Joyce Kilmer

It is the felicity of these pages that they cannot be dull. It is their merit, peculiar in such a memoir, that they cannot be sad. It is their novelty that they can be restricted in appeal only by the varieties of the human species. It is their good fortune that they can be extraordinarily frank. It is their virtue that they cannot fail to do unmeasurable good. And it is their luck to abide many days.

With their subject how could it be otherwise? They make not a wreath, but a chronicle, and in their assembled facts tell a bright chapter in the history of our time. If there is one word which more than any other should be linked with the name of this gallant figure now claimed (and rightly) by so many elements of the nation, that word certainly is “American.” A character and a career so racy, typical of all that everybody likes to believe that at our best we are, can hardly be matched, I think, outside of stories.

I

Joyce Kilmer was reported in the papers as having said, just before he sailed for France, that he was “half Irish,” and that was why he belonged with the boys of the Sixty-ninth. His birth was not exactly eloquent of this fact. Though, indeed, he was, as will appear, a much more ardent Irishman than many an Irishman born—that is, in the sense of keenly savouring those things which are fine in the Irish character, and with characteristic gusto feeling within himself an affinity with them. Later, in a letter from France to his wife, he was more explicit on this point:

He also, in a letter from France, quoted with much relish the remark of Father Francis P. Duffy that he was “half German and half human.” English and Scotch strains made up another half or three quarters. The English goes straight back to one Thomas Kilburne, church warden at Wooddilton, near Newmarket, in Cambridgeshire, who came to Connecticut in 1638. The “e” was lost apparently in Massachusetts, and the word became, as in his mother’s maiden name, Kilburn.

Soldier blood, too, flowed in his veins—though it is likely that this fact for the first time occurred to him, if at all, when his nature rose white-hot to arms. He was, so to say, a Colonial Dame on both sides, as members of both his father’s and his mother’s family fought in the American Revolution; and members of his father’s family in the French and Indian wars.

Alfred Joyce Kilmer (as he was christened) was born at New Brunswick, New Jersey, December 6, 1886, son of Annie Kilburn and Frederick Kilmer. Though he seems always to have been, in familiar address and allusion, called Joyce, the Alfred did not disappear from his address and signature until he began, as more or less of a professional writer, to publish his work, when it went the way of the Newton in Mr. Tarkington’s name, and the Enoch in Mr. Bennett’s. Then “Joyce Kilmer” acquired a fine humorous disdain for what he regarded as the florid note in literary signatures of three words (or, worse still to his mind, the A. Joyce kind of thing); and he enjoyed handing down, with much relish of the final and judicial character of his utterance, the opinion that the proper sort of a trademark, so to say, for success in letters was something short, pointed, easy to say and to remember, such as Rudyard Kipling, Mark Twain, O. Henry, Joseph Conrad, and so on through illustrations carried, at length, to intentionally infuriating numbers.

As a small boy, Kilmer is described by those who knew him then as the “funniest” small boy they ever saw, by which is meant, apparently, that he was an odd spectacle. And this, of course, is so altogether in line with literary tradition that it would have been odd if he had not been an oddity in the way of a spectacle. He wore queer clothes, it seems, ordinary stockings with bicycle breeches, and that sort of thing. He didn’t altogether fit in somehow, couldn’t find himself, was somewhat of an outsider among the juvenile clans; he was required to fight other boys a good deal; he evidenced a pronounced inability to comprehend anything at all of arithmetic; and somewhere between eight and twelve (so the report goes) he contracted a violent passion for a lady, of about thirty-five, who was his teacher at school; a passion which endured for a considerable time, and became a hilarious legend among the youth about him of jocose humour.

It is told that at “Prep” school, when this goal seemed rather unlikely of his attainment, he made up his mind to stand at the head of his class; and with something like the later Kilmerian exercise of will he accomplished his purpose.

