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JAMES WHITCOMB RILEY: "THE HOOSIER POET" Thomas E.Q. Williams, ©2006, originally published as the 150th birthday biography of James Whitcomb Riley entitled, James Whitcomb Riley: The Poet as Flying Islands of the Night © 1999 Thomas Williams.
A WAYWARD SONG
The pen of “The Hoosier Poet,” James Whitcomb Riley, produced the most genuine and humble of American poems. Their resonances caused America to consider him the chief poet of his time in the late 19th Century and early 20th Century. During this period all of America knew of the Riley poetry of frontier American farm families, Hoosier cricks and corn shocks...and children. He might have been the last truly popular poet America has had. Through James Whitcomb Riley we know of hardy and yet tenderly vulnerable American pioneers of the West huddled together in a richly experiential yet poor earthly life. James Whitcomb Riley wrote songs for them to keep up their courage. With the way the world was aflame with disease hardship and hunger in the West, the early Americans of this place really needed the Riley poetry to lift their spirits. As America matured and entered the Twentieth Century, the influence of Riley grew and James Whitcomb Riley became an icon of a home soil poet. Some consider Riley as the voice of a new people. This folk was the confused remnant from the great American Civil War. After this deadly conflict pitting friend against friend, America's spirit needed direction and lifting very badly. Others connect James Whitcomb Riley only with the light-hearted and happy poetry of the later years of his life. James Whitcomb Riley really was a much beloved person and his poetry was heartening. He came to be known as the "Children's Poet." His humanism, caring and depiction of the "heart" in children was captured in such poems as "Little Orphant Annie."
LITTLE ORPHANT ANNIE (1885)
Little Orphant Annie's come to our house to stay, An' wash the cups an' saucers up, an' brush the crumbs away, An' shoo the chickens off the porch, an' dust the hearth, an' sweep, An' make the fire, an' bake the bread, an' earn her board-an- keep; An' all us other childern, when the supper-things is done, We set around the kitchen fire an' has the mostest fun, A-listenin' to the witch-tales 'at Annie tells about, An' the Gobble-uns 'at gits you Ef you Don't Watch Out! ...
It does not hurt to think of James Whitcomb Riley this way. He was America's poet for children of his time as his friend Rudyard Kipling was the poet for the children of the British Empire. But Riley was so much more complicated than that. He was an enigmatic creative genius. It is almost impossible to learn about him or explain his life because he so completely related to his age that he can hardly be separated from it. We do know that Riley's life was not all joyous. He also felt deeply wrenching despair. When James Whitcomb Riley was suffering his deepest anguish about his life in the Nineteenth Century, he fell into depression and occasional alcoholism and knew great dejection for many reasons. This was primarily when he was a homeless young man in his twenties. Riley did not arise to his most popular acclaim until after his depression was brought under control-although never fully conquered. Around Riley's thirtieth birthday, he started building on the faith that helped him survive. He began singing American versions of the "Christ Hymn" in poetry. These were songs of hope and courage for living humbly. The great poetry of James Whitcomb Riley, and those poems, particularly his early "Benjamin Johnson of Boone" poems, which made Riley the most famous poet of his time, were frontier American "Christ Hymn" masterpieces.
TO MY OLD FRIEND, WILLIAM LEACHMAN (1882)
Fer forty year and better you have been a friend to me, Through days of sore afflictions and dire adversity, You allus had a kind word of counsul to impart, Which was like a healin' `intment to the sorrow of my hart.
When I buried my first womern, William Leachman, it was you Had the only consolation that I could listen to - Fer I knowed you had gone through it and had rallied from the blow And when you said I'd do the same, I knowed you'd ort to know.
But that time I'll long remember; how I wundered here and thare- Through the settin'-room and kitchen, and out in the open air- And the snowflakes whirlin', whirlin', and the fields a frozen glare, And the neghbors' sleds and wagons congergatin ev'rywhare.
I turned my eyes to'rds heaven, but the sun was hid away; I turned my eyes to'rds earth again, but all was cold and gray; And the clock, like ice a-crackin', clikt the icy hours in two - And my eyes'd never thawed out ef it hadn't been fer you!
We set thare by the smoke-house - me and you out thare alone- Me a-thinkin' - you a-talkin' in a soothin' undertone - You a-talkin' - me a-thinkin' of the summers long ago, And a-writin' "Marthy - Marthy" with my finger in the snow!
William Leachman, I can see you jest as plane as I could then; And your hand is on my shoulder, and you rouse me up again; And I see the tears a-drippin' from your own eyes, as you say: "Be rickonciled and bear it - we but linger fer a day!"
At the last Old Settlers' Meetin' we went j'intly, you and me - Your hosses and my wagon, as you wanted it to be; And sence I can remember, from the time we've neghbored here, In all sich friendly actions you have double-done your sheer.
It was better than the meetin', too, that nine-mile talk we had Of the times when we first settled here and travel was so bad; When we had to go on hoss-back, and sometimes on "Shank's mare," And "blaze" a road fer them behind that had to travel thare.
And now we was a-trottin' 'long a level gravel pike In a big two-hoss road-wagon, jest as easy as you like - Two of us on the front seat, and our wimmern-folks behind, A-settin' in theyr Winsor-cheers in perfect peace of mind!
And we pinted out old landmarks, nearly faded out of sight: - Thare they ust to rob the stage-coach; thare Gash Morgan had the fight With the old stag-deer that pronged him - how he battled fer his life, And lived to prove the story by the handle of his knife.
Thare the first griss-mill was put up in the Settlement, and we Had tuck our grindin' to it in the Fall of Forty-three - When we tuck our rifles with us, techin' elbows all the way, And a-stickin' right together ev'ry minute, night and day.
Thare ust to stand the tavern that they called the "Travelers' Rest," And thare, beyent the covered bridge, "The Counterfitters' Nest" - Whare they claimed the house was ha'nted - that a man was murdered thare, And burried underneath the floor, er 'round the place somewhare.
And the old Plank-road they laid along in Fifty-one er two - You know we talked about the times when the old road was new: How "Uncle Sam" put down that road and never taxed the State Was a problem, don't you rickollect, we couldn't dimonstrate?
Ways was devius, William Leachman, that me and you has past; But as I found you true at first, I find you true at last; And, now the time's a-comin' mighty nigh our jurney's end, I want to throw wide open all my soul to you, my friend.
With the stren'th of all my bein', and the heat of hart and brane, And ev'ry livin' drop of blood in artery and vane, I love you and respect you, and I venerate your name, Fer the name of William Leachman and True Manhood's jest the same!
By the time of his death, James Whitcomb Riley's folklore and poetry had come to personally represent America's vision of itself in humility and redemption. How this could happen is not only strange but close to miraculous considering the temperance forces at work in America at the same time as Riley's years of great popularity. One would have thought they would have teamed up against Riley because of his occasional very public bouts of intoxication. They never did. Riley's "affliction" (alcoholism) was forgiven him because the age needed to be reassured by the re-singing of the humble message of the "Christ Hymn." By the time of Riley's death, he was highly revered with celebrations of his birthday all across America. His poetry was sung in America's voice. In describing the affect of Riley's death upon the nation, Meredith Nicholson, author and Editor of the Indianapolis NEWS from 1885 to 1897, wrote, "On a day in July, 1916, thirty-five thousand people passed under the dome of the Indiana capitol to look for the last time upon the face of James Whitcomb Riley. The best-loved citizen of the Hoosier commonwealth was dead, and laborers and mechanics in their working clothes, professional and business men, women in great numbers, and a host of children paid their tribute of respect to one whose sold claim upon their interest lay in his power to voice their feelings of happiness and grief in terms within the common understanding. The very general expressions of sorrow and affection evoked by the announcement of the poet's death encourage the belief that the lines that formed on the capitol steps might have been augmented endlessly by additions drawn from every part of America." The incredible path of Riley's life which led to this outcome is the story that follows. How did the public perceive such a poet? The answer seems that James Whitcomb Riley was taken mainly as a humorist and entertainer in his time. "Riley" was fun. He dealt in the healing influence of laughter and humor. He was Riley at play as a mischievous comic, "dialect singer" and entertainer. This was the perception of Riley from his days on the lyceum circuit when his "lectures" to great public audiences all around the country were managed by the great James Redpath and his Boston Redpath Bureau and by the successor "manager" Major James B. Pond of New York and his agency. Being a popular lyceum speaker gave Riley huge access to the American public in the Post-Civil War era. This was, of course, an age before electronic media. Folk went out to public lecture halls for entertainment in those days instead of watching televisions in their homes. A "popular" picture of James Whitcomb Riley comes to us from the promotional literature about him. Called "The Autobiography of James Whitcomb Riley," it was not really written by Riley at all but rather "in fun" by Edgar Wilson Nye, Riley's great platform partner during the 1880's. It is quoted here clothed in Nye's humor: AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF JAMES WHITCOMB RILEY Written by Himself Through Edgar Wilson Nye. The unhappy subject of this sketch was born so long ago that he persists in never referring to the date. Citizens of his native town of Greenfield, Ind., while warmly welcoming his advent, were no less anxious some few years ago to "speed the parting guest." It seems, in fact, that, the better they came to know him, the more resigned they were to give him up. He was ill-starred from the very cradle, it appears. One day, while but a toddler, he climbed, unseen, to an open window where some potted flowers were ranged, and while leaning from his high chair far out, to catch some dainty, gilded butterfly, perchance, he lost his footing and, with a piercing shriek, fell headlong to the gravelled walk below; and when, an instant later, the affrighted parents picked him up, he was - a poet. The father of young Riley was a lawyer of large practice, who used, in moments of deep thought, to regard this boy as the worst case he ever had. This may have been the reason that, in time, he insisted on his reading law, which the boy really tried to do; but, finding that political economy and Blackstone didn't rhyme, he slid out of the office one hot, sultry afternoon, and ran away with a patent medicine and concert wagon, from the tail end of which he was discovered by some relatives in the next town, violently abusing a brass drum. This was a proud moment for the boy; nor did his peculiar presence of mind entirely desert him till all the country fairs were over for the season. Them afar off, among strangers in a strange State, he thought it would be fine to make a flying visit home. But he couldn't fly. Fortunately, in former years he had purloined some knowledge of a trade. He could paint a sign, or a house, or a tin roof - if some one else would furnish him the paint - and one of Riley's hand-painted picket fences gave rapture to the most exacting eye. Yet, through all his stress and trial, he preserved a simple, joyous nature, together with an ever widening love of men and things in general. He made friends, and money, too - enough, at last, to gratify the highest ambition of his life, namely, to own an overcoat with fur around the tail of it. He then groped his way back home, and worked for nothing on a little country paper that did not long survive the blow. Again excusing himself, he took his sappy paragraphs and poetry to another paper and another town, and there did better till he spoiled it all by devising a Poe poem fraud, by which he lost his job; and, in disgrace and humiliation shoe-mouth deep, his feelings gave way beneath his feet, and his heart broke with a loud report. So the true poet was born. Of the poet's present personality we need speak but briefly. His dress is at once elegant and paid for. It is even less picturesque than all-wool. Not liking hair particularly, he wears but little, and that of the mildest shade. He is a good speaker - when spoken to - but a much better listener, and often longs to change places with his audience so that he also may retire. In his writings he probably shows at his best. He always tries to, anyway. Knowing the manifold faux pas and "breaks" in this life of ours, his songs are sympathetic and sincere. Speaking coyly of himself, one day, he said: "I write from the heart; that's one thing I like about me. I may not write a good hand, and my `copy' may occasionally get mixed up with the market reports, but, all the same, what challenges my admiration is that humane peculiarity of mine - i.e., writing from the heart - and, therefore, to the heart." More about this side of Riley "the humorist" and the public perception of the man will follow, but I take the biographer's prerogative of focusing on what I find the most revealing about James Whitcomb Riley first.
A "TWINTORETTE" IN THE MORNING PAPER
To know about this enigmatic figure of the American frontier, humor and Incarnation Theology ("kenoticism"3), it would have helped to open up a Hoosier newspaper, The Indianapolis Saturday HERALD," on August 24, 1878. The citizens of Indiana found one of the strangest writings in all of literature on its page 6. What was it? The piece called itself a "Twintorette." What was that? It was embedded in a column calling itself: "Respectfully Declined" Papers of The Buzz Club, Number IV. What was the Buzz Club? Who wrote it? The piece had a cast as a play does. Was it a play? Time revealed that the author of "The Flying Islands of the Night" was the young Hoosier poet, James Whitcomb Riley, very early in his career and long before fame settled upon him. In this "flight" lies the answer to Riley's poetry of love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control, the kenotic categories of expression of the spirit of the "Christ Hymn."
1. The whole "Christ Hymn" is as follows: "Let this mind be in you, which was also in Christ Jesus: Who, being in the form of God, thought it not robbery to be equal with God: But made himself of no reputation, and took upon him the form of a servant, and was made in the likeness of men: And being found in fashion as a man, he humbled himself, and became obedient unto death, even the death of the cross. Wherefore God also hath highly exalted him, and give him a name which is above every name: That at the name of Jesus every knee should bow..." 2. The first Incarnation theologians of the Nineteenth Century were the Germans: Thomasius, its founder, Neander, Dorner, Van Oosterzee, Pressense, Schneckenburger, Liddon, Uhlhorn, Edersheim, soon joined by such as J.P. Lange, and C.A. Ross. A primary text of the German inception is found in the Nineteenth Century lectures of Alexander Bruce, D.D, in THE HUMILIATION OF CHRIST and R.J. Cooke's THE INCARNATION AND RECENT CRITICISM. A more recent work (1965) is Claude Welch, GOD AND INCARNATION IN MID-NINETEENTH CENTURY GERMAN THOUGHT. An easy-to-read introduction to the subject is found in the OXFORD DICTIONARY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH, ed. by F.L. Cross under "Kenotic theories." Interesting variations of Incarnation Theology appeared concurrently in Germany such as Hegel's conception that the Incarnation was manifest in the human race in general and not in individuals. Even at the theological level, Incarnation Theology engaged the age's social Darwinism. SEE: Herbert Spencer's SYNTHETIC PHILOSOPHY, "First Principles," part 1, in which God is seen as an unknown and unknowable substratum of all phenomena rather than one known through human appearance. These should get started someone interested in Nineteenth Century theology such as became expressed popularly by James Whitcomb Riley's poetry. None of course explains the phenomenon of the Incarnation because, as theologian Edward Towne says, "What is a mystery if it can be dissolved away in an explanation?" 3. "Kenoticism" is a more technical name for Incarnation Theology of the Nineteenth Century. It is an idea of "emptying out oneself." It derives from the Greek adjective "kenos" - the adjective used in the Philippian's "Christ Hymn" to describe Jesus's act of casting off pride, advantage and power to find satisfaction in a humble life.
THE FLYING ISLANDS OF THE NIGHT
Marcus Dickey, the secretary of James Whitcomb Riley once wrote, "It was not the habit of the Hoosier Poet to explain. Again and again his friends saw him as through a glass darkly. At times he took conspicuous pride in concealing his thought and his way of doing things. My assumptions concerning him remained assumptions. The more his friends sought to know his history the more capriciously he concealed it." In the cryptic poem that follows Riley revealed his own life in the form of an autobiography with himself in his various "soul-selves" as the cast except for the woman who was his great encourager and "soul partner."
JAMES WHITCOMB RILEY: THE POET AS FLYING ISLANDS OF THE NIGHT: A BRIEF INTRODUCTION TO RILEY'S AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL POEM
It is a simple fact that James Whitcomb Riley tended to write out of his own experiences. There is not a single poem where Riley's fantasies are not based on some projection out of his life. Riley's prodigious imagination used himself always to create his poetry. If this is so, where does Riley's "The Flying Islands of the Night" fit in? It is certainly obscure at places. It stands out so in the body of his poetry like a sore thumb because of its length as well as its oddity. The only answer appears to be that Riley made it obscure for a reason. It was the most "personal" poem he ever wrote. The poem describes the groping of his own soul. It is the last rush of the madness from his impetuous youth. Then Riley sheltered his soul from criticism by obscuring his poetic expression of it. Riley's autobiographical poem (from age 28-but revised at intervals) originally contained two great themes and a minor one. The most important was Riley's "dark play" on his own dire alcoholism. The language is a combination of Middle English spiced with American folklore, and "intoxicatese" creating a fantastic and wildly "astronomically" extravagant imagery. The origins of all of this will be explained later. For now we need only remember Riley's fear of his alcoholism as its most basic theme. Riley portrays himself "married" to alcoholism personified as the "nasty" Queen Crestillomeem. Riley is first introduced as his minstrel self called Jucklet. This is Riley's "survival self" at the soul level. Jucklet has to live "underground" and he can only "peep out" when Crestillomeem permits. Riley lived by his wits and was often penniless during the period of his "minstrel wandering" twenties. Now he had begun consoling himself from tragic events in his life with overuse of alcohol. This poem tells us of the outcome of all of this. You will be very surprised. In "The Flying Islands of the Night" Riley must experience the effects of alcoholism. The "night" in the title is a reference to alcohol addiction. Riley's contempary of the related book FIFTEEN YEARS IN HELL, Luther Benson, says:"...From time to time until I tried to break the terrible chain...of intemperance, my life was one long, hopeless, blank, black night." Riley's alcoholism was his night too. He feared himself sinking into a "night" of depression, delirium and madness. The second great theme is Riley's groping for salvation from his alcoholism. As his mind turns to recollections of loving encouragement and true friendship he has known, he remembers Nellie Millikan Cooley, a married friend, who has just died in Illinois critical days before the poem was written. Nellie is the only other character in the original play which is not a Riley "personified personality breakdown." Nellie is "Dwainie" who tells the fearfully drunken Riley she will continue to encourage him and love him even though she is now dead. How can this be? Another surprise is in store! The version of "The Flying Islands of the Night" which follows was the original one. In a later expansion of the original play for a book, Riley adds his mother, Elizabeth as "AEo" as an encourager along with Nellie. Dwainie will eventually convince Riley in the poem that she is still encouraging him in spirit and this gives Riley the strength to produce the Godly poetry of "Spraivoll," the "tune fool" of Riley's cast of self-characters. A minor comical but tragic theme is the "Murphy" pledge that temperance ladies were requiring young men to sign at the time the play was written. This pledge committed a person not to drink intoxicants. Riley had recently seen how futile such a pledge was and enjoyed harpooning it. His brother, Hum (Reuben Alexander Humboldt Riley), took one as revealed in this letter to brother John Riley, in 1877: "... within the last few days, on the evening of the 4th of July, I commenced a work that will in time make me more money than any other work I could engage in. I think it is the most honorable work a young man can engage in. I celebrated the 4th in a better way than I ever did before. On that morning I signed the Murphy Pledge and have been at work ever since in that great cause and hope before a great while to bring a great many more into the ranks and try and bring the cause to a great and glorious end. We have already taken in some of the boys such as Jim Walsh, John Huley, John Skinner and his father and many others to (sic) numerous to mention. When I went up to take the pledge Father Wilson kissed me and told me to stick to it. I told him I would try..." Hum couldn't make it. Disastrous drinking soon followed. The Murphy pledge was a joke. Signing a pledge proved not a real commitment to anything. Hum became an alcoholic so severely that often he would disappear without word requiring his family to try to locate him wherever they could find him. In this same year Riley was dealing with his own alcoholism he saw what alcoholism was doing to his brother Hum. A letter contemporaneous to Riley's "The Flying Islands of the Night," reads:
Friend "Meeks" -- Hum left on noon train to-day and as he was "full", and none of us knew where he started for, we are all greatly distressed. He went east, and it has occurred to me that possibly he had gone to see you -- thence this letter of inquiry. And now, dear Jim tell me if he is with you, and if so I charge you, with all earnestness, do what you can to keep him from whisky - for he is killing himself and breaking all our hearts at home. He is good, and wouldn't act as he does could he realize what he is doing -- and I trust and believe that you will do all in your power to turn him from it. I tried to see him before he went, and was at the depot, but he slipped me somehow. I wanted to tell him that if he got hard up to write to me for money -- I will raise it if he needs it, and if you see him you must tell him so for me. If he is not with you try to find him along the line by telegraphing, and I will compensate you for your trouble. It may be that he has not gone far, but let me know at once if you know anything of him. Very truly yours J.W. Riley. Hum's fitful life continued. We know he was in Indianapolis in Feb., 1881, and wrote sister Mary to send him "his things" by express train in a telegram of Feb. 25th. Hum died November 24, 1881 at 5 a.m. at age 25 from severe hemorrhage of the bowels according to the Riley family Bible at the Riley Birthplace in Greenfield, Indiana. Someone noted underneath the entry "typhoid fever," but the suspicion is a complication of alcoholism. Hum's funeral was apparently on the Friday following. Hum isn't mentioned thereafter in family correspondence. Crestillomeem got his younger brother and now the alluring siren was after James Whitcomb Riley! The version of "The Flying Islands of the Night" which follows is the first one published. The poem seems an excellent point of departure for a biography of the poet's life. I apologize if "The Flying Islands of the Night" is sometimes hard to follow. Riley wrote it that way to cause it to be mysterious and secretive to protect his very fragile ego. Just remember that Riley was all the characters in the cast that follows except "Dwainie." Only a creative genius might conceive of himself in such an odd but imaginative way. This was James Whitcomb Riley. His poem continues into Three Acts which we will examine in greater detail as an aid in unraveling the knot of his life - a chapter per character at a time. Perhaps we should allow Riley to introduce his own autobiography as he did at his "Buzz Club" newspaper article - through Mr. Clickwad - one of the fictional members-who says of the piece: "This is an affliction," continued Mr. Clickwad, unrolling an enormous manuscript, "too great for me to bear alone, and I ask your succor and assistance as humbly and earnestly as ever beggar asked for alms."
THE FLYING ISLANDS OF THE NIGHT. A Twintorette.
Dramatis Personae1 KRUNG.........................King of the Spirks CRESTILLOMEEM..........................The Queen SPRAIVOLL..........................The Tune Fool AMPHINE.............................Son of Krung DWAINIE.............................Of the Wunks2 JUCKLET....................................Dwarf CREECH, ) )........................Nightmares GRITCHFANG, ) Counselors, Courtiers, Etc.
1. The names of the characters have loosely evocative associative qualities. Krung is Riley's triumphant public reputation- or his hopes about it, a sober and rational personality in responsibility, success and empowerment. It is Riley as Cronus (or "Kronus"), the Titan, and "King." Spraivoll is the poetic "tune-fool" Riley. It is Riley the "Christ hymn" poet. The aspect of poetry has the feminine gender, as Calliope, the muse of poetry was feminine. Amphine evokes Riley as a lover like Amphion, son of Zeus and Antiope, who, in Greek legend, built Thebes by music of lute which he played so melodiously that the stones danced into walls and houses. Riley played the guitar and violin for romantic purposes. Dwainie is his inspirational friend, recently deceased at the time of the first writing of "The Flying Islands," Nellie Millikan Cooley, wife of George B. Cooley. "Dwainie" suggests the Old English word "Dwine" meaning waste away. Nellie was recently dead when "The Flying Islands" was first written in August 1878. Riley shared the author Thomas Chatterton's fascination with old English sounding names. Chatterton's writings were major inspiration for this poem. "Jucklet" the dwarf is Riley as self-admitted prankster but also Riley's survival self since Riley can only survive by his wits. The name evokes juggler from the Latin joculator, a jester, or joker in the Middle Ages. Jugglers of those days accompanied minstrels and troubadours and added entertainments to musical performances, e.g. sleight of hand, antics, feats of musing prowess and a staple of tricks. The form is in the diminutive just as Riley was small. The nightmares suggest interior aspects of creed for Creetch and dreads of novel encounters or depressive events where Riley is "greenhorn" and engaged or bitten as by fangs as Gritchfang. That the names are not entirely imaginative, but rather referential and elliptical is supported by some evidence. The poet in his 1898 edition of "The Flying Islands" added a footnote to additions to "Spirk and Wunk Rhymes," saying, "So, too, in numberless other aspects, must the reader's fancy freely-play- even as the writer frankly confesses his own has done,- in such particulars, for instances, as fancying the "ont-l-dawn-bird" of the Flying Islanders is our nightingale; their "trance- bird" our humming-bird; their "echo-bird" our mocking-bird, etc., etc., ad infinitum." 2. A wunk is a Hoosier folklore figure. It is not what it appears to be. It is like a ghost that can take on outward appearance at night of anything or anyone it wishes to. ACT I SCENE - THE FLYING ISLANDS Scene I. - Spirkland at Moondawn - Interior of the King's Court - A star burns dimly in the dome above the throne- Enter Crestillomeem. CRESTILLOMEEM. The throne is throwing wide its gilded arms To welcome me. The throne of Krung! Ha! ha! Leap up, ye lazy echoes, and laugh loud! For I, Crestillomeem, the queen - ha! ha! Do fling my richest mirth into your mouths That ye may fatten ripe with mockery! I wonder what the kingdom would become Were I not here to nurse it like a babe, And dandle1 it beyond the silly reach Of sycophants and serfs. Ho! Jucklet, ho! `Tis time my twisted warp of nice anatomy Were here to weave away upon our web - Of silken villainies. Ho! Jucklet, ho! 1."Dandle" is something like dangle and handle mixed up. (Lifts a secret door to the pave, and drops a star-bud through the opening. Enter Jucklet.) JUCKLET. Spang sprit1! my gracious queen, but thou hast scorched My left ear to a cinder, and my head Rings like a ding-dong on the coast of death! For, patient hate! thy hasty signal burst Full in my face as thitherward I came; But though my lug2 is fried to a crisp, and my Singed wig stinks like a little sun-stewed wunk, I stretch my fragrant presence at thy feet, And kiss thy sandal with a blistered lip. 1. "Sprit" is Chatterton's representation of the verb for "gives spirit" at "AElla," 2.1332. Chatterton, living in the century prior to Riley, wrote poetry which he fraudulently claimed was written by a monk named Rowley of the 15th Century. Chatterton sold these forgeries for income. The poetry was actually rather good and came to be much admired by Riley. There was no such monk as Rowley, of course, and Chatterton killed himself with arsenic at the age of 17 when his deception was discovered. 2. The external ear in this use. CRESTILLOMEEM. Hold! rare-done fool, lest I may call the cook And bake thee brown! How fares the king by this? JUCKLET. I left him sleeping1, but uncorked his nose, And o'er the odorous blossom of his lips2 I squeezed the tinctured sponge, and felt his pulse Come staggering back to regularity. And four hours hence his highness will awake and Peace will take a nap. 1. The setting is Riley sleeping off intoxication which becomes subject to delirium in Act II, with recovery in Act III. 2. "Liquor breath." CRESTILLOMEEM. Ha! what mean you? JUCKLET. I mean that he suspects our knaveries. Some traitor spy is burrowed in the court Whose unseen eye is ever focused fine Upon our actions, and whose hungry ear Eats every crumb of counsel that we drop In these our secret interviews -for he - The king - thro' all his talking-sleep to-day Has jabbered of intrigue, conspiracy, And treachery and hate in fellowship, With dire designs upon his royal self, To oust him from the throne. CRESTILLOMEEM. He spoke my name? JUCKLET. I never hear him speak but that thy name Makes melody of every sentence. Yes, - He thinks thou art as true to him as thou Art fickle, false and subtle! O how blind, and lame and deaf and dumb, and worn and weak, And faint and sick, and all-commodious His dear love1 is! 1. Riley's love of alcohol. CRESTILLOMEEM. Wilt thou wind up thy tongue Nor let it tangle in a knot of words! What said the king? JUCKLET. He said: "Crestillomeem - O that she knew this great distress of mine! For she would counsel with me, and her voice Would flow in limpid wisdom o'er my wounds, And, like an ointment, lave my hidden grief, And heal my bleeding heart;" and so went on Spinning the web of love in which he lies Bound hand and foot and buzzing helplessly. CRESTILLOMEEM. And did he drop no hint of his distress, And how, and when, and whence his trouble came? JUCKLET. He spoke as the tho' some woman talked with him - Full courteously he said: "In woman's guise Thou comest, yet I think thou art indeed But woman in thy form; they words are strange, And I am mystified! I feel the truth Of all thou hast declared, and yet so vague And shadow-like thy meaning is to me, I know not how to act to ward the blow Thou say'st is a hanging o'er me even now." And then, with open hands held pleadingly, He asked, "Who is my foe?" and o'er his face A sudden pallor flashed like death itself, As tho' if answer had been given it Had fallen like a curse. CRESTILLOMEEM. I'll stake my soul `Tis Dwainie1, of the Wunks, who peeks and peers With those fine eyes of hers in our affairs, And carries Krung, in some disguise, these hints Of our intent! See thou that silence falls Forever on her lips, and that the sight She wastes upon our secret action blurs With gray and grisly skum that shall for aye Conceal us from her gaze while she writhes blind And fangless as the fat worms of the grave. Here, take this tuft of downy druze, and when Thou comest on her, fronting full and fair, Say "Sherzham!" thrice, and fluff it in her face. 1. Nellie Millikan Cooley, Riley's beloved married friend, who died shortly before the publication of this piece.
