“There is a Latin sharpness of mentality manifested in these clearly, sardonically etched portraits of a ship’s crew. The whimsical humour revealed in final lines is a portent, in the present writer’s opinion, of a talent which will probably come to maturity in a very different field. Indeed it may be, though it is too early to dogmatise, that these poems are but the early efflorescence of a gift for vigorous prose narrative.
“Mr. Milton Raison has settled for himself, with engaging promptitude, that a seafaring career provides the inspiration he craves. The influence of Masefield is strong upon him, and some of his verses are plainly derivative. As already hinted, it is too early to say definitely how this plan will succeed. In his diary, kept while on a voyage to South America, a document remarkable for its descriptive power and a certain crude and virginal candour, one may discover an embryo novelist struggling with the inevitable limitations of youth. But in his simple and naïve poems, whether they give us some bizarre and catastrophic picture of seamen, or depict the charming emotions of a sensitive adolescence, there is a passion for experiment and humility of intellect which promises well enough for a young man in his teens.”
I find it particularly difficult to choose a poem for citation from this book. Perhaps I shall do as well as I can, with only space to quote one poem, if I give you “Vision”:
Have I forgotten beauty, and the pang
Of sheer delight in perfect visioning?
Have I forgotten how the spirit sang
When shattered breakers sprayed their ocean-tang
To ease the blows with which the great cliffs rang?
Have I forgotten how the fond stars fling
Their naked children to the faery ring
Of some dark pool, and watch them play and sing
In silent silver chords I too could hear?
Or smile to see a starlet shake with fear
Whenever winds disturbed the lake’s repose,
Or when in mocking mood they form in rows,
And stare up at their parents—so sedate—
Then break up laughing ’neath a ripple’s weight?
It seems as if,The First Person Singularhaving been published, more people now know William Rose Benét as a novelist than as a poet. I cannot help feeling that to be something of a pity. I am not going to quote one of Mr. Benét’s poems—indeed all his best work is in quite long and semi-narrative verse—but I will give you what Don Marquis was inspired to write after reading Benét’sMoons of Grandeur. On looking at it again, I see that Mr. Marquis has quoted eight lines, so you shall have your taste of William Rose Benét, the poet, after all!
“Some day, just to please ourself, we intend to make a compilation of poems that we love best; the ones that we turn to again and again. There will be in the volume the six odes of Keats, Shelley’s ‘Adonais’; Wordsworth’s ‘Intimations of Immortality’; Milton’s ‘L’Allegro’ and ‘Il Penseroso’;William Rose Benét’s ‘Man Possessed’ and very little else.
“We don’t ‘defend’ these poems ... no doubt they are all of them quite indefensible, in the light of certain special poetic revelations of the last few years ... and we have no particular theories about them; we merely yield ourself to them, and they transport us; we are careless of reason in the matter, for they cast a spell upon us. We do not mean to say that we are in the category with the person who says: ‘I don’t know anything about art, but I know what I like’—On the contrary, we know exactly why we like these things, although we don’t intend to take the trouble to tell you now.
“William Rose Benét has published another book of poems,Moons of Grandeur. Here is a stanza picked up at random—it happens to be the opening stanza of ‘Gaspara Stampa’—which shows the lyric quality of the verse:
“Like flame, like wine, across the still lagoon,
The colours of the sunset stream.
Spectral in heaven as climbs the frail veiled moon
So climbs my dream.
Out of the heart’s eternal torture fire
No eastern phoenix risen—
Only the naked soul, spent with desire,
Bursts its prison.
“Was Benét ever in Italy? No matter ... he has Italy in him, in his heart and brain. Italy and Egypt and every other country that was everwarmed by the sun of beauty and shone on by the stars of romance. For the poems in this book are woven of the stuff of sheer romance. There is nothing else in the world as depressing as a romantic poem that doesn’t ‘get there.’ And to us, at least, there is nothing as thrilling as the authentic voice of romance, the genuine utterance of the soul that walks in communion with beauty.Moons of Grandeuris a ringing bell and a glimmering tapestry and a draught of sparkling wine.
