American nights entertainment
were sown, to be harvested several years later in accusations of
log-rolling[2] that were levelled at others a-plenty besides Morley.
Here, however, it should be explained that Morley had come from Oxford
to go to work, at the age of twenty-three, at Garden City; that while
learning the publishing business he had married Miss Helen Booth
Fairchild, a New York girl whom he had met in England. If, therefore,
he modestly undertook to become the American poet of domesticity with
his songs for households “of two or more,” the guilt should by no means
be made personal to him, but may justly be laid at the door of the race.
[2] The term is borrowed from the Congress of the United States, where
it has long been employed, quite unofficially, to describe an exchange
of favors among Congressmen, some voting for another’s bill in exchange
for his favorable vote upon their pet measures. As here used, it refers
to the alleged praise of one writer by another in tacit exchange for
similar praise back; the public being expected to take both encomiums
at face value and without any discounting for personal friendship, etc.
Whether the public has ever quite done so is possibly to be doubted;
but, at any rate, in the winter of 1921-22, New York and some other
literary circles were so openly under suspicion of log-rolling that
the suspects were not able to ignore the charges openly made. The
boldest method of counter-attack adopted was that of Heywood Broun,
who ridiculed the accusation, not quite successfully from every
standpoint. There was, however, an immediate and noticeable diminution
of enthusiasm among some of the younger writers for each other’s
work, publicly expressed. Morley himself, discussing the matter of
log-rolling, explained that the accusers had the cart before the horse;
that commonly one liked another man’s work and praised it, and in
consequence thereof came into a personal acquaintance. This is without
doubt frequently the true situation.
The year following _Shandygaff_ witnessed the appearance of another
book of verse, _The Rocking Horse_; the sequel to _Parnassus on
Wheels_, entitled _The Haunted Bookshop_; and a book done in
collaboration with Bart Haley. Called _In the Sweet Dry and Dry_, this
is quite exceptional among Morley books, and not too common among any
books, for its badness. An extravaganza on the subject of prohibition,
the plot may be said to have resided mainly in incessant and outrageous
puns, at that time a pronounced Morley weakness. But again it is
necessary to point out a detail which, taken in one light, and, as I
think, the proper light, reflects great personal credit on Mr. Morley;
he has never disowned the bad book. He could not do so openly, of
course--copies probably exist--but he has not done so tacitly, as
he might have without question or comment. I have in mind a little
booklet on Christopher Morley published in 1922 and concluding with a
bibliography. There it stands: “_In the Sweet Dry and Dry_, Boni and
Liveright, 1919. (In collaboration with Bart Haley, out of print.)” The
book, no doubt. George Moore and Henry James, not to mention other men
of literary genius, have had occasion to be ashamed of their work and
to drop it quietly from the roll. I like Mr. Morley for not doing so.
iv
Christopher Darlington Morley was born at Haverford, Pennsylvania,
5 May, 1890, of parents both English by birth but long Americans
by residence. Dr. Frank Morley, an English Quaker of Woodbridge,
Suffolk--the home of Edward Fitzgerald--was graduated at Cambridge
and came to Haverford in 1887 as professor of mathematics. His wife
was Lilian Janet Bird, of Hayward’s Heath, in Sussex, a woman of some
musical and poetical gifts, the daughter of a man at one time with the
London publishing house of Chapman and Hall. CDM frequently praises
her cooking, which blended as an influence on his boyhood with the
Haverford campus, where cricket is played. In 1900 Professor Morley
went to Baltimore and Johns Hopkins. His son entered Haverford in 1906,
was graduated in 1910 and, in the same year, was chosen as Rhodes
Scholar representing Maryland. The three years at Oxford were spent
at New College. In the title-poem of a new book of verse, _Parson’s
Pleasure_--the name of the old bathing pool on the Cherwell at
Oxford--occur the lines:
Two breeding-places I have known
Where germinal my heart was sown;
Two places from which I inherit
The present business of my spirit:
Haverford, Oxford, quietly
May make a poet out of me.
The confused exigencies of his native land, however, were, more
immediately, to make something else out of him. Repairing to
Garden City, he interviewed Mr. F. N. Doubleday, otherwise FND
(“Effendi”) on the matter of a job. Mr. Doubleday has preserved
the record of that interview in an amusing account which fully
displays the youth, eagerness, enthusiasm and amiable audacity of the
twenty-three-year-old. The noted Effendi, whose philosophy of life
is not without its Oriental suggestions and whose sense of humour
is at such times gently active, was feeling “a little weighted down
that morning with the difficulties of the job which the President of
Doubleday, Page & Company takes as a daily routine,” and therefore
finally told Morley “to go to work at all his manifold plans and
literary philanderings, reserving the right to restrain his commitments
if necessary.”
It was Morley who discovered William McFee. English sheets of that
long and very fine novel, _Casuals of the Sea_, had been submitted
to the firm for consideration and possible purchase. Ultimately
it became necessary to set up type for the novel in America. “We
were accustomed,” Mr. Doubleday explains, “to hold what we called a
‘book-meeting,’ when each member of the staff gave his suggestion about
authors and books. For months when it came Christopher’s turn to speak
he always began, ‘Now, about McFee--we don’t appreciate what a comer he
is’ and so on for five minutes without taking a breath until finally
it became the joke of the meeting that nothing could be done until
Morley’s McFee speech had been made. Our jibes influenced him not at
all. His only reply to our efforts in humour was to bring on a look of
great seriousness and the eternal phrase, ‘Now, about McFee.’”
In leaving Garden City after a stay of nearly four years to become, in
his own phrase, one of the “little group of wilful men who edit the
Ladies’ Home Journal,” CDM departed from the well-established tradition
under which so many men in the book publishing business have fallen. It
is some kind of a tribute to Doubleday, Page & Company that the house
has been the training-place of a considerable number of the heads in
other publishing houses. In Philadelphia a term on the Ladies’ Home
Journal was followed by work as a columnist on the Evening Public
Ledger, the direct preliminary to Morley’s column on the editorial
page of the New York Evening Post, with which he has been since 1920.
The book, _Travels in Philadelphia_; the personal acquaintance of A.
Edward Newton, author of _The Amenities of Book Collecting and Kindred
Affections_; and a deepened interest in Walt Whitman, are some of
the concomitants of the Philadelphia period. Also, I think, Morley’s
gradual disillusionment began then. The collection of essays called
_Mince Pie_ was published late in 1919 and there were still to appear,
in 1920, certain overflowings of the Morley of the first period--the
story of an Oxford undergraduate prank, called _Kathleen_; a book of
verse, _Hide and Seek_; and more essays in _Pipefuls_. But that was
to be about all. Something very definite had happened to the young
man who was so friendly with everybody, who was forever talking about
William McFee, who wrote forty-leven letters and notes a day, who had
made a cult of quaintness and who liked to be called Kit and to have
the resemblance of his name to that of Christopher Marlowe’s stretched
into a fanciful resemblance of personalities and writing. Some lone
reviewer, speaking harshly; or some slight wound received in the house
of one of his friends; or the shifts and vicissitudes of commercial
enterprise--dissatisfaction with what he had already done, a thirtieth
birthday, a wish to do something he had yet to do--together or singly
may have been the agents of the change. Only the change itself matters.
And what was that? It was not that Chris became less friendly, or
autographed fewer dozens of copies of a new book of his, or loved
the Elizabethans less or the work of Theodore Dreiser more. But a
retractation took place, an alteration of ideas went on ... aided, it
may be, by the uniformity with which American magazine editors rejected
a short story called “Referred to the Author,” one of the contents of
Morley’s book _Tales from a Rolltop Desk_--a story which Morley himself
thinks marks the definite line between his old work and new.
v
Those who care for the poet of “households of two or more” will find
him most readily now in the volume called _Chimneysmoke_ (1921), which
is a representative selection from the earlier books of verse, _Songs
for a Little House_, _The Rocking Horse_, and _Hide and Seek_. Vincent
O’Sullivan has said that the Morley here represented belongs with
“the English intimists, Herrick, George Herbert, Cowper, Crabbe.”
Writing an introduction for the English edition of _Chimneysmoke_, E.
V. Lucas remarked: “Domesticity has had many celebrants, but I cannot
remember any one work in which such a number of the expressions of
Everyman, in his capacity as householder, husband and father, have
been touched upon, and touched upon so happily and with such deep and
simple sincerity. The poet of ‘The Angel in the House’ was, I suppose,
a predecessor; but Coventry Patmore was a mystic and a rhapsodist,
whereas Mr. Morley keeps on a more normal plane and puts in verse,
thoughts and feelings and excitements that most of us have known but
have lacked the skill or will to epigrammatise. If we are to look in
literature for a kindred spirit to Mr. Morley’s we find it rather in
the author of ‘The Cotter’s Saturday Night.’”
Morley’s new book of essays, _The Powder of Sympathy_, shows the man
changed and changing. It would be impossible to detect any loss of
humour or cheerfulness in such papers as those on Sir Kenelm Digby or
the Morley automobile, Dame Quickly (to be succeeded some day by the
more impressive Dean Swift). But the satire in “The Story of Ginger
Cubes” is not less complete or sharp for being throughout good-natured;
and in his piece on “The Unknown Citizen” Morley seems to me to strike
a single magnificent chord in which satire and humour are simply notes
underlain by the deep bass of pathos and truth. The new book of poems,
_Parson’s Pleasure_, shows that where there was so much _Chimneysmoke_
a fire burns also. This book has an inspiring and inspiriting essay
for preface--one far too quotable; I must resist it. Instead, let me
give the first sonnet in the “Memoranda for a Sonnet Sequence”:
The herb Lunaria, old books aver,
If gathered thus and so, in moony patches,
Has property of mystic opener
When laid upon the fastest locks and latches.
In this respect, the moonplant duly matches
The magic of the poets, who bestir
Their art to loosen spirit’s careful catches
And split our secret bolts like gossamer.
To sprinkle moonseed on the tight-locked soul
Bidding it open, or stand soft ajar--
To sprinkle moonseed, gathered thus and so,
This is the poet’s honourable rôle.
Like some old Tudor captain bound afar
I hear him crying _Inward! Inward Ho!_
Books by Christopher Morley
1912 _The Eighth Sin._ Oxford: B. H. BLACKWELL. Out of print
1917 _Parnassus on Wheels_
1917 _Songs for a Little House_