JUCKLET. Thou knowest little magic, O, my queen, But all thou dost is very excellent. And now for Amphine - he, too, doubtless, has Been favored with an outline of our scheme. And I would kick my soul all over hell If I might juggle his fine figure up In such a shape as mine. CRESTILLOMEEM. Then this: if thou Canst ever find him bent above a flower, Or any blooming thing, and thou canst slip Behind and reach it first and touch it fair, And with thy knuckle strike him on the breast, Then his fine form will shrink and shrivel up As warty as a toad's - so hideous Thine own will seem a marvel of rare grace, Tho' idly speakest them of mystic skill `Twas that which won the king for me - `twas that Bereft him of his daughter1 ere we had Been wedded for a month; she strangely went Astray one morning from the palace steps; And when the dainty vagrant came not back And all the spies in Spirkland in her quest Came straggling empty-handed home again Why, then the wise king wiped his rainy eyes And sagely tho't the little toddler strayed Out to the island's edge and tumbled off. I could have set his mind at ease on that; I could have told him when she tumble off. I tumbled her, and tumbled her so far She tumbled in another land, from which But one charm known to art can tumble her Back into this. 1. Spraivoll, Riley's poetic self, in this delirium tremens attack from alcoholic binge. JUCKLET. Ay, true enough, perhaps! But dost thou know that rumors float about Among thy subjects of thy sorceries? And if my counsel is worth aught to thee, Then have a care thy charms do not revert Upon thyself! CRESTILLOMEEM. Ha! ha! no fear of that While Krung remains - (She pauses abruptly, and a voice of exquisite melody is heard singing.) VOICE. When kings are kings, and kings are men - And the lonesome rain1 is raining - O who shall rule from the red2 throne then, And who shall wield the scepter when - When the winds3 are all complaining?
When men are men, and men are kings - And the lonesome rain is raining - O who shall list as the minstrel sings Of the ermine robes and the signet rings when the winds are all complaining?
1. Rain most often refers to God's judgment on sinners in frontier American poetry. Such imagery often derives from scripture in this case possibly Ez. 38.22. 2. Red is the color of sin in frontier American Protestant folklore. This probably derives from Isaiah 1.18. The sin in this use would be the overuse of alcohol. 3. The wind is often a depiction of the operation of the Holy Spirit within the world in the same folklore tradition. John 3.8. In light of the imagery of Spraivoll's initial poem, we would suspect the answer to the poem's question is no one.
CRESTILLOMEEM. Whence flows that sweetness, and whose voice is that? JUCKLET. The voice of Spraivoll if mine ears are tuned. CRESTILLOMEEM. And who is Spraivoll, and what song is that she sings? JUCKLET. Spraivoll, the Tune Fool is she called By those who meet her in her nightly rounds.1 She comes from Wunkland, as she so declares, And has been roosting round the palace here For half a moon. 1. Riley only wrote poetry at night. CRESTILLOMEEM. And pray, where is she perched? JUCKLET Under some dingy cornice1, like enough. She is no woman, tho' - and yet, indeed She is licensed idiot, and drifts About as restless, and as useless, too, As any lazy breeze in summertime. I'll call her forth to greet your majesty - Ho! Spraivoll! Ho! my plumeless bird, flit here! 1. Riley was writing most of his poetry at this time in a place he called the "Morgue," an upstairs space in row office buildings in downtown Greenfield, Indiana. (From behind a group of statuary Spraivoll enters.) SPRAIVOLL. (Singing1) Ting-along aling-ting! Tingle-tee! Ting-aling, aling-ting! Tingle-tee! The world runs round and round for me; Wind it up with a golden key Ting-aling, aling-ting! Tingle-tee! 1. Spraivoll's songs contain ellided and unintelligible words because, we remember, Riley cannot write poetry while he is intoxicated as he is in Acts I and II. Spraivoll does much better in Act III when she is "herself" or rather Riley "himself." JUCKLET. Who art thou, woman, and what singest thou? SPRAIVOLL. (Singing.) What sings the breene1 on the wertling-vine2, And the tweck3 on the bamner-stem4? The song they sing is the same as mine, And mine is the same to them. 1. Probably a brown wren. Under Chatterton's "Rowley" technicalities, any word that can take a terminal "e" does so. Riley's poem has elements of Chatterton "takeoff." 2. Wert, wyrt, wairt, wurt, wort (as in liverwort) refers to a herb in Middle English. A "wertling-vine" is possibly a herb-vine. 3. Probably suggestive of a "twaddling" (or silly) "peck" or "woodpecker" although the "tw" might refer to the Middle English twecche (twitch). 4. A "bamner-stem" is possibly a "runner bamboo stem" or some such. JUCKLET. Your majesty may be surprised somewhat, But Spraivoll cannot talk; her only mode Of speech is melody; and thou might'st put The gifted fool a-thousand questions, and In full return, receive a thousand songs, Each set to different tunes - as full of naught As space is full of emptiness. CRESTILLOMEEM. A fool? A fool, and with a voice so strangely sweet? A fool? JUCKLET. Ay, warranted! Around the world She walks unrivalled, and a queen of fools - Eh, Spraivoll? SPRAIVOLL. (Singing.) O, Aye! Tho' Spirkland has grown great In foolish ways, I ween Her greatest fool will intimate, He bows to me as queen. CRESTILLOMEEM. So! my Jucklet finds his peer! Come hither woman, and be not afraid, For I like fools so well I married one. And since thou art a queen of fools, and he A king, why I've a mind to bring you two Together in some way. Canst use thy tongue in such a wise thy hearer can but list? SPRAIVOLL. (Singing.) If one should ask me for a song And I should answer, then my tongue Would twitter, trill and troll along Until the song was done.
Or should one ask me for my tongue, And I should answer with a song, I'd trill it till the song was sung And troll it all along. CRESTILLOMEEM. Thou art indeed a fool, and one I think To serve my purpose well. Give ear to me! And Jucklet, thou go to the king and wait His waking; then repeat these words: "The queen Impatiently awaits his majesty, And craves his presence in the Tower of Stars,1 That she may there express all tenderly Her great solicitude and" - there, say this: "So much she bade, and drooped her glowing face Deep in the shadows of her unbound hair, And with a flashing gesture of her arm Turned all the moonlight pallid, saying, "Haste!" 1. A "tower of stars" is the prison of his hopes for success. In Riley's personal symbolism, a tower is a place of bondage where one is made a prisoner. SEE: Contemporaneous Riley letter to the Cooleys and his beloved married friend, Nellie Cooley, dated October 28, 1877 "...take me your prisoner and `fasten me down forever in the round tower of your heart; and I'll never murmur for release till heaven dawns thro the gates." In Riley imagery, stars have to do with success. In a letter to his brother John of Nov. 16, 1874, Riley states, "In those dark hours (of drifting while a sign painter), I should have been content with the twinkle of the tiniest star." JUCKLET. And would it not be well to hang a pearl Or two upon thy silken lashes? CRESTILLOMEEM. Go! (Jucklet disappears.) Now fool, I'll furnish thee a topic for A song: A woman once, with angel in Her face and devil in her heart, had cause To breed confusion to her sovereign lord, And work the downfall of his haughty son - The issue of a former marriage, who Inspired her hatred from the very first; Thro' her the king is haunted with a dream That he is soon to die, and so prepares The throne for the ascension of the son. The woman now has won the husband's love, And by her craft and wanton flatteries Sways him to every purpose but the one Most coveted. And so, to serve that end She would make use of thee, and if thou dost Her will as her good pleasure shall direct. Why, thou shalt sing at court, and thy sweet voice Shall woo the echoes of the listening throne. At present does the king lie in a sleep Drug-wrought and deep as death - the after-phase Of an unconscious state in which each act Of his throughout his waking hours is so Rehearsed in manner, motion, deed and word Her spies may tell her of his very tho't, And should he come upon the throne to-night Where his wise counselors sit waiting him, Then has she cause to think her purposes Will fall in jeopardy; but if he fail, Thro' any means, to lend his presence there, Then, by a former mandate, is his queen Empowered with all sovereignty to reign And work the royal purposes instead. Therefore the queen has set an interview With him that will occur at noon to-night - One hour ere the time the throne convenes - And with her thou shalt go, and lie in wait Until she signal thee to sing, and then Shalt thou so work upon his mellow mood With that unearthly magic of thy voice - So dazzle all his serious tho't with dreams - The queen may, all unnoticed, slip away, And leave thee singing to a throneless king. SPRAIVOLL. (Singing.) And who shall sing for the haughty son While the good king droops his head? And will he dream when the song is done That a princess fair lies dead?1 1. If he is drunk, can he forget about his dead friend, Dwainie (Nellie) recently deceased? CRESTILLOMEEM. The haughty son has found his "song" sweet curse And may she sing his everlasting dirge! She comes from that near-floating land of thine, And with her fairer skin and finer ways, Has caught the prince between her mellow palms And stroked him flutterless. Didst ever hear Of Dwainie, of the Wunks? SPRAIVOLL. (Singing.)1 Ay, "Dwainie! My Dwainie!" The lurloo2 ever sings, A tremor in his flossy crest And in his glossy wings, And "Dwainie! My Dwainie" The winnow welvers call, But Dwainie hides in Spirkland And answers not at all.
The teeper3 twitters "Dwainie!" The tcheucker4 on his spray Teeters up and down the wind And will not fly away; And "Dwainie! My Dwainie:" The drowsy oovers5 drawl; But Dwainie hides in Spirkland And answers not at all.
O Dwainie! my Dwainie,! The breezes hold their breath; The stars are pale as blossoms, And the night as still as death; And "Dwainie! My Dwainie!" The fainting echoes fall; But Dwainie hides in Spirkland And answers not at all.
1. A poem of Riley's anguish over his separation from his great soul-mate, Nellie Cooley, so recently deceased. Spraivoll, Riley's poetic self, cannot reach Nellie; only Amphine, Riley's manifestation of love, can as we will soon discover. 2. Dwainie (Nellie Cooley) is evoked to Riley by an alluring but hidden spirit. "Lurloo" is a name in intoxicated onomatopoeia through formation of allegorical qualities rather than from animal sounds. The name probably derives from the archaic form "lure" in the sense of an enticement or allure and the loo which suggests a masking of an appearance as in the loo or mask a woman wore to avoid tanning her complexion. The fantastic bird creatures of "Dwainie" are spirits, a common Riley catachresis extending the obvious "bird" word into a proper poetic, as in "Song of the Rain." 3. Something which "tees" draws, tugs, pulls. Such a spirit twitters about Dwainie. Possibly a tree-toad which is said to "twitter" in Riley's poem "A Treat Ode" of roughly contemporaneous time. ("Scurious-like!" said the tree-toad, - \"I've twittered for rain all day...") 4. A tcheucker has the intoxicatese onomatopoeic ring of a squirrel's call. 5. oover suggests a compaction of "owl hooting overhead" giving its "hooooooooot."
CRESTILLOMEEM. A melody ecstatic, and thy words Altho' so meaningless, seem something more - A vague and shadowy something, eerie-like, That makes me catch my breath all tremulous, But save thy music! Come, that I may make Thee ready for thy royal auditor. (Exeunt).
ACT II Scene 2. - A garden of Krung's palace, screened from the moon and lighted with star flakes. An arbor, near which is a table spread with a repast. A fountain, near which Amphine sits thrumming a trentoraine.1 1. "Thrumming" is like strumming with his thumb. Trentoraine, is probably something like a "trembling instrument sounding like rain" or some such, most likely Riley's guitar with which he entertained Nellie on many evenings in his early twenties. AMPHINE. O warbling strand of silver, where, oh where Hast thou unraveled that sweet voice of thine, And left its silken murmurs quavering In spasms of delight? O golden wire, Where hast thou spilled thy precious twinkerings What thirsty ear ear has drained thy melody And left me but a wild, delirious drop To tincture all my soul with vain desire? O, Trentoraine, how like an empty vase Thou art - whose clustering blooms of song have drooped And faded, one by one, and fallen away And left to me but dry and tuneless stems, And crisp and withered tendrils of a voice Whose thrilling tone, now like a throttled sound Lies stifled, faint, and gasping all in vain For utterance. (Enter Dwainie1, unperceived) O empty husk of song, If deep within my heart the music thou Hast stored away might find an opening, A fount of limpid laughter would leap up And gurgle from my lips, and all the winds Would revel round me riotous with joy; And Dwainie in her beauty would lean o'er The battlements of night, and like the moon, The glory of her face would light the world, For I would sing of love, 1. Riley's beloved - and dead - Nellie appears in spirit. Riley elsewhere calls her his "truest friend on earth, or now in heaven" in a letter to Nellie's daughter, Mrs. Emma Cox, on April 10, 1885. He adds, "God bless us always with the sweetness of her memory!" DWAINIE. (Concealed.) And she would hear, And reaching overhead among the stars Would scatter them like daisies at thy feet. AMPHINE. O voice, where art thou floating on the air? O angel-soul, where art thou hovering? DWAINIE. I hover in the zephyr of thy sighs, And tremble lest thy love for me shall fail To buoy me thus forever on the breath Of such a dream as heaven envies. AMPHINE Then Thou lovest! O my angel, flutter down And nestle to the warm home of my breast So empty are my arms, so full my heart The one must hold thee or the other burst. DWAINIE. (Throwing herself in his embrace.) I think the hand of God has flung me here; O hold me that he may not pluck me back. AMPHINE. So closely will I hold thee that not e'en The hand of death shall separate us. DWAINIE. So, May sweet death find us, then, that, woven thus In the corolla of a ripe caress, We may drop light, like twin plustre-buds1, On Heaven's star-strewn lawn. 1. Buds which are purely lustrous. AMPHINE. So do I pray, But tell me, tender heart, as thou dost love, Where hast thou loitered for so long? For I have ordered merl1 and viands to be brought For our refreshment here, where all alone I might sip with thee words as well as wine. Why hast thou kept me so athirst, for I Am jealous of the very solitude In which thou walkest. (They sit at table.) 1. Merl is an alcoholic beverage, probably wine, and named after a fictional character of Riley poetry. SEE: Riley's poem of 1879, "To the Wine-God Merlus" (the "God" of "drink" who "blowest all my cares.") DWAINIE Nay, I will not tell, Since, if I did a thousand questions more Would vex our interview with idle tho't And speculation vain. Let this suffice - I talked with one who knew me long ago In dreamy Wunkland,1 talked of mellow nights And long, long hours of golden olden times When love lay like a baby in my arms. And life was like a tinkling toy. We talked Of all the past, ah, me, and all the friends That now await my coming and we talked Of many, many things, so many things That I forget them all in dreams of when, With thy warm hand clasped close in this of mine We walk the floating bridge that spans the gulf Between this isle of strife and gloom, and doubt, And my most glorious realm of joy and peace, Where summer-night reigns ever, and the moon Hangs ever ripe and lush with radiance Above a land were roses gloat on wings And fan their fragrance out so lavishly The winds dive out of heaven to bathe in it. 1. Earthly life. In Hoosier folklore, Wunkland persons are those who have been "wunks" on earth, personalities or selves or souls within shapes and sizes of humanity for homes. AMPHINE O empress of my listening soul, talk on, And tell me all of that rare land of thine, For even tho' I reigned a peerless king Within mine own, I think I could fling down My scepter, signet, crown and royal robes, And so walk naked down the path of life, If at the dwindling end my feet might touch Upon the shores of such a land as thou Dost paint for me. O tell me more of it, And tell me if thy sister-woman there Is like to thee - but nay! for it thou didst These foolish eyes would not believe - but thou Canst tell me of thy brothers. Are they great, And can they grapple with God's arguments, And cipher out the problems of the stars? DWAINIE. Aye, they have leaped all earthly barriers. `Twas Wunkland's son1 that voyaged round the moon, And talked with Mars, and buckled Saturn's belt; `Twas Wunkland's son that bent the rainbow straight. And walked it like a street, and so returned To tell us it was made of hammered shine, Inlaid with strips of selvedge2 from the sun, And burnished with the rust of rotten stars. `Twas Wunkland's son who comprehended first All grosser things, and took the world apart And oiled its joints with new philosophies; For now our goolores3 say, below these isles A million million miles are other worlds - Not like to ours, but round, as bubbles are, And like them, ever reeling on thro' space, And anchorless thro' all eternity; Not like to ours, for our isles,4 as they say Are living things that fly about at night, And soar above, and cling, throughout the day Like bats, beneath the rafters of the skies: and I myself have heard, at dawn of moon, A liquid music filtered thro' my dreams, As tho' a thousand trilling voices pent In some o'erhanging realm, had spilled themselves In streams of melody that trickled thro' the chinks and crannies of a crystal pave Until the wasted juices of harmony, slow-leaking o'er my senses, drowned my soul With ecstacy divine. And afferhaiks5 Who scour our coasts on missions for the King, Declare our island's shape is like the zhibb's6 When lolling in a trance upon the air, With open wings upslant and motionless. O such a land it is - so all complete In all wise habitants, and knowledge, lore, Arts, sciences, perfected government - In kingly wisdom, worth and majesty - So furnished forth in all things lovable, O Amphine, love of mine, it lacks but thy Sweet presence to make it a Paradise. 1. Riley seeks the soul within as rendering those in earthly bodies as "wunks" and the earth as we know it as "wunkland." Persons in the "beyond" will have activities including universal explorations, musical enjoyments, ministerial functions for God, etc. 2. Variant spelling of selvage, an edge of woven material which prevents ravelling out of the weft. 3. Probably an ellipse of "good lores" or "best books." 4. Riley confirms to us that "The Flying Islands" are lives that he lives at night. These are himself in fragmented souls or selves. 5. A haik is worn by an Arab explorer into the deserts. It is an outer cloth. "Afferre" is Latin meaning "to conduct inward." Afferhaiks may refer to functionaries in the universal sphere. 6. An inventive creature of Riley's vivid imagination possibly striped as a zebra and thus "ribbed" or some such. (Takes up the Trentoraine.) And shall I tell thee of the home1 that waits For thy glad coming, Amphine? Listen, then - 1. After describing the people of the "beyond" and their activities, Dwainie now tells Riley of the land itself in song in an imaginative fanciful vision in which Riley and Nellie can live together. Dwainie gives Amphine to know that their "heaven" is a garden-party. SONG A palace veiled in a gleaming dusk; Warm breaths of a tropic air, Drugged with the odorous Marzhoo's1 musk And the perfumed cynchottaire2; Where the trembling hands of the lilwing's3 leaves The winds caress and fawn, As the dreamy starlight idly weaves Designs for a damask4 lawn.
Densed in the depths of a dim eclipse Of palms in a flowery space, A fountain leaps from the marble lips Of a girl with a golden vase Held atip on a curving wrist, Drinking the drops that glance Laughingly in the gleaming mist Of her crystal utterance.
Archways looped o'er blooming walks That lead thro' gleaming halls; And balconies where the tune-bird talks To the tipsy waterfalls. And easements gauzed with a filmy sheen Of a lace that sifts the sight, While a ghost of bloom on the haunted screen Drips with the dews of light.
Weird, pale shapes of sculptured stone, And marble nymphs agaze Ever in fonts of amber sown With seeds of gold, and sprays Of emerald mosses ever drowned, Where glimpses of shell and gem Peer from the depths as round and round The nautilus nods at them.
Faces blurred in a mazy dance And a music wild and sweet, Spinning the threads of a mad romance That tangles the waltzer's feet: Twining arms, and warm swift thrills That pulse to the melody, Till the soul of the dancer dips and fills In the wells of ecstacy.
Eyes that melt in the quivering ore Of love, and the molten kiss Bubbling out of the hearts that pour Their blood in the molds of bliss; `Tis worn to a languor slumber-deep, The soul of the dreamer lifts A silken sail on the gulfs of sleep, And into the darkness drifts.5 1. Possibly an ellipse of "martyrs of the Hoosiers" or such. 2. "Sin-choked air" or such. 3. Possibly "Littlest winged cupid" kind of thing. 4. A lawn of ornamental variegated pattern as is damask. 5. What kind of place is Riley heading as Dwainie tells him his destination? Is this overblown, sensation-sated place described with bawdy house parlor accouterments a delirium- evoked description of where Riley is really heading due to his alcoholism, i.e. hell? (The instrument falls from her hands; and Amphine in a gust of passionate delight, embraces her.) AMPHINE Thou art not all of earth, O angel one! I do not wonder me those eyes of thine, Have peeped above the very walls of Heaven! What hast thou seen there? Hast thou looked on God! And did he fling as bright a smile as thine Back to thee as he beckoned thee within? And tell me, didst thou meet an angel there Alinger at the gates, nor entering Till I, her brother, joined her?1 1. Riley's sister, Martha Celestia, born February, 1847, died as a baby in 1851, two years after Riley was born. DWAINIE Why, hast thou As sister dead? Truth, I have heard of one Long lost to thee - not dead? AMPHINE Of her I speak. She strayed away from us long, long ago, But I remember her - wondering eyes That seemed as tho' they ever looked on things We could not see, as haply so they did, For she went from us all so suddenly, So strangely vanished, that I of times think She found a pathway leading back to God, And bent her steps therein and slipped away Unseen of earthly eyes. DWAINIE Nay, do not grieve Thee thus, O loving heart! Thy sister yet May come to thee in some sweet way the fates Are planning, even while thy tear-drops fall; so calm thee while I speak of thine own self. And I have listened to a whistling bird That pipes of waiting danger. Did'st thou note No strange behavior of thy sire of late? AMPHINE Ay, he is silent, and he walks as one In some deep melancholy, or as one Asleep. DWAINIE And does he never speak with thee, Nor ask thy counsel? AMPHINE Once he stopped me on The palace stairs, and whispered, "Lo! my son, thy reign draws near - prepare!" and so passed on And vanished like a ghost - so pale he was. DWAINIE And didst thou never reason on this thing? Nor ask thyself "What dims my father's eye, And makes a sullen shadow of his form?" AMPHINE Why, there's a household rumor that he dreams Death lurks forever at his side, and soon Will signal him away.1 But Jucklet says Crestillomeem has said the leeches say There is no cause for serious concern; As so I am assured it is nothing more Than childish fancy; so I laugh, ha! ha! And wonder, as I see him gliding past, If ever I shall waver as I walk And stumble o'er my beard, and knit my brow, And o'er the dull mosaics of the pave Play checkers with mine eyes.2 Ho, ho! Ah,ha! 1. A possible subtle hint of a Riley suicide plan if he cannot get himself together enough to write poetry. SEE: the contemporary poem in Hoosier dialect, "Lines to an Onsettled Young Man." ("An' what is Death?" - W'y, looky hyur -\ Ef Life an' Love don't suit you, sir, \Hit's jes' the thing yer lookin' fer!"). At this point, Riley's poetry contains the theme of the relief from life that comes with nihilation. SEE the 1879 poem "Death," with its final line "Soh, bless me! I am dead!" 2. Riley is in a stupor and the fears he will die while intoxicated in tremens if he cannot come to. His intoxicated self, Crestillomeem, however, doesn't deter him from alcohol consumption. Riley notices himself tumbling about glancing in distraction as do checkers jumping about on a board, square by square. DWAINIE (Aside) How dare I tell him? Yet, I must - I must? AMPHINE Why, art thou, too, grown childish, that thou canst Find crazy pleasure talking to thyself, And staring frowningly with eyes whose smiles I need so much? DWAINIE Nay, rather say their tears, poor thoughtless prince! AMPHINE What mean you? DWAINIE Why, I mean, one hour agone, The queen, thy mother - AMPHINE Nay, say only "queen!" DWAINIE The queen, one hour agone, as so I learn, Sent message craving audience with the king At noon to-night, within the Tower of Stars. Thou knowest one hour later that the throne Convenes, and that the king has set his seal Upon a mandate that proclaims the queen Shall there preside if he do not appear.1 And therefore she, as I have been apprised, Connives to hold him absent purposely That she may claim the vacancy - for what Covert design I know not, but I know It augurs danger to you both. 1. If Riley can't get over his alcoholism, he will consign himself to a life as an alcoholic under Crestillomeem's control. AMPHINE I feel Thou speakest truth, and yet how know you this? DWAINIE Ask me not that; my lips are welded close, And more - since I have dared to speak, and thous To listen - Jucklet is accessory, And even now is plotting for thy fall - But, passion of my soul, think not of me, For nothing but sheer magic was avail To work me harm; but look thee to thyself! For thou art blameless cause of all the hate That rankles in the bosom of the queen. So have thine eyes about thee, that no step May steal behind thee ever - for in this Unlooked of way thy enemy will come. This much I know, but for what fell intent And purpose dire I dare not even guess; So look thee, night and day, that none may come Upon thee from behind. AMPHINE And thou, O precious heart! How art thou guarded, and what shield hast thou Of safety? DWAINIE Fear thou not for me at all; Possessed am I of wondrous sorcery - The gift of holy magic at my birth, My enemy must face me as he comes And I will know him at one utterance, And then I may disarm him tho' he be A giant and of thrice a giant's strength, But hist! What wandering minstrel comes this way? VOICE (In the distance.) The drowsy eyes of the stars grow dim; The wamboo roosts on the rainbow's rim, And the moon is a ghost of a shine: The soothing song of the crool1 is done, But the song of love is a sweeter one, And the song of love is mine. Then wake! O wake! For the sweet song's sake, Nor let my heart with the morning break! 1. Crooning oriole or some such. AMPHINE Some serenader, but what does he in The gardens here at glare of noon? Let us Conceal ourselves within the bower and watch. (They go within.) VOICE. (Drawing nearer.) The mist of the morning, chill and gray, Wraps the night in a shroud of spray, The sun is a crimson blot: The moon fades fast, and the stars take wing; The comet's tail is a fleeting thing, But the tale of love is not, Then, wake! O wake! For the sweet song's sake, Nor let my heart with the morning break. (Enter Jucklet.) JUCKLET Ho! ho! what will my dainty mistress say When I shall stand knee-deep in the wet grass Beneath her window, and with upturned eyes And swaying head, and all-melodious tongue Out-lolling like the clapper of a bell, Fling her a song like that? I wonder now If she will not put up her finger thus, And say, "Hist! heart of mine! the angels call For thee!" Ho! ho! Or will her blushing face Light up her dim boudoir, and from her glass Flare back to her a flame upsprouting from The red-hot socket of a soul whose light She tho't long since had guttered out - Ho! ho! Or, haply, will she chastely bend above - A parian phantom with its head atip, And twinkling fingers dusting down the dews That glitter on the tarpysma vines That riot round her casement, gathering Their blooms to pelt me with, as I below All winkingly await the fragrant shower? Ho! ho! how jolly is this thing of love! But how much richer, rarer, jollier Than all the loves is this rare love of mine! Why, my sweet mistress does not even dream I am her lover; for, to tell the truth, I have a way of wooing all my own, And waste no speech in creamy compliment, And courtesies all gaumed with winy words. In fact, I do not woo at all. I win! How is it now the old duct glides off? SONG1 How is it you woo? and now answer me true, - How is it you woo and you win? Why, to answer you true, - the first thing to do Is simply, my dear, to begin.
