of Poe’s stories with the dramatic method of the best French tellers of
tales. The details of technique will bear and repay the closest scrutiny.
But in certain stories Melville Davisson Post has put his high skill to a
larger use than skill can accomplish; for those of his accomplishments an
endowment and not an acquisition was requisite. When one says that of the
relatively few American writers with that endowment in mind and heart he
was able to bring to the enterprise in hand a skill greater than any of
the others, one has indeed said all.
BOOKS BY MELVILLE DAVISSON POST
1896 _The Strange Schemes of Randolph Mason_
1897 _The Man of Last Resort_
1901 _Dwellers in the Hills_
1909 _The Corrector of Destinies_
1910 _The Gilded Chair_
1912 _The Nameless Thing_
1918 _Uncle Abner, Master of Mysteries_
1919 _The Mystery at the Blue Villa_
1920 _The Sleuth of St. James’s Square_
1922 _The Mountain School-Teacher_
1923 _Monsieur Jonquelle, Prefect of Police of Paris_
1924 _Walker of the Secret Service_
SOURCES ON MELVILLE DAVISSON POST
Mr. Post’s own two articles on the short story are of the highest value,
not only to an understanding of his method, but as a contribution to the
theory of literary structure—a contribution, unlike most, allied to and
realized in practice.
His first article appeared under the title, “The Blight,” in the Saturday
Evening Post for 26 December 1914. A shorter article on “The Mystery
Story” appeared in the same magazine, 27 February 1915.
In April, 1924, while in New York for a short time Mr. Post dictated the
following notes which amplify a little his written articles:
“The modern plan for the mystery or detective story can no longer
follow the old formula invented by Poe and adopted by Gaboriau, Conan
Doyle, etc. All life has grown quicker, the mind of the reader acts
more quickly, our civilization is impatient at delays. In literature,
and especially literature of this type, the reader will not wait for
explanations. All explanations must be given to him in advance of the
solution of the mystery.
“It became apparent upon a very careful study of the mystery story that
something must be done to eliminate the obvious and to get rid of the
delay in action and the detailed and tiresome explanation in the closing
part. It occurred to me that these defects could be eliminated by folding
together the arms of the Poe formula. Instead of giving the reader the
mystery and then going over the same ground with the solution, the
mystery and its solution might be given together. The developing of the
mystery and the development toward the solution would go forward side by
side; and when all the details of the mystery were uncovered the solution
also would be uncovered and the end of the story arrived at. This is the
plan which I followed in my later mystery-detective stories—the _Uncle
Abner_ series, _Monsieur Jonquelle_, and _Walker of the Secret Service_.
This new formula, as will at once be seen, very markedly increases the
rapidity of action in a story, holds the reader’s interest throughout,
and eliminates any impression of moving at any time over ground
previously covered.
“It requires a greater care and more careful technique, for _every
explanation which the reader must receive in order to understand either
the mystery or the solution must be slipped into the story as it proceeds
without any delay in its action_. There can be no pause for explanation.
Each explanation must be a natural sequence and a part of the action
and movement. The reader must never be conscious that he is being
delayed for an explanation, and the elements of explanation must be so
subtly suggested that one receives them as he receives the details of a
landscape in an adventure scene, without being conscious of it.
“In undertaking to build up a story on this modern formula, one must
first have a germinal or inciting incident upon which the whole story
may turn as upon a hinge. Out of this controlling incident, the writer
must develop both the mystery and its solution and must present them side
by side to the reader in the direct movement of the story to the end.
When the mystery is finally explained, the story is ended. There can be
no further word or paragraph; there can be no added explanation. If a
sufficient explanation has not preceded this point, the story has failed.
If the reader has been compelled to pause at any point in the story long
enough to realize that he is receiving an explanation, the story has
failed.
“But it will not be enough if the writer of the mystery-detective story
is able cleverly to work out his story according to this formula. He must
be able to give this type of story the same literary distinction that can
be given to any type of story. To do this he has only to realize a few
of the primary rules of all literary structure. He must remember that
everything, every form of character, has a certain dignity. This dignity
the writer must realize and respect. Flaubert told Maupassant that in
order to be original he had only to look at the thing which he wished
to describe long enough and with such care that he saw in it something
which no one had seen in it before. That rule ought to be amended to
require the writer to look at every character and every situation long
enough and with sufficient care to realize the dignity in it—that element
of distinction which it invariably possesses in some direction—and when
he has grasped that, to respect and convey it in his story.
“It may as well be said that no one form of literary structure is
superior to another. The story dealing with the life and action of
our highest types does not in itself result in any better literature
than the story dealing with the lowest or most abandoned types; nor
are physical adventures to be graded below metaphysical adventures.
The mystery-detective story may be structurally so excellent and its
workmanship so good that it is the equal of any form of literature.
“The obvious is at the base of all boredom. The thing that provides our
perpetual interest in life is that the events lying just ahead of us
cannot be determined. It is the mystery in the next moment, the next
hour, the next day that we live to solve. If by any mental process we
could ascertain the arrival of events ahead, no human being could endure
the boredom of life. Something of this mystery, this uncertainty, must be
caught up for the reader in the short story if his interest is to abide
to the end. The skill of the author in preserving this uncertainty and
mystery in events—in this imitation of life—will indicate the place to be
assigned to him in the art he has undertaken.”
To an interviewer (by letter) who asked for the principal events of his
life, Mr. Post once made a suitably whimsical answer:
“I was born like the sons of Atreus in the pasture land of horses. I
was reared by a black woman who remembered her grandmother boiling a
warrior’s head in a pot. I was given a degree by a college of unbeautiful
nonsense. I have eaten dinner with a god. And I have kissed a princess in
a land where men grind their wheat in the sky.”
4. Jeffery Farnol’s Gestes
i
A geste is a great exploit or an heroic achievement; the thing that has
today pretty generally dwindled to a gesture. But although the fiction
of Jeffery Farnol is full of gestures—of ladies who cry, “La!” and of
ladies who swoon; of gentlemen who draw swords as naturally as they
draw breath, or even more so—the succession of his work is a series of
gestes. For one point, he followed his bent in the teeth of literary
fashion and scored, at the outset, an enormous popular success. For
another point, he kept his head when success was upon him. Although a
favorite scene in his stories is one full of lightning fence, swifter
guard and dexterous riposte, the true portrait of the author is decidedly
different: It shows him in the patient and laborious attitudes of his own
Black George, in the toil the young Farnol was himself committed to for
a period in his youth, the heavy work of the forge and the foundry, the
slow heating to malleability and the shape hammered out before cooling.
After _The Broad Highway_ had captured the fancy of England and America,
in an incautious moment Farnol the smith, Farnol the patient artificer,
contracted to furnish his next tale as a serial in an American magazine.
The editor blithely began publication with only part of the manuscript
in hand. Dissatisfied with his work, the author at one stage tore up ten
completed chapters. For several months he worked under pressure. In the
end he kept the editor supplied. The experience did not lead him into
the misconception that his smithy was a Ford factory. Nor has the fact
that he can write one kind of tale ever led him to suppose that he ought
to succeed with another variety; he followed _The Definite Object_ with
_Our Admirable Betty_. It is surprising to reflect that he made his first
hit by reviving a species of romance when romance of that species, and of
pretty nearly every species, was justly considered to have breathed its
last; but it is vastly more surprising to realize that he has continued
to succeed by the same tactics. Almost ten years later another young
man, similarly self-willed, was to score an equal success in America
(though not in England) by the same sort of reckless behavior, only the
title of the book was to be _Main Street_ and not _The Broad Highway_.
But Sinclair Lewis, although unaware of his advantage, was setting a
fashion, not defying one. Both Mr. Lewis’s novel and Mr. Farnol’s were
the products of that kind of saturation which, while it cannot be relied
upon to produce enduring literature, can nearly always be counted upon
to produce literary phenomena. Such a phenomenon, certainly, was the
Kentish tale of Peter Vibart, Charmian, the Tinker, Black George, and the
Ancient, appearing as a book early in 1911 and rolling rapidly up to a
sale of 500,000 copies in England and America. And though perhaps not a
portent, as _Main Street_ has been a portent, it was a sign of far more
significance than the appearance on the scene of a new individual writer.
