V
POETS

Trobadour, by Alfred Kreymborg.
William Blake in this World, by Harold Bruce.
John Keats, by Amy Lowell.
Poe—Man, Poet and Creative Thinker, by Sherwin Cody.
Edgar A. Poe, A Psychopatic Study, by Dr. John W. Robertson.
Rimbaud, by Egdell Rickword.

Despite the number and varieties of biographies published every year, we rarely come upon one that is so interesting that it can not be put down until the last page is read, one that grips us like a novel such as The Constant Nymph or Tono Bungay. Alfred Kreymborg, a maker of verses without rhyme or capitals, some of which have great emotional range, has succeeded in writing a story of his life that rivets our attention. And he has pitched it in a key that persistently revives pleasant memories. Reading it, one feels that it is the faithful portrait of a soul in its adventures through life. Mr. Kreymborg is an uncommon individual: a modest artist. He is content that his artistry shall dawn upon us gradually, that we shall discover it as it were. He does not proclaim it in the first chapter and reiterate it in all the succeeding ones.

Neither our country nor its metropolis has been considered favourable breeding ground for artists, nor is our atmosphere congenial to the artistic temperament. It is difficult to conceive of more sterile soil or environment for the growth and display of the emotional and intellectual endowment that constitute artistry than those in which Mr. Kreymborg found himself at his birth and during his formative years. Indeed, he can not even be said to have been fortunate in his parents, though his father, a German cigar packer, had a sense of humour, liked Jews, and detested Tammany Hall; and his mother played the Butterbrod Walzer and was optimistic. But that his talent was nevertheless “in the family” on his mother’s side is testified by his Aunt Isabelle, who went to the library every day, and was devoted to things called ideals.

The author does not dwell upon the locus and environment of his early days; he spares us the minutiæ of his drab and sordid surroundings, but we get a picture of them that is more informative than if it were painted in vivid colours. Years ago I saw it every day, that German-American home in the middle East Side, I ministered unto those who constituted it, and I gained an esteem and an affection for its members that required a world-calamity to alter. Now that it is presented to me anew through verbal medium my recollections are refreshed, my affections renewed and I praise the dexterity of the artist’s pen and the accuracy of his memory.

The picture he gives of New York is the thing that will give the book whatever permanency it will have. When Mouquin’s and the Hotel Algonquin shall be replaced with a Rotonde and a Café Michaud; when there will be a Boulevard Saint-Michel instead of a Greenwich Village; a rue la Boëtie instead of a 57th Street; when pagan practice shall have succeeded puritanic principle—then hedonists and students of manners and customs who would know what New York was like while big with the twentieth century, may turn to Troubadour for enlightenment. When poets, now considered radicals or rhythmicals, shall have taken on conventionality, or professorships, and would tell their fellows or their students of the birth and early days of their art and show them the incubators in which the punies were put for development, they will take them for a walk in 14th Street and they will read to them from Troubadour. The latter will be more agreeable than the former for Kreymborg’s prose has much of the elusive loveliness of his poetry; for like his friend Sherwood Anderson, he knows how to string words together so that they make music for the reader; and Fourteenth Street is down at the heels, frayed at the cuffs and woozy in the head.

The author bears unnecessarily hard on the forte pedal when he renders his hardship selections. It does not add anything to our picture of New York’s Bohemia to be told about the “awful stench one could never quite grow accustomed to” in Kiel’s Bakery, and one reader at least has not been able to guess the riddle of the Fourteenth Street studio. The occupant had been working at Æolian Hall and had progressed to orchestrelle leader, apparently content with his prospects. Then Eve came in ostensibly to buy some rolls for her pianola. They called her Tommy. She was twenty-seven or eight and “scarcely what worldly folks would have designated a sophisticated person but with one or two indisputable claims in the direction of Plymouth and the Mayflower.” “Krimmie” learned about women from her. I suspect it was to facilitate deeper knowledge rather than to gestate his art that he resigned his sinecure for the sake of a thing so quixotic as a studio, “not even a studio, but a room, less than a room—up the stairs of a dismal rickety building on West 14th Street.”

Be that as it may, it was from that day that he began to get that intimate knowledge of the habits of the wolf called want, which his autobiography shows us that he possesses, and of the world frequented by the wolf’s readiest prey. He reduced the beast to fictitious pacification by throwing him his winnings at chess and as he had become an expert player they were often considerable, and his germinating worldly love he embodied in a story called Erna Vitek, which brought him a mild succès de scandale. As strange a trio as could be assembled in New York at the time—George Francis Train having left Madison Square for the beyond—came forward to defend him. They were Frank Harris, Rev. Percy Grant and Dr. Frank Crane. Mr. Kreymborg observes parenthetically that he has not met the author of My Life and Loves to this day. It is gratifying to know that amidst all the blows that he received in his quarter century of struggle, there was occasionally a caress!