But how can I begin to woo or to win When I don't know a Win from a Woo? Why, cover your chin with your fan or your fin And I'll introduce them to you.
But what if it drew from my parents a view With my own in no manner akin? No matter, - your view is the best of the two So I hasten to usher them in.
But stay! Shall I grin at the Woo or the Win? And what will he do if I do? Why, the Woo will begin with "How pleasant it's been" And the Win with "Delighted with you."
Then supposing he grew very dear to my view? I'm speaking, you know, of the Win? Why, then you should do what he wanted you to, And now is the time to begin.
The time to begin? O then usher him in - Let him say what he wants me to do! He is here - he's a twin of yourself, - I am Win, And you are my darling - my Woo. 1. An amusing song-poem of courtship and marriage in which Jucklet contemplates his hope of marriage with Dwainie (Nellie, already married of course.) One who "woos" is an object of courtship and one who "wins" gets married. When Jucklet says, "I am win" he is expressing his confidence that he can become a groom. The phrase is found in an early 1971 Riley courtship poem, the "Unexpected Result," as a "casual" phrase for the ritual of courtship and marriage. ("...If I were you/ I'd marry that woman, that's what I'd do,/ As certain as one and one make two!/ Or ain't you much on the marry now?/ Well, she's a mighty fat take anyhow!"/ "Well now, you can bet she ain't so slow,/ Hang it! I won't play off on her so!/ Where's my overcoat? I'm going to go!/ And you needn't sit up till I come in,/For I am right on the `woo' and the `win!'")
That song I call most sensible nonsense; And if the fair and peerless Dwainie were But here with that sweet voice of hers, to take The part of "Woo," I'd be the happiest "Win" On this side of futurity! Ho! ho! DWAINIE. (Aside to Amphine.) What means he? AMPHINE. Why he means that throatless head Of his needs further chucking down between His ugly shoulders! (Starts forward, Dwainie detains him.) DWAINIE. Nay, thou shalt not stir! See; now the monster has discovered our Repast, so let us mark him further. JUCKLET. What! A roasted wheffle and a toe-spiced whum1 - Tricked with a larvey and gherghling's tail And, sprit me2! wine enough to swim them in! Now I should like to put a question to The guests, but as there are none, I direct My interrogatory to the host: Am I behind time? 1. A "wheffle" is probably something like a waffle and a truffle mix and a "whum" a wheat bun or some such. 2. Give me spirit. (Showing humbly.) Then I can but trust My tardy coming will be overlooked In my most active effort to regain A gracious tolerance by service now: Directing the attention to the fact That I have brought my appetite along, I can but feel - ahem! that further words Would be a waste of time. (Sits at table, pours out wine, and eats voraciously) There was a time When I was rather backward in my ways; But somehow, as I think I have outgrown The nice, shy age, wherein one makes a meal Of two estardles and a fork of soup. Hey, Sanaloo; but my starved stomach stands With mouth agape, awe-stricken and aghast Before the rich profusion of this feast; So will I lubricate it with a glass of merl And coax it on to more familiar forms Of fellowship with these delectables. (Pours out wine and holds up the goblet.) Mine host - thou of the viewless presence and Hush-haunted lip - thy most imperial, Ethereal, and immaterial health! Live till the sun dries up, and comb thy cares With star-prongs till the comets fizzle out And fade away and fall and are no more! (Drinks and refills the goblet.) And if thou wilt permit of the remark, - The gleaming shaft of spirit in this wine Goes whistling to its mark, and full and fair Zipps to the target center of my soul. Why, now, I am the veriest gentleman That ever buttered woman with a smile, And let her melt and run, and drip and ooze All over and around a wanton heart; And if my mistress bent above me now, In all my hideous deformity, I think she would look over, as it were, The hump upon my back; and so forget The kinds and knuckles of my crooked legs In this enchanting smile, that she would leap Love-dazzled, and fall faint and fluttering Within these open, all-devouring arms Of mine! Ho! ho! and yet Crestillomeem Would have me blight my dainty mistress with This feather from the Devil's wing, but I Am far too full of craft to spoil the eyes That yet shall pour their love like nectar out Into my own, and I am far too deep For royal wit to wade my purposes. DWAINIE. What can he mean. AMPHINE. I will rush forward and Tear out his tongue, and slap it in his face! DWAINIE. Nay, nay! It's what he says! JUCKLET. How big a fool - How all magnificent an idiot - I would be to blight her, when I have power To crush the only object that now lies Between her love and mine! Ho! ho! ho! ho! I wonder, when she sees the human toad Squat at her feet, and cock his filmy eyes Upon her, and croak love, if she wilt not Call me to tweezer him with two long sticks, And toss him from her path - O, ho! ho! ho! Hell bend him o'er some blossom quick, that I May have one brother in the flesh! (Nods drowsily.) DWAINIE. (Aside) Ha! See! Look, Amphine, he grows drunken; bide a spell And I will vex him with my sorcery1; Then will we leave him, for the hour draws on When all our arts and strategies must needs Be called in action. 1. The spirit of Nellie and her faith in Riley's poetic possibility invests Jucklet, Riley's survival personality, with awareness that his drunkenness may kill him.
Jucklet yawns drowsily, stretches, and gradually sinks at full length on the sward.1 Amphine and Dwainie come forward. Amphine is about to place his foot contemptuously upon the sleeper's breast, but is held back by Dwainie, who motions him to turn away and hide his face; this time, she unbinds her hair, and throwing it forward over her face, and bending till it trails the ground she lifts to the knee her dress, and so walks backward round the sleeper, crooning to herself an incoherent song.2 Then pausing, letting fall her dress, and rising to full stature, waves her hands above the sleeper's face, and runs to Amphine, who turns about and looks upon her wonderingly. 1. A grassy surface. 2. A song of reminder of her faith in Riley which will soon combine with the terror of dementia tremens from his alcoholism to reform Riley and wake him out of the poem's delirium. DWAINIE. Now shalt thou look on Such misery as thou hast never dreamed. (As she speaks a chorus of unearthly voices is heard chanting to strange discord.) CHANT When the fat moon smiles And the comets kiss, And the Spirkland elves rejoice, The whanghoo twunkers1 A tune like this, And the nightmare nips the royce2: 1. "whanghoo twunkers" is possibly an ellipse for a wailing spirit evoking a "twang" or "plunk" sound. 2. Possibly an ellipse for "royal arse." (As these words die away, a comet-freighted with weird shapes, dips from the sky, and trails near the sleeper's feet, while from it two nightmares, Creech and Gritchfang, alight; the comet hisses, switches its tail and disappears, while the two goblins hover over Jucklet, who stares at them with starting eyes and horribly comforted features.) CREECH (To Gritchfang.) Buzz! Buzz! Buzz! Buzz! Flutter your wings like your grandmother does,1 Tuck in your chin, and wheel over and whir Like a dickerbug fast in the web of the wurr, Reel out your tongue and untangle your toes, And rattle your claws o'er the bridge of his nose; Tickle his ears with your feathers and fuzz, And keep up a hum like your grandmother does. (Jucklet moans and clutches at the air convulsively.2) 1. In Middle English mythology, the "nightmare" was a female monster supposed to settle upon people and animals in their sleep producing a feeling of suffocation or great distress from which the sleeper vainly tries to free one's self. The grandmother of nightmares would be the ultimate ancestral nightmare herself. 2. An account of Riley's "survival self" in tremens. AMPHINE (Shuddering) Most horrible! See how the poor worm writhes! DWAINIE But good will come of it, a far voice sings. GRITCHFANG (To Creech.) Let me dive down in his nostriline caves, And keep an eye out as to how he behaves; Fasten him down while I put him to rack, And don't let him flops from the flat of his back. (Shrinks to minute size, disappears in the sleeper's nose, and calls gleefully from within:) Lo! I have bored thro' the floor of his brains, And set them all writhing with torturous pains; And I shriek out the prayer as I whistle and whizz, I may be the nightmare that my grandmother is! (Appears, and assuming former shape, crosses to Creech, and they dance on the sleeper's stomach in broken time to chorus.) CHORUS Whing! whang! so our ancestors sang, And they guzzled hot blood and blew up with a bang; But they ever tenaciously clung to the rule To only blow up in the hull of a fool - To fizz and explode like a cast-iron toad In the cavernous depths where his victuals were stowed - When chances were ripest and thickest and best To burst every button-hole out of his vest. (They pause, float high above, and fussing together into a ponderous iron weight, they drop heavily upon the chest of the sleeper, who moans piteously.) AMPHINE (Hiding his face.) Ah! Heavens! take we hence! (Dwainie leads him off, looking backward as she disappears and waving her hands.) CREECH (To Gritchfang.) Zipp! Zipp! Zipp! Zipp! Sting his tongue raw and unravel his lip: Grope, on the right, down his windpipe, and squeeze His liver as dry as a petrified flea's. (Gritchfang bows, shrinks and disappears.) Throttle his heart till he's black in the face, And bury it down in some desolate place, Where only remorse in her agony lives To dread the advice that your grandmother gives. (The sleeper struggles convulsively, while the voice of Gritchfang calls from within.) Ho! I have clambered the rounds of his ribs, And riddled his lungs into tatters and dribs; And I turn up the tube of his heart like a hose And squirt all the blood to the end of his nose; I stamp on his stomach, and caper and prance, With my tail tossing round like a boomerang lance, And thus may success ever crown my intent To wander the way that my grandmother went. (Appears, falls hysterically in Creech's outstretched arms. They dance and chorus.) CHORUS Whing! Whang! so our ancestors sung. And they snorted and pawed, and they hissed and they stung, And they took a terrific delight in their work On the fools that they found in the lands of the Spirk. And each little grain of their powders of pain They scraped up and pestled again and again, And they mixed it in doses for gluttons and sots Till they strangled their dreams with abdominal knots. (The comet again trails past, upon which the nightmares leap and disappear. Jucklet staggers to his feet, glares frenziedly about him, and with a wild, unearthly howl of agony, rushes off.)
ACT III Scene I. - Court of Krung -The royal ministers and counselors in session - Crestillomeem, in royal attire presiding - She signals to herald on her right, who steps forward - Blare of trumpets, greeted with loud murmurings and tumult from without. HERALD. Hist, ho! Ay,ay! Ay,ay! Her majesty, The all glorious and ever gracious queen Crestillomeem, to her most loyal, leal1 And right devoted subjects, greeting sends - Proclaiming, in the absence of the king, Her royal presence, as by him empowered To sit upon the throne in sovereign state And work the royal will. (Confusion) Hist, ho! Ay,ay! Ay,ay! And be it known, the king, in view of his Approaching dissolution - Hath decreed The reading of this royal document. 1. A Middle English word meaning "true." (Sensation among the counselors, etc. within and wild tumult without; cries of "Long live the king!" and "Down with the sorceress!") (Unrolls a scroll with royal seal attached. Sensation in court - wild tumult without, and cries of "Plot!" "Conspiracy!" "Down with the Queen!" "Down with the sorceress!") CRESTILLOMEEM. (Wildly) Bring me the traitor-knave who dares to cry "Conspiracy!" (Wild confusion without - sound of rioting, and a voice, "Let me be taken!" Enter officers, dragging Jucklet, wild-eyed and hysterical.) CRESTILLOMEEM. (Starting.) Why bring you Jucklet here? OFFICER. Because `tis he who cries "conspiracy!" And who incites the mob without with cries Of "Plot" and "Treason!" CRESTILLOMEEM. Ha! Can this be true? I'll not believe it! Jucklet is my fool, But not so great a fool that he would tempt His sovereign's ire. Let him be freed. Come here, My Fool. JUCKLET. (Wildly) Thy fool? Ho! ho! Why, thou art mine! (Confusion. Cries of "Strike down the traitor!") JUCKLET. Back! all of ye! I have not waded Hell That I should fear your puny enmity! But I will give you proof of what I say. (Presses toward the throne, hurling his opposers left and right. Crestillomeem sits as tho' stricken speechless, waving him off, while Jucklet folds his arms and stands before her.) JUCKLET. (To the throng) Lo! do I here defy her to lift up her voice And say this is a lie that Jucklet speaks. (The queen motions to officers, who, unperceived, close behind Jucklet.) And further - I pronounce the document1 That craven herald there holds in his hand A forgery - a trick - and dare the Queen Here in my listening presence to command Its utterance. 1. Probabaly an anti-temperance Murphy pledge to remain alcoholic rather to remain sober. CRESTILLOMEEM. (Wildly rising to her feet) Hold, hireling! traitor! fool! The Queen thou dost in thy mad boasts insult Will utter first thy doom. (Jucklet is seized from behind, and hurled, face upward on the dais at her feet, while a minion, with a drawn sword pressed against his breast, stands over him.) Ere we proceed With graver matters let this demon-knave Ben sent back home to Hell. Give me the sword - The insult has been mine - so even shall The vengeance be! (As she bends forward with the sword, Jucklet, with a super human effort frees his hand and with a sudden motion, and an incoherent muttering, flings something1 at the queen, who staggers, dropping the sword, and with her arms tossed wildly aloft, totters forward and falls prone upon the pave. In the confusion following, Jucklet mysteriously disappears, and as the bewildered and awe-stricken courtiers lift the fallen queen, a clear and piercing voice is heard singing.) 1. Sobriety which will change Riley from Crestillomeem's influence in drunkenness to Krung a respectable person in society. VOICE. The pride of noon must wither soon, The dusk of death must fall; Yet out of darkest night the moon Shall blossom over all. (For an instant a dense cloud envelops the throne, then slowly lifts, discovering Krung seated in royal state, with Jucklet in the act of presenting the scepter to him. Blare of trumpets, and chorus of courtiers, ministers, heralds, etc.) CHORUS. All hail! All hail! All hail! Long live the King! KRUNG. Thro' God's great providence, together with The intervention of an angel whom I long ago tho't lost to earth and me,1 Once more, as your sovereign, do I greet And tender you my blessing. Until late I have been subject of the baleful spells And witcheries2 of this poor woman here3 Who grovels at my feet, blind, speechless, and So stricken with a curse herself designed Should light upon hope's fairest minister. Remove her from my sight. 1. Nellie. 2. Intoxication. 3. Crestillomeem, Riley's drunken self. (As the queen is led away Spraivoll appears in royal attire. She kneels and kisses the king's hand; in return he kisses her upon the brow, and lifts and seats her at his side.1) 1. Spraivoll, Riley's "versifier" self can now write humble poetry. Behold in this sweet woman here my child, who, when a babe, The cold, despicable Crestillomeem - (He bows his head within his hands and shudders) By spells And wicked necromancies spirited To some strange real, where, happily A Wunkland princess1 found her, and undid The spell by a most potent sorcery2 She doth possess, God-given, to right wrong. Lo! let the peerless princess now appear! 1. "Dwainie-Nellie." 2. The power of encouragement and love. (He lifts his scepter, and a gust of melody, unearly beautiful, sweeps through the court. The star above the Throne drops slowly downward, bursting like a bubble on the scepter-tip, and issuing therefrom Amphine and Dwainie, hand in hand, full at the feet of Krung, who bends above them with his blessing, while Jucklet capers wildly round the group.) JUCKLET. Ho! ho! but I could shriek for very joy - For tho' fair Amphine even now bends o'er A blossom, I, ho! ho! have no desire To meddle with it, since with but one eye I slept the while she backward walked around Me in the garden. (Amphine laughs gaily, Jucklet blinks and leers, and Dwainie bites her finger.) KRUNG. Peace! good Jucklet, peace! For this is not a time for juiceless wit - Tho' I have found restored to me my life - Tho' I have found a daughter, I have lost A son - for Dwainie, with her sorcery, Will, on the morrow, carry him away.1 1. Riley's bond with Nellie causes his "lover-self" to go live with Nellie in her grave or perhaps heaven as her "soulmate."
SOME COMMENTS ON THE POEM FROM THE TIME OF ITS FIRST PUBLICATION
Riley never talked about the substance of the poem. There is an account of a Riley acquaintance of the time, Minnie Belle Mitchell, who was in her brother-in-law, George F. Hauck's Greenfield Grocery in 1878 when the Saturday HERALD arrived with "The Flying Islands" in it. Riley's brother, Hum, working in the store as a clerk received the newspaper from the paper carrier and spread it out on a counter. While she and Hum were reading it, Riley and his friend Frank Hayes came into the store. Minnie Belle remembers saying to Riley, "It's wonderful, simply marvelous," with her teen-age exuberance. She continued, "It's beautiful to look at too, but do you know, I can't understand a word of it - I don't know what it's all about." She adds, "My extravagant remarks were followed by an explosion of laughter from the three young men, and I knew instantly that I had said the wrong thing and my face was scarlet." Riley's autobiographical poem was a lark to him at the time. He was "Thomas Chatterton" putting forth a prank poem but without so serious an intent as to try to make any money out of a Middle English "forgery" as Chatterton had tried. Riley eventually replied, "Well, Minnie Belle, I have to confess-I don't know what that poem is all about myself. If was given to me, you know." Riley was not about to tell his young friend that it was a soul journey while he was intoxicated. The public was just as confused about "The Flying Islands of the Night" as was Minnie Belle Mitchell. The Kokomo TRIBUNE published the following about "The Flying Islands of the Night" on September 26, 1878. Our young friend, J.W. Riley, has covered himself all over with glory by his "The Flying Islands of the Night" recently published in the Indianapolis HERALD. Never since the days of Poe has there been such a fanciful piece of versification written. It is so unique and purely original that any attempt to describe it or criticize it would result in a miserable failure. It must be read to be appreciated. Mr. Riley has been before the public but for a short time, but in that time his poems have placed him at the head of the poets of the West. For sublimity, originality, conception and purity of diction, Mr. Riley ranks the leading literary lights of the state. His sonnet on the death of Mr. Philips was one of the grandest concepts that was ever penned. Christ hears the wailing of the tired soul, and reaching down from Heaven, takes him by the hand and helps him up. We are pleased to learn Mr. Riley's engagements to lecture are numerous and financially his prospects are bright." Yes, but what about the subject matter? The poem was really a play. The play was about Riley's life. The strange thing about it was that Riley was all the characters except for Dwainie.
THE FLYING ISLANDS AS THEATER
There is something like the great Shakespearian explanation that "All the world's a stage" in Riley's autobiographical poem. Riley loved to act and was considered a great actor in his time. We might digress to talk about Riley and the theater in his life. Riley was a great actor. We have the testimony of other actors to confirm this. Riley played in the soul-roles he described in his poem. At a dinner given in London for Riley by Sir Henry Irving, the great Nineteenth Century actor of England, with Coquelin, the great actor of France present, Coquelin remarked to Irving upon hearing Riley, "This Monsieur Riley has by nature what you and I have spent twenty years to acquire." This remark was made on Riley's famous summer trip of 1891 through Scotland to see Robert Burns' "wee cot" that ended up in London. Riley was a great American actor as well as poet. He lived in a play cast of himself on the stage of his soul.
ALCOHOLIC'S CONFESSIONAL GENRE LITERATURE
What about the plot? Who would have guessed that Riley's genius had produced the most novel use of a purely American genre in all of literature. Riley had transformed the Alcoholic's Confessional Genre of literature into poetry. He had come close to strangling it. He used it absurdly. Literature had never seen such a mischievous minstrel as Riley before. One of the most original aspects of Riley's writing of "The Flying Islands of the Night" was the use he made of the Alcoholic's Confessional Genre. In that genre generally, an alcoholic describes himself as a despicable alcoholic. Then along comes a "saving soul" or perhaps the "agent of salvation." It is a special person to the doomed alcoholic who pleads to the deranged intoxicated person and inspires them to escape their drunkenness while in tremens or delirium of one sort or another. Presto! The alcoholic is saved and a "new person." This genre was very popular in Riley's time when great temperance movements swept the country. However no other poet made even the slightest use of the genre. Nor does it appear that any other author followed Riley's lead in applying it to autobiographical poetry. "The Flying Islands of the Night" is really a very complex puzzle. Once we see that Poe's "Scenes from Politian" and mock Thomas Chatterton trumpery were sources of form and language, then we must look to the movement of Riley's piece. Alcoholic's Confessional Genre literature provides that more dominant influence. The key to the genre is an initial description of alcoholic "hell" followed by the saving influence of somebody and then a final scene where sobriety triumphs. In Riley's autobiographical use of the genre, the spirit of the dead Nellie Cooley, his married inspiration of days gone by, is the saving force. Later, during his revisions for subsequent publications, Riley adds his mother's love as AEo as a saving force too. Riley's triumph is that of Krung in achieving great fame and respectable status. We find the alcoholic's confessional genre in the prose of Luther Benson's FIFTEEN YEARS IN HELL. In that book, which Riley was reading at the time he wrote "The Flying Islands of the Night," Benson describes the following sequence in his life in which his mother saves him. "My wild revel was protracted for days out of dread of the awful sorrow and remorse that I knew must surely come on my getting sober. My mother appeared to me in my troubled dreams, and talked to me as in life. Many times in my slumber, and in my waking fancies did I see her pale, troubled face, with her pitying eyes looking on me as from that bed of pain and death, and at such times I reached out my hands toward her in mute pleading for forgiveness, forgetting or not knowing that she was dead." Riley looked on Benson with awe and reverence. But was he for real? Was he just another "charlatan" with a product to sell - piety and salvation - as did Docs McCrillus and Townsend sell "miracle cures." Luther was someone of national significance as can be seen in two representative press reports of his time. From the Pittsburgh (Pennsylvania) GAZETTE: Luther Benson, Esq. of Indiana, has just closed one of the most powerful temperance lectures ever delivered here. The house was one solid mass of people, with not one spare inch of standing-room. For nearly two hours he held the audience as any magic. At the close a large number signed the pledge, some of them the hardest drinkers here. The people are so delighted with his good work that they have secured him for another lecture Wednesday evening." From the Manchester (New Hampshire) PRESS: "Smyth's Hall was completely filled, seats and standing room at two o'clock Sunday afternoon, with an audience which came to hear Luther Benson. The officers of the Reform Club, clergymen and reformed drunkards occupied seats upon the platform. Mr. Benson is a native of Indiana, and says he was a drunkard from six years of age. He was within three months of graduation from college when he was expelled for drunkenness. Then he studied for a lawyer, and was admitted to practice, being drunk while studying and drunk while engaged in a case. At length he reduced himself to poverty, pawning all he had for drink. At length he started to reform and though he had once fallen he was determined to persevere. Since his reformation two years ago, he gave temperance lectures. He is a young man, a powerful, swinging sort of speaker, with a good command of language, original with peculiar intonation, pronunciation and idioms, sometimes rough, but eminently popular with his audiences. He spoke for an hour and a half steadily, wiping the perspiration from his face at intervals, taking up the greater part of his address with his personal experience. He said he had delirium tremens several times, once for fifteen days, and gave an exceedingly minute and graphic description of his torments. A number of men signed the pledge at the close of the meeting. Among them was one man, who sat in front of the audience and kept drinking from a bottle he had evidently in a spirit of bravado, but at the conclusion of the address he signed the pledge, crying like a child." In another example of the genre, THIRTY-THREE YEARS A LIVE WIRE, the autobiography of John T. Hatfield, another reformed alcoholic and incidentally a childhood friend of James Whitcomb Riley who went on to lecture on holiness, the Act II stage (the saving agency) is referred to as an "Anointing." Instead of a "Dwainie" as with James Whitcomb Riley or a "doting mother" as with Benson, Hatfield's inspiration is Christ. Riley was as much aware of Hatfield's writing in the genre as he was Benson's. As to their boyhoods together, Hatfield writes, "James Whitcomb Riley and myself were boys together. We were in the same class at school, and at the same "swimming hole," since made famous in one of Mr. Riley's poems. During the Civil War we marched the streets together with tin pans for drums and broomsticks for guns. Little did passers-by imagine, as they cast indifferent glances at us little dust-begrimed urchins out in the road playing soldier, that, in the coming years, little Johnnie Hatfield would bless his country as John T. Hatfield, "The Hoosier Evangelist," and little Jim Riley would be known the world over as James Whitcomb Riley, "The Hoosier Poet." Hatfield held revivals country-wide as a primary speaker of the American "Holiness movement" and founded a religious college in Pasadena, California. From his boyhood memorials, he says, "My father, in those days, frequently kept a bottle of "Old Kentucky Rye" in the cupboard and its contents were offered to both children and guests. This custom of the home had something to do in kindling to great intensity my appetite for strong drink, and at the age of twenty years I was frequenting saloons and seeking companionship among the vile, soul-destroying influence of saloon life. (Biographer's Note: This crowd probably included James Whitcomb Riley.) Like a meteor in the night I was fast going down, and nothing less powerful than the mighty attraction of heavenly gravitation could reverse my hellward course and draw me to the heights of noble Christian manhood. Thank God, the Holy Spirit interposed, the blood of Christ was supplied, and my young life was transformed from a disgraceful career of drunken profligacy to one of eminent usefulness in the cause of the Lord Jesus Christ." Strangely enough, James Whitcomb Riley's life passage had the same result. An anointing incident which saves Hatfield from his life of sin is described as occurring at a typical Midwestern camp-meeting of the period. Hatfield says, "People who witnessed the scenes of that day declared that they saw flashes of Divine light appear over the congregation as wave and wave of heavenly power descended upon the assembly of thousands." After the meeting, Hatfield went to a farmer's home exhausted and went to bed, but couldn't sleep until "I again closed my eyes and there appeared before me a vision. I saw a silver horn lined with gold, the large end resting upon my breast. It appeared to be many feet in length from the large end to the mouthpiece which appeared to be quite small. I looked up from the large end, and had never held anything so indescribably beautiful. Suddenly the opening at the small end was darkened and there appeared a halo of light, which seemed to envelop a fast-approaching figure. As nearer and nearer the lovely vision approached, I soon recognized the central figure as that of Jesus and the beautiful halo proved to be a band of bright, shining angels. All the angels were singing and such exquisite tones cannot be described, neither can they be compared to any earthly melodies. In a short time, Jesus stood close beside me, and looked down upon me with an expression that, in clearer tones than words, spoke of tenderest love, then He disappeared. At the same time I felt a sensation in my throat as though I was swallowing something. Then the horn passed away, the angels disappeared and the music ceased. I opened my eyes and then closed them again, hoping that the vision would appear one more, but I waited and listened in vain." The call was for Hatfield to preach just as James Whitcomb Riley's call from his deceased Dwainie was inspiration for him to write poetry and recite it from the lyceum circuit stages around the country. Whether Riley was intoxicated while writing "The Flying Islands of the Night" is unknown. There is this possibility. Recent study by Mark Brunke and Merv Gilbert in "Alcohol and Creative Writing" in PSYCHOLOGICAL REPORTS (1992,71, 651-658) found that alcohol facilitates creative writing and specifically the use of novel figurative language. The testing of the hypothesis had intoxicated persons write brief stories or streams of consciousness, all of which were fictional. There were significantly more novel tropes while intoxicated than sober. Subjects also wrote significantly more words when intoxicated. There is obviously very marked used of figurative language and novel trope use in "The Flying Islands of the Night." Nevertheless, the writing bears great sense as an autobiographical exposition under the circumstances of its writing. Whether Riley wrote the piece while intoxicated is debatable but unnecessary to know for its value in this biography. We cannot fully explore "The Flying Islands of the Night" in this preface to the life of the most important of the late Nineteenth Century American poets, James Whitcomb Riley. We must however confirm its autobiographical nature as the basis of this biography. Crestillomeem, Krung, Jucklet and others are the self-visualization which Riley embodied in his wonderfully "astronomically" impossible vision of self- alienation and personality fragmentation he called "The Flying Islands of the Night" which will govern the biography to follow. Why bother with such an impossible person? There may be other reasons for a study of Riley - and some of them will be explored - but ultimately the very mix of his personality, and the eventual triumph of his poetic self, "Spraivoll," (usually) was brought about by an intervening instrumentality of spirituality that I find so compelling it must be written about. At its point of greatest flourish, this aspect of Riley became transforming to Riley's poetry as well as literally "saving" him from Crestillomeem. At its very best the quality in his life became kenotic poetry. Kenotic poetry is the finest poetry of Post-Civil War American literature and Riley wrote its greatest singing verse. The reason it is the finest poetry of the period is that it connected ecstatically with the American soul and expressed its song. Some mention of the obscure kenotic theological movement originating in Germany must be interwoven into this account and also its odd peripatetic journey into the American mid- continent where Riley wrote his poetry. This will come with a discussion of Riley as Spraivoll later on in this biography. But for now let us meet Riley as a cast of himself as he knows himself to be at the level of his soul. There is simply no way of accounting for the life of James Whitcomb Riley without meeting his dialoguing "self- cast" play partners. We will introduce them in the chapters that follow and see how their individual lives were lived.
