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Eugene Field, A Study In Heredity And Contradictions, Volumes 1 and 2, a non-fiction book by Slason Thompson |
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Volume 2 - Chapter 5. Publication Of His First Books |
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_ VOLUME II CHAPTER V. PUBLICATION OF HIS FIRST BOOKS Although the bibliomaniac and collector will claim that "The Tribune Primer," printed in Denver in 1882, was Eugene Field's first book, and cite the fact that a copy of this rare pamphlet recently sold for $125 as proof that it is still his most valuable contribution to literature, his first genuine entrance into the world of letters between covers came with the publication of "Culture's Garland," by Ticknor & Company, of Boston, in August, 1887. Whatever may be the truth as to the size of the first edition of the "Primer," so few copies were printed and its distribution was so limited that it scarcely amounted to a bona-fide publication. Neither did the form of the "Primer," a little 18mo pamphlet of forty-eight pages, bound in pink paper covers, nor its ephemeral newspaper persiflage, rise to the dignity of a book. "Culture's Garland," on the contrary, marks the first real essay of Field as a maker of books. Field himself is the authority for the statement that "Tom" Ticknor edited the book. "I simply sent on a lot of stuff," wrote he, "and the folks at the other end picked out what they wanted and ran it as they pleased." This is scarcely just to Mr. Ticknor. Field himself, to my knowledge, selected the matter for "Culture's Garland," and arranged it in the general form in which it appeared. He then delegated to Mr. Ticknor authority to reject any and all paragraphs in which the bite of satire or the broadness of the humor transgressed too far the bounds of a reasonable discretion. The true nature of this, to my mind the most entertaining of all Field's books, is reflected in its title page, frontispiece, emblem, tail-piece, and the advertisements with which it concludes. The full title reads:
Being Memoranada of by With an Introduction by Julian Hawthorne.
Writing to a friend in Boston, in 1893, Field said that he thought "the alleged advertisements at the end of the volume are its best feature." These were introduced by a letter from one of Field's favorite fictitious creations, "Felix Bosbyshell," to Messrs. Ticknor & Co.: CHICAGO, June 26th, 1887. Dear Sirs:--I am informed that one of the leading litterateurs of this city is about to produce a book under your auspices. Representing, as I do, the prominent advertising bureau of the West, I desire to contribute one page of advertisements to this work, and I am prepared to pay therefor cash rates. I enclose copy, and would like to have the advertisements printed on the fly-leaf which will face the finis of the book in question. This was accompanied by a Publisher's Note, which Field also supplied: It is entirely foreign to our custom to accept advertisements for our books; but we recognize the exceptional nature of the case and the fine literary character and high tone of the Messrs. Bosbyshells' offering, and we cheerfully give it place over leaf.In his discriminating and felicitous introduction to his friend's book, Julian Hawthorne said: "The present little volume comprises mainly a bubbling forth of delightful badinage and mischievous raillery, directed at some of the foibles and pretensions of his enterprising fellow-townsmen, who, however, can by no means be allowed to claim a monopoly of either the pretensions or the foibles herein exploited. Laugh, but look to yourself: mutato nomine, de te fabula narratur. It is a book which should, and doubtless will, attain a national popularity; but admirable, and, indeed, irresistible though it be in its way, it represents a very inconsiderable fraction of the author's real capacity. We shall hear of Eugene Field in regions of literature far above the aim and scope of these witty and waggish sketches. But as the wise orator wins his audience at the outset of his speech by the human sympathy of a smile, so does our author, in these smiling pages, establish genial relations with us before betaking himself to more ambitious flights."
