18. Lost Patterns
COLLESTAMORE was showing me his library, but a summons to the telephone had drawn him from the room and I was standing before the set of shelves between the cases containing rarities and those which held fine bindings, frankly puzzled. There were not many books ranged here and I could not make out the distinction that grouped them together. It might have been no distinction but mere accident in the case of anyone less methodical than Collestamore. With him, no; some thought or queer intention must underlie the choosing. Fiction and non-fiction, new books and some old ones, some volumes of attractive format and design and others whose homely plainness was possibly compensated by the fact of their being first editions—it meant nothing. Alphabetical arrangement by authors hadn’t been attempted and was, indeed, scarcely worth while until the little assembly grew larger. Then he returned and met my look of inquiry with:
“You’ve discovered my Lost Patterns.”
“Lost Patterns?”
“Oh,” he said, “there aren’t many of them, as yet. The fact is, I only thought of it a week ago. It rained all afternoon, so I spent a couple of hours amusing myself with them—with a beginning of them.”
“‘Lost’? But some of them are new enough.”
“It’s the only name I could think of that I rather liked,” was his explanation. “A Lost Pattern—the idea I was trying to express—may be either old or new. It has nothing to do with the edition or the binding, but everything to do with the contents of a book. Novel or essay or biography, the text ought to represent something we have not had before or since and aren’t likely to have again; something individual in the scheme or the style; something wholly personal in the flavour—in short, unique, I suppose. What James Huneker would have called a unicorn. By the way, he is a Lost Pattern, probably.”
“Probably.” I was not unsympathetic to his idea. “You are anxious to get together a collection for the collection’s sake, I take it.”
“No, for the reader’s sake. It wouldn’t have any value as a collection, other than the curious, and I swear it could have no value for the person of literary practices.” I glanced at him but could detect nothing in his expression. I have always suspected Collestamore of secret literary practices, concealed efforts to put his freakish self into words. My idea is that he attempts essays and that so far he is like a fellow fond of cigarettes and learning to roll his own. He went on, more meditatively: “A fellow desiring to be a writer would waste his time if he aped these people.” All the same, I thought, I will bet that you——
“I began with a few new books,” he was saying. “New or comparatively so. The thing that started me, I guess, was Elinor Wylie’s novel.” He fingered his copy of Jennifer Lorn.
“I haven’t read it.”
“She has made a replica of the eighteenth century novel, a suitably fantastic story about an English aristocrat and his bride who journey to the India of the East India Company and meet with bizarre adventures. It is what you would expect of a poet enamoured with the life of that glittering period. I wonder that Max Beerbohm hasn’t done it long before this. Or Aldous Huxley.”
“I see you have them both represented here.”
“Yes, the thought of them sprang from Mrs. Wylie’s book. I took down Huxley’s Crome Yellow and his Mortal Coils. From Max I wanted the books of his caricatures—Rossetti and His Circle and that other one he calls A Survey. My collection of Lost Patterns was begun, then and there. The idea of what would constitute a Lost Pattern was formed—I don’t say it didn’t enlarge afterward nor that it won’t enlarge or change shape again. But, essentially, I knew what I wanted.”
“Nobody knows what he wants,” I objected. “The thing is obviously impossible. You mean you knew that you wanted to add more books to the five you had assembled.”
“Any way you like.” Collestamore’s indifference was polite, but profound. “I began looking over the other shelves. The next thing I came upon was George Moore’s Hail and Farewell. We shall never have a writer like George Moore, not even George Moore.” I thought to myself: With that nuance, with a phrase like that, he is deliberately imitating Beerbohm’s prose; I had better take no notice of it. His next remark startled me.
“Literary style, distinction, in the enterprise I had embarked upon was of no consequence whatever.” And seeing that this wasn’t brilliantly intelligible, he continued:
“The thing was much deeper than that—the personal twist or wrinkle was what I was after, the fly in the amber. Not a perfectly preserved fly in the amber of a choice literary expression but a wriggling insect caught on the tanglefoot of unaccustomed words would do as well.” He was fast throwing grammar overboard in the effort to lighten ship and bring his thoughts to port. “I have not, as yet, come upon an illiterate author who deserves inclusion among my Lost Patterns, but I shouldn’t hesitate to put him in.”
“I see.” After a pause: “Here you’ve got George Meredith. He’s very nearly illiterate, don’t you think so? Sometimes literacy can go too far, as in Meredith and in Henry James, whom you’ve put alongside. Maurice Hewlett is another matter.”
“Well,” said Collestamore, “I stuck them in as a matter of course. Anybody would naturally have thought of them in such a connection. The things I really pride myself upon are my detections among these single and mostly more recent books. You take F. Scott Fitzgerald’s This Side of Paradise, or William McFee’s Casuals of the Sea, or C. E. Montague’s very fetching Fiery Particles, or Ernest Bramah’s Kai Lung’s Golden Hours, or Don Marquis’s Hermione, or Alfred B. Stanford’s The Ground Swell”—he was half pulling them out and letting them fall back, as he enumerated them—“and tell me if I have not shown both enterprise and catholicity.”