JUCKLET
HOW CAN RILEY SURVIVE IT ALL? - JUCKLET, A MINSTREL WHO ANSWERS THE CALL WITH MISCHIEF IN MIND
Among the play characters Riley sees himself playing in his autobiographical "The Flying Islands of the Night," is Jucklet, the mischievous "jongleur," dialect singer, story teller and Riley's survival self. It would be a grave mistake to consider this Riley "self" as some sort of happy idiot. Jucklet kept his eyes open and his genius was searching out American life. Jucklet was probably the role that people enjoyed the most about Riley. Some of his clever shenanigans, such as his "blind painter" act when he was wandering around Indiana as an itinerant house and sign painter, are firmly lodged in American folklore. THE BLIND PAINTER PRANK The "blind painter" prank occurred in August, 1872 with his traveling friends- also itinerant craftsmen or vagrants calling themselves "The Graphics" - who knew of Riley's genius for mimicry. The group decided to have some fun with the town folk of Peru, Indiana. The young men hinted around town that a "blind sign painter" was outside trying to paint a sign on a building. Soon half the town came out to witness. How could a blind man paint a sign? Riley assumed the patient, weary look of a blind man, groping about and upsetting a can of paint, whereupon his associates jeered him and made terrible fun of him. Then another would say, "Look at that poor blind man. Isn't it a shame the way folks make fun of him!" In the meantime, Riley climbed the ladder, fumbled for a few minutes, and, at last, without laying out the letters, as a sign painter customarily did, he produced a beautifully done free-hand sign on the side of the building while his friends laughed and poked each other below. In the meantime, people chirped, "He isn't blind! How could he do that if he were blind!" while the Graphics solemnly insisted, "Oh, yes he is!" This Riley, the "blind sign painter," was classic Jucklet. THE VOICE FROM THE CELLAR PRANK My favorite prank performed by Riley was done with John Hoover in a small town in the heat of summer of 1874. Bill Moore, hot and fat, plodded the main street which was baking in a scorching sun. In front of the dry goods store, a pleading voice reached his ear. "Bill, help, Bill! Lift up the cellar door. I am trapped in the cellar. I can't see in here!" Bill put his hands under the cellar door and tugged and pulled and teased but the cellar door failed to move when along came another person, Lee Trees. Lee was wearing a new white suit and was the town "dandy." "Lee, Lee. Help!" the voice called out from the cellar. "Please lift up the cellar door. I'm in here and I can't get out." Both men pulled and tugged and teased. Dripping with perspiration they went inside the dry goods store and came out with candles to look through a window into the dark cellar. They saw that the cellar door was locked with chains from the inside. When they went back into the dry goods store, the merchant scratched his head and rocked on his heels and said he didn't know how anyone could get down there in the first place. Then, from next door in the hardware store, they heard James Whitcomb Riley and John Hoover laughing hysterically and holding their sides. Upon further investigation they found Riley holding a hose the other end of which went through an iron grating and down into the cellar. The voice from the cellar door came from the lips of James Whitcomb Riley in the hardware store through the hose. Jucklet was just having some fun. TAKE RADWAY'S READY RELIEF PRANK I should add that Riley himself was not simply pranking playing Jucklet, he was also surviving in the character role. Sometimes the two mixed. There is a story of Jucklet, while a young man traveling through the countryside painting signs. On a new gate between Kennard and New Castle, Riley noticed a farmer had displayed on its top board: "What will you do to be saved?" With no one in sight, Riley painted underneath it, "Take Radway's Ready Relief!" This was a common laxative of the time. Some days later, he passed the same farm and on the bottom board the farmer had added, "And prepare to meet thy God!"
Jucklet was also a poet. His greatest writing is found in the "Poetical Gymnastics" series and "Respectably Declined Papers of the Buzz Club" series published originally in the Indianapolis Saturday HERALD. This body of Riley's work represents Riley in unburdened creativity and mischievous orientation. In these great series, Riley writes the poem "On Quitting California." No, this poem is not about moving away from the great Pacific coastal state. It is about giving up a "California" brand of cheap "red-eye" whiskey. Riley is quitting a crummy brand -not giving up alcohol entirely. Cleverness and humor are marks of Jucklet. Jucklet is the usual story teller. There seems to be an easy, casual and honest relationship between Riley and Jucklet. Occasionally one finds Jucklet lapsing into the "dots" and "disses" of his native Hoosier Deutsch culture. Here is one of Riley's stories from his "Buzz Club" writings.
UNAWANGAWAWA; OR, THE EYELASH OF THE LIGHTNING (1878).
It was the noble red man, from the land of the setting sun, in company with some half dozen members of his tribe, under management of "Captain Rigby Knowles," who, as the big bills went on to state, had been "nine years a captive among the wild, untutored wanderers of the western wilderness," and was now "a missionary, disseminating knowledge, and the advantages of education, to his dusky brothers, as well as enlightening the civilized world regarding the manners and customs of the poor Indian." They were billed to show "for one night only," at the one church in our little village, the Thursday evening prayer meeting having been postponed for their accommodation, and "the clergy" complimented. I shall never forget their visit to our school that afternoon, for I was then a lad of ten or thereabout; so I leave you to infer the aching sense of my own inferiority as they stalked stoically into the school room, in full bloom of war-paint, wampum, bead moccasins and feathers, and headed by the redoubtable "Captain Rigby Knowles" himself, looking, for the world, like an enlarged facsimile of the "Daniel Boone" in Monteith's geography, only excepting the melancholy and the deceased deer at his feet. The arithmetic class, in fractions, hurried to its seat, and the silence of death fell upon the room, while the blanched faces of the "scholars" contrasted vividly with those of their tawny visitors as "the famed interpreter and guide," after a wheezy conversation with the teacher, in which the latter only nodded his head submissively at every proposition - seized suddenly hold of a stalwart warrior, and with the bloodcurdling remark of "Pombee steel-ah da be-bee wah-wah!" or words to that effect, wheeled him before us with the following introduction: "He iss a big chief. He come to make some talk wiss you. He iss a much, heap, smart man. He will make you big Injun speech dot you don't could understand, and den we told you w'as he say. He no talk white talk. He on'y talk much very Injun. He talk Choctaw - he talk Mohawk - he talk Chippavay - he talk effry all style of Injun talk, on'y he no talk white talk. He iss awful smart! Me talk, like big chief, effry all style of Injun-talk, on'y me talk United States also. He iss - O, he iss awful smart, big, very, posted Injun gentlemans. Now he iss go to speak big Injun speech, unt den I say it explain, so dot you know wass he say." Then, turning to the big chief, he touched him off with the following fuse: "De ah-ghee-ghah bee-gah wah-way!" at which the chief at once opened fire in deep, lazy guttural, accompanying the utterance with that facial contortion indicative of an acute attack of cholera morbus. This incoherent mastication had occupied but a brief interval of time when the interpreter jerked the tail of the warrior's shawl, and with a spasmodic "Chow," and a "Ching-ching," he stopped as abruptly as a German music-box. The interpreter explained: "He say dot you must oxcuse him - dot he don't know he was go to speak. He say dot he ain't much fix on the de subjec', but dot he try to drop some small, leedle, few remarks dot come to hiss mind." Then, prodding the big chief between the shoulders with a rigid thumb, the noble red man lumbered off again in a complexity of verbal chow-chow that put the listener's ears on edge, and thrilled the speculative fancy with a nameless dread, as the ever-widening stream of conglomerated eloquence dashed into savage meaning, fiercely defined by gestures that swung invisible war-clubs, hurled tomahawks, and manipulated the gory scalping-knife. And it was sometime before the fearless interpreter could check this impassioned burst. He had jerked at the tail of the warrior's shawl like a school-boy at the string of a limber-jack, and with pretty much the same result. The "scholars" were wild- eyed, and pale with fright. The teacher had one leg thrown carelessly over the window sill, and with an air of careless indifference was pruning his trembling nails with the big blade of his knife, while the girls in actual terror hid their pallid faces behind their desk-lids, and pencils and pen-holders rained from their places, some, piercing with their barbed points the floor, stood bolt upright and quivered with affright. It was a critical moment for us all; but the daring interpreter, with a presence of mind worth a Van Amburg, threw open his blouse, disclosing a magic something lurking in an inner pocket which the savage reached for with a pacified "Ugh! give some, me dry up!" while the small boys whispered they bet it was a pistol! They bet he'd killed lots o' Indians! They bet he wasn't afraid!, etc. etc. And so we listened with unusual interest as the interpreter explained: "You mustn't don't get sceert: he won't hurt noting. He wass on'y yoost say dot he for hissef iss sorry dot he don't gone to school when he wass been a leedle childrens like you. But he say when he was leedle like dot, he roll unt dumble in de grass, unt go mitout hiss clothes, unt kick hiss heels like a jaybird. He say dot he not got some advantages ober he would gone to school now off he wass a leedle boy wonce. He was yoost told you how he wass a leedle poor Injun boy, unt don't gone to Sunday school. He say when he wass leedle, heap, awful naughty Injun boy he wass one time play mit hiss leedle brutters mit seesters in de big wasser, unt he want to comed out unt dey wont let um, unt sling um wiss mud, unt dot make um heap-much-brave, so dot he kill um unt scalp um. Den when he goned home his folks dey said: "Where iss your leedle brutters unt seesters?" Unt he say: "Dey at de swimmin-hole." Unt when gone to found um, dey all was scalped unt dead, unt dey hands cut off, unt dey nose cut off, unt dey ears unt eyes cut off. Den hiss folks say: "Who wass done it?" Unt he say: "I don't could lied about it; I do it wiss my leedle hatchet!" Unt den his folks dey say: "Dot's goot! Dot boy will been on de war-path ober he been twelf moons of age!" Unt den he say dot make um feel like big warrior, so dot he can't wait, unt got impulsiff, unt kill also de rest of his folks, unt gone on de war-path unt kill heap-much of ladies unt gentlemens. But he say dot he won't done it now - dot he iss sorry cos off he would a saved his leedle brutters unt seester he would took um to Sunday school wiss um. "Ugh gee bebah wah-wah!" This concluding sentence of the interpreter, abruptly addressed to the warrior, evidently conveyed to him instructions to simmer down, and close his peroration in some conciliatory and complimentary fashion, for the noble savage smiled like a genial hippopotamus, and thumped his breast like a bass drum. His remarks now seemed to be particularly addressed to the fairer portion of his audience, and his gesticulation at was so palpably indicative of love and affection the big girls blushed and giggled, and the small boys whistled aloud. Only once did he cause a tremor of trepidation to thrill the bosoms of his gentle auditors, when in a triumphant burst he tossed his arms aloft, an, with a glory of inspiration lighting up his dusky features, gave vent to the impassioned utterance, "Shoot-pop-bang!" and then, shortly after, he drew his shawl tightly about him, slapped his chest so vehemently it jarred a feather from his head-gear, and, with the pompous exclamation, "Me big chief, wah!" he folded his arms, and stood stoical and silent. The interpreter, quivering with an inward paroxysm, after prefacing the interpretation with the chuckling observation, "Bet you don't know whas he say!" went on in this wise" "Well he say dot he would like to marry a few off you girls. You notice he hold up hiss hand like dot? Well, dot mean five; he say he would like to marry five off you girls. You notice he hold up de also both hands? Well, dot mean dot he would have ten wife - off de both kind - five injun, unt five white squaw. He say he tink dot make things lifely off his domestics unt hiss leedle quiet wigwam. He say dot off you marry him he make you all a good husband, unt dot he took you to de land of de setting sun, where you to do nothing - only yoost work. He say he will done all de huntin' hisself, unt dot he will "shoot-pop-bang," like he say, de mussrat unt possum, unt cath um by the tail unt bring um home; den all you had to done wass build de fire, unt peel um, unt cook yoost a leedle, unt he will eat um. Den he say he will give you all de rest. He say you will suit de climate - he say it iss so healdy dot you live more as a hundred years old off you gone wiss him once, unt a tree don't fall on you. He say it iss so healdy out dere dot hiss grandpa iss livin' yet, unt he iss over four tousand year old, unt ain't a gray hair in his head. He say dey also no hair in his head. He say he chaw tobacker all hiss life unt don't hurt um. He say he is healdy dot you wouldn't know um off you see um. He say dot you got in for fifteen cent, unt de leedle children's five cent tonight at de meetin' house." As Spraivoll's friends are ministers, primarily Myron Reed and Robert Burdette, or fellow kenotics such as Lew Wallace author of "Ben Hur," as Crestillomeem's are fellow alcoholics such as James McClanahan, Clint Hamilton, and Luther Benson, as Krung's friends are establishment figures such as Dr. Wycliffe Smith, Booth Tarkington and Benjamin Harrison, Jucklet's friends are the mischievous and daring nonconformists and "funsters" such as John Skinner, Bill Nye and Mark Twain. Here is an incident that reveals how Riley as Jucklet often mischievously made his way through life before he became famous minstrelizing. The incident is one recalled by Minnie Belle Mitchell. TRIP TO CHARLOTTESVILLE "The struggle and disappointments endured by the Hoosier poet in his effort to arouse public interest in his poems would have discouraged fainter hearts. But each succeeding failure made him more determined to carry on. He had for some time been reading his poems at home and church entertainments and social gatherings (from his early twenties). Public offerings at first failed completely. Then another opportunity presented itself when the trustee of the Charlottesville one-room school came to Greenfield and Riley saw his chance to offer a public entertainment there. After Riley explained to the school trustee his plan, the trustee appeared interested. The fellow not only have his consent to the enterprise, but agree to have the schoolhouse warm and lighted and to see that a large audience would greet him. Thinking this would be fun, Riley and his friend and roommate, John Skinner, prepared a variety show with a few guitar numbers and reading of poetry by Riley. Charlottesville was eight miles east of Greenfield and the two young men in their twenties, never doubting that a full house would mean a big income, ordered a horse and buggy from Greenfield's liveryman, a Mr. Morgan. The only problem was that the only road to Charlottesville was a toll road at the time. To get there a tollgate had to be passed and neither Riley nor Skinner had any money to get through. When the two reached the tollgate, they got the toll gate keeper to agree to await payment until they returned with their receipts from the entertainment. The two arrived at Charlottesville and went to the schoolhouse but found it dark. Everyone in Charlottesville was in bed. The two drove their team to the trustee's home and found him in bed too. He forgot his promise to broadcast publicity about the entertainment. He did, however, get up and go open the schoolhouse. About a dozen people were rousted up. The collection to pay for the show at the end of the program amounted to only thirty-five cents. The trustee said he and his family should not have to pay. The two boys were in a quandary since they had to pay the tollgate keeper to get home and the liveryman. When the two reached the tollgate, they found the tollhouse was dark - the tollgate keeper was in bed and the pole across the road was tied down. There was just one thing to do. John Skinner got out and cut the rope and up flew the pole from across the road. Then he got back in and the two flew down the road towards Greenfield as if chased by bandits. When the two got to the livery stable, Riley found a boy in charge. Riley as Jucklet, ever resourceful, asked the boy if he could change a twenty dollar bill. The boy said "No," and told them young men they would have to pay for the horses in the morning when Mr. Morgan was there. Then the two returned to their lodgings at the Guyman Inn in Greenfield where they spent their "take" from the entertainment on cheese and crackers sinking behind the potbelly stove in the tavern office. While they were relaxing, there was a great knocking on the tavern door, and the irate tollgate keeper came in, fuming and swearing. He asked the night clerk if he had heard a rig pass by the tavern traveling at high speed. The clerk said he didn't remember any such thing and then listened as the tollgate keeper told his tale of somebody running the tollgate and probably driving on to Indianapolis. He said, "I think I know who they were. Two young men looking awful suspicious went through earlier and said they would pay on their way back through. They were wearing white collared shirts and looked like city fellers." As Riley and Skinner slumped deeper and deeper into their chairs on the other side of the stove, the clerk confirmed that young men like that were probably city "fellers" as the tollgate keeper left." Getting started as a poet and platform artist was made much easier for Riley because, as Jucklet, he appreciated and enjoyed mischief and the occasional humor of the perverse. There is something to be said that Riley's Jucklet character has the good humor and sense of fun of his Hoosier Deutsch ancestors. Central Indiana is sometimes referred to as the land of the "Hoosier Deutsch." Riley was predominantly of Hoosier Deutsch cultural influence. Riley's father, Reuben, spoke Deutsch in his boyhood home and did not learn to speak English until after his childhood even though he came from Irish roots. Riley's ancestors kept alive many of the old folktales and stories of their lives. Few of these Deutsch tales survive. I myself preserved one in a book called THE WILD BULL OF BLUE RIVER. The records are very, very scant about the hardy Deutsch settlers of Central Indiana. Their language was once spoken on the street corners of Greenfield. Cultural influences discouraged it. For example, in Riley's own Bradley Methodist Church of Greenfield, Indiana those who spoke German were consigned to the back of the church since it was deemed only the English speaking Methodists could derive benefit of the English sermons. Balconies were built in some such churches so that the Deutsch might see what was going on at the altar since they could not be expected to understand the service verbally. The Deutsch language was slowly lost in Indiana until the time of the First World War. In fact Deutsch was made illegal in Greenfield schools by an ordinance of the Greenfield City Council during World War One and was rarely spoken after that. One of the Deutsch poems was preserved by Riley. It was called "Lullaby," and was published in Riley's famous column in the Indianapolis Saturday HERALD called "Poetical Gymnastics" in 1879. Its subtitle says "From the German." It has never been included in Riley's COMPLETE WORKS apparently because Riley translated it and it was not an original composition. Riley did write another "Lullaby" but it was not his Hoosier Deutsch translation.
HOOSIER DEUTSCH LULLABY
Leedle dutch baby haff gome to town! Jabber and jump till der day goes down; Jabber unt schpluter, unt blubber unt phizz Vot a dutch baby dees lannsman is! I dink dose mout vas leedle too vide Obber you laugh fon dot also-side; Haff got blenty of deemple unt vrown? Hey, leedle dutchman gome to town.
Leedle dutch baby, I dink me proud Obber your fader can schquall dot loud Ven he vos leedle dutch baby like you, Unt yoost don'd gare like he always do; Guess ven dey vean id on beer you bet Dots der reason he don'd vean'd yet - Vot you said off he drink you down, Hey, leedle dutchman gome to town.
Leedle dutch baby, yoost schquall avay - Schquall fon breakfast till gisterday: Better you all-time gry unt shoud Dan schmile me vonce fon der coffin oud! Vot I gare off you keek my nose Downside-up, mit you heels unt toes - Downside-up, or sideup-down Hey! leedle dutchman gome to town.
