Joyce Kilmer: Poems, Essays, and Letters, Volume II (of 2)

For Heaven’s sake, don’t tell me about how bad tea rooms are! I admit that I used to scorn them. Now I could live in one, enthusiastically. I wouldn’t mind at all the closeness, the bad service, the soiled table linen. Why, Max’s Busy Bee sounds better to me now than Sherry’s used to sound.

“She walks the way Primroses go” reechoes in my soul. What a delightful poet you are! Send me some more poems, at once, please.

It’s time I heard from you again. Some mail came to-day, but I got nothing from you. You should write me long letters often. By all means take up Fr. Hayes’ lecture offer. You can make your lectures chiefly readings. Get Dr. Pallen to help you make a circular, and put on it testimonials from whomever he suggests. Get Bob Holliday’s advice as to form of circular. You will find valuable suggestions as to engagements in my correspondence files, wherever they are.

Young —— is in a nearby town—an amiable child indeed he is. I saw him twice, and he presented me with a bag of cakes and a box of cigars. He reminds me very much of Kenton, but is in many respects his inferior. I’d like to see Kenton and Fr. Daly and Deborah and Michael and Christopher and Sister Emerentia and some Bass’ Ale and some dry sherry and a roast of lamb with mint sauce and Blackwood’s Magazine and the bar in the Auditorium Hotel in Chicago and a straw hat and the circus. And I really wouldn’t mind seeing you.

Your friends are a bit impertinent, I think. I don’t claim to be a learned French scholar (although I have talked French every day for six months). But I do claim to know the name of the place where I lived in constant danger of death for six weeks, where many of my friends gave their lives for their country. It is Rouge Bouquet, not Rouge Bosquet. I’ll be deeply grieved if it appears in print incorrectly. Also, I wish the grace in “Holy Ireland” to stand as I wrote it. It is just as Frank Driscoll said it on that unforgettable night—it is the grace used in Jesuit houses. Please see to this, and don’t let all the world revise my mss. I rather expected you’d like the poem better, but perhaps the reason the fellows in the Regiment liked it so much is because we all felt keenly the event it memorizes.

The above is rather stern and brusque, isn’t it? Well I wrote it in rather stirring times—now only memories. I am resting now, in a beautiful place—on a high hilltop covered with pine and fir trees. I never saw any mountain-place in America I thought better to look at or from. I sleep on a couch made soft with deftly laid young spruce boughs and eat at a table set under good, kind trees. A great improvement on living in a dug-out and even (to my mind) an improvement on a room with a bed in a village. I am not on a furlough, I am working, but my work is of a light and interesting kind and fills only six out of twenty-four hours. So I have plenty of time for writing, and have started a prose-sketch (based on an exciting and colourful experience of the last month) which I will send you soon. Everything I write, I think, in prose or verse, should be submitted to Doran first.

I wish I could tell you more about my work, but at present I cannot. But there are advertised in the American magazines many books about the Intelligence Service—get one of them and you’ll find why I like my job. The work Douglas is doing is not allied to mine. Only I suppose he’ll have a commission. I won’t work for one, because I don’t want to leave this outfit. I love you more than ever, and long for the pictures you promise me. You will be amused by the postcards I enclose.

Say, the stuff about your not appreciating “Rouge Bouquet” was written before I got your delightful letter of April 18, admirable critic!

I have just received your letters of April 1st and April 5th. “Moonlight” is noble, like its author. As to being worried about you because it expresses pain, why, I’d be worried only if you did not sometimes feel and express pain. Spiritual pain (sometimes physical pain) is beautiful and wholesome and in our soul we love it, whatever our lips say. Do you not, in turn, worry because of my foolish letter to you from the hospital. At that time I was just an office hack—now I am a soldier, in the most fascinating branch of the service there is—you’d love it! It is sheer romance, night and day—especially night! And I am now therefore saner than when I wrote to you from the hospital. I’ve had only a week of this work—but I’m already a much nicer person.

As to the picture I sent you, why, surely I have a moustache, and not a “morning pout.” Mechante. A long moustache I have (illustration of moustache) comme ca. Also, I have thick hair which stands up (illustration) comme ci. I had my head shaved last November, you know, and it had a good effect. My letter is thrilling, isn’t it, with all these martial details? A veritable cross-section of battle, a flower from No Man’s Land. Well, I am sending some battling picture-postcards soon which you will find amusing, I think—portraits, in two striking histrionic poses, of myself. You know now, from my previous letters, that I am no longer (I thank God!) doing statistics, so gently, but widely and most firmly, correct the statement that I have a bullet-proof job. I had one, but succeeded, after two months’ intriguing, in getting rid of it. It wasn’t a shell-proof job—nothing in a real regiment is. (Such jobs are in the Ordnance or Supply Departments, back of the lines.) It wasn’t shell-proof, I say, and if I should be squashed by a shell, wouldn’t you hate to have it said that I was nobly holding my post in the office, or bravely manning my typewriter? Now, I’m doing work I love—and work you may be proud of. None of the drudgery of soldiering, but a double share of glory and thrills. But it is not so glorious and thrilling as you.

