Chapter XVII: A Place to End 172 (4)

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:

If Mark Twain, as a whimsical bit of humor, had chopped one of his
prose articles into fantastic form, commenced each line with a
capital letter, and labelled the whole poetry, he would have been
attempting in jest what some of the writers of today are undertaking
seriously. And if he had declared that he was guided by rules known
only by himself, and that the ear which could take pleasure in
Shelley and Swinburne was not always delicate enough to value him
correctly, he would have been foreshadowing the attitude of the free
versifiers. The difference is that he would have been greeted with
laughter, whereas the free versifiers are sometimes accorded a more
sober approval.

In another passage, I call attention to the basic distinction between prose and poetry. I point out that “Prose is the vehicle for the ordinary expression of ideas, poetry for their artistic expression”; that “Artistic creation must always imply restraint,” the remoulding of “the gross material of inartistic expression into the sharply defined and chiselled product of art.” Always before our own day, poetic technique has been the means of consummating this end. But this fact never seems to occur at all to the apostles of the new school:

They ask for freedom, and forget that freedom is not the way of art;
they clamor to express an idea untrammeled by convention, and fail to
remember that the only vehicle permitting such liberty is prose. They
demand all the rights of the prose writer, and shrink from all the
duties of the poet--and yet they call their productions poetry.

If called upon to amend these lines today, I should not limit myself to saying that the spokesmen of the new freedom “demand all the rights of the prose writer.” I should add that they ask rights no prose writer has ever required, sometimes including the privilege of expressing themselves with an incoherence, a turgidness, or a ranting effusiveness that would earn nothing but laughter if offered as straight prose. Imagine, for example, what would happen to any writer of prose who took the liberties assumed by Dylan Thomas in lines such as these:

Altarwise by owl-light in the halfway house
The gentleman lay graveward with his furies;
Abaddon in the hangnail cracked from Adam,
And, from his fork, a dog among the fairies,
The atlas-eater with a jaw for news,
Bit out the mandrake with tomorrow’s scream....

My point, of course, is that our verse writers have claimed such additional liberties since 1927 that criticism which might then have seemed startlingly radical is much too tame to express the present situation.

After _The Literary Revolution_--which produced far less than a revolution in literature--about three years went by before I attempted any further book publication connected with poetry. Then one day I entered the office of _The Poet’s Magazine_ and _Poetic Publications_ in a large downtown building, and had a talk with the proprietor, George Sakele, a dark-skinned somber man with an Oriental cast of countenance. Looking back on _Poetic Publications_, I think that it was truly the most curious institution that ever attempted to purvey poetry to an indifferent public. Was Mr. Sakele himself a poet or critic? If he was--at least, in anything but the most private way--that fact never came to my attention. He ran his poetic enterprises, if the strange truth must be confessed, in connection with his sale of cosmetics; his speciality was some sort of an alleged Egyptian cream for women’s skins, which he advertised over the radio as akin to that in which Cleopatra used to bathe (price, five dollars a bottle). I shall never forget the sickly sweet odor with which it pervaded his office. Poetry to him was evidently a hobby, though I have always wondered why he did not pick something simpler, such as stamp-collecting; in any case, he did indubitably publish a magazine, with the aid of a young employee named Dorothy Gretzner; and he did also publish books--which was the occasion of my visit to him.

Even in those days, a young poet in search of a publisher could not always be too critical--not if the publisher was willing to assume the financial responsibility. Just now I have been wondering just what sort of a contract Sakele could have offered me; and burrowing back in my files, I have looked for the first time in many years at the one-page agreement, which, mercifully free of small-print provisos and legal _ifs_, _whats_, and _moreovers_, proceeds in the simplest language to state that the publisher will issue the book in an edition of not less than 1,000 copies, take out the copyright in the author’s name, and “pay the author a royalty of 10% on the retail price of all copies sold.”

On the basis of later experience, I cannot help wondering how many of the stipulated “edition of not less than 1,000 copies” Mr. Sakele ordered to be bound. I also wonder how he expected to sell any copies at all--a department in which his success appears to have been much less notable than in the distribution of Egyptian face-creams. Nevertheless, in order to obtain an agreement such as he gave me, many an aspiring poet would, I am sure, overlook all dubious factors, including the face-creams.

True, there were several peculiarities about my second collection of short poems, _Shadows on a Wall_. The least was that the binder, evidently running out of cloth or wishing to get rid of some scraps, completed various copies in different shades of blue and brown. Another peculiarity, which likewise troubled me but little, sprang from Sakele’s theory that no poem should occupy more than one page; in consequence of this unique idea, which would have run into difficulties in the case of _Locksley Hall_ or _The Ancient Mariner_, a sequence of three sonnets was crowded into page 27 in minute unspaced eight-point type, whereas most of the poems were printed in amply spaced ten-point. But what really did annoy me was the typographical error in the poem, _A Thousand Years From Now_. Preceding the first line, “Above the ruins that were once New York,” these irrelevant words from another poem appear: “Whose blade was sharp and strong.”

I was sure that, whatever mistakes may have escaped my proofreading eyes--and many have escaped them, before and since--such an intrusion would have glared at anyone not wholly blind. And I was not at all consoled when a friend, commenting on the error, assured me that some day this flaw would make the book all the more valuable--as a collector’s item. If there is any logic in this reasoning, I ought to regret that the book did not commend itself to collectors by more disfigurations, and more serious ones.

The title of the collection, which was never one of my favorites, was supplied by the opening quatrain:

Our lives are shadows cast along a wall
By writhing flames that wave-like rear and fall.
The shadows deepen, and the flames droop low;
The embers smolder, and the shadows go.

I quote this not as anything I take pride in, but on the contrary, because it is something I should not be disposed to write today. It represents a pessimistic--and, I believe now, a shallow view which I was inclined to take sometimes in my brooding earlier days. I believe now, and believe profoundly, that there is more to life than the leaping and subsiding of flames and of the shadows they throw on a wall; but the fact that I could once have written these lines, and even picked them as the title poem of a collection, strikes me as an indication of the extent of the changes that have overtaken some of my general views during a period when my ideas as to poetry and the making of poetry have been little altered.

CHAPTER
TWELVE

The Depression, the Sea,
and the Redwoods

The great worldwide depression, beginning in 1929, cast few immediate visible reflections in poetry. I was but one of many who had no idea of letting our crumbling economic foundations undermine their poetic foundations. Like others, I continued writing verse, gratified whenever any magazine saw the light clearly enough to open its doors to me.

The names of some that did open their doors--_The Bookman_, _The Independent_, _The World Tomorrow_, _Shards_, _The Wanderer_, etc.--read like a list of the bygone and forgotten. But even then, as more recently, I sent a majority of my offerings to the metropolitan newspapers. And why? First, as a matter of convenience. The typing of poems, the keeping of records, the very selection of manuscripts to send, require more time and effort than you would suppose. And when one is preoccupied with multitudes of duties, it is sometimes impossible to find time for repeated submissions--particularly as manuscripts, when they come back, are usually dogeared, soiled, dented with paper clips, or even burned by cigarettes, though not many of them may suffer the fate endured by one of my book manuscripts, which was dropped down an elevator shaft. In most cases, poems must be retyped: that is, unless one wishes to say to the editor, in effect, “Others didn’t think these worth keeping, but maybe you’re an easier target.”

Because of such difficulties, the poet naturally submits where his chances are greatest. And if his chances are, let us say, anywhere from about twenty-five to ninety-eight per cent or more with newspapers where his work is known, but perhaps no more than two or three per cent with large magazines that use but few poems and hence reject more, the decision may be automatically made for him. In the course of the years, I contributed literally hundreds of poems to the New York _Sun_ (a luminary that, unfortunately, has long gone out), while the editors of the _Times_ and other papers were very receptive.

You may say, of course, that newspaper publication is ephemeral--come today, gone tomorrow! And this no doubt is true, but it is likewise true to a degree of all periodical publication. And, besides, there is always the possibility of reprints; and many people will clip the poems they like and preserve them for years. I do not, in any case, share the supercilious, the almost snobbish contempt which some poets profess toward newspaper publication; no means of distribution that reaches a wide general audience should be disdained. And knowing what I do of poets, and of literary sour grapes, I may perhaps be pardoned for wondering if those who cry out loudest may not have built their scorn on a deep foundation of rejection slips.

But to turn back to the depression era. During this very period my own work, as if perversely ignoring the world’s dejected state, burst forth in new veins, and with a character which, in my own biased opinion, it had not had before--a character that arose largely from my new contacts with nature.

To begin with a transient phase, there was my response to the sea during a particular voyage--a voyage whose exceptional circumstances were directly concerned with the depression. There are millions who will never forget how President Roosevelt, almost immediately after taking office in 1933, closed the banks of the country, and thereby averted national catastrophe. There are also millions who will remember how, even if they had money in theory, they had none in practice except what their pockets contained, since they could not draw upon their bank accounts. That such a situation, with all its painful accompaniments, could have had any connection with the writing of poetry, and particularly of poetry of the sea--this, surely, would seem among the most fantastic of impossibilities. Yet the connection, at least in my own case, did exist.

It happened that Flora and I had elected March of that very year for a badly needed vacation, and decided upon the extravagance of a cruise into southern waters. We had reserved, but still had not paid for, accommodations on the Swedish liner _Kungsholm_, and were expecting to leave sometime in the second week of the month ... when lo! the bombshell exploded. The banks faced us with shut doors! For all practical purposes, we were penniless! I remember counting all our available cash, which came to no more than twenty dollars. As for paying for the tickets--that was impossible; checks could not pass through the clearing house, and therefore, for the time being, were worthless. Under these circumstances, most travelers did the obvious, and cancelled their passages. But Flora and I did not quite so easily give up our precious vacation; I telephoned the steamship line, and was informed, to my surprise, that the _Kungsholm_ would sail at the scheduled time; the company would accept my check in payment of our passage; and would cash any further checks for any reasonable amounts so that we might have pocket money _en route_.

Flora and I, accordingly, were among the passengers--the very few passengers--who stood staring shoreward from the _Kungsholm_ on that bitterly cold morning when she sailed. The vessel, a capacious liner of around 30,000 tons, was all but deserted; it was possible to stroll completely around the promenade deck without encountering a soul. And this, though it did not make for sociability, was ideal for poetry; one could read and muse and dream, undisturbed as if one were the steamer’s sole owner, while day after day she made her way across the glorious cobalt-blue Caribbean. I remember that my almost constant companion was A. E.’s _Collected Poems_; and the lyrical and mystical mood of these verses helped to put me into the right state of mind for writing. The fruit of the voyage, therefore, was a series of _Sea Sketches_, eleven of which were to appear in my book _The Merry Hunt_. The mood of these poems, though no two are alike, may be illustrated by the opening of the ninth of the sequence:

A sadness rises in my breast,
I cannot answer how nor why,
When, low against a shoreless sky,
A ship goes down into the west
Beneath the day’s red closing eye.

Slowly it turns from dusk to dark,
With dwindling masts and hull a-gleam,
And, where the firelit hazes stream,
Fades in the vastness, spark by spark,
And passes softly as a dream....

Such stanzas can be written only in a mood of detachment. And detachment is not possible amid the chatter of crowds and the riot of merrymaking. Therefore I have always held that the great depression, culminating in the national financial disaster that forced the closing of the banks, was responsible for something seemingly so remote from economic affairs as my lyrics of the sea.

But deeply as the sea has moved me, my poetry found richer sustenance in the great earth-world of growing things, of hills and mountains, forests and streams. These, ever since I have come to know them, have seemed my natural domain; more than once, coming west on the train after a long stay in New York, I have glowed at my first glimpse of the great snow-line of the Rockies as at the sight of approaching home. Strangely, though I lived in a mountainous state, I did not know the mountains in childhood--not until, just before my seventeenth birthday, I registered as a student at Berkeley, and almost immediately headed for the hills, and took long walks, companioned or alone--though more often alone--to the far-looking eminence of Grizzly Peak and its rolling neighbors.

But while these invigorating strolls did result in some attempts at poetry, nature reserved her greatest gifts until the years beginning with 1930, when Flora and I came every summer to Mill Valley (where we finally settled in 1938). Our daily routine, enforced only by our own desires during those charmed months when we were free from the grind of a great city, was ideal for verse-writing. Nearly every morning, after two or three hours which I devoted to various writing tasks, Flora and I would set out with a bag containing a lunch of sandwiches and fruit, one or more books, and a second bag holding paper, pens, and pencils. For an hour or two we would wind in fog or sunlight or beneath the shadow of leaves along one of the many trails looping among the redwoods or across the bush-grown slopes to Muir Woods or to some point high on the slopes of Mt. Tamalpais, where we might have lunch in some sheltered ferny grotto to the purling music of clear waters, or stare across wide vistas of tawny hill and blue sea and bay, or up at the two-hundred-foot towers of the sequoias, with their cinnamon-brown boles and down-slanting scented limbs. The clear exhilaration, the shining joy of those walks, is something I have tried, perhaps not successfully, to put into verse. And the many sights and sounds of the wayside offered material for poetry--a dragonfly, a crested bluejay, a crawfish in a stream, a water Strider, a mountain flower, a rock, a weed, a redwood grove.

My poems of the woods, in the vast majority of cases, were written in the woods, with my eyes on the objects described. Many a day, while Flora sat not many feet off with a book or with pen and letter paper, I lay stretched out beneath the trees, in a state of relaxation in which I was as close as possible to being unaware of my physical being; and let the lines of a poem form themselves in my mind--lines which I would never put down until the complete composition had come to me. Whatever the quality of the resulting verses, I know that I could reach into depths rarely if ever plumbed in the city, and could write with an undistracted absorption that made it possible to call upon the inmost reserves of my being.

Among the products of those summer strolls, I number the lyrics in _Songs of the Redwoods_, and most of the poems of nature in subsequent books. In those poems there is a simplicity that may be deceptive, a simplicity my earlier work had not always possessed, as when I express my gratitude and relief at returning to nature:

I have been long an exile from the sod,
The firm gray earth that dusty feet may tread,
The earth where one may lay a tired head
As on the lap of God.

My sense of the timelessness of the woods and hills, in contrast to the impermanence of man, is expressed in various offerings, as in the lyric from _Green Vistas_, beginning:

The woods shall not be lonely
When man has slipped away,
Leaving no token, only
Dark timbers that decay,

and in the sonnet that opens:

These hills, where silence with her ancient humming
Speaks to the green-plumed ridge and picture-sky,
Echo no creeds of getting or becoming,
No Parliaments that shout, no men that die.

Amid the gratifying vastness of nature, I have often had the sense of the loss of personal identity in a greater, more meaningful identity:

Firm-pillowed on the earth, with head to grass,
And all the hot sky arching over me,
Almost I seem to merge with the great mass
Of root, and rock, and pinnacle, and tree.
Almost I seem to lose the “I,” the one,
And blend with currents of the bush and stóne,
And with the flowing air, the soil and sun,
And be no more self-clouded and alone.

The reader will, I hope, bear with me for thus quoting my own verses, since these lines express the nature of my experience and the sources of my poetry much more vividly than my prose could do.

For eighteen successive summers, during some of which my time was absorbed by long poems--from 1930 to 1947--Flora and I took those long and stimulating, almost daily walks into the hills; in the latter years we were accompanied by our romping black-tan-and-white toy shepherd dog, “Sheppie,” herself the unwitting source of more than one poem. Only with our removal to a home higher in the hills and further from the hiking trails did our regular pilgrimages to the woods come to an end; and then my poems of nature, while not ceasing, became much less frequent.

There is today, I realize, a movement away from poetry of nature--a movement only to be expected in a world which is itself withdrawing from nature, a world of concrete strips and macadamized landscapes, a world of super-highways that rip down the wilderness as a gardener pulls out a weed, a world of power-madness symbolized by the bulldozer that slashes out the very soil and makes deserts of once-blossoming fields and green hillsides. What communion with nature can be expected by the worried dweller in an apartment house, who sees nature at most for two or three weeks a year through the windshield of a sixty-mile-an-hour car on a six-lane freeway, or in the overcrowded camps of one of our national parks? How much of nature is observed by the dweller among the skyscrapers of New York, Chicago, Houston, or St. Paul? How much of nature even among the methodically trimmed lawns and neatly curving concrete roads of our suburban districts? Lovers and viewers of nature there may still be, but they are a dwindling minority. And that is why city sophisticates, bleary-eyed with gazing at neon lights and television screens, increasingly tend to scoff at poetry of nature as something unreal, unfelt, sentimental, or derivative; they do not realize that no man has the right to deny another man’s experience, nor that in a world where color-blindness was the rule, the majority would consider themselves wise for mocking the viewers of rainbowed tints.

But poetry of nature is real, and will continue to be real, because it is built upon realities that antedated man and will no doubt outlast him; we can no more forbid it by critical mandate than we can proscribe poetry of joy or sorrow, religion or love. What we have a right to ask of the poet of nature, as of all writers, is that the impulse behind his work be genuine; that the poems be based upon actual experience, actual observation, actual feelings, and not be drawn from his readings of other poets. But whether or not he is able to communicate the impressions that come to him, whether his incentive is equalled by his skill, or whether his message is acceptable or even understandable--these are questions to be decided by that great eventual arbiter to whose judgment all creators must yield themselves.

CHAPTER
THIRTEEN

Year of Miracles

Probably for most of us, certain years are more eventful than half a dozen others. Such a year, in my own case, was 1933--a year notable particularly for its poetic happenings. It was in 1933 that Flora and I obtained our little four-room cabin among the redwoods of Mill Valley--a log-walled, garden-surrounded cottage, with the great sequoias forming a wall of protection in front, and maples and a giant mountain laurel and an ever-flowing stream in the rear. This house, originally built as a summer home, was procured at a price that now seems impossibly low, but was to repay us in blessings for years to come; and was to open the way to our eventual removal to California, where it would be a fountainhead of inspiration, a perfect place in which to write, think, and breathe poetry.

The year 1933, also, saw the appearance of my _Songs of the Redwoods_, which was not entirely devoted to the redwoods, but did pay its respects to those great trees, “Close-massed as brothers in some mystic rite, / With prayerful heads that search the blue unseen.” The publisher was Arthur H. Chamberlain, who ran “Overland-Outwest Publications” in conjunction with the revived _Overland Monthly_, of which he was the editor, and into which he vainly tried to breathe new life. I had never met Chamberlain prior to the acceptance of my book, but was to meet him many a time afterwards, and was to number him among my friends until his death sometime in the forties. I can still picture him clearly: a small, slight figure, gray-haired and thin-faced, with an overflowing, singularly ingratiating smile as he hobbled forward to greet me in his hotel in San Francisco (he suffered from a chronic foot complaint). Chamberlain was one of those gentle, lovable souls who are willing to embrace the world in the circle of their confidence and affection; he was also, like other magnanimous persons I have met, the hatcher of rather grandiose undertakings, as when he planned to resurrect the _Overland_ as a large national literary magazine, offered to bring me into the scheme as partner and co-editor, circulated a handsome prospectus, and failed--as was almost preordained--because we lacked funds to put into the project and because no financier could be induced to risk scores or hundreds of thousands of dollars in the interests of literature.

The year 1933, again, marked the launching of my most ambitious poem. Having gone to Mill Valley for the summer (this year we had come early, at the end of May), I had begun a series of character sketches in sonnet form, which turned out to be of indifferent quality, and were eventually discarded. But one day, while I was still engaged on the series, a message came to Flora by automatic writing--a method which she had been employing for several years, and which, no matter what one’s theories as to its source, has produced some extraordinary results. “Tell your mate to discontinue the child’s play he is now engaged on,” the message said in effect--I cannot quote it word for word, but distinctly recall its import. “There is a bigger work waiting for him, if he will but reach out and find it.”

How was that possible? I wondered. What bigger work could be waiting for me? Was the message not merely the product of my wife’s subconscious imagination? Yes, perhaps this was the explanation; even now, I cannot prove the contrary; it may be that the message had put me into the frame of mind to look for some other theme, and that this accounts for the new train of ideas. In any case, something strange and novel did overcome me an evening or two later as I stood on the porch of the barnlike rickety old house we had rented for a short while before moving into our redwood cabin. It was a weirdly beautiful night; and the incoming sea-fog, flowing across the redwood-clad slopes, threw luminous witches’ shawls about a moon that was near its full. As I stared at the swift-changing fantastic scene, the plan for a poem leapt into my mind--a poem of epic proportions, in which the present, past, and future of man might be surveyed. The whole hatched itself full-born, almost without effort; the outline of the entire work had come to me before I stepped back into the house.

And thus it was that I began my most elaborate poem, _The Pageant of Man_. Several months more than two years were to pass before its completion; the whole of three summers would be given to the project, in addition to all the time I could find during the rest of the year while engaged in other types of writing (though the better part of the work, in every sense of the term, was written in California). I did not at first realize how much work lay ahead; I was to pass endless hours in revising; and was to type the whole of the 11,000 lines three times before I was satisfied to write _Finis_. On the other hand, there was compensations; I can hardly describe the expansive feeling that comes from contact with higher and wider planes of being, while panoramas of wonder and pathos and glory spread out before one on a many-colored tapestry. From the opening passage, this feeling never ceased to possess me:

For half of man’s allotted years and more
I ranged the highways of this worried earth
Like some long pilgrim from a distant shore,
Baffled by men of foreign speech and birth.
I scarcely seemed to share
The fires, the swords and fevers of my land,
Was blinded when they saw, and saw when they were blind.

Because rhyme has real and sometimes invaluable advantages, and because blank verse tends to descend to the level of prose--as a reading of some of our best poets will convince you--I had decided to rhyme the poem throughout. But since I wished to express a great variety of themes and moods and to avoid the rigidity of any one pattern, I aimed to employ lines of varying lengths, and to let the rhymes fall wherever they best suited my purpose. Thus, while not sacrificing the advantages of rhyme, I would have almost unlimited freedom and flexibility. This method, while it had been used by others in occasional shorter poems, was, I believe, an innovation in a poem of epic length. And it has therefore always seemed to me that _The Pageant of Man_ might be called experimental in technique--experimental not in the sense of going back to Adam and starting the art of poetry all over again, but in building in unexplored directions upon known and tried devices.

All this, to be sure, will not interest those who maintain that the day of the long poem is over--those who hold that, in this hurdy-gurdy age of motor fever, television monomania, and the wear-and-tear of grab-and-get, we no longer have time for verses of more than fifteen or twenty lines if even that. For the proponents of such views, poems of fifteen or twenty lines are doubtless too long (by fifteen or twenty lines). Yet it may be that the very furor and distractions of the age highlight the need for long, contemplative works in which the mind may find repose and the spirit may refresh itself at fountains old as time.

But to return to 1933. The spring of that year brought me still another poetic event which, in the course of the decades, has had repercussions upon many another verse-writer.

Occasionally, as I have mentioned, a friend and I had discussed the possibility of starting a poetry magazine, though our talks had never reached the stage of serious intention. But it was quite otherwise in the case of a man who came to me with a proposition early in 1933; for reasons that will be obvious and because he still moves in the publishing world (when I last heard of him, he was connected with a large subsidy house), I will not give his actual name, but will christen him Melvin J. Post. He was a thin-faced, wily-looking man, with something just a little hungry in his aspect; our acquaintance had begun in 1932, when his small firm published, in book form, at its own expense, a sequence of forty of my sonnets, _The Enduring Flame_ (sonnets that, revised and reduced in number to thirty, were reprinted years later in my book of selected poems, _Garnered Sheaves_). Though I do not know how many copies Post bound and distributed, and though this project, like most poetic ventures, was fruitful neither in money nor in fame, I had cause to be grateful to him--what poet is not grateful to the man who has opened new paths for him amid the great world of print? Therefore, when he came to me with his project, I was receptive.

