[Illustration: A PAGE FROM THE MANUSCRIPT OF MAX BEERBOHM’S “SEVEN MEN”]
THE BORZOI 1920
_Being a sort of record of five years’ publishing_
[Illustration]
_New York_
ALFRED · A · KNOPF
_1920_
------------------------------------------------------------------------
COPYRIGHT, 1920, BY
ALFRED A. KNOPF, INC.
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
------------------------------------------------------------------------
FOREWORD
_Many readers have doubtless long been familiar with the catalogs issued
now and again by European publishers—no bare lists of authors and
titles, but such wholly charming productions as, for example, the annual
almanacks of the_ Insel-Verlag _of Leipzig. As I approached the
conclusion of my first five years’ publishing it seemed to me—in view of
the uncommon friendliness of so many readers—that they, at any rate,
would perhaps receive with favor a more permanent record of the early
activities of the Borzoi than it would be possible to present in the
usual sort of American publisher’s announcement. Authors—may I say my
authors?—greeted the idea with such enthusiasm (how generous their
coöperation the following pages abundantly testify) that it soon took
fairly definite shape. The original papers are of course the real excuse
for_ The Borzoi 1920, _while the balance of the book is intended simply
to be useful—to the individual reader, the bookseller, and the
librarian. I have tried to make the bibliography complete, but the Who’s
Who is confined to writers who are, I hope, more or less definitely
associated with my list (and from whom I could get the necessary
information)._
_My best thanks are due many for whatever success Borzoi Books may have
achieved. Those, first, who wrote them, and especially the generous
contributors to this volume; the booksellers, who have been both
friendly and intelligent in their coöperation; the critics who have been
for the most part both understanding and encouraging; the loyal
co-workers in my own office; and last, but not least, the readers who
have made the whole venture possible._
ALFRED A. KNOPF.
CONTENTS
PAGE
Introduction _Maxim Gorky_ ix
PART ONE
WRITTEN ESPECIALLY FOR THE BORZOI 1920 1
The Movies _Claude Bragdon_ 3
Maxwell Bodenheim _Witter Bynner_ 6
On the Art of Fiction _Willa Cather_ 7
Astonishing Psychic Experience _Clarence Day, Jr._ 9
Max Beerbohm _Floyd Dell_ 12
Joseph Hergesheimer _Wilson Follett_ 15
On Drawing _A. P. Herbert_ 20
A Note on the Chinese Poems translated by _Joseph Hergesheimer_ 24
Arthur Waley
Willa Cather _H. L. Mencken_ 28
Van Vechten _Philip Moeller_ 32
On H. L. Mencken _George Jean Nathan_ 34
A Sketch _Sidney L. Nyburg_ 37
Chant of the Nurses _Eunice Tietjens_ 41
A Memory of Ypres _H. M. Tomlinson_ 42
On the Advantages of Being Born on the _Carl Van Vechten_ 48
Seventeenth of June
The Master of the Five Willows _Arthur Waley_ 52
PART TWO
A BRIEF WHO’S WHO OF WRITERS PARTICULARLY IDENTIFIED WITH THE 53
BORZOI
PART THREE
SELECTED PASSAGES FROM BORZOI BOOKS 63
How He Died _Conrad Aiken_ 65
From “Youth and Egolatry” _Pío Baroja_ 68
From “The Romantic Woman” _Mary Borden_ 71
October _Robert Bridges_ 74
“Letters of a Javanese Princess” _Louis Couperas_ 75
April Charms _William H. Davies_ 79
A page from “The Three Mulla Mulgars” _Walter de la Mare_ 80
Burbank with a Baedeker; Bleistein with a _T. S. Eliot_ 81
Cigar
From “Where Angels Fear to Tread” _E. M. Forster_ 83
Dorothy Easton’s “The Golden Bird” _John Galsworthy_ 86
War and the Small Nations _Kahlil Gibran_ 88
A First Review _Robert Graves_ 89
Joe Ward _E. W. Howe_ 90
Doc Robinson _E. W. Howe_ 92
John Davis _E. W. Howe_ 92
Concerning “A Little Boy Lost” _W. H. Hudson_ 93
Ancient Music _Ezra Pound_ 96
Fire and the Heart of Man _J. C. Squire_ 97
Preface to “Deliverance” _E. L. Grant Watson_ 101
PART FOUR
A BIBLIOGRAPHY OF ALL BORZOI BOOKS FROM 25 SEPTEMBER 1915 TO 25 103
SEPTEMBER 1920
Postscript 133
ILLUSTRATIONS
A Page from the Manuscript of Max Beerbohm’s “Seven Men” _Frontispiece_
FACING PAGE
Witter Bynner 6
Floyd Dell 12
Clarence Day, Jr. 12
Joseph Hergesheimer 15
Sidney L. Nyburg 28
Willa Cather 28
Carl Van Vechten 32
H. L. Mencken 34
George Jean Nathan 34
Eunice Tietjens 41
Pío Baroja 41
Mary Borden 72
Kahlil Gibran 89
Robert Graves 90
J. C. Squire 90
E. L. Grant Watson 102
------------------------------------------------------------------------
INTRODUCTION
[The following—reprinted from the _Athenæum_ (London) of June
11th, 1920, and translated by S. Kotliansky is part of Gorky’s
preface to the first catalogue of “World Literature,” the
publishing house founded by him under the auspices of the
Bolshevik government. It is reprinted here as a plea, as noble as
it is typical of Gorky, for good books.
A. A. K.]
Is it necessary to speak of the necessity of a serious study of
literature, or at least of a wide acquaintance with it? Literature is
the heart of the world, winged with all its joys and sorrows, with all
the dreams and hopes of men, with their despair and wrath, with their
reverence before the beauty of nature, their fears in face of her
mysteries. This heart throbs violently and eternally with the thirst of
self-knowledge, as though in it all those substances and forces of
nature that have created the human personality as the highest expression
of their complexity and wisdom aspired to clarify the meaning and aim of
life.
Literature may also be called the all-seeing eye of the world, whose
glance penetrates into the deepest recesses of the human spirit. A
book—so simple a thing and so familiar—is, essentially, one of the great
and mysterious wonders of the world. Some one unknown to us, sometimes
speaking an incomprehensible language, hundreds of miles away, has drawn
on paper various combinations of a score or so of signs, which we call
letters, and when we look at them, we strangers, remote from the creator
of the book, mysteriously perceive the meaning of all the words, the
ideas, the feelings, the images; we admire the description of the scenes
of nature, take delight in the beautiful rhythm of speech, the music of
the words. Moved to tears, angry, dreaming, sometimes laughing over the
motley printed sheets, we grasp the life of the spirit, akin or foreign
to ourselves. The book is, perhaps, the most complicated and mightiest
of all the miracles created by man on his path to the happiness and
power of the future.
There is no one universal literature, for there is yet no language
common to all, but all literary creation, in prose and poetry, is
saturated with the unity of feelings, thoughts, ideals shared by all
men, with the unity of man’s sacred aspiration towards the joy of the
freedom of the spirit, with the unity of man’s disgust at the miseries
of life, the unity of his hopes of the possibility of higher forms of
life, and with the universal thirst for something indefinable in word or
thought, hardly to be grasped by feeling, that mysterious something to
which we give the pale name of beauty, and which comes to an ever
brighter and more joyous flower in the world, in our own hearts.
Whatever may be the inward differences of nations, races,
individualities, however distinct may be the external forms of states,
religious conceptions and customs, however irreconcilable the conflict
of classes—over all these differences, created by ourselves through
centuries, hovers the dark and menacing spectre of the universal
consciousness of the tragic quality of life and the poignant sense of
the loneliness of man in the world.
Rising from the mystery of birth, we plunge into the mystery of death.
Together with our planet we have been thrown into incomprehensible
space. We call it the Universe, but we have no precise conception of it,
and our loneliness in it has such an ironical perfection that we have
nothing with which to compare it.
The loneliness of man in the Universe and on the earth, which is to many
“a desert, alas! not unpeopled”—on earth amid the most tormenting
contradiction of desires and possibilities—is realized only by few. But
the faint feeling of it is implanted in the instinct of nearly every man
like a noxious weed, and it often poisons the lives of men who appear to
be perfectly immune from that murderous nostalgia which is the same for
all ages and peoples, which tormented equally Byron the Englishman,
Leopardi the Italian, the writer of “Ecclesiastes,” and Lao-Tse, the
great sage of Asia.
This anguish that arises from the dim sense of the precariousness and
tragedy of life is common to great and small, to every one who has the
courage to look at life with open eyes. And if a time is to come when
men will have overcome this anguish and stifled in themselves the
consciousness of tragedy and loneliness, they will achieve that victory
only by the way of spiritual creation, only by the combined efforts of
literature and science.
Besides its envelope of air and light all our earth is surrounded with a
sphere of spiritual creativeness, with the multifarious rainbow
emanation of our energy, out of which is woven, forged or moulded all
that is immortally beautiful; out of which are created the mightiest
ideas and the enchanting complexity of our machines, the amazing temples
and tunnels that pierce the rock of great mountains, books, pictures,
poems, millions of tons of iron flung as bridges across wide rivers,
suspended with such miraculous lightness in the air—all the stern and
lovely, all the mighty and tender poetry of our life.
By the victory of the mind and will over the elements of nature and the
animal in man, striking out ever brighter sparks of hope from the iron
wall of the unknown, we men can speak with legitimate joy of the
planetary significance of the great efforts of our spirit, most
resplendently and powerfully expressed in literary and scientific
creation.
The great virtue of literature is that by deepening our consciousness,
by widening our perception of life, by giving shape to our feelings, it
speaks to us as with a voice saying: All ideals and acts, all the world
of the spirit is created out of the blood and nerves of men. It tells us
that Hen-Toy, the Chinaman, is as agonizingly unsatisfied with the love
of woman as Don Juan, the Spaniard; that the Abyssinian sings the same
songs of the sorrows and joys of love as the Frenchman; that there is an
equal pathos in the love of a Japanese Geisha and Manon Lescaut; that
man’s longing to find in woman the other half of his soul has burned and
burns with an equal flame men of all lands, all times.
A murderer in Asia is as loathsome as in Europe; the Russian miser
Plushkin is as pitiable as the French Grandet; the Tartufes of all
countries are alike, Misanthropes are equally miserable everywhere, and
everywhere every one is equally charmed by the touching image of Don
Quixote, the Knight of the Spirit. And after all, all men, in all
languages, always speak of the same things, of themselves and their
fate. Men of brute instincts are everywhere alike, the world of the
intellect alone is infinitely varied.
