The Earlier Lewis Though Mrs

JANUARY 20, 1934 THE SATURDAY REVIEW OP LUERATURE 421 knew, later became the wife of Harry Leon Wilson. We were all great friends, even The Earlier Lewis though Mrs. Cooke dubbed me "William the Silent," and "Red" somewhat annoyed BY WILLIAM ROSE BENET Helen Cooke, solely out of his admiration for her, by chanting a most complimen tary song about her which he had made NCE a man attains fame he is Henry Mencken, who professes a low i up, entitled "A Fugitive Queen." "Red" trailed by the "I-knew-him- opinion of poetry in general is, I believe, i and I swam in the Pacific, picnicked on when"-ers. I am not writing this still trying to suppress any reappearance '• the beach, took long walks, did our own Oarticle precisely in that spirit. At the re of his own early poetic efforts. As a mat- ' cooking, and even tried experiments with quest of the editor of The Saturday Re ter of fact, "Red's" undergraduate verse | our own laundry. I was amazed then, as I view of Literature I am setting down a was not at all bad for those days. I have have been ever since, at the man's ability few reminiscences concerning a man who some of it still, clipped from old Courants. to reel off stories. .On the way home from was at one time one of my best friends, He soon began to sell verse here and there George Sterling's, through the Carmel a man to some of whose early stages as to New York magazines. I remember a woods, of a summer night, he would a writer I was witness, a man for whom most rollicking stave he wrote about a \ launch into some yarn that he had made I have retained a sincere admiration as priest, highly laudatory of this particular ! up on the spur of the moment; and be one of the most independent and honest priest's convivial spirit and called "Father fore we were back at our cottage—we had spirits of our time. In certain formative Kileen." It was modeled upon the late moved into better quarters due to the years after leaving college—for I was late Richard Hovey's "Barney McGee." At that benevolence of a grand old lady who was in developing a mature viewpoint—"Red" time there was another man of literary then one of the leading spirits in Carmel Lewis was one of the strongest influences promise in Yale College, Allan Updegraff. —the whole story would have been com in my life, and, I may say, a thoroughly He and Lewis were great friends and were pleted in recitative. It was a marvellous SINCLAIR LEWIS IN CALIFORNIA beneficial one. That is not to say that we associates later, I think, on Transatlantic performance, and apparently his fund of always got along well together. Our ideas Tales in New York, where they set them- : invention was inexhaustible. Also there Village, "Red" being employed by the often clashed. It is from such clashes, when selves to translating foreign masterpieces ! were, as doubtless there are still—-and as Frederick A. Stokes firm of publishers, I you are yovmg, that sparks are struck to of fiction. Updegraff has since become a appears in "The Man Who Knew Cool- as a cub editor on the old Century Maga kindle new ideas. The controversial bat well-known novelist. idge"—the almost endless monologues in zine. The youth of that period was chiefly tles of youth are necessary to growth. I never saw Lewis again, that I remem which he suddenly took on a character interested in sociological matters. It was I first heard of Harry Lewis, as he was ber, in college. It was after graduation, in part, and the fantastic imaginings that some years before the war, and after the called then—Sinclair being his middle California, that my best friend, Henry would be worked out in the most intricate war the more or less disillusioned youth name—^when I was a Yale tmdergraduate. Hoyt (Elinor Wylie's brother), wrote me detail, till one almost screamed for sur of America seemed to turn, in the Scott As he was in Yale College and I was in that he had run into "Red" in New York, cease from the spate of words. From in Fitzgerald days, toward intense individu the Scientific School we had no occasion found him a great scout, and that Lewis tense hilarity the man would also, at times, alism and the "eat, drink, and be merry to meet. Second to the historic Yale Lit was coming to the Coast. I must meet him. turn as grave and didactic as a Baptist for tomorrow we die" attitude. Not so in erary Magazine in those days there was At that time Henry and I had decided, minister and proceed to lay down the that earlier time. Most of the young people another small literary magazine modeled with the arrogance of youth, that most moral law, according to his own highly were out to reform the world in one way somewhat upon Stone & Kimball's Chap- people were bovine and that a soul could individual ideas, with an almost snarling or another—and, by Golly, the world was Book, known as the Yale Courant. Lewis be discerned in very few. By that we earnestness that seemed to bode hell-fire going to reform or know the reason why! was already drawing more books from the meant, I suppose, that most people had for the unbeliever. It appeared as if Shel ley himself could never have been more It was the day of the old Masses with Yale library than, I believe, any under very little independence of mind or spirit. Max Eastman and Floyd Dell as editors; graduate has before or since, and trying "Red," however, quite evidently had. deeply stirred by the injustices and tyran nies of the economic order, or disorder. of "The Working Girls' Home," namely his prentice hand at writing, as he had I had lately come back from across the the back room of O'Connor's old Cafe on doubtless done in school. It was quite nat Pacific as deck yeoman on an Army trans My brain, to use Henry Hoyt's expres the comer of Greenwich Avenue and ural that he quickly "made" both the Lit port, and I decided now to take a trip to sion, was sometimes thoroughly "sand Sixth, where beer flowed freely and music and the Courant and was elected to the Carmel, California, to meet this avatar. I papered" by the constant dissection of had charms—the place where John Mase- Chairmanship of the latter. This office he arrived over a sandhill in a creaking buck- ideas, the questioning of every premise, fleld himself once tended bar. It was the almost immediately resigned to devote his board of some sort to have a lanky indi the rovings of "Red's" insatiable curiosity day of "The Old Grapevine," long gone, up literary energies to the Lit. I stood second vidual, in corduroys and sweater or some- concerning preconceived notions, and the Sixth Avenue a few blocks, whe'-e wero in the Courant competition and succeeded I thing of the kind, topped by the bonfire constant challenge of his argument. And checker players and bar philosopfc • > it did me a whole l;t of good. This man was ^ fot th^t wfllkptl r>ii the bar; it ' not content to stand and gaze at the ho day of the Anarchist Ball, where I - rizon. He stalked forth immediately to troduced to Emma Goldman; it was uie crest the hill and find the next one. He day when Frances Perkins, now a member may have come from Minnesota, but he of President Roosevelt's cabinet, was lay was spiritually from Missouri, and had ing the foundation for a notable career in to be "shown." His intellect and his imagi labor matters; when Edna Kenton lived nation were steaming up for the battle not so far off; when Union Square was a with life, and the ferment of young ambi veritable Hyde Park for soap-box orators; tion in him shriveled up any "green sick when "Red" came home one day with news ness" of youth. The days of the making of a new Stokes author who had just swum of a writer are days wonderful and ab into their ken, by name Edna Ferber;when surd. "Red" himself has caught the yearn John Reed managed to get some of my ing absurdity of such a period beautifully poetry into the American Magazine; when in his latest novel, "Work of Art," in the Sinclair Lewis, on his way from Sauk grand Swinburnian poem that the young Centre to Stockholm, pounded furiously ster in Black Thread chants from a roof at his typewriter, in his Van Nest Place top. We had great days—as they seem to room, lit by a tattered welsbach, compos me now—days of typewriter-pounding ing lyrics for a comic opera he was sure he with "great thoughts." Nights of convivi was going to sell to George M. Cohan. At ality and tremendous conversations. Once the same time he had become fascinated we "hiked" a long way down the Coast to by aviation and journeyed out to Mineola gether, camping out at night. Then the to renew acquaintance with Captain Paul time at Carmel came to an end. Beck, one of the first Army fliers, whom he Lewis took a job on the San Francisco had originally met in Benicia, California.

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