brain he drew matter that was never dull, never
bitter or petty or slovenly. In the fervent attack and counter-attack,
shock and counter-shock of his strenuous days he never forgot his
secret loyalty to fine craftsmanship. He kept half a dozen brightly
coloured balls spinning in air at all times--verses, essays, reviews,
lectures, introductions, interviews, anthologies, and what-not; yet each
of these was deftly done. When he went to France and his days of hack
work were over, when the necessities of life no longer threatened him,
the journalistic habit fell away. It was never more than a garment, worn
gracefully, but still only what the tailors call a business suit.

In France, Kilmer wrote but a handful of pieces intended for
publication, but at least one of them--the prose sketch "Holy
Ireland"--showed his essential fibre. The comparative silence of his pen
when he found himself face to face with war was a true expression. It
bespoke the decent idealism that underlay the combats of a journalist
wringing a living out of the tissues of a busy brain. The tender humour
and quaint austerity of his homeward letters exhibit the man at his
inmost. What could better the imaginative genius of the phrase in which
he speaks of friendship developed by common dangers and hardships as "a
fine, hearty, roaring, mirthful sort of thing, like an open fire of
whole pine trees in a giant's castle?"

The memoir and Kilmer's own letters admit us to see something of the
spiritual phases of this man's life, whose soul found "happiness and
quiet kind" in the Roman Catholic faith. The most secret strengths and
weaknesses that govern men's lives are strangely unknown to many of
their intimates: one wonders how many of Kilmer's associates on the
_Times_ staff knew of his habit of stopping daily at the Church of the
Holy Innocents, near the newspaper office, to pray. It was the sorrow of
personal affliction that brought Kilmer to the Catholic Church. Shortly
after being received into that communion he wrote:

Just off Broadway on the way from the Hudson Tube Station to the
Times Building, there is a church called the Church of the Holy
Innocents. Since it is in the heart of the Tenderloin, this name
is strangely appropriate--for there surely is need of youth and
innocence. Well, every morning for months I stopped on my way to
the office and prayed in this church for faith. When faith did
come, it came, I think