I want to go to Fairyland
And live forever more.”
I was reading this effusion on my way in to college. When I reached the climax in the stanza,
“The world seems black and ugly”
I thrust the manuscript back into my bag in disgust and turned for relief to the morning paper. Here—for the young writer was the daughter of a prominent Bostonian—I saw the announcement of her engagement to a Chicago man, and I knew, of course, what ailed the poetry; and I knew the medicine that I should administer.
How far apart literature and life sometimes get! And how much more real and romantic is ordinary life than ordinary literature!
The girl was to meet me that afternoon in the university extension lecture. The amphitheater was full of city folk, and there in the middle of the hall sat the young poet. She was very pretty, one of the daughters of men still fair. Taking her poem, I read it aloud to that last stanza, when, turning sharply, and pointing the manuscript hard at her, I demanded,
“Is this so? Do you want to leave Boston for Fairyland, instead of Chicago? Do you?”
She was staggered by the suddenness and savageness of it all and rose to her feet, adorably pink in her confusion, stammering, “No, no, I beg—of course I—no, I don’t”—by this time so recovered that her eyes flashed wrath as she dropped to her seat amid the gaping and the twittering of the class.
“If you don’t mean it,” I demanded, “why in the sacred name of literature did you write it? Why don’t you ever write what you mean? And you mean that Boston has suddenly become a back number for literature; that the literary center has shifted to Chicago—that’s what you mean. Chicago! the one romantic, fairy-like spot on earth! Isn’t that what you mean? Then don’t you see how fresh, how thrilling a theme you have in your Chicago? No one else, perhaps, ever saw Chicago in quite this rosy, romantic light before.”