All men ignored in me,
of his native country. I was critical, for I bore in my mind the growth of materialism, the corruption of the law, the lynchings of the Negroes, and the rest. He wanted me to dissociate America from the dollar, from the noisy business rampage, and from all that was unworthy, and instead identify America with the dreams of her idealists.
“That is what I did with Russia,” said I. “If I tell England of the ideal America they’ll only call me a mystic. But you, Vachel,” I continued, “try and think of the Empire that way.”
He found it difficult. He could think creatively about his own country, but where others were concerned he reverted to the normal critical mind.
It is almost a recognised convention in literature. If you are writing about a foreign country you take the general average of what you observe and describe that. You can attack lustily without fear that the magazine will lose “advertising.” The writer on Russia was supposed to bring home a report that the police, and indeed every one else, took bribes, the Jews were persecuted, the prisoners in Siberia were chained together. Most American writers on Russia have done it. Kennan is a characteristic case, who obtained fame identifying Russia with prison horrors without recalling to the minds of his readers that there are dreadful prisons also in the United States, and that the silence of his own Georgia is sometimes desecrated by the melancholy clank-clank of the chain-gang.
I was besought in 1917, by a leading magazine of America, to write an account of Rasputin, and although I had many interesting stories of that evil genius of Russia I refused to write what I considered would at that time be damaging to Russia. On the other hand, I wrote in 1919 a realistic vision of America in perhaps her saddest post-war moment, when Wilson was down and no one knew what America was going to do next, and offered it to the same journal. But the editor was quite hurt that I did not then see America in roseate hues. How characteristic of this sprightly world, which, as Latimer said, “was begotten of Envy and put out at Discord for nurse!”
Not that the poet was critical of England. He idealised England. He was not as critical of England as I was of America. Whilst he idealised America creatively he idealised England romantically. To him America was something to be; to him England was something that forever was—beautiful, the substance of poetry, the evidence of things not seen. He did not sympathise with the Irish. He did not think England was so well organised, commercially, as America. But then to him that was a point in our favour. Only one point was registered against us—he did not think that as a nation we could make coffee; and we lagged behind on Prohibition. But then he had to admit that the Americans for their part did not know how to make tea.
“Except for the King,” said Vachel, “we are much the same people.” He loathed kings. “There’s not much difference between Canada and the United States,” he went on.
“We’ll see,” I answered. “Canadians are subjects of a monarch; Americans are citizens of a Republic. Canadians look to the King. More than a mere line divides the two halves of North America. You’ll see.”