When Winter Comes to Main Street Part 19

"I read _Nene_ with great interest, especially because of its relation to _Maria Chapdelaine_. It seems to me the two books came out most happily together. _Maria Chapdelaine_ gives us the French peasant in the new world, touched with the pioneer spirit, and though close to the soil in constant battle with nature, somehow always master of his fate. _Nene_ gives us this same racial stock, again close to the soil, but an old-world soil its fathers worked, and the peasant here seems ringed around with those old ghosts, their prejudices and their pa.s.sions. I have seldom read any book which seemed to me so unerringly to capture the enveloping atmosphere of place and tradition, as it conditions the lives of people, and yet to do it so (apparently) artlessly. This struck me so forcibly that it was not till later I began to realise with a sigh--if one himself is a writer, a sigh of envy--that _Nene_ has a directness, a simplicity, a principle of internal growth or dramatic life of its own, which, alas!

most of us are incapable of attaining."

The author of _Carnival_, _Sinister Street_, _Plasher's Mead_; of those highly comedic novels, _Poor Relations_ and _Rich Relatives_; of other and still more diverse fiction, Compton Mackenzie, has turned to a new task.

His fine novel, _The Altar Steps_, concerns itself with a young priest of the Church of England. We live in the England of Lytton Strachey's _Queen Victoria_--the England of 1880 to the close of the Boer War--as we follow Mark Lidderdale from boyhood to his ordination. _The Altar Steps_, it is known will be followed by a novel probably to be called _The Parson's Progress_. Evidently Mr. Mackenzie is bent upon a fictional study of the whole problem of the Church of England in relation to our times, and particularly the position of the Catholic party in the Church.

"Simon Pure," who writes the monthly letter from London appearing in The Bookman (and whose ident.i.ty is a well-known secret!) thus describes, in The Bookman for September, 1922, a visit to Mr. Mackenzie:

"I have recently seen the author of _The Altar Steps_ upon his native heath._ The Altar Steps_ is the latest work of Compton Mackenzie, and it has done something to rehabilitate him with the critics. The press has been less fiercely adverse than usual to the author. He is supposed to have come back to the fold of the 'serious' writers, and so the fatted calf has been slain for him. We shall see. My own impression is that Mackenzie is a humorous writer, and that the wiseacres who want the novel to be 'serious' are barking up the wrong tree. At any rate, there the book is, and it is admitted to be a good book by all who have been condemning Mackenzie as a trifler; and Mackenzie is going on with his sequel to it in the pleasant land of Italy. I did not see him in Italy, but in Herm, one of the minor Channel Islands. It took me a night to reach the place--a night of fog and fog-signals--a night of mystery, with the moon full and the water shrouded--and morning found the fog abruptly lifted, and the islands before our eyes. They glittered under a brilliant sun. There came hurried disembarking, a transference (for me, and after breakfast) to a small boat called, by the owner's pleasantry, 'Watch Me' (Compton Mackenzie), and then a fine sail (per motor) to Herm. I said to the skipper that I supposed there must be many dangerous submerged rocks. 'My dear fellow!' exclaimed the skipper, driven to familiarity by my navete.

And with that we reached the island. Upon the end of a pier stood a tall figure, solitary. 'My host!' thought I. Not so. Merely an advance guard: his engineer. We greeted--my reception being that of some foreign potentate--and I was led up a fine winding road that made me think of Samoa and Vailima and all the beauties of the South Seas. Upon the road came another figure--this time a young man who made a friend of me at a glance. He now took me in hand. Together we made the rest of the journey along this beautiful road, and to the cottage of residence. I entered.

There was a scramble. At last I met my host, who leapt from bed to welcome me!

