"Macey"

IN THE MILL--John Masefield--Macmillan ($2).

By stiff literary standards, England's Poet Laureate is an easy man to underestimate. But the very qualities that make his work minor (and made him Laureate) --simplicity, traditionalism and sentimentality--are also his great charm. Hardly less than Rudyard Kipling, he is a workingman's poet. The same qualities make In the Mill, the story of the days when he was an intelligent young workingman, one of the most engaging of his books.

In the Mill describes the two years Masefield spent in Yonkers, N.Y., in the late '90s, working for the Alexander Smith Carpet Mills. He worked first at straightening the metal tubes which held the yarns. Later, as "mistake finder," he learned the 30 processes which went into carpetmaking, and all the 1,500 colors, by tint and number. Masefield gives a real sense of the beautifully counterpointed complexities of mill work: "No man can be unmoved by the great concerted energy of many men and women." More than the work, he liked the food, the money and the leisure it gave him.

(He had been a farmer and a sailor.) Sundays, for the first time "at liberty in Nature," he wandered the still unblemished Palisades; or, on Manhattan's South Street, edited the rigging of the world's richest show of sailing vessels. He also read--unsystematically, ignorantly, voluminously--and burned to become a writer.

Every payday he bought more books. Du Maurier suggested Dumas, De Musset, Villon (he picked up French) ; De Quincey brought him toward Wordsworth; Hazlitt, by devious means, to the metaphysicians. He read The Origin of Species and a life of Buddha; he bought a Gray's Anatomy and set his hopes toward medicine. Those hopes were forgotten when he happened on Chaucer, Keats and Shelley, who opened "a world where incredible beauty was daily bread and breath of life."

He was determined to live in that world, from then on. He read Milton through three times in three months. He found William Morris, whom he still regards as "the one sensible man of modern times." Under Shelley's influence he became a vegetarian. Under the influence of everything in sight he began to try his hand at writing.

Meanwhile he blacked his own dollar-a-pair shoes, mended the little triangular tears in his clothes characteristic of his trade, and discussed with mill friends that Second Revolutionary War, the fight between Corbett ("a most lovely splendid man") and Englishman Bob Fitzsimmons.

"Macey" -- that was his factory nick name -- did well at his job; they all thought a lot of him, and as one of the workers told him when he left, he might one day even have charge of a floor. But the pull of England was strong, and that of poetry was stronger. Before he left he had his photograph made (see cut) and gave one to each of his friends. He also got rid of most of his manuscripts. "These, when torn up, filled a large bucket, weighed astonishingly, and burned with a clear flame."

In 1933 John Masefield went back to Yonkers, gave a lecture at the high school (the company is very proud of him), and rejoined old friends of the mill days at the neat boardinghouse he used to live in at 8 Maple Street. William R. Booth had found him working in a Sixth Avenue saloon, and got him the mill job in the first place. Billy Booth has every word his friend has ever written, post cards and letters as well. Like "Macey," he always was a thoughtful, reading man. He still is, but he never left the mill. He is mechanical supply manager now.

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