With a clearness irresistibly convincing, fine literature gives us all
these innumerable likenesses and infinite varieties—literature, the
pulsing mirror of life, reflecting with quiet sadness or with anger,
with the kindly laugh of a Dickens or the frightful grimace of
Dostoevsky, all the complications of our spiritual life, the whole world
of our desires, the bottomless stagnant pools of banality and folly, our
heroism and cowardice in the face of destiny, the courage of love and
the strength of hatred, all the nastiness of our hypocrisy and the
shameful abundance of lies, the disgusting stagnation of our minds and
our endless agonies, our thrilling hopes and sacred dreams—all by which
the world lives, all that quivers in the hearts of men. Watching man
with the eyes of a sensitive friend, or with the stern glance of a
judge, sympathizing with him, laughing at him, admiring his courage,
cursing his nullity—literature rises above life, and, together with
science, lights up for men the paths to the achievement of their goals,
to the development of what is good in them.
At times enchanted with the beautiful aloofness of science, literature
may become infatuated with a dogma, and then we see Emile Zola viewing
man only as a “belly,” constructed “with charming coarseness,” and we
also see how the cold despair of Du Bois Reymond infects so great an
artist as Gustave Flaubert.
It is obvious that literature cannot be completely free from what
Turgeniev called “the pressure of time”; it is natural, for “sufficient
unto the day is the evil thereof.” And it may be that the evil of the
day poisons more often than it should the sacred spirit of beauty, and
our search for its “inspirations and prayers”; these inspirations and
prayers are poisoned by the venomous dust of the day. But “the beautiful
is the rare,” as Edmond Goncourt justly said, and we most certainly
often consider lacking in beauty and insignificant habitual things—those
habitual things which, as they recede into the past, acquire for our
descendants all the marks and qualities of true, unfading beauty. Does
not the austere life of ancient Greece appear to us beautiful? Does not
the bloody, stormy and creative epoch of the Renaissance with all its
“habitual” cruelty enrapture us? It is more than probable that the great
days of the social catastrophe we are going through now will arouse the
ecstasy, awe and creativeness of the generations that will come after
us.
Nor let us forget that though Balzac’s “Poor Relations,” Gogol’s “Dead
Souls,” “The Pickwick Papers,” are essentially books that describe
conditions of actual life, there is hidden in them a great and
imperishable lesson which the best university cannot provide, and which
an average man will not have learnt so exactly or so clearly after fifty
years of hard-working life.
The habitual is not always banal, for it is habitual for man to be
consumed in the hell fire of his vocation, and this self-consumption is
always beautiful and necessary, as it is instructive for those who
timidly smoulder all their life long, without blazing up in the bright
flame that destroys the man and illuminates the mysteries of his spirit.
Human errors are not so characteristic of the art of the word and image;
more characteristic is its longing to raise man above the external
conditions of existence, to free him from the fetters of the degrading
actuality, to show him to himself not as the slave, but as the lord of
circumstance, the free creator of life, and in this sense literature is
ever revolutionary.
By the mighty effort of genius rising about all circumstances of
actuality, saturated with the spirit of humanity, kindling its hatred
from the excess of passionate love, fine literature, prose and poetry,
is our great vindication, and not our condemnation. It knows that there
are no guilty—although everything is in man, everything is from man. The
cruel contradictions of life that arouse the enmity and hatred of
nations, classes, individuals, are to literature only an inveterate
error, and she believes that the ennobled will of men can and must
destroy all errors, all that which, arresting the free development of
the spirit, delivers man into the power of animal instincts.
When you look closely into the mighty stream of creative energy embodied
in the word and image, you feel and believe that the great purpose of
this stream is to wash away for ever all the differences between races,
nations, classes, and, by freeing men from the hard burden of the
struggle with each other, to direct all their forces to the struggle
with the mysterious forces of nature. And it seems that then the art of
the word and image is and will be the religion of all mankind—a religion
that absorbs everything that is written in the sacred writings of
ancient India, in the Zend-Avesta, in the Gospels and Koran.
MAXIM GORKY
PART ONE
WRITTEN ESPECIALLY
FOR
THE BORZOI 1920
THE MOVIES
_By Claude Bragdon_
I must protest against the movies, though I be stoned to death for it in
the middle of Longacre Square.
My sight is either jaundiced or clairvoyant: which, I leave the reader
to decide.
Strip life of its color, mystery, infinitude; make it stale, make it
grey, make it flat; rob the human being of his aura, deny him speech,
quicken his movements into galvanic action; people a glaring
parallelogram with these gigantic simulacra of men and women moved by
sub-human motives; drug the tormented nerves with music, so that the
audience shall not go mad—this is the movie as it is to me.
The other day I read a panegyric on the most beautiful of all moving
pictures. I forced myself to sit through it though I could scarcely
forbear shrieking aloud. It was an amusement seemingly devised for
devils in hell.
Only degradation of the soul and a vast despondency result from this
seeking joy in the pictured suffering wickedness, weakness of others; in
this orgy of sex-sentimentality, silliness, meaningless violence. Such
amusement either depraves the mind or arrests its action, and makes of
the heart a mechanical toy which must be shaken violently before it will
act.