While Mr. Hawthorne's analysis of the book was correct, his prophecy as to its attaining a national popularity was never realized. The literary critics, East as well as West, whose views and pretensions Field had so often lampooned mercilessly, had their innings, and as Field had not then conquered the popular heart with his "Little Boy Blue," his matchless lullabies, and his fascinating fairy tales and other stories, "Culture's Garland" was left to cumber the shelves of the book-stores. Several of the articles and poems in this book have been included in the collected edition of Field's works. In it will be found Field's famous "Markessy di Pullman" papers, with these clever introductory imitations:
"He who conduces to a fellow's sleep "Sleep mocks at death: when weary of the earth
Through all my life the poor shall find The dumb shall never call on me In all their walks the lame shall know 'Tis by such pious works as these--
Throughout "Culture's Garland" Field is the unsparing satirist of contemporary humbug and pretence--social, political, and literary--and that perhaps accounts for its failure to achieve an immediate popular success. I, for one, am glad that so late as December, 1893, and after he had tasted the sweets of popular applause, with its attendant royalties, he had the courage to write of it to a friend in Boston, "I am not ashamed of this little book, but, like the boy with the measles, I am sorry for it in spots." "Culture's Garland" really cleared the way for Field's subsequent literary success. It taught him the lesson that his average daily newspaper work had not body enough to fill out the covers of a book. With grim determination he set himself the task to master the art of telling stories in prose. He was absolutely confident of himself in verse, but to his dying day he was never quite satisfied with anything he wrote in prose. His poems went to the printer almost exactly as they were originally composed. Nearly all of his tales were written over and over again with fastidious pains before they were committed to type. Every word and sentence of such stories as "The Robin and the Violet," "The First Christmas Tree," "Margaret, a Pearl," and "The Mountain and the Sea" was scrutinized and weighed by his keen literary sense and discriminating ear before it was permitted to pass final muster. In only one instance do I remember that this extreme care failed to improve the original story. "The Werewolf" ("Second Book of Tales") was a more powerful and moving fancy as first written than as eventually printed. He consulted with me during four revisions of "The Werewolf," and told me that he had written the whole thing over seven times. I never knew him so finicky and beset with doubts as to the use of words and phrases as he was in this instance. The result is a marvellous piece of technicality perfect archaic old English mosaic, with the soul--the fascinating shudder--refined, out of a weird and fearful tale. But all the care, study, and exercise Field put upon his prose stories bore fruit in the gradual improvement in tone and style of his daily composition. His study of old English ballads started him about this time on the production of a truly remarkable series of lullabies, while his work began to show more and more the influence of Father Prout. But the old Field continued to show itself in such occasional quatrains as this:
It must not be imagined that this was the result of one day's or one week's work. He had been preparing for it for months; and each piece of versification was as perfect as he could make it. The amazement and widely expressed admiration with which this broadside of verse was received encouraged Field to a still greater tour de force, upon the preparation of which he bent all his energies and spare time for more than three months. What Field described in a letter to Cowen as "The 'Golden Week' in my newspaper career," consisted in "the paper running a column of my (his) verse per diem--something never before attempted in American journalism." The titles of the verse printed during the "Golden Week" testify alike to his industry and versatility:
Monday, July 15, "Prof. Vere de Blaw." Tuesday, "Horace to His Patron," "Poet and Wednesday, "The Conversazzhyony." Thursday, "Egyptian Folk Song," Beranger's Friday, "Marthy's Younkit," "Fairy and Child," Saturday, "The Happy Isles of Horace," Beranger's
