NON-FICTION: Idler

The Story.* A country carpenter—tall, inarticulate, muscled like a bison—marries a horse-breeder’s daughter and moves in from Huntington, L. I., to hammer up frame houses in Brooklyn, the lustily sprawling community of 1823. His wife, Louisa, bears nine children in quiet, capable fecundity, expressing through motherhood and housewifery certain deep stirrings that are incommunicable to her husband.

Her strong little sons move freely about the town, one in particular, Walt, the second oldest, bringing home much news of teamsters and ferryboatmen, or—the gravity gone from his ruddy-brown face, his tar-black hair cocked with excitement—of how the Marquis de Lafayette picked him up and kissed him.

This small Walt awes her somewhat. He is affectionate, demonstrative, but utterly imperturbable, even before his father’s taciturn anger or tenderness. When, by 16, he has towered up to his father’s height and beam, his mother has accepted as inscrutable in him a poise that seems a latent power, like a wind not yet blowing.

Swimming, gulls’ egging, clamming, spearing eels through the bay ice, are more in his line than schoolbooks. He gravely swaps yarns with the bearded herdsmen of Montauk Point. The sea’s spell is on him early.

He reads the Thousand and One Nights, learns to set type, begins writing prose and verse for Brooklyn sheetlets, the Star, the Patriot. When city life irks—even New York with John Jacob Astor tinkling through it in his sleigh—he leaves his compositor’s stool to godown the Island and teach in rural schools—at Flushing, Woodbury, Whitestone. He is loved everywhere, a big gentle lad who joins in at games as soon as the bell rings; and he is content everywhere—for whenever it seems good to him he walks away, down the country roads, over a plain, off to the shore to split waves with his strong body and loaf on the warm sand.

That imperturbable quality grows in him. Editors, recognizing his ability, are irritated by his indolence, then struck foolish and speechless by the impersonal tolerance and good Humor with which he takes his leave. Openings are plentiful, for he can pump a column into a gorgeous political balloon and, modeling his style after Edgar Poe’s, turn off fiction serials that harrow most satisfactorily. By sheer imperturbability he proceeds on up to the Brooklyn Eagle’s staff, departing, when his Abolition feelings get too vigorous for his employers, to take charge of Publisher McClure’s new Crescent in New Orleans.

He is 29 and graying, patriarchal. Women, to whom he was long indifferent, have come into his life as simply as food and drink—as Woman. In New Orleans, an exquisitely voluptuous Creole girl, schooled in Paris, takes him—great-bodied, red-bronze of complexion—to herself as Man. They part, still lovers, and the episode is invested with the same universality that spreads over a vast hoard of experiences and impressions he gains traveling the broad Mississippi basin by canal, river and Great Lakes, by farmlands, mountains and new cities, back to Brooklyn, to lean on the front fence sucking a twig, to decide to quit picayune political hacking and try working with his big hands.

His father and George and Jeff, brothers, are delighted, even if Walt does hammer all around his nailheads and sit on a rafter reading Homer and Aeschylus at lunch hour. He has “quit loafing.” But the morning comes when he is late for breakfast and they find him sitting up in bed, the floor strewn with loose papers, writing again. They guess he is hopeless.

Only the mother, Louisa, senses his new, deeper travail. She leaves Walt more alone than ever, except to put food where he can get it and unlatch the kitchen window when he is gone to wander in the night, during months of vision, revision, destruction and creation, months of the purgation, despair, and finally the vehement triumph of a man giving his whole self to his country and his kind.

“I had great trouble,” he says simply, “in leaving out the stock poetical touches, but succeeded at last.” Five versions of Leaves of Grass have been cast to wind, water and fire, after bitter hours of solitude in the lee of basaltic boulders on a sand-strewn promontory. The sixth version is stark flesh and marrow with life’s tide flooding, pounding through it.

Emerson writes that silly phrase, “I greet you at the beginning of a great career”—silly because the greatness is complete, the “oneself” has been sung. The rest is controversial and boisterous”Walt the boastful, Walt the Broadway swaggerer. It is splendid and touching—Walt nursing Civil War soldier boys, Walt’s seerhood and second childhood in Camden, N. J. But it is all on the down grade, all in the public eye and more or less familiar, all but the peace of Walt’s profound epitaph—

Come, lovely and soothing death,
Undulate round the world, serenely arriving. . . .

The Significance, the grand thing, is to have made Walt known as a natural force is known, by its unhurried yet manifest effects—by putting the reader into the boots of people who knew and felt Walt, bringing his big frame and nature so close that psychological terms are irrelevant and it is unnecessary even to quote the poems to show why they were written, what they mean. If there is a mite of unction spread through Author Rogers’ pages, it is not obtrusive nor out of place in a book that is bound to be laid warmly and strongly to the hearts of many people—a book, by the way, from huge presses that roar today on a Long Island plain Walt must often have crossed, meditating.

The Author is arrestingly young, only 25 or so, only three years out of Harvard—a fact which seems to have annoyed certain stiff-jointed metropolitan pundits, who, holding Whitman to be an object for grave veneration, have almost called Cameron Rogers an overweening puppy. But young Author Rogers is not overweening nor has he overreached his powers. He is mature, not precocious—maybe as the result of a cosmopolitan upbringing. He and his brothers were schooled in Switzerland. His summer vacations from college were all spent with the Meynell family in England—authors Wilfrid and Alice and their talented children. After college, where he had played at football and tennis as well as writing for the Advocate and Hasty Pudding (drama), he joined the World’s Work staff, edited a roaring book of drinking songs (Full and By), contributed essays to the Saturday Review. Gusty Christopher Morley is his friend, and Rogers is now editing The Three Hours for Lunch Club Book.

*THE MAGNIFICENT IDLER—Cameron Rogers—Doubleday, Page ($2.50).