The Joys of Futility

THE comfort of doing a perfectly unrestrained, even ostentatiously futile thing has not been adequately sung.

We live in an efficient age — efficient, all too efficient. Efficiency is our presiding demon, never letting us out of his sight for a moment. We must sleep efficiently, and take tea of an afternoon with due regard to the completest organization of social and intellectual advantage. Against all this we react — some of us — and take a keen pleasure in achieving unqualified inefficiency.

I know of no one who realizes literary futility more nobly in his life than my friend Horace Lovinski, the young free-form poet of Greenwich Village. Horace spends most of his time in writing light, saccharine vers libres, entirely unpoetic, and somewhat resembling, in their vague flavor of barley-sugar and their irregular length and thickness, the broken and mixed candies which the confectioners sell at ten cents a pound. Horace cannot sell his poetry at ten cents a pound, but he keeps on producing it joyously and sending it around. It is never printed by the magazines. It does not even stir Greenwich Village. But that matters nothing to Lovinski. He goes on joyously producing it. I believe that the futility of it all is its greatest joy to him.

I have a better instance still. The happiest autograph collector that I have ever known was a woman who scorned the autographs of people already famous, but gathered eagerly those of persons who, in her opinion, were bound to become famous sometime. Recognizing incipient genius in various young writers for the press, she sent to these people for their autographs. You may imagine the promptness and enthusiasm with which they responded. The lady has a large and very fine collection of signatures, letters, autographed verses, and pages of manuscript from people who were going to become famous, but never did. Some of these people had rudimentary reputations along about 1897, but are now as completely forgotten as the flat in which you lived in that year. The value of the collection resides wholly in the mind of the lady who owns it; but to her the price of it is above rubies. One would say that it would spoil all her pleasure if any one of her heroes or heroines were really to become famous.

I believe, now, to be frank, that my own collection of presentation copies of first editions is not very far away from this lady’s autograph albums. It consists largely of the first literary attempts of poets, essayists, and philosophers all of whom might reasonably have been expected to be famous by this time, but whose distinction has somehow gone astray on the eternal camping-ground. Mindful of the fact that the first editions of Tamerlane, Endymion, the Rubaiyat, and so on, were unprized on their appearance, but bring fabulous prices now, I have carefully treasured, for as much as a quarter of a century, the first attempts in literature that have been sent to me in bound and printed form. My library of these books is quite respectable. And every day I rejoice in its ample, unviolated futility.

I shall not say that the Eagle of Fame has not fastened its talons in the back of any one of these children of the fancy. There are exceptions to the halcyon calm of obscurity in which the great majority of my authors still dwell; but not many. In the old-book market, I suppose that an average of about eleven cents apiece might be realized for the volumes in my collection; being for the most part unread and in some cases uncut, they would be classed in the trade as ‘in perfect condition.’

I cannot feel at all sad over the thwarted ambition, the blighted hopes of the producers of this futile but beautiful library. I do not really know that their hopes were blighted, or that their ambitions were not fulfilled. There is much pretty verse, there are many bright essays, in my collection. The expression of all these thoughts brought intellectual and artistic satisfaction to the authors. The sum of all the ideas — naturally including those which were borrowed — contained in these quiet, refined, unruffled rows of little books is very great. Nine out of ten of the books missed their mark, but the bolt was beautifully and joyously fired just the same. Their very futility says to me, ‘How much there must be in the world, when all this genius makes no mark on the page of fame! ’ I am not sure that I would not rather have my first editions than if they had all turned out Tamerlanes or Endymions. Their immortal futility soberly rejoices me.