"A few days later I came suddenly upon the face again. The very incongruity of its alliance with laughter overwhelmed me, and wonderingly I read what he had written, not once, but every day, always with the handicap of that half-tone. If Cobb were an older man, I would go on the witness stand and swear that the photograph was made when he was witnessing the Custer Massacre or the passing of Geronimo through the winter quarters of his enemies. Notwithstanding, he supplied my week's laughter.

"Digression this:

"After Bret Harte died, many stories were written by San Franciscans who knew him when he first put in an appearance on the Pacific Coast. One contemporary described minutely how Bret would come silently up the stairs of the old Alta office, glide down the dingy hallway through the exchange room, and seat himself at the now historic desk. It took Bret fifteen minutes to sharpen a lead pencil, one hour for sober reflection, and three hours to write a one-stick paragraph, after which he would carefully tear it up, gaze out of the window down the Golden Gate, and go home.

"He repeated this formula the following day, and at the end of the week succeeded in turning out three or four sticks which he considered fit to print. In later years, after fame had sought him out and presented him with a fur-lined overcoat, which I am bound to say Bret knew how to wear, the files of the Alta were ransacked for the pearls he had dropped in his youth. A few gems were identified, a very few. Beside this entire printed collection the New England Primer would have looked like a set of encyclopedias. Bret worked slowly, methodically, brilliantly, and is an imperishable figure in American letters.

"Returning to Cobb: He has already written twenty times more than Bret Harte turned out during his entire career. He has made more people laugh and written better short stories. He has all of Harte's subtle and delicate feeling, and will, if he is spared, write better novels about the people of today than Bret Harte, with all his genius and imagination, wrote around the Pioneers. I know of no single instance where one man has shown such fecundity and quality as Irvin Cobb has so far evinced, and it is my opinion that his complete works at fifty will contain more good humour, more good short stories, and at least one bigger novel than the works of any other single contemporaneous figure.

"He was born in Paducah, Kentucky, in June, '76. I have taken occasion to look into the matter and find that his existence was peculiarly varied. He belonged to one of those old Southern families-there being no new Southern families—and passed through the public schools sans incident. At the age of sixteen he went into the office of The Paducah Daily News as a reportorial cub.

"He was first drawn to daily journalism because he yearned to be an illustrator. Indeed, he went so far as to write local humorous stories, illustrating them himself. The pictures must have been pretty bad, although they served to keep people from saying that his literature was the worst thing in the paper.

"Resisting all efforts of the editor, the stockholders and the subscribers of The Paducah Daily News, he remained barricaded behind his desk until his nineteenth year, when he was crowned with a two-dollar raise and a secondary caption under his picture which read 'The Youngest Managing Editor of a Daily Paper in the United States.'

"If Cobb was consulted in the matter of this review, he would like to have these preliminaries expunged from his biography. But the public is entitled to the details.

"It is also true that he stacked up more libel suits than a newspaper of limited capital with a staff of local attorneys could handle before he moved to Louisville, where, for three years, he was staff correspondent of The Evening Post. It was here that Cobb discovered how far a humorist could go without being invited to step out at 6 a.m. and rehearse 'The Rivals' with real horse-pistols.

"The first sobering episode in his life occurred when the Goebel murder echoed out of Louisville. He reported this historic assassination and covered the subsequent trials in the Georgetown court house. Doubtless the seeds of tragedy, which mark some of his present work, were sown here. Those who are familiar with his writings know that occasionally he sets his cap and bells aside and dips his pen into the very darkness of life. We find it particularly in three of his short stories entitled 'An Occurrence Up a Side Street,' 'The Belled Buzzard,' and 'Fishhead.' Nothing better can be found in Edgar Allan Poe's collected works. One is impressed not only with the beauty and simplicity of his prose, but with the tremendous power of his tragic conceptions and his art in dealing with terror. There appears to be no phase of human emotion beyond his pen. Without an effort he rises from the level of actualities to the high plane of boundless imagination, invoking laughter or tears at will.

"After his Louisville experience Cobb married and returned to Paducah to be managing editor of The Democrat. Either Paducah or The Democrat got on his nerves and, after a comparison of the Paducah school of journalism with the metropolitan brand, he turned his face (see Evening World half-tone) in the direction of New York, buoyed up by the illusion that he was needed there along with other reforms.

"He arrived at the gates of Manhattan full of hope, and visited every newspaper office in New York without receiving encouragement to call again. Being resourceful he retired to his suite of hall bedrooms on 57th Street West and wrote a personal note to every city editor in New York, setting forth in each instance the magnificent intellectual proportions of the epistolographer. The next morning, by mail, Cobb had offers for a job from five of them. He selected The Evening Sun.

"At about that time the Portsmouth Peace Conference convened, and The Sun sent the Paducah party to help cover the proceedings. Upon arriving at Portsmouth, Cobb cast his experienced eye over the situation, discovered that the story was already well covered by a large coterie of competent, serious-minded young men, and went into action to write a few columns daily on subjects having no bearing whatsoever on the conference. These stories were written in the ebullition of youth, inspired by the ecstasy which rises from the possession of a steady job; a perfect deluge from the well springs of spontaneity. There wasn't a single fact in the entire series, and yet The Sun syndicated these stories throughout the United States. All they possessed was I-N-D-I-V-I-D-U-A-L-I-T-Y.

"At the end of three weeks, Cobb returned to New York, to find that he could have a job on any newspaper in it. This brings him to The Evening World, the half-tone engraving, which was the first glimpse I had of him, and the dawn of his subsequent triumphs. For four years he supplied the evening edition and The Sunday World with a comic feature, to say nothing of a comic opera, written to order in five days. The absence of a guillotine in New York State accounts for his escape for this latter offence. Nevertheless, in all else his standard of excellence ascended. He reported the Thaw trial in long-hand, writing nearly 600,000 words of testimony and observation, establishing a new style for reporting trials, and gave further evidence of his power. That performance will stand out in the annals of American journalism as one of the really big reportorial achievements.

"At about this juncture in his career Cobb opened a door to the past, reached in and took out some of the recollections of his youth. These he converted into 'The Escape of Mr. Trimm,' his first short fiction story. It appeared in The Saturday Evening Post. The court scene was so absolutely true to life, so minutely perfect in its atmosphere, that a Supreme Court judge signed an unsolicited and voluntary note for publication, in which he said that Mr. Cobb had reported with marvelous accuracy and fulness a murder trial at which His Honour had presided.

"Gelett Burgess, in a lecture at Columbia College, said that Cobb was one of the ten great American humourists. Cobb ought to demand a recount. There are not ten humourists in the world, although Cobb is one of them. The extraordinary thing about Cobb is that he can turn a burst of laughter into a funeral oration, a snicker into a shudder and a smile into a crime. He writes in octaves, striking instinctively all the chords of humour, tragedy, pathos and romance with either hand. Observe this man in his thirty-ninth year, possessing gifts the limitations of which even he himself has not yet recognised.

"In appraising a genius, we must consider the man's highest achievement, and in comparing him with others the verdict must be reached only upon consideration of his best work. For scintillant wit and unflagging good humour, read his essays on the Teeth, the Hair and the Stomach. If you desire a perfect blending of all that is essential to a short story, read 'The Escape of Mr. Trimm' or 'Words and Music.' If you are in search of pure, unadulterated, boundless terror, the gruesome quality, the blackness of despair and the fear of death in the human conscience, 'Fishhead,' 'The Belled Buzzard' or 'An Occurrence Up a Side Street' will enthrall you.

"Thus in Irvin Cobb we find Mark Twain, Bret Harte and Edgar Allan Poe at their best. Reckon with these potentialities in the future. Speculate, if you will, upon the sort of a novel that is bound, some day, to come from his pen. There seem to be no pinnacles along the horizon of the literary future that are beyond him. If he uses his pen for an Alpine stock, the Matterhorn is his.

"There are critics and reviewers who do not entirely agree with me concerning Cobb. But they will.

"As I write these lines I recall a conversation I had with Irvin Cobb on the hurricane deck of a Fifth Avenue 'bus one bleak November afternoon, 1911. We had met at the funeral of Joseph Pulitzer, in whose employ we had served in the past.

"Cobb was in a reflective mood, chilled to the marrow, and not particularly communicative.

"At the junction of Fifth Avenue and Forty-second Street we were held up by congested traffic. After a little manoeuvring on the part of a mounted policeman, the Fifth Avenue tide flowed through and onward again.

"'It reminds me of a river,' said Cobb, 'into which all humanity is drawn. Some of these people think because they are walking up-stream they are getting out of it. But they never escape. The current is at work on them. Some day they will get tired and go down again, and finally pass out to sea. It is the same with real rivers. They do not flow uphill.'

"He lapsed into silence.

"'What's on your mind?' I inquired.

"'Nothing in particular,' he said, scanning the banks of the great municipal stream, 'except that I intend to write a novel some day about a boy born at the headwaters. Gradually he floats down through the tributaries, across the valleys, swings into the main stream, and docks finally at one of the cities on its banks. This particular youth was a great success—in the beginning. Every door was open to him. He had position, brains, and popularity to boot. He married brilliantly. And then The Past, a trivial, unimportant Detail, lifted its head and barked at him. He was too sensitive to bark back. Thereupon it bit him and he collapsed.'

