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