Kilmer was graduated from Rutgers College in 1904, and received his A. B. from Columbia in 1906. His University life seems to have been, in outward effect, fairly normal. There is no ready evidence that he “shone” particularly, and none that he failed to “shine.” He was not deported by the authorities, and he was not unanimously hailed the idol of his classmates. He became a member of Delta Upsilon fraternity: and he was, of course, active in college journalism. Then as always he appears to have been zestful in living well, to have counted sufficient to the day the excellence thereof, and to have been too warm with life to be calculating in expenditures. He retained in the years that followed—and it seems to have been the college memory he retained most distinctly—a humorous recollection of his consuming his allowance on an abundance of rich viands during the first few days of each month, and being reduced to the necessity of living precariously on a meagre ration of crackers and sandwiches thereafter—until next income day.

Characteristic of the vehement manner in which he went after life, as a Sophomore Kilmer became engaged to Miss Aline Murray, of New Jersey, a step-daughter of Henry Mills Alden, editor of Harper’s Magazine. Upon leaving Columbia he took up the business of making a living in the way of an elder American intellectual tradition, by teaching school in a (more or less) rural community. He returned to New Jersey and began his career as instructor of Latin at Morristown High School. So slight a lad he was, even several years after this time, that it is difficult to picture him in the disciplinary adventures of the classic figure of this calling. His problems at Morristown doubtless were dissimilar to those of his early, Hoosier, prototype. He married and became a householder. His son, Kenton, was born. In religion he had been bred an Episcopalian, and during this period in New Jersey (it is told) he acted as a lay reader in this church.

He soon concluded, apparently, that pedagogy was, so to say, no life for a boy. At the conclusion of a year’s teaching he tore up the roots he had planted, and, together with the young lady he had married, and the son born to them, and with a few youthful poems in his pocket, he advanced upon the metropolis, even in the classic way, on the ancient quest of conscious talent.

The rapidity and brilliance of Joyce Kilmer’s success has altogether obscured his very democratic beginnings. As his initial occupation in New York, he obtained, by a lucky chance, employment as editor of a journal for horsemen, though of horses he had no particular knowledge—to be exact, no such knowledge whatever. Here finding little to do, and discovering one day in a desk drawer a bulky manuscript, he decided—as he was editor—to edit it. This, apparently, he did with youthful energy. The little job he mentioned with some satisfaction to his employer, a fine portly sportsman with a crimson face and an irascible temper. The young editor explained that the manuscript evidently had been written by a man familiar with horses, but one apparently innocent of the art of literary composition. “Young man,” bellowed his employer, “I would have you understand I have been through the best veterinary college in the world, and I have been a veterinary myself for over forty years.” His wife, he added, was his amanuensis, and he guessed she knew something about writing. The editorship came to an abrupt termination.

Then followed a brief sojourn, at a salary of (I think) eight dollars a week, as retail salesman in the book store of Charles Scribner’s Sons, a dignity which the young littérateur wore with humorous dignity for exactly two weeks. A distinct mental impression of him of this time presents him as decidedly like an Eton boy in general effect, and it seems that a large white collar and a small-size high hat should have gone with him to make the picture quite right. One who met him then felt at once a gracious, slightly courtly, young presence. He gave forth an aroma of excellent, gentlemanly manners. He frequently pronounced, as an indication that he had not heard you clearly, the word “Pardon?”—with a slight forward inclination of his head, which, altogether, was adorable. His smile, never far away, when it came was winning, charming. It broke like spring sunshine, it was so fresh and warm and clear. And there was noticeable then in his eyes a light, a quiet glow which marked him as a spirit not to be forgotten. So tenderly boyish was he in effect that his confreres among the book clerks accepted with difficulty the story that he was married. When it was told that he had a son they gasped their incredulity. And when one day this extraordinary elfin sprite remarked that at the time of his honeymoon he had had a beard they felt (I remember) that the world was without power to astonish them further.

As a retail salesman, however, this exceedingly interesting young man did not make a high mark. One’s general impression of him “on the floor” is a picture of a happy student, standing, entranced, frequently with his back to the door (which theoretically he should have been watching for incoming customers), day after day engrossed in perusing a rare edition of “Madame Bovary.” One sensational feat of business he did as a clerk perform. Misreading, in his newness to these hieroglyphics, the cypher in which in stores the prices of books are marked on the fly leaves of the volumes, he sold to a lady a hundred-and-fifty-dollar book for a dollar and a half. This transaction being what is termed a “charge sale,” not a “cash sale,” and amid some excitement the matter being immediately rectified, disaster for the amateur salesman was averted.

At Scribner’s a close friendship was, almost at once, formed between the youthful poet and another then unpublished writer acting at that time in the same capacity of clerk—a friendship which was never diminished by the numerous shiftings of Kilmer’s fields of activity, the multitudinous, diverse and ardent interests which he acquired in an ever-mounting measure, and the steady addition of numberless friends of all classes who eagerly yielded him their devotion. It was rather a friendship which was continually cemented by increasing and closer bonds. It was a part of Kilmer’s spirit to make his first friend in his literary life a sharer as far as was possible in each new success of his own. One among many, innumerable, instances of this was his contriving, by his influence with the editor (at that time another intimate, Louis H. Wetmore), to work his friend into a position somewhat rivaling his own at the period (1912–1913) when he was the bright and shining star reviewer for the New York Times Review of Books. The regular Tuesday lunching together of these two friends when their offices were widely separated became, at least in their own fancy, an American literary institution. The two were united in all the symbols of affection between men. And at seasons of rejoicing and adversity the Kilmer house was to his friend as his own. It is to this one who among all of Joyce Kilmer’s friends owes him the greatest debt of friendship has come the supreme trust of writing, within the power of his many and conscious limitations, this Memoir, and editing these volumes.

Dropping the very small bird which he held in his hand in the way of a secure salary, the spectacular bookseller, somewhat to twist the figure, plunged again into uncharted seas, and became a lexicographer, as an editorial assistant in the work of preparing a new edition of the Standard Dictionary. He blithely began his Johnsonian labours by defining ordinary words assigned to him, at a pay of five cents for each word defined. This is a very different thing indeed from receiving a rate of five cents a word for writing. It is a task at which you can obtain an average of perhaps ten or twelve dollars a week, though some weeks “stickers” will hold you back. It soon became apparent, evidently, that it was advisable to put this very capable pieceworker on a salary; and he was rapidly promoted, with corresponding increases in remuneration (reaching an amount of something like four times his initial earnings), to more advanced phases of the work: research into dates of birth (involving correspondence with living celebrities); research into the inception of inventions (as, for example, the introduction of the barrier into horse racing); together with the defining of words of contemporary origin, in, for instance, the nomenclature of aviation. In this last mentioned department, it was his office to call upon authorities, such as the Wright brothers, and upon presentation of his credentials to receive precise information. He interviewed famous tobacco importers, and coffee merchants; compiled in the New York Public Library material about fans; unearthed for use as an illustration a picture of a strange bird; or was assigned to collect for this purpose designs of ancient mouldings.

If lexicography was Kilmer’s venerable occupation, by political faith he was at the time, this very young, young man, a socialist. He subscribed for and frequently contributed to the Call newspaper. And the height of his effervescence was in addressing meetings of the proletariat. He was, it must be said, a burning “young radical.” He frequented, to some extent, a club of that name. And with a joyous consciousness of being in the character of his surroundings he ate meals at the Rand School of Social Science. He rapidly acquired a wonderful string of queer acquaintances, in whose idiosyncrasies he took immense delight. Some, not of the persuasion, fancied that as an adherent of the socialist party he was merely enamoured of an intellectual idea. At any rate, whenever in conversation he spoke of socialism, as he frequently did, his graceful, amiable young features assumed a very firm and earnest aspect. Exactly the point of transition, if there was any decided point, I cannot recall, but from the proletariat he passed to the literati. A “man of letters” became a great word with him. And he looked rather proudly about as he said it, as a Scot might speak of the doughty deeds of the Scotch. He was wont to refer, too, to the “intellectual aristocracy.” His luncheon engagements were now mostly with this order of humanity, and his anecdotes featured such figures as Richard Le Gallienne and Bliss Carman—men whose personalities delighted his heart beyond measure.

