Poet As Entertainer: Will Carleton, James Whitcomb Riley, and the Rise of the Poet-Performer Movement
[In the following essay, Gray argues that Riley was primarily an entertainer and that his poetry was performance art.]
Spectacular as Carleton's meteoric career had been, the reputation he established in the 1870s was eclipsed in the very next decade by another poet-performer from the Midwest, James Whitcomb Riley. Though the Indiana poet was just four years younger than Carleton, his career developed at a far more leisurely pace. When “Betsy and I Are Out” thrust Carleton into the limelight in 1871, Riley was just beginning to think of a career on the platform. His heroes at that time were not poets but comedians like Josh Billings, Mark. Twain, and Petroleum V. Nasby.1 Riley wanted to be a performer, not a writer, and the details of his career indicate that he seldom swerved from that goal. Like Carleton, he wound up writing poetry because that turned out to be what he performed best. As a young man, he had refused to follow his father into law, joining a medicine show instead. After eight years of polishing his performance skills, the still-unpublished poet read his own work in Kokomo, Indiana, during the winter of 1878, to a full house for fifteen dollars. He followed this with performances in Tipton and Noblesville, weeding out what didn't work and writing fresh material to replace it. By April he was ready to risk all in front of the Indianapolis Literary Club, and so successful was that venture that the Western Lecture Bureau signed him up for a year's tour of the state (Crowder, pp. 83-86). Declared the Indianapolis News: “He has a fertility and exuberance of imagination, a felicity of expression, and a power of delineation that should make him one of the first readers of America” (Crowder, p. 94). Riley had now worked up to the munificent fee of twenty-five dollars a performance.
In '79 and '80 he began making forays out of the state, and in the summer of 1881 he signed with the Redpath Bureau of Chicago. In 1882, pleased with his continued success in the Midwest, the Bureau booked him as an extra on the Boston Lyceum Course. He performed at the Tremont Temple, the same site chosen twelve years earlier by Dickens, to an audience of 2500. That Riley, who had yet to publish a single volume of poetry, could attract so large a crowd in an Eastern city, gives us a notion of the growing national appetite for the new poetry coming out of the Midwest. In Boston he received encouraging reviews, and Longfellow pronounced him a major new American voice. Riley followed this success with a winter tour of Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Delaware. That spring he realized another ambition by appearing on the Star Course at the Philadelphia Academy of Music with his hero and mentor, Josh Billings (Crowder, pp. 96-108). In 1883 he published “The Old Swimmin' Hole” and 'Leven More Poems, which sold 500,000 copies, and spent the next decade solidifying his reputation as the most famous poet in America, touring with Bill Nye and Eugene Field, reading in New York with Howells, Cable, and Twain, and again a year later in the same city by himself, outdrawing even Edwin Booth, who appeared that same season in Julius Caesar (Crowder, pp. 123-33).
By now Riley was a major attraction throughout America. His reputation as a performer became international when in 1891, at the urging of Henry Irving, he performed in England, reading to the likes of Bram Stoker and the great Coquelin, the latter declaring that “Riley had by nature what he and Irving had striven for years to achieve” (Crowder, p. 149). By the early '90s, Riley's performance schedules were reaching backbreaking proportions. In the summer of 1888, for example, he interrupted his usual summer at home to appear at the Chautauqua Assembly in New York. That fall he was touring alone in the East until November, when he joined Bill Nye for appearances in New York, Washington, Richmond, Georgia, Ohio, and Kentucky. At Christmas the pair began a six-month tour which called for seven performances a week plus an occasional Sunday matinee and would eventually take them through New England, the Midwest, the Mountain States, the West Coast, and finally, Canada (Crowder, pp. 132-37).
Though Riley would continue to perform through the '90s and into the twentieth century, factors were developing in his life which would preclude the feverish pace of these years. Since his early twenties, Riley had suffered from alcoholism, an affliction he was to fight with varying degrees of success all his life. The disease was aggravated by the loneliness Riley always suffered on long tours away from Indiana. By the mid-'80s, Riley was popular enough for the Redpath Bureau to send a traveling manager with him, but his depression persisted, along with the drinking (Crowder, pp. 115-118).
As a solution, Riley decided to tour with his friend Bill Nye. There would be little chance for loneliness or depression with Nye, who could more than match Riley's penchant for practical jokes. Their shenanigans together on the road would even spill onto the platform, where Nye would parody Riley's performances with his own recitations of “Little Orchid Anna” and “The Fuzz Upon the Porcupine” (Crowder, p. 84). Their first joint tour, in 1886, went well, furthering the reputations of both writers in the Midwest. But the next tour, which began in the fall of that same year, ended up with Riley working alone after Nye's health forced him to quit. The major tour they undertook in 1888 ended prematurely in Kansas when Nye's children caught scarlet fever, and he again had to return home. The year 1889 saw them together once more, but Riley could no longer control his drinking, and Nye called the tour to a halt.2
Riley also cut back on the number of his performances for a pleasanter reason: the steadily mounting sales of his poetry volumes. By the '90s, his royalties were beginning to match touring as a source of income. Consequently, Riley spent more time writing and publishing, cranking out poetry books at unprecedented rates. Between 1891 and 1895 alone, he produced seven volumes of poetry. He struck a bonanza in the late 1890s, when giving a volume of his poetry at Christmas became a middle-class fad. The poems didn't even have to be new to ring up brisk Yuletide sales. Consequently, almost every December, shoppers would be greeted with at least one, and sometimes three, “new” collections of poems by James Whitcomb Riley (Crowder, pp. 156, 176, 188-99).
As the most famous of the poet-performers, Riley has received most of the contempt of twentieth-century literary critics, or what one literary sociologist calls “the terrorism of the intellectual critique of mass culture.”3 These critics speak of Riley, if they speak of him at all, as “maudlin,” “sentimental,” “mawkish,” and even “sub-literary.” By the standards of traditional written poetry, their adjectives are probably accurate. As was the case with Carleton's verse, however, such standards force Riley's poems into a genre for which they were never intended, relate them to an audience Riley had no interest in, and assume a purpose for them he never conceived.4
These poems grew out of Riley's performance skills, and these skills were formidable. The adoration of his public we can attribute to the boorish taste of the mass audience. It is harder to dismiss the opinions of the great performers of the time. When, for example, Delmonico's held a banquet to honor Ellen Terry on her arrival in America, her one request was that Riley perform. According to witnesses, he reduced her to tears (Crowder, p. 131). When Henry Irving heard Riley, he convinced him to come to England, where Irving hosted a dinner party to which he invited some of the major performers in Europe to hear “the Hoosier Poet” recite.
Perhaps the most impressive tribute to Riley's skill comes from that genius of the platform, Mark Twain. Eight years after he had performed with Riley on the New York stage, Twain wrote “How to Tell A Story,” an essay almost entirely given over to a description of Riley's performance skill. What Riley achieves, Twain concludes, “is a performance which is thoroughly charming and delicious. This is art—and fine and beautiful, and only a master can compass it.”5
Unlike literary critics, Terry, Irving, Coqueline, and Twain were responding to literature in performance, rather than literature in print. To consider Riley's poetry apart from performance is as radically unfair as it would be to evaluate the verse of a song lyricist like Stephen Sondheim apart from the music for which the lyrics were composed. It is not unfair, however, to compare Riley's poetry with that of his fellow poet-performer, Will Carleton, for such a comparison reveals much about the shifting tastes of the American public, as well as the differences between these two artists.
Riley, of course, inherited the audiences Carleton had cultivated, and the two poets held similar views about their enterprise. Like Carleton, Riley had fashioned his verses to appeal to the masses, insisting that a writer should not try to please himself alone or even his critics. “He should mingle with the people … and find out what they were like and what they wanted to read” (Crowder, p. 181). Like Carleton, Riley measured his success in terms of his income:
For some years [he wrote to Rudyard Kipling], I've been striving to ferrit [sic] out the one evident lack or defect of our whole art guild: and I've struck it: it's business. We 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. …”6
In spite of these similarities, Riley and Carleton created markedly different poetry. The differences reveal changing tastes in the American mass audience and suggest the variety to be found in the poet-performer movement.7 Perhaps the most obvious difference is in subject matter. The grim economic conditions of the 1870s, which had prompted the realism of Carleton's poetry, had yielded to more prosperous times for Riley's listeners in the '80s. Consequently Riley's verses are pitched to different needs. They do not often focus on contemporary problems, but instead, cater to a decided taste for nostalgia. His most popular lyrics like “The Old Swimmin' Hole,” “The Raggedy Man” and “A Barefoot Boy” depict an edenic past that probably bore little resemblance to the actual experiences of his listeners. Like Dickens before him, Riley tapped into the apparently inexhaustible Victorian taste for child-deaths. Such titles as “The Little Coat,” “The Absence of Little Wesley,” and “That-Air Young 'Un” convey the sentimental treatment of Riley's poems.8
Carleton's biggest successes on the platform had been narrative poems, and at first Riley was quick to follow his lead. Like Carleton, he cast many of these as dramatic monologues, but because Riley was a more versatile performer, the variety of his speakers is much greater. Where Carleton's speakers tended to be farmers or their wives, Riley, who was a master of dialects, created characters who would allow him to display the full range of his talent. Though midwestern farmers predominate in his poems, there are also German-Americans (“Mr. Silberberg”), Scotsmen (“Which Ane”), children (“Granny,” “Little Orphant Annie”), speakers with speech impediments (“The Smitten Purist”), and, of course, blacks (“When De Folks Is Gone”). Riley's success with the last two dialects exerted considerable influence on the poet-performers who followed. Eugene Field and Edgar Guest, in particular, were to build major reputations on the lisping child, and audiences maintained their craving for black dialect deep into the twentieth century.
As the superior craftsman, both as writer and performer, Riley refined and extended many of Carleton's practices such as dialect and narrative. He also introduced innovations of his own, the most important of which undoubtedly was to combine dialect with lyric poetry. Before Riley, no poet had had much success with this combination. Carleton had avoided lyric poetry almost completely, and John Hay, whose Pike County Ballads played such a seminal role in the local-color movement, used dialect only in his narrative poems. Riley, on the other hand, managed to write in a lyrical mode while preserving the country voices his audiences enjoyed so much. Indeed, Riley's most successful poems were usually dialect-lyrics, including such popular classics as “The Old Swimmin' Hole,” “Knee-Deep in June,” and “When the Frost is on the Punkin.” “The Old Swimmin' Hole,” in fact, was the first Riley poem to achieve national popularity.
These differences in their poetry are interesting, but Riley and Carleton differed most fundamentally in their attitude toward that poetry. As we have seen, Carleton's defense against the attitude of high culture was humility, even to the point of seeming to agree that his work was basically unpoetical. But Riley was far less in awe of that culture, even parodying it in such verse as “Idyl of the King,” a tale of Hector who appears in Riley's poem as “Old Hec,” and for those not in the local Browning Society, “Another Ride from Ghent to Aix”:
We sprang for the side-holds—my gripsack and I—
It dangled—I dangled—we both dangled by. …
When defending the poet-performer's use of dialect, Riley carried his argument to high critical ground itself. “It is highly probable,” he wrote, “that what may have been the best of English once may now by some be counted as a weak, inconsequent Patois, or dialect.” Rather than shunning dialect as vulgar, major writers from Chaucer to Dickens, Riley noted, had willingly embraced it in their writings.9
The real objection to the poet-performers, he insisted, was based on social rather than aesthetic grounds. For Riley, the controversy was one more manifestation of the struggle between two “very old and bitter foemen,” the Unlettered and the Lettered:
Of the two divisions, in graphic summary,—one knows the very core and center of refined civilization, and this only; the other knows the outlying wilds and suburbs of civilization, and this only. Whose, therefore, is the greater knowledge, and whose the just right of any whit of self-glorification?10
Riley's rising confidence in his own work was, like so much of the poet-performer movement, a reflection of the rising confidence of his lower-middle class audience; an audience that was about to take over a major political party with William Jennings Bryan, place curbs on industrial America with the trustbuster movement, and broaden the base of prosperity with the labor movement. We know this movement economically, politically, and socially. What the careers of Carleton and Riley reveal is that it had aesthetic dimensions was well, dimensions fundamentally shaped by performance.
Notes
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Richard Crowder, Those Innocent Years: The Legacy and Inheritance of a Hero of the Victorian Era, James Whitcomb Riley (N.Y.: Bobbs-Merrill, 1957), p. 74. Future references appear in the text.
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Nye ended the tour in Louisville, Ky., by calling a press conference, where his treatment of Riley's condition was remarkable for its cruelty, even to his suggested headline: “The poet breaks with Bill Nye to go in with John Barleycorn” (Quoted in Crowder, p. 139). Riley returned to Indianapolis a broken man, convinced the Nye publicity stunt had ruined his career. He was wrong, of course, as the successful tours and book sales of the next twenty years would demonstrate.
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Jeffrey Sammons, Literary Sociology and Practical Criticism: An Inquiry (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1977), p. 123.
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Riley's often stated contempt for the opinions of the literary establishment did not preclude his elation when two of his poems appeared in the Atlantic, a periodical he promptly described as “the very first of magazines on earth!” Letters of James Whitcomb Riley, ed. William Lyon Phelps (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1930), p. 229.
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In Selected Shorter Writings of Mark Twain, ed. with an introduction by Walter Blair (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1962), pp. 241-45. In the performance Twain describes, Riley parodied a bad storyteller. Riley got his idea from listening to welcoming committees explain local lore. Once, to entertain Nye, he parodied one such character. Nye was convulsed and insisted that Riley perform his parody on the platform. See Clara E. Laughlin, Reminiscences of James Whitcomb Riley (N.Y.: Fleming H. Revell, 1969), pp. 92-94.
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Letters, p. 183.
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This variety corroborates Herbert J. Gans' objections to the unexamined prejudice that a writer of popular literature must “give up the individual expression of his own skill and values in order to create a homogeneous and standardized product.” See Popular Culture and High Culture (N.Y.: Basic Books, 1974), p. 20.
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That mass culture no longer dwells on the child-death theme is probably more attributable to the advances of pediatric medicine than any increased sophistication on the part of consumers. Future cultural historians will no doubt smile at our own preoccupation with cancer, a theme which pervades not just popular literature, movies, and television, but the writing of our most sophisticated authors.
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The Complete Works of James Whitcomb Riley, ed. Edmund Henry Eitel (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1913), 6, 382.
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Works, 6, 385.
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