13. Nathalia Crane — The Janitor’s Boy and Other Poems

Note: Lost Ladies of Lit transcripts are generated using human transcribers, and may contain errors. Please check the corresponding audio before quoting in print.

KIM: Hey, Amy, are you in the mood for some poetry?

AMY: That’s a loaded question. And a scary one. I mean, there’s a lot of bad poetry in the world.

KIM: Okay, but the poetry we’re going to be talking about today was written by an 11-year-old child prodigy.

AMY: Prepubescent poetry? C’mon, Kim. Now I’m absolutely terrified. Yikes.

KIM: Don’t be terrified! The writer’s name is Nathalia Crane, and her story is completely fascinating, if mostly forgotten. It’s going to spark an interesting conversation for today’s “Lost Ladies of Lit” episode, whether you actually like her poetry or not. 

AMY: Okay, if you say so… then all right, let’s raid the stacks and get started!

[Intro music]

AMY: Hi again, everyone, I’m Amy Helmes and I’m here with my writing partner, Kim Askew, for another episode dedicated to shedding light on female writers who have been buried in the shadows. Only today’s episode isn’t about a “lost lady” so much as it’s about a “lost little girl.”

KIM: You’re right. Nathalia Crane was only 9 years old, living in Brooklyn, New York in 1924 when she first began receiving attention for her poetry. She originally wrote her verses alone in her bedroom on a typewriter. But then her father convinced her to send a few to the Brooklyn Daily Times, and later, she sent some to The New York Sun. In both instances, they were accepted, but also in both cases the editors, at first anyway, had no idea that they weren’t dealing with an adult. 

AMY: Yeah, so The New York Sun editor, Edmund Leamy, recalled the moment he actually first met Crane in person. He said: “A call at the office made by the author in answer to a letter about the poem The Army Laundress disclosed to my amazement that the writer was none other than a little girl -- a shy, unassuming youngster who was as embarrassed during the interview as I was myself. For I must admit I was embarrassed -- or rather taken aback.”

KIM: Okay, so from that point, she pretty much became a sensation. She was dubbed “The Brooklyn Bard,” and journalists of the day flocked to write about this pint-sized literary phenom. 

AMY: Her first book of poetry was rushed into print. It was a collection called The Janitor’s Boy, and Pulitzer-Prize winning poet William Rose Benét wrote the foreword to the book. Although he admitted that he was usually skeptical of claims of child prodigies, he felt that Nathalia could be the real deal. He has a very measured take on her talents in this introduction. He’s not fully gushing. But at one point he does compare her to Emily Dickinson, of all people.

KIM: Yeah, and that’s pretty high praise. I mean, almost the highest to some people.  Then a year later, her publisher advertised that Nathalia had been elected into the British Society of Authors, Playwright and Composers (and that was presided over by Thomas Hardy! It was claimed that no poet since Walt Whitman himself had received this distinction… )

AMY: So that sounds pretty impressive on paper, but actually, if you do a little more looking into it, it really wasn’t that big of a deal. That society (that sounds so fancy) it had no really stringent criteria for submission and her dad basically just paid the standard dues so that she could join. (It’s sort of how it works to get a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. If you’re willing to pay, you can get one.) That’s kind of how she got into it, and the publisher eventually backpedaled that brag a little bit, but still, she was receiving a lot of accolades for her work.

KIM: So Crane put out several other volumes of poetry in her early teens, so it wasn’t just a “one-hit-wonder” kind of thing, and that led to some controversy as well, but we’ll get to that in a little bit. First, let’s take a look at some of her early poems.

AMY: And since Nathalia was only 11-years-old when The Janitor’s Boy was published, we thought who better to help introduce us to a few of her poems than an actual 11-year-old girl. We recruited my daughter, Julia, to drop in to today’s episode to help us read a few of Nathalia’s early poems!

KIM: Hi Julia! 

JULIA: Hi!

AMY: So Julia, as you know, we’re talking about a child poet today, Nathalia Crane, and her book of poems that’s called The Janitor’s Boy. Just so you know, she lived in an apartment in Brooklyn, and she actually had a huge crush on the red-haired son of the janitor who lived in her building. His name was Roger Jones. So the first seven poems in the book are about Roger Jones. Okay, Jules, if you were ever to write poems about a boy that you had a crush on, how would you feel about having it published for all the world to read? Would you be down for that?

