contributed to the privately printed brochure, _W. B. in California_,
in which he was eulogized by the various members of the class, and
which was presented to him at a dinner on May 27, 1919. “The truest
teacher is the truest friend,” I began, didactically, “And you were
friend to us in thought and deed.” This was the truth as I saw it, even
if uninspired in utterance as a stone pavement. Others addressed him
in similar though perhaps more colorful tones, including the Chinese
poet Moon Kwan, who waxed figurative, and spoke of him as “a weaver of
the petal-speech.” But I believe, truly, that no teacher was ever more
beloved, for no teacher was ever less pedagogical or more human.
CHAPTER
SIX
Poetry by Prescription
When the Spring semester of 1919 had been followed by the fleeting
Summer Session, I remembered my interview with Edmond Coblentz of the
_Examiner_ and his invitation to see him again.
By way of equipment, I armed myself with a sequence of short poems
which I had been writing--at least, I may call them poems by courtesy,
though “satirical rhymes” would be a more appropriate designation. They
were all based on animals, birds, fishes, or insects: one, for example,
told of a “chimpanzee of science,” who expressed the belief that the
apes were descended from mankind, and provoked “sneers and jeers and
hoots” from his hearers, who did not wish to consider themselves the
offspring of brutes. Another, no less in a vein of mockery, described a
mole who had gained his eyesight, frolicked in the sun, and shouted to
his fellows to join him, since it was good to have one’s sight. However,
The other moles responded,
“Your theories are unsound.
There is no sun or moon, for none
Have seen them underground!”
The mole with eyesight therefore suffered the penalty for seeing too
well; was put in jail, tried, and hung.
I do not know if these particular two offerings were among those which
I showed to “Cobby” on that memorable second visit to the _Examiner_,
but I do know that he seemed impressed by the ones I did show him.
“You say you have others like these?” he asked, bending toward me
across his paper-strewn desk with an affable smile.
“About a hundred and fifty.”
His smile broadened. “Well, that’s a few too many for the present. But
if you want to pick out twenty or thirty of the best, I’ll take time to
look them over. When did you say you’re through college?”
“A week from Friday.”
“Well, step in here a week from Monday, at one o’clock, if you’d like
to start work with us. Your salary, to begin with, will be twenty a
week.”
I started to murmur my acceptance, my gratitude. But he had arisen; had
cut me short with a hasty gesture; and had turned to receive a gaunt,
bespectacled man, who, wearing a green eyeshade, and with a pencil
cocked across one ear at the angle of a badly listing vessel, entered
in rolled-up shirtsleeves and with suspenders showing from beneath his
open vest, and waved a paper at “Cobby” as excitedly as one who has
just discovered that the city is afire.
During the next week or two, I spent all my spare time selecting about
thirty of my too-numerous animal satires; resisting the temptations
of the tennis courts during the daylight-saving hours of the long
summer evenings, I sat studiously typing out the chosen pieces. These
I brought to “Cobby” when I began my new duties; and he took them with
a noncommital grunt, but perhaps not with entire dissatisfaction, for
during the next several months fifteen of them were to appear in the
paper, with illustrations and a display two or three columns wide,
beneath the caption--which I had no part of choosing--“Think it over!”
At this point, coincidence appeared very long-armed indeed. Many
readers of the paper, on seeing these verses, chose to regard “Stanton
A. Coblentz” not as a real person, but as a synthetic individual,
formed by the collaboration of Managing Editor Edmond Coblentz with the
publisher, whose surname happened to be “Stanton”--as for the “A.,” it
was neatly accounted for as representing the “and” which linked the two.
Meanwhile, at regular intervals, the paper was printing other verses
under the same confusing byline. I say “verses,” for though they
looked like poems, it would be an unjustified exaggeration to call
them that. As the clippings have long ago slipped into limbo, I can
offer no documentary proof; and I can hardly think my obsolete doggerel
would justify the labors of research required by a search of the old
newspaper files. Perhaps, under the circumstances, I came as near to
writing poems as most persons could have done; but the circumstances
were not exactly propitious.
