The Circus, and Other Essays and Fugitive Pieces

Joyce Kilmer

The Circus, and Other Essays and Fugitive Pieces

Published by Good Press, 2019

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EAN 4057664594280

Table of Contents

Cover

Titlepage

Text

INTRODUCTION

INTRODUCTION

I

SINCE last I took up my pen in the service of my friend who on July 30, 1918, laid down his sword in the service of his country, fame, and yet greater fame, has been busy with his name. Any further eulogy by my hand would have only the point of being altogether superfluous and the foolish effect of being very much at the rear of the situation. Further, the story of Joyce Kilmer, doubtless in very fair measure, is known to nearly everyone. An account of his career is not to be appreciably elaborated here.

There are, however, some facts in explanation of the appearance of this volume at this time which require to be set down. And a number of circumstances in relation to the material here collected may be told, I think, to general interest. With these matters I am probably as familiar as anyone, and so have the great privilege of undertaking to record them.

The ten highly humorous and altogether charming essays which form the first part of this volume have led a rather queer life so far—though I think their existence will be a very happy one from now on. First, they were not essays at the time of their birth. They came into the world as articles. So they were spoken of by the young journalist who at various times and with very little to do about the matter wrote them in the course of a bewildering variety of other activities. Or, to be still more frank, he was perhaps more apt to refer to them, when he did refer to them at all, as Sunday stories, done as a part of his job with the New York Times Sunday Magazine. What they were called, however, is neither here nor there. The thing is that they are here.

At the time they were offered for book publication their author, then about thirty years of age, was well established as the author of Trees and Other Poems—poems which had been appearing for some time in various publications, collected and issued in book form in 1914. He had been for several years a conspicuous figure and an invaluable worker in the Poetry Society of America and the Dickens Fellowship. He was a member of the Authors Club, and several other organizations. He had been a lexicographer and an associate magazine editor. He was a star book reviewer, conducted the Poetry Department of The Literary Digest, associated much with literary celebrities, and appeared in Who's Who. The point I am getting at is that he had a good deal of what is called a name.

Satan finds mischief for idle hands to do. I suppose that is why the thought occurred to Joyce to get out a book of prose. So, as the professional literary term has it, he pasted up ten of his articles—that is, cut them out of the newspaper and stuck them column width down the middle of sheets of copy paper. He typed a title page, The Circus and Other Essays, and submitted his manuscript to a publisher. It was promptly turned down. Joyce again did up his manuscript, gummed on some fresh stamps, and again away it went to another leading publishing house. And—well, and so on. I do not know precisely how many times this manuscript was submitted for publication; but I know it was a number, a good number, of times.

That, however, The Circus seemed likely not to find any publisher at all at that time is not a matter for anything like astonishment. Not when one bears in mind a publishing hobgoblin of the day. The book was labeled essays and therefore damned. And here, perhaps, it may not be too irrelevant to take a brief glance at the whole history of this mysterious thing, the light, familiar essay in English. In the Augustan age of English prose, we remember, appeared the easy, graceful style of Steele and Addison, so admirably suited to the pleasant narrative form of essay which they introduced. And in the nineteenth century in England, when Johnson and Goldsmith were followed by Lamb, Hazlitt, De Quincey, Leigh Hunt, Macaulay, Carlyle, Ruskin and all the rest, the essay certainly appears to have been, so to say, very much the go.

Irving, Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Lowell, Holmes—certainly our fathers were not afraid of essays. Nevertheless, somewhere about the opening of our own day an iron-bound tradition became erected in the publishing business, at least in the United States, that books of essays would not sell; could not be made to sell even sufficiently to avoid a considerable loss on the investment of manufacture; in fact, were quite impossible as a publishing venture. No matter how much a publisher himself, or his manuscript reader, might enjoy a collection of essays that chanced to turn up in his shop, his conviction as to its unmarketability as a book was not altered—not even stirred. A few, a very few, essayists there were, indeed, who got published. Agnes Repplier and Samuel McChord Crothers most prominent, perhaps, among them. But these writers had somehow got established as essayists. They were found on the lists only of a house with peculiarly literary traditions, which it was business policy to capitalize and perpetuate for the sake of the firm's imprint. I have heard scoffers among publishers ask if anybody outside of New England bought the books of these writers. Maybe their prime function was, in the publishing term, to dress the list. The volumes of essays by Dr. Henry van Dyke, I know from experience as a bookseller, sold in popular measure. And now and then a volume of collected papers by, say, Meredith Nicholson would bob up for a short space of time. But such instances as these did not affect the general situation.

