was
that it was due not merely to his newspaper work, but generally to the
incessant and intense mental activity, the extraordinary and flaming
energy, whereby he crowded into ten years the experiences of several
ordinary lifetimes.” And this touch of the slight Bunker portrait is, I
feel, essential to any fuller picture:
As to his physical aspect, he was stockily built and about
medium height, and his habit of body was what I should call
plump, though later, under the stress of military drill, he
changed somewhat in this last respect. I noted at once that
he had a remarkable head--well rounded, with broad and high
forehead and a very pronounced bulge at the back, covered
thickly with dark, reddish-brown hair. But his eyes were his
most remarkable feature. They were of the unusual colour of
red, and they had a most peculiar quality which I can only
inadequately suggest by saying that they literally glowed. It
actually seemed as if there were a fire behind them, not a
leaping and blazing fire, but a steady and unquenchable flame
which appeared to suffuse the whole eyeball with a brooding
light. This characteristic was so striking that I cannot help
dilating on it. And I observed later on that this glow, this
brooding and somewhat sombre light, never left his eyes even in
his most weary or most care-free moments, so that they gave the
impression of what I believe was the fact--the impression of a
brain behind them which was working intensely and perhaps even
feverishly every hour of the waking day.
The better poet Kilmer became, as his friend Richardson Wright says in
his admirable “Appreciation” in _The Bellman_, the less like a poet he
acted. And after he grew up, he would about as soon have æstheticised,
off the platform, as he would have forged a check. Whenever he did
refer to poetry as related to himself he, as the slang term has it,
took it smiling. One of Kilmer’s most pronounced pet aversions was the
phrase, utterly mawkish to him, about “prostituting” one’s talent.
He one time explained to me, with considerable apparent pride, that
he used every idea three times: in a poem, in an article, and in a
lecture.
Charles Willis Thompson, an editorial writer of the _New York Times_,
and to whom belongs the credit of first taking, as editor of the
_Sunday Magazine_ and _Book Review_, Kilmer’s “stuff” in any amount,
inspired, so to say, the poem “Delicatessen,” in this way. Mr. Thompson
happened to remark to Kilmer that of course there were a lot of
things which couldn’t be treated in poetry. Kilmer declared he would
like to know what they were. Mr. Thompson cast about in his mind for
the most ridiculous theme for a poem he could think of, and finally
proclaimed that no one could possibly write a poem about such a thing
as a delicatessen shop. “I’ll write a poem about a delicatessen shop,”
Kilmer promptly replied. “It will be a long poem. I’ll sell it to a
high-brow magazine. It will be much admired. And it will be a good
poem.” He insisted on betting on this the sum of several dollars.
The origin of “The Twelve-Forty-Five” I do not exactly know. But I
remember shortly before that poem was written, sitting disgusted and
miserable with Kilmer in that horrible “Jersey City shed” waiting for
the midnight train. Taking out of his mouth that villainously large,
fifty-cent pipe (mentioned in all genuine appreciations) Kilmer, with
a fervour almost violent, suddenly exclaimed: “I certainly do like
railroad stations! They are fine places!” The very famous poem “The
White Ships and The Red” (a poem so wonderfully effective that it was
at once reprinted all over the country and in Europe) was a newspaper
assignment. He rather liked the poem when he saw it in the paper;
though, with his feet cocked up on his desk, he spoke apologetically
of what he felt to be the failure of the latter stanzas to link up
perfectly with the first, explaining that a luncheon appointment, at
which he chatted for an hour or two, had split the writing of it into
two sittings. That the author of this “Lusitania” poem thoroughly felt
and meant what he said, is, I fancy, sufficiently proven by the event
to permit of this being told.
The point is, that Kilmer was a poet, an artist of a high order, a
perfectly conscious master of what he was doing. The febrile gush of
emotion he loathed. He knew finely that:
It is stern work, it is perilous work, to thrust your hand in the sun
And pull out a spark of immortal flame to warm the hearts of men.
There was nothing accidental about the effect of his own verse, any
more than there was “luck” in his worldly success. He achieved the one
as he did the other by a masculine heart and mind. And while all things
were necessary and joyous, it was impossible not to feel that, after
all, throughout his day “the rhymer’s honest trade” was his primary
concern.
