A Closeup of Domba Splew

Not since the tardy, posthumous death of Agera Cholera has the American literati been so baffled toward a rising genius of letters than has been demonstrated in regards to the Italian poet, Domba Splew, who, just a year ago, sprang into worldwide indifference by the publication, in The Bookman, of his verse, “La battia fella inna base tuba” (The weasel fell into the bathtub).

It is a matter of history that in the month in which this poem appeared, the circulation of the magazine in which it was printed increased two copies. And the fame of the author on this side of the old pond, as I call it, spread as far west as North Attleboro, Mass. You could not wake up in the morning or any other time without either wife or kiddies yelping, “Sweet papa, did you see this poem of Domba Splew’s, ‘La battia fella inna base tuba’ (The weasel fell into the bathtub)?”

It got so finely a person could not sleep at home at all and I for one rented one of the big New York hotels and slept outdoors, not being able to get a room. Everybody wondered what was the matter, but I laughed at them. Finely the editor of Rickets Weekly caught me in an upright position in the gutter and made me the unheard-of offer of $5.00 and no hundreds dollars to go and interview this America-Italio sensation and find out something about his home life.

To locate a man as famous as him is what Ex-Attorney-General Daugherty would call “les arbeit tough” (a hard job). But the writer, an experienced interviewer, looked upon it as child’s play and went to the nearest city ticket office where luckily I found a clerk who had not returned from lunch.

“Listen,” I said, “where would a man be apt to run acrost a foreign literary genius, discovered only a year ago?”

“Listen,” replied the clerk, “have you tried the artistic and bohemian mecca of American letters?”

“Where is that?” I coughed.

“Scranton, PA,” was the clerk’s reply.

So the writer bought a ticket to Scranton and arrived there only a half hour late.

To make a short story out of a risqué story, I found our hero living on the top floor of a six-story bungalow.

“If,” he said, “I am away from the smoke and chimbley, I am at a lost. In other words, I am a gone gosling.

“Listen,” he said: “I don’t think you know much about Italy, but I will tell you. In the first place there is a military rule which provides that when a native born reaches the age of seven, they must spend the next three years in jail, or, as Oscar Wilde aptly named it, Reading Gaol. The reason I came over to America was on acct. of the fact that there is more words here. I need words.”

In a little while he was supine.

“Now listen,” I said: “I have been sent over here to Scranton to find out about your home life. Tell me what you do all day.”

He went scarlet.

“I have got a set of rules,” he said, pulling a fresh cucumber off the hatrack. “In the morning I get up and talk to my dromedaries. Oh, those dromedaries! I would walk a mile for one of them! I have got a collection of eighty of them and each one more laughable than the first one. Every morning somebody sends me a dromedary. After talking to my dromedaries. I sit down and read the telephone book from cover to cover charge. But now leave me go out and show you my garden.”

The two of us strolled haltingly through his garden, which was an Italian garden with all the Italian dishes in bloom⁠—ravioli, spaghetti, garlic, Aida, and citrous fruits.

“Is this your diversion?” I asked him.

“Yes,” he said, toppling over a govvel sprig and breaking his ankle in two places.

“Tell me about your home life,” I said with a sneer.

“I presume,” he said, taking a pair of suspenders out of the nearest waste basket, “I presume you want to know my daily calendar. Well, I always make it a point to get up at six in the morning and eat my breakfast food.”

I found out later that his breakfast food was ground-up quail feathers, the rest of the carcass being thrown outdoors.

“I,” he continued, “spend my next ten minutes with my dromedaries. It is just a romp. Then I return to my own room, where an ostrich shaves me. Not too close.

“Then I sit down on a milk stool and begin my day’s work. I aim to never write lest than one poem a day. For instance, look at this one I turned out this morning, just after the ostrich had shaved me.”

And he read me the verse that was published by mistake in last month’s Applejack⁠—

Hail to thee, blithe owl!
Bird thou never wantest to been.
Queenly and efflorien,
How did thou ever begin?

“That,” I said, “sounds like a steal on Kipling.”

“Kipling yourself!” said the poet, and I loped over the nearest hedge.

“But listen,” he said: “Have you heard my ‘Gooseflesh,’ after the style of Alfred Geese?”

There was no use saying no:

Quiescent, a person sits heart and soul,
Thinking of daytime and Amy Lowell.
A couple came walking along the street;
Neither of them had ever met.

“That,” said Mr. Splew, “is the verse I have worked on all winter.”

“It’s been a hard winter,” I said. “We didn’t have enough coal either.”

With that, he climbed up on top of the pigeon house.

“I want to tell you about my wife,” he said. “She has got what is called chronic paralysis. She has a stroke every day, but it is never quite enough.”

With that, he led me into the beehive, where he and the dromedaries eat all their meals.

“Now, Mr. Splew,” I said, “my editor wanted me to ask you how you got the name ‘Domba.’ He thought it might be a contraction of Dumbbell.”

“Your editor is both wrong,” said Mr. Splew. “I was named for my father, who gave the money to found the Kalter Aufschnitt (Cold High School) in Rome. And the children that attended the school said it must have been dumbfounded. Would you like to go into the pool?”