Krimmie did not exactly tire of Tommy, nor did Tommy exactly tire of Krimmie. But the latter went West and the former East and the experience gave the lie to the poet who sang about the effect of absence on the heart. In East Lyme or thereabouts, Christine threw a dazzling light across Krimmie’s path. It flabbergasted him for a moment so that he could not distinguish her from others, but as soon as his eyes became adjusted to the illumination he knew the die was cast, the seal was set. He hastily sought a scrap of paper and embodied his emotion in six words, each a monosyllable:

Thus did he disregard his oft-repeated admonition that simplicity should occur at the end of a long line of tradition. It reminds me of a picture that Life published many years ago: a small boy gazing intently at a child’s garment (the name of which it is improper to mention in polite American society) hanging on the line of a tenement backyard and uttering ecstatically: “They’re hern.”

And so they were married. Krimmie did not distinguish then between infatuation and love, and Christine had no idea how rough the road would be from romance to reality, especially the part through Grantwood, N. J. So after a year of many detours they decided to try it alone—for a time at least. A young man whose adolescence was pitted with piety had returned from Rome whither he had gone to have love’s scars removed. He was keen to take Christine into his matriomonale Ford in which he had invited her to ride before the priesthood beckoned to him. Day by day, in every way, Krimmie’s affectivity resembled more and more that of the late Mr. Barkis. It is not clearly apparent why Mr. Kreymborg gave up Christine with such readiness. I suspect she had an infantile personality, much like Dora who stole little Emily’s lover away. Adult infantilism and matrimony make an unpalatable emulsion.

One of the many fragments of knowledge that years bring is that man consoles himself readily, often quickly. Krimmie got a job in a Wall Street office as literary secretary to a Hungarian fourflusher, “high in the counsels of the Democratic Party,” to compose superfine notes, commensurable with the calling of the Boss. He had not been there long when he met Dorothy. If Troubadour did not give us anything besides the picture of a person who looked like one of Goya’s ladies, and who had the gentleness of Ruth with the constancy of Penelope, it would still be a precious document. When I think of the many perfect wives of artists that I have known: Mark Twain’s Livy, James Joyce’s Lady; Paderewski’s alter ego, I shall always have a fancy that I have known Dorothy in the quick. One of the first things she did for him after orienting him on life’s pathway was to save for the world his “most quasi-popular composition,” Lima Beans. Then she married him and his days began to lengthen as his heart began to strengthen. They went West, he to intone his poems, and climb Parnassus on the lake; she to pull the strings of his marionettes and to encourage him when his feet slipped on the mountain.

Krimmie’s rejuvenation was more complete than anything Steinach has accomplished. He wrote plays, walked securely amongst the Provincetown Thespians, fraternised intimately with literary arrivistes and puppet-people, encouraged youngsters who were yearning for self-expression and struggling against starvation, earned the good will of the Dial, “now the leading æsthetic periodical of the soil,” and gained the confidence of the young man who was to facilitate him in a long dreamed-of gesture: the founding of an international Magazine of the Arts which would stress the efforts of young Americans. So Krimmie and Dorothy went to Italy and brought forth Broom. Incidentally, they met Ezra Pound, James Joyce, Jean Cocteau, Tristan Tzara, the daddy of Dada, Gertrude Stein, the mammie of gibberish, and Gordon Craig, the master of marionettes, and others too numerous to mention. Krimmie liked them and they all liked Krimmie, or if they did not, one would never suspect it from Mr. Kreymborg’s book; I fancy they did for obviously he has a genius for friendship. If they did not like Dorothy, good taste has deserted the habitués of the Quarter.

Among the many engaging episodes of their European trip none is more delightful than the description of their encounter with the world’s most famous poetic clown, Signor F. P. Marinetti, unless it be the meeting with the pompous Pound. Marinetti directing his fellow-players, totally oblivious of the vegetables that were hurled at him, insensitive of their obvious decay, deaf to the insults and imprecations that came from every quarter of the theatre, was a man risking his life for a reputation. Mr. Kreymborg knew the habits of the wolf, but he knew little of bears or their garden and he had never visited the Parliament of Italy when the House was in session. Later, when he was informed that the civil warfare which he had witnessed had been arranged by Marinetti in the subtle behalf of publicity—that he always hired a number of desperados to open the attack on the stage, and to arouse the audience to an emulation of activity, he realised that he had had a lesson in finesse. Such lessons are given nowhere in the world better than in Italy.