Why do people go to the movies? Because their caged souls seek
forgetfulness and joy as insistently as blind eyes yearn for light. But
joy is such a stranger to them that they ignorantly mistake this
owl-eyed Monster of Darkness for the Blue Bird of Happiness. I have
asked many why they go to the movies, and have heard many reasons—most
of them bad—but one answer recurs like a refrain: “There isn’t any thing
else to do.” It reminds me of John Russel’s reason why Eliza (of Uncle
Tom’s Cabin) crossed the river on the ice. “The poor girl had no other
place to go—all the saloons were closed.”
Today all the saloons are closed, and professional philanthropy prides
itself on the fact that more men go now to the movies. The saloon was an
evil institution, but the prostitution of the mind is worse than any
poisoning of the nerves.
The priests of the temple of the Movie Momus do not know that they are
offering a form of amusement which stifles the mind and hardens the
heart. Doubtless they believe the contrary, but it is a case of the
blind led by the blind: Neither know where they are going, and each
depends upon the other to lead the way. Producers, impresarios,
scenario-writers have always their ears to the ground to catch the first
faint rumble of condemnation or approval. Their business is frankly to
assimilate the popular taste in order to reproduce it. But this taste is
fickle, being that of a child with a digestion impaired by too much of
the wrong kind of food. The movie public is like the Athenian populace
always eager for “some new thing,” and like the Roman mob it shows an
insatiable greed for danger (to others) cruelty and destruction. Of
daring it demands more daring; of beauty more nudity; of wickedness a
deeper depth of wickedness; scenery must be ever more sumptuous, orgies
more orgiastic, violence more violent. Lacking anything to turn its
imagination away from these things, into some new channel, the public
can only build high and higher this particular house of cards.
There is a great deal talked and written about the “educational value”
of the movies, and this acts as a deterrent to many persons who are
minded, as I am, to denounce this evil in the market place. But such
deceive themselves with the word “education,” forgetting that mankind is
_one_. In order that some may learn easily a few merely physical facts,
such people countenance and support an institution that eats at the very
heart of the spirit of man.
I hear in anticipation the crushing argument against my point of view:
The Movies constitute the fourth largest industry in the world; they
command the respect of governments, the service of the press, the
participation of captains of industry, cabinet members, international
bankers. But all this is quite beside the point, and reminds me of the
answer once given to my criticism of an absurd soldiers’ monument: “It
cost fifty thousand dollars and was carved out of a single piece of
granite that weighed ten tons.”
The Movies too are carved out of a single piece of granite: the granite
of ignorance of the obscure spiritual forces now active in the secret
hearts of men.
On a vast scale, in infinite variety of detail, the Movies show
“The very age and body of the time its form and pressure.”
May not the unforeseen, amazing, ultimate result be to recoil in horror
from the image there presented? The Movies represent the quest of joy
aborted. Perhaps their true purpose is to bring bitter, but salutary
knowledge.
MAXWELL BODENHEIM
_By Witter Bynner_
While poets have been placed by the critics in this or that category and
have lent themselves more or less to the indignity, Maxwell Bodenheim
has continued as he began, a poet of disturbing originality. Whether you
like him or not, you cannot evade him. Let him once touch you and a
perfume is upon you, pungent and yet faint, offensive and yet delicate,
of the street and yet exotic. It is as if Pierian springs bubbled
crystalline from the nearest sewer, forcing from you a puzzled and
troubled enjoyment. It is as if a diamond leered or a rose exhaled
sulphur or a humming-bird lanced your self-respect. It is a drunken
thief’s hand, still deft, in the poetic treasury; nuances pouring
Niagaran; sensibilities crowding in masquerade; madness mocking sanity;
ideas dancing nude through confetti; a falsetto growl; a whispered song;
a rainbow in the loose:—and yet, all the while a human eye watching the
incredible kaleidoscope, an eye that sees and makes you see likewise,
good and evil, beauty and pain, opposing and commingling their designs.
Historically Bodenheim’s work is likely to share with Donald Evans’ very
different “Sonnets from the Patagonian” the distinction of having
initiated in American poetry for better or worse the season and
influence of fantastic impressionism. Evans has now become almost
orthodox, his green orchid is put away; but Bodenheim still wears in his
lapel the coloured ghost of a butterfly-wing whose veinings mock at
human progress.
[Illustration: Witter Bynner]
ON THE ART OF FICTION
_By Willa Cather_
One is sometimes asked about the “obstacles” that confront young writers
who are trying to do good work. I should say the greatest obstacles that
writers today have to get over, are the dazzling journalistic successes
of twenty years ago, stories that surprised and delighted by their sharp
photographic detail and that were really nothing more than lively pieces
of reporting. The whole aim of that school of writing was novelty—never
a very important thing in art. They gave us, altogether, poor
standards—taught us to multiply our ideas instead of to condense them.
They tried to make a story out of every theme that occurred to them and
to get returns on every situation that suggested itself. They got
returns, of a kind. But their work, when one looks back on it, now that
the novelty upon which they counted so much is gone, is journalistic and
thin. The especial merit of a good reportorial story is that it shall be
intensely interesting and pertinent today and shall have lost its point
by tomorrow.
Art, it seems to me, should simplify. That, indeed, is very nearly the
whole of the higher artistic process; finding what conventions of form
and what detail one can do without and yet preserve the spirit of the
whole—so that all that one has suppressed and cut away is there to the
reader’s consciousness as much as if it were in type on the page. Millet
had done hundreds of sketches of peasants sowing grain, some of them
very complicated and interesting, but when he came to paint the spirit
of them all into one picture, “The Sower,” the composition is so simple
that it seems inevitable. All the discarded sketches that went before
made the picture what it finally became, and the process was all the
time one of simplifying, of sacrificing many conceptions good in
themselves for one that was better and more universal.
