THE man who did most (I am secretly convinced) to deprive American literature of some really fine stuff was Mr. John Wanamaker. It was in his store, some years ago, that I bought a kind of cot-bed or couch, which I put in one corner of my workroom and on which it is my miserable habit to recline when I might be getting at those magnificent writings I have planned. Every evening I pile up the cushions and nestle there with The Gentle Grafter or some detective story (my favourite relaxation), saying to myself: “Just ten minutes of loafing”....
But perhaps Messrs. Strawbridge and Clothier (also of Philadelphia) are equally at fault. When I wake up, on my Wanamaker divan, it is usually about 2 A. M. Not too late, even then, for a determined spirit to make incision on its tasks. But I find myself moving towards a very fine white-enamelled icebox which I bought from Strawbridge and Clothier in 1918. With that happy faculty of self-persuasion I convince myself it is only to see whether the pan needs emptying or the doors latching. But by the time I have scalped a blackberry pie and eroded a platter of cold macaroni au gratin, of course work of any sort is out of the question.
So do the Philistines of this world league themselves cruelly against the artist, plotting temptation for his carnal deboshed instincts, joying to see him succumb. Once the habit of yielding is established, Wanamaker, Strawbridge and Clothier (dark trio of Norns) have it their own way. Just as surely as robins will be found on a new-mown lawn, as certainly as bonfire smoke veers all round the brush pile to find out the eyes of the suburban leaf burner, so inevitably do the Divan and the Icebox exert their cruel dominion over us when we ought to be pursuing our lovely and impossible dreams. Wanamaker and Strawbridge and Clothier have blueprints of the lines of fissure in our frail velleity. As William Blake might have said:
Let Flesh once get a lead on Spirit,
It’s hard for Soul to reinherit:
When supper’s laid upon a plate
Mind might as well abdicate.
But one of the things I think about, just before I drop off to sleep on that couch, is My Anthology. Like every one else, I have always had an ambition to compile an anthology of my own; several, in fact. One of them I call in my own mind The Book of Uncommon Prayer, and imagine it as a kind of secular breviary, including many of those beautiful passages in literature expressing the spirit of supplication. This book, however, it will take years to collect; it will be entirely non-sectarian and so truly religious that many people will be annoyed. People do not care much for books of real beauty. That anthology edited by Robert Bridges, for instance—The Spirit of Man—how many readers have taken the trouble to hunt it out?
But the Uncommon Prayer Book is not the kind of anthology I have in mind at the moment. What I need is a book that would boil down the best of all the books I am fond of and condense it into a little bouillon cube of wisdom. I have always had in mind the possibility that I might go travelling, or the house might burn down, or I might have to sell my library, or something of that sort. I should like to have the meat and essence of my favourites in permanent form, so that wherever I were I could write to the publisher and get a fresh copy.
This thought came with renewed emphasis the other day when I was talking to Vachel Lindsay. He was saying that he had lately been rereading Swinburne, for the first time in nearly twenty years, and was grieved to see how the text of the poet had become corrupted in his memory. He had been misquoting Swinburne for years and years, he said, and the errors had been growing more and more firmly into his mind. That led me to think, suppose we had only memory to rely on, how long would the text of anything we loved remain unblurred? Suppose I were on a desert island and yearned to solace myself by spouting some of the sonnets of Shakespeare? How much could I recapture? Honestly, now, and with no resort to the book on the shelf at my elbow, let me try an old friend:
Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
That alters when it alteration finds
Or bends with the remover to remove.
Oh no, it is an ever-fixed mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken—
Love is the star to every wandering bark
Whose worth’s unknown, although his height be taken.
Then there’s something about a sickle, but I can’t for the life of me quite get it. Presently I’ll look it up in the book and see how near I came.
Before opening the Shakespeare, however, let’s have one more try:
When to the sessions of sweet silent thought
I summon up remembrance of things past,
I wail the lack of many a thing I sought
... my dear time’s waste——
And all the rest of that sonnet that I can think of is something about “death’s dateless night.” A pretty poor showing. Of course, I should do better on a desert island: there would be the wide expanse of shining sand to walk upon, and I could throw myself into it with more passion and fury. The secret of remembering poetry is to get a good barytone start and obliterate the mind of its current freight of trifles. The metronomic prosody of the surf would help me, no doubt, and the placid frondage of the breadfruit trees. But even so, the recension of Shakespeare’s sonnets that I would write down upon slips of bark would be a very corrupt and stumbling text. Favourite lines would be scrambled into the wrong sonnets, and the whole thing would be a pitiful miscarriage of memory.
The only sagacious conduct of life is to prepare for every possible emergency. I have taken out life insurance, and fire insurance, and burglary insurance, and automobile insurance. I have always insured myself against losing my job by taking care not to work too hard at it, so I wouldn’t miss it too bitterly if it were suddenly jerked from under me. But what have I done in the way of Literary Insurance? Suppose, to-morrow, Adventure should carry me away from these bookshelves? How pleasant to have a little microcosm of them that I could take with me! And yet, unless I can shake off the servitude of those three Philadelphia mandarins, Wanamaker and Strawbridge and Clothier, I shall never have it.
When I think of the plays that I would have written if it weren’t for those three rascals.
