leather business at Leicester—but he had started writing stories before
that. He began to write them at fifteen, and showed his first to the
headmaster of the school, “who, instead of giving me the birching I
deserved, wished me luck and encouraged me to persevere.” The leather
business was successful and was bought up by Blumenthals, a large
American and Paris leather firm, who appointed young Oppenheim their
director at Leicester. “His experience in that trade,” asserts Mr. A.
St. John Adcock in his _Gods of Modern Grub Street_,[52] “has proved
immensely useful to him. It has not only helped him to material for his
tales, but it was through the American head of Blumenthals that he had
his chief incentive to the writing of the type of story that has brought
him such success as a novelist. This gentleman introduced him to the
proprietor of the Café de Rat Mort, the once famous Montmartre haunt,
for Oppenheim was frequently in Paris on the affairs of his leather
company, and at the Café he acquired his taste for the mysteries of
those international intriguings and rascalities that figure so largely
in several of his books, for the proprietor used to tell him all manner
of thrilling yarns about political and international adventurers,
some of whom had been among his customers, and his listener formed a
habit of weaving stories around the more striking personalities in the
cosmopolitan crowd that he met in the Dead Rat.”
He was eighteen years old when his first short story was published,
and only twenty when his first novel appeared. Before he was thirty he
married Miss Elsie Hopkins, of Chelsea, Massachusetts. Mr. Oppenheim and
his wife called their cottage in Sheringham, Norfolk, “Winnisimmet,”
which was the Indian name of her Massachusetts home town. The house
overlooked the North Sea. Perhaps this detail, as much as another,
led the author to the construction in the years before the world war
of that series of stories in which, as an element of his plots, Mr.
Oppenheim kept repeating Germany in the rôle of the villain. Legend
has it that during the war itself his name was on the list of Britons
to be shot if captured, although lists of that sort are usually myths.
“There was one period,” he has commented since, “in the autumn of 1918,
when a well-directed bomb upon the Ministry of Information might have
cleared the way for the younger novelists at the expense of Arnold
Bennett, John Buchan, Dion Calthrop, E. Temple Thurston, Hugh Walpole
and myself.”[53] He visited America in 1911 and again in 1922, when
Mrs. Oppenheim came with him. On the latter occasion he made by far the
wittiest comment of any visitor in reply to the usual question: what he
thought of prohibition. “My only fear,” with a smile, “is that it may
make me a drunkard.”[54] Those who met the victim of this reasonable
dread saw a sturdy, broad-shouldered figure developed by air and outdoor
exercise; and those who played golf with him respected his handicap of
seven strokes only. His large, florid face seemed to kindle into laughter
from the constant humorous gleam in his blue eyes. Among his own titles
he confessed to a fondness for _A Maker of History_, _The Double Life
of Mr. Alfred Burton_, _The Great Impersonation_ and—perhaps influenced
a little by its then impending publication—_The Great Prince Shan_.
At this time he was subjected to one of those sets of questions from
the answers to which one may construct a totally wrong picture of the
person. However, we may note that his idea of happiness was tied up with
his work, and that he gave as his notion of unhappiness, “No ideas.”
His particular aversion, he said, was fog.[55] Fog? Yet he has said: “I
would be perfectly content to spend the rest of my days in London. Half
a dozen thoroughfares and squares in London, a handful of restaurants,
the people whom one meets in a single morning, are quite sufficient for
the production of more and greater stories than I shall ever write.”[56]
He describes himself as no great traveller; he has, though, been in most
European countries, and he pretty regularly spends his winters at his
villa in Cagnes on the Riviera. He divides his time in England between
the house in Norfolk and his rooms in London.
iv
Mr. Oppenheim does not take himself seriously in the rôle of prophet.
