“Remarkable,” he’d called my poems at our first meeting. “So urban and breezy. So droll and cosmopolitan. It’s rare to find such profusion of wit in a woman.” This remark, I now suspect, was neither as thoughtless nor as innocent as it seemed at the time; it was an experiment, intended to see how gracefully I’d handle being patronized. I responded with what seemed an appropriate blend of honey and vinegar, suggesting that wit, like anything else, is rarely found where rarely sought, and that in my experience it was damned uncommon in men as well. Artie beamed; if it was a test, I had passed.
From the beginning Artie understood that my poetic career had as much potential to advance through the society column as through the book review—as much to gain by well-documented bons mots as by publications in prestigious magazines. The trick was to cultivate a compelling public persona—the Girl Poet—that was a simplified and amplified version of my best-composed self. I didn’t squirm away from this initiative. Au contraire, I was all in favor, having arrived independently at similar conclusions: By then I’d grown skilled at crafting disciplined messages on behalf of R.H. Macy’s, and I was eager to ply those skills on the product I endorsed most heartily of all—namely, me.
To be sure, ambition wasn’t my only motive. The voice of the Girl Poet also let me say the things I most wanted to say, to whom I most wanted to say them. It set me up to play with popular preconceptions about girls, and poets, and especially girl poets, and to do so in a way that made people listen to me and remember what they heard. The day would come when I’d have second thoughts about this approach—or at least consider the degree to which playing with those preconceptions also meant embracing them—but as I laid the corrected proofs on Artie’s desk, that day was still far in the future.
After the Great War it had become acceptable for women to smoke and to apply makeup in public. I avoided the latter habit as one best left for the powder room, but I’d taken up the former as soon as I’d come to the city. Smoking helped me think and calmed my nerves, which I had in excess.
Before I’d even gotten the cigarette from my engraved gold case—a present from a beau of a few years back—to my lips, Artie was leaning over with a filigreed lighter. He smelled clean, like lavender and lemons, and was dressed in his typical fashion: tweed jacket, wool pullover, off-white Oxford bags, all slightly out of date and a bit too casual for the office.
“Thank you for coming by,” he said. “So much more pleasant than an impersonal messenger.”
“I hardly needed to get these back to you. By messenger or in person. The copy was sparkling clean.”
“We do strive for excellence. Especially with such sophisticated vers de société as yours.”
I liked that Artie never called my light verse “light verse,” instead referring to it by its French name, “vers de société,” and doing so with the intention of giving it the seriousness the English had when they used that term—a nod to my work’s dignity, he’d once explained: its epigrammatic and aphoristic qualities.
I wouldn’t have minded if he had called it light verse. My verse was light—though I couldn’t abide when anyone called it “lighthearted,” as that seemed a poor reading and against my intent. My rhymes were not sappy, were meant neither to comfort nor inspire.
I also liked that Artie would garnish his speech with foreign morsels, much as I’d adorn my apartment with vases of cut flowers. I kept a list of them in my mind, and sometimes put them in my poems for him to find, which he did with delight: caelum, non animum mutant, for instance—climate may change, but not character—and chacun à son goût—people have their own taste.
“So is that it?” I said. “We send it to the printer, and then we wait?”
“That’s almost it,” said Artie. “Apart from one fairly minor thing, Miss Boxfish.”
He had averted his eyes and was fully engaged in the important business of straightening the already very straight edges of my stacked proofs. His expression was sheepish enough to supply a Highland village with wool and milk.
I cocked a loaded eyebrow.
“It’s about the title,” he said, picking up a pen and holding it above the thing of which he spoke: the words Oh, Do Not Ask for Promises centered on my manuscript’s top page. “The sales department and I think it might need to be changed.”
“The title?” I said, trying to keep my question mark from shading into an exclamation point. Artie blanched, raising the pen slightly, as if he might need it to defend himself. “How embarrassing,” I said, “after all these years, and so many verses written, to learn that I have been misusing the word minor.”
“Of course, Miss Boxfish, you’re right. I misspoke,” Artie said. “It’s not a tiny thing. But if you’ll permit me, I shall make our case.”
“Very well,” I said. “Fire away.”
“Our concern is that Oh, Do Not Ask for Promises does not speak to the full range of your poetic flowering. Your emotional gamut.”
“Maybe not,” I said. “But it’s catchy. It’s perfect. It evokes Dorothy Parker by way of Edna St. Vincent Millay. The title matches much of the sentiment.”
“Much,” said Artie, “but not all, Miss Boxfish. That’s the issue. You’re still in the bloom of youth—hardly a spinster, and hardly such a perpetual cynic as that title suggests. While the persona is amusing and effective for a poem’s length—just the thing for Vanity Fair—in assembling the book we’ve sought to hint at a more gentle, more vulnerable sensibility. A distruster of people, an eater of men: Is this really the narrow picture of yourself you wish to present to the world? You scoff at love now, but may yet change your mind.”
“Artie, darling,” I said, appealing to his status as a confirmed bachelor, one who perhaps shared with Housman more than just a pair of initials, “you may be more likely than I to marry someday.”
Artie gave me a wary look. Then he relaxed, his abashed expression sliding away, another of who knows how many masks. “Aren’t you curious to hear our alternate title?”
“Fine,” I said, trying not to sigh. “Why not?”
“Frequent Wishing on the Gracious Moon,” he said. “Isn’t that pretty? Fresh and wistful.”
“It’s too tritely poetic,” I said. “Too much of the sky. Not enough of the razor.”
“I take your point. But speaking as someone who knows you, Miss Boxfish, you are not so wicked as you seek to appear. You know a thing or two about cocktail-lounge love, but that hardly sums you up.”
Artie was right: I was not entirely like that. My poems were not entirely like that. Though I kept the effort off my face, my mind was racing to consider poems in the book that might supply a compromise title, one that could mollify the sales department without mortifying me. One of my favorites was inspired by a wish I once made on a lightning bug I’d seen, operating improbably in East Fiftieth Street: “What makes you seek your fortune here / In Gotham? You must be as queer / As I am, and a million other / Insects far from home and Mother.”
Still, a judicious capacity for wonder hardly invalidated my cynicism, which was no less sincere or profound. When it came to love—so-called—I considered myself particularly accomplished in the art of amputating body from heart. Love makes the world go round, Helen and I would often say, setting the other up to reply, Then it makes the world go flat.
“Of course there’s more to the book, Artie. But that title’s terrible. Boxfish is no moony girl sighing for her lunar love to find her on a silver-bathed balcony. Here, just look,” I said, reaching for the proofs. “Just turn to any page, any page whatsoever, and you’ll see what I mean.”
“But Frequent Wishing on the Gracious Moon also comes from one of your poems, Miss Boxfish, as I’m sure you recall,” said Artie, reaching across the desk to turn to that page, that poem, with startling accuracy. “So it too describes you. It’s a beautiful line, I daresay. Hopeful, and bright—and romantic, at least latently. All fine qualities that you personally share with your wonderful poems.”
In all my days I have rarely received praise with any sort of discomfort. Yet as this conversation drifted away from my manuscript and toward my character, I found myself reacting with an antipathy that was almost allergic. I did not want to talk about this. I particularly did not want to talk about this with Artie, whom I’d viewed as the gatekeeper to a world of letters free of treacly sentiment, a guide to a route around the tacky cobwebs that seemed fated to snare every promising or challenging thing and drag it back to some tedious norm. Hearing him advance an argument that I’d sooner expect from my mother was worse than disappointing; it was just shy of horrifying, catapulting me straight past self-doubt into crack-brained paranoia. Surely, he seemed to suggest, I couldn’t really mean what my poems said. Could any sane person really oppose hope, romance, love, marriage, children, family: the most basic materials of human society? Was I—the cool and composed sweetheart of the smart set, the Girl Poet made flesh—secretly a monster for entertaining such suspicions?
Polite intransigence seemed the best tactic. “Ah, inflation!” I said. “Personal inflation, that’s the thing! I am so much pleasanter and more competent when I am being flattered. But nevertheless I must insist, Artie, on the original title. With all due respect to your expertise, I do know a thing or two about how to entice a customer.”
“Are you sure, my dear, that you cannot be persuaded?”
“Artie, I’m sure. Please don’t tell me that this means we’ve reached an impasse. I’ve already begun to spend the royalties in my mind.”
“No, it’s not an impasse,” he said, leaning back in his wooden chair. “I told the boys in sales I’d give it a try and do my best. Now I have. I still wish you’d change it, but if it’s the original title you want, then the original title you shall keep. I suppose you do have a certain hard-won reputation to uphold. Your more-than-passable vamp impersonation. Even if I’m not entirely fooled.”
“Thank you, Artie, for seeing the good in me,” I said, standing up and proffering a hand to shake. “Now I must do my best impersonation of a track star and dash back to remain in the good graces of R.H. Macy’s.”
“Good-bye, my fair Miss Boxfish. Dash with care. We’ll be in touch once the reviews begin to roll in, and if any of them remark unfavorably on your title, then I promise not to say I told you so.”
“Oh, Artie,” I said, smiling. “If you want the last word that much, you can have it.” He laughed as I shut the door behind me.
I did have to hurry, but I walked back on Broadway, the better to gaze for a moment at the Flatiron Building, like the face of a friend, and to sneak a glimpse at Madison Square Park, a trusty destination on other lunch breaks. I still managed to make it back before Chester noticed I’d been gone longer than usual.
My victory pleased me, but all afternoon, whatever else I was doing, Artie’s alternate title kept rising to the top of my mind, like the fizzy little bubbles in a carbonated drink. Tickling my brain.
I remained sure I’d been right. But I would wonder later, much later, if I had done things differently—lots of things, even something as seemingly small as naming a book—other aspects of my life might have turned out otherwise. Then again, who doesn’t wonder?
* * *
When the book came out five months later, under the title I desired, it was a smash, selling out its print run within the first thirty days and hurrying through four subsequent printings. The reading public, at least some of them, wanted a break from the Depression, and found repose in my pose, world-weary but still cheery.
Although R.H. Macy’s was already paying me more than I could think to spend, I wanted to use my first royalty check for something celebratory. Symbolic. Thus I acquired—simultaneously, so as to let them get to know and learn to live with one another—two delightful little Hartz Mountain canaries to fill my apartment with song, and a red-haired kitten I’d named Tallulah—after Miss Bankhead—whom I fed on fish and cream.
The reviews glowed so hard they threw off heat; I could feel it on my face when I read them. They led to an avalanche of fan mail. Some went to E.P. Dutton, but most went to the thirteenth floor of the World’s Largest Store, since the biographical note below my author photo, which Helen had snapped, listed it as my place of employment.
One sunny day in late May of 1932, Chester Everett, in an unseasonably saturnalian disruption of the usual office order, brought me my mail. I thanked him and was about to set it aside to carry home with me to open that night, when he said:
“I’m curious—if it’s not too forward—what do all these people have to say to you, Lillian?”
“Let’s open one,” I said, “and we’ll see.”
The letter, as I’d suspected, was from another male stranger, an admirer, one of the dozens I’d acquired since my book’s birth date. I read it aloud:
“Dear, Sweet Miss Boxfish, I know I mustn’t be the only man to have made this joke, but Oh, Do Not Ask for Promises has got me wanting to ask you for the promise of joining me for dinner. You name the time and the place, and I’ll consider it an honor…”
“Is that what it takes these days to bring the poor boys a-runnin’?” said Chester. “For a single gal to sneer at love?”
“They can run all they want,” I said. “They’ll be rejected and exhausted.”
“Make something seem difficult to get and more people want it, I suppose,” said Chester. I noted something unsettled in his expression: concern, or jealousy, or both; it was indeterminate in its precise character.
I decided to ignore it. “That’s exactly it, Chip,” I said. “A lot of these love notes seem to be from well-read and lovesick young men with literary aspirations. That type doesn’t interest me in the least. They say they only have eyes for gazing at you and then end up gazing right back at their navels.”
“I hope so, Lil, because I don’t know what we’d do if one of those would-be Casanovas swept you off your feet and away from Macy’s institutional advertising.”
“Put it out of your mind, Chip. You needn’t worry. And actually, I’m trying to finish the summer campaign, so if you don’t need anything more, I’ll get back to it.”
“Actually, Lil,” he said, “I do have one concern, more serious than love. I’ll strive to be brief.”
He shut the door—thereby providing a month’s supply of grist for the office rumor mill—and took a seat. “It’s just,” he went on, “that your poems, well, they’re as snappy and as fun to read as your advertising. And you know I’m happy for your success in publishing, but—”
“You don’t want me to give away my best ideas?” I said. “To serve the muse before mammon?”
He looked relieved at my comprehension. “That’s the crux of it,” he said. “Your work has been finer than fine these past few months as the book’s been coming out, but as your supervisor, I felt I’d be remiss in not sharing my concern.”
“Chip, darling, I understand perfectly,” I said, because I did, and because I’d considered it already myself. “Can I let you in on a remarkable secret? I find that the more ideas I let myself have, the more ideas I have. They just pour out of me. Poems for ads and poems for poems.”
I was speaking the truth. My lunch-poem routine, my practice of poetry, was actually quite similar to and compatible with my working practices. One just happened inside the department store, and the other happened outside.
In R.H. Macy’s I was a veritable stroller, too, taking the wooden escalators and roaming from floor to floor, surveying the displays, coming up with ads and writing them. Not so different from roaming the sidewalks around Herald Square after gobbling a sandwich or watching people—seeking faces or trees and greenery and then composing poems about them. That had become the way that I moved through the world, and the way that the world, in turn, moved my mind.
“Ah, Lillian,” said Chester, “I can see that’s the case. And it’s a load off my shoulders to hear you say so. And the viewpoint in the poems is certainly more that of a scoffer at conventi
on than the one in the ads is.”
“But?”
“But,” he said, “I have another worry. And you can tell me if you think I’m being a ninny when I say this. While I agree there’s no sign of the Boxfish wit-well running dry, there’s a danger that comes with oversupply, too, isn’t there? Till now you’ve enjoyed the element of surprise: Your readers have happened on your verses in the pages of a magazine—or, hell, in the even unlikelier setting of an advertisement—and been swept off their feet. It’s like encountering some jungle beast on a stroll through Central Park. But this book—”
A copy of Oh, Do Not Ask for Promises—which had been lurking, I supposed, in my disorderly stack of mail—materialized in Chester’s hand.
“—is like a trip to the Bronx Zoo. It’s a delight, of course. I’m happy to give up serendipity in return for a chance to make a sustained study of your craft, and your sales figures show I’m not alone. But doesn’t this very success hem you in a bit? You’re now subject to the admiring scrutiny of connoisseurs. Each new Boxfish poem is apt to be compared with other Boxfish poems, received as part of a body of work, and not simply assessed on its own merits. Doesn’t this stand to lessen its impact? Now that you’ve become fashionable, are you in danger of falling out of fashion?”
His awkwardness had fallen away as he warmed to his own argument, and he summed up with the satisfied smile of a debate-society champ. It was impossible to tell how sincere he’d been about any of this.
“That is extremely prescient, Chester,” I said, “in one respect: You are being a ninny. As for the rest, I am truly grateful for your concerns, but upon reflection I am inclined to file them in the drawer labeled good problems. Now, shall I get back to the copy?”
“Last thing, Lillian, and then yes, I’ll leave you in peace,” he said, handing me his favorite fountain pen, a gift from his wife, along with the book from his hand. “May I please have your autograph?”
Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk Page 5