American nights entertainment
the Cap’n. ‘Show me the woman!’”
iii
Hamlin Garland, the author of some accounts of American life which have
not omitted the sombre, the discouraging, the bitter scenes and places,
has written:
“Joseph Lincoln is not only a novelist of wide reputation, he is a
public benefactor. His success has in it something heartening and
corrective. In the midst of work which appeals to the base and cynical
in human life (American city life) his clean, wholesome, humorous
stories of Cape Cod sea captains and their neighbours give evidence of
the fact that there is a huge public for decent and homely fiction,
just as the success of his play, ‘_Shavings_,’ is evidence that there
is a paying audience for a decent and homely drama. His books can be
read aloud in the family circle with joy to all the members of it--I
know, for I have myself read eight or ten of them to my wife and
daughters. They make no pretense of being profound, or new, or ‘smart.’
They are filled with the characters and the humour which are native
to the Cape. Lincoln knows these Cape towns and their inhabitants
as Irving Bacheller knows his men of the North Woods, for he was
raised among them and lives in their neighbourhood several months of
each year. He looks like one of them, like an old skipper, hearty,
unassuming and kindly. The task which he has set himself is one which
calls for a keen sense of character, democracy of sentiment and a fancy
which never--or very seldom--loses its hold on the solid ground of
experience. His plots are sometimes negligible, but his characters,
even when they seem a bit repetitious, are a joy. His prosperity is
well earned.”
This undoubtedly expresses a general sentiment, although it does not
express it so vividly as a sentence that appeared in the Los Angeles
Express:
“One enjoys a Joe Lincoln novel as one does a long, cool,
thirst-quenching drink on a hot day.”
However, before examining the novels themselves, it is proper to
put down here some things that Mr. Lincoln has said, at one time or
another, showing his attitude toward them. Of course his attitude
toward other kinds of fiction is a part of his general attitude, and so:
“I read all sorts of books and at all times. I don’t know that I can
name any particular author who may be called my favourite. I am very
fond of Stevenson, for instance--but then, so I am of Kipling, except
his more recent stories, which have a bit too much British Empire in
them to please me,--of Mark Twain, of W. J. Locke, and many others. I
think I like a story for the story’s sake. I like to like my characters
or dislike them in the old-fashioned way. It is for this reason perhaps
that the work of such writers as Arnold Bennett, William De Morgan,
Joseph Conrad, and others, of the realistic school, so-called, does
not appeal to me as much as--well, as Mr. Locke’s work, for instance.
I realise,--no one can help realising--the fine literary craftsmanship
in a book like _Lord Jim_. It is a wonderful piece of character mosaic,
and yet in reading it I am always conscious of the literary work. I
say to myself, ‘This is marvellous; see how the writer is picking his
hero to pieces, thought by thought, motive by motive.’ And being so
conscious of the writer, I do not lose myself in the story. This is not
offered as a criticism; certainly I should not presume to criticise Mr.
Bennett or Mr. Conrad. It is more of a confession of something lacking
on my part. I enjoy reading _Lord Jim_, or _The Old Wives’ Tale_, but I
do not return to them again and again as I do to _The Beloved Vagabond_
or _The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne_. Perhaps this is, as some of my
realistically inclined friends tell me, a childish love for romance on
my part. Well, perhaps it is. If it is, I can’t help it; as I said,
this statement is not offered as an excuse, but a confession.
“This sort of thing shows in my own stories. It would be very hard for
me to write a long story which should end dismally. It is only too
true that stories in real life frequently end that way, but I don’t
like my yarns to do so. So it is fair to presume that in whatever
books I may hereafter write, the hero and the heroine will be united,
virtue rewarded and vice punished, as has happened in those for which
I am already responsible. Perhaps this same weakness for a story, a
cheerful story, makes me care little for the so-called problem novel.
It doesn’t mean that I am not fond of novels dealing with certain
kinds of problems. Winston Churchill’s _The Inside of the Cup_ I liked
immensely; but the sex problem, the divorce question, and all that sort
of thing does not appeal to me. A morbid lot of disagreeable people,
married or otherwise, moping and quarrelling through a long story seem
to me scarcely worth while. To a specialist in nervous diseases such a
study might be interesting, but I really doubt if the average healthy
man or woman finds it so. Certainly we should not care to associate
with such people were they living near us. We should get away from them
if we could.
“Perhaps I _could_ write a story with gloomy situations and an unhappy
ending, but I wouldn’t like to try it. I would much rather try to make
people cheerful and keep myself cheerful at the same time. There’s
enough sorrow in this world without finding it in books.”
So he spoke ten years ago; so, with possibly the change of an
illustration or two, would he speak today. From nine in the morning
until noon or one o’clock he disappears into his workshop, frequently
a place known only to himself, and either writes (with a soft, stubby
pencil, on large sheets of yellow paper) or thinks about characters and
the very attenuated skeleton which, for Mr. Lincoln, constitutes the
“plot.”