DEAR MR. GRAY: I send herewith copies of poems which have appeared in the Daily News this week. I am proud to have been the first newspaper man to have made the record of a column of original verse every day for a week; I am greatly mistaken if this feeling of pardonable pride is not shared by you. I regard some of the poems as my best work so far, but I shall do better yet if my life is spared. We are rusticating here by the side of a Wisconsin lake this summer. Farm board seems to agree with us and we shall in all likelihood remain here until September. I have been grievously afflicted with nervous dyspepsia for a month, but am much better just now. The paper gives me a three months' European vacation whensoever I wish to go. At present I intend to go in the winter and shall take Julia and Mary (Trotty) with me. I do wish that Mrs. Gray would write to me; I want to know all about her home affairs and especially about Mrs. Bacon--my grudge against her in re mince pie has expired under the statute of limitations. God bless you, dear friend--you and yours, Although Field's body was rusticating on farm fare in Wisconsin, his pen was furnishing its two thousand three hundred words a day to the Daily News, as the "Sharps and Flats" column through the summer of 1889 shows. In a letter written from the Benedict Farm during the Golden Week to Cowen, who was at this time in London working on the English edition of the New York Herald, Field unfolds some of his doings and plans: The copies of the London Herald came to hand to-day; I am sure I am very much indebted to you for the boom you are giving me; it is of distinct value to me, and I appreciate it. I send you herewith a number of my verses that have appeared this week in my column. Having done my work ahead I am rusticating in great shape and have become a veritable terror to the small fry in which the lakes of this delectable locality abound. My books will be issued about the first of August; they will be very pretty pieces of work; I shall send you a set at once. My western verse seems to be catching on; I notice that a good many others of the boys are striking out in the same vein. Young McCarthy has made a translation from the Persian, and I have half a notion to paraphrase parts of it. I want to dip around in all sorts of versification, simply to show people that determination and perseverance can accomplish much in this direction. You know that I do not set much store by "genius." The books to which Field refers as likely to be issued about the first of August were his two "Little Books" of verse and tales, the copy for which had not, when he wrote the foregoing, all gone to the printer. His idea then was that a book could be got out with something like the same lightning dispatch as a daily newspaper. To tell the story of the publication of Field's two "Little Books," unique as it was in the making of books, requires that I say a few words of the change that had come over our personal relations, though not in our friendship. Two causes operated to make this change--my marriage in the spring of 1887, which drew from Field "Ye Piteous Appeal of a Forsooken Habbit" and the manuscript volumes of the best of his verse prior to that event, and my retirement from the staff of the Daily News, to assist in the foundation of the weekly political and literary journal called America. It was through my persuasion that we secured from Field his now famous "Little Boy Blue" for the initial number of the new periodical. Many stories are extant as to how this affecting bit of child verse was written, and many fac-similes of copies of it in Field's handwriting have been printed as originals. But the truth is, "Little Boy Blue" was written without any special suggestion or personal experience attending its conception and composition. It was an honest child, begotten of the freest and best genius of Field's fancy--the genius of a master craftsman who had the instinct to use only the simplest means to tell the significant story of the little toy dog that is covered with dust and the little toy soldier that is red with rust in so many a home. Field handed his original copy of "Little Boy Blue" to me in the Daily News office. We read it over carefully together, and there I, with his consent, made the change in the seventh line of the last verse, that may be noted in the fac-simile. With my interlineation the copy went to the printer, who had orders to return it to me, which was accordingly done, and it has been in my possession ever since. Field made several other noteworthy contributions to the pages of America, including such important verse or articles as "Apple Pie and Cheese," "To Robin Goodfellow," "A Proper Trewe Idyll of Camelot," "The Shadwell Folio," "Poe, Patterson, and Oquawka," "The Holy Cross," and "The Three Kings." The most remarkable of these was undoubtedly "The Shadwell Folio," which ran through two issues of America and afforded a prose setting for the following proofs of Field's versatility: "The Death of Robin Hood," "The Alliaunce," "Madge: Ye Hoyden," "The Lost Schooner," "Ye Crewel Sassinger Mill," "The Texas Steere," "A Vallentine," "Waly, Waly," "Ailsie, My Bairn," "Ye Morris Daunce," "Ye Battaile Aux Dames," "How Trewe Love Won Ye Battel," "Lollaby" (old