Chapter XVII: A Place to End 172 (2)

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.

My opinion of Bynner was embodied in the not very poetic sonnet which I 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.

For an endless two weeks the merry search went on, while the nest egg I had brought with me to New York became noticeably thinner and more sickly looking. Clearly, I must do something--and soon. It was but natural, therefore, that I should think of book reviewing, in which I had had well over a year’s experience on the _Argonaut_. I remembered a letter from the magazine’s editor, Sidney Corwyn, _To Whom It May Concern_; and I decided that it might concern the editors of the New York reviewing sections. The first one whom I approached was Robert Jermain Cole, a gentle and sensitive being, then book editor of the old _Herald_, a job in which he would not remain much longer. (Years later I was to be briefly in touch with him again, when he wrote from Paris to send me some poems for my magazine _Wings_ shortly after its establishment in 1933.) Cole received me pleasantly; glanced over my letter _To Whom It May Concern_; scrutinized several clippings of my reviews from the _Argonaut_; and then, to my boundless delight, made the first dent in the solid wall surrounding me ever since my arrival in New York. He reached into one of the crowded bookshelves behind him, pulled out a huge tome, and suggested, “Maybe you’ll let me have six hundred words on this?”

“Copy due on Thursday,” he went on, as, after profuse thanks, I turned to leave.

This, as it happened, was only the beginning. Before long, as will appear a little later, I was reviewing books for other media also; was writing articles (when I could get them assigned to me) for the Sunday _Herald_ and other publications; and was interviewing for _Success Magazine_.

The connection with _Success_ (an “inspirational” magazine that was to prove a notable failure, and was to be followed by a new failure called _The New Success_) would not have come to me except for my poetic interests. The dean of American poets at that time, a man whose work I greatly admired (as I still do) was Edwin Markham; and through some mutual acquaintance I had obtained the one letter of personal introduction that brought me much except gainless footwork. Having written Markham at his home in Staten Island, I was invited to visit him on a specified Sunday afternoon; and you may be sure that, even had my engagements been innumerable (which was far from the case), nothing short of the necessity of swimming the distance would have kept me away.

My recollections of the visit are most pleasant: the large old-fashioned house, in agreeable rustic surroundings; the spirit of amiability and hospitality that pervaded the small gathering; the Markhams themselves, Mrs. Markham a kindly elderly woman with a heart-warming manner, and still personally attractive; and Mr. Markham looking every inch the poet, white-bearded as a patriarch, with cordial, twinkling eyes, and a voice that could roll like that of one of the old bards when intoning his own poems.

Unlike a host of this latter-day age, who would have made it a point of honor not to let his guests stretch their legs further than between their car-doors and his house-door, Markham took his visitors on a stroll down a wooded lane, then dreamily beautiful with the first tan and crimson of the autumn foliage. I remember that I was privileged to walk at his side for a good part of the time; he took my arm, in a fatherly way, and discoursed to me on matters connected with poetry, though not only with poetry, for I recall his advice to read Carlyle, and his appraisal of the great moral strength and conviction behind the famous Scotsman’s writing.

One of the visitors that afternoon was a bald middle-aged man who was introduced to me as “Mr. Mackay,” and who, I was told, was the editor of _Success Magazine_. It was at his own initiative, and not owing to any suggestion of mine, that he said to me, before the meeting broke up that evening, “Listen, Coblentz. If you’re in the neighborhood of 1133 Broadway some day before long, drop in to see me. Bring some of your writings--enough to give me an idea what you can do. Don’t forget!”

As I shook his hand, I assured him heartily that I would not forget. Nor did I. Not many days had passed before I had seen the inside of the offices of _Success Magazine_; and not many additional days had gone by before Mr. Mackay, after looking over some samples of my prose and verse, made me a proposition.

“Ever done any interviewing?”

“A little for the _Examiner_.”

“Well, we need something better than newspaper interviewing. Every now and then some celebrity passes through town, and we arrange for one of our writers to visit him and get his views on some important subject--such as the prospects of the League of Nations, or the position of women in India, or the future of air travel. Think you could handle an occasional assignment?”

To this question I gave the expected answer.

“We can’t pay very much,” he drawled on, his stubby fingers drumming meditatively at his desk. “Twenty-five dollars an article is as high as we can go.”

Since twenty-five dollars looked as big to me as the side of a mountain, I assured him that this would be satisfactory.

And thus it came about that I interviewed various notables, of whom far from the least was Einstein, as modest a man as you could meet, who spoke through an interpreter, and tried his obliging best to make plain to me some of the root principles of relativity, though he was less receptive to certain other reporters, one of whom wanted to know what he ate for breakfast and was told that the question was too trivial to answer.