Krimmie came home a better man. No change was to be discerned in Dorothy on her return. She was the same as when she went: a bit of perfection. Then he published his latest book of poems Less Lonely, which caused some of his friends to fear that it indicated the consecration of approaching middle age. The verses observe too many maxims too carefully; they are too regularly iambic; their plethora of monosyllables cause them to lose the nuance of accent, etc. Others thought they showed the effect of Italian atmosphere so favourable to every form of classicism. He “made up” with Louis Untermeyer; and wrote the story of his own life. For one of these accomplishments, we can never cease to be grateful. It has contributed to our pleasure, our instruction and our welfare. Any one who will read Troubadour will love his fellow man more easily, and more intensely.

Troubadour is an album filled with pictures big and little of people we have known or would like to have known. Some of them are vignettes. Some are life-size portraits, all of them testify to the facile and the tender heart. There are few who have figured in the artistic life of this country in the past twenty years who do not come in for mention or characterisation. They all had to do in some way with the genesis, birth and development of his urge for expression,—an urge which is upon him imperiously and which no one, so far as may be judged from the text, has tried to impede. Indeed one of the striking features of the book is that it reveals no skunner against puritanism, no grouch against democracy, no belief in the existence of a cabal to strangle artistry, no ideas of persecution on the part of the author. The world has treated him fairly enough. If ever there was a writer who had no preparation for writing it was Alfred Kreymborg. What he learned he taught himself. If he had learned the piano or the violin without instruction or direction he would have had no fewer long days or lean nights than he has had.

It is a pity that Alfred Kreymborg could not have gone to Columbia University instead of Æolian Hall. Had he been judiciously advised and properly guided he might have been thrown into currents that would have carried him more quickly to success, as he would have developed his artistic consciousness more smoothly and harmoniously and would the more easily have been able to guess the poet’s secret: to be happy in his heightened power to see and feel.

The era of self-made men is passing; many regret it and amongst them are those who get pleasure from struggle, and happiness from contemplating it. As Mr. Kreymborg says, recalling the days when he first went to Fourteenth Street to the “studio:” “And there was absolutely no joy like it—nothing like it.” Writers and artists have no “corner” on that joy.

Writing in 1833, six years after William Blake, the poet-artist, had gone to immortality, Edward FitzGerald said, “To me there is a particular interest in this man’s writing and drawing, in the strangeness of the constitution of his mind.” That is the interest of William Blake to-day when his poetry fails to thrill or to inspire, and when his highest claim to be considered an artist rests on a series of drawings and engravings called Illustrations to the Book of Job.

William Blake had visual hallucinations. At least, he had the capacity to see the creations of his imagination with the same vividness as if they had been before his eyes, and he maintained that they were before his eyes. He contended that things whose reality cannot be proved, such as angels, people deceased for ages, and buildings demolished for centuries, presented themselves in his visual field. He maintained it with sincerity and determination and he drew what he said he saw. But the fact that a man has hallucinations is not sufficient to label him “insane.” Conduct that is prejudicial to others’ happiness, welfare, and comfort is an essential condition, and none of William Blake’s biographers or commentators has described such conduct. To many psychiatrists like myself, Mr. Bruce’s effort to show that William Blake was sane will undoubtedly seem an unnecessary labor, but a gratifying one, for sympathetic hero handling is a kindly thing to observe.

We never cease to marvel that persons who are “mad” can create or copy so masterfully that the admiration of contemporaries is compelled and the gratitude of posterity earned. This, despite the long list of accomplishments in the world of art and letters by men who have been potentially or actually mad.

Mr. Bruce opens one of his chapters with the sentence: “Blake, in other words, was neurotic.” Now, the word “neurotic” must have some very specific meaning for our young author, otherwise he would not declare himself in this dramatic way. If William Blake was neurotic, there is no indication of it in Mr. Bruce’s book. William Blake was psychotic. He had what is called for purposes of facile designation a manic-depressive temperament. The manic-depressive temperament can be described with the same specificity as pneumonia; practically the only thing about it that we do not know is its cause, but it is only very recently that we have known the cause of pneumonia. I do not consider that this is the proper place for the disquisition on the individual psychic functions, particularly on the one known as affectivity, which would be necessary were I to make a readily comprehensible description of the manic-depressive psychosis, whether it reveals itself in shadowy outlines or majestic proportions. Mr. Bruce writes, “To say confidently that Blake suffered from mythomania, or from automatism, or from occasional hyperæsthesia, or from manic-depressive tendencies, or that he did not tend toward a definite schizophrenia is to add polysyllables rather than illumination to the discussion of his state.” This is an attitude of preciosity on the part of Mr. Bruce that is very offensive to me. If he does not know what “schizophrenia” means, then he should consult a dictionary and not display his infirmities to the world. If he knows a better word, that is a more comprehensive or a more descriptive word for personality cleavage, I suggest that he submit it. What further illumination concerning the mental processes of an individual can be desired than is conveyed in the statement that he is a manic-depressive personality, or that he displayed the manifestations of the mental disorder known as the manic-depressive psychosis?

