Chapter II

And then, lo! the aesthete became a churchman. After a couple of years or so of lexicographic employment, work on the dictionary was completed, and Kilmer entered what, with immense gusto, he described as “religious journalism.” He became literary editor of _The Churchman_.

He had completed a very thorough course in uptown New York apartment house life (living, I think, in rapid succession in some half dozen specimens of “the great stone box cruelly displayed severe against the pleasant arc of sky”); and now removing to the suburban village of Mahwah, New Jersey, in the Ramapo foothills, he entered upon his career as one of the world’s most accomplished commuters. He used to say, with a spacious gesture of the arm and a haughty inflation of the chest, that it was no life at all, no life at all, for a man not to swing around an orbit of at least sixty miles a day between his office and his home. His home, even so!

I never have seen a vagabond who really liked to roam
All up and down the streets of the world and not to have a home.

What more exhilarating experience than the owning of a home! And one paid one’s installments on the building loan with the fine pride of a man exercising a noble prerogative. Yes, he often walked to Suffern along the Erie track, and meditated on “what a house should do, a house that has sheltered life,”

That has put its loving wooden arms around a man and his wife,
A house that has echoed a baby’s laugh and held up his stumbling feet.

As became a churchman, he began to hold forth to his companion on the train to and from the city on the fascinations of the Anglican poets. Either his enthusiasm for the subject resulted in a series of articles on the theme, or an assignment for such a series of articles resulted in his enthusiasm, I don’t know which. The significant point is that it was just as like to have been either way about. “Passon Hawker”--Robert Stephen Hawker--Vicar of Morwenstow, a coast life-guard in a cassock--who can recite off hand the deeds of his piety and his valour? Well, on the Erie smoker he became one of the most romantic figures of story. Robert Herrick, in a manner of speaking, went home many a night on the Twelve-Forty-Five (Robert Herrick, that is, with his “Unbaptized Rhimes” left out), and Bishop Coxe returned on the Seven-Fifty-Six in the morning.

Kilmer had already done a few book reviews for _The Nation_ and for the _New York Times_; but at _The Churchman_ he acquired such a proficiency at this exercise that he was able, jocularly, to regard Arnold Bennett, as a literary journalist, as a “mere amateur.” The real reward of “religious journalism,” however, it soon developed, was the opportunity of writing a feature which the secular might call an editorial, but the proper name of which this editor pronounced, in the tone and with the manner of one who was consciously engaged in something grand, gloomy and peculiar, as a “meditation.”

The real meditations of Joyce Kilmer, however, were not “meditations” so called, and partook in no wise of the nature of editorials. He had been, in the main, a graceful troubadour who thrummed pleasant things to his lady-love, and had a bright eye to his singing robes. He had thought it rather fine, too, that refrain in imitation of Richepin:

May booze be plenty, bulls be few,
The poet is the beggars’ king.

He had even been much taken, artistically, with the thought of absinthe:

O little green god in your crystal shrine,
Your heavenly dream-shower shed!

It was when his business took him near to God, when his exploring spirit, upon a peak in Darien, beheld that:

Poems are made by fools like me,
But only God can make a tree,

that he began to be a poet. “Trees,” which more than all the rest he had written put together made his reputation, appeared in _Poetry. A Magazine of Verse_ in August, 1913.

At about this period it was that he was altogether born again. Then, doubtless in castigatory reaction against his own aesthetic and “decadent” wild oats, entered into his fibre that sovereign disdain for the intellectual flub-dub which later gave such a delightful note of “horse-sense” to all his humorous thought--the Johnsonian sting (“and don’t you think you were an ass?”) which found its earliest biting expression in the verses “To a Young Poet Who Killed Himself.”

“I’ve been leading a rather active life, for several days,” was with a gay salute of the hand, a frequent Kilmerian remark. In 1912 the direction of the _New York Times Review of Books_ fell into the hands of a high-spirited young man, a Max-Beerbohmian character, with a decided taste for gaiety in reviews, Mr. Wetmore, who conducted that organ through what is known in New York journalistic tradition as its “meteoric period.” Mr. Wetmore’s wit perceived in Kilmer his happiest rocket. Not only given his head but egged on by his editor to strive for sublime heights of fantasy, this fairly unknown contributor shot in a series of reviews which for readability was, the applause now indicated, an altogether new thing in the book pages of an American newspaper. “This is a bad book, a very bad book, indeed,” so ran the style. “It is bad because it makes this reviewer feel old and fat and bald.” If, together with their humorous assumption of a jovial cocksureness of manner, the literary judgments expressed were, of necessity, snap-shot judgments, there was nothing snap-shot nor assumed about a certain quality in them which in general effect was the most striking of all, namely, the reflection in a very positive way of a radiantly clean and wholesome young nature, abounding in mental and spiritual health.