But let us tell the story of that story in orderly fashion.
ii
It begins with two little boys in their nightshirts listening furtively
but eagerly outside the door of a room in which their father was reading
aloud to their mother, whose eyes were on her needle. The book was _The
Count of Monte Cristo_. The name of the older boy—he was eight—was John
Jeffery Farnol; of the younger, who was to fall in the Boer War, Ewart
Farnol. The family had removed from Birmingham, where Jeffery was born,
to Lee, in Kent. The reading proceeded until a sneeze betrayed the boys.
But after that they were admitted for an extra hour to the evening
readings. The senior Farnol read excellently, varying his voice to suit
the characters. He made the stories live, for Jeffery at least. From
Cooper, Scott, Dickens, Dumas, Thackeray and Stevenson heard at home,
Jeffery became a schoolboy who invented tales to entertain his fellows;
in particular he started a story which he carried on for three months,
winding it up with the close of term. When he had finished school he
wanted to become a writer, but as there was not money to send him to one
of the universities, his father thought the ambition foolish, and at
17 the boy was set to work in Birmingham with a firm of engineers and
brassfounders. Manual labor at the forge was varied by a great deal of
fighting with fists. He was short and thickset; he spent the lunch hour
either telling stories to the other men, “stories from the classics,”
as he says, “vividly touched up, no doubt, or making a rough drawing of
some scowling diffident sitter.” As he sat drawing one noon, a man of
the crowd looking over his shoulder remarked: “Ah, that’s all very well,
but drawing ain’t manliness.” A test of manliness, inquiry developed,
was the feat of a chap who had climbed up the inside of the big chimney.
Farnol laid five shillings to half a crown that he could duplicate the
deed. Says one account: “The chimney towered up, one hundred and twenty
feet of blackness, choked with the soot of four years and with insecure
stanchions, several of them broken.” He fastened his handkerchief at the
top for all to see; it is easy to believe that the worst of the thing
was the climb down with soot tumbling in his eyes. The men refused to
pay their bets, he had to fight one of them, though sick and giddy, and
was beaten. But a climax was near at hand. Farnol kept a note-book in
which he was forever jotting down ideas and impressions. The foreman most
reasonably objected to these interruptions of work. There were blows.
Leaving the foreman “reclining in a daze against an anvil”—the words
aren’t Farnol’s—the last Farnol saw of the place was his handkerchief
fluttering from the chimney top.
“No good for work, always writing.” How singularly right the foreman’s
verdict had been, some years were required to prove. For a time Farnol
stayed at home and wrote stories, poems, whatnot. A few stories got
printed. His father was unimpressed, except by the unanimity of family
relatives in declaring that he was encouraging Jeffery to grow into
an idle fellow. It seemed as if something might be constructed from
his son’s natural aptitude for drawing. Jeffery began the study of
line and figure drawing under Loudon at the Westminster Art School. He
found everybody else at the school so much more clever that he became
discouraged.
“I think I’ll write.”
“You can’t write,” said his father. “You’ve not had a University
education.”
He went into his father’s business, but as he continued to write stories,
and as some of them continued to get accepted, this arrangement was a
failure. At this time his favorite recreation was cycling. “All the
highroads and byroads of Kent, Surrey and Sussex became familiar to
me. I wheeled between the flowery hedgerows and quenched my thirst at
the wayside taverns. It was then, while watching villagers wending
their way to church, that I first saw the Ancient. There he was, tall
hat, smock-frock, shrewd, wrinkled face, and gnarled hands grasping his
knobbly staff just as I have described him in _The Broad Highway_. And
that was the first inception of the book, though it was not until several
years afterward that it came to be written.” Black George was fashioned
out of his own time spent at the Birmingham forge.
Farnol wasn’t yet twenty-one when he married Blanche Hawley, daughter
of F. Hughson Hawley, a New York artist. The pair set out for America.