"From that moment my holiday was delightful. The island is really magnificent. Short of a stream, it has everything one could wish for in such a place. It has cliffs, a wood, a common fields under cultivation, fields used as pasture, caves, sh.e.l.l beaches, several empty cottages. Its bird life is wealthy in cuckoos and other magic-bringers; its flowers have extraordinary interest; dogs and cattle and horses give domestic life, and a boat or two may be used for excursions to Jethou, a smaller island near by. And Mackenzie has this ideal place to live in for as much of the year as he likes. None may gather there without his permission. He is the lord of the manor, and his boundaries are the sea and the sky. We walked about the islands, and saw their beauties, accompanied by a big dog--a Great Dane--which coursed rabbits and lay like a dead fish in the bottom of a small boat. And as each marvel of the little paradise presented itself, I became more and more filled with that wicked thing, envy. But I believe envy does not make much progress when the owner of the desired object so evidently appreciates it with more gusto even than the envious one. Reason is against envy in such a case. To have said, 'He doesn't appreciate it'

would have been a lie so manifest that it did not even occur to me. He does. That is the secret of Mackenzie's personal ability to charm. He is filled with vitality, but he is also filled with the power to take extreme delight in the delight of others and to better it. Moreover, he gives one the impression of understanding islands. Herm has been in his possession for something more than a year, and he has lived there continuously all that time (except for two or three visits to London, of short duration).

It has been in all his thoughts. He has seen it as a whole. He knows it from end to end, its rocks, its birds, its trees and flowers and paths.

What wonder that his health is magnificent, his spirits high! What wonder the critics have seen fit to praise _The Altar Steps_ as they have not praised anything of Mackenzie's for years? If they had seen Herm, they could have done nothing at all but praise without reserve."

CHAPTER XVII

THE HETEROGENEOUS MAGIC OF MAUGHAM

=i=

Now, I don't know where to begin. Probably I shall not know where to leave off, either. That is my usual misfortune, to write a chapter at both ends.

It is a fatal thing, like the doubly-consuming candle. Perhaps I might start with the sapience of Hector MacQuarrie, author of _Tahiti Days_. I am tempted to, because so many people think of W. Somerset Maugham as the author of _The Moon and Sixpence_. The day will come, however, when people will think of him as the man who wrote _Of Human Bondage_.

This novel does not need praise. All it needs, like the grand work it is, is attention; and that it increasingly gets.

[Ill.u.s.tration: W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM]

=ii=

Theodore Dreiser reviewed _Of Human Bondage_ for the New Republic. I reprint part of what he said:

"Sometimes in retrospect of a great book the mind falters, confused by the mult.i.tude and yet the harmony of the detail, the strangeness of the frettings, the brooding, musing intelligence that has foreseen, loved, created, elaborated, perfected, until, in the middle ground which we call life, somewhere between nothing and nothing, hangs the perfect thing which we love and cannot understand, but which we are compelled to confess a work of art. It is at once something and nothing, a dream of happy memory, a song, a benediction. In viewing it one finds nothing to criticise or to regret. The thing sings, it has colour. It has rapture. You wonder at the loving, patient care which has evolved it.

"Here is a novel or biography or autobiography or social transcript of the utmost importance. To begin with, it is unmoral, as a novel of this kind must necessarily be. The hero is born with a club foot, and in consequence, and because of a temperament delicately attuned to the miseries of life, suffers all the pains, recessions, and involute self tortures which only those who have striven handicapped by what they have considered a blighting defect can understand. He is a youth, therefore, with an intense craving for sympathy and understanding. He must have it.

The thought of his lack, and the part which his disability plays in it soon becomes an obsession. He is tortured, miserable.

"Curiously the story rises to no spired climax. To some it has apparently appealed as a drab, unrelieved narrative. To me at least it is a gorgeous weave, as interesting and valuable at the beginning as at the end. There is material in its three hundred thousand or more words for many novels and indeed several philosophies, and even a religion or stoic hope. There are a series of women, of course--drab, pathetic, enticing as the case may be,--who lead him through the mazes of sentiment, s.e.x, love, pity, pa.s.sion; a wonderful series of portraits and of incidents. There are a series of men friends of a peculiarly inclusive range of intellectuality and taste, who lead him, or whom he leads, through all the intricacies of art, philosophy, criticism, humour. And lastly comes life itself, the great land and sea of people, England, Germany, France, battering, corroding, illuminating, a Goyaesque world.

"Naturally I asked myself how such a book would be received in America, in England. In the latter country I was sure, with its traditions and the Athenaeum and the Sat.u.r.day Review, it would be adequately appreciated.

