h2g2 Literary Corner: The Eugene Field Myth

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De mortuis nihil nisi bonum? Well, that's not what William Marion Reedy thought in the case of Eugene Field (1850-1895, annoying American poet). You've probably never heard of Eugene Field, which is a mercy. Field blighted the Editor's childhood with his maudlin poems, such as 'Little Boy Blue', 'Wynken, Blynken, and Nod', and 'The Duel', which was about the gingham dog and the calico cat. Field was called 'The Poet of Childhood', which made me gag as a ten-year-old.

The worst thing he did was to write a snarky, patronising poem called 'Jest 'Fore Christmas', about a little boy who was as hypocritical as the author himself. It contains the jocular lines,

Gran'ma says she hopes that when I git to be a man,

I 'll be a missionarer like her oldest brother, Dan,

As was et up by the cannibuls that lives in Ceylon's Isle,

Where every prospeck pleases, an' only man is vile!


At that time, my family believed I would grow up to be a 'missionarer'1. My mother suggested my memoirs should be titled I Was Et Up By the Cannibals.

I disliked Eugene Field as a kid. It is therefore with great glee that I bring you this excerpt from the delightful 1901 pamphlet, The Eugene Field Myth, a joyfully iconoclastic tomelet. Enjoy.

The Eugene Field Myth

A Eugene Fields parade. If they only knew. . .

Field left this city for Kansas City and Denver, where he distinguished himself chiefly as a practical joker of a none too refined stamp. His humor was broad and not characterized by much charity. He devoted himself to exploiting in extravagant misrepresentation actors, actresses, politicians, railroad magnates and other persons who moved about much and did much talking and thereby spread his fame. Mr. Thompson tells us that Field's classicism, of which we have heard so much, was an acquirement of his later life, but it is known, among his old associates in St. Louis, that even in those early days he had a penchant for borrowing classics from other men and of never returning them, a form of bibliomania not at all lovable2. This biographer tells us one truth that is important as to Field's fame and that is, that he never cared for children generally. In the main, however, the Thompson "study"
shows us Field as a very likeable fellow, without any particularly set principles, without any
bump of reverence for anything whatever, without much consideration for the feelings of men3, without any conception whatever of responsibilities. He was what the newspaper boys of to-day would call a "frosty proposition" and so long as things went well with Field he had no other purpose in life than to amuse himself at the expense of others4. He led a sort of kobold existence, was merry all the time, lived from hand to mouth and enjoyed his own assumption of eccentricity. Those who remember him best in the days before he was taken up and brought to Chicago cannot be said to remember him as one of deep and radiant soulfulness. In fact, a man who worked with Field said to the present writer, recently, that Field did not discover his own soul until within a few years of the day he died5. This criticism is unwittingly demonstrated by almost every line of Mr. Thompson's biography, and the fact that Field was the thinking, feeling man, and not the facile poseur, does not develop until the last pages wherein Mr. Thompson describes his hero's last days. . . .

Eugene Field turned his knack at verse to good account when he bent it to the task of "catching on" with the mothers. What he thought of his "play" was best expressed when he told a
friend, on the street, in Chicago, "I've got to go home now and write some mother rot" only the
word wasn't rot, but something much worse6. This devotion to children was, to a great extent, a pose7, It was a good pose, an effective pose. And that is all it was. Mr. Thompson's work furnishes us convincing evidence of this fact.

Eugene Field, talented as he was, clever as he was, was no good fellow. He was as chilly
as an iceberg. He did not remember his friends. He did not care sincerely for people. He had
very little of the real milk of human kindness in him. He did not respect confidences. He was
something of a snob, in his later and more famous years. He cultivated a few of Chicago's codfish aristocracy8, and he was not considerate of the feelings of many whom he had known
in earlier and less famous years. He never hesitated to ridicule a friend and he was not addicted to remembering kindly services. He loved adulation better than he ever loved anything in the world, possibly excepting his own family, and the gentleness of him was found only when he had to conjure it up for use in a piece of verse to make mother-readers of the News.

We hear a great deal of the purity of Eugene Field's poetry9. Those of the old-timers who knew him, know something of quite a large body of Fieldian verse that was the exact reverse of pure. Field was one of those men who delight in the coarsely, vulgarly erotic10. His writings in that line are notorious, under the rose11. The world of letters in America is familiar with his poem on Socrates12 , which has long been privately circulated as a triumph of its kind. There are, perhaps, a dozen other "poems" of the same sort, in which to the most banal eroticism is added a scatalogic and callipygic salacity that lost little of its disgustingness from being cleverly handled in rhyme13. Field's sub-rosa writings14 might make a good-sized book in themselves, and the requirements of truth compel one to say that in mere technique of handling several of them are truly miraculous examples of the man's ability. They are treated with a lingering lovingness that illustrates the spirit in which he approached such subjects. Field's filth was more offensive than Lincoln's smutty stories15. It was more deliberate. It was indulged in for its own sake. . .. .

One grows tired of seeing Field haloed and hearing him idolized as an angel of purity. One realizing the unction with which he was wont to handle dirty subjects with his pen, and not infrequently in conversation, is rather nauseated at the form which recognition of his ability takes when it names public schools after him. In the interest of biographic and literary truth let us have an end of this unmitigated twaddling eulogy of Eugene Field as a sort of glorified choir-boy16. Let us have the man as he was. Let us see the other side of him now and then, not the side on which he was least natural, if most popular. Eugene Field was no Charles Lamb, no Tom Hood, even. He was not the "gentle" poet, except to those to whom it may have been, in one way or another, his interest to seem gentle. He was as frigid a personality to come down to the language of the street of to-day as ever came over the pike, and his sincerity was always an unknown quantity with those who knew him best, in the actual world of work. He was not the paragon of kindliness he has been made out. He was not the simple child of nature that some people would have us believe. He was a man who discovered the "child-and-mother game," and worked it very dexterously to the immortalization of himself.

And now we are left imagining what those mothers would have said if they'd known about Fields' extra-curricular 'poetry'. If it had kept that gingham dog out of the anthology, the outrage would have been worth it.

The Literary Corner Archive

Dmitri Gheorgheni

02.10.17 Front Page

Back Issue Page

1I did, but not in the way they imagined.2Don't you hate the people who 'borrow' books and never return them? Whoever stole my set of Hitchhiker's Guide radio tapes: there's a special library in a hot place for people like you.3Or women. Or kids. Pah. I knew it! Anybody who would write that poem about stuffed animals murdering each other is capable of anything.4Er, like Seinfeld?5He must have left it in the laundry hamper.6Oh, no! You mean he used bad language? Say it isn't so!7Duh. If he'd liked kids, he wouldn't have written that stuff.8I don't know why they are called 'codfish aristocracy'. I don't think you can catch cod in Lake Michigan. Go ask Psychocandy, she's the Chi-Town expert.9He means moral purity.10You just woke up, didn't you? Naughty.11He means sub rosa. It must be available as samizdat. I'll find it. Whether I can get it past the filther, though. . . 12Okay, I found it. And if you want to read it, go and look it up yourselves. It's not clever, and it's not particularly funny. But it's certainly vulgar.13I question the 'cleverly'. That Socrates poem wasn't nearly as good as the lyrics to, say, 'Kathusalem'. Which will give you an idea.14See?15Abe Lincoln had a sometimes bawdy sense of humour, but there was not a mean bone in that man's misshapen body.16I dunno. There were probably a lot of choir-boys back then who would have got a chuckle out of that Socrates poem. . .

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