“Coblentz,” City Editor Hines would bawl, glaring at me where I sat in
the City Room five or six rows of typewriters away, “here’s an item
for you!” Knowing that haste was of the essence of discretion, I would
hurry to Hines’ desk. And he would point to something in the day’s
news--perhaps a sentimental note about a memorial to some war mothers,
or perhaps a report in lighter vein, that a burglar alarm had been
rung, and the police, upon arriving breathlessly, had found the culprit
to be a stray dog who had wandered in through an open rear door. “Write
me a poem on this, Coblentz!” he would prescribe, somewhat as he might
say to a carpenter, “Build me a work-bench!”, or to a cook, “Make me
some hash!” Not for a moment did he seem to doubt that the prescription
would be filled.
And in all cases, the prescription _was_ filled, though I am not
saying how well. Rhyme and meter were, assuredly, supplied; and I
tried as well as I could to turn on the required sentiments, whether
of awe or pity, applause or comedy. Under any circumstances, this
would have been difficult if not impossible, at a moment’s notice,
and with the finished product demanded the same afternoon; but in the
frantic atmosphere of a newspaper office, to the accompaniment of
clicking typewriter keys, shouts and calls and laughter, shuffling of
hasty feet, telephone bells and fire alarms, it demanded a feat of
concentration which, I fear, I would be unable to duplicate now.
Even in those budding days, despite the pleasure I took in my frequent
appearances in print, I perceived the dangers of my position--a
position in which my occasional reporting duties were subordinate to my
specialty of writing verses on demand. I was not ungrateful for my job;
I realized that I had, in fact, a privileged position, for how many
youths just out of college are given an opportunity to make a living
by weaving rhymes together? Nevertheless, this verse-writing to order,
if long continued, could be deadening, stultifying; one might become
little more than a poetic hack, a rhyme-machine.
At about this time, I was receiving other encouragements--slight ones,
but enough to give me a real spur and stimulus. At last, after the
many rejections, various poems had been accepted by different media:
two by _Sunset_, then a general magazine; one or two more by the New
York _Times_; and several by _Judge_ and _Life_, both of them leading
national magazines of humor (the latter unrelated to the present
periodical of the same name). Also, an article on poetry had been taken
by the university quarterly, _The Texas Review_ (now long defunct), and
the new-born magazine _True Stories_ had sent me a check for one of my
narratives. With these and one or two other marks of favor from the
editorial gods, I began thinking of wider fields.
But perhaps I was becoming too confident. I had not yet learned that
most permanence is in appearance only; I did not foresee that my
position with the _Examiner_, if I desired, might not be forever. A
raise in salary to a princely twenty-five a week had assured me that my
employers were not dissatisfied with my performance; and it may be that
except for something quite extraneous--a by-product of the late war,
in the nature of a paper shortage, which cut down the space available
for newspaper features--I could have continued turning out custom-made
poems for the _Examiner_ as long as I chose, which surely would not
have been forever.
In any case, the serenity of one blue day was shattered by an
unexpected blow. An innocent-looking little note informed me that my
continued services were not required.
“Ah well,” I philosophized, “I suppose one goes through life as on a
long stairway, first up two steps, then down one, or maybe even two or
three. Now I’ll have to set about to climb again.”
My situation was far from desperate: I had saved a little money, and
was still making a little from the book reviews which I continued to
contribute to the _Argonaut_, at a gratifying five dollars a column.
The question now was to find another job, at least temporarily. For
some weeks I had a position on the _Call_, as editor in a limerick
contest, until my eyes gave out beneath the reading of thousands of
daily submissions--I mean, literally, thousands!--and I had no choice
except to resign. I have sometimes thought that, except for the state
of my eyes, this would have led to a permanent connection; but perhaps
it is well that it did not, for this might have held out attractions
that would have trapped me in San Francisco, when the route of destiny
lay elsewhere.
But in San Francisco or its vicinity I must remain until I could see
my path more clearly. And since the literary opportunities there were
strictly limited, it is not surprising that my footsteps led me to the
doors of that once-popular but now decrepit magazine, _The Overland
Monthly_, which had boasted the work of Bret Harte, Jack London, Mark
Twain, and many another notable, and which continued publication as
if by force of habit, though now little more than the ghost of its
old-time self.
