out Thomas Burke’s autobiographical volume because the spirit of it, and
the color of his writing, seemed to place it here. He calls it _The Wind
and the Rain_; it is the most intimate book he has ever written, and
the best since _Limehouse Nights_ (from some standpoints it is better
than that work). In _The Wind and the Rain_, Thomas Burke returns to
Limehouse, telling of his boyhood and youth, of the squalor of his early
years, of the loneliness and hunger of his City days, of the moments of
spiritual exaltation that came to him at night in London streets. He
recalls his friendship with old Quong Lee, a storekeeper in the Causeway;
his one-room house with an Uncle; his adventures in the kitchen of the
Big House at Greenwich where his Uncle worked; his rapturous hours in the
street; his four wretched years in an orphanage; his running away and
being sheltered by the queer woman in the queer house; his first job; his
friendship with a girl of thirteen and its abrupt end; his discovery of
literature and pictures and music; his first short story accepted when he
was still an office-boy; and then his first success. This somewhat long
recitation speaks for itself and will kindle the imagination of anyone
who ever read Thomas Burke or saw Griffith’s film, “Broken Blossoms.”
Hugh Walpole’s critical study of _Anthony Trollope_ is welcome both
because a good account of Trollope is needed and because Walpole’s own
work used to be likened to that of the author of _Barchester Towers_. I
believe the comparison is pretty well obsolete—Mr. Walpole is now rather
the object than the subject of comparisons—but those who know Walpole
best have long known of his very definite interest in Trollope and his
gradual acquisition of materials for a survey of Trollope’s work. The
_Anthony Trollope_ by Walpole is a book to set beside Frank Swinnerton’s
_Gissing_ and _R. L. Stevenson_; we have a right to hope that the
fashion will spread among the novelists; and I should like nothing better
than to record a similar book by Arnold Bennett, even if, as is very
probable, he would consent to do one only on a French subject—in which
case he would probably select Stendhal.
But this leads directly to the whole subject of literary discussions.
It is too big to deal with here, and yet I can’t drop it without some
reference to the two most provocative books of the sort in recent memory.
Dr. Joseph Collins is a well-known New York neurologist whose literary
hobby has been cultivated in private during a number of years. It was the
rich pungency of his conversation which first led to insistences that he
write a book about authors. He did. _The Doctor Looks at Literature_,
with its praise of Proust and its incisiveness regarding D. H. Lawrence,
its appreciation of Katherine Mansfield and its penetrating study of
James Joyce, was something new, sparkling, resonant and simply not to be
missed. Dr. Collins’s second book, _Taking the Literary Pulse_, is as
strongly brewed and as well-flavored. I find it even more interesting
because it deals to a much greater extent with American writers—Sherwood
Anderson, Edith Wharton, Amy Lowell and others—and because of the
uncompromised utterance in the first chapter on literary censorship, a
subject which most discussion merely muddles.
iii
Of collections of essays, I have no hesitation in putting first the
anthology by F. H. Pritchard, _Essays of To-Day_. Not only are the
inclusions amply representative of the best work by contemporary
English essayists, but to my mind Mr. Pritchard has supplied, in his
Introduction, one of the most inspiring essays of the lot. He writes,
naturally, about the essay as a form of art, and shows quite simply
how the essay and the lyric poem are “the most intimate revelations of
personality that we have in literature.” His wisdom is equaled by a power
of expression which can best be intimated by quoting a few of his words
regarding the lyric:
“Ordered by the strict limitations of rhythm, and obedient to the
recurrences of rime and meter, the unruly ideas are fashioned into a
lyric, just as scattered particles, straying here and there, are drawn
together and fused into crystalline beauty. The difference, indeed, is
one of temperature”—the difference between lyric and essay. “The metal
bar, cold or lukewarm, will do anywhere, but heat it to melting-point
and you must confine it within the rigid limits of the mold or see it at
length but an amorphous splash at your feet.”
Then follow thirty-four selections, each prefaced by a short biographical
note on its author. Youth and old age, reminiscences, the spirit of place
and of holiday, and various interrelations between life and letters are
the subjects. Kenneth Grahame, Joseph Conrad, Maurice Hewlett, E. V.
Lucas, Robert Lynd, W. B. Yeats, Hilaire Belloc, Rupert Brooke, C. E.
Montague, E. Temple Thurston, Alice Meynell, George Santayana, Gilbert
K. Chesterton and Edmund Gosse are some of the writers who achieve
inclusion; and the variety of the essays is great—irony, humor, romantic
feeling, delight in places and sadness all have their moment.
Such a collection, one feels, cannot but lead the reader to books by some
of the authors represented; and I hope such readers will not miss Robert
Lynd’s _The Blue Lion_. Here are some chapters dealing apparently with
children, birds, flowers, taverns and the like, but animated by that
interest in, sympathy for and appreciation of human nature which is the
field of the essay’s most fertile cultivation.
It is, to a great extent, the field which Robert Cortes Holliday has
occupied himself with since the day of his _Walking-Stick Papers_; and
while the title of his new book is _Literary Lanes and Other Byways_, the
“other byways” are frequently the most engaging to tread. Mr. Holliday,
for example, has been interviewing the ancient waiters on the subject
of the golden years at a lost Delmonico’s; and he has also become an
authority on nightwear. But there is plenty of contact between life and
literature in _Literary Lanes_. One essay is devoted to the subject of
the vamp in literature; another to books as presents; another harvests
_bons mots_ from the inner circles of celebrated wits; “and,” as Mr.
Holliday would say, “and so on.”
Stephen McKenna’s _By Intervention of Providence_ is a felicitous blend
of diary, essay and short story, written by this novelist during an
extended visit to the West Indies. The atmosphere of the West India
islands is conveyed with some care, while the digressions to the essay or
the short story are anecdotal, philosophical, and frequently humorous.
“From day to day,” Mr. McKenna explains, “I set down whatever fancy
tempted me to write. The result can only be called ‘Essays’ in the
Johnsonian sense of that word. I desire no more accurate definition of
what is in part a series of letters, in part a journal, in part vagrant
reminiscences, in part idle reflection, in part stories which I do not
ask the reader to believe.” But the potpourri, however unusual, will be
welcomed alike by the traveler and the arm-chair tourist.
iv
The return to poetry must not be deferred longer. And first let me
speak of John Farrar’s book of verse, _The Middle Twenties_, which is
more than usually interesting because it is the first collection of his
serious work in a half dozen years. There has been none since his book,
_Forgotten Shrines_. I do not forget _Songs for Parents_, but that is
somewhat of a piece with his book of plays for children, _The Magic Sea
Shell_, and it is likely it would continue popular for this reason alone.
His work as an editor and an anthologist, with many other activities,
have tended to obscure Farrar the poet, and have certainly taken time
and energy the poet could ill spare. But I know that much of the hardest
work Mr. Farrar has done these past few years has been upon the verse in
_The Middle Twenties_. The result ought to satisfy him, though probably
it won’t; he is not easily pleased with his own work. But all the poems
in _The Middle Twenties_ keep to a high level and the volume has more
than variety, it has positive and effective contrast. Whether he is most
successful in the “Amaryllis” group, gay and rollicking, or in the savage
pain and passion of “The Squaw” is for the reader’s own decision. But
from the flaming “Ego,” the opening poem, to the fine understanding of
such work as “War Women” the book affords a range of subject, treatment,
and emotional feeling which leaves no reader indifferent.
Nellie Burget Miller’s _In Earthen Bowls_ explains its title in these
lines which open the book:
So here we have our treasure in an earthen bowl,
Distorted, marred, and set to common use:
And some will never see beyond the form of clay,
And some will stoop to peer within and softly say,
“There is a wondrous radiance prisoned there,
And I heard the stir of an angel’s wing.”
Such a volume makes its candid appeal to the audience—very large—which
asks insistently for poems of a simple sincerity and a direct relation
to daily lives. Their lives are the earthen bowls in which they want to
be able to see the suggestion of something radiant and feel the stir
of something divine. In the fifty-seven poems in her book, Mrs. Miller
has not tried to build an imaginary world, but has appealed to the love
of nature, and to the feelings of happiness and grief, for her lyrical
expression. The evidence of her success has been recorded in several
ways. She has, for one thing, been made the chairman of the literary
division of the National Federation of Women’s Clubs. She has also been
chosen poet laureate of her State, Colorado.
