American nights entertainment

i

WHAT actually took my breath away (in the first place) was an inspection of the “general catalogue” of one of our publishing houses, and a discovery therein. Now, a general catalogue, showing all the books published by a particular house and “in print”—that is, procurable new—is in itself a species of adventure. I admit all that Mr. A. Edward Newton puts forward as to the amenities of book collecting—by which, I take it, he means the joys, the sorrows, the moments of irony and the moments of amusement which fall to the lot of the collector of rare books. The quest of the book that is out of print, and must be had at second hand by diligent search and patient waiting, is an exceptional delight. Nevertheless, a special and more accessible pleasure lies in the catalogue, whether of a publisher or a bookshop. All but a handful of us are certain to come upon titles that kindle the imagination or rekindle the memory. Both were lit for me by the entry:

And not only The Count’s Millions, but a roll of eleven others, an even dozen in all, ready to be re-read after these too many years and pleasingly freshened up by the new illustrated jackets! There they were: Baron Trigault’s Vengeance, The Clique of Gold, and a fine array of enticing titles that memory doesn’t recall—The Champdoce Mystery, Within an Inch of His Life, which has the proper ring; The Widow Lerouge; Other People’s Money, always an engrossing subject; The Mystery of Orcival (illustrated by Jules Guerin) and one or two others besides (of course!) Monsieur Lecoq and that famous File No. 113. It is desolating to reflect that there must be thousands, perhaps millions, to whom the name of Monsieur Lecoq conveys nothing and who are totally unacquainted with File No. 113, the most marvellous genealogical mystery story ever written, a tale in which one does not know which more to admire, the genealogy or the plot, until one grasps that the genealogy is the plot, and that what is desperately needed is not a detective but an expert in the ascension of family trees. However, that is not the worst. A yet more fearful thought concerns the author himself. It is even possible that there exists a whole generation, and perhaps races of men, to whom the name of Gaboriau is nothing but part of a quatrain (though rather a famous jingle) perpetrated first by Julian Street and James Montgomery Flagg under the auspices (I think) of Franklin P. Adams (“F. P. A.”):

Too, too flippant! Recalling Monsieur Lecoq, one exclaims: “There were detectives in those days!” And then again, such despondency is excessive. There is, now and occasionally, a detective in these days also. For proof, look at this fellow, Monsieur Jonquelle, in Melville Davisson Post’s new book of that title. Ah! M. Davisson Post! It is but to mention him to introduce a new and important subject, n’est ce pas?

Mr. Post is worth talking about, certainly; and assuming that you have read him, you have probably discussed what you read afterward. His reputation as a writer of detective-mystery stories was pretty well abroad before the publication of Uncle Abner, Master of Mysteries, but that book established the reputation solidly. My recollection is that even before its appearance Mr. Post had written one or two articles in which he explained his theory and practice of story writing. I may simply remark that he went into the matter with as much technical skill and artistic nicety as Poe or de Maupassant; the man is an artist to his fingertips and his work shows it. One has the feeling of construction and the sense of ornamentation springing from fine tastes; his tales are like beautiful pieces of cabinet work in which, at first sight, the effects of form, of shapeliness and of beauty and power are felt; on a closer examination you fall to admiring the sure hand and the cunning art; and at last your exploring fingers touch a particular joint, disclosing an unsuspected drawer that flies out and reveals the story’s secret ... though not Mr. Post’s secret, which, like that of all genuine artists, remains with himself. If this has a ring of exaggeration to your ear, I need only refer you to such a perfect thing as the opening tale, “The Doomdorf Mystery,” in Uncle Abner. Or you may make the test on Monsieur Jonquelle, where likewise all the stories turn on a central character, the Prefect of Police of Paris. Monsieur Jonquelle exemplifies very well Mr. Post’s method of developing the mystery and its solution side by side. The gain in movement and surprise is the compensation for a technique immensely more difficult than the usual formula, by which a mystery is first built up and then, with inevitable repetition, dispelled. Those who are interested in the mechanism of stories will also find it worth while to consider why Mr. Post varies the narrative standpoint in his new book, so that some of the tales of Monsieur Jonquelle are related by the chief character, some by a third person, some by the author.... Mr. Post is a native of West Virginia, where he lives (Lost Creek, R. F. D. 2). A lawyer by training, he became particularly interested in the possibilities that lie open for the use of the law to aid the commission of crime; and this led to his first book, The Strange Schemes of Randolph Mason, in which this perversion of the law to criminal ends was the tissue of the stories.

A rural free delivery route at Lost Creek, West Virginia, has about it something pleasing in connection with a writer of breathless fiction, but the height of suitability in authors’ residences belongs to Beatrice Grimshaw, whose mystery-adventure yarns of the South Pacific begin to be as numerous as a group of Pacific Islands. Indeed, I feel it would be no surprise some day, running before the southeasterly trade wind in a longitude west of 135 degrees and a latitude exceeding 20 degrees south, to sight a succession of dark blue cloud shapes lying on the horizon and be told: “Yonder’s the Beatrice Islands of the Grimshaw group—big archipelago.” Beatrice Grimshaw lives at Port Moseby, Papua, New Guinea, and is a planter as well as an author. There is practically no place in the South Seas which she has not visited, including the cannibal country of Papua. An old and possibly untrue story recalled by Hector MacQuarrie tells of a time when, on a schooner in mid-Pacific, “the captain, a gentle ancient, thinking that the dark women were having it all their own way, offered to embrace Miss Grimshaw, finding in return a gun pointing at his middle, filling him with quaint surprise that anyone could possibly offer violence in defence of a soul in so delightful a climate.” Anyway, the lady knows her corner of the world and the people in it, as anyone may discover by the exciting enterprise of reading such a book as The Sands of Oro, with its strange group of five persons bound together by necessity and ugly chance, and committed to each other’s fortunes for a term on a lonely Pacific island. Here, as in the author’s Nobody’s Island, the reader is at once let into the general secret with the result of a deepening mystery as to why and how and what next.

In truth, the tale which attempts breathlessness simply by the device of withheld explanations takes our breath away no longer. We have come to demand of the author that he proceed with direct and forward action, producing genuine interest instead of merely artificial suspense. He must hew to the line of his story, must move, letting the explanations, chips of his tough puzzle, fall where they may. Thus it has come about that the mystery story which is not also an adventure story fails to capture our interest or stir our curiosity. Of living writers, one of the earliest to grasp this was A. E. W. Mason. With others, I feared a half dozen years ago that he might have forgotten the vital principle; for his story of The Summons was quite unlike the Mason who had given us The Four Feathers, The Witness for the Defense, and other superb novels. But the fear may be dissipated, for in his new book, The Winding Stair, Mr. Mason has written a story comparable with his best work. Like The Four Feathers, it is a tale of cowardice becoming ultimate bravery; and I do not recall a heroine so pitifully appealing, so desperately lovable, so admirably brave as Marguerite Lambert since Joseph Conrad gave us the girl Lena in Victory. Possibly the title of Mr. Mason’s newest work may, offhand, convey the wrong flavor to the incipient reader; it is not a yarn of mysterious goings-on in some old mansion but the history of a soldier and the son of a soldier, moving principally in Northern Africa; the very appropriate phrase that christens the book is quoted from no less person than Bacon, “All rising to Great Place is by a winding stair.” Seldom does one come upon a novel of adventure which is also so profoundly a novel of character or which has so direct and free an appeal to the emotions, or makes that appeal so successfully. The Winding Stair is the work of a masterly storyteller, and such scenes as those of Paul Ravenel’s discovery of who he is, his rescue of Marguerite Lambert, and Marguerite’s discovery of his self-betrayal sprung from his love for her are something more than exciting drama. There is a breathlessness here that comes from a slowing-down rather than a quickening, from a pause, from a moment of perilous silence in which the only sound or sensation is the painful throbbing of the human heart.

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The other way of breathlessness is laughter.

“Laughter, holding both his sides,” sang Milton; and, in fact, I once knew a man who sat at a dinner or some place between Don Marquis and Pelham Grenville (P. G.) Wodehouse. It is not necessary to recall what happened to him. Let us draw a veil, and proceed. Don (perhaps you recall it) was under the necessity of conducting a guessing contest in a New York newspaper. The purpose was to guess his real name. People refused to believe that he could be Don Marquis. The Supreme Court, in a case brought as a test, has since decided that such incredulity is not a sign of moral turpitude. Even Donald Robert Perry Marquis, held the Court (seven to two; Holmes, J., and Brandeis, J., dissenting), does not sound sufficiently possible, especially when the evidence shows that he was born in Walnut, Bureau County, Illinois. The Court ruled that Don was conceivably a literary hoax, but that his play, The Old Soak, was the real thing and within the Amendment. Popular rather than judicial cognisance has extended to the other and uncollected works of Don Marquis, such as Prefaces, his stories in Carter and Other People, his truth-telling about a young woman called Hermione, his newly rededicated record of The Cruise of the Jasper B., his iliad of Noah an’ Jonah an’ Captain John Smith, his poetry in Sonnets to a Red-Haired Lady and Famous Love Affairs, etc., etc. You have read Anatole France’s The Revolt of the Angels, but are you familiar with Don’s The Revolt of the Oyster, I ask you? Or Pandora Lifts the Lid, by Christopher Morley, writing under the auspices of Don Marquis? Or The Almost Perfect State, a vision vouchsafed exclusively to Mr. Marquis?

The truth is, there is a good deal of Mark Twain in Don Marquis. Don is usually as good as ever Mark was and in some cases a good deal superior—and throughout, more genuine. When I make the comparison I am thinking of the best Mark Twain, the satirist and not too easily satisfied thinker; neither the embittered and savage pessimist of those final years nor the facile (too facile) humourist. Marquis, who can sustain the severer comparison with Twain, can also well sustain the comparison on the lighter side; for Don is a humourist, too. The point is in the “too.” And the exemplification may be sought in (let us say) The Almost Perfect State. “No matter how nearly perfect an Almost Perfect State may be, it is not nearly perfect enough unless the individuals who compose it can, somewhere between death and birth, have a perfectly corking time for a few years.... In the Almost Perfect State every person shall have at least ten years before he dies of easy, carefree, happy living.” A place of pay-as-you-enter wars; a heaven where everyone is an aristocrat and there are no professional reformers—in short, a Marquisate. Where Don differs from Mark Twain is in being a poet who sometimes uses poetry as the medium of his expression—see Dreams and Dust and his Poems and Portraits. Christopher Morley (whose essay on Don Marquis, in Shandygaff, deserves to be read) has coaxed Don into a Frank R. Stocktonish enterprise in Pandora Lifts the Lid, with its narrative of seven young women snatched from the shades of a young ladies’ seminary and—. But as I write, Pandora has lifted the lid on a crack only.

P. G. Wodehouse is another matter, a chap over whose books thousands of people have found themselves unable to keep straight faces. Yet, not long ago, writing in the London Sphere, Clement K. Shorter declared he had never read a single one of the more than twenty Wodehouse yarns. He had never read Jeeves, or that new one, Leave It to Psmith, or Mostly Sally, or Three Men and a Maid, or The Little Warrior, or A Damsel in Distress, or Piccadilly Jim—think of it! Or no, don’t think of it. It won’t bear thinking of, it won’t really. The Wodehouse novels, though in most respects like those jolly things he writes to go with music by Jerome Kern, have now and then a page that dips far below the surface of fun into something very deep and true to the inwardness of human nature. Such are some bits in The Little Warrior, and such are the more tragic moments for Sally in Mostly Sally; and yet Mr. Wodehouse brings his story up again quickly like a diver clutching a pearl and rising up through clear water to sparkling and sunlit air. It is the prettiest talent imaginable, and I can think of no other contemporary writer of light fiction who has the same dexterity.

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There is no formula for achieving breathlessness. Those who are most susceptible to what may be loosely called Plot will find an enviable difficulty in breathing while they peruse, besides the stories already mentioned, some of the following tales:

When Ghost Meets Ghost.

Ordeal by Water.

Almost Anything by HAROLD MACGRATH.

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Let us approach the subject of humour circumspectly. In addition to the Works of DON MARQUIS, passim, as the reference books say, and the Works of P. G. WODEHOUSE, both before-mentioned, and the Works of DONALD OGDEN STEWART (see Chapter 13, “A Parody Outline of Stewart”), and the Works of IRVIN S. COBB in many places, the reader may be well advised to consult at the outset Tom Masson’s Annual for 1923, a humorous anthology; KATHARINE DAYTON’S Loose Leaves, IRVIN COBB’S collection of the best humorous stories he has ever met, A Laugh a Day Keeps the Doctor Away, and—oh, yes!—the Works of OLIVER HERFORD, including Neither Here Nor There and This Giddy Globe. A word of warning in regard to a couple of others: