play golf, and read the works of Max Beerbohm, Sainte-Beuve, Casanova,
Swift, James Branch Cabell, James Huneker, and William Congreve. He
also renewed his piano lessons, getting as far as the Bach three-part
inventions and ‘Easy Classics.’ On December 30, 1920, he read the
first volume of the Alexander Hamilton business course, after which he
decided that he wanted to go in for literature. In January, 1921, Mr.
Stewart came to New York City to find a job (literary if possible), but
there were so many symphony concerts that month that he didn’t get a
chance to look around until the middle of February.
“The idea for the _Parody Outline of History_ came to Mr. Stewart in
March, while hearing Mr. Mengelberg conduct the National Orchestra in
the Pathetique Symphony.
“Mr. Stewart is unmarried and very near-sighted. He is fond of
Beethoven, Scotch, and Max Beerbohm.”
ii
So much for Mr. Stewart’s life up to the publication of _The Parody
Outline of History_. In the following year (1922)--but let Mr. Stewart
again speak:
“After the appearance of the _Parody Outline_ Mr. Stewart, having heard
a great deal about Europe in the course of his naval war service in
Chicago, decided to go abroad. Many of his friends recommended Paris as
a pleasant city in which to work, so Mr. Stewart went to Paris, which
he found indeed very pleasant but not for work. So after a brief period
of recuperation he journeyed to Vienna where he grew a splendid red
beard and wrote _Perfect Behavior_.
“Finding, however, that the beard was exhausting too much of his
creative energy, Mr. Stewart shaved and went to Budapest, where he
enjoyed himself immensely at the rate of 700 Hungarian crowns to the
dollar.
“But in the middle of October he began to feel strangely uneasy, and
as his condition grew steadily worse he consulted an authority and
learned, to his surprise and delight, that he was going to have another
book.
“Bidding a hasty farewell to the gay life of Budapest, which now seemed
all too empty and frivolous, Mr. Stewart journeyed with his precious
secret to Capri, there, under the ever-blue Italian skies, to await
the happy event. He prayed with all his heart that it might be a novel,
for he had never had a novel, although he had wanted one all his life.
But early in February, 1923, Mr. Stewart discovered that the ‘little
stranger’ was to be another satire, and although it was a bit of a blow
at first, after a few days he got over his disappointment at not having
a novel; and when, in June, Mr. Stewart returned to America he took
with him, proudly, his little third book, which he had christened _Aunt
Polly’s Story of Mankind_.”
iii
Alexander Woollcott speaking in “Shouts and Murmurs” in the New York
Herald of March 18, 1923:
“Stewart is a preposterously tall, blonde man, with an enviably large
amount of his twenties still to squander. His profile is faintly
reminiscent of that most delightful and fantastic of all creatures,
Winsor McKay’s Gertie. He knows more about the music than he does about
the books of the world, and has, we suspect, gone in for reading so
recently that he probably thinks all novels are like Joyce’s _Ulysses_.
We ran across him here and there in France last summer, starting out on
one pilgrimage together from the Café Valterre, in the Place Stanislas
at Nancy, that celebrated restaurant which set forth marvellous dishes
even when the bombs were dropping on Nancy every evening and there was
not another good meal to be found anywhere else in Lorraine. Up the
street somewhere was M. Coué, healing away for dear life, and on the
outskirts of the town an imitation Oberammergau was in full swing. But
the two of us were minded rather to move on to the battlefields, and
for the purpose engaged a morsel of a French car, driven by a youngster
who spoke a horrible dialect he had picked up three years before from
the Americans stationed at Neufchateau. The memories of that rambling
excursion into a cheerless countryside, still littered with the rusted
snarls of barbed wire and still gashed with the trenches no one has
had time or strength to obliterate, are brought flooding back by the
inscription in the copy of _Perfect Behavior_ lying open here on the
desk. It is inscribed: ‘In memory of terrible days and ghastly nights
on the battlefields of France,’ and winds up with this disconcerting
proclamation: ‘“It shall never happen again.”--Stewart.’
“Marc Connelly was agitated the other day by the receipt of a cablegram
from Stewart in Capri which read thus:
“‘The Queen of Sweden is here. What shall I do?--Stewart.’
“Connelly’s cabled reply must be admired equally for its sagacity and
its thrift. It was: ‘Compromise.’”