“A certain rich intricacy of pattern distinguishes the physical body of Benét’s art; when he chooses he can use words as if they were the jewelled particles of a mosaic; familiar words, with his handling, become ‘something rich and strange.’ Of the spiritual content of his poems, we can say nothing adequate, because there is not much that can be said of spirit; either it is there and you feel it, and it works upon you, or it is not there. There are very few people writing verse today who have the power to charm us and enchant us and carry us away with them as Benét can. He has found the horse with wings.”
The Bookman Anthology of Verse(1922), edited by John Farrar, editor of The Bookman, is an altogether extraordinary anthology to be made up from the poets contributing to a single magazine in eighteen consecutive months. Among those who are represented are: Franklin P. Adams, Karle Wilson Baker, Maxwell Bodenheim, Hilda Conkling, John Dos Passos, Zona Gale, D. H.Lawrence, Amy Lowell, David Morton, Edwin Arlington Robinson, Carl Sandburg, Siegfried Sassoon, Sara Teasdale, Louis and Jean Starr Untermeyer, and Elinor Wylie.
Mr. Farrar has written short introductions to the example (or examples) of the work of each poet. In his general preface he says:
“Where most anthologies of poetry are collected for the purpose of giving pleasure by means of the verses themselves, I have tried here to give you something of the joy to be found in securing manuscripts, in attempting to understand current poetry by a broadening of taste to match broadening literary tendencies; and, perhaps most important of all, to present you to the poets themselves as I know them by actual meeting or correspondence.”
I will choose what Mr. Farrar says about Hilda Conkling, prefacing her poem “Lonely Song”; and then I will quote the poem:
“A shy, but normal little girl, twelve years old now, nine when her first volume of verses appeared, Hilda Conkling is not so much the infant prodigy as a clear proof that the child mind, before the precious spark is destroyed, possesses both vision and the ability to express it in natural and beautiful rhythm. Grace Hazard Conkling, herself a poet, is Hilda’s mother. They live at Northampton, Massachusetts, in the academic atmosphere of Smith College where those who know the little girl say that she enjoys slidingdown a cellar stairway quite as much as she does talking of elves and gnomes. She was born in New York State, so that she is distinctly of the East. The rhythms which she uses to express her ideas are the result both of her own moods, which are often crystal-clear in their delicate imagery, and of the fact that from time to time, when she was first able to listen, her mother read aloud to her. In fact, her first poems were made before she, herself, could write them down. The speculation as to what she will do when she grows to womanhood is a common one. Is it important? A childhood filled with beauty is something to have achieved.”
Bend low, blue sky,
Touch my forehead;
You look cool ... bend down ...
Flow about me in your blueness and coolness,
Be thistledown, be flowers,
Be all the songs I have not yet sung.
Laugh at me, sky!
Put a cap of cloud on my head ...
Blow it off with your blue winds;
Give me a feeling of your laughter
Beyond cloud and wind!
I need to have you laugh at me
As though you liked me a little.
This has been, as I meant it to be, a wholly serious chapter; but at the end I find I cannot stop without speaking of Keith Preston. No one whoreads the Chicago Daily News fails to know Keith Preston’s delightful humour and “needle-tipped satire.” And his book,Splinters, contains all sorts of good things of which I can give you, alas, only some inadequate (because solitary) sample. Yet, anyway, here is his “Ode to Common Sense”:
Spirit or demon, Common Sense!
Seen seldom by us mortals dense,
Come, sprite, inform, inhabit me
And teach me art and poetry.
Teach me to chuckle, sly as you,
At gods that now I truckle to,
To doubt the New Republic’s bent,
And jeer each bookish Supplement.
Now, like a thief, you come and flit,
You call so seldom, Mother Wit!
Remember? Once when you stood by
I found a Dreiser novel dry.
One day when I was reading hard—
What? Amy Lowell, godlike bard!
You peeped and then at what you saw
Gave one Gargantuan guffaw.
Spirit or demon, coarse or rude,
(Sometimes I think you must be stewed)
Brute that you are, I love your powers,
But,—drop in after office hours!
Yes, Common Sense, be mine, I ask,
But still respect my critic’s task;
Molest me not when I’m employed
With psychics, sex, vers libre, or Freud.
ii
ii
The matter of playwrights is much more difficult than that of poets! A play cannot, as a rule, be satisfactorily quoted from. In the case of a play which is to be staged there are terrible objections (on the part of the producer) to any excerpts at all appearing in advance. The publication of the text of a play is hedged about by all manner of difficulties, copyrights, warnings and solemn notifications. As I write, it is expected that A. H. Woods, the producer of plays, will stage at the Times Square Theatre, New York, probably in September, 1922, the new play by W. Somerset Maugham,East of Suez. Pauline Frederick is expected to assume the principal rôle. Mr. Maugham’s play will be published when it has been produced, or, if the theatre plans suffer one of those changes to which all theatres are subject, will be published anyhow! Shall we say that the setting is Chinese, and that the characters are Europeans, and that Mr. Maugham has again shown his peculiar skill in the delineation of the white man in contact with an alien civilisation? We shall say so. And—never mind! A sure production of the play for the Fireside Theatre is hereby guaranteed. The Fireside Theatre, blessed institution, has certain merits. The actors are always ideal and the performance always begins on time, as a letter to the New York Times has pointed out.
Arnold Bennett has written a lot of plays;The Love Matchis merely the latest of them. If I cannot very well quote a scene fromThe Love Match,—on the grounds of length and possible unintelligibility apart from the rest of the drama—I can give you, I think, an idea of the wit of the dialogue:
Russ(with calm and disdainful resentment). You’re angry with me now.
Nina(hurt). Indeed I’m not. Why should I be angry? Do you suppose I mind who sends you flowers?
Russ.No, I don’t. That’s not the reason. You’re angry with me because you came in here tonight, after saying positively you wouldn’t come, and I didn’t happen to be waiting for you.
Nina.Hugh, you’re ridiculous.
Russ.Of course I am. That’s not the reason. You took me against my will to that footling hospital ball last night, and I only got three hours’ sleep instead of six, and you’re angry with me because I yawned after you kissed me.
Nina.You’re too utterly absurd!
Russ.Of course I am. That’s not the reason, either. The real reason is (firmly) you’re angry with me because you clean forgot it was my birthday today. That’s why you’re angry with me.
Nina.Well, I think you might have reminded me....
Nina.I like sitting on the carpet.
(She reclines at his feet.) I wonder why women nowadays are so fond of the floor.
Russ.Because they’re oriental, of course.
Nina.But I’m not oriental, Hughie! (Looking at him with loving passion.) Am I?
Russ.That’s the Eastern question.
Nina.But you like it, don’t you?
Russ.Every man has a private longing to live in the East.
Nina.But not harems and things?
Russ.Well—within reason....
Nina.What do you think of me? I’m always dying to know, and I’m never sure.
Russ.What do you think ofme?
Nina.I think you’re magnificent and terrible and ruthless.
Russ(with amicable sincerity). Oh, no, I’m not. But you are.
Nina.How? When? When was I ruthless last?
Russ.You’re always ruthless in your appetite for life. You want to taste everything, enjoy all the sensations there are. This evening you like intensely to sit very quiet on the floor; but last night you were mad about dancing and eating and drinking. You couldn’t be still. Tomorrow night it’ll be something else. There’s no end to what you want, and what you want tremendously, and what you’ve jolly well got to have. You aren’t a woman. You’re a hundred women.
Nina.Oh! Hughie. How well you understand!
Russ.Yes, don’t I?
Nina(tenderly). Do I make you very unhappy? Hughie, you mustn’t tell me I make you unhappy. I couldn’t bear it.
Russ.Then I won’t.
Nina.But do I?
Russ.Let’s say you cause a certain amount of disturbance sometimes.
Nina.But you like me to be as I am, don’t you?
Russ.Yes.
Nina.You wouldn’t have me altered?
Russ.Can’t alter a climate.
Nina.You don’t know how much I want to be perfect for you.
Russ.You know my ruthless rule, “The best is good enough; chuck everything else into the street.” Have I ever, on any single occasion, chucked you into the street?
Nina.But I want to be more perfect.
Russ.Why do women always hanker after the impossible?
J. Hartley Manners is the husband of Laurette Taylor and the author of plays in some of which she appears. His dramaThe Harp of Lifehas as its theme the love of two women, his mother and a courtesan, for a nineteen-year-old boy, and their willing self-sacrifice that he may go forward unbroken and unsmirched. The interestingthing, aside from the strength of the play and its vivid study of adolescence, is the portrait of the mother. And now his play,The National Anthem, which caused so much discussion, is procurable in book form.
Here I have been talking aboutEast of SuezandThe Love Matchand have said nothing aboutThe CircleorMilestones! But I suppose everyone knows thatThe Circleis by Maugham and was markedly successful when it was produced in New York; and surely everyone must know thatMilestonesis by Arnold Bennett and Edward Knoblauch—one of the great plays of the last quarter century. I must take a moment to speak of Sidney Howard’s four act play,Swords. I think the best thing to do is to give what Kenneth Macgowan, an exceptionally able critic of the drama, said about the play:
“Swordsis as remarkable a play as America has ever produced. It is a drama of action on a par withThe Jest, fused with the ecstasy of inspiration and the mysticism of the spirit and the body of woman. It sets Ghibelline and Guelph, Pope and Emperor, two nobles and a dog of the gutters fighting for a lady of strange and extraordinary beauty who is the bride of one noble and the hostage of the other. With the passions, the cruelties, and spiritual vision of the middle ages to build uponSwordssweeps upward to a scene of sudden, flashing conflict shot with the mystic andtriumphant ecstasy which emanates from this glorious woman.”
American lovers of the drama have a special interest in the two volumes ofThe Plays of Hubert Henry Davies.At the time of his first success Mr. Davies was working in San Francisco, whither he had come from England. It was Frohman who made him an offer that brought him to New York and began the series of productions which ended only with his death in 1917 in Paris. These two volumes, very beautiful examples of fine bookmaking, contain the successes:Cousin Kate,Captain Drew on Leave, andThe Mollusc. Among the other plays included are:A Single Man,Doormats,Outcasts,Mrs. Gorringe’s Necklace, andLady Epping’s Lawsuit. Hugh Walpole has contributed a very touching introduction.
Chapter XXIIITHE BOOKMAN FOUNDATION AND THE BOOKMAN
“Thank you very much for the May Bookman,” writes Hugh Walpole (June, 1922). “I have been reading The Bookman during the last year and I congratulate Mr. Farrar most strongly upon it. The paper has now a personality unlike any other that I know and it is the least dull of all literary papers! I like especially the more serious articles, the series of sketches of literary personalities seeming especially excellent to me.” Mr. Walpole evidently had in mind the feature of The Bookman called “The Literary Spotlight.”
“The Bookman is alive. If there is a better quality in the long run for a general literary magazine to try for, I do not know what it is,” writes Carl Van Doren, literary editor of The Nation.
“Mr. Farrar has turned The Bookman into a monthly brimming with his own creative enthusiasm,”says Louis Untermeyer. “It has technically as well as figuratively no rival.”
And Irvin S. Cobb declares: “By my way of thinking, it is the most informative, the most entertaining, and incidentally the brightest and most amusing publication devoted to literature and its products that I have ever seen.”
ii
ii
The idea of The Bookman Foundation first occurred in a discussion of the future of the magazine and the ampler purposes it was desired to have The Bookman serve. The idea had been advanced that more than the future of the magazine should be considered; those to whom the welfare of the magazine was a most important consideration distinctly felt that welfare to depend upon a healthy and thriving condition of American literature and of American interest in American literature. The broadest possible view, as is so often the case, seemed the only ultimately profitable view. In what way could The Bookman serve the interests of American literature in which it was not already serving them? How could public interest in American literature best be stimulated?
