James Whitcomb Riley (1849-1916)
[In the following essay, Raffel proposes that Riley's drive for money and success—and a skill at marketing—helped the poet commodify his poetry, producing a mass market phenomenon.]
In 1899 William Dean Howells declared, in the pages of one of the oldest and most august of American magazines, the North American Review, that James Whitcomb “Riley has known how to endear himself to a wider range of American humanity than any other American poet.”1 Sales figures fully support the statement. Published in 1883, by 1889 Riley's The Old Swimmin' Hole and 'Leven More Poems had sold over half a million copies.2 Between 1893 and 1949, his books sold something like three million copies.3 “No one could equal James Whitcomb Riley,” Russel B. Nye explains. “The public loved him for his frankly sentimental, gently humorous, and artfully artless treatment of tried-and-true themes …, and for his celebration of old-fashioned country values in a frantically competitive, urbanized society.”4 Riley was also a superb performer who “could have been one of the greatest stage comedians of his time (7).”5 When he “appeared at Chickering Hall in Boston on the same platform with [Mark] Twain, George Washington Cable, and William Dean Howells, [he] virtually stole the show. After that, his annual tours with humorist Bill Nye became national events. …”6
Craftsmanlike, immensely cleverly calculated, his poetry has worn badly. “As he read his poems before large audiences he studied their reactions and was able, he explains, to ‘use the knowledge gained in my writing.’ The public, he discovered, ‘demands simple sentiments that come direct from the heart.’”7 His is not negligible poetry, but it is exceedingly thin, reflecting only a highly artificial and overwhelmingly sentimental view of existence. Its totally conventional technique and extensive use of dialect speech, and dialect spellings, make it very hard to take seriously. Riley once queried William Dean Howells, in the latter's capacity as an editor, “Do you want dialect—or serious work—or both?” (157) We have long since learned to ask more of our poets.
Riley was as beloved in person as he was on the stage or in print. William Lyon Phelps, editor of Riley's Letters, says flatly that “Everybody who read Riley loved him, and those who met him loved him even more” (8). Again, the evidence more than supports the assertion. By 1888 Mark Twain could speak of “the strong love and admiration which I feel for Riley,” and in 1915 Howells, unable to attend what he called a “Riley-Fest,” asked that the organizers “give him my dearest love” (329, 334). Even Riley's constant cursing, hardly a venial sin in those straitlaced times, could not disturb his friends. “Although he kept up a stream of profanity in conversation, his profanity never seemed vulgar; it was lyrical; and spoken in that soft, gentle voice, seemed a natural manner of emphasis.”8
What manner of man was this immensely popular, immensely prosperous poet and performer, who emerged into the national limelight from the then rather unlikely home territory of Indiana—and who always remained a “Hoosier,” both in his heart and in his residence? Riley never married; except for a few odd jobs in youth, he never in all his life worked at anything but his craft. Poetry and cracker-barrel stage talk were literally his only skills. Even prose, he wrote to a publisher in 1897, “likes me not. … In fact, prose is the only verse I write that is worse than my other verse” (220). “I've sworn I'd never try to write prose again” (214). Most of his letters revolve around the same unchanging core: what he was writing, and what he had written, and where he was publishing (or performing), and what others were writing. It was a life of almost total dedication. But who did Riley think he really was, and what were the emotional signposts by which he traveled his life's path? Were his inner values really as close to those of the masses of men and women in Victorian America as his poetry, and his career as a whole, would seem to indicate? Fairly plainly, he was an honest man; his poetry was not fraudulent, whatever else it was or was not. But were his life and his art in fact so tightly interwoven, so essentially identical, as they seem to be? Are there discernible currents flowing through the man, deeper and perhaps more disturbing than what he allowed others to see? And how willing was he to reveal himself, in the relatively unbuttoned epistolary form, communicating, often, with people he had known virtually since boyhood?
Riley was a driven man, and what drove him was the same pair of American gods that impelled most of his countrymen in his own lifetime and impel them still: money and success. In 1893 he wrote to Rudyard Kipling:
For some years I've been striving to ferret out the one evident lack or defect of our whole art guild; and I've struck it: It's business. We [artists] naturally hate that, and therefore avoid it. That's why we're all victims. So I've gone to work to change that status of affairs. In consequence, I'm a revelation to myself. Am making not only “oodles” of money off my books, but twice over as much again by personally reading the same to packed houses.
(183)
Alexis de Tocqueville had foreseen (as later commentators have corroborated) that “democratic nations … will … cultivate the arts which serve to render life easy, in preference to those whose object is to adorn it.” And de Tocqueville goes a good deal further:
There are always in democracies a large number of men whose fortune is upon the increase, but whose desires grow much faster than their fortunes: and who gloat upon the gifts of wealth in anticipation, long before they have the means to command them. Such men are eager to find some short cut to these gratifications, already almost within their reach. … The artisan readily understands these passions, for he himself partakes of them … [and realizes that] there are only two ways of lowering the price of commodities. The first is to discover some better, shorter, and more ingenious method of producing them: the second is to manufacture a larger quantity of goods, nearly similar, but of less value. … Not that in democracies the arts are incapable of producing very commendable works. … But they have rarely an opportunity of displaying what they can do; they are scrupulously sparing of their powers; they remain in a state of accomplished mediocrity, which condemns itself, and, though it be very well able to shoot beyond the mark before it, aims only at what it hits. … No longer able to soar to what is great, they cultivate what is pretty and elegant; and appearance is more attended to than reality. … They are for ever copying trivial objects, the originals of which are only too abundant. …9
And yet, significantly, Riley hated his public performances, and before he could go on stage he suffered the tortures of the damned. “I persuaded Riley to give a reading from his poems,” records William Lyon Phelps in his Autobiography. And the rest of what Phelps writes must be reproduced at some length:
I went to his room at the hotel about five o'clock, and found him in a state of absolute hysteria. He was walking up and down in his room like a caged beast, shouting out his woes, “Oh, my God, why did I agree to do this, why, oh, why?” I said, “After you have had a good dinner, you'll feel better.” “Dinner? Hear him talk! dinner! I haven't eaten a mouthful all day. I could not possibly eat.”
I thought I had better go, and he screamed “Don't leave me! stay with me! What will happen to me if you go?” It is impossible to exaggerate his agony of mind; and I wondered why he ever consented to appear in public when it produced such suffering. I tried to tell him that he wasn't going to lecture, did not have to think about anything to say; all he had to do was recite his poems. It was no use. He remained in this excruciating torture until it was time to go to the lecture [i.e., the reading], and he was exactly in that same frame of mind behind the curtain, so I feared he would break down. But the instant he appeared before the immense audience he was wholly at ease, gave a marvellous recital of his poems, and seemed to enjoy doing it; and certainly enjoyed the tumultuous applause. After the lecture, I took him to the [Yale] Graduates' Club, where, not having eaten anything all day, he ate a huge dinner and was in the highest spirits. I could not help asking him if he always suffered agony during the hours preceding his appearance in public. “Always.” “But I should think you would remember that you had done it before and always enjoyed it.” “No, that doesn't do any good at all.”10
Phelps plainly recognizes this as unusual (or, at least, as distinctive and interesting) behavior: he would not otherwise record the episode at such length, and in such detail, giving it almost a fifth of his brief chapter on Riley. But having recorded the episode, he at once turns to other matters. Equally plainly, he either has no way of explaining Riley's actions, or perhaps feels that any explanation he might have would be inappropriate in print. Or, perhaps most likely of all, he considers this to be “poet's” behavior, colorful and requiring no rational basis whatever.
But there is a great deal of evidence in Riley's Letters to demonstrate beyond doubt both that the pain Phelps describes was intensely real and also that it was a lifelong problem. Early in 1890, indeed, one night Riley did find himself unable to go on, and when his performance was cancelled had to deal with an immediate rumor that alcoholic overindulgence lay behind his nonappearance. (The rumor even had it that he wrote his poetry while under the influence.) Phelps attributes this particular nonappearance to “the strain of the heavy lecture schedule … together with a clash with his shrewd and hard-driving manager” (93), and indeed those probably were significant factors. But there seems to be a good deal more than that to it. Riley found another manager, the public performances continued, and so too did his pained reaction to them. “I am accepting but very few platform engagements,” he wrote in 1891, “and always those I do accept I go to with most positive reluctance” (154). In 1893, writing to his former platform partner, Edgar Wilson Nye, Riley exclaims: “I just won't work, after the long undying struggle for bread on the platform” (187; emphasis added). In any literal sense, this is of course nonsense, as the evidence about the sales of his books demonstrates. But Riley felt obliged to cast the strain and suffering of public performances in the light of a life-essential, something without which he would not have had food to eat. Why?
By 1900, age fifty-one, he was already writing to Joel Chandler Harris that he was “just well enough to travel for my health, and I'm coming down your way to look for it” (239). “Am already much better in this truly invigorating air,” he advised a female correspondent only seven days later (240). By 1902 he writes, again to the author of the Uncle Remus stories (who was one year Riley's senior):
Well, it's good to hear from you, even though the news includes a hint of your indifferent health,—for I know just what ails you,—and even now I'm suffering in like way and for exactly the same reason, though in your case you do about three or four times the weight of over-work that brings me down.
Riley then pledges “So I won't ever overwork no more!”—and immediately, and significantly, adds: “And oh! if there's a lovelier thing than work (when the whole exquisite machinery is just a-clickin' right) I've never overtaken the unnamable rapture yet. Nor have you, I know” (257). But on 21 January 1904 Riley still finds himself writing to Bliss Carman: “Just now I'm showing some really serious symptoms of long overwork, and my best friend, who is first a physician, says I must at once rid myself of all responsibilities now so weighing me lop-sided” (290). In September 1905, he is still advising a correspondent that “I ain't dead at all, but just loafin' round, like the doctor said” (297). In December 1905, he assures the same correspondent that “Soon … I'll be able to read and write again” (301). In April 1906, he apologizes for not answering a letter, explaining that it's all “because of an illness from which only now I'm recovering—with friends, doctor and attendant all warning me that every attempt at, or thought of, anything like work must be avoided, at the peril of my life!” (303) Six months or so later he sends his regrets to a Longfellow dinner: “Only ill health could and does keep me from answering with my presence” (307). In March 1907, he “certainly wishes he could be there for the long-promised visit with you all,” but the doctor will not allow it (307). In November 1907, he apologizes for “a-getting to be not a youngster no longer, but a real shore-'nuff ‘Oldster,’” concluding with the hopeful third-person observation about himself that “next time he writes he'll be a-feeling more like his old se'f” (310). By 15 June 1910 he is still “your ever-loyal though long-voiceless friend and fellow,” struggling with “one infirmity after another” (313). And then, less than a month later, he suffered a severe and disabling stroke. Plainly, his long slide into ill health had been brought on by years of constantly driving himself. And still one needs to ask: why?
Not for the money, certainly, in any literal sense. Riley had been a wealthy man for years. “No poet since Longfellow was so widely read”;11 he was without a doubt “the most popular poet in America in the 1890s.”12 Nor, though he was a serious poet, and as I have said a very capable craftsman, was he driven by the urge to communicate some unique personal message, some special doctrine, or any new perspective on anything. For all its technical skill, his was a poetry of commonplaces, even of clichés, and that was exactly how he wanted it. “My idea is to have it less profound than entertaining,” he wrote in 1879. (23)
It seems to me that Riley, in many ways very like Washington Irving, needed to construct a literary personality—and then needed to work as hard as he knew how simply to remain that personality, simply to keep life and the world from impinging in any significant way on what had been thus constructed.13 Like Irving, he had no real profession other than writing; both men studied law and tried a bit of this and a bit of that, with neither pleasure nor success. Like Irving, he never married; both men were fond of children—but always and only, and apparently without regret, other people's children. Even more than Irving, he neither involved himself in nor apparently gave much if any thought to the social or political movements of his day. Both men had large ambitions for their work, though for good reason Riley remained a good deal less secure about his literary achievement. Riley remained far more overtly a child; in Irving's time it would not have been acceptable to be openly a “boy” in middle age. Riley's range of emotions, however, and the values he advocates explicitly in his poetry, implicitly in his letters, are like Irving's the values of a determinedly hemmed-in, a fixedly self-constrained man—a man who can, in short, function in the real world only in a distinctly limited way, and who therefore exploits that path, and himself, without mercy. For in the end, such self-constraints leave a man without any choice: there is only one direction possible, and once embarked there is no going back. There is thus a kind of self-immolation in Riley that cannot be found in Washington Irving; it is plainly desperation, for all his outward show of good humor and joy. In March 1893, writing to a friend whose father had just died, Riley described himself as “rather inclining toward the sombre side of all views. … But I am learning to smile right bravely” (185). “No sound right-minded man can fail in this world or the next,” he insists to a nephew, in 1903 (284). But how deeply he believed his own words is, on the evidence of his letters, another question entirely. Tormented, rarely in full equilibrium, equally rarely truly happy (except in his mind, and in memory), Riley is in many ways almost a paradigm of the American Victorian who has made it, who has it all, and who finds that it is all ashes and dust, in his hands and in his mouth.
Applying a kind of emotional screening process to the bulk of Riley's printed letters, and picking out the strongly emotive words that recur, sometimes over and over, we can frame the following list, alphabetically arranged for easier reference:
affable | grateful | promptly |
appreciation | gratefulness | pulse |
artless | gratitude | pure |
beautiful | greatness | rapturously |
blessed (blest) | hale | rare |
blithe | halest | reliant |
brave | handsomely | repose |
bright | happy | reposeful |
cheer | hearten | ripe |
cheerfully | heartening | robust |
cheery | heartiness | rounded |
childishly | heart-warmth | sacredly |
comfort | hearty | sane |
considerate | honest | serenity |
decorous | honest-sounding | simple |
delicious | hope | simplest |
delight | human | simply |
delighted | immortal | solidity |
direct | inspiration | sound |
divinely | intrepid | splendid |
dulcet | joys | steadfastly |
earnest | kinder | stout |
ease | kindliness | stronger |
enduring | kindly | subdued |
fancy | kindness | success |
fine | lovable | successful |
fit | loved | sweet |
fittingly | lovely | sweetly |
gallant | loving | tender |
generous | loyal | tenderest |
genial | luscious | true |
gentle | marvellous | universal |
gentleness | masterly | uplift |
gentlest | mellow | warmer |
genuine | mild | warmest |
glad | mirthful | warmly |
gladly | natural | wholesome |
gleefully | pathos | wholesomely |
gloriously | patient [adjective] | wholesomer |
glory | peerless | wholesomest |
good | perfect | wonderful |
grace | perfected | |
gracious | pleasant |
I will not vouch for the absolute completeness of this listing, but it has been compiled with some care and accurately represents, in general if not in every detail, the high-color words which Riley uses, usually many times, in his correspondence. It is in some ways an extraordinary listing, though it is surely one that readers of Riley's poetry will readily recognize. These words represent, in truth, the emotions, the states of mind, toward which Riley constantly strove. The key word, to be sure, is “strove”—for as Riley himself well knew, it did not come naturally to him. On 4 March 1883 he wrote, to an old friend: “All melancholy themes are pets of mine—positively; but I am growing to avoid them as much as possible. … I notice the poems we love the best—the poems that really live—have always blood and pulse and heart-warmth in them. There's the thing!” (42) “Keep 'em all sunny and sweet and wholesome clean to the core,” he advised the poet Madison Cawein on 3 July 1890, “or, if ever tragic, with sound hopes ultimate, if pathetic, my God! with your own tears baptized and made good as mirth.” (102; emphasis added). The religious thrust is significant, but as I have indicated it is by no means all-controlling: there are other and arguably deeper impulses at work. Riley writes, late in 1890, “As far as I've prospected, all has been meant just as it is; and the thing to do is accept it, not because it pleases us, but because it most certainly does please the Master Intelligence. … So let's content us very cheerily indeed” (115). Again, the key phrase would seem to be “not because it pleases us”—because, in truth, it did not please Riley, and he had to work, continuously and hard, to try to persuade himself that it did. That is, without much doubt, the secret of his ability to persuade so many others. “Whatever good is wrought is not our doing,” he writes in December 1891, and then immediately he adds, most significantly, “it is through us, not of us, thank god” (148). For a man of declared faith, plainly, Riley places remarkably little of that faith in man: indeed, he seems distinctly worried that there might be any serious reliance on man, for whom he seems to feel a good deal more suspicion than trust. Recall his 1893 estimate of himself, already quoted, as “being fashioned of both mind and tendency … rather inclining toward the sombre side of all views,” which estimate concluded, “But I am learning to smile right bravely” (185). Riley's friends, like his readers, had a way of not listening to him when he said such things, but he meant them. “Never until you and I talk long together,” he told a correspondent in 1894, “will you wholly comprehend how most serious I am when seemingly trivial” (198). And this same letter ends, significantly:
Therefore be comforted. That is enough. [I] am largely a fatalist—regarding myself, at least. What I most desire is generally denied. And yet I feel and know perfectly that God's hand's on the helm and His breath is in the sails!
(199; emphasis added)
The vital enthusiasm of the final declaration, complete with its adoring, emphatic exclamation mark, is however distinctly undercut by the sour claim, profoundly real to Riley, that “what I most desire is generally denied.” Even toward the end of his life, he cannot separate the sour realities from the hoped-for cheerfulness. Writing to the popular journalist Mrs. Juliet Strauss, 9 July 1906, he declares: “Never you mind age or lapse of youthful eye-sight, or faltering step, or flagging hope and heart and zest—just let your pen prance on at its present pleasant gait, and all the world will skurry for the happy, wholesome messages you bring” (304). Never mind your actual state of either body or mind, one might translate. Disregard all the pain you feel, and the disappointment. Look to a better time, and a better place, have faith, and preach that faith for the nourishment of others—and, it must be added, both for your own comfort and also for your own success.
For who better than Riley knew both the importance of success and the pathway to it? “I'm still believing as of old that I'm goin' to make it,” he affirmed a trifle uncertainly, in 1879, having just explained, somewhat sourly, that “the old promises for my brilliant future are still promising—they never let up on that” (25). As success in fact came, Riley did not relent a jot. “I'm not ‘goin' to give it up …’ till I get [a poem] to stick in every magazine that has ever rejected me! This is as good as sworn to, and I want you to ‘hang on’ with me, and we'll ‘bring 'em’ yet!” Indeed, his 1877 prank, publishing under Edgar Allan Poe's name a poem he had himself written, in imitation of Poe's style, is equally relentless. Riley afterwards liked to pretend that his purpose was objective, “an idle scheme of mine to demonstrate the theory I held and hold, that all that it is necessary to make a poem successful and popular is to prove its author a genius known to fame” (16; emphasis added). The “theory” is of course no theory at all: every writer who has ever lived has experienced and often has testified to its absolute truth. Riley's original letter, to the editor who published the imitation Poe poem, first declares, ingenuously, that “the dull times worry me, and I yearn for something to stir things from their comatose condition.” But then, after describing the scheme, he gets to the real heart of it. “We will ‘rise up William Riley’ and bu'st our literary bladder before a bewildered and enlightened world!!!” (14-15)
When Riley did not press his cause with some publisher or journal, it was because he did not think his chances were as yet good enough: “Why I didn't publish with Osgood of Boston,” he assures Joel Chandler Harris, 9 August 1883, is because “I felt I couldn't get in gun-shot of 'em. After while I want to tackle 'em—and will” (47). Three weeks later, writing to his older brother, Riley confesses to being “still absorbed in most exacting restlessness,” and still “deferring everything until I shall have come up to the real breathing-space that has been so ‘long, long, long on the way’”—and which, as we have seen, never came. And then Riley declares, with fatalistic and perhaps somewhat grim calm: “And, I guess, after all, I am really going to ‘get there’—maybe very soon now—as it seems” (48). (“I'm tolerably tired already,” he also confides revealingly, “but guess I'll worry on all right” [49].)
Riley's wildest hopes were gratified—but after some exclamations of glee, he quickly settles down to the business of milking success for all it is worth—and as much more as possible. As he writes in 1886 to his platform partner, and the coauthor of Nye and Riley's Railway Guide (1888), Edgar Wilson Nye:
There's not an hour of the day I'm not thinking of that venture [the Railway Guide]—and more and more convinced that it'll stanch a long-felt want. And we can hustle it into market, too, before any long delay. That's the beauty of it—it really wants to look impromptu—and be so—measurably so, at least.
The dear public here [Indianapolis] is on the “key-veeve” regarding our next appearances, and oh, my boy, we're going to get their everlastin' pelt on our pitchfork!
(60)
It is splendidly, carefully calculated, including the awareness that the thing must seem impromptu, whether it is so or not.14 Nor does Riley's approach ever change, though after a time he begins to wonder why it goes on being successful: it is plainly hard for him to believe that it is real, in good part because he cannot quite believe that he is himself real, at least in the role of successful, prosperous American poet. “First edition all gone,” he tells Nye in 1887, “second issued and half exhausted—and there's no end o' promise for the darn thing! And it's sellin' the other two books again—and ‘it all beats Sheol’” (79). “I just pray for the success of that book,” he writes Nye the next year, referring to the Railway Guide. “And if it does succeed—we've got a little jersey mine, and one of the pleasantest ones to work in the world” (86). “Am awful busy,” he explains in 1890, “but put up with prosperity with appropriate resignation” (109). To an old friend, in 1891, his tone is less arch: “Gave two nights in his church, and his club … just loaded four hundred dollars, clear into my coyest, most retiring pocket” (126). The somberness of the whole process emerges, starkly, in an 1897 letter to the now-deceased Nye's brother:
For a long, long while I've been at hardest work, and lost wholly in it. All else has been—not forgotten, but denied.—Just as though I complacently were thinking I had a check for it and could go and call for it any future time.—But I am realizing that this is not the state of things, by any means, as age comes on.
(224-25; emphasis added)
How revealing is his metaphor for all the things he has not permitted himself: a check, drawn against the future but never to be cashed.
And what goes along with this unrelenting, grim drive for more and more success, more and more money, is Riley's fixed, lifelong unwillingness to see himself as an adult, as a mature man—ever. “You must wait yet a little for the picture [of himself],” he writes in 1879. “I will have some taken soon. I must—'cause I'm going to sacrifice the moustache before I read [in public] this winter, besides it's in my way for other reasons—and it's too big for the little man, and keeps me titled—… and its red anyhow, and don't match my hair—which is blue, you know” (24; emphasis added). Writing to Edward Bok, the publisher, in 1890, he speaks of two books in press, “the first, for grown-up children; the last, for the happily otherwise.” This latter volume, his famous Rhymes for Childhood, then elicits the following explanation from its author:
Getting it together has been great fun, and I'm the happiest boy in it, for literally therein the enthused writer goes scampering barefoot from page to page, with no more sense of dignity than socks, and like wholesome rapture in heels and heart.
(107; emphasis added)
The passage needs no more explanation than does Riley's reference, two months later, to “positive childish enjoyment” (114), or his explanation, at the close of the same letter, that “right here I'm goin' to let up on both of us, and go out with a prowling, midnight pie-eating friend who paces at my door and will not rest until I join him in our customary unholy feast, which we always relish the more for being assured that we ought not positively to eat such things at such hours” (115; emphasis added). Riley was forty-one years old—and still both acting like a child and glorying in his indefinitely prolonged childishness. Such things seem to me to speak for themselves.
When Mark Twain writes him, approving of Rhymes of Childhood, Riley replies that Twain and all the many others who had similarly approved “had all combined to make me the happiest dad burn' boy o' the whole gang!” (116).
When a teacher writes him, on behalf of her little charges, Riley replies that “I smile childishly and think I'd like to go to school to you, with all the happy other little children” (128).
Apologizing for a long silence, he tells a correspondent that “you are good, and infinitely patient with all such thoughtless children as myself” (153).
To Thomas Bailey Aldrich, who in 1896 wrote him, approving of another book of poems for children, Riley expresses great gratitude and closes: “Smilingly pardon a fellow as he thus childishly puts on exhibition his most particularly ‘strong weaknesses’” (209).
To the dead Edgar Wilson Nye's mother he writes, in 1897, beginning with the salutation “Dear Mother Mine,” that “you are still remembered, though your boy James [i.e., himself, most emphatically not her son] doesn't get the time to write it down as often as he wants to” (212).
To his old friend George Carr he writes in December, 1899—aetatis suae fifty!—a letter that must be reproduced in its entirety:
Your good word of the second is like a cheery hail out of our boyhood times, and it's the first letter I've tried to answer for many weeks—for I've been ill and shut in for an age, it seems, and am just beginning to sit up. As to your query as what to tell the oft-recurring interviewer, I'm sure your own taste will direct you wisely, though I do hope you'll recall the happy and often ridiculous, incidents of our truant days,—such, for instance, of our boyish escapades as are in likeness of our open-day raid on Grandpap Huntington's “much”-melonpatch, and his unlooked-for descent upon us, in our very lair, and the deft handling of that buggy-whip of his as it swishingly sorted us out, over the old slat fence. There was “poetic justice”! Then there's the only fight we ever had,—at night, you remember,—with not a solitary witness to keep us from the dread encounter, or to interpose when we really yearned to be separated. And Ed Howard was with us, I think, when we swiped a whole basketfull of spring-clothes-pins out of the new preacher's back yard, and fringed our roundabouts with 'em, and clamped 'em to our ears and noses and played “Injun” and ransacked the town, till, alarmed at last, we went into concealment from the outraged citizens, and, long after nightfall, were found in our stable, all sound asleep in the old top-carriage with all the curtains fastened on, etc., etc., world without end!
(236; emphasis added)
It is stunningly apparent, and this letter thus sheds light on all the similar references in other letters, that what Riley delights—that is, what he needs—to recall is not simply the happiness of those long-gone boyhood days but also and very specifically the rebellious, the liberated, the naughty things that, as boys, he and his friends could and did indulge themselves in. Hung by his own inner needs to the wheel of constant work, Riley's intense glorification of those dead times is even more poignantly obvious. As he wrote to the artist John T. McCutcheon, who had artfully illustrated The Old Swimmin'-Hole: “Oh, but you do lift back into realest life the utterly, unobjectionably, ornry boy of my happy childhood—till I see him again—hear him again—follow him again—and am him again. …” Riley signs that 1903 letter—at age fifty-four—“I am your always grateful, faithful and loving little playmate” (276-77). So too he assures Joel Chandler Harris, in 1904, that “Truly you've a way of making me positively young again … and not only young, but grinningly, gigglingly, rapturously childish—just as I first was, when the whole world about me seemed a tingling delight” (289; emphasis added).
But Riley summed it all up, in a 1901 letter to Harris: “Lord! to be for ever young!” (254) That is, again, completely consonant with his poetry. “Avoid reading the older poets,” he advised an aspirant writer in 1883, “(this is not the usual advice, I know, but the best advice, I believe) and read only the successful modern poets” (46). “Here it has been raining for days and days,” he wrote to a friend in 1890, “and likewise some other days and days—kind of a serial rain, the author of which seems to be trying to produce something longer and more tedious than Middlemarch” (96). He did not like—strictly, he loathed—Walt Whitman, too. But with Riley's approach to life, as to art, how could he not have an equally determined drive toward the trivial, the shallow, the easily, sentimentally victorious? In the end, perhaps it says even more about Victorian America, and about modern America, too, than it says about James Whitcomb Riley.
Notes
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Quoted in Frank Luther Mott, Golden Multitudes: The Story of Best Sellers in the United States (New York: Macmillan, 1947), p. 224.
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Ibid., p. 310.
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Perkins, A History of Modern Poetry; p. 117.
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Russel B. Nye, The Unembarrassed Muse: The Popular Arts in America (New York: Dial, 1970), p. 117.
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Letters of James Whitcomb Riley, p. 7. All references to this, my basic text in this chapter, will be incorporated in the text.
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Nye, The Unembarrassed Muse, p. 117.
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Perkins, A History of Modern Poetry, pp. 116-117.
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Phelps, Autobiography, p. 402.
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Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, (1835; reprint, New York: Schocken, 1961), 2:56, 58-60, 62.
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Phelps, Autobiography, p. 406; emphasis added.
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Nye, The Unembarassed Muse, p. 119.
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Ziff, The American 1890s, p. 306.
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For a fuller discussion of Washington Irving, from this perspective, see Burton Raffel, American Victorians: Explorations in Emotional History (Hamden, Conn.: Archon Books, 1984), pp. 83-93.
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“I would not advise a too close application to the sonnet form,” Riley counsels an aspiring poet, in 1888. “Poets who have gained wide recognition on this form alone are indeed few. A conformity to its strict rule results more often in obscurity and failure than otherwise” (Letters of James Whitcomb Riley, p. 82.)
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