When Winter Comes to Main Street Part 17

"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 c.o.c.kneys--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 surpa.s.s. 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, _Pa.s.senger_, 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 ent.i.tled _The Cas.e.m.e.nt_. 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 Cas.e.m.e.nt_ 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 pa.s.sionate 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-cla.s.s 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 princ.i.p.al 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 a.s.sert 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 enn.o.bled, 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 pa.s.s the medical examination for the army. He is still in the business of publishing, being one of the princ.i.p.al personages in the ancient and well-tried firm of Chatto & Windus, the English publishers of Swinburne and Mark Twain. He reads ma.n.u.scripts, including his own--and including mine. He refuses ma.n.u.scripts, 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 t.i.tle-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 Sat.u.r.days.

"Frank Swinnerton has other gifts. He is a surpa.s.singly 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-cla.s.s realists he is also a romantic, and in his mercilessness there is a mysterious touch of fundamental benevolence--as befits the att.i.tude 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-cla.s.s critic and a first-cla.s.s 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 pa.s.sion for letters and a terrific ambition to be an author. The officer gave me a ma.n.u.script 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 pa.s.sages, but since its appearance Stevenson's reputation has never been the same."

BOOKS BY FRANK SWINNERTON

THE MERRY HEART THE YOUNG IDEA THE CAs.e.m.e.nT 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 Sh.o.r.e 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 pa.s.sion 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 embarra.s.sment. 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 her _Painted Meadows_ will 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 of plumb, 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 Sh.o.r.e, 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.

=ii=

_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 as _Main Street_ and _Moon-Calf_, a romantic story of age and youth, of love and hate, of bitter unyielding hardness, and of 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 Swords_ is 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.

=iii=