The Muse and Mr. Parkinson

A Story

by JAMES B. GIDNEY

I HAD known Mr. Parkinson for several years before he became a national figure. I didn’t know him very well but only as everyone who rode the 7.51 knew him. We said “Hello” when we met and occasionally, riding together on the train or the ferry, we exchanged the superficial remarks of two people who don’t know each other very well and belong to different generations. He would talk mostly about his children, and, like many people who rode the same train, I followed Bob through Amherst and Priscilla through Smith. He would keep us up-to-date with such information as: “Priscilla’s doing very well at Smith. A couple of A’s this term”; or “Bob’s running the mile this year. Seems to be pretty good at it. Surprised his mother but it didn’t surprise me. The kid’s not very husky but he’s wiry.” He would think this over for a moment and then confirm it with: “Yes, he’s pretty wiry all right.”

If I had been asked to describe Mr, Parkinson I should probably have said that he was a “typical commuter.” He was a sort of abstract of all the commuters in existence. He usually walked to the station in the morning, but when the weather was bad his wife drove him down in time to catch the 7.51. After a perfunctory kiss she drove off, leaving him to chat with other commuters or run an eye over his Times. The Times was Mr. Parkinson’s only departure from normal commuter behavior. Almost everyone else read the Tribune. He never rode in the smoker and never played cards during the half-hour ride to Jersey City. A number of young bloods put in the time in that way but the more sedate commuters read their papers or talked to one another. Mr. Parkinson always read the financial page first as most of the businessmen on the 7.51 did.

When we reached Jersey City he would rush through the Eric shed to the ferry, jostling with the crowds that poured off the t rains from various parts of Bergen, Passaic, and Essex Counties. There was no reason for him to hurry since he was an actuary with a big insurance company and didn’t have to get to his office early. He rushed for the ferry because he had got in the habit of doing so over the course of a good many years. All the other middleaged men on the train did the same thing and for the same reason. In fact, the impression Mr. Parkinson always gave me was that, in spite of reading the Times instead of the Tribune, he was as much like everyone else as it was possible to be. He was such a perfect suburbanite that he appeared almost a caricature of the type. Sometimes when I was talking to him this air of caricature became so pronounced that I felt as if I had been introduced to an English solicitor and he had looked discreet and greeted me with a dry cough.

In the evening he rode out on the 5.46 and read the Sun. His wife usually met him at the station and drove him home. If she failed to show up he walked home grumbling good-naturedly about the lot of the “tired businessman,” He spent his evenings playing bridge or serving on committees, or, when the weather was nice, working in his garden. His conversation, outside of his children, dealt with sports, the behavior of the market, or local affairs, frequently those of the Presbyterian Church, of which he was a deacon.

Mr. Parkinson’s views on public affairs were considered entirely sound and his membership in the Presbyterian Church was of a piece with his general solidity. He did not walk with God — he would have been as likely to walk with John L. Lewis — but he regarded the Presbyterian Church as the sort of institution to which a man like himself should belong. He even had a certain affectionate regard for Dr. Mason, the pastor, who was suspected of being a socialist and who, according to Mr. Parkinson, sometimes talked “like a chump.”

Mr. Parkinson played golf moderately well, was a popular, though rarely boisterous, member of the locker-room gang, paid for the drinks cheerfully when he lost, and gloated a little when he won.

2

THERE was no reason at all to associate Mr. Parkinson with Padraic O’Connor. O’Connor’s vogue has declined sharply in recent years and I find that a good many people, even among the reasonably well informed, don’t know who he was, but in his day he enjoyed a status which poets rarely attain in America, that of being at the same time a favorite of the literati and popular with the larger reading public. He made his first appearance with Chants from the Gaelic. The volume was brought out in a small edition by Chisholm and Stevenson and got rather a good reception from the critics.

It was characterized by a tone that was lyrical and even a little wild, coupled with an astonishingly conservative regularity in technique. Yet the poems never gave the impression of being mere exercises in ingenuity as technically skillful verse is likely to do. There was something hauntingly elegiac about them, particularly those which appeared in the volume entitled As on a Darkling Plain. They were simple as Yeats and Housman are simple — with a simplicity directed by an unobtrusive but very real sophistication.

O’Connor hasn’t lasted so well as Yeats and Housman, and I can only infer from this that there was something a little commonplace in his lyricism, but certainly no one thought so during the period of his popularity. This “ fresh, untrammeled singer ” caught the fancy of the public as well as that of the critics. All of his volumes enjoyed substantial sales, not comparable of course to those enjoyed at the time by the historical novels which rolled off the presses like Curtiss-Wright engines, but very good sales for verse.

It was natural that the public should want to know something about the poet, and inevitable that its interest in him should increase when it transpired that Padraic O’Connor was a pseudonym and that, with the exception of three or four editors at Chisholm and Stevenson, no one knew who he was. The Chisholm and Stevenson people were sworn to secrecy, which they maintained for something like a quarter of a century. During that time O’Connor published five volumes of verse.

