Joyce Kilmer

It would be a decidedly false estimate of Kilmer which failed to note, even with some emphasis, that he was an excellent man of business. He “played the game,” in the exceedingly difficult job of earning a thoroughly competent living at the literary profession, with a dexterity which, it was frequently apparent, was at once an inspiration and a despair to those who sought to rival him. The Kilmer cult which grew apace was considerably accelerated by a rich Kilmerian strategy. And he delivered to the little world of intensely intense literary societies and blue-nosed salons which hung upon his lips the pure milk of the word with a strongly humorous consciousness of the feat as a part of the immense sport of living.

Kilmer’s “act” as it was observed from behind the scenes is excellently presented by an associate in the office of the New York Times. This writer says in the Philadelphia Press:

A thing which I found very singular was that, in manner Kilmer was apt, in the two or three later years of his life, to give strangers on their first meeting the impression of being somewhat too dignified for so young a man, of being, as his office associate John Bunker in an admirable, even a remarkable, portrait of him at this period published in America, says, “in fact just a trifle pompous.” Mr. Bunker continues: “This was due partly to his physical appearance, and also, insofar as it had any basis in reality, to that protective instinct which quickly teaches a sensitive and imaginative spirit to cast a veil between itself and the outer world.”

I myself think this effect had its origin in the same perverse instinct which causes you, immediately after talking with a deaf person, to speak very loud to your next auditor whom you very well know can hear perfectly; that is, it was the result of being keyed up to appearing on an elevated platform before a curious throng. He one time astonished me by the declaration that it was only by, quite early in his life, drastically schooling himself to the task, one then exceedingly trying and hateful to him, that he became able to rise and “speak” at all. The most entertaining recollection, by the way, that I have of the Kilmerian pontifical manner is of a time when he generously invited me to have my shoes polished with him, thrust his hand deep into his pocket to pay the boy, paused, and with a very large gesture directed him to call in again later in the day.

There is first-rate perspicacity in the remark of one of Kilmer’s friends, Laurence J. Gomme, that at one score and ten he was, in the amount that he had lived, about seventy years old. Something of the force and sharpness of Mr. Bunker’s evocation of the man as he was at last resides, I think, in the circumstance that here is no blending in the mind of the flower and the bud. He says: “When I first met Kilmer he had just passed his thirtieth year, but he gave me the impression of being somewhat older. I afterwards spoke of this to him, and it was his theory that newspaper work had served to age him. The truth was that it was due not merely to his newspaper work, but generally to the incessant and intense mental activity, the extraordinary and flaming energy, whereby he crowded into ten years the experiences of several ordinary lifetimes.” And this touch of the slight Bunker portrait is, I feel, essential to any fuller picture:

The better poet Kilmer became, as his friend Richardson Wright says in his admirable “Appreciation” in The Bellman, the less like a poet he acted. And after he grew up, he would about as soon have æstheticised, off the platform, as he would have forged a check. Whenever he did refer to poetry as related to himself he, as the slang term has it, took it smiling. One of Kilmer’s most pronounced pet aversions was the phrase, utterly mawkish to him, about “prostituting” one’s talent. He one time explained to me, with considerable apparent pride, that he used every idea three times: in a poem, in an article, and in a lecture.

Charles Willis Thompson, an editorial writer of the New York Times, and to whom belongs the credit of first taking, as editor of the Sunday Magazine and Book Review, Kilmer’s “stuff” in any amount, inspired, so to say, the poem “Delicatessen,” in this way. Mr. Thompson happened to remark to Kilmer that of course there were a lot of things which couldn’t be treated in poetry. Kilmer declared he would like to know what they were. Mr. Thompson cast about in his mind for the most ridiculous theme for a poem he could think of, and finally proclaimed that no one could possibly write a poem about such a thing as a delicatessen shop. “I’ll write a poem about a delicatessen shop,” Kilmer promptly replied. “It will be a long poem. I’ll sell it to a high-brow magazine. It will be much admired. And it will be a good poem.” He insisted on betting on this the sum of several dollars.

The origin of “The Twelve-Forty-Five” I do not exactly know. But I remember shortly before that poem was written, sitting disgusted and miserable with Kilmer in that horrible “Jersey City shed” waiting for the midnight train. Taking out of his mouth that villainously large, fifty-cent pipe (mentioned in all genuine appreciations) Kilmer, with a fervour almost violent, suddenly exclaimed: “I certainly do like railroad stations! They are fine places!” The very famous poem “The White Ships and The Red” (a poem so wonderfully effective that it was at once reprinted all over the country and in Europe) was a newspaper assignment. He rather liked the poem when he saw it in the paper; though, with his feet cocked up on his desk, he spoke apologetically of what he felt to be the failure of the latter stanzas to link up perfectly with the first, explaining that a luncheon appointment, at which he chatted for an hour or two, had split the writing of it into two sittings. That the author of this “Lusitania” poem thoroughly felt and meant what he said, is, I fancy, sufficiently proven by the event to permit of this being told.

The point is, that Kilmer was a poet, an artist of a high order, a perfectly conscious master of what he was doing. The febrile gush of emotion he loathed. He knew finely that:

There was nothing accidental about the effect of his own verse, any more than there was “luck” in his worldly success. He achieved the one as he did the other by a masculine heart and mind. And while all things were necessary and joyous, it was impossible not to feel that, after all, throughout his day “the rhymer’s honest trade” was his primary concern.

He was sufficiently grounded in literature to feel, as Mr. Le Gallienne says, no “weariness with those literary methods which had sufficed for Chaucer and Shakespeare and Milton, or Catullus or Bion, or François Villon—content, with reverent ambition, to tread that immortal path.”

In his religious mysticism a trace, and more than a trace, has been found of Crashaw, of Vaughan, of Herbert, and of Belloc and Chesterton. And there is no difficulty at all about finding in Kilmer hints of Patmore, and there may be easily recognised something of the accents of A. E. Housman and of Edwin Arlington Robinson. He did, indeed, to put it in a racy phrase, have the drop on those who do not know that all art that endures must have its roots in a constant interrogation of the “unimpeachable testimony” of the ages. His song was as old as the hills, and as fresh as the morning. Precisely in this, in fact, is his remarkableness, his originality, as a contemporary poet; and in this will be, I think, his abiding quality. “Simple and direct, yet not without subtle magic,” wrote Father James J. Daly, S.J., in a review of “Trees and Other Poems,” printed in America, his verse “seems artlessly naïve, yet it possesses deep undercurrents of masculine and forceful thought; it is ethical in its seriousness, and yet as playful and light-hearted as sunlight and shadows under summer oaks.” And this admirable summing up of Kilmer’s talent leaves little more in the way of direct criticism to be said.

Mr. Le Gallienne with felicitous tact of phrase has touched upon this, that “no young poet of our time has so reverently, on so many pages, in so many different ways, so playfully at times, as in that masterpiece of playful reverence, ‘A Blue Valentine,’ woven through the texture of his song the love of his lady—that lady ‘Aline,’ whose name will be gently twined about his as long as the printed word endures.” A misquotation in the Ladies’ Home Journal led to an interesting tribute to the author of “Trees.” Many readers of the Journal were somewhat startled to find the editor attributing to John Masefield the lines:

The following issue of the magazine contained this correction and acknowledgment by Mr. Bok:

As one, somewhat effusive commentator has remarked, “Trees” just could not be confined within the covers of a book. At once reprinted in newspapers throughout the United States (and still being so reprinted) it was crowned in that warmest of all ways in which a work of literature can be honoured, by being cut out by the world and pasted in its hat. In one version it reads, in part, in this way:

Many of Kilmer’s poems have been translated into Spanish by Salomon de la Selva, Enriquez Urenia and others, and have appeared in a number of prominent South American papers.

In a letter from France to Edward W. Cook, who in quest of material for a book on contemporary poets had written Kilmer asking several questions, Kilmer commented, among other things, on his “earlier efforts in poetry” (as the questionnaire apparently had put it), in a manner which is evidence again of how perfectly well he knew what he was about. “If what I nowadays write is considered poetry,” he announced, “then I became a poet in November, 1913.” Admirable for hard-headedness, directness and precision, it is a statement which leaves the critic no point upon which to take issue. His early poems “were only the exercises of an amateur, imitations, useful only as technical training.” The peculiar thing about these highly skilful experiments in various forms of craftsmanship is that they were so very much better as poems than the derivative efforts usually written at this period of apprenticeship, “so free,” as Mr. Le Gallienne notes, “from those artistic immaturities which have made many old great poets angrily denounce unlicensed reprinters of their ‘first editions.’” And in this fact they have a decided, and a perfectly legitimate, interest for the observer of the development of his talent—though Kilmer declared “they were worthless, that is, all of them which preceded a poem called ‘Pennies,’ which you will find in my book ‘Trees and Other Poems.’” He added, “I want all of my poems written before that to be forgotten.”

He was writing, one remembers, to a gentleman with whom he was so slightly acquainted that he addressed him as “Dear Mr. Cook,” with the measure of whose sympathy and critical acumen, it is to be inferred, he was not conversant, and who presumably was about to estimate (with what perspective he could not perceive) his earliest productions. It were better to head off any uncertainty in the matter. Also, we all know, one’s hot impatience with one’s strivings of yesterday is mellowed by time into an amiable and appreciative tolerance of one’s earnest efforts of twenty years ago. It is difficult to think that Kilmer at fifty would have had an unjust scorn of those charming exercises on the poetic scales he wrote at twenty-one.

Anyhow, no man can, by decree or otherwise, obliterate his past; both the good and the bad that he has done continue to pursue him. Ten times thrice happy is he, rarest of men, who, like Kilmer, never penned a line or said a word or did a deed that can arise to bring confusion to those that love him. The world does not willingly let die those verses on which glistens the dew of his tender youth. They are brought forth for praise by no mean critics in tribute to his memory. And in conformity with the wishes of those most jealous of his good name as a poet a representative selection of his early poems is reprinted in these volumes.

He that lives by the pen shall perish by the pen, saith the wisdom of James Huneker. For a sapling poet, within a few short years and by the hard business of words, to attain to a secretary and a butler and a family of, at length, four children, is a modern Arabian Nights Tale. Equally impossible is it, seemingly, to accomplish another thing, which is a remarkable part of Kilmer’s distinction. From first to last, from the verses contributed to Moods in 1909 to the last poem he wrote, “The Peacemaker,” printed in the Saturday Evening Post in October, 1918, Kilmer was a poet’s poet. “A pretty good poet,” said such a poet (shaking his head at his conviction of the truth of this) as Bliss Carman. His poems were repeatedly adjudged high places among the best poems read before the Poetry Society. Among competitive honours, under the name of “John Langdon” he won easily enough with his poem, “The Annunciation,” first prize in the Marian Poetry contest conducted by The Queen’s Work, in July, 1917, an award competed for by a great number of poets, including many in other countries. He was a poet’s poet who declared (with considerable vehemence, I remember) that he certainly wished he had written “Casey At The Bat.” He one time said in praise of a book of essays that it was “that kind of glorified reporting which is poetry.” As a singer of the simpler annals of humanity his place will draw closer and closer, I think, to that of the most widely loved poet of our own era. Only the name of James Whitcomb Riley expresses in greater measure the rich gift of speaking with authentic song to the simplest hearts. A man who believes that churches are devices of the devil and literature a syrup for crack-brained females can enjoy, with profit to his soul, “The House With Nobody In it,” “Dave Lilly” and “The Servant Girl and the Grocer’s Boy” equally with “The Old Swimmin’-Hole” and “Little Orphant Annie.”

If Colonel Roosevelt had never done anything other than what he has done in writing, he would undoubtedly be highly esteemed as an American man of letters. And people have made very creditable reputations as humourists who never wrote anything like as humorous essays as those of Joyce Kilmer. They fairly reek with the joy of life. They explode with intellectual robustness. They are fragrant in fancy, richly erudite in substance, touch-and-go in manner, poetic in feeling, rocking with mirth, and display an extraordinary flair for style. If it should seem that I am not here measuring my words I suggest a reference to a piece of documentary evidence called “The Gentle Art of Christmas Giving,” a “Sunday story” in the New York Times, here reprinted. Writing at top-notch speed, never looking again at what he had written, intentionally producing a readily marketable commodity, from which profit must be realised quickly, Kilmer was an exceedingly rare bird in America; that is, a belletristic journalist. There is always the touch to his work of a man of letters. Decidedly Bellocian, Chestertonian, certainly his humorous essays are. But that it was a good deal more an affinity of mind with, than an imitation of, those splendidly humorous English philosophers is borne out by this: Joyce Kilmer did not talk poetry, but he did talk exactly like his essays, which admirably present the brave humorous wisdom of the man as his intimate friends knew him.

Official critical authority did not dampen his verve. As a contributing editor of “Warner’s Library of the World’s Best Literature,” he supplied the articles on Madison Cawein, John Masefield, William Vaughn Moody and Francis Thompson. He contributed prefaces to various volumes of standard authors. Excellent examples of this department of his activity are his Introduction to Thomas Hardy’s “The Mayor of Casterbridge” in the Modern Library, his introduction to the American edition of the “Verses” of Hilaire Belloc, and the introduction to the volume “Dreams and Images,” his anthology of Catholic poets. The Introduction to this Anthology is dated 165th Regiment, Camp Mills, Mineola, N. Y., August, 1917, just a year before Sergeant Kilmer’s death in battle. Doubtless few know that at one time Kilmer had drawn a contract to write a “Life” of Father Tabb. Because of peculiar complications in the situation this enterprise, most unfortunately, fell through. In 1916 Kilmer was called to the faculty of the School of Journalism of New York University, in succession to Arthur Guiterman, to lecture on “Magazine and Newspaper Verse.” The object of the course, which was open to outsiders as well as to those enrolled in the School of Journalism, was to familiarise the students with the practical side of writing verse for publication.

VI

It seems rather a misnomer, and something of an absurdity, to say that Kilmer was ever neutral in anything. But in the political sense he was a neutral, and, if it may be put that way, neutral to a pronounced degree, preceding the entrance of the United States into the war. His keen feeling for the sturdy virtues and robust customs of Old England, Merrie England, was of course, patent. His delight in London, and the English countryside, which he knew from a child, was manifest. The pillars of his fairly large literature were, of course, English. His profound sense of integrity was violently jolted by the violation of Belgium. As the war went on, however, he developed an attitude which was quite capable of being interpreted as Pro-German, by anyone interested in so interpreting it. The explanation of this attitude is simple enough. Instinctively a combative character intellectually, his humorous essays, which expressed him so intimately, almost without exception found their spring in his running counter to some current idea. As he one time remarked, he was “bored by feminism, futurism, free love;” and, too, he was invariably for the under dog. It may seem rather grotesque to present Germany by implication as an under dog in the early years of the war; the point is, the force of the argument was so overwhelmingly against Germany that Kilmer reacted to this in a characteristic fashion, stood boldly against the current, and was, in fact, a neutral—until the sinking of the Lusitania. All reports agree, including even reports from sources of strong anti-English feeling where Kilmer’s inclination to see what could be said for Germany was coveted, that from this point on his manner was altogether hostile to Germany. Outside of his Lusitania poem he did not, so far as I know, denounce the deed; but the unanimity and the precision with which the change in him is fixed by all who observed him is striking.

Kilmer’s successive literary passions were a curious medley. He seemed to have been born with a great love for Scott, and he held stoutly to Sir Walter throughout the years. In his burly days he found a humorous sport in defending, with jovial emphasis, the old-fashioned chivalrous romance against the scientific modern novel. In his æsthetic period he had a touch, hardly more, of Oscar Wilde, though early in his literary career he experienced a rather severe case of Swinburneitus. Some time shortly after this he was very much intrigued by the Celtic revival. Shaemas O’Sheel, a friend dating back to Columbia days, bears testimony that an early boast of Kilmer’s was that an ancestor of his had been hanged for taking a rebel’s part in ’ninety-eight. And though as we know, Kilmer’s immediate ancestry was not Irish, a Gaelic enthusiast who has made a specialty of the Irish language, suggests in his ardour, that the name Kilmer is a derivation of Mac Gilla Mor. At any rate, an affection for Ireland—her literature, her lore, her traditions, and her people—was indeed natural with him.

In his Yeats period Kilmer had about chosen “Nine Bean Rows” as the name of his house then in the course of construction, though it was not altogether “of clay and wattles made.” The thing which deterred him from this decision was that persons unacquainted with the poem “Innisfree,” to whom he spoke of the matter, conceived his address as Number Nine Beanrose Avenue. What a funny street, they said, that is. Literary merely, of course, that; and though a part of the whole, remote from later, deeper and graver things. Something inherently Irish in Kilmer undoubtedly was felt by many, Irish themselves and very much so, who, in some cases, are “quite certain” that the fact of their being Irish was the reason why he regarded them and their work as writers with friendship. He did, indeed, like all manner of Irish. He liked the Irish fairies, he liked Lady Gregory, he liked most decidedly the poor Irish people who went to the Catholic church, and (as he later showed), of all soldiers, Irish soldiers he liked best.

Everything chivalrous and sacrificial appealing to his deepest instincts, he felt noble “delight in hopes that were vain.” It is not at all improbable that had he been an Irishman born and resident in Ireland he would have been among the martyrs of Easter Week. In certain qualities of his soul a kinship with these spirits may readily be traced. Some of them, I have been told, he knew personally; and his reverence for Plunkett he has written.

And all that Kilmer wrote, every line of it, he wrote in two ways; he wrote it in words, and he wrote it in his acts. When the idea of the Poets’ Meeting to express the sympathy of American poets with the three Irish martyred poets of Easter Week, Pearse, MacDonough and Plunkett, first occurred to Eleanor Rogers Cox, she asked Kilmer’s advice about it over the telephone. And he said, “Go ahead, I’ll back you up,” with the result that the meeting, a success, took place in Central Park, with Edwin Markham presiding, Kilmer, Margaret Widdemer, Miss Cox, Louis Untermeyer, and many other representative poets taking part.

Indeed, in the logical scheme of things (or, at any rate, in Joyce Kilmer’s scheme of things) the poet is a soldier, an idealist with the courage of his song; and, in a manner of speaking, all soldiers are poets, whether or not they ever pen a line, for they give supreme expression to the conviction of their soul. And then, as Christopher Morley has finely written in his tribute to Kilmer, “the poet must go where the greatest songs are singing.” To anyone who knew Kilmer it would have been perfectly dumfounding if, when war was declared between his country and Germany, he had not done exactly as he did. It is inconceivable—to picture him moving about here, from restaurant to office, in this hour. Flatly, the thing can’t be done. With him, when he joined the army, it was only one fight more, the best, and as it proved, the last.

He hated many things, but I believe that of all things he hated most a pacifist—a pacifist in anything. He was a fighter. He fought for his home, stone by stone; he fought for his renown. His conception of the church was the Church Militant. His thoughts dwelt continually on warrior-saints. He believed in the nobility of war and the warrior’s calling, so long as the cause was holy, or believed to be holy. As he saw it, there was no question as to his duty. This I know, you might as well have asked Niagara Falls why it pours over its ledge, as have discussed with Kilmer the matter of his going to war. That was, in its way, just such another force of nature. As to what might happen to him, it is hardly necessary to remark that his faith told him that that would be all right, too. John Bunker was among the last to bid him farewell. There is the Kilmerian splendour in what he wrote:

Kilmer had first joined the Officers’ Reserve Training corps. He soon resigned from this. In less than three weeks after the United States entered the war he enlisted as a private in the Seventh Regiment, National Guard, New York. His own statement was: “I haven’t time for Plattsburg: had too much work to finish, but I had to get in.” The Regiment was mustered into the Federal Service on July 15, 1917; and Kilmer expected to go to training camp somewhere in the South for a couple of months, then to be sent to “France, or Russia, or Cuba, or Mexico or somewhere else.” He had a great distaste for going to Russia, because he disliked cold climates. He one time expressed a decided aversion to a book commonly held to be quite good. When asked what was the matter with it, he denounced it as being about “one of those cold countries.” It would not, of course, have been Kilmer had he not found elation in the distinguished and picturesque character of the crack regiment to which he belonged. “We are the oldest outfit in the Guard—Lafayette reviewed us in 1824 and Joffre two weeks ago.” If you had not seen the dress uniform of “the Seventh” you heard all about it at lunch. And “hard newspaper man” as he was, he became even “harder” now. “Can’t hurt my feelings,” he wrote requesting a friend to be quite frank with him. “Hard military character, seriously considering acquisition of habit of chewing tobacco.”

Shortly before the Seventh left New York for Spartanburg, South Carolina, Kilmer was transferred, at his own request, to the 165th Infantry, U. S. A., formerly the famous old “Fighting Sixty-ninth,” New York, a unit of the Rainbow Division, assembled at Camp Mills, Mineola, Long Island. He was most particular to impress upon his friends the point that he had been transferred at his own volition. I do not know that he ever said so, in so many words, but I gathered from him the impression that a considerable part of his motive in having himself transferred was occasioned by his belief that the 165th would go sooner than the Seventh to the battlefield. Then, too, as we know, he was “half Irish”; and an Irish-American regiment doubtless was a powerful magnet to him. In the 165th the people he liked best of all were “the wild Irish boys who left Ireland a few years ago, some of them to escape threatened conscription, and travelled about the country in gangs, generally working on the railroads. They have delightful songs that have never been written down, but sung in vagabonds’ camps and country jails. I have got some of the songs down and hope to get more—‘The Boston Burglar’—‘Sitting in My Cell All Alone’—they are a fine, a veritable Irish-American folk-lore.”

Kilmer at this time was the father of four children, named respectively Kenton Sinclair, Rose, Deborah Clanton and Michael Barry. One day he appeared in my office on an errand of business relating to the handling of his literary property. He was, in outward effect, perfectly composed, an admirable picture of a young soldier. It was then, in what followed, that he displayed the most extraordinary, the most amazing, measure of spiritual stature that I ever observed in any man or ever read of in any human book. Settled, with his customary air, in my chair, he demanded some pipe tobacco. I had none. And for this he heartily damned me out. Then he said: “Bob, my affairs are somewhat in disarray.” Thinking that perhaps he wanted to borrow two dollars, or something like that, I asked: “What’s the matter, Joyce?” “Well,” he answered, quite in his ordinary way, “several days ago Rose died; yesterday my son, Christopher, was born; Kenton is with my wife at her mother’s; my family is, in fact, very much scattered; I’m expecting to go to France within a few days—and I have many other difficulties.” That was all he said as to this. He then talked excellent business. I went to the elevator with him. We shook hands more quietly than usual; he said, “Good-bye, Bob;” and the door of the car closed upon him, standing erect in his military overcoat, looking somewhat serious. That was all.

From Company H. Kilmer was transferred, within a short time, to Headquarters Company, and exchanged his eight hours a day of violent physical exercise (“most deadening to the brain, a useful anodyne for one, coming as it did after my grief,” he wrote in an intimate letter) for exacting but “interesting” statistical work. Though called Senior Regimental Statistician he continued to rank as a private. His work was under the direction of the Regimental Chaplain, Father Francis Patrick Duffy. He was thankful, he wrote from Mineola in a letter at this time, that he was not with the Seventh at Spartanburg, as from Mineola he could telephone to his wife every night, and he said: “I’ll be an accomplished cuss when I get back from the wars—I’ll know how to typewrite and to serve Mass and to sing the ‘Boston Burglar.’”

VII

It was “the pleasantest war he had ever attended,” so he wrote back from France. “Nice war, nice people, nice country, nice everything,” he said on the back of a postcard. To the Reverend James J. Daly he wrote, “When I next visit Campion, I’ll teach you (in addition to ‘The Boston Burglar’) an admirable song called ‘Down in the Heart of the Gas-House District.’ I sing it beautifully.” And “as a common soldier, I have the privilege of intimacy with the French peasants—and I find them edifyingly good Catholics.” But his pleasures in war he has told, as none but the author of “Trees” and “Main Street” could tell them, in his letters. What he never told must be read between the lines. When the war was over, he said, he never wanted again to go far away from Browne’s Chop House and Shanley’s Bar. Though it is firmly held in the background, there is in all that he wrote from France, it seems to me, a reflection that his life was, so to say, somewhat in disarray. And clearly enough, though proudly, too, in the few poems that he sent back he spoke his body’s pain:

And:

And in the closing lines of this poem certainly is given, as fully as anything can be told in this world, the answer to the question, How did the war most affect Joyce Kilmer?—

Though he said, “I have very little chance to read contemporary poetry out here,” he did read, as he says, “what do you suppose? The ‘Oxford Book of English Verse.’” And he hoped that contemporary poetry was

“Just what effect the war would have had on Kilmer had he been spared is of course an entirely elusive topic,” has said one very able and on the whole most valuable commentator, speaking from the testimony then in hand, and voicing, I fancy, an idea still rather general. It is not now, I think, an elusive topic at all, but a matter as plain as a pikestaff. And the matter is, by the way, the second of the two most indispensable pages in Kilmer’s story. It is a page in which his character underwent another metamorphosis as consequential in its effect on his talent even, if that could be possible, as his conversion to the Catholic faith.

Kilmer left the United States a professional writer from his twenty-third year, and one of the most accomplished, prolific and industrious journalists of his day. Writing with him had become a habit almost as natural as speech. It was his intention when he left New York to write a war book. He discussed this project with his publishers even so definitely as to have settled upon a title: “Here and There With the Fighting Sixty-Ninth.” As time passed it became puzzling why no “copy” of any kind came from him. And as still more time passed this matter assumed for me an element of more than considerable mystery. It was incomprehensible because none of the reasons which would ordinarily apply in such a situation explained Kilmer’s case to me. If it had been anyone else I should have concluded that he was unable to find time to write anything. But precisely the point about Kilmer was that he did the impossible: it was quite his habit to, in the racy phrase, “get away with” situations which would have floored anyone else. It was to my mind an illogical hypothesis that he could be frustrated by obstacles. And I felt that, inexplicable as it was for Kilmer to fail in anything or to neglect any opportunity, he was here failing in justice to his career. How was it in fact? As it had always been. He was receiving the light opened to him. There could not be, I submit, any more telling proof that he had genius, the capacity to become an absolutely great writer, than this: that in this war which has prompted more people to write, and has produced more “copy” than nearly all the other events of history put together, he ceased altogether to be a journalist of any kind; that is, even the instinct of the journalist dropped from him, when he touched it.

He had had no thought, he says, of attempting to report the war: “If I had, I’d have come over as a correspondent instead of as a soldier.” All his days he had been trying to get closer and closer to the heart of life. In the war his profound instinct for humanity found fulfilment. Of his close comrades he writes: “Say a prayer for them all, they’re brave men and good, and splendid company. Danger shared together and hardships mutually borne develops in us a sort of friendship I never knew in civilian life, a friendship clean of jealousy and gossip and envy and suspicion—a fine, hearty, roaring, mirthful sort of thing, like an open fire of whole pine-trees in a giant’s castle.”

He was at present “a poet trying to be a soldier.” “To tell the truth, I am not at all interested in writing nowadays, except in so far as writing is the expression of something beautiful. And I see daily and nightly the expression of beauty in action instead of words, and I find it more satisfactory.”

“My days of hack writing are over, for a time at least.” Upon his return to civilian life his civilian work “may be straight reporting.” As for “that mob of war writers (thank God—let me pharisaically say—that I am not one of them).” The book? “The only sort of book I care to write about the war is the sort people will read after the war is over—a century after it is over!”

Kilmer’s “Holy Ireland,” a sketch of a lodging for the night enjoyed by a little group of Irish-American soldiers at a farmhouse in France, is the only piece of prose writing of any extent at all that came from him overseas. He himself wrote of it to his publishers: “I sent you a prose sketch ‘Holy Ireland,’ which represents the best prose writing I can do nowadays.” It is unmistakably a piece of literature, that is to say, though slight enough in substance, a work of firm and exquisite and enduring art.

In a letter to the Reverend Edward F. Garesché, S.J., one of the last he wrote, the following paragraphs occur:

And he ends with these words: “Pray for me, my dear Father, that I may love God more and that I may be unceasingly conscious of Him—that is the greatest desire I have.”

Though he gloried in being a private soldier, it is quite evident, too, that he was charmed with his promotion. “I am now a sergeant,” appears on the back of every copy of the well-known “tin-hat” post-card, and in every letter near this date. In more than one intimate letter he says: “I’ll never be anything higher. To get a commission I’d have to go away for three months to school, and then whether or not I was made an officer—I’d be sent to some outfit other than this, and I don’t want to leave this crowd. I’d rather be a sergeant in the 69th than a lieutenant in any other regiment in the world.” “A volunteer regiment, the bravest and best regiment in the army.” “I have a new stripe—an inverted chevron of bright gold on the left cuff for six months’ service ... let my children be proud of it.” And, “a long moustache I have.”

For a while he had worked in the Adjutant’s Office, having special charge of recording and reporting statistics. Then he was no longer (“thank God!”) doing statistics. Someone over here had said that he had “a bullet-proof job.” “I had one, but succeeded, after two months intriguing, in getting rid of it.” “At that time I was just an office hack—now I am a soldier, in the most fascinating branch of the service there is—sheer romance, night and day—especially night.” He had become attached to the Regimental Intelligence Section, working as an observer—“very amusing work,” “wonderful life!”—“the finest job in the army!” But “I don’t know what I’ll be able to do in civilian life—unless I become a fireman!” “I am having a delightful time, but it won’t break my heart for the war to end.”

“Rouge Bouquet” was his “first attempt at versification in a dug-out.” He had lived in “billets, dug-outs, trenches, observatories and all sorts of queer places.” And at length, he was “(after a most violent and amusing month) resting (six hours out of every twenty-four!) in a beautiful place, among the firs and pines on a lovely mountain top, from which I can see strange things.” “I sleep on a couch made soft with deftly laid young spruce boughs and eat at a table set under good, kind trees.” And with that inimitable, irrepressible and incomparable Kilmerian pleasure he contemplated what he called “my senility”: