American nights entertainment
remain so. Not indignation nor ridicule is likely to alter this state
of affairs, since the prototypes of Miss Sackville-West’s Davenants
must be conceived of as resembling Galsworthy’s Forsytes in one
respect: They are almost certainly impervious to the wrath or derision
of any except their own kind, and this will hardly be forthcoming.
_Challenge_, admirable in its technique, begins with an epilogue,
giving us through the eyes of disinterested bystanders a glimpse of
Julian Davenant many years afterward. We see him with his wife at a
great affair in London. He has power, wealth, distinction; and his wife
is perfectly equipped for her rôle. Many people expect that Davenant
will be the next Viceroy; he has already been in the Cabinet. A cynical
man, who believes in nothing--and a philanthropist, really. His face,
or his eyes, give one the impression that he has “learnt all the sorrow
of the world”; they are inexpressibly weary. And the two onlookers, a
man and a woman, recall that there was some “crazy adventure” in Julian
Davenant’s youth. “Very romantic, but we all start by being romantic
until we have outgrown it.”
The three parts which follow narrate in a strictly chronological
order the details of that “crazy adventure.” Julian Davenant was
the young son of a house of English Levantines, that is to say, an
English family established for several generations in the Levant and
possessing, at the time of the story, besides much land, the site of
valuable vineyards, prestige and influence and political power. It will
be recalled that the Goulds of Costaguana in _Nostromo_ constituted
a similar clan. Such English exoterics (not to say exotics) are only
moderately rare. It is not proper to speak of them as hybrids, since in
their marriages they are careful to avoid a non-English admixture and
their sons are invariably sent to England for their education. Without
in any essential degree sacrificing a single one of those peculiarly
tenacious English traits of character and without any alteration of the
English habit of thought, they are in most other matters assimilated to
the country of their holdings. They come to understand it, its ways,
its habit of thought and policy of conduct and instinct of behaviour
with a completeness that amounts to perfection and reposes, as a rule
and deep down, on a sincere distaste. They are really marvellous,
whether Goulds in South America or Davenants in Greece. And their young
men....
In any comparison of _Nostromo_ and _Challenge_ it will be found that
the most obvious likenesses are purely superficial. In _Nostromo_
we have the son, Charles Gould, determined to avenge, by a patient
commercialism and a silent political sagacity, the fate of his Uncle
Harry and the killing worry of his father; the instrumentality to his
hand is the silver of the mine. In _Challenge_ young Julian Davenant is
the victim of the romantic impulse which causes him to respond, at any
cost, to the patriotic appeal of the Islands lying off the coast and
unwillingly a part of the tiny republic of Herakleion. The girl, Eve,
and the woman, Kato, a native of the Islands and a famous singer, are
the personal contending forces in the struggle over Julian Davenant.
Eve is Julian’s cousin. In the developing story of her love for Julian,
in its culminating struggle and final disaster a precise comparison
with _Nostromo_--even in respect of the tragedy that befell Linda
Viola--is a waste of our attention.
vi
What may profitably be compared in Mr. Conrad’s acknowledged
masterpiece and Miss Sackville-West’s dramatic novel is the identity
of method and art. I say “identity” without any hesitation, for in
both cases I think the artist has achieved a proportionately impressive
and living and beautiful result. As to method, the reader will observe
for himself that either novel might have been written by either
author. In each case the actual knowledge of a totally foreign country
is perhaps the same, and in neither case is it very great or very
important. Again, in each case, the imaginative creation is on a plane
so much above the level attained in other (and very excellent) novels
that the book must definitely be set in a class apart. One accounts
for the intense imaginative insight of _The Old Wives’ Tale_ and _My
Antonia_ (to choose two especially fine examples) by saying that,
after all, both Arnold Bennett and Willa Cather had the immeasurable
aid of childhood’s unblunted perceptiveness; and in so partially
accounting for the sheer fact, one does quite rightly. But neither
memory nor the deepest well of sympathy serves to explain _Nostromo_
and _Challenge_; in these two novels the imagination had to create
something _de novo_ and actively body it forth; memories, hearsay,
would be an actual interference and the existence of an outer world a
positive interruption. They are both novels of a perfectly valid idea
recreated in terms of the subconscious personality. If that is too
cloudy an explanation I will ask you to think of the subconscious mind
as a happily benevolent oyster, of the germ-idea as an infinitesimal
particle of irritant sand, and of the accomplished story as the
resulting pearl. It is as near as I can come to conveying what I mean
... and know to be at least subjectively true.
Abandoning this difficult region and ascending to the surface on which
most art and literary method lies, the comparison becomes so easy that
one feels superfluous in making it. Have we not the same complexity of
persons presented in an intimate relation to each other and composing
a little world, complete socially, politically and in their attitudes;
so that we can perfectly conceive them in any set of circumstances?
Have we not also an atmosphere resulting from a multitude of impalpable
small touches? Is not the effect in each case more exact than any
impression to be derived from personal familiarity with either South
America or Greece? Is not the same impersonal viewpoint present?
the same astringent humour in evidence in its application to the
incongruities of the life presented? In both cases the avoidance of
any expression of emotion, the final austerity of the highest art,
exercises an effect out of all predictable proportion on the emotions
of the reader. He is led to feel amusement, ridicule, sympathy,
indignation, dismay, horror and grief; because never is it intimated to
him that it is his duty to feel any of these things.
vii
The new novel, _Grey Wethers_, taking its name from those ancient
sacrificial stones of the Druids which are the symbols of the story,
traces back in substance to Miss Sackville-West’s _Heritage_, but
is free from the faults of construction which made her first novel
so unsatisfactory. The fineness of her hand upon this more familiar
material is the delicate reward for her incessant painstaking. She is
not a person to rest satisfied, but an artist. An artist....
“What was the promise of that mediocre ease beside the certainty of
these exquisite privations?” So Chase questioned himself, in Miss
Sackville-West’s story of _The Heir_. “What was that drudgery beside
this beauty, this pride, this Quixotism?” There is only one answer. If
you would be an artist you do not even bother with the answer. But your
heart leaps.
Books by V. Sackville-West
_Poems of West and East_ [in England]
1921 _Orchard and Vineyard_ [in England]
1918 _Heritage_
1920 _The Dragon in Shallow Waters_
1923 _Knole and the Sackvilles_
1923 _Challenge_ [withdrawn in England prior to publication, 1920]
1923 _Grey Wethers_
1924 _The Heir and Other Stories_
Sources on V. Sackville-West
_Knole and the Sackvilles_, generally, and also pages 11, 17, 68, 82,
83, 219 and 220
_Who’s Who_ [in England]
Private Information
7. _Harold Bell Wright_
i
From _Who’s Who in America_, 1922-1923 (Volume 12):
“WRIGHT, HAROLD BELL, author: born, Rome, Oneida County, New York, May
4, 1872; son, William A. Wright and Alma T. (Watson) Wright; student
two years, preparatory department, Hiram College, Ohio; married,
Frances E. Long, of Buffalo, New York, July 18, 1899; married, second,
Mrs. Winifred Mary Potter Duncan, of Los Angeles, California, August
5, 1920. Painter and decorator, 1887-92; landscape painter, 1892-7;
pastor, Christian (Disciples) Church, Pierce City, Missouri, 1897-8,
Pittsburg, Kansas, 1898-1903, Forest Avenue Church, Kansas City,
Missouri, 1903-5, Lebanon, Missouri, 1905-7, Redlands, California,
1907-8; retired from ministry, 1908. Author: _That Printer of Udell’s_,
1903; _The Shepherd of the Hills_, 1907; _The Calling of Dan Matthews_,
1909; _The Uncrowned King_, 1910; _The Winning of Barbara Worth_, 1911;
_Their Yesterdays_, 1912; _The Eyes of the World_, 1914; _When A Man’s
a Man_, 1916; _The Re-Creation of Brian Kent_, 1919; _Helen of the Old
House_, 1921. Home: Tucson, Arizona.”
Such is the outline derived by the compilers of an invaluable work of
reference whose method is to ask of the individual certain standard
questions which he may answer in his discretion and which he may
supplement--in the editor’s discretion--by further information about
himself. The latitude allowed in such a work as _Who’s Who in America_,
is necessarily rather small; it would, however, have permitted Mr.
Wright to say that the sales of his fiction exceed those of any
other living American writer--perhaps those of any other living
writer anywhere. He did not say it. The impression given by the words
“landscape painter” may be misleading, for Mr. Wright at that time
made his living by sign painting and house painting; but also he made
sketches and water colors which he sold as he went along. Let this tiny
matter be as a warning that, on his own terms and in his own fashion of
speech, Harold Bell Wright is to be taken literally.
Always! Is there metaphor in his writing? Was there metaphor in
_Pilgrim’s Progress_? Are there parables in the Bible? Do sermons
contain allegories? We know that allegories embody sermons. Mr. Wright
has never concealed the purpose behind his novels, stories. It is to
say plainly some word that he believes will be of help, if uttered, to
men and women. In his strange personal history lies the seed of a novel
more absorbing, if less credible, than any he has written. The poor
boy, the boy left motherless at ten, the man out of work, the man with
an empty stomach and no means of filling it, the man who has been told
that “the rock pile was intended for fellows like you!”--and through
it all the sleazy thread of ill-health, down-right sickness, and the
bright scarlet stain of disease.... Two years at a little college,
cut short by illness; two years financed by hard work and ground down
in disappointment. Then the haphazard wandering, the tramping afoot
outdoors, the small painting jobs, the inability to find work at times,
the hardships of climate--and at last he finds himself in the Ozark
Mountains looking for ... what? For the chance to live, first of all.
It was there that he preached his first sermon, and there he found a
background and a setting for some of the stories he was eventually to
write. They were very far off, then, those stories, below the horizon,
out of sight as were so many other things that were to dawn on his life
when he should be thirty.
ii
In any consideration of Harold Bell Wright as an author, the usual
approaches are of no value, and not only of no value but so without
meaning as to be absurd. Almost he raises the fundamental question:
What is an author, anyway? Of course the word does apply to all whose
writing achieves publication, especially as a book or books; and
perhaps it may be used of a person who remains unpublished. But, as