After twenty-five years someone found out that Mr. Parkinson was Padraic O’Connor. How the secret got out will probably never be known. One of the New York papers printed it first and it was copied all over the country. The nation was astounded to learn that its favorite lyric poet was an actuary with a good income and a middle-class family in a suburb. Mr. Parkinson became a celebrity for a time — as long as it’s possible for anyone who is not a criminal, a movie actor, an athlete, or a freak to be a celebrity in America, that is, about two weeks. During those two weeks he was interviewed in his office, offered substantial fees by syndicates to write his life story, invited to lecture at a number of universities, photographed on his front porch with Mrs. Parkinson, Bob, and Priscilla, and again on the links addressing a mashie shot in a rather difficult lie. This last was the only occasion on which he betrayed irritation during his brief spell in the limelight.

It was suggested at the time that Chisholm and Stevenson had deliberately let the secret out to stimulate a fading interest in O’Connor and revive his sales. I mentioned this some years later to an executive of the firm. He was not one of those who had been in on the secret but he was “morally certain” that none of the men entrusted with it had given it away.

“One of them may have let it out inadvertently,” he told me, “but disabuse yourself of the notion that it was a publicity stunt. This talk about stimulating a ‘fading’ interest in O’Connor is bunk. Actually it had just the opposite effect. It stimulated interest out there in your town where everybody knew Parkinson, and in a few other commuter towns in Jersey, Long Island, and Westchester. But in the rest of the country sales dropped,”

“How do you account for that?” I asked.

“Easily. There’s a streak of romanticism in a lot of people who read poetry — even contemporary poetry. The firm never tried to capitalize on the romantic aspect of O’Connor — we only used the name because Parkinson insisted on it and we liked the stuff well enough to print it anyway — but there’s no denying it helped sales. People used to imagine him roosting in solitude on a crag in pantheistic contemplation of earth and heaven, or shooting it out with the English during the troubles. I tell you it was a shock to learn that he was a middleclass suburbanite who spent his spare time playing golf and had a boy at Amherst and a girl at Smith. And an actuary at that! ”

So the source of the story was and is a mystery, but once it was out no attempt was made to deny it. After a few weeks it seemed to make little difference. Public interest, which in any case would not have survived the World Series, was diverted by a killing of peculiar ferocity in Chicago and Mr. Parkinson was left alone to go back to golf, gardening, and Presbyterian committees.

There is no doubt that this is what Mr. Parkinson wanted. He had not used a pseudonym out of modesty but from a sincere desire to avoid the life that was expected of a poet. In France, where an outstanding poet becomes a senator if he lives long enough, he might have indulged his talent for letters while working in an office, without any sense of incongruity, but in an English-speaking country this would have been difficult. A poet is expected to live a poet’s life, and while no one seems to know exactly what this is, working as an actuary in an insurance company is assuredly one thing it is not. Mr. Parkinson had solved the problem by creating Padraic O’Connor as an alter ego and keeping his two personalities entirely separate. Once the cat was out of the bag it was no use expecting his neighbors to keep them separate. The rest of the country could forget the affair and did, but to our village Mr. Parkinson would never be the same again.

3

MY FIRST hint of the change came when I learned that at the annual elections of the Presbyterian Church, Mr. Parkinson had lost the chairmanship of the Finance Committee, which he had held for a number of years. The church reaction to the disclosure had been mixed. In general the younger members were pleased, if startled, while Dr. Mason, a standard twentieth-century Protestant divine who read Goethe and Dostoevski with reverence and Luther and Calvin with horror, was delighted.

Among the older people most of the women and practically all of the men were upset. There were two quite distinct reasons for their reaction. One group, composed largely of women, objected to the poems on doctrinal grounds. I have said that the elegiac note bulked large in O’Connor’s work. Certainly there is nothing shocking about this, and without it we should have very little poetry indeed. But it did not seem proper to some of the members of Mr. Parkinson’s church that he should support in print the view that the death of the body is the end of life.

Whatever one’s views on theology, it was impossible not to respect these ladies for clear thinking. They knew what they believed, they read what Mr. Parkinson had written, and recognized that the two were not the same. They perceived that he was not Presbyterian but a pagan. On the other hand, it was hard to feel anything like the same respect for the other group, largely masculine, whose objections were not theological at all. Their misgivings about Mr. Parkinson sprang entirely from the conviction that a poet must be rather an unsound person. Although they had all said more than once that “old Park” was extremely able in handling money, as he undoubtedly was, they now became obsessed with the idea that if he had charge of the church funds, he would spend them on “vague experiments.” Needless to say, the chairman of the Finance Committee was in no sense “in charge” of the church funds but this consideration carried little weight. The change resulted in no modification at all in the church’s fiscal policy but seriously hurt Mr. Parkinson’s feelings.

