American nights entertainment
TIME SPIRIT: So you refuse to answer? On the usual ground, of course;
it might tend to incriminate or degrade you?
MRS. WHARTON: I refuse to answer on the ground that it might
incriminate and degrade others who write about me like this: “_The
House of Mirth_, _Ethan Frome_--these are orchestral in their richly
subtle clashing of overtones, a sort of infra-discordance which is
among the rare improbable finenesses accessible to the artist, on
condition of his readiness to take infinite pains for infinitesimal
effects.”
TIME SPIRIT: Madame, permit me to deal lightly with you.
MRS. WHARTON: _Merci, monsieur._ But I think we have concluded our
bargain, haven’t we? _Au ’voir._
Books by Edith Wharton
1899 _The Greater Inclination_
1900 _The Touchstone_
1901 _Crucial Instances_
1902 _The Valley of Decision_
1903 _Sanctuary_
1904 _The Descent of Man, and Other Stories_
1904 _Italian Villas and Their Gardens_
1905 _Italian Backgrounds_
1905 _The House of Mirth_
1907 _Madame de Treymes_
1907 _The Fruit of the Tree_
1908 _The Hermit and the Wild Woman_
1908 _A Motor-Flight Through France_
1909 _Artemis to Actæon and Other Verse_
1910 _Tales of Men and Ghosts_
1911 _Ethan Frome_
1912 _The Reef_
1913 _The Custom of the Country_
1915 _The Book of the Homeless_
1915 _Fighting France_
_The Decoration of Houses_
_The Joy of Living_
1917 _Xingu and Other Stories_
1917 _Summer_
1918 _The Marne_
1919 _French Ways and Their Meaning_
1919 _In Morocco_
1920 _The Age of Innocence_
1922 _The Glimpses of the Moon_
1923 _A Son at the Front_
Sources on Edith Wharton
_Contemporary American Novelists, 1900-1920_, by Carl Van Doren. THE
MACMILLAN COMPANY, 1922.
_Some Modern Novelists_, by Helen Thomas Follett and Wilson Follett.
HENRY HOLT & COMPANY, 1918. The chapter deals with Mrs. Wharton’s work
up to and including _Summer_. Her novel, _The Valley of Decision_, is
singled out for especial emphasis.
_Edith Wharton, A Critical Study_, by Katharine Fullerton Gerould.
Booklet published by D. APPLETON & COMPANY, 1922. A spirited
exposition of what are conceived to be Mrs. Wharton’s special
qualities by a woman whose interest lies particularly in Mrs.
Wharton’s material.
_21. The Unclassified Case of Christopher Morley_
i
To know Christopher Morley is to be interested, amused, enthusiastic,
sceptical or even secretly puzzled; but to have him for a friend is to
learn the meaning of friendliness in a degree that is very exceptional.
And few escape being his friends, though this is less true than
formerly. There was, indeed, once a time when the friendship of Morley
was among the two or three serious responsibilities of an individual’s
life--like marriage, or filial duty or a conscience in regard to one’s
chosen craft. Practically every day, sometimes twice in a day, the
evidence of Morley’s friendliness would appear in a brief letter or
hastily-penned note about this or that or the other thing under the sun.
An image arose of an ever-active, a sleepless mind; of an emotional
nature more unresting than the Atlantic and quantitatively as great.
This awful abstraction slowly faded out into a visual image of a
“burly” man with a smiling face and a lighted pipe, and that, in turn,
gave place to the fear lest so much confidence in the human race should
prove fatally misplaced.... Somewhat, it has; but what we didn’t
foresee was that the change, coming about gradually, would operate as
a gradual salvation of (1) his friends from Morley, (2) Morley from his
friends, (3) Morley’s work from Friend Morley.
Yet this beneficial and important transformation has been accomplished
in the most salutary manner, with a result that may accrue with
permanence and advantage to American literature.
ii
As lately as 1920 one estimating American talents could observe of
Morley: “His gift is purely journalistic, isn’t it?” and receive the
answer from Morley’s friend: “Purely”--an answer conceived in entire
truthfulness. Both the asker and the answerer were pretty certain to
regard the assumed fact as a great pity. But as to the fact!--why, what
further evidence was needed to establish it? Morley had been writing
for several years, had averaged several books a year of prose and
verse, and nowhere gave the least sign of doing work of a different
character. What, then, was the character of his work in those years?
He began at Oxford with a book of verse; from a more actual standpoint
his beginnings had been made with _Parnassus on Wheels_, published
in 1917. This really capital conceit had engendered a sequel, _The
Haunted Bookshop_, published two years later. There were certain books
of essays--_Shandygaff_, _Mince Pie_, _Pipefuls_--pleasant, partly
serious, sometimes sentimental and showing a deplorable fondness for
the pun. There were books of verse--_Songs for a_ _Little House_,
_The Rocking Horse_, _Hide and Seek_. _Travels in Philadelphia_, the
short story, _Kathleen_, and an unfortunate collaboration called _In
the Sweet Dry and Dry_ completed the roll. It is no reflection upon
these volumes to say that they gave the impression of a talent strictly
journalistic; the best journalism is more than ephemeral and most of
the titles enumerated are still actively in demand. The quality we
call “journalism” is not an affair of perishability but something
very difficult to define, something in the approach, something in the
treatment rather than in the choice of subjects. In the last analysis
it is probable that the effort to define it would end with hands flung
out hopelessly before the mystery of a personal temperament.
The facts were these: Morley had been educated at Haverford College
and Oxford; he had then come to Garden City to work for the publishing
house which, principally, has published his prose, and his first
enterprises as an author were precociously instructed by an “inside”
acquaintance with what James Branch Cabell would call the auctorial
career. The influence upon his own work of this very special knowledge
is not easy to estimate. He saw, as only one in a publishing house
sees, the facts of authorship after the author’s child is born. For
example: the immense effect upon the fortunes of a writer’s book, or
books, of the attitude toward them of the bookseller. And that attitude
is quite rightly fixed by what the bookseller (1) knows he can sell,
or, less frequently (2), by what he thinks he can sell.
Morley saw that books are sold through bookstores. Looking a little
further, he discerned that books which are not in bookstores are, with
certain class exceptions, very rarely sold. He learned, as everyone in
a publishing house learns, that three-quarters of the books that are
sold to retail purchasers are bought because retail purchasers have had
these books thrust directly under their noses. He suffered, no doubt,
the customary amazement on discovering the vast number of people who
(1) either enter the bookstore with no particular book in mind, or (2),
on being unable to obtain the book in mind, readily take something
else. It was brought to his keen attention that, as Frank Swinnerton
reiterates in his admirable brochure on “Authors and Advertising,”
direct advertising, as in newspapers and magazines (the commonest
mediums) does not sell books. Being a young man of alert perceptions,
it cannot have been lost upon him that book reviews do not, with any
reliability, sell books, either. What does sell books is talk--in some
instances--but the hard rock foundation of book sales is a favourable
attitude on the part of “the trade.”
To know the people in the bookstore, to have and to cultivate and
to deserve their good will (for, in the long run, you must deserve
it), and thus to insure the sale of your book to the bookseller
and to enlist his energy and enterprise in re-selling it to his
customers--this is the “favourable attitude” just mentioned. Few
authors succeed in establishing it; fewer succeed in maintaining it.
Mr. Morley has done both, with the result that in five years from the
time of his _Parnassus on Wheels_ he has been able to publish a highly
imaginative, refined and polished satire and see it become, in its
field, a pronounced best seller.
iii
One would about as soon expect to see a fantasy by Lord Dunsany a
best seller as witness the sale, in tens of thousands, of Morley’s
_Where the Blue Begins_--if one were making one’s estimate solely
on the work itself. _Where the Blue Begins_ is the story of the dog
Gissing’s search for God--a search conducted in various places and
circumstances parallel to human life of the present day by an animal
discreetly analogued to the human animal. Such a piece of writing
has ordinarily no hope except from unusual and very favourable (or
acutely controversial) critical attention; and the hope from that
quarter is relatively small. By “hope,” of course, is meant a hope of
a considerable sale. _Where the Blue Begins_ belongs to that class
of literature which is written because it has lain in the author’s
heart to write it, regardless of its fate after it lies on paper. In
the case of Mr. Morley, the work has received merited praise; but it
would be naïve to suppose that this notice and commendation sold the
book; and the book trade might even justifiably be indignant at such
a supposition. Did not they, the booksellers, buy _Where the Blue
Begins_ because it was Morley’s new book? And did not they and their
clerks “push” the book for the same reason? The Ayes have it, to both
questions, and unanimously.
On the other hand, the sceptical soul who argues that Chris Morley
wrote _Parnassus on Wheels_, in the first place, because it was a
story about a bookseller calculated to “get him in right” with the
trade--that man does not know Morley and shows that he does not know
him. It is possible to detect in the character of Morley’s work, in
the circumstance of its publication and in the accessories provided
for that publication evidences of a singularly intelligent literary
campaign; it is possible to detect them and believe them to be such;
but it is not possible to over-estimate the part played by Morley’s own
naïveté, affectionate nature and formerly unchecked and indiscriminate
enthusiasm.
Such an attitude is always open to misconstruction. But it takes real
intelligence to go beneath the surface; and among Morley’s friends were
many who could do that. These perceived his genuineness without being
in the least able to predict the outcome of his generosity. Ours is
a world thus and thus and so and so. The ultimate effect upon Morley
himself of a disposition which he would unquestionably see suffer
and change was the problem. It would be very easy for him to come a
tremendous cropper of any one of several sorts; and then should we have
a soured, an embittered young man? Prophecy was worthless.
Meanwhile, with the auspicious beginning of _Parnassus on Wheels_, the
young man went gaily on. His first book of verse (barring the Oxford
experiment) was published in the same year under the valuable title,
_Songs for a Little House_; and at once the small beginnings of a
Morley vogue were faintly perceptible. The suspicion that such a title
harboured a spirit committed to the sentimental attitude toward life
was confirmed within a year by the publication of a book of essays,
_Shandygaff_, named after a reputed or actual beverage and got up with
a deliberately quaint title page. One was left in no doubt that Morley
liked Stevenson, was affectionately fond of Robert Cortes Holliday, and
worshipped the genius of Don Marquis. The seeds of literary jealousy