Not long ago I accepted the invitation of a young poet to visit him at his lodging. As my life has fallen chiefly among merchants, lawyers and other practical folk, I went with much curiosity.
My poet, I must confess, is not entirely famous. His verses have appeared in several of the less known papers, and a judicious printer has even offered to gather them into a modest sheaf. There are, however, certain vile details of expense that hold up the project. The printer, although he confesses their merit, feels that the poet should bear the cost.
His verses are of the newer sort. When read aloud they sound pleasantly in the ear, but I sometimes miss the meaning. I once pronounced an intimate soul-study to be a jolly description of a rainy night. This was my stupidity. I could see a soul quite plainly when it was pointed out. It was like looking at the moon. You get what you look for--a man or a woman or a kind of map of Asia. In poetry of this sort I need a hint or two to start me right. But when my nose has been rubbed, so to speak, against the anise-bag, I am a very hound upon the scent.
The street where my friend lives is just north of Greenwich Village, and it still shows a remnant of more aristocratic days. Behind its shabby fronts are long drawing-rooms with tarnished glass chandeliers and frescoed ceilings and gaunt windows with inside blinds. Plaster cornices still gather the dust of years. There are heavy stairways with black walnut rails. Marble Lincolns still liberate the slaves in niches of the hallway. Bronze Ladies of the Lake await their tardy lovers. Diana runs with her hunting dogs upon the newel post. In these houses lived the heroines of sixty years ago, who shopped for crinoline and spent their mornings at Stewart's to match a Godey pattern. They drove of an afternoon with gay silk parasols to the Crystal Palace on Forty-second Street. In short, they were our despised Victorians. With our advancement we have made the world so much better since.
I pressed an electric button. Then, as the door clicked, I sprang against it. These patent catches throw me into a momentary panic. I feel like one of the foolish virgins with untrimmed lamp, just about to be caught outside--but perhaps I confuse the legend. Inside, there was a bare hallway, with a series of stairways rising in the gloom--round and round, like the frightful staircase of the Opium Eater. At the top of the stairs a black disk hung over the rail--probably a head.
"Hello," I said.
"Oh, it's you. Come up!" And the poet came down to meet me, with slippers slapping at the heels.
There was a villainous smell on the stairs. "Something burning?" I asked.
At first the poet didn't smell it. "Oh,
that smell!" he said at last. "That's the embalmer."
"The embalmer?"
We were opposite a heavy door on the second floor. He pointed his thumb at it. "There's an embalmer's school inside."
"Dear me!" I said. "Has he any--anything to practice on?"
The poet pushed the door open a crack. It was very dark inside. It smelled like Ptolemy in his later days. Or perhaps I detected Polonius, found at last beneath the stairs.
"Bless me!" I asked, "What does he teach in his school?"
"Embalming, and all that sort of thing."
"It never occurred to me," I confessed, "that undertakers had to learn. I thought it came naturally. Ducks to water, you know. They look as if they could pick up a thing like embalming by instinct. I don't suppose you knew old Mr. Smith."
"No."
"He wore a white carnation on business afternoons."
We rounded a turn of the black walnut stair.
"There!" exclaimed the poet. "That is the office of the
Shriek."
I know the
Shriek. It is one of the periodicals of the newer art that does not descend to the popular taste. It will not compromise its ideals. It prints pictures of men and women with hideous, distorted bodies. It is solving sex. Once in a while the police know what it is talking about, and then they rather stupidly keep it out of the mails for a month or so.
Now I had intended for some time to subscribe to the
Shriek, because I wished to see my friend's verses as they appeared. In this way I could learn what the newer art was doing, and could brush out of my head the cobwebs of convention. Keats and Shelley have been thrown into the discard. We have come a long journey from the older poets.
"I would like to subscribe," I said.
The poet, of course, was pleased. He rapped at a door marked "Editor."
A young woman's head in a mob-cap came into view. She wore a green and purple smock, and a cigarette hung loosely from her mouth. She looked at me at first as if I were an old-fashioned poem or a bundle of modest drawings, but cheered when I told my errand. There was a cup of steaming soup on an alcohol burner, and half a loaf of bread. On a string across the window handkerchiefs and stockings were hung to dry. A desk was littered with papers.
I paid my money and was enrolled. I was given a current number of the
Shriek, and was told not to miss a poem by Sillivitch.
"Sillivitch?" I asked.
"Sillivitch," the lady answered. "Our greatest poet--maybe the greatest of all time. Writes only for the
Shriek. Wonderful! Realistic!"
"Snug little office," I said to the poet, when we were on the stairs. "She lives in there, too?"
"Oh, yes," he said. "Smart girl, that. Never compromises. Wants reality and all that sort of thing. You must read Sillivitch. Amazing! Doesn't seem to mean anything at first. But then you get it in a flash."
We had now come to the top of the building.
"There isn't much smell up here," I said.
"You don't mind the smell. You come to like it," he replied. "It's bracing."
At the top of the stairs, a hallway led to rooms both front and back. The ceiling of these rooms, low even in the middle, sloped to windows of half height in dormers. The poet waved his hand. "I have been living in the front room," he said, "but I am adding this room behind for a study."
We entered the study. A man was mopping up the floor. Evidently the room had not been lived in for years, for the dirt was caked to a half inch. A general wreckage of furniture--a chair, a table with marble top, a carved sideboard with walnut dingles, a wooden bed with massive headboard, a mattress and a broken pitcher--had been swept to the middle of the room. There was also a pile of old embalmer's journals, and a great carton that seemed to contain tubes of tooth-paste.
"You see," said the poet, "I have been living in the other room. This used to be a storage--years ago, for the family that once lived here, and more recently for the embalmer."
