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Introduction to Tramping Across America: Travel Writings of
Vachel Lindsay
Vachel Lindsay. Tramping Across America: Travel Writings of
Vachel Lindsay. Rosehill Press, (1999).
Introduction Essay
Again and again, American writers in the twentieth century have
heard the seductive call of Walt Whitman's "Song of the Open
Road," responding with a typically American genre that might
be called the Road Book. This highly popular mini-genre would
include such diverse titles as John Steinbeck's Travels With
Charley, Peter Jenkins' A Walk Across America, William
Least Heat Moon's Blue Highways, Charles Kuralt's On
the Road With Charles Kuralt, and even such irreverent narratives
as Jack Kerouac's On The Road and Hunter Thompson's Fear
and Loathing in Las Vegas. But if Whitman provided the ultimate
inspiration to "read" the landscape (as Kerouac so aptly
put it), then Vachel Lindsay must be seen as a major contributor-if
not the inspirational model-to writers in this genre. Lindsay
occupies this landmark position in our literary landscape primarily
for two often neglected but still highly readable works: Adventures
While Preaching the Gospel of Beauty (1914) and A Handy
Guide for Beggars (1916).
One of three downstate Illinois poets who achieved national prominence
in the years immediately preceding World War One (the others,
of course, were Edgar Lee Masters and Carl Sandburg), Vachel Lindsay
was born in Springfield in 1879 and committed suicide in 1931--in
the very house where he was born--by drinking Lysol. That tragic
year was the nadir of the early Depression, and another Midwestern
poet (Hart Crane) chose to end his life a few months later. Although
the precise alchemy Lindsay's suicide may never be known, he was
clearly tormented by debt, writer's block, and the pervasive sense
of doom that accompanied this year of national bankruptcy and
personal suffering--catastrophes that a less optimistic writer
may have been able to take in stride.
But Vachel Lindsay was a card-carrying optimist who made a kind
of religion out of aesthetics, what he called the Gospel of Beauty:
" . . . I am knocking at the door of the world," he
proclaimed, "with a dream in my hand" (Gospel of
Beauty 21). He believed that even historical Springfield,
Illinois, state capital and home of Abraham Lincoln, as well as
the site of turn-of-the-century race riots, could be transformed
and resurrected into a "magical" city. One glimpses
this celestial city, the product perhaps of his Campbellite liberalism
and Populist sympathies, in his fanciful drawings of huge censers
(like strange, smoking space ships) suspended in the sky over
the realistically wrought dome of the State Capitol and other
Springfield landmarks. No writer in the history of American letters
(including William Carlos William and his beloved city of Paterson,
New Jersey) invested so much emotional and artistic capital in
the fate of one city-only to feel those hopes irretrievably dashed.
The "tired" citizens, after all, didn't see the celestial
city but "only a place for trade" (Beggar's Guide
191). As the poet observed in the third "Gospel
of Beauty" poem ("On the Building of Springfield"),
one of the works performed most frequently on the lecture circuit,
Say, is my prophecy too fair and far?
I only know, unless her faith be high,
The soul of this, our Nineveh, is doomed,
Our little Babylon will surely die.
(Collected Poems 75)
This utopian preoccupation with the city of Springfield is framed
in a particular way, or put into a special context, by the events
of Lindsay's life-not merely his birth and death in the same house
at 603 South Fifth Street, but his extended "tramping"
outside Springfield in 1906, 1908, and 1912, when he visited Florida,
Georgia, North Carolina, Tennessee, New Jersey, Pennsylvania,
Missouri, Kansas, Colorado, and New Mexico. Springfield became
for him the numinous hub at the center of these extended forays
into the American landscape, the jumping-off point, and the ultimate
destination to which he instinctively returned like some migratory
bird. In any event, those three trips formed the basis for the
prose episodes and incidental poetry of Adventures While Preaching
the Gospel of Beauty (1914) and A Handy Guide for Beggars (1916).
These two books were published out of chronological order since
the Gospel deals with the later, western experiences as
the Guide does with the earlier, eastern ones.
The single, most extraordinary fact about these books is their
very existence. Lindsay had no model for such literary enterprises,
and he launched right into the texts without really providing
his reader any kind of background or rationale-as if it were perfectly
normal for a grown man, without any money or baggage except a
few pamphlets, to go roaming about the country "trading rhymes
for bread." One enters the fairy-land of Lindsay's imagination
while sharing his literal observations. The real and the imaginary
co-exist, as they did in all of his important literary efforts.
The necessity of this aesthetic-ethical program is a kind of given,
an axiom upon which everything else depends. No proof was required,
and apparently none was expected. How many homes in contemporary
America, armed with burglar alarms, 911 emergency numbers, motion
sensors, and even security guards, would welcome such a peripatetic
poet? How far could Vachel Lindsay walk today before being detained
or arrested? How many good burghers would sit still long enough
to hear his vatic message?
Yet, in the halycon years before World War One, it was still
possible-if difficult-to discover good Samaritans with a yen for
poetry. Many an agrarian family took in the itinerant bard and
tendered food and lodging in exchange for his vigorously chanted
rhymes. Those encounters-a kind of poetry "outreach"
program-are the main subject of Lindsay's two "road books."
