Lonesome Dreamer by Timothy G. Anderson

Author:Timothy G. Anderson [Anderson, Timothy G.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: BIO007000 Biography & Autobiography / Literary
ISBN: 978-0-8032-9037-2
Publisher: Bison Books
Published: 2016-05-23T00:00:00+00:00

11

An Offer Declined and Another Move

John Neihardt had first encountered John Macy in early 1913 when he had thoroughly panned Macy’s book The Spirit of American Literature. Macy was an important literary critic who had worked for the Youth’s Companion and helped edit Helen Keller’s autobiography, eventually marrying Keller’s teacher Anne Sullivan. In the book, a survey of the “emergent” American novelists and poets of the time, Macy proclaimed that the “American spirit in literature” was a myth, in the same way that “American valor” was a myth: the valor of Americans, Macy argued, was no different than that of the Italians or the Japanese.1 He focused on sixteen men working in what he called the American branch of English literature. Neihardt, a true believer in American literature, was not happy with Macy’s opinions—his suggestion that James Whitcomb Riley was one of two poets “who have made literature,” Neihardt thought, was a “Philistine judgment”—but what bothered him most was what he saw as Macy’s “imperial manner.” In the end Neihardt concluded that Macy must have been “living in a trunk for the last ten years.”2

A little more than a decade later, in the spring of 1926, Neihardt read a new Macy book, The Story of the World’s Literature, at about the same time Macy was reading Neihardt’s Song of the Indian Wars. This time, both liked what they read: Neihardt gave Macy’s book a glowing review in the Kansas City Journal-Post, calling it “a glorious trip, worth any amount of intellectual shoe leather and a deal of honest panting,” and Macy thought enough of Indian Wars to ask Neihardt to write a book for his new boss, William Morrow.3 Morrow, who had been working in New York publishing for two decades, had just organized his own company, and he wanted a book that explored the American Indians’ relations with the white population. Macy told Morrow that Neihardt was the man to do it and set about persuading Neihardt to write the book. “Your interest is poetic, and most of your expression is, I believe, in the form of verse,” Macy wrote to Neihardt. “But would you not be interested to put your experiences into the form of straight prose narrative and exposition of the nature of the Indian, and perhaps go into the history of the breeds that you do not know by personal contact?”4

Neihardt, though flattered, wanted to get to work on his next long narrative poem, one he was envisioning as a continuation of The Song of the Indian Wars, and he had no interest in taking on another prose book. Still, like writers everywhere, Neihardt was occasionally dissatisfied with his regular publisher, and he used Macy’s offer to poke gently at the Macmillan Company: he asked H. S. Latham, Macmillan’s vice president, what he should do about the offer. “I think this letter of Macy’s is a very clever approach in the hope that Morrow may sooner or later publish something for you,” Latham responded, “and I want you to regard Macmillan as your publisher, and not to pass us up for anything.

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