Kilmer wrote from France, in answer to an inquiry as to his ideas about
poetry, "All that poetry can be expected to do is to give pleasure of a
noble sort to its readers." He might have said "pleasure or pain of a
noble sort."
It is both pleasure and pain, of a very noble sort, that the reader will
find in Robert Cortes Holliday's memoir, which introduces the two
volumes of Kilmer's poems, essays, and letters. The ultimate and
eloquent tribute to Kilmer's rich, brave, and jocund personality is that
it has raised up so moving a testament of friendship. Mr. Holliday's
lively and tender essay is worthy to stand among the great memorials of
brotherly affection that have enriched our speech. To say that Kilmer
was not a Keats is not to say that the friendship that irradiates Mr.
Holliday's memoir was less lovely than that of Keats and Severn, for
instance. The beauty of any human intercourse is not measured by the
plane on which it moves.
Pleasure and pain of a noble sort are woven in every fibre of this
sparkling casting-up of the blithe years. Pleasure indeed of the
fullest, for the chronicle abounds in the surcharged hilarity and
affectionate humour that we have grown to expect in any matters
connected with Joyce Kilmer. The biographer dwells with loving and
smiling particularity on the elvish phases of the young knight-errant.
It is by the very likeness of his tender and glowing portrait that we
find pleasure overflowing into pain--into a wincing recognition of
destiny's unriddled ways with men. This memory was written out of a full
heart, with the poignance that lies in every backward human gaze. It is
only in the backward look that the landscape's contours lie revealed in
their true form and perspective. It is only when we have lost what was
most dear that we know fully what it meant. That is Fate's way with us:
it cannot be amended.
There will be no need for the most querulous appraiser to find fault
with Mr. Holliday on the score of over-eulogy. He does not try to push
sound carpentry or ready wit into genius. Fortune and his own impetuous
onslaught upon life cast Kilmer into the role of hack journalist: he
would have claimed no other title. Yet he adorned Grub Street (that most
fascinating of all thorny ways) with gestures and music of his own. Out
of his glowing and busy brain he drew matter that was never dull, never
bitter or petty or slovenly. In the fervent attack and counter-attack,
shock and counter-shock of his strenuous days he never forgot his
secret loyalty to fine craftsmanship. He kept half a dozen brightly
coloured balls spinning in air at all times--verses, essays, reviews,
lectures, introductions, interviews, anthologies, and what-not; yet each
of these was deftly done. When he went to France and his days of hack
work were over, when the necessities of life no longer threatened him,
the journalistic habit fell away. It was never more than a garment, worn
gracefully, but still only what the tailors call a business suit.
In France, Kilmer wrote but a handful of pieces intended for
publication, but at least one of them--the prose sketch "Holy
Ireland"--showed his essential fibre. The comparative silence of his pen
when he found himself face to face with war was a true expression. It
bespoke the decent idealism that underlay the combats of a journalist
wringing a living out of the tissues of a busy brain. The tender humour
and quaint austerity of his homeward letters exhibit the man at his
inmost. What could better the imaginative genius of the phrase in which
he speaks of friendship developed by common dangers and hardships as "a
fine, hearty, roaring, mirthful sort of thing, like an open fire of
whole pine trees in a giant's castle?"
The memoir and Kilmer's own letters admit us to see something of the
spiritual phases of this man's life, whose soul found "happiness and
quiet kind" in the Roman Catholic faith. The most secret strengths and
weaknesses that govern men's lives are strangely unknown to many of
their intimates: one wonders how many of Kilmer's associates on the
_Times_ staff knew of his habit of stopping daily at the Church of the
Holy Innocents, near the newspaper office, to pray. It was the sorrow of
personal affliction that brought Kilmer to the Catholic Church. Shortly
after being received into that communion he wrote:
Just off Broadway on the way from the Hudson Tube Station to the
Times Building, there is a church called the Church of the Holy
Innocents. Since it is in the heart of the Tenderloin, this name
is strangely appropriate--for there surely is need of youth and
innocence. Well, every morning for months I stopped on my way to
the office and prayed in this church for faith. When faith did
come, it came, I think, by way of my little paralyzed daughter.
