Arts and Letters

Leonard Bacon, inheritor of a well-known New England name, was one of that group of young enthusiasts for literature produced by the universities in and after 1907. He himself was one of the earlier members of the group, a graduate of Yale College in 1909, who published his first volume, The Scrannel Pipe, in the same year. The adoption of the title was characteristic of him, and indicative of a future habit. It was of course drawn from Milton's Lycidas, where it is used with fierce scorn for the cheap and shopworn poetry turned out by the clerical versifiers of the seventeenth century. Many of our poet's later titles, like his first, recall other titles and famous phrases, thus: The Banquet of the Poets, Animula Vagula, The Goose on the Capitol, Rhyme and Punishment, and even Bullinger Bound. Bacon's verse reeks with reminiscence. He can suggest by implication a given master or a period in literary history without departing from the subject in hand. His output was extensive. There are over twenty volumes on the shelf in my library devoted to his works. Their variety is no less remarkable than their number. One may say of him as Samuel Johnson said of his friend Goldsmith, that "there was almost no species of writing which he left untouched." He delighted in lyric poetry no less than in narrative. You will find epigram and satire side by side with elegy and occasional verse. He was one of the best translators of his time (of which more hereafter), and at the age of fifty published an autobiography, entitled Semi-Centennial, and in 1951 recited a tribute to his Alma Mater on her 250th birthday. But among all these, his abiding favorite was the epic. As one tries to traverse the vast area of his production there are moments when one asks oneself whether an anthologist could give an adequate notion of his work as a whole; but epic and novels in verse defy the kindliest and most skillful of anthologists, for epic poetry cannot be represented in selections. It involves a contradiction in terms.

Now all that I have said thus far illustrates one of the most prominent of Bacon's qualities, his exuberance. Without being loquacious, he was somehow never at a loss for a word. He always had something to say. The other day that admirable journalist, Mr. Cyril Connolly, after resigning the editorship of Horizon, asked himself, "What shall I write now that there is nothing that I have to write?" No doubtful query of that kind ever assaulted the mind of Leonard Bacon. He fell readily under the enchantment of his subject. He never ran out of matter. His was an ever-gushing spring. This is exuberance, the quantitative measure—the ability to go on "abundantly productive." No doubt exuberance may sometimes be extremely unattractive. Do we not all know the friend who talks us deaf and dumb? Nevertheless, the quality always accompanies the highest manifestations of genius. Shakespeare has it, and Cervantes. The Athenian tragedians had it, and Lope de Vega, Molière, Scott, Dickens, Trollope, Dumas père, and a thousand others. So exuberance, as appearing in union with Leonard Bacon's other gifts, must be reckoned with. He needs elbow room, freedom of movement and plenty of time. Happily the surge and flow of his productivity did not cancel his delight in the happy phrase or curb his ability to create it. In the sonnet which he entitled "Portrait of My Master, Henry Augustine Beers," he revealed his love of the aperçu, the brief phrase worth whole pages of critical analysis. So

like an etcher's jewel
That voice graves on the mind strokes kind or cruel:
"Richardson (with an owl-blink) was a creeper."
"Byron's Parnassus was not high but steeper
"Than Shelley's." "There's an atmosphere of gruel
"And dressing-gowns round Cowper."

There are plenty of "touchstones," as Matthew Arnold called them, in Bacon, and I heartily wish that I had time to cite a score of them; but I will take time for only one—a line from The Furioso, about his own passion for the rhythm of verse:

And my dust shall pulse to music after death.

But we must beware of suggesting that Bacon's genius could be defined by quotations such as these, or reduced to miniature, no matter how beautiful the engraver's outlines may be. His long poems, The Mound-Builders, Ulug Beg, Quincibald (his Phi Beta Kappa poem), Lost Buffalo, The Voyage of Autoleon, and a dozen others reveal his need for the long and rolling trajet ahead of him. Some of these long pieces, like Bullinger Bound, are fantastic and elusive; one or two, like The Banquet of the Poets, are very funny indeed—it is an achievement to be screamingly comic about Cambridge, Massachusetts—and many of them, perhaps too many, darken into tragedy. The greatest and the strangest of them all is The Furioso (1932). I say "greatest," not because of its 5,000 lines of ottava rima, but because it has, in the twenty-two years that have elapsed since it was given to the world, lost none of its original power, and that, let me add, is a superlative.

I call it the "strangest" because of our author's taking for his subject the career of a contemporary figure, no less a person than Gabriele D'Annunzio and that elusively lovely actress, Eleonora Duse. The publishers made the most of this unusual subject in the advertisement on the dust-jacket. They offered the reader the story of "a Latin poet, playwright, soldier, and irresistible lover. You know him, but here you will discover him anew." Leonard Bacon had dwelt for months in Italy, till Rome, Pisa, Verona, Parma, Trascara, and the Dolomites became as familiar to him as Peace Dale. Now our author had never stressed local color to the exclusion of more important features of the novelist's art. In spite of the significance of background in the events he was narrating, he would never permit it to dominate him in The Furioso. Indeed, I find on looking back upon the poem that one recalls this phase of the story only with effort.

In this versified novel, then, D'Annunzio appears under the name of Stelio Effrena, and Mme. Duse as La Foscarina; but prominent as the two of them are, they do not furnish the exclusive interest of the plot. Lesser characters here and there catch and hold the reader's attention. One of these is Pio Speranza, who appears first as a babe at the breast, then as a young apothecary, though with literary aspirations and a passion for the verse of Stelio; next he is an officer in his native town, and presently a captain in the Italian army during its campaign against the Austrians. Towards the close of the sixth canto he becomes for a time the hero of the entire piece. It is he who, though suffering from the sick fatigue of a war of attrition, is assigned the task of superintending the raising of a gun which has been caught in the rocks far below the station of Pio's unit, on the cliffs opposite the Austrians, similarly drawn up on the other side. It is the Captain's business to get this camouflaged gun brought up to its first position on a ledge of rock, and then, after loosening the coils and knots in which the monstrous thing has contrived to fasten itself, to get it swung up to the peak above; this while bullets are scattering death all about, the enemy fire being directed by the white beams of an enormous searchlight from the other side. Well, Pio, a fine chap, though weary and pale from the loss of blood, succeeds in his task, but at once afterwards has the perilous descent to make, back to the station whence he had set out, and all the time with the white beams playing upon him as he, in his bloody rags, climbs painfully down. And then suddenly he realizes that the rain of bullets has ceased, and that the enemy, in a burst of admiration for his pluck, are lighting him on his way. In all the deluge of war stories since 1915, I can think of no incident more breath-taking, more romantic, and, shall I not say, more touching than this.

But Pio is destroyed at last. He recovers from shell-shock, and returns to the front. And now the inevitable stroke of irony occurs, for he is assigned to serve under Stelio, who has won a foothold for Italy in Fiume. Pio is lost in a mad flight of Stelio's from that beleaguered city to Rome. He might have lived his life out if he had not come under the fatal spell of the selfish and arrogant Furioso. He thus gives his recovered life to a commander whom he had first come to know as a poet. But he cannot transfer to his commander that loving admiration which he had had for him half a lifetime before. He now has such a disillusion as a young officer acquires in watching the result of the stupidity of the commander above him. And so his life is thrown upon the scrap heap.

This modern epic is narrated with all Bacon's dash and vigor. He follows Stelio's career from boyhood to his rise to heights of fame and success, and then to his fall into shame and public ignominy. The long career of the Furioso is thus a protracted journey, full of sound and fury, only to end in fiasco at last. This ultimate disaster—capitulation, misdirected aims and defeated hopes—is the kind of subject in which Bacon's skill is seen at its most telling. If time served it would be interesting to set the conclusion of The Furioso over against the great sonnet which treats the same theme, "The siege is over and the walls are down." The vigorous and self-confident style of the poet serves to give point and luminosity to the cheap and futile ruin that human beings make of their lives. He illustrates this in sketch after sketch, in tale after tale. Many of these are laid in university towns with which of course Bacon was but too well acquainted.

The dreadful climax is reached in the tragedy of "Craig Carruthers." It is a story laid in New Haven, where the hero, a highly gifted and eminently endowed man, is one of the most successful and popular instructors in Yale University. It is a psychological study of the terrifying theme of possession by a malignant power, whose nature nobody really comprehends, a mental disease, recognized but not understood. "Part of him," remarks the psychiatrist,

Destroys life for the rest. Queer that it takes
A feminine form for him. When he refers to it
It's always "She."

Carruthers, a mind of the highest and subtlest power, is haunted by this strange and invisible demon, from whose slavery he cannot escape. At last she drives him to self-destruction, and nothing is left but the debris of what was once clean and holy. Such is the story of Craig Carruthers as told by the sympathetic and horrified author, a friend who slowly comes to realize the dire position in which the doomed man finds himself, a man aware of his splendid powers, yet knowing at the same time that for him there is no hope.

If it be permissible for an author to make the reader's mind reflect the black despair into which a noble spirit has fallen innocently and unaware, only to realize that he has been caught in a quicksand from which no human power can pluck him; if this, I say, is within the proper scope of the poet's art, then Bacon in "Craig Carruthers" has produced a masterpiece. Henry James did the same kind of thing in The Turn of the Screw.

It would be deplorable and untrue to leave an impression that Leonard Bacon was a saddened man or a depressing companion. He was ever on the qui vive, incredibly buoyant and forward-looking. Friends turned to him instinctively for encouragement and renewal. What problems and difficulties he had in his existence, he kept to himself. It is pleasant to remember that for many months during the latter years of his life, the spell of creation was on him as he rendered into English The Lusiads of Camoëns. He had long been known for his skill in rendering foreign poetry. He, with the assistance of certain colleagues, had translated the Heroic Ballads of Servia, a standard work. He translated the Cid and the Song of Roland. And at last, at the request of Mr. Huntington, he turned to Camoëns. He learned the language; it became as familiar to him as French or Italian. And his passion for epic poetry sustained him through the long and happy months when he worked on the world-famous poem.

Early in the summer of 1950 the Hispanic Society of America put forth an edition of The Lusiads of Camoëns, consisting of a translation by Leonard Bacon, with introduction and notes by him. It is an imposing volume in large octavo, containing 423 pages, the entire body of material amounting to an assemblage of all the important information about the poet, his epic, and his times. Everything except the Portuguese text is to be found here. The translation consists of 8,816 lines in ottava rima. In it Bacon's scholarship and his exuberance of style appear in happy union. Many readers thought to find an antiquated style or a frank imitation of Elizabethan diction, but the translation, like Bacon's original narratives, moves forward with ease and clarity. It reads well, if one may use the expression, and thus it attains to the highest quality that a translation may attain, to escape the derivative tone of a work that constantly suggests an origin in another tongue. The Camoëns volume was thus a worthy capstone of all his work in this kind. It was received with acclaim and at once assumed, together with his Lay of the Cid, its position as a standard work.

Leonard Bacon, born the 26th of May, 1887, published his first book in 1909. He was elected to the Institute in 1941, the year in which he received the Pulitzer Prize for poetry. He entered the Academy in 1951, and few members have appreciated the honor more than he. On New Year's afternoon, January 1954, while at afternoon tea with friends and members of his family, he suddenly and quietly ceased to be. Could he have foreseen that such was to be his departure from life he would, we may be confident, have detected the symbolism in it. He might possibly have beheld a path ahead, shining far beyond the horizon, or have heard the peal of trumpets sounding for him, with the rhythm he so loved, on that distant shore towards which he and so many of the children of his mind had resolutely set their sail.