Publishing mishaps, as more than one writer will testify, do not always occur singly. This was true in my own case in 1927, the year that saw my misadventures with The Lone Adventurer. In that same year, I put forth another book, The Literary Revolution, a critical work dealing with the changes that had overcome literary standards, both in poetry and prose. This volume, which has assuredly fled long ago from everyone’s memory (and almost from that of its author) was issued by an establishment called Frank-Maurice, Inc.—one of those concerns which are not necessarily less worthy or successful because the same man is owner, manager, and editor, and may in fact insure closer author-publisher relationships and better attention to the individual book. But the one-man house suffers from this serious drawback: it is in danger of paralysis if anything happens to its guiding spirit.
And that is just what, unhappily, did befall Frank-Maurice. The head of the firm—it would be no exaggeration to say, the firm itself—was an aging, scholarly man named Rosenblatt; but he was not too old, nor apparently in bad health. Therefore it was with a stunning shock that one day, shortly after the appearance of my book, I stepped into his office and learned that Rosenblatt was dead. His passing had been very sudden—perhaps due to a coronary occlusion, though I doubt if that term was much in use then. But whatever the cause, he was gone; and with him died the firm of Frank-Maurice. There were, it is true, some lawyers and others to supervise the post-mortem, and give what accounting they could to authors; but the wheels had ground to a halt; sales campaigns had ended, and so had sales, and the whole organization was rapidly dissolved. I was, of course, not the only author affected, nor probably the one most affected, and it is unlikely that The Literary Revolution would in any circumstances have kindled more than the mildest of blazes. But the effect was a little like that of having a horse in a race, even though not an expected prize-winner, and of seeing it stumble and fall just after the starting signal. This, of course, was just one of the occupational hazards of authors. And occupational hazards, as I think everyone will agree, are easy to endure—when they overtake others.
In The Literary Revolution, I said much the same things about poetry as in my unpublished Poetic Revival in America; and aimed my blows, as often in later days, against those persons who either wilfully or out of ignorance were confusing poetry and prose, and so threatening to destroy poetry as a separate form of creation. A typical passage follows:
If Mark Twain, as a whimsical bit of humor, had chopped one of his prose articles into fantastic form, commenced each line with a capital letter, and labelled the whole poetry, he would have been attempting in jest what some of the writers of today are undertaking seriously. And if he had declared that he was guided by rules known only by himself, and that the ear which could take pleasure in Shelley and Swinburne was not always delicate enough to value him correctly, he would have been foreshadowing the attitude of the free versifiers. The difference is that he would have been greeted with laughter, whereas the free versifiers are sometimes accorded a more sober approval.
In another passage, I call attention to the basic distinction between prose and poetry. I point out that “Prose is the vehicle for the ordinary expression of ideas, poetry for their artistic expression”; that “Artistic creation must always imply restraint,” the remoulding of “the gross material of inartistic expression into the sharply defined and chiselled product of art.” Always before our own day, poetic technique has been the means of consummating this end. But this fact never seems to occur at all to the apostles of the new school:
They ask for freedom, and forget that freedom is not the way of art; they clamor to express an idea untrammeled by convention, and fail to remember that the only vehicle permitting such liberty is prose. They demand all the rights of the prose writer, and shrink from all the duties of the poet—and yet they call their productions poetry.
If called upon to amend these lines today, I should not limit myself to saying that the spokesmen of the new freedom “demand all the rights of the prose writer.” I should add that they ask rights no prose writer has ever required, sometimes including the privilege of expressing themselves with an incoherence, a turgidness, or a ranting effusiveness that would earn nothing but laughter if offered as straight prose. Imagine, for example, what would happen to any writer of prose who took the liberties assumed by Dylan Thomas in lines such as these:
My point, of course, is that our verse writers have claimed such additional liberties since 1927 that criticism which might then have seemed startlingly radical is much too tame to express the present situation.
After The Literary Revolution—which produced far less than a revolution in literature—about three years went by before I attempted any further book publication connected with poetry. Then one day I entered the office of The Poet’s Magazine and Poetic Publications in a large downtown building, and had a talk with the proprietor, George Sakele, a dark-skinned somber man with an Oriental cast of countenance. Looking back on Poetic Publications, I think that it was truly the most curious institution that ever attempted to purvey poetry to an indifferent public. Was Mr. Sakele himself a poet or critic? If he was—at least, in anything but the most private way—that fact never came to my attention. He ran his poetic enterprises, if the strange truth must be confessed, in connection with his sale of cosmetics; his speciality was some sort of an alleged Egyptian cream for women’s skins, which he advertised over the radio as akin to that in which Cleopatra used to bathe (price, five dollars a bottle). I shall never forget the sickly sweet odor with which it pervaded his office. Poetry to him was evidently a hobby, though I have always wondered why he did not pick something simpler, such as stamp-collecting; in any case, he did indubitably publish a magazine, with the aid of a young employee named Dorothy Gretzner; and he did also publish books—which was the occasion of my visit to him.
Even in those days, a young poet in search of a publisher could not always be too critical—not if the publisher was willing to assume the financial responsibility. Just now I have been wondering just what sort of a contract Sakele could have offered me; and burrowing back in my files, I have looked for the first time in many years at the one-page agreement, which, mercifully free of small-print provisos and legal ifs, whats, and moreovers, proceeds in the simplest language to state that the publisher will issue the book in an edition of not less than 1,000 copies, take out the copyright in the author’s name, and “pay the author a royalty of 10% on the retail price of all copies sold.”
On the basis of later experience, I cannot help wondering how many of the stipulated “edition of not less than 1,000 copies” Mr. Sakele ordered to be bound. I also wonder how he expected to sell any copies at all—a department in which his success appears to have been much less notable than in the distribution of Egyptian face-creams. Nevertheless, in order to obtain an agreement such as he gave me, many an aspiring poet would, I am sure, overlook all dubious factors, including the face-creams.
True, there were several peculiarities about my second collection of short poems, Shadows on a Wall. The least was that the binder, evidently running out of cloth or wishing to get rid of some scraps, completed various copies in different shades of blue and brown. Another peculiarity, which likewise troubled me but little, sprang from Sakele’s theory that no poem should occupy more than one page; in consequence of this unique idea, which would have run into difficulties in the case of Locksley Hall or The Ancient Mariner, a sequence of three sonnets was crowded into page 27 in minute unspaced eight-point type, whereas most of the poems were printed in amply spaced ten-point. But what really did annoy me was the typographical error in the poem, A Thousand Years From Now. Preceding the first line, “Above the ruins that were once New York,” these irrelevant words from another poem appear: “Whose blade was sharp and strong.”
I was sure that, whatever mistakes may have escaped my proofreading eyes—and many have escaped them, before and since—such an intrusion would have glared at anyone not wholly blind. And I was not at all consoled when a friend, commenting on the error, assured me that some day this flaw would make the book all the more valuable—as a collector’s item. If there is any logic in this reasoning, I ought to regret that the book did not commend itself to collectors by more disfigurations, and more serious ones.
The title of the collection, which was never one of my favorites, was supplied by the opening quatrain:
I quote this not as anything I take pride in, but on the contrary, because it is something I should not be disposed to write today. It represents a pessimistic—and, I believe now, a shallow view which I was inclined to take sometimes in my brooding earlier days. I believe now, and believe profoundly, that there is more to life than the leaping and subsiding of flames and of the shadows they throw on a wall; but the fact that I could once have written these lines, and even picked them as the title poem of a collection, strikes me as an indication of the extent of the changes that have overtaken some of my general views during a period when my ideas as to poetry and the making of poetry have been little altered.