"Again Cobb ceased talking. For some reason—indefinable—I respected his silence. Two blocks further down he took up the thread of his story again:

"'—and one evening, just about sundown, a river hand, sitting on a stringpiece of a dock, saw a derby hat bobbing in the muddy Mississippi, floating unsteadily but surely into the Gulf of Mexico.'

"As is his habit, Cobb tugged at his lower lip.

"'What are you going to call this novel?'

"'I don't know. What do you think?'

"'Why not "The River"?'

"'Very well, I'll call it "The River."'

"He scrambled from his seat. 'I'm docking at Twenty-seventh Street. Good-bye. Keep your hat out of the water.'

"Laboriously he made his way down the winding staircase from the upper deck, dropped flat-footed on the asphalt pavement, turned his collar up, leaned into the gust of wind from the South, and swung into the cross-current of another stream.

"I doubt if he has any intention of calling his story 'The River.' But I am sure the last chapter will contain something about an unhappy wretch who wore a derby hat at the moment he walked hand in hand with his miserable Past into the Father of Waters.

"For those who wish to know something of his personal side, I can do no better than to record his remarks to a stranger, who, in my presence, asked Irvin Cobb, without knowing to whom he was speaking, what kind of a person Cobb was.

"'Well, to be perfectly frank with you,' replied the Paducah prodigy, 'Cobb is related to my wife by marriage, and if you don't object to a brief sketch, with all the technicalities eliminated, I should say in appearance he is rather bulky, standing six feet high, not especially beautiful, a light roan in colour, with a black mane. His figure is undecided, but might be called bunchy in places. He belongs to several clubs, including The Yonkers Pressing Club and The Park Hill Democratic Marching Club, and has always, like his father, who was a Confederate soldier, voted the Democratic ticket. He has had one wife and one child and still has them. In religion he is an Innocent Bystander.'

"Could anything be fuller than this?"

iv

It was Mr. Davis, also, who in the New York Herald of April 23, 1922, made public the evidence for the following box score:

1st 2nd

Best Writer of Humour Cobb —— Best All-Round Reporter Cobb —— Best Local Colourist Cobb —— Best in Tales of Horror Cobb —— Best Writer of Negro Stories —— Cobb Best Writer of Light Tarkington Cobb and Humorous Fiction Harry Leon Wilson Best Teller of Anecdotes Cobb Cobb

"Not long ago a group of ten literary men—editors, critics, readers and writers—were dining together. Discussion arose as to the respective and comparative merits of contemporaneous popular writers. It was decided that each man present should set down upon a slip of paper his first, second and third choices in various specified but widely diversified fields of literary endeavour, and that then the results should be compared. Admirers of Cobb's work will derive a peculiar satisfaction from the outcome. It was found that as a writer of humour he had won first place; that as an all round reporter he had first place; that as a handler of local colour in the qualified sense of a power of apt, swiftly-done, journalistic description, he had first place. He also had first place as a writer of horror yarns. He won second place as a writer of darkey stories. He tied with Harry Leon Wilson for second place as a writer of light humorous fiction, Tarkington being given first place in this category. As a teller of anecdotes he won by acclamation over all contenders. Altogether his name appeared on eight of the ten lists."

Cobb lives at Ossining, New York. He describes himself as lazy, but convinces no one. He likes to go fishing. But he has never written any fish stories.

BOOKS BY IRVIN S. COBB

BACK HOME COBB'S ANATOMY THE ESCAPE OF MR. TRIMM COBB'S BILL OF FARE ROUGHING IT DE LUXE EUROPE REVISED PATHS OF GLORY OLD JUDGE PRIEST FIBBLE, D.D. SPEAKING OF OPERATIONS LOCAL COLOR SPEAKING OF PRUSSIANS THOSE TIMES AND THESE THE GLORY OF THE COMING THE THUNDERS OF SILENCE THE LIFE OF THE PARTY FROM PLACE TO PLACE "OH, WELL, YOU KNOW HOW WOMEN ARE!" THE ABANDONED FARMERS SUNDRY ACCOUNTS A PLEA FOR OLD CAP COLLIER ONE THIRD OFF EATING IN TWO OR THREE LANGUAGES J. POINDEXTER, COLORED STICKFULS

Plays: FUNABASHI BUSYBODY BACK HOME SERGEANT BAGBY GUILTY AS CHARGED UNDER SENTENCE

SOURCES ON IRVIN S. COBB

Who's Who in America.

Who's Cobb and Why? Booklet published by GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY. (Out of print).

Article by Robert H. Davis in the book section of THE NEW YORK HERALD for April 23, 1922.

Robert H. Davis, 280 Broadway, New York.



CHAPTER XII

PLACES TO GO

i

The book by Thomas Burke called More Limehouse Nights was published in England under the title of Whispering Windows. At the time of its publication, Mr. Burke wrote the following:

"The most disconcerting question that an author can be asked, and often is asked, is: 'Why did you write that book?' The questioners do not want an answer to that immediate question; but to the implied question: 'Why don't you write some other kind of book?' To either question there is but one answer: BECAUSE.

"Every writer is thus challenged. The writer of comic stories is asked why he doesn't write something really serious. The novelist is asked why he doesn't write short stories, and the short-story writer is asked why he doesn't write a novel. To me people say, impatiently: 'Why don't you write happy stories about ordinary people?' And the only answer I can give them is: 'Because I can't. I present life as I see it.'

"I am an ordinary man, but I don't understand ordinary men. I am at a loss with them. But with the people of whom I write I have a fellow-feeling. I know them and their sorrows and their thwarted strivings and I understand their aberrations. I cannot see the romance of the merchant or the glamour of the duke's daughter. They do not permit themselves to be seized and driven by passion and imagination. Instead they are driven by fear, which they have misnamed Commonsense. These people thwart themselves, while my people are thwarted by malign circumstance.

"Often I have taken other men to the dire districts about which I write, and they have remained unmoved; they have seen, in their phrase, nothing to get excited about. Well, one cannot help that kind of person. One cannot give understanding to the man who regards the flogging of children as a joke, or to whom a broken love-story is, in low life, a theme for smoking-room anecdotes.

"Wherever there are human creatures there are beauty and courage and sacrifice. The stories in Whispering Windows deal with human creatures, thieves, drunkards, prostitutes, each of whom is striving for happiness in his or her way, and missing it, as most of us do. Each has hidden away some fine streak of character, some mark below which he will not go. And—they are alive. They have met life in its ugliest phases, and fought it.

"My answer, then, to the charge of writing 'loathsome' stories, is that these things happen. To those who say that cruelty and degradation are not fit subjects for fiction, I say that all twists and phases of the human heart are fit subjects for fiction.

"The entertainment of hundreds of thousands with 'healthy' literature is a great and worthy office; but the author can only give out what is in him. If I write of wretched and strange things, it is because these move me most. Happiness needs no understanding; but these darker things—they are kept too much from sensitive eyes and polite ears; and so are too harshly judged upon the world's report. I am no reformer; I have never 'studied' people; and I have no 'purpose,' unless it be illumination.

"What we all need today is illumination; for only through full knowledge can we come to truth—and understanding."

ii

Burke's new book, The London Spy, is described by the author as "a book of town travels." Some of the subjects are London street characters, cab shelters, coffee stalls and street entertainers. The range is very wide, for there is a chapter called "In the Streets of Rich Men," which deals with Pall Mall and Piccadilly, as well as a study of a waterside colony, including the results of a first pipe of opium ("In the Streets of Cyprus"). Mr. Burke tells a good deal about the film world of Soho and is able to give an intimate sketch of Chaplin. Perhaps the most charming of the titles in the book is the chapter called "In the Street of Beautiful Children." This is a study of a street in Stepney, with observations on orphanages and reformatories and "their oppressions of the children of the poor."

Thomas Burke was born in London and seldom lives away from it. He started writing when employed in a mercantile office, and sold his first story when sixteen. He sincerely hopes nobody will ever discover and reprint that story. His early struggles have been recounted in his Nights in London. He married Winifred Wells, a young London poet, author of The Three Crowns. He lives at Highgate, on the Northern Heights of London. He hates literary society and social functions generally. His chief recreation is wandering about London.

iii

There is very little use in doing a book about China nowadays unless you can do an unusual book about China; and that, precisely, is what E. G. Kemp has done. Chinese Mettle is an unusual book, even to the shape of it (it is nearly square though not taller than the ordinary book). The author has written enough books on China to cover all the usual ground and, as Sao-Ke Alfred Sze of the Chinese Legation at Washington says in his foreword, Miss Kemp "has wisely neglected the 'show-window' by putting seaports at the end. By acquainting the public with the wealth and beauty of the interior, she reveals to readers the vitality and potential energy, both natural and cultural, of a great nation." Three provinces are particularly described—Yunnan, Kweichow, Hunan—and there are good chapters on the new Chinese woman and the youth of China. This book has, in addition to unusual illustrations, what every good book of its sort should have, an index.

In view of the title of this chapter I have hesitated over mentioning here Albert C. White's The Irish Free State. Whether Ireland now should be numbered among the places to go or not is possibly a matter of heredity and sympathies; but at any rate, Ireland is unquestionably a place to read about. Shall we agree that the Irish Free State is one of the best places in the world to go in a book? Then Mr. White's book will furnish up-to-the-minute transportation thither.

The book is written throughout from the standpoint of a vigorous and independent mind. It will annoy extreme partisans of all shades of opinion, and will provoke much discussion. This is especially true of the concluding chapter, in which the author discusses "Some Factors in the Future." The value of the book is enhanced by the inclusion of the essential documents of the Home Rule struggle, including the four Home Rule Bills of 1886, 1893, 1914 and 1920, and the terms of the Treaty concluded with Sinn Fein.

Whether Russia is a place to go is another of those debatable questions and I feel that the same conclusion holds good. A book is the wisest passport to Russia at present. Marooned in Moscow, by Marguerite E. Harrison, is not a new book—in the sense of having been published last week. It remains about the best single book published on Russia under the Soviet government; and I say this with the full recollection that H. G. Wells also wrote a book about Soviet Russia after a visit of fifteen days. Mrs. Harrison spent eighteen months and was part of the time in prison. She is an exceptionally good reporter without prejudices for or against any theory of government—with an eye only for the facts and a word only for an observed fact.

It is good news that The Secret of the Sahara: Kufara, by Rosita Forbes, is to be published in a new edition. This Englishwoman, with no assistance but that of native guides, penetrated to Kufara, which lies hidden in the heart of the Libyan desert, a section of the Sahara. This is the region of a fanatical sect of Mohammedans known as the Senussi. No other white woman has ever been known to enter the sacred city of Paj, a gloomy citadel hewn out of rock on the edge of a beautiful valley. The Secret of the Sahara is illustrated with pictures taken by the author, many times under pain of death if she were detected using a camera.

iv

C. E. Andrews is a college professor who saw war service in France and relief administration work in the Balkans. His gifts as a delightful writer will be apparent now that his book of travels, Old Morocco and the Forbidden Atlas, is out. This book, unlike the conventional travel book, has the qualities of a good story. There is colour and adventure. There are humorous episodes and there are pictures that seem to be mirrored in the clear lake of a lovely prose. The journey described is through a region of Morocco little traversed by white men and over paths of the Atlas Mountains frequented chiefly by wild tribes and banditti.

Of all places to go, old New York remains, for many, the most appealing. Does it sound queer to recommend for those readers A Century of Banking in New York: 1822-1922, by Henry Wysham Lanier? Mr. Lanier is a son of Sidney Lanier, the poet, and those who believe that a chronicle of banking must necessarily be full of dry statistics are invited to read the opening chapter of this book; for Mr. Lanier begins his tale with the yellow fever epidemic of 1822, when all the banks of New York, to say nothing of the thousands of people, fled "from the city to the country"—that is, from lowermost Broadway to the healthful village of Greenwich. This quality of human rather than statistical interest is paramount throughout the book.

I go back almost four years to call attention again to Frederic A. Fenger's Alone in the Caribbean, a book with maps and illustrations from unusual photographs, the narrative of a cruise in a sailing canoe among the Caribbean Islands.... It is just a good book.

v

Robin Hood's Barn, by Margaret Emerson Bailey, should be classified, I suppose, as a volume of essays. It seems to me admirably suited for this chapter, since it is all about a pleasant house inhabited by pleasant people—and surely that is a place where everyone wants to go. Margaret Emerson Bailey is describing, I think, an actual house and actual people; not so much their lives as what they make out of life in the collectivism that family life enforces. At least, I seem to get from her book a unity of meaning, the lack of which in our lives, as we live them daily, makes for helplessness and sometimes for despair.

With even more doubt as to the exact "classification," I proceed to speak here and now of L. P. Jacks's book, The Legends of Smokeover. Mr. Jacks is well known as the editor of the Hibbert Journal and a writer of distinction upon philosophical subjects. I should say his specialty is an ability to relate philosophical abstractions to practical, everyday existence. Those familiar with his essays in the Atlantic Monthly will know what I mean. And is the Smokeover of his new book, then, a place to go? It is, if you wish to see our modern age and industrial civilisation expressed in such terms—almost in the terms of fiction—as make its appraisal relatively easy.

I suppose this book might make Mr. Jacks memorable as a satirist. It brings philosophy down from the air, like a peaceful thunderbolt, to shatter the vain illusions we entertain of our material success and our civilised strides forward. The fact that when you have begun to read the book you may experience some difficulty in knowing how to take it is in the book's favour. And why should you complain so long as from the outset you are continuously entertained and amused? You can scarcely complain ... even though at the end, you find you have been instructed. In a world thickly spotted with Smokeovers, Mr. Jacks's book is a book worth having, worth reading, worth reading again.



CHAPTER XIII

ALIAS RICHARD DEHAN

i

At that, I think I am wrong. I think the title of this chapter ought to be "Alias Clotilde Graves."

The problems of literary personality are strange. Some time after the Boer War a woman who had been in newspaper work in London and who had even, at one time, been on the stage under the necessity of earning her living, wrote a novel. The novel happened to be an intensive study of the Boer War, made possible by the fact that the writer was the daughter of a soldier and had spent her early years in barracks. England at that time was interested by the subject of this novel. It sold largely and its author was established by the book.

She was forty-six years old in the year when the book was published. But this was not the striking thing. William De Morgan produced the first of his impressive novels at a much more advanced age. The significant thing was that in publishing her novel, The Dop Doctor (American title: One Braver Thing), Clotilde Graves chose the pen name of Richard Dehan, although she was already known as a writer (chiefly for the theatre) under her own name.

I do not know that Miss Graves has ever said anything publicly about her motive in electing the name of Richard Dehan. But I feel that whatever the cause the result was the distinct emergence of a totally different personality. There is no final disassociation between Clotilde Graves and Richard Dehan. Richard Dehan, novelist, steadily employs the material furnished in valuable abundance by Clotilde Graves's life. At the same time the personality of Richard Dehan is so unusual, so gifted, so lavish in its invention and so much at home in surprising backgrounds, that something approaching a psychic explanation of authorship seems called for.

ii

Clotilde Inez Mary Graves was born at Barracks, Buttevant, County Cork, Ireland, on June 3, 1864, third daughter of the late Major W. H. Graves of the Eighteenth Royal Irish Regiment and Antoinette, daughter of Captain George Anthony Deane of Harwich. Thus, the English Who's Who.

"She numbers among her ancestors admirals and deans," said The Bookman in 1912.

As the same magazine at about the same time spoke of her as descended from Charles II.'s naval architect, Admiral Sir Anthony Deane, one wonders if Sir Anthony were not the sum of the admirals and the total of the deans. But no; at any rate in so far as the admirals are concerned, for Miss Graves is also said to be distantly related to Admiral Nelson.

I will give you what The Bookman said in the "Chronicle and Comment" columns of its number for February, 1913:

"Richard Dehan was nine years old when her family emigrated to England from their Irish home. She had seen a good deal of barrack life, and at Southsea, where they went to live, she acquired a large knowledge of both services in the circle of naval and military friends they made there, and this knowledge years afterward she turned to account in Between Two Thieves. In 1884, Miss Graves became an art student and worked at the British Museum galleries and the Royal Female School of Art, helping to support herself by journalism of a lesser kind, among other things drawing little pen-and-ink grotesques for the comic papers. By and by she resolved to take to dramatic writing and being too poor, she says, to manage in any other way, she abandoned art and took an engagement in a travelling theatrical company. In 1888 her first chance as a dramatist came. She was again in London, working vigorously at journalism, when some one was needed to write extra lyrics for a pantomime then in preparation. A letter of recommendation from an editor to the manager ended in Miss Clo Graves writing the pantomime of Puss in Boots. Later a tragedy by her, Nitocris, was produced for an afternoon at Drury Lane, and another of her plays, The Mother of Three, proved not only a literary, but also a material, success."

Her first novel to be signed Richard Dehan being so successful, an English publisher planned to bring out an earlier, minor work, already published as by Clotilde Graves, with "Richard Dehan" on the title-page. The author was stirred to a vigorous and public protest. In the ensuing controversy someone made the point that the proposed reissue would not be more indefensible than the act of a publishing house in bringing out posthumous "books" by O. Henry and dragging from its deserved oblivion Rudyard Kipling's Abaft the Funnel.

I do not know whether the publishing of books is a business or a profession. I should say that it has, at one time or another and by one or another individual or concern, been pursued as either or both.

There have certainly been, and probably are, book publishers who not only conduct their business as a business but as a business of a low order. There have been and are book publishers who, though quite necessarily business men, observe an ethical code as nice as that of any of the recognised professions. Perhaps publishing books should qualify as an art, since it has the characteristics of bringing out what is best or worst in a publisher; and, indeed, if we are to hold that any successful means of self-expression is art, then publishing books has been an art more than once; for unquestionably there are publishers who find self-expression in their work.

This is an interesting subject, but I must not pursue it in this place. Certainly Miss Graves was justified in objecting to the use of her new pen name on work already published under her own name. In her case, as I think, the objection was peculiarly well-founded, because it seems to me that Richard Dehan was a new person. Since Richard Dehan appeared on the title-page of The Dop Doctor, there has never been a Clotilde Graves in books. You have only to study the books. The Dop Doctor was followed, two years later, by Between Two Thieves. This novel has as a leading character Florence Nightingale under the name of Ada Merling. The story was at first to have been called "The Lady With The Lamp"; but the author delayed it for a year and subjected it to a complete rewriting, the result of a new and enlarged conception of the story.

Then came a steady succession of novels by Richard Dehan. I remember with what surprise I read, in 1918, That Which Hath Wings, a war story of large dimensions and an incredible amount of exact and easy detail. I remember, too, noting that there was embedded in it a marvellous story for children—an airplane flight in which a youngster figured—if the publisher chose, with the author's consent, to lift this out of its larger, adult setting. I remember very vividly reading in 1920 a collection of short stories by Richard Dehan, published under the title The Eve of Pascua. Pascua is the Spanish word for Easter. I wondered where on earth, unless in Spain itself, the author got the bright colouring for his story.

What I did not realise at the time was that Richard Dehan is like that. Now, smitten to earth by the 500-page novel which he has just completed, I think I understand better. The Just Steward, from one standpoint, makes the labours of Gustave Flaubert in Salaambo seem trivial. It is known with what passionate tenacity and surprising ardour the French master studied the subject of ancient Carthage, grubbing like the lowliest archseologist to get at his fingertips all those recondite allusions so necessary if he were to move with lightness, assurance and consummate art through the scenes of his novel. But, frankly, one does not expect this of the third daughter of an Irish soldier, an ex-journalist and the author of a Drury Lane pantomime. Nevertheless the erudition is all here. From this standpoint, The Just Steward is truly monumental. I will show you a sample or two:

"Beautiful, even with the trench and wall of Diocletian's comparatively recent siege scarring the orchards and vineyards of Lake Mareotis, splendid even though her broken canals and aqueducts had never been repaired, and part of her western quarter still displayed heaps of calcined ruins where had been temples, palaces and academies, Alexandria lay shimmering under the African sun....

"The vintage of Egypt was in full swing, the figs and dates were being harvested. Swarms of wasps and hornets, armed with formidable stings, yellow-striped like the dreaded nomads of the south and eastern frontiers, greedily sucked the sugary juices of the ripe fruit. Flocks of fig-birds twittered amongst the branches, being like the date-pigeons, almost too gorged to fly. Half naked, dark or tawny skinned, tattooed native labourers, hybrids of mingled races, with heads close-shaven save for a topknot, dwellers in mud-hovels, drudges of the water-wheel, cut down the heavy grape-clusters with sickle-shaped cooper knives.

"Ebony, woolly-haired negroes in clean white breech-cloths, piled up the gathered fruit in tall baskets woven of reeds and lined with leaves. Copts with the rich reddish skins, the long eyes and boldly curving profiles of Egyptian warriors and monarchs as presented on the walls of ancient temples of Libya and the Thebaid, moved about in leather-girdled blue linen tunics and hide sandals, keeping account of the laden panniers, roped upon the backs of diminutive asses and carried to the winepresses as fast as they were filled.

"The negroes sang as they set snares for fig-birds, and stuffed themselves to the throat with grapes and custard-apples. The fat beccaficoes beloved of the epicurean fell by hundreds into the limed horsehair traps. Greek, Egyptian and negro girls, laughing under garlands of hibiscus, periwinkle and tuberoses, coaxed the fat morsels out of the black men to carry home for a supper treat, while acrobats, comic singers, sellers of cakes, drinks and sweetmeats, with strolling jugglers and jesters and Jewish fortune-tellers of both sexes, assailed the workers and the merrymakers with importunities and made harvest in their own way."

The story is extraordinary. Opening in the Alexandria of the fourth century, it pictures two men, a Roman official and a Jewish steward, who are friends unto death. The second of the four parts or books into which the novel is divided opens in England in 1914. We have to do with John Hazel, the descendant of Hazael Aben Hazael, and with the lovely Katharine Forbis, whose ancestor was a Roman, Hazael Aben Hazael's sworn friend.

A story of exciting action certainly; it has elements that would ordinarily be called melodramatic—events which are focussed down into realities against the tremendous background of an incredible war. The exotic settings are Egypt and Palestine. It must not be thought that the story is bizarre; the scenes in England, the English slang of John Hazel, as well as the typical figure of Trixie, Lady Wastwood, are utterly modern. I do not find anything to explain how Miss Graves could write such a book; the answer is that Richard Dehan wrote it.

iii

Miss Graves, of whose antecedents and education we already know something, is a Roman Catholic in faith and a Liberal Unionist in politics. She lives at The Towers, Beeding, near Bramber, Sussex. Her recreations are gardening and driving.

But Richard Dehan knows the early history of the Christian Church; he knows military life, strategy, tactics, types; he knows in a most extraordinary way the details of Jewish history and religious observances; he knows perfectly and as a matter of course all about English middle class life; he knows all sorts of things about the East—Turkey and Arabia and those countries.

This is a discrepancy which will bear a good deal of accounting for.

Before I try to account for it I will give you a long passage from The Just Steward, describing the visit of Katharine Forbis and her friend to the house of John Hazel, lately of London and now of Alexandria:

"The negro porter who had opened the door, a huge Ethiopian of ebony blackness, dressed and turbaned in snow-white linen, salaamed deeply to the ladies, displaying as he did so a mouthful of teeth as dazzling in whiteness and sharply-pointed as those of the mosaic dog.

"Then the negro shut the heavy door and locked and bolted it. They heard the car snort and move away as the heavy bolts scrooped in their ancient grooves of stone. But, as they glanced back, towards the entrance, the imperturbable attendant in the black kaftan waved them forward to where another man, exactly like himself in feature, colouring and costume, waited as imperturbably on the threshold of a larger hall beyond. On its right-hand doorpost was affixed a cylinder of metal repoussee with an oval piece of glass on that something like a human eye. And the big invisible bees went on humming as industriously and as sleepily as ever:

"'Bz'zz'z!... Bzz'z!... Bzz m'm'm!...'

"Perhaps it was the bees' thick, sleepy droning that made Miss Forbis feel as though she had previously visited this house in a dream, in which, though the mosaic dog had certainly figured, together with a negro who had opened doors, the rows of shoes along the wall, the little creature tripping at her side, the two dark, ultra-respectable men in black tarbushes and kaftans had had no place or part. Only John Hazel had bulked big. He was there, beyond the grave Semitic face of the second Jewish secretary, on the farther side of the torrent of boiling amber sunshine pouring through a central opening in the roof of the inner hall that succeeded the vestibule of the mosaic Cerberus. An atrium some forty feet in length, paved with squares of black and yellow marble with an oblong pool in the midst of it, upon whose still crystal surface pink and crimson petals of roses had been strewn in patterns, and in the centre of which a triple-jetted fountain played.

"The humming of the unseen bees came louder than ever, from a doorway in the wall upon Katharine's right hand, a wall of black polished marble, decorated with an inlaid ornament in porphyry of yellow and red and pale green. The curtain of dyed and threaded reeds did not hide what lay beyond the doorway. You saw a long, high-pitched whitewashed room, cooled by big wooden electric fans working under the ceiling, and traversed by avenues of creamy-white Chinese matting, running between rows of low native desks, before each of which squatted, on naked or cotton-sock-covered heels, or sat cross-legged upon a square native chintz cushion, a coffee-coloured, almond-eyed young Copt, in a black or blue cotton nightgown, topped with the tarbush of black felt or a dingy-white or olive-brown muslin turban, murmuring softly to himself as he made entries, from right to left, in a huge limp-covered ledger, or deftly fingered the balls of coloured clay strung on the wires of the abacus at his side.

"Oh! ... Wonderful! I'm so Glad you Brought me!'

"Lady Wastwood's emphatic exclamation of pleasure in her surroundings brought cessation in the humming—caused a swivelling of capped or turbanned heads all down the length of three avenues—evoked a simultaneous flash of black Oriental eyes, and white teeth in dusky faces lifted or turned. Then at the upper end of the long counting-house, where three wide glassless windows looked on a sanded palm-garden, and the leather-topped knee-hole tables, roll-top desks, copying ink presses, mahogany revolving-chairs, telephone installations, willow-paper baskets, pewter inkstands and Post Office Directories suggested Cornhill and Cheapside rather than the Orient—one of the olive-faced Jewish head-clerks in kaftans and side-curls coughed—and as though he had pulled a string controlling all the observant faces, every tooth was hidden and every eye discreetly bent on the big limp ledgers again.

"All the Coptic bees were humming sonorously in unison as Katharine went forward to a lofty doorway, framing brightness, where waited to receive her the master of the hive....

