THE JANITOR’S BOY
AND OTHER POEMS

Marceau
Nathalia Clara Ruth Crane

THE JANITOR’S BOY
AND OTHER POEMS

By NATHALIA CRANE

NEW YORK
THOMAS SELTZER
1924

Copyright, 1924, by
THOMAS SELTZER, Inc.

All Rights Reserved

First Printing, May, 1924
Second Printing, May, 1924

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

Foreword, by
WILLIAM ROSE BENET

Nathalia at Ten, by
NUNNALLY JOHNSON

Afterword, by
EDMUND LEAMY

TO
MY MOTHER

When I took the two poems from Nathalia’s mother, and promised to read them, I had seen none of the press notices of Miss Crane’s talent. Being only a quasi-journalist I seldom read the newspapers. I am extremely skeptical of infant prodigies, and the poems of Nathalia’s that I have since seen most quoted in newspaper articles about her are just what you would expect. They prove nothing except that she is a little girl with a lively fancy. Certain poems in this first collection, however, seem to me to prove something more.

Some long time ago in Scotland there was a little girl named Marjorie Fleming, and to-day a twelve-year-old, Helen Douglas Adam, the daughter of a Scotch parson and his wife of Dundee, is her successor overseas to the juvenile purple. Miss Adam has now been published both in England and America. Yet the best poems of hers that I have read do not seem to me to possess such individuality or such maturity of melody and diction as Miss Crane’s best poems. Then there is our own Hilda Conkling, whose mother is a distinguished American poet, and who writes in free verse and has published several volumes of poems. Hilda is a real poet. But she has never grappled with and conquered certain problems of poetic structure from which Miss Crane, by sheer instinct, seems to have wrested occasional victory.

I took the two poems from Nathalia’s mother; and first I read The Blind Girl. I came upon the two verses:

[XIV]These lines and the meditation from which they spring were the spontaneous phrasing and the natural meditation of—a child of ten. That in itself, I think, is sufficiently remarkable.

Strange insight for a comparative infant!

In her lighter moments—and, naturally, there are a great many—Nathalia’s “heart is all a-flutter like the washing on the line”; she “could not stain romance with monetary fee”; and, when she has sat upon a bumble-bee, she knows “the tenseness of humiliating pain.” Many a grown humorist might envy the freshness of such amusing phrase.

There is much laughter and nonsense in this book—that of a rather romantic little girl with a quick eye and ear and a pert fancy. But there is, as I have intimated, more than that.

Here the thing we call poetry asserts itself. The instinct for remarkable phrase and striking figurative expression is either inborn or it is not. Facility with rhyme and metre is not nearly so remarkable. But when a child can write, as in the poem My Husbands,

[XV]it is almost uncanny. Here is, if you like, a somewhat derivative diction, but here also is true poetry by every test.

Well, I not only wonder how she has learned simple finality of phrase so quickly; I also wonder whether she can possibly realize the philosophical implications of her best poems.

As for imagery, Nathalia’s angels hearing “the hurdy-gurdies in the Candle-Maker’s Row” is an example of her fancy that quickens into imagination. She sees the Oriental bees flying “in golden convoys to the mountains of the moon,” she quizzically presents the pathos of The Dinosaurs’ Eggs; she has “steered by stars that sorrowed, with the moonlight in our wake”; she sees Berkley Common

As to exactly what she is trying to say in The Symbols, I am in doubt, but it is hard to forget the Talmud stalking like a rabbi in a gown.

On the one hand, with Nathalia, we have simply a rhyming gift turned to amusing descriptions of certain fairly ordinary episodes and characteristics of life that interest every healthily alert young lady. On the other hand, we have the beginnings of a poet with a true ear for rhythm, an eye for the color of words, and a fancy that often rises into the realm of imagination. I only hope that the young lady will continue to enjoy all the ordinary incidents of her existence as much as she has heretofore, and to perfect her technique in her spare moments. It needs perfecting. It is hardly to be wondered[XVI] at that her work is still in the experimental stage. She is not yet “the youngest of the seers,” nor yet “released from fetters of ancestral pose,” but there is undoubtedly conquest of poetic beauty “waiting down the years” for her—“revisions of the ruby and the rose,” as she puts it. Read the first two verses of The Vestal and marvel that a young lady of Nathalia’s age should be able to master without effort such a perfectly Emily Dickinsonian idiom. This is no copy; it is something that even Emily Dickinson would not have been at all ashamed to have written. And that is a good deal to say.

Now as to prophecies, who can make them? Frankly, I have not the slightest idea how Miss Crane’s gift may develop. I only know that she has given signs of astonishing precocity as a young poet. Her parents have wisdom and they will see that she is not spoiled. Her gifts will simply develop according to her experience of literature and her experience of life. It is a very ticklish thing to endeavor in any way to direct so young a gift. It will find by instinct its own nourishment; that is my belief.

Meanwhile, to Nathalia, good luck on the difficult road!

William Rose Benet

New York City, May, 1924.