Essentially the same qualities of mood and appeal characterize Martha
Haskell Clark’s book, _The Home Road_. Mrs. Clark has been a contributor
of verse to Harper’s and Scribner’s magazines and to several of the
enormously popular women’s magazines, so-called. Her poems are concerned,
as her title indicates, chiefly with the longing, often wistful and
sometimes delightful, for an old home or fireside, old friends and
holidays and memories. The language is as simple as the feeling. Curtis
Hidden Page, professor of English at Dartmouth and compiler of _English
Poets of the Nineteenth Century_, writes the preface to _The Home Road_.
Here is an anthology of recitations! Grace Gaige’s _Recitations—Old and
New for Boys and Girls_ seems to me of more than ordinary interest,
because the author is the buyer of books for one of the largest stores
in the world. It is a store of so widespread a reputation that one thinks
of it as constantly creating book readers from the mere fact of its
having a book department. And certainly Miss Gaige is in an unequaled
position to know what, in the way of a book, people want. Well, she
does. And having found no present-day book that quite met the problem,
she has made one. Her _Recitations—Old and New for Boys and Girls_
has a foreword by Christopher Morley and contains poems dealing with
every imaginable subject. They are divided into sections in a natural
grouping: poems about and for children, poems about fairies, about
birds and other animals, about flowers and seasons; humorous poems,
patriotic poems, holiday poems—I can’t remember them all. But despite the
classification, the range is so great that over 200 poems had to go under
“Miscellaneous.” You are sure to find it there, if nowhere else!
How were they chosen? With just three things in mind, (1) their
interest, (2) their proved popularity, and (3) their special fitness for
recitation. The triple crown of the collection is the threefold index, of
authors, of titles, and of first lines. And although people want poems
for recitation, and though these poems _are_ for recitation, there is
nothing to debar this mammoth anthology as a book for reading. As such,
it will be found a work of the utmost satisfaction.
A book that particularly deserves inclusion in this chapter is the new
illustrated edition of Jay William Hudson’s novel, _Abbé Pierre_. The
great success of this charming story is of the kind that goes steadily
on, year after year; and while our present-day taste is rather against
the illustration of novels, a book of this character (like _David
Harum_) can be greatly enhanced by the right pictures. Mr. Hudson has
got exactly the thing, I think, in the sixteen pencil drawings and
the endpapers by Mr. Edwin Avery Park. This artist will also become
familiar to readers by his work in collaboration with Maitland Belknap
in _Princeton Sketches_. Mr. Park traveled in the parts of France where
the scenes of _Abbé Pierre_ are laid and has caught both the spirit and
character of place and tale. His drawings have been rather carefully
reproduced as half-tones, and with other details of the book’s new dress,
make a volume of a sort in entire keeping with the novel’s quality.
18. Coming!—Courtney Ryley Cooper—Coming!
i
What I need at the moment is not a chapter but a billboard on which
to paste with great splashy gestures a three-sheet announcement:
“Coming!—The Literary Lochinvar—Coming!” Both words and pictures—yes, and
muted notes from the steam calliope—are requisite to herald adequately
the author of _Under the Big Top_. If I tell the story of Courtney Ryley
Cooper, fiction, even his own fiction, will seem colorless beside it.
Therefore read no further. The lights are off and a beam flung from the
projection room high overhead shows us——
Scene. Large white canvas mushrooms growing closely together and
obviously attracting swarms of the human ant. Animals in gaudy cages,
the living skeleton, lemonade, spangles and paper hoops. Close-up.
Fifteen-year-old boy, at once timid and bold, interviewing the master of
destinies. Caption: “Boy, water the elephants!”
Scene. Amphitheatre within the largest of the tents. Several thousand
faces that are all one face and that have even less significance than
one face and that emit a crackling, collective sound. Clowns, masked by
perpetually surprised looks painted on noses, mouths and eyebrows, in
ballooning white costumes, rolling and tumbling about the arena. Thwack!
