feeling sonnets dealing with remembrances of his native village in
Russia. These, I knew, were an acquisition for the anthology; and here,
I also knew, was a poet of unusual promise--promise, unhappily, not
to be fulfilled. For Morris chose to follow other roads than those of
poetry--roads leading toward ruin and disgrace. What was the flaw, the
weak link, the fatal trap within the personality of this intelligent
and capable man? That his thoughts should turn toward publishing was
not unnatural, in view of his bookish interests--but why, of all fields
of publishing, should he choose pornography as his particular area? In
his appearance, and in his conversations, he gave no suggestion of any
perverse tendencies--was it then that he was looking for an especially
lucrative source of income? I only know that he underwent successive
trials, convictions, and prison sentences, while perhaps the force of
circumstances or his own fierce and defiant nature forbade him to turn
to other channels--a good life and an able intellect largely lost, and
one more poet cast into the abyss.
Another memorable verse-writer, whom I never knew well but cannot
forget, was Anton Romatka--a man whose death some years ago was the
subject of wide newspaper publicity, not because his poetry was
notable, but because the facts of his life were extraordinary.
He was a man certain to impress you on sight: like a picture straight
out of a Victorian album, with his small figure, his round ruddy face,
his gold-rimmed spectacles over watery eyes, his blond side-whiskers
and long, drooping blond mustache, his small bow-tie, and high stiff
celluloid collar that gave a sort of European rigidity and formality
to his appearance. Romatka was a man who took poetry seriously--would
that there were more of his kind! Though his own offerings may have
been nothing to boast of, he did a real service for poets by the forum
which he provided for them in a hall on Fourteenth Street, somewhere
near Third Avenue. I can still see him, as he gravely, even ponderously
officiated, introducing the various poets in an English that perhaps
left something to be desired, but with a zeal in which nothing was
lacking: he was that rare poet who was less interested in reading his
own work than in providing means for others to read theirs. I can
recall various meetings, perhaps not greatly attended, but pervaded by
that spirit, that enthusiasm which is more important than numbers; he
made it possible for many different groups to be represented, as on the
occasion when Henry Hazlitt (then literary editor of the _Sun_, but
later known as a writer on economics) appeared in order to introduce
some of the _Sun’s_ local poets.
Alas, I fear that Romatka, though a good saint of poetry, was not
always appreciated. I know that he was a bit discouraged, as I was, on
that Sunday afternoon when he had asked me to appear at a Third Avenue
location to address a poetry group, and I found an audience of three in
addition to Romatka and myself. That was the last I ever saw of him;
but I know that he, with little or no means and handicapped by his
foreign appearance, speech, and mannerisms, did more in his humble way
for poetry than could be claimed by most of those who laughed slyly at
his oddities.
A man whom I knew far better, over a longer term of years, is likewise
a definite and memorable individual. In this case, for fear of
embarrassing him, I will not give the actual name, but will christen
him Jim Maynor. I first met him in the early twenties, and I knew from
the beginning that he was a real poet--though one whose production was
exceedingly scanty, and who would give more time to polishing a phrase
than other poets will take in completing a sonnet. At the time of our
first meeting, he had published a brochure of poems, one copy of which
he proudly presented to me--only to request its return sometime later
when, being engaged, he found that he had no copy to inscribe to his
fair one. His engagement, incidentally, had come about in true romantic
fashion: he had met the young lady in the lamp factory in which they
were both employed (he for a period of weeks only); and being treated
to a harrowing tale of how she was about to be locked out of the house
by a cruel stepfather named (believe it or not!) Proudfit, he rushed to
the rescue of her imperilled innocence, and promptly wooed and married
her, though neither of them had a penny put aside for bread or rent.