Riley enjoyed being a Hoosier Deutschman as we can tell from this recollection of one of their poems. The Hoosier Deutsch were a playful, happy people who enjoyed life as well as industry. They were wanderers. Jucklet sprang from predominantly Deutsch culture although not entirely from Deutsch roots. Andrew A. Riley, Irish grandfather of James Whitcomb Riley, was born in Bedford County, Pennsylvania in a Deutsch speaking community. Andrew's parents were Rebecca Harvey, born July 11, 1769 in England who died in Montgomery County, Ohio on Sept. 7, 1849, and James (or John "William") Riley born 1752 in Torsnagh, Cork, Ireland who died in Bedford, Pennsylvania before 1820. The source of this pedigree is listed in the acknowledgements. James Riley had married Rebecca Harvey about 1775 at Reading Berks, Pennsylvania. Andrew was the second child. The firstborn was Samuel Riley, born 1790. After Andrew came James Anderson Riley, born 1796 who died in Nov. 1840; Isaac Riley, born about 1800; Henry Riley, born about 1803; George Washington Harvey Riley, born Dec. 19, 1807 who died May 22, 1868; Sarah Riley, born about 1810 in Pennsylvania who married George Roudebush; and Mary Ann Riley, born 1813 who died in 1887. Andrew's wife, Margaret Slick, was the daughter of John Slick born about 1769, the son of Philip Slick born about 1740 in Germany, and Elizabeth Wilson. Andrew A. Riley and Margaret Slick were married in Bedford, Pennsylvania, but the Family Bible gives no date. It must have been around 1820 since they started West soon after that date. They stopped first near Cincinnati, Ohio and then at Richmond and finally located on a farm a short distance southeast of Windsor in the western part of Randolph county on what was later known as the Joshua Swingley farm, with Andrew remaining there and running a tavern until the time of his death about November 29, 1840. He was also the local justice of peace for Stoney Creek Township until 1837 according to the bond records of the county. The farm was on a knoll along Stoney Creek. Coming to frontier Indiana was a daring family trip. During the 400 mile journey from Pennsylvania, Andrew sold all of his belongings for $30 except a horse, a "carry-all" and some clothing. He and his older sons walked while the mother and daughters rode in the wagon. Reuben Riley was one of those sons who walked. He was the fifth in a family of 14 children. During this westward trek, the family lived in the open, building campfires in the woods at night. In the Allegheny foothills, their fare was slight. When they reached Randolph County, Indiana, they were able to find a bounty of food from wild deer, black bear, squirrels, wild turnkey and wild vegetables growing along Stoney Creek. Andrew and Margaret had the following children: Sarah Ann Riley, born about 1815 who married Tom D. Shepherd; Job Harvey Riley, born about 1816; John Sleek Riley (Dr.) born Dec. 12, 1817; Reuben (the poet's father) born June 2, 1819; Andrew Pinckney Riley, born 1820 who married Elizabeth Cline; James Anderson Riley born about 1821; George Washington Harvey Riley born about 1823 who married Emma C. Nex; Joseph Sleek Riley, born about 1824; Benjamin Frank Riley born about 1826 who married Elizabeth Patterson; and Martin Whitten Riley born about 1828 who married Elizabeth Dodson. Andrew's agricultural labor produced large crops and one winter it is said he helped save a tribe of starving Miami Indians by loading their ponies with corn. In another time of scarcity, a stockman offered him 75 cents a bushel for his corn, but he chose to sell it to needy neighbors for 25 cents a bushel. Shortly before his death, Andrew said, "I have never intentionally wronged any man. I have not been vulgar or profane. I have tried to do right. I do not fear to die." Not all Hoosiers could say the same. Reuben Riley reached Hancock County, Indiana, within a few scant years of the departure of the last native Americans from Indiana. Many were wrenched away in a horrible episode in Indiana history. The last of the Potawatomi, those who had not accepted "white folks ways" or left before were rounded up and removed by the county militiamen of Indiana called up to state service for that purpose by the Governor in 1838. These native Americans were forced to take the infamous "Trail of Death" out of Indiana during September of that year. A militia officer, General Tipton, was placed in charge of the roundup of the Hoosier Indians. Many tried to escape into the woods but were arrested and made prisoners. Indian children were left in the woods by parents in the hope that they, at least, might be able to stay in the native lands if they could survive. Many stories exist of such children being adopted by "white European" families when they were discovered. No sad story stopped General Tipton. He was not cruel but he knew what the Hoosier Governor's orders were and that was to round up the remaining Indians and get them out of the state. Here is an excerpt of one of his written accounts, "Many of the Indian men were assembled near the chapel when we arrived, and were not permitted to leave camp or separate until matters were amicably settled and they had agreed to give peaceable possession of the land sold by them." If Indians had weapons, these were taken away. Squads of militia fanned out to collect the remnants of the tribes who had refused to move out of Indiana by that time. By September, Tipton had gathered the last 859 which contained many old people and young. One of the Catholic missionaries, Father Petit, who had lived with the tribes describes his final Christian worship service since he was not permitted to go on the Trail of Death. "At the moment of my departure I assembled all my children to speak to them for the last time. I wept, and my auditors sobbed aloud. It was indeed a heartrending sight, and over our dying mission we prayed for the success of those on their way to the new hunting grounds. We then with one accord say, `O Virgin, we place our confidence in thee.' It was often interrupted and but few could finish it. After the Indians were sequestered, the soldiers were under orders to burn and destroy the huts and cabins of the Indians to erase temptation to return to Indiana. When the Indian march order was given on the early morning of September 4th. The weather was very hot and dry. The ordinary sources of water were dried up by then and malaria started infecting the Indians because water supplies were stagnant. The native Americans were marched single file on foot to cross Indiana, Illinois and the Mississippi. Few made it. Even by the time they reached the pioneer settlement at Logansport many died. Their camp there was described as "a scene of desolation; on all sides were the sick and dying." The militiamen too were getting sick and many were permitted to return to their homes. The few Indians with Indian ponies were compelled to give them up for these departing militiamen to return to their families. On the way through the Wabash Valley, the suffering increased so much that General Tipton relented and allowed the Indians to call for Father Petit to come to them. Despite his own delicate health the good father went and says, "On Sunday, September 16, I came in sight of my poor Christians, marching in a line, and guarded on both sides by soldiers who hastened their steps. A burning sun poured its beams upon them, and they were enveloped in a thick cloud of dust. After them came the baggage wagons into which were crowded the many sick, the women and children who were too feeble to walk... Almost all the babies, exhausted by the heat, were dead or dying. I baptized several newly-born happy little ones, whose first step was from the land of exile to heaven." Soon the militiamen tired of walking and chose to ride in the baggage wagons forcing the Indian women and children out to walk and die all the quicker. Many stories remain. There is one of a hundred year old Indian woman, the mother of a Chieftain, who pleaded with her tribe to put her to death in Indiana. She knew she had no hopes of surviving a long trek and wished to be buried in the land of her ancestry. The tribe refused the old woman's wish to kill her. She was buried along the trail four days later. Not a single baby made the trip. The Hoosier people live with the memories of their history. These memories mix with those of the settlers like Andrew Riley who came to Hoosier forests. There are no records of Andrew's death in the Family Bible and his date of death in 1840 is derived from the records in the Randolph County probate court records of that date. A Dr. Dynes was the attending physician during Andrew Riley's last illness. Dr. Dynes made daily calls for some days prior to November 20, 1840. His itemized claim filed against the estate shows a charge each day up to and including November 19th for a call and medicine left. On the 20th day a charge is made for just the call - no medicine. This was the doctor's last call so Andrew probably didn't need the doctor anymore. Andrew Riley was buried on the farm where he lived. In the probate court order book of Randolph County, vol. 2, page 139 is this entry: "Be it remembered that on the fifteenth day of December in the year of our Lord, one thousand eight hundred and forty; letters of administration of all and singular the goods and chattels, rights, credits, monies and effects which were of Andrew Riley late of Randolph County in the State of Indiana, deceased, was granted by George W. Monks, clerk of the probate court in and for said county to Reuben A. Riley, he, the said Reuben A. Riley, having first filed bond in the sum of fifteen hundred dollars with Lewis Remmel and Smoot securities and he was duly affirmed as such administrator." Reuben Riley's authority to handle his father's estate was later revoked by this entry: "In the matter of Reuben A, Riley, administrator of the estate of Andrew Riley, deceased. It appearing to the satisfaction of the court, from the affidavit of Margaret Way, late Margaret Riley, widow and relict of said Andrew Riley, that the said Reuben A. Riley has emigrated to and is now a citizen of Iowa Territory. It is ordered and adjudged by the court that the letters of administration heretofore granted by the clerk of this court to the said Reuben A. Riley, on the estate of said deceased, be and the same are hereby revoked and nulled and made void. Whereon on application of the said Margaret, it is further ordered by the court that administration de bonis non of said estate is hereby committed to Thomas W. Reece, and thereupon said Thomas W. Reece appears in open court and accepts said appointment and files bond in the sum of twelve hundred dollars, with William Dickson and George W. Smithson as his securities." What became of Margaret? Margaret (Slick) Riley remained Andrew's widow for only about a year and a half and then in March 1842 she married Thomas Way. Little is known about this arrangement. Eventually Margaret moved from the Windsor neighborhood to Greenfield, Indiana, as a single woman, and lived near her son Reuben Riley until 1868. She died October 3, 1884 at the home of her son Dr. A.J. Riley in Muncie. The funeral notices were sent out under the name of Margaret Riley. The notice read: "Mrs. Margaret Riley was born in Bedford County, Pa. October 23rd, 1793, died at the home of her son, Dr. A.J. Riley in Muncie, Indiana, Monday evening, Oct. 3rd, 1884, aged 87 years, 11 months, and 10 days. Her funeral will take place tomorrow, Wednesday, October 5th at the grave yard near Windsor, Randolph County, at 2 o'clock P.M. The funeral cortege leaving Muncie at 8 o'clock A.M. The funeral services will be conducted by Rev. F.D. Simpson. The friends of the family are invited." The dates have to be wrong because if correct she died at 90. The burial places of Andrew and Margaret Riley are in the Clevenger Cemetery about a mile south of Windsor. The exact spots are no longer locatable. The lettering of the stones is mostly erased in this cemetery, vegetation has overgrown it and most tombstones are broken or at least half- buried. Windsor might well have become the birth home of James Whitcomb Riley. Reuben Riley owned a lot there and was licensed to practice law there in 1842 but Riley's stay was short and he sold his lot in Windsor to Andrew West on August 18, 1842. After his father's death, Reuben had gone to a prairie village in Iowa, been admitted to the bar there, but had only achieved a very limited practice. He subsequently returned to Randolph County. He was tall, black eyed and considered to be an eloquent debater. Reuben Riley became re-acquainted with Elizabeth Marine at a Fourth of July gathering in Neeley's Woods, near Windsor, in 1843 after his return from Iowa. The occasion was a grand barbecue of pigs, an ox and five lambs. Reuben danced with Elizabeth and the two were said to have decided to get married instantly. Reuben Alexander Riley and Elizabeth (Marine) Riley, parents of the poet, were married March 15, 1844 at Union Port, Randolph county, by Rev. Thomas Leonard, minister of the Methodist church. Elizabeth's brother Jonathan and Emily Hunt stood up for the two. Elizabeth wore a pale pink silk wedding dress with a long white veil and white kid gloves and shoes. Her "in-fair" dress was of gray poplin, and she wore a leghorn bonnet when she rode away with Reuben the next day. They went immediately to Greenfield and occupied a log cabin. The marriage license of Reuben A. Riley and Elizabeth Marine was issued by the Clerk of the Randolph Circuit Court on the 18th of Feb. but they were not married until about a month later, March 15, 1844. Elizabeth Marine Riley's father was John Marine. In the Riley family Bible she spells his last name M-E-R-I-N-E. John Marine's father was Jonathan Marine and his mother was Mary Charles who lived in the Carolinas. Mary Charles Marine died in Wayne County, Indiana, and was buried in Randolph County. Jonathan Marine was buried in the New Garden churchyard about nine miles from Richmond. Mary Charles Marine lived to be ninety-six years old. Elizabeth was the tenth in a family of 11 children and a descendent of persecuted French Huguenots and English Quakers. She claimed birth in Rockingham, North Carolina in 1823. Probably Reuben's first work was on his father's farm and in his tavern. Reuben Riley became the school teacher in the little one-room schoolhouse at the east end of Union Port on the south side of the road. Soon after marriage the Rileys went to Greenfield to Hancock county to make their future home. Greenfield was at that time a little village of a few scattered log houses with puncheon floors and oil paper windows. Reuben Riley was said to have built the log cabin and equipped it with furniture which he had made. The main advantage of the site was that it was located on the National Road that stretched from Cumberland, Maryland across country to the trails to the Pacific Coast. It was here in their original log cabin that their six children were born. The Riley children were John Andrew Riley, born Dec. 11, 1844 who married Julia Wilson and died Dec. 11, 1911; Martha Celestia Riley, born Feb. 21, 1847; James Whitcomb Riley, born Oct. 7, 1849 and died July 22, 1916 in Indianapolis, Indiana, Elva May Riley born Jan. 1856 and died in 1909 in Indianapolis, Indiana; Humboldt Alexander Riley born Oct. 15, 1858 and died Nov., 1887; and Mary Elizabeth Riley born Oct. 27, 1864 who married and divorced Frank C. Payne and died in 1936. There is speculation that James Whitcomb Riley's genius came from John Marine, the probable father of Elizabeth and an outstanding character in the early history of Randolph and Delaware counties. John Marine loved poetry and, like his famous grandson, was said to have written his autobiography in rhyme. He also was said to write and write. He wrote a book, now lost, on religion urging all Christians to unite. He also wrote sermons in verse and delivered them to Methodist camp meetings. None of these works survive. John had lost his modest fortune speculating in weaver-sleighs two years after Elizabeth's birth and came to Indiana. James Whitcomb Riley was one of those many great men who have been unusually fond of their mothers. There was the artist Whistler whose most famous work was a portrait of his mother. Then there was George Washington. No matter how far his surveying took him from Virginia, he kept in touch with Mary Washington. To this list, we must add James Whitcomb Riley whose primary love was Elizabeth Marine Riley, his lovely mother. His first poem was a valentine written to his mother. As a child, she had come in a one-horse buggy with her parents the 700 miles from North Carolina to Indiana. They came over the Cumberland Gap, the usual route through the Allegheny Mountains. Then on through the endless forests where all sorts of wild animals lurked. There were about 400 in their party which finally found its way to Randolph County Indiana. The party found only wilderness without any inhabitants or built up places or village. After brief stops at New Garden and one or two points in Wayne County, he settled with his family in Randolph County and built a cabin on a high bank of the Mississinewa River a few miles below Ridgeville and a mill nearby. James Whitcomb Riley thought that his mother had led an ideal life as a young person. The Marine cabin was on the banks of a beautiful stream, called by an Indian name, the Mississiniwa River. She had grown to become a beautiful young woman. One of Elizabeth's interests was discovering new things. The Marines were flat boat builders, millers and poets. John laid out the defunct town of Rockingham on the Mississinewa and advertised lots in verse. It did no good. The town failed to attract settlers. John also was a preacher and teacher. He advocated the union of all churches, a dangerous thing to do in those days. He and the poet's grandmother, Margaret Riley, were leaders in the camp meetings of Randolph and Delaware Counties. William A. Thornburg, an elderly neighbor who remembered the Marines living nearby, told Marcus Dickey, an early Riley biographer, that "Elizabeth Marine was remarkably pure- minded. I never saw anyone so beautiful in a calico dress. She loved to wander along streams and wander in the green woods. She was always seeing things among the leaves." Elizabeth met Johnny Appleseed who planted apple cores among the settlements and liked to listen to listen to his accounts of his wanderings and his views on Christianity one of which was that folk do not die but "go right on living." Every boy has an early determination - a first one - to follow some exciting profession, once he grows up to man's estate, such as being a policemen or a performer on the high trapeze. Riley was not interested in these nor in being the "People's Laureate," but the Greenfield baker, had his fairy godmother granted his "boy-wish." Here is how Riley remembered his "wish" in his later life.
"AN IMPETUOUS RESOLVE" (1890)
When little Dickie Swope's a man, He's going to be a sailor; And little Hamey Tincher, he's A'going to be a Tailor; Bud Mitchell, he's a'going to be A stylish Carriage-Maker; And when I grow a great big man I'm going to be a Baker. And Dick will buy his sailor-suit Of Hame; and Hame will take it And buy as fine a double rig As ever Bud can make it; And then all three'll drive round for me, And we'll drive off together Slinging pie-crust along the road Forever and forever.
To Riley, running a bakery "seemed the acme of delight," using again his own expression. Happiness was "to manufacture those snowy loaves of bread, those delicious tarts, those toothsome bon-bons. And then to own them all, to keep them in store, to watch over and guardedly exhibit. The thought of getting money for them was to me a sacrilege. Sell them? No indeed. Eat `em - eat `em, by tray loads and dray loads! It was a great wonder to me why the pale-faced baker in our town did not eat all his good things. This I determined to do when I became owner of such a grand establishment. Yes, sir. I would have a glorious feast. Maybe I'd have Tom and Harry and perhaps little Kate and Florry in to help us once in a while. The thought of these playmates as `grown up folks' didn't appeal to me. I was but a child, with wide-open eyes, a healthy appetite and a wondering mind. That was all. But I have the same sweet tooth to-day, and every time I pass a confectioner's shop, I think of the big baker of our town, and Tom and Harry and the youngsters all." As a child, Riley often went with his father to the courthouse where the lawyers and clerks playfully called him "Judge Wick, Jr." Here as a privileged character he met and mingled with the country folk who came to sue and be sued, and thus early was exposed to the dialect, the native speech, the quaint expressions of his "own people." How frontier folk spoke took firm root in the fresh soil of his young memory. Why was he called "Judge Wick, Jr.?" William Wick was Circuit Judge of Hancock County from 1850 to 1853. It was during his tenure, James Whitcomb Riley came to have the nickname, "Judge Wick, Jr." The nickname came about when Reuben Riley made James Whitcomb Riley, about four years old, a suit of clothes identical in style and cloth to that worn by the Judge. The boy was given to wear a long swallowtail coat and matching trousers. When Riley first wore that outfit going with his father to court, he earned the name "Judge Wick, Jr." The judge gave him this name. It stayed with Riley through early adolescence when he hated it so much no one dared call him it anymore. While his father was in court, the poet listened and played in the back or in the window sills where he could see what was going on while cases were being tried. At about this time, he made his first poetic attempt in a valentine which he gave to his mother. Not only did he write the verse, but he drew a sketch to accompany it, greatly to his mother's delight, who, according to the best authority, gave the young poet "three big cookies and didn't spank me for two weeks. This was my earliest literary encouragement." 1856 was a critical year for the Riley family. It was the year Reuben Riley joined his friend Oliver P. Morton is forming a new political party in Indiana. Then, as the 1860 presidential election loomed, Reuben was an Indiana delegate at the Chicago convention that nominated Lincoln for the Presidency. After this convention, Reuben arrived home in the middle of the night to announce what had happened at the Chicago convention. Abraham Lincoln, the "Emancipator," had been nominated in part through Reuben's efforts in the Indiana delegation. Hancock County did not share Reuben's enthusiasm for Lincoln. Lincoln failed to carry Hancock County in the crucial 1860 election. Nevertheless, much of the rest of Indiana was solidly in the majority for Lincoln as was the tier of Northern states sufficient to elect Abraham Lincoln to the presidency. Reuben Riley was named a Lincoln "elector" to vote Indiana's selection of Lincoln for electoral college purposes. Before throwing in his lot with Oliver Morton and Abraham Lincoln, Reuben Riley had been Hancock County Prosecutor in 1844, Representative in the Indiana Legislature in 1845 (Reuben was the youngest member of the state legislature at the time) and 1848, published a newspaper, The INVESTIGATOR in Greenfield for six months in 1847, was prominent in the county Democratic conventions since 1845, and in 1852 became Greenfield's first mayor. This in effect made him a judge and enforcer of the city's ordinances, mainly against things such as assaults and batteries.
What did Riley remember of his earliest days in the log cabin at Greenfield? He recalled the first time the family had a night lamp. Here came Reuben Riley bringing home a lamp and chimney in one hand and a bottle of coal oil in the other. The family tinkered with it the whole evening. Riley said, "To us it gave forth marvellously lustrous light..I was then reading the "Arabian Nights," wholly enraptured with that magic story, and had come to the tale of the Wonderful Lamp and the cry of new lamps for old. Well, the smell of that coal oil became associated in my mind with Aladdin and his Wonderful Lamp, and to this day I cannot smell coal oil without recalling the old delights of the story and feeling myself lying prone on my stomach reading, reading, and reading by the hour." A story survives of how Riley wandered after older boys toward the "Ole Swimmin' Hole" before he could swim. His father learned of this and ran toward the crick in a great panic. Upon arriving at the banks, his worst fears were realized. Riley was out in the middle splashing in the water. Only after Reuben jumped in and got out to save his son did he discover the poet was in no danger. He had been holding on to a submerged root that extended out from a huge tree. What about Riley's dismal school record? Mrs. Neill's was the first to try. She did not teach in a free public school, but rather a private pay one. The school began in the early Spring. Mrs. Neill had no experience as a teacher but enrolled students after advertising in a local Greenfield newspaper, "Mrs. Neill will open school at her residence on Monday next. This lady has had much experience and will, no doubt, render good service." Mrs. Neill taught as a mother would rather than as a formal teacher. She encouraged good behavior for a week by hanging a bright silver dollar around the scholar's neck until the good behavior stopped. Mrs. Neill did not tolerate either lying or tattle-telling. Lying resulted in getting one's mouth washed out with lye soap and tattle-telling earned wearing a card with "tattle tale" in large letters. If a child was restless she took the child into her kitchen and gave him a cookie from the cookie jar or if thirsty permitted the child to go to the well and drink from a yellow gourd from a bucket drawn up with its cool water. All drank from the same gourd. On Friday afternoons she passed out small cardboard rings with holes in the center and brought out a box of colored yarn. The yarn was drawn in and out of the hole until filled and then the children had fluffy, colored balls to take home for the weekend. If a child fell asleep she took the child into her sitting room to a pallet beside her blind husband who sat on a rocker day in and day out rocking monotonously. After attending Mrs. Neill's school, Riley went on to attend the Greenfield Academy in the late 50's. The school was first taught by a Greenfield Presbyterian Minister, Rev. David Montfort to supplement his salary. Reuben Riley was the secretary of this school. At the Academy, Riley was not comfortable. He didn't join "gangs" very easy because the boys did robust things that required more stamina than he had. He always lost in races. He sometimes went off by himself in depression. Reuben Riley wished his son to be more of a competitor. It is not believed Riley was able to rise above the Primary Department because of his difficulty with mathematics. Later in 1861, the Greenfield Academy moved to the Methodist Church where Lee O. Harris became the teacher after he got back from 90 days service. Then this private church-housed school ceased to operate because of the Civil War. Lee O. Harris had enlisted in the Fifth Indiana Cavalry for a three year term. During this period, Riley is recalled as being truant in school, but it was more anti- social than anti-intellectual. He was said to be a persistent truant and to go off by himself into the woods. Probably recalling this period, Riley wrote of truanting "Out to Old Aunt Mary's in his later days:"
OUT TO OLD AUNT MARY'S (1884)
Wasn't it pleasant. O brother mine, In those old days of the lost sunshine Of youth - when the Saturday's chores were through, And the "Sunday's wood" in the kitchen, too, And we went visiting, "me and you," Out to Old Aunt Mary's? -
"Me and you" - And the morning fair, With the dewdrops twinkling, everywhere; The scent of the cherry-blossoms blown After us, in the roadway lone, Our capering shadows onward thrown - Out to Old Aunt Mary's!
It all comes back so clear to-day! Though I am as bald as you are gray, - Out by the barn-lot and down the lane We patter along in the dust again, As light as the tips of the drops of the rain, Out to Old Aunt Mary's.
The few last houses of the town; Then on, up the high creek-bluffs and down; Past the squat toll-gate, with its well-sweep pole, The bridge, and the "the old 'baptizin'-hole,'" Loitering, awed, o'er pool and shoal, Out to Old Aunt Mary's.
We crossed the pasture, and through the wood, Where the old gray snag of the poplar stood, Where the hammering "red-heads" hopped awry, And the buzzard "raised" in the "clearing"-sky And lolled and circled, as we went by Out to Old Aunt Mary's.
Or, stayed by the glint of the redbird's wings, or the glitter of song that the bluebird sings, All hushed we feign to strike strange trails, As the "big braves" do in the Indian tales, Till again our real quest lags and fails - Out to Old Aunt Mary's. -
And the woodland echoes with yells of mirth That make old war-whoops of minor worth!... Where such heroes of war as we? - With bows and arrows of fantasy, Chasing each other from tree to tree Out to Old Aunt Mary's!
And then in the dust of the road again; And the teams we met, and the countrymen; And the long highway, with sunshine spread As thick as butter on country bread, Our cares behind, and our hearts ahead Out to Old Aunt Mary's. -
For only, now, at the road's next bend To the right we could make out the gable-end Of the fine old Huston homestead - not Half a mile from the sacred spot Where dwelt our Saint in her simple cot - Out to Old Aunt Mary's.
Why, I see her now in the open door Where the little gourds grew up the sides and o'er The clapboard roof! - And her face - ah, me! Wasn't it good for a boy to see - And wasn't it good for a boy to be Out to Old Aunt Mary's? -
The jelly - the jam and marmalade, And the cherry and quince "preserves" she made! And the sweet-sour pickles of peach and pear, With cinnamon in 'em, and all things rare! - And the more we ate was the more to spare, Out to Old Aunt Mary's!
Ah! was there, ever, so kind a face And gentle as hers, or such a grace Of welcoming, as she cut the cake Or the juicy pies that she joyed to make Just for the visiting children's sake - Out to Old Aunt Mary's!
The honey, too, in its amber comb One only finds in an old farm-home; And the coffee, fragrant and sweet, and ho! So hot that we gloried to drink it so, With spangles of tears in our eyes, you know - Out to Old Aunt Mary's.
And the romps we took, in our glad unrest! - Was it the lawn that we loved the best, With its swooping swing in the locust trees, Or was it the grove, with its leafy breeze, Or the dim haymow, with its fragrancies - Out to Old Aunt Mary's.
Far fields, bottom-lands, creek-banks - all, We ranged at will. - Where the waterfall Laughed all day as it slowly poured Over the dam by the old mill-ford, While the tail-race writhed, and the mill-wheel roared - Out to Old Aunt Mary's.
But home, with Aunty in nearer call, That was the best place, after all! - The talks on the back porch, in the low Slanting sun and evening glow, With the voice of counsel that touched us so, Out to Old Aunt Mary's.
And then, in the garden - near the side Where the beehives were and the path was wide, - The apple-house - like a fairy cell - With the little square door we knew so well, And the wealth inside, but our tongues could tell - Out to Old Aunt Mary's.
And the old spring-house, in the cool green gloom Of the willow trees, - and the cooler room Where the swinging shelves and the crocks were kept, Here the cream in a golden languor slept, While the waters gurgled and laughed and wept - Out to Old Aunt Mary's.
And as many a time have you and I - Barefoot boys in the days gone by - Knelt, and in tremulous ecstasies Dipped our lips into sweets like these, - Memory now is on her knees Out to Old Aunt Mary's -
For, O my brother so far away, This is to tell you - she waits to-day To welcome us: - Aunt Mary fell Asleep this morning, whispering, "Tell The boys to come"...And all is well Out to Old Aunt Mary's.
Some think that "Aunt Mary" was "Aunt Rachel Loehr," the relative of Almon Keefer, an older neighbor boy as the "Aunt Mary." Riley visited her often as a vagrant child escaping his poverty-stricken adolescent home. The Loehr and Riley families visited each other as well. Minnie Belle Mitchell provides an idealized picture of Riley's youth going to Aunt Rachel's as follows: "...the three boys, Bud, John and Hum with Almon Keefer would go to Aunt Rachel's alone, walking the entire distance, loitering along country roads....cutting through time land, playing games of make-believe, giving Indian and catbird calls and gathering hackberries and haws along the way. But all weariness disappeared when Aunt Rachel's home was reached and they were welcomed...The country home...had its gourd vine climbing to the roof... It had its windless well, its little spring house where the milk and butter and all sorts of good things were kept cool and fresh. There hollyhocks at the windows and a swing hung from an apple tree. And after the children had taken their usual bareback rid on the old mare, slid down he hay stack, and had visited the traps where robber rabbits and foxes were caught...Aunt Rachel would call them to dinner. The boys recalled the wild scramble to the well for the hasty washing of hands and faces, the "jellies, jams and marmalades," the usual cherry cobbler or custard pie with plenty of milk to drink. The poem is nominally written to Riley's brother, John, which helps to date its first writing. Riley used an original four stanzas for "Old Aunt Mary's" from the letter in his early platform appearances. New stanzas were added over the years. In a special edition of the poem in 1904, the poem was completed with twelve additional stanzas. Riley's great poetic characters were all "composites." There were actually many "Aunt Mary's." Aunt Mary was a "character type" of warm-hearted persons who cared for children. Possibly a new such person contributed every time Riley revised the poem which was often. Additionally every time an older person died, she seems to have been eulogized by obituary and funeral sermon as the kindly "Aunt Mary" of Riley's poem if Riley had only a remote connection to the decedent. One version of how the poem "Out to Old Aunt Mary's" happened to be written has Riley and friend, "Haute" Tarkington, later Mrs. Ovid Butler Jameson, preparing to accompany Haute's little brother, Booth, who lived at Indianapolis, on a week-end visit with the grandparents and his Aunt Mary. Sunday came and with it, the prospect of a visit to Aunt Mary but it had to be postponed. On hearing of this disappointment Booth began to cry over the unexpected failure of his plan. This suggested a theme for the poet, who, with his characteristic genius wrote one of his best poems -"Out to Old Aunt Mary's." The poem was first published in the Indianapolis JOURNAL and later revised. This Mary was Mary Tarkington Alexander and she lived in Greensburg, Indiana. Her portrait shows a warmly "pudgy" faced woman with friendly eyes, wide smile a close cropped white hair in a matronly gown. She was a person any child wanted to embrace in a hug. Among other candidates of "aunt's" were "blood" aunts in Mooresville and Martinsville, Indiana. The family of Riley's mother, the Marines, were very close. Riley visited their families often as a child, adolescent and in his later years. When a childhood friend heard Riley recite the poem in later years, he noted that the poem had changed and wrote Riley to enquire about it after which the following letter was returned: Ann Arbor, Mich. Oct. 29, 1893
(Dear Clint Hamilton:) This, as I read it in public, is the "completion" of "Old Aunt Mary's." By joining these four stanzas, at fifth one of printed form, thereafter following in order as here written until last stanza of printed is reached - then using that still as closing stanza. Keep this copy, so hastily done, in your possession.