JULIA: Probably not.

AMY: No? Might be a little embarrassing? Well, Nathalia was cool with it, apparently. But, I want you to go ahead and read one of those initial poems in the book. It’s called “The Vacant Lot.” It’s basically about a property next door to where Nathalia and Roger used to play. And listeners, we’re going to have Julia read it so that you can keep in mind that, basically, a 10-year-old girl wrote this. So go ahead, Jules. 

JULIA: Okay. 

They’re going to build a flat house on the lot next door to me;

And Roger Jones, the janitor’s boy, is mad as he can be.

That lot was like a tropic isle, with weeds and rubbish fair,

The rusty cans and coffee pots that looked like Roger’s hair.

‘Twas oft we strolled among the weeds, we were in love, you see,

And Roger Jones was going to build a bungalow for me.

We used to rest upon a rock just where the weeds were tall;

We were engaged, I think, until the builders spoiled it all.

But now they’ve ruined Roger’s plans, they’ve dug up all the lot;

With all the brick and mortar round, you’d never know the spot.

They came with carts and horses; tore our wilderness apart;

No wonder Roger Jones is wild; it nearly broke my heart.

We could have done some wondrous things if time were not so slow;

The weeds, they might have grown to trees, fit for a bungalow.

With rusty cans and broken glass, we’d planned a home so nice;

But they dumped their brick and mortar in our little paradise.

They dumped their brick and mortar, ‘mid the smoky lakes of lime,

Yet we won’t forget, ‘twas Eden -- Eden, once upon a time.

Eden, where we dreamed supremely -- rusty can and coffee pot;

Eden, with weeds and rubbish, in a vacant city lot.

And now we’re simply waiting, oh, that janitor’s boy and me,

Until the janitor’s boy grows up and finds himself quite free

To just discover areas where builders never go,

Where we may live forever in a little bungalow.

KIM: Julia, that was beautiful.

JULIA: Thank you!

KIM: Yeah, I mean, really, poetry needs to be read. When I hear it read, I love it so much more, and I feel it so much more than reading it on the page. I have a whole new appreciation for that poem after having you read it.

AMY: And hearing it read in the voice of a child, who would have written it.

KIM: Exactly. It was perfect.

AMY: It kind of makes it a little magical.

KIM: Yeah, and you were very expressive, but not too expressive. It was really nice. A lot of these poems really give you that feel of being a kid growing up in Flatbush. Her other poems about Roger talk a lot about all the make-believe they used to play in the neighborhood. It sounded really idyllic in this poem and in the other ones that are in the book.

AMY: Yeah, and at the same time, I think this poem, in particular, represents the sort of ending of childhood innocence, which, to me, seems mature for her to have written that at the age of 10. But, by the same token, a lot of her poems are just kind of silly, and they do seem like they would have been written by a child. They rhyme, and they feel very “Ogden Nash” maybe. Definitely I get a Shel Silverstein vibe. They’re cute, but pretty basic, and we’ll have Julia read one called “Suffering,” for us. So Julia, take it away.

JULIA: 

I sat down on a bumble bee

In Mrs. Jackson’s yard:

I sat down on a bumble bee:

The bee stung good and hard.

I sat down on a bumble bee,

For just the briefest spell,

And I had only muslin on,

As any one could tell.

I sat down on a bumble bee,

But I arose again;

And now I know the tenseness of

Humiliating pain.

AMY: That was a fun one, what did you think of that one, Julia, about her sitting on a bumblebee?

JULIA: I do think it would hurt a lot if you sat on a bumblebee, so, it really explains the pain.

AMY: Now, can you picture a girl your age writing something like that?

JULIA: Well, I mean, I think it’s really cool that she can write this poetry only at the age of like 11 and 10. I just think it’s really cool, how she, like, wrote it.

AMY: And you did a good job, too, and it’s almost past your bedtime now, so we’re going to let you sign off and go to bed, okay? But it was fun having you on. 

JULIA: Okay.

KIM: Thanks, Julia. That was great.