Books by Donald Ogden Stewart
1921 _A Parody Outline of History_
1922 _Perfect Behavior_
1923 _Aunt Polly’s Story of Mankind_
Sources on Donald Ogden Stewart
_The Making of a Humorist_, by DONALD OGDEN STEWART, suppressed by the
author, 1921.
_My Naval Career_, by DONALD OGDEN STEWART (Privately unpublished,
1921).
_14. Miss Zona Gale_
i
No one any longer doubts that Zona Gale belongs in the very small
company of American women novelists whose work is of the first artistic
importance. Her history is interesting. Of old New England parentage,
she was born in Portage, Wisconsin, where she now lives. She wrote, at
thirteen, a novel “which almost simultaneously came back to me from
a publisher.” At sixteen, just after she had entered the University
of Wisconsin, she submitted a 3,000-word short story to the Milwaukee
Evening Wisconsin, which paid her $3. When she finished college she
went to work for that newspaper. “I secured a position by attrition. I
presented myself every morning at the desk of the city editor. At the
end of two weeks the city editor let me write about a flower show. I
have never put such emotion into anything else I have written.” She
was another month getting on the staff. Later, by offering a list of
suggestions based on the day’s news, she succeeded after many weeks in
getting on the staff of the New York World.
An anonymous writer in The Bookman has pictured Miss Gale in New York:
“When she was a reporter on the World, and as beautiful as any girl
could be, she was put on difficult assignments that might well have
terrified one as fragile and flower-like and feminine as she; but she
never winced.... She covered murders and robberies--anything given
her to do she did, at any hour of the day or night. But all the while
she was writing exquisite poetry; and every day of her life she sent
a letter to her mother, who was back in Wisconsin. If she was waiting
for an interview with some financier of the hour, she did not dawdle
her time away in the corridor of his hotel. Instead, she pulled out a
pad and pencil and wrote as many pages as she could on a short story;
or she dashed off a lyric; or she made copious notes for future work.
I think she was about the most ambitious girl in New York at that
time--too ambitious, some said; her praises were being sung--too much
sung was a common rumour; her picture--how lovely she was, and is!--was
published repeatedly--too repeatedly, dear enemies whispered; and
everyone was waiting to see just how long it would take her to make
good.”
ii
It took some time. Not until the year in which she was 29 did she
land anywhere “to speak of,” though for ten years previous to that
acceptance, by Success Magazine, she had constantly submitted stories.
That was in 1903. Then, in 1911, the Delineator held a short story
contest in which over 15,000 stories were received. Miss Gale took
first prize with a tale called “The American Dawn.” It was $2,000 and
in addition her other two entries (each person was allowed to submit
three stories) were deemed good enough to be purchased. But meanwhile
she had written stories about Pelleas and Ettare, two old lovers,
and stories about Friendship Village--some forty of the first and,
ultimately, about sixty of the second--and the process of collecting
her Friendship Village fiction into books had begun. Said Miss Gale, in
1919: “The first editor to whom these Friendship Village stories were
submitted declined them with the word that his acquaintance with small
towns was wide but that he had never seen any such people as these....
I am still not sure that he was not right.”
She was the author of ten published books before she produced anything
constituting a lien upon general attention. But then, with an effect
of extreme suddenness to the world outside of Portage, there came from
her pen the 402-page novel, _Birth_. Its length is a point of interest
in view of the brevity of _Miss Lulu Bett_ and _Faint Perfume_, both
of which are so decidedly under the average novel in length. And yet
_Birth_ exhibits the same conciseness of phrase, the same avoidance of
unnecessary words so noticeable in the two later books. It is the story
of a poor little man, Marshall Pitt, who comes to an insignificant
Western town as a pickle salesman and remains there as a paperhanger,
a husband and a father. The book’s comments on life have been aptly
described as “piercing”--it is a fine needlework of satire--but
there are lovely lyrical moments and the tragic action is touched
with majesty. Altogether a great novel. Miss Gale considers it the
finest thing she has done and for once her judgment of her own work,
generally as untrustworthy as most authors’ or slightly more so, is
right.
