Despite the number and varieties of biographies published every year, we rarely come upon one that is so interesting that it can not be put down until the last page is read, one that grips us like a novel such as The Constant Nymph or Tono Bungay. Alfred Kreymborg, a maker of verses without rhyme or capitals, some of which have great emotional range, has succeeded in writing a story of his life that rivets our attention. And he has pitched it in a key that persistently revives pleasant memories. Reading it, one feels that it is the faithful portrait of a soul in its adventures through life. Mr. Kreymborg is an uncommon individual: a modest artist. He is content that his artistry shall dawn upon us gradually, that we shall discover it as it were. He does not proclaim it in the first chapter and reiterate it in all the succeeding ones.
Neither our country nor its metropolis has been considered favourable breeding ground for artists, nor is our atmosphere congenial to the artistic temperament. It is difficult to conceive of more sterile soil or environment for the growth and display of the emotional and intellectual endowment that constitute artistry than those in which Mr. Kreymborg found himself at his birth and during his formative years. Indeed, he can not even be said to have been fortunate in his parents, though his father, a German cigar packer, had a sense of humour, liked Jews, and detested Tammany Hall; and his mother played the Butterbrod Walzer and was optimistic. But that his talent was nevertheless “in the family” on his mother’s side is testified by his Aunt Isabelle, who went to the library every day, and was devoted to things called ideals.
The author does not dwell upon the locus and environment of his early days; he spares us the minutiæ of his drab and sordid surroundings, but we get a picture of them that is more informative than if it were painted in vivid colours. Years ago I saw it every day, that German-American home in the middle East Side, I ministered unto those who constituted it, and I gained an esteem and an affection for its members that required a world-calamity to alter. Now that it is presented to me anew through verbal medium my recollections are refreshed, my affections renewed and I praise the dexterity of the artist’s pen and the accuracy of his memory.
The picture he gives of New York is the thing that will give the book whatever permanency it will have. When Mouquin’s and the Hotel Algonquin shall be replaced with a Rotonde and a Café Michaud; when there will be a Boulevard Saint-Michel instead of a Greenwich Village; a rue la Boëtie instead of a 57th Street; when pagan practice shall have succeeded puritanic principle—then hedonists and students of manners and customs who would know what New York was like while big with the twentieth century, may turn to Troubadour for enlightenment. When poets, now considered radicals or rhythmicals, shall have taken on conventionality, or professorships, and would tell their fellows or their students of the birth and early days of their art and show them the incubators in which the punies were put for development, they will take them for a walk in 14th Street and they will read to them from Troubadour. The latter will be more agreeable than the former for Kreymborg’s prose has much of the elusive loveliness of his poetry; for like his friend Sherwood Anderson, he knows how to string words together so that they make music for the reader; and Fourteenth Street is down at the heels, frayed at the cuffs and woozy in the head.
The author bears unnecessarily hard on the forte pedal when he renders his hardship selections. It does not add anything to our picture of New York’s Bohemia to be told about the “awful stench one could never quite grow accustomed to” in Kiel’s Bakery, and one reader at least has not been able to guess the riddle of the Fourteenth Street studio. The occupant had been working at Æolian Hall and had progressed to orchestrelle leader, apparently content with his prospects. Then Eve came in ostensibly to buy some rolls for her pianola. They called her Tommy. She was twenty-seven or eight and “scarcely what worldly folks would have designated a sophisticated person but with one or two indisputable claims in the direction of Plymouth and the Mayflower.” “Krimmie” learned about women from her. I suspect it was to facilitate deeper knowledge rather than to gestate his art that he resigned his sinecure for the sake of a thing so quixotic as a studio, “not even a studio, but a room, less than a room—up the stairs of a dismal rickety building on West 14th Street.”
Be that as it may, it was from that day that he began to get that intimate knowledge of the habits of the wolf called want, which his autobiography shows us that he possesses, and of the world frequented by the wolf’s readiest prey. He reduced the beast to fictitious pacification by throwing him his winnings at chess and as he had become an expert player they were often considerable, and his germinating worldly love he embodied in a story called Erna Vitek, which brought him a mild succès de scandale. As strange a trio as could be assembled in New York at the time—George Francis Train having left Madison Square for the beyond—came forward to defend him. They were Frank Harris, Rev. Percy Grant and Dr. Frank Crane. Mr. Kreymborg observes parenthetically that he has not met the author of My Life and Loves to this day. It is gratifying to know that amidst all the blows that he received in his quarter century of struggle, there was occasionally a caress!
Krimmie did not exactly tire of Tommy, nor did Tommy exactly tire of Krimmie. But the latter went West and the former East and the experience gave the lie to the poet who sang about the effect of absence on the heart. In East Lyme or thereabouts, Christine threw a dazzling light across Krimmie’s path. It flabbergasted him for a moment so that he could not distinguish her from others, but as soon as his eyes became adjusted to the illumination he knew the die was cast, the seal was set. He hastily sought a scrap of paper and embodied his emotion in six words, each a monosyllable:
Till you came,
I was I.
Thus did he disregard his oft-repeated admonition that simplicity should occur at the end of a long line of tradition. It reminds me of a picture that Life published many years ago: a small boy gazing intently at a child’s garment (the name of which it is improper to mention in polite American society) hanging on the line of a tenement backyard and uttering ecstatically: “They’re hern.”
And so they were married. Krimmie did not distinguish then between infatuation and love, and Christine had no idea how rough the road would be from romance to reality, especially the part through Grantwood, N. J. So after a year of many detours they decided to try it alone—for a time at least. A young man whose adolescence was pitted with piety had returned from Rome whither he had gone to have love’s scars removed. He was keen to take Christine into his matriomonale Ford in which he had invited her to ride before the priesthood beckoned to him. Day by day, in every way, Krimmie’s affectivity resembled more and more that of the late Mr. Barkis. It is not clearly apparent why Mr. Kreymborg gave up Christine with such readiness. I suspect she had an infantile personality, much like Dora who stole little Emily’s lover away. Adult infantilism and matrimony make an unpalatable emulsion.