Jim Maynor, as you will divine from the above, was not one who cared
too much for the ways of this grubbing, mundane world. Not that he had
not tried often enough to conform with the dull laws of society, but
that something in his own nature forbade him to continue in any of a
long succession of jobs as librarian, postal carrier, book salesman,
department store clerk, caretaker in a city park, choir singer in a
church, and other occupations more numerous than I can recall. Finally,
during the depression days of the thirties, he found his vocation. At
least, he will swear to you that it _is_ his vocation; and, certainly,
it has given him greater contentment than any conventional job. More
than once, walking on the streets of New York, I have heard a strong
tenor voice wafted across a distance; and drawn toward the source of
the sound, I have seen Jim on a street or in the court of an apartment
house, an unsought minstrel bowing as he collected the pennies, dimes,
or quarters thrown him by passers-by or from windows above. On one
occasion, in a subway train, I heard that same voice; listened to the
strains of a sentimental song strangely competing with the crashing
tumult of the cars; and saw Jim approaching, raggedly dressed, and
smiling at me out of his thin, slightly worn, not unintelligent face.
In the eyes of the unappreciative world, this may seem like begging,
but not to Jim, who insists that he repays the people in pleasure for
every cent they throw to him--he is like one of the roving troubadours
of old, though born, unfortunately, a few hundred years too late.
The ways of the modern world, to be sure, are hard; the returns of
itinerant singing have not sufficed to cover the expenses of an
apartment in the Bronx, plus a wife and two children; and Jim has
had to supplement his income by occasional night-club singing and
by his wife’s wages from a downtown department store. But somehow
he has managed to exist. When I last saw him, a year or two ago, he
was browned from his outdoor activities; and looked well and happy.
Meanwhile he continues to write a rare poem, and never one without
quality.
A poet of a more volatile disposition, whom I knew even before my
first acquaintance with Maynor, became my friend owing to a letter
of introduction given me by a man I was never to see again, to a
woman I was to see but once. During my lonely first autumn in New
York, I did not refuse any chances for possible human contacts; one
Sunday afternoon found me in Brooklyn, at the home of the middle-aged
Sophie, whom a certain Jackson in California had insisted that I must
know. At Sophie’s apartment I met her much younger sister Bertha, a
quick-witted, dark-eyed, vivacious girl who might have passed for an
Italian, though she was actually a Russian Jewess; and there also I
met the tall, straight-limbed, flaming-eyed youth who, two or three
years later, was to become Bertha’s husband: Ignace M. Ingianni--the
“Ignace” being a mere decoration so far as I was concerned, for, like
all our mutual acquaintances, I never called him by any other name than
“Johnnie.” The son of an immigrant family, he had come to New York in
early childhood; and he showed all the volcanic fire of his Sicilian
origin. Despite our common poetic interests, he met me with prejudice,
I should almost say passionate antagonism; he had recently read one of
my poems in a Sunday paper, and had (doubtless justifiably) conceived
an intense dislike of it. Having disapproved of the poem, he likewise
disapproved of its author, even before seeing him; and his hostility
found expression in a roof-shaking argument, though not on poetry--no,
on warfare, whose advantages Johnnie defended in a tumult of words that
was almost like private warfare; while I, who have never been able to
see the militaristic point of view, answered him blow for blow during
a long, overheated debate. And what was the result? That we went our
way in mutual disgust, and saw no more of each other? Or that we became
lifelong enemies? On the contrary, the result was that we went our way
in mutual pleasure, and became lifelong friends.
Johnnie was, at the time I met him, a writer of free verse; my analysis
of his work, which I did not keep from him, was that it contained the
raw material of poetry but not the finished fabric. He would be able,
I suggested, to write good rhymed lyrics--and this proved to be the
case, as was shown by his subsequent poems that appeared in various
magazines, and in the volume _Songs of Earth_. Johnnie, who had passed
the bar examination but never practiced law, and earned his living
in the unlikely-seeming occupation of title examiner for the City of
New York, sometimes discussed with me the possibility of our joint
launching of a poetry magazine; but we never advanced further than
to decide on a title, _Flame_. When I actually did become the editor
and proprietor of a magazine, it was not known as _Flame_ (a title,
incidentally, later used by another poetry journal); and Johnnie was
not concerned with the enterprise except as an interested bystander and
occasional contributor.