As one of the general prime movers in, and for a number of years Corresponding Secretary of The Poetry Society of America, Kilmer engaged on the side in activities which for many another would have been in themselves almost a whole job. A fervent Dickensonian, he was for a long period president and (one felt) the animating principle of the American Dickens Fellowship. He accumulated offices to such an extent that I am doubtful if anyone but himself knew exactly how many employments he had altogether, or at any one moment. He conducted the Poetry department of _The Literary Digest_ for something like nine years, an obligation which he continued to fulfill even from Camp Mills, Long Island, to the time when he sailed for France. For a time he conducted a similar department in _Current Literature_, and also did a quarterly article on poetry for, I think, the _Review of Reviews_. Among his earlier essays in the lecture field was a paper on “The Drama as an Instrument of Sex Education,” read before a regular meeting of the Society of Sanitary and Moral Prophylaxis held at the New York Academy of Medicine, in December, 1913. The society with the playful name, I recollect, got seriously interested in the matter of sex education as then expounded. Their views on the drama in this connection were enlarged by acquisition of the idea that though “‘The Great Love’ is, in my opinion, one of the most skilfully constructed plays presented on the New York stage for many a year, I am quite serious in saying that as a factor in sex education, it is a thousand times inferior to ‘Bertha the Beautiful Cloak Model.’”

As Kilmer was always decidedly what is termed a ready writer, what I should attempt to describe as a natural writer (a startling exception to the rule that easy writing makes hard reading), so he appeared to have the gift of speaking readily in public. On frequent occasions, at any rate in his early talks, he neglected altogether to prepare any outline beforehand, and even sometimes to choose a subject. Every now and then, I have known him repeatedly to say to his companion at dinner, without, however, any trace at all of nervousness: “Now, look here: Put your mind on this. Stop all that gossip. Tell me what I’m to talk about. I have to begin” (looking at his watch) “in twenty-five minutes.”

He was particularly active in the affairs of the Authors’ Club, and was a member of the Vagabonds, the Columbia University Club and the Alianza Puertorriguena. In 1913 he ceased, officially, to be a churchman. For a brief period he contemplated the prospect of a professorship, lecturing on English Literature at the University of the South, Sewanee, Tennessee. Then, to his great delight, he became a newspaper man--as he continually put it, with much relish in the part, “a hard newspaper man.” He became a special writer for the _New York Times Sunday Magazine_. I am sure he saw himself in fancy as one of those weather-beaten characters bred in the old-time newspaper school of booze, profanity and hard knocks, his only text-book the police-court blotter and the moulder of his youth a particularly brutal night city-editor. He maintained, with humorous arrogance against opposing argument, the thesis that every great writer had got his “training” as a newspaper man. He delighted to point, as illustrations of this, to Dickens, to Thackeray, and to a lot more, who, in any strict sense of the word, were not “newspaper men” at all. Hard pressed, he even stood ready to make some such hilariously sweeping assertion as that George Eliot, Shakespeare, Tennyson and Robert Browning were, properly perceived, “newspaper men.”

At any rate, this hard newspaper man had to begin with a comical equipment for his task: he would never learn to typewrite and he knew nothing of shorthand. Or rather, he was remarkably well equipped, as one of the outstanding traits of his character was the fearless zest with which, so to say, he took the hurdles of life, and a peculiar faculty in triumphing over such obstacles as his own limitations. He rapidly invented a curious system of abbreviations and marks to remind him of points, which served him as an interviewer as effectively as any knowledge of stenography could have done. He energetically entered upon his occupation as a feature writer with the customary themes of the “Sunday story.” He interviewed, figuratively speaking, the man who had discovered the missing link, and he got from the latest inventor of perpetual motion all the arresting details of his machine. And a lively part of the early Sunday morning ritual at his home was the advance calculating with a tape measure of the week’s income from space writing.

It was later that he created his own highly successful type of literary interview. An intelligent perception of the business, a perception which is not general, perhaps is required fully to appreciate the fact that in this department of newspaper work he was an exceedingly skillful journalist. The secret of his really brilliant success in this field lay in large part in his instinct for luring the distinguished subject of his interview into provocative statements, enabling him to employ such heads as: “Is O. Henry a Pernicious Literary Influence?” “Godlessness Mars Most Contemporary Poetry,” “Americans Lack Loyalty To Their Writers,” “Shackled Magazine Editors Harm Literature,” “Declares Our Rich Authors Make Cheap Literature” and “Says American Literature Is Going To the Dogs.”

At the time of the death of James Whitcomb Riley, Kilmer hurried to the Catskills for his interview with Bliss Carman. On his way back to the city, by way of his home at Mahwah, he dashed with his usual impetuosity in front of the moving train he was seeking to board, was knocked down and hurled or dragged a considerable distance, and taken to the Good Samaritan Hospital at Suffern, New York, with three ribs fractured and other injuries; where, wiring immediately to New York for his secretary, he dictated an interview as engaging and as full of journalistic craft as any he ever wrote. He seemed much more intent on his Sunday story, it is reported by H. Christopher Watts, who was acting as his secretary at that time, than on his predicament.

I did not see Kilmer at this time myself, but I have an idea that, when he had relieved his mind of the anxiety concerning his article, he entered into the spirit of his experience with much relish. It isn’t every day that one gets hit by a train, nor everybody that has three ribs broken. Exhilarating kind of thing, when you see it that way! I remember one time when I was practically in hospital myself he went to a good deal of trouble to come to see me. He seemed to admire my predicament very much, and, beaming upon me, remarked in high good humour that it must be an entertaining thing to be so completely at the mercy of circumstances over which you had no control. When shall we look upon his like again!