Any first rate novel or story must have in it the strength of a dozen
fairly good stories that have been sacrificed to it. A good workman
can’t be a cheap workman; he can’t be stingy about wasting material, and
he cannot compromise. Writing ought either to be the manufacture of
stories for which there is a market demand—a business as safe and
commendable as making soap or breakfast foods—or it should be an art,
which is always a search for something for which there is no market
demand, something new and untried, where the values are intrinsic and
have nothing to do with standardized values. The courage to go on
without compromise does not come to a writer all at once—nor, for that
matter, does the ability. Both are phases of natural development. In the
beginning, the artist, like his public, is wedded to old forms, old
ideals, and his vision is blurred by the memory of old delights he would
like to recapture.
ASTONISHING PSYCHIC EXPERIENCE
_Being a True Account of How Alfred A. Knopf Appeared
in a Vision to Clarence Day, Jr._
[Illustration: She tilts her head back]
I have a friend who, when she hears a strange voice on the telephone,
can visualize the person—that is to say, she sometimes can, if it
interests her. She half-closes her eyes, tilts her head back, stares
away off into space; and then she slowly describes the appearance of
whoever is telephoning, almost as well as though he or she were standing
before her. It is one of those supernatural gifts that seem to our times
so startling.
[Illustration: French Academician]
The reason I mention this is, that though I hadn’t supposed I was that
sort of person, I had one of these mysterious psychic visions myself,
years ago. It came to me while I was reading Mr. Knopf’s first
announcements of books. I had never seen the man, never heard a word of
what he was like, yet his image suddenly arose clear as a photograph
before my inner eye. There he stood, tall and thin, an elder statesman,
with a bushy white beard; round, glowing eyes, ivory skin; an animated
savant.
He spoke in his circulars as a man of great taste and authority. I
pictured him as a French Academician of American birth.
Year by year as I read his new catalogs this image grew stronger. People
would ask me, “Have you met this man Knopf?” and I would say: “No, I
haven’t, but I can tell you what he’s like just the same. I’m a bit of a
psychic.” And then I would describe my strange vision. This sometimes
annoyed them: they would even ask, “But how do you _know_?” I would then
describe the sense of quiet certitude that comes with such an
experience.
[Illustration: I found he had changed]
Then one evening I met Mr. Knopf—in the flesh, as we phrase it. I found
he had changed. He was more human, and in a way more impressive, but
less picturesque. Instead of being tall and thin he was of medium-size,
strong, and well-formed. And he wasn’t exactly what you’d call old: in
fact he was in his twenties; and instead of a bushy white beard, he had
only a small black moustache.
It is not for me to explain this astonishing and almost incredible
discrepancy. I must leave that to the Psychical Research Society, to
which I wish all success. The only way I can account for it is to
suppose that Mr. Knopf has more than one personality. I admit I did not
see in my vision the side he physically presents to the world. But it
may be I am such a powerful psychic that I saw something deeper. I saw
the more appropriate vehicle of his innermost soul.
We sat down for a talk. I tried out of courtesy not to use this power of
mine any further. Even when I gave him my manuscript to publish, and we
began to talk terms, I endeavoured not to peer into his heart. He gave
me good terms however. He explained that his idea of a publishing house
was a sort of a companionable enterprise, and that authors and
publishers ought to be friends. They at least ought to try.
I carefully looked over his list to see who his author-friends were, and
picked out one or two pretty rum ones and asked him about them. He
admitted with composure that of course every man made mistakes. I said
anxiously that I hoped I had made none in choosing him as my publisher.
He said probably not; but it was harder for him to pick out the right
authors. He added however that he had done very well—up to now.
We stared thoughtfully at each other....
I glanced at his list again. It did consist chiefly of quality belles
lettres, after all. He really seemed to care about books. But then I
wondered suspiciously if the very fact of his being so cultivated had
made him a poor man of business. His appearance was certainly forceful
and energetic, but nevertheless—
[Illustration: In spite of his bitter objections]
I decided to have one more vision. I half-closed my eyes, the way that
friend of mine does, and tilted my head back. Mr. Knopf seemed
surprised. I paid no attention to this, but coolly gazed right into his
mind. It was a tall, roomy mind, with long rows of thoughts, like onions
on rafters—thoughts of bindings and dogs and Archimedes and authors and
what-not. In the middle was a huge pile of packing cases (mostly
unopened) containing his plans and ambitions in the publishing world. I
am sorry now I didn’t unpack a few to see what they were, but they
looked pretty solid; and I was distracted by seeing, way over in a
corner, his thoughts of myself. As these were at that time rather mixed,
I prefer not to describe them. My catching sight of them at all was
merely one of those unhappy annoyances that must often upset a seer’s
life. It’s one of the risks of the business.
As I gazed on, indignantly, something drew across his mind like a truck,
only even more massive. I presently discerned that it was a large strong
intention to go. Simultaneously—for the man is well coordinated—he said
good-bye and went out.
I was left there alone in my rooms, with my weird psychic gift. I may
add that after a brief contemplation of it, I rang for the janitor, and
in spite of his bitter objections, transferred it to him.
