editor of “Warner’s Library of the World’s Best Literature,” he
supplied the articles on Madison Cawein, John Masefield, William
Vaughn Moody and Francis Thompson. He contributed prefaces to various
volumes of standard authors. Excellent examples of this department
of his activity are his Introduction to Thomas Hardy’s “The Mayor of
Casterbridge” in the Modern Library, his introduction to the American
edition of the “Verses” of Hilaire Belloc, and the introduction to
the volume “Dreams and Images,” his anthology of Catholic poets. The
Introduction to this Anthology is dated 165th Regiment, Camp Mills,
Mineola, N. Y., August, 1917, just a year before Sergeant Kilmer’s
death in battle. Doubtless few know that at one time Kilmer had drawn
a contract to write a “Life” of Father Tabb. Because of peculiar
complications in the situation this enterprise, most unfortunately,
fell through. In 1916 Kilmer was called to the faculty of the School of
Journalism of New York University, in succession to Arthur Guiterman,
to lecture on “Magazine and Newspaper Verse.” The object of the course,
which was open to outsiders as well as to those enrolled in the School
of Journalism, was to familiarise the students with the practical side
of writing verse for publication.
VI
It seems rather a misnomer, and something of an absurdity, to say that
Kilmer was ever neutral in anything. But in the political sense he was
a neutral, and, if it may be put that way, neutral to a pronounced
degree, preceding the entrance of the United States into the war. His
keen feeling for the sturdy virtues and robust customs of Old England,
Merrie England, was of course, patent. His delight in London, and the
English countryside, which he knew from a child, was manifest. The
pillars of his fairly large literature were, of course, English. His
profound sense of integrity was violently jolted by the violation
of Belgium. As the war went on, however, he developed an attitude
which was quite capable of being interpreted as Pro-German, by anyone
interested in so interpreting it. The explanation of this attitude is
simple enough. Instinctively a combative character intellectually,
his humorous essays, which expressed him so intimately, almost without
exception found their spring in his running counter to some current
idea. As he one time remarked, he was “bored by feminism, futurism,
free love;” and, too, he was invariably for the under dog. It may seem
rather grotesque to present Germany by implication as an under dog in
the early years of the war; the point is, the force of the argument
was so overwhelmingly against Germany that Kilmer reacted to this in a
characteristic fashion, stood boldly against the current, and was, in
fact, a neutral--until the sinking of the Lusitania. All reports agree,
including even reports from sources of strong anti-English feeling
where Kilmer’s inclination to see what could be said for Germany was
coveted, that from this point on his manner was altogether hostile to
Germany. Outside of his Lusitania poem he did not, so far as I know,
denounce the deed; but the unanimity and the precision with which the
change in him is fixed by all who observed him is striking.
Kilmer’s successive literary passions were a curious medley. He seemed
to have been born with a great love for Scott, and he held stoutly to
Sir Walter throughout the years. In his burly days he found a humorous
sport in defending, with jovial emphasis, the old-fashioned chivalrous
romance against the scientific modern novel. In his æsthetic period he
had a touch, hardly more, of Oscar Wilde, though early in his literary
career he experienced a rather severe case of Swinburneitus. Some time
shortly after this he was very much intrigued by the Celtic revival.
Shaemas O’Sheel, a friend dating back to Columbia days, bears testimony
that an early boast of Kilmer’s was that an ancestor of his had been
hanged for taking a rebel’s part in ’ninety-eight. And though as we
know, Kilmer’s immediate ancestry was not Irish, a Gaelic enthusiast
who has made a specialty of the Irish language, suggests in his ardour,
that the name Kilmer is a derivation of Mac Gilla Mor. At any rate, an
affection for Ireland--her literature, her lore, her traditions, and
her people--was indeed natural with him.
In his Yeats period Kilmer had about chosen “Nine Bean Rows” as the
name of his house then in the course of construction, though it was
not altogether “of clay and wattles made.” The thing which deterred
him from this decision was that persons unacquainted with the poem
“Innisfree,” to whom he spoke of the matter, conceived his address as
Number Nine Beanrose Avenue. What a funny street, they said, that is.