I do not wish to give the impression that our village reacted to Mr. Parkinson’s newly discovered eminence with hostility. People liked him as much as ever but they regarded him now as something extraordinary. He no longer seemed to fit into the commuting crowd. He still sat out on the upper deck of the ferry and looked just like everybody else, but the attorneys, bankers, and investment brokers who had been his companions in the past obviously felt a little uneasy in his presence. He began to stand more often by himself on the station platform and to clutch his Times almost defensively. I could see that he was far from happy. Why he should have opened his heart to me, twenty-five years his junior and hardly more than an acquaintance, I don’t know. Perhaps because I was a dabbler in the arts myself, he thought I would be sympathetic, but more probably it was just an accident of time and circumstance.

I had worked late one night and reached Jersey City too late for the 10.45. There was nothing to do but wait for the 11.30. The close atmosphere of the waiting room was even less inviting than usual, so I drifted into the bar and had a drink. After the first one Mr. Parkinson came in. It was unusual that he should be going home so late but he explained that he had been dragged to a “damned pompous lecture” at the Town Hall. We killed the time together with a few drinks until we could get on the 11.30. At that hour the standards of commuter behavior called for us either to fall asleep or disappear behind our papers and refrain from speaking to one another during the ride. It was probably the drinks that diverted us from this eminently sensible procedure.

4

THROUGHOUT the early part of the ride I experienced a sense of expectancy. Mr. Parkinson was in an unusual mood, for he had not talked about his children at all. I was waiting for I don’t quite know what — some rending of the veil, I suppose. It seems absurd now that I anticipated a prophetic utterance from the poet which I had never expected from the actuary, but it is exactly the sort of notion a young man gets and I make no apology for it. The day had been close and oppressive but toward evening it had begun to clear and now a full moon lit the Hackensack meadows with a pale brilliance. Even through the dirt-encrusted windows of the coach the scene was a lovely one and I could see that it was affecting Mr. Parkinson in an unusual way.

“These meadows present a spectacle of extraordinary beauty at night,” he said at last. “Even during the day, when their natural sweep and loveliness arc disfigured by boxcars and other ungracious reminders of the presence of man, they are not without their attraction. I am continually baffled by people from the South and West who have made a brief trip through New Jersey and see fit to regard it as an eyesore for the rest of their lives. Aside from the extreme provincialism of their assumption that they have seen all of the state when they have crossed the meadows, I am perplexed by their failure to see the beauty of the meadows themselves. ‘Dull would he be of soul who could pass by a sight so touching in its majesty.’”

“That’s true,” I said, feeling ridiculously anticlimactical. Mr. Parkinson seemed scarcely to hear me. He was peering at the scene with that gimletlike air of concentration which is the expression of one who sees the natural urorld through the almost opaque windows of an Erie coach. “I’d miss it if I had to leave it,” he murmured.

Something in Mr. Parkinson’s tone startled me. “You’re not thinking of leaving?” I asked quickly.

“As a matter of fact, I am.”

I was sufficiently flabbergasted to say nothing. It may be, as frequently claimed, that the suburbanite has no roots. In that case, I don’t know what keeps him in place, unless it’s just inertia. Sometimes young folks move into the city because they can’t afford suburban life, and older people may retire to California or Florida, but in all my years in the suburbs I had never heard of a man of Mr. Parkinson’s age moving away of his own accord.

“I don’t fit in here any more,” Mr. Parkinson added bitterly. “Ever since they found out about those damned poems they won’t accept me.”

“You shouldn’t feel that way,” I told him. “People don’t dislike poets. They joke about them a lot but they don’t dislike them.”

“Of course they don’t dislike them,” said Mr. Parkinson. “They don’t take them seriously enough to dislike them. They just insist on regarding them as wayward and eccentric. They expect a poet to have all kinds of weird attitudes and they won’t treat him as they treat people whom they consider their ‘own kind.’ Some poets five and even thrive in spiritual solitude but I can’t. It probably seems ridiculous to you — you young fellows are always making fun of the bourgeoisie — but I really like to play golf.”

“So do I. There’s nothing shameful about it.”

“Of course there isn’t,” he snapped, “but nobody wants to play with me any more. It’s taken twentyfive years to make a place for myself, and one newspaper edition wiped it out. They even think I’m a New Dealer.”

I couldn’t help smiling. Mr. Parkinson was not one of the noisy Roosevelt-haters but he had always held the opinions expected of a suburbanite.

“You think it’s funny,” he said. “You’ll find out that a government can’t run forever on crazy experiments and deficit financing.”

The conversation had taken on an oddly contrapuntal quality as though I were talking to the poet and the actuary at the same time. The themes did not alternate but ran along together and it took a good ear to follow them.

