ROBERT W. CHAMBERS AND THE WHOLE TRUTH
=i=
Once a man came to Robert W. Chambers and said words to this effect:
"You had a great gift as a literary artist and you spoiled it. For some
reason or other, I don't know what, but I suppose there was more money in
the other thing, you wrote down to a big audience. Don't you think,
yourself, that your earlier work--those stories of Paris and those novels
of the American revolution--had something that you have sacrificed in your
novels of our modern day?"
Mr. Chambers listened politely and attentively. When the man had finished,
Chambers said to him words to this effect:
"You are mistaken. I have heard such talk. I am not to blame if some
people entertain a false impression. I have sacrificed nothing, neither
for money nor popularity nor anything else.
"Sir, I am a story-teller. I have no other gift. Those who imagine that
they have seen in my earlier work some quality of literary distinction or
some unrealised possibility as an artist missing from my later work, are
wrong.
"They have read into those stories their own satisfaction in them and
their first delight. I was new, then. In their pleasure, such as it was,
they imagined the arrival of someone whom they styled a great literary
artist. They imagined it all; it was not I.
"A story-teller I began, and a story-teller I remain. I do pride myself on
being a good story-teller; if the verdict were overwhelmingly against me
as a good story-teller that would cast me down. I have no reason to
believe that the verdict is against me.
"And that is the ground I myself have stood upon. I am not responsible for
the delusion of those who put me on some other, unearthly pinnacle, only
to realise, as the years went by, that I was not there at all. But they
can find me now where they first found me--where I rather suspect they
found me first with unalloyed delight."
This does not pretend to be an actual transcription of the conversation
between Mr. Chambers and his visitor. I asked Mr. Chambers recently if he
recalled this interview. He said at this date he did not distinctly
recollect it and he added:
"Probably I said what is true, that I write the sort of stories which at
the moment it amuses me to write; I trust to luck that it may also amuse
the public.
"If a writer makes a hit with a story the public wants him to continue
that sort of story. It does not like to follow the moods of a writer from
gay to frivolous, from serious to grave, but I have always liked to
change, to experiment--just as I used to like to change my medium in
painting, aquarelle, oil, charcoal, wash, etc.
"Unless I had a good time writing I'd do something else. I suit myself
first of all in choice of subject and treatment, and leave the rest to the
gods."
As a human creature Chambers is strikingly versatile. It must always be
remembered that he started life as a painter. There is a story that
Charles Dana Gibson and Robert W. Chambers sent their first offerings to
Life at the same time. Mr. Chambers sent a picture and Mr. Gibson sent a
bit of writing. Mr. Gibson's offering was accepted and Robert W. Chambers
received a rejection slip.
Not only was he a painter but Chambers has preserved his interest in art,
and is a welcome visitor in the offices of curators and directors of
museums because he is one of the few who can talk intelligently about
paintings.
He knows enough about Chinese and Japanese antiques to enable him to
detect forgeries. He knows more about armour than anyone, perhaps, except
the man who made the marvellous collection of mediæval armour for the
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
One of his varieties of knowledge, observable by any reader of his novels,
is lepidoptery--the science of butterflies. He collects butterflies with
exceeding ardour. But then, he is a good deal of an outdoor man. He knows
horses and books; he has been known to hunt; he has been seen with a
fishing rod in his hand.
His knowledge of out-of-the-way places in different parts of the
world--Paris, Petrograd--is not usual.
Will you believe me if I add that he is something of an expert on rare
rugs?
Of course, I am, to some extent, taking Rupert Hughes's word for these
accomplishments; and yet they are visible in the written work of Robert W.
Chambers where, as a rule, they appear without extrusion.
=ii=
And here is the newest Robert W. Chambers novel, _Eris_. Mr. Chambers's
_The Flaming Jewel_, a melodrama of the maddest character, was published
last spring. _Eris_ is really a story of the movie world, and reaches its
most definite conclusion, possibly, in a passage where the hero says to
Eris Odell:
"Whether they are financing a picture, directing it, releasing it,
exhibiting it, or acting in it, these vermin are likely to do it to death.
Your profession is crawling with them. It needs delousing."
But I am not really anxious, in this chapter, to discuss the justice or
injustice of the view of motion pictures thus forcibly presented. I have
read _Eris_ with an interest sharpened by the fact that its hero is a
writer. I seem to see in what is said about and by Barry Annan expressions
of Mr. Chambers's own attitude of more than casual importance.
Barry Annan is obsessed with the stupidity of the American mass and more
particularly with the grossness (as he sees it) of New York City.
"Annan went on with his breakfast leisurely. As he ate he read over his
pencilled manuscript and corrected it between bites of muffin and bacon.
"It was laid out on the lines of those modern short stories which had
proven so popular and which had lifted Barry Annan out of the uniform
ranks of the unidentified and given him an individual and approving
audience for whatever he chose to offer them.
"Already there had been lively competition among periodical publishers for
the work of this newcomer.
"His first volume of short stories was now in preparation. Repetition had
stencilled his name and his photograph upon the public cerebrum. Success
had not yet enraged the less successful in the literary puddle. The frogs
chanted politely in praise of their own comrade.
"The maiden, too, who sips the literary soup that seeps through the pages
of periodical publications, was already requesting his autograph. Clipping
agencies began to pursue him; film companies wasted his time with
glittering offers that never materialised. Annan was on the way to
premature fame and fortune. And to the aftermath that follows for all who
win too easily and too soon.
"There is a King Stork for all puddles. His law is the law of
compensations. Dame Nature executes it--alike on species that swarm and on
individuals that ripen too quickly.
"Annan wrote very fast. There was about thirty-five hundred words in the
story of Eris. He finished it by half past ten.
"Re-reading it, he realised it had all the concentrated brilliancy of an
epigram. Whether or not it would hold water did not bother him. The story
of Eris was Barry Annan at his easiest and most persuasive. There was the
characteristic and ungodly skill in it, the subtle partnership with a
mindless public that seduces to mental speculation; the reassuring caress
as reward for intellectual penetration; that inborn cleverness that makes
the reader see, applaud, or pity him or herself in the sympathetic rôle of
a plaything of Chance and Fate.
"And always Barry Annan left the victim of his tact and technique
agreeably trapped, suffering gratefully, excited by self-approval to the
verge of sentimental tears.
"'That'll make 'em ruffle their plumage and gulp down a sob or two,' he
reflected, his tongue in his cheek, a little intoxicated, as usual, by his
own infernal facility.
"He lit a cigarette, shuffled his manuscript, numbered the pages, and
stuffed them into his pocket. The damned thing was done."
And again:--
"Considering her, now, a half-smile touching his lips, it occurred to him
that here, in her, he saw his audience in the flesh. This was what his
written words did to his readers. His skill held their attention; his
persuasive technique, unsuspected, led them where he guided. His
cleverness meddled with their intellectual emotions. The more primitive
felt it physically, too.
"When he dismissed them at the bottom of the last page they went away
about their myriad vocations. But his brand was on their hearts. They were
his, these countless listeners whom he had never seen--never would see.
"He checked his agreeable revery. This wouldn't do. He was becoming smug.
Reaction brought the inevitable note of alarm. Suppose his audience tired
of him. Suppose he lost them. Chastened, he realised what his audience
meant to him--these thousands of unknown people whose minds he titivated,
whose reason he juggled with and whose heart-strings he yanked, his tongue
in his cheek."
And this further on:--
"He went into his room but did not light the lamp. For a long while he sat
by the open window looking out into the darkness of Governor's Place.
"It probably was nothing he saw out there that brought to his lips a
slight recurrent smile.
"The bad habit of working late at night was growing on this young man. It
is a picturesque habit, and one of the most imbecile, because sound work
is done only with a normal mind.
"He made himself some coffee. A rush of genius to the head followed
stimulation. He had a grand time, revelling with pen and pad and littering
the floor with inked sheets unnumbered and still wet. His was a messy
genius. His plot-logic held by the grace of God and a hair-line. Even the
Leaning Tower of Pisa can be plumbed; and the lead dangled inside
Achilles's tendon when one held the string to the medulla of Annan's
stories."
Our young man is undergoing a variety of interesting changes:
"Partly experimental, partly sympathetically responsive, always tenderly
curious, this young man drifted gratefully through the inevitable episodes
to which all young men are heir.
"And something in him always transmuted into ultimate friendship the
sentimental chaos, where comedy and tragedy clashed at the crisis.
"The result was professional knowledge. Which, however, he had employed
rather ruthlessly in his work. For he resolutely cut out all that had been
agreeable to the generations which had thriven on the various phases of
virtue and its rewards. Beauty he replaced with ugliness; dreary squalor
was the setting for crippled body and deformed mind. The heavy twilight of
Scandinavian insanity touched his pages where sombre shapes born out of
Jewish Russia moved like anachronisms through the unpolluted sunshine of
the New World.
"His were essays on the enormous meanness of mankind--meaner conditions,
mean minds, mean aspirations, and a little mean horizon to encompass all.
"Out of his theme, patiently, deftly, ingeniously he extracted every atom
of that beauty, sanity, inspired imagination which _makes_ the imperfect
more perfect, creates _better_ than the materials permit, _forces_ real
life actually to assume and _be_ what the passionate desire for sanity and
beauty demands."
There comes a time when Eris Odell says to Barry Annan:--
"'I could neither understand nor play such a character as the woman in
your last book.... Nor could I ever believe in her.... Nor in the ugliness
of her world--the world you write about, nor in the dreary, hopeless,
malformed, starving minds you analyse.... My God, Mr. Annan--are there no
wholesome brains in the world you write about?'"
I think these citations interesting. I do not feel especially competent to
produce from them inferences regarding Mr. Chambers's own attitude toward
his work.
_Eris_ will be published early in 1923, following Mr. Chambers's _The
Talkers_.
=iii=
Mr. Chambers was born in Brooklyn, May 26, 1865, the son of William
Chambers and Carolyn (Boughton) Chambers. Walter Boughton Chambers, the
architect, is his brother. Robert William Chambers was a student in the
Julien Academy in Paris from 1886 to 1893. He married, on July 12, 1898,
Elsa Vaughn Moler. He first exhibited in the Paris Salon in 1889; he was
an illustrator for Life, Truth, Vogue and other magazines. His first book,
_In the Quarter_, was published in 1893; and when, in the same year, a
collection of stories of Paris called _The King in Yellow_ made its
appearance, Robert W. Chambers became a name of literary importance.
Curiously enough, among the things persistently remembered about Mr.
Chambers to this day is a particular poem in a book of rollicking verse
called _With the Band_, which he published in 1895. This cherished--by
very many people scattered here and there--poem had to do with Irishmen
parading. One stanza will identify it.
"Ses Corporal Madden to Private McFadden:
'Bedad yer a bad 'un!
Now turn out yer toes!
Yer belt is unhookit,
Yer cap is on crookit,
Yer may not be drunk,
But, be jabers, ye look it!
Wan-two!
Wan-two!
Ye monkey-faced divil, I'll jolly ye through!
Wan-two!
Time! Mark!
Ye march like the aigle in Cintheral Park!'"
In the course of writing many books, Chambers has been responsible for one
or two shows. He wrote for Ada Rehan, _The Witch of Ellangowan_, a drama
produced at Daly's Theatre. His _Iole_ was the basis of a delightful
musical comedy produced in New York in 1913. He is a member of the
National Institute of Arts and Letters.
BOOKS BY ROBERT W. CHAMBERS
IN THE QUARTER
THE KING IN YELLOW
THE RED REPUBLIC
THE KING AND A FEW DUKES
THE MAKER OF MOONS
WITH THE BAND
THE MYSTERY OF CHOICE
LORRAINE
ASHES OF EMPIRE
THE HAUNTS OF MEN
THE CAMBRIC MASK
OUTSIDERS
THE CONSPIRATORS
CARDIGAN
THE MAID-AT-ARMS
OUTDOOR-LAND
THE MAIDS OF PARADISE
ORCHARD-LAND
FOREST LAND
IOLE
THE FIGHTING CHANCE
MOUNTAIN LAND
THE TRACER OF LOST PERSONS
THE TREE OF HEAVEN
THE FIRING LINE
SOME LADIES IN HASTE
THE DANGER MARK
THE SPECIAL MESSENGER
HIDE AND SEEK IN FORESTLAND
THE GREEN MOUSE
AILSA PAIGE
BLUE-BIRD WEATHER
JAPONETTE
THE STREETS OF ASCALON
ADVENTURES OF A MODEST MAN
THE BUSINESS OF LIFE
THE COMMON LAW
THE GAY REBELLION
WHO GOES THERE?
THE HIDDEN CHILDREN
ATHALIE
POLICE!!!
THE GIRL PHILIPPA
THE BARBARIANS
THE RESTLESS SEX
THE MOONLIT WAY
IN SECRET
THE CRIMSON TIDE
THE SLAYER OF SOULS
THE LITTLE RED FOOT
THE FLAMING JEWEL
THE TALKERS
ERIS
SOURCES ON ROBERT W. CHAMBERS
Hugh Walpole: An Appreciation, by Joseph Hergesheimer, GEORGE H. DORAN
COMPANY.
English Literature During the Last Half Century, by J. W. Cunliffe, THE
MACMILLAN COMPANY.
A Hugh Walpole Anthology, selected by the author. LONDON: J. M. DENT
& SONS. NEW YORK: E. P. DUTTON & COMPANY.
Hugh Walpole, Master Novelist. Pamphlet published by GEORGE H. DORAN
COMPANY. (Out of print.)
Who's Who [In England].