History of Oregon Literature/Chapter 26
CHAPTER 26
C. E. S. Wood
The free can understand the free.
Joaquin Miller.
Charles Erskine Scott Wood—usually known as Colonel C. E. S. Wood—is now 83 years old and his long life has been divided into four periods of alternating restriction and freedom, the latter gained in each instance by victorious acquiescence in the former.
At the age of 22 he was graduated from the United States Military Academy at West Point. The fact that he finished is sign enough that he knew how, with a polite and deferential "Yes, sir," to take orders given, with sadistic satisfaction, by young superiors. The first mature period of his life, therefore, was a period of exaggerated discipline and of strict, inescapable regimentation.
As a young officer himself, he served ten years in the army. He secured an assignment in the West and took part in Indian campaigns. In this way he enjoyed freedom of geography, of movement and of association, dominant in his everyday opportunities over the salutes, ceremonies and regulations of army authority.
Then for many years he was a corporation lawyer in Portland and sat in drawing rooms and around the conference table with the Brahmins of the city. While receiving and earning large fees from them, he never hesitated to talk and write as a man of extremely liberal, even iconoclastic opinions. He had two separate offices, one where he practiced law, the other where he indulged his soul; one where men of objective minds came with money and large enterprises, the other where he spent relaxed and happy hours with such subjective-minded men as poets, artists, scholars, philosophers and social reformers. His stands and his utterances were sincere but could not wholly look so. His vigorous doctrines at outs with the sanctity of the status quo did not alienate his profitable clients, but others cried Jekyll and Hyde. When he spoke for the emancipation of man and society he was twitted with the fact that he was a prominent attorney for soulless corporations.
So, in complete break with all this, he inaugurated the fourth period of his life. After prolonged, arduous and successful duty, he turned his face fully towards the sincerities. To seek serenity after the hard struggles and compromises of life is common, and is called retirement. This goes on for a while and death comes, all in decorous concatenation with the past, and the firm's name is still Scrooge & Marley. What this poet did was to take up a new life to him altogether authentic by cutting entirely loose, in apostolic severance, from the old. By the most exacting standards of his former existence, he left every obligation magnificently performed, and not performed in gloom or with irritation over unsatisfied longings, but high-spiritedly and with gallant courtesy and consideration. He was already an old man, yet he was like a boy, high-conscienced but irresistibly eager for the trees and the bending skies, who does all the chores before he leaves a good home for the open road. His duty so well accomplished, his age, his social and professional standing, and all the things that he had been saying and that were now believed, excused him to some extent with the conventional world he left behind. His spirit, however, was now so fully freed and so sure of the right to its freedom that it was beyond the need of excuses or extenuations. There was his bright record as husband, father, citizen. Through the longevity that had been vouchsafed to him, he had these years left and he acknowledged no human mortgage upon them except that of humanity itself.
Working in the unlimited compass of the freedom thus taken, he has come to be regarded by many as one of the great poets of America and by some as one of the great men of his age. Perhaps partly for reasons connected with his emancipation, the people of Oregon, who have been so proudly possessive of Edwin Markham's first five childhood years, have not been so fully aware of the grace that is theirs for having had so long among them this gifted man who is to Markham about as Whitman is to Longfellow.
He was born on February 20, 1852, at Erie, Pennsylvania, and received his early education at Erie Academy and Baltimore City College before entering West Point. After graduating from the Military Academy, he spent ten years as a second and first lieutenant in the army, meanwhile by serious use of his spare time getting a bachelor of philisophy degree and a law degree from Columbia University, New York.
He was stationed for a while at Vancouver Barracks and, securing a furlough, spent part of 1876 and 1877 in Alaska. He served in the Nez Percé campaign in 1877 and in the Bannock and Piute campaign the following year. During his army days he contributed articles to periodicals, including "Among the Thlinkits of Alaska" and "Chief Joseph, the Nez Percé" in the Century Magazine, and "Our Indian Question," a long paper of 58 pages, in the Journal of the Military Service Institution of the United States. In 1878, when he was 26, he was married to Nannie Naole Smith. In 1884 he was admitted to the bar, and, quitting the army, began the practice of law in Portland, where he remained as a leader in that profession for 35 years, until 1919. His present home is at Los Gatos, California.