Imagine my surprise to find that the English reviews were almost uniformly contemptuous and critical on moral and social grounds. The hero was a weakling, not for a moment to be tolerated by sound, right-thinking men.

On the other hand, in America the reviewers for the most part have seen its true merits and stated them. Need I say, however, that the New York World finds it 'the sentimental servitude of a poor fool,' or that the Philadelphia Press sees fit to dub it 'futile Philip,' or that the Outlook feels that 'the author might have made his book true without making it so frequently distasteful'; or that the Dial cries 'a most depressing impression of the futility of life'?

"Despite these dissonant voices it is still a book of the utmost import, and has so been received. Compact of the experiences, the dreams, the hopes, the fears, the disillusionments, the ruptures, and the philosophising of a strangely starved soul, it is a beacon light by which the wanderer may be guided. Nothing is left out; the author writes as though it were a labour of love. It bears the imprint of an eager, almost consuming desire to say truly what is in his heart.

"Personally, I found myself aching with pain when, yearning for sympathy, Philip begs the wretched Mildred, never his mistress but on his level, to no more than tolerate him. He finally humiliates himself to the extent of exclaiming, 'You don't know what it means to be a cripple!' The pathos of it plumbs the depths. The death of Fannie Price, of the sixteen-year-old mother in the slum, of Cronshaw, and the rambling agonies of old Ducroz and of Philip himself, are perfect in their appeal.

"There are many other and all equally brilliant pictures. No one short of a genius could rout the philosophers from their lairs and label them as individuals 'tempering life with rules agreeable to themselves' or could follow Mildred Rogers, waitress of the London A B C restaurant, through all the shabby windings of her tawdry soul. No other than a genius endowed with an immense capacity for understanding and pity could have sympathised with Fannie Price, with her futile and self-destructive art dreams; or old Cronshaw, the wastrel of poetry and philosophy; or Mons. Ducroz, the worn-out revolutionary; or Thorne Athelny, the caged grandee of Spain; or Leonard Upjohn, airy master of the art of self-advancement; or Dr. South, the vicar of Blackstable, and his wife--these are masterpieces. They are marvellous portraits; they are as smooth as a Vermeer, as definite as a Hals; as brooding and moving as a Rembrandt. The study of Carey himself, while one sees him more as a medium through which the others express themselves, still registers photographically at times. He is by no means a brooding voice but a definite, active, vigorous character.

"If the book can be said to have a fault it will lie for some in its length, 300,000 words, or for others in the peculiar reticence with which the last love affair in the story is handled. Until the coming of Sallie Athelny all has been described with the utmost frankness. No situation, however crude or embarra.s.sing, has been shirked. In the matter of the process by which he arrived at the intimacy which resulted in her becoming pregnant not a word is said. All at once, by a slight frown which she subsequently explains, the truth is forced upon you that there has been a series of intimacies which have not been accounted for. After Mildred Rogers and his relationship with Norah Nesbit it strikes one as strange....

"One feels as though one were sitting before a splendid Shiraz or Daghestan of priceless texture and intricate weave, admiring, feeling, responding sensually to its colours and tones. Mr. Maugham ... has suffered for the joy of the many who are to read after him. By no willing of his own he has been compelled to take life by the hand and go down where there has been little save sorrow and degradation. The cup of gall and wormwood has obviously been lifted to his lips and to the last drop he has been compelled to drink it. Because of this, we are enabled to see the rug, woven of the tortures and delights of a life. We may actually walk and talk with one whose hands and feet have been pierced with nails."

=iii=

I turn, for a different example of the heterogeneous magic of Maugham, including his ability to create and sustain a mood in his readers, to the words of Mr. MacQuarrie, who writes:

"It was Tahiti. With a profound trust in my discretion, or perhaps an utter ignorance of the homely fact that people have their feelings, a London friend sent us a copy of _The Moon and_ _Sixpence_. This friend, actually a beautiful, well set up woman of the intelligent cla.s.s in England (which is more often than not the upper fringes or spray of the _bourgeoisie_), wrote: 'You will be interested in this book, since quite the most charming portion of it deals with your remote island of Tahiti. I met the author last night at Lady B----'s. I think the landlady at the end, Mrs. Johnson, is a perfect darling.'

"Knowing Somerset Maugham as a dramatist, the author of that kind of play which never bored one, but rather sent one home suffused with pleasantness, I opened the book with happy antic.i.p.ation. Therefore--and the t.i.tle of the book, _The Moon and Sixpence_, gave a jolly calming reaction--I was surprised and frankly annoyed when I found myself compelled to follow the fortunes of a large red-headed man with mighty s.e.x appeal, who barged his way through female tears to a final goal which seemed to be a spiritual achievement, and a nasty death in a native _fare_. I was alarmed; here was a man writing something enormously strong, when I had been accustomed to a.s.sociate him with charming London nights--the theatre, perfect acting, no middle cla.s.s problems, a dropping of one's women folks at their doors and a return to White's and whiskey and a soda. And furthermore, in this book of his, he had picked up Lavina, the famous landlady of the Tiare Hotel, the uncrowned queen of Tahiti, and with a few strokes of his pen, had dissected her, and exposed her to the world as she was. Here I must quote:

"'Tall and extremely stout, she would have been an imposing presence if the great good nature of her face had not made it impossible for her to express anything but kindliness. Her arms were like legs of mutton, her b.r.e.a.s.t.s like giant cabbages; her face, broad and fleshy, gave you an impression of almost indecent nakedness and vast chin succeeded vast chin.'

"This may seem a small matter in a great world. Tahiti is a small world, and this became a great matter. I read the book twice, decided that Somerset Maugham could no longer be regarded as a pleasant liqueur, but rather as the joint of a meal requiring steady digestion, and suppressed _The Moon and Sixpence_ on Tahiti. The temptation to lend it to a kindred spirit was almost unbearable, but the thought of Lavina hearing of the above description of her person frightened me and I resisted. For kindred souls, on Tahiti as elsewhere, have their own kindred souls, and slowly but surely the fact that a writer had described her arms as legs of mutton (perfect!) and her b.r.e.a.s.t.s as huge cabbages (even better!) would have oozed its way to Lavina, sending her to bed for six days, with gloom spread over Tahiti and no c.o.c.ktails.

"All of which is a trifle by the way. Yet in writing of Somerset Maugham one must gaze along all lines of vision. And it seemed to me that Tahiti in general, and Papeete in particular should supply a clear one; for here, certainly, in the days when Maugham visited the island a man could be mentally dead, spiritually naked and physically unashamed. I therefore sought Lavina one afternoon as she sat clothed as with a garment by the small side verandah of the Tiare Hotel. (Lavina was huge; the verandah was a small verandah as verandahs go; there was just room for me and a bottle of rum.)

"'Lavina,' I remarked; 'many persons who write come to Tahiti.'

"'It is true,' she admitted, 'but not as the heavy rain, rather as the few drops at the end.'

"'Do you like them?' I enquired.

"One makes that kind of remark on Tahiti. The climate demands such, since the answer can be almost anything, a meandering spreading-of-weight kind of answer.

"'These are good men,' said Lavina steadily, wandering off into the old and possibly untrue story of a lady called Beatrice Grimshaw and her dilemma on a schooner in mid-Pacific, when the captain, a gentle ancient, thinking that the dark women were having it all their own way, offered to embrace Miss Grimshaw, finding in return a gun pointing at his middle, filling him with quaint surprise that anyone could possibly offer violence in defence of a soul in so delightful a climate.

"After which and a rum c.o.c.ktail, I said: 'Lavina, did you see much of M'sieur Somerset Maugham when he was here?'

"'It is the man who writes?' she inquired lazily.

"'It is,' I returned.

"'It is the _beau garcon-ta-ta, neneenha roa?_' she suggested.

"'Probably not,' I said; 'I suspect you are thinking, as usual, of Rupert Brooke. M'sieur Maugham may be regarded as _beau_, but he is not an elderly waiter of forty-seven, therefore we may not call him a _garcon_.'

"'It is,' Lavina admitted; 'that I am thinking of M'sieur Rupert, he is the _beau garcon_.'

"'But,' I said, 'I want to know what you thought of M'sieur Somerset Maugham?'

"Once started on Rupert Brooke, and Lavina would go on for the afternoon!