I don’t know just what kind of a mental picture you have of my present life—to be accurate it would need to be rather kaleidoscopic, for my activities and the spheres of them vary frequently and greatly. But this afternoon you (or perhaps not you, but readers of Empey and Private Peat and the rest of that mob of war writers—thank God, let me Pharisaicly say, that I am not one of them—would do so) would have been amazed at the martial picture before you, had you seen me. Just outside the edge of the forest of firs and spruce in which we fourteen men live is a lovely meadow. There, among the knee-high buttercups, lay in the May sunshine all afternoon three warriors—myself being one. Whiles we smoked and gazed at the lovely valley miles below us—whiles we took turns in reading aloud from—what do you suppose? The Oxford Book of English Verse! We read Gray’s Elegy, the first chorus from Atalanta in Calydon, “They told me, Heraclitus,” that witch poem of William Bell Scott, “Love in the Valley,” “Lake Isle of Innisfree,” “Keith of Ravelston,” and half a dozen other poems, all of which brought you most poignantly and beautifully before me. No, they didn’t bring you before me—you are always before me and with me and in my heart and brain—but it’s dangerous to write this—it draws so tight the cords that bind me to you that they cut painfully into my flesh. Well, we are to be together sometime, inevitably, and soon in terms of eternity. For we are absolutely one, incomplete apart, and in Heaven is completeness. How unhappy must lovers be who have not the gracious gift of faith!

There is to be an Homeric banquet at our house one day—the day when I exhibit to my comrades the glory of my life—yourself. You will like them all—Watson (a gifted artist from Richmond, who is now at work on a fine drawing which must accompany Rouge Bouquet in Scribner’s), Bob Lee, Titterton (my especial friend), Beck, Mott, Kerrigan, Levinson—say a prayer for them all, they’re brave men and good, and splendid company. They are all men of education, and breeding, and humour, and we have fine times. Dangers 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, or a truly timed bombardment with eight-inch guns. I don’t know that this last figure will strike you as being particularly happy, but it would if you’d had the delight of going to war.

Right here I had to pause to discuss theology with Watson, Titterton, Levinson and Jongberg. Jongberg is up here for a brief spell; he is a Swedish-Irishman, and now he is posing for St. Michael for Watson, using a bayonet for a sword. Levinson (in full uniform, including belt and helmet) is being model for the soldiers leaving Rouge Bouquet for Heaven. He is a quaint little French-Jewish-American, with whom we have a lot of fun. They all trooped into the room where Titterton and I sit writing to our respective sweethearts, to ask about the style of St. Michael’s sword and that of his halo. These questions settled, Watson became enamoured of the idea of angels saluting, and devised a whole manual of arms for angels—as “Angels, attention! Wings raised, by the numbers. 1 up! 2 down! Wings flap! Hey you down there! what’s the matter with you? Don’t you know enough to keep your hands down when you flap your wings? Awkward squad for you to-morrow!” Then they went back to their work.

Well, I don’t know how long the Intelligence Section is to stay in this lovely summer resort of a place, but it’s certainly fine while it lasts. And I am very fortunate to have such a crowd as this to work with. I never was with so congenial a company in civilian life. Fr. O’Donnell came up to see us yesterday—he is stationed not far away. Fr. Duffy has an assistant—Fr. Kennedy—a Jesuit, thank God! I have not met him yet. He is a brother of the publishers of Barclay Street. I have a new stripe—an inverted chevron of bright gold on the left cuff for six months service. Let you be proud of that too, please, and let my children be proud of it. That is all the news except that I love you.

To-day I was made very happy by receiving two nice little ridiculous letters from you—one of which considered itself to be long. As to Sr. Mary Leo—if you happen to be writing to her (you will be, for I told her to ask you for “Rouge Bouquet”) ask her by all means to tell you how her grandmother taught her geography. It’s an absolutely delightful story, and she’s a delightful old saint.