But he himself was eventually to start his own magazine, and therein
rests an irony. Years later, after I had left New York and he had
come under new influences, he returned to the _vers libre_ of his
earlier days, but went beyond the freedoms of his earlier days, and
embraced that very extremism which I have always battled against. And
he launched the _avant-garde_ magazine, _Symbolica_, a mimeographed
periodical of irregular publication, to which he gives himself
devotedly, and for which he serves as typist and mimeographer no
less than as editor. Since therefore we are poetically at opposite
extremes--as far apart, let us say, as an atheist and a fundamentalist,
though I do not mean to compare us to either--what has happened to
our friendship? Nothing at all. I still see Johnnie from time to time
(for he has retired from his services to New York City, and moved
to California), and we still hold discussions with reminders of the
old-time fervor; but poetry is not among our topics of debate.
Whereas Johnnie has moved westward, another poet, whom I met in the
west, has since gone east. Our meeting was, I think, one of the
strangest and grimmest that ever paved the way for a friendship. During
the summer of 1930, Flora and I had come to California for our annual
vacation; and remembering the redwood forests and the far-looking hills
of Mill Valley, among which I had occasionally hiked while a youth at
college, I suggested that we rent a cottage there for a month. Flora,
little suspecting that she was to fall so deeply in love with the
environment as to wish to live there all the rest of her life, seemed
to think that two weeks would suffice; nevertheless, we did pass a
month, which seemed all too short, in two furnished rooms in the upper
story of a reconverted old church, from which we had a gratifying
view across a tree-clad range. Toward the end of our stay, we spent
a pleasant day with Anne Heller and another young woman, friends of
a New York friend of Flora’s, who were passing by on a hitch-hiking
expedition; and I remember how gay and carefree we were on the long
walk to Muir Woods via the green windings of the Pipe Line Trail, then
undesecrated by the demands of that modern devourer, the automobile. We
bade the travelers a hearty good-bye, little forseeing the sequel.
Two mornings later, as I picked up a San Francisco paper at a
newsstand, I was startled by the headlines: “HITCH-HIKER KILLED.” With
a shock, I glanced at the bold letters staring from the top of the
first page, and was almost felled to read--the name of Anne Heller.
That very evening, Anne was to reach out to us as if from beyond the
grave. I had gone to look for mail at the post office, when Flora heard
a rapping at the door, and opened to see two immaculately dressed
strangers: one a slender, tall, conspicuously handsome youth of about
twenty-seven; the other a short, dark-complexioned man in his forties,
severe and dignified of aspect, and with a European formality of manner.
Having made sure that they had come to the right door, the younger man
held forth an envelope. “Here,” he said, “is a letter of introduction
from Anne Heller.”
Flora gasped. “But don’t you know,” she blurted out, “don’t you know
Anne Heller is no longer here?”
The men gaped at her, speechless. Their eyes narrowed; tears trickled
down; they seemed ready to weep as Flora told the dread tidings in the
morning’s paper.
The letter from Anne--probably the last she ever wrote--had been given
to the younger man after a chance meeting with him the day before, the
very day that was to see her stretched bleeding and lifeless beneath
the wheels of a speeding automobile on a northern California highway.
Reeling, the men left with a few mumbled words, but not before
promising to get into further touch with us. This promise they kept;
and thus began a close friendship with them both, a friendship cemented
all the more firmly because of the sorrowful circumstances surrounding
its inception. The older man, the Portuguese Vice-Consul and for long
periods Acting Consul at San Francisco, bore the formidable name of
Guillermo de Amaral, but we got around the difficulty by simply calling
him “Bill”; the younger man, at that time an assistant at the Consulate
though he had no Portuguese blood, was Douglas V. Kane, who was truly
the poet that he looked, a sensitive being whose beauty-loving poems
have deservedly appeared in many magazines, and whom we have ever since
numbered among our dearest friends. Strange, strange that we should
have been brought together by Anne Heller, whom neither of us knew very
well, and who so suddenly and tragically departed from this earth so
many years ago.
Tragedy is also connected with another poet, whom I knew under totally
different circumstances. Not long ago a letter from Mary, the wife
of LeGarde S. Doughty, saddened us with the news of the death of her
husband--shot by his own hand. Perhaps it was only fitting that this
man, who lived turbulently, amid struggle and difficulty, should have
died violently. Across more than twenty years, a picture comes back
to me of a forceful, intelligent face, already deeply crisscrossed
and corrugated by life though the man could not have been beyond his
early forties. I see him in the only environment that somehow seems
appropriate: the pines of the Georgia hill-lands rising all about him
on soil too badly exhausted to bear any other crop; the red slash of
a road, which he told me was the celebrated “Tobacco Road,” rambling
among wild jasmine and honeysuckle and past houses that were mostly
mere unpainted shanties.
