(FURTHER OSCILLATIONS OF OUR HERO)
Mr. Holliday was driven home from England and Police Constable
Buckington by the war, which broke out while he was living in Chelsea.
My chronology is a bit mixed here; just what he was doing from autumn,
1914, to February, 1916, I don't know. Was it then that he held the fish
reporter job? Come to think of it, I believe it was. Anyway, in
February, 1916, he turned up in Garden City, Long Island, where I first
had the excitement of clapping eyes on him. Some of the adventures of
that spring and summer may be inferred from "Memories of a Manuscript."
Others took place in the austere lunch cathedral known at the press of
Doubleday, Page & Company as the "garage," or on walks that summer
between the Country Life Press and the neighboring champaigns of
Hempstead. The full story of the Porrier's Corner Club, of which Mr.
Holliday and myself are the only members, is yet to be told. As far as I
was concerned it was love at first sight. This burly soul, rumbling
Johnsonianly upon lettered topics, puffing unending Virginia cigarettes,
gazing with shy humor through thick-paned spectacles--well, on Friday,
June 23, 1916, Bob and I decided to collaborate in writing a farcical
novel. It is still unwritten, save the first few chapters. I only
instance this to show how fast passion proceeded.
It would not surprise me if at some future time Mrs. Bedell's boarding
house, on Jackson Street in Hempstead, becomes a place of pilgrimage for
lovers of the essay. They will want to see the dark little front room on
the ground floor where Owd Bob used to scatter the sheets of his essays
as he was retyping them from a huge scrapbook and grooming them for a
canter among publishers' sanhedrim. They will want to see (but will not,
I fear) the cool barrel-room at the back of George D. Smith's tavern, an
ale-house that was blithe to our fancy because the publican bore the
same name as that of a very famous dealer in rare books. Along that
pleasant bar, with its shining brass scuppers, Bob and I consumed many
beakers of well-chilled amber during that warm summer. His urbanolatrous
soul pined for the city, and he used in those days to expound the
doctrine that the suburbanite really has to go to town in order to get
fresh air.
In September, 1916, Holliday's health broke down. He had been feeling
poorly most of the summer, and continuous hard work induced a spell of
nervous depression. Very wisely he went back to Indianapolis to rest.
After a good lay-off he tackled the Tarkington book, which was written
in Indianapolis the following winter and spring. And "Walking-Stick
Papers" began to go the rounds.
I have alluded more than once to Mr. Holliday's book on Tarkington. This
original, mellow, convivial, informal and yet soundly argued critique
has been overlooked by many who have delighted to honor Holliday as an
essayist. But it is vastly worth reading. It is a brilliant study, full
of "onion atoms" as Sydney Smith's famous salad, and we flaunt it
merrily in the face of those who are frequently crapehanging and dirging
that we have no sparkling young Chestertons and Rebecca Wests and J.C.
Squires this side of Queenstown harbor. Rarely have creator and critic
been joined in so felicitous a marriage. And indeed the union was
appointed in heaven and smiles in the blood, for (as I have noted) Mr.
Holliday's grandfather was the biographer of Tarkington's grandsire,
also a pioneer preacher of the metaphysical commonwealth of Indiana. Mr.
Holliday traces with a good deal of humor and circumstance the various
ways in which the gods gave Mr. Tarkington just the right kind of
ancestry, upbringing, boyhood and college career to produce a talented
writer. But the fates that catered to Tarkington with such generous hand
never dealt him a better run of cards than when Holliday wrote this
book.
The study is one of surpassing interest, not merely as a service to
native criticism but as a revelation of Holliday's ability to follow
through a sustained intellectual task with the same grasp and grace that
he afterward showed in the memoir of Kilmer in which his heart was so
deeply engaged. Of a truth, Mr. Holliday's success in putting himself
within Tarkington's dashing checked kuppenheimers is a fine achievement
of projected psychology. He knows Tarkington so well that if the latter
were unhappily deleted by some "wilful convulsion of brute nature" I
think it undoubtable that his biographer could reconstruct a very
plausible automaton, and would know just what ingredients to blend. A
dash of Miss Austen, Joseph Conrad, Henry James and Daudet; flavored
perhaps with coal smoke from Indianapolis, spindrift from the Maine
coast and a few twanging chords from the Princeton Glee Club.
Fourth Memo--Mr. Holliday is critic as well as essayist.