MAX BEERBOHM
_By Floyd Dell_
The very name of Max Beerbohm carries the mind back to the time when he
first emerged as a literary figure—the time of the Yellow Book—the time
of Whistler’s letters and Swinburne’s newest poem, of velvet jackets and
plush knee-breeches, and foot-in-the-grave young poets who caroused
mournfully at the sign of the Bodley Head. But it was above all the
period of the Enoch Soameses who are celebrated by Max Beerbohm in his
latest volume, “Seven Men”—an age of strange young Satanists who would
be content with nothing less than founding a new English literature upon
the cornerstone of their own thin sheaves of unintelligible poems. They
are dead, now—they got tired of waiting for their immortality to
begin—and forgotten, except for the wreaths of tender and ironic phrases
which Max Beerbohm lays from time to time on their graves. He survives
them, the Last of the Esthetes. And yet Enoch Soames would say bitterly
that it was just like Fate that the Last of the Esthetes should be a man
who never was an Esthete at all!
And there is something to the Enoch Soames point of view. Max Beerbohm’s
title to Estheticism is rather precarious. His words may be the words of
Dorian Grey, but the laughter behind them is surely the laughter of Huck
Finn! Yes, under the jewelled stylistic cloak of Max Beerbohm, what do
you find but the simple-hearted amusement of a healthy child? From the
story of the Young Prince in “The Complete Works of Max Beerbohm,” to
the celebrated Bathtub passage in “Zuleika Dobson,” the whole effect
consists in the sudden substitution of the obvious for the recherché.
You thought you were going to have to pretend to enjoy pickled
nightingale’s tongues, and you find—greatly to your relief—that it is
just ice-cream-and-cake!
[Illustration: Floyd Dell]
[Illustration: Clarence Day Jr.]
And yet his style cannot be said to be mere masquerade. Max Beerbohm, it
is hardly to be doubted, loves the magic of word and phrase and rhythm
as devoutly as any pure soul who ever took opium in an attic for art’s
sake.
I like to think of Max Beerbohm as a boy who ran away to sea and was
captured and brought up by a band of pirates. The pirates, you
understand, are that romantic crew who embarked under the Yellow flag
upon a career of ruthless literary destruction in the ‘Nineties, at a
time when it seemed that the deeps of literature were given over to a
peaceful and profitable traffic in morals and ethics, pieties and
proprieties and puerilities. What havoc they did create! The royal
Victorian navy, for all its literary big guns, was helpless against
them. It was not, in fact, until Captains Gilbert and Sullivan sailed
out against them in the good ship _Patience_ that they received any
serious setback! And if we go to the log-books of Gilbert and Sullivan
for further information about this particular adventure, we shall find
it, I think, in “The Pirates of Penzance”—where the tender and confident
relations of the virtuous young hero and his piratical captors may serve
as an illuminating picture of young Max Beerbohm in piratical captivity
among the Esthetes.
He learned his manners from them; and a more graceful band of literary
desperadoes never existed. Nothing could exceed the savoir faire with
which they scuttled the traditions and made the familiar virtues walk
the fatal plank. And so it is that when we read Max Beerbohm today, the
superb gallantry of his style suggests that he is going to commit a
felonious assault upon our most treasured ideals. But he never does. You
are stopped by a gun-shot across your bow, and you prepare for the
worst. But the worst is merely a jolly invitation in a boyish voice to a
game of marbles.
The combination is irresistible.... I am reminded of an authentic tale
of the South seas. A band of wicked mutineers set their captain and
officers afloat in an open boat, and sailed to Pitcairn Island, where
they proceeded to live in the most Nietzschean fashion imaginable,
enslaving the natives, taking their wives away from them, and living in
fabulous luxury. They were a fractious lot, however, and they quarrelled
among themselves, and shot each other up, and went insane and committed
suicide, until the natives got tired of it, and revolted and killed them
all—all except one gentle person who had got mixed up with the mutineers
by mistake. He was not a Nietzschean; he believed at heart in all the
old-fashioned virtues. And where the Nietzscheans had failed, he
succeeded—so notably that when the island was rediscovered half a
century later, he was ruling there in a little peaceful paradise, the
Last of the Mutineers. There is something about gentleness, it would
seem, that makes for survival. And I like to think that Max Beerbohm
remains with us to tell the story of quaint, devil-worshipping literary
mutineers like Enoch Soames, precisely because he cannot bear ever to
press home the shining blade of his wit to its most deadly
extent—because he does not really want to hurt anybody after all, not
even Enoch Soames.
[Illustration: _Photograph by Robert H. Davis_]
JOSEPH HERGESHEIMER
_By Wilson Follett_
I
When Mr. Knopf asked me to pay my brief respects to Joseph Hergesheimer,
he must have been aware that I had not the material for an intimate
portrait. He and my other readers must forgive me, then, if what I shall
have to say tallies rather better with the exigencies of formal public
criticism than with the more delightful _convenances_ of this altogether
jolly family party. After all, there is a certain advantage—especially
for a person of amiably weak will—in knowing an author’s public aspects
better than his private and personal. I cannot profess to be of those
austere souls who can criticize the book of a friend as if he were not a
friend, or, knowing and liking a man, can read or appraise his books
uninfluenced by a charm which would still exist even if the books did
not. Because of this distrusted weakness of my own temper, I insist on
being glad that I never met or even saw Joseph Hergesheimer until “The
Three Black Pennys” had become a solid part of my awareness of
things—the things that do most richly signify. I never had any reason to
think well—or ill—of this author until the Pennys and “Gold and Iron”
had exerted their swift effortless compulsion. Even now, I can lay claim
to no more than what the biographic essayist calls, in his standard
idiom, a “literary friendship”—meaning thereby the occasional exchange
of abysmally polite letters on purely impersonal subjects or personal
subjects impersonally dealt with.
II
Yet even I have my one sufficiently quaint, sufficiently spicy
reminiscence. And meet it is I set it down—partly because it seems too
precious to die, even more because otherwise, as time shuffles the cards
of our mortal anecdotage, it will be sure to turn up, with only the
substitution of one name for another, as part of the mythos surrounding
the late Jack London, or Richard Harding Davis, or some still
flourishing nominee for an epitaph and an official biography.
It was three o’clock of a rainy summer morning in 1918. Hergesheimer and
your present scribe were sleeping—or rather we were not—in the twin beds
of a guest-room at San-Souci, in Hartsdale. A Nox Ambrosiana had been
put behind us, and, we fatuously supposed, a few hours of ambrosial
sleep lay ahead. It had been a great night, dedicated to much fine talk
of Art, and as free from “the posings and pretensions of art” as
Conrad’s Preface to “The Nigger.” But that is not the story.
Somewhere in the blackness under our opened windows, vocal in his
forlornness, was Bistri, the flesh-and-blood original of the borzoi
whose mere inadequate outline appears on a really amazing proportion of
the most distinguished books now being published in These United
States—or, if your literary capital be Arnold Bennett’s, Those United
States. This Bistri, a perfectly incredible yet perfectly actual
milk-white creature of enormous size, decorative as a dryad, but
possessed of something less than half a gill of brains within his
extremely dolichocephalic head, was frank to assert—and reiterate—his
disapproval of the pelting rain and his cynical disillusionment in
respect to the kindly graces of humankind. The sound was like the
ululating whimper of a punished child, only it hinted no promise of
subsiding, ever.
Genius, supine in the dark across the room, grew first restive, then
indignant, then furious, and thence, passing round the circle of
exhausted emotions, came back by the way of despair to a disgusted
silence. Not so Bistri: silence was the last thing to fall within the
orbit of his intentions, so long as the Master and Maker of dogs
vouchsafed him breath and being. Gradually the silence of genius, there
across the room, acquired a subtly grim texture. When next the voice of
genius spoke, it was tensely, with suppressed ferocity, as through
clenched teeth. What it said was this: “_I’ll bet Scribner has got no
such damned dog._”
The rest, after Gargantuan laughter, was silence.... Ah, but was it,
quite? Or did the speaker of these words, also deeming them too precious
to die, retail them at late breakfast to the mistress of the borzoi,
even as their sole hearer presently reported them at earlier breakfast
to the borzoi’s master? It would be interesting to know—and not very
surprising either way.
III
So far the record of a personal and temperamental susceptibility, of
some incidental interest, perhaps, to the curious. What remains to speak
of is the deeper susceptibility of which Mr. Hergesheimer’s books are
the record, and which runs through all his public work, a determining
law and a binding _continuum_; that enormous and delicate susceptibility
to sights, sounds, forms, colours, movements, aspects, which is at once
his purpose and his effect, his unconscious excuse for being and his
conscious claim to self-justification. He might say, in the words of a
document already referred to, and important in the history of fictional
art: “My task which I am trying to achieve is, by the power of the
written word, to make you hear, to make you feel—it is, before all, to
make you see. That—and no more, and it is everything. If I succeed, you
shall find there according to your deserts: encouragement, consolation,
fear, charm—all you demand and, perhaps, also that glimpse of truth for
which you have forgotten to ask.”
We can all see now, with the glib wisdom of after the event, that
Mr. Hergesheimer’s career before its one sharp early break
is—comparatively—all promise, and after that break—comparatively—all
performance. In “The Lay Anthony” and “Mountain Blood” one finds a
slight uneasiness or unevenness of recital, the result, I think, of
a subconscious attempt to make the manner dignify and sanction two
performances not, in matter, quite good enough to receive that
ultimate sanction, style. With and after “The Three Black Pennys,”
and very specially in “Java Head” and “Wild Oranges,” which remain
thus far the masterpieces of perfect formal integrity, this
discrepancy is lost from the reckoning. The artist has an exigent
discrimination of that which is good enough for him to touch, and
his touch upon it is exquisite.
But in one respect, the betrayal of a born artist’s susceptibility, the
works of promise are at one with the works of performance. The man who
could not help going out of his way, in “The Lay Anthony,” to allude to
“Heart of Darkness” as “the most beautiful story of our time,” was
simply predestined to write a book of which susceptibility to beauty
should actually be the theme—as he did in “Linda Condon.” And the man
who, in “Java Head,” achieved so supreme a saturation with the aromas
and essences of loveliness, had prefigured his own future when, in
“Mountain Blood,” he wrote: “The barrier against which he still fished
was mauve, the water black; the moon appeared buoyantly, like a rosy
bubble blown upon a curtain of old blue velvet.”