It was _Wings_ that brought me into contact with LeGarde, as with many
another able poet. During the early days of the magazine, I noticed the
strikingly original poems sent me under his name, and a correspondence
between us arose. At that time he was literary editor of the Augusta
_Chronicle_ (a post he subsequently lost owing to his free expression
of published opinion). Sometime in 1937 he first invited Flora and me
to visit Mary and himself in their home a few miles out of Augusta; and
in April, 1938, we were finally induced to accept. Neither of us will
ever forget those two days spent with them amid the pine-woods, in a
four-room cottage that lacked every modern invention from running water
to electricity, but that glowed and bubbled with laughter, good cheer,
and good talk, while we and LeGarde and Mary and their hospitable
southern friends and neighbors lingered over our coffee until the early
morning hours, poems were read, and heated discussions held. LeGarde,
a lover of nature, showed me with pride a young redwood and an acacia
which I had sent him from California, and which had taken root in the
southern soil; and as we rambled together past a beggarly field of
undernourished wheat or out along the rutted road, he took as much joy
in the red earth of his pine-lands as if they had represented Eden
itself.
But how did he manage to subsist in that infertile territory? I never
knew for certain. I do recall his delight, at the very hour of our
departure, when a letter from a mid-western magazine contained a check
for $75 for a story just accepted; and I know that he published other
stories and one novel. But could he support himself on the slim reed
of literature? I am afraid that he could not; and I suspect that the
many rebuffs he received, along with the never-healing wound from the
loss of a dearly beloved son in an air accident in World War II, lay
in the background of his tragic end. His one published book of poetry,
a slim collection of quatrains issued in 1934, bears the suggestive
title, _With Lips of Rue_--a title expressive not only of the man’s
work but of the man himself. Yet I have always believed that here was
one who, had life been a little less difficult and fortune a bit more
beneficent, might have been among the luminaries of American poetry if
not of American prose.
Now and then, while making new poetic friends, I was being reintroduced
to old. I recall an occasion in the early thirties when some members
of Hal Bynner’s one-time poetry class held a reunion with Hal in an
old farmhouse at Nyack, where we all stayed overnight. This event,
perversely, stands out in my memory not so much because of the
reestablishment of old bonds as for a certain ride which I would not
re-enact for the joy of all the reunions on earth. Now that I look back
upon it, it seems almost incredible, and I know that it might have been
disastrous--but great are the risks and trials that one will undergo in
the name of poetry, particularly when one is young and not too wary!
It was a cold evening in early February, and the snow lay on the
ground. At an appointed time after dinner, Flora and I went to an
address on Forty-Second Street, where we met two other guests, who were
to drive us to Nyack. So far, so good! and having the inconvenient
habit of being on time, we arrived at the agreed hour, and were
rewarded with a long wait before the journey began. We were, I must
admit, just a little taken aback when we saw the intended means of
transportation! a broken-down old two-seated automobile, repainted a
chilly aluminum, and completely open and exposed in the rear. Had we
known then what we knew an hour or two later, one or both of us would
instantly have developed chills, or pains in the stomach, or some other
appropriate indisposition. But no! two complaisant if somewhat dubious
people took their assigned back seats in the automobile.
