American Nights Entertainment

Grant Overton

By GRANT OVERTON

About Books and Authors

AMERICAN NIGHTS ENTERTAINMENT WHEN WINTER COMES TO MAIN STREET THE WOMEN WHO MAKE OUR NOVELS

Fiction

ISLAND OF THE INNOCENT THE ANSWERER WORLD WITHOUT END THE THOUSAND-AND-FIRST NIGHT (In Preparation)

American Nights Entertainment

BY

GRANT OVERTON

New York, 1923

D. APPLETON & CO. GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & CO. CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

COPYRIGHT, 1923,

BY GRANT OVERTON

First Printing, September, 1923.

Press of J. J. Little & Ives Company New York, U. S. A.

Bound in Interlaken-Cloth

This Book

IS DEDICATED TO BOOKSELLERS AND BOOKREADERS EVERYWHERE BY THE AUTHOR AND THE PUBLISHERS WHO HAVE JOINED IN ITS PRODUCTION

[Pg vii]

Preface

THIS book is written because of the rapid spread of the habit of reading books, developing in its march an interest in the personalities of authors. Indeed, the existence of this book is an evidence of the quick contagion of the book-reading habit, since four publishing houses have joined to make possible the pages that follow.

Few developments of the early part of this century are more encouraging than the new attention to books. The increase in book stores, the very large increase in the number of books sold, the multiplication of libraries and their great patronage, the success of new book review pages and periodicals—all are signs of the change that has come about in recent years, and perhaps especially during and since the war of 1914-18.

And in a narrower department, no development of recent years has borne a more cheerful promise than the resolution of four publishers to associate themselves in an enterprise the disinterestedness of which the reader is invited to assess for himself.

The entire responsibility for the estimates and opinions offered (where they are not directly attributed) is mine. I have tried to tell the truth, use my imagination legitimately, and observe good[Pg viii] taste without the sacrifice of valuable insights into character and work.

For example, in addition to biographical facts, in themselves often unenlightening, I have usually tried, as in the account of Mr. Galsworthy, to disclose the personality so carefully (albeit high-mindedly) withheld from the writer’s books. Again, as in the chapter on Joseph Conrad, aside from the effort at novelty and freshness of interest by the device of adopting Conrad’s own Marlow as the narrator, I have made bold to set down some facts never before printed and not in the least generally known, because they seem to me a side of the picture that it is wrong to obscure.

The wealth of material spread before me has made the task of selection exceedingly difficult, and I cannot pretend to be satisfied with what I have chosen in the light of my knowledge of what has had to be left out. I owe a grateful acknowledgment to the publishers and to individuals in the several publishing houses for their generous assistance.

1 August, 1923.

Grant Overton.[Pg ix]

Contents

[Pg x]

[Pg xi]

Portraits

JOHN GALSWORTHY, 15

JOSEPH CONRAD, 65

ARTHUR TRAIN, 93

V. SACKVILLE-WEST, 103

HAROLD BELL WRIGHT, 121

BOOTH TARKINGTON, 219

DONALD OGDEN STEWART, 241

JOSEPH C. LINCOLN, 323

EDITH WHARTON, 347

CHRISTOPHER MORLEY, 365

[Pg xii]

[Pg 13]

American Nights ENTERTAINMENT

1. Mr. Galsworthy’s Secret Loyalties

i

IN the autumn of 1922 New York began to witness a play by John Galsworthy, called Loyalties. Not only the extreme smoothness of the acting by a London company but the almost unblemished perfection of the play as drama excited much praise. Because, of the two principals, one was a Jew and the other was not, with consequent enhancement of the dramatic values in several scenes, it was said (by those who always seek an extrinsic explanation) that Loyalties simply could not have avoided being a success in New York. The same type of mind has long been busy with the problem of Mr. Galsworthy as a novelist. It read The Man of Property and found the book explained by the fact that the author was a Socialist. Confronted with The Dark Flower, it declared this “love life of a man” sheer sentimentalism (in 1913 there was no Freudianism to fall back on). And the powerful play called Justice[Pg 14] was accounted for by a story that quiet Mr. Galsworthy had “put on old clothes, wrapped a brick in brown paper, stopped in front of a tempting-looking

plate-glass window” and let ’er fly. On being “promptly arrested,” he “gave an assumed name, and the magistrate, in his turn, gave Galsworthy six months. That’s how he found out what the inside of English prisons was like.”

A saying has it that it is always the innocent bystander who gets hurt; but the fate of the sympathetic bystander—and such a one John Galsworthy has always been—is more ironic. That peculiar sprite, George Meredith’s Comic Spirit, reading all that has been written about Galsworthy would possibly find some adequate comment; but Meredith is dead and the only penetrating characterisation that occurs to me is: “Galsworthy’s the kind of man who, if he were in some other station of life, would be a splendid subject for Joseph Conrad.”

In the middle of Loyalties a character exclaims: “Prejudices—or are they loyalties—I don’t know—criss-cross—we all cut each other’s throats from the best of motives.” Well, in a paper written in 1917 or earlier and included in their book, Some Modern Novelists, published in January, 1918, Helen Thomas Follett and Wilson Follett, discussing Galsworthy’s early novels put down a now very remarkable sentence, as follows:

“Mr. Galsworthy does not see how two loyalties that conflict can both be right; and he is always interested in the larger loyalty.”

© Eugene Hutchinson

JOHN GALSWORTHY

So interesting and significant a statement, buried as seed, might easily sprout as novel or play. I have [Pg 17]no atom of evidence that Mr. Galsworthy ever saw the comment; but if he read it and forgot (buried?) the words, then Loyalties was written in their effectual disproof. For in this drama, as in all his novels, as in all his other dramas, Mr. Galsworthy is constantly seeing and portraying how conflicting loyalties both are right; he is never interested in the larger loyalty and cannot keep his eye on it through consecutive chapters or through a single act; he is forever presenting the two or more sides and taking none. He once said: “I suppose the hardest lesson we all have to learn in life is that we can’t have things both ways.” He should have added:“—and I have never learned it!”

ii

“Learned,” of course, in the sense of “accepted,” of becoming reconciled to the fact. It did not need Mr. St. John Ervine to tell us that “Mr. Galsworthy is the most sensitive figure in the ranks of modern letters”; for of all modern writers the author of Loyalties and The Forsyte Saga is the most transparent. He is transparent without being in the smallest degree luminous; he refracts, but he does not magnify—a prism through which we may look at society.

Compare him for a moment with Mr. Conrad. Mr. Conrad is by no means always transparent; his opacity is sometimes extraordinary, as in The Rescue; and yet from the midst of obscure sentences, like a gleam from those remarkably deep-set eyes, something luminous will shine out, both light and[Pg 18] heat are given forth. “In a certain cool paper,” explains Galsworthy, “I have tried to come at the effect of the war; but purposely pitched it in a low and sober key; and there is a much more poignant tale of change to tell of each individual human being.” But even when telling the more poignant tale, as in Saint’s Progress, the coolness is noticeable, like the air of an April night; the key is still sober, pitched low; and the trembling passion of a melody proclaimed by violins is quickly muted. Such is his habitual restraint, so strong is his inhibition, that when we hear the orchestral brasses, as we do once or twice in Justice and Loyalties, it shocks us, like a rowdy outburst in a refined assembly or a terse sentence in Henry James. But it is

nothing, nothing. Mr. Galsworthy has momentarily achieved a more perfect than usual transparency; he has suddenly surrendered to the pounce of another of those multitudinous loyalties which give him no peace and the secret of which, except for its continual disclosure in his works, he would most certainly carry with him to the grave.

For he does not talk. No! “You are nearer Galsworthy in reading his books than in a meeting.” Another keenly observant person summed up Galsworthy’s conversational resources in the one word: “Exhausted!” St. John Ervine: “Whatever of joy and grief he has had in life has been closely retained, and the reticence characteristic of the English people ... is most clearly to be observed in Mr. Galsworthy.... How often have we observed in our relationships that some garrulous person, constantly engaged in egotistical conversation, contrives[Pg 19] to conceal knowledge of himself from us, while some silent friend, with lips tightly closed, most amazingly gives himself away. One looks at Mr. Galsworthy’s handsome, sensitive face, and is immediately aware of tightened lips!... But the lips are not tightened because of things done to him, but because of things done to others.” Mr. Galsworthy, in a personal letter: “The fact is I cannot answer your questions. I must leave my philosophy to my work generally, or rather, to what people can make

out of that work. The habit of trying to tabloid one’s convictions, or lack of convictions, is a pretty fatal one; as I have found to my distaste and discredit.” He conducts his own cross-examination, in new books, new plays. He acknowledges, with quiet discontent, the claims upon his sense of loyalty of a dog, a jailbird, two “star-crossed lovers,” the wife of a possessive Forsyte, a De Levis unjustly used. His pen moves, with a bold stroke, across the paper; another secret is let out; his lips tighten. He is serene and indignant and completely happy.