The office of the _Overland_, significantly, was located in a back
street half blocked with great drays and trucks, and much less redolent
of the odor of printers’ ink than of brewing and manufacturing. And
there I had a successful interview with the editor, a portly Irishman
whom I may call Finnegan, a man of sixty-seven or sixty-eight, with a
round bespectacled face that was perpetually red. There was something I
immediately liked about him, though his slouching ungainly figure, with
the frayed collar and soiled shirt, did not conform to my notions of
how an eminent editor should look.
I began, tentatively, by showing him a poem--or rather, a rhymed satire
on a political theme. And he liked it well enough to accept it on
the spot--which surprised me less when I came to know more about the
magazine, and learned how little in the way of worthwhile material
it ordinarily received. What was most astonishing was that Finnegan
eventually let me have five dollars for the poem.
After this encouraging start, I went on to divulge my principal reason
for visiting him.
“Oh, so it’s work you’re looking for, is it?” he demanded, running a
set of gnarled stubby fingers through the scanty remnants of his gray
hair. “Well, young man, there’s lots better places to look than here.
Why don’t you go somewhere where they pay wages?”
“Don’t you pay wages?”
His owlish, inflamed eyes looked out at me half seriously, half
humorously from their sunken sockets.
“Pay wages, young man? Now you’re expecting too much. Do you think I’d
be staying here myself if I could get a job anywhere else?”
“But you’re the editor!”
“Sure I’m the editor! Also, managing editor, assistant editor, chief
make-up man, manuscript reader, proofreader, stenographer, and office
boy. I don’t have one job, young man. I have a dozen.”
“In that case,” I contended, seeing my opportunity, “you need someone
to take part of the burden off your shoulders.”
He fumbled unconsciously at his left shoulder, where there was a
conspicuous rip in his coat.
“Right you are, young man! I could use half a dozen to take the burden
off my shoulders. There’s only one trouble. People in this town don’t
like working without wages.”
“Surely, you could pay something.”
“Our something would be almost nothing.”
“How much, for example?”
His eyes wrinkled together and narrowed, and he stared at me in
silence, as if debating with himself. Several seconds passed ...
then, with an air of a man proposing the magnificent, he announced,
“Well, all we could afford would be afternoons only, at two dollars a
half-day.”
“Two dollars? But you couldn’t expect a man to live on that!”
“Just what I’m telling you,” he agreed, turning back to the huge shears
and pastepot on his untidy, paper-strewn desk. “I’d advise you not to
take it.”
“Maybe it’s good advice, but I don’t intend to follow it,” I decided,
with a smile.
And thus I made my connection with the _Overland_, and simultaneously
with the _News Letter_, a local weekly published under the same
management, and for which I served as dramatic critic, copy reader, and
general office hand.
In part my tasks were connected with poetry, since in my capacity as
chief manuscript reader I had the duty of picking any acceptable verses
as well as acceptable stories, and of writing to inform the lucky
contributor that he would have a free two-year subscription to the
_Overland_ (payment of cash, as in the case of my rhymed satire, was an
extravagance not repeated so long as I remained with the magazine).
Before I had been in my new post a month, Mr. Finnegan inaugurated
a poetry contest. Readers of the _Overland_ were to send in their
favorite poetic quotations, not exceeding four lines each; cash prizes
were to be given for the five best submissions, and free subscriptions
were to be awarded for the twenty-five runners-up. There were to be
three judges: two designated writers of local reputation, and the
assistant editor--namely, myself. However, as things worked out, all
the labors of selection fell upon the assistant editor, the two local
celebrities being congenial souls, willing to utter a loud approving
“YES!” in return for the honor of some free publicity.
My problem was, to say the least, peculiar. It is hard enough to
decide among the submissions of unknown contributors: but here I was,
obliged to say which was the best from among selections by Shakespeare,
Milton, Dryden, Pope, Wordsworth, Landor, Keats, Browning, and other
outstanding poets. Should first prize go to Shelley or to Byron? Should
Tennyson come out third, or only fifth? Should Burns be placed above
Coleridge, or Blake above Emily Dickinson? Questions like these, of
course, would defy the judgment of any critic, and certainly would not
be answered alike by any two readers. But I unblushingly had to give
_the_ correct answer.
At last, however, after much brain-racking and sifting and weighing and
comparing, I showed Finnegan my choices for the five winners of cash
prizes.