"The light beings behind him may have exaggerated his proportions, but he seemed to Trixie the biggest man she had ever seen, and nearly the ugliest. Close-curling coarse black hair capped his high-domed skull, and his stern, powerful, swarthy face, big-nosed and long-chinned, with a humorous quirk at the corners of the heavy-lipped mouth, that redeemed its sensuousness, was lighted by eyes of the intensest black, burning under heavy beetle-brows. His khaki uniform, though of fine material and admirable cut, was that of a common ranker, and a narrow strip of colours over the heart, and the fact of his left arm being bandaged and slung, intimated to Lady Wastwood that Katharine's Jewish friend had already served with some degree of distinction, and had been wounded in the War. And drawing back with her characteristic inconquerable shyness, as he advanced to Miss Forbis, plainly unconscious of any presence save hers, Trixie's observant green eyes saw him bend his towering head, and sweep his right arm out and down with slow Oriental stateliness, bringing back the supple hand to touch breast, lips and brow. Whether or not he had raised the hem of Katharine's skirt to his lips and kissed it, Lady Wastwood could not definitely determine. She was left with the impression that he had done this thing."

iv

I should have liked to have given, rather than purely descriptive passages, a slice of the complicated and tense action with which the story brims over, but there is the difficulty that such a scene might not be intelligible to one not having read the story from the beginning. I must resist the tendency to quote any more, having indulged it already to excess, and I am ready to propound my theory of the existence of Richard Dehan.

If you receive a letter from The Towers, Beeding, it will bear a double signature, like this:

RICHARD DEHAN CLOTILDE GRAVES

Clotilde Graves has become a secondary personality.

There was once a time when there was no Richard Dehan. There now are times when there is no Clotilde Graves.

To a woman in middle age an opportunity presented itself. It was the chance to write a novel around the subject which, as a girl, she had come to know a great deal about—the subject of war. To write about it and gain attention, the novel required a man's signature.

Then there was born in the mind of the woman who purposed to write the novel the idea of a man—of the man—who should be the novelist she wanted to be. He should use as by right and from instinct the material which lay inutile at her woman's disposal.

She created Richard Dehan. Perhaps, in so doing, she created another monster like Frankenstein's. I do not know.

Born of necessity and opportunity and a woman's inventiveness, Richard Dehan took over whatever of Clotilde Graves's he could use. He is now the master. It is, intellectually and spiritually, as if he were the full-grown son of Clotilde Graves. It is a partnership not less intimate than that.

Clotilde Graves—but she does not matter. I think she existed to bring Richard Dehan into the world.

BOOKS BY RICHARD DEHAN

Novels: THE LOVER'S BATTLE THE DOP DOCTOR BETWEEN TWO THIEVES THE HEADQUARTER RECRUIT THE COST OF WINGS THE MAN OF IRON OFF SANDY HOOK EARTH TO EARTH UNDER THE HERMES THAT WHICH HATH WINGS A SAILOR'S HOME THE EVE OF PASCUA THE VILLA OF THE PEACOCK THE JUST STEWARD

Plays NITOCRIS DRURY LANE PANTOMIME, PUSS IN BOOTS DR. AND MRS. NEILL A MOTHER OF THREE A MATCHMAKER THE BISHOP'S EYE THE FOREST LOVERS A MAKER OF COMEDIES THE BOND OF NIKON A TENEMENT TRAGEDY

SOURCES ON RICHARD DEHAN

Who's Who [in England].

THE BOOKMAN for February, 1913 (Volume XXXVI, pp. 595-6), also brief mention in THE BOOKMAN for September and October, 1912.

Private Information.



CHAPTER XIV

WITH FULL DIRECTIONS

i

I have read the book called Civilization in the United States, a collection of essays by various Americans, and count the time well spent chiefly because, at the end of the chapter on "Sport," I came upon these words by Ring W. Lardner:

"The best sporting fiction we know of, practically the only sporting fiction an adult may read without fear of stomach trouble, is contained in the collected works of the late Charles E. Van Loan."

This is expert testimony, if there is such a thing. The books Mr. Lardner referred to are published in a five-volume memorial edition consisting of:

FORE! GOLF STORIES SCORE BY INNINGS: BASEBALL STORIES OLD MAN CURRY: RACETRACK STORIES TAKING THE COUNT: PRIZE RING STORIES BUCK PARVIN: STORIES OF THE MOTION PICTURE GAME.

This collected edition was published by George H. Doran Company with the arrangement that every cent above actual cost should go to Mrs. Van Loan and her children.

William T. Tilden, 2nd, was winner of the world's tennis championship in 1920 and 1921. With W. M. Johnston he was winner of the Davis cup in the same years. He also won the United States championship in those years. His book, The Art of Lawn Tennis, published in 1921, was republished in 1922. The revised edition included chapters on the winning of the Davis cup and on the world's and the United States championships, on Mrs. Mallory's play in the women's world championship games in France and England, and on Mlle. Lenglen's play in America. Mr. Tilden also added an estimate of the promising youngsters playing tennis and indulged in one or two surprising and radical prophecies.

Twenty Years of Lawn Tennis, by A. Wallis Myers, an English player of distinction, has interesting chapters on play in other countries than America, England and France. An anecdotal volume this, with moments on the Riviera and matches played in South Africa.

After unpreventable delays we have, at last, The Gist of Golf by Harry Vardon. Using remarkable photographs, Vardon devotes a chapter to each club and chapters to stance, grip, and swing. Although the chief value of the book is to the player who wants to improve his game, there is text interesting to everyone familiar with golf; for Vardon gives personal reminiscences covering years of play and illustrative of his instructions.

ii

I suppose the fifty-three photographs, mostly full page ones, are the outstanding feature of Wild Life in the Tree Tops, by Captain C. W. R. Knight. This English book, large and flat, shows with the aid of the camera, the merlin pursuing her quarry, young tawny owls in a disused magpie's nest, female noctules and their young, the male kestrel brooding, and a male buzzard that has just brought a rabbit to the younglings in the nest. Plenty of other pictures like these! The chapters deal with the buzzards of the Doone country, the lady's hawk, woodpeckers, brown owls, sparrow-hawks, herons and various other feathered people.

Did you ever read Lad: A Dog? Well, anyway, there is a man named Albert Payson Terhune and he and his wife live at a place called "Sunny-bank," at Pompton Lakes, New Jersey, where they raise prize winning collie dogs. Photographs come from New Jersey showing Mr. and Mrs. Terhune taking afternoon tea, entirely surrounded by magnificently coated collies. You will also find, if you stray into a bookstore this autumn, a book with a jacket drawn by Charles Livingston Bull—a jacket from which looms a colossal collie. He carries in a firmly knotted shawl or blanket or sheet or something (the knot clenched between his teeth) a new-born babe. New-born or approximately so. The title of this book is Further Adventures of Lad.

Mr. Terhune writes the best dog stories. Read a little bit from the first chapter of Further Adventures of Lad:

"Even the crate which brought the new dog to the Place failed somehow to destroy the illusion of size and fierceness. But the moment the crate door was opened the delusion was wrecked by Lad himself.

"Out on to the porch he walked. The ramshackle crate behind him had a ridiculous air of chrysalis from which some bright thing had departed. For a shaft of sunlight was shimmering athwart the veranda floor. And into the middle of the warm bar of radiance Laddie stepped—and stood.

"His fluffy puppy-coat of wavy mahogany-and-white caught a million sunbeams, reflecting them back in tawny-orange glints and in a dazzle as of snow. His forepaws were absurdly small even for a puppy's. Above them the ridging of the stocky leg bones gave as clear promise of mighty size and strength as did the amazingly deep little chest and square shoulders.

"Here one day would stand a giant among dogs, powerful as a timber-wolf, lithe as a cat, as dangerous to foes as an angry tiger; a dog without fear or treachery; a dog of uncanny brain and great lovingly loyal heart and, withal, a dancing sense of fun. A dog with a soul.

"All this, any canine physiologist might have read from the compact frame, the proud head carriage, the smoulder in the deep-set sorrowful dark eyes. To the casual observer, he was but a beautiful and appealing and wonderfully cuddleable bunch of puppyhood.

"Lad's dark eyes swept the porch, the soft swelling green of the lawn. The flash of fire-blue lake among the trees below. Then he deigned to look at the group of humans at one side of him. Gravely, impersonally, he surveyed them; not at all cowed or strange in his new surroundings; courteously inquisitive as to the twist of luck that had set him down here and as to the people who, presumably, were to be his future companions.

"Perhaps the stout little heart quivered just a bit, if memory went back to his home kennel and to the rowdy throng of brothers and sisters and, most of all, to the soft furry mother against whose side he had nestled every night since he was born. But if so, Lad was too valiant to show homesickness by so much as a whimper. And, assuredly, this House of Peace was infinitely better than the miserable crate wherein he had spent twenty horrible and jouncing and smelly and noisy hours.

"From one to another of the group strayed the level sorrowful gaze. After the swift inspection Laddie's eyes rest again on the Mistress. For an instant, he stood, looking at her, in that mildly polite curiosity which held no hint of personal interest.

"Then, all at once, his plumy tail began to wave. Into his sad eyes sprang a flicker of warm friendliness. Unbidden—oblivious of everyone else—he trotted across to where the Mistress sat. He put one tiny white paw in her lap and stood thus, looking up lovingly into her face, tail awave, eyes shining.

"'There's no question whose dog he's going to be,' laughed the Master. 'He's elected you—by acclamation.'"

iii

Not content with being the husband of Margaret Sangster, C. M. Sheridan has written The Stag Cook Book. I would have it understood that this is an honest-to-goodness cook-book, although I readily confess that there is plenty of humour throughout its pages. Mr. Sheridan has acquired various unusual and unreplaceable recipes—I believe he secured from Wladislaw Benda, the illustrator, a rare and secret formula for the preparation of a species of Hungarian or Polish pastry. Now, as every housewife knows, and as no man except a Frenchman or somebody like that knows, the preparation of pastry is an intricate art. Simply to make ordinary French pastry requires innumerable rollings to incredible thinnesses; besides which the pastry has to be chilled; but there is more than that to this recondite substance which Mr. Benda, probably under the terms of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, surrendered to Mr. Sheridan. The pastry in question has to be executed with the aid of geometrical designs. Mr. Sheridan has supplied the necessary front elevation and working plans. He shows you where you fold along the line from A to B—in other words, along the dotted line. Thus no man using this unique cook-book can go wrong any more than his wife can go wrong when making a new dress according to Pictorial Review or McCall's or Delineator patterns.

On the other hand, women remain still chiefly responsible for the food we eat. Elizabeth A. Monaghan's What to Eat and How to Prepare It is an orthodox cook-book in contrast with Mr. Sheridan's daring adventure.

iv

Large numbers of people still play games. I do not mean cards or tennis or golf or any of the famous outdoor and indoor sports, but just games, the sort of things that are sometimes called stunts and that make the life of the party—or, by their absence or failure, rob the evening gathering of all its vitality. For the people who play games, Edna Geister is the one best bet. Edna Geister knows all about stunts and games and parties and she brims over with clever ideas for the hostess or recreation leader. You will find them in her book Ice-breakers and the Ice-breaker Herself. The second section of this book, The Ice-breaker Herself, has been bound separately for the convenience of those already owning Ice Breakers. Miss Geister's latest book, It Is to Laugh, was written primarily for adults because there is so much material already available for the recreation of children. Nevertheless almost every one of the games and stunts described in It Is to Laugh can be used for children. There are games for large groups and small groups, games for the family, for dinner parties, for community affairs and for almost any kind of social gathering, with one chapter devoted to out-of-door and picnic programmes.

Playing the piano is not a game, at least not as Mark Hambourg, the pianist and composer, plays it. Hambourg, though born in South Russia in 1879, the eldest son of the late Professor Michel Hambourg, has for years been a naturalised Englishman. In fact, he married in 1907 the Honourable Dorothea Mackenzie, daughter of Lord Muir Mackenzie. And the pair have four daughters. Mark Hambourg was a pupil of Leschetitzky in Vienna, where he obtained the Liszt scholarship in 1894. He has made concert appearances all over the world, his third American tour falling in 1907, and his first Canadian tour in 1910.

Mark Hambourg's book is called How to Play the Piano and the text is helped with practical illustrations and diagrams and a complete compendium of five-finger exercises, scales, arpeggi, thirds and octaves as practised by Hambourg.

v

Those who read The Bookman will not need to be told that the articles by Robert Cortes Holliday on Writing as a Business: A Practical Guide for Authors, will constitute an exceptional book. The great point about Mr. Holliday's chapters, which have been written in collaboration with Alexander Van Rensselaer, is that they are disinterested. There has been an immense amount of printed matter, some of it in book form, telling of the problems that confront the writer, especially the young beginner. As a rule, the underlying motive was to induce people to write so that someone else might make money out of their efforts, whether the writers did or not. So-called correspondence schools in the art of writing, so-called literary bureaus, interested individuals anxious to earn "commissions," and sometimes individuals who purported to be publishers have for many years carried on a continuous campaign at the expense of persons who did not know how to write but who fancied they could write and who, above everything, craved to write—craved seeing themselves in print and hearing themselves referred to as "authors" or "writers." It would take a statistician versed in all manner of mysteries and calculations to tell how many people have been deluded by this stuff, and how much money has been nuzzled out of them. The time was certainly here for someone in a position to tell the truth to speak up.

And of Mr. Holliday's qualifications there is no question. He has had to do with books and authors and book publishing for years. He was, as his readers know, for a number of years in the Scribner bookstore. He was with Doubleday, Page & Company at Garden City; he was with George H. Doran Company, serving not only as editor of The Bookman but acting in other editorial capacities. He is now connected with Henry Holt & Company. As an author he is amply established. Therefore, when he tells about writing and book publishing and bookselling, and when he discusses such subjects as "Publishing Your Own Book," his statements are most thoroughly documented. The important thing, however, is that Mr. Holliday is disinterested, he has no axe to grind in the advice he gives; although the impressive thing about his book is the absence of advice and the continual presentation of unvarnished facts. After all, confronted with the facts, the literary aspirant of ordinary intelligence must and should reach his own conclusions as regards what he wants to do and how best to essay it. This is a sample of the kind of straightforwardness to which Mr. Holliday adheres:

"An experienced writer 'on his own' may earn a couple of hundred dollars or so in one week, and for several weeks afterward average something like $14.84. The beginner-writer should not consider that he has 'arrived' when he has sold one story, or even several; it may be a year before he places another. And the future of a writer who may be having a very fair success now is not any too secure. Public taste changes. New orders come in. The kind of thing which took so well yesterday may be quite out of fashion tomorrow.

"There is among people generally much misconception as to the profits ordinarily derived by the author from the publication of a book. The price of a novel today is about two dollars. Usually the author receives a royalty of about fifteen cents a copy on the first two thousand copies sold, and about twenty cents on each copy thereafter. A novel which sold upward of 50,000 copies would bring the author something like $10,000. Many men make as much as $10,000 by a year's work at some other business or profession than authorship. But authors who make that amount in a year, or anything near that amount, are exceedingly rare. A book is regarded by the publisher as highly successful if it sells from five to ten thousand copies. Far and away the greater number of books published do not sell as many as 1,500 copies. Many far less. A recently published book, which received a very cordial 'press,' has had an uncommon amount of publicity, and the advertisements of which announce that it is in its 'fourth printing,' has, after about half a year, earned for its author perhaps $1,000. Its sale now in active measure is over. An author is fairly fortunate who receives as much as $500 or $600 from the sale of his book. I recall an excellent story published something over a year ago which was much praised by many reviewers. It took the author probably the better part of a year to write it. He was then six months or more getting it accepted. He has not been able to place much of anything since. At the end, then, of two years and a half he has received from his literary labors about $110."

Mr. Van Rensselaer has greatly enhanced the usefulness of Writing as a Business by the addition of very complete bibliographies.

Illumination and Its Development in the Present Day, by Sidney Farnsworth, has nothing to do with street or indoor lighting but has a great deal to do with lettering and illuminating manuscripts. Mr. Farnsworth traces the growth of illumination from its birth, showing, by means of numerous diagrams and drawings, its gradual development through the centuries from mere writing to the elaborate poster work and commercial lettering of the present day. Although other books have already been written on this fascinating subject, Mr. Farnsworth breaks new ground in many directions; he treats the matter from the modern standpoint in a manner which makes his work invaluable not only to students of the art, but also to the rapidly-growing public interested in what has hitherto been a somewhat exclusive craft. The book is well illustrated.



CHAPTER XV

FRANK SWINNERTON: ANALYST OF LOVERS

i

It is as an analyst of lovers, I think, that Frank Swinnerton claims and holds his place among those whom we still sometimes call the younger novelists of England.

I do not say this because his fame was achieved at a bound with Nocturne, but because all his novels show a natural preoccupation with the theme of love between the sexes. Usually it is a pair of young lovers or contrasted pairs; but sometimes this is interestingly varied, as in September, where we have a study of love that comes to a woman in middle life.

The unique character of Nocturne makes it very hard to write about Swinnerton. It is true that Arnold Bennett wrote: "I am prepared to say to the judicious reader unacquainted with Swinnerton's work, 'Read Nocturne,' and to stand or fall, and to let him stand or fall by the result." At the same time, though the rule is that we must judge an artist by his finest work and a genius by his greatest masterpiece, it is not entirely just to estimate the living writer by a single unique performance, an extraordinary piece of virtuosity, which Nocturne unquestionably is. For anyone who wishes to understand and appreciate Swinnerton, I would recommend that he begin with Coquette, follow it with September, follow that with Shops and Houses and then read Nocturne. That is, I would have made this recommendation a few months ago, but so representative of all sides of Swinnerton's talent is his new novel, The Three Lovers, that I should now prefer to say to anyone unacquainted with Swinnerton: "Begin with The Three Lovers." And after that I would have him read Coquette and the other books in the order I have named. After he had reached and finished Nocturne, I would have him turn to the several earlier novels—The Happy Family, On the Staircase, and The Chaste Wife.

ii

The Three Lovers, a full-length novel which Swinnerton finished in Devonshire in the spring of 1922, is a story of human beings in conflict, and it is also a picture of certain phases of modern life. A young and intelligent girl, alone in the world, is introduced abruptly to a kind of life with which she is unfamiliar. Thereafter the book shows the development of her character and her struggle for the love of the men to whom she is most attracted. The book steadily moves



through its earlier chapters of introduction and growth to a climax that is both dramatic and moving. It opens with a characteristic descriptive passage from which I take a few sentences:

"It was a suddenly cold evening towards the end of September.... The street lamps were sharp brightnesses in the black night, wickedly revealing the naked rain-swept paving-stones. It was an evening to make one think with joy of succulent crumpets and rampant fires and warm slippers and noggins of whisky; but it was not an evening for cats or timid people. The cats were racing about the houses, drunken with primeval savagery; the timid people were shuddering and looking in distress over feebly hoisted shoulders, dreadfully prepared for disaster of any kind, afraid of sounds and shadows and their own forgotten sins.... The wind shook the window-panes; soot fell down all the chimneys; trees continuously rustled as if they were trying to keep warm by constant friction and movement."

