Mark Harris - City of Discontent

City of Discontent

Mark Harris

New York

For Josephine

Who Advised, Subsidized,

And Was Patient

In this, the City of my Discontent,

Sometimes there comes a whisper from the grass,

Romance, Romanceis here. No Hindu town

Is quite so strange. No Citadel of Brass

By Sinbad found, held half such love and hate;

No picture-palace in a picture-book

Such webs of Friendship, Beauty, Greed and Fate!

Vachel Lindsay, Springfield Magical

INTRODUCTION

In simple sheltered 1945, in quest of a girl to marry and a book to write, I discovered in Springfield, Illinois, not only the girl but also the poet Vachel Lindsay, married both, and have lived ever since in a polygamous awe arising from the repeated discovery that when I reach the truth of one or the other I am nevertheless as distant as ever: all roads lead not to finite horizons but merely to new turnings. I was twenty-three, if not too young to marry certainly too young to acknowledge any deficiency in myself likely to prevent me from promptly grasping every aspect of every motivation of a poet who was by that year fourteen years dead, whose geographical origin, educational training, and religious background were significantly different from my own, whose literary production was mature and extensive although my own had scarcely begun, and whose disposition, perhaps as the very result of that production, had led him to a despair I had not the least preparation to share. It was the year the bomb fell upon Hiroshima, a city in which I have since lived with my wife and the children of our Springfield union, and the year I undertook, with all the passion of a dedicated Know Nothing, a biography of the poet.

My passion was attacked but never subdued by the poets sister, Olive Wakefield, of Springfield, her objections being that my mind was too young and unformed. These objections my young and unformed mind discounted as the peccadillo of a lady whose own mind had necessarily been weakened by long missionary years in China. My publisher, for different and less valid reasons, roughly ordered me to abandon the project, and I suffered, as a consequence, an affliction of spirit which settled in my lungs and left me almost dead in a Catholic hospital in Springfield. Luckily, I was rescued by nuns equipped with needles loaded with a new, war-born drug called penicillin, and by a devout lay nurse who in the moment of most extreme crisis actually restored warmth to my body by leaping upon me with her own; it was an act of mercy performed for my salvation in spite of the fact that my fevered tongue had continuously declared to her my contempt for her Church. Whether I was aware of it or not (these things take time) I was now better prepared than beforemy mind less young, beginning to be formedto seize hints of love, faith, charity, and hope.

Once more upon my feet, still far short of full strength or full understanding, I resumed my work. Over and over I read the books of Vachel Lindsay, traced his route through life upon calendars, index-cards, and maps of the United States, accumulated mountains of correspondence, and visited persons who had known him in Springfield and elsewhere. It was my first excuse to place myself in the presence of men of artistic prominenceLouis Untermeyer and Langston Hughes in New York, Percy Grainger and John Sloan in New Mexico, and others, each of whom was indulgent, and all of whom warned me against haste.

For me, the most memorable of these interviews was with Edgar Lee Masters, who had already written a biography of Lindsay, and who was puzzled why anyone should attempt an improvement upon it. We met in the lobby of the Hotel Irving in New York on a fine autumn day. His face brightened as we shook hands, but he soon grew sullen and withdrawn, as one does who knows too much. He was well, but anxious to die. He stared briefly with wonder at an object nearly sixty years his junior, soon shifting his gaze to some memory upon the wall behind me, and the conversation proceeded, as his wife had warned me it would, principally between her and me. At the end of about twenty minutes she gently suggested that we had talked long enough. Masters agreed, and rose, adding only, Vachel was the greatest of us all. It was the thought he meant me to carry away.

My book was subsequently published, not in haste, but perhaps too soon. On the other hand, how could I have put it indefinitely off? A writer must discharge his mistakes and go on to others; if they loom to embarrass him so much the better: he can revisit them with the added advantage of having followed Lindsay upon the dangerous path of literary endeavor. On the day it was published I stood upon a street in Minneapolis, in the company of the poet Allen Tate, admiring my brilliant production in a bookshop window and trying to persuade Mr. Tate that if he would only read it (first buying it) he would learn what the life of a poet is like. Like Mrs. Wakefield before him, he appeared to be under the impression I was unready, and we passed on, he to the post-office in flapping galoshes, and I into the future via Hiroshima.

I have carried about the world and down the years a great many books which, in one place or another, I have abandoned, but the shelf of Lindsays books, and my own contribution to his history, have remained intact. In fancy and in fact they have altered. My interlinear and marginal notations in Lindsays books, and in the Masters biography, have begun to fade, and my own volume, like some aged, wasting, distant cousin occupies a sentimental place in the house without contributing to the familys present style.

The life of Vachel Lindsay is so incredible in its details, and so rare an example of the extinct passion to mingle poetry with a programmatic national and religious purpose that we are compelled in the name of our own sane preservation to doubt that he actually lived it. We may comfort ourselves in recoil by charging that his effort was inspired by a vast illusion whose outcome could have been nothing less than his eventual despair. Thus we fortify ourselves with the conviction that he was the author of his downfall, and we relieve ourselves of the obligation to question whether the illusion was, in fact, illusion; or whether, even if it was, it was not the best of all illusions, especially for a poet.

Lindsay died in 1931, harvested. Done in. Had. He was fifty-two. My marginal notations for 1945 tell me exactly whysociety did it look what society did to him!although I am now less inclined to press the case. In the end, every poet dies when his work is done, society his perennial exasperation, but never his killer. All poets are mad, or, to be gentler, estranged, alienated, perceiving too much, feeling too much, ranging too far, lingering too long at the poles of exaltation and morbidity. Not to explore life all the way is not to be a poet, and one must draw what consolation he can from the thought that the alternatives must be rather dull.

In Lindsays case success took at first the happy form of ready publication. Thus his work is available to our solitude. It would have been well had he retained his own.

Unfortunately he was temptedself-temptedinto a program of platform recitals, exhilarating at first, whose missionary character committed him beyond return.

His touring soon effectively displaced his writing as a way of life. As early as 1922 he complained how utterly impossible it has become for me to live a private life I am like a newspaper or the front-door rug for everybody to use. He planned to say good-by to all such schemes by July 1, 1923.