Struggling as a poet in early 20th-century Chicago, Scharmel Iris hoped for praise from the luminaries of his era. Then he went further.
The poet, says Craig Abbott, used forgery, plagiarism, and imposture in an astonishing campaign of self-promotion. In a run that endured until his death, Iris (1889-1967) merged fact and fantasy as he sought blurbs, publication, prefaces, money, portraits, and above all, praise. Among his targets: Yeats, Eliot, Pound, Shaw, Swinburne, Kipling, Frost, Santayana, Dali, Diego Rivera, Picasso, Jane Addams, Woodrow Wilson, William Wrigley, and even John Ruskin, who, dead of influenza in 1900, had to have praised a very young Iris indeed.
Jaw-dropping in places, Mr. Abbott’s Forging Fame: The Strange Career of Scharmel Iris (Northern Illinois University Press) entertains beyond a constant escalation of Iris’s audacity and narcissism. There is also much wit, as the professor emeritus of English at Northern Illinois chides his subject, and as Pound, Shaw, Eliot, and others weigh in.
Scharmel Iris, of “uncertain paternity,” was born Federico Scaramella in Castelcivita, Italy. Shortly after, his mother married a man who took the family to America. There, in Chicago, a new Frederick, who would become Scharmel with Iris for flourish, grew to enjoy literature and art with the help of Jane Addams’s settlement-house movement.
At 16, he was first published by a Chicago Catholic newspaper. Later editors at a San Francisco publication accepted comments he proffered from Ruskin et al. seemingly without question. At the offices of Harriet Monroe’s Poetry magazine, he crossed paths with Carl Sandburg, Edgar Lee Masters, and other Chicago lights, but Monroe was reluctant to publish his work and urged him to pare down his Romantic stylings. As Mr. Abbott quips, Iris tended to favor all the poetic flowers.
Monroe eventually published the poet, but she was furious after learning he had forged a letter by her in an effort to get the chewing-gum magnate Wrigley to buy a poem about a skyscraper. Forgeries would mark many of Iris’s dealings with the famous. He often wrote to them; he often wrote for them. Among his worst fakes is a preface Iris claimed was written by Yeats in in which the Irishman said of the Chicagoan: “of poets writing today there are no greater.” Over his entire career, Iris worked to protect those words through a palimpsest of lies.
Closing, Mr. Abbott traces Iris’s final decades as, informally, a poet in residence at Lewis College (now University), where the scholar would come to mine his papers. Iris’s death earned a brief obituary without quotations from the famous, he writes, and eliminated forever the poet’s primary audience.
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http://chronicle.com Section: Research & Publishing Volume 53, Issue 50, Page A17
