Spoon River Revisited (June 1971 | Volume: 22, Issue: 4)

Spoon River Revisited

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Authors: Edward Laning

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June 1971 | Volume 22, Issue 4

I always felt at home in Edgar Lee Master᾿s quarters in the Chelsea Hotel. It was all so much like a Petersburg, Illinois, law office that I might have been back in Papa Smoot’s office overlooking the courthouse square. Edgar Lee, plain and short and stocky, sat in a straight chair near a big desk. there was the same smell of books and tobacco. The same southern light filtered through the braches of the ailanthus trees, and the court behind the Chelsea was almost as quiet as the empty Petersburg square with its big elms. there was even a spittoon on the floor near Master’s chair.

I had never known Edgar Lee in Petersburg. When I was growing up there, he lived in Chicago, where he practiced law, and after the shock of Spoon River Anthology he was no longer welcome in his home town. Too many of the characters in the book were recognizable in spite of the made-up names attached to them. In later years he could only return secretly because there was some sort of court order againts him in a matter of alimony. And anyway, if I had talked to him, Papa Smoot would have been furious when he found out (and everybody in town knew everything about everybody).

It was through Miss Edith, Edgar Lee’s cousin and my high school history teacher, that I came to know and revere the poet. Edgar Lee was a secret cult of Miss Edith’s, but one she chose to share with me. She would read to me sometimes from his letters and from poems he sent to her. (“A Corybantic din, as of a Salvation Army, followed Him.…And then along came Paul who almost spoiled it all.”) I have always thought that Edgar Lee might have written “Emily Sparks” with Miss Edith in mind. (And inevitably I became Reuben Pantier. “Dear Emily Sparks”! Dear Miss Edith!) I don’t remember if I ever betrayed these great confidence at home. If I did, Mama and Papa Smoot would have put it down to Miss Edith’s spinsterish eccentricity. All Edgar Lee ever said to me of her was that she had wasted her life caring for her mother and father.

He always seemed glad to see me, and i think he enjoyed my visits, because he loved Petersburg and it was of Petersburg that we talked. I believe that the Petersburg of long ago was more real to him than the great city outside the Chelsea Hotel. I was proud of the fact that he had mentioned me in his book about the Sangamon, the river that flows past New Salem and Petersburg, but I had an uneasy feeling that it was my origins he was interested in and that it was not I he was seeing but my Grandfather Laning’s house, “all of pressed brick and Victorian towers and balconies, standing picturesque view at the foot of the