Close-up. Fifteen-year-old ecstatic over the time of his life, working
hard. Caption: “Spare the slap-stick and spoil the child.”
Scene. Office of the Denver Post, twelve years later. Enter Buffalo Bill,
white hair pigtailed and everything. He strides up to the city editor.
Caption: “Whar’s that reporter fellow——”
Flash. “Film not broken, but we have just been informed that all motion
picture rights in the career of Courtney Ryley Cooper are reserved to Mr.
Cooper. Please keep your seats.”
ii
He was born in Kansas City, Missouri, 31 October 1886, the son of
Baltimore Thomas Cooper and Catherine (Grenolds) Cooper. He is a
descendant of the Calverts, Lords of Baltimore, and of other settlers
of Maryland and Virginia. He ran away from school in Kansas City to
become water-boy and clown in a circus. He also became an actor, bill
distributor, property man and song and dance artist with bad repertory
companies playing “East Lynne,” “In Old Kentucky,” “The James Boys in
Missouri” and other classics of the road.
He has been a newsboy, a trucker, a glove salesman, a monologist in
vaudeville, a circus press agent, a newspaper man, and general manager of
the world’s second largest circus.
He began writing at 24, a play, “the world’s worst play,” he says. It was
produced in Kansas City “and I had to sit and watch the darned thing for
two weeks.” Then he began to write magazine stories. So great has been
his output that at least five pen names have been necessary. They are
Barney Furey, William O. Grenolds, Jack Harlow, Frederick Tierney and
Leonard B. Hollister. He has written as much as 45,000 words of fiction
in three days—or days and nights. As a newspaper man he has written eight
columns (1,200 words to the column) in two hours. For such excesses he
naturally pays in an inability to walk, eat or sleep for some immediate
time afterward. It might be supposed that the work so turned out would be
mere machine-made stuff, but this is not true. However, the ability to
write at such speed has necessitated a small staff to gather the writer’s
material.
There are several reasons why Mr. Cooper could never gather it all
himself. He married, in 1916, Genevieve R. Furey, of Los Angeles, and
they have a pleasant home in Idaho Springs, Colorado. Mr. Cooper gets his
recreation in the mountains round about. But the stuff for the hundreds
of stories he has written of circus life and jungle animal life cannot
be renewed except from elsewhere. It cannot be renewed and added to
sufficiently except—almost literally—from everywhere. After all, Mr.
Cooper has contributed stories to more than half a hundred magazines. And
if he were to stop writing to gather material——!
“I have a little circus all my own,” he explains. He knows nearly
everything that is happening in all the big shows. He keeps up an
uninterrupted correspondence with circus people and he has five persons
on his payroll at all times. One is a man who makes a specialty of
circus pictures. Another is a lion trainer who has trained as many as
thirty lions in one den. Whenever he has some unusual incident of animal
behavior to report, he writes to Cooper. A third member of the little
staff is an all-round animal man, menagerie superintendent and “bullman.”
A fourth is a highly educated woman with ten years’ experience in
training lions, tigers, leopards and elephants. Mr. Cooper pays her a
salary and she takes “assignments,” just as if she were a reporter—which,
in fact, she is in this work. She is a reporter on animals, their
training, and their characteristics. The fifth employee is a circus clown
who sends a regular monthly letter reporting things that happen under the
big top.
There is, besides, a large number of volunteer correspondents, friends of
long standing.
Mr. Cooper has used his material both directly, in the form of articles,
and in stories. While he was on his way from clown to general manager of
the circus, he became deeply interested in jungle animals and discovered
a great many human traits (or traits parallel, if you prefer) in them.
He himself, it must be remembered, has been in the training dens with
leopards, lions, tigers and pumas; and he has been in with as many as six
lions and tigers at one time.
He looks, in certain poses, remarkably like Eric von Stroheim, and the
camera sometimes brings out the multitude of his freckles. He is bald and
enjoys baldness. Better company is not to be had, and this is only partly
due to the innumerable anecdotes at his command. Many of these grow out
of his association with Buffalo Bill, whose personal secretary he was
for a while and whose biographer (with Buffalo Bill’s widow, Mrs. W. F.