His literary output has not been voluminous and much of it was originally published in Portland. Following is a descriptive list of his pamphlets and books:
A Book of Tales; Being Some Myths of the North American Indians. Englished by Charles Erskine Scott Wood. Portland. McArthur & Wood. 1891.
A 143-page book in a limited edition of 105 copies. Another edition was published in 1929 by The Vanguard Press, New York.
A Masque of Love. Chicago. Walter M. Hill. 1904.
"Of this book five hundred copies have been printed at the Elston Press, New Rochelle, New York." It consists of 90 pages of prose and poetry. Back that far it contained some of the doctrine which his friends may have considered academically poetic but which they were to recognize more strikingly later. The following is a brief example, as put in the mouth of Magdalen:
"I must be free and I will be free. This wicked compact marriage which in an hour doth bind the unknown sum of years despite what change may come."
The Sleeping Princess. A Christmas Masque. 1913.
A 38-page pamphlet of prose and poetry.
The Poet in the Desert. Portland. 1915.
"Of this book one thousand copies have been printed at the Press of F. W. Baltes and Company in Portland, Oregon, April, 1915."
Of this, one critic has said: "I know of nothing like it for sheer splendor of speech, sheer beauty of vision: unless one thinks back to certain books of the Bible." Another edition was published in 1929 by The Vanguard Press, New York. It is a long poem of 124 pages, in blank verse, with an 8-page prologue that scarcely has a parallel as a word picture of the desert. The whole consists of a dialogue between the Poet and Truth. It was published when he was 63. In it the philosophy previously referred to, is repeated:
But man has named his mumbled Marriage holier than Love."
Out of the Darkness. A Christmas Revel. 1917.
A prose pamphlet.
Feudalism the Fire. Help Burn It Up. Support Wilson and His War Aims. A Letter and Comments by C. E. S. Wood. June, 1918.
A pamphlet of 27 pages.
Maia. A Sonnet Sequence. Portland. 1918."One hundred and eighty-six copies of this book were printed by the author at the printing house of F. W. Baltes and Company, in Portland, Oregon. Completed May twenty-second, nineteen hundred and eighteen. Seen through the press by John Julius Johnck and Arthur Purdy, printers."
Author's Edition, 73 pages, priced at $50. The 22nd and 63rd sonnets by Sara Bard Field.
Circe. Portland. F. W. Baltes and Company. 1919.
Heavenly Discourse. New York. The Vanguard Press. 1927.
With drawings by Art Young. Introduction by Floyd Dell. Prose satires, of 325 pages, originally contributed to the magazine Masses. It reached seven editions within a year after its first book publication.
Poems from the Ranges. San Francisco. The Lantern Press. Gelber-Lilienthal, Inc. 1929.
A book of poems. "Printed by the Grabhorn Press, San Francisco, 1929. The frontispiece designed and cut on wood by Ray Boynton. This edition consists of 50 copies on handmade paper, signed and numbered 1 to 50, and 450 copies numbered 51 to 500."
Too Much Government. New York. The Vanguard Press. 1931.
Not important as literature. "His own constructive philosophy of government." The list of topics includes the Mann act, prohibition, land tenure, limitations upon free speech, monopolies and public utilities.
These books, together with a large quantity of magazine articles and poems, do not constitute all his creative work. This versatile man, in addition to being a soldier, a scholar, a lawyer, a social philosopher, a lecturer, a brilliant conversationalist, a writer and a poet, was a talented artist who painted many pictures in various media. The following condensed account of his exhibit at the Portland Art Museum in the fall of 1913 was written by Edith Knight Holmes and appeared in the Sunday Oregonian of August 31, 1913:
A collection of paintings and sketches by C. E. S. Wood will be on exhibition at the Portland Art Museum beginning tomorrow and extending all through the month of September. . . . There are studies in still life, scenes depicting all the seasons of the year, oils, water colors and pastels. ... A striking bit of still life in oils is a brace of ducks and an assortment of vegetables ready for the duck dinner. The Big-Out-Of-Doors of Eastern Oregon is shown in several fine studies. The plains and fields and the hills beyond are painted attractively with much atmospheric effect in the distance. Mr. Wood has done some of his best work to his skies and his clouds are fleecy and natural. One study shows a golden field with blue and purple in the distant hills, and another interesting study is of fruit trees with an immense fir tree at one side.
