Harry Kemp

“ I lived naked till I grew brown all over. I studied and read and wrote to my full desire, there in the grateful silence of trees and waters—a solitude broken only by an occasional train streaming its white trail of smoke as it whistled and raced round the curve of shining track toward Laurel.
I read Josephus entirely through, haltingly, line by line, in the Greek. I read all the books the "stack" at the university could afford me on New Testament life and times, in preparation for my play on Judas. ”

“ I was dreaming, as I pleaded, "I'll go to England ... to some college with cool, grey mediaeval buildings ... and there spend a long time in the quiet study of poetry ... thinking of nothing, caring for nothing else."
"No! how absurd!" he was snapping decisively. I came to from my vision.
"My dear Johnnie, your proposition is both absurd and—" as if that were the last enormity—"very unbusinesslike!"
"But I will then become a great poet! On my word of honour, I will! and I will be a great honour to the Gregory family!" ”

“ I think that summer I learned Shelley and Whitman by heart.
And Keats was more than my creed. He comprised my life!
Day by day I took care of my body, gaining in weight, filling out the hollows in my face, till I had grown into a presentable young man. For the first time in my life I knew the meaning of perfect health. Every atom of my blood tingled with natural happiness as I have felt it in later days, under the stimulation of good wine.
No coffee, no tea, no beefsteak, no alcohol.... ”

“ Baxter even to call her by her first name of Hildreth ... during that brief visit....
Hildreth Baxter was always moving about leisurely, gracefully, like some strange, pretty animal. Not shy, just indifferent, as if processes of thought were going on inside of her that made an inner world that sufficed, to the exclusion of all exterior happenings.
She had a beautiful small head with heavy dark hair; large, brown, thoughtful eyes ... a face so strong as to be handsome rather than beautiful. She walked about in bloomers, languidly conscious that her legs were graceful and lovely.... ”

“ In the long Winter evenings we sat together by the warmth of the kitchen stove, alone, studying our lessons,—the place given over entirely to us for our school work.
A touch of the hand with either of them, but with Silvia especially, was a superb intoxication, an ecstasy I have never since known. When all my power of feeling fluttered into my fingers ... and when we kissed, each night, good-night (the girls kissed me because I pretended to be embarrassed, to object to it) our homework somehow done,—the thought of their kisses was a memory to lie and roll in, for hours, after going to bed. ”

“ Ruth and I had just settled down to a discussion of the writing of narrative poetry, how it was done, and the reason why it was no longer customary with the poets to write longer stories out of real life, like Chaucer's Canterbury Tales,—when we heard a rustling as of some wild thing in the bushes beside the house, and here came Hildreth breaking through, her eyes blazing, her hair down, her light walking skirt that she had slipped on over her bloomers torn by catching on thorns. ”

“ The only problem that now confronted us was divorce! I would ask Penton to divorce Hildreth, and then Hildreth and I would marry.
But why even that? Was not this the greatest opportunity in the world for Hildreth and me to put to practical test our theories ... proclaim ourselves for Free Love,—as Mary Wollstonecraft and the philosopher Godwin had done, a century or so before us?
The following day Ruth and I ate breakfast together, alone. I had behaved with unusual sedateness, had showed an aplomb I had never before evidenced. Full manhood, belated, had at last come to me. ”

“ Nonchalantly and with an emotion of inner triumph I let him walk homeward with Hildreth, while I paced along with Ruth and Darrie.
Let him congratulate her now on her triumph ... that she had had, as Titania, there under the wide heaven of stars, in our outdoor theatre ... in the midst of the Chinese lanterns that swayed in the slight breaths of summer air....
Later on, when she was warm in my arms, I would congratulate her ...—tell her she was greater than Bernhardt ... than Duse herself!... tell her every incredible thing that lovers hold as mere, commonplace truths. ”

“ Working on farms, in factories, on ships at sea, being up at all hours to catch freights out of town had instilled in me the habit of early rising; I would have risen at dawn anyhow without the birds to wake me.
Turning over for my pencil, which I ever keep, together with a writing pad, at my bedside, to catch the fleeting poetic inspiration, I indited a sonnet to Baxter (all copies of which I have unfortunately lost or I would give it here) in which I sang his praises as a great man of the same rank as Rousseau and Shelley. ”

“ It would rain before daylight. A haunted shiver swept through my back as I stole along the path. I repeated poetry rapidly aloud to crowd out uncanny imaginings. I had a silly, sick impulse to run back to the big house and sleep on the couch in the library.
But I forced myself on. "If you're ever going to be a man, you'd better begin now," I muttered to myself, as if talking to another person.
In my tent ... I lit the lamp. I removed all hanging objects because their lurching shadows sent shivers of apprehension through me....
"That damned coffee—wish I hadn't drunk it." ”

“ I shifted my mind like a weather vane and decided against shipping to England, with the forlorn hope of, somehow attending Oxford or Cambridge, and studying English literature there. My old ideal of being a great adventurer and traveller had vanished, and, in its stead, came the desire to live a quiet life, devoted entirely to writing poetry, as the poet Gray lived his.
I drifted inland to Concord, a-foot, as a pilgrim to the town where Emerson and Thoreau had lived. I was happy in loitering about the haunts of Thoreau ”

“ O God, make me pure, and wonderful ... let me do great things for humanity ... make me handsome, too, O God, so that girls and women will love me, and wonder at me, in awe, while I pass by unperturbed—till one day, having kept myself wholly for her as she has kept herself for me,—give me then the one wonderful and beautiful white maiden who will be mine ... ”

“ I ended, "but, if I ever get free, I'll send you twenty-five dollars or so from up home, when I reach the North."
A prisoner's first dream is "escape." Voices outside on the street, the sight of the tops of green trees through bars, dogs barking far away, the travels of the sun as shown by moving bands of light on the walls and in the cells—all remind him of the day when he was, as he now sees it, happy and free ... he forgets entirely, in the midst of the jail's black restraints, the lesser evils of outside, daily life. ”

“ In the smoker I listened till late to the talk of the drummers who clenched big black cigars between their teeth, or slender Pittsburgh stogies, expertly flicking off the grey ash with their little fingers, as they yarned.
I wore a tag on my coat lapel with my name and destination written on it. My grandmother had put it there in a painful, scrawling hand.
The swing out over wide, salt-bitten marshes, the Jersey marshes grey and smoky before dawn!... then, far off, on the horizon line, New York, serrate, mountainous, going upward great and shining in the still dawn! ”

“ I lay in all attitudes. Sprawling on the floor on my back, on my belly ... on my side ... now with my knees crossed....
Whitman, Shakespeare, Scott, Shelley, Byron ... Speke, Burton, Stanley ... my real comrades!... my real world! Rather a world of books than a world of actuality!...
I was so glad to be among my books again that for a month I gave no thought to the future. I did nothing but read and study ... except at those times when I was talking to people prodigiously of my trip and what I had seen and been through. ”

“ Then Nichi launched forth on a long disquisition on Japanese and Chinese art, and Mrs. Meunier and I gladly remained silent during the whole morning, enchanted by the vistas of beauty which Swartzman's words opened for us.
"Why," I thought, "must such a man lack audiences? If civilisation were in its right mind, he would hold a chair in some great university, and lecture daily to hundreds ... this man is alive. His fire wakes kindred fire ... why must we leave the business of teaching to the corpse-minded, the dead-hearted? like so many of our professors and teachers!" ”

“ He asked me what I intended making of myself.
"A poet!" I exclaimed.
He spread his hands outward with a gesture of despair.
"Of course, one can write poetry if necessary ... but what career are you choosing?"
"The writing of poetry."
"But, my dear Gregory, one can't make a living by that ... and one must live."
"Why must one live?" I replied fervently, "did Christ ever say 'One must live'?"
"Gregory, you are impossible," laughed Stanton heartily, "but we're all rather fond of you ... and we want you to behave, and try to graduate. Though we can't tell just what you might do in after-life ... ”

“ Never since did I see the real man, Spalton, as I saw him then, the man he might always have been, if he had had an old-world environment, instead of the environment of modern, commercial America—the spirit of which finally claimed him, as he grew more successful....
Modern, commercial America—where we proudly make a boast of lack of culture, and where artistic and aesthetic feeling, if freely expressed, makes one's hearers more likely than not, at once uneasy and restive. ”

“ Each department housed a different kind of worker. In the grinding, squealing, squeaking, buzzing machine shop the men were not mixed with women.
They were alert, well-muscled; their faces were streaked with paleness and a black smutch like dancers made up for a masquerade. Always they were seeking for a vigorous joke to play on someone. And, if the trick were perpetrated within the code, the foreman himself enjoyed it, laughing grimly with the "boys." ”

“ But words and elegant, burning phrases are never enough for a woman.
In a week I noticed her going by on the arm of a mill-hand.
And, broke again, I wrote to my grandmother that I must have fifty dollars to get back to school on. And, somehow, she scraped it together and sent it to me. My first impulse was to be ashamed of myself and start to return it. Then I kept it. For, after all, it was for poetry's sake.
On the train to Hebron, as I walked up the car to my seat, health shining in my smooth, clear face and skin, the women and girls gave me approving, friendly glances, and I was happy. ”

“ I have met many a man in my wanderings, simple and silent, who felt beauty like a poet or an artist, without the poet's or artist's gifts of expression,—with, on the contrary, a queer shame that he was so moved, a suspicion that, somehow, it was not manly to be moved by a sunrise or sunset.
I found Penton Baxter, his wife Hildreth, and their child, Dan, living in two tents, among a grove of trees, near the main building of the Health Home. ”

“ There was a park on the outskirts of town where I loved to loaf, when the weather was sunny,—a place where the blue jays fought with the squirrels and the leaves flickered in the sun ... sometimes I lay on the grass, reading ... sometimes I lounged on a bench ... I read my Greek and Latin poets there ... and my English and German poets ... and, when hungry, I sauntered home to my bread and cheese, or, now that I was in receipt of Derek's weekly stipend, to a frugal meal at some lunch counter. ”

“ How wonderful it would be to become a hermit on some far mountain side, wearing a grey robe, clear-browed and calmly speculative under the stars—or, maybe,—more wonderful: a singer for men, a travelling minstrel—in each case, whether minstrel or hermit, whether teaching great doctrines or singing great songs for all the world—to have come to me, as a pilgrim seeking enlightenment, the most beautiful maiden in the world, one who was innocent of what man meant. ”

“ I was glad to find myself back in my little cottage, that same night—back in my little cottage, and in the arms of the woman who was everything to me, no matter if they said she spelled the ruination of my career.
For any man, I held, and still hold, who lets a woman ruin his career, ought to have it ruined.
I did not tell her of what Dr. Ward had told me. Why cause her unnecessary worry?
After all, the magazine world was not the only medium to present my literary wares to the public. There remained the book world, a less narrow and prejudiced one. ”

“ From Byron and Moore I built up an adolescent ideal of woman,—exquisitely sensual and sexual, and yet an angel, superior to men: an ideal of a fellow creature who was both a living, breathing mystery and a walking sweetmeat ... a white creation moved and actuated by instinct and intuition—a perpetually inexplicable ecstasy and madness to man. ”