Springfield is not usually thought of as a fount of the literary arts, but by some lights the denizens of that dreary capital are, as Dr. Johnson remarked about his college, a nest of singing birds. Springfield was home to the memoirist J. Edward Day, who grew up to become perhaps the only U.S. postmaster general to be reviewed in Saturday Review. It was home too to that master of prose, Abraham Lincoln; the poet and translator Robert Fitzgerald (who lived there as a boy two blocks from the statehouse); and Benjamin Thomas, whose 1952 biography of Lincoln is good enough that other scholars have been stealing from it ever since.
Lindsay is denigrated these days in the United States as a secondary poet, but his ghost tramps the anthologies. I grew up in Springfield and remember reading “Abraham Lincoln Walks at Midnight” in school–his former school–but I don’t remember anyone telling me that its author had lived only blocks away. Later I was surprised to learn that someone had written serious verse with Springfield as its inspiration, and even more surprised to learn that people had actually read it. Lindsay (I learned) was the son of a man whose virtues as a doctor made him relatively unsuccessful as a businessman of medicine. The boy idolized his father and Lincoln, who had lived but four blocks away and used to visit the previous owner of the Lindsay house. His education, however, came at the hands of women. His mother was of an artistic temperament and had a profound influence on her son. In Springfield’s public schools he was tutored by similarly strong-minded women.
A tree that grew a tiny height, but thickened on apace,
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Sympathetic critics assure us that there’s more than hot air keeping all that lace afloat, but James Dickey came closer to the truth when he wrote of Lindsay’s “self-enchanted, canny, bulldozing, and somehow devilish innocence.” Lindsay never preached revolution. He preached conversion. He devoted a life of ceaseless vagabondage to exhorting the Babbitts of this world to accept the redemptive power of Art. There was always something of the child who still believed in Santa Claus about Lindsay. Unfortunately, what is charming in a child is pathetic in a man.
Lindsay seemed never to know, only to feel, with what Dickey called “indiscriminate responsiveness.” He was passionately interested in the East but had trouble keeping China and Japan straight in his mind. This is what people expected of artists then, and I suppose today. But when an artist settles for it he dooms himself. This man who prided himself on seeing into the souls of things was the most superficial of poets.
In 1946 Harris was living in the capital, where he worked as a reporter for the old International News Service. Lindsay had been dead 15 years by then, but he was still alive in the minds and hearts of everyone in Springfield who had known him. That year Harris began to assemble notes on the life of Lindsay, whom he’d known until then only as the author of a few poems he’d read in high school. By the summer of 1949 he felt ready to write a book that, he later claimed, would tell people what the life of a poet is really like. He finished it ten months later.
The poet’s sister, Olive Lindsay Wakefield, had tried to talk Harris out of doing the book and, failing that, tried to dissuade his publisher from printing it. She was right when she said that Harris was too “unformed” to tackle her brother’s life. Harris himself later admitted that his portrait was naive. “I went about interviewing everyone who had been associated with him,” he recalled in Best Father Ever Invented. “These interviews were brief and superficial, as if I was preparing an article for the Port Chester Daily Item. I thought that people told me what they knew. I was without suspicions of opportunism or complexities, of complicated currents or connections of love, hate, guilt. I thought all minds were as simple as I thought mine was, that for every act there was a reason, one act, one reason, and the reason, moreover, was the first that came to mind, for I was in a hurry.”