Literary merely, of course, that; and though a part of the whole,
remote from later, deeper and graver things. Something inherently Irish
in Kilmer undoubtedly was felt by many, Irish themselves and very much
so, who, in some cases, are “quite certain” that the fact of their
being Irish was the reason why he regarded them and their work as
writers with friendship. He did, indeed, like all manner of Irish. He
liked the Irish fairies, he liked Lady Gregory, he liked most decidedly
the poor Irish people who went to the Catholic church, and (as he later
showed), of all soldiers, Irish soldiers he liked best.
Romantic Ireland is not old;
For years untold her youth will shine,
Her heart is fed on Heavenly bread,
The blood of martyrs is her wine.
Everything chivalrous and sacrificial appealing to his deepest
instincts, he felt noble “delight in hopes that were vain.” It is not
at all improbable that had he been an Irishman born and resident in
Ireland he would have been among the martyrs of Easter Week. In certain
qualities of his soul a kinship with these spirits may readily be
traced. Some of them, I have been told, he knew personally; and his
reverence for Plunkett he has written.
There is no rope can strangle song,
And not for long death takes his toll;
No prison bars can dim the stars,
Nor quicklime eat the living soul.
And all that Kilmer wrote, every line of it, he wrote in two ways; he
wrote it in words, and he wrote it in his acts. When the idea of the
Poets’ Meeting to express the sympathy of American poets with the three
Irish martyred poets of Easter Week, Pearse, MacDonough and Plunkett,
first occurred to Eleanor Rogers Cox, she asked Kilmer’s advice about
it over the telephone. And he said, “Go ahead, I’ll back you up,” with
the result that the meeting, a success, took place in Central Park,
with Edwin Markham presiding, Kilmer, Margaret Widdemer, Miss Cox,
Louis Untermeyer, and many other representative poets taking part.
When you say of the making of ballads and songs that it is a woman’s
work,
You forget all the fighting poets that have been in every land.
There was Byron, who left all his lady-loves, to fight against the Turk,
And David, the singing king of the Jews, who was born with a sword in his
hand.
It was yesterday that Rupert Brooke went out to the Wars and died,
And Sir Philip Sidney’s lyric voice was as sweet as his arm was strong;
And Sir Walter Raleigh met the axe as a lover meets his bride,
Because he carried in his soul the courage of his song.
Indeed, in the logical scheme of things (or, at any rate, in Joyce
Kilmer’s scheme of things) the poet is a soldier, an idealist with
the courage of his song; and, in a manner of speaking, all soldiers
are poets, whether or not they ever pen a line, for they give supreme
expression to the conviction of their soul. And then, as Christopher
Morley has finely written in his tribute to Kilmer, “the poet must go
where the greatest songs are singing.” To anyone who knew Kilmer it
would have been perfectly dumfounding if, when war was declared between
his country and Germany, he had _not_ done exactly as he did. It is
inconceivable--to picture him moving about here, from restaurant to
office, in this hour. Flatly, the thing can’t be done. With him, when
he joined the army, it was only one fight more, the best, and as it
proved, the last.
He hated many things, but I believe that of all things he hated most
a pacifist--a pacifist in anything. He was a fighter. He fought for
his home, stone by stone; he fought for his renown. His conception of
the church was the Church Militant. His thoughts dwelt continually on
warrior-saints. He believed in the nobility of war and the warrior’s
calling, so long as the cause was holy, or believed to be holy. As he
saw it, there was no question as to his duty. This I know, you might
as well have asked Niagara Falls why it pours over its ledge, as have
discussed with Kilmer the matter of his going to war. That was, in
its way, just such another force of nature. As to what might happen
to him, it is hardly necessary to remark that his faith told him that
that would be all right, too. John Bunker was among the last to bid him
farewell. There is the Kilmerian splendour in what he wrote:
You didn’t pose, self-conscious of your lot,
Or speak of what might be or might have been;
You always thought heroics simply rot,
And so you merely wore your old-time grin.