But Lindsay is a far more complex writer than implied in this
simple overview-he is no mere memoirist or journal-kepper. He
overflows with opinions, insights, wisdom, and some delightful
obiter dicta. There is a highly oral and coversational quality
to these works, as if the reader had become one more set of ears
and eyes on Lindsay's strange odyssey. Lindsay was, after all,
a great talker, and his oral performances (especially of the thunderous
"Congo") are legendary, an essential part of his poetic
persona. But like any verbal artist, Vachel Lindsay has permanent
value and readability because of how he writes, no matter
what he writes about.
His subjects (farm life, rural eccentrics, animals, weather,
and food) are familiar; his treatment of them remains fresh and
vivid even today, some eighty years after publication. What the
reader hears at the end of this millennium (an appropriate time
to be reading such a Blakean-prophetic writer) is Lindsay's absolutely
original voice, an utterance uniquely whimsical in tone and gentle
in manner. In Kansas, his ravenous appetite finds this expression
on the page: "The ham and ice water were going to my head
as it was. And I could have eaten more. I could have eaten a fat
Shetland pony" (Gospel 62-63). Or, consider this observation
apropos the Kansas grasshopper: "The Kansas grasshopper makes
himself friendly. He bites pieces out of the back of my shirt
the shape and size of the ace of spades. Then he walks into the
door he has made and loses himself. Then he has to be helped out,
in one way or another" (Gospel 55). Lindsay leaves
his verbal signature with such whimsies as the following, a strange
blend of personification and children's literature:
We had met Mr. Terrapin, Mr. Owl, Mrs. Cow, and Master Calf,
all of them carved by the train-wheels, Mr. Buzzard sighing
beside them. We had met Mr. Pig again at the cracker's table,
cooked by last year's forest fire, run over by last year's train.
But what had it mattered? For we together had had ears for the
mockingbird, and eyes for the moss-hung live oaks . . . .
(Beggar's Guide 122)
Here is another splendid passage, a few pages along, teeming
with metaphor and personification:
A chair is a sturdy creature. I wonder who captured the first
one? Who put out its eyes and taught it to stand still? A table-cloth
is ritualistic. How nobly the napkin defends the vest, while
thoseglistening birds, the knife, the fork, the spoon, bring
one food.
(Beggar's Guide 133)
Clearly, this species of writing approaches a kind of prose-poetry,
and thetwo books are replete with such passages. The description
of the Florida swamp (above) is balanced by this elegant Shakespearean
conceit on Kansas flora, perceived imaginatively as a marching
brigade, composed of "healthy legions of waving mustard"
and "regiments of pale lavender larkspur" as well as
"that disreputable camp-follower the button-weed." Lindsay
concludes this variation on a theme by saying, "Here is a
group of black-eyed Susans, marching like suffragettes to get
the vote at Tipton. Here is a war-dance of Indian paint. And here
are bluebells" (Gospel 23).
Making the same point that Robert Pirsig was to make in Zen
and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance some sixty years later,
Lindsay notes that the Midwestern scenery cannot be properly appreciated
from the roofed confines of a car. Like Sandburg (who also tramped
around the country, supporting himself with the sale of stereopticons)
and Whitman (who internalized and absorbed all his natural environment
or Umwelt), Lindsay identifies with the broad, democratic
vistas of the American scene: "Many's the night I have slept
in the barn; lofts of Kansas with the wide loft door rolled open
and the inconsequential golden moon for my friend" (Gospel
7).
But Lindsay did not specialize in prettified and idealized scenes
of American life. The grotesque, the disgusting, and the downright
evil made their appearance in these pages also. Consider the sadistic
cowboys of Great Bend, Kansas who systematically beat and tortured
Dick the Bronco until the animal collapsed one day in a paroxsym
of pain:
He was bleeding at the mouth and his eyes almost popped out
of his head. He had hardly an inch of hide that was whole, and
his raw places were completely covered with Kansas flies. And
the hot winds have made the flies so ravenous they draw blood
from the back of the harvester's hand the moment they alight."
(Gospel 71)
This incident in Great Bend, Kansas led directly to Lindsay's
composition of one of his best poems (often singled out by critics):
"The Broncho [sic] That Would Not Be Broken."
It is dramatically clear that the poet identifies with the indomitable
will and heroic dignity of the bronco:
In that last afternoon your boyish heart broke.
The hot wind came down like a sledge-hammer stroke.
The blood-sucking flies to a rare feast awoke.
And they searched out your wounds, your death-warrant tracing.
And the merciful men, their religion enhancing,
Stopped the red reaper, to give you a chance.
Then you died on the prairie, and scorned all disgraces,
O broncho that would not be broken of dancing."
(Collected Poems 78)
Cruelty to animals was not the only "disgrace" that
Lindsay witnessed on his wanderings. He saw ill-fed and ill-kept
children; disease-ridden shanties, filthy urban missions (a far
cry from the Salvation Army of his hero, Gen. William Booth),
and a steady undercurrent and occasionally overt voicing of racism.