I thought he had, but I also thought he should attempt some justificatory remarks, and said so. His point in regard to This Side of Paradise was its vitality in spite of its having, as Edmund Wilson, Jr., observed, almost every conceivable fault. “It had all imaginable faults, but yet, in Wilson’s words, ‘it did not fail to live,’” Collestamore argued. I nodded, and he went on. Casuals of the Sea, it appeared, pleased him by a lack of anything self-conscious in the writing. He much preferred it to the too purposeful artistry of McFee’s Command. The singularity of those tales in Fiery Particles, he thought, called for no special pleading in its behalf. The Ground Swell was a sea pattern unique in its simplicity; Don Marquis’s heroine and her little group of serious thinkers were the apotheosis of the Great Inane. As for Kai Lung’s Golden Hours, he was merely echoing G. K. Chesterton, Belloc and a dozen others whose judgment was respectable and might command my deference not given to his own.
“Oh, I defer,” I assured him. “You are the Lord High Executioner in this series of literary beheadings. I consider that a reign of terror has begun.”
It wasn’t beheadings, he said. He wasn’t going over the field of daisies like the Syracusan tyrant and with his sceptre, cane, stick or staff cropping off the heads of the taller blooms.
“Daisies? I thought it was a field of corn.”
As to that, he didn’t remember. It was no matter, anyway. He was not demolishing, but singling out for eminence. No whistling cane, but——
“The sceptre gently touching one here, one there, knighting him, commanding him to spring up——”
“You will observe,” in a tone of patient tolerance, “the surprising variety one gets in the shortest possible space of time at this sort of thing. Of course I thought of Jane Austen, and rather than put in Pride and Prejudice I chose The Watsons as completed by Miss Oulton. After all, The Watsons is later work than either Pride and Prejudice or Sense and Sensibility and the conjecture as to why it was never finished gives it special interest. By that time I was running over my books more or less as they stand on the shelves, alphabetised by authors. The next thing, therefore, was Arnold Bennett, and I chose The Truth About an Author. You know, it is the one book of Bennett’s that could not, imaginably, have been written by anybody else. H. C. Bunner was next. I really don’t know whether anyone living besides myself and Franklin P. Adams now cares for Bunner; if not, so much the better!”
“I see. The more lost the Lost Pattern, the more to be prized.”
“Why not? His Stories and his Short Sixes are as American as, perhaps more so than, O. Henry.” He was quietly dogmatic.
“Is O. Henry here?” I looked. “Yes, to be sure. Also portions of Kipling and, I judge, Frank R. Stockton practically complete. But these were among the matter-of-courses. Let’s see: Shouldn’t you put in Frank Norris? The Pit, I suppose. And there’s W. W. Jacobs.”
He looked so restive that I stopped. “It’s really no way to go at the thing wholesale,” he protested. “I haven’t made up my mind as to which one or two books of Stockton’s yet; he’s there in bulk only temporarily. I suppose it had better be Rudder Grange.”
“Make it Salthaven from W. W. Jacobs,” I urged. “Unless you strongly prefer At Sunwich Port.”
“I do. Probably it’s just that I read it first. After Bunner I ran against George W. Cable’s The Grandissimes. Then I laid hold of Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage. Then John Dos Passos’s Rosinante to the Road Again.”
“Thomas Beer has just finished a biography of Stephen Crane. Joseph Conrad has written a preface for it,” I said, but Collestamore paid no attention. He was across the room, picking something out, and came back in a moment holding up Edmund Gosse’s Three French Moralists. “Just thought of Gosse. This will do to hold the place for him until I decide. Have you never read it? Then you don’t know Rochefoucauld or La Bruyere as you should know them. And you’ve missed a singularly urbane and exquisite example of English prose style.”
“You have both Compton Mackenzie’s Carnival and his Sinister Street in here. Make it Carnival. Let’s see: David Graham Phillips’s Susan Lennox: Her Fall and Rise; John Ames Mitchell’s Amos Judd; and that new illustrated edition of David Harum. I guess I’d agree with your choice of each of those.” His expression remained polite but I could see it would make not the least difference whether I agreed or not. “Did you see Rodolph Valentino in ‘The Young Rajah’?” I asked, to tease him. He was good-natured about it. “I did. I have no objection to Valentino, but I much prefer the story as told in Amos Judd.” He was ruffling the pages of David Harum. “I like these text drawings, don’t you?” I said I did, adding that David Harum was the kind of book that cried for illustration.
“About biography, or especially, autobiography,” he said suddenly. “Should you say Booker T. Washington’s Up From Slavery, for one? There’ll never be another of that pattern.” But I had a suggestion for him there. “Anyway, you must include Bouck White’s The Book of Daniel Drew.” He said at once, “Oh, yes!”—adding, “Autobiographical in form, anyway. White always contended that he found an actual record left by Uncle Dan’l Drew. Semi-fictional, if you like; but a grand piece of satire. And now I rather think we’re wanted to sit down to lunch. Er—how about a swallow of something first? Or is that among your lost appetites?”