The jelly - the jam, and the marmalade, And the cherry and quince "preserves" she made! - And the sweet-sour pickles of peach and pear, With cinnamon in 'em, and all things rare! And the more you ate was the more to spare, Out to old Aunt Mary's!
And then, in the garden, near the side Where the bee-hives were, and the path was wide, - The apple-house, like a fairy cell, With the little square door we knew so well - And the wealth inside but our tongues could tell - Out to old Aunt Mary's!
And the old spring-house, in the cool green gloom Of the willow trees, - and the cooler room Where the swinging shelves and crocks were kept, Where the cream in a golden languor slept, Where the waters gurgled and laughed and wept - Out to Old Aunt Mary's!
And as many a time have you and I Barefoot boys in the days gone by - Knelt, and with tremulous ecstacies Dipped our lips into sweets like these, - Memory now is on her knees Out to old Aunt Mary's! Very truly your old friend, - James Whitcomb Riley Here is Riley's picture of a life lived meaningfully in service to others. Riley's niece by marriage, Harriet Eitel Wells remembered Riley telling her this incident from his schooling as she related in the Indianapolis STAR of October 7, 1934. When Riley's teacher asked him once where Christopher Columbus went on his second voyage, Riley asked his teacher who was Christopher Columbus? Then Riley admitted he didn't know where the fellow went on the first trip. Math went in one ear and out the other. Riley's math teacher once commented "He doesn't know which is more - Twice ten or Twice Eternity." Riley was Jucklet in his early schooling. He was an errant scholar and traveler even before he got Riley into mischief in many other ways. He loved fun. As a scholar, Riley knew how to slide a piece of wood under the old school clock and get it out of plumb so it ran faster, shortening the school hours which seemed far too long. This way Riley caused his school to be dismissed early from time to time pleasing the other pupils, especially his `swimmin'-hole' buddies. Riley was often a hero of his schoolmates. If caught on any of his pranks, he took his "licking" like a boy should, and did not try to lay the blame on someone else. William B. Davis recalls it was in the winter of `59 that he first saw and met Jim Riley. He was in the rear of the old music hall at Greenfield working on a horizontal bar. "He was the quickest fellow - boy -that I ever saw. He was just like a squirrel going round and round in a cage. He was 10 years old then - and he could turn either backward or forward." Riley often went out to the Davis's farm because Reuben kept his horse there. There is another incident about Riley's schooling of this period. Inside his big geography and held down under a rubber band, Riley frequently had a copy of Longfellow's poems which he read surreptitiously. When Riley's instructor, Lee O. Harris passed up and down the aisles between the rows of desks and came near Riley's desk, he always pretended not to see the book of poems. How it would delight this old professor to know that toward the end of this little pupil's life he would receive so many college degrees that he would remark he would have to stop writing poetry so as to remember his degrees. When the Greenfield Academy fizzled out due to the Civil War, Riley went to study at the home of Rhoda Houghton Millikan who arrived in Greenfield in 1862 and opened a school in her home. Rhoda Millikan was the daughter of a Superior Court Judge and a native of Vermont. She was a cultured, educated lady and possessed many talents. She was the widower of a man who had left his family in Ohio to prospect for gold in Calfornia during the "gold rush." The husband never returned leaving Rhoda Millikan to raise five children - two girls and three boys. She taught school to make ends meet. Riley practically moved into the Millikan home. One of the daughters was Nellie Millikan who was "Dwainie" of "The Flying Islands of the Night." Nellie was slightly older than Riley and enchanted him with her playing of the piano and guitar. One of the boys, Jesse, became Riley's best friend. Rhoda Millikan's family were readers and had many books. They were musical and both girls played and sang. Riley held the mother in great esteem. She had a bright schoolroom, pictures which she painted on the walls, and wooden benches for the students to sit on. She kept hanging jars filled with garden flowers in summer and in winter, parlor ivy and wandering jew trailed about. The woods were visible from her back yard to offer shade for a recess playground. She directed Riley's studies along the lines of his interest, art, literature and poetry. Riley was memorizing verse she discovered. She gave him prominent parts in Friday afternoon exercises and allowed him to recite poems he memorized from his mother. Mrs. Millikan - who was an artist - began a Saturday afternoon class in painting and drawing. Riley became a pupil and found he could draw almost anything and easily became her star pupil. An incident from Riley's adolescence in Mrs. Millikan's school survives. As a young self-conscious teen, Riley's face was covered with freckles and he was called "Spotted Face" by friends. As an adolescent he became very conscious of these. He tried many things, buttermilk, vinegar and salt and was often washing his face with lye soap. He took an old custom seriously and prayed for May to wash his face in its due which he was told would get rid of them. One day his mother sent him to the store to get sugar for 50 cents and he bought a bottle advertised "A sure cure for freckles, - Balm of a thousand flowers" instead. He charged the sugar, went home to deliver the sugar, and stopped at a deserted barn to coat his face with the Balm of a Thousand Flowers without reading the instructions. When he arrived at school, Ms. Millikan was angry and while the schoolmates laughed took him from the room to look at his face as yellow as a pumpkin. The Balm was supposed to be washed off almost immediately after being put on. His face was stained for several days and when it came off the freckles and also a layer of skin came with it. He never again had freckles. There really is no play character from Riley's autobiographical poem "The Flying Islands of the Night" who relates to Riley's adolescence except Nellie Millikan Cooley, "Dwainie," in Riley's life. This reflects the great unhappiness and poverty Riley knew as an adolescent. Riley was not a happy teenager. He ascribed his lack of a social life to a "poor start" from those days. He claimed frustration from the very first. When he wished to escort his first sweetheart to a party, Riley said he dressed very carefully and knocked at his first love's door. Her father opened it, eyed him critically and demanded: "What you want, Jimmy?" When Riley said, "Come to take Bessie to the party," the father snorted, "Humph! Bessie ain't goin' to no party; Bessie's got the measles!" Riley knew very well she didn't. As the Civil War came to a close, Greenfield reopened the Academy. In fact, Reuben Riley was chosen as the president of the public meeting called to plan its operation. This school began in 1866 and ran a fourteen week session. Riley started this school but attended in a very haphazard manner. He was truant as much as he was present. During one such truancy, his father beat him severely. It did not help. Riley quit school at sixteen. After Riley was a drop out, his reputation in Greenfield slipped lower and lower. The other boys weren't to be around him. In a youthful letter to a friend who has been told to stay away from him, the sixteen year old Riley comments, "Your father forbids your associating with me. Well, with his understanding of my character, he did what was right. Well, so long as he thinks me a mean boy, just so long you must abide his law, for he thinks it for your good. Sometime, maybe, I can show him my real character..." Riley did not attend another school for several years but he was present on January 26, 1870 when Greenfield opened its first public school with 236 students. The school ran from January to May. Lee O. Harris was one of the teachers. Riley distinguished himself as an editor of one of the two school newspapers, his being The CRITERION. Meredith Nicholson, Riley's friend in later life and noted American author, believes that Riley "would have been injured rather than benefited by an ampler education. He was chiefly concerned with human nature, and it was his fortune to know profoundly those definite phases and contrasts of life that were susceptible of interpretation in the art of which he was sufficiently the master." Riley's education best came from riding his horse about the American woods and towns and from contacts with the popular culture of America itself. Riley's first employment was as a decorator of the shaving mugs that ornamented and did service to the customers of the barbershop of a black barber of Greenfield, George Knox. Knox says he received "35 cents per mug, for which there never was a time he did not seem duly grateful and appreciative. ...during five years, in return for the many services rendered in the line of his trade (painting), I kept him "shaven and shorn" without price or remuneration save as he paid me in the manner indicated above." We remember that Riley lived in a poverty stricken home after his father was discharged from the Civil War as a disabled man. The sting of poverty never left Riley. As an old man, he refused to take change from any newsboy after buying a newspaper and when asked about this he explained that he remembered when he was that age when "coins were scarce." Knox has written, "I nicknamed (Riley) Mr. Jones and we played at imagining that he was a rich farmer of eccentric ideas, and fixed impressions of his importance and standing as a tiller of the soil. I would frequently say to him: "Well, Mr. Jones, how does it happen that you are in town so late today," and he would reply in the dialect of the Hoosier farmer, accompanied with the peculiar nasal twang that have made his recitations famous - "Wal, I kum into town to-day, intendin' to go right back as soon as possible, and what did they do but pop me on the jury first thing. I put up at the tavern and there was so much noise about I couldn't sleep, so I got up about 4 o'clock this mornin' and bought me a cegar - two fer five you know - they last longer. I kum over to git a shave; how much do you ask for a shave, George." I would say ten cents. "Now, that's too much; I'll give you five cents for a shave." etc., etc." George Knox remembered the neighbors "sneered at him (Riley), (spoke) derisively of him and declared him no good."
Riley escaped into literature to avoid his wretched poverty as a teenager. He read more out of school than in. He came to love the literature of Charles Dickens most of all. Jucklet seized upon Dickens even though Dickens was not known for his poetry but rather for his prose. Meredith Nicholson, commented: Riley "knew his Dickens thoroughly, and his lifelong attention to "character" was due no doubt in some measure to his study of Dickens's portraits of the quaint and humorous." Early in his schooling, Riley ran away when Dickens's "The Death of Little Nell" was read. "It was a matter of eternal wonder to me, how the other children could go strong- voiced and dry-eyed through those tragedies that almost broke my heart," he once said.
DEATH OF LITTLE NELL (From McGUFFEY'S ECLECTIC READER) She was dead. No sleep so beautiful and calm, so free from trace of pain, so fair to look upon. She seemed a creature fresh from the hand of God, and waiting for the breath of life; not one who had lived, and suffered death. Her couch was dressed with here and there some winter berries and green leaves, gathered in a spot she had used to favor. "When I die, put near me something that has loved the light, and had the sky above it always." These were her words. She was dead. Dear, gentle, patient, noble Nell was dead. Her little bird, a poor, slight thing the pressure of a finger would have crushed, was stirring nimbly in its cage, and the strong heart of its child mistress was must and motionless forever! Where were the traces of her early cares, her sufferings, and fatigues? All gone. sorrow was dead, indeed, in her; but peace and perfect happiness were born, imaged in her tranquil beauty and profound repose..." A strange thing happens when we read about the life of Charles Dickens. It begins to sound like Riley's. We review the facts of the life of Charles Dickens, 1812-1870, to note the great parallels of the lives of Jucklet and him. Dickens was born in Portsmouth, but spent nearly all his life in London. It would turn out that Riley, born in Greenfield, would spend most of his adult life in Indianapolis. Dickens's father was a conscientious man, but lacked capacity for earning a livelihood. This reminds one of Riley's father. In consequence, Dickens's youth was much darkened by poverty as was Riley's. Dickens began his active life as a lawyer's apprentice; but soon left this employment to become a reporter. Riley did the same. Dickens followed this employment from 1831-1836. Dickens's first book was entitled, "Sketches of London Society, by Boz." This was followed, in 1837, by the "Pickwick Papers," a work which suddenly brought much fame to the author. His other works followed with great rapidity, and his last was unfinished at the time of his death. Riley's books of poetry were very popular from the first and Riley kept on writing them. He wrote on and on and on. Dickens visited America in 1842, and again in 1867. During his last visit, he read his works in public in the principal cities of the United States. This was what Jucklet came to have in mind for Riley to do. The resources of Dickens' genius seemed exhaustless. He copied no author, imitated none, but relied entirely on his own powers. He excelled especially in humor and pathos. He gather materials for his works by the most careful and faithful observation. And he painted his characters with a fidelity so true to their different individualities that, although they sometimes have a quaint grotesqueness bordering on caricature, they stand before the memory as living realities. His writings present very vividly the wants and sufferings of the poor and encourage kindness and benevolence. Finally, somehow, despite his poverty-striken youth, Dickens came to great fame and, when he died, was honored with burial in Westminster Abbey, London. Here was a live route for Riley to follow. Riley's life parallels that of Dickens. I think this is intentional. Riley looked to Dickens as a role model. Out of such devotion, Riley gave to America figures as compelling as Dickens did for his Englishmen. Dickens gave to England "Little Nell," while Riley gave to America "Little Haly" of "On the Death of Little Mahala Ashcraft" (1882).
"Little Haly! Little Haly!" cheeps the robin in the tree; "Little Haly!" sighs the clover, "Little Haly!" moans the bee; "Little Haly! Little Haly!" calls the killdeer at twilight; And the katydids and crickets hollers "Haly!" all the night.
The sunflowers and the hollyhawks droops over the garden fence; The old path down the garden walks still holds her footprints' dents; And the well-sweep's swingin' bucket seems to wait fer her to come And start it on its wortery errant down the old beegum. ...
Riley took from Dickens the impetus to get close to his own people in order to reflect them in his writing. Riley learned from Dickens in the novel way that Riley did things. He made a play about Dickens' characters and got his chums to act them out in their lives in Greenfield. The shoeshop of Thomas Snow was "base." In fact, the cobbler, a recent immigrant from England who knew his Dickens, was the "stage manager." The adolescent boys mixing it up with Riley in this Dickens "life production" of Riley's called themselves the "Fagan Club." Occasionlly, things got out of hand as when the Fagan Club members acted as Fagan's thieving band of children and literally stole everything they could "pickpocket." It was fun and Riley was learning how to become Dickens. They did not get caught often enough to get thrown in jail. As the years continued, Riley probed the perimeters of Dickens's precedents. To be as Dickens was, Riley felt it necessary to write publicly at every opportunity. This included writing letters to the editor of newspapers. In 1873 A friend in Mooresville, A.W. Macy, suggested Riley write a letter from Anderson to the Mooresville paper about his life in Anderson and Riley did so. Doc Marigold was the name Riley used in a correspondence letter published in the May 8, 1873 issue of the Mooresville ENTERPRISE. In one of Dickens' short stories a vendor of cheap articles was named "Doc Marigold. "Riley's letter was written at Anderson, April 24, 1873. "Dear ENTERPRISE: I have ben intending to write you a letter, but have deferred it from day to day until I could bestow more attention to it than has been at my command for some time. I have not been still in one place long enough to write my "John Hancock" in a legible manner on hotel registers; and now that I have at last "found a level, I am not certain that I can interest you; for I know so little of general importance that, was there nothing else to write about, my little would be as brief as the tail of Tam O'Shanter's mare. Anderson is a very handsome little city of about five thousand inhabitants - good people, speaking generally, though, of course, "It takes all kinds of people," etc ... The Methodist church is in strong power here; and noble and energetic ministers and members are doing great and good work. The leading business men here are principally workers in the church - as I believe they are in every thriving place. it the city has one flaw it is its Courthouse - that looks really lost and out of place and uncomfortable, surrounded as it is with beautiful business blocks..." In keeping with the scheme of Dickens to write of what he knew, Riley studied the Hoosier landscape very carefully and noted its many moods. Jucklet kept his eyes open if he was going to have Riley survive as a writer. The strained mind of the adolescent Riley saw in the life of Dickens not just a man, but the range of characters that Dickens was able to portray. Possibly out of this observation, Riley began to create his own characters, those he could see around him. Some of them were even promising "selves" for roles for him to become. During Riley's twenties, Jucklet also very much liked hoaxes. Riley was familiar with practically all of such literature of every age. The Jucklet in him chose out the fantastic and weirdly amusing from it. One can imagine Riley overjoyed at coming across Poe's great hoax writing called "The Balloon Hoax." Riley no doubt wondered if the American public of 1878 would appreciate the sensational as had Poe's reading public. Poe's "The Balloon-Hoax" opened with the headline: "ASTOUNDING NEWS BY EXPRESS, VIA NORFOLK! - The Atlantic Crossed in Three Days! - Signal Triumph of Mr. Monck Mason's Flying Machine! -Arrival at Sullivan's Island, near Charlestown, S.C., of Mr. Mason...in the Steering Balloon, Victoria..." This was of course impossible in Poe's day but the fun of concocting a hoax as Poe had done no doubt played on Jucklet's mind. Riley was determined to outdo Poe! Riley's poetry came to bear the mischievousness of Jucklet.
WHAT SMITH KNEW ABOUT FARMING (1871)
There wasn't two purtier farms in the state Than the couple of which I'm about to relate; - Jinin' each other - belongin' to Brown, And jest at the edge of a flourishin' town. ... (Smith, a rich town merchant with no knowledge of agriculture decides to buy one, live in the country "where the air is free" and take up farming, disastrously from a financial point of view.) ... Mr. Smith found he was losin' his health In as big a proportion, almost, as his wealth; So at last he concluded to move back to town And sold back his farm to this same Mr. Brown At very low figgers, by gittin' it down. Further'n this I have nothin' to say Than merely advisin' the Smiths fer to stay In their grocery stores in flourishin' towns And leave agriculture alone - and the Browns.
There is something to be said about simply surviving. As James Whitcomb Riley grew to maturity, it was obvious that he was not going to survive easily. He was simply not born to be a domineering, noticeable person. Riley was a "shrimp" of a boy and man. He was not physical. He was not some macho study either. Most women took one look at him and said good-bye. There is a letter Riley's friend, Nellie Cooley, wrote to him after she moved to Illinois. In the letter, Nellie tells him she has heard from a friend that Riley "has gone to the dogs." To which she replies that she "raved" about him as loyal Nellie always did. Nellie was the exception as she always was for Riley. Perhaps total loyalty and friendship blinded her. Only by his wits did Riley survive. Riley needed to play Jucklet badly. As alcoholic as he was becoming, his wits remained. Some part of Riley needed to deal with his ever- increasing dependence upon alcohol. How does an alcoholic survive? Riley acknowledges in his autobiographical poem, "The Flying Islands of the Night," that he did it by relying upon his mischievous minstrelsy persona he calls Jucklet. Jucklet, in the autobiographical poem, is the "tool" of Crestillomeem for survival purposes. However, when Riley understands he must be sober for some reason or another, he turns to his Jucklet role. When it comes to survival, Jucklet takes over the transformative role in the poem, "The Flying Islands of the Night." When it is necessary to "ditch" Crestillomeem, his dependency on alcoholism, Jucklet defies Crestillomeem and takes over. From the third act of "The Flying Islands of the Night," we find the following:
"(General sensation within, and growing tumult without, with wrangling cries of "Plot!" "Treason!" "Conspiracy!" and "Down with the Queen!". "Down with the usurper!" Down with the Sorceress!")
Crestillomeem (Wildly) Who dares to cry "Conspiracy!" Bring me the traitor-knave!
(Growing confusion without - sound of rioting, - Voice, "Let me be taken! Let me be taken!" Enter Guards, dragging Jucklet forward, wild-eyed and hysterical - the Queen's gaze fastened on him wonderingly.)
Crestillomeem Why bring ye Jucklet hither in this wise?
Guard O Queen, 'tis he who cries "Conspiracy!" And who incites the mob without with cries Of "Plot!" and "Treason!" Crestillomeem (Starting)
Ha! Can this be true? I'll not believe it! - Jucklet is my fool, But not so vast a fool that he would tempt His gracious Sovereign's ire. (To guards) Let him be freed!
(Then to Jucklet, with mock service)
Stand hither, O my Fool!
Jucklet (To Queen)
What! I, thy fool? Ho! ho! Thy fool? -ho! ho! Why, thou art mine!"
Jucklet is not merely the survival force at work within Riley's alcoholism, but also Riley's savior. Riley saw his wit and capacity to be humorous and to "minstrelize" as a pathway to salvation from his alcoholism and to get by. Riley's father sought out a more concrete way of getting by for his son when he arranged that Riley take up house and sign painting. The former slave George L. Knox recalled, "One evening as I sat in my (barber) shop I heard three men talking. They seemed very much interested in their boys. One suggested that the carpenter's trade would be a good trade for his son to learn, another thought the painter's a good trade. The parents of the three boys finally concluded that they would have their sons learn the painter's trade. The men were Captain (Reuben) Riley, Morris Pierson and Mr. Lipskin. It seemed strange to me to hear these white men talk of putting their boys out to learn trades, as where I came from (the South) white boys did not have to work. The boy who was most indulged and petted and did the least was thought the most of. I wondered why three men took such an interest in their boys, as I thought to teach the white boys to work was out of the question. One of the boys who was to learn painter's trade was James Whitcomb Riley, now the Hoosier Poet, another Wm. Pierson, now Dr. Pierson of Morristown, and the other Harry Lipskin. They all learned their trade from a man by the name of Kiefer who could paint all kinds of pictures. He was thought quite an artist by the people of Greenfield. Some of the boys were more successful in their trade than the others. Young Riley seemed the most apt. He could drawn anything and would take up his pencil and a piece of paper and make a perfect picture of anything he wanted to. The boys, when they were out of the shop (Keefer's) would come to my place of business to lounge and idle the time away. James Whitcomb used to come quite often. He seemed different than the other boys and did not choose his associates from among the boys, but the men, such as Dr. Milligan, Ed Milligan and others. The other boys would keep coming, and bother me more or less, while young Riley would come around, but seldom bothered me or got in the way. I said to him one day, "J.W." I always called him that "you can come around to the shop when you desire; I like to have you; you are not like the other boys." He gradually became a frequent visitor at my place." When we think of Riley in his twenties, we think of Riley traveling around Indiana living as a wanderer. He often returns to Greenfield, his hometown, but he rarely stays. He has learned to be a painter. Employments are casual and transitory. He paints a barn or a sign to earn enough money to go someplace else. What kind of signs was Riley painting? In the Post-Civil War Era, it was customary for every merchant to have his windows ornamented with a neatly worded sign done in different colors and always in a sort of scroll design with many fancy letters, mostly in script. An example of one is recorded by Henry Miller, a retired merchant who painted with Blowney's at South Bend, Indiana, at the same time James Whitcomb Riley did. A Riley sign in South Bend was at George Muessel's grocery store on the two lower lights of each window which consisted of four large panes and on the two lower ones he painted the following signs: "G.C. Muessel-queensware and crockery," and on the other two panes, "G.C. Muessel -groceries and provisions." The sign was done with Riley's usual flourish and many colored paints. Riley stayed where he could. He grew a long red mustache. The pace is quick. Riley needs money so he travels from town to town in search of painting jobs. He returns to Greenfield as we know he did in February, 1873 but then heads back to Anderson where he and his friend, Jim McClanahan branch out into the Graphics, named after the NEW YORK GRAPHIC MAGAZINE, a periodical popular with designers. The Graphics consist of no less than three but sometimes more living on craftsmanship services offered to residents of the Indiana towns they pass through. These gentlemen lived freely and easily. The Graphics did many odd-jobs. Frank Spear dressed silk hats while Riley painted signs. Others of the Graphics and what happened to them were remembered in an Anderson IN Morning HERALD article on the death of Frank Spear of Jan. 4, 1895. Edward Lemon committed suicide in a newspaper office at Nellsville, Wisconsin. Jim McClanahan, who Riley called "The Poor Man's Friend," lived in Anderson. He subsequently died of exposure after being found drunk. Will Ethell was an artist of prominence and Turner Wickersham ended up in Kansas City. Life with the Graphics was an "off and on" employment for Riley for four years - from 1873 until the Spring of 1877. The Graphics modus operandi for making a living was worked out slyly and mischievously. They would dress fashionably and enter a town and entertain especially the girls and get contracts to make signs from merchants. Farm wives along the roads would give them pies. They would then survive having the fun of it all while they travelled together. In this journey, Riley found his way to South Bend, Indiana in July 1873, where the Graphics disbanded for a time and each went his own way until reforming again the next Spring. Riley stayed in South Bend for several days. One of Riley's most famous projects was the making of a mural about the progress of South Bend that took two weeks to finish. In 1873, After five weeks, Riley heard his father married again to a Quaker woman from a farm near Pendleton. In November, 1873 Riley went back to Anderson to work for Doc McCrillus but went home to Greenfield shortly afterwards to see his father and meet his father's new bride. Riley stayed in Greenfield in late 1873 to help start up a theatrical troop, the Adelphians, to put on plays in Greenfield during the winter. Lee O. Harris, Riley's old teacher, was still in Greenfield and they worked together on theatricals. Riley continued to write during this period of time and sent a poem to the Danbury Connecticut NEWS published in its February 25, 1874 issue. Originally the concept of painting advertising signs outside the stores, on barns, fences, or prominent places was profitable. Sign painting was a new medium. As the group traveled around Indiana, Jim McClanahan was able to bring in many new jobs. New helpers were brought in. The Graphics made great profits. Soon, however, new advertising "firms" sprang up. Competition grew fierce. New jobs became scarce and profits were just a memory. The business of "The Graphics" dwindled away until nothing when in the spring of 1877 Riley and McClanahan returned to Anderson insolvent where they knew they had room and board at least in Mother McClanahan's household. Riley was a witty and companionable associate. The "Ho!", often repeated as "Ho! Ho!" or Ha!, etc., in the autobiographical poem "The Flying Islands of the Night" is an identifier of Jucklet, the "minstrel" Riley persona. Perhaps it likens Riley "To the Wine-God Merlus" of a poem of that name subtitled, "A Toast of Jucklet's" wherein the "Ho! Ho!" represents Jucklet's state when "the jolly god, with kinked lips and laughter-streaming eyes," has "liftest me up." As Riley's years with the Graphics ended, he wrote his "Craqueodoom" for the Anderson DEMOCRAT of June 1, 1877. In the newspaper world there was great consternation. What did it mean? Craqueodoom" was exchanged with other newspapers and reached other audiences.
The Crankadox leaned o'er the edge of the moon And wistfully gazed on the sea Where the Gryxabodill madly whistled a tune To the air of "Ti-fol-de-ding-dee." The quavering shriek of the Fly-up-the creek Was fitfully wafted afar To the Queen of the Wunks as she powdered her cheek With the pulverized rays of a star.