The beginnings of the trip, before we had reached the New Jersey side
of the Hudson, are drowned out of memory by what happened after we had
crossed the river and began following the curves of the road along the
ridge of the Palisades. We had never before had the faintest idea how
cold a February night could be. It may be that the temperature was
not many degrees below freezing, but I would have sworn that sixty
below zero could not have seemed colder as the unimpeded north winds,
edged like the shivery blades of knives and amplified in effect by the
speed of the car, swept over us from across the wide dark vacancies
of the river. Flora and I shrank down as low as possible, trying to
sink into our seats, so as to lessen the cutting power of the gale;
we huddled together, beat each other on the back so as to bring back
some semblance of warmth. Though dressed in our heaviest--Flora in a
thick brown beaver-cloth coat that made her look like a bear but was
really not fur at all, and I in my most ponderous woolen coat--we both
felt clad in cheese-cloth, if not actually naked in that boundless
cold. The frigid air beat at our skins, caressed us, numbed us, and
there was no defense, no way of escape. For what seemed hours, endless
hours, that tormented drive continued. They tell me that the distance
to Nyack is not more than about forty miles; but it seemed hundreds,
it seemed infinity itself; each second of torture was minutes long,
and the seconds were innumerable. Comparing notes afterwards, we found
that our thoughts were similar. “This _is_ hell,” Flora had been saying
to herself. “This truly _is_ hell.” And I had been trying to comfort
myself with the bleak reflection, “The fundamentalist preachers were
all wrong. Hell is not heat and fire. Hell is ice and cold.”
But terrible as was the puffing, panting progress of that tumbledown
old car against the blasts of the polar night, a still more appalling
possibility lowered before us. What if the ancient engine should
break down, and we should be stranded here on the frozen plateau?
Automobiles, I knew, had a habit of stalling at the most inconvenient
times--as, for example, the one that had balked in mid-journey when
bearing Flora and me to the railroad station just after we were
married. And if we were to face the full force of the wind, perhaps for
hours, unprotected on that lonely night-road--
Here, however, imagination outleapt reality. Finally, after crawling
ages, we did reach our destination, so numb that we could hardly walk;
we did share in the joy of the expected reunion; we did warm ourselves
before a blazing fire, whose heat we could hardly get enough of--a fire
that was our salvation, though I have always marveled that neither of
us came down with pneumonia.
Ever since that night, it has been my view that there are torments
which it is not worth while to endure even for the sake of poetry. And
it has likewise been my belief--with which, I am sure, Flora would
concur--that when the devil wishes to punish some especially wicked
sinner, he entices him forth to the top of a cliff in an open car on an
icy night in February.
CHAPTER
ELEVEN
Shadows on a Wall
Publishing mishaps, as more than one writer will testify, do not always
occur singly. This was true in my own case in 1927, the year that
saw my misadventures with _The Lone Adventurer_. In that same year,
I put forth another book, _The Literary Revolution_, a critical work
dealing with the changes that had overcome literary standards, both
in poetry and prose. This volume, which has assuredly fled long ago
from everyone’s memory (and almost from that of its author) was issued
by an establishment called Frank-Maurice, Inc.--one of those concerns
which are not necessarily less worthy or successful because the same
man is owner, manager, and editor, and may in fact insure closer
author-publisher relationships and better attention to the individual
book. But the one-man house suffers from this serious drawback: it is
in danger of paralysis if anything happens to its guiding spirit.
And that is just what, unhappily, did befall Frank-Maurice. The head
of the firm--it would be no exaggeration to say, the firm itself--was
an aging, scholarly man named Rosenblatt; but he was not too old, nor
apparently in bad health. Therefore it was with a stunning shock that
one day, shortly after the appearance of my book, I stepped into his
office and learned that Rosenblatt was dead. His passing had been
very sudden--perhaps due to a coronary occlusion, though I doubt if
that term was much in use then. But whatever the cause, he was gone;
and with him died the firm of Frank-Maurice. There were, it is true,
some lawyers and others to supervise the post-mortem, and give what
accounting they could to authors; but the wheels had ground to a halt;
sales campaigns had ended, and so had sales, and the whole organization
was rapidly dissolved. I was, of course, not the only author affected,
nor probably the one most affected, and it is unlikely that _The
Literary Revolution_ would in any circumstances have kindled more
than the mildest of blazes. But the effect was a little like that of
having a horse in a race, even though not an expected prize-winner,
and of seeing it stumble and fall just after the starting signal.
This, of course, was just one of the occupational hazards of authors.
And occupational hazards, as I think everyone will agree, are easy to
endure--when they overtake others.
In _The Literary Revolution_, I said much the same things about poetry
as in my unpublished _Poetic Revival in America_; and aimed my blows,
as often in later days, against those persons who either wilfully or
out of ignorance were confusing poetry and prose, and so threatening
to destroy poetry as a separate form of creation. A typical passage
follows: