ALIAS RICHARD DEHAN
=i=
At that, I think I am wrong. I think the title of this chapter ought to be
"Alias Clotilde Graves."
The problems of literary personality are strange. Some time after the Boer
War a woman who had been in newspaper work in London and who had even, at
one time, been on the stage under the necessity of earning her living,
wrote a novel. The novel happened to be an intensive study of the Boer
War, made possible by the fact that the writer was the daughter of a
soldier and had spent her early years in barracks. England at that time
was interested by the subject of this novel. It sold largely and its
author was established by the book.
She was forty-six years old in the year when the book was published. But
this was not the striking thing. William De Morgan produced the first of
his impressive novels at a much more advanced age. The significant thing
was that in publishing her novel, _The Dop Doctor_ (American title: _One_
_Braver Thing_), Clotilde Graves chose the pen name of Richard Dehan,
although she was already known as a writer (chiefly for the theatre) under
her own name.
I do not know that Miss Graves has ever said anything publicly about her
motive in electing the name of Richard Dehan. But I feel that whatever the
cause the result was the distinct emergence of a totally different
personality. There is no final disassociation between Clotilde Graves and
Richard Dehan. Richard Dehan, novelist, steadily employs the material
furnished in valuable abundance by Clotilde Graves's life. At the same
time the personality of Richard Dehan is so unusual, so gifted, so lavish
in its invention and so much at home in surprising backgrounds, that
something approaching a psychic explanation of authorship seems called
for.
=ii=
Clotilde Inez Mary Graves was born at Barracks, Buttevant, County Cork,
Ireland, on June 3, 1864, third daughter of the late Major W. H. Graves of
the Eighteenth Royal Irish Regiment and Antoinette, daughter of Captain
George Anthony Deane of Harwich. Thus, the English _Who's Who_.
"She numbers among her ancestors admirals and deans," said The Bookman in
1912.
As the same magazine at about the same time spoke of her as descended from
Charles II.'s naval architect, Admiral Sir Anthony Deane, one wonders if
Sir Anthony were not the sum of the admirals and the total of the deans.
But no; at any rate in so far as the admirals are concerned, for Miss
Graves is also said to be distantly related to Admiral Nelson.
I will give you what The Bookman said in the "Chronicle and Comment"
columns of its number for February, 1913:
"Richard Dehan was nine years old when her family emigrated to England
from their Irish home. She had seen a good deal of barrack life, and at
Southsea, where they went to live, she acquired a large knowledge of both
services in the circle of naval and military friends they made there, and
this knowledge years afterward she turned to account in _Between Two
Thieves_. In 1884, Miss Graves became an art student and worked at the
British Museum galleries and the Royal Female School of Art, helping to
support herself by journalism of a lesser kind, among other things drawing
little pen-and-ink grotesques for the comic papers. By and by she resolved
to take to dramatic writing and being too poor, she says, to manage in any
other way, she abandoned art and took an engagement in a travelling
theatrical company. In 1888 her first chance as a dramatist came. She was
again in London, working vigorously at journalism, when some one was
needed to write extra lyrics for a pantomime then in preparation. A letter
of recommendation from an editor to the manager ended in Miss Clo Graves
writing the pantomime of _Puss in Boots_. Later a tragedy by her,
_Nitocris_, was produced for an afternoon at Drury Lane, and another of
her plays, _The Mother of Three_, proved not only a literary, but also a
material, success."
Her first novel to be signed Richard Dehan being so successful, an English
publisher planned to bring out an earlier, minor work, already published
as by Clotilde Graves, with "Richard Dehan" on the title-page. The author
was stirred to a vigorous and public protest. In the ensuing controversy
someone made the point that the proposed reissue would not be more
indefensible than the act of a publishing house in bringing out posthumous
"books" by O. Henry and dragging from its deserved oblivion Rudyard
Kipling's _Abaft the Funnel_.
I do not know whether the publishing of books is a business or a
profession. I should say that it has, at one time or another and by one or
another individual or concern, been pursued as either or both.
There have certainly been, and probably are, book publishers who not only
conduct their business as a business but as a business of a low order.
There have been and are book publishers who, though quite necessarily
business men, observe an ethical code as nice as that of any of the
recognised professions. Perhaps publishing books should qualify as an art,
since it has the characteristics of bringing out what is best or worst in
a publisher; and, indeed, if we are to hold that any successful means of
self-expression is art, then publishing books has been an art more than
once; for unquestionably there are publishers who find self-expression in
their work.
This is an interesting subject, but I must not pursue it in this place.
Certainly Miss Graves was justified in objecting to the use of her new pen
name on work already published under her own name. In her case, as I
think, the objection was peculiarly well-founded, because it seems to me
that Richard Dehan was a new person. Since Richard Dehan appeared on the
title-page of _The Dop Doctor_, there has never been a Clotilde Graves in
books. You have only to study the books. The _Dop Doctor_ was followed,
two years later, by _Between Two Thieves_. This novel has as a leading
character Florence Nightingale under the name of Ada Merling. The story
was at first to have been called "The Lady With The Lamp"; but the author
delayed it for a year and subjected it to a complete rewriting, the result
of a new and enlarged conception of the story.
Then came a steady succession of novels by Richard Dehan. I remember with
what surprise I read, in 1918, _That Which Hath Wings_, a war story of
large dimensions and an incredible amount of exact and easy detail. I
remember, too, noting that there was embedded in it a marvellous story for
children--an airplane flight in which a youngster figured--if the
publisher chose, with the author's consent, to lift this out of its
larger, adult setting. I remember very vividly reading in 1920 a
collection of short stories by Richard Dehan, published under the title
_The Eve of Pascua_. Pascua is the Spanish word for Easter. I wondered
where on earth, unless in Spain itself, the author got the bright
colouring for his story.
What I did not realise at the time was that Richard Dehan is like that.
Now, smitten to earth by the 500-page novel which he has just completed, I
think I understand better. _The Just Steward_, from one standpoint, makes
the labours of Gustave Flaubert in _Salaambo_ seem trivial. It is known
with what passionate tenacity and surprising ardour the French master
studied the subject of ancient Carthage, grubbing like the lowliest
archseologist to get at his fingertips all those recondite allusions so
necessary if he were to move with lightness, assurance and consummate art
through the scenes of his novel. But, frankly, one does not expect this of
the third daughter of an Irish soldier, an ex-journalist and the author of
a Drury Lane pantomime. Nevertheless the erudition is all here. From this
standpoint, _The Just Steward_ is truly monumental. I will show you a
sample or two:
"Beautiful, even with the trench and wall of Diocletian's comparatively
recent siege scarring the orchards and vineyards of Lake Mareotis,
splendid even though her broken canals and aqueducts had never been
repaired, and part of her western quarter still displayed heaps of
calcined ruins where had been temples, palaces and academies, Alexandria
lay shimmering under the African sun....
"The vintage of Egypt was in full swing, the figs and dates were being
harvested. Swarms of wasps and hornets, armed with formidable stings,
yellow-striped like the dreaded nomads of the south and eastern frontiers,
greedily sucked the sugary juices of the ripe fruit. Flocks of fig-birds
twittered amongst the branches, being like the date-pigeons, almost too
gorged to fly. Half naked, dark or tawny skinned, tattooed native
labourers, hybrids of mingled races, with heads close-shaven save for a
topknot, dwellers in mud-hovels, drudges of the water-wheel, cut down the
heavy grape-clusters with sickle-shaped cooper knives.
"Ebony, woolly-haired negroes in clean white breech-cloths, piled up the
gathered fruit in tall baskets woven of reeds and lined with leaves. Copts
with the rich reddish skins, the long eyes and boldly curving profiles of
Egyptian warriors and monarchs as presented on the walls of ancient
temples of Libya and the Thebaïd, moved about in leather-girdled blue
linen tunics and hide sandals, keeping account of the laden panniers,
roped upon the backs of diminutive asses and carried to the winepresses as
fast as they were filled.
"The negroes sang as they set snares for fig-birds, and stuffed themselves
to the throat with grapes and custard-apples. The fat beccaficoes beloved
of the epicurean fell by hundreds into the limed horsehair traps. Greek,
Egyptian and negro girls, laughing under garlands of hibiscus, periwinkle
and tuberoses, coaxed the fat morsels out of the black men to carry home
for a supper treat, while acrobats, comic singers, sellers of cakes,
drinks and sweetmeats, with strolling jugglers and jesters and Jewish
fortune-tellers of both sexes, assailed the workers and the merrymakers
with importunities and made harvest in their own way."
The story is extraordinary. Opening in the Alexandria of the fourth
century, it pictures two men, a Roman official and a Jewish steward, who
are friends unto death. The second of the four parts or books into which
the novel is divided opens in England in 1914. We have to do with John
Hazel, the descendant of Hazaël Aben Hazaël, and with the lovely Katharine
Forbis, whose ancestor was a Roman, Hazaël Aben Hazaël's sworn friend.