How absurdly juvenile he looked. But you would have noted, as you observed him, that he had a very fine head, something like that of Arthur Symons (without the moustache), I thought; or, according to Mr. Le Gallienne’s sympathetic picture in The Bookman: “Though the resemblance was perhaps only a spiritual expression, his then thin, austere young face, with those strangely strong and gentle eyes (eyes that seemed to have an independent, dominating existence), reminded me of Lionel Johnson, for whom he had already a great admiration, and whose religion he was afterwards to embrace.” Or, again, he seemed as if he might be a comely youth out of ancient Greece. I think that what I mean is that he was so unlike all other young men anyone had ever seen walking about, so much brighter and purer, or some indescribable thing, that he did not seem altogether real. A feeling which I think was shared by many, and which I have never quite been able to make articulate, Mr. Le Gallienne has most happily expressed with his own easy charm; that is the “hint of destiny” in this “very concentrated, intense young presence—masculine intense, not feminine:”

Above all, this young gentleman was the portrait of a poet, even (in those days) of the type of literary sophistication which is (or was) called decadent! There was about him a perceptible aroma of literary self-consciousness. He had begun to contribute to magazines and newspapers the verses which he soon gathered into a first volume, “A Summer of Love” (an “author’s book,” as the trade term has it), verses patently derivative in character (as whose early verses are not?), showing the influences of various masters.

He had already become a bit of a celebrity, arriving at twenty-five in Who’s Who. In conversation he spoke with striking fluency and precision, and a rather amusing effect of authority; all of which, together with a ready command, rather incongruous for his years, of very apt words little employed in speech, gave a general impression, I fancy, of something of an infant prodigy. He wrote in a letter of this time of the poems of Coventry Patmore:

The finding of Patmore, by the way, was what might be called a finger-post in Kilmer’s life. The fortunate introduction was performed by, it is my impression, Kilmer’s friend Thomas Walsh.

If in cold print to-day there is a slightly preposterous didactic quality in these remarks of this youthful character, it should be instantly noted as a tribute to the charm that was his that in the presence of so much handsomeness and grace, combined with so much flexibility of mind and agile humour, even this was an engaging thing.

There was to Kilmer nothing whatever dry-as-dust about the erudite business of lexicography; instead his impressionable nature found among his co-workers a rich, a colourful, an exciting school of humanity. He glowed continually with affectionate amusement at the motley band of literary adventurers, intellectual soldiers of fortune, who apparently were his colleagues. One, the most motley perhaps of all (the long cherished dream of whose ancient bachelor life it was one day to write a popular song), touched, for the first time, I think, the deepest spring of his song—his profound and wide-ranging humanity.

II

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

III

I really doubt very much whether anybody ever enjoyed food more than Kilmer. The slender youth had become a decidedly stocky young man, who ate mammoth meals with prodigious satisfaction. He delighted upon sitting down to breakfast to maintain, with almost savage earnestness (such was the amusing effect), that the most fitting dish for that meal was steak. As a matter of fact, however, his habit was to miss his breakfast altogether through haste to catch his train, except for a cup of coffee and a piece of buttered toast which, when he missed the ’bus, he ate, a mouthful every dozen or so leaps, on his way down the hill (almost a mountain) to the station. Sundays, however, with the whole day at home, he apparently regarded among other things as a sort of barbecue. Looking over the morning table it was his custom to inquire with the air of a man making a fairly satisfactory beginning, what was scheduled for dinner.