Kilmer had first joined the Officers’ Reserve Training corps. He soon
resigned from this. In less than three weeks after the United States
entered the war he enlisted as a private in the Seventh Regiment,
National Guard, New York. His own statement was: “I haven’t time for
Plattsburg: had too much work to finish, but I had to get in.” The
Regiment was mustered into the Federal Service on July 15, 1917; and
Kilmer expected to go to training camp somewhere in the South for a
couple of months, then to be sent to “France, or Russia, or Cuba, or
Mexico or somewhere else.” He had a great distaste for going to Russia,
because he disliked cold climates. He one time expressed a decided
aversion to a book commonly held to be quite good. When asked what
was the matter with it, he denounced it as being about “one of those
cold countries.” It would not, of course, have been Kilmer had he not
found elation in the distinguished and picturesque character of the
crack regiment to which he belonged. “We are the oldest outfit in the
Guard--Lafayette reviewed us in 1824 and Joffre two weeks ago.” If you
had not seen the dress uniform of “the Seventh” you heard all about it
at lunch. And “hard newspaper man” as he was, he became even “harder”
now. “Can’t hurt my feelings,” he wrote requesting a friend to be
quite frank with him. “Hard military character, seriously considering
acquisition of habit of chewing tobacco.”
Shortly before the Seventh left New York for Spartanburg, South
Carolina, Kilmer was transferred, at his own request, to the 165th
Infantry, U. S. A., formerly the famous old “Fighting Sixty-ninth,”
New York, a unit of the Rainbow Division, assembled at Camp Mills,
Mineola, Long Island. He was most particular to impress upon his
friends the point that he had been transferred at his own volition. I
do not know that he ever said so, in so many words, but I gathered from
him the impression that a considerable part of his motive in having
himself transferred was occasioned by his belief that the 165th would
go sooner than the Seventh to the battlefield. Then, too, as we know,
he was “half Irish”; and an Irish-American regiment doubtless was a
powerful magnet to him. In the 165th the people he liked best of all
were “the wild Irish boys who left Ireland a few years ago, some of
them to escape threatened conscription, and travelled about the country
in gangs, generally working on the railroads. They have delightful
songs that have never been written down, but sung in vagabonds’ camps
and country jails. I have got some of the songs down and hope to get
more--‘The Boston Burglar’--‘Sitting in My Cell All Alone’--they are a
fine, a veritable Irish-American folk-lore.”
Kilmer at this time was the father of four children, named
respectively Kenton Sinclair, Rose, Deborah Clanton and Michael Barry.
One day he appeared in my office on an errand of business relating
to the handling of his literary property. He was, in outward effect,
perfectly composed, an admirable picture of a young soldier. It was
then, in what followed, that he displayed the most extraordinary, the
most amazing, measure of spiritual stature that I ever observed in any
man or ever read of in any human book. Settled, with his customary air,
in my chair, he demanded some pipe tobacco. I had none. And for this
he heartily damned me out. Then he said: “Bob, my affairs are somewhat
in disarray.” Thinking that perhaps he wanted to borrow two dollars,
or something like that, I asked: “What’s the matter, Joyce?” “Well,”
he answered, quite in his ordinary way, “several days ago Rose died;
yesterday my son, Christopher, was born; Kenton is with my wife at her
mother’s; my family is, in fact, very much scattered; I’m expecting to
go to France within a few days--and I have many other difficulties.”
That was all he said as to this. He then talked excellent business. I
went to the elevator with him. We shook hands more quietly than usual;
he said, “Good-bye, Bob;” and the door of the car closed upon him,
standing erect in his military overcoat, looking somewhat serious.
That was all.
From Company H. Kilmer was transferred, within a short time, to
Headquarters Company, and exchanged his eight hours a day of violent
physical exercise (“most deadening to the brain, a useful anodyne for
one, coming as it did after my grief,” he wrote in an intimate letter)
for exacting but “interesting” statistical work. Though called Senior
Regimental Statistician he continued to rank as a private. His work
was under the direction of the Regimental Chaplain, Father Francis
Patrick Duffy. He was thankful, he wrote from Mineola in a letter at
this time, that he was not with the Seventh at Spartanburg, as from
Mineola he could telephone to his wife every night, and he said: “I’ll
be an accomplished cuss when I get back from the wars--I’ll know how to
typewrite and to serve Mass and to sing the ‘Boston Burglar.’”