Then came _Miss Lulu Bett_, read with the enthusiasm of discovery by
the publisher, who telegraphed his congratulations--a thing publishers
infrequently do! Except in England, where its merit was quickly
noted, _Birth_ had not sold at all well. Six magazine editors had
rejected _Miss Lulu Bett_ as a serial. Happily, all signs failed. The
crisply-told little novel of the household drudge and her fortunes went
into one edition after another; a play from the novel was sought and
Miss Gale fashioned it herself; the annual Pulitzer prize was awarded
to the play. Whether the concision of style practised so effectively in
_Birth_ was not carried a bit too far in _Miss Lulu Bett_ must always
remain a matter of opinion. The most interesting point, I think, is the
change of ending which the requirements of the theatre forced upon Miss
Gale. As she observed, an audience in a playhouse could not reasonably
be expected to swallow the spectacle of a woman marrying two men in the
space of three hours, even though the indicated lapse of time was much
longer than that; she therefore, to make the play, caused Miss Bett’s
first marriage to turn out to be valid after all. In this matter Miss
Gale was not guilty of “sweetening” her story, as has been charged. She
simply was up against a limitation as definite as that which restricts
the number of scenes possible in a play.
iii
And this year she has given us _Faint Perfume_, a study of a finely
sensitive feminine personality stifling in the atmosphere of a quite
usual sort of American family. Leda Perrin, forced to make her home
with the Crumbs, is brought into a fleeting contact with Barnaby
Powers, a writer with a temperament of the same response. They
meet, together face the defeat of their desire, and go separately
apart. At the close there is the briefest possible second meeting
and a hope is held out for their eventual happiness together. This
theme, of the utmost delicacy, is the occasion for a considerable
display of virtuosity by Miss Gale. By means of deft and distinct
individualisation of her characters--each Crumb, for instance, standing
out as a complete fiery particle--she orchestrates the melodic
fragment of Leda and Barnaby in a sort of free treatment (but with
careful working out), as a composer might do in setting a quartette
for strings. May this musical simile be helpful! The clipped style of
_Miss Lulu Bett_ is here carried a step further, until Miss Gale almost
seems to out-Sinclair Miss May Sinclair. The style has been called
precious, which is the technical word for what the ordinary person
calls “affected”; and, on the other hand, one able critic has declared
that it is not the style that is precious but Miss Gale’s material.
One thing is certain, the treatment is as far removed as possible from
the literalness of such a novel as _Main Street_, and this is natural
to expect when we remember that Miss Gale is, after all and perhaps
fundamentally, a poet. Her poems published in book form are to a great
extent inferior to her best poems, which, so far as I know, still
repose in some old files of the Smart Set magazine.
The point, however, is not the merit or demerit of _Faint Perfume_,
nor the relative values of Miss Gale’s three books here discussed. The
point is Zona Gale, her undeniable artistry, her literary maturity and
her manifest power ... and the importance of her work to come.
Books by Zona Gale
1906 _Romance Island_
1907 _The Loves of Pelleas and Ettarre_
1908 _Friendship Village_
1909 _Friendship Village Love Stories_
1911 _Mothers to Men_
1912 _Christmas_
1913 _When I Was a Little Girl_
1914 _Neighborhood Stories_
1915 _Heart’s Kindred_
1917 _A Daughter of Tomorrow_
1918 _Birth_
1919 _Peace in Friendship Village_
1920 _Miss Lulu Bett_
1920 _Neighbors_ (play)
1921 _Miss Lulu Bett_ (play)
1923 _Faint Perfume_
Sources on Zona Gale
_The Women Who Make Our Novels_ (second or third edition, 1919 or
1922). MOFFAT YARD & COMPANY.
The Literary Spotlight, XVIII: Zona Gale, in THE BOOKMAN for April,
1923. This article now forms a chapter in the book, _The Literary
Spotlight_, with an introduction by John Farrar.
_Zona Gale, An Artist in Fiction_, by WILSON FOLLETT. Booklet
published by D. Appleton & Company.
_15. For the Literary Investor_
i
As in the world of finance there are varieties of investment, so in
reading. A delicate parallel would be between individual authors and,
let us say, the mortgage field; whereas the reader who chooses books
included in undertakings like the Lambskin Library, the Murray Hill
Library or the Modern Student’s Library is like the man adventuring
among well-seasoned bonds. The individual author is the bolder
risk, less easily to be abandoned, lacking (usually) the element
of diversification; the certainty of interest from those carefully
selected Library volumes is somewhat greater and the investment in them
is more readily marketable in the discovery that your commitment is
shared with the other fellow, who also knows and has read them. Then
there is among books that type of investment for which men constantly
seek when trying to place their money--the unlisted and almost
unheard-of, lonely, isolated enterprise which one may, and probably
will, have all to himself....