Kilmer never ate any lunch, as the ordinary world understands the word—about the first hour of the afternoon he went (when his means had become such that he could afford it) to a sort of Thanksgiving or Christmas dinner every day. How proceeding directly to his office he did any work afterward, was always considerable of a mystery to me. And lunching alone he doubtless regarded as a misanthropic perversion. His luncheons and his frequent dinners in town alone represented what many would regard as a rather arduous social life, which however arduous, however, never failed to include the weekly luncheon with his mother, Mrs. Kilburn-Kilmer. As an epilogue, so to say, to his meal it was his wont to have, speaking his order slowly so as to suck the full flavour of the idea, “a large black cigar.”

One time being in the city with his family for a period after the birth of one of his children, he gave a series of Sunday morning breakfasts at a fashionable restaurant (it was a pleasant crotchet with him that he was “a fashionable young man”), entertainments which were distinguished by, first, the fact the guests so abundantly represented the world of journalism that they filled a good portion of the room, and, secondly, by the circumstance of their lingering at the board until mid-day diners began to arrive.

How a poet could not be a glorious eater, it was one of Kilmer’s whims to say, he could not see; for the poet was happier than other men by reason of his acuter senses, and as his eyes delighted in the beauty of the world, so should his palate thrill with pleasure in the taste of the earth’s bounteous yield for the sustenance of men. The romance, too, of the things we eat he felt lustily.

He had another, and a decidedly quaint, notion of food. He firmly believed that hearty eating was an adequate physical compensation for loss of sleep. He was fond of declaring his faith in this fantastic idea by means of a story of some “ancient receptive child” (friend of his) who managed to bring up a family of seven (or so) children by ill-paid hack-work occupying most of the day and night—a noble success due entirely to noble meals.

And “this man’s” days were long, long days: Kilmer’s home, a place of boundless week-end hospitality and almost equally boundless domesticity (guests being obliged to exercise much agility in clambering about toys with which the stairs were laden), was also year after year a place of almost unbelievable literary industry. The trying idiosyncrasies of the artistic temperament were about as discernible in Kilmer as kleptomania. He was, as you may say, social and domestic in his habits of writing to an amazing degree. Night after night he would radiantly walk up and down the floor singing a lullaby to one of his children whom he carried screaming in his arms while he dictated between vociferous sounds to his secretary or wife—his wife frequently driven by the drowsiness of two in the morning to take short naps with her head upon the typewriter while the literally tireless journalist filled and lighted his pipe.

This, however, was an atmosphere of cloistral seclusion compared with Kilmer’s office at the New York Times. Here, where he regularly got through each week enough hard work to hold down three or four fairly capable young men, he maintained a sort of salon for a ludicrous variety of picturesque characters with nothing in particular to do and no place else to go, ranging from types of patrician leisure to stray dogs of the literary world visibly out of a job.

The latter class, indeed, apparently regarded him as a kind of a clearing house for employment. A singularly convincing commentary on the radiating humanity of this brilliant young man was one rather grotesque feature of his mail. In addition to a constant and copious stream of requests from persons but slightly known, or quite unknown to him, for advice as to how to succeed in letters, and for his personal imprimatur on their enclosed manuscripts, he was apparently constantly in receipt of innumerable epistolary stories of extraordinary distress, suffered (generally) by elderly characters defeated in the lists of literature. Though there was in Kilmer’s robust nature a decided distaste, somewhat analogous to the innate aversion of the clean in spirit to moral obliquity, for what he termed “ineffectual people,” there was too an amusing strain of paternal feeling toward most of those of all ages with whom he was in contact. And this feeling he did not neglect, whenever the occasion arose, to translate into practical effect.

