CHAPTER TWO

Path of Stones and Thorns

Early in my apprenticeship to poetry, I was to learn that the path was not entirely one of daisies and primroses, but was beset with stones, thorns, and pitfalls--a tortuous trail, where you had to sweat and strain in order to satisfy yourself even for a time.

There may be those whose inspiration needs no afterthought; who can dash off poems with a perfection that would make revision as superfluous as an attempt to paint the sky blue. But I have met no such super-gifted persons, and have seen no evidence that they ever existed; on the contrary, I have observed proof of the meticulous and often radical revisions made by many, including Milton, Gray, Coleridge, Tennyson, Browning, Swinburne, Fitzgerald and others. Possibly now and then a poem does spring forth full-fledged, like fabled Minerva from the head of Jove; I can even testify from experience that this does occur, though I make no claim as to the quality of the product. But this is the rare exception; usually the poet must labor with a chisel. After all, the words of the English language are so many, their combinations so innumerable, the shades and nuances of thought so varied, and the possibilities of technical adjustments and figurative embellishments so rich! Surely, only by a rare intuitive stroke could a poet immediately pick the truest and best phrasing! The original impulse, which may be too urgent to allow the writer to debate with himself over the sound of a syllable or the choice of an adjective before the thought has been caught on paper, would not be well-served if the poet strove for instant perfection. Let the essence of the poem be caged in words before its fragile and delicate substance vanishes; then let the details be strengthened, rearranged, and purified.

To be sure, I may smile now to recall how zealously I toiled to improve lines that not even the genius of a Milton could have redeemed from the waste basket. I may smile, also, to think of the epic in heroic couplets, which, sometime during my High School days, I started to confide to a notebook; it had a fabulous Spenserian theme, as allegorical as _The Faerie Queene_, and eventually met its deserts, and was lost to sight. Similarly, I may smile to think of the still longer poem on which I embarked somewhat later, under the egregious title, _The Key to the Universe_--which will doubtless sound as funny to the reader as it does to me today, though it was not actually so presumptuous as the wording might indicate. I really did not imagine that I had the key to the universe; on the contrary, I was impressed then, as today, by the fathomless and awesome mystery of all created things; and in pursuance of this feeling of wonder and bewilderment, the poem dealt with a man who merely _sought_ the objective mentioned in the title. I recall that I wrote this would-be masterpiece during one of my summer school vacations: in the heat of the Stockton days, when 100 degrees in the shade was not unusual, creative work was impossible; and therefore, in order to find the necessary coolness as well as uninterrupted quiet, I would go at about seven every morning to my father’s office on the fifth floor of a downtown building, where I would be undisturbed until his arrival at eight-thirty or nine--at which time, creation would end. But by then I had ordinarily completed about fifty lines of blank verse, which I would revise later in the day.

So far as I am aware, no eyes but mine have ever glanced at _The Key to the Universe_, which occupied me all of one summer. It was not that I was exceptionally secretive; it was that I had discovered that few people in this matter-of-fact world, even among those closest to one, are interested in seeing poems, and especially long poems, unless out of curiosity, or because they are impressed by something quite apart from the work itself, such as the prospect of gain, or the trailing effulgence of some chance honor. Like everyone, I want to have my work read and appreciated; but in my later years, as in my earlier, I have found the writing of poetry a lonely, a very lonely task; in my later years, as in my earlier, I have never shown my work to anyone who did not ask to see it (my wife and editors alone excepted); and it rarely happens that anyone does ask to see it.

When just under seventeen, I saw the first glimmerings of what looked to me like success. I say “looked” like success, for appearances are more illusory than I, in my juvenile ardor, could have realized. An essay in rhymed couplets, entered in a state-wide contest for High School students, won me a free trip to the Yosemite Valley (a trip which, for reasons I need not enter into here, I was unable to take); and this was the more extraordinary since I had never seen the Yosemite, although I wrote in glowing terms about “this masterpiece of nature’s art.” The prize-winning offering, so far as I can recall it, was an execrable concoction in which words like “grand,” “superb,” “majestic,” “splendid,” and “magnificent” took the place of poetry; but I was elated at the recognition, and did not realize that recognition of itself is a bubble, prizes are bubbles, and are apt in the end to mock you, unless your work itself is good--in which case you need no prizes.

Nevertheless, that prize did give a spur to my spirits and at the same time it offered my father and others about me their first faint hope that perhaps after all the young scapegrace of a poet was not altogether a squanderer of time. But I doubt whether it had any more effect than an April shower upon my future.

This was, indeed, the only encouragement I was to have for a long, long time. Instead, I took my tuition in the form of slaps in the face. One of the hardest came during my second year in college, when for the first time I did meet a real poet--Leonard Bacon, a tall, waggish reed of a man, then much less known than later, though he had some real poetry to his name, and was available where you could actually see and talk with him; in fact, he was a member of the staff of the English Department. Even if he was no older and no more bearded than my one-time acquaintance Mr. Spring (or Springer), I had by now lost some of my romantic ideas as to the required looks of poets. What I did have was a high aspiration to enter Bacon’s class in verse-writing, a class limited to fifteen members. With unabashed temerity, I submitted what I regarded as my best poems--in all probability, my most bombastic; and confidently awaited the word of the great man. In due time, this word came--and like unexpected thunder, it left me stunned. I was refused! This in itself would have been devastating enough; but still worse was Mr. Bacon’s comment when he returned my manuscripts. “If you want to write soporifics for the entertainment of your friends, by all means go on. Otherwise, I’d advise you to turn to some other line of work.”

This advice, like much other good counsel I have received, was not taken; and a time was to come, as we shall see, when Mr. Bacon would soften his verdict. Looking back today, however, I cannot doubt that his opinion was justified by the possibly facile but quite unillumined verses I had submitted. But at the time, his decree pounded me like a sledgehammer. Had it not been that even sledgehammers could not break my tie to poetry, I might truly have turned to some less difficult subject, like mathematics or astrophysics.

Other blows also were in store for me. In the beginning, I had written just in order to write--in order to fulfill some vague and nameless but powerful impulse, which caused me to take strange satisfaction in smooth-flowing words and lines and in the rhythmical expression of the thoughts surging over me. To write was enough! The possible fate of the output was something I did not even consider. But in time a new element was to be injected. And the date, as nearly as I can place it, was sometime after my eighteenth birthday.

At the beginning of the second semester of my second college year, a great change came into my life. To an outsider, the difference would have seemed a routine one; yet it was as if the fabled magic carpet had taken me to new continents on that day when I left my uncle and aunt in Oakland, and came to live in Berkeley, where I shared a room and sleeping porch with my cousin Stanley. Stanley, a clever and kindly youth about three and a half years my senior (now a lawyer in Los Angeles) had something of a penchant for leadership; and one of the ways in which this penchant manifested itself was in connection with my poetry. Now I have no reason to suppose that he had then, or at any time, any interest whatever in poetry as such; but he did show an interest in _my_ poetry, at least to the extent of trying to market it. What he did was to constitute himself, in a sense, my literary agent, though I doubt if either of us had ever heard this term. I typed out the poems (having just received from my father the gift of a reconditioned typewriter, for which I was more grateful than if it had been the wealth of Croesus). And Stanley compiled a list of periodicals, and sent my none-too-skillful typescripts to most of the leaders of the day: the _Atlantic_, _Scribners_, _Harpers_, the _Century_, the _North American Review_, the _Forum_, and other magazines, many of them now long departed from this mortal life.

With the publication fever thus aroused, I eagerly awaited the results. Poor deluded hopeful! I did not yet know that even with the most accomplished work, and the arduous labors of a practiced hand, the road to editorial favor is often long, sinuous, and spiny. And with verse as amateurish as mine--well, the outcome was inevitable. When my treasures started coming back, I was disappointed, and disappointed again, and disappointed once more, and so on and on, scores of times. I could not believe that the editors, _all editors_, were too shortsighted to see the merits so luminously evident to me. To be sure, their printed slips were invariably worded politely: they “had had pleasure in reading the submissions,” rejection “did not necessarily imply any lack of merit,” and the author was thanked for “his courtesy” in permitting the editors to turn down his work. Sometimes the rejection slips even invited further submissions--with the result that I would acquire duplicate slips, soliciting still further submissions. But not a single penned or pencilled line suggested that editors were human! I began to doubt if they were.