The idea gradually took shape as a form of foundation, naturally to be called The Bookman Foundation, with a double purpose. Fundamentally The Bookman Foundation is being established to stimulate the study of American literatureand its development; more immediately, and as the direct means to that end, the purpose of the Foundation will be to afford a vehicle for the best constructive criticism, spoken and written, on the beginnings and development of our literature. In association with the faculty of English at one of the larger and older American universities, Yale, the Foundation will establish a lectureship; and annually there will be given at Yale a lecture or a course of lectures on American literature by some distinguished writer or critic. It is hoped that, as the Foundation grows, other universities will be brought into co-operation with Yale so that the lectureship may move from centre to centre, stimulating to intelligent self-expression the varied elements that are contributing to our national growth.
The lectures given on The Bookman Foundation will be published in book form by The Bookman in a handsome and uniform edition. Membership in The Bookman Foundation will be by invitation. All members of the Foundation will be entitled to receive the published lectures without charge and they will also have the privilege of subscribing for certain first and limited editions of notable American books. At the present writing, even so much as I have suggested is largely tentative, and I offer it for its essential idea; an executive committee of The Bookman Foundation, in co-operation with an advisory committee, the members of which committees haveyet to be finally determined, will settle all details. By the time of this book’s publication or even sooner, I expect a full announcement will have been made; and for the correction of what I have stated I would refer the reader to The Bookman itself.
iii
iii
I am not going to give a historical account of The Bookman here. The magazine is no newcomer among American periodicals. It has a reasonably old and highly honourable history. For long published by the house of Dodd, Mead & Company, it was acquired by George H. Doran Company and placed under the editorial direction of Robert Cortes Holliday. That was the beginning of a new vitality in its pages. Mr. Holliday was succeeded by Mr. Farrar, and now, in its fifty-sixth volume, The Bookman seems to the thousands who read it more interesting than ever before in its history.
The roll call of its past and present contributors includes many of the representative names in contemporary American and English literature. I will give a few:
Joseph Hergesheimer
Amy Lowell
Siegfried Sassoon
James Branch Cabell
Mary Roberts Rinehart
Zona Gale
Fannie Hurst
William McFee
Sherwood Anderson
Hugh Walpole
Frank Swinnerton
Robert Frost
Sara Teasdale
Irvin S. Cobb
Richard Le Gallienne
Donn Byrne
Christopher Morley
Robert Cortes Holliday
Johan Bojer
William Rose Benét
Edgar Lee Masters
Kathleen Norris
Frederick O’Brien
D. H. Lawrence
John Drinkwater
Joseph C. Lincoln
George Jean Nathan
William Allen White
Carl Sandburg
Sinclair Lewis
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Eugene O’Neill
H. L. Mencken
John Dos Passos
Elinor Wylie
Gertrude Atherton
Floyd Dell
iv
iv
Among the American essayists whose work has appeared in The Bookman before its publication in book form is Robert Cortes Holliday; among strikingly successful books that appeared serially in The Bookman was Donald Ogden Stewart’sA Parody Outline of History. Among The Bookman’s regular reviewers are Louis Untermeyer, Wilson Follett, Paul Elmer More, H. L. Mencken, Henry Seidel Canby and Maurice Francis Egan. Among writers of distinction whose short stories have first appeared in The Bookman are William McFee, Sherwood Anderson, Mary Austin, and Johan Bojer; while the intimate personal portraits published under the general title “The Literary Spotlight” have Lytton Stracheyized contemporary American literature. Possibly it is in the department of poetry that The Bookman now shines the brightest (see the account of The Bookman Anthology in the previous chapter); if so, that may be because the editor, John Farrar, is himself a poet.
Probably no other literary magazine in the world exhibits such a degree of personal contact between the editor, his readers, his contributors and the magazine’s friends. This note of personal contact is constantly reflected in the magazine’s pages; but anyone who has called upon the editor of The Bookman once or twice will know explicitly just what I mean.
EPILOGUE
I have been surprised, on looking back over these chapters, by the variety of the books I have talked about. That so diverse a list should be under a single imprint and should represent, with few exceptions, the publications of a single twelvemonth, seems to me very remarkable. I believe a majority of the books are the production of a single publishing season, the autumn of 1922, and the Doran imprint is but thirteen years old.
“Of the making of books, there is no end”; but of the making of any single book, there must come an end. Yet what is the end of a book but the beginning of new friendships?
THE END
THE END
INDEX