He had a comical manner of terming his elders “young” So-and-So. I was six years his senior, which at the period of life at which we met represented a considerable difference in experience. And yet, throughout our association, in spiritual force he was the oak, I the clinging vine. And I know of cases where this was quite as much so when the other man was something like fifteen years the elder. One such instance, ludicrous in its contrast between the two men, was confessed to me with deep feeling just the other day.

“So-long” or “good-bye” was seldom Kilmer’s parting word. It was rather a word he continually used which will be thought of as peculiarly his as long as his memory endures, the closing word of “Rouge Bouquet.” The last time I saw him at his home, then at Larchmont Manor, New York, my companion (in marriage) and I upon leaving almost missed our car, which started a block or so from the Kilmer house. As the three of us dashed after it, Kilmer stopped this car by what seemed to me something like sheer force of his willing it to stop. Then, as he dropped away from the race, there came from him high and clear out of the night (and always shall I hear it ring) his benediction: “Farewell! Children.” Yes, it is even so; as the spirit is measured and the frailties of the soul are numbered, how many who knew this wondrous boy were his “children”!

The wisdom of the maxim “A busy man is never too busy to do one thing more” was indisputable in the spectacle of Kilmer. Though this was not, so far as I recollect, a maxim he employed, he had one of his own something like it, which admirably summed up his practical philosophy. When confronted by some financial dilemma, he was fond of declaring: “The demand creates the supply. A sound economic principle.” He seemed to crave serious responsibilities and insistent obligations as some men crave liquor; and he grew more rosy as these increased.

There was nothing incongruous to Kilmer about the incongruity expressed in a communication written in 1916 to the Reverend Edward F. Garesché, S. J.; a letter which began by saying, “I am sorry that your letter of October 11 has been so long unanswered, but this has been the busiest month of my life”; which then told of his looping the loop of the country in lecture engagements; proceeded to discuss a matter which had made a strong appeal to his heart, the founding of an Academy of Catholic Letters to be called the Marian Institute; and concluded with the remark, “I will gladly take on the work of acting secretary until the members make their own selection.”

IV

In 1913, Kilmer’s daughter Rose, nine months of age, was stricken with infantile paralysis. It was then, upon his bringing his family to town to give his daughter the treatment of a specialist, when he came to my house to tell me of this, that I first distinctly realised that this young man was remarkable—in a manner far beyond mere talent. The idea which he kept firmly before his mind was that it had been declared there was no occasion to fear her death as a result of her affliction. During the course of his stay with me that day he said several times, “Well, there are lots of people worse off than I am.” This idea, too, it was apparent, he felt he must hold before him. And then, with his amazing and unconquerable flair for life, he launched upon the theme that this was a “very interesting disease,” and he elaborated the thought that an infirmity of the body frequently resulted in an increased vitality of the mind.

“I like to feel that I have always been a Catholic,” was a sentiment frequently expressed by Kilmer. It has repeatedly been declared by friends very close to him that his minute knowledge of pious customs and practices of which a life-long Catholic might easily be ignorant was a constant surprise to them, but that with respect to religion as particularised in himself he kept silent, would never discuss the steps that led to his conversion, and it was only by chance they discovered he was a daily communicant. It was late in 1918 that Kilmer astonished the little world that then comprised his family, his friends and acquaintances by entering, with his wife, the Roman Catholic Church. One afternoon not long after this occurrence he not so much invited as directed me over the telephone to meet him that night for dinner at the Columbia Club. His purpose soon became clear. This was the only solemn hour I ever spent with Kilmer. I think it well to record here what he deeply impressed upon me: that it was this searing test of his spirit which had come upon him in the affliction of his daughter that fixed his religion.

