'The Real Vincent Starrett'
A most remarkable biographical sketch
This is going to be a bit different.
Most posts to this blog feature multiple images with an almost equal amount of explanatory text. This time around, we’re going to flip the pattern and look at a most remarkable biographical essay from the pages of The Step Ladder. As the monthly newsletter for that group of writers, editors and readers based in the Chicagoland region, The Step Ladder regularly promoted the work of its members.
The December 1919 issue, Volume 1, Number 2, was no exception. In addition to noting the publication of books like Starrett’s In Praise of Stevenson, there are poems and other bookish notes. But most remarkably, the issue contains an essay devoted to Starrett that runs over more than two pages. Part biography, part flattering press release, it is an effort to breathlessly praise the young writer, who was also one of the first members of The Bookfellows.
It’s a remarkable love letter, unlike anything I’ve read. There are many essays that praise Starrett, but few are as unfailingly effusive as this one.
Here, without comment, is the essay.
The Real Vincent Starrett
A later issue of The Step Ladder. I have yet to add Volume 1, Number 2 to my collection. Yet!
Strong limbed, clear eyed, out-spoken, a child of nature, hating shams, not to be influenced by fear or favor, standing squarely on his own feet and owning no man master, despising conventions and missing no opportunity to show his independence of them, a born radical, loathing respectability, opposed to all hoary pretenses, speaking the thoughts of his mind, calling a spade a spade because he will not be bound by petty restrictions, and sometimes alluding to spades merely to show his independence, an intellectual in every pore, lineal descendant of Francois Villon, a keen critic, a strong and pungent writer, a masterful poet, talent shining in every line of his clear-cut face, his curly hair prematurely tipped with gray and his big, appealing eyes appropriately framed in shell-rimmed spectacles.
Such is the Starrett pose. What, then, of the real Starrett? The true story would contain much that is normal and uninteresting. Why mention it? For the most vital part of life, after all, is not the reality, but the appearance. It is not what we are that counts, but what we seem to be, for that is all the world is likely to know of us. If we were to write of the normal Starrett, it would read somewhat as follows:
A photo of Starrett from 1929, 10 years after this essay was written. Much was said about how handsome Starrett was as a young man by writers in Chicago media.
Charles Vincent Emerson Starrett was born in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, October 26, 1886, and received what education he has in the public schools of Toronto and Chicago, to which latter city he was removed in childhood. He passed through the usual erotic experiences of youth, which he enjoyed immensely. Being an egotist, he found himself possessed of the usual idea that he could put to paper thoughts that the world was longing to peruse. Yielding to the overmastering desire for gratification usually found in persons of this type, he determined to embark on a career of professional journalism, regardless of the needs of his family, which were great. After a vagabond journey in Europe, he became a reporter for the Chicago Daily News, in which capacity he was sent to Mexico during the Vera Cruz fiasco, an excursion which pleased him immensely, since it gave him a semblance of importance, emancipation from galling dry-laws, and an inexhaustible topic for future conversation.
Title page to the first edition of the poetry anthology, Estrays.
His coign of vantage on a newspaper made it possible for him to write to distinguished persons with a fair prospect of being noticed, an occupation satisfying to vanity and conducive to autograph collecting, into which habit he speedily fell. There is not only a peculiar exhilaration in his pursuit, but there is the principle of doing as you would be done by, to which Starrett easily and frankly succumbed.
He has thumped out vast quantities of typewritten matter which he peddles around to the big publishers. By dint of writing down to his market and harping on the note of suggestiveness, he manages to break into print about once in every five times, and so secures a fair amount of publicity. He has the usual visions of fame and reputation which never leave him and color most of his acts. In December, 1918, with three other enthusiasts, he published a small book of poems entitled Estrays. This book was too slight to make any impression on a hard-headed public, which received it with indifference, but it gave its authors a talking point and added much to their self-satisfaction. Soon after this Mr. Walter M. Hill, a kind-hearted bookseller, brought out one of Starrett’s ephemera, a monograph on Arthur Machen, in book form, using the best paper and scoring a highly attractive mechanical performance, which is all that buyers of “rare” and “odd” items demand.
Title page for the Arthur Machen booklet published by Walter M. Hill in 1918.
Since his rise to fame (or perhaps slightly prospective thereto) Starrett has found it advisable to adopt a pose, the better to identify himself as an Intellectual. He has shortened his name into the customary duet affected by all translucent geniuses from Oscar Wilde to Ambrose Bierce. He has displayed a marked leaning toward sin and has allowed the influence of great decadent writers to manifest itself in his works, though those who know him best fear a lack of the personal contact essential to success in this role. He is a model husband and would rather lose a page of manuscript than his wife. However, pornography possesses the same appeal for him that it does for everyone else, and he cherishes the usual secret ambition to burst into bloom some day as a terrible rake. He takes it out in writing about it.
H.L. Mencken’s Smart Set magazine, this one from September 1918, with a short story by Starrett, “The Pleasant Madness of the Faculty.”
He is acquainted with all the great sinners of history and speaks of them with familiar regard, though fortunately, like the great saints, they are all dead.
He regards H.L. Mencken as the greatest living editor because Mencken accepts his stuff for Smart Set and once sent him a small pamphlet free of charge.
He is continually gathering up privately printed booklets which he considers very valuable and keeps under lock and key, most of them being unsafe to keep elsewhere. He is inordinately fond of cats because they annoy him and his neighbors, and he manages to have from one to six on hand all the time, lest life should become too bearable.
Artist Gene Markey captured Starrett in what this essay might call, full intellectual pose, for this 1924 caricature.
He lives in a suburb to which has parents removed him at the age of four years and to which he has ever since inertly adhered, selective discrimination in this matter not being demanded by his career. He is an insatiable notoriety seeker and will do anything to gain publicity except indulge in personal scandal, for which he has neither the inclination nor the courage. He enjoys the life of a hack-writer since it permits of elasticity in working hours and opportunity to visit second-hand bookstores, on the shelves of almost any of which one may find discarded volumes inscribed with his name. He likes to “bum around,” is very little inclined to work, and then only when he ought to be in bed.
We have said nothing of the real Vincent Starrett. This we greatly regret, but it was unavoidable on account of lack of information. We have never encountered that phase of the subject.
I said I was going to offer this essay without comment, but after re-reading it, I just can’t help myself.
Although unsigned, I think it possible that the editor of The Step Ladder, Flora Warren Seymour, is the hand at work. At the very least, she would have given full permission to publish the piece. Mrs. Seymour was the wife of George Seymour, another Chicago writer whose poetry was included in Estrays along with Starrett, Thomas Kennedy, and Basil Thompson. I have in my head that Starrett dedicated a book to one or both Seymours, but can’t find it right now. (If you find it, let me know.) Of course, the author could be none other than Starrett himself, but that first run-on sentence is so bad I can’t believe he would commit it.
That Starrett adopted an intellectual pose is commented on by others. Starrett left high school before graduation for his European “vagabond journey,” and lacked the classical education of some of his peers. He never quite let go of the pose, preferring three-piece suits, a watch fob on his waistcoat, and using a cigar holder well into his 60s, when such affectations had gone out of style.
The comments about his desire to be a rake conflicting with his loyalty to his wife as a “model husband” are intriguing. His marriage to Lillian Hartsig was not always a happy one and his affair with Rachel Latimer would certainly qualify him as a “rake” by the standards of the era.
I would like to know more about that locked box of “printed booklets which he considers very valuable.” What was kept under lock and key? And what became of it all?
Like most things associated with Starrett, this essay ends up offering more questions than answers.