He was sufficiently grounded in literature to feel, as Mr. Le Gallienne
says, no “weariness with those literary methods which had sufficed for
Chaucer and Shakespeare and Milton, or Catullus or Bion, or François
Villon--content, with reverent ambition, to tread that immortal path.”
In his religious mysticism a trace, and more than a trace, has been
found of Crashaw, of Vaughan, of Herbert, and of Belloc and Chesterton.
And there is no difficulty at all about finding in Kilmer hints of
Patmore, and there may be easily recognised something of the accents
of A. E. Housman and of Edwin Arlington Robinson. He did, indeed, to
put it in a racy phrase, have the drop on those who do not know that
all art that endures must have its roots in a constant interrogation of
the “unimpeachable testimony” of the ages. His song was as old as the
hills, and as fresh as the morning. Precisely in this, in fact, is his
remarkableness, his originality, as a contemporary poet; and in this
will be, I think, his abiding quality. “Simple and direct, yet not
without subtle magic,” wrote Father James J. Daly, S.J., in a review
of “Trees and Other Poems,” printed in _America_, his verse “seems
artlessly naïve, yet it possesses deep undercurrents of masculine and
forceful thought; it is ethical in its seriousness, and yet as playful
and light-hearted as sunlight and shadows under summer oaks.” And this
admirable summing up of Kilmer’s talent leaves little more in the way
of direct criticism to be said.
Mr. Le Gallienne with felicitous tact of phrase has touched upon this,
that “no young poet of our time has so reverently, on so many pages, in
so many different ways, so playfully at times, as in that masterpiece
of playful reverence, ‘A Blue Valentine,’ woven through the texture
of his song the love of his lady--that lady ‘Aline,’ whose name will
be gently twined about his as long as the printed word endures.” A
misquotation in the _Ladies’ Home Journal_ led to an interesting
tribute to the author of “Trees.” Many readers of the _Journal_ were
somewhat startled to find the editor attributing to John Masefield the
lines:
A tree that looks at God all day
And lifts her leafy arms to pray.
The following issue of the magazine contained this correction and
acknowledgment by Mr. Bok:
I am free to confess that I did not know the correct author. I
had been reading John Masefield that morning and unconsciously
wrote his name as the author of these lines. A number of
friends have pointed to the error and supplied the knowledge.
The author is Joyce Kilmer, and to him I owe, and here express,
my sense of deep apology. The exquisite lines were worthy of
John Masefield, but that does not make them less worthy of
their rightful author, as all will agree who read his beautiful
work in his book “Trees and Other Poems.”
As one, somewhat effusive commentator has remarked, “Trees” just could
not be confined within the covers of a book. At once reprinted in
newspapers throughout the United States (and still being so reprinted)
it was crowned in that warmest of all ways in which a work of
literature can be honoured, by being cut out by the world and pasted in
its hat. In one version it reads, in part, in this way:
Cuando contemplo un arbol pienso: nunca vere un poema tan bello
y tan intenso.
Un arbol silencioso que con ansia se aferra a la dulce y jugosa
entrans de la tierra.
Un arbol que mirando los cielos se extansia y en oracion
levanta los brazos noche y dia.
Many of Kilmer’s poems have been translated into Spanish by Salomon de
la Selva, Enriquez Urenia and others, and have appeared in a number of
prominent South American papers.
In a letter from France to Edward W. Cook, who in quest of material
for a book on contemporary poets had written Kilmer asking several
questions, Kilmer commented, among other things, on his “earlier
efforts in poetry” (as the questionnaire apparently had put it), in
a manner which is evidence again of how perfectly well he knew what
he was about. “If what I nowadays write is considered poetry,” he
announced, “then I became a poet in November, 1913.” Admirable for
hard-headedness, directness and precision, it is a statement which
leaves the critic no point upon which to take issue. His early poems
“were only the exercises of an amateur, imitations, useful only as
technical training.” The peculiar thing about these highly skilful
experiments in various forms of craftsmanship is that they were so very
much better as poems than the derivative efforts usually written at
this period of apprenticeship, “so free,” as Mr. Le Gallienne notes,
“from those artistic immaturities which have made many old great poets
angrily denounce unlicensed reprinters of their ‘first editions.’” And
in this fact they have a decided, and a perfectly legitimate, interest
for the observer of the development of his talent--though Kilmer
declared “they were worthless, that is, all of them which preceded a
poem called ‘Pennies,’ which you will find in my book ‘Trees and Other
Poems.’” He added, “I want all of my poems written before that to be
forgotten.”