VII
It was “the pleasantest war he had ever attended,” so he wrote back
from France. “Nice war, nice people, nice country, nice everything,”
he said on the back of a postcard. To the Reverend James J. Daly he
wrote, “When I next visit Campion, I’ll teach you (in addition to ‘The
Boston Burglar’) an admirable song called ‘Down in the Heart of the
Gas-House District.’ I sing it beautifully.” And “as a common soldier,
I have the privilege of intimacy with the French peasants--and I find
them edifyingly good Catholics.” But his pleasures in war he has told,
as none but the author of “Trees” and “Main Street” could tell them, in
his letters. What he never told must be read between the lines. When
the war was over, he said, he never wanted again to go far away from
Browne’s Chop House and Shanley’s Bar. Though it is firmly held in the
background, there is in all that he wrote from France, it seems to me,
a reflection that his life was, so to say, somewhat in disarray. And
clearly enough, though proudly, too, in the few poems that he sent back
he spoke his body’s pain:
Upon his will he binds a radiant chain,
For Freedom’s sake he is no longer free.
It is his task, the slave of liberty,
With his own blood to wipe away a stain.
That pain may cease, he yields his flesh to pain,
To banish war, he must a warrior be;
He dwells in Night, eternal Dawn to see,
And gladly dies, abundant life to gain.
And:
My shoulders ache beneath my pack
(Lie easier, Cross, upon His back).
I march with feet that burn and smart
(Tread, Holy feet, upon my heart).
Men shout at me who may not speak
(They scourged Thy back and smote Thy cheek).
I may not lift a hand to clear
My eyes of salty drops that sear.
(Then shall my fickle soul forget
Thy Agony of Bloody Sweat?)
My rifle hand is stiff and numb
(From Thy pierced palm red rivers come).
And in the closing lines of this poem certainly is given, as fully as
anything can be told in this world, the answer to the question, How did
the war most affect Joyce Kilmer?--
Lord, Thou didst suffer more for me
Than all the hosts of land and sea.
So let me render back again
This millionth of Thy gift. Amen.
Though he said, “I have very little chance to read contemporary poetry
out here,” he did read, as he says, “what do you suppose? The ‘Oxford
Book of English Verse.’” And he hoped that contemporary poetry was
reflecting the virtues which are blossoming on the blood-soaked
soil of this land--courage, and self-abnegation, and love, and
faith--this last not faith in some abstract goodness, but faith
which God Himself founded and still rules. France has turned
to her ancient faith with more passionate devotion than she
has shown for centuries. I believe that America is learning
the same lesson from war, and is cleansing herself of cynicism
and pessimism and materialism and the lust for novelty which
has hampered our national development. I hope that our poets
already see this tendency and rejoice in it--if they do not
they are unworthy of their craft.
“Just what effect the war would have had on Kilmer had he been spared
is of course an entirely elusive topic,” has said one very able and
on the whole most valuable commentator, speaking from the testimony
then in hand, and voicing, I fancy, an idea still rather general. It
is not now, I think, an elusive topic at all, but a matter as plain
as a pikestaff. And the matter is, by the way, the second of the two
most indispensable pages in Kilmer’s story. It is a page in which his
character underwent another metamorphosis as consequential in its
effect on his talent even, if that could be possible, as his conversion
to the Catholic faith.
Kilmer left the United States a professional writer from his
twenty-third year, and one of the most accomplished, prolific and
industrious journalists of his day. Writing with him had become a habit
almost as natural as speech. It was his intention when he left New York
to write a war book. He discussed this project with his publishers even
so definitely as to have settled upon a title: “Here and There With the
Fighting Sixty-Ninth.” As time passed it became puzzling why no “copy”
of any kind came from him. And as still more time passed this matter
assumed for me an element of more than considerable mystery. It was
incomprehensible because none of the reasons which would ordinarily
apply in such a situation explained Kilmer’s case to me. If it had
been anyone else I should have concluded that he was unable to find
time to write anything. But precisely the point about Kilmer was that
he did the impossible: it was quite his habit to, in the racy phrase,
“get away with” situations which would have floored anyone else. It
was to my mind an illogical hypothesis that he could be frustrated
by obstacles. And I felt that, inexplicable as it was for Kilmer to
fail in anything or to neglect any opportunity, he was here failing in
justice to his career. How was it in fact? As it had always been. He
was receiving the light opened to him. There could not be, I submit,
any more telling proof that he had genius, the capacity to become an
absolutely great writer, than this: that in this war which has prompted
more people to write, and has produced more “copy” than nearly all the
other events of history put together, he ceased altogether to be a
journalist of any kind; that is, even the instinct of the journalist
dropped from him, when he touched it.