He glanced over them, and groaned. His heavy puffy form sagged forward
at his desk in discouragement.
“My God, Cob,” he complained, “this is awful!”
“Awful? What’s awful?” I protested, prepared to defend my choices.
“Aren’t the quotations good enough?”
“Good enough, be damned!” he snorted, shoving the papers at me in
disgust. “Look at these winners, will you! Just look at them! Four from
California, and the fifth from Arizona!”
“That’s natural enough,” I reminded him, “considering that ninety-nine
per cent of our subscribers are westerners.”
“Hell, but do we have to let that be known?” he growled back. “We claim
a national circulation, don’t we? How the deuce we going to make good
that claim if we award all the prizes to Californians? Here, let’s see
those poetry contributions!”
For the next twenty minutes, Finnegan was busy exploring the piles
of manuscripts. Finally he looked up, his big round face beaming his
triumph, and thrust five papers toward me. “There--that’ll do it!”
I glanced hastily over five contributions of indifferent quality, and
saw that only one was from California. The others came from Wyoming,
Texas, New York, and Wisconsin.
For a few months I remained with the _Overland_, and doubtless could
have stayed as long as the tottering old magazine retained the breath
of life, which was not to be very long. But my two dollars a day, even
with the addition of various stray earnings, were barely enough to
keep me alive in the style to which I was accustomed (which required
a monthly expenditure of all of sixty or sixty-five dollars). Here, I
saw more clearly than ever, there was no future. And so once again my
thoughts ranged to wider horizons.
“Go East, young man!” was the injunction whispered into my ears by
my hopes and ambitions; and the East, of course, meant New York,
that Rome to which all literary aspirants sooner or later make their
pilgrimage of reverence. By degrees my plans took shape; and on one
never-to-be-forgotten day of September, 1920, I bade a heart-wrenching
farewell to my father and to the younger brother who stood beside
him at the railroad station in Stockton. I shall never forget how my
father’s words clutched at me as I saw him approach the porter, slip a
crumbled bit of paper into his hand, and mumble, brokenly, “Take good
care of the boy, Sam. Take good care of the boy.”
Then, safeguarded by a round-trip ticket, I had boarded the train that
was to bear me toward new poetic and personal adventures.
CHAPTER
SEVEN
A Mote in the Metropolis
The city to which I was winging my way was not on the surface a poetic
one. Among its long, traffic-clogged defiles, its endless miles of
five- and six-story residential buildings, its fabulous skyscrapers,
and its slums laden with pushcarts, evil odors, and dangling washing,
there was indeed picturesqueness and interest; but the tints were
mostly the drab and gray of prose. Here indeed, as time went by, I was
to find the subject-matter of poetry, which may bloom in the small
weed struggling to life beside a cobblestone quite as much as in the
free-blowing flowers of the fields. But here in the beginning my verses
reflected the solitude of the lonely wanderer among the swarm rather
than the enthusiasm of the visitor stirred by the physical or human
panoramas of the metropolis. I would write nostalgically of friends
and loved ones in the West, in lines which show less distinction of
utterance than poignancy of feeling:
Oh, that there gleamed some searchlight of the soul
To let us view the cherished far away,
And intimately follow, day by day,
Loved ones that dwell where alien oceans roll.
The need for personal friendship was expressed in another sonnet of
about this time:
Oh, why do friends, like meteors of the dark,
Gleam to the sight, then go some hidden way?
Like lingering music cheer us for a day,
Then vanish swiftly as a chance remark?
These pieces, and others like them, including poems on more general
themes--to none of which I would now grant the nod of critical
approval--I find written out in a crumbling old notebook, some with
notations showing that they had been printed in papers such as the New
York _Sun_ and _Herald_ (then not yet absorbed by the _Tribune_). But
they are numerous enough to prove that, in the lonely room which I
occupied--first, the gas-lit cubbyhole on the top floor of an ancient
brownstone building on West Eighty-Fourth Street, and later the more
modern quarters not a block from the little Fordham park containing
Poe’s famous cottage--I had by no means forgotten my Muse. And this
despite the dire necessity to earn my way if I wished to remain in New
York.
