George Ade may have been serious,
for he tells how the best American writing has been done from Edgar Allen Poe
to Edward Lewis Wallant." "To coin one's
brain into silver," Poe once wrote, "is to my thinking, the hardest job in the
world."" He had his best year when he
edited the Southern Literary Messinger, for $800.
" His "Raven" was one of the few poems
recognized as a work of genius when it first appeared, but this apparently did
him no good, for legend has it that it was a year and a half before he pried
loose his ten bucks from the New York Mirror."
Only a few American writers spent less time on earth than Poe - Stephen
Crane, 28; Alan Seeger, 28; Frank Norris, 32; Wallant, 36.
" After his wife's death he claimed that he
lived with only "intervals of horrible sanity.""
He died at 40, perhaps addicted to drugs, spent his last day stumbling
into Baltimore polling places and
casting ballots for drinks.
But
the poverty program in American literature is usually associated with, and
justified by Henry David Thoreau, who would have penned no panegyric on
penury." Thoreau had to borrow an axe to
cut the wood to build the 10x15 ft. shack that kept him warm at Walden.
" Budgeting 27 cents a week for food, you can
believe he never sang "The Battle Hymn Of The Republic" while he worked.
" (Especially if he knew that the Atlantic
Monthly paid Mrs. Howe only $4 for the lyrics.)
Thoreau's
death from tuberculosis at age 45 suggests little harmony in Concord,
but he died young." Herman Melville,
alias Salvatore R. Tarmoor, was as poor as Thoreau, probably prouder and lived
much longer." None of Melville's stories
brought him much more than $200 - "Benito Cereno" went for $85, "Moby Dick" got
mixed reviews; one critic called it 'so much trash belonging to the Bedlam
school of literature."" Melville had to
work as a customs inspector for his last 20 years and is said to have cried
upon being complimented for never having been late in that time.
" "Probably, if the truth were known, - one of
his obituaries read, "even his own generation had long thought him dead, so
quiet had been the later years of his life."
Nathaniel
Hawthorne, Melville's good friend and critic, fared no better.
" The earning from Hawthorne's
pen were never enough to support him, and he too had to take a custom-house
post." Although "The Scarlet Letter"
brought him some recognition at 45 - long after he published his first novel at
his own expense - Hawthorne died
believing he was a failure.
Only
Walt Whitman among great native authors seems to have been able to take the
writing life in stride:" He never tried
solving problems, he simply let them dissolve."
Whitman published numerous editions of "Leaves Of Grass" himself,
setting one in type, even though the first edition was remaindered after
failing to sell at half price." "This
book," said the Boston Intelligencer critic about his poems, 'should find no
place where humanity urges any claim to respect and the author should be kicked
from all decent society as below the level of brute . . . it seems to us as he
must be some escaped lunatic, raving in pitiable delirium."
Ambrose
Bierce, pen "dipped in wormwood and acid" was never neutralized by
indifference." "Denied existence by the
chief publishing houses in this country," ran the dedication to "Tales Of
Soldiers And Civilians," his masterwork, "this book owes itself to Mr. E. L.
Steele, merchant of this city."
Stephen
Crane's first stories were regularly rejected, but he borrowed a thousand
dollars and, using the pseudonym Johnston Smith (the two most numerous names in
the New York Telephone Book), published his novel "Maggie:
" A Girl Of The Streets."
" Them, when Crane was 24, "The Red Badge Of
Courage" was newspaper syndicated and became an overnight success, although he had
never seen a battle." Crane became
something of a folk hero when he went on to write, directly from experience,
masterpieces like the "Open Boat," which H. G. Wells and Joseph Conrad
considered the best short story in English."
Even after such triumphs he died in another country, broken by
experience at 28." Like F. Scott
Fitzgerald, who worked in a room filled with clocks and calendars, Crane had
"lived in desperation against time."
In
the final analysis Americans have as many fine literary traditions as anyone
else:" The poets Timrod and Lanier dying
of tuberculosis like Charles Brockden Brown long before them.
" Hart Crane leaping into the ocean.
" Vachel Lindsay swapping rhymes for bread.
" Henry Miller digging graves for a
living." William Faulkner running rum,,
Tennessee Williams writing $35 pieces for the old Weird Tales magazine.
But
it is best to end with William Gilmore Simms - for his epitaph if not because
he died of befriending fellow writers."
Simms, though little-known today, composed last lines for himself that
few contemporary authors would not understand:"
"Here lies one who, after a reasonable long life, distinguished chiefly
by unceasing labors, left all his better works undone."