The imagination which sees in the movement of trees an endeavour to keep warm is not less sharp in its discernment of human beings. I will give one other passage, a conversation between Patricia Quin, the heroine, and another girl:

"'Do you mean he's in love with you?' asked Patricia. 'That seems to be what's the matter.'

"'Oho, it takes two to be in love,' scornfully cried Amy. 'And I'm not in love with him.'

"'But he's your friend.'

"'That's just it. He won't recognise that men and women can be friends. He's a very decent fellow; but he's full of this sulky jealousy, and he glowers and sulks whenever any other man comes near me. Well, that's not my idea of friendship.'

"'Nor mine,' echoed Patricia, trying to reconstruct her puzzled estimate of their relations. 'But couldn't you stop that? Surely, if you put it clearly to him....'

"Amy interrupted with a laugh that was almost shrill. Her manner was coldly contemptuous.

"'You are priceless!' she cried. 'You say the most wonderful things.'

"'Well, I should.'

"'I wonder.' Amy moved about, collecting the plates. 'You see ... some day I shall marry. And in a weak moment I said probably I'd marry him.'

"'Oh, Amy! Of course he's jealous.' Swiftly, Patricia did the young man justice.

"'I didn't give him any right to be. I told him I'd changed my mind. I've told him lots of times that probably I sha'n't marry him.'

"'But you keep him. Amy! You do encourage him.' Patricia was stricken afresh with a generous impulse of emotion on Jack's behalf. 'I mean, by not telling him straight out. Surely you can't keep a man waiting like that? I wonder he doesn't insist.'

"'Jack insist!' Amy was again scornful. 'Not he!'

"There was a moment s pause. Innocently, Patricia ventured upon a charitable interpretation.

"'He must love you very much. But, Amy, if you don't love him.'

"'What's love got to do with marriage?' asked Amy, with a sourly cynical air.

"'Hasn't it—everything?' Patricia was full of sincerity. She was too absorbed in this story to help Amy to clear the table; but on finding herself alone in the studio while the crockery was carried away to the kitchen she mechanically shook the crumbs behind the gas-fire and folded the napkin. This was the most astonishing moment of her day.

"Presently Amy returned, and sat in the big armchair, while, seated upon the podger and leaning back against the wall, Patricia smoked a cigarette.

"'You see, the sort of man one falls in love with doesn't make a good husband,' announced Amy, as patiently as if Patricia had been in fact a child. She persisted in her attitude of superior wisdom in the world's ways. 'It's all very well; but a girl ought to be able to live with any man she fancies, and then in the end marry the safe man for a ... well, for life, if she likes.'

"Patricia's eyes were opened wide.

"'I shouldn't like that,' she said. 'I don't think the man would either.'

"'Bless you, the men all do it,' cried Amy, contemptuously. 'Don't make any mistake about that.'

"'I don't believe it,' said Patricia. 'Do you mean that my father—or your father...?'

"'Oh, I don't know. I meant, nowadays. Most of the people you saw last night are living together or living with other people.'

"Patricia was aware of a chill.

"'But you've never,' she urged. 'I've never.'

"'No.' Amy was obviously irritated by the personal application. 'That's just it. I say we ought to be free to do what we like. Men do what they like.'

"'D'you think Jack has lived with other girls?'

"'My dear child, how do I know? I should hope he has.'

"'Hope! Amy, you do make me feel a prig.'

"'Perhaps you are one. Oh, I don't know. I'm sick of thinking, thinking, thinking about it all. I never get any peace.'

"'Is there somebody you want to live with?'

"'No. I wish there was. Then I should know'

"'I wonder if you would know,' said Patricia, in a low voice. 'Amy, do you really know what love is? Because I don't. I've sometimes let men kiss me, and it doesn't seem to matter in the least. I don't particularly want to kiss them, or to be kissed. I've never seen anything in all the flirtation that goes on in dark corners. It's amusing once or twice; but it becomes an awful bore. The men don't interest you. The thought of living with any of them just turns me sick.'"

iii

The analysis, in The Three Lovers, of Patricia Quin is done with that simplicity, quiet deftness and inoffensive frankness which is the hallmark of Mr. Swinnerton's fiction. And, coming at last to Nocturne, I fall back cheerfully upon the praise accorded that novel by H. G. Wells in his preface to it. Said Mr. Wells:

"Such a writer as Mr. Swinnerton sees life and renders it with a steadiness and detachment and patience quite foreign to my disposition. He has no underlying motive. He sees and tells. His aim is the attainment of that beauty which comes with exquisite presentation. Seen through his art, life is seen as one sees things through a crystal lens, more intensely, more completed, and with less turbidity. There the business begins and ends for him. He does not want you or anyone to do anything.

"Mr. Swinnerton is not alone among recent writers in this clear detached objectivity. But Mr. Swinnerton, like Mr. James Joyce, does not repudiate the depths for the sake of the surface. His people are not splashes of appearance, but living minds. Jenny and Emmy in this book are realities inside and out; they are imaginative creatures so complete that one can think with ease of Jenny ten years hence or of Emmy as a baby. The fickle Alf is one of the most perfect Cockneys—a type so easy to caricature and so hard to get true—in fiction. If there exists a better writing of vulgar lovemaking, so base, so honest, so touchingly mean and so touchingly full of the craving for happiness than this, I do not know of it. Only a novelist who has had his troubles can understand fully what a dance among china cups, what a skating over thin ice, what a tight-rope performance is achieved in this astounding chapter. A false note, one fatal line, would have ruined it all. On the one hand lay brutality; a hundred imitative louts could have written a similar chapter brutally, with the soul left out, we have loads of such 'strong stuff' and it is nothing; on the other side was the still more dreadful fall into sentimentality, the tear of conscious tenderness, the redeeming glimpse of 'better things' in Alf or Emmy that could at one stroke have converted their reality into a genteel masquerade. The perfection of Alf and Emmy is that at no point does a 'nature's gentleman' or a 'nature's lady' show through and demand our refined sympathy. It is only by comparison with this supreme conversation that the affair of Keith and Jenny seems to fall short of perfection. But that also is at last perfected, I think, by Jenny's final, 'Keith ... Oh, Keith!...'

"Above these four figures again looms the majestic invention of 'Pa.' Every reader can appreciate the truth and humour of Pa, but I doubt if anyone without technical experience can realise how the atmosphere is made and completed, and rounded off by Pa's beer, Pa's meals, and Pa's accident, how he binds the bundle and makes the whole thing one, and what an enviable triumph his achievement is.

"But the book is before the reader and I will not enlarge upon its merits further. Mr. Swinnerton has written four or five other novels before this one, but none of them compares with it in quality. His earlier books were strongly influenced by the work of George Gissing; they have something of the same fatigued greyness of texture and little of the same artistic completeness and intense vision of Nocturne.

"This is a book that will not die. It is perfect, authentic and alive. Whether a large and immediate popularity will fall to it, I cannot say, but certainly the discriminating will find it and keep it and keep it alive. If Mr. Swinnerton were never to write another word I think he might count on this much of his work living, when many of the more portentous reputations of today may have served their purpose in the world and become no more than fading names."

iv

Arnold Bennett has described Swinnerton personally in a way no one else is likely to surpass. I will prefix a few elemental facts which he has neglected and then will let him have his say.

Frank Arthur Swinnerton was born in Wood Green, England, in 1884, the youngest son of Charles Swinnerton and Rose Cottam. He married, a few years ago, Helen Dircks, a poet; her slim little book of verse, Passenger, was published with a preface by Mr. Swinnerton. His first three novels Swinnerton destroyed. His first novel to be published was The Merry Heart. It is interesting to know that Floyd Dell was the first American to appreciate Swinnerton. I make way for Mr. Bennett, who says:

"One day perhaps eight or nine years ago I received a novel entitled The Casement. The book was accompanied by a short, rather curt note from the author, Frank Swinnerton, politely indicating that if I cared to read it he would be glad, and implying that if I didn't care to read it, he should endeavour still to survive. I would quote the letter but I cannot find it—no doubt for the reason that all my correspondence is carefully filed on the most modern filing system. I did not read The Casement for a long time. Why should I consecrate three irrecoverable hours or so to the work of a man as to whom I had no credentials? Why should I thus introduce foreign matter into the delicate cogwheels of my programme of reading? However, after a delay of weeks, heaven in its deep wisdom inspired me with a caprice to pick up the volume.

"I had read, without fatigue but on the other hand without passionate eagerness, about a hundred pages before the thought occurred suddenly to me: 'I do not remember having yet come across one single ready-made phrase in this story.' Such was my first definable thought concerning Frank Swinnerton. I hate ready-made phrases, which in my view—and in that of Schopenhauer—are the sure mark of a mediocre writer. I began to be interested. I soon said to myself: 'This fellow has a distinguished style.' I then perceived that the character-drawing was both subtle and original, the atmosphere delicious, and the movement of the tale very original, too. The novel stirred me—not by its powerfulness, for it did not set out to be powerful—but by its individuality and distinction. I thereupon wrote to Frank Swinnerton. I forget entirely what I said. But I know that I decided that I must meet him.

"When I came to London, considerably later, I took measures to meet him, at the Authors' Club. He proved to be young; I daresay twenty-four or twenty-five—medium height, medium looks, medium clothes, somewhat reddish hair, and lively eyes. If I had seen him in a motorbus I should never have said, 'A remarkable chap'—no more than if I had seen myself in a motorbus. My impressions of the interview were rather like my impressions of the book: at first somewhat negative, and only very slowly becoming positive. He was reserved, as became a young author; I was reserved, as became an older author; we were both reserved, as became Englishmen. Our views on the only important thing in the world—that is to say, fiction—agreed, not completely, but in the main; it would never have done for us to agree completely. I was as much pleased by what he didn't say as by what he said; quite as much by the indications of the stock inside the shop as by the display in the window. The interview came to a calm close. My knowledge of him acquired from it amounted to this, that he held decided and righteous views upon literature, that his heart was not on his sleeve, and that he worked in a publisher's office during the day and wrote for himself in the evenings.

"Then I saw no more of Swinnerton for a relatively long period. I read other books of his. I read The Young Idea, and The Happy Family, and, I think, his critical work on George Gissing. The Happy Family marked a new stage in his development. It has some really piquant scenes, and it revealed that minute knowledge of middle-class life in the nearer suburbs of London, and that disturbing insight into the hearts and brains of quite unfashionable girls, which are two of his principal gifts. I read a sketch of his of a commonplace crowd walking around a bandstand which brought me to a real decision as to his qualities. The thing was like life, and it was bathed in poetry.

"Our acquaintance proceeded slowly, and I must be allowed to assert that the initiative which pushed it forward was mine. It made a jump when he spent a week-end in the Thames Estuary on my yacht. If any reader has a curiosity to know what my yacht is not like, he should read the striking yacht chapter in Nocturne. I am convinced that Swinnerton evolved the yacht in Nocturne from my yacht; but he ennobled, magnified, decorated, enriched and bejewelled it till honestly I could not recognise my wretched vessel. The yacht in Nocturne is the yacht I want, ought to have, and never shall have. I envy him the yacht in Nocturne, and my envy takes a malicious pleasure in pointing out a mistake in the glowing scene. He anchors his yacht in the middle of the Thames—as if the tyrannic authorities of the Port of London would ever allow a yacht, or any other craft, to anchor in midstream!

"After the brief cruise our friendship grew rapidly. I now know Swinnerton—probably as well as any man knows him; I have penetrated into the interior of the shop. He has done several things since I first knew him—rounded the corner of thirty, grown a beard, under the orders of a doctor, and physically matured. Indeed, he looks decidedly stronger than in fact he is—he was never able to pass the medical examination for the army. He is still in the business of publishing, being one of the principal personages in the ancient and well-tried firm of Chatto & Windus, the English publishers of Swinburne and Mark Twain. He reads manuscripts, including his own—and including mine. He refuses manuscripts, though he did accept one of mine. He tells authors what they ought to do and ought not to do. He is marvellously and terribly particular and fussy about the format of the books issued by his firm. Questions as to fonts of type, width of margins, disposition of title-pages, tint and texture of bindings really do interest him. And misprints—especially when he has read the proofs himself—give him neuralgia and even worse afflictions. Indeed he is the ideal publisher for an author.

"Nevertheless, publishing is only a side-line of his. He still writes for himself in the evenings and at week-ends—the office never sees him on Saturdays.

"Frank Swinnerton has other gifts. He is a surpassingly good raconteur. By which I do not signify that the man who meets Swinnerton for the first, second or third time will infallibly ache with laughter at his remarks. Swinnerton only blossoms in the right atmosphere; he must know exactly where he is; he must be perfectly sure of his environment, before the flower uncloses. And he merely relates what he has seen, what he has taken part in. The narrations would be naught if he were not the narrator. His effects are helped by the fact that he is an excellent mimic and by his utter realistic mercilessness. But like all first-class realists he is also a romantic, and in his mercilessness there is a mysterious touch of fundamental benevolence—as befits the attitude of one who does not worry because human nature is not something different from what it actually is. Lastly, in this connection, he has superlatively the laugh known as the 'infectious laugh.' When he laughs everybody laughs, everybody has to laugh. There are men who tell side-splitting tales with the face of an undertaker—for example, Irvin Cobb. There are men who can tell side-splitting tales and openly and candidly rollick in them from the first word; and of these latter is Frank Swinnerton. But Frank Swinnerton can be more cruel than Irvin Cobb. Indeed, sometimes when he is telling a story, his face becomes exactly like the face of Mephistopheles in excellent humour with the world's sinfulness and idiocy.

"Swinnerton's other gift is the critical. It has been said that an author cannot be at once a first-class critic and a first-class creative artist. To which absurdity I reply: What about William Dean Howells? And what about Henry James, to name no other names? Anyhow, if Swinnerton excels in fiction he also excels in literary criticism. The fact that the literary editor of the Manchester Guardian wrote and asked him to write literary criticism for the Manchester Guardian will perhaps convey nothing to the American citizen. But to the Englishman of literary taste and experience it has enormous import. The Manchester Guardian publishes the most fastidious and judicious literary criticism in Britain.

"I recall that once when Swinnerton was in my house I had there also a young military officer with a mad passion for letters and a terrific ambition to be an author. The officer gave me a manuscript to read. I handed it over to Swinnerton to read, and then called upon Swinnerton to criticise it in the presence of both of us. 'Your friend is very kind,' said the officer to me afterward, 'but it was a frightful ordeal.'

"The book on George Gissing I have already mentioned. But it was Swinnerton's work on R. L. Stevenson that made the trouble in London. It is a destructive work. It is bland and impartial, and not bereft of laudatory passages, but since its appearance Stevenson's reputation has never been the same."

BOOKS BY FRANK SWINNERTON

THE MERRY HEART THE YOUNG IDEA THE CASEMENT THE HAPPY FAMILY GEORGE GISSING: A CRITICAL STUDY R. L. STEVENSON: A CRITICAL STUDY ON THE STAIRCASE THE CHASTE WIFE NOCTURNE SHOPS AND HOUSES SEPTEMBER COQUETTE THE THREE LOVERS

SOURCES ON FRANK SWINNERTON

Who's Who [In England].

Frank Swinnerton: Personal Sketches by Arnold Bennett, H. G. Wells, Grant Overtor, Booklet published by GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY, 1920.

Private Information.



Chapter XVI

AN ARMFUL OF NOVELS, WITH NOTES ON THE NOVELISTS

i

"The quiet, the calm, the extreme individualism, and the easy-going self-content of my birthplace and early habitat—the Eastern Shore of Maryland, have been, I fear, the dominating influences of my life," writes Sophie Kerr. "Thank heaven, I had a restless, energetic, and very bad-tempered father to leaven them, a man with a biting tongue and a kind heart, a keen sense of the ridiculous and a passion for honesty in speech and action. I, the younger of his two children, was his constant companion. I tagged after him, every day and all day. Even when I was very small he interested me—and very few fathers ever really interest their children.

"The usual life of a girl in a small semi-Southern town was mine. I learned to cook, I made most of my own frocks, I embroidered excessively, I played the violin worse than any other person in the world, I went away to college and I came back again. I wasn't a popular girl socially for two reasons. I had inherited my father's gift of sarcasm, and there was the even greater handicap of a beautiful, popular, socially malleable older sister. Beside her I was nowhere.

"But I wanted to write, so I didn't care. I got my father to buy me a second-hand typewriter, and learned to run it with two fingers. And I wrote. I even sold some of the stuff. The Country Gentleman bought one of my first stories, and the Ladies' World bought another. This was glorious.

"Then I got a job on the Pittsburgh Chronicle-Telegraph, an afternoon newspaper owned by Senator Oliver. Later I went to The Gazette-Times, the morning paper also owned by the Senator. A few years later I came to New York and found a place on the staff of the Woman's Home Companion, eventually becoming Managing Editor. Two years ago I resigned my editorial job to give all my time to writing. Of course I had been writing pretty steadily anyway, but holding my job too.

"I had expected, when I gave up office work, to find my leisure time an embarrassment. I planned so many things to do, how I would see all my friends often, how I would travel, read, do all sorts of delightful things that double work had before made impossible. But I've done none of them. I haven't nearly as much time as I had when I hadn't any time at all, and that's the honest truth.

"If only I could arrange a multiple existence—one life for work; one for the machinery of life, housekeeping, getting clothes made, shopping; one for seeing my friends, travel, visiting; one life for the other diversions such as music, the theatre, clubs, politics, one life for just plain loafing. Now that would be wonderful. But to crowd it all into twenty-four hours a day—no, too much of it gets squeezed out.

"What do I like the most? Comfort, I think. And old painted satinwood, and cats and prizefights, and dancing, and Spanish shawls, and looking at the ocean, and having my own way. And I dislike argument, and perfume, and fat women, and people who tell the sort of lies that simply insult your intelligence, and men who begin letters 'Dear Lady,' and long earrings, and intolerance."