(OUR HERO'S BOOK AND HEART SHALL NEVER PART)
Perhaps I should apologize for treating Mr. Holliday's "Walking-Stick
Papers" in this biographical fashion. And yet I cannot resist it for
this book is Mr. Holliday himself. It is mellow, odd, aromatic and
tender, just as he is. It is (as he said of something else) "saturated
with a distinguished, humane tradition of letters."
The book is exciting reading because you can trace in it the growth and
felicitous toughening of a very remarkable talent. Mr. Holliday has been
through a lively and gruelling mill. Like every sensitive journalist, he
has been mangled at Ephesus. Slight and debonair as some of his pieces
are, there is not one that is not an authentic fiber from life. That is
the beauty of this sort of writing--the personal essay--it admits us to
the very pulse of the machine. We see this man: selling books at
Scribner's, pacing New York streets at night gloating on the yellow
windows and the random ring of words, fattening his spirit on hundreds
of books, concocting his own theory of the niceties of prose. We see
that volatile humor which is native in him flickering like burning
brandy round the rich plum pudding of his theme. With all his
playfulness, when he sets out to achieve a certain effect he builds
cunningly, with sure and skillful art. See (for instance) in his "As to
People," his superbly satisfying picture (how careless it seems!) of his
scrubwoman, closing with the précis of Billy Henderson's wife, which
drives the nail through and turns it on the under side--
Billy Henderson's wife is handsome; she is rich; she is an excellent
cook; she loves Billy Henderson.
See "My friend the Policeman," or "On Going a Journey," or "The
Deceased"--this last is perhaps the high-water mark of the book. To vary
the figure, this essay dips its Plimsoll-mark full under. It is
freighted with far more than a dozen pages might be expected to carry
safely. So quietly, so quaintly told, what a wealth of humanity is in
it! Am I wrong in thinking that those fellow-artists who know the thrill
of a great thing greatly done will catch breath when they read this, of
the minor obits in the press--
We go into the feature headed "Died," a department similar to that
on the literary page headed "Books Received." ... We are set in
small type, with lines following the name line indented. It is
difficult for me to tell with certainty from the printed page, but I
think we are set without leads.
In such passages, where the easy sporting-tweed fabric of Mr. Holliday's
merry and liberal style fits his theme as snugly as the burr its nut,
one feels tempted to cry joyously (as he says in some other connection),
"it seems as if it were a book you had written yourself in a dream."
And follow him, for sheer fun, in the "Going a Journey" essay. Granted
that it would never have been written but for Hazlitt and Stevenson and
Belloc. Yet it is fresh distilled, it has its own sparkle. Beginning
with an even pace, how it falls into a swinging stride, drugs you with
hilltops and blue air! Crisp, metrical, with a steady drum of feet, it
lifts, purges and sustains. "This is the religious side" of reading an
essay!
Mr. Holliday, then, gives us in generous measure the "certain jolly
humors" which R.L.S. says we voyage to find. He throws off flashes of
imaginative felicity--as where he says of canes, "They are the light to
blind men." Where he describes Mr. Oliver Herford "listing to starboard,
like a postman." Where he says of the English who use colloquially
phrases known to us only in great literature--"There are primroses in
their speech." And where he begins his "Memoirs of a Manuscript," "I was
born in Indiana."
We are now ready to let fall our third memorandum:
Third Memo--Behind his colloquial, easygoing (apparently careless)
utterance, Mr. Holliday conceals a high quality of literary art.