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A Eulogy for Logan
by Kevin Plunkett
October 2004
By all appearances Algernon Sydney Logan was like any other Philadelphia aristocrat living at the end of the 19th century. He spent his mornings strolling the grounds of one of his vast family estates, afternoons sailing the Delaware Bay and evenings at the Academy of Music. He enjoyed robust health, good looks, a voracious mind hunting, skating, drawing, dancing, riding horses, piloting ships, farming land and playing the violin and guitar.
But none of this was enough to make a happy man of Logan, who only wanted the one thing that would elude him his entire life—to be remembered as a brilliant poet, the Lord Byron of the Delaware Valley. As a young man he would recite his poems to an empty bedroom, convinced the ghosts of Homer and Shelley were murmuring their approval at his sentimental Victorian verse. But by the time he was 42 years old, Logan began to realize that he would have to content himself with writing for an imaginary audience.
“It seems to me that I stand a very good chance of never being heard of at all, even after my death,” he confided to his diary.
He was right. By the time he died in 1925, at the end of a bruising crusade for literary fame and long trail of unread books, history had rendered its irrevocable verdict: Logan was a dilettante.
Today, the only place where Logan's literary works survive are the libraries of massive institutions, rare book dealers and the stone walls of Logan's mausoleum at West Laurel Hill Cemetery in Bala Cynwyd. In front of the crypt stands a marble obelisk, with the titles of Logan's books carved into its base: The Last Crusade, The Mirror of a Mind, The Image of Air, A Feather from the World's Wing. Near a stone clock forever indicating three o'clock—the time of Logan's death—is this epitaph:
All worthy effort is its own reward Who looks for more is out of tune with time; Nature but bids our hearts to find accord With the wind currents of her shifting clime.
But while Logan continues to broadcast this message of stoic renouncement from beyond the grave, during his life he was convinced that fame was his just reward for worthy poetic efforts, and grew embittered as that fame failed to materialize. He learned to savor the pain, responding to each of his many failures by admirably redoubling his efforts. All to no avail.
Algernon Sydney Logan was born into old money and the social station that came with it. His Quaker ancestors include Revolutionary War figure John Dickinson, who became known as “Penman of the Revolution” through his pseudonymous essays on government, and James Logan, the secretary and deputy of William Penn whose name still graces a Philadelphia neighborhood and public square. His father John Dickinson Logan headed the Pennsylvania Hospital and raised him in a Germantown mansion dubbed “Vernon.” There he discovered a great love for the natural world. An apricot tree in the backyard, he wrote, “greatly impressed itself upon my … mind [and] filled me with a love in which wonder and awe were blended.”
His other early interest was poetry. As a boy he shut himself up in the attic and shouted out these lines of Paradise Lost:
On a sudden open fly With impetuous recoil and jarring sound The infernal doors and on their hinges grate Harsh thunder, that the lowest bottom shook Of Erebus.
Logan graduated from Yale, married his second cousin Mary Wynne Wister in 1873 and by 24 had settled into a life of full-time aristocratic leisure. Certain he was the American equivalent of the European Romantics he idolized, he set out to make his name as a poet. His first collection of verse was single poem of more than two hundred cantos. He paid Philadelphia's G. P. Putnam's Sons nearly $200—$3,000 in today's dollars—to publish it as The Mirror of a Mind.
The poetry was grandiloquent, engrossed by nature, uninhabited by human beings and prone to flights of reverie and jarring clichés. One canto reads:
We go, return, depart, return again, But Thought still sits beside the sounding shore, Far from the haunts of hollow-minded men; Infinity's wild voice is ocean's roar! Hark to the billow's shout as on they pour! Each hath a tongue that speaks in accents clear The secret of the world, the unwritten lore; All that we know of life waves image here, They ebb but return, break but to reappear.
Some poets—Walt Whitman, Wallace Stevens, and many of the Beats—were initially self-published, and we remember their willingness to finance their own work as an act of courage, not vanity. Not so Logan, whose book sold all of 118 copies after receiving little help in the way of publicity from Putnam or any critics. (Unlike Whitman, he didn't take it upon himself to write pseudonymous reviews.) Logan was “in great dejection,” he later told his journal, published after his death as Vistas from the Stream.
