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JAMES WHITCOMB RILEY , THE POET AS FLYING ISLANDS OF THE NIGHT HOME

JAMES WHITCOMB RILEY
THE POET AS FLYING ISLANDS OF THE NIGHT
by Thomas Earl Williams with primary illustrations by Katherine Kuonen and the great assistance of Robert Tinsley with Riley artifacts, Copyright, 1997, Thomas Earl Williams
Part 9

CRESTILLOMEEM
DRUNKENNESS AND DELIRIUM
TREMENS AS A LADY TRYING TO
RUIN RILEY'S LIFE

BOOKMARK FOR RILEY'S FOUR GREAT ENCOUNTERS WITH CRESTILLOMEEM
BOOKMARK FOR THE FIRST FOLLOWING THE UNTIMELY DEATH OF THE POET'S MOTHER

250 • THE POET AS FLYING ISLANDS OF THE NIGHT

CRESTILLOMEEM
DRUNKENNESS AND DELIRIUM TREMENS AS A LADY
TRYING TO RUIN RILEY'S LIFE

In the Preface we first met Crestillomeem.' She is the naggy depression and drunkenness that threatens Riley. She is Riley's "Queen." She has taken charge of him in his late 20's when "The Flying Islands Of the Night" was written. Riley calls her his "Second Consort" in the later "book" editions of the poem. His first and foremost "Consort" was his beloved "soul-mate" Nellie who died shortly before the poem was first composed.

1. We remember her name is an elision of "crestfallen" (dejected), "ill" and "me" backwards and forwards.

Crestillomeem is the Riley who goes crazy about life sometimes and becomes a

binge              drinker

before pulling himself out. She is also the scary tremens and tor-porous deliriums

of alcoholism. These are, of course, the vision of Riley's great autobiographical poem "The Flying Islands of the

Night 9, Crewstillomeeem is the nasty Queen of Riley's life try­ing to destroy its meaning and hope for success.

Riley in the clutches of "Crestillomeem." A court record of a Riley arrest and convic­tion of public intoxication in Greenfield. Indiana, the poet's hometown, on Dec. 27, 1877, within the few months prior to writing "The Flying Islands of the Night."

CRESTILLOMEEM • 251

Crestillomeem is one of Riley's "Flying islands." Flying Islands are Riley's lives in the poem. They are not a singular island. Riley, with great insight, knew himself as an archipelago afloat in "red eye" whiskey at the time of the writing of "The Flying Islands of the Night." All of the islands make up Riley's conception of his own life as a man in great alienation act­ing through life as a cast of players. Riley was a great enough actor to get by with this. He simply was not a single "himself."

Islands are lonely images. They are by themselves and don't have "con­nections." Riley must have felt so very, very lonely at times to take upon himself this representation of himself in his imagination. I suspect this loneliness was the cause for becoming Crestillomeem at times. Most often, Riley retreated to Greenfield when he fell under Crestillomeem's spell and "waited her out" among friends and family.

We see Riley using this depressed and sometimes drunken aspect of him­self most often in his John C. Walker poems which we will discuss later in this book. For now, we might want to get a taste of how this persona wrote poetry:

JOHN GOLLIHER'S THIRD WOMERN ' (1879) (From the Kokomo Saturday TRIBUNE of Dec. 27, 1879)

I'm               - not adzac'ly in the old-maid kindo way 0' sayin' things onpleasant 'cause there're plenty sich to say: -

'Ner cause I am a womern 'ats tuck sich manly part

In Tempernce institutions as to spile her womern's heart:-

But I 'low 'at married people, as a rule, all has their sheer 0' troubles and vexations. - Yet theyr're one example here 'At some folks find confusin' - seein's how they used to say John Golliher's third womern wouldn't be alive today!

You see, John's ben a drinker - jest a SOAKER thue and thue!­As his daddy was afore him, and his old grandaddy, too! - W'y. the Golliher's, I reckon, of you'd stand 'em in a row, Would make a string o' drunkards clean from here to Jericho.

John was drunk at his first weddin', But his wife had made her brags

252 • THE POET AS FLYING ISLANDS OF THE NIGHT

She'd have him, drunk or sober, ef she had to dress in rags,-And thems the kind o' clothin' she dome to 'fore she died, And laid 'em down forever, thanking God, and saisfied.

John's sobered up a little after that; and found a place

For the little girl still left him - like her mother in the face;

And fer-well, a year and better, he kep' straight enough, I guess Til he met a widder womern 'at upset him more or less.

He was warned agin the womern -she was warned agin the man,-And ef that won't make a weddin', w 'y there're nothin' else 'at can! And when THAT couple married, they was some 'at even bet The widder would out-last him, hut - John's a-livin yet!