JULIA: Thank you!

AMY: So back to the poetry now…

KIM: Okay, so there’s this other poem, “Jealousy,” which is all about her having to stand guard and be her mother’s “signal corps” whenever Nathalia goes out in the neighborhood with her dad. She knows she has to keep an eye on him to make sure he doesn’t cheat on her mother. So that takes us into a whole new area from the bumblebee poem.

AMY: You just don’t expect that a 10-year-old girl is going to have concerns like that going through her mind. It was kind of funny, but it also stops you in your tracks a little. And one of the final couplets from that poem says: “And mother knows when I go out with Pa, things are O.K./For I belong to the Flatbush Guards -- we don’t let father stray.” Watch out ladies! Nathalia is on patrol!

KIM: It made me laugh, but it also kind of made me cringe that she even had to think about that! Speaking of Nathalia’s father, he was the person who probably most encouraged her writing. He was an erstwhile poet himself with a background working in newspapers, and he used to read aloud poems by Kipling to her, and he was always regaling her with stories from his own travels and adventures. He was a war veteran, both of WWI and the Spanish American War. You can see his influence in the fact that she wrote a few poems with military themes.

AMY: That seems like a pretty unexpected topic for a 10-year-old to me. There’s a whole poem about her playing “toy soldiers” with her dad on the living room floor called “The Battle on the Floor,” and I loved the last few lines from that poem, which read: “For Father feels that every girl/Should have some nerve and tone,/And know just how to manage in/A battle all her own.”

KIM: I love that. That’s good.

AMY: Yeah, like he was getting her ready, you know, ready for the world. But I’m actually going to read another poem which is about this fort that sits in the New York harbor, called Castle Williams, but I guess people know it as “Castle Bill” for short. When Nathalia was a child, it was actually serving as a prison, and so she writes about it in this sort of haunting, romantic way, as the prisoners hear the echoes from this battle in the Philippines in the aftermath of the Spanish American War. That seems like a history that I can’t imagine any 10-year-old girl would know about, but I have to imagine this this was inspired by tales her father told her. So I’ll go ahead and read that one:

Castle Bill

Down on Gov’nor’s Island,

Ivy etched and chill,

Hollow as a halo,

There is Castle “Bill.”

Once the pride of outfits--

Prisoners under guard,

Form for evening roll-call

In the castle yard.

Sentries with their side arms,

Counting, one by one,

While the twilight tarries

For the sunset gun.

Miles away the music

Soundeth at parade

Chanting of Cochita,

Filipino maid;

Chanting of Cochita

Of Corregidor;

Piping of the palm trees

’Long Lunetta shore.

Dusty gunners listen,

Lead and chain and wheel;

Long ago Manila

Held them all to heel;

Boys from all battalions,

Saberless and still,

Waiting on a sunset --

Down in Castle “Bill.”

AMY: So that’s an example of the fact that just a good majority of the poems in this collection don’t necessarily focus on kid themes. The acclaimed poet and critic Louis Untermeyer, who was a champion of Crane’s work, said that this book “was alternately juvenile and mature, frivolous and profound, absurd and mystical.” And I know, Kim, you kind of liked some of the poems in the second half of the book, I think, getting a little more way from some of the rhyming, cutesy stuff.

KIM: Yeah, and speaking of going back to things prior to her time, my poem that I’m going to read goes back even farther. I’m not going to say too much about it until after but I’m going to read “The First Story”:

Mid seaweed on a sultry strand, ten thousand years ago,

A sun-burned baby sprawling lay, a-playing with his toe.

The babe was dreaming of the day that he might swing a club,

When lo! He saw a fishy thing, a-squirming in the mud.

The creature was an octopus, and dangerous to pat,

But the prehistoric infant never stopped to think of that.

The baby’s fingernails were sharp, his appetite was prime,

He clutched that deep-sea monster, for ‘twas nearing supper-time,

Oh! Suddenly, from out the pulp a fluid black did flow,

‘Twas flavored like a barberry wine and gave a sort of glow;

It squirted in the baby’s eyes; it made him gasp and blink,

But to that octopus he held, and drank up all the ink.

The ink was in the baby -- he was bound to write a tale;

So he wrote the first of stories with his little fingernail.