The bride of seventeen had been sent to England on a visit. It was hoped
that Mr. Hawley would take the news well. It was also hoped that Jeffery
might sell stories more successfully in the United States. He had a
negligible amount of money. The seven, and more than seven, lean years
were beginning.
iii
Mr. Hawley received them well. In an interview a year ago[11] Mr. Farnol,
recalling the New York period, is quoted as saying:
“I hadn’t a cent in the world. My wife had paid for the wedding ring and
the honeymoon, and it seemed to me that after that it was up to me to
do something. It has been said that her father remained adamant when we
arrived, but that isn’t true. I’m expecting a knock on the bean from him
when he reads that. On the contrary, I found him a delightful old cove,
and we were forgiven.
[Illustration: JEFFERY FARNOL
_Photograph by E. Hoppé, London._]
“After that I went to work, living alone in a room at Thirty-eighth
Street and Tenth Avenue. One night, about 3 o’clock in the morning, I
came across a man down by the river whose face was all covered with blood.
“‘What’s the matter?’ I asked him.
“‘I’m dying, kid, I’m dying!’ he told me.
“I took him home and fixed him up. It turned out that he was the leader
of a notorious gang. I’ve never known a finer chap than he. I’ve found
out in this life that if you scratch deep enough you’ll always find true
worth.
“About a week after that night he came around and took me to a notorious
saloon. He took me into the back room and introduced me to the bunch.
Several of them have gone to the chair since, but they were good
fellows.[12] I’ve gone into that saloon without a nickel in my pocket,
and looking it. I’ve had one of the gang say to me: ‘Stony up against it,
kid? Will a fiver help?’ and before I could know what happened the gang
would have taken up a collection of $25 and given it to me.[13]
“My wife was living with her family at that time, but often she would
come to bring me baskets with chicken and all sorts of delightful little
delicacies. The neighborhood was a terrible one in those days, and I was
afraid at first to have her come there. I told some of the boys about it.
They told me never to worry again. They arranged that an unseen bodyguard
should follow her from the street car and escort her to my room and back
again when she was ready to leave.... She believed in me even then when
it meant more to me than anything in the world. People don’t know it, but
I am naturally a timid man. She gave me confidence in myself, and with it
came the ability to succeed.”
The room at Thirty-eighth Street and Tenth Avenue was a studio, “dismal,
rat-haunted,” where a job as a painter of theatrical scenery compelled
him to spend a great many of his nights and days. In intervals of
scene-painting he began _The Broad Highway_. “I met O. Henry several
times in the offices of Ainslee’s Magazine. I think it was Will Irwin
who introduced us. O. Henry was unusually taciturn for an American, and
I—well, I am an Englishman. So though we saw each other frequently, never
more than ‘How d’ ye do’ passed between us.
“The pleasantest recollections I have of those old days was the time I
spent in dabbling in painting and theatricals at the old Astor Theatre.
One day a down-and-out young man got past the doorkeeper and strolled on
the stage. ‘I’ve got a fortune here in my pocket,’ he said. ‘We all have
that,’ I replied.
“The young fellow said he had been a cub reporter in Chicago, but now he
was hungry and looking for a job. Finally he got the attention of the
producer at the theatre. He pulled out a manuscript and began reading.
The producer at first paid no attention, but gradually became more and
more interested. When the first act had been read the producer said,
‘All right, I’ll take it.’ The starving dramatist was Eugene Walter and
the manuscript was that of ‘Paid in Full.’”[14]
Farnol wrote in the studio and also at Mr. Hawley’s home, in Englewood,
New Jersey. When _The Broad Highway_ was the best seller, Mr. Hawley
rounded out the picture of the New York period.[15] “Farnol,” he said,
“is a dreamer and a bookworm, and has just about as much practical
idea of time and money as that type is popularly supposed to have. He
kept right on writing, and night was the time he had to do it. Many a
time when I’ve been detained late with a press of work I’d get home at
midnight or thereabouts to find a light supper waiting for me and Jeffery
up working, only waiting to be called to entertain me while I ate. For
he is the most entertaining talker I’ve ever known and loves to talk.
His natural speech is the phraseology in _The Broad Highway_.[16] It has
become natural to him through many years of living with the characters in
the books of that period he loves so well. And he is a born storyteller.
