American nights entertainment
I thought he had, but I also thought he should attempt some
justificatory remarks, and said so. His point in regard to _This
Side of Paradise_ was its vitality in spite of its having, as Edmund
Wilson, Jr., observed, almost every conceivable fault. “It had all
imaginable faults, but yet, in Wilson’s words, ‘it did not fail to
live,’” Collestamore argued. I nodded, and he went on. _Casuals of the
Sea_, it appeared, pleased him by a lack of anything self-conscious in
the writing. He much preferred it to the too purposeful artistry of
McFee’s _Command_. The singularity of those tales in _Fiery Particles_,
he thought, called for no special pleading in its behalf. _The Ground
Swell_ was a sea pattern unique in its simplicity; Don Marquis’s
heroine and her little group of serious thinkers were the apotheosis
of the Great Inane. As for _Kai Lung’s Golden Hours_, he was merely
echoing G. K. Chesterton, Belloc and a dozen others whose judgment was
respectable and might command my deference not given to his own.
“Oh, I defer,” I assured him. “You are the Lord High Executioner in
this series of literary beheadings. I consider that a reign of terror
has begun.”
It wasn’t beheadings, he said. He wasn’t going over the field of
daisies like the Syracusan tyrant and with his sceptre, cane, stick or
staff cropping off the heads of the taller blooms.
“Daisies? I thought it was a field of corn.”
As to that, he didn’t remember. It was no matter, anyway. He was not
demolishing, but singling out for eminence. No whistling cane, but----
“The sceptre gently touching one here, one there, knighting him,
commanding him to spring up----”
“You will observe,” in a tone of patient tolerance, “the surprising
variety one gets in the shortest possible space of time at this sort
of thing. Of course I thought of Jane Austen, and rather than put
in _Pride and Prejudice_ I chose _The Watsons_ as completed by Miss
Oulton. After all, _The Watsons_ is later work than either _Pride
and Prejudice_ or _Sense and Sensibility_ and the conjecture as to
why it was never finished gives it special interest. By that time I
was running over my books more or less as they stand on the shelves,
alphabetised by authors. The next thing, therefore, was Arnold Bennett,
and I chose _The Truth About an Author_. You know, it is the one book
of Bennett’s that could not, imaginably, have been written by anybody
else. H. C. Bunner was next. I really don’t know whether anyone living
besides myself and Franklin P. Adams now cares for Bunner; if not, so
much the better!”
“I see. The more lost the Lost Pattern, the more to be prized.”
“Why not? His _Stories_ and his _Short Sixes_ are as American as,
perhaps more so than, O. Henry.” He was quietly dogmatic.
“Is O. Henry here?” I looked. “Yes, to be sure. Also portions of
Kipling and, I judge, Frank R. Stockton practically complete. But these
were among the matter-of-courses. Let’s see: Shouldn’t you put in
Frank Norris? _The Pit_, I suppose. And there’s W. W. Jacobs.”
He looked so restive that I stopped. “It’s really no way to go at
the thing wholesale,” he protested. “I haven’t made up my mind as to
which one or two books of Stockton’s yet; he’s there in bulk only
temporarily. I suppose it had better be _Rudder Grange_.”
“Make it _Salthaven_ from W. W. Jacobs,” I urged. “Unless you strongly
prefer _At Sunwich Port_.”
“I do. Probably it’s just that I read it first. After Bunner I ran
against George W. Cable’s _The Grandissimes_. Then I laid hold of
Stephen Crane’s _The Red Badge of Courage_. Then John Dos Passos’s
_Rosinante to the Road Again_.”
“Thomas Beer has just finished a biography of Stephen Crane. Joseph
Conrad has written a preface for it,” I said, but Collestamore paid
no attention. He was across the room, picking something out, and came
back in a moment holding up Edmund Gosse’s _Three French Moralists_.
“Just thought of Gosse. This will do to hold the place for him until I
decide. Have you never read it? Then you don’t know Rochefoucauld or La
Bruyere as you should know them. And you’ve missed a singularly urbane
and exquisite example of English prose style.”
“You have both Compton Mackenzie’s _Carnival_ and his _Sinister Street_
in here. Make it _Carnival_. Let’s see: David Graham Phillips’s _Susan
Lennox: Her Fall and Rise_; John Ames Mitchell’s _Amos Judd_; and that
new illustrated edition of _David_ _Harum_. I guess I’d agree with
your choice of each of those.” His expression remained polite but I
could see it would make not the least difference whether I agreed or
not. “Did you see Rodolph Valentino in ‘The Young Rajah’?” I asked, to
tease him. He was good-natured about it. “I did. I have no objection to
Valentino, but I much prefer the story as told in _Amos Judd_.” He was
ruffling the pages of _David Harum_. “I like these text drawings, don’t
you?” I said I did, adding that _David Harum_ was the kind of book that
cried for illustration.
“About biography, or especially, autobiography,” he said suddenly.
“Should you say Booker T. Washington’s _Up From Slavery_, for one?
There’ll never be another of that pattern.” But I had a suggestion for
him there. “Anyway, you must include Bouck White’s _The Book of Daniel
Drew_.” He said at once, “Oh, yes!”--adding, “Autobiographical in form,
anyway. White always contended that he found an actual record left
by Uncle Dan’l Drew. Semi-fictional, if you like; but a grand piece
of satire. And now I rather think we’re wanted to sit down to lunch.
Er--how about a swallow of something first? Or is that among your lost
appetites?”
_19. Joseph C. Lincoln Discovers Cape Cod_
i
On 13 February, 1870, in the town of Brewster, Massachusetts, which
is on Cape Cod, there was born to Joseph Lincoln and Emily (Crosby)
Lincoln a son whom they named Joseph Crosby Lincoln. The child’s
father was a seaman, so had been his father’s father and his father’s
father’s father; and so were all his uncles. His mother’s people
followed the sea. For a mile in each direction from the plain little
house of the Lincolns every house contained a Cap’n. When the boy was
a year old, his father died of a fever in Charleston, South Carolina.
Emily Crosby Lincoln had made voyages with her husband, whose death
made it necessary to move up toward Boston. In summers, however, the
boy got back to the Cape with its sand dunes and cranberry bogs, its
chance to fish and swim. “He rode the old stage coach from Harwick to
Chatham; he knew the lightkeepers, the fishermen, the life savers,
and the cracker-box oracles in the village stores. The perfume of the
green salt meadows, the pungent pines and bayberries ... the fishing
boats, the dripping nets, ‘the mighty surge and thunder of the surf
along the shores’ were part of his very existence.” The description
is reminiscent of Walt Whitman’s account of his young manhood. “I
suppose if I had been born a few years earlier, I would have had my own
ship,” Joseph C. Lincoln says. But the day of steam had begun. He went
to school at Brewster and Chelsea. As he grew up, college was seen to
be out of the question. The youth and his mother went to Brooklyn and
he entered a broker’s office. This work he hated. “I have always felt
that they were fully as glad to get rid of me as I was to leave them.”
Wishing to draw, he fell under the guidance of Henry Sandham (“Hy”)
and went to Boston where, with another fellow, an office was opened
for commercial work. To make a picture sell better, Lincoln sometimes
wrote a verse or joke to go with it. Sometimes the verse or joke sold
when the drawing did not. It was the day of universal bicycling. The
League of American Wheelmen Bulletin had a circulation of over 125,000
and Sterling Elliott, its editor, offered Lincoln a job as associate
editor. His verses were thus brought to the attention of a considerable
public. He married in 1897 Florence E. Sargent, of Chelsea,
Massachusetts, and he was writing verse, mostly in the vernacular
of Cape Cod, for a number of publications. In 1899 the passion for
bicycling began to wane and Lincoln definitely moved from Boston to New
York to try to make a living as a writer on his own. He had written
a first short story, a Cape Cod narrative, and sold it to Saturday
Evening Post. That magazine, Harper’s Weekly, The Youth’s Companion
and Puck were taking his verse, which was sometimes in a swinging
metre and sometimes humour tinctured with philosophy. In 1902 Albert
Brandt, of Trenton, New Jersey, published Lincoln’s _Cape Cod Ballads_,
in a yellow-backed volume with illustrations by E. W. Kemble. It was
Lincoln’s first book. Now he was writing short stories in earnest and
with some success and he began a novel which could only be written by
labouring at it on a corner of the dining room table from midnight on
Saturdays through Sunday mornings until the manuscript was completed.
It was the story of three old sea captains who, despairing of their
joint efforts at housekeeping, advertised for a wife. Published in 1904
as _Cap’n Eri_, this affair settled two large doubts in Lincoln’s mind;
first, that he could sustain the interest of readers through a long
story; second, that he could make a living by writing, and by writing
books.
ii
Many have been the editions of _Cap’n Eri_ since its appearance,
nineteen years ago. The outline of those nineteen years in Joseph C.
Lincoln’s life is only pleasantly eventful. A friendship with Sewell
Ford led him to become a resident of Hackensack, New Jersey. There he
has built a house of “Colonial” lines, the sight of which is not good
for less successful writers. A very handsome summer home stands on a
terrace at Chatham, Cape Cod. In 1912 the Lincolns lived for a while
in England and travelled to some extent on the Continent, visiting
Switzerland. Frequently Mr. Lincoln has gone to one or another part of
the United States, even unto California, to deliver, before crowded
houses, his lecture on “Cape Cod Folks” or to give readings from his
own books. And every year since 1904 has seen the publication of one,
sometimes two, Lincoln novels.
In Hackensack Mr. Lincoln attends the Unitarian Church--he is a member
of its Board of Trustees--and he was at one time a member of the
Hackensack Board of Education. He used to belong to the Salmagundi Club
in New York but resigned because he used the club and its privileges
so little. He still belongs to The Players in New York; but in any
ordinary sense of the word he is not a clubman. The family usually goes
to Cape Cod in a motor car and while there Mr. Lincoln fishes and swims
and sails all he can. In Hackensack golf is his principal diversion and
he tries to play daily, “although there are times, particularly in my
brand of golf, when there seems to be more hard work and moral strain
than amusement, by a good deal.” The man is a red-cheeked, rotund and
comfortable man, with a bright eye and a catching smile and a great
fund of stories such as the following:
“An old salt of my acquaintance spent a recent winter in Florida and
found in the fishing of the region a fascinating but pretty strenuous
pastime. As a skipper of the old school he scorned modern devices for
fishing, such as reels. In fact he went out to fish tarpons in good
Cape Cod fashion with merely a fishing line and his own bare hands. He
hooked a tarpon and for a couple of hours there was waged a terrific
battle between the fish and the stubborn old Cape Codder, whose hands
were torn and blistered. Proudly he exhibited his 79-pound catch to
the natives. ‘Not much of a haul,’ was their comment. ‘Why, a little
woman, no size at all, just brought in a tarpon that tipped the scales
at 100 pounds.’ Would he like to see a real fish? ‘Thunder, no!’ roared