"Storage!" I exclaimed. "You don't suppose that they kept any--?"
"No."
"Well," I said, "it's a snug little place."
I bent over and picked up one of the embalmer's journals. On the cover there was a picture of a little boy in a night-gown, saying his prayer to his mother. The prayer was printed underneath. "And, mama," it read, "have God make me a good boy, and when I grow up let me help papa in his business, and never use anything but
Twirpp's Old Reliable Embalming Fluid, the kind that papa has always used, and grandpa before him."
Now, Charles Lamb, I recall, once confessed that he was moved to enthusiasm by an undertaker's advertisement. "Methinks," he writes, "I could be willing to die, in death to be so attended. The two rows all round close-drove best black japanned nails,--how feelingly do they invite, and almost irresistibly persuade us to come and be fastened down." But the journal did not stir me to this high emotion.
I crossed the room and stooped to look out of the dormer window--into a shallow yard where an abandoned tin bath-tub and other unprized valuables were kept. A shabby tree acknowledged that it had lost its way, but didn't know what to do about it. It had its elbow on the fence and seemed to be in thought. A wash-stand lay on its side, as if it snapped its fingers forever at soap and towels. Beyond was a tall building, with long tables and rows of girls working.
One of the girls desisted for a moment from her feathers with which she was making hats, and stuck out her tongue at me in a coquettish way. I returned her salute. She laughed and tossed her head and went back to her feathers.
The young man who had been mopping up the floor went out for fresh water.
"Who is that fellow?" I asked.
"He works downstairs."
"For the
Shriek? "
"For the embalmer. He's an apprentice."
"I would like to meet him."
Presently I did meet him.
"What have you there?" I asked. He was folding up a great canvas bag of curious pattern.
"It's when you are shipped away--to Texas or somewhere. This is a little one. You'd need--" he appraised me from head to foot--"you'd need a number ten."
He desisted from detail. He shifted to the story of his life. Since he had been a child he had wished to be an undertaker.
Now I had myself once known an undertaker, and I had known his son. The son went to Munich to study for Grand Opera. I crossed on the steamer with him. He sang in the ship's concert, "Oh, That We Two Were Maying." It was pitched for high tenor, so he sang it an octave low, and was quite gloomy about it. In the last verse he expressed a desire to lie at rest beneath the churchyard sod. The boat was rolling and I went out to get the air. And then I did not see him for several years. We met at a funeral. He wore a long black coat and a white carnation. He smiled at me with a gentle, mournful smile and waved me to a seat. He was Tristan no longer. Valhalla no more echoed to his voice. He had succeeded to his father's business.
Here the poet interposed. "The Countess came to see me yesterday."
"Mercy," I said, "what countess?"
"Oh, don't you know her work? She's a poet and she writes for the people downstairs. She's the Countess Sillivitch."
"Sillivitch!" I answered, "of course I know her. She is the greatest poet, maybe, of all time."
"No doubt about it," said the poet excitedly, "and there's a poem of hers in this number. She writes in italics when she wants you to yell it. And when she puts it in capitals, my God! you could hear her to the elevated. It's ripping stuff."
"Dear me," I said, "I should like to read it. Awfully. It must be funny."
"It isn't funny at all," the poet answered. "It isn't meant to be funny. Did you read her 'Burning Kiss'?"
"I'm sorry," I answered.
The poet sighed. "It's wonderfully realistic. There's nothing old-fashioned about that poem. The Countess wears painted stockings."
"Bless me!" I cried.
"Stalks with flowers. She comes from Bulgaria, or Esthonia, or somewhere. Has a husband in a castle. Incompatible. He stifles her. Common. In business. Beer spigots. She is artistic. Wants to soar. And tragic. You remember my study of a soul?"
"The rainy night? Yes, I remember."
"Well, she's the one. She sat on the floor and told me her troubles."
"You don't suppose that I could meet her, do you?" I asked.
The poet looked at me with withering scorn. "You wouldn't like her," he said. "She's very modern. She says very startling things. You have to be in the modern spirit to follow her. And sympathetic. She doesn't want any marriage or government or things like that. Just truth and freedom. It's convention that clips our wings."
"Conventions are stupid things," I agreed.
"And the past isn't any good, either," the poet said. "The past is a chain upon us. It keeps us off the mountains."
"Exactly," I assented.
"That's what the Countess thinks. We must destroy the past. Everything. Customs. Art. Government. We must be ready for the coming of the dawn."
"Naturally," I said. "Candles trimmed, and all that sort of thing. You don't suppose that I could meet the Countess? Well, I'm sorry. What's the bit of red paper on the wall? Is it over a dirty spot?"
"It's to stir up my ideas. It's gay and when I look at it I think of something."
"And then I suppose that you look out of that window, against that brick wall and those windows opposite, and write poems--a sonnet to the girl who stuck out her tongue at me."
"Oh, yes."
"Hot in summer up here?"
"Yes."
"And cold in winter?"
"Yes."
"And I suppose that you get some ideas out of that old tin bath-tub and those ash-cans."
"Well, hardly."
"And you look at the moon through that dirty skylight?"
"No! There's nothing in that old stuff. Everybody's fed up on the moon."
"It's a snug place," I said. And I came away.
I circled the stairs into the denser smell which, by this time, I found rather agreeable. The embalmer's door was open. In the gloom inside I saw the apprentice busied in some dark employment. "I got somethin' to show you," he called.
"Tomorrow," I answered.
As I was opening the street door, a woman came up the steps. She was a dark, Bulgarian sort of woman. Or Esthonian, perhaps. I held back the door to let her pass. She wore long ear-rings. Her skirt was looped high in scollops. She wore sandals--and painted stockings.
[The end]
Charles S. Brooks's essay: Visit To A Poet