THE CONFESSIONS OF A WELL-MEANING YOUNG MAN, STEPHEN MCKENNA
=i=
In a sense, all of Stephen McKenna's writing has been a confession. More
than any other novelist now actively at work, this young man bases fiction
on biographical and autobiographical material; and when he sits down
deliberately to write reminiscences, such as _While I Remember_, the
result is merely that, in addition to confessing himself, he confesses
others.
He has probably had more opportunity of knowing the social and political
life of London from the inside than most novelists of his time. In _While
I Remember_ he gives his recollections, while his memory is still fresh
enough to be vivid, of a generation that closed, for literary if not for
political purposes, with the Peace Conference. There is a power of wit and
mordant humour and a sufficiency of descriptive power and insight into
human character in all his work.
[Illustration: STEPHEN McKENNA]
_While I Remember_ is actually a gallery of pictures taken from the life
and executed with the technique of youth by a man still young--pictures of
public school and university life, of social London from the death of King
Edward to the Armistice, of domestic and foreign politics of the period,
of the public services of Great Britain at home and abroad. Though all
these are within the circle of Mr. McKenna's narrative, literary
London--the London that is more talked about than seen--is the core of his
story.
=ii=
Mr. McKenna's latest novel, _The Confessions of a Well-Meaning Woman_, is
a series of monologues addressed by one Lady Ann Spenworth to "a friend of
proved discretion." I quote from the London Times of April 6, 1922: "In
the course of them Lady Ann Spenworth reveals to us the difficulties
besetting a lady of rank. She is compelled to live in a house in Mount
street--for how could she ask 'The Princess' to visit her in
Bayswater?--and her income of a few thousands, hardly supplemented by her
husband's directorships, is depleted by the disbursements needed to keep
the name of her only son out of the newspapers while she is obtaining for
him the wife and the salary suited to his requirements and capacities. Mr.
Stephen McKenna provides us with the same kind of exasperating
entertainment that we get at games from watching a skilful and
unscrupulous veteran. Her deftness in taking a step or two forward in the
centre and so putting the fast wing off side; her air of sporting
acquiescence touched with astonishment when a penalty is given against her
for obstruction; her resolution in jumping in to hit a young bowler off
his length; the trouble she has with her shoe-lace when her opponent is
nervous; the suddenness with which every now and again her usually
deliberate second service will follow her first; the slight pucker in her
eyebrows when she picks up a hand full of spades; the pluck with which she
throws herself on the ball when there is nothing else for it; her
dignified bonhomie in the dressing room! We all know Lady Ann and her
tricks, but nothing can be proved against her and she continues to play
for the best clubs.
"In this story Lady Ann is playing the social game, and it is a tribute to
the skill of Mr. McKenna that at the end we hope that the Princess will be
sufficiently curious about her new 'frame and setting' to continue her
visits.... We have used the word 'story' because Lady Ann reports her
machinations while they are in progress and we are a little nervous about
the issue. Her main service, however, lies in the pictures she draws of
her own highly placed relatives and of a number of people who at house
parties and elsewhere may help ladies of title to make both ends meet.
Chief among them is her son Will, who even as seen through her partial
eyes, appears a very dishonest, paltry boy. Her blind devotion to him
humanises both her shrewdness and her selfishness. It is for his sake that
she separates her niece from the fine young soldier she is in love with
and that she almost succeeds in providing the King's Proctor with the
materials for an intervention that would secure to him the estates and
title of his fox-hunting uncle. There is always a plain tale to put her
down and always the friend of proved discretion is left with the
impression that the tale is the invention of malice; at least we suppose
she must be, for Lady Ann is allowed by people to whom she has done one
injury to remain in a position to do them another. The difficult medium
employed by Mr. McKenna entitles him, however, to count on the
co-operation of the reader; and it is to be accorded the more readily that
to it we owe the felicity of having her own account of the steps she took
to prevent an attractive but expensive widow from running away with her
husband, and of the party which she gave, according to plan, to the
Princess and, not according to plan, to other guests let loose on her by
her scapegrace brother-in-law."
=iii=
Stephen McKenna, the author of _Sonia_, not to be confused with Stephen
McKenna, the translator of Poltinus, belongs to the Protestant branch of
that royal Catholic sept which has had its home in the County Monagham
since the dawn of Irish history. Some members, even, of this branch have
reverted to the old faith since the date of Stephen McKenna's birth in the
year 1888 in London.
He was a scholar of Westminster and an exhibitioner of Christ Church,
Oxford. After he had taken his degree, his father, Leopold McKenna, an
elder brother of the Right Honourable Reginald McKenna, K. C., the last
Liberal Chancellor of the British Exchequer, made it possible for him to
travel desultorily and to try his luck in the great literary adventure.
On the outbreak of the war, as his health, which is delicate to the point
of frailness, debarred him from entering the army, Stephen McKenna first
volunteered for service at his old school, and, after a year, joined the
staff of the War Trade Intelligence Department, where he did valuable war
work for three and a half years. He represented his department on the
Right Honourable A. J. Balfour's mission in 1917, to the United States,
where he enjoyed himself thoroughly and made himself very popular; and he
did not sever his connection with the government service until February,
1919, four months after the conclusion of the armistice.
Stephen McKenna's first three novels--_The Reluctant Lover_, _Sheila
Intervenes_ and _The Sixth Sense_--were written and published before their
author was 27 years of age! But _Sonia_, the story that made him widely
known, was written entirely during the period of his activities on the
staff of Westminster School and at the War Trade Intelligence Department.
The book won the public favour more quickly than perhaps any other novel
that has appeared in our time.
The success of _Sonia_ was largely due to its description in a facile,
popular and yet eminently chaste and polished style, of the social and
political situation in England for a half generation before and during the
early stages of the war. This description Stephen McKenna was peculiarly
well-equipped to produce, not only as the near relative of a prominent
cabinet minister, but also as an assiduous frequenter of the leading
Liberal centre, the Reform Club, on the committee of which he had sat,
despite his youthful years, since 1915. The political interest, indeed, is
revealed in the subtitle, _Between Two Worlds_, which was originally
intended for the actual title.
McKenna's next book, _Ninety-Six Hours' Leave_, appealed to the reader's
gayer moods and _Midas and Son_, with its tragic history of an
Anglo-American multimillionaire, to the reader in serious temper.
In spite of certain blemishes due to Mr. McKenna's unfamiliarity with
American life, I should say that _Midas and Son_ is probably his ablest
work so far. I think it surpasses even _Sonia_. Mr. McKenna returned to
Sonia in his novel, _Sonia Married_. His work after that was a trilogy
called _The Sensationalists_, three brilliant studies of modern London in
the form of successive novels called _Lady Lilith_, _The Education of Eric
Lane_ and _The Secret Victory_.
=iv=
Writing from 11, Stone Buildings, Lincoln's Inn, London, in 1920, Mr.
McKenna had this to say about his trilogy:
"_Lady Lilith_ is the first volume of a trilogy called _The
Sensationalists_, three books giving the history for a few years before
the war, during and immediately after the war, of a group of
sensation-mongers, emotion-hunters or whatever you like to call them,
whose principle and practice it was to startle the world by the
extravagance of their behaviour, speech, dress and thought and, in the
other sense of the word, sensationalism, to live on the excitement of new
experiences. Such people have always existed and always will exist,
receiving perhaps undue attention from the world that they set out to
astonish. You, I am sure, have them in America, as we have them here, and
in the luxurious and idle years before the war they had incomparable scope
for their search for novelty and their quest for emotion. Some of the
characters in _Lady Lilith_ have already been seen hovering in the
background of _Sonia_, _Midas and Son_ and _Sonia Married_, though the
principal characters in _Lady Lilith_ have not before been painted at full
length or in great detail; and these principal characters will be found in
all three books of the trilogy.