“Large numbers of people have noted the fact that in certain of my
earlier novels I prophesied wars and world events that actually did come
to pass. In _The Mysterious Mr. Sabin_, I pictured the South African
Boer war seven years before it occurred. In _The Mischief Maker_, _The
Great Secret_, and _A Maker of History_ I based plots upon the German
menace and the great war that did actually occur. The romance of secret
diplomacy has enthralled me for years. In writing my novels I have
had no particular advance knowledge of world affairs. I have reasoned
to myself, ‘This nation is aiming toward this,’ and ‘That nation is
aiming toward that’; then I have invented my puppets representing these
conflicting ambitions and set them in action. It was the story first of
all that appealed to me, and not any burning desire to express political
convictions and lay bare great conspiracies.”[57]
He takes himself seriously only in the rôle of entertainer, of
storyteller. “If you tell him you like his books,” says Gerald
Cumberland, in _Written in Friendship_, “he is frankly pleased; but
if you pay him high-flown compliments he will begin to yawn.” There
need be no paying of compliments in a consideration of Mr. Oppenheim’s
work, but no analysis of his method could fairly withhold considerable
praise. We have spoken of his confidential, easy manner with the reader
as a secret of his toward establishing plausibility for the things he
is about to tell. But there is more to be noted. Like the best writers
of his sort among his countrymen—and like far too few Americans in
the same field—he is unhurried. He is never afraid to pause for the
amplification of sentiment, the communication of the moment’s feeling,
a bit of characterization or a passage of pure description. And these
are the matters which give an effect of rondure, and not infrequently
touches of charm, to a story of whatever sort. At the moment I can
think of only one American—Hulbert Footner—who has had the wisdom, or
perhaps the temperament, to follow British practice in this by no means
negligible affair of workmanship; and it is significant that Mr. Footner,
an American, has so far had a better reception in England than in his own
country. Apparently we value this certain leisureliness when it comes to
us from abroad, for Mr. Footner, re-exported to us, is making distinct
headway. What the American writer generally does is to accelerate his
action to the pitch of implausibility (if he only knew it). This does
very well, and may be indispensable, for all I know, with the readers of
a certain type of American magazines; unfortunately the habitual buyers
and readers of books demand something more careful.
The other interesting point of excellence in Oppenheim’s work derives
from his method of spontaneity. He once said: “The lure of creation
never loses its hold. Personally I cannot account for the fact. Perhaps
it springs from the inextinguishable hope that one day there will be
born the most wonderful idea that has ever found its way into the brain
of a writer of fiction.”[58] For the creator, the superlative never
arrives; but certainly for the reader Mr. Oppenheim has materialized more
than one wonderful idea. _The Great Impersonation_, deservedly one of
his most successful books, is a fairly recent illustration. But I would
like to call particularly to attention an earlier story, both for what
seems to me to be its astonishing merit and for its interesting light on
the method of spontaneity which is Oppenheim’s special technique. This
is _The Way of These Women_, now ten years old. That it still sells is
evidence that its merit is recognized; that one never hears mention of it
in any offhand mention of its author’s work shows that the recognition is
by no means wide enough.
Sir Jermyn Annerley, a young man of fine taste and high honor, though
certainly inclined toward priggishness, is a playwright of the
intellectual type. Sybil Cluley, the actress who has aroused London by
her performance in Jermyn’s drama, comes to Annerley Court as his weekend
guest. They are to discuss his new play in which Sybil is to appear.
Aynesworth, Marquis of Lakenham and Jermyn’s second cousin, chances
to pay a visit at the same time. Another distant cousin of Jermyn’s,
Lucille, who has divorced a French nobleman, is Jermyn’s hostess. Lucille
is in love with Jermyn. During the visit Jermyn surrenders to his love
for Sybil; they announce their engagement to the others. Sybil is
obviously afraid of Lakenham to a degree not to be accounted for by his
reputation for excesses, and after some time Lakenham confirms and shares
with Lucille his knowledge of a discreditable episode in Sybil’s career
before her success on the stage.
Lakenham is murdered at Annerley Court. Suspicion points directly to
Sybil, but Lucille has aided Sybil and Jermyn in the removal of very
incriminating evidence. As the price for protecting Sybil, Lucille
requires Jermyn to marry her within two months.
The story is developed with admirable intervals and suspense. The point
of the first quarter of the book is Lakenham’s knowledge of something in
Sybil’s past, and Lucille’s determination to fight Sybil for Jermyn. Then
Lakenham is killed. Almost half the book lies between the murder and its
solution. It is evident that as he wrote Mr. Oppenheim saw (what he may
not have grasped at the beginning) that Lucille was his most striking
character. As the novel proceeded he became absorbed in the possibilities
Lucille offered; if, as may well be the case, he vaguely contemplated
solving the murder and bringing Sybil and Jermyn happily together for a
quick “curtain,” he deliberately abandoned so conventional and easy an
ending. Jermyn and Lucille are married under the hateful terms Lucille
has imposed as the price of Sybil’s safety.
It is this that lifts _The Way of These Women_ out of the run of Mr.
