1990
WIND FROM THE PRAIRIE
Roll along, Prairie Moon,
Roll along, while I croon.
AROUND World War I, writers from the American Middle Western states began to appear on the literary scene. In fiction, there were Theodore Dreiser, Sinclair Lewis, and Sherwood Anderson, and also the three known as the Prairie Poets, Carl Sandburg, Vachel Lindsay, and Edgar Lee Masters.
Looking into the new biography of Carl Sandburg, a work of exhaustive, definitive coziness in the current American mode of entranced biographical research, I was reminded of having some years ago taken from the library stacks a curiosity, a biography of Lindsay written by Edgar Lee Masters. If Carl Sandburg can be said to have managed shrewdly the transactions of his declamatory, bardic career as a national treasure, born in Illinois on a corn-husk mattress, the other two rose and fell disastrously and literally. Vachel Lindsay committed suicide, and Masters died in want, having been found broke and sick in the Chelsea Hotel in New York and rescued to die in a nursing home.
The two men, Lindsay and Masters, are not quite soul mates. Their union is geographical, a territorial, circumstantial linkage to a mythographic Middle West, the putative spiritual grasslands of the vast native country. Lindsay was a naïve, manic evangelist, preaching the Gospel of Beauty, and carrying with him on his incredible cross-country hikes the Christian fundamentalism and Anti-Saloon teachings of his youth—along with, of course, the prairie, the conviction of being the voice of some real America, in situ, that must be honored, as if under threat of extinction by a flood. As a versifier he had no more caution than a hobo hitching a ride, but somehow his voice prevailed for a time, even with some of the respected critics of the day. He appeared and appeared, willing to recite at a high-school reunion as well as in London, where, according to a later biographer, Eleanor Ruggles, “he and his mother met Robert Bridges, venerable laureate and defender of the tongue [sic], and John Masefield, always Vachel’s admirer, came in from Boars Hill to pay his respects.” Feverish days, but, toward the end, in Washington, D.C., an audience of two hundred walked out, puzzling the performer and Edgar Lee Masters but attributed in the Ruggles biography to a microphone failure of which the poet was unaware.
Edgar Lee Masters, for a good part of his life a successful lawyer in Chicago, was a lot smarter than Vachel Lindsay and certainly more worldly—but then everyone was more worldly than Lindsay. Masters was in religion a freethinker, set against the “hypocrisy” of the preachers, even more exasperated by the temperance movement, and along the way set against puritanical sexual inhibitions. He was a handsome man who, step by hesitating step, nevertheless made a rashly uncomfortable marriage to a fundamentalist, teetotaler young woman. He had children, stayed on, was unfaithful (listing in his autobiography nearly as many female loves as Goethe), finally divorced, and remarried a young woman—indeed, thirty years younger than he. Lindsay was one of those too friendly boosters with their often strange imperviousness and faltering sense of the appropriate. Masters was splenetic, the cemetery headstone his natural memorial, cranky in opinion, and, although very productive and for a time immensely successful, there was in his life a feeling of being undervalued, and even of seeing the whole country in an enormous displacement from virtue, pioneer and otherwise.
Of Lindsay, Masters said he was “impelled to write something about the poet who was native to Illinois, as I am in reality, and who knew the same people and the same culture that I do, and who practiced the art of poetry, as I have, in the same part of America, and under the same social and political conditions.” In the end, as he reaches Lindsay’s declining audience and death, he begins to see the life as a social rather than a personal tragedy, to view the native “singer” as a victim of the East, the money-grubbing, alienated world that preferred the poems of Robert Frost and E. A. Robinson, poets Masters finds essentially “English” in tone and landscape rather than American.
There’s more to it than that from this strange man about his stranger fellow bard:
The motley stocks and alien breeds which have taken America cannot be American until there is an America to mold them into Americans. . . . Lindsay might sing himself hoarse of the old courthouse America, the old horse and buggy America, the America of the Santa Fé Trail, of Johnny Appleseed. . . . Did the East, did these alien stocks want to be American? This is what Lindsay was up against. In this connection mention must be made of the Jews who are enormously numerous, powerful and influential. Jews are not Americans in the sense that the Jews are English or French, according to habitat.
Ezra Pound described Vachel Lindsay as a “plain man in gum overshoes with a touching belief in W. J. Bryan.” Yes, there was “Bryan, Bryan, Bryan, Bryan,” the poem celebrating the Free Silver populist, fundamentalist, and prohibitionist in his losing campaign against McKinley. Almost three hundred lines in which Bryan is seen as “the prairie avenger . . . smashing Plymouth Rock with his boulders from the West.” His defeat was the “victory of Plymouth Rock and all those inbred landlord stocks” (perhaps it was) and also, in a wild extension, somehow the defeat of the “blue bells of the Rockies and the blue bonnets of old Texas.”
Lindsay’s life was one of intense, sentimental aggressiveness; and yet there is something unprotected about him. His unanchored enthusiasm has the dismaying aspect of being genuine and unforced, a sort of hysterical innocence, or so it seems. The cheerful, round-faced, fair-haired country boy was in fact town bred, born in Springfield, Illinois. Fate put his birthplace next to the house in which Lincoln had lived, and this—the nearness of the great, solemn son of the prairie, the hallowed walker of the streets of Springfield—had the effect of igniting the boy like a firecracker. Lincoln in Illinois had quite a contrary effect on Edgar Lee Masters, who wrote a long, scathing biography of the fallen president, composed with the racing eloquence of contempt for the man and for the “tyrannous plutocracy” that followed the Civil War.
Both Lindsay and Masters come from professional families. Masters’s father was a self-made lawyer, a conscientious man of some influence in Illinois and given, at least in part, to liberal causes and worthy cases. The Lindsay family was an older combination of beliefs and habits. The father, as a young man in impecunious circumstances, worked his way through an Ohio medical school, set up practice in Illinois, and, after the death of his first wife, somehow saved enough for further study in Vienna. On the boat going to Europe, he met his future wife, a teacher of art and other subjects in Kentucky. Throughout their lives, with or without their children, the couple traveled quite a lot, going several times to Europe and even as far as Japan and China, but there were less cosmopolitan strains in the mother. She passed on to her son the ornamental, provincial “art-loving” claim of certain small-town American wives and also a good measure of the missionary qualities he displayed. Mrs. Lindsay was the organizer of church spectacles, liked to officiate in group meetings, attend conferences, and so on.
Her family was attached to the Campbellite Church, also known as the Christian Church. The church had been founded by Alexander Campbell and his son Thomas, originally Presbyterians and then, coming to believe in baptism by immersion, united with the Baptists, before finally breaking away—in one of those organizational disputes so peculiar to the Protestant denominations—to found their own Campbellite sect. From these roots, Vachel Lindsay got his fundamentalism and prohibitionism, the Gospel of Beauty, and a flair for expounding preacher-style. He was sent to the Art Institute of Chicago and later, in New York in 1905, studied with William Merritt Chase and Robert Henri but did not make notable progress as a painter or as a cartoonist.
All the time, Lindsay had been writing verses in his hymn-tune rhythms, reciting at the YMCA, and turning himself into a peddler. With his verses and drawings, the plain, open-faced, clean young man wandered the streets of New York, knocking on the doors of fish markets, Chinese laundries, and bakeries, stopping people to listen to his wares, canvassing, as it were, Hell’s Kit
chen. A curious, impervious nuisance, bringing to mind the intrepid appeals of the Jehovah’s Witness bell ringers. And then he began his years of quite literally tramping across the country, pamphlets and verses for sale, doing missionary work for the Gospel of Beauty. He carried with him a character reference from the YMCA.
It was in California that Lindsay learned of the death of General William Booth, founder of the Salvation Army. And thus he came to write one of his first bizarre incantations, an unaccountable success for which the mind glancing back on our literary history is, well, dumbstruck.
General William Booth Enters into Heaven
(To be sung to the tune of “The Blood of the Lamb” with indicated instrument)
The work opens with bass-drum beats and:
Booth led boldly with his big bass drum—
(Are you washed in the blood of the Lamb?)
The Saints smiled bravely and they said: “He’s come.”
(Are you washed in the blood of the Lamb?)
The thing flows on apace and concludes:
He saw King Jesus. They were face to face,
And he knelt a-weeping in that holy place.
Are you washed in the blood of the Lamb?
The submission appeared in an early issue of Poetry and Harriet Monroe in the annual prizegiving of 1913 awarded it $100. A prize for $250 went to William Butler Yeats, the latter having been pushed for by Ezra Pound. Sometime later, when Yeats was in Chicago, Miss Monroe invited Lindsay to a dinner at which the various important writers on hand were invited. That evening Vachel Lindsay recited the whole of “The Congo” and was apparently “well-received” in spite of its being over two hundred fiercely resounding lines. This most extraordinary embarrassment in our cultural history achieved a personally orated dissemination scarcely to be credited. Anywhere and everywhere he went with it—the Chamber of Commerce, high schools, ladies’ clubs, the Lincoln Day banquet in Springfield, the Players Club in New York, where Masters tells that its noise greatly irritated certain members.
“The Congo” is the supreme folly of Lindsay’s foolhardy career. There is a sad, no doubt unconscious, complacency in its concussive hilarity, the compositional shove coming from
an allusion in a sermon by my pastor, F. W. Burnham, to the heroic life and death of Ray Eldred. Eldred was a missionary of the Disciples of Christ who perished while swimming a treacherous branch of the Congo.
The work is subtitled “A Study of the Negro Race,” and part one lies under the heading “Their Basic Savagery.” The imagery, if such it can be called, is blackface American minstrel, except for a strophe about Leopold of Belgium in hell with his hands cut off.
With a “deep rolling bass,” the prairie evangelist sets out on his crusade:
Fat black bucks in a wine-barrel room,
Barrel-house kings, with feet unstable . . .
Beat an empty barrel with the handle of a broom . . .
Boomlay, boomlay, boomlay, BOOM . . .
THEN I SAW THE CONGO, CREEPING THROUGH THE BLACK,
CUTTING THROUGH THE FOREST WITH A GOLDEN TRACK. . .
Tattooed cannibals danced in files;
Then I heard the boom of the blood-lust song. . . .
Boom, kill the Arabs,
Boom, kill the white men,
Hoo, Hoo, Hoo. . . .
Mumbo-Jumbo will hoo-doo you.
The second section has the title “Their Irrepressible High Spirits.” Here, on the Congo River, we run into a round of crap-shooting, whoops and yells, witch-men dressed to kill, “cake-walk princes” in tall silk hats, coal-black maidens with pearls in their hair, and more Boom, Boom, Boom. In the third section, “The Hope of Their Religion,” the Apostles appear in coats of mail and, to the tune of “Hark, ten thousand harps and voices,” ordain that “Mumbo-Jumbo will die in the jungle.” The forests, the beasts, and the “savages” fade away, whispering, in a pianissimo, the dying strains of “Mumbo-Jumbo will hoo-doo you.” The “bucks” are thus converted, all now down-home Campbellites.
What the far-flung audiences made of this infernal indiscretion is hard to imagine. There is always a market for “carrying on” in public, as we can confirm today. No doubt there was more condescension in the air than the reports would suggest. A performance organized in 1920 at Oxford University by Robert Graves can be read as an elaborate prank on the pretensions of the dons rather than as a tribute to the prairie poet—indeed, the sweating reiterations of the amateur elocutionist might recall Tom Thumb at Queen Victoria’s court.
In any case, scholars can excavate in the old magazines many alarming commendations of this native genius, fresh voice, America’s Homer, and so on. Harriet Monroe, a promoter of poetry and of the Middle West in tandem, wrote the introduction to the book publication of The Congo and Other Poems. The praise is short but unfortunately ranging in reference, like a kangaroo leaping over rich and spacious plains. Whistler and Whitman are called forth before a landing by Miss Monroe on the “old Greek precedent of the half-chanted lyric.” The “Greek precedent” is one of those critical jokes like “the Jane Austen of the Upper West Side,” but the claims of the Prairie Poets and subsequent idolators to the example of Whitman is an unending irritation.