"_Lady Lilith_, of course, takes its title from the Talmud, according to
which Lilith was Adam's first wife; and as mankind did not taste of the
Tree of Knowledge or of death until Eve came to trouble the Garden of
Eden, Lilith belongs to a time in which there was neither death nor
knowledge of good or evil in the world. She is immortal, unaging and
non-moral; her name is given by Valentine Arden, the young novelist who
appears in _Sonia_ and elsewhere, to Lady Barbara Neave, the principal
character in _Lady Lilith_ and one of the principal characters in the two
succeeding books."
=v=
In person, Stephen McKenna is tall, with a slender figure, Irish blue
eyes, fair hair, regular features and a Dante profile. He has an engaging
and very courteous address, a sympathetic manner, a ready but always
urbane wit and great conversational charm. He possesses the rare
accomplishment of "talking like a book." His intimates are legion; and,
apart from these, he knows everyone who "counts" in London society. He is
known never to lose his temper; and it is doubtful whether he has ever had
cause to lose it.
His one recreation is the Opera; and during the London season his
delightful chambers in Lincoln's Inn are the almost nightly scene of
parties collected then and there from the opera house.
=vi=
A sample of _The Confessions of a Well-Meaning Woman_:
"Lady Ann (_to a friend of proved discretion_): You have toiled all the
way here again? Do you know, I feel I am only beginning to find out who my
true friends are? I am much, much better.... On Friday I am to be allowed
on to the sofa and by the end of next week Dr. Richardson promises to let
me go back to Mount Street. Of course I should have liked the operation to
take place there--it is one's frame and setting, but, truly honestly,
Arthur and I have not been in a position to have any painting or papering
done for so long.... The surgeon insisted on a nursing home. Apparatus and
so on and so forth.... Quite between ourselves I fancy that they make a
very good thing out of these homes; but I am so thankful to be well again
that I would put up with almost any imposition....
"Everything went off too wonderfully. Perhaps you have seen my brother
Brackenbury? Or Ruth? Ah, I am sorry; I should have been vastly
entertained to hear what they were saying, what they dared say. Ruth did
indeed offer to pay the expenses of the operation--the belated prick of
conscience!--and it was on the tip of my tongue to say we are not yet
dependent on her spasmodic charity. Also, that I can keep my lips closed
about Brackenbury without expecting a--tip? But they know I can't afford
to refuse £500.... If they, if everybody would only leave one alone! Spied
on, whispered about....
"The papers made such an absurd stir! If you are known by name as
occupying any little niche, the world waits gaping below. I suppose I
ought to be flattered, but for days there were callers, letters,
telephone-messages. Like Royalty _in extremis_.... And I never pretended
that the operation was in any sense critical....
"Do you know, beyond saying that, I would much rather not talk about it?
This very modern frankness.... Not you, of course! But when a man like my
brother-in-law Spenworth strides in here a few hours before the anæsthetic
is administered and says 'What is the matter with you? Much ado about
nothing, I call it.' ... That from Arthur's brother to Arthur's wife,
when, for all he knew, he might never see her alive again.... I prefer
just to say that everything went off most satisfactorily and that I hope
now to be better than I have been for years...."
BOOKS BY STEPHEN MCKENNA
THE RELUCTANT LOVER
SHEILA INTERVENES
THE SIXTH SENSE
SONIA: BETWEEN TWO WORLDS
NINETY-SIX HOURS' LEAVE
MIDAS AND SON
SONIA MARRIED
LADY LILITH
THE EDUCATION OF ERIC LANE
THE SECRET VICTORY
WHILE I REMEMBER
THE CONFESSIONS OF A WELL-MEANING WOMAN
SOURCES ON STEPHEN MCKENNA
_Who's Who_ [In England].
Private Information.