Oppenheim’s work. Did Sybil kill Lakenham? If she did not, who did she
think killed him? If Lucille used fraud with Jermyn, why not annul the
marriage for fraud and bring down the curtain? (And in putting these
questions I decline responsibility for your wrong inferences as to the
answers.) In any case, the solution of the murder would seem to end the
story. But something larger and more fateful, something of very near
universal significance, had by this time lodged in Mr. Oppenheim’s mind.
The “wonderful idea” had come. The last quarter of _The Way of These
Women_ is the material, intrinsically, for a very great novel. And Mr.
Oppenheim handles it with touches of greatness. He could, of course, by
slashing off most he had already written, by adopting some such technical
device as W. B. Maxwell used in _The Devil’s Garden_, have made it a
masterpiece, for his knowledge of his theme and his appreciation of
its character are plain to be seen. I do not know whether this novel
has ever been dramatized, but it is incredible that it should not have
been dramatized; the possibilities of Lucille are greater than those of
Camille, for they are less artificial and they are not either sentimental
or cheap. Why did Mr. Oppenheim not rework it; why did he let it go as
the book is, a mixture? Of several possible extenuations, I think the
best is that by leaving it alone he probably was able to take the reader
who sought merely to be entertained into a very high place whither that
reader could not have been lured directly. And it is an elevation to
which the writer of ready-made plots never leads.
BOOKS BY E. PHILLIPS OPPENHEIM
NOTE: The reader is referred to the bibliography by Mr. Hulings C. Brown
appearing in the Boston Evening Transcript for 5 May 1923. Mr. Brown’s
arrangement of the titles is alphabetical (including both English and
American titles). His list includes Mr. Oppenheim’s five serials of book
length, not given below because not published in book form. Mr. Brown
also gives the publisher (except in a few cases where no record exists).
In the list below books that have been published in America are starred;
those that have been published in America and were recorded by Mr.
Brown as in print are double-starred. Books written under the pseudonym
“Anthony Partridge” are so indicated.
1887 _Expiation_
1894 _A Monk of Cruta_
1895 **_A Daughter of the Marionis._ First title in America
was _To Win the Love He Sought_.
1895 _The Peer and the Woman_
1896 _False Evidence_
1896 _A Modern Prometheus_
1896 *_The Mystery of Mr. Bernard Brown_
1896 _The Wooing of Fortune_
1897 _The Amazing Judgment_
1898 *_As a Man Lives._ First title in America was _The Yellow House_.
1898 _A Daughter of Astrea_
1898 *_Mysterious Mr. Sabin_
1899 *_Mr. Marx’s Secret_
1899 _The Postmaster of Market Deighton_
1899 **_The Man and His Kingdom_
1900 *_A Millionaire of Yesterday_
1900 *_The World’s Great Snare_
1901 **_The Survivor_
1902 **_A Sleeping Memory_
In England: _The Great Awakening_
1902 *_Enoch Strone_
In England: _Master of Men_
1903 *_The Traitors_
1903 **_A Prince of Sinners_
1903 **_The Yellow Crayon_
1904 **_Anna the Adventuress_
1904 **_The Betrayal_
1905 **_A Maker of History_
1905 **_The Master Mummer_
1906 *_A Lost Leader_
1906 _The Tragedy of Andrea_
1907 **_The Malefactor_
In England: _Mr. Wingrave, Millionaire_
1907 *_Berenice_
1908 *_The Avenger_
In England: _The Conspirators_
1908 **_The Great Secret_
In England: _The Secret_
1908 *_The Distributors_, “by Anthony Partridge”
In England: _Ghosts of Society_. Another title in America
was _The Plunderers_
1908 *_Passers-By_, “by Anthony Partridge”
1909 *_The Governors_
1909 **_The Missioner_
1909 **_Jeanne of the Marshes_
1909 *_The Kingdom of Earth_, “by Anthony Partridge”
In England: _The Black Watcher_
1910 *_The Long Arm of Manister_
In England: _The Long Arm_
1910 **_The Illustrious Prince_
1910 **_The Lost Ambassador_
In England: _The Missing Delora_
1911 *_The Moving Finger_
In England: _A Falling Star_
1911 *_The Golden Web_, “by Anthony Partridge”
1911 **_Havoc_
1912 **_Peter Ruff and the Double Four_
In England: _The Double Four_
1912 **_The Lighted Way_
1912 *_Those Other Days_ (short stories)
1912 *_The Court of St. Simon_, “by Anthony Partridge”
1913 **_The Mischief Maker_
1913 *_For the Queen_ (short stories)
1913 _Mr. Laxworthy’s Adventures_
1913 **_The Tempting of Tavernake_
In England: _The Temptation of Tavernake_
1914 _The Amazing Partnership_
1914 *_The Double Life of Mr. Alfred Burton_
1914 **_The Way of These Women_
1915 *_An Amiable Charlatan_
In England: _The Game of Liberty_
1915 **_Mr. Grex of Monte Carlo_
1915 *_The Black Box_
1915 **_A People’s Man_
1916 _The Mysteries of the Riviera_
1916 **_The Vanished Messenger_
1917 **_The Hillman_
1917 **_The Kingdom of the Blind_
1918 **_The Double Traitor_
1918 **_The Cinema Murder_
In England: _The Other Romilly_
1918 **_The Pawns Count_
1918 **_The Zeppelin’s Passenger_
In England: _Mr. Lessingham Goes Home_
1919 **_The Wicked Marquis_
1919 **_The Curious Quest_
1920 **_The Great Impersonation_
1920 **_The Box with the Broken Seals_
In England: _The Strange Case of Mr. Jocelyn Thew_
1920 **_The Devil’s Paw_
1920 _Aaron Rod, Diviner_
1920 _Ambrose Lavendale, Diplomat_
1920 _Hon. Algernon Knox, Detective_
1921 **_Jacob’s Ladder_
1921 **_The Profiteers_
1921 **_Nobody’s Man_
1922 **_The Great Prince Shan_
1922 **_The Evil Shepherd_
1923 **_The Seven Conundrums_
1923 **_The Mystery Road_
1923 **_Michael’s Evil Deeds_
1924 **_The Wrath to Come_
1924 **_The Passionate Quest_
SOURCES ON E. PHILLIPS OPPENHEIM
In addition to those referred to in the text and in footnotes, the reader
is urged to consult the full-page interview and account appearing in the
Boston Evening Transcript for 8 March 1924 (“Oppenheim the Master Maker
of Plots,” by James Walter Smith). This is by all odds the best and most
interesting single article. It quotes Mr. Oppenheim’s amanuensis as
saying that he dictates 5,000 words a day on good days and about 4,000
words on an average day—a phenomenal speed. “In summer he dictates out of
doors and I take it down in my note-book. In winter, he dictates direct
to the machine. He likes a low easy-chair while working. It’s amazing to
me how sure he is in his dictation, and what a grip he has on his plots.
Occasionally he has two or more stories moving at the same time, but no
matter what the number of characters or of the places where the action
occurs, he rarely becomes confused. When he is held up, sometimes by a
trifling detail, or by the more important one of getting a character out
of a difficulty, he simply says: ‘Three dots’ ... like that, and moves
on. This may happen several times in the course of a sitting, and I
usually can divine, as the story proceeds, when I’m going to hear that
‘three dots.’ When the dictation is finished, he goes out for a game
of golf, perhaps. Then next day he takes up the typescript where the
suspension points appear and unerringly fills in the bits which bothered
him. This would be easy if the case were single, but where there are
several ‘three dot’ cases it demands skill and concentration to get out
of the bunker.”
9. G. Stanley Hall, Psychologist
i
In describing a novel course he gave at Clark University and which he
called psychogenesis—the birth and evolution of the soul—G. Stanley Hall
remarks in his autobiography, _Life and Confessions of a Psychologist_:
“Interest, like steam in an engine, must be developed over a large
surface, although when put to work it has to be applied to a small one.”
That is true of this chapter. The large surfaces of Dr. Hall’s long and
unusual career can be depended on, I think, to develop interest in my
reader; although whether that interest will apply itself to psychology,
methods of teaching, child study, or the central figure of the Christian
faith is uncertain and perhaps immaterial. A developed interest, before
passing on to any of these things, does well to linger for some time on
the man himself, who had so many vicissitudes and whose account of his
life, outside and inside, is the best of a certain type since Benjamin
Franklin’s, which it most nearly resembles.
Both Franklin and Dr. Hall were Yankees; both were much abroad and
transcended their Puritan beginnings on the intellectual side, though
in the sphere of conduct each was a tree inclined as the twig had been
bent. Both were zestful of every human experience; each alike, though
for a somewhat differing purpose, has gone far and deep in the matter of
self-examination, writing down his confessions and conclusions for the
world to read. If Franklin is more clear and practical and personal, Dr.
Hall takes the reader to greater levels and to vistas of
“fresh woods and pastures new.”
His _Life and Confessions of a Psychologist_ is a book of more than
ordinary account simply for this reason. It has distinct faults. Its
material is a little diffuse and not too well organized; it is far from
lucid in places and lapses into technical language where it need not do
so. In addition, Dr. Hall’s particular interests are allowed to override
the literary, and sometimes the human, interest. The introductory chapter
perplexes and dismays the ordinary reader with a series of conclusions
couched in scientific lingo; the second chapter repels him with its
dullness. Yet, if he persist, he will soon find himself unable to stop
until the book is finished; certain chapters and parts of chapters will
absorb his whole attention; and in the end he will have a sense of having
had glimpses into many mansions, all spacious; of having come in touch
with largeness and nobility of soul.
ii
Granville Stanley Hall, who died on 24 April 1924, was born 1 February
1846 in Ashfield, Massachusetts. His father was of impetuous temperament,
his mother a rather submissive and devoutly pious woman. There were
three children, all brought up on a farm. From the first, Stanley Hall
was keenly interested in animals. But he was also one of those boys
whose imagination is strongly exercised by the figures of frost on a
windowpane, the broken march of clouds across the sky, the shapes and
images seen in dancing firelight and the visions excited by musical
sounds. He was sensitive and both brave and timid; pacifistic by temper,
he could persist in a course once taken. He was essentially a lonely
child, as such children often are, and this loneliness was to become more
pronounced as he grew older, developing a habit of isolation which was to
be his salvation in the greatest crisis in his career.
His schooling culminated in Williams College, which gave him his A. B.
in 1867. He was a classmate of Hamilton Wright Mabie. Mark Hopkins—he
of whom it was said that “a university was Mark Hopkins on one end of a
log and a student on the other”—was president of the college and also
“professor of moral and intellectual philosophy.” An important friendship
of this time was with Charles Eliot Norton.
A single year in New York followed. Young Hall was a student at the
Union Theological Seminary, but he was also twenty-one, in New York for
the first time, full of a healthy curiosity and bound to satisfy it. He
went to the theatre as well as all manner of churches and was one of a
number employed by the City Missionary Society to invite women of the
street to attend the midnight mission. Through the friendly act of Henry
Ward Beecher money was provided for Hall to go abroad and study, the
lender being Henry Sage, the benefactor of Cornell University. It was
already apparent that Hall had no vocation to the ministry. He dreamed
of becoming a professor. Darwin, Spencer and Tyndall, Renan, Strauss,
Emerson and Carlyle had profoundly influenced him. In the summer of 1868
he went to Germany, first to the University of Bonn and then to that
of Berlin. Here he dabbled in all manner of subjects, from theology
to surgery and mental clinics. On his return to America he wished to
teach the history of philosophy but was unable to lest he should, in the
opinion of a college president, “unsettle men and teach them to hold no
opinions.”
Private tutoring was followed by a spell of teaching at Antioch College,
Yellow Springs, Ohio. It was at this time that the first volume of
Wundt’s _Physiological Psychology_ was published. In a sense, psychology
as we know it began with this work, so definite in its experiments
and conclusions. Here was something one could lay hold of! Hall read
it, was amply fascinated, and left Antioch, resolved to go to Leipzig
and study under Wundt. But at Cambridge he was met by the offer of an
instructorship at Harvard and stopped to teach for a year, going on
to Leipzig in 1876. He spent a year in Berlin, some time in Paris and
England, and came home to resume his friendship with William James
and others, to lecture on education under Harvard auspices, and to
cast about. He was much in debt and had no prospects. He had married.
Having spent three years in Germany between the ages of 22 and 25,
and three more from 32 to 35, “the narrow, inflexible orthodoxy, the
Puritan eviction of the joy that comes from amusements, from life, the
provincialism of our interests, our prejudice against continental ways of
living and thinking, the crudeness of our school system, the elementary
character of the education imparted in our higher institutions of
learning—all these seemed to me depressing, almost exasperating. I fairly
loathed and hated so much that I saw about me that I now realize more
clearly than ever how possible it would have been for me to have drifted
into some, perhaps almost any, camp of radicals and to have come into
such open rupture with the scheme of things as they were that I should
have been stigmatized as dangerous, at least for any academic career,
where the motto was Safety First.” But he must teach or go back to the
farm.
iii