“The Santa-Fé Trail” is another noisy work, the theme seeming to be that the sound of the automobile—Crack, Crack, Crack—is trying without success to overwhelm the song “sweet, sweet, sweet” of a local Southwest bird known as Rachel-Jane. Then there is a salute to the firemen, “Clang, Clang, Clang,” and an evocation of Jesus in “I Heard Immanuel Singing.”
He was ruddy like a shepherd.
His bold young face how fair.
Apollo of the silver bow
Had not such flowing hair.
Tramping and reciting, forever in manic locomotion with notebook in hand to scribble whatever came into his head, head to be laid down at night on a YMCA pillow, leaving little time for romantic life. Actually, Lindsay comes across as more than a little girl-shy in spite of crushes here and there, one falling on the poet Sara Teasdale. But she married a rich shoe manufacturer and for a time was set up grandly in New York, until she too was mowed down by the drastic scythe of taste and died divorced, no longer rich, reclusive and embittered. At last, Lindsay married a young woman from Spokane, a high-school teacher of English and Latin. She was twenty-three, and he was forty-six. They had two daughters and were always in financial distress, since his income came largely from recitations and a good portion went to agents and expenses. On the road, the listeners forever calling for “Congo” and “General Booth,” Lindsay was to experience the pathos of repetition: exhaustion and insolvency.
Along the way, uphill and downhill, Lindsay wrote a most interesting book, fortunately in prose: The Art of the Moving Picture, first issued in 1915, revised in 1922, and later reprinted with an excellent appreciation of its worth in an introduction by Stanley Kauffmann. After the rant and carelessness of the verses, Lindsay concentrated his mind on the movies. Here it is, he must have decided as he rested his vocal cords in the darkness of the old cinemas—American, popular, infinite in variety, flung out to the folk with a prodigality very similar to his own production methods. He tries to organize what the films can do, sort out the types, explain the power of directors such as D. W. Griffith.
For instance, “The Action Picture”:
In the action picture there is no adequate means for the development of full-grown personal passion. The Action Pictures are falsely advertised as having heart-interest, or abounding in tragedy, but though the actors glower and wrestle and even if they are the most skillful lambasters in the profession, the audience gossips, and chews gum.
There are the Intimate Photoplays, the Splendor Pictures, which divide into Crowd Splendor, Patriotic Splendor, Religious Splendor, and so on. Concerning the intimate photoplay, he writes:
Though the intimate and friendly photoplay may be carried out of doors to a row of loafers in front of the country store, or the gossiping
streets of the village, it takes its origin and theory from the snugness of the interior. The restless reader replies that he has seen photoplays that showed ballrooms that were grandiose, not the least cozy. These are to be classed as out-of-door scenery so far as theory goes, and are discussed under the head of Splendor Pictures. The intimate Motion Picture . . . is gossip in extremis.
The movies and their vagrant images for him, the lonely traveling man, had the seductive power of the saloon for others of his kind. He was seduced into a contemplation and wish for coherence absent from his verse making. Thus, he finds “noble views of the sea,” common to early camera effects, allied to “the sea of humanity spectacles”:
the whirling of dancers in ballrooms, handkerchief-waving masses of people on balconies, the hat-waving political ratification meetings, ragged, glowering strikers, and gossiping, dickering people in the market-place. Only Griffith and his disciples can do these as well as almost any manager can reproduce the ocean. Yet the sea of humanity is dramatically blood-brother to the Pacific, the Atlantic, or Mediterranean. . . . So, in The Birth of a Nation, the Ku Klux Klan dashes down the road as powerfully as Niagara pours over the cliff.
A film version of Ibsen’s Ghosts came to town, and Lindsay reports that it was not Ibsen and should have been advertised under the title “The Iniquities of the Fathers. An American Drama of Eugenics, in a Palatial Setting.” The style of these reflections, offhand and colloquial, is usefully attuned to the subject and to his casual but transfixed attentions. Returning from the showing of Larry Trimble’s The Battle Hymn of the Republic, he recorded that the girl at the piano played “Under the Shade of the Apple Tree” throughout. Among the virtues of the films are their usefulness, nonalcoholic, to the working classes, who, in the heat of summer, “under the wind of an electric fan, can witness everything from a burial at Westminster to the birthday parade of the ruler of the land of Swat.”
The Collected Essays of Elizabeth Hardwick Page 53