Thomas Walsh: Poet

...Bunker was chosen by Mr...

...In fact, it might be truer to say that his quality of magnificence brought him closer to those gorgeous Italian humanists of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and he could well have taken the part of "a gentleman of the Renaissance...

...Two elements in my friend's character quickly became evident—his preeminent social gifts and graces and his insistence on personal freedom...

...It was probably too close to him—too much a natural growth in his heart...

...His translations of many Spanish and Spanish-American poets introduced them to their first North American audience...

...His name was Thomas Walsh—and so began my friendship with one of the most charming and delightful of men...

...Soon our meetings became frequent, and in the course of them certain facts about my new friend gradually emerged—that he had published several books of poetry, did a good deal of literary reviewing, lectured occasionally, and had sufficient income to live an independent, leisurely, bachelor life with his sisters and brothers in the old family home in Brooklyn...

...Indeed, this last circumstance was the source of one of his mischevious pleasantries, when he would defend some one or other of his luxurious habits by insisting that it showed a positive sense of ingratitude of the treasury of merits laid up by the saints if there were not frequent withdrawals from the said treasury by easy-going livers like himself...

...He was that unusual specimen in this day and country, a free spirit who had the courage to give exclusive devotion to his intellectual interests, irrespective of monetary, social, ambitional or other alien considerations...

...October 22, 1930 THE COMMONWEAL 635 THOMAS WALSH: POET By JOHN BUNKER kBOUT nine o'clock one cold winter night during the war years—it must have been in January or in February of 1918— I was sitting in my room on the third floor front of a typical bleak New York boarding-house...

...Not only was the acquisitive or possessive instinct not in him, so far as money or material possessions were concerned, but he was not drawn even by the intangible influences which will sometimes snare those of an idealistic or artistic bent...

...Right in the midst of the collection, however, there was a sensational, ultrasexy poem in the well-known modern manner, upon which he made the comment that "to find such a poem in such a collection is like coming on a satyr's hoof-print in a convent garden...

...There are other works left in manuscript by Thomas Walsh, which it is hoped will be published later on...

...These constituted the crown of his social activities, at once his pride, his pleasure and his never-failing solace...

...Indeed, he was in the fullest meanlutely rejected, although there were two notable occa- ing of the term a citizen of the world—gracious, keen, sions in his unfettered career when he consented to witty and full of a most disarming simplicity...

...Then I recalled having met him casually some eight months before in Kilmer's office in the New York Times Annex...

...Walsh as his literary executive...

...This volume will be published soon by the Dial Press...

...He had traveled widely and somewhat out of the beaten track—particularly in Spain, to whose people and history he had a veritable devotion...

...The way he looked me up that winter night was entirely characteristic, and he literally had "troops of friends," most of them young and many of them strangers and foreigners to the country—Spaniards, Lithuanians, South Americans, Swedes, Norwegians, a large number of whom he was helping to get established in America...

...Interest in the work of one of the most distinguished of modern poets will be increased by the following article on him written by Mr...

...In the most exact meaning of the word he had a positive "genius for friendship," so that even if he had never written a line, it would be difficult not to foresee for the consummate charm, noble courtesy and warm generosity that made up Tom Walsh the sort of immortality that becomes a legend—a legend of high friendship, that those who knew him would not willingly let die...

...And he was one of the very few established poets I have known who would risk his own standing with publishers to urge upon them the work of obscure or uninfluential writers...

...Such things as a definite job and regular working hours he absoBecause of his long and close association with the late Thomas Walsh, Mr...

...Something of this appears in his narrative and dramatic poems, and if such outspokenness is a source of surprise to those holding naive notions of the supposed iron discipline and putative regimentation of Catholicism, it simply shows that they are not so familiar as they might be with the frank expression of such orthodox writers as Dante and Chaucer, Erasmus and Thomas More, who put forth their critical comments on churchmen when the Church was supreme...

...Bunker—The Editors...

...Like Johnson he had the wisdom to "keep his friendships in a constant state of repair" by association with younger men...

...Literary log-rolling, that prevalent vice of writing cliques, and all the mean shifts and paltry expedients of writing people, were completely out of his orbit...

...Joyce Kilmer and many others of the younger writing-men of my acquaintance were either over in France or otherwise called away, so that at this particular time there was in the entire city of New York hardly a single person with whom I was on intimate terms...

...He held degrees in law, philosophy and letters, had been distinguished by various American patriotic societies and had, moreover, an unusual array of extraterriotorial honors—awarded for his eminent services in the cause of Spanish culture...

...Almost as a corollary of this quality was his extreme generosity...

...Despite his apparent sophistication and his liking for what he called "charming rogues," Tom Walsh's chief admiration was reserved for spiritual and ascetic characters, and he took much pride in the fact that his family tree could boast of a canonized saint in the person of Saint Lawrence O'Farrell...