I had set out blithely enough to conquer the great city, my pockets
bristling with ammunition in the shape of letters of introduction
from friends in the West. But I was soon to learn that most of my
high-powered shells were really duds. This I began to suspect after
my first interview, with a Nassau Street lawyer whom I will give the
name of Frederick Horton--a man said to have extensive connections in
Manhattan.
Mr. Horton received me courteously in a room lined with great
leather-bound tomes, and glanced at me amiably through his horn-rimmed
spectacles across the polished width of his great oaken desk.
“Ah, Mr. Coblentz!... But you’ll let me call you Stanton? Glad you
stepped in! George wrote me you were coming. I’ve a number of things to
talk to you about.”
I would hardly have been human if I had not felt a flash of hope at
this cordial, not to say chummy reception. Doubtless Mr. Horton, with
his wide associations, knew of some literary openings.
The lawyer’s ferret eyes narrowed in a face seamed with the wisdom of
fifty winters; all the amiability had been drained from them while he
surveyed me appraisingly, as if I were a client approaching him with a
questionable case.
His swivel chair creaked as he swung slightly to one side, and,
thrusting his bullet-head toward me, threw his questions like a
cross-examiner.
“So, Stanton! You’re out to earn your way in the big city?”
“That’s right,” I acknowledged, with the sinking feeling of one
entering a plea of guilty.
“You want to be a writer--a poet?”
“Guess your brother George has told you all about that?” I countered,
thinking a direct answer unnecessary.
“Yes, indeed.”
He sat inspecting me solemnly, and unconsciously shook his head, in the
way of one who says, “Too bad! Too bad!”
“Of course,” he went on, slowly, picking his words with difficulty,
“you understand that the writing game isn’t exactly as easy as falling
downstairs. Still, I wonder--do you realize how very hard it is?”
I sat staring at him gravely.
“You’re tackling something so tough that one hundred thousand persons
in New York are starving at it,” he went on in warning tones, drawing
his features together darkly. “It’s darned lucky you came to me,
Stanton; I can give you more pointers than most fellows. You see I’ve
known so many good writers who went under. There was Bill Arlington--if
I had more time, I’d tell you about poor Bill. Then there was Joe
McBride--poor devil, met him in the Village just the other day--looked
like he needed the loan of a dime. And Jim Callender--well, a million
dollars wouldn’t help him where he is now, and I always say it’s a
merciful release. There are others, too, lots of them.”
By this time I felt as if a leaden bar were pressing down upon my head.
“You see, Stanton,” Horton finished, puffing out his chest like
a _paterfamilias_ who has done his painful duty by the younger
generation, “I believe in being frank. Better for you that way in the
long run. Why not pick some graft where the pace isn’t quite so hard?
I’d suggest--”
I thanked him, and rose to leave.
“Just one point more,” he added, as he escorted me warmly, almost
affectionately toward the door, “I have a friend, Dick Grosset, who
used to be a writer himself, before he found he had to make a living
and turned to real estate. He’s with Dunstall, Grosset, and Brown--a
million-dollar firm. Knows a lot more than I do about the literary
humbug. Suppose we all have lunch together some day?”
Without waiting for my acquiescence, which he took for granted, Horton
went on to request, “Here, give the girl over there your address! I’ll
let you know just as soon as I’ve been in touch with Dick.”
But that was the last I ever heard from Horton.
My enthusiasm was just a little subdued as I went to visit the next man
on my list.
My second letter of introduction was to a prominent preacher, who was
courtesy personified, and promptly sat down and wrote two further
letters of introduction. One of these was to the editor of a literary
monthly, with which I had hopes of a connection; but all that this
great man could do was to dictate still another letter of introduction,
to a friend who volunteered to send me yet further on my travels with
an additional letter of introduction.
By this time I was feeling just a little like a rat in a treadmill.
“The best way,” I decided, “is to make the introductions myself.”
And so, armed with no passport but my own resolution--or, if you wish
to call it that, my own effrontery--I began visiting the editors of my
choice. In the beginning I found reason to fear that Mr. Horton might
be only too correct in his gloomy prognosis: from office to office I
took my way, seeking an opening in an editorial staff; and openings in
editorial staffs appeared about as easy to find as free passageways
into armored cars. At every office they were “completely staffed”; but
at every office they were obligingly willing to take down my name and
address, just in case.... However, this did not delude me.