A few years ago, in a book entitled Idling in Italy, I said anent Giovanni Papini (who in 1920 was quite unknown to the American public) that no one unfamiliar with the disorder of the mind called manic-depressive psychosis could fully understand him.

I contend that any one who will read even the summaries of the chapters of Mr. Bruce’s book will need no further evidence to be convinced that William Blake, who had “everywhere the poet’s firm persuasion that things were so, who stuck to a choice that was contemned, to a taste that was laughed at”; who was as immune to ridicule as a tortoise is to admonition; who spoke his mind on all occasions even when it clashed with authority; who, like the master potter, knew, knew, knew; who swung backward and forward from high exaltation to pits of melancholy; who listened to messengers from heaven daily and nightly and composed under their dictation a poem which he considered the grandest that this world contained, even though he was never able to find one purchaser; who received Richard Cœur-de-Lion at a quarter past twelve, midnight, and painted his portrait though he had been dead several centuries; who displayed a persecutory state of mind when he was depressed, and a self-sufficiency that brooked no curbing when he was exalted; who took no thought for the morrow and was as unable to take care of himself as a two-year-old child, was of manic-depressive temperament. That he escaped being sent to Bethlehem Hospital, vulgarly called Bedlam, entitles him to our belated congratulations.

When Mr. Bruce ceases to be annoying about adjectives, he is both amusing and amazing. “William Blake had the neurotic’s need for dependence on some one outside himself.” A neurotic is an individual who has some nervous disorder or disease, functional or organic. A typical nervous disorder is migraine, sick headache. I could easily enumerate a score of the world’s great men and women who were thus afflicted. What was their need for dependence on some one outside themselves? “He had the neurotic’s sense of time.” What can that possibly be? Was it the sense of time that Dostoievsky had just before the convulsions appeared that attended his epileptic attacks? Dostoievsky was a neurotic—one of the most typical that ever lived, perhaps. He maintained that the few seconds previous to the motor manifestation of an attack were a timeless eternity. If it lasted another fractional part of a second, he could not possibly survive it. Did William Blake have this kind of sense of time?

He could not tolerate a pedantic, pretentious, stupid, pachydermatous patron, William Hayley. According to Sinclair Lewis there are only two races of people, the neurotic and the stupid: William Hayley was stupid, William Blake was neurotic. At least, it can be said of this reasoning that it offers a better foundation for Mr. Bruce’s thesis than that which he has heretofore provided.

William Blake was a happy man, for he believed in himself. He was a lucky man—his wife believed in him. He was a courageous man: he threw a trespassing sailor, emboldened by strong drink, out of his garden and was tried for high treason. Yet he patiently tolerated the inquisitive visits of the greatest bore of his time, Crabb Robinson, without even threat of assault. He did not get his just deserts from his contemporaries, but posterity has more than made up for their niggardliness, and Mr. Bruce has given posterity a leg up. Had he dwelt more on the value and significance of Blake’s art and less on his “neurosis” he would have served us better. But his book is a snappy, concise, readable account of a man who had faith in himself and who, finally, compelled others to acknowledge his merit.

Students of Keats’ poetry and personality are not likely to admit that a new life of him was called for, in view of Sir Sidney Colvin’s searching and critical study which has just appeared in a third edition. Amy Lowell’s reason for putting forth a new biography was that she had new material; but what I say elsewhere about Barton’s Lincoln applies here: the new material justified a brochure, not a life.

Miss Lowell wanted to write a life of Keats; that, aside from anything else, was reason enough for her. She had a vicarious mother-feeling for him and she was determined to display it. Her last book is an enduring monument to her industry, patience and perspicacity. She had a relish for criticism, but at times she confounded it with abuse and when she championed an individual, a cause, or a movement, she did it in the manner of a fellow-townsman, John L. Sullivan: with all her might and main. She “never trembled like a guilty thing surprised,” or if she did it was only when she was enraged by the stupidities and ignorance of others—those who did not agree with her.