Things was might bad, I tell you, at that funeral o'hern!- No serous indications o' very deep concern‑

Except the tears 'at Mary his grow'd-up dorter shed

Fer the crazy wretch with tremans howlin' there beside the dead!

W'y the preachers worked their sermints out o' that!- and women wrung Their empty hands in meetin! and shouted, cried and sung:

And little sleepy childern was shuck awake to pray,

With "Golliher'll git ye fer neglectin' that-away!"

They was no one else to 'tend him, so I staid there -more on Account of Mary's feelin's than fur any keer o' John, ‑

Fer that fust thing, when he rallied so's he knowed me, I- says- I-"I'm mighty feered the chances is you aint a-goin' to die!"

O I said it! and I meant it! and was jest a stoopin' down

To bathe the feller's forred when he whispered, with a frown,‑

"Don't, then! I'll DIE - A DRUNKARD! and the womern who can say As mean a thing as that is, ortn't tetch him! GO A WA Y!"

It was afterwards 'at Mary told me she was peekin' thue The kitchen-door, and saw me, knelln'- like I used to do In public meetins' - on'y, the prayer, she said was more Full o' lovin' stren'th 'an any 'at she'd ever heerd afore.-

CRESTILLOMEEM • 253

And, rainy, I reckon the girl's opinion was

About as nigh pefection as they git 'em now - because, Her father he forgive me- quit his drinkin'- and is- Well, John Golfiber's third womem ain't got nuthin' else to tell.

I. This poem parenthetically points out the difficult life of women in Riley's day. Life was literally a woman-killer. A man might marry the first time for love, resulting in several chil­dren. To bring up the children, he might marryseveral more times "for convenience." Riley describes housework of women in "My First Womern:"

"Ter I'm allus thinkin' - thinkin' Of the first one's peaceful ways. A bilin' soap and singin' of the Lord's amazin' grace.

-And I'm thinkin' of her constant, Dyin' carpet-chain and stuff And a makin' up rag carpets,

When the floor was GOOD ENOUGH!

And I'm allus thinkin' of her reddin' up around the house; Er cookin fer the farm hands; er drivin' up the cows.

- And there she lays out yander By the lower medder fence. W'y they ain't no sadder thing

Than to think of my first women), and her funeral last spring."

Crestillomeem's spell on Riley really wasn't so humerous as John C. Walker portrayed. She brought about Riley's depression or was at least a product of it. But she is also a uniquely important person in the life of James Whitcomb Riley because she impels him through dialogue to see her as a

consequence to him if he does not pursue the only other goal for his life that James Whitcomb Riley could imagine more powerful - the lust for fame (another figure in Riley's imaginative self-life who Riley thinks of as an equally clearly defined "flying island" named Krung. We shall meet Krung later on in this book. The happy result of it all was, however, to allow Spraivoll, yet another character, to sing poetically. This conforms to the common description of alcohol as "the great exciter of the Yes function in people."

It was about himself as the sinful persona dominated by his alcoholic Crestillomeem that Riley's 1878 poem, "The Flying Islands of the Night," was written in the turmoil of one of his greatest periods of intoxication and tremens and possible concern over impotency.

In the "Flying Islands of the Night," Riley knows that Crestillomeem, his alcoholism, is constantly beckoning him. She seeks to destroy him and even

254 • THE POET AS FLYING ISLANDS OF THE NIGHT

seek his death. Crestillomeem demands Riley toe her line and meet her demands. She invites him to imprison himself in the tower of servitude to alcoholism and its fantasies. We read:

"The Queen (Crestillomeem)

Impatiently awaits his Majesty

And craves his presence in the Tower of Stars,

That she may there express full tenderly

Her great solicitude."

In alcoholics' confessional genre literature the curse of alcohol manifest in a person, here Crestillomeem in James Whitcomb Riley, always leads to self-destructive behavior. As the great temperance mediator Luther Benson states in Fifteen Years in Hell, "(to go out on an alcoholic spree) "is to quench the light of ambition, to crush hope, entomb joy, lay waste the pow­ers of the mind, neglect duty, desert the family and commit in the end sui­cide."

In the poem, "The Flying Islands of the Night," Riley is able to cast her off. In reality Riley never was able to fully subdue his alcoholism. Riley's capacity to physically love was probably affected by Crestillomeem. One suspects that impotence was her legacy, possibly manifest about the time he began writing "The Flying Islands of the Night" and after the death of Nellie Cooley, the only woman Riley had loved as a soul-mate.