A story of exciting action certainly; it has elements that would
ordinarily be called melodramatic--events which are focussed down into
realities against the tremendous background of an incredible war. The
exotic settings are Egypt and Palestine. It must not be thought that the
story is bizarre; the scenes in England, the English slang of John Hazel,
as well as the typical figure of Trixie, Lady Wastwood, are utterly
modern. I do not find anything to explain how Miss Graves could write such
a book; the answer is that Richard Dehan wrote it.
=iii=
Miss Graves, of whose antecedents and education we already know something,
is a Roman Catholic in faith and a Liberal Unionist in politics. She lives
at The Towers, Beeding, near Bramber, Sussex. Her recreations are
gardening and driving.
But Richard Dehan knows the early history of the Christian Church; he
knows military life, strategy, tactics, types; he knows in a most
extraordinary way the details of Jewish history and religious observances;
he knows perfectly and as a matter of course all about English middle
class life; he knows all sorts of things about the East--Turkey and Arabia
and those countries.
This is a discrepancy which will bear a good deal of accounting for.
Before I try to account for it I will give you a long passage from _The
Just Steward_, describing the visit of Katharine Forbis and her friend to
the house of John Hazel, lately of London and now of Alexandria:
"The negro porter who had opened the door, a huge Ethiopian of ebony
blackness, dressed and turbaned in snow-white linen, salaamed deeply to
the ladies, displaying as he did so a mouthful of teeth as dazzling in
whiteness and sharply-pointed as those of the mosaic dog.
"Then the negro shut the heavy door and locked and bolted it. They heard
the car snort and move away as the heavy bolts scrooped in their ancient
grooves of stone. But, as they glanced back, towards the entrance, the
imperturbable attendant in the black kaftan waved them forward to where
another man, exactly like himself in feature, colouring and costume,
waited as imperturbably on the threshold of a larger hall beyond. On its
right-hand doorpost was affixed a cylinder of metal _repoussée_ with an
oval piece of glass on that something like a human eye. And the big
invisible bees went on humming as industriously and as sleepily as ever:
"'Bz'zz'z!... Bzz'z!... Bzz m'm'm!...'
"Perhaps it was the bees' thick, sleepy droning that made Miss Forbis feel
as though she had previously visited this house in a dream, in which,
though the mosaic dog had certainly figured, together with a negro who had
opened doors, the rows of shoes along the wall, the little creature
tripping at her side, the two dark, ultra-respectable men in black
tarbushes and kaftans had had no place or part. Only John Hazel had bulked
big. He was there, beyond the grave Semitic face of the second Jewish
secretary, on the farther side of the torrent of boiling amber sunshine
pouring through a central opening in the roof of the inner hall that
succeeded the vestibule of the mosaic Cerberus. An atrium some forty feet
in length, paved with squares of black and yellow marble with an oblong
pool in the midst of it, upon whose still crystal surface pink and crimson
petals of roses had been strewn in patterns, and in the centre of which a
triple-jetted fountain played.
"The humming of the unseen bees came louder than ever, from a doorway in
the wall upon Katharine's right hand, a wall of black polished marble,
decorated with an inlaid ornament in porphyry of yellow and red and pale
green. The curtain of dyed and threaded reeds did not hide what lay beyond
the doorway. You saw a long, high-pitched whitewashed room, cooled by big
wooden electric fans working under the ceiling, and traversed by avenues
of creamy-white Chinese matting, running between rows of low native desks,
before each of which squatted, on naked or cotton-sock-covered heels, or
sat cross-legged upon a square native chintz cushion, a coffee-coloured,
almond-eyed young Copt, in a black or blue cotton nightgown, topped with
the tarbush of black felt or a dingy-white or olive-brown muslin turban,
murmuring softly to himself as he made entries, from right to left, in a
huge limp-covered ledger, or deftly fingered the balls of coloured clay
strung on the wires of the abacus at his side.
"Oh! ... Wonderful! I'm so Glad you Brought me!'
