Herman George Scheffauer (February 3, 1876 – October 7, 1927) was a German-American poet, architect, writer, dramatist, journalist, and translator.
San Francisco childhood Little is known about Scheffauer's youth, education and his early adult years in America, or, about his parents and siblings. His father was Johann Georg Scheffauer, a cabinet maker ("Tischler"), probably born in 1842 in the village of Unterkochen, Württemberg, who, according to Hamburg passenger lists, had first immigrated to America in 1868, returning again to Germany where he married Maria Theresa Eisele in Augsburg, and who then came back with him to America in 1872.Who's Who in America: a Biographical Dictionary of Notable Living Men and Women of the United States. 1908–1909. His brother was the civil engineer, Frederick Carl Scheffauer, born in 1878The National Cyclopædia of American Biography, Vol. 57, p. 611. and he had another younger brother, Walter Alois Scheffauer (1882–1975). The family was related to the German painter and sculptor Philipp Jacob Scheffauer (1756–1808)"Scheffauer, Philipp Jacob", Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie 30 (1890), S. 672–676 (Onlinefassung) who it was said was his great-grandfather,"Die Tragodie eines Publizisten. Der Schriftsteller Hermann George Scheffauer ersticht seine Sekretaerin und veruebt Selbstmord. Die Motive bisher unbekannt", Hamburger Anzeiger (8 October 1927), p. 4. who went to the same school as the poet Friedrich Schiller and in Stuttgart moved in a circle of German poets such as Friedrich Haug, Ludwig Ferdinand Huber and Friedrich Hölderlin.
Educated in public and private schools, he attended a Roman Catholic Sunday school in San Francisco, where services were conducted in German. He later wrote about the role of the nuns there and a certain Father Gerhard, instilling into the youth of this school terrifying and hellish religious imagery.Scheffauer in: Was wir Ernst Haeckel verdanken. Ein Buch der Verehrung und Dankbarkeit, 2 Bde. Hrsg. v. Heinrich Schmidt (Leipzig, 1914), 2, S.75. It is highly probable that Scheffauer had read the serialisation of James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man that, with Ezra Pound's assistance, had originally appeared in The Egoist (1914–1915). Heinrich Schmidt translated Scheffauer's English essay into German. His parents were not orthodox, in fact he spoke of being shocked by his father's religious indifference and scepticism. He discovered that he was a poet from about the age of ten, on a school outing, where the pupils ascended Mount Olympus in the Ashbury Heights neighbourhood of San Francisco. He impressed his school friends with his ability to recount the ascent, as he put it:
Suddenly I burst forth into a jog-trot doggerel. I chanted the heroic deeds of the day – the ascent of the peak, the routing of a belligerent bull, the piratical manoeuvres on a pond. The delivery of this improvised epic was volcanic. My companions regarded me with awe and suspicion. Thus, primitively and barbarically, I began. The climate had had its will of me – that marvellous 'Greek' climate of California which works like champagne upon the temperament. I was fated to become one of the native sons of song.Herman Scheffauer. "How I Began", in: T. P.'s Weekly (April 3, 1914, p. 419).
From then on he only wanted to write poetry but his parents insisted that he pursue a proper job. He began his career as an amateur printer, printing a broadsheet called The Owl while he was still at school writing satires on his schoolmates and teachers and "mournful valedictory odes". He went through a youthful period, through which he thought all young poets with an imaginative cast of mind must inevitably pass, namely a combination of what he termed "idealistic fanaticism and Byronic romanticism".Was wir Ernst Haeckel verdanken. Ein Buch der Verehrung und Dankbarkeit, 2 Bde. Hrsg. v. Heinrich Schmidt (Leipzig, 1914), 2, S.77."Ich war jetzt in jener unglücklichen, jugendlichen Periode von idealistischer Schwärmerei und Byronscher Romantik, durch welche alle, besonders die mit phantasievollen gemüt, hindurchgehen müssen." He studied art, painting and architecture at the Arts School of the University of California (The Mark Hopkins Institute). He later worked as an architect, a teacher of draughting and a water colourist.Who's who in America (1908), vol. 5, p. 1663.
Early intellectual influences He was aware that "Ingersoll was in the air",Was wir Ernst Haeckel verdanken, op. cit, S.76. a reference to the ideas of Robert G. Ingersoll the American freethinker and agnostic, and Scheffauer admitted that at first he looked upon Ingersoll and his followers as "enemies", and intellectually cowering, as it were, he read The Night Thoughts (1742) of the deeply religious English poet Edward Young to reaffirm his faith."Ich führte gegen sie flammende Stellen aus dem durch und durch düsteren Werk Youngs, den "Nachtgedanken", an." op. cit., S.77.
However, he soon departed from his religiosity and became aware of the heated discussions about the "missing link" in the writings of John Augustine Zahm, the priest and professor of physics at the University of Notre Dame (South Bend, Indiana). He said that the following authors came to his aid in California bringing him "light and fire",Was wir Ernst Haeckel verdanken, op. cit., S. 77. namely works by Charles Darwin, Thomas Huxley, Arthur Schopenhauer, Herbert Spencer, Ludwig Feuerbach and Ludwig Büchner. Probably the greatest influence on his thinking, in the sense of a clearer scientific Weltanschauung, was a chance encounter with a work of the German zoologist, biologist and philosopher, and popularizer of Darwin's evolutionary theory, Ernst Haeckel.See John Vivian (2023) “eine Propaganda der Liebe und des Lichtes…”: On the Reception of Haeckel’s Popularization of Science in California around 1900 : The San Francisco ‘Bohemians’ as Haeckel’s American Disciples. In: Haeckels ambivalentes Vermächtnis. Halle (Saale), Stuttgart: Wissenschaftliche Verlagsgesellschaft Stuttgart. S. 57–70; 77–88. (= NAL-historica)., He came across the massively popular book Die Welträtsel (The world riddles or enigmas) in the F.W. Barkhouse bookshop, 213 Kearney Street, San Francisco, which was translated by Joseph McCabe as The Riddle of the Universe at the close of the nineteenth century (1901). He bought a copy and read half of it the same evening and the rest in his architect bureau the following day. He would later describe himself as a monist poet, and claimed that together with his close friend George Sterling they represented "a new school of poetry" in California, developing "a poetry that sought to unify poetry with science".See Scheffauer's article "The Poetry in Our Path", in: Out West [Los Angeles, Cal.] New Series Vol. 2, June, 1911, Number 1, pp. 33–36.
Protégé of Ambrose Bierce Scheffauer later gave up his architectural day job and wrote poetry and short stories. He was encouraged by his friend and mentor Ambrose Bierce the journalist, short story writer and veteran of the Civil War. How they actually first met is uncertain. It has been claimed,Edward F. O'Day, "The Poetry of San Francisco", The Lantern. Edited by Theodore F. Bonnet and Edward F. O'Day, Vol. 3. No. 6, September 1917, p. 176. that Bierce had first noticed a poem of his entitled The Fair Grounds that he had entered in a literary competition in 1893, organised by the San Francisco newspaper The Call.
Scheffauer who was only 17 years of age had used the pseudonym Jonathan Stone, and his poem was favorably compared to the American romantic poet William Cullen Bryant.The Call (San Francisco), Vol. 74, Number 179, November 26, 1893. Bierce, who was 36 years older, became an alternative father figure for him and as a mentor criticized, encouraged and nurtured his poetic sensibility. Bierce published a number of his poems in his own "Prattle" columns. In 1899 Bierce was responsible for the so-called "Poe-Scheffauer affair". One of Scheffauer's poems, "The Sea of Serenity" (1893) was published in the San Francisco Examiner on March 12, 1899, albeit not under his own name but heralded as "an unpublished poem" of Edgar Allan Poe".See Carroll D. Hall, Bierce and the Poe hoax. With an Introduction by Carey McWilliams (San Francisco, The Book Club of California, 1934.)
This carefully planned "Poe hoax" passed without creating too much attention. However, it elicited some of the greatest praise from Bierce for the young poet:
I am very far from saying that I think the poem mentioned was written by Poe ... As to internal evidence— evidence inhering in the poem itself— that is strongly in favor of Poe's authorship. If not written by him it was written by his peer in that kind of writing— by one who has so thoroughly mastered the method that there is nowhere a slip or fault. The writer, if not Poe, has caught the trick of Poe's method utterly, in both form and manner, the trick of his thought, the trick of his feeling and the trick of that intangible something which eludes nomenclature, description and analysis ... He need not fear any dimming of his glory, for distinctly greater than the feat of hearing "a voice from the grave of Edgar Allan Poe" is the feat of discovering a ventriloquist with that kind of voice.
Another early poem of his, also written in the spirit of Poe, entitled The Isle of the Dead (1894) was later published under his own name in the Californian Overland Monthly. The poem was published together with the image of the painting 'Die Toteninsel' by the Swiss-German artist Arnold Böcklin. Scheffauer translated Goethe, read Walt Whitman and Rudyard Kipling avidly, adored W. B. Yeats and discussed with Bierce varied themes such as the poems of the Irish poet Thomas Moore who he declared to be "the greatest of the lover poets"Walter Neale, Life of Ambrose Bierce (New York, 1929), p. 222. Poe also said of Moore's "Melodies" and the lines beginning:"Come, rest in this bosom." that "The intense energy of their expression is not surpassed by anything in Byron." Poe also acclaimed his imaginative qualities in opposition to Coleridge. See the essay "The Poetic Principle" and Poe's review of Moore's 'Alciphron' in: "Tom Moore: Fancy and Imagination" both in: The Fall of the House of Usher, and other Tales and Prose Writings of Edgar Poe. Ed. by Ernest Rhys (London: Walter Scott Ltd., 1920), pp. 253, 299–301. and the technical nature of Algernon Swinburne's alliteration. The full correspondence with Bierce has not yet been published but the encouragement and belief that he showed in him as a young American poet is palpable: "I so like the spirit of your letter of July 7! It gives me assurance of your future. You are to do great work, believe me. I shall not see it all, but that does not greatly matter, having the assurance of it."AB to HS, August 4, 1903, p. 110. In his 'Prattle' column in 1897 he had already called the young poet "...my gifted young friend "Jonathan Stone" – of whom I have already filed a prediction that the world will one day be turning an attentive ear his way."The San Francisco Examiner, 8 Aug. 1897, p. 18.