The Imprint of Alan Swallow: Quality Publishing in the West

10 Postmortem

155 10 Postmortem mae called her mother in Powell as the Elders were getting ready to go out to a family Thanksgiving dinner. At two pm her father, Ralph Elder, sat down and wrote to her in his meticulous longhand that Alan “evidently went the way he would have wished to (at work).” He added his confidence that Mae had “the ability and poise to meet the situation and carry on as Allan [sic] would have wished to do.” He also said he was certain that Alan would not “leave his business affairs in a mess (as they say) and as some people do.”1 In Portland, Vi Gale was getting ready to leave the house for lunch with a writer friend when she heard a radio broadcaster say something about Alan Swallow in Denver and an apparent heart attack. She called a man she knew who worked for the Portland Oregonian and he said he would check the Associated Press wire. When her friend came back to the phone, he said, “The news is bad; he’s gone.” Gale felt that she had known it all along.2 At his breakfast table on Friday morning, the poet and journalist Thomas Hornsby Ferril opened his Rocky Mountain News and read of his friend’s death. A few minutes later, he opened the family mailbox, found a Sage Books catalog for 1965 on top of the pile, and counted 156 | The Impr int of A lan Swallow the titles. There were 209, new and old. “Alan Swallow’s name must be perpetuated by some fitting memorial,” he wrote in his column the next week.3 The University of Denver announced plans for an Alan Swallow Memorial Fund.4 When he received a copy of a circular letter from Dean John R. Little of the university faculty asking for donations to the fund, Vardis Fisher wrote that he favored the idea, but considered Swallow both “a great man in some ways” and “a sly and calculating deceiver” and believed that “all should be known about him, the great and the not so great, the admirable and the detestable.” “Damn it, I loved Alan, but he put me in such an impossible position that the resentment still flows through my nerves,” he told a friend.5 To another he said, “You’re jumping the gun: let’s not have a minor ‘John F. Kennedy ’ apotheosis on Alan. If there is to be any kind of memorial . . . let it be considered and unanimous.”6 In the spring of 1968, the poet Rolfe Humphries donated money to finance a scholarship in the Swallow name, covering fee, tuition, board and room, and some travel over at least a four-year period.7 Two days after Alan Swallow’s death, a memorial service was held in the newly rebuilt Gothic-style Evans Chapel at the university, with an Episcopal priest presiding . Swallow was not a religious man, but his daughter was a religious woman, and it was Karen who pushed for the church service.8 A selection of her father’s poems was read, including the one he chose to open his volume The Remembered Land: Postmortem | 157 Stone The older poets were wrong, speaking the lone Imperturbable, imperishable, imponderable stone Because a rock faced sun surviving human eyes. For even stone dissolves and dies. With wear of water, split of frost, Stones break, and down the river-sewers are lost. And feeble too those men who placed A stone at the grave’s end, now with the words effaced. Who knows the hawk speaks well of rock and cliff, Finding a haven there when wings are stiff. And man in his hawk-days breathed life in stone, Chipping and grinding it down, extending his bone. Turn hammer words on rock, the fugitive: So stone will live. The family requested contributions to the ACLU in lieu of flowers.9 Alan Swallow was cremated, as he had wished. The family wanted to scatter the ashes from an airplane, but they were told this would be illegal, and the ashes were deposited in the backyard of the York Street house. A gravestone was later placed in the cemetery in Powell. On Sunday evening, at her home near Lake Washington in Seattle, Carol Harper had just put into the mailbox, to be sent to Alan, a page from a nautical magazine concerning her friend Rawls. Her husband, Maurice...