“I know there are people who can turn out a short story in two or
three hours and it will be good enough to sell, but I cannot help
feeling that it would have been much better if the writer had devoted
more time to it. In my case, doing work that is satisfactory to me
in any degree means that I must fairly sweat it out, if I may use the
expression.” There usually comes a time when he gets “a letter about
once a week asking how the thing is coming along. That has been a
frequent experience, especially when there are a lot of characters in
my story, and I’m having more or less trouble with them. The story
keeps stretching itself out. I think I may have to adopt Mark Twain’s
method, and begin throwing my people down the well.” There is a genial
artifice about nearly all his tales. Some years ago an interviewer
for the Boston Globe touched on the subject of “specialty” writing,
which was a natural topic, as all of Mr. Lincoln’s fiction is a highly
specialised affair, not only in its general localisation on Cape Cod
but in its characterisation and homely wit and humour. The author said:
“A man writes what he knows. If he tries anything else it must
fall--show hollow. And I find that it is necessary to write to your
audience--that one must consider that a large number of his readers are
to be women, and he must write things that will appeal to the women of
today.”
“You don’t mean that you would consider the women to the point of
writing stuff that would be saleable, and refrain from writing stuff
which appealed to you, but might not be saleable?”
“Well,” said Mr. Lincoln, slowly, “I haven’t any ‘message’ that I know
of. I’m not much of a high-brow. I have standards, though. And if I
am to do the thing I want to do, I must get my book printed. But I’ve
never been satisfied--although I did like _The Postmaster_ pretty
well.”
This was ten years ago, and Mr. Lincoln has gone on, unchanging. He
has the most enviable record of any living American writer. No book of
his has been a failure. Some have done better than others, but with
no serious qualification of the statement it can be said that each
book has added to his audience, so that he has for some years been an
unfailing best seller. Perhaps there has been a noticeable increase
in his popularity with and since _The Portygee_ (1919), which was
published serially and then surprised the publishers by beating Lincoln
records as a book. Or the gain may be traceable to the preceding book,
“_Shavings_,” and its successful dramatisation. But in his sustained,
unbroken and increasing popularity as a fictionist Mr. Lincoln has no
competitor. There are others whose individual books have sold more
heavily, whose total sales may be larger, but they have had lapses, and
their popularity has either been impaired or lost. Even as I write the
process known in the trade as “slipping” is observable, here and there,
in the case of one of the most popular American authors, a person with
a long record of immediate successes, one of whose work the American
soldier, in 1917-18, could not apparently get enough. Time does this
thing, but apparently it cannot touch, except to enhance, the passion
for the work of this native of Cape Cod, who clips his words a little
and sometimes says “hev” and “hed” for “have” and “had”--about whom
there is even a suspicion of the Down East nasal twanging as he talks.
A wholly lovable personality. He once wrote:
“Bless the children. They are the most convenient excuses in creation.
Probably, if it were not for them, you wouldn’t get to the zoological
gardens or the aquarium or the fairy play oftener than once a year or
so. And as for the circus--but that’s an old story.”
iv
We have not finished, though, with the man’s own account of his
relation to his work.
“You can’t use actual people. People aren’t as dramatic in actual
life as you want them to be. Of course, you may hear a phrase, or a
story--you may talk with a person and get an impression and build up
your character from those things. But using an actual person wouldn’t
work. Besides, it would be rather mean.
“In writing of a Cape Cod town or village, although I purposely
refrain from describing it as any one town in particular, I have tried
conscientiously to give the characteristics of Cape Cod towns I am
acquainted with. The promontories and inlets and hills and marshes in
‘my’ Cape Cod may not be found where I have located them, but I have
tried very hard to make them like those which are on the real Cape. And
so with the Cape Codders in my stories. I have never knowingly drawn
the exact, recognisable portrait of an individual. I have of course,
received hundreds of letters from readers who inform me, in strict
confidence, that they know the original of ‘Cap’n ----’ and recognised
him at once. Nevertheless they are wrong. I have endeavoured always
to be true to type, and in writing of the old deep-sea captain, the
coasting skipper, the longshoreman or the people of the Cape villages,
I have done my best to portray each as I have seen and known specimens
of his or her kind. And in attempting to transcribe the habit of
language I have made it a rule never to use an expression or idiom I
have not heard used by a native of the old colony.”
The differentiation of the various types of seaman has been carefully
made by Mr. Lincoln, and is perhaps valuable to a full appreciation of
his fiction.
“The type of sea captain who figures in my stories has not necessarily
an accurately corresponding type in my acquaintance. Going back to
the Cape after having lived in New York and Boston, I was able to get
varying angles on the lives of the men and women I had known in my
childhood. The old sea captains that I remembered best as a child were
of more than one character, classified according to their work. One
was the dignified old man who had travelled to some far-away corner of
the earth and returned prosperous, to spend the rest of his days as
an autocrat among his own people. He had met strange peoples, he had