Arts and Letters

Alfred Kreymborg revealed himself ingratiatingly in the autobiographical Troubadour, and even more fully in its sequel, The New Troubadour. The first, which appeared in 1925, was an accepted document of an exciting period; it was as delightful as it was successful. The second, written about twenty years ago, is still unpublished. One cannot help throwing up one's hands and reiterating Cicero's despair about the times and the mores.

Alfred was something of a rebel in 1914 when he organized a group of poets which, half deprecatingly, half defiantly, called itself "Others." Subsequently he published three collections of their sometimes bold, sometimes merely bizarre works. In the nineteen twenties he was co-editor with Van Wyck Brooks and Lewis Mumford of an anthology of experimental writing entitled American Caravan. In the thirties and forties his evocative poems were roundly praised by such discriminators as Conrad Aiken, Malcolm Cowley, Howard Mumford Jones, and particularly by Lewis Mumford who said, "He refurbishes one's faith in the underlying human drift of things in the face of all the horrors that infest the world." In the nineteen fifties, author of a dozen volumes of poetry, nine books of intimate plays, a couple of novels, and a scattering of anthologies, he was all but forgotten.

The public could forget about Alfred because he forgot to fit himself to the public's changing fashions. Forty years before the beatniks, he anticipated the vogue for reading poetry against a background of music by accompanying himself on an instrument he called a mandolute. Audiences were charmed. But another generation preferred expressions of violence shouted over or against a jazz combo, and Alfred became a stranger to the coffee shops. Martha Graham directed a program of his poems with the Denishawn Dancers, but the delicacy of the lines was not adapted to the later developments of the ballet. The little theatres that once had welcomed him no longer wanted his fanciful plays.

Alfred was too gentle, too generous, to complain about the makeshifts of fortune. "Being a forgotten man isn't tragic," he said during one of our meetings a few years ago, "especially when there are so many things you can't forget. I've come a long way since those days in my father's poor little cigar store and the lonely years—ten of them—in a garret on Fourteenth Street when everything I wrote came back as fast as I sent it out—faster, it seemed. I've been kicked around from one publishing house to another—I've had more than twenty different publishers—but I can point to forty different books on the shelves, and some of them are still read."

Looking over the things I wrote about Alfred reminds me of his generous and forgiving spirit. I had applauded him for his recognition of the difference between oratory and poetry at a time when few writers on this side of the Atlantic thought of taking rhetoric and wringing its neck, and I had said that his early poetry tried to extend the borders of verse into the realm of tonic art. But I had complained that some of his puppet plays were too whimsical-ingenuous, too doll-charming or too doll-tragic; and, reviewing his later predilection for the sonnet, I said that his middle-age love of the formal Muse was, unfortunately, not reciprocated.

When, during the time we were fellow judges of the Pulitzer Prize competition, I tried to make amends, he stopped me. "You were right to reprove me," he said,

I grow older, but not wiser. My father liked to say, Schon so alt und noch so dumm. Besides, you were one of the first to reprint some of the things that others sneered at, even if you did make pathetic fun of the pathetic fallacy called "Old Manuscript." (The poem begins: "The sky / is that beautiful old parchment / in which the sun / and the moon / keep their diary.")

After I moved to Connecticut I saw Alfred only occasionally. He was suffering from more than neglect, but he did not indulge in self-pity. He was ill, but he still wanted to prove himself. In one of the last letters to me he wrote, "I am still very active at heart, in head, and in my writing. If I'm out of circulation otherwise, it is due to a ferocious concentration on work I'm trying to finish before I'm gone." He enclosed a quatrain that was characteristic of the man, the man who was slowly dying.

Though the moribund earth
Take a still blacker shape,
I'll be the last man
To put it in crepe.