Just here, in the crystallization of his own sensitivity into the
objective forms of beauty, lies the peculiar distinction of
Hergesheimer. It is an aristocratic distinction. It is, if you go by the
counting of tastes, a distinctly un-American trait. This fact it is,
rather than any less fundamental consideration, which explains—even if
it does not justify—those critics who even before they discover how to
divide his name properly into syllables, discover that there is
something slightly exotic about him. Exotic or autochthonous—what does
it matter? The point is, Mr Hergesheimer’s power “to make you hear, to
make you feel ... before all, to make you see” is the condition of his
success as a coiner of beauty. It is also his way, whatever way another
artist may take, to reveal to us those glimpses of deep truth for which
we may, indeed, have forgotten to ask, but for which, once they are
opened to our sight, we can never forget to be grateful.
ON DRAWING[1]
_By A. P. Herbert_
It is commonly said that everybody can sing in the bathroom; and this is
true. Singing is very easy. Drawing, though, is much more difficult. I
have devoted a good deal of time to Drawing, one way and another; I have
to attend a great many committees and public meetings, and at such
functions I find that Drawing is almost the only Art one can
satisfactorily pursue during the speeches. One really cannot sing during
the speeches; so as a rule I draw. I do not say that I am an expert yet,
but after a few more meetings I calculate that I shall know Drawing as
well as it can be known.
The first thing, of course, is to get on to a really good committee; and
by a good committee I mean a committee that provides decent materials.
An ordinary departmental committee is no use: generally they only give
you a couple of pages of lined foolscap and no white blotting-paper, and
very often the pencils are quite soft. White blotting-paper is
essential. I know of no material the spoiling of which gives so much
artistic pleasure—except perhaps snow. Indeed, if I was asked to choose
between making pencil-marks on a sheet of white blotting-paper and
making foot-marks on a sheet of white snow I should be in a thingummy.
Much the best committees from the point of view of material are
committees about business which meet at business premises—shipping
offices, for choice. One of the Pacific Lines has the best white
blotting-paper I know; and the pencils there are a dream. I am sure the
directors of that firm are Drawers; for they always give you two
pencils, one hard for doing noses, and one soft for doing hair.
[Illustration: Fig. 1]
When you have selected your committee and the speeches are well away,
the Drawing begins. Much the best thing to draw is a man. Not the
chairman, or Lord Pommery Quint, or any member of the committee, but
just A Man. Many novices make the mistake of selecting a subject for
their Art before they begin; usually they select the chairman. And when
they find it is more like Mr. Gladstone they are discouraged. If they
had waited a little it could have been Mr. Gladstone officially.
[Illustration: Fig. 2]
As a rule I begin with the forehead and work down to the chin (Fig. 1).
When I have done the outline I put in the eye. This is one of the most
difficult parts of Drawing; one is never quite sure where the eye goes.
If, however, it is not a good eye, a useful tip is to give the man
spectacles; this generally makes him a clergyman, but it helps the eye
(Fig. 2).
Now you have to outline the rest of the head, and this is rather a
gamble. Personally, I go in for _strong_ heads (Fig. 3).
[Illustration: Fig. 3]
I am afraid it is not a strong neck; I expect he is an author, and is
not well fed. But that is the worst of strong heads; they make it so
difficult to join up the chin and the back of the neck.
The next thing to do is to put in the ear; and once you have done this
the rest is easy. Ears are much more difficult than eyes (Fig. 4).
I hope that is right. It seems to me to be a little too far to the
southward. But it is done now. And once you have put in the ear you
can’t go back; not unless you are on a _very_ good committee which
provides india-rubber as well as pencils.
[Illustration: Fig. 4]
Now I do the hair. Hair may either be very fuzzy and black, or lightish
and thin. It depends chiefly on what sort of pencils are provided. For
myself I prefer black hair, because then the parting shows up better
(Fig. 5).
Until one draws hair one never realizes what large heads people have.
Doing the hair takes the whole of a speech, usually, even one of the
chairman’s speeches.
[Illustration: Fig. 5]
This is not one of my best men; I am sure the ear is in the wrong place.
And I am inclined to think he ought to have spectacles. Only then he
would be a clergyman, and I have decided that he is Mr. Philip Gibbs at
the age of twenty. So he must carry on with his eye as it is.
I find that all my best men face to the west; it is a curious thing.
Sometimes I draw two men facing each other, but the one facing east is
always a dud.
There, you see (Fig. 6)? The one on the right is a Bolshevik; he has a
low forehead and beetling brows—a most unpleasant man. Yet he has a
powerful face. The one on the left was meant to be another Bolshevik,
arguing with him. But he has turned out to be a lady, so I have had to
give her a “bun.” She is a lady solicitor; but I don’t know how she came
to be talking to the Bolshevik.
[Illustration: Fig. 6]
When you have learned how to do Men, the only other things in Drawing
are Perspective and Landscape.
[Illustration: Fig. 7]
PERSPECTIVE is great fun: the best thing to do is a long French road
with telegraph poles (Fig. 7).
I have put in a fence as well.
LANDSCAPE is chiefly composed of hills and trees. Trees are the most
amusing, especially fluffy trees.
Here is a Landscape (Fig. 8).
[Illustration: Fig. 8]
Somehow or other a man has got into this landscape; and, as luck would
have it, it is Napoleon. Apart from this it is not a bad landscape.
But it takes a very long speech to get an ambitious piece of work like
this through.
There is one other thing I ought to have said. Never attempt to draw a
man front-face. It can’t be done.
A NOTE ON THE CHINESE POEMS TRANSLATED BY ARTHUR WALEY[2]
_By Joseph Hergesheimer_