The Gool closed his ear on the voice of the Grig, And his heart it grew heavy as lead As he marked the Baldekin adjusting his wing On the opposite side of his head, And the air it grew chill as the Gryxabodrill Raised his dank, dripping fins to the skies, And plead with the Plunk for the use of her bil To pick the tears out of his eyes.
The ghost of the Zhack flitted by in a trance, And the Squidjum hid under a tub As he heard the loud hooves of the hooken advance With a rub-a-dub-dub-a-dub-dub And the Crankadox cried, as he lay down and died, "My fate there is none to bewail," While the Queeen of the Wunks drifted over the tide With a long piece of crape to her tail.
At Kokomo, the Editor Oscar Henderson published not only the poem but also two queries to the poet as to the meaning. William Croan, Riley's Editor at the Anderson DEMOCRAT, passed the queries along to Riley who went on to draft a reply subsequently published in "The DISPATCH." Riley's reply was evasive and mysterious. "Although in endeavoring to reply to the above query, I feel that I place myself in rather a peculiar position, I can but trust, in so doing, to escape the incessant storm in inquiries haled so piteously upon me since the appearance of the above mentioned poem - of whatever it is. As to its meaning - if it has any I am as much in the dark, and as badly worried over its incomprehensibility as anyone who may have inflicted himself with a reading of it; in fact more so, for I have in my possession now not less than a dozen of similar character; and when I say they were only composed mechanically, and without apparent exercise of my own thought, I find myself at the threshold of a fact that over which I cannot pass. I can only surmise that such effusions emanate from long and arduous application - a sort of poetic fungus that springs from the decay of better effort. It bursts into being of itself, and in that alone from the decay of better effort. It bursts into being of itself, and in that alone do I find consolation. The process of much composition may furnish a curious fact to many, yet I am assured that every writer of either poetry or music will confirm the experience I am about to relate. After long labor at verse you will find there comes a time when everything you see or hear, touch, taste, or smell, resolves itself into rhyme, and rattles away until you can't rest. I mean this literally. The people you meet upon the streets are so many disarranged rhymes, and only need proper coupling. The boulders in the sidewalks are jangled words. The crowd of corner loungers is a mangled sonnet with a few lines missing. The farmer and his team an idyl of the road, perfected and complete when he stops at the picture of a grocery and hitches to an exclamation point. This is my experience and at times the effect upon both mind and body is exhausting in the extreme. I have passed as many as three nights in succession without sleep - or at least without mental respite from this tireless something which "Beats time to nothing in my hand From some old corner of the brain."
I walk, I run, I writhe and wrestle with it, but I cannot shake it off. I lie down to sleep and all night long it haunts me. Whole cantos of incoherent rhyme dance before me, and so vividly at last I seem to read them as from a book. All this without will power of my own to guide or check; and then secure a stage of repetition - when the matter becomes rhythmically tangible at least, and shapes itself into a whole of sometimes a dozen stanzas, and goes on repeating itself over and over till it is printed indelibly in my mind. This stage heralds sleep at last, from which I wake refreshed and from the toils of my strange persecutor; but as I have just said, some senseless piece of rhyme is printed on my mind and I go about repeating it as though I had committed it from the pages of some book. I often write these jingles afterward, though I believe I never could forget a word of them. This is the history of the "Craqueodoom." This is the history of the poem I give below. I have theorized in vain. I went gravely to a doctor on one occasion and asked him seriously if he didn't think I was crazy. His laconic reply that he "never saw a poet that wasn't." is not without consolation. I have talked with numerous writers regarding it, and they invariably confirm a like experience, only excepting the inability to recall these Gypsy changelings of a vagrand mind." Riley's father thought his son was out of his mind for traveling with the Graphics and no doubt writing such strange poetry as "Craqueodoom," and got him home to learn lawyering. Reuben Riley was a lawyer who taught many others to become lawyers in the county seat of Greenfield. We find in the county histories of Hancock County many members of the Hancock County Bar Association admitted on his motion. On many occasions we find James Whitcomb Riley drawn to his father's law office. Now came one of those times. The father's hope no doubt was that James Whitcomb Riley was apprenticing himself for the law. The fact was simply the opposite. While the father was away, Riley wrote poetry or fiddled around drawing funny pictures in his father's somber lawbooks. In the back of Riley's mind must always have been the expectation that he might return to finish apprenticing as a lawyer to take over his father's law practice. Mainly, I believe, he preferred his writing and was also rebellious against the law and order lawyering upheld. There are those in the legal profession who attempt to move the recalcitrant legal system into another posture usually failing miserably. Riley took a wider road toward humanitarian lifework. Reuben A. Riley himself was a product of the legal apprenticeship system and was admitted to the Hancock County Bar after reading in Randolph county. Upon moving to Greenfield, Reuben was admitted to the Hancock Bar on motion of R. M. Cooper August 19, 1844. The Motion of Reuben to admit his son as a qualified reader in his office never came. Lawyers admitted to the Hancock County Bar on the Motion of Reuben Riley included Gustavus N. Moss, August 18, 1845; William P. Davis, August 10, 1847; Nimrod Johnson, August 10, 1847; Michael Wilson, August 10, 1857; William R. Hough, August 10, 1857; Joseph R. Silver, May 26, 1859; William H. Pilkinton, February 15, 1860; Brayan C. Walpole, February 1860; Oliver P. Gooding, August 15, 1865; Augustus W. Hough, February 13, 1866; W.W. Kersey, February 13, 1866; John H. Popps, August 21, 1866; Prestly Guymon, February 15, 1867; Matthias M. Hook, February 15, 1867; W.S. Denton on June 4, 1877; Richard A.M. Black, October 15, 1877; Samuel B. Waters, March 26, 1878; William C. Barrett, June 13, 1881, etc. Since the party who moved the admission of the bar member was most often the master of the apprentice, it can be seen how active Reuben Riley was in educating new lawyers in Greenfield. He didn't get the job done with his son. And so Riley's life in his twenties went...never very seriously...mostly as Jucklet truanting about in carefree poverty with friends. Eventually, Riley settled down at Anderson, Indiana to write for a newspaper, the Anderson DEMOCRAT. Riley had taken odd jobs with newspapers before, but the Anderson DEMOCRAT offered him the steadiest work and the chance for a journalism career. We will note what happened to this position with the story of "Leonainie."
Riley's play character Jucklet deviously arranged for Riley to come to great fame in the way that the scheming, ludicrous minstrelsy of this character would do such a thing: through a "hoax" more outrageous than any "hoaxer" had ever "pulled" before. In July, 1877, shortly after Riley had composed the poem "Leonainie" and shortly after poetry he had sent to an Eastern magazine for publication had been rejected, Riley spoke with anguish to friends. He angrily proposed the theory that his poetry was rejected by national publications in the Eastern cities simply because his name was unknown, not because his poetry was not good enough. To prove the theory, Riley proposed to pass off his poem "Leonainie" as one written by Edgar Allan Poe. His hypotheses was that the poem would be immediately successful because its author was known to fame. Riley's friend, William H. Croan, Junior Editor of Riley's newspaper, the Anderson DEMOCRAT, and a journalist from the competing Anderson newspaper, William Kinnard of the Anderson Herald, together with Mrs. D.M. Jordan, a contributor to the Richmond "Independent" were the initial conspirators about the project. The three decided on the Kokomo DISPATCH as the newspaper to approach about initially printing the hoax poem. Riley wrote the Editor of that paper, Oscar Henderson, the following letter: Office of The Anderson DEMOCRAT Todiman and Croan Anderson, Indiana July 25, 1877 Proprietors Editor DISPATCH - Dear Sirs: I write to ask a rather curious favor of you. The dull times1 worry me, and I yearn for something to stir things from their comatose condition. Trusting to find you of like inclination, I ask your confidence and assistance. This idea has been haunting me: - I will prepare a poem - carefully imitating the style of some popular American poet deceased, and you man "give it to the world for the first time" thru the columns of your paper, - prefacing it, in some ingenious manner, with the assertion that the original MS. was found in the album of an old lady living in your town - and in the handwriting of the poet imitated - together with signatures etc. etc. - You can fix the story - only be sure to clinch it so as to defy the scrutiny of the most critical lens. If we succeed, and I think sheer audacity sufficient capital to assure that end, - after "working up" the folks, and smiling over the encomiums of the Press, don't you know; we will then "rise up William Riley,2" and bust our literary bladder before a bewildered and enlightened world !!! I write you this in all earnestness and confidence, trusting you will favor the project with your valuable assistance. It will be obvious to you why I do not use our paper here. Should you fall in with the plan, write me at once, and I will prepare and send the poem in time for your issue of this week. Hoping for an early and favorable response, I am, Very truly yours, J.W. Riley 1. Some might argue the times were not so dull. At the time of this letter, America was in the midst of a crippling and bloody railroad strike from Illinois to the Atlantic Coast, Indiana's current Senator and former Civil War Governor, Oliver Morton, was seriously ill. In Utah, Brigham Young, the founder of the Morman Church, was dying. Then, too, the Russians and Turks were in a desperate war. 2. The expression "rise up William Riley" was a reference to "Riley songs," old English or Irish ballads preserved by mountaineer bards of Tennessee and Kentucky. One began "Rise up, William Riley, you must appear this day\ The lady's oath will hang you, or else will set you free..."
The Editor of the Kokomo DISPATCH wrote back the following: The DISPATCH Kokomo, Ind., July 23, 1877 J.W. Riley, My Dear Sir: Your favor of this date is just received. Your idea is a capital one and is cunningly conceived. I assure you that I "tumble" to it with eagerness. You are doubtless aware that newspaper men, as a rule, would rather sacrifice honor, liberty, or life itself, than to deviate from the paths of truth - but the idea of getting in a juicy "scoop" upon the rural exchanges, causes me to hesitate, consider, yea, consent to this little act of journalistic deception. Yes, my dear Riley, I am with you boots and soul. But hadn't I better forestall the poem by a "startling announcement" or something of the sort one week before its publication? The public would then be on the tip-toe of expectancy, etc. I merely offer this as a suggestion. We would hardly be able to publish the poem, if of any great length, this week. Copy is well in for Thursday's issue now, same some local paragraphs. Send copy as soon as you can and we may print next week. If you like, you may also write the preface as you have indicated. Perhaps you could do better than I. I enclose this letter in a plain envelope to disarm suspicion. Let me hear from you. Fraternally, "Mum's the word." J.O. Henderson
Riley read the Henderson letter and communicated its good news to Croan and Kinnard and wrote to the out-of-town member of the conspiracy, Ms. Jordan, as follows: Anderson, Ind. July 25, 1877 Dear Friends: I write - not in answer to your letter, for I haven't time to do that justice now - but to ask of you a very special favor. I have made arrangements with the editor of the Kokomo DISPATCH that he shall publish the poem "Leonainie," under the guise of its being the work of Poe himself. Henderson is to invent an ingenious story of how the original manuscript came into his possession, and when it appears with a hurrah from the DISPATCH, I shall copy and comment upon it in the DEMOCRAT - in a way that will show that I have no complicity and I want you to review it, if you will, favorably, in the Independent - I don't want you to really admire it - but I do want you to pretend to, and eulogize over it at rapturous length, and as though you were assured it was in reality the work of Poe himself - as the DISPATCH will claim. Our object is to work up the "Press" broadcast if possible, and then to unsack the feline, and let the "secret laughter that tickles all the soul" erupt volcanically. The "Ring" around the literary torpedo as it now lies includes but four persons, including yourself, and it must be the unwavering resolved of every member to hold the secret safely fastened in the bosom quartette till time shall have ripened the deception, and the slow match had reached the touch-hole of success. Now will you do this for me at once, for I shall not be thoroughly happy till the answer which I believe, in your great kindness, you will give, reaches me. How are you, anyway? Happy, I trust, as I am to sign myself Your friend, J.W. Riley
Riley also replied to Henderson: Anderson July 26, `77 Dear Henderson: Your letter did me good, and as I am something of an enthusiast, I am more than ever assured of the ultimate success of our detour. You ask me to fix up the story, and although I have two or three in crude design, I think it will be better, since the poem is to be unearthed at Kokomo, that you manufacture it to suit the surroundings; beside, were I to do it, the trick might be betrayed in some peculiarity of composition - no matter how trifling; for if the ruse succeeds at all, it will certainly receive most rigid scrutiny, and that too of a keenness that will probe to deepest limits. No, I think you will concede the propriety of weaving that fabric on your own loom, I will make suggestions, however, which you may use or ignore as they may be adapted to your surroundings, "In time of peace prepare for war" - that is get ready for afterclaps - or in other words fix a firm foundation. I would get some old woman, we'll say who does washing, or something of that sort, and if she hasn't got an old album, she's got an old book of some kind from which can be torn a blank leaf. Tell her frankly that you want to create a little sensation, and ask her to assist you by saying - should anyone inquire of her as to the truth of it - "that there some poetry written in the book, and that you had noticed it, and asked where the book come from, and she had said it was a book her grandmother used to have; then you had asked her if you mightn't tear out the poetry and print it, and she had acquiesced." Or, - hunt out an old wood-sawer, or an old chap who lives alone, and give him a good send off of some kind - swear him, and then tear a leaf from some old book of his - or if he hasn't got an old book, get him one and let him say "his mother gave it to him fifty year ago - that he don't know where she got it, only that he'd heard her say a young feller about twenty stayed at their house one night, and acted strange like, and looked pale, and paced the floor till morning, and the book was in his room, and when he went away she found the poetry written in it and signed simply E.A.P." -for I have selected Poe to imitate from. And now can you find anything in these suggestions you can utilize - or does not your own fancy suggest a better plan. think. there are a thousand ways, select the most feasible, and nip it at once - taking care to make it anything but complicated or sensational, -and right here while I think of it: You will be called on to produce the M.S. - say simply that you have sent it to W.D. Howells, of The Atlantic," or some other eminent critic for inspection; and if Will Siddell is in your office, let him into it, and he can have seen it, and set from it - but don't let too many know it - only a very few in whom you can repose every confidence. And now my dear Henderson, I have worried you enough. I turn the whole thing over to you - feeling you will get all out of it there is in it. When you publish it, I will copy and review it in a manner that shall evince most thoroughly that I have no complicity with it; and do not be surprised if I exhibit, in what I shall have to say, a covert jealousy of the "DISPATCH" - I'll do anything to throw unfavorable comment out o' gear. It might be well, as you suggest, to prepare the people for it in some startling way. Do nothing tho' without mature deliberation. Copy the poem with every care and don't omit a mark, for I have taken every precaution to imitate the most minute characteristics of the erratic original. Write me that this is received O.K. and what you think of it. Another thing, preserve our correspondence. Yours J.W. R. --- LATER ---It might be well for you to refresh yourself in Poe history - for such material cannot fail to be of most effective service in the "tangled web we weave." By such a course you will be enabled to locate the old lady at whose house the wild-eyed stranger stayed and penned the "Matchless lines;" and also to most minutely describe the poet's chirography. Write me at once - if only a line, for I am interested. J.W.R. "State that the original M.S. has not a single word crossed out, nor sign of erasure - and is copied exact in all particulars. Henderson received Riley's letter that same day and had Will Siddell, his head type-setter, set up the poem "Leonainie" in type and strike off a galley proof to enclose with a letter to Riley reading as follows:
The DISPATCH J.W. Riley Kokomo, Ind., July 27, 1877
My Dear Sir: Your favor and poem received yesterday. Your suggestion is good. Will publish poem next Thursday. It is really Poe- tical in every word and line - a superbly written and matchlessly conceived poem It certainly would not detract from Poe's transcendental genius to father the fugitive. I assure you it is withal a marvelous and rare creation, honoring you and the State as well. Have not yet matured my story but will have it in due time. Have you any additional suggestions? We have your "Kalamazoo1" Sargeant a left- handed dig in the ribs this week in the DISPATCH, but do not wish to antagonize the DEMOCRAT. Can't you favor us with a poem written over your own signature, sometime "when you have nothing else to do?" Our readers are quite well acquainted with "Riley the Poet," already. Fraternally, J.O. Henderson 1. "Kalamazoo" was the nickname of a baseball player named Sargeant who played for the Anderson baseball team and was called a notoriously "dirty player" in another article in the Kokomo DISPATCH. Riley responded to Henderson's letter as follows: OFFICE OF THE ANDERSON DEMOCRAT Todiman and Croan Anderson, Indiana, July 30, 1877 Proprietors
Dear Henderson:
Your letter has furnished me special pleasure, as it indicates that you are sanguine of success. You ask if I have any more suggestions; None I believe - unless it be to say that the typographical form of the poem is faulty in the regard of architectural construction; tho' doubtless you have already remedied the defect, i.e. - it is not properly indented. Have you noticed? If not, repair if this reaches you in time. Nothing more - only "Courage, Courage, Mon Comrade!" We'll drive `em bald-headed I'm sure. Yours, J.W. Riley The Kokomo DISPATCH printed the following story in its issue of August 2, 1877, at the top of the fourth column of editorial page 2: POSTHUMOUS POETRY---"A Hitherto Unpublished Poem of the Lamented Edgar Allan Poe - Written on the Fly-Leaf of an Old Book now in Possession of a Gentleman in this city ---The following beautiful posthumous poem from the gifted pen of the erratic poet, Edgar Allan Poe, we believe has never before been published in any form, either in any published collection of Poe's poems now extant, or in any magazine or newspaper of any description; and until the critics shall show conclusively to the contrary, the DISPATCH shall claim the honor of giving it to the world. That the poem has never before been published, and that it is a genuine production of the poet who we claim to be its author, we are satisfied from the circumstances under which it came into our possession, after a thorough investigation. Calling at the house of a gentleman of this city the other day, on a business errand, our attention was called to a poem written on the back fly-leaf of an old book. Handing us the book he observed that it (the poem) might be good enough to publish, and if we thought so, to take it along. Noticing the initials E.A.P., at the bottom of the poem it struck us that possibly we had run across a "bonanza," so to speak, and after reading it, we asked who its author was, when he related the following bit of interesting reminiscence: He said he did not know who its author was, only that he was a young man, that is, he was a young man when he wrote the lines referred to. He had never seen him, himself, but had heard his grandfather, who gave him the book containing the verses, tell of the circumstances and the occasion by which he, the grandfather, came into possession of the book. Hs grandparents kept a country hotel, a sort of wayside inn, in a small village called Chesterfield, near Richmond, Va. One night, but before bed-time, a young man, who showed plainly the marks of dissipation, rapped at the door and asked if he could stay all night, and was shown to a room. That was the last they saw of him. When they went to his room the next morning to call him to breakfast he had gone away and left the book, on the fly-leaf of which he written the lines given below. Further than this our informant knew nothing, and, being an uneducated, illiterate man, it was quite natural that he should allow the great literary treasure to go for so many years unpublished. That the above statement is true, and our discovery no canard, we will take pleasure in satisfying any who care to investigate the matter. The poem is written in Roman characters, and is almost as legible as print itself, though somewhat faded by the lapse of time. Another peculiarity in the manuscript which we notice is that it contains not the least sign of erasure or a single inter-lineated word. We give the poem verbatim - just as it appears in the original. Here it is: LEONAINIE
Leonainie - angels named her; And they took the light Of the laughing stars and framed her In a smile of white: And they made her hair of gloomy Midnight, and her eyes of bloomy Moonshine, and they brought her to me In the solemn night.
In a solemn night of summer, When my heart of gloom Blossomed up to meet the comer Like a rose in bloom; All the forebodings that distressed me I forgot as joy caressed me -- (Lying joy that caught and pressed me In the arms of doom!)
Only spake the little lisper In the angel-tongue; Yet I, listening, heard her whisper, - "Songs are only sung Here below that they may grieve you - Tales are told you to deceive you - So must Leonainie leave you While her love is young."
Then God smiled and it was morning, Matchless and supreme; Heaven's glory seemed adorning Earth with its esteem: Every heart but mine seemed gifted With the voice of prayer, and lifted Where my Leonainie drifted From me like a dream. The next morning Henderson sent Riley a copy of the story of the hoax clipped from the DISPATCH with a letter: The DISPATCH Dear Riley: Kokomo, Ind. Aug. 3, 1877 We published the poem yesterday. The net-work enveloping the old book, ignorant possessor, etc., you will observe, has been altered materially, for the best, we think. We have our man, a Mr. Hurd, formerly of Va. all posted, primed, etc. The ruse works. Our people think it the "finest poem" Poe ever wrote. Those best acquainted with him declare "Leonainie" to be Poe-tical in every detail. It is success here. We have sent marked copies to Cincinnati, Indianapolis, Boston, New York, Chicago, and Louisville papers. Also to the Monthlies - Atlantic, Harpers, Scribners, etc. The thunder of their voices will soon be reverberating through the length and breadth of the commonwealth. Do you want any extra copies of the DISPATCH If so, will send you. What do you think of it? How are you pleased with it, etc. Answer. Fraternally, J.O. Henderson Riley received Henderson's letter the same day it was written and immediately did two things to avoid suspicion of himself. He composed a squib for insertion in that days "DEMOCRAT" August 3, as follows: The Kokomo DISPATCH of yesterday "startles the nation and the hull creation" by publishing a posthumous Poe poem clamorously claiming the honor of its first presentation to the world. Lack of space prevents us from further remark; but we will say, however, that of all the Nazareths now at large, Kokomo is the last from which we would expect good to come." Secondly, Riley wrote Henderson a post-card, purposely worded to convey a message if read by the curious at Anderson or Kokomo, as follows: Anderson, Ind. August 3, 1877 Editor DISPATCH Kokomo, Ind. Dear Sir: Some literary thug has gobbled our DISPATCH containing your Poe discovery. Please send me two or three extra copies. What does it mean? Are you in earnest? I would like to enter into a correspondence with you regarding it, for even though you be the victim of a deception I would be proud to know your real author. Do I understand from your description that the manuscript is written like printed letters? Write me full particulars and I will serve you in response in any way in my power. Very truly, J.W. Riley The next day, Riley wrote another letter: Anderson Aug. 4, 1 `77 Dear, dear Henderson - and I've a notion to call you darling, - Your Leonainie introductory is superb, and as for the leading paragraph, a neater, sweeter lie was never uttered. I fancy Poe himself leans tiptoe o'er the walls of Paradise and perks an eager ear to listen and believe. There may be a feature or two open to attack, but that's at it should be, for once the excitement of controversy started, a thousand hydra-headed critics will rise up in its behalf - if only to be contrary. I am well pleased; and especially grateful for the evident interest you bestow upon it. Let me caution you again to guard the imposition with most jealous care. Let no one know it - not even your mother-in-law, if you possess so near and dear a relative. Nor would I seem over-anxious to convince unbelievers, for they will strive to run you thro' the gauntlet on that very point; - excuse me for useless suggestions, but I am so fearful of detection a shadow scares me, and I find myself "Like one that on a lonesome road Doth walk in fear and dread, And having once turned round walks on And turns no more his head, Because he knows a frightful fiend Doth close behind him tread." And so, dear Henderson, walk with me, "and the devil may pipe to his own" till our designs shall have ripened into the fullest bloom of victory, - then we'll have our day. I sent you a postal yesterday which will understand and use perhaps to advantage. And now let me post you in regard to those who are assistants in the deception, - for you might be approached by persons claiming to be into the secret falsely, and by so doing catch you off guard. Mrs. D.M. Jordan, of the Richmond INDEPENDENT, and Mr. Kinnard here, of the HERALD, are the only ones outside yourself and DEMOCRAT who know of it. The former - Mrs. J. - will be of greatest value to the success of the scheme, and the latter -Mr. Kinnard - in his way, will be no less effective and valuable. So now you are fortified on that point, and all you have to do is smile inwardly, "and with a lack-luster, dead blue eye" await the unfoldings of it at least a curious future. I believe I have said as little and as much as now is necessary: but you must write me in the meantime, and keep me lubricated with the oily experience which I can but fancy will be yours. Send extra papers. I shake your hand in silence and in tears; and in the language of Artemus Ward, - "I am here; I think so. Even of those." J.W. Riley The fact was also that another person knew of the conspiracy. Riley also told his roommate, Jim McClanahan of all the details. On Monday, Riley wrote Henderson again: Anderson, Ind. Aug. 6 Dear Henderson: This from the Indianapolis NEWS of the 4th is rather pointed. Yet i trust it will not have the effect of discouraging you in the least. We can't expect the public to gulp it whole, you know; for they are bound to suspect the "worm" contains a hook. "Patience and shuffle the cards!" The singular reticence of the other dailies may auger good - or bad - time only will disclose; and bear in mind no critic has as yet pronounced upon it. We will give them "a long pull - a strong pull, and a pull all together," and in the meantime let me assure you that my ardor is not in the least dampened. "Mrs. Jordan's review will soon prod them, and your humble servant's likewise, and should you receive letters or coms., select quotations etc. etc., and publish good and bad alike, in order to show your willingness to abide by the public decision - in a measure at least. I find it necessary for surrounding circumstances, to claim in my review that you may perhaps be the victim of a clever deception, and also to rend the tender fabric of the poem to some extent. I do this for the double purpose of directing the attention from your complicity, and to draw attention from my own; and although I evidently strive to condemn the poem, I indirectly furnish more praise than blame - but you understand. Let nothing discourage you, I shall not. I shall watch carefully for any new points, and in case I "drop" on anything, will alter criticism to suit the public appetite. Write me if any new developments - write anyhow, and tell me you are not discouraged. Yours fraternally, J. W. Riley --- LATER ---In case my review of the poem should cause any public comment to its detriment, I will furnish you with a private letter in which I will express the belief that the poem is certainly genuine, and you may answer my article by reproducing it - see? It will be well, perhaps, for you to give me a slur of some kind this week - in response to our notice in last issue. Make it hot - call us jealous, etc. etc. I notice Harding of the HERALD steps round it as carefully as he would a torpedo. If he'd only bit I could die resigned. I have examined two or three here with regard to it -but they're wary, and don't want to commit themselves. Our best literary man says its a GRAND thing, and reads it like a Murdoch. Prof. Hamilton pronounces it a fine thing, but thinks it yours. He knows you, and is almost satisfied that it is your composition. This is all "fruit" for me, you know, and after an interview of this character, I generally "wind up" my face and let it "run down" the other way. I notice that it worries `em, and that's a good sign -a good sign! Another feature, - everybody would like to believe - they want to the worst way, and all we have to do is to exercise proper policy; and as the old man has it "We study to please." Let nothing shake your first convictions, and although we eventually cry Peocavi, the "euchered" public will be forced not only to forgive, but render homage. And now whatever you do, write to me - Write, and keep me informed as to the welfare or the dangers attending our orphan venture - Very truly, J.W. Riley The Indianapolis NEWS item referred to by Riley read, "The Kokomo DISPATCH publishes for the first time a poem said to have been written on the fly-leaf of an old book, by Edgar Allan Poe. The poem bears no internal evidence of such paternity." The Harding referred to is Reverend George C. Harding, owner and editor of the Indianapolis Saturday HERALD, one of Indiana's most distinguished editors. The Saturday HERALD commented, "The Kokomo DISPATCH prints what it claims to be an unpublished poem of Edgar A. Poe."
