The Eleventh Virgin by Dorothy Day (important books to read .TXT) 📕

tables in the room, two of them stacked with drawings, manuscripts and proofs in the utmost confusion. Huge drawings stood against the wall, reprints of the same drawings were tacked around the room. On four sides, two shelves had been built and these were crowded with books that had been reviewed, as June could tell by the titles, and books to be reviewed. The one window in the room looked out over Union Square’s battleship.

June explored thoroughly and then sat down at her desk which held a pile of opened mail six inches high. Evidently Mr. Brace didn’t care for reading manuscripts. She did not wonder, as she read them carefully at first and then more swiftly, signing her initials to rejection blanks and enclosing them in return envelopes with their luckless contributions.

One page held these three:

Passersby

There were two of them,
tight-corseted,
tight-lipped,
tight-minded,

jealous
of my loose dress,
loose breasts,
loose morals
the lover at my side.

A Brown Stone Front

My apartment house
stands like an old horse
that is being curried
Two men are shearing off its coat.

The Monkey

Pennies,
Lice,
Garlic and Waterspouts⁠—
When I would swing by my tail from the treetops
Life keeps a cord
About my neck.

Bad as the poems were, June took an enthusiastic interest in all of them. Mr. Brace had said that she was to write letters to those whose work seemed worthy of criticism if not publication and she ventured a few replies, not to be sent however until they had been approved. The work was engrossing, and it was one o’clock before she knew it. By two she had finished the stack, and selecting a book from the shelves which she thought she would like to review for the next number, she proceeded to lunch.

Mr. Brace did not appear in the office for several days and June continued the work which he had pointed out to her at her leisure. She took to arriving at ten, answering the mail and reading by the open window which looked out over Union Square. Artists dropped in now and then, bringing drawings for the next number of the magazine and stopped to chat.

There was a little round-faced, round-bodied man with a curl on the top of his head like one of the Katzenjammer kids. He was the best cartoonist on the staff and in addition to running a comic monthly magazine of his own, represented a large capitalist monthly, for which he drew political cartoons.

There were two serious young artists, one an American Jew and another a Hungarian, who often came together for an hour’s gossip with Brace or June, whoever happened to be in the office.

The younger group of radicals that June met every day no longer talked of the war. That had already been declared. Now it was the draft which followed upon the heels of the declaration on April first. Registration day was June fifth. Were they to register? If they were consistently opposed to war, it was inconsistent to register. Registering and taking the chance that they wouldn’t be conscripted and so have to plead conscientious objection seemed cowardly. Not to register would make them fugitives from the law.

Sometimes June lunched with them and sometimes Ivan and Chester called her on the telephone and she met them at what was their breakfast and her lunch.

Poets came in and sat on the desk swinging their feet and declaiming, or, if they had their poems with them, reading aloud.

But these were only the accredited members of the staff and their friends. Other poets, and other artists came diffidently and asked her advice as to markets and the kind of work the Flame wanted. And June was both condescending and pitiful.

After the first few days when Brace did show up, he looked pale and puffy eyed. “I always loaf a bit after getting the magazine out every month,” he told her.

“You don’t look as though you have been loafing,” June told him.

“Not exactly. Loafing on the job, I meant. I’ve been writing for the last couple of nights and couldn’t sleep in the day.”

He fidgeted around desultorily for a while, approved of the letters that June had written, glanced over the contributions that she had laid to one side for him, and then threw his pen down in disgust.

“I’ve got to do something. This infernal restlessness. Worked myself out and you can’t get drunk in the springtime. It goes against the grain somehow. What’ll we do?” and he turned to June appealingly.

“Goldman and Ulan were in a little while ago and they were starting out for a tramp up the Hudson. You might walk off your feelings.”

He chuckled as he jumped out of his chair and went out into the business office. When he returned he had the business manager and the advertising manager with him. It was an unusual occurrence but all three were in the office at the same time.

“All decided. We’ve dismissed the office force, in other words the stenographer and bookkeeper, and we four will go on a picnic over in New Jersey. I’ve got a little old shack there which I retire to in moments of stress.” Brace was radiant.

“I think I should like to forget free verse for a while,” June sighed, stretching tremendously. “It makes me so angry after I’ve read a hundred samples, that I get all tense from holding myself in. Back here,” and June located the tenseness in the back of her neck, “and ’specially here,” and she rubbed her jaw.

“Chuck the work in the drawer,” Hugh told her briskly. “That tense feeling is just what I’ve been recovering from. After a number as full of ‘suppressed sex’ verse and ‘obscene art’ as this one has been, I feel like going home and writing healthy romances in the style of Marion Crawford. And when I get there I find myself putting down on paper the same ideas the Flame is full of. It’s a good thing for the novel I’m writing that I don’t realize it until I’ve been at it for three days. Then I