KIM: So I loved the clever idea of this poem. There’s a prehistoric baby imbibing the ink of an octopus and writing the very first story with his fingernail. And the imagery is really great, but it also made me think of Nathalia, herself, a young child, herself, writing these stories, seemingly out of nowhere, with all this arcane knowledge.

AMY: That is a good metaphor, I guess. for Nathalia. I never really thought of that. And you’re right, that in some of these poems, in fact, her vocabulary and the knowledge she’s able to reference seems really astonishing for a girl her age. Especially in her subsequent books of poetry, we see even more of that cerebral sophistication that shines through. And yet, some of Nathalia’s own teachers remarked that she wasn't among their brightest students, or the most well-read. 

KIM: So we’ve dropped some little hints about the controversy. Let’s get completely into it right now. As more and more attention became focused on her, people started to really question whether she could actually have written the poems. In 1925, an American poet named Edwin Markham suggested it was all fake. He said:  "It seems impossible to me that a girl so immature could have written these poems. They are beyond the powers of a girl of twelve. The sophisticated viewpoint of sex, ...knowledge of history and archeology found in these pages place them beyond the reach of any juvenile mind."

AMY: And even her own publisher, Thomas Seltzer, wondered about it. He said: “I am as much mystified as anybody. Nathalia Crane is either a miracle or she is the most colossal hoax in history.” So what do we think of this? Is she a legitimate literary wunderkind or a complete hoax?

KIM: Hmm. I’m not sure. The poems really did seem to have -- as you suggested earlier -- some of these adult concepts. And hearing that her teachers didn’t consider her particularly bright or well-read, you’d think someone that precocious would really stand out at school in one way or another. (Maybe she’d just be annoying.) But that said, I didn’t think the poems were as good as some suggested. But given the evidence, we have, it’s hard to know. I guess she’d at least had some help from her father. He was described in one article as a “raconteur.” 

AMY: Hmmm. Yeah, it’s hard to know this many years later, but he definitely feels like a “stage father,” a little bit. But he also loved poetry, as we mentioned. Could he have maybe finessed or edited some of her works a little bit? Perhaps. I think it’s maybe possible. But I do think that probably most of the poems in The Janitor’s Boy  were written by her. For a normal 10-year-old child, her writing ability would be considered extremely advanced, yes. But it sounds like she was inundated with poetry by her dad growing up, and that probably could have rubbed off on her and given her a gift for writing verse. And given that I know what she does later in her life, I’m willing to say that yes, she had a passion for writing. We don’t know how much editing happened before these books were published, but you know, “the bumblebee” poem, for sure. I totally buy that an 11-year-old wrote that. And even probably the Roger Jones poems. They definitely sound like a child would have written them. But yeah, there are some poems where even I didn’t know the vocabulary words, and that’s saying something. 

KIM: Yep. It is.

AMY: So that said, at one point, Dorothy Parker, one of the founding members of the Algonquin Round Table, she commented on Crane’s talent (or lack thereof, depending on how you choose to read it.) So Parker was writing about an anthology of poems written for a contest about Charles Lindbergh, which she thought was a totally stupid idea in the first place. In The New Yorker magazine, she explains that she's holding this book of poems about Lindbergh in her left hand, and quote: “with my right hand, I am guiding the razor across my throat. Honestly, this book contains the worst stuff you ever saw in your life.” She goes on to say she hoped the aviator would be spared from having to read the “sickly, saccharine, inept, ill-wrought tributes.” This relates to Nathalia Crane because Nathalia won the top prize in this poetry contest and her poem was featured in this book. 

So Parker goes on to say: “The first prize, an award of $500, was given to Nathalia Crane, the Baby Peggy of poesy. [Which, I believe Baby Peggy was some sort of Hollywood Shirley Temple precursor.] A couple of years ago, a controversy raged,” Parker goes on to say, “as to whether or not the twelve-year-old Miss Crane wrote her own works. They were ascribed to various older poets, though whether for the purpose of taking the credit or shouldering the blame I never knew.”

KIM: Ouch! That’s pretty funny, but also, I feel sort of bad for Nathalia if she read any of this stuff. I do love Dorothy Parker, though. She’s very witty and it shows. 

