Kentucky in American Letters, 1784-1912. Vol. 2 of 2

by John Wilson Townsend

[IRVIN S. COBB]

Irvin Shrewsbury Cobb, humorist and short-story writer, was born at Paducah, Kentucky, June 23, 1876. He was educated in public and private schools, but the newspaper field loomed large before him, and at the age of nineteen he became editor of the Paducah Daily News. For three years he conducted the "Sour Mash" column in the Louisville Evening Post, when he returned to Paducah to become managing editor of the News-Democrat, which position he held from 1901 to 1904. Late in the year of 1904 Mr. Cobb went to New York, and for a year he was editor of the humorous section and special writer for The Evening Sun. In 1905 he became staff humorist for The World, and for the following six years he remained with that paper. Mr. Cobb has written several plays, none of which have been published in book form, but they have been produced upon the stage. They include: The Campaigner, Funabashi, Mr. Busybody, The Gallery God, The Yeggman, and Daffy-Down-Dilly. He has written many humorous stories, among which may be mentioned: New York Through Funny Glasses, The Hotel Clerk, Live Talks with Dead Ones, Making Peace at Portsmouth, The Gotham Geography, and The Diary of Noah.

Then, one day, the daily grind racked his nerves, he rebelled and bethought himself of the good old days in Kentucky years agone. Ah, what a fine chapter was added to the history of our native letters when Cobb looked backward! Now, when he was but twenty-four years of age, he had written a story, a horror tale of Reelfoot Lake, which he named "Fishhead" and immediately forgot, but which he had brought on East with him. On this he made some minor revisions and started it on its round of the magazine editors. But Cobb didn't wait for the fate of "Fishhead"; and it's a good thing that he didn't! He wrote what he now regards as his first fiction story, The Escape of Mr. Trimm; and The Saturday Evening Post accepted it so quickly, printing it in the issue for November 27, 1909, that Cobb gleefully cashed the cheque and sent them another shortly thereafter. The editor of The Post, George Horace Lorimer, whom many competent judges considered the greatest editor in the United States, realized that a new literary planet had swam into his ken; and in 1911 he asked Cobb to become a staff contributor, which the Kentuckian was delighted to do. All of his stories have appeared in that publication, all save Fishhead, which Mr. Lorimer regarded as a bit too strong medicine for his subscribers. Mr. Cobb's next big story in The Post was one that he has come to regard as the best thing he has done hitherto, "An Occurrence Up a Side Street," which appeared in the issue for January 21, 1911. This was a real horror tale, a "thriller," making one couple the name of Cobb with Poe, a comparison which has gathered strength with the passing of the months. For The Post Mr. Cobb created Judge Priest, a character that has made him famous. He did a group of tales about and around this leading citizen of a certain Southern town—which town was none other than his own Paducah; and which character was none other than old Judge Bishop, whom many Kentuckians recall with pleasure. Cobb is a great realist and he has never had any patience with the romanticists. He painted the old town and the old judge and the judge's friends and enemies—if he had any—just as he remembered them. The best of these yarns, perhaps, was "Words and Music," printed in the issue for October 28, 1911; and when they were collected the other day and published under the title of Back Home (New York, 1912), that story, in which the old judge "rambles," was the first of the ten tales the book contained. Some reviewers of this work have rather loosely characterized it as a novel, and in a certain big sense it is; but the sub-title is a better description: "the narrative of Judge Priest and his people." The book is really a series of pictures; and what Francis H. Underwood did so well in his Kentucky novel, Lord of Himself, and what William C. Watts did much better in his Chronicles of a Kentucky Settlement, Irvin S. Cobb has done in a manner superior to either of them in his Back Home. Judge Priest is a worthy and welcome addition to the gallery of American heroes of prose fiction, hung next to Bret Harte's highest heroes. Cohan and Harris have acquired the dramatic rights of his book, and it is to be made into play-form by Bayard Veiller, author of Within the Law, the great "hit" of the 1912 New York season, in collaboration with the Kentuckian, who once wrote of his original plays, which have already been listed: "One was accidentally destroyed, one was lost, and one was loaned out and never returned." Let us hope that none of these things may overtake the present work; and that, when Thomas Wise struts across the boards in the autumn of 1913 as Judge Priest he may receive a bigger "hand" than he ever drew in The Gentleman from Mississippi.