What Stanley thought of the debacle I do not know; in the end, when he saw that his efforts brought nothing but a waste of time and postage stamps, he probably told himself that his verse-writing cousin would do well to cease his scribblings and settle down to some good, solid occupation, like that of a schoolteacher or a filing clerk.

Still, to my own way of thinking, the score was not quite absolute zero. One of the final submissions did bring me a ray of hope. No, more than a ray! a blaze! The poems, submitted to a Boston literary magazine, came back exactly in the way of their predecessors, but this was not because they were not good--oh, not at all, said the glowing letter that accompanied them, on an imposing letterhead, with a subheading that particularly impressed me, _Books in Belles Lettres_. The return of my “splendid poems” was greatly regretted by Mr. Scottfield, the editor, and was due only to the unhappy fact that he was overstocked. However, if I had poems enough to make a book, he would be glad to recommend the manuscript to the consideration of the other editors associated with him in The Poet-Craft Publishing Company.

The fact that I had never heard before of the Poet-Craft Publishing Company made no difference whatever. I pictured it as an immense concern, occupying the whole of some noble building in downtown Boston, where a learned knot of editors and scores of able assistants were devoted to the uplifting task of giving poetry to the world.

Riding cloud-high on the wings of such thoughts, I let my eyes range again and again over those magical lines. If I had poems enough to make a book! To think that my work was wanted by that great publishing house, the Poet-Craft Company! So then all the editors who had returned my work had been wrong! Of course! I had known that from the beginning! And now those eminent authorities at Poet-Craft would prove it by publishing my book! That they actually would publish it I did not doubt--all that was necessary was for me to pick out my best, and send them to Mr. Scottfield.

Having dispatched the manuscript, which contained most of the poems that Stanley had sent out with such unanimous lack of success, I could hardly wait for the letter that would tell me when Mr. Scottfield would publish the book. But the suspense was not to be long, considering that there were no air mails in those days. Hardly two weeks had passed before the postman delivered a long blue envelope whose upper left-hand corner bore that enchanted inscription, _The Poet-Craft Publishing Company_. My fingers trembled as, during that breathless instant, I tore open the envelope.

The first lines brought me a thrill: Mr. Scottfield was “delighted” with my poems! His fellow editors agreed with him in recommending publication. The book would be printed on a “special laid paper” and bound in “antique boards.” (I had, to be sure, no idea what laid paper or antique boards might be, but they sounded magnificent.) A publication date could be set almost immediately, and I would have proofs in a few weeks, dependent, however, upon one small condition.

By the time I had read this far, my pulse was beating fast, but my heart was beginning to sink. The “one small condition” did not look small to me: it was that I must forward to Mr. Scottfield “the nominal sum of $575.”

He might as well have asked “the nominal sum” of five hundred and seventy-five millions. Not that I would not have paid the money, and eagerly, if I had had it; but in my impecunious student’s life, in which a dollar looked as large as a pumpkin, an item of five or six hundred dollars surpassed my wildest dreams of wealth. Some fantastic ideas did, indeed, flit through my head: I might borrow the money. But nobody whom I knew had that much money to lend, except possibly a certain uncle, who ran a retail clothing store and was regarded as the rich man of the family. However, he was not known to be so free-handed as to throw money away (which, I had just sense enough to realize, would be how he would look upon the proposed investment). No, I had nowhere to turn, nowhere at all! I must give up the dream--my book would never be published, on laid paper and with antique boards, by that distinguished concern, the Poet-Craft Publishing Company!

Little did I realize the shoals I was avoiding! I have often thought how unfortunate it would have been if some obliging relative, with more money than literary judgment, had come forward to provide Mr. Scottfield with the requested sum. Surely, it would not have been easy to live down the appearance between boards (even antique boards!) of the _juvenilia_ that I regarded as poetry.