The Crestillomeem character of Riley's fragmented life is "roughly" ref­erenced in verse in James Whitcomb Riley's poem "Luther Benson" con­temporaneously written with "Flying Islands" as the poem's subtitle says, "After reading his autobiography." The poem describes alcoholism as the "vulture curse, That hovers o'er the universe, With ready talons quick

to strike In every human heart alike." Benson's autobiography, Fifteen Years in Hell, like Riley's play/poem, marks how Benson was wasted in alcohol addiction, reformed,and went on to "lecture" extensively throughout Indiana and the nation as a temperance speaker. The parallel to the move­ment of the acts of "Flying Islands" is pronounced as is the eventual progress of Riley's own life...although Riley's"cause" was not temperance but the spread of humanistic and "kenotic" themes. His dependency makes of his dissolute and alcoholic nature the relationship of something wedded to him as a queenly wife as well as curse. Possibly "Flying Islands" was originally intended as an extensive farcical account of the life of Benson, based on Benson's autobiography, in the nature of Riley's comical imitation of Benson on the platform called "Benson Out-Bensoned" but if so Riley's

CRESTILLOMEEM • 255

realization that the alcoholic addiction was similar to his own probably changed the story line and the play\poem into Riley's own autobiography. Benson does not seem to be remembered much these days, but his book Fifteen Years in Hell describing his alcoholic years was a national best‑

seller in the 1880's.

A major event in Riley's life must have been his first encounter with tremens from his alcoholism. This was the most dispiriting aspect of play with himself as Crestillomeem. I am informed that such tremens come only to one of lengthy and alcoholic lifestyle.

Riley admits his writing is "under the influence" in his Sixth and Final episode of the Buzz Club Papers in which series "The Flying Islands of the Night" appears. When writing "The Flying Islands" the author was stated to be under the "baleful influence of intoxicants...driving reason from her Throne." The work is the product of "old crime."

Riley was, of course, notorious for using pseudonymous names for his writings. The ostensible writer of the original "The Flying Islands of the Night" is Mr. Clickwad, a member of the "Buzz Club" whose poetry is deliberately questioned in the very first of the "Respectfully Declined" Papers of the Buzz Club. Another member asks: "The gentleman who has just favored us," said Mr. Plempton, "is a weird cuss, but if he'll pardon my curiosity I should like to inquire if he was ever troubled with the tremens?" The answer is obvious. "The Flying Islands of the Night," appearing in the fourth installment of the "Respectfully Declined" series, is introduced as Mr. Clickwad's work.

Riley knows of the tremens. He experienced them. He also wrote of them in such prose accounts as "Jamesy" where he refers to them as "jim jams." At one point in that short narrative appears the following colloquy which might relate to one of James Whitcomb Riley's own experiences:

"Liable to what?" said I

"Liable to jilt keel over - wink out, you know - cos he

has fits, kindo jim jams. I^. guess. Had a fearful old matinee

with him last night! You see he comes all sorts o' games on

me, and I have to put up for him - cos he's got to have

whisky, and if we can on'y keep him about so full he's a

regular lamb, but he don't stand no monkeyin' when he wants

whisky, now you bet!.."

Riley must have felt enraged because intoxication was not supposed to have such a down side! As Riley's teenaged years dawned alcohol use was

256 • THE POET AS FLYING ISLANDS OF THE NIGHT

only beginning to questioned. When Riley was 11, a newspaper article pub­lished in the Hancock DEMOCRAT of July 3, 1861 stated, "It was at one time generally believed that the use of alcoholic liquors was positively nec­essary and beneficial to all men...Physicians recommended such beverages and regular daily rations of rum were provided in all armies and navies. These notions are still entertained by many persons, and very generally there is a want of correct information on the subject. It is very common for sol­diers of all classes to indulge in the use of alcoholic beverages...By close observation and many experiments, it has been found that the tissues and the blood of drunkards, as well as those who continually tipple in beer and whisky, but do not get drunk, are generally in a state of degeneration. Alcohol passes into the blood and retards the elimination of waste and inju­rious matter from the body and thus tends to produce disease, especially fever..." The effects of alcohol were obviously unclear in Riley's time.

Eventually, Riley came to see his alcohol addiction to personify the activ­ity of a person he called Crestillomeem and took her vision of himself as his own to see what it meant. This was done in "The Flying Islands of the Night." Crestillomeem never left Riley but came to become a pretty much subdued lady except for many private but also a few highly publicized inci­dents such as one recurrence in Louisville, Kentucky in February 1890 which caused the breakup of his stand-up comedy partnership with Edgar Nye.