During a brief sojourn in Italy, Logan paid J.B. Lippincott & Co. handsomely to print another book of his poetry called The Image of Air. Sixty copies found readers.
In 1881, Logan inherited 2,600 acres of depleted farmland in Delaware and managed, after studying farming techniques, to restore the soil's fertility. Dissatisfied with life as a country gentleman, he started work on a poetic drama based on the Biblical story of Saul:
March 11, 1883. On Wednesday, last March 7th, I took my manuscript of Saul to Lippincott. If that happiest time of lovemaking is that which intervenes between certainty and fulfillment—the pleasantest time in authorship is that which comes between printing and publicity. Your thought is endowed with form and identity—but it is as yet all your own, unsmirched by inky fingers and unimpeached by the gibes and sneers of the ignorant and vulgar.
Five months later Logan received this form letter from Lippincott:
Dear sir, We have on hand now 408 copies of your book. The sales have entirely ceased, and there seems little likelihood of disposing of any more copies through the regular channels of trade. Possibly you can suggest a plan by which they may be sold, if not, we will be pleased… to dispose of the same for whatever may be therefrom as old paper, etc…
In his next book, the 600-stanza poem A Feather from the World's Wing, Logan returned to writing odes to Pennsylvania nature, this time with more realistic expectations: Altogether it will do well enough to lie on Lippincott's shelves and catch dust stirred up by the hurrying feet of the busy purchasers of other books.
After A Feather fulfilled his dreary prophecy, however, Logan began to get depressed. His son Robert wrote that he shrank “away from men. And began to feel the agony of them shrink away from him.”
But rather than shrink away from poetry as well, Logan mined his loneliness as a muse for poems like the Hardy-esque November:
Leafless and dry and still! How weak the shadows, How pale the sun far down the Southern sky, How russet are the woods, how buff the meadows— Tints everywhere of cold and neutral dye […]
Meanwhile, Logan's life deteriorated further; his wife, who endured his occasional temper tantrums and read him books, was developing chronic deafness. Logan wrote a book of biblical criticism, Jesus in Modern Life (1888) and a neoclassic play, Messalina (1890).
Messalina received a few compliments in the Philadelphia press.
Between jottings about bank statements, property mortgages, the stock market, Philadelphia city politics and an account of bailing out his butler after the man was arrested on sodomy charges, Logan's journal contains some classic examples of the peculiar emotional psychology of the dispossessed writer. He calls his contemporary Edgar Allen Poe an “unnatural” versifier and a fraud. Whitman appears as a kind of village minstrel. When Lippincott's Monthly Magazine rejects one of his poems he becomes fully enraged:
I know my writing deserves a place in classic English literature. I also know the trash called poetry that the magazines habitually publish cannot live and hour; so that I feel sure time will vindicate me.
There are also moments of clarity scattered about the diary, when Logan looks to be ready to give up on the hope that his reputation would improve with time:
April 1887. It makes but little difference, after all, whether one writes or not.. The only wholesome and comforting society I have ever found has been with the shadows of those who have gone before …One pines to stretch across the time-gulf between, doomed to divide us from the loved shades till we, too, are mere simulacra, shadows taking a varying form with every mind that looks upon us.
Logan tried his hand at novel writing. Not on the Chart (1899), an account of a failing marriage, gathered some critical attention including a letter from Emile Zola, but again eluded readers. Amy Warren (1900) tanked completely. Logan self-published his last book, a collection of despairing poems called Vestigia, at 64. It went unnoticed. On December 30, 1900 Logan wrote the most extraordinary passage in Vistas from the Stream:
Now that I am getting old, I am beginning to think my thirty years of literary failure have constituted a blessing for me … It seems as if every literary man in the world were ‘successful.' Thousands of unsuccessful men are around one, of course, but they are practically invisible. Failure and death are alike in their loneliness. The vast companionship in each case is invisible.
Although Logan's writing has largely disappeared, his tomb is not the only monument he left behind. Soon after the close of World War I, the still-vigorous Logan single-handedly erected a 65-foot granite clock tower on family land in Goshenville, Chester County to protest against the slaughter in Europe that had just ended. On its bell, he cast these words: “I count the unreturning as they pass.” He named it the Peace Tower. It still stands.
Kevin Plunkett lives near Logan's grave in Bala Cynwyd. He can reached at kevplunkett@hotmail.com.
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