Amy: The New York Times also weighed in on the Nathalia Crane debate. They were of the opinion that she did write her own poems, but like Parker, they weren’t necessarily tactful in their review of her second book of poems, Lava Lane. I’m going to read you just a portion of their review of Lava Lane: “For our own part, we have not the slightest doubt that little Miss Crane is the author of the several versifications attributed to her. We see no reason why there should not be youthful geniuses in poetry as well as musical and mathematical. And after all, poetry is not such a difficult thing to achieve as the quantity of bad verse turned out annually attests. And Nathalia’s verse is bad. Very bad. That is, just so long as it is considered to be poetry as serious-minded critics insist. As soon, however, as it is put in its proper place and treated as juvenilia, it is very good indeed.”

So, I don’t know. Maybe that’s where we fall in line with Nathalia Crane, Kim. You know, I think for a child her poetry is… blows you away. Is it Emily Dickinson? After reading Janitor’s Boy, what do you think?

KIM: No. No. I’d say it’s not Emily Dickinson, but i do think for juvenilia it is quite good. So I think a lot of people saw her as merely a gimmick. And Crane wasn’t the only “girl poet” of this time period. It was kind of a thing. There was a sort of interest around this time in uncovering prodigies in art or music or literature. In terms of poets, there was also Hilda Conkling and Sabine Sicaud, and then later Minou Drouet.

AMY: I haven’t read any of those girls, but yeah, it would be interesting to go back and look at some of their work and compare it to Crane’s and see how they sort of measured up against each other. In any case, public interest in Crane waned when she got older. When she was no longer the cute little girl sensation, people really didn’t pay her as much notice.

KIM: Amy, do we know much about what happened to her once she grew up?

AMY: I could only find bits and pieces of information, really. She studied at Barnard College and then she also attended the Universities of Madrid and Granada as well as the Sorbonne. And, interestingly enough, I read that she graduated from the Gemological Institute of America, which is in Los Angeles. Because she went on to live on the West Coast. She became an assistant professor of literature at San Diego State University, and she continued writing poetry in adulthood, but I couldn’t find too much about those titles, beyond their names, basically. She wrote two novels when she was still quite young, teenager, basically. They’re out of print though The Sunken Garden is one she wrote when she was 13 and I did find an excerpt from it in a 1926 issue of Vanity Fair. It’s about a young girl that’s ship-wrecked on a tropical island. It’s sort of a young girl Robinson Crusoe. It was okay. It was definitely sort of lyrical. It reminded me of her poetry even though it was prose. But the most interesting about this all is the fact that she was famous enough in 1926 for Vanity Fair to decide to print a portion of the book. I feel like that’s a big deal. It just shows that the public was sort of clamoring for her.

In terms of her personal life, she did not grow up to marry the Janitor’s Boy, but she did marry. Her first husband died, and then in 1973, she fell in love with Peter O’Reilly, who was a Roman Catholic priest. He was teaching philosophy professor at CSU San Diego. He gave up the priesthood so that they could get married, and this made news in The New York Times that year in a small announcement, and that’s where I found out some of these details about her life as an adult.

KIM: Oh, that’s really interesting, and I like that she sort of stayed true to her love of literature and taught. It seems to lend her more credence, like you said earlier. That’s really interesting. We also have some other interesting trivia for you. It’s said she’s related to Stephen Crane (who wrote The Red Badge of Courage) and — this one’s really good — Natalie Merchant of the 10,000 Maniacs turned “I’m in Love with the Janitor’s Boy” into a song (And we’ll link to a video of her performing that in our show notes.)

AMY: Yeah, I think it’s kind of cool that Natalie Merchant not only knew about her, but was inspired by her. And speaking of music, it’s actually time to cue our theme song and say good-bye everyone. 

[closing music]

KIM: For more information on this episode, as well as further reading material, you can check out our website, LostLadiesofLit.com. And if you loved this episode, please leave a review. It really helps new listeners to find us!

AMY: Our theme song was written and performed by Jennie Malone, and our logo was designed by Harriet Grant. “Lost Ladies of Lit” is produced by Kim Askew and Amy Helmes.