Part 5 (1/2)

When he was born, a pa.s.sion for books was born with him. His niece tells me that by the time he was twenty-one he had collected a considerable library. He began life as a newspaper man, on the Macon _Telegraph_.

About the age of twenty-four he went to Galveston where he was first a copy-reader, and then for seven years telegraph editor of the Galveston _News_.

I do not know all the details of his life in Galveston, where he lived for about twenty years. He told me that at the time of the disastrous storm and flood he was working in a drug store near the Gulf front. He gave me a thrilling description of the night he spent standing on the prescription counter with the water swirling about his waist. He slept in a little room at the back of the store, where he had a shelf of books which were particularly dear to him. Among them was a volume of Henley's poems. When the flood subsided all the books were gone, but the next day as he was looking over the wreckage of neighbouring houses he found his Henley washed up on a doorstep--covered with slime and filth but still intact. He sent it to Brentano's in New York to be rebound in vellum, instructing them not to clean it in any way. He wrote to Henley about the incident, who sent him a very friendly autographed card which he pasted in the volume. That was one of the books which he held most dear, and rightly.

I do not know just when he came to New York; about 1910, I believe. He took a position as salesman at Brentano's. After a couple of years there he became anxious to try the book business on his own account. He and his nephew opened a shop in San Antonio. Neither of them had much real business experience. Certainly Howes himself was far too devoted a book-lover to be a good business man! After a few months the venture ended in failure, and all the personal library which he had collected through patient years was swallowed up in the disaster. After this he returned to Brentano's, where he remained until his death. About a year before his death he was run over by a taxicab, which shook his nerves a great deal.

At some time during his career he came into intimate friendly contact with Ambrose Bierce, and used to tell many entertaining anecdotes about that erratic venturer in letters. He edited one of Bierce's volumes, adding a pleasant and scholarly little introduction. He was an occasional contributor to _Reedy's Mirror_, where he enjoyed indulging in his original vein of satire and shrewd comment. He was a great lover of quaint and exotic restaurants, and was particularly fond of the Turkish cafe, the Constantinople, just off Madison Square. It was a treat to go there with him, see him summon the waiter by clapping his hands (in the eastern fas.h.i.+on), and enjoy the strangely compounded dishes of that queer menu. He had sampled every Bulgar, Turkish, Balkan, French, and Scandinavian restaurant on Lexington Avenue. His taste in unusual and savoury dishes was as characteristic as his love for the finer flavours of literature. I remember last November I elicited from him that he had never tasted gooseberry jam, and had a jolly time hunting for a jar, which I found at last at Park and Tilford's, although the sales-girl protested there was no such thing. I took it to him and made him promise to eat it at his breakfasts.

He had the true pa.s.sions of the book-lover, which are not allotted to many. He had read hungrily, enjoying chiefly those magical draughts of prose which linger in the mind: Bacon, Sir Thomas Browne, Pater, Th.o.r.eau, Conrad. He was much of a recluse, a little saddened and sharpened perhaps by some of his experiences; and he loved, above all, those writers who can present truth with a faint tang of acid flavour, the gooseberry jam of literature as it were. One of my last satisfactions was to convert him (in some measure) to an enthusiasm for Pearsall Smith's ”Trivia.”

As one looks back at that quiet, honourable life, one is aware of a high, n.o.ble spirit s.h.i.+ning through it: a spirit that sought but little for itself, welcomed love and comrades.h.i.+p that came its way, and was content with a modest round of routine duty because it afforded inner contact with what was beautiful and true. One remembers an innate gentleness, and a loyalty to a high and chivalrous ideal.

Such a life might be a lesson, if anything could, to the b.u.mptious and ”efficient” and smug. Time after time I have watched him serving some furred and jewelled customer who was not fit to exchange words with him; I have seen him jostled in a crowded aisle by some parvenu ignoramus who knew not that this quiet little man was one of the immortal spirits of gentleness and breeding who a.s.sociate in quiet hours with the unburied dead of English letters. That corner of the store, near the front door, can never be the same.

Such a life could only fittingly be described by the gentle, inseeing pen of an E. V. Lucas.

My greatest regret and disappointment, when I heard of his sudden death, was that he would never know of a little tribute I had paid him in a forthcoming book. I had been saving it as a surprise for him, for I knew it would please him. And now he will never know.

February, 1918.

JOYCE KILMER

[Ill.u.s.tration]

I

I wonder if there is any other country where the death of a young poet is double-column front-page news?

And if poets were able to proofread their own obits, I wonder if any two lines would have given Joyce Kilmer more honest pride than these:

JOYCE KILMER, POET, IS KILLED IN ACTION

which gave many hearts a pang when they picked up the newspaper last Sunday morning.

Joyce Kilmer died as he lived--”in action.” He found life intensely amusing, unspeakably interesting; his energy was unlimited, his courage stout. He attacked life at all points, rapidly gathered its complexities about him, and the more intricate it became the more zestful he found it. Nothing bewildered him, nothing terrified. By the time he was thirty he had attained an almost unique position in literary circles. He lectured on poetry, he interviewed famous men of letters, he was poet, editor, essayist, critic, anthologist. He was endlessly active, full of delightful mirth and a thousand schemes for outwitting the devil of necessity that hunts all brainworkers.

Nothing could quench him. He was ready to turn out a poem, an essay, a critical article, a lecture, at a few minutes' notice.

He had been along all the pavements of Grub Street, perhaps the most exciting place of breadwinning known to the civilized man.

From his beginning as a sales clerk in a New York bookstore (where, so the tale goes, by misreading the price cipher he sold a $150 volume for $1.50) down to the time when he was run over by an Erie train and dictated his weekly article for the New York _Times_ in hospital with three broken ribs, no difficulties or perplexities daunted him.

But beneath this whirling activity which amused and amazed his friends there lay a deeper and quieter vein which was rich in its own pa.s.sion. It is not becoming to prate of what lies in other men's souls; we all have our secrecies and sanctuaries, rarely acknowledged even to ourselves. But no one can read Joyce Kilmer's poems without grasping his vigorous idealism, his keen sense of beauty, his devout and simple religion, his clutch on the preciousness of common things. He loved the precarious bustle on Grub Street; he was of that adventurous, buoyant stuff that rejects hum-drum security and a pelfed and padded life. He always insisted that America is the very shrine and fountain of poetry, and this country (which is indeed pathetically eager to take poets to its bosom) stirred his vivid imagination. The romance of the commuter's train and the suburban street, of the delicatessen shop and the circus and the snowman in the yard--these were the familiar themes where he was rich and felicitous. Many a commuter will remember his beautiful poem ”The 12:45,” bespeaking the thrill we have all felt in the shabby midnight train that takes us home, yearning and weary, to the well-beloved hearth:

What love commands, the train fulfills And beautiful upon the hills Are these our feet of burnished steel.

Subtly and certainly, I feel That Glen Rock welcomes us to her.

And silent Ridgewood seems to stir And smile, because she knows the train Has brought her children back again.

We carry people home--and so G.o.d speeds us, wheresoe'er we go.