You say Tad will go “in a few months.” I’m glad I’m not Tad. There are many reasons for this, of course, but I mean I am especially glad I’m not to go in a few months. I’m glad I’m a Sergeant in the 69th, a volunteer regiment, the bravest and best regiment in the army. I’m glad I have a golden service chevron on my left arm—that means six months service in France, and is better than two bars on my shoulder, which would mean only three months stay at Plattsburg. If I get an honorable wound that will unfit me for soldiering but not for civilian work, that civilian work will not be hack-writing. It may be straight reporting, or editing, or writing (Evening World at $80 a week, for instance) a weekly essay-column, or dramatic criticism (this last appeals to me strongly). Also I’ll do less lecturing and more oratory—bombastic, thundering, literary, Henry Woodfin Grady oratory! It is exciting, and lecturing isn’t, especially.

Meanwhile I find myself approving your plan of getting literary work, although doing it makes me feel like a coloured man approving his wife’s plan of taking in washing. You relieve my mind greatly by your willingness to keep your name off the book. I thought I would acknowledge to you the pleasure I got from “A Wind Rose in the Night.” It is a holy and dear poem.

Please see that Kenton learns to serve Mass, won’t you? Sorry to keep teasing you about this, but you never write anything about it.

Your poem “To a Sick Child” is beautiful, and “cookies” is the making of it. I love you.

I didn’t get your letter expressing enthusiastic approval of “Rouge Bouquet” until I had received two others just mentioning it. I certainly am glad the poem “got” you, as it got me. The Regiment—and soldiers outside the Regiment as high as a Brigadier General—are wonderfully enthusiastic. The Brigadier General had twenty-four copies made to send his friends. Of course we are especially moved by it because the event is so close to us. But to appreciate it you should have heard taps played and at a soldier’s funeral. P. C. ought to know the distinction between peacemakers and pacifists. I wonder he didn’t include St Michael in his catalogue of pacifists. We are peace-makers, we soldiers of the 69th, we are risking our lives to bring back peace to the simple, generous, gay, pious people of France, whom anyone (knowing them as I have come to know them in the last six months) must pity and admire and love. They are an invaded people—and invaded people always are right. The careful study of certain ghostly villages (I cannot forget them) has taught me where I would have stood in the 60’s and that is on the side of the invaded Southern States. God keep me from ever being ordered to take part in an invasion of a peaceful land! So long as I am helping drive out the invader, I know I’m right—and all questions of international politics are of no importance whatever. Here are nice old ladies, fat babies, jovial humorous men, and little girls just after making their First Communions. They’ve been driven out of their pretty sleepy little villages. They want to get back and mend the shell holes in the roof and go to school and take their place drinking red wine of an evening according to their tastes and ages. Well, we men of the 69th are helping to give these people back their homes—and perhaps to prevent our homes from one day being taken from us by the same Power—of whom nothing at all worse need be said than that it is an invader. And St. Patrick and St. Bridgid and St. Columkill and all the other Saints are with us—they are no more pacifists than they are Roycrofters! And God keep us from Washington Square! No Man’s Land is a damn sight healthier place—I have tried both, and I know what I’m talking about.

And as for you, you young flippertigibbet, you won’t be middle-aged, you say? Well, we’ll see about that! I’ll probably come back with one eye, one arm, one leg and a horrible temper, and turn your hair white in a day. Stop calling any child of ours “Billy.” When you referred to “Billy” in previous letters I thought you meant some rather unfortunately named dog or cat. Now I am annoyed to find out you meant Michael. The habit of so designating him probably started humorously—please stop it at once.

I have not read “The Tree of Heaven,” to which you refer in a recent letter. But I have read Carnival—and if when I get back to the States I find that you really think such books are “fine,” as you say in your letter, I’ll grab a baby (probably young Michael) and start for whatever South American Republic or other bellicose land has need of the services of a ranting, roaring, slashing, dashing young Sergeant, fresh from the ranks of the quarrelsome Irish, veteran of the Great War.