"Lady Wastwood's emphatic exclamation of pleasure in her surroundings
brought cessation in the humming--caused a swivelling of capped or
turbanned heads all down the length of three avenues--evoked a
simultaneous flash of black Oriental eyes, and white teeth in dusky faces
lifted or turned. Then at the upper end of the long counting-house, where
three wide glassless windows looked on a sanded palm-garden, and the
leather-topped knee-hole tables, roll-top desks, copying ink presses,
mahogany revolving-chairs, telephone installations, willow-paper baskets,
pewter inkstands and Post Office Directories suggested Cornhill and
Cheapside rather than the Orient--one of the olive-faced Jewish
head-clerks in kaftans and side-curls coughed--and as though he had pulled
a string controlling all the observant faces, every tooth was hidden and
every eye discreetly bent on the big limp ledgers again.
"All the Coptic bees were humming sonorously in unison as Katharine went
forward to a lofty doorway, framing brightness, where waited to receive
her the master of the hive....
"The light beings behind him may have exaggerated his proportions, but he
seemed to Trixie the biggest man she had ever seen, and nearly the
ugliest. Close-curling coarse black hair capped his high-domed skull, and
his stern, powerful, swarthy face, big-nosed and long-chinned, with a
humorous quirk at the corners of the heavy-lipped mouth, that redeemed its
sensuousness, was lighted by eyes of the intensest black, burning under
heavy beetle-brows. His khaki uniform, though of fine material and
admirable cut, was that of a common ranker, and a narrow strip of colours
over the heart, and the fact of his left arm being bandaged and slung,
intimated to Lady Wastwood that Katharine's Jewish friend had already
served with some degree of distinction, and had been wounded in the War.
And drawing back with her characteristic inconquerable shyness, as he
advanced to Miss Forbis, plainly unconscious of any presence save hers,
Trixie's observant green eyes saw him bend his towering head, and sweep
his right arm out and down with slow Oriental stateliness, bringing back
the supple hand to touch breast, lips and brow. Whether or not he had
raised the hem of Katharine's skirt to his lips and kissed it, Lady
Wastwood could not definitely determine. She was left with the impression
that he had done this thing."
=iv=
I should have liked to have given, rather than purely descriptive
passages, a slice of the complicated and tense action with which the story
brims over, but there is the difficulty that such a scene might not be
intelligible to one not having read the story from the beginning. I must
resist the tendency to quote any more, having indulged it already to
excess, and I am ready to propound my theory of the existence of Richard
Dehan.
If you receive a letter from The Towers, Beeding, it will bear a double
signature, like this:
RICHARD DEHAN
CLOTILDE GRAVES
Clotilde Graves has become a secondary personality.
There was once a time when there was no Richard Dehan. There now are times
when there is no Clotilde Graves.
To a woman in middle age an opportunity presented itself. It was the
chance to write a novel around the subject which, as a girl, she had come
to know a great deal about--the subject of war. To write about it and gain
attention, the novel required a man's signature.
Then there was born in the mind of the woman who purposed to write the
novel the idea of a man--of _the_ man--who should be the novelist she
wanted to be. He should use as by right and from instinct the material
which lay inutile at her woman's disposal.
She created Richard Dehan. Perhaps, in so doing, she created another
monster like Frankenstein's. I do not know.
Born of necessity and opportunity and a woman's inventiveness, Richard
Dehan took over whatever of Clotilde Graves's he could use. He is now the
master. It is, intellectually and spiritually, as if he were the
full-grown son of Clotilde Graves. It is a partnership not less intimate
than that.
Clotilde Graves--but she does not matter. I think she existed to bring
Richard Dehan into the world.
BOOKS BY RICHARD DEHAN
Novels:
THE LOVER'S BATTLE
THE DOP DOCTOR
BETWEEN TWO THIEVES
THE HEADQUARTER RECRUIT
THE COST OF WINGS
THE MAN OF IRON
OFF SANDY HOOK
EARTH TO EARTH
UNDER THE HERMES
THAT WHICH HATH WINGS
A SAILOR'S HOME
THE EVE OF PASCUA
THE VILLA OF THE PEACOCK
THE JUST STEWARD
Plays
NITOCRIS
DRURY LANE PANTOMIME, PUSS IN BOOTS
DR. AND MRS. NEILL
A MOTHER OF THREE
A MATCHMAKER
THE BISHOP'S EYE
THE FOREST LOVERS
A MAKER OF COMEDIES
THE BOND OF NIKON
A TENEMENT TRAGEDY
SOURCES ON RICHARD DEHAN
Who's Who [in England].
THE BOOKMAN for February, 1913 (Volume XXXVI, pp. 595-6), also brief
mention in THE BOOKMAN for September and October, 1912.
Private Information.