American nights entertainment
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_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
_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 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.
_Contents_
_1_ MR. GALSWORTHY’S SECRET LOYALTIES, _13_
_2_ THE MAGIC CARPET, _34_
_3_ A BREATHLESS CHAPTER, _51_
_4_ IN THE KINGDOM OF CONRAD, _64_
_5_ THE DOCUMENTS IN THE CASE OF ARTHUR TRAIN, _91_
_6_ THE LADY OF A TRADITION, MISS SACKVILLE-WEST, _102_
_7_ HAROLD BELL WRIGHT, _119_
_8_ “AH, DID YOU ONCE SEE SHELLEY PLAIN?” _139_
_9_ ALICE IN AUTHORLAND AND PENROD’S FIVE-FOOT SHELF, _157_
_10_ THE MAN CALLED RALPH CONNOR, _178_
_11_ HERE, THERE AND EVERYWHERE, _189_
_12_ TOTALLING MR. TARKINGTON, _217_
_13_ A PARODY OUTLINE OF STEWART, _239_
_14_ MISS ZONA GALE, _248_
_15_ FOR THE LITERARY INVESTOR, _255_
_16_ NATURALIST VS. NOVELIST: GENE STRATTON-PORTER, _270_
_17_ POETRY AND PLAYS, _293_
_18_ LOST PATTERNS, _313_
_19_ JOSEPH C. LINCOLN DISCOVERS CAPE COD, _321_
_20_ EDITH WHARTON AND THE TIME SPIRIT, _345_
_21_ THE UNCLASSIFIED CASE OF CHRISTOPHER MORLEY, _363_
_22_ THE PROPHECIES OF LOTHROP STODDARD, _380_
INDEX, _387_
_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_
_American Nights Entertainment_
_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_ 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.”
So interesting and significant a statement, buried as seed, might
easily sprout as novel or play. I have 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 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!”