...To describe the special quality of Tom Walsh as a friend and companion many epithets come to mind: sophisticated, scholarly, cultured, charming, cosmopolitan...

...In certain respects Tom Walsh afforded a curious parallelism with the great Dr...

...Such traits as these have a deeper significance than perhaps appears on the surface...

...No matter how high or how low, how learned or how ignorant the person to whom he was talking, his manner, if not his matter, was always exactly the same—never did he condescend, never did he pretend to be anything but himself...

...Although Tom Walsh was a sophisticated man of the world, and so was thoroughly alive to social distinctions and conventions, in a certain sense he was the most unworldly of men...

...His friendships were as strong as they were numerous and he was universally saluted as "Tom...

...Various hints of Tom Walsh's multifarious learning would come out appositely from time to time in the course of conversation, but always naturally and unforcedly, as from one who bore his knowledge gracefully...

...He also is the editor of the forthcoming volume of selections from the various books of poetry published by Thomas Walsh in his lifetime...

...Johnson—in his physical proportions, his trenchant and ready wit, his kindness especially to juniors, his fondness for conviviality and companionship, his liking for late hours and corresponding dislike of getting up in the morning, his wide scholarship, "fit to grapple with whole libraries," his democracy, his liking for and excellence in talk...

...On another occasion he was reviewing a book of poetry by a young lady who had some reputation as a religious poet and whose book consisted of a series of very fine devotional lyrics...

...He knew himself to be a member of an ancient and world-wide family, and his jokes were those charming and delightful affairs, family jokes...

...Of course, pietistic souls were grievously shocked —as he intended they should be—by such talk, and even more scandalized by his spicy stories of clerical japes and ecclesiastical rogueries, wherein, by rolling eyes and uplifted hands, more was implied than met the ear...

...Once in speaking of a certain well-known writer with a very loose-jointed style, he remarked that it was a style without suspenders or garters and gave the impression that the man's clothes were drippling down over his shoe tops...

...636 THE COMMONWEAL October 22, 1930 Tom Walsh had the gift of incisive utterance...

...I invited him up, and a few minutes later there walked into the room a stoutish man of distinguished aspect, with clipped moustache, black hair, large, intelligent brown eyes and a general air of prosperity and good living...

...Curiously enough he was never able to explain the origin of his love for Spain...

...What anyone and everyone could see and feel in Tom Walsh was his extraordinary charm, since in social contacts he was that rare person, a man who was at ease, and who put others at ease, on any stratum...

...The idea was so preposterous that I dismissed it several times, but finally the noise became so insistent that I opened the window and looked down...

...The real point is that Tom Walsh was so thoroughly persuaded of the truth of his religion—or rather, he was so intimately and comfortably at home in the household of Faith— that he could afford to jest about it...

...Tom Walsh never made any secret of his profound admiration and reverence for the Catholic faith, but he did not go to the extreme of Charles Lamb who loved his friends "not in spite of their faults, but faults and all...

...It was practically a warrant of possession for one to express admiration for anything of his—whether some foreign curio or a rare first edition...

...Nevertheless, the parallel with Johnson will persist, and in nothing was it more exact than in his friendships...

...Not only alien cultures of the present day did he seem to absorb into himself, but also those of past ages and far-off civilizations—mediaeval France, Arabia, Morocco, Italy, Persia and, above and beyond all, Spain...

...and he was too worldly wise to be astonished at the irregularities of the professedly religious...

...forego, with certain reservations, his customary freedom: when he joined the editorial staff of the Catholic Encyclopedia and, some years later, on the establishment of The Commonweal, when he became first assistant editor of that journal— a position he continued to hold till his sudden death, in October, 1928, when he was still in the prime of life...

...Though he was a scholar and a humanist, scholarship and humanism exert no general appeal...

...but the word that best sums him up is urbanity—he was very particularly a product of civilized centres: Paris and New York, London and Rome, Washington, Havana, Oslo, Seville, Stockholm, Madrid, Cairo, Constantinople and even less familiar capitals like Kovno and Bogota...

...At any rate I was alone and deeply absorbed in a book when I became dimly conscious that someone was calling my name from the street...

...By the light of a street lamp I could see a figure standing at the curb and looking up at my windows, with a cane hooked over one arm, his hands cupped to his mouth, shouting my name above the din of Broadway traffic...

...But the differences were just as marked, and his fastidiousness in dress, his fine manners, his cosmopolitan outlook, his aesthetic sense in the various arts, his lack of dogmatism and intolerance, raised definite distinctions between himself and the great cham of eighteenth-century literature...

...Realizing that a Church which began with one traitor and one denier among its original twelve would have its proportionate lapses in later ages, he knew that human nature is human nature, and this was the stuff in which, as a literary artist, he was primarily interested...