Besides these tales of Judge Priest, Cobb wrote several detached short-stories, and many humorous articles for The Post during 1912. The best of this humor appeared simultaneously with Back Home, in a delightful little book, called Cobb's Anatomy (New York, 1912). This contained four essays on the following subjects: "Tummies," perhaps the funniest thing he has done so far; "Teeth;" "Hair;" "Hands and Feet." The only adverse criticism to make of the work was its length: it was too short. Its sequel will appear in 1913 under the title of Cobb's Bill of Fare, containing four humorous skits. Aside from his Judge Priest yarns, which began in The Post in the autumn of 1911 and ran throughout the year of 1912, and his humorous papers which also appeared from time to time, Cobb wrote the greatest short-story ever written by a Kentuckian (save that first book of stories by James Lane Allen), entitled "The Belled Buzzard" (The Post, September 28, 1912). This, with "An Occurrence Up a Side Street," and "Fishhead," which is to be published in The Cavalier for January 11, 1913, after having been rejected by almost every reputable magazine in America, form a trio of horror tales of such power as to compel comparison with the best work of Edgar Poe, with the "shade" going to the Kentuckian in many minds. All three of them, together with "The Escape of Mr. Trimm"; "The Exit of Anse Dugmore," a Kentucky mountain yarn; and four unpublished stories, called "Another of Those Cub Reporter Stories"; "Smoke of Battle"; "To the Editor of the Sun;" and "Guilty as Charged," will appear in book form in the autumn of 1913, entitled The Escape of Mr. Trimm.

In summing up Cobb's work for the New York Sun, Robert H. Davis, editor of the Munsey magazines, wrote: "Gelett Burgess, in a lecture at Columbia College, said that Cobb was one of the ten great American humorists. Cobb ought to demand a recount. There are not ten humorists in the world, although Cobb is one of them.... Thus in Irvin Cobb we find Mark Twain, Bret Harte, and Edgar Allan Poe at their best.... If he uses his pen for an Alpine stock, the Matterhorn is his." And George Horace Lorimer holds that Cobb is "the biggest writing-man ever born in Kentucky; and he's going to get better all the time." This is certainly high praise, but that it voices the opinions of many people is beyond all question. "The great 'find' of 1912" may be the trade-mark of his future.

Bibliography. Everybody's Magazine (April, 1911); Hampton's Magazine (October, 1911); The American Magazine (November, 1912); Who's Cobb and Why, by R. H. Davis (New York, 1912, a brochure).

THE BELLED BUZZARD[86]

[From The Saturday Evening Post (Philadelphia, September 28, 1912)]

There was a swamp known as Little Niggerwool, to distinguish it from Big Niggerwool, which lay nearer the river. It was traversable only by those who knew it well—an oblong stretch of yellow mud and yellower water, measuring, maybe four miles its longest way and two miles roughly at its widest; and it was full of cypress and stunted swamp oak, with edgings of cane-break and rank weeds; and in one place, where a ridge crossed it from side to side, it was snaggled like an old jaw with dead tree-trunks, rising close-ranked and thick as teeth. It was untenanted of living things—except, down below, there were snakes and mosquitoes, and a few wading and swimming fowl; and up above, those big woodpeckers that the country people called logcocks—larger than pigeons, with flaming crests and spiky tails—swooping in their long, loping flight from snag to snag, always just out of gunshot of the chance invader, and uttering a strident cry which matched those surroundings so fitly that it might well have been the voice of the swamp itself.

On one side Little Niggerwool drained its saffron waters off into a sluggish creek, where summer ducks bred, and on the other it ended abruptly at a natural bank of high ground, along which the county turnpike ran. The swamp came right up to the road, and thrust its fringe of reedy, weedy undergrowth forward as though in challenge to the good farm lands that were spread beyond the barrier. At the time I am speaking of it was midsummer, and from these canes and weeds and waterplants there came a smell so rank as almost to be overpowering. They grew thick as a curtain, making a blank green wall taller than a man's head.