Crestillomeem did not produce poetry. Riley wrote no poetry when he was in delirium. Crestillomeem did, however, provide the delirious subject matter of a small body of very important poetry to a biographer. She gave Riley "An Adjustable Lunatic" with its vision of a lover in another dimen­sion whose ethereal connectedness is an otherwise mad man's only touch with reality.

FANTASY (1878)
(FROM "AN ADJUSTABLE LUNATIC")

(a poem written by a fictional author in a Riley sketch, a man who subse­quently committed suicide within the story line and who described himself as "an adjustable lunatic" by profession. The sketch from which this poem derives portrays the writer of "Fantasy" as a penniless bachelor, the owner of a painting of a mysteriously enchanting woman in his room.

The poem reveals an impossible romantic attachment so real and yet so

CRESTILLOMEEM • 257

imaginary that it severs the man from his senses. As a biographer, I find the story bears relation to Riley's relationship with his married friend, Nellie Cooley, so recently dead at the time of its writing.)

And on my hearing fell a storm

Of gusty music, sadder yet

Than every whimper of regret

That sobbing utterance could form,

And patched with scraps of sound that seemed Torn out of tunes that demons dreamed,

258 • THE POET AS FLYING ISLANDS OF THE NIGHT

And pitched to such a piercing key, It stabbed the ear with agony; And when at last it lulled and died, I stood aghast and terrified.

I shuddered and I shut my eyes

And still could see, and feel aware Some mystic presence waited there;

And staring, with a dazed surprise,
I saw a creature so divine

That never subtle thought of mine May reproduce to inner sight So fair a vision of delight.

A syllable of dew that drips

From out a lily's laughing lips Could not be sweeter than the word I listened to, yet never heard. -For, oh, the woman hiding there Within the shadows of her hair, Spake to me in an undertone

So delicate, my soul alone

But understood it as a moan

Of some weak melody of wind

A heavenward breeze had left behind.

A tracery of trees, grotesque

Against the sky, behind her seem Like shapeless shapes of arabesque

Wrought in an oriental screen; And tall, austere and statuesque

She loomed before it - e'en as though

The spirit-hand of Angelo

Had chiseled her to life complete,

With chips of moonshine round her feet.

And I grew jealous of the dusk,

To see it softly touch her face,

As lover-like, with fond embrace It folded round her like a husk:

A brewery ad which commonly was hung on tavern walls in Riley's epoch.

CRESTILLOMEEM • 259

But when the glitter of her hand Like wasted glory, beckoned me,

My eyes grew blurred and dull and dim -My vision failed - I could not see ‑

I could not stir - I could but stand,
Till, quivering in every limb,

flung me prone, as though to swim The tide of grass whose waves of green Went rolling ocean-wide between My helpless shipwrecked heart and her Who claimed me for a worshiper.

And writhing thus in my despair,

I heard a weird, unearthly sound,

That seemed to lift me from the ground

And hold me floating in the air.

I looked, and lo! I saw her bow

Above a harp within her hands;
A crown of blossoms bound her brow,

And on her harp were twisted stranc Of silken starlight, rippling o'er With music never heard before By mortal ears; and, at the strain, I felt my Spirit snap its chain

And break away, - and I could see It as it turned and fled from me

To greet its mistress, where she smiled To see the phantom dancing wild And wizard-like before the spell Her mystic fingers knew so well.

What is it? Who will rightly guess          A cartoon of Riley's era. If it be aught but nothingness

That dribbles from a wayward pen

To spatter in the eyes of men?

What matter! I will call it mine,

And I will take the changeling home

And bathe its face with morning-shine,

260 • THE POET AS FLYING ISLANDS OF THE NIGHT

And comb it with a golden comb

Till every tangled tress of rhyme

Will fairer be than summer-time; And I will nurse it on my knee

And dandle it beyond the clasp

Of hands that grip and hands that grasp Through life and all eternity!

Something like this vision became Act II of Riley's great delirious, auto­biographical play\poem "The Flying Islands of the Night." The other subject matter is in such poetry as "Quitting California." The poem is not, of course, about the State of California at all, but rather about a brand name of whiskey. While one is led by the poem to believe that the poem's writer is becoming temperate and giving up alcohol, the poem playfully concludes that the writer is merely changing to another brand of cheap whiskey and not giving up whiskey at all.