Kilmer did not become a great patriot when his country entered the world war. He was, of course, the same in fibre then as before. Only then was known to him and visible to others what was latent in his heart. And in this sense it was, I think, that it was clear to him that he did not become, but had always been a Catholic, though he had not earlier realised it. He tried all things and held fast to that which he found good. He was inwardly driven to seek until his spirit found its home. That only the time of his conversion was, in a sense, accidental, and that the conversion itself was inevitable, must be evident in the fact that he was never really himself before he became, as we say, a convert. Then his fluid spirituality, his yearning sense of religion, was stabilized. What is the “secret,” as we say, of all that has been told of his ability? His courage, his mental and physical energy, were, manifestly, unusual. But his character, in the faith that he embraced, found its tempered spring. His talent was a wingéd seed which in the rich soil which had mothered so much art found fructification.

It is not an unsupported assertion to say that he was in his time and place the laureate of the Catholic Church. His sentiments as to the function of a Catholic poet he has expressed very positively in his essays and lectures. He joyed in the new proof given by Helen Parry Eden “that piety and mirth may comfortably dwell together.” “A convert to Catholicism,” he wrote of Mr. Yeats on Lionel Johnson, “is not a person who wanders about weeping over autumn winds and dead leaves, mumbling Latin and sniffing incense.” Nor is it necessary to lay æsthetic hands on the church’s treasures, “and decorate rhymes with rich ecclesiastical imagery and the fragrant names of the saints.” But in Faith one may find “that purity and strength which are the guarantees of immortality.”

And, once a Catholic, there never was any possibility of mistaking Kilmer’s point of view: in all matters of religion, art, economics and politics, as well as in all matters of faith and morals, his point of view was obviously and unhesitatingly Catholic. Considerable as were his gifts and skill as a politician in the business of his career, the veriest zealot could not say that he did not do the most unpolitic things in the service of his faith. A very positive figure, he laboured tirelessly, alternating from one field to another, for the Catholic Church.

As a brilliant interpretative critic of Catholic writers, such as Crashaw, Patmore, Francis Thompson, Lionel Johnson and Belloc, he brought, I think I may venture to say, an altogether new touch into Catholic journalism in America, a striking and distinguished blend of “piety and mirth,” which had the rare and highly effective quality of being both engaging and highly illuminating even to, as Kilmer would amiably have said, the Pagan. Impetus, of course, was given to his style in this by his admiration for the brilliant school of English Catholic journalists, an impetus doubtless accelerated by the personal acquaintance with Belloc, the Chestertons and the Meynells he gained in a flying visit to England in 1914 to rescue his mother from war difficulties in London; when, during a few odd moments before his return, he established a lively connection with the Northcliffe papers and T. P.’s Weekly. Even so, Kilmer almost, or quite, alone transplanted this particular spark; and his note of witty common sense and spiritual sensibility was particularly Kilmerian, too.

One day about four years ago the village Post Office at Mahwah did a totally unprecedented and most extraordinary business in outgoing mail, and Kilmer was again multiplied manifold. The neat circulars which he had printed and with which he stuffed the mail box announced that the author of “Trees,” a member of the staff of the New York Times, etc., etc., “offered the following lectures for the coming season.” The result may best be epitomised in the parable of the gentleman who cast his bread upon the waters to have it come back to him in the form of sardine sandwiches. The rapid development of Kilmer’s lecture business, which soon assumed the proportions of no mean career in itself, immensely extended his force as a quickening influence in the Catholic world. Before societies and educational institutions in many places, frequently travelling as far as Notre Dame, Indiana, and Prairie du Chien, Wisconsin, he flung his bright portraits of “seekers after that real but elusive thing called beauty, a thing which they found in their submission to her who is the mother of all learning, all culture, and all the arts, the Catholic Church.”

V

As a literary lecturer and a reader of his own poems before secular audiences his success was no less abundant. In “the only combination of its kind since Bill Nye and James Whitcomb Riley,” as the circular of the J. B. Pond Lyceum Bureau stated it, “the young American Poet” and the author of “Pigs is Pigs” contributed considerably to the lightening of the rigours of existence by an extended repetition of “a joint evening of readings from their works.” Ellis Parker Butler, in a letter before me, writes of his partner on the programme: