Shandygaff | Page 9

other ace will not come--the little ball will not settle upon the right number or the proper colour--the girl will marry the other man--the public will cry, Bedamned to him! he can't write anyhow!--the cosmos will refuse its revelations of divinity--the Welsh rabbit will be stringy--you will find there are not enough rhymes in the language to finish your ballade--the primrose by the river's brim will be only a hayfever carrier--and your fountain pen will dribble ink upon your best trousers.
But Don Marquis's mind has two yolks (to use one of his favourite denunciations). In addition to these comic or satiric shadows, the gnomon of his Sun Dial may be relied on every now and then to register a clear-cut notation of the national mind and heart. For instance this, just after the United States severed diplomatic relations with Germany:
This Beast we know, whom time brings to his last rebirth Bull-thewed, iron-boned, cold-eyed and strong as Earth ... As Earth, who spawned and lessoned him, Yielded her earthy secrets, gave him girth, Armoured the skull and braced the heavy limb-- Who frowned above him, proud and grim, While he sucked from her salty dugs the lore Of fire and steel and stone and war: She taught brute facts, brute might, but not the worth
Of spirit, honour and clean mirth ... His shape is Man, his mood is Dinosaur.
Tip from the wild red Welter of the past Foaming he comes: let this rush, be his last.
Too patient we have been, thou knowest, God, thou knowest. We have been slow as doom. Our dead Of yesteryear lie on the ocean's bed-- We have denied each pleading ghost-- We have been slow: God, make us sure. We have been slow. Grant we endure Unto the uttermost, the uttermost.
Did our slow mood, O God, with thine accord? Then weld our diverse millions, Lord, Into one single swinging sword.
I have been combing over the files of the Sun Dial, and it is disheartening to see these deposits of pearl and pie-crust, this sediment of fine mind, buried full fathom five in the yellowing archives of a newspaper. I thought of De Quincey's famous utterance about the press:
Worlds of fine thinking lie buried in that vast abyss, never to be disentombed or restored to human admiration. Like the sea, it has swallowed treasures without end, that no diving-bell will bring up again.
Greatly as we cherish the Sun Dial, we are jealous of it for sapping all its author's time and calories. No writer in America has greater of more meaty, stalwart gifts. Don, we cry, spend less time stoking that furnace out in Port Washington, and more on your novels!
There is no more convincing proof of the success of the Sun Dial than the roster of its contributors. Some of the most beautiful lyrics of the past few years have been printed there (I think particularly of two or three by Padraic Colum). In this ephemeral column of a daily newspaper some of the rarest singers and keenest wits of the time have been glad to exhibit their wares, without pay of course. It would be impossible to give a complete list, but among them are William Rose Benét, Clinton Scollard, Edith M. Thomas, Benjamin De Casseres, Gelett Burgess, Georgia Pangborn, Charles Hanson Towne, Clement Wood.
But the tragedy of the colyumist's task is that the better he does it the harder it becomes. People simply will not leave him alone. All day long they drop into his office, or call him up on the phone in the hope of getting into the column. Poor Don! he has become an institution down on Nassau Street: whatever hour of the day you call, you will find his queue there chivvying him. He is too gracious to throw them out: his only expedient is to take them over to the gin cathedral across the street and buy them a drink. Lately the poor wretch has had to write his Dial out in the pampas of Long Island, bringing it in with him in the afternoon, in order to get it done undisturbed. How many times I have sworn never to bother him again! And yet, when one is passing in that neighbourhood, the temptation is irresistible.... I dare say Ben Jonson had the same trouble. Of course someone ought to endow Don and set him permanently at the head of a chophouse table, presiding over a kind of Mermaid coterie of robust wits. He is a master of the tavernacular.
He is a versatile cove. Philosopher, satirist, burlesquer, poet, critic, and novelist. Perhaps the three critics in this country whose praise is best worth having, and least easy to win, would be Marquis, Strunsky, and O.W. Firkins. And I think that the three leading poets male in this country to-day