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قراءة كتاب The Dead Men's Song Being the Story of a Poem and a Reminiscent Sketch of its Author Young Ewing Allison
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The Dead Men's Song Being the Story of a Poem and a Reminiscent Sketch of its Author Young Ewing Allison
managing editor of The Louisville Commercial, and after a lapse of years as previously told, editor-in-chief of The Daily Herald.
Fifteen years or more ago, long before we dreamed of being associated in business, Allison wrote me with the frankness that has characterized our friendship from the first, just how he came to enter newspaper work. Where he was concerned I was always “wanting to know” and he seemed ever willing to tell—me. The letter was as usual written in lead pencil on soft, spongy, ruled copy paper and that portion having reference to the subject named is given verbatim:
You see I lost two years going to school—from seven to nine years old. I was put out of all the private schools for incorrigible “inattention”—then it was discovered that I had been partially deaf and not guilty—but my schooling ended there and I was turned loose on my father’s library to get an education by main force—got it by reading everything—had read Rousseau’s “Confessions” at 14—and books replaced folks as companions. Wanted to get nearer to books and so hired myself to the country printer and newspaper at 13—great disappointment to the family, my mother having dreams of my becoming a preacher—[hell of a preacher I would have made]. I had meantime begun and finished as much as a page apiece of many stories and books, several epic poems—but one day the Old Man went home to dinner and left me only a scrap of “reprint” to set during his hour and a half of absence. It was six or eight lines nonpareil about the Russian gentleman who started to drive from his country home to the city one evening in his sleigh with his 4 children. Wolves attacked them and one by one he threw the children to the pack, hoping each time thus to save the others. When he had thrown the last his sleigh came to the city gate with him sitting in it a raving maniac. That yarn had been going the rounds of print since 1746. The Old Man was an absent-minded old child, and I knew it, so I turned my fancy loose and enlarged the paragraph to a full galley of long primer, composing the awful details as I set the type and made it a thriller. The Old Man never “held copy” reading proof, so he passed it all right and I saw myself an author in print for the first time. The smell of printer’s ink has never since been out of my hair.
Allison’s newspaper years are rich with experience, for while he could never be classed as a Yellow Reformer, his caustic, or amusing, or pathetic pen, as the case demanded, has never been idle. Away back in the old days the gambling element in Louisville fairly “owned the town” and he attempted to curtail their power. They tried to cajole him and to bribe him and when both alike failed, intimidated the millionaire owner of the Commercial out from under him! He either had to sacrifice Allison or his street railway interests, and chose Allison to throw to the lions. But he made Mr. Dupont go the whole length and “fire” him! He wouldn’t resign when asked to do so. And of course while it all lasted Allison had his meed of personal amusement. For no editor ever took himself less seriously. Prominent citizens came with fair words and he listened to them and printed them; bribes were offered and accepted only for publication; while threats were received joyously and made the subject of half-whimsical comment.
As a newspaper man Allison prided himself on never having involved any of his papers in a libel suit, though he was usually the man who wrote the “danger-stuff.” He had complaints, yes; libel suits, no. Dick Ryan, known in prehistoric newspaper circles in Louisville as “Cold Steel,” because his mild blue eyes hardened and glinted when his copy was cut—the typical police court reporter who could be depended upon for a sobbing “blonde-girl story” when news was off—always said that when a party came in to complain of the hardship of an article, Allison talked to him so benevolently that the complainant always went away in tears, reflecting on how much worse it might have been if Allison hadn’t softened the article that seemed so raw. “Damned if I don’t believe he cries with ’em, too!” said Ryan. “If I had that sympathetic stop in my own voice I know I’d cry during ordinary conversations, just listening to myself.”
Caricature by Wyncie King in Louisville Daily Herald
But of course the libel suit had to come to spoil an otherwise perfect record. And of course it was political and sprang out of a red-hot state campaign, while he was editor-in-chief of the Herald, in which his pen went deep enough to enrage the adversary and force the libel case. Like all political cases of this kind it was not a suit for damages, but an indictment for criminal libel, found by a complaisant political grand jury at the other end of the state—intended to cause the greatest amount of annoyance and to die out slowly. By that means it costs the accused both time and money while the state pays all expenses for the prosecution.
Judge “Bill” Smith, one of the greatest of Kentucky lawyers on constitutional points, or rather Judge William Smith of the Jefferson Circuit Court—because he has passed over now, taking his kindly and childlike, yet keen and resourceful personality out of life’s war for good and all—Judge Smith told me the story of that case one night after we had discussed down to the water-marks in the paper, his treasured copy of Burns. And at my very urgent solicitation he transcribed the salient features, not in all the intimate details of the spoken words, but with deep poetic feeling and rare conception of their human aspects. He wrote:
There are three poets in Burns. One is the poet you read; the second is the poet some mellow old Scot, with an edge on his tongue, recites to you; the third and most wonderful is the Burns that somebody with even a thin shred of a high voice sings to you. Burns is translated to the fourth power by singing him—without accompaniment—just the whinnying of a tenor or soprano voice, vibrant with feeling and pathos, at the right time of the evening, or in some penumbrous atmosphere of seclusion where memory can work its miracles.
I was defending Allison in that libel case and we started off on the 200-mile trip together. We had the smoker of the Pullman all to ourselves, and after I had recited some furlongs of Burns to him, he began to sing “Jockey’s Ta’en the Parting Kiss” in a sort of thin and whimpering quaver of a tenor that cut through the noise of the train like a violin note through silence. I thought I knew the poem, but it seemed to me I had never dreamed what was in it, with the wail of a Highland woman pouring plaintive melody through the flood gates of her heart. And he knew every one of them and sang them all with the tailing of the bag-pipes in the sound.
I wasn’t going down to practice law, but to practice patience and politics. I had been on that circuit for years and knew the court and the bar very well. So I said to Allison “Don’t you sing one of those songs again until I give the sign.” And the first thing I did was to bring him into touch with the circuit judge, who had the room adjoining mine at the hotel. He was a Burns lover, too; and besides as I had brought whiskey and as the town was prohibition, there was really nowhere else for the judge to spend his evenings. Soon we were capping back and forth, the