Henderson replied to Riley's letter, saying: THE DISPATCH
Dear Riley: Kokomo, Ind., Aug. 7, 1877. Your very kind letter was received yesterday. I admire your zeal and join you heartily in the hope of ultimate success. Our people here believe the poem a "true bill." The TRIBUNE folks have interviewed me and I believe I succeeded in "stuffing" them to the muzzle. They feel a trifle jealous of our journalistic "scoop" - hence their reticence. That's their way. If they doubted the genuineness of the story or poem, they would stand on their hind legs and howl furiously. Please send us every extract or notice of the poem you find in the prints with the name of the paper in which you find it. Next week perhaps we will publish all "comments of the press" etc. concerning it. This week will be too early to hear from them. Be sure to send me Mrs. Jordan's notice. We don't get the INDEPENDENT. I will keep you posted. Do the same with me. Write. Fraternally, J.O. Henderson On August 9th, the Kokomo DISPATCH published an item stating "Our Edgar Allan Poe poem, published in last week's DISPATCH, is creating quite a flutter over the country. The literary critics are giving it the closest scrutiny." Henderson continued to risk his professional prestige and that of his newspaper in participating in this hoax.
The same day, he wrote Riley as follows: THE DISPATCH Dear Riley: Kokomo, Ind. Aug. 9, 1877. The dawn of success is breaking, and every day brings us fresh evidence of ultimate triumph. Glory! The N.Y. HERALD of last Friday, Aug. 5, is before me and it has nibbled. It republished the entire article from The DISPATCH, comments on poem and credits it to The DISPATCH; so did The N.Y. SUN last Tuesday. The Rochester UNION-SPY (Ind.) also publishes the entire article. Soon we shall hear its thunder reverberating through the length and breadth of the Union! It is a success. The plot or story that we told in introducing the poem seems to somewhat disarm criticism. Think of the N.Y. HERALD, the grandest journal in Christendom, gulping it down! Riley, your fame is assured! You are destined to become a second Thomas Chatterton! Shake! I am sanguine and overjoyed for your sake. I feel that the poem has merit that should place it in the front ranks of poetry in America. Hail, conquering hero! Fraternally, J.C. Henderson P.S. The reticence of the Cincinnati papers is strange indeed. I sent them all copies. Keep on the lookout and write me every paper that refers to it. J.C.H. The only comment of the New York HERALD was in its headline: "EDGAR ALLAN POE - An Indiana Journal Professes to Have Exhumed a Hitherto Unpublished Poem - Inscription on an Old Fly-Leaf." The New York SUN published a condensed version of the DISPATCH story and the complete poem, but without any headlines or comments.
Riley wrote Henderson a letter the same day with this letterhead: ---WILLIAM R. MYERS --- --------- ATTORNEY AND COUNSELOR AT LAW COLLECTIONS MADE A SPECIALTY
"All claims entrusted to his care will be attended to without fear, favor or affection. Anderson, Ind. Aug. 9, 1877 Dear Henderson: The JOURNAL this morning "nibbles," and other papers will zip it - in consequence the J. will be forced to champion the poem. I can't tell you how sanguine of success I now am. I can only exclaim, in the delirious eloquence of the gifted Poe, - " W H O O P ! " A steady nerve is all that is now required. Keep me informed of any new phases. I will send you Richmond paper when it appears. Have only time to write this. Yours, J.W. Riley
The next day, Riley wrote to Henderson again: Anderson, Aug. 10 Dear Henderson: -- 1877 --
I presume you have seen New York SUN of the 7th., and Cincinnati GAZETTE of yesterday - both got it - bad! The SUN reproduces a portion of your editorial, and the poem entire, but ventures no comment of its own. The GAZETTE heads article "An Old Poem by Poe." It must surely bring some critic to the fore ere long. I have written my review in a way that will be apt to awaken a reply from some quarter, and I shall mark the article and ship it to the four winds. Why don't you write? I hope you are not losing faith, or becoming "tired now and sleepy too" - for - God bless us - we are certainly at the very threshold of success! I am eager for the fray. That the poem has merit is established, you see, and all we have now to do is "Hold the Fort!" till our own good time, and in the meantime aggravate controversy from every possible quarter. Can't you come over and see me. If we could talk for one square hour we could make ourselves believe it! That's what we want - is to get together -Come over to-night or tomorrow - or Sunday - anytime that will suit you - only come. Yours "Till death us do part." J.W, Riley That same day Riley finished his review of "Leonainie" for publication in his own newspaper, The Anderson DEMOCRAT. As the day progressed, Riley's review was set up in type, placed in the form and was waiting press time when Riley decided to withdraw it from that day's issue. He then added a section to Henderson's letter before mailing: --- LATER --- I have "weakened" at the last moment. I have been afraid of my review, - I mean the effect of it - Is it right or wrong? I have withheld it from this issue. I will be sure I'm right before I go ahead. I send proof of it for your inspection. Examine carefully - mark what new points may strike you - suggest - etc. etc., and I'll hash it over for next issue - `Twill be better maybe for the delay: tho' I much regret that I am not better assured of the success of the article. You know the object of it all - now criticize it impartially, and tell me how I may improve it. I do wish you would come over - Come, in god's name if possible. Yours etc. J.W. Riley Riley's request that Henderson come to Anderson should be put into perspective. Henderson was a co-owner of the Kokomo newspaper and Riley was an Associate Editor of his, merely an employee. Henderson simply couldn't leave his newspaper to come to Anderson. Both the Anderson HERALD and DEMOCRAT were published on Fridays. Kinnard when he learned of the "Leonainie" story in the DISPATCH of August 2d then wrote the following for his newspaper, The HERALD: "We expect a rhapsody of jealous censure from the jingling editor of the sheet across the way, and shall wait with the first anxiety ever experienced for the appearance of the DEMOCRAT. We look for an exhausting and damning criticism from Riley, who will doubtless fail to see "Leonainie's" apocryphal merit, and discover its obvious faults. As it is, we were led to believe "Leonainie," to quote from Riley, is a "superior quality of the poetical fungus, which springs from the decay of better thoughts." No doubt our young friend Riley will belittle this poem and say it is not the work of Poe. But it is Poe, and Poe's best manner." At the last minute, Riley decided to publish his review of the poem and stopped the press, already printing that week's issue, to make room for his review. This did not endear Riley to the press foreman. The review reads as follows: THE POET POE IN KOKOMO An alleged important literary discovery was announced by The Kokomo DISPATCH in its issue of last week, in which the following extract from a lush and juicy article occurs: (Riley repeated the full Kokomo DISPATCH article and poem, "Leonainie.") We frankly admit that upon first reading the article, we inwardly resolved not to be startled; in fact we resolved to ignore it entirely; but a sense of justice due - if not to Poe, to the poem - has induced us to let slip a few remarks. We have given the matter not a little thought; and in what we shall have to say regarding it, we will say with purpose far superior to prejudicial motives, and with the earnest effort of beating through the gloom a path-way to the light of truth. Passing the many assailable points of the story regarding the birth and late discovery of the poem, we will briefly consider first - IS POE THE AUTHOR OF IT? That a poem contains some literary excellence is not assurance that its author is a genius known to fame, for how many waifs of richest worth are now afloat upon the literary sea whose authors are unknown and whose nameless names have never marked the graves that hid their value from the world; and in the present instance we have no right to say, -"This is Poe's work - for who but Poe could mould a name like LEONAINIE?" and all that sort of flighty flummery. Let us look deeper down, and pierce below the glare and gurgle of the surface, and analyze it at its real worth. Now we are ready to consider, - IS THE THEME of the poem one that Poe would have been likely to select? We think not; for we have good authority showing that Poe had a positive aversion to children, and especially to babies. And then again, the thought embodied in the very opening line is not new - or at least the poet has before expressed it when he speaks of that "rare and radiant maiden whom the angels name Lenore," and a careful analysis of the remainder of the stanza fails to discover a single quality above mere change of form or transposition. The second verse will be a more difficult matter to contest; for we find in it throughout not only Poe's peculiar bent of thought, but new features of that weird facility of attractively combing with the delicate and beautiful, the dread and repulsive - a power most rarely manifest, and quite beyond the bounds of IMITATION. In fact, the only flaw we find at which to pick, is the strange omission of capitals beginning the personified words "joy" and "doom." This, however, may be an error of the compositor's, but not probably. The third stanza drops again. True, it gives us some new thoughts, but of very secondary worth compared with the foregoing, and is such commonplace diction the Poe- characteristic is almost entirely lost. The first line in the concluding stanza, although embodying a highly poetical idea, is not at all like Poe; but rather so UNLIKE, and for such weighty reasons we are almost assured that the thought could not have emanated with him. It is a fact less known than remarkable that Poe avoided the name of the Deity. Although he never tires of angels and the heavenly cherubim, the word God seems strangely ostracized. That this is true, one has but to search his poems; and we feel we are safe in the assertion that in all he has ever written the word God is not mentioned twenty times. In further evidence of this peculiar aversion of the poet's, we quote his utterance, - "`Oh, Heaven! oh, God! How my heart beats in coupling those two words." The remainder of the concluding verse is mediocre till the few lines that compete it - and there again the Poe- element is strongly marked. To sum up the poem as a whole we are at some loss. It most certainly contains rare attributes of grace and beauty; and although we have not the temerity to accuse the gifted Poe of its authority, for equal strength of reason we cannot deny that it is his production; but as for the enthusiastic editor of the DISPATCH, we are not included, as yet, to the belief that he is wholly impervious to the wiles of a deception. J.W. Riley
Paul Henderson, the author and compositor of this series of letters, newspaper articles and background of notes, calls this review by Riley "a masterpiece of subtle chicanery. Setting the scene with his sly reference to the poem's merit: "...a sense of justice due - if not to Poe - to the poem," Riley had the impudence to refer to his own pet theory: "...that a poem contains some literary excellence is not assurance that its author is a genius known to fame!"" Riley then analyzes the poem revealing his own great knowledge of Poe's style as well as acclaiming his own poem as one "of grace and beauty." The next day, Riley wrote Henderson: Anderson, Aug. 11 `77 Dear Henderson: "I wrote you yesterday that I would not publish my review this week, but receiving a letter from a literary friend in Indianapolis, enclosing "Leonainie," I stopped the press in time to insert my article for benefit of more notable exchanges at least. I think it was best, for my criticism will do everything to throw them from the agent. And now do you think it will be a good idea for me to write you a "put up" letter, praising the poem and expressing a belief in its genuineness? Write me at once - or come over. Id' come to you - but can't possibly leave work out before me. Yours in the bonds -J.W. Riley "Will send Richmond papers as soon as they appear." Henderson then wrote Riley a letter on the next Monday afternoon: THE DISPATCH Dear Riley: Kokomo, Ind., Aug. 13, 1877. Your two letters Saturday received. I would like to visit you ever so well but can't get away for two weeks at least. My brother and partner has gone to Baltimore, Md., and per consequence I am tied at home. Have you seen notice in N.Y. WORLD, TRIBUNE, POST; Chicago TRIBUNE, INTER-OCEAN, Cincinnati papers, COURIER JOURNAL? I am saving all notices and will publish them this or next week. Your notice in DEMOCRAT is capital; so is HERALD'S, but it sounds like you all over. Our plot is developing rapidly. The ball is now fairly in motion and will not stop until it reaches every State in the Union. No article was ever published in a "country" paper in the State that has had such a run as this has and will have. The end is not yet. I am anxious to see The ATLANTIC, SCRIBNER'S MONTH, etc. They are the critics. Send me all extracts you find. Get WORLD'S if possible. We do not get the paper here. Would be happy to receive a visit from you if only for one night. Fraternally, J.O. Henderson It should be noted that the two had not yet figured out how they would release the secret of the hoax. It should also be noted that we know Riley was at the point of physical collapse at this point in his life. He was both writing and editorializing at his regular work for The DEMOCRAT and trying to cope with the strain of his hoax. On Wednesday morning, the Editor of The DEMOCRAT, Croan, sensing Riley's near breakdown, suggested that Riley go to Kokomo to work out a definite plan. He could take the Panhandle railroad connection at 1:20 P.M. and get to Kokomo a couple of hours before Henderson's newspaper went to press. A problem was the manuscript on the fly-leaf of an old book. Croan suggested he take a book with him to Kokomo and selected out of a small book-case beside his desk an Ainsworth's Latin Dictionary with a blank fly-leaf. Croan also knew of a facsimile of Poe's handwriting from a back issue of Scribner's Magazine. Croan went to see a friend he knew who kept back issues of Scribner's and found the facsimile poem in the September 1875 issue by tracing through the annual index of the previous December. The poem was "Alone" and was said to have been written when Poe left West Point in 1829 - at about the time Riley would have been about twenty. Riley needed a forger and knew where to find one in an artistic friend of his. Riley went to see his friend Sam Richards at his boarding house but Sam had gone to Indianapolis and wasn't due back until late that night. Riley left a note with the boarding house owner to be given to Richards the minute he returned to Anderson and then went to see his Graphics friend, Will Ethel. Riley didn't want to buy the "pale ink of a bluish tinge" himself and needed a friend to buy it for Sam to use on his forgery which Ethel did. The next morning, Sam Richards came to The DEMOCRAT office. Riley gave him the book with the fly-leaf, his own copy of "Leonainie" and the bottle of ink from Will Ethel. He also gave him the facsimile poem of Poe's as a model. Riley said he had to have the poem on the flyleaf by 1:20 to take to Kokomo. Initially, Richards tried to do the job at The DEMOCRAT office but Riley hovered over him so he couldn't do it and said he was going to take it back to his own room to work on. Riley agreed but said he was coming up to see how he was doing in an hour. When Riley went, Richards said he was still practicing on Poe's handwriting and wasn't going to do it without "perfection." Meanwhile Riley was pacing around because he had to make a train to Kokomo with the forgery at 1:20. After Riley left, Richards went back to work. He showed up at Riley's office at The DEMOCRAT to say he had not been able to get more than the first verse done on the fly-leaf. Although Riley was taken aback and very disappointed, a coincidence happened. A compositor of Henderson's own newspaper, the DISPATCH, happened to be visiting Riley's newspaper to talk to a friend who was a pressman there. The man, Will Siddell, had come to Anderson to see his sick mother and decided to stop in for a visit. When Riley learned of this he decided not to go to Kokomo until the next day but instead to have this Will Siddell tell Henderson about the forgery. Will Siddell took notes that would permit Henderson to write up the forgery document for his next issue. Riley told him about the Ainsworth's Latin Dictionary, the pale, blueish ink on both sides of a single sheet, or fly-leaf, taken from the back of the book, writing remarkably clear, can be read as easily as print, though dimmed by time and exposure. Riley told Siddell to make sure Henderson knew he himself would be over with the forged document on the next day's train. On the next morning, Thursday, August 16th, Henderson got a letter from a Boston publisher and sent Riley a letter about it. Henderson's letter was hasty because he wanted Riley to have it that day. This meant he had to post it on the 9:35 "Panhandle" train to Anderson for Riley to get it at about 1:00 P.M. when the train would arrive at Anderson. Henderson knew something must be done. Disastrous exposure of the hoax would surely follow if no manuscript was in his hands. THE DISPATCH J.W. Riley Kokomo, Ind., Aug. 16, 1877 I have just received a letter from WM. F. GILL & CO., Publishers, at Boston, requesting me to forward original MSS, of our Poe's poem. Mr. Gill has just written and published a "Life of Poe" and writes that he has the MSS. of his "Bells." He says he can identify his MSS beyond cavil and such identification would be of value to me. I send you his letter and notice of his book which please return to me at once. What shall I write him! Where is original MSS? Notices still come in - latterly from the South, Baltimore, etc. Send me all your clippings. I will need them by Friday or Saturday to publish in next week's DISPATCH - outside. I would like to see you but can't leave office until my brother returns. "Nothing succeeds like success," and this is a success. Watch "Monthlies" closely. Write. Fraternally, J.O. Henderson. Henderson then had his office boy take the letter to the train for dispatch to Anderson. Later that day, Will Siddell arrived from Anderson with Riley's message that he would be over the next day with the forged poem and its description. Based on Siddell's notes, Henderson edited in the description to a previously written article for his newspaper as follows: "The furor over our discovery of Poe's remarkable and hitherto unpublished poem - the sweet and beautiful "Leonainie," is just not in its insipiency. The poem is traveling like wild-fire all over the country, and the ablest critics in the land have leveled their lenses upon it. If we have been the victim of a deception, we are as willing as anybody to know it. We believe in the paternity of the poem and can await with complacency the verdict of the reading public. The original MS., together with the book from which the leaves were torn, are now in our possession. The book is one of an old edition of "Ainsworth's Dictionary," considerably time-worn. The poem is written in pale ink of blueish tinge on the fly-leaf taken from the back of the book. The chirography is remarkably clear and can be read as easily as print. Of course it is somewhat dimmed by time and exposure. It is written on both sides of a single leaf. The MS will be sent East to critics for examination and judgment. The poem is indeed remarkable, and its accidental discovery is a valuable contribution to American literature." Henderson slipped up here by saying he had the MS. "now" since in the original announcement he stated he took the MS into his possession which would have been two weeks previous. Another article in the same DISPATCH newspaper edition was an "out and out" lie. Referring to the Friday previous, Henderson wrote the enclosed article for publication: J. W. Riley, the Hoosier poet, was in the city last Friday, and of course called at the DISPATCH office. He is a bright, sparkling conversationalist, and a more excellent elocutionist. Riley writes rhymes as easily as he writes prose. He is probably the ablest poet in Indiana. He is considerably "shook up" over our Poe's poem discovery. While he shakes his head in seeming doubt, it is evident that he believes "Leonainie" to be worthy of Poe. While here he examined the original MS., and a perplexed expression o the countenance told he was considerably worried over it, if not entirely "at sea". Later that same Thursday, Richards brought Riley the completed forgery of the poem on the fly-leaf. It was a beautiful piece of work identical with the facsimile of Poe's writing from Scribner's. Riley showed the forgery to Croan and both agreed that Riley could spend Friday night in Kokomo, perhaps with Charley Philips, the Editor of the rival newspaper to the DISPATCH. Then Riley said he would go down to Greenfield to spend the weekend with his family. The next afternoon, Friday, Riley got on the 1:20 "Panhandle" train to Kokomo carrying the old Dictionary wrapped in brown paper with "Leonainie" on its fly-leaf. Once in Kokomo, Riley took a round-about path to the DISPATCH office which was on the second floor of the Kokomo "opera house" block on Railroad Street at the North-West corner of Court House Square, facing the Square. He did this to avoid being seen by his good friend, Charles Philips, whose Kokomo TRIBUNE office was also on Railroad Street. When Riley arrived at the office, he met Henderson for the first time. The session was a "great time" with both laughing gleefully and with great chuckles at how everyone was deceived. Later the two however began to argue about how to bring closure to the hoax. Riley proposed that Charles Philips of the Kokomo TRIBUNE, Henderson's great rival, be contacted and that the hoax be revealed through that newspaper. Henderson exploded. He did not like the plan and told Riley that he was the one who would have to live in the town after the hoax was over. The two agreed to think of another plan. Henderson asked Riley to spend the night since there was no train back to Anderson that night, but Riley declined. He was going to see his friend Charles Philips and anticipated spending the night there as he had on many occasions. When Riley looked up Charles Philips at the TRIBUNE office, Charley asked him what he was doing in Kokomo. Riley said he came to see the "Leonainie" MS. Riley told Charley that he saw it and Henderson kept it in his office safe. Riley further said the poem certainly sounded good enough for Poe. Then Riley spent the night at Charles Philips home. While staying in Kokomo, Riley wrote his Anderson girlfriend, Kit Myers, saying: Dear Kit: Kokomo, Ind. August 18, 1877 I write to tell you how happy I am, and yet how miserable; happy that I find my pet schemes here in such lovely working order, and miserable that I can't tell you about them verbally - never mind - I'll have whole cantos to tell you when we meet again, and soon. I have only time now to write you these few words, for I'm to take a jaunt this morning thro' Ko-ko-mo, the new way of saying it - behind the laziest horse the market affords. The eds. of both papers are making a lion of me, which you, knowing my weakness, will accept as the best of reasons for my present blissful condition and brevity of letter talks. Write to me at once, won't you, at Greenfield, for I will be there Monday at the fartherest. Love to all my friends, and for yourself, the warmest love of `Mr. Riley' From that day's Kokomo TRIBUNE, Charles Philips had written the following personal: J.W. Riley, of the Anderson DEMOCRAT, the author of the strange and fantastical poem, "Craquedoom," published in these columns several weeks ago, is in the city, and gave us a pleasant call last evening. Riley is becoming well-known throughout the country for his original compositions and he has a bright future before him. Riley left for Greenfield on late Saturday afternoon. He was so close to complete physical exhaustion that his short holiday extend to nearly two weeks in Greenfield. The next Monday, August 20th, was a critical day in the life of the "hoax." Metcalf, Kinnard's partner at the Anderson HERALD had learned that Riley wrote "Leonainie" from a person he called a "young man" and came into the HERALD office to see Kinnard. He was determined that they should expose the hoax. Kinnard was forced to tell Metcalf that he knew of the hoax and could not reveal it in their newspaper. Despite every argument, Kinnard refused to budge. The news spread around Anderson, however, that Riley was the author of "Leonainie." When Riley's Editor, Croan, heard the rumors he wrote Riley that he needed to get back to Anderson, but this day Riley had decided to go to Indianapolis to visit his friend, George Harding, Editor of the Indianapolis Saturday HERALD. During the visit, Riley told Harding of seeing the "poe" manuscript. Riley was trying to build up discussion of the "manuscript." This visit did result in a the following notice in The Indianapolis Saturday HERALD: The HERALD was favored on Monday last with a call from one of Indiana's favorite poets - Mr. J.W. Riley, of the Anderson DEMOCRAT. Mr. Riley had just returned from a trip to Kokomo, where he had gone for the purpose of investigating the authenticity of the alleged Poe poem, discovered by the editor of the Kokomo DISPATCH. Mr. Riley reports favorably to the honesty of the claim put forward by the editor of the DISPATCH. Whatever may be the facts, he firmly believes in the authenticity of the poem and guards it with jealous care. The book, on the fly leaves of which the poem is written, is kept under double lock and key, and it was only by tearful pleading that Mr. Riley was permitted a sight of it. The discoverer stood uneasily by while Riley studied the faded manuscript, and heaved a great sigh of relief when the precious volume was once more locked up in the safe." On Tuesday, Metcalf still could not convince his partner that the Anderson HERALD should expose the hoax and so he wrote the full details of the hoax to Charles Philips of the Kokomo TRIBUNE. Apparently he decided that if his newspaper couldn't benefit by exposure of the hoax, he would give the benefit of it to another newspaper, the Kokomo TRIBUNE. Also Metcalf did not tell his partner Croan that he had written the letter. At this point it should be mentioned that the poem "Leonainie" had traveled from coast to coast and particularly in the press of the East. Once the publicity about the poem had reached the East, it was re-published from the great Eastern newspapers of New York, Boston, Philadelphia, and Baltimore to those newspapers that fed on their exchanges. Between August 2d and August 25th, 1877, the Kokomo DISPATCH story with the "Leonainie" poem in it was reprinted in at least thirty-five cities in seventeen of the nation's then thirty-eight states exclusively of Indiana. Literally, from Boston to Portland, Oregon, from New York to San Francisco, from Philadelphia to Richmond and Savannah, from Chicago to Nashville, the poem "Leonainie" was printed. Not one of the newspapers in any of these places accompanied the article with editorial comment. Most tellingly however was the fact that not one of the newspapers also believed that Edgar Allan Poe had actually written "Leonainie." Not one was fooled. From the New York EVENING POST of August 7th, '...a poetic sin has been laid at (Poe's) door..." From the Philadelphia COMMONWEALTH of August 8th, "...The gin mills of Maryland and the Old Dominion never turned out liquor bad enough to debase the genius of Poe to the level of these wretched verses..." From the New York WORLD of August 8th came the suggestion that a renegade of young men in a boisterous literary club called "The Perforators" were probably behind the hoax. From the Baltimore AMERICAN of August 9th, "...The unfortunate poet (Poe) was no doubt guilty of many indiscretions, but it is hard to suppose that in his most eccentric mood he could ever have penned such wretched doggerel as that which is now attempted to be fastened on him under the name of "Leonainie..." From the Brooklyn DAILY EAGLE of August 9th, "The composition is wild enough to have been written under the influence of Egyptian or Terre Haute whiskey, and possesses, therefore, what an eminent journalist of this city defines as a local flavor..." From the Philadelphia PRESS of August 9th, "...If Poe wrote it, he probably intended to call it `La Inane.'" From the Nashville DAILY AMERICAN of August 10th, "(Poe) will surely pay his respects to the scalp of the Indiana man who brought it out." From the Richmond ENQUIRER of August 10th, "It is fair to presume that the discoverer of `Poe's Unpublished Poem' wishes that he had kept his secret..." From the New York DAILY GRAPHIC of August 15th, "Set your nonsense to music and announce that it is copied from Edgar A. Poe's lost memorandum book, and it will travel from the South Pole to Symme's Hole and excite the wildest enthusiasm." From the Denver ROCKY MOUNTAIN NEWS of August 16th,"... Now we can easily imagine the ebon darkness of the maiden's hair, but the `bloomy moonshine' of her eyes is what troubles us. Were they white eyes, shining in the night?" From the Detroit FREE PRESS of August 16th, "...`Bloomy moonshine.' One sees that kind best while hanging on to the lamp post." From the Oakland DAILY TRANSCRIPT of August 19th comes the thought that "Leonainie" should have been signed "Pooh!' instead of with the initials E.A.P. Nevertheless, in almost every account there is the statement of the hoax that the poem "fooled even William Cullen Bryant." This singular misstatement comes from the fact that Bryant, even though in his eighty-third year at the time, still wrote regular reviews and probably wrote the one for the New York EVENING POST.
The "grand expose" appeared on Saturday morning. It was written in the Kokomo TRIBUNE, the rival newspaper of Henderson's DISPATCH. The article was written by the doughty owner and fire-eating senior editor of the TRIBUNE, Theophilus C. Philips, who had been anxious for some time to "take down" Henderson, who he called the fresh "collegiate boy editor." On page four of the August 25th TRIBUNE appeared the following headline: LEONAINIE ---
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