Nathalia’s day is today. All of Time that is past, from the birth of those odd old folk, the troglodytes, about which she has ruminated so pleasantly, up to and through the final scene of the latest Broadway moving picture is, to her, a harvested crop—important in its way but no longer interesting. And as for tomorrow and the next year, they will have their turn presently. It is today....

This extract from Nathalia’s as yet unarticulated philosophy is offered by way of information for those who are instinctively inclined to be harsh, on general principles, with a talent that springs, a little too boldly perhaps, ahead of its years.

Nathalia had been writing her verse for several months before Mr. and Mrs. Crane came across it, writing it without fuss or excitement and storing it in a small and private album, content apparently with the reward of whatever pleasure the rereading of it gave her. If she had, even secretly, any concern with such a vanity as applause, she certainly did not betray it. And when shortly before Christmas of 1922, the little girl mailed some of her poems to a Brooklyn newspaper and received immediate acknowledgment from the editor, her parents were as much astonished as, later on, was the editor of a newspaper when, after having accepted a number of poems signed Nathalia Crane, the author herself walked into the office and proved to be a mite of a human being.

I was one of the file of reporters that trailed into Nathalia’s home the morning after her first publication, bent less on nourishing and encouraging a young artist than on getting a human-interest story. It was a file that eventually included generous, vociferous, and indiscriminate[XVIII] eulogists, a file that threatened to demoralize or spoil whatever young talents Nathalia had.

Those kind-hearted newspaper folks showered her with a shocking amount of almost unqualified praise, some of it accurately placed but most of it merely blank fire. This would have been very bad for her but for one thing—Nathalia never read any of it.

And so, unaffected, she maintained the same tenor of her young days, playing with her dolls when she pleased and retiring to her boudoir to make rhythms when she pleased. She has always written, and still does write, only when the fancy prompts her.

What Nathalia has written is the kind of thing that she can write, whatever its merits or demerits. She has measured it against no other verse, youthful or adult. The inspiration for most of it comes from books she has read, which are mainly romantic in character. As for the rest, it happens that she is an extraordinarily articulate little girl, and if in some cases the conceits and fancies which she crystallizes are no rarer than those that, in all probability, throng the mysterious mind of every imaginative child, the explanation is simply that she is able to utter and clarify them, and these other children are, for the most part, normally unable to do that. That also they have, in Nathalia’s case, taken the form of mature work, as evidenced, in one way, by the fact that editors published her contributions for several months before learning that she was so much below the accepted age for serious consideration, is, I believe, another mark of her high singularity.

Others, unfortunately, will be less easily satisfied. A cynicism concerning the future careers of precocious children is one of the rigid fundamentals of nearly every mind. It has, no doubt, a valid basis. But, for that reason, Nathalia’s future, probably very dark in popular prospect, threatens to shade her present. That is why I offered at the outset, as a point of information, the comment on Nathalia’s general attitude toward life. Nathalia,[XIX] I am sure, sees no reason why anybody else should read these poems with an eye any further ahead in time than this afternoon’s sunset. She is content to leave the verdict, so far as posterity is concerned, to her own grandchildren.

Nunnally Johnson

Brooklyn, N. Y., May, 1924.

[XX]

[XXI]

[XXII]

[80]

In a maze of contributions such as the poetry editor of a large metropolitan newspaper printing daily two or three poems receives there came to me unheralded one morning in the mail a little poem which bore the name of an author of whom I had never heard—Nathalia Crane. It was a whimsical piece of verse such as an editor rarely receives, a rhythmical, lilting production that would gladden the heart of any one. It was called The History of Honey. Needless to say it was accepted for publication. Subsequently others submitted by Nathalia Crane also found a place in The Sun.

Then followed some correspondence in regard to various other poems but a call at the office made by the author in answer to a letter about the poem The Army Laundress disclosed to my amazement that the writer was none other than a little girl—a shy, unassuming youngster who was as embarrassed during the interview as I was myself. For I must admit I was embarrassed—or rather taken aback.

My surprise is excusable. So many times I had received “poems” from youngsters who were careful to give their ages in addition to their names; so often I had received visits from doting parents or relatives requesting publication of verses by their children or sisters or cousins that I had never dreamed any child would ever submit any work from his or her pen without adding the words “Aged — years.” But little Nathalia was the exception—and there was nothing in her poems that I received to indicate her age.

The poems bought were accepted on their merits and on their merits alone, and many a poet of greater years[82] and of recognized standing would not despise being known as the author of The Reading Boy, The Three Cornered Lot and The Commonplace.

Nathalia Crane is a little girl who plays with dolls and toys and Roger Jones, whom she has glorified in some of her poems, when she is not busy at a typewriter giving expression to dreams and visions. She is also an author of delightful verse who obtained wide recognition of her work not because it was written by a child but because it was in itself worth while reading. For this alone, if for nothing else, she deserves all the success that is hers, all the laurels with which her friends and readers are glad to crown her and none more than the writer of this “Afterword” who came to know Nathalia Crane through her poetry which did not disclose her years.

Edmund Leamy.

New York, May, 1924.