The idea, he told me, was to start a poetry magazine, one of national scope, which would mark a milestone in its field. He would be the publisher, and assume all the financial responsibility; and he hoped that I would officiate as editor. The thought did, I must confess, appeal to me, though the position, like most tasks in the poetic world, was to be without benefit of a salary. However, a question thrust itself upon me. If I was to be the editor, I must really be the editor; I must formulate the policy, and must decide the contents of the magazine beyond possibility of contradiction. Would Mr. Post agree? Definitely! stated Mr. Post. He would control the publishing end, and I would be the editorial Lord Absolute. Under such circumstances, the arrangements were quickly made. Post and I held several conferences, at which plans were threshed out: the magazine was to be a quarterly, for which he accepted my suggested title, _Wings_; and the first issue would contain thirty-two pages in addition to covers, and would be printed on a good grade of heavy book paper. All that remained, therefore, so far as the editor was concerned, was to plan the various departments, and obtain contributions.

In the case of a long-established magazine, contributions flow in, sometimes with embarrassing profusion; but not so with an unborn periodical, which no one has ever heard of before. Therefore I wrote to friends and acquaintances in the poetic world, and obtained suitable poems from Witter Bynner, David Morton, and other established poets, as well as from a number who were still to earn their laurels. I also planned a prose section; applied to publishers for books for review; and wrote an editorial of about three pages setting out the policy of the magazine, in addition to a note on _Reviews and Reviewers_, and a five-page article, the first of a series on _Neglected Poets_ (the author chosen in this case was Arthur O’Shaughnessy). Finally my labors were completed, and I turned all the material over to the publisher, who had been advertising the forthcoming magazine by means of circulars. By now it was early March, and I was ready to leave on that Caribbean cruise already mentioned; upon my return sixteen days later, the magazine would be awaiting me.

At the scheduled time I returned, but the magazine was not awaiting me. With vague and all too justified premonitions, I telephoned Mr. Post, who assured me that an oversight must have occurred; _Wings_ was indeed out, and copies should have been sent me--he would put some immediately in the mails; I should receive them next day.

Mr. Post was as good as his word--the copies did reach me next day. But what a blow as I took them out of their envelope! There are, as we all know, some shocks that cannot be absorbed all at one stroke. Those pale-blue covers, printed in dull black and looking like a drug store’s wrapping paper--were they actually the covers of my _Wings_? And what had happened to the part of the magazine between the covers? The least was that the paper was thinner than Post and I had agreed upon, and the type smaller, making certain portions and particularly the prose difficult to read. But how had the poems come to be printed with such originality?--sonnets divided after the seventh line, and four-stanza poems with no divisions at all? And how had it happened that our stipulated thirty-two pages had shrunk to twenty-two?

A swift survey of the contents told me that Post had omitted six of the eight book reviews (a fact more painful to me than a series of needle thrusts, since I had assumed a responsibility to one or two authors, and had obtained their books under promise of comments on the work). And as if to add insult to injury, the _Neglected Poets_ had been still further neglected, and had been left out, along with the editorial note setting forth the reviewing policy of the magazine.

My fury was slow in dying down as I contemplated the sadly clipped _Wings_. After all I had expected, after all the labor I had given to that first issue, I felt compromised and betrayed. But two things, amid all the confusion, were luminously clear. The first was that Mr. Post’s motives for cutting down the magazine had been financial rather than literary. And the second was that, by deleting material without my knowledge or consent, he had himself been acting as editor, and therefore had violated his agreement. Moreover, in beginning our association with this gross breach of his word, he had proved that the two of us could never harmonize. Therefore the sooner I disconnected myself from him, the better.