Books: Modern Minstrel

PEGASUS PULLS A HACK — Berton Braley—Minton, Batch ($3).

A “Book of Chronicles” rather than a “Book of Revelation” is Berton Braley’s description of his autobiography. Despite the sniffs of critics, Braley has made a good living out of what some people call “poetry.” He has published nearly 9,000 “poems” or, according to his reckoning, ten linear miles of poetic feet.

Besides contributing to newspapers and magazines, he has versified for greeting cards, mottoes, calendars, bridge score pads, trade papers in which he has sung of machine tools, electric toasters, coal breakers, Mergenthalers, vacuum cleaners. He has bombarded the quality magazines. Harper’s stood out against him five years, Century ten, Scribner’s twelve, Atlantic, 28. All succumbed except Vanity Fair which he is still attacking. It is nothing for Minstrel Braley to turn out six verses a week for a newspaper syndicate, four for trade publications, while keeping 25 to 60 in the mail as a matter of routine. On an average, a “poem” is rejected eight times, travels 500 miles. He figures his postage overhead alone has cost him $4,500.

When he was 18 young Braley got hold of a copy of Tom Hood’s Rhymster, an experience which he compares to that of the youthful Keats on first looking into Chapman’s Homer. Free verse and bizarre modern forms get short shrift from Rhymster Braley. The critics, in his opinion, know nothing about professional writing. And editors are a bad-mannered, incompetent, timid, unreliable lot of numbskulls with “more taboos than a South African savage.”

Born in Madison, Wis., Author Braley was, he says, “a fat and rather repulsive baby.” His father was a judge and politician with a secret ambition to write, mostly about Shakespeare. Young Berton was a prig until, after his father’s death, he had to leave school and spend two years in a factory. At 18 he sold his first piece of verse to Judge for $3. After working his way through the University of Wisconsin, writing for college papers and holding down odd jobs, he began his career on a Butte, Mont. newspaper. When, after four years there, he sold ten “poems” at one lick to the Saturday Evening Post (Songs of a Mining Camp), he pulled up stakes and went to New York.

He nearly starved, but hung on, sold a few “poems,” helped edit Puck for six months, got a lift here, a boost there, made friendships with other writers, editors, artists. Markets opened and checks began dropping in. His peak year was 1913 when he was taken into the Players’ Club (“the best club in the world”) and covered the World Series in verse for United Press.