When Winter Comes to Main Street Part 27

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 of _me_?

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 appet.i.te 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 drama _The Harp of Life_ has 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 interesting thing, 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 about _East of Suez_ and _The Love Match_ and have said nothing about _The Circle_ or _Milestones_! But I suppose everyone knows that _The Circle_ is by Maugham and was markedly successful when it was produced in New York; and surely everyone must know that _Milestones_ is by Arnold Bennett and Edward k.n.o.blauch--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:

"_Swords_ is as remarkable a play as America has ever produced. It is a drama of action on a par with _The 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 n.o.bles and a dog of the gutters fighting for a lady of strange and extraordinary beauty who is the bride of one n.o.ble and the hostage of the other. With the pa.s.sions, the cruelties, and spiritual vision of the middle ages to build upon _Swords_ sweeps upward to a scene of sudden, flashing conflict shot with the mystic and triumphant ecstasy which emanates from this glorious woman."

American lovers of the drama have a special interest in the two volumes of _The 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_, and _The Mollusc_. Among the other plays included are: _A Single Man_, _Doormats_, _Outcasts_, _Mrs. Gorringe's Necklace_, and _Lady Epping's Lawsuit_. Hugh Walpole has contributed a very touching introduction.

CHAPTER XXIII

THE 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 br.i.m.m.i.n.g 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=

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 literature and 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 a.s.sociation 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 ent.i.tled 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 have yet 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=

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 Sa.s.sOON 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 BENeT 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 Pa.s.sOS ELINOR WYLIE GERTRUDE ATHERTON FLOYD DELL

=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's _A 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 t.i.tle "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.