What follows is a series of what, in the money world, would be called
“offerings.” These literary offerings are not necessarily in the least
related to each other, although here and there you may find features
in common. Each stands on the foundation of its own “attractiveness”
to you as an individual; but there is none which has not given a
good return to some group of readers, large or less large. Some are
well-seasoned; others, although new, show their intrinsic worth for
such time and attention as you may commit to them.
ii
J. C. Snaith, novelist. John Collis Snaith, born in 1876, in
Nottinghamshire of Yorkshire stock. Athletic in his youth, before
his health became impaired, playing cricket, football and hockey on
county teams. Always in the middle of a novel, either at Skegness or
in London, where he may with difficulty be tracked down at the Garrick
Club, hidden among W. J. Locke, W. B. Maxwell, A. E. W. Mason, Hugh
Walpole, Arnold Bennett, E. Temple Thurston, etc. His novels exhibit
constant variety. Richard Mansfield was always hoping for a play from
Snaith’s _Broke of Covenden_ so that he might act as Broke. _The
Sailor_, supposed to have been suggested by John Masefield’s career,
was a great popular success (1916) and is read and remembered widely
today. _The Coming_, an exquisite and powerful story in which the
reappearance of Jesus Christ in present-day England is suggested,
made an extraordinary impression. On the whole it is perhaps Snaith’s
own favourite. _The Undefeated_, a story of England in wartime, had
a large sale and gives promise of more permanence than any similar
book, including H. G. Wells’s _Mr. Britling_. A recent novel, _The
Van Roon_, is a lighter story written around the theft of a famous
painting. Snaith’s _Araminta_, which is being freshly brought out this
year, is a whimsical romance of a country girl who comes to London
and is sued for by two noblemen. Snaith says: “Each novel I write is
in the nature of an experiment. To me a good novel is a mental tonic,
exhilarating, educative, humanising.” He is both versatile and in the
quality of his work of unusual excellence.
W. B. Maxwell, novelist. English. A writer who has reached undeniable
greatness at times and who, when possessing the finest material, need
ask no odds of any living novelist. His most recent story, _The Day’s
Journey_, is a beautifully-conceived and beautifully-written story of
the friendship between two men enduring throughout their lives. The
differences in character, the obstacles arising in the course of that
friendship, the antagonisms and fallings-apart and the renewals of
these two old comrades are put on paper with a fidelity of observation,
a tenderness and an avoidance of sentimentality that would be difficult
to overpraise. Maxwell’s novels are of great variety; attention is
particularly called to _In Cotton Wool_, the story of a weakling. _Mrs.
Thompson_, _The Devil’s Garden_ and _Spinster of This Parish_ are also
highwater marks in his writing.
Hugh Walpole. Perhaps no living novelist has shown so uniform a quality
or so progressive an excellence. He resembles a stock which, starting
at a modest price and unfailingly paying dividends, has gone steadily
upward to par and is now quoted at a premium. His great success, _The
Cathedral_, is now followed by _Jeremy and Hamlet_, which, although
not a “sequel,” is a companion volume to _Jeremy_ (most popular of
all Walpole’s stories before the appearance of _The Cathedral_). As
_Jeremy_ dealt with the history of a little boy--most singularly
resembling the Hugh of Mr. Walpole’s own boyhood--so _Jeremy and
Hamlet_ presents the adventures of that boy accompanied by the only
proper companion for a small boy, a dog.
Rudyard Kipling. For a discussion of Kipling’s new work, _The Irish
Guards in the Great War_, see Chapter 8. The best exposition of
Kipling, the poet, will be found in Andre Chevrillon’s _Three Studies
in English Literature: Kipling, Galsworthy, Shakespeare_ (translated
by Florence Simmonds). Katharine Fullerton Gerould, in her _Modes and
Morals_, in the essay on “The Remarkable Rightness of Rudyard Kipling,”
offers a brilliant justification for Kipling as a prophetic and moral
influence in English affairs. The literary investor should not let
these aspects take his attention from the Kipling of _Plain Tales from
the Hills_, of _Kim_ and of such short stories as “The Brushwood Boy”
and “They.” A collection of rich, remarkably diversified, “gilt-edged”
securities possessing the widest possible market and an almost
universal currency.
