“Actually, Lil,” he said, “I do have one concern, more serious than love. I’ll strive to be brief.”
He shut the door—thereby providing a month’s supply of grist for the office rumor mill—and took a seat. “It’s just,” he went on, “that your poems, well, they’re as snappy and as fun to read as your advertising. And you know I’m happy for your success in publishing, but—”
“You don’t want me to give away my best ideas?” I said. “To serve the muse before mammon?”
He looked relieved at my comprehension. “That’s the crux of it,” he said. “Your work has been finer than fine these past few months as the book’s been coming out, but as your supervisor, I felt I’d be remiss in not sharing my concern.”
“Chip, darling, I understand perfectly,” I said, because I did, and because I’d considered it already myself. “Can I let you in on a remarkable secret? I find that the more ideas I let myself have, the more ideas I have. They just pour out of me. Poems for ads and poems for poems.”
I was speaking the truth. My lunch-poem routine, my practice of poetry, was actually quite similar to and compatible with my working practices. One just happened inside the department store, and the other happened outside.
In R.H. Macy’s I was a veritable stroller, too, taking the wooden escalators and roaming from floor to floor, surveying the displays, coming up with ads and writing them. Not so different from roaming the sidewalks around Herald Square after gobbling a sandwich or watching people—seeking faces or trees and greenery and then composing poems about them. That had become the way that I moved through the world, and the way that the world, in turn, moved my mind.
“Ah, Lillian,” said Chester, “I can see that’s the case. And it’s a load off my shoulders to hear you say so. And the viewpoint in the poems is certainly more that of a scoffer at convention than the one in the ads is.”
“But?”
“But,” he said, “I have another worry. And you can tell me if you think I’m being a ninny when I say this. While I agree there’s no sign of the Boxfish wit-well running dry, there’s a danger that comes with oversupply, too, isn’t there? Till now you’ve enjoyed the element of surprise: Your readers have happened on your verses in the pages of a magazine—or, hell, in the even unlikelier setting of an advertisement—and been swept off their feet. It’s like encountering some jungle beast on a stroll through Central Park. But this book—”
A copy of Oh, Do Not Ask for Promises—which had been lurking, I supposed, in my disorderly stack of mail—materialized in Chester’s hand.
“—is like a trip to the Bronx Zoo. It’s a delight, of course. I’m happy to give up serendipity in return for a chance to make a sustained study of your craft, and your sales figures show I’m not alone. But doesn’t this very success hem you in a bit? You’re now subject to the admiring scrutiny of connoisseurs. Each new Boxfish poem is apt to be compared with other Boxfish poems, received as part of a body of work, and not simply assessed on its own merits. Doesn’t this stand to lessen its impact? Now that you’ve become fashionable, are you in danger of falling out of fashion?”
His awkwardness had fallen away as he warmed to his own argument, and he summed up with the satisfied smile of a debate-society champ. It was impossible to tell how sincere he’d been about any of this.
“That is extremely prescient, Chester,” I said, “in one respect: You are being a ninny. As for the rest, I am truly grateful for your concerns, but upon reflection I am inclined to file them in the drawer labeled good problems. Now, shall I get back to the copy?”
“Last thing, Lillian, and then yes, I’ll leave you in peace,” he said, handing me his favorite fountain pen, a gift from his wife, along with the book from his hand. “May I please have your autograph?”
*
Back at E.P. Dutton, Artie, needless to say, was spared any temptation to say I told you so as he’d threatened he might. No one could argue with the bottom line.
“Oh, Do Not Ask for Promises has delivered on its promise!” he’d written in the note he sent with my author’s copies of the second printing.
Artie would end up editing all my books, or the poetry books anyway: Notes Found in the Street in 1933, A Complaint to the Management in 1935, and All Right, You Win; or, I Admit Defeat in 1936.
And my pride just went; there was no fall. Not for a long time.
But E.P. Dutton didn’t publish my final book of original poems. That came out much later, in the 1960s, after Artie was long dead.
With the help of a new editor, one whom I did not like remotely as much, I’d settled upon the name Nobody’s Darling, which by that point had become an accurate descriptor of my state of being.
6
A Sandwich at the Mission