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The Critics. Throughout the career Mr. Lindsay has been praised and attacked with the utmost heartiness by critics of high grade and low. However, it is generally admitted by any with a modicum of intelligence that he is one of the most individual and interesting poets of present-day America.
The Author. Vachel Lindsay (the Vachel rhymes with Rachel), poet, lecturer, artist, 43-year-old native of Springfield, Ill., has been known to an increasingly larger audience for the last ten years. Besides his various volumes of verse, he has published The Art of the Moving Picture, The Golden Book of Springfield, Adventures While Preaching the Gospel of Beauty Going to the Sun (the description of a tramp through the Rockies with Stephen Graham).
*COLLECTED POEMS—Vachel Lindsay— Macmillan ($3.50).
"Fan-Mail"
How Does a Popular Author Spend His Time?
"Dear Mr. Tarkington: My little Isaac acts a lot like your dear Penrod—could you tell me? . . . "
"Dear Mrs. Atherton: I am thirty-nine—blonde—my friends think me beautiful ..."
With the increase of comparative literacy, cheap postage, the typewriter and so on, the supposedly retiring tribe of authors share with cinema folk in the deluge of unsolicited advice, enquiries, compliments, brickbats, heart-histories. Share ? The most prominent are fairly drowned with "fan-mail." They are driven to printed forms of reply, to private secretaries who do nothing but " answer."
Letters of praise and blame are easy enough to understand. If a reader enjoys a book immensely, he has, in almost every case, no way whatsoever of thanking the author for the pleasure he has given him except by letter — and such letters form by far the pleasantest part of any author's mail, no matter how much said author may lie about it. If the reader doesn't like a book, is shocked, offended or proudly discovers some technical mistake—his injured feelings and his professional criticism must, too, be expressed at long distance. And let him have no fear of going unheeded—such letters are always read—and with painful attention. And then there are the letters, usually accompanied by manuscripts, lengthy manuscripts, from aspirants of from seven years to seventy who want to "break into the writing game." And here let it be said to the credit of most authors of any reputation—such letters very seldom go unanswered. (One of the most prominent women writers of America ever since she first made her reputation, has read, and carefully, every manuscript submitted to her for advice—and the manuscripts for years have averaged something like two a day.)
But there is a third class—the writers who tell their troubles. Perhaps because the author seems to them a sort of impersonal, veiled prophet, they pour out to him or her the most intimate sort of confessions. They don't get on with their spouses, their children go wrong, the roof leaks, they are in trouble, sick, despairing, what to do ? Rather pitifully, they assume that the author can help them, tell them why and how, set life on its feet again. Strange.