Selma Lagerlöf, Swedish novelist, the only woman so far to receive the
Nobel Prize for Literature. The quality of her work is best conveyed
by the words of various critics. Edwin Björkman: “She has revived not
only the courage but the ability to feel and dream and aspire that
belonged to the scorned romanticists of the early nineteenth century.
But this ... she has achieved for us without surrender of that intimate
connection between poetry and real life which was established by the
naturalists in the latter half of the same century.” J. B. Kerfoot, in
Life: “The wise cannot find bottom nor the child get beyond its depth.”
Attempted comparisons with George Eliot fail because Selma Lagerlöf has
the fine Swedish folklore to enrich the roots of her work. “She is as
national,” says Walter Prichard Eaton, “as a song by Grieg or a play of
Tchekov. And like all deeply national art, it is therefore universal.”
Hugo Alfven, the Swedish composer: “Reading Selma Lagerlöf is like
sitting in the dusk of a Spanish cathedral.... Afterward, one does not
know whether what he has seen was dream or reality, but certainly he
has been on holy ground.” The best approach is possibly through _The
Story of Gösta Berling_. Her other great novels are _Jerusalem_, woven
from the actual experience of Swedish colonists in the Holy Land,
and _The Emperor of Portugallia_. Her _Nils_ stories for children
are mentioned in Chapter 9. Complete works are best procured in the
Northland Edition.
iii
A convenient size and a beautiful binding are more than desiderata.
Who, wishing Bram Stoker’s grim masterpiece, _Dracula_, would not now
prefer a new copy in the handy leather of the Lambskin Library? If
one is out to acquire a copy of W. Somerset Maugham’s _The Moon and
Sixpence_, will he not choose it in its plum-coloured leather and
gilt top of the Murray Hill Library? If I go forth to buy _Pride and
Prejudice_, I am as certain as anything to ask for it from the volumes
of the Modern Student’s Library, because this will give me William Dean
Howells’s introduction to the novel.
There is a further advantage of these collections in that they give
ready and inexpensive access to exceptional books that are otherwise
out of print. I might have excessive trouble, for example, to get
hold of _Dracula_ elsewhere. Yet the commonest advantage of such
sets is probably as a guide in reading. A publisher does not put a
book into his Lambskin Library, or his Murray Hill Library, or his
Modern Student’s Library unless the book is one of proved worth
and established permanence and continuing popularity. The Library,
therefore, offers a convenient and trustworthy solution to those who,
among books not freshly published, are unable to see the trees for the
forest. A word about these collections is in order.
The Lambskin Library at present comprises nearly fifty volumes,
chiefly fiction, although Lawrence F. Abbott’s _Impressions of
Theodore Roosevelt_, Helen Keller’s _The Story of My Life_, Booker
T. Washington’s _Up From Slavery_ and Franklin’s _Autobiography_ lay
a massive foundation for biographies. Conrad, Frank Norris, Selma
Lagerlöf, O. Henry, Dumas, Scott, Tarkington, Edna Ferber, Ellen
Glasgow, Zola and Rider Haggard are some of the authors represented.
Many of the books have interesting prefatory notes and among the
contributors of these are William Lyon Phelps, Christopher Morley,
William Allen White, John Macy and William Dean Howells.
The Modern Student’s Library is ultimately to include as many as
possible of the books one would wish to read in a comprehensive survey
of English and American literature. Both the general reader and the
student have been held in mind; the books represent a sane departure
from the heavily annotated texts of a few years ago. The books have
been edited, and introductions to them have been provided by such
authorities as William Dean Howells, Stuart P. Sherman, William Lyon
Phelps and Carl Van Doren. Bacon’s _Essays_, Boswell’s _Life of
Johnson_, Browning, Carlyle’s _Sartor Resartus_, Emerson’s _Essays_,
Hardy’s _The Return of the Native_, Hawthorne’s _The Scarlet Letter_,
Meredith, Ruskin, Scott, Stevenson, Thackeray, Thoreau and Whitman are
among those already included.
The Murray Hill Library, commencing with modern fiction, will probably
enlarge its scope to include some of the best modern non-fiction. Its
very handsome binding now covers twelve books, picked works by Arnold
Bennett, Somerset Maugham, Mary Roberts Rinehart, Irvin S. Cobb,
Walpole, G. A. Birmingham, John Buchan, Stephen McKenna, Swinnerton and
Richard Dehan.