Chapter XV

iii

Not content with being the husband of Margaret Sangster, C. M. Sheridan has writtenThe 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 anintricate 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’sWhat to Eat and How to Prepare Itis an orthodox cook-book in contrast with Mr. Sheridan’s daring adventure.

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 bookIce-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 owningIce 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 inIt Is to Laughcan 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 fallingin 1907, and his first Canadian tour in 1910.

Mark Hambourg’s book is calledHow to Play the Pianoand 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.

Those who read The Bookman will not need to be told that the articles by Robert Cortes Holliday onWriting 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 towrite—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 doand 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 manyas 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 ofWriting as a Businessby 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 XVFRANK SWINNERTON: ANALYST OF LOVERS

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 withNocturne, 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 ofNocturnemakes 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, ‘ReadNocturne,’ 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 justto estimate the living writer by a single unique performance, an extraordinary piece of virtuosity, whichNocturneunquestionably is. For anyone who wishes to understand and appreciate Swinnerton, I would recommend that he begin withCoquette, follow it withSeptember, follow that withShops and Housesand then readNocturne. 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 withThe Three Lovers.” And after that I would have him readCoquetteand the other books in the order I have named. After he had reached and finishedNocturne, I would have him turn to the several earlier novels—The Happy Family,On the Staircase, andThe Chaste Wife.

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

FRANK SWINNERTON

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 womencanbe 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.

“‘Youarepriceless!’ she cried. ‘You say the most wonderful things.’

“‘Well,Ishould.’

“‘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! Ofcoursehe’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’tinsist.’

“‘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 alldoit,’ cried Amy, contemptuously. ‘Don’t make any mistake about that.’

“‘I don’t believe it,’ said Patricia. ‘Do you mean that my father—oryourfather...?’

“‘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.

“‘Butyou’venever,’ she urged. ‘I’ve never.’

“‘No.’ Amy was obviously irritated by the personal application. ‘That’s just it. I say weoughtto 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 youwantto live with?’

“‘No. I wish there was. Then I shouldknow’

“‘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 bekissed. 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, inThe 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 toNocturne, 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 lastperfected, 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 ofNocturne.

“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.”

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 wasThe 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 entitledThe 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 readThe Casementfor 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 intothe 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. Myimpressions 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 readThe Young Idea, andThe Happy Family, and, I think, his critical work on George Gissing.The Happy Familymarked 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 bandstandwhich 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 inNocturne. I am convinced that Swinnerton evolved the yacht inNocturnefrom my yacht; but he ennobled, magnified, decorated, enriched and bejewelled it till honestly I could not recognise my wretched vessel. The yacht inNocturneis the yacht I want, ought to have, and never shall have. I envy him the yacht inNocturne, 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 examinationfor 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 naughtif 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 ManchesterGuardian 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.”

Booksby Frank Swinnerton

Books

by Frank Swinnerton

THE LOVER’S BATTLETHE MERRY HEARTTHE YOUNG IDEATHE CASEMENTTHE HAPPY FAMILYGEORGE GISSING: A CRITICAL STUDYR. L. STEVENSON: A CRITICAL STUDYON THE STAIRCASETHE CHASTE WIFENOCTURNESHOPS AND HOUSESSEPTEMBERCOQUETTETHE THREE LOVERS

THE LOVER’S BATTLE

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

Sourceson Frank Swinnerton

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 XVIAN ARMFUL OF NOVELS, WITH NOTES ON THE NOVELISTS

“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 sociallyfor 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.”

All of which is excellent preparation for the reader of Sophie Kerr’s new novel,One Thing Is Certain. Those who read herPainted Meadowswill expect and will find in this new novel the same charming background, but they will find a much more dramatic story. Since the novel is one of surprise, with an event at its close which throws everything that went before in a new, a curious, a startling and profoundly significant light, I cannot indulge in any further description of it in this place. But I do wish to quote some sentences from a letter Sophie Kerr wrote me:

“I wanted to show that when lives get out ofplumb, the way to straighten them is not with a violent gesture. That when we do seize them, and try to jerk them straight again, we invariably let ourselves in for long years of unhappiness and remorse. Witness Louellen. In two desperate attempts ... she tries to change the whole current and colour of her life.”

So much for the essential character of the story, but there is a question in my mind as to what, in the story, readers will consider the true essential! I think for very many it will not be the action, unusual and dramatic as that is, but the picture of a peculiar community, one typical of Maryland’s Eastern Shore, where we have farmer folk in whom there lives the spirit and tradition of a landed aristocracy. The true essential with such readers, will be the individuals who are drawn with such humour and skill, the mellowness of the scene; even such a detail as the culinary triumph that was Louellen’s wedding dinner. A marvellous and incomparable meal! One reads of it, his mouth watering and his stomach crying out.

The House of Five Swords, by Tristram Tupper, is a gallant representative of those novels which we are beginning to get in the inevitable reaction from such realism asMain StreetandMoon-Calf, a romantic story of age and youth, of love and hate, of bitter unyielding hardness, andof melting pity and tenderness. It begins with the Robin, age seven, with burnished curls, viewing with awestruck delight five polished swords against the shining dark wall in Colonial House, where she had gone to deliver the Colonel’s boots! She forgot the boots. She lifted two of the swords from the wall, crossed them on the floor and danced the sword dance of Scotland. From the doorway a white-haired old figure watched with narrowed eyes and tightened mouth. Then the storm broke....

The House of Five Swordsis Mr. Tupper’s first novel. A native of Virginia, he has done newspaper work, has tramped a good deal and was fooling with the study of law when American troops were ordered to the Mexican border. After that experience he went overseas. On his return from the war, he tried writing and met with rapid success.

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Readers of Baroness Orczy’s novels will welcomeNicolette.

This is essentially a love story, with the scene laid in the mountains of Provence in the early days of the Restoration of King Louis XVIII to the throne of France. An ancient half-ruined château perches among dwarf olives and mimosa, orange and lemon groves. There is a vivid contrast between the prosperity of Jaume Deydier, a rich peasant-proprietor, and the grinding povertyof the proud and ancient family of de Ventadour, whose last scion, Bertrand, goes to seek fortune in Paris and there becomes affianced to a wealthy and beautiful heiress. Nicolette, the daughter of Jaume Deydier, whose ancestor had been a lackey in the service of the Comte de Ventadour, is passionately in love with Bertrand, but a bitter feud keeps the lovers for long apart.

There will be a new novel this autumn,Ann and Her Mother, by O. Douglas, whosePenny Plaingave great pleasure to its readers. “Penny plain,” if you remember, was the way Jean described the lot of herself and her brothers whom she mothered in the Scottish cottage; but matters were somewhat changed when romance crossed the threshold in the person of the Honourable Pamela and a bitter old millionaire who came to claim the house as his own.

Ann and Her Motheris the story of a Scotch family as seen through the eyes of the mother and her daughter. The author ofPenny PlainandAnn and Her Motheris a sister of John Buchan, author ofThe Thirty-nine Steps,The Path of the King, and many other books.

December Love, by Robert Hichens, will have a greater popularity than any of his novels sinceThe Garden of Allah. It is a question whether this uncannily penetrative study of power and the need for love of a woman of sixty does not surpassThe Garden of Allah. In Lady Sellingworth, Mr. Hichens is dealing with a brilliant woman.The theme is daring and calls for both skill and delicacy. Of the action, one really should not say very much, lest one spoil the book for the reader. The loss of the Sellingworth jewels in Paris had caused a sensation in the midst of which Lady Sellingworth was silent. She declined to discuss the disappearance of the jewels. There followed the advent at No. 4 Berkeley Square of Alick Craven, a man of thirty, vigorous, attractive and decidedly a somebody. But inexplicably—at any rate without explanation—Lady Sellingworth retired from society when Craven appeared.

Tell Englandby Ernest Raymond is a novel which has been sensationally successful in England. It is a war story and I will give you some of the opening paragraphs of the “Prologue by Padre Monty”:

“In the year that the Colonel died he took little Rupert to see the swallows fly away. I can find no better beginning than that.

“When there devolved upon me as a labour of love the editing of Rupert Ray’s book,Tell England, I carried the manuscript to my room one bright autumn afternoon and read it during the fall of a soft evening, till the light failed, and my eyes burned with the strain of reading in the dark. I could hardly leave his ingenuous tale to rise and turn on the gas. Nor, perhaps, did I want such artificial brightness. There are times when one prefers the twilight. Doubtless the tale held me fascinated because it revealed the schooldays ofthose boys whom I met in their young manhood and told afresh that wild old Gallipoli adventure which I shared with them. Though, sadly enough, I take Heaven to witness that I was not the idealised creature whom Rupert portrays. God bless them, how these boys will idealise us!

“Then again, as Rupert tells you, it was I who suggested to him the writing of his story. And well I recall how he demurred, asking:

“‘But what am I to write about?’ For he was always diffident and unconscious of his power.

“‘Is Gallipoli nothing to write about?’ I retorted. ‘And you can’t have spent five years at a great public school like Kensington without one or two sensational things. Pick them out and let us have them. For whatever the modern theorists say, the main duty of a story-teller is certainly to tell stories.’”

This prologue is followed by the novel which begins with English public school life in the fashion ofSoniaand other novels American readers are familiar with. The main theme of the book is Gallipoli.

The new novel by J. E. Buckrose isA Knight Among Ladies. Mrs. Buckrose says that the character of Sid Dummeris in this book is modelled upon an actual person. “He did actually live in a remote country place where I used to stay a great deal when I was a child and as he has been gone twenty years, I thought I might employ my exactmemories of him without hurting anyone.” This was in answer to questions asked by The Bookman (London) of a number of English writers. The London Bookman wanted to find out if novelists generally drew their characters from actual people. The replies showed that this proceeding was very rare. Mrs. Buckrose recalled only one other instance in which she had used an actual person in her fiction. Mrs. Buckrose is Mrs. Falconer Jameson. She lives at Hornsea, East Yorkshire, and says:

“My real hobby is my writing—as it was my secret pleasure from the age of nine until I was over thirty when I first attempted to publish. I look after my chickens, my house and a rather delicate husband; write my books and try to do my duty to my neighbour!”

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