Her lifeless hands led me; I think her tiny feet still know
beautiful paths.
Mr. Holliday does well to point out that Kilmer was almost unique in
this country as a representative of the Bellocian School of Catholic
journalism, in which piety and mirth dwell so comfortably together;
though he might have mentioned T. A. Daly as an older and subtler master
of devout merriment, dipping in his own inkwell rather than in any
imported bottles. It is to Belloc, of course, and to Gilbert
Chesterton, that one must go to learn the secret of Kilmer's literary
manner. Yet, as Holliday affirms, the similarity is due as much to an
affinity of mind with these Englishmen as to any eagerness to imitate.
Kilmer was like them in being essentially a humorist. One glance at his
face, with its glowing red-brown eyes (the colour of port wine), and the
twitching in-drawn corners of the mouth, gave the observer an impression
of benignant drollery. Mr. Holliday well says: "People have made very
creditable reputations as humorists who never wrote anything like as
humorous essays as those of Joyce Kilmer. They fairly reek with the joy
of life."
"He that lives by the pen shall perish by the pen," the biographer tells
us, quoting James Huneker. "For a sapling poet, within a few short years
and by the hard business of words, to attain to a secretary and a butler
and a family of, at length, four children, is a modern Arabian Nights
Tale." Aye, indeed! But Joyce Kilmer will have as genuine a claim on
remembrance by reason of his friends' love as in anything his own hand
penned. And what an encircling, almost paternal, gentleness there is in
the picture of the young poet as a salesman at Scribner's bookstore:
His smile, never far away, when it came was winning, charming. It
broke like spring sunshine, it was so fresh and warm and clear.
And there was noticeable then in his eyes a light, a quiet glow,
which marked him as a spirit not to be forgotten. So tenderly
boyish was he in effect that his confreres among the book clerks
accepted with difficulty the story that he was married. When it
was told that he had a son they gasped their incredulity. And
when one day this extraordinary elfin sprite remarked that at the
time of his honeymoon he had had a beard they felt (I remember)
that the world was without power to astonish them further.
And even more striking is what is implied in the narrative: that when
this "elfin sprite," this gently nurtured young man of bookish pursuits,
took up the art of war, he gloried in his association with a rip-roaring
regiment recruited mainly from hard-handed fellows of the type we may
call (with no atom of disrespect) roughnecks. Hardships and exertions
familiar to them were new to him, but he set himself to win their love
and respect, and did so. He was not content until he had found his way
into the most exhausting and hazardous branch of the whole job. He said,
again and again, that he would rather be a sergeant with the 69th than a
lieutenant with any other outfit. There was a heart of heroism in the
"elfin sprite." The same dashing insouciance that dictated the weekly
article for his paper when in hospital with three broken ribs after
being run down by a train was hardened and steeled in the sergeant who
nightly tore his uniform into ribbons by crawling out through the barbed
wire.
Laughter and comradeship and hearty meals clustered about Kilmer:
wherever he touched the grindstone of life there flew up a merry shower
of sparks. There is convincing testimony to the courage and beauty that
lay quiet at the heart of this singer who said that the poet is only a
glorified reporter, and wished he had written "Casey at the Bat."
Let us spare his memory the glib and customary dishonesty that says "He
died as he would have wished to." No man wishes to die--at least, no
poet does. To part with the exhilarating bustle and tumult, the blueness
of the sky, the sunlight that tingles on well-known street corners, the
plumber's bills and the editor's checks, the mirths of fellowship and
the joys of homecoming when lamps are lit--all this is too close a fibre
to be stripped easily from the naked heart. But the poet must go where
the greatest songs are singing. Perhaps he finds, after all, that life
and death are part of the same rhyme.