I enclose three bits of verse by various hands. “A Nun’s Prayer for a Soldier” is by dear old Sister Mary Leo. The flattering sonnet was sent to me by Sr. Mary Emerentia, having been copied from a paper published by the girls of St. Mary’s College, Notre Dame, Indiana. I destroyed Sr. Emerentia’s letter before I copied down the author’s name, so I couldn’t write to thank her, unfortunately. “The Green Estaminet” I want carefully preserved, for it must go in every anthology made by you or me or anybody we know. I like it better than any war poem I’ve read since I became a soldier, and I deeply regret that I didn’t write it. Many and many a jovial evening I have spent in just such bistrals as the poet describes. Dear old Madame—she always has that “strange disease,” and she finds that white bread is good for it—and in exchange for that white bread (from army kitchens) she gives the delicious soft-crumbed brittle-crusted war-bread, better than any bread in the States. “The great round songs begin”—they do, indeed! “Bing Bang Bingen on the Rhine!” “Down in the Heart of the Gas House District,” “Sidewalks of New York,” and always “Madelon,” in which the French soldiers in the corner enthusiastically join. Cecil Chesterton told me he always judged a country by its drinking-places. Well, here are the merriest, bravest drinking places in the world. If the States go dry, I’m going to bundle all you young critters over here to live—a comfortable, humorous, Catholic country. Honestly, the only drawback to living in this country is the absence of you and your gang. I’d like a house on the very mountain top I now inhabit, and I know you’d enjoy it tremendously. I’m perfectly serious about this, and look forward to bringing you here.

A terrible thing, this war, what with a pine forest to live in, all the latest novels to read, and bridge every evening. And now I am preparing for a short week-end in a certain nice small city, an hour’s walk through the forest and across the mountains. It is a lovely forest in which to wander of a June day—so deliberately European—a forest whose tall evergreen trees and smooth brown floor suggest all the folk tales I ever heard your dear voice beautify for our children’s delight. Reaching this certain town, I have interesting things to do—to collect my pay for one thing. To get mail—I hope from you. To go to confession to Fr. Duffy or Fr. Kennedy, S. J., our new assistant chaplain, or to some curé with thin hands and long white hair. To drink a bottle of beer at the Sergeants’ Club—among my brother noncoms, French, Italian and American, in horizon blue, green and olive drab respectively. To mail to you this letter and a splendid drawing for “Rouge Bouquet,” by Emmett Watson, of ours. To dine sumptuously on steak and fried potatoes and Pinard at a merry bistral on a side-street, where Madame la patronne will present me with a sprig of lilies of the valley, which I (imagine a boutonierre with an American uniform!) will present to the baby of the tailor’s daughter. To attend the movies—two sous! To sleep between clean sheets in a hotel-bedroom—half a franc! And to-morrow to be (gold service stripe flashing in the sunlight, trench-stick jauntily swinging) a part of the many-coloured Sunday afternoon procession along a certain broad avenue. Then back to my forest-lodge for supper.

So far, I have told about six people about your rejoicing in the fact that the possession of a kitten justifies you in purchasing a bird-cage. An absolutely delightful character-revelation—that is, the revelation of a delightful character. And the most genuine sample of you I have had since last November.

I am writing this letter in the end of one of our barracks, which its partition cuts to make an airy office for the Supply Sergeant of Headquarters Company. You’d like him very much—a very beautiful person of about my age, a playwright by profession, educated in Paris. At the other end of the long table sits a bridge party, of which the members are the Supply Sergeant (Lemist Esler is his name), Howard Young (who was a Marine before he became a fighting Irisher), Sergeant Kenneth Russell (a wealthy and charming business man of very literary taste, who knows most of the living poets we know and revels in the Oxford Book of English Verse), and Tom O’Kelly, who has the most beautiful tenor voice you ever heard. He is a professional singer from Dublin, with very tightly curled close-cropped hair, a reddish brown face, and the build of a prize-fighter. In the lulls of the game he sings snatches of “Digging for Gould” and other nice ballads. Admirable person.

“HE LIES BURIED, ON THE RIGHT,
BESIDE LIEUTENANT OLIVER AMES,
AT THE EDGE OF A LITTLE COPSE
KNOWN AS THE WOOD OF THE
BURNED BRIDGE, CLOSE TO THE
PURLING OURCQ”

I am with the Regiment now—the Intelligence Section is back from its Post, the beautiful place from which I wrote you many letters. Now we are in very flat country, the flattest I ever saw. Very violent flowers, chiefly scarlet poppies and small blue things, cornflowers, I believe. Gloriously hot, with good swimming nearby, and the best sort of shower-bath, obtainable by merely sitting under the spout of a pump while an obliging friend turns the handle.

Your letter of May twenty-sixth came after I had received a June letter. I am delighted to hear of Kenton’s confirmation and of his choice of a name—St. Stephen is a gallant gentleman and a true friend and does wonderful things for me.

I’m not very enthusiastic about that group picture of office-workers in which I appear—I like myself better as I am now, a soldier instead of a clerk, visiting the office only occasionally—to work on my history. And I’m ever so much happier now than when the picture was taken.

Is Kenton serving Mass yet? Please have him do so. And please send me my Anthology—I believe restrictions no longer keep packages from soldiers. I love you.