English). The first section of the "Shadwell Folio" appeared in the issue of America of October 25th, 1888. It was one of those conceits in which Field took the greatest pleasure and in the preparation of which he grudged no labor. It purported to be a parchment folio discovered in an old hair trunk by Colonel John C. Shadwell, "a wealthy and aristocratic contractor," while laying certain main and sewer pipes in the cellar of a deserted frame house at 1423 Michigan Street, Chicago. This number would have located the cellar well out in Lake Michigan. Colonel Shadwell presented this incomparable folio to "The Ballad and Broadside Society of Cook County, Illinois, for the Discovery of Ancient Manuscripts and for the Dissemination of Culture (limited)." On receipt of the folio, this society immediately adopted the following resolutions: Resolved, That the ballads set forth in the parchment manuscript, known as the Shadwell folio, are genuine old English ballads, composed by English balladists, and illustrating most correctly life in Chicago in Ancient Times, which is to say, before the fire. Field then proceeded to review the contents of the fictitious folio, taking the precaution to premise his remarks and extracts with the statement that "it must not be surmised that all the poems in this Shadwell folio are purely local; quite a number treat of historical subjects." Of the poems in the first half of "The Shadwell Folio" I am able to give one of the most interesting in fac-simile, premising that, although this did not see the light of print until October, 1888, it was written in an early month of 1887. On pages 19 and 20 of the folio, according to Field, we get a "pleasant glimpse of the rare old time" in the ballad entitled:
Come hither, gossip, let us sit The air is cool and we can hear See how that Tom, my sone, doth fare Boys will be boys and girls be girls His evening chores ben all to-done, His squeaking crowd the fiddler plies, Nould give Frank in goodly store-- Your family trees and blade be naught So, gossip, let us found a line Sic stout and braw a sone as mine
Hard by ye lake, beneath ye shade, He fared him off on Aprille 4, "Ye schippe she ben as braw an hulk "Ye schippes yt saile untill ye towne "Ye Mary Jane ben lode with logs, "And ither schippes bring salt and ore, So wailed ye faire Chicago maide
The "Winfreda" here referred to is one of the poems upon which Field exhausted his ingenuity in composing with the verbal phraseology of different periods of archaic English. The version which appears in his "Songs and Other Verse" is his first attempt at versification "in pure Anglo-Saxon," as he says in a note to one of the manuscript copies. Field intended to render this finally into "current English," but, so far as I know, he never got to it. The publication of numerous poems and tales in the Daily News during the years 1888 and 1889, together with those printed in America, culminating in "The Golden Week," in July of the latter year, was but the prelude to the issue of his two "Little Books," according to a unique plan over which we spent much thought and consumed endless luncheons of coffee and apple pie. As I have intimated, Field was quite piqued over the cavalier reception of "Culture's Garland," and was determined that his next venture in book form should be between boards, a perfect specimen of book-making, and restricted, as far as his judgment could decide, to the best in various styles which he had written prior to the date of publication. He did not wish to entrust this to any publisher, and finally hit upon the idea of publishing privately, by subscription, which was carried out. The circular, which was prepared and mailed to a selected list of my friends, as well as his, will best explain the rather unusual method of this venture: PRIVATE CIRCULAR The accompanying blank addressed to me read: Find enclosed ------ for ------ ($ ) representing my subscription for ------ share ------ in the two-volume publication of Eugene Field's original work. If Field had any doubts as to the estimation in which he was held by his friends, they were dispelled by the ready response to this appeal, while the generous words accompanying many of the orders were well calculated to warm the cockles of a colder heart than beat within the breast of "The Good Knight sans peur et sans monnaie." Many persons to whom circulars had not been sent heard of the proposed publication and wrote asking to be allowed to subscribe. The largest single subscription was for five shares. There were three for two shares, and all the rest were for one share each, many echoed the "Certainly! and glad of the chance," which was Stuart Robson's response. F.J.V. Skiff, Field's old associate on the Denver Tribune, added a postscript to his order, saying, "And wish I could take it all," while Victor F. Lawson, in