He had had no thought, he says, of attempting to report the war:
“If I had, I’d have come over as a correspondent instead of as a
soldier.” All his days he had been trying to get closer and closer
to the heart of life. In the war his profound instinct for humanity
found fulfilment. Of his close comrades he writes: “Say a prayer for
them all, they’re brave men and good, and splendid company. Danger
shared together and hardships mutually borne develops in us a sort
of friendship I never knew in civilian life, a friendship clean of
jealousy and gossip and envy and suspicion--a fine, hearty, roaring,
mirthful sort of thing, like an open fire of whole pine-trees in a
giant’s castle.”
He was at present “a poet trying to be a soldier.” “To tell the truth,
I am not at all interested in writing nowadays, except in so far as
writing is the expression of something beautiful. And I see daily and
nightly the expression of beauty in action instead of words, and I find
it more satisfactory.”
“My days of hack writing are over, for a time at least.” Upon his
return to civilian life his civilian work “may be straight reporting.”
As for “that mob of war writers (thank God--let me pharisaically
say--that I am not one of them).” The book? “The only sort of book I
care to write about the war is the sort people will read after the war
is over--a century after it is over!”
Kilmer’s “Holy Ireland,” a sketch of a lodging for the night enjoyed by
a little group of Irish-American soldiers at a farmhouse in France, is
the only piece of prose writing of any extent at all that came from him
overseas. He himself wrote of it to his publishers: “I sent you a prose
sketch ‘Holy Ireland,’ which represents the best prose writing I can do
nowadays.” It is unmistakably a piece of literature, that is to say,
though slight enough in substance, a work of firm and exquisite and
enduring art.
In a letter to the Reverend Edward F. Garesché, S.J., one of the last
he wrote, the following paragraphs occur:
I have written very little--two prose sketches and two
poems--since I left the States, but I have a rich store of
memories. Not that what I write matters--I have discovered,
since some unforgettable experiences, that writing is not the
tremendously important thing I once considered it. You will
find me less a bookman when you next see me, and more, I hope,
a man.
And he ends with these words: “Pray for me, my dear Father, that I may
love God more and that I may be unceasingly conscious of Him--that is
the greatest desire I have.”
Though he gloried in being a private soldier, it is quite evident, too,
that he was charmed with his promotion. “I am now a sergeant,” appears
on the back of every copy of the well-known “tin-hat” post-card, and
in every letter near this date. In more than one intimate letter he
says: “I’ll never be anything higher. To get a commission I’d have to
go away for three months to school, and then whether or not I was made
an officer--I’d be sent to some outfit other than this, and I don’t
want to leave this crowd. I’d rather be a sergeant in the 69th than a
lieutenant in any other regiment in the world.” “A volunteer regiment,
the bravest and best regiment in the army.” “I have a new stripe--an
inverted chevron of bright gold on the left cuff for six months’
service ... let my children be proud of it.” And, “a long moustache I
have.”
For a while he had worked in the Adjutant’s Office, having special
charge of recording and reporting statistics. Then he was no longer
(“thank God!”) doing statistics. Someone over here had said that he
had “a bullet-proof job.” “I had one, but succeeded, after two months
intriguing, in getting rid of it.” “At that time I was just an office
hack--now I am a soldier, in the most fascinating branch of the service
there is--sheer romance, night and day--especially night.” He had
become attached to the Regimental Intelligence Section, working as
an observer--“very amusing work,” “wonderful life!”--“the finest job
in the army!” But “I don’t know what I’ll be able to do in civilian
life--unless I become a fireman!” “I am having a delightful time, but
it won’t break my heart for the war to end.”
“Rouge Bouquet” was his “first attempt at versification in a dug-out.”
He had lived in “billets, dug-outs, trenches, observatories and all
sorts of queer places.” And at length, he was “(after a most violent
and amusing month) resting (six hours out of every twenty-four!) in a
beautiful place, among the firs and pines on a lovely mountain top,
from which I can see strange things.” “I sleep on a couch made soft
with deftly laid young spruce boughs and eat at a table set under good,
kind trees.” And with that inimitable, irrepressible and incomparable
Kilmerian pleasure he contemplated what he called “my senility”: