The Hoosier Bard Poetry Snobs Love to Hate

Disdained by Eastern critics, James Whitcomb Riley at least looked every inch a respectable poet.

high minded, serious folk— the worst high school English teachers, academics whose careers depend on culling ever diminish heard of obscure poets for publish-or-perish theses that no one reads, and critics convinced that only the obscure and arcane are worthy of notice and that popularity is vulgar.  Together these folks have just about beat to death any chance that the general public might consider reading and enjoying poetry.

Today we offer up a poet sure to set fire to these folks hair.

The Hoosier poet James Whitcomb Riley may not have been the greatest American poet.  But for a good many years he was the most popular—and the most beloved.  Many of his verses were written for, and loved, by children and there was a time when most could recite at least one of his poems by heart.

Riley was born on October 7, 1849 in the extremely rustic village of Greenfield, Indiana.  Although his father was a lawyer with political ambitions—the boy was named for a governor of the state—the family was still crowded into a two room log cabin.  

What passed for a super highway, the planked National Road, ran by the cabin’s dooryard.  In those days with inns and taverns scarce, travelers on the road often pulled up at the cabin, the largest in the village, for supper or a place to sleep by the hearth or in the soft hay of the barn.  From the time he was a small boy, James listened to and absorbed the accents and the stories of the visitors and entertained his family and friends with imitations.

Riley grew up in this comfortable frame home in Greenfield, Indiana which replaced the rustic log cabin of his birth.  It is now preserved and open to the public.

As the village and fortunes of the family grew, they replaced the cabin with a handsome two story white frame house.

James was an indifferent, make that horrible, student in the local one room academy.  His mind was always wandering to the meadows, woods, and creeks and the play of his friends.  He learned well enough to read and write, but seemed totally indifferent to anything else. One teacher told his exasperated father, “He doesn’t know which is more—twice ten or twice eternity.”  He dropped out of school to work odd jobs in town and on nearby farms.

His father convinced him to try reading law with him.  But that was a failure, too.

Despite his love of his town and his friends among the lively local youths, Riley had itchy feet and a hankering to see a bit more of the world.  He took up the tramp profession of traveling sign painter, roaming the Midwest.  Later, he became a barker in a traveling medicine show where he honed stage skills that would later help make him famous and where he cultivated a lifelong taste for the product, heavily laced with alcohol.

Riley didn’t write his first known poem until the age of 21 in 1870.  He sent it to a newspaper, which published it.  It became a habit.  The poems, usually in dialect, reflected his memories of the rural childhood.  Newspapers began, in the custom of the time, to reprint the poems “on exchange.”  He even started to get paid a dollar or two for a submission.

Despite this modest success, Riley suspected that as a rural bumpkin he would never be taken seriously as a poet by the Eastern literary establishment.  To prove his point, he perpetuated a hoax.  He submitted Leonanie an “undiscovered poem” by Edgar Allan Poe which was universally proclaimed as a masterpiece.  The Eastern critics failed to note that Poe himself was a famous hoaxer, having published at least six in his life, the most famous about a supposed 1844 crossing of the Atlantic by balloon.  When Riley revealed himself there were a lot of embarrassed—and angry—critics.  It is seems likely that tribe holds the grudge to this day. 

He established himself enough as a writer to get a full time job on the Indianapolis Journal where he did reporting and regularly contributed verse, still a popular part of any American newspaper. 

In 1883 he self-published an edition of 1000 copies of a collection, The Old Swimmin’ Hole and ‘Leven More Poems under the pen name of Benjamin F. Johnson, of Boone.  Most poets trying this gambit ended up with crates full of unsold books and ruinous debts to the printer.  Riley’s book sold out its first printing in only a few months.

Riley was saluted with that singular 19th Century honor, a cigar brand and box.

That got the attention of local Indianapolis publisher Merrill, Meigs and Company which published a beautifully bound second edition under his real name.  It sold like hot cakes.  Riley would be associated with the company, which eventually became Bobbs-Merrill, for the rest of his life.  In fact that well known publishing house was largely built on the success of its Riley books.  The first of the original ones was The Boss Girl.

Riley was able to give up his day job, cater to his wanderlust, and promote his books when he took to the lecture platform.  With his charming wit, and theatrical style of reading he became one of the most sought after public speakers in the country, a genuine star of the Lyceum Circuit.  And everywhere he spoke, he sold even more books.  

One of the few critics who appreciated him, fellow Midwesterner Hamlin Garland, noted that of American writers only Mark Twain  “who had the same amazing flow of quaint conceits.  He spoke ‘copy’ all the time.”  In an interview in 1892 in Greenfield, Riley told him, “My work did itself.  I’m only the willer bark through which the whistle comes.”

Twain, by the way, was not fond of Riley.  In their only appearance together on the same program, he felt that he was upstaged by someone plowing similar ground.  There after he avoided those literary dinners where Riley might make an appearance and occasionally derided his adversary. 

Riley’s lectures and book sales made him the best paid writer America for a while, surely another bitter pill for struggling “serious” scribes.  It was said copies of his books were found in homes that contained no other save the Bible.

Riley never married.  He said a failed teenage romance back in Greenfield had made him decide not to commit his heart.  But serious alcoholism, that all too common malady of writers, was more likely the cause.  At least one lecture tour was aborted do to drunkenness.  Several attempts of stop drinking all ultimately failed.

In 1893 Riley began boarding at the home of his friends, Charles and Magdalena Holstein in the Indianapolis neighborhood of Lockerbie.  It was his home for the rest of his life and his friends took care of him through bouts of drinking and later severe health problems.

Although ravaged by alcoholism and in declining heath, Riley enjoyed regaling the neighborhood children with his yarns and verse.

By 1895 he had largely stopped touring and his attempts to publish more “serious” poems were savaged even by critics who had warmed to his rustic style.  At home in Lockerbie he appointed himself an uncle to neighborhood children who flocked to hear his stories and tales. 

That inspired his last, and ultimately most successful, original book, Rhymes of Childhood with illustrations by Howard Chandler Christy.  It was so popular through so many editions—it remains in print today—that Riley was proclaimed the Children’s Poet, much as Henry Wadsworth Longfellow had been years before.  Twain was so moved by this collection—and probably the memory of his dead children—that he finally had good things to say about Riley.

In 1902 Boobs-Merrill began issuing elegantly appointed volumes of his complete works, an honor few poets lived to see.  Riley spent his last years editing the texts.  Eventually 16 volumes were issued.

Riley purchased the family homestead in Greenfield and his brother John lived in the house.  Riley would make occasional visits. 

Riley’s health had been in steady decline since 1901.  He suffered a debilitating stroke in 1910 which confined him to a wheel chair.  The loss of the use of his writing hand bothered him and he later relied on dictation to George Ade for his last poems and biographical sketches.  By 1912 he had recovered enough to begin recording readings for Edison cylinders.  The same year the Governor of Indiana declared his birthday James Whitcomb Riley Day, a state holiday observed until 1968.

He made his last visit to Greenfield in 1916 for the funeral of a boyhood friend.  A week later back in Lockerbie, he suffered a second stroke and died on July 22nd.

Riley was widely mourned.  His books continued to be popular through the next two decades, finally falling out of favor.

The James Whitcomb Riley Museum Home in Indianapolis, a National Historic Site.

 His boyhood home in Greenfield is now a preserved historical site and his home in Lockerbie is the James Whitcomb Riley Museum Home and a designated National Historic Site.

Our Hired Girl

Our hired girl, she’s ‘Lizabuth Ann; 
An’ she can cook best things to eat! 
She ist puts dough in our pie-pan, 
An’ pours in somepin’ ‘at's good an’ sweet; 
An’ nen she salts it all on top 
With cinnamon; an’ nen she’ll stop 
An’ stoop an' slide it, ist as slow, 
In th’ old cook-stove, so's 'twon't slop 
An’ git all spilled; nen bakes it, so 
It's custard-pie, first thing you know!

An’ nen she’ll say, 
“Clear out o’ my way! They’s time fer work, an’ time fer play! 
Take yer dough, an’ run, child, run! 
Er I cain’t git no cookin’ done!”

When our hired girl ‘tends like she’s mad, 
An’ says folks got to walk the chalk 
When she's around, er wisht they had! 
I play out on our porch an' talk 
To Th’ Raggedy Man ‘at mows our lawn; 
An’ he says, “Whew!” an’ nen leans on 
His old crook-scythe, and blinks his eyes, 
An’ sniffs all ‘round an’ says, “I swawn! 
Ef my old nose don’t tell me lies, 
It ‘pears like I smell custard-pies!”

An’ nen he’ll say, 
“Clear out o’ my way! 
They’s time fer work, an’ time fer play! 
Take yer dough, an’ run, child, run! 
Er she cain’t git no cookin’ done!

Wunst our hired girl, when she 
Got the supper, an we all et, 
An’ it wuz night, an’ Ma an’ me 
An’ Pa went wher’ the “Social’ met,--
An’  nen when we come home, an’ see 
A light in the kitchen door, an’ we 
Heerd a maccordeun, Pa says, “Lan’-- 
O’-Gracious! who can her beau be?’ 
An’ I marched in, an’ ‘Lizabuth Ann 
Wuz parchin’ corn fer The Raggedy Man!

Better say, 
“Clear out o’ the way! 
They’s time fer work, an’ time fer play!

Take the hint, an’ run, child, run! 
Er we cain’t git no courtin’ done!”

—James Whitcomb Riley

So it Goes....Vonnegut’s Life Skating on the Edge

Kurt Vannegut and some of his work.

“I want to stay as close to the edge as I can without going over.  Out on the edge you see all kind of things you can’t see from the center.” —Kurt Vonnegut

Kurt Vonnegut was born on Armistice Day, November 11, 1922 in Indianapolis, Indiana. He would go on to become a veteran of another war and the experience shaped him as a human being and one of the great iconoclasts of his time.

His death on April 11, 2007 at the age of 84 was, as he predicted, not an emphatic period at the end of a long life, but a mere semi-colon (he despised semi-colons.)  He died of a brain injury sustained after slipping and falling in his Manhattan apartment several days earlier.  It was the kind of comic, anti-heroic departure he could have written himself.

And Vonnegut would have noted the connection to the announcement in Washington the same day that all American troops in Iraq and Afghanistan were having their tours in the war zones extended by another 120 days.  He despised the war and the men who started it.  Leaving behind such brutal stupidity would have been a pleasure for him.

But I myself feel that our Country, for whose Constitution I fought in a just war, might as well have been invaded by Martians and body snatchers.  Sometimes I wish it had been. What has happened instead is that it was taken over by means of the sleaziest, low-comedy, Keystone Cops-style coup d’état imaginable.  (From A Man Without a Country.)

Unitarians Universalists, in our insecurity, are always making lists of “greats.”  Having dominated 19th Century American literature, there is often a kind of desperately wide net thrown to haul in contemporary writers so as to keep up our cultural bona fides.  Vonnegut shows up on these lists. 

He was, after all, very publicly avowed Humanist, the successor to another science fiction writer, Isaac Asimov, as honorary chair of the American Humanist Association. A Man Without a Country, his last book, was something of a Humanist scream in a world corrupted by fake Christianity.  It was largely assembled from his essays in the Chicago based socialist magazine In These Times.  We all know that Humanism has also found a home in Unitarian Universalism.

Kurt Vonnegut, Sr. and his family, wife Edith, eldest son Bernard, and daughter Alice.  Kurt, Jr. would arrive in 1922 shortly after this picture was taken.  The family came from a long line of German Free thinkers and the family attended the Indianapolis Unitarian Church for which architect Kurt Sr. designed a building.