In general, when the manuscript of The Circus was going the rounds it was (supposedly) economic madness, at any rate professional heresy, not to regard books of essays as what the trade terms plugs, and a drug on the market. Doubtless, the publishing position in this matter was evolved from cumulative facts of experience in the past. But a screw was loose somewhere. The publishing barometer had, it would seem, failed to note a change in the weather of the public mind.

That The Circus would not have made a fairly popular book at the time it was first submitted for publication, it seems to me, there is a good deal of reason to believe was a fallacy. Not a couple of years afterward a collection of random articles in general character not dissimilar to The Circus, by another young man of greatly likable nature, but then practically unknown outside the circle of his personal friends, was in some idiosyncratic moment accepted, and directly won its way to a very considerable sale and a very fair degree of fame. About then, too, along came another book of pasted-up papers (about which I happen to know a good deal), which after having been rejected by nearly every publishing house in America was taken in a spirit of generous friendliness by a publisher of much enterprise, began almost at once to sell as well as a fairly successful novel, has been numerous times reprinted, and in the way of luck brought its altogether obscure author something of a name. And just now the light, personal, journalistic-literary essay is having quite a brisk vogue.

If Joyce stood to-day merely where he stood five years ago The Circus, without doubt, would be snapped up by anybody. More; some publisher's scout very likely would get a hunch about the probability of Joyce's having sufficient material in his scrap-book for such a volume and go after it even before Joyce had submitted it to the house of this fellow's connection. But, alas! for ifs and might have beens. Fair fortune did not attend The Circus.

Failing of placing the book with any large house having an extensive and organized machinery for carrying it to a wide audience, Joyce welcomed the opportunity of having the book published by his friend Laurence J. Gomme. Mr. Gomme had been for several years the proprietor of the Little Book Shop Around the Corner, at number two East Twenty-ninth Street, directly across the street from the Protestant Episcopal Church of the Transfiguration, so altogether charming in its Old World effect, nestling in a tiny green spot hemmed in by high buildings, and known to fame and legend as the Little Church Around the Corner. This was a shop conducted in excellent taste, a sort of salon for pleasant persons of literary breeding, and its circulars were written by no less an advertising man than Richard Le Gallienne. In addition to selling the best books of other publishers, Mr. Gomme (at a good deal of risk to himself) served the cause of good literature by himself issuing now and then a volume of a nature close to his heart.

In the autumn of 1916 he published, in a very attractive form, the American edition of Mr. Belloc's poems. The volume was entitled Verses, by Hilaire Belloc. The introduction to the book by Kilmer was reprinted in the two volume set, Joyce Kilmer: Poems, Essays and Letters, under the title The Poetry of Hilaire Belloc. That same fall Mr. Gomme published The Circus and Other Essays. He made a charming little book: a thin volume in size betwixt and between what the book trade calls a 16mo volume and a duodecimo; bound in plain tan boards, with olive cloth back stamped in gold; very neatly printed on soft cream paper in rather small type. The book had a rather fantastically amusing and somewhat lurid jacket, picturing in black and yellow the professional activities of several clowns.

A very pleasant bibelot, but, I felt then, not a volume effective in catching the popular trade. For one thing, it looked very much like it might be a book of verse. Also, the book was so thin that one would not be likely to catch sight of it standing among other volumes in a row on a bookstore shelf.

Mr. Gomme's means as a publisher at that time did not permit him to give the book any paid advertising; it had no campaign whatever of free publicity behind it. Nor had the publisher any traveling salesmen to show the book to dealers over the country. He merely covered New York City himself in the interests of the volumes he issued. Indeed, one would not be making a hilarious exaggeration in saying that The Circus was semi-privately printed.

A fair number of copies of the book were sent out for review. And here is a very interesting thing. The book, as has been said, was decidedly insignificant in bulk. It was published at a time when the assumption prevailed that there was no appreciable public for volumes of essays; and consequently, the inference would be, the publication of such a book was quite without news value. Further, it was issued at a period when newsprint paper was appallingly scarce, newspaper space rigorously conserved, and the war engrossing public attention. There was, too, as we have seen, nothing about the launching of The Circus to tempt any literary editor or reviewer to believe that the book was of any consequence whatever. Indeed, half a stick of fairly favorable comment here and there would have been all that anybody could reasonably have expected in the way of a press. But, as a matter of fact, all in all the book got a surprising amount of space in the papers, and was awarded the dignity of thoughtful appreciation. The New York Evening Post devoted half the front page of its book review section to an article, which was continued through a column of another page, to The Circus and another book of essays with which it was grouped.

Shortly after the publication of The Circus the difficulties of the business of bookselling and publishing at this time forced Mr. Gomme to close out his business. And for a period his affairs were very much involved. His stock in hand was scattered, and before long his recent publications became exceedingly difficult to obtain. A couple of years after the date of its imprint, Mr. Belloc, in the course of correspondence which I had with him mainly relating to other matters, repeatedly besought me to obtain for him a copy of his Verses, the volume containing Kilmer's introduction. Indeed, he was apparently much put out by the fact that, as he expressed it, he had never even seen a copy of the American edition of his poems. I had more than a little difficulty in finding a copy to send to him. This he never received. With some petulance he laid its loss to the German submarines, which he declared sank everything that was being sent to him. I found the trail to another copy of Verses still more elusive; and, to tell the truth, I really don't know whether or not I got another copy off to him. This story is to show that anyone who has a copy of that book now has a volume far from readily found.

Copies of the original edition of The Circus are somewhat easier to lay hold of. Doubtless, though, they will soon be scarce, as the original edition could not have been large. And the book will not be reprinted in its first form. With all the untoward circumstances of its publication, however, The Circus did seem to find its way to no mean circle of friends. When the memorial volumes, Joyce Kilmer: Poems, Essays and Letters, were published in the autumn of 1918, numerous inquiries were received by the publishers as to why the essays which comprised the volume The Circus were not included. The explanation is this: In the continuance of the entanglement of the affairs of Mr. Gomme's former business no clear title to the rights of this book was at that time in sight. Since then these matters have all been straightened out, and, I am happy to be able to say, this excellent friend of Joyce Kilmer is again in circumstances more auspicious than before, and with joy to his fine heart, effectively serving the cause of good books.

In direct critical appreciation of these ten essays there is not much that I care to say. They were written by my friend, and are therefore holy. That is, of course, to me. They may be charged with being very youthful. Aye; even so.

Their youthfulness is to me a thing of very poignant, tender beauty. I see again that radiant boy, trailing clouds of glory come from God who was his home. His childhood spent in a town less than a hundred miles from New York, now he feels himself actually a New Yorker, enjoys the proud novelty of working for wages, and joyfully, therefore, he goes forth every noon to explore the territory of his new possession. The subway was to him the great nickel adventure; a ride on the elevated railroad, aërial journeying; his alarm clock, the urban chanticleer. Again, as a commuter, I see him on the 5.24, flying across leagues to his cottage in the primeval forest of New Jersey. On his red velvet chair he sits, enjoying with his neighbors tobacco smoke, rapid travel, and the news of the world. None ever enjoyed these things more, red velvet chair and all!

The connection which I may boast of having with the writing of some of these essays illustrates in an amusing way the pleasantly pugnacious character of Joyce's mind. Joyce held that I was offensively æsthetic in regarding sign-boards about the countryside as ugly things. Signs and Symbols was his hilarious and scornful rebuke. The Gentle Art of Christmas Giving (a New York Times article reprinted in the two-volume set) had a similar origin. You remember with what amusing gusto it begins:

If a dentist stuck a bit of holly in his cap and went through the streets on Christmas morning, his buzzing drill over his shoulder and his forceps in his hand, stopping at the houses of his friends to give their jaws free treatment, meanwhile trolling out lusty Yuletide staves—if he were to do this, I say, it would be said of him, among other things, that he was celebrating Christmas in a highly original manner. Undoubtedly there would be many other adjectives applied to his manner of generosity—adjectives applied, for instance, by the children whom, around their gayly festooned tree, he surprised with his gift of expert treatment. But the adjective most generally used (not perhaps in adulation) would be original. And