a personal note to me accompanying his order, wrote, "If you run short on this scheme I shall be glad to increase my subscription whenever advised that it is needed." This spirit pervaded the replies to our circular and gave Field keener pleasure than he ever experienced through the publication of any of his other books. Chicago, as was to be expected, took a majority of the shares; Denver came next, and then Kansas City. Comparatively few shares were taken in the East, for Field's fame had scarcely yet penetrated that region. But the names of Charles A. Dana, of Whitelaw Reid, and of Field's "Cousin Kate" were early among the subscribers. His friends among the stage folk responded numerously, and so did journalists and railway men. There were only some half dozen bibliomaniacs on the list, for Field had not then become the poet, torment, and idol of the devotees of rare and eccentric editions. To remind them of the unusual opportunity they missed, let me recall the negotiations for the making of this original edition de luxe, which was not published for profit, but as an example of the excellence of simplicity and clearness in printing. From the start Field insisted that everything about the "Little Books" should be American, and the best procurable of their kind. The letters from John Wilson & Son show the progress of the negotiations for the printing of the two books, which were carried on in full assurance that there would be no failure of funds to carry out the enterprise. I quote their first reply to my request for an estimate on the work:
SLASON THOMPSON, ESQ., Dear Sir:--In your request for a rough estimate of two volumes of 200 pages each, on paper 5 x 8 and printed page 2-1/2 x 4-1/2 you forgot to state the number of copies desired and the size of the type. We enclose two samples of paper that we can find. We have doubts about finding enough of the 5 x 8, but think we can that of the 5 x 7-1/2. We prefer the former. If the edition is small--say 100 or 150--we can, we think, scrape up enough of the 5 x 8. The size of your page could not, we think, be improved on. We also enclose samples of long primer, bourgeois and brevier sizes of type. [Here followed a detailed estimate on 250 copies of bourgeois type of $668.70 for the two volumes.] We should be most happy to execute the work. Hoping to hear from you again, We are respectfully yours, JOHN WILSON & SON.
Dear Sir:--After much delay we have succeeded in finding a paper manufacturer in Massachusetts (the only one in America) who has just commenced making a paper similar to that used in "Riley's Old-Fashioned Roses" (printed on English hand-made paper which I had sent them). To-morrow we shall send you a specimen (printed), also a specimen of another paper which we used some time ago on an edition de luxe of "Memorials of Canterbury" and of Westminster Abbey for Randolph & Co., of New York. No. 1 is a hand-made paper 16 x 20/28, at 60c. a lb.; No. 2, a machine made 20 x 22/60 at 20c. a lb.
Alterations from copy, 50 cts. an hour. (The estimate on No. 2 paper was $727.00.) We return "Riley." Both of these papers have the rough, or deckle, edge. We are anxious to make this book in the best style, and of American materials if possible. Respectfully yours, JOHN WILSON & SON.
It was well into the middle of the fall when I received the following note from the printers, showing that the work had been completed:
SLASON THOMPSON, ESQ.
We shall send the two copies of each volume (unnumbered) to secure the copyright, and when the certificate is received, will send it to you. These copies are over and above the 250 copies sent to you. Regretting the delay incident to the bringing out of two such volumes, and hoping that the author and his friends may be gratified and pleased with their mechanical execution, we are, Respectfully yours, JOHN WILSON & SON.
These two books contained not only the best of what Field had written up to that time, but their contents were selected with such care that they continue to represent the best he ever wrote. Much that he rejected at that time went to make up subsequent volumes of his works. The popular editions from the subscription plates of "A Little Book of Western Verse" and "A Little Book of Profitable Tales" had a phenomenal sale, and made a handsome return in royalties to him who sent them forth with the words: "Go, little book; and if any one would speak thee ill, let him bethink him that thou art the child of one who loves thee well."_ Read next: Volume 2: Chapter 6. His Second Visit To Europe Read previous: Volume 2: Chapter 4. More Letters Table of content of Eugene Field, A Study In Heredity And Contradictions, Volumes 1 and 2 GO TO TOP OF SCREEN Post your review Your review will be placed after the table of content of this book |
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