In water color some dainty sketches are seen cleverly portraying the every day scenes on our own Willamette River. . . . There are two beach scenes. ... A rich pastel shows the heart of the woodland. . . . Another pastel of Mt. Hood seen in a haze that hangs over the city. An autumnal landscape with hay stacks and half bare trees is hung next to a charming little barnyard scene. One of the gems is a small moonlight in oils. The city's lights are suggested and the coloring is a sort of Venetian blue. ... An unusually rich coloring is utilized in a boat and water scene in oils. . . .
He performed more work in each of several fields than most men in a lifetime can perform in one. He could go to such an occupation of pure beauty as has just been described, or could take up the composition of a poem, after having been applauded by an I. W. W. meeting. The Oregonian could change its mood, too. In the issue of November 30, 1909, it said in an editorial:
Mr. C. E. S. Wood stirred the enthusiasm of the I. W. W. members in a Portland meeting last Sunday by declaring himself an anarchist, for which he was rewarded with loud applause and yells. Said Mr. Wood: "I work with the Democratic Party because it is nearer my ideals than others. Yet that Party would be the first to deny to me the title of Democrat. I don't want it. I am an Anarchist. That is my ideal! [Great applause and yells]. I believe in the Anarchist theory that land should be held only by those who possess and use it. [Applause]. So I work with the single-taxers."
The Colonel—such he is sometimes called—is lithe in adjusting himself to the varying degrees of wealth and social status.
As attorney for one of the biggest land monopolies in the West—a wagon road company in Eastern Oregon—he stands champion of a land system far more monopolistic than that which he denounced amid cheers last Sunday. As attorney for the gas monopoly in Portland, he stands defender of special and capitalistic privilege that enrages the Industrial Workers of the World. As councilor of big banks and rich estates and as frequenter of aristocratic, exclusive social strata the Colonel might seem disqualified from being the boon companion of rowdy, feted Have-nots of the street, who howl for free Anarchy, free land, and free speech.
All of which shows Colonel Wood an unusually versatile man. It is a rare make-up of person who can flatter such far flung elements of the social body at the same time. The question "Whose man is he?" is out of order each time it is asked whether in high places or low places. . . .
He did indeed appear rather ambidextrous but whose man he was he made clear enough later, as has been pointed out. He was nobody's but his own.
Ten years later the Reverend Albert Ehrgott came to town, with sensational reproval not only of this error of Anarchy but of another error in the poet's ways. He apparently let it be known beforehand that words would not be minced, so that a stenographer was there to take down what he said. This only gave flambuoyancy and confidence to his indictment. The following is part of a report of the meeting given in the Oregonian of May 30, 1919:
In a slashing attack upon the social evil and the cult of free love, Albert Ehrgott, former pastor of the East Side Baptist church, speaking last night to 300 auditors at Christensen's hall, specifically named Colonel C. E. S. Wood, Portland attorney and poet, ....
"While there are others guilty in this respect," he continued, "still pampered and condoned by society in this city, but unworthy of the association of decent folk, the outstanding character in Portland is the self-confessed Anarchist and practicer of free love, C. E. S. Wood."
He folded the paper and spoke to the stenographer again.
"Write that down," commanded Mr. Ehrgott. "I said C.—E.—S. Wood!"
The evangelist's vainglorious indignation, in exploitation of a technicality, was something like the Reverend Herbert Beaver's righteous attitude towards Dr. McLoughlin and the whole unblessed but orderly Fort Vancouver colony in 1836. At the time of this meeting the poet was 67 years old. His second mar- riage, with sanctity and permanence and in accord- ance with truths that he held, was with Sara Bard Field, also a gifted poet, who wrote two of the sonnets in Maia, and who is author of five books of poems— Barabbas, The Vintage Festival, To a Poet Born on the Edge of Spring, The Pale Woman and Vineyard Voices. No attitude of the city has ever graced it more than its refusal to withdraw the respect, admiration and affection in which it had held him so long. The people themselves, for having had him among them, had become less capable of a narrow view. The buoyancy of his personality, the vitality of his presence, his welcome face thickly swathed in ruddy beard, these are undimmed in Portland recollection. Those who knew him personally recall him with reminiscent gladness. He was the merriest of men, they say, and the kindest and the most loyal to his friends.