As we were pulling into Rutherford at this point,

I thought it appropriate to mention that William Carlos Williams, a rather well-known poet at that time, was a practicing physician there. This suggested that it was possible for a poet to five in the suburbs and enjoy the respect of his neighbors.

“Williams is different,” Mr. Parkinson replied. “He’s avant-garde. I don’t mean that I don’t like his stuff, because frequently I do, but it’s so far off the beam from the suburban point of view that it’s probably looked on as a harmless eccentricity, not so very different from collecting postage stamps or beer bottle caps. “If I’d written like Williams or some of those other very modern fellows, I’d have gotten away with it all right. But I couldn’t write that way. Or if I’d gone to the other extreme and written horrible jingles about mother and hard work like Edgar Guest, that would have been all right too. I’d have been named poet laureate of the village and expected to turn out odes to commemorate Lincoln’s birthday, the annual boy scout rally, and things of that sort. My trouble is that I’ve stuck to the traditions of English poetry. I’ve never been obscure and I’ve tried not to be corny. I’ve tried to put honest emotions into graceful and melodious verse. That’s the traditional function of the poet, and our neighbors know just enough about it to distrust it. It makes them uneasy to have someone like Shelley or Swinburne in town.”

I almost laughed aloud. “But you’re not like Shelley or Swinburne, Mr. Parkinson,” I protested, growing more and more puzzled as to just how seriously all this should be taken.

“Of course I’m not. And I’m not a New Dealer either. But they all know what a poet is and I’m expected to fit the picture. I used to have to behave the way people thought an actuary should behave. It wasn’t very hard for me, so I became a successful and respected citizen. Now I have to behave like a poet and I can’t do it. Why, I can’t even talk about business any more. Everyone on the 7.51 used to be glad to get my opinion. They used to say: ‘Old Park knows his stuff.’” (I had heard my father say just that more than once.) “Now I’m supposed to ‘wander lonely as a cloud.’”

“Well, Dr. Mason is pleased with you anyway,” I said fatuously.

“Good Lord, that’s the worst of it. He wants me to ‘occupy the puipit’ at a regular Sunday service. Wouldn’t I feel like an idiot preaching a sermon! Mason says that poets are closer to God than ministers are. Did you ever hear such damn fool talk?”

I had frequently heard such damn fool talk but saw no point in saying so. Instead I asked him how he had come to develop his “dual nature.”

“I haven’t got a dual nature,” he replied almost desperately. “True, I’ve always loved poetry but it never made me an eccentric and I certainly never had any notion of making my living out of it. When I got out of college I was offered a chance to learn to be an actuary. I was quick at figures and I liked playing around with them, so I took it. I’m with the same company today. For the first, few years I lived in Greenwich Village and spent a lot of my evenings with other poetry lovers. I wrote Chants from the Gaelic during those years. When I married Ethel it seemed natural to move out to the suburbs since she preferred that kind of life, and I agreed it would be better for bringing up a family. But I soon saw that I’d have to change my character to get along. Suburbanites expect you to fit their pattern, you know.”

I said I knew.

“Well, Chants from the Gaelic had already been shown to an editor at Chisholm and Stevenson and he had liked it. Naturally a book of verse didn’t jibe with my new character, so I asked the firm if they’d be willing to publish it under another name. They had no objection and that’s how Padraic O’Connor got started. It was a Jekyll and Hyde existence, I suppose, but O’Connor behaved better than Hyde. He never erupted into my everyday life, and because I really liked my job and playing golf and all that, it wasn’t very difficult to settle down and be what I was expected to be. Now I’m expected to be a poet and it’s impossible. Besides, think how humiliated Bob and Priscilla would be at college if their father had no responsible position in the community but only wrote verses.”

I was recently enough out of college myself to feel sure that, with some of their contemporaries at least, such a father would afford Bob and Priscilla a certain prestige, but I didn’t say so. Mr. Parkinson had offered convincing proof that he was in reality a suburbanite by this automatic assumption that everyone would see the thing as he saw it.

“ So now Ethel and I are thinking of moving out,” he went on mournfully. “Maybe in some other town people wouldn’t connect me with O’Connor at all.”

We were pulling into the station, so I tried to bring the conversation to a close on a jocular note.

“It seems to me,” I said, “that what you had better do is resign from your job and take over the editorship of a literary journal. You could get an apartment in the city where you could entertain poets and painters and people of that sort. Your social life would not be dull in the winter when publishers’ teas and cocktail parties are in full swing, and you could probably lecture at the Bread Loaf School in the summer.”

“Good God!” Mr. Parkinson exclaimed in a stricken voice, “do you think I might have to do that?”

He looked so dejected as he walked down the station platform that I had an impulse to run after him and assure him that I had only meant it as a joke. I don’t suppose it would have done any good if I had.