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"OLD BOURBON, A.P HOTALING, SOLE AGENTS" Crown on neck, gold amber. whittled. concave bottom, glopped top

9 q 1.F. CUTTER

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Heav^y floral embossing around rim. sides and base

Contained Bultseye Whiskey. No other identification                       35.00

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and address of Oregon distillers. 11-1/2"                                      15.00

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34. 0 DUFFY HALT WHISKEY CO. Round amber quad._                   12.00

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Amber whiskey bottle                                                             70.00

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Prohibitionshape..._ whiskey bottle. Mask shape                            65.00

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Crestillomeem's friends.

CRESTILLOMEEM • 261

ON QUITTING CALIFORNIA (1879)

0 rare old drink, the oldest, strongest far Of which the house can boast,

Whose guardian, smiling, betteth at the bar On who can drink the most -

How art thou conquered - tamed in all the pride Of average beauty still!

How brought, 0 painter of the human hide, To know thy master's will!

No more the shallow goblet is baptized Until it overflows;

No more thy liquid blushes are capsized, And succored by the nose.

For now the wild oats thou ^past helped to till In pain are harvested,

And, as the boss presents his little bill, The gleaner droops his head.

Yet at thy shrine shall thousands kneel again Beneath thy mystic spell;

0 mother-in-law of great and mighty men, Thou do'st thy mission well!

Thy newer children shall restore the right I force you to resign

And future years yield up an appetite, Perchance as wild as mine.

Though order, justice, social law shall scowl On all the works reveal,

And art and science shake their heads and howl With unabated zeal,

The marble, shaken from its glassy sheath,

262 • THE POET AS FLYING ISLANDS OF THE NIGHT

Shall twirl and palpitate

For those of fiery eye and potent breath Who take their whisky straight.

The cornless cob shall drain its warmest blood -The still its blackest lees,

And all transfusive percolations flood

Thy swollen arteries,

Till "Tremens," as he hides himself away Within thy depths, shall wink

As victims pour him down from day to day At fifteen cents a drink.

When Mr. Clickwad is finished his friends congratulate him at least on agreeing to quit alcohol. Mr. Clickwad denies this intent and admits that he is only quitting the one brand indicated. He remains an unrepentant alco­holic which is his nature.

While the poetry of Crestillomeem is small in volume, Riley considered it his personal record of the hell of his life and treasured it inordinately. One finds his poem "The Flying Islands of the Night" being published again and again from 1878 to the end of his life. None of the printings was popular. Most contained changes as Riley considered and reconsidered its autobio­graphical cryptic subject matter. The poem came to have a strange life of its own because of its beautiful lyrics and of course authorship by the famous James Whitcomb Riley.

Riley simply hid himself in this poem. No one except possibly his alco­holic brother Hum (who died three years after "The Flying Islands of the Night's" composition) and friend, Dr. Frank Hays, knew the poem was a delirium.

Why?

Among the reasons why Crestillomeem was not a visible presence was Riley's later popularity and commercial posture. But another reason was that Crestillomeem lurked within his soul. Riley couldn't account for this him­self. His vision of life included a simple belief that ultimately life was inex­plicable. When his father died, Riley had engraved on the Riley family marker in the little Greenfield cemetery where he was buried, "God is his own interpreter and will someday make things clear." Riley's alcoholism

CRESTILLOMEEM • 263

like his father's death was a part of life that God alone understood. Nevertheless there was an expectation that it fit in with some greater plan.

Crestillomeem was Riley in his uneasiness about his alcoholism. Benjamin Franklin, in his autobiography, declared uneasiness was the cen­tral human motive. Riley was constantly in a state of uncertainty about him­self. His incentive to survive despite his alcoholism required great mental work, emotionality and activity. After a person's biological needs are satis­fied, time and energy are next spent in a narrow space of mind bounded on the right by boredom and ordinarily on the left by terror of the bizarre. Riley often lived in this region of the bizarre and actually knew it as a comfort. He often lived in the nurture of Crestillomeem. Others have commented that Riley's "weakness" was even beneficial. Rev. Finley Sapp, minister of a Greenfield Protestant Church from 1904-1906 and knew Riley, has written: "James Whitcomb Riley touched the heart of humanity as only a few have. "Jim" was really more `"ligious" when "lit up" a little, than most of the saints at camp meeting." (From page 54, A HISTORY OF THE GREEN-FIELD CHRISTIAN CHURCH, Dorothy June Williams).

So who is Crestillomeem? She is the one whose life is explained in The Flying Islands as an entourage of faces. She is the soul breaking apart in Riley's "Poem of Seven Faces." In tremens deliriums, Riley encounters faces swarming around him telling him all about Crestillomeem.

CRESTILLOMEEM'S
STORY IN A CHORUS OF SWARMING FACES

264 • THE POET AS FLYING ISLANDS OF THE NIGHT

To dazzle earth and Heaven, too!"