He always kept us sitting overtime at meals, just as he used to keep me
sitting up till 2 or 3 o’clock in the morning on the occasion of the
midnight suppers. When he gets to spinning a yarn, whether telling it or
writing it, he loses all knowledge of the flight of time. Often when I’ve
come down to breakfast before catching my early train to New York I’ve
found him just finishing his night’s work, fresh and enthusiastic. Even
when his days are full of leisure he likes best to work at night. Then,
he says, his brain is clearer, and there are no interruptions. His power
of concentration and absorption is the most marvellous thing I’ve ever
encountered. I remember once taking him to the Players Club with me for
luncheon. After luncheon he wandered into the library and was delighted
to see the work of Aphra Behn, an early writer I’d never heard of, but
belonging to his favorite period and well known to him. I left him there
renewing her acquaintance with delight. I forgot all about him, but
chancing to go back for dinner, on entering the library to my amazement I
saw him sitting there in exactly the same posture in which I’d left him
hours before. He didn’t know whether ten minutes or as many hours had
elapsed.”
Farnol succeeded in selling a number of short stories and had some work
as an illustrator. He wrote two light romances, _My Lady Caprice_ and
_The Money Moon_, which magazines bought. For two years he put all his
spare time on _The Broad Highway_, the history of which is among the
curiosities of book publishing.
iv
Like _Main Street_ a decade later, _The Broad Highway_ was possibly
conceived and certainly executed in a spirit of revolt. Such rebellions
are common, and the only wisdom that can be uttered in respect of them
is embodied in that proverb which says that one man’s meat is another
man’s poison. Editors and publishers endeavor to give the public what
the public wants. The public, very naturally, never knows what it wants
until it tastes it. The public is like a husband sitting down to his
wife’s dinner. He may like everything or nothing; he may enormously
relish the unexpected, placed before him with inward perturbation and
in a spirit of desperate doubt. He may pounce with appetite upon, and
sing loudly the praise of, some dish denounced by him and refused by
his palate the week before. If a writer attempt to please editors or
publishers, who, in turn, are attempting to please their publics, he will
be successful with the entrepreneurs and possibly with the audiences.
And his temperament may make such a course the very best thing. If his
temperament is otherwise, sooner or later he will please himself; and if
he can then get published a large public may just possibly discover that
he greatly pleases them.
The completed manuscript of _The Broad Highway_ was submitted to the
Century Company and Charles Scribner’s Sons in New York, both of whom
failed to come to terms and returned it shortly. It was then submitted to
Dodd, Mead & Company, who indicated a conditional acceptance and asked
the author to come in and discuss possible changes. The firm’s readers
offered their suggestions and Farnol took notes. The principal result
was that he cut 20,000 words out of the book, which still remained of
200,000-word length, or twice the length of the usual “full-length”
novel. The alterations were not enough to give the publisher the
necessary confidence; the year was 1907, the year of the money panic;
and the manuscript was finally returned to Farnol with a definite
declination. The reasons were sound: There had been a bad slump in
Wall Street, the book was formidably long, the author was unknown, the
interest of the tale might be almost wholly for English readers. But
there was another reason in the nature of the novel to which a few words
should be devoted.
Robert Louis Stevenson had died in 1894. His work spawned a school of
historical fiction, much of it pseudo-historical, which had dominated the
American book market for years. The public taste did not discriminate
during that decade between the good and the bad; _To Have and To Hold_
and _When Knighthood Was in Flower_ were equally hailed as masterpieces
and alike elevated to the top of the heap. From that day, indeed, dates
the name and the peculiarity of the “best seller.” The term remains, but
it has only in very recent years begun to undergo a transformation of
meaning, the idea of relativity having crept in. With a truer perception
and a better sense of proportion, we now tend to speak of a book as a
best seller _in its class_, or in relation to the literary merit of the
work or the record of the author or generally with an eye to what sale
could be expected in the circumstances. The fact of a sale in so many
figures remains; but the estimation in which the fact is held is quite
different. A sale of 20,000 copies that would have passed unregarded
twenty years ago is now likely to be accounted as of the greatest
significance.