Why not? “My experience tells me this: An artist who is by accident of independent means can, if he has talent, give the Public what he, the artist, wants, and sooner or later the public will take whatever he gives it, at his own valuation.” And he speaks of such artists as able to “sit on the Public’s head and pull the Public’s beard, to use the old Sikh saying.” Nothing else is worth while—for an artist. “The artist has got to make a stand against being exploited.” But if the artist should exploit himself, or anything more human or individual than that impersonal entity, the Public, Mr. Galsworthy’s[Pg 20] mouth would become grim again; his loyalty would be forfeited, I think. There might be a larger cause, but his concern would be with the other fellow. And however hard you might press him for a verdict, he would bring in only a recommendation for mercy.

iii

The Galsworthys have been in Devonshire as far back as records go—“since the flood—of Saxons, at all events,” as John Galsworthy once put it. His mother came of a family named Bartleet, whose county for many centuries was Worcestershire. The boy, John, was born in 1867 at Coombe, in Surrey. “From the first,” continues the anonymous but authorised sketch I am quoting, “his salient characteristics were earnestness and tenacity. Not surprisingly brilliant, he was sure and steady; his understanding, not notably quick, was notably sound. At Harrow from 1881-1886 he did well in work and games. At New College, Oxford, 1886-1889, he graduated with an Honour degree in Law. After some further preparation he was called to the bar (Lincoln’s Inn) in 1890. It was natural he should have taken up the law, since his father had done so. ‘I read,’ he says, ‘in various chambers, practised almost not at all, and disliked my profession thoroughly.’

“In these circumstances he began to travel. His father, a successful and unusual man in both character and intellect, was ‘not in a position to require his son to make money’; his son, therefore, travelled,[Pg 21] off and on, for nearly two years, going, amongst other places, to Russia, Canada, British Columbia, Australia, New Zealand, the Fiji Islands, and South Africa. On a sailing-ship voyage between Adelaide and the Cape he met and became a fast friend with the novelist Joseph Conrad, then still a sailor. We do not know whether this friendship influenced Galsworthy in becoming a writer; indeed, we believe that he has somewhere said that it did not. But Galsworthy did take to writing, published his first novel, Jocelyn, in 1899, Villa Rubein in 1900, A Man of Devon and Other Stories in 1901.” Jocelyn has been dropped from the list of Galsworthy’s works, Villa Rubein was revised in 1909, The Island Pharisees, a satire of English weaknesses which appeared in 1904, was revised four years later; and it was not until the publication of The

Man of Property in 1906 that our author succeeded in sitting on the Public’s head and twining his fingers firmly into the Public’s whiskers.

This was the first volume of the then-unplanned Forsyte Saga and it led Conrad, who had two years previously dedicated to Galsworthy what remains his greatest novel (Nostromo), to write an article in which he said:

“The foundation of Mr. Galsworthy’s talent, it seems to me, lies in a remarkable power of ironic insight combined with an extremely keen and faithful eye for all the phenomena on the surface of the life he observes. These are the purveyors of his imagination, whose servant is a style clear, direct, sane, illumined by a perfectly unaffected sincerity. It is the style of a man whose sympathy with mankind[Pg 22] is too genuine to allow him the smallest gratification of his vanity at the cost of his fellow-creatures ... sufficiently pointed to carry deep his remorseless irony and grave enough to be the dignified vehicle of his profound compassion. Its sustained harmony is never interrupted by those bursts of cymbals and fifes which some deaf people acclaim for brilliance. Before all it is a style well under control, and therefore it never betrays this tender and ironic writer into an odious cynicism of laughter and tears.

“From laboriously collected information, I am led to believe that most people read novels for amusement. This is as it should be. But whatever be their motives, I entertain towards all novel-readers the feelings of warm and respectful affection. I would not try to deceive them for worlds. Never! This being understood, I go on to declare, in the peace of my heart and the serenity of my conscience, that if they want amusement they shall find it between the covers of this book. They shall find plenty of it in this episode in the history of the Forsytes, where the reconciliation of a father and son, the dramatic and poignant comedy of Soames Forsyte’s marital relations, and the tragedy of Bosinney’s failure are exposed to our gaze with the remorseless yet sympathetic irony of Mr. Galsworthy’s art, in the light of the unquenchable fire burning on the altar of property. They shall find amusement, and perhaps also something more lasting—if they care for it. I say this with all the reserves and qualifications which strict truth requires

around every statement of opinion. Mr. Galsworthy[Pg 23] will never be found futile by anyone, and never uninteresting by the most exacting.”

Twelve years after the appearance of The Man of Property, in the volume Five Tales (1918), was included a long short story, Indian Summer of a Forsyte. The year 1920 saw publication of the novel, In Chancery, and another long short story, Awakening; and the following year brought the novel, To Let. These five units, separately in the order named or together in the same chronological order in the thick volume called The Forsyte Saga, compose a record of three generations of an English family which has very justly been compared to the Esmonds of Thackeray. The Forsytes and their associates and connections are indeed “intensely real as individuals—real in the way that the Esmonds were real; symbolic in their traits, of a section of English society, and reflecting in their lives the changing moods of England in these years.” The motif is clearly expressed by certain words of young Jolyon Forsyte in The Man of Property:

“‘A Forsyte is not an uncommon animal. There are hundreds among the members of this club. Hundreds out there in the streets; you meet them wherever you go!... We are, of course, all of us slaves of property, and I admit that it’s a question of degree, but what I call a “Forsyte” is a man who is decidedly more than less a slave of property. He knows a good thing, he knows a safe thing, and his grip on property—it doesn’t matter whether it be wives, houses, money, or reputation—is his hallmark.... “Property and quality of a Forsyte. This little animal, disturbed by the ridicule of his[Pg 24] own sort, is unaffected in his motions by the laughter of strange creatures (you or I). Hereditarily disposed to myopia, he recognises only the persons and habitats of his own species, amongst which he passes an existence of competitive tranquillity”.... They are half England, and the better half, too, the safe half, the three-per-cent half, the half that counts. It’s their wealth and security that makes everything possible; makes your art possible, makes

literature, science, even religion, possible. Without Forsytes, who believe in none of these things, but turn them all to use, where should we be?’”

One of Galsworthy’s severest critics, St. John Ervine, calls The Forsyte Saga “his best work,” and breaks the force of many strictures to declare: “The craftsmanship of To Let is superb—this novel is, perhaps, the most technically-correct book of our time—but its human value is even greater than its craftsmanship. In a very vivid fashion, Mr. Galsworthy shows the passing of a tradition and an age. He leaves Soames Forsyte in lonely age, but he does not leave him entirely without sympathy; for this muddleheaded man, unable to win or to keep affection on any but commercial terms, contrives in the end to win the pity and almost the love of the reader who has followed his varying fortunes through their stupid career. The frustrate love of Fleur and Jon is certainly one of the tenderest things in modern fiction.”

iv

Grove Lodge, The Grove, Hampstead, London, N. W. 3, is the residence of Mr. and Mrs. Galsworthy;[Pg 25] if you have occasion to telephone, call Hampstead 3684. The approach to the house is described by Carlton Miles in the Theatre Magazine (December, 1922):

“The Galsworthys live at the bottom of a long, rambling lane called The Grove, in that part of Hampstead that looks calmly down on the crowded chimneypots of northwestern London. To reach the house you must climb a steep hill from the underground station and pass the stone building in which Du Maurier wrote Peter Ibbetson and to whose memory it bears a tablet. A few minutes’ walk in one direction and you are in Church Row with the historic cemetery in which Du Maurier and Beerbohm Tree rest side by side. Follow the Grove walk and you arrive on Hampstead Heath, black with thousands of workers on Bank Holiday, overlooking the little row of cottages where Leigh Hunt and his followers established their ‘Vale of Health.’ But, having passed the Du Maurier home, you turn fairly to your left, descend a winding pathway that takes you by the Admiral’s House—designated by large signs—erected 159 years ago by an aged commander who built his home in three decks and mounted it with guns. The guns have vanished but the Admiral’s House still is one of the sights of Hampstead.