It is worth noting that, when Lindsay could find lodging on one
leg of his Missouri journey, he was offered hospitality by a gracious
African-American family. The term "African-American"
was unknown, however, and the infamous "N" word seemed
to be on everyone's lips, a historically accurate bit of linguistic
history (compare Samuel Clemens' transcriptions of Pike County
dialect in Huckleberry Finn). Kansas Caucasians were upset,
for example, when Johnson (the African-American) beat Flynn (the
Irishman) in the famous heavyweight bout of 1912. A man in Florida
asked Lindsay if "niggers" had souls. Lindsay answered
in the affirmative (Beggar's Guide 116). Racism was rampant,
taking all sorts of bizarre forms, as in this diatribe filled
with hateful racial and ethnic slurs, oddly reminiscent of Klan-style
bigotry encountered even today:
"There are just a few white people, and more mulattoes
every day. The white people ought to keep their blood pure.
Russians are white people. Germans, English, and Americans are
white people. French people are niggers. Dagoes are niggers.
Jews are niggers. All people are niggers but just these four.
There is going to be a big war in two or three years between
all the white people and all the niggers. The niggers are going
to combine and force a fight, Japan in the lead." (Beggar's
Guide 124)
In a similar vein, another interlocutor blurted to Lindsay, "I'm
awful glad to see a white man. This place is full of Bohunks,
and Slavs, and Rooshians, and Poles. . . . They're not bad to
have around, but they ain't Cawcasians. They all talk Eyetalian"
(Beggar's Guide 197).
Religious bigotry may not have occurred as frequently in the
two texts, although Lindsay did encounter an anti-Catholic Congregationalist
who demanded to know his denomination. Lindsay responded, "I
am what is sometimes disrespectfully called a 'Campbellite'"
(Beggar's Guide 234). This answer deserves a certain amount
of amplification because Lindsay's religious orientation, although
nominally Campbellite (also known as Disciples of Christ or members
of the Christian Church) was never rigorously orthodox. Lindsay
is clearly in awe of two important non-Cambellites: William Blake
and Gautama Buddha. But, more importantly, the single most frequently
occurring religious reference in the two texts is Saint Francis,
an outdoor, animal-oriented mendicant whose life became a potent
exemplum for the Springfield bard. And that is the
first of many Roman Catholic threads running like a filigree through
the two travel narratives. Perhaps his love of medieval romance
and ritual in general might account for Lindsay's sympathies,
but the data is rather suggestive. There are all those censers
in his line drawings, for example-hardly a commonplace liturgical
vessel in good Protestant sanctuaries. At one point, Lindsay actually
attends a Roman Catholic mass in the company of his German Catholic
host (Beggar's Guide 79), and two of the incidental poems,
"Heart of God" (Gospel 27) and "Immaculate
Conception Church" (Beggar's Guide 221) are highly
Catholic in subject matter and approach. Immaculate Conception
Church just happens to be the seat of the Bishop of the Diocese
of Springfield-and the church building itself is featured in one
of Lindsay's art nouveau drawings.
Why did a graduate of Hiram College flirt with Catholicism? One
might ask the same question of his other cultural and aesthetic
flirtations-his incorporation of several drawing styles into his
own graphic designs, his love of Blake, Ruskin, Swinburne, and,
of course, Whitman. These catholic (with a small "c")
interests suggest a fertile and highly adaptive imagination, an
ability to appreciate the cornucopia of life available to him
in those productive years before World War One. The poet, the
worshipper of the Muse, could easily "renew his vows"
in a Catholic church, vows of an essentially aesthetic nature,
all set in the "cornland" of Illinois. The "Immaculate
Conception" poem is a brilliant synthesis of everything that
mattered to Vachel Lindsay:
Scourge me, a slave that brings unhallowed praise
To you, stern Virgin in this church so sweet,
If I desert the ways wherein my feet
Were set by Heaven, in prenatal days.
It is not too great a stretch of the imagination to see the "church
so sweet" as extending far beyond that one venue, expanding
to include all of Springfield, all of the states mentioned in
the two Road Books-indeed, the entire universe, as suggested by
his drawings.
It is astonishing to realize how much Lindsay omitted from the
content of his narratives and poems-all the realistic "data"
that has become so prevalent in modern writing and consumer living-brand
names, for example, names of trains, cars, soaps, candies, highways,
and counties. His contemporary Hart Crane literally concocted
a new kind of poetry from such neologisms. But Lindsay skipped
over these names and treated their referents generically because,
for him, they were mere backdrops, raw materials for the spiritually
inclined artist. One day lived in the company of Vachel Lindsay
would have been worth a thousand days of "surfing the Net"
or indulging in some other form of "data-crunching."
For Lindsay was not intending to document the world but, rather,
to present the world as seen. Like his hero William Blake,
Lindsay may have been the closest thing to an authentic mystic
in our literary tradition, a rare soul who experienced the momentary
and the eternal all at once, a spiritual and aesthetic revolutionary
who shouted to his future readers, "An artistic Renaissance
is coming. An America is coming such as was long ago prophesied
in Emerson's address on the American Scholar. This by faith, and
a study of the signs, we proclaim" (Gospel 94)!
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