Those who have studied genius or who have read his writings can understand him.
His hair and beard, still thick, are now white, giving him a patriarchial look or, as one man has said, the look of Zeus. He is 83 years old and still writing. In addition to all his other gifts, he was granted one of sustained power, which is an ultimate accomplishment of the rest and which we are told is a characteristic of genius. As Emerson said: "No ray is dimmed no atom worn, my oldest force is good as new."
He is a peripatetic writer, according to one observer:
His vest pocket reminds one of a series of pipe organs because of the number of huge fountain pens he carries—all filled. For Mr. Wood has the ability to write wherever he may be: on street cars; standing in a queue before a ticket window; waiting for the doctor, the dentist; in between trains, in hotel lobbies. Every little odd minute of the day is scribbled over with ink.
Verne Bright, in an article in the Northwest Literary Review, has summed him up—“Pioneer, soldier, lawyer; humanitarian, iconoclast, poet: such are the six sides to the man.” A semicolon divides the objective from the subjective, with three classifications under each.
Following are the first 57 lines from the Prologue to The Poet in the Desert, published in 1915 when he was 63:
“Behold the Signs of the Desert”
Poet:
The Desert confronts me haughtily and assails me with solitude.
She sits on a throne of light,
Her hands clasped, her eyes solemnly questioning.
I have come into the lean and stricken land
Which fears not God, that I may meet my soul
Face to face, naked as the Desert is naked;
Bare as the great silence is bare:
And the great host which shall come after,
By whom I also shall be forgot.
So am I defiant of all gods,
Shadows of Man cast upon the fogs of his ignorance.
As a helpless child follows the hand of its mother,
So I put my hand into the hand of the Eternal.
I have come to lie in the lap of my mother and be comforted.
I am alone but not alone—I am with myself.
My soul is my companion above all companions.
A buzzard, afloat on airy seas,
Alone, between the two immensities, as I am alone between two immensities;
A juniper tree on a rocky hillside;
A dark signal from afar off, where the weary may rest in the shade;
A monastery for the flocks of little birds which by night hurry across the Desert and hide in the heat of the day;
A basaltic-cliff, embroidered with lichens and illuminated by the sun, orange and yellow,
The work of a great painter, careless in the splash of his brush.
In its shadow lie timid antelope, which flit through the sage-brush and are gone;
But easily they become fearless unto love.
The sea of sage-brush, breaking against the purple hills far away.
The mirage paints upon the sky, rivers with cool, willowy banks;
You can almost hear the lapping of the water,
I lie down upon the warm sand of the Desert and it seems to me Life has its mirages, also.
I sift the sand through my fingers.
The stagnant water-hole, trampled with hoofs;
About it shines the white bones of those who came too late.
The whirling dust-pillar, waltz of Wind and Earth,
The dust carried up to the sky in the hot, furious arms of the wind, as I also am lifted up.
The glistening black wall of obsidian, where the wild tribes came to fashion their arrows, knives, spearheads.
The ground is strewn with the fragments, just as they dropped them, the strokes of the maker undimmed through the desperate years.
But the hunters have gone forever.
The Desert cares no more for the death of the tribes than for the death of the armies of black crawling crickets.
Silence. Invincible. Impregnable. Compelling the soul to stand forth to be questioned.
Dazzling in the sun, whiter than snow, I see the bones
Of those who have existed as I now exist. The bones are here; where are they who lived?
Like a thin veil, I see a crowd of gnats, buzzing their hour.
I know that they are my brethren, I am less than the shadow of this rock,
For the shadow returneth forever.
Night overwhelms me. The coyotes bark to the stars.
Upon the warm midnight sand I lie thoughtfully sifting the earth through my fingers. I am that dust.
I look up unto the stars, knowing that to them my life is not more valuable than that of the flowers;
The little, delicate flowers of the Desert,
Which, like a breath, catch at the hem of Spring and are gone.