He was writing, one remembers, to a gentleman with whom he was so
slightly acquainted that he addressed him as “Dear Mr. Cook,” with the
measure of whose sympathy and critical acumen, it is to be inferred, he
was not conversant, and who presumably was about to estimate (with what
perspective he could not perceive) his earliest productions. It were
better to head off any uncertainty in the matter. Also, we all know,
one’s hot impatience with one’s strivings of yesterday is mellowed
by time into an amiable and appreciative tolerance of one’s earnest
efforts of twenty years ago. It is difficult to think that Kilmer at
fifty would have had an unjust scorn of those charming exercises on the
poetic scales he wrote at twenty-one.
Anyhow, no man can, by decree or otherwise, obliterate his past; both
the good and the bad that he has done continue to pursue him. Ten times
thrice happy is he, rarest of men, who, like Kilmer, never penned a
line or said a word or did a deed that can arise to bring confusion
to those that love him. The world does not willingly let die those
verses on which glistens the dew of his tender youth. They are brought
forth for praise by no mean critics in tribute to his memory. And in
conformity with the wishes of those most jealous of his good name as
a poet a representative selection of his early poems is reprinted in
these volumes.
He that lives by the pen shall perish by the pen, saith the wisdom of
James Huneker. For a sapling poet, within a few short years and by the
hard business of words, to attain to a secretary and a butler and a
family of, at length, four children, is a modern Arabian Nights Tale.
Equally impossible is it, seemingly, to accomplish another thing, which
is a remarkable part of Kilmer’s distinction. From first to last, from
the verses contributed to _Moods_ in 1909 to the last poem he wrote,
“The Peacemaker,” printed in the _Saturday Evening Post_ in October,
1918, Kilmer was a poet’s poet. “A pretty good poet,” said such a poet
(shaking his head at his conviction of the truth of this) as Bliss
Carman. His poems were repeatedly adjudged high places among the best
poems read before the Poetry Society. Among competitive honours, under
the name of “John Langdon” he won easily enough with his poem, “The
Annunciation,” first prize in the Marian Poetry contest conducted by
_The Queen’s Work_, in July, 1917, an award competed for by a great
number of poets, including many in other countries. He was a poet’s
poet who declared (with considerable vehemence, I remember) that he
certainly wished he had written “Casey At The Bat.” He one time said
in praise of a book of essays that it was “that kind of glorified
reporting which is poetry.” As a singer of the simpler annals of
humanity his place will draw closer and closer, I think, to that of the
most widely loved poet of our own era. Only the name of James Whitcomb
Riley expresses in greater measure the rich gift of speaking with
authentic song to the simplest hearts. A man who believes that churches
are devices of the devil and literature a syrup for crack-brained
females can enjoy, with profit to his soul, “The House With Nobody In
it,” “Dave Lilly” and “The Servant Girl and the Grocer’s Boy” equally
with “The Old Swimmin’-Hole” and “Little Orphant Annie.”
If Colonel Roosevelt had never done anything other than what he has
done in writing, he would undoubtedly be highly esteemed as an American
man of letters. And people have made very creditable reputations as
humourists who never wrote anything like as humorous essays as those of
Joyce Kilmer. They fairly reek with the joy of life. They explode with
intellectual robustness. They are fragrant in fancy, richly erudite
in substance, touch-and-go in manner, poetic in feeling, rocking with
mirth, and display an extraordinary _flair_ for style. If it should
seem that I am not here measuring my words I suggest a reference to
a piece of documentary evidence called “The Gentle Art of Christmas
Giving,” a “Sunday story” in the _New York Times_, here reprinted.
Writing at top-notch speed, never looking again at what he had written,
intentionally producing a readily marketable commodity, from which
profit must be realised quickly, Kilmer was an exceedingly rare bird in
America; that is, a belletristic journalist. There is always the touch
to his work of a man of letters. Decidedly Bellocian, Chestertonian,
certainly his humorous essays are. But that it was a good deal more an
affinity of mind with, than an imitation of, those splendidly humorous
English philosophers is borne out by this: Joyce Kilmer did not talk
poetry, but he did talk exactly like his essays, which admirably
present the brave humorous wisdom of the man as his intimate friends
knew him.