The Yale Literary Magazine (Vol. LXXXVIII, No. 9, June 1923)

(VOL. LXXXVIII, NO. 9, JUNE 1923) ***

Vol. LXXXVIII No. 9

The Yale Literary Magazine

Conducted by the Students of Yale University.

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“Dum mens grata manet, nomen laudesque YALENSES Cantabunt SOBOLES, unanimique PATRES.”

June, 1923.

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THE YALE LITERARY MAGAZINE

Contents

JUNE, 1923

Leader DAVID GILLIS CARTER 283

Valediction HERBERT W. HARTMAN, JR. 285

The Wind on the Sea W. T. BISSELL 286

Association MORRIS TYLER 291

Three Fables WALTER EDWARDS HOUGHTON, JR. 292

Sonnet FRANK D. ASHBURN 300

Song Before Dawn WALTER EDWARDS HOUGHTON, JR. 301

To —— ARTHUR MILLIKEN 302

Stanza D. G. CARTER 303

Sonnet FRANK D. ASHBURN 304

Lady of Kind Hands J. CROSBY BROWN, JR. 305

_Book Reviews_ 307

_Editor’s Table_ 310

The Yale Literary Magazine

VOL. LXXXVIII JUNE, 1923 NO. 9

_EDITORS_

WALTER EDWARDS HOUGHTON, JR. LAIRD SHIELDS GOLDSBOROUGH DAVID GILLIS CARTER MORRIS TYLER NORMAN REGINALD JAFFRAY

_BUSINESS MANAGERS_

GEORGE W. P. HEFFELFINGER WALTER CRAFTS

_Leader_

Probably one in every ten men brought up in a cultured environment has written, at some youthful period or other, sentimental verse. Such product is in any prep.-school paper; a few brilliant or hard working youngsters win prizes each year for the best “poems” of their classes. But too many of these prodigies, because they are one in ten, are convinced that they are endowed with the powers of a poet. They cannot realize that riming is to be outgrown at adolescence, just as other games are. Since some grown men continue to write poetry, and no one continues to rollerskate, they put off rollerskating as a childish thing, but they keep puttering away over platitudes “To ——” and to Spring. They have not yet come fully into their manhood.

Personally, I should prefer them to become professional rollerskaters, for then they could do no harm. Instead, they join the group of “younger _litterati_” of college, and play the artist as an extra-curriculum means to distinction, bringing down an undeserved indictment upon whatever men there happen to be with music in their hearts, and with something to say. The university which most desires to honor its true artists finds itself rewarding a kindergarten Greenwich Village for sentimentality that will be forgotten before the quickness of time has killed it. “_Litterati_” thus has become to others a name of derision, and “he heels the Lizzie Club” is a taunt. Especially, a magazine founded for the sincere promotion of literary expression is in danger before these men with the trick of verse and a desire for prominence.

It has become, therefore, the duty of the LIT. to defend itself, and to stand guard for the rest of the College, against this tendency to dilettantism, even while it welcomes to its pages the writer who is eager to learn and practice expression. Such a task is difficult, I acknowledge, because it involves a judgment between boys by boys, but it is not impossible. We have had enough poets at Yale in the past few years to be able to distinguish them generally from the poetasters, and if a fake slips by now and then, time betrays him and the laurels he has won. Many attain a kind of prominence that is strangely akin to that of a rollerskater who has taken a spill.

Yet it might be well for those interested in Yale literature to look suspiciously at the number of undergraduates who are LIT. heelers only when it is profitable, who drop out—never to write again—when the competition is crowded, or who begin to write when it is seen that there is to be a vacancy on the Board. They are unquestionably with us, accomplishing nothing more than to disgust and alienate those who really desire to write. Unquestionably, such an element is exceedingly bad for Yale, if Yale intends to be any kind of a force in literature. If the LIT. Board and kindred honors are to mean more than a badge placed somewhere on a college boy’s anatomy, we must show the pretender that he is out of place.

Of course, this must not lead to the discouragement of anyone with the slightest itching of the pen. It is the man who writes badly, yet for the sheer and indescribable love of writing, who should resent most the prostitution of our literary organizations, for to the “passionate few” creating is serious, joyous business. The “passionate few” must direct public sentiment against those who would play it as a game in the childish politics of the University. We must not permit a false intelligentsia to become associated with Yale. We cannot allow clever youngsters, fired with the aspiration of a charm for their watch-chains, to hack out verses in the feverish night before a makeup. However few, and however dry, the pages of the LIT. may be, we want them to contain the result of sincere emotion; we want the author to have given the best of his ability toward making his contribution acceptable by any editor. This is the only way a _literary_ magazine can be written.

DAVID GILLIS CARTER.

_Valediction_

Here where our hearts respond to lovers’ cries With ready swiftness, where our laughters leap From our lips, shall we not resolutely keep This boyhood, looking on stars with boyish eyes? Rapture, we know, grows old and subtly dies Within us,—this much we know, and wisely creep Away from age lest we disturb his sleep Where Youth intolerably weeping lies.

Is this our portion? Shall we not go far Beyond this presence, bearing our flags unfurled Exultantly beyond some alien hill Of dreams?—rise up, and up, and up, until This place we knew must seem a sorry world And the old earth a too familiar star?

HERBERT W. HARTMAN, JR.

_The Wind On the Sea_

A fresh wind from the ocean made the waves sparkle when Daniel took his cruise. He was on a solitary tour of New York Harbor in a hired motorboat, his tribute to the general pleasantness of a spring day out of doors, balmy, yet with sufficient air. A motorboat was not, he reflected, as attractive to a lover of the sea as a sailboat, but it enabled him to poke around the arms of the port more satisfactorily. Today he set off down the harbor with the breeze in his face.

At first he passed close to the docks of the enormous ships, some of which were so long their shapely stems reached far out into the stream. Nothing was so exciting as seeing their masts and the tops of their huge funnels over the top of a dock. It reminded him of a glimpse he had had of the tall, delicate spars of sailing vessels over the roofs of a seacoast town. The realization of being on the immediate threshold of the romantic sea is irresistible in its rich suggestions, linking the most prosaic person for a moment with strange places, hitherto only imagined, and possibilities of adventure, startling even at a distance from the point of view of ordinary life. Daniel thought about this and other theories of his concerning the sea as his boat sauntered past the imposing liners which so engrossed his attention. Their sharp, carefully flaring bows and the suggestion of velocity in their slanting rigging attracted him. One was just docking as he went by. It was huge, and seemed a city with a host of tugs like parasites slowly pushing it around. He could never get over the size of them. It seemed like magic,—this, building a community that floated so snugly on the water, the four red funnels above adding the emblem of something powerful in its compactness. Yet in spite of their size, the steamers seemed at a distance slim and graceful, essentially ships and obviously made to deal with the exacting ocean. Daniel saw liners with more penetrating eyes than the ordinary casual observer, he was sure.

It was not long before he was off down the harbor away from the docks. Here the waves danced to the breeze among the little boats which carried on the teeming local traffic of the port, rushing back and forth like water-bugs on a pond. The vessels that were anchored strained at the ends of taut hawsers with the wind and tide both coming up the bay. Over near the farther shore against the sun, a great ship was moving down, a massive black shadow sliding imperiously out to sea. He steered the launch near the anchored vessels, under their high sterns. Reading their names was a fascinating diversion for an imaginative person like himself, he thought. Here was the “George B. White” of Jersey City, near it the “Orphan” of Bombay; here a sloppy tramp from Beirut, there an empty freighter of Cape Town; Japanese and Chinese and Javanese vessels were there whose names he could not read, and a little ship from the Piraeus, laden with smells from Athens—dirt from her gutters and hovels, and dust from the Acropolis.

Well, well, what a highway the sea was, after all. It was fascinating, the harbor, fascinating! These great ships always sailing out on voyages that somehow still seemed perilous, and others, looking—to the imagination, at least—weatherbeaten, coming in from foreign lands.

He turned and headed out past the narrows to the slow dips of the ground swell, powerful, but almost at peace for the moment, which his little boat climbed and descended like smooth, gentle hills. The sun still sparkled, and here the water slapped more vigorously against the sides of the boat, throwing flecks of spray out and whirling back some of them to sting his face. He was getting gradually drunk, he concluded. Certainly the spaciousness of everything around him was going to his head. But it was, he later decided, really the smell of the air that did it. No sweet gasoline-sick atmosphere of streets out here, nor the faint odor of millions of his fellow-men to which he was accustomed in the buildings he frequented. The breeze was fresh and tasted strong of salt. It had a palpable vigor of its own. Not artificially intoxicating like a stimulant, but with a gusty sting. It whipped his mind and brought it up eager and sharp, like a trembling racehorse.

That air—that makes men on steamers feel so ridiculously fit without exercise, enabling them to eat and eat—tea, jam, pastry, steaks, cheeses, and then sit and read all day in one steamer chair and be ravenous again! If only he could sail on a ship, he thought. To feel so strong and finely balanced—not, as usual, subject to his little moods of depression which so often went hand in hand with indigestion, he had discovered—to feel so well tuned! He had a vision of himself as he would stand on a ship—as he had, on the only trip he had ever taken—in the very peak of the bow, looking over and watching the tall prow sweep down on and devour the unsuspecting patches of the sea. He remembered how the breeze was steady in his face and how he used almost to taste it! His hair was worried by the wind and he relished its swift buffets on his face as he stood against it, drinking it in as a hot man drinks a running stream. What nameless joy he felt, he now remembered; and how he used so to overflow with something buoyant inside him that he would ecstatically smile. Well tuned! And singing, like an old lyre at the touch!

Well, if he could get to feeling like that he would give anything, he said to himself in his conventional way—and suddenly he grew disgusted. Give anything! Lord, he wouldn’t give up a month of his most valuable time. Love the sea! He had been repeating to himself all during his little outing that he loved the sea. He was one of those few who really loved the sea. He felt that he understood it better than a good many people. As though he knew anything about it, who had never gone to sea and never would. His experience of it standing on the street-like decks of a liner and watching it; thinking about it, he flattered himself, with rather a light touch, as it were, but still from a poetic point of view.

The light touch! Everything nowadays was written and spoken and even thought of with a light touch. A light touch in connection with the sea! The old sailing vessels—swift clippers around the horn; that was the ocean! No drawing-room stuff about that. When the brutal masters carried all the press of sail they could in those tremendous storms, till the topmasts went and the gear came flying down like a thunderbolt and had to be chopped away to save the ship. Trim ships where you worked beneath the lash, and insubordination was best viewed from the yardarm. Ships used to go down and never be heard from—often in those days. But the men that lived were really children of the sea who knew its great aspects; and they knew their ships, every inch of them, from their thin spars that “shone like silver”, as the chantey says, to the bright copper on their keels.

The great longing, the parching thirst of a hothouse intellect for hardship swept over him like a wave of the sea itself. Hardship assumed an intrinsic value for him at once, as it had one winter in the South when he missed savagely the bleak Januaries of his Northern home; as it had when he read of the Homeric heroes who so relished battle, and the brawn children of Thor, and Sir Lancelot with his great shoulders in iron, oppressed and conquering. It seemed as though hardships were the only road to reality, somehow. Hardships of the sea,—the grim knowledge of experience; that would have given him something solid in his mind! But none of that on the ocean now. Where there had been towers of canvas (as he visualized it) now there were freighters. Clippers and freight ships! The sea rather intriguing whimsical people like himself—when once she held men until it was her will to fling them away! Whimsy! What was this compared to a strong man’s desire? What was this careful self-consciousness of his feelings to his grand impulses?—the humorous affairs of life to the grim ones?—dilettantism to the austere compulsion of a passion?

While Daniel was working himself up in this manner, he was steering straight out to sea, and, in doing so, overhauling a tramp steamer that was starting on a voyage. He was coming abreast of what he later called his fate. Upon impulse, he dared the wash of the boat when he came opposite and ran in close along her side, slowing down so as to keep pace for a while. She was old and scarred, with a dip in her middle like an overworked horse’s back which seemed to give her a jaunty air. Paint had not been wasted on her ramshackle sides, nor any white on her cabin above, nor red on her rusty funnel. Filthy clothes, drying in the sun, hung from clotheslines; a thick rope dragged over the side near the stern and it splashed irregularly in the water. She was dilapidated. But some of her crew were singing for some reason or other as they finished stowing cargo, and the sight of the little boat facing outward and the sight of the great, blank, capricious sea ahead waiting for her was distinctly thrilling, particularly as a fog was coming up, making even the horizon mysterious in its invisibility.

What would it be like, Daniel wondered all of a sudden, if he were to hail this boat and jump aboard? Often he had considered doing some quite possible thing like this, such as getting off a Western train as it stopped at a little, unknown town and—simply staying there, or chucking his work some morning and going on the stage. But there he was again with those light fancies of his. People like himself seemed to have their individualities in glass cases, to be looked at like shell-flowers. What was he, anyway, that he actually could not do what he wanted to? Why should he be so bound, and he was bound, he knew, as if with iron bars. Tied down. Slaves, slaves, slaves. People thought of doing this and that—they still had impulses at least, thank God—and were powerless to do them. There seemed no manhood left. People didn’t seem to be in control of themselves any more. Freedom!—he wondered at the word. Oh, for a touch of it—just a taste—just a whiff! Creatures in the grasp of something huge and stolid! Damn those infernal practical considerations! What was the world, a gigantic taskroom—an ogre-like mill to be turned? By heaven, he must have a will! God knew he _must_ stand there free! He even looked around wildly to assure himself that he was there alone and free.

Then he stood up. There was the rope hanging over the side. He sprang for it, clutched it, and swung there.

There was no shield between him and a rasping sense of mortification as he dragged himself spluttering and coughing into his motorboat once more forty seconds later. He had so neatly proved what he had railed at in this unusual seizure of the disease of spring, and so humorously. Had staid old common sense ever had to deal so brazenly with an impulse as to make a man jump into the sea? Damp physically, and with a real bitterness in his heart at such a plain statement of affairs, the world seemed very dark. Depression swooped down upon his mind like the swift black shadow of a vulture, and as he made his way home for three hours it seemed to be actually feeding on his nerves. It was that dark, stone-wall type of depression which is unarguable and seems final—as though trusted old hope had a limit which was suddenly glimpsed around a bend in the road. It left no room for hypothesis; things were seen clearly to be foundationless that had been rocks to the imagination.

He resolved at any rate to bury this experience in his heart as a tragic sort of trophy which should represent in its bitter essence all the disgust with life that assails people during a lifetime. He had nearly played a trick upon mortality, he reflected. A fine gesture had been made, and he had snatched lustily for the unvouchsafed. It was an affecting experience and one to be reverenced. But of course what really happened was that he made a very good story out of it and one which afforded intense amusement to his friends, though he was prone to shed a mental tear as he told it now and then.

W. T. BISSELL.

_Association_

He sat across from me, one hand on chin, The other, carrion-clawed, twitched side to side, And I could see how brittle was his skin Like crust of bread too long in oven dried. We had been talking as two strangers will At times. But just then something I had said Had seemed to shake him like a fever-chill The way he shook, the way his face went red.