Cody) he became. There is, for example, the story of the time when Cooper
contracted with a clipping bureau for newspaper notices. They were to be
ten cents each. They arrived—a bale—and with them a bill for $134.90.
With a single exception, they consisted of 1,348 clippings about the
Buffalo baseball team, which was much to the fore owing to the temporary
existence of the Federal League.
Cooper also told this story at a Dutch Treat Club luncheon in New York:
“Colonel Cody arrived home unexpectedly early one morning. Going to his
wife’s bedroom window he tapped on the glass, calling: ‘It’s all right;
let me in.’ ‘Go away,’ said Mrs. Cody. ‘This is Buffalo Bill’s house, and
I’m his wife, and I can shoot, too.’ Buffalo Bill, sore, remounted his
horse and rode off to a neighboring saloon. Eventually he returned home,
galloping up the driveway and on to the veranda of the house, letting out
Whoops the While. As he reached the door a gentle voice greeted him from
behind it: ‘Is that you, Willie dear?’”
iii
In 1918 Mr. Cooper enlisted as a private in the United States Marines.
Very shortly he was commissioned as a second lieutenant and sent to
France to collate historical matter for the Marine Corps.
He has a very exceptional talent for handling people in masses, and has
sometimes been requisitioned by motion picture people and others who
had spectacles to produce. As the talent is coupled with a talent for
creative organization at least equal, the life of a writer represents a
deliberate sacrifice of money on Cooper’s part. For example:
Wild West shows, rodeos and bucking horse contests are one of his
hobbies. A few years ago he ran the first Annual Round-up at Colorado
Springs. In three days the show took in $19,800 gate money. And the
whole show, from the announcement, building of grandstands to seat
8,000 persons, hiring of cowboys, wild horses, bucking broncos, steers
for bulldogging, advertising and everything else, was put on in less
than three weeks. Overtures piled in on Cooper to go into the business
in other places. In the end, he refused contracts for $150,000 for two
years’ work.
iv
His books have been of two principal kinds, novels of the West and the
two volumes, _Under the Big Top_ and _Lions ’n’ Tigers ’n’ Everything!_
that spring from the circus. The novels are _The Cross-Cut_, _The
White Desert_, and _The Last Frontier_, in that order. Are they simply
the usual “Westerns”? No. There is in _The Cross-Cut_ that quality of
humor, that enjoyment of a capital hoax, which first cut out from the
stampeding herd of Western stories Owen Wister’s _The Virginian_. Almost
everyone, recalling Mr. Wister’s novel, thinks of the opening scene in
which the cowboys, like Little Buttercup in Mr. Gilbert’s “Pinafore,”
“mixed those babies up.” That affair, so refreshingly different in its
realism and sense of scandalous fun from the sentimental heroics of other
Western tales, is easily recalled when most other incidents of _The
Virginian_ are forgotten. Similarly one recalls with fresh amusement the
ruse whereby ’Arry ’Arkins got the Blue Poppy mine unwatered. Messrs.
Fairchild and ’Arkins had very little capital; but by a convincing effect
of drowning in the mine, the whole community was stirred to rescue the
presumed corpse of ’Arkins; machinery that the two men could not have
hired was set to work pumping, and by the time the hoax was revealed, the
mine was dry.
_The White Desert_ has nothing to do with sand and alkali but is a story
of the bleak, white stretches of the Continental Divide, where the world
is a world of precipices, blue-green ice, and snow-spray carried on the
beating wings of never-resting gales. It is the tale of a lumber camp and
of a highly dramatic, last ditch struggle. Mr. Cooper admits that the
first chapters were from an experience of his own. On the Berthoud Pass,
11,300 feet high, his speedster broke down. Now safety speed on the roads
thereabouts is possibly fifteen miles an hour. The grades sometimes run
as high as eighteen and twenty per cent. With no windshield, no gears to
aid his brakes, no goggles and a sprained steering gear, Mr. Cooper was
towed on these mountain roads by a largely liquored gentleman in a truck
at a speed of twenty-five miles an hour. Mr. Cooper was bald before this
happened....