Take the ABAB Train: The Curious Story of Poet Charles Malam
Why Did Robert Frost's Protege End Up in Brooklyn Working for the MTA?
An old book, if it’s the right book, can take you down quite a rabbit hole.
Twenty-five years ago or so, I was gifted a first edition of a slim volume of poetry called Spring Plowing. It was the work of a young man named Charles Malam. The book was published in 1928 by Doubleday, Doran & Company. This is how the famous publishing house—which began as Doubleday & McClure Publishing in 1897— was known from 1927 to 1946.
It was an unexpected gift. I had never heard of Charles Malam, and had never professed myself an avid consumer of poetry. I am more of a fiction and drama guy. I suspect the gifter—my ex-wife, a creature of the art world—chose the volume based solely on its beauty as an object.
And it was beautiful. It cast an aesthetic spell. The slim book, a mere 58 pages, was in mint condition, with dust jacket intact. The paper stock was thick and substantial and pleasing to the touch. The font was small and elegant. And each chapter of verses was adorned by a woodcut by J.J. Lankes.
Lankes was more famous for his particular art than Malam would ever become as a poet. He was friends with poet Robert Frost and illustrated several of Frost’s books, as well as works by Sherwood Anderson and Beatrix Potter. Anderson wrote this of Lankes in an article in 1931:
The man has feeling. He has that odd quality, so infinitely valuable, the feeling for things, for the reflected life in things… It is his determination, his assertion and reassertion, as well as the beauty of his work that, it seems to me, makes Lankes, the Virginia woodcut man, one of the very significant living artists of our day.
Anderson was a literary giant when he wrote those words. Malam was no giant. But he was a prodigy. Born in 1906 in tiny South Ryegate, Vermont, he was 21 and still an undergraduate at Middlebury College when Spring Plowing was published. He was, in fact, the first student in the 128-year history of Middlebury to achieve such an accomplishment.
So how had he landed Lankes as a collaborator? The likely answer lied on the inner leaf of the dust jacket, which read, “Charles Malam is a young Vermont poet whose verse have received the highest praise of Robert Frost, Hervey Allen, and other critics of notes.” (Allen is the novelist best known for the 1926 work Anthony Adverse.)
Being a protege of Frost, the most famous and celebrated poet in the nation, obviously had its benefits.
Spring Plowing and Malam have pulled at my imagination over the years. It is a book of secrets, whispers from the past. Tucked in its pages was an original pamphlet advertising the work of “Two new voices in American poetry,” Carl Carmer and Malam. It quoted Herbert Gorman, a novelist, biographer and book critic for The New York Times, as saying Malam’s book was “marked by a delicate sensitivity, a clear comprehension of word values and a natural rhythmical sense.”
The pamphlet features a photograph of Malam. It is the only image of the poet that I have been able to find. His is the very image of a 1920s collegiate striver. He is dressed in a fine suit with wide lapels, tie and starched collar, his dark hair slicked back and parted neatly at the center. Malam stares unsmilingly at the reader, his brow high, his gaze steely, an earnest man of letters. He looks like a character from a Fitzgerald short story, someone invested with the serious, yet modernist energy of his time.
My volume was not just signed, but inscribed. “To Margaret,” it read, “remembering Middlebury ‘literary’ days. Charles Malam, Bread Loaf, 1928.”
Bread Loaf is a famous Vermont writing conference, held annually. It was founded in 1926, which means Malam attended one of the first such conclaves. Bread Loaf, in its early years, was closely associated with Frost, who first conceived of the conference and lived nearby. That is probably how Malam and Frost met.
The inscription wasn’t all that Malam wrote to Margaret. The poet penned a little playlet on the page opposite the title page. Titled “Dialogue in Hades,” its two characters were CFM (the poet) and M.S. (presumedly Margaret). The lines, written in ink with superb penmanship, run thus:
M.D.—Happy, Charlie?
Cfm—No! Of course I am.
M.D.—But why? How in Hades—
Cfm—Not in Hades, but walking up and down the rubber matting among the upper caves of the Delta Upsilon cliff-dwellings. I wore that matting out, myself personally. I had to. There was no one to talk to about it. And I decided that what I wanted would never be brought to me, and that I must go out after what I wanted—And having found that out, being busy about going, why shouldn’t I be happy?
[From a febrile memory Aug. 15, 1928.]
By way of these special aspects of this obscure book of poetry, I began to form an image of Malam in my mind, that of the purest and least cynical sort of American literary idealist; a creature of the early years of the American Century when it seemed that the country was on its way to compiling a crop of writers and collections of writings to beat anything produced by any country in history.
Malam certainly had an auspicious beginning—published while yet in college; endorsed by Frost; the recipient of multiple awards; editor-in-chief of both the Middlebury literary magazine The Saxonian and its humor magazine The Blue Baboon; works reviewed in the New York Times. That made me curious why I had never heard of Malam, why he was not a known name. So I began digging into his story.
The pamphlet held some clues. He had followed up his Middlebury tenure with a Rhodes Scholarship. He attended Oxford from 1928 to 1931. In 1930, he produced a second volume of poetry, Upper Pasture, again with woodcuts by Lankes, published by Farrar and Rinehart. It contains Malam’s most anthologized poem, “Steam Shovel.” John C. Farrar worked at Doubleday before he founded Farrar & Rinehart in 1929 and was, like Malam, a Vermont boy. He led the Bread Loaf conference in its early years. So Farrar, as much as Frost, was Malam’s literary angel.
In 1931, Farrar published Malam’s first novel, Slow Smoke. Like nearly all of Malam’s writings, it concerns the places and people of rural Vermont, in this case a Methodist minister and his son. Written after Slow Smoke, but published before it, in England in 1931, was the novel City Keep. Malam was terribly prolific in his early years.
And then came a sudden turn. He returned from England in 1931 to settle down, not in Vermont, but Brooklyn. That year, on August 1, he married Muriel Jane Harris, to whom Spring Plowing is dedicated. They had two daughters, Jane, born in 1933, and Margaret (perhaps named after that same Margaret to whom he inscribed my book). And from 1932, until his retirement in 1966, he worked at the New York City Board of Transportation, the poet of the subway. He died in 1981.
Learning this history, Malam struck me as an ineffably poignant figure. How had Robert Frost’s favorite son, the Rhodes scholar, the Vermont protege, the author of four books, come to live out his life as a functionary of what would become the MTA?
And why did a man who celebrated the soil of Vermont choose urban Brooklyn as his home? Not even romantic Manhattan, but Brooklyn—which, let’s face it, was not a romantic place to live in the mid-20th century. Had his books not sold? Had he become discouraged? Was it the burden of suddenly having a family to support, or the crushing constraints of the Depression?
Of course, such stories are not without precedent. Every day, artists are forced to face the music and become more practical. Poet Wallace Stevens spent his life working at an insurance company in Hartford. Malam’s tale may be just another such example of self-sacrifice.
Malam did not give up on writing entirely. There was another volume of poetry, Wagon Weather, albeit published in 1939 by the much smaller firm of Kaleidograph Press in Dallas. It was the result of a book publishing contest by Kaleidograph, which was a poetry magazine.
Over the years, he submitted poems to countless newspapers like The New York Times and the New York Herald-Tribune, as well as papers in Buffalo, Bangor, Lewiston, Maine, and tiny Olean, New York. This was back when newspapers still exercised the quaint practice of using poetry as space fillers. The poems were invariably about nature, with titles like “Fireflies” and “Mountain Wind.” You could take the boy out of Vermont, but you couldn’t take the Vermont out of the boy, it seemed.
He even submitted entries to poetry competitions at Bread Loaf, where his career had begun. Malam also wrote plays, though I can find no evidence of any being published or performed.
In his final years, Malam’s name appeared in the New York papers only when one of his daughters married. Jane married Herbert Scheurich in 1954. They settled in Brooklyn. Margaret, who graduated from Syracuse University, married Charles Brooks of Syracuse in 1960.
A poem published in 1969 in the Scranton Press-Tribine is the last printed mention of poet Charles Malam that I can find. It was called “Morning” and was, as usual, an ode to the natural world.
It was so fair a day,
So clear, so deep, so blue, so rare a day
I opened the door to let the whole house fill—
And found the world on my sill.
Come in, old world, I shall but break fast, then,
Carry you up the mountain once again.
He lived for 12 more years and died in 1981. I could not find a death notice in either the New York or Vermont newspapers, or information on where he was buried. I contacted Middlebury, where the Malam papers are archived, but they did not know either. I was not successful in tracking down his descendants.
Malam’s love of nature was such that his life in the city—a span that encompassed two-thirds of his life—seems not to exist at all in his written output. I did, however, find a rare poem by Malam about city life, published in the Herald-Tribune in 1944. He even worked in some mention of transportation—his daily trade:
Trolley riders reveling in picture-paper shocker,
Salesmen and brokers, the big cigar smokers;
Cabbies discussing the arm of Dixie Walker,
The shouts of the technical student practical jokers;
Clatter of the cars and rumble of the subway,
Loudspeaker Swing from the record store’s wing,
The hustle and bustle of Victory’s hubway—
Brooklyn in Spring!
Wouldn’t it make sense for this verse to be featured as part of the MTA’s popular “Poetry in Motion” series, in which poems are posted in subway cars?
I wonder if the MTA even knows it had a poet working for them for forty years.
Odds and Ends…
I wrote in The New York Times about Brooklyn’s distiller New York Distilling Company’s move from Williamsburg to Bushwick, and its retiring of the Ragtime Rye brand in favor of the new Jaywalk Rye line, which is distilled largely from the heritage, 17th-century Horton strain of rye. This is good news for rye whiskey lovers, as the new juice is excellent … Booze writer Kara Newman looks at the increasingly high price of cocktails in New York in Bloomberg… Sekund Sun, the Astoria cocktail bar, is holding a cocktail competition in which mere civilians are welcome to enter and submit their original cocktail creations. The winner gets a chance to see their cocktail on the bar’s menu… “Feud: Capote Vs. the Swans” is a new limited television series about the novelist Truman Capote’s 1970s expulsion from the highest echelons of New York City culture after he published, in Esquire magazine, its denizens’ deepest secrets in a thinly-veiled fictional form. Tom Hollander is Capote. The various swans are played by Naomi Watts, Chloe Sevingy, Diane Lane, Calista Flockhart and Demi Moore. The script is by playwright Jon Robin Baitz and several episodes are director by filmdom’s Gus Van Sant. Recommended if you like New York history and high-end soap opera… Vinepair published an article on the best cocktails to drink while watching particular romantic comedies… Mixologist Kristina Magro (Prairie School, Lone Wolf, California Clipper) is now in charge of the beverage program at Chef Erling Wu-Bower's newly opened Maxwells Trading in Chicago. The restaurant is situated below a rooftop farm which supplies the herbs, honeys, dried florals and teas showcased in Magro's program. She also works to direct the farm's growing plan. The menu is rooted in the classics with heavy emphasis on martinis. And many drinks demonstrate the property's sustainability ethos… Irene’s Place, a longstanding neighborhood bar in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, with roots in the Polish community has closed its doors after 44 years. The place was noteworthy for its Polish beers, cheap prices and lack of a sign. You only knew the name was Irene’s if you knew it.
I hope someone sees this who knows something more of this story! And what a beautiful book that is!
Love these little excursions into the hidden histories of people and places!