Vonnegut was proud to claim descent from generations of German-American free thinkers, just the sort of folks who found a congenial home with the radical brand of Unitarianism espoused by Jenkin Lloyd Jones and the old Western Unitarian Conference  at the turn of the 20th  Century.  Vonnegut’s parents were married by a Unitarian minister and the family belonged to the congregation in Indianapolis.  Architect Kurt, Sr. even designed a building for the congregation.  Although not much of church goer later in life, he liked to tell of visiting a Unitarian congregation and hearing the minister joke about the bells peeling “No Hell! No Hell!” (surely a Universalist sentiment.)  He sometimes referred to himself as a Unitarian and was glad to be called to give the prestigious Ware Lecture at the 1986 UUA General Assembly.  He was also asked to speak on the occasion of William Ellery Channing’s 200th birthday at First Parish in Cambridge, Massachusetts. 

But Vonnegut was hard to pin down—and idealist and a cynic, a humorist who’s satire was tinged with the deepest melancholy of man who had been brought up to believe in human progress “onward and upward forever” only to witness the gravest savageries of the 20th Century.  He genuinely believed in the pieties of civics lessons learned at James Whitcomb Riley School in Indianapolis.  Yet he saw his father, a sensitive and creative architect, ruined by the Depression, and his mother sink into mental illness and suicide. 

Kurt Vonnegut as a young soldier.  He dropped out of Cornell to join the Army.

Then it was off to war as an infantry scout for Patton’s 3rd Army.  In the confusion of the Battle of the Bulge Vonnegut was separated from his unit and wandered for several days behind German lines before being captured.  As a prisoner of war, in the defining moment of his life, he survived the Allied firebombing of the historic city of Dresden and was put to work collecting and disposing of the incinerated corpses of the old city.  This was the central event of one of his most famous novels, Slaughter House-Five, named for the actual facility in which he and his fellow prisoners rode out the fire storm.  The incident also figures in at least 5 other novels.

In post-war America he participated in the rush to corporate security when he took a public relations job with General Electric in Troy, New York.  The job didn’t last long, but the bitter experience of corporate corruption, power, and arrogance lingered.  Troy became the Ilium of several Vonnegut novels beginning with his first novel Player Piano, a savage corporate dystopia.  The book was a publishing failure in 1952, but slowly gained a cult following as paperback editions followed.

Many of his novels involved organized religion on one hand and a drive for spiritual honesty on the other.  In Sirens of Titan gave us The Church of God the Utterly Indifferent.  In Cat’s Cradle it was the transparently fraudulent, but serenely comforting—and perhaps actually saving—Bokononism. God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater even distills what might be called a theology of atonement, forgiveness and kindness.  In it Eliot Rosewater says:

 Hello, babies, welcome to Earth.  It’s hot in the summer and cold in the winter.  It’s round and wet and crowded.  At the outside, babies, you’ve go about a hundred years here.  There only one rule that I know of, babies—‘God damn it, you’ve got to be kind.’

Vonnegut thought so much of that last passage he repeated it in his swan song A Man Without a Country.  

About a year before his death Vonnegut and his second wife Jill Krementz in 2006, about a year before his death.

He had his heroes.  His fright-wig hair and droopy mustache were surely homage to Mark Twain (for whom he named a son) and Albert Einstein.  He admired Abraham Lincoln of whose speech attacking the Mexican War he wrote “Holy shit! And I thought I was a writer!” He paired Jesus and Socialist—and fellow Terre Haute native—Eugene V. Debs.  He liked to quote Debs, “As long as there is a lower class, I am in it.  As long as there is a criminal element, I am of it.  As long as there is a soul in prison, I am not free,” and follow up with the Beatitudes.  

Vonnegut was a fearless opponent of war and injustice—any war and all injustice.  He despised hypocrisy.  He despaired for humanity.  People like that are hard to come by.

Booth Tarkington—The Man Who Remembered

Booth Tarkington the American novelist and dramatist, was born on July 29, 1869 into a comfortable, upper middle class family in Indianapolis, Indiana.  His long and very productive career was marked by his close examination of those 19th Century Mid-Western roots in the humorous, nostalgic vein of his popular Penrod novels and Seventeen, as well as more serious depictions as in The Magnificent Ambersons and Alice Adams. 

At first educated in Indianapolis schools, his socially ambitious family had him transferred to Phillips Exeter Academy, the fashionable eastern boarding school that was a conduit to the Ivy League.  But his family lost some of their wealth in the Panic of 1879, and young Booth was sent instead to Indiana’s own Purdue University.  A gifted enough student not to have to work hard for decent grades, he was popular on campus and enjoyed his two years there. 

With improving fortunes he was sent to Princeton to finish his education.  There he joined a theatrical group where he excelled as an actor and first turned his hand as a playwright.  He became one of the charter members when the drama club was re-chartered as The Triangle Club, which continues to this day producing original work by students.  He also belonged to the Ivy Club, the oldest and most prestigious of Princeton’s dining clubs and edited the Nassau Literary Magazine. 

Voted the most popular student of the class of 1893, Tarkington failed to graduate, missing credit in one class.  However, he kept close ties to both of his colleges and made significant gifts to each when he became a wealthy and successful writer.  A residence hall at Purdue was named for him after he underwrote its construction and both schools awarded him honorary degrees.  In fact, he was the only person ever to receive two honorary degrees from Princeton, a measure of his literary prestige in the first quarter of the 20th Century. 

Upon leaving school, Tarkington was able to undertake the traditional grand tour of Europe and spent time in such upper-class enclaves as Kennebunkport, Maine between extended stays in Indianapolis.  He began successfully writing short stories for popular magazines.  In 1900 he had success with his second book, Monsieur Beaucaire.  Uncharacteristic of most of his work the slender novel was a comic historical romance 18th Century England.  It’s themes of social class and caste, however would be reflected in more American scenes.  The book went on to be a successful play, was made into an operetta, and was twice filmed, in 1924 with Rudolph Valentino and 1946 with Bob Hope.  

Tarkington married in 1902 and set up primary residence in Indianapolis. The marriage, which produced one daughter, ended in divorce in 1911 and Tarkington married Susanah Keifer Robinson the following year.  In 1902, the year of his first marriage, Tarkington was elected to a single term as a Republican in the Indiana legislature, which gave him fodder for his book In the Arena: Stories of Political Life published in 1905. 

Tarkington was soon publishing nearly a book a year in addition to a volume of poetry and plays, including adaptations of his books.  Later he would also do screenplays from his work. 

Penrod, the first of a series of books about the adventures of a small town boy of comfortable circumstances, began as magazine stories and was published in 1914 and was widely popular.  The next year Tarkington finished The Turmoil, the first book of the Growth trilogy about the fall of an old wealth family and the rise of the industrial new rich.  The second book of that series, The Magnificent Ambersons was published in 1918 and is considered by most critics as him most important work.  It won the Pulitzer Prize in 1919.  Orson Wells famously made it into a classic film in 1941. 

In between, in 1916 came Seventeen, a much beloved, painfully comic tale of a young man’s unrequited love.  It is still an entertaining and enjoyable read.  In 1922 Tarkington won a second Pulitzer Prize for Alice Adams, his tale of a vivacious small town girl of modest means who plots to snag the handsome son of the town’s leading wealthy family.  It, too, was twice made into a film adapted for the screen most famously in 1935 by my distant kinswoman Jane Murfin for Katherine Hepburn. 

Presenting Lily Mars, published in 1933 told the story of a stage struck young woman and incorporated themes from Tarkington’s lifelong interest in the theater.  It was made into a MGM musical staring Judy Garland in 1943.

In the early ‘20’s Tarkington began to lose his sight and was blind by mid-decade.  He continued to produce a steady stream of novels, plays, and non-fiction by dictation up to his death in 1946. 

In all nine of his novels were top best sellers and several of his stage plays long running hits.  His reputation as a novelist has been eclipsed by harder edged work by later American writers.  Seventeen remains perennially in print as a juvenile favorite, but Tarkington is now best remembered for the films made of his work.