i
The other evening I picked up a novel called The Lighted Way, which, although it was published in May, 1912, I hadn’t chanced ever to read. The page blurred slightly before my eyes, I think, because in going back over it some of the names and particulars seemed entirely changed. But this, as I took it in first, was the way it ran:
“Mr. E. Phillips Oppenheim, sole proprietor of the firm of E. Phillips Oppenheim & Nobody, wholesale entertainers of London and Europe, paused suddenly on his way from his private office to the street. There was something which until that second had entirely slipped his memory. It was not his title, for that, tastefully chosen, was already under his arm. Nor was it the Plot, for that, together with the first chapter, was sticking out of his overcoat pocket, the shape of which it completely ruined. As a matter of fact, it was more important than either of these—it was a commission from his conscience.
“Very slowly he retraced his steps until he stood outside the glass-enclosed cage where twelve of the hardest-worked clerks in London bent over their ledgers and invoicing. With his forefinger—a fat, pudgy forefinger—he tapped upon a pane of glass, and an anxious errand boy bolted through the doorway.
“‘Tell Mr. Reader to step this way,’ his employer ordered.
“Mr. Reader heard the message and came hurrying out. He was an undersized man, with somewhat prominent eyes concealed by gold-rimmed spectacles. He was possessed of extraordinary zest for the details of the business, and was withal an expert and careful adviser. Hence his hold upon the confidence of his employer.
“The latter addressed him with a curious and altogether unusual hesitation in his manner.
“‘Mr. Reader,’ he began, ‘there is a matter—a little matter—upon which I—er—wish to consult you.’
“‘Those American serial rights——’
“‘Nothing to do with business at all,’ Mr. Oppenheim interrupted, ruthlessly. ‘A little private matter.’
“‘Indeed, sir?’”
Now as I say, at this point I went back and found to my bewilderment at first, but perfect satisfaction afterward, that Mr. Oppenheim seemed to be Mr. Weatherley, a worthy provisioner; the title, an umbrella; the Plot, a copy of the London Times; and the alarming commission from Mr. Oppenheim’s conscience, a possibly no less embarrassing commission from Mr. Weatherley’s wife. Thereupon everything went smoothly and excitingly through thirty-seven chapters. But afterward it occurred to me that perhaps, after all, my blunder, visual or mental, was not an unnatural one. Who has not had in his mind’s eye a picture of Mr. Oppenheim with a Plot, or Plots, bulging from his pockets, and with as many titles in his mental wardrobe as most men have neckties? And what one of his readers has not felt himself, time and again, personally summoned by the author to the consideration of a matter—a little matter—a quite private matter just then upon the author’s conscience....
ii
It is the secret of Mr. Oppenheim’s success, not detected as such by his readers, very probably not a trifle of which he himself is consciously aware. This engaging gift of confiding something, this easy air, this informality of his beginnings, disarms us and interests us as could no elaborately staged effort to arrest our attention and intrigue our minds. Even when he commences his story dramatically with such a confrontation as that which opens his The Wrath to Come, the air of naturalness is upon the scene. And the source of this effect? It comes from the fact that Mr. Oppenheim is imparting to you all that he himself knows at the given moment. Yes, literally. For our notion of him as a man with plots distending his pockets is entirely a mistaken notion. He has no plots; at least, he has no ready-made plots; he does not, so to say, plot his plots. “Just the first chapter, and an inkling of something to follow,” was his answer to some one who asked him how much of his leading character he saw when he began a novel.[47] What other method, when you stop to reflect upon it, would be possible for the author of eighty-six published novels? Certainly no one could map out his tales, even in essentials, and then write them to that number, not if he were to do the plots one by one, as occasion arose. He would be a slave, and the book, as written, would soon come to be lifeless. Nor, by such a method, would thirty-eight years afford time. In thirty-eight years the pace would be lost. Only spontaneity is capable of guaranteeing such a record as stands to Mr. Oppenheim’s credit. “Two or three people in a crowded restaurant may arouse my interest, and the atmosphere is compelling. I start weaving a story around them—the circumstances and the people gradually develop as I go on dictating to my secretary the casual thoughts about them that arose in me while I was looking at them and their surroundings. First of all I must have a congenial atmosphere—then the rest is easy.”[48] And again:
“Writing for the movies is a ghastly business. I speak from experience. I shall never do it again. The picture people came to me and said, ‘Next time you have a novel in your head, why not, instead of writing 80,000 words, write a 5,000-word synopsis and let us have it? Then write your novel from the synopsis.’
“Well, they paid well and I did it. I wrote the synopsis first and then set to work on the novel. I have never had a harder job in my life. Some writers, no doubt, do sketch out their plots beforehand, but I never work that way. When I start a story I never know just how it is going to end. All I have to start with is an idea. As I go along the idea grows and develops. So do the characters. I sort of live with them through the story and work out their salvation as it goes along. It is like a game.
“But when you write for the movies you have to reverse the process. In my case, it is fatal. Novels, even the kind that I write—and they are solely for amusement—must have some soul, something that gives them a human quality. This the author puts into the story as he goes along. When, however, he writes a synopsis and then sits down to enlarge and expand it into a novel, the spell is broken. He has a cold and rigid plan to follow. It nearly killed me to novelize my first scenario.”[49]
He dictates his novels, revising the sheets as they come from the typewriter, sometimes re-dictating a passage or chapter. In summer he works outdoors; in winter he may pace up and down his study. “Many a time, earlier in life, when I used to write my stories with my own hand, I have found that my ideas would come so much faster than my fingers could work that I have prayed for some more speedy method of transmission. My present method is not only an immense relief to me, but it enables me to turn out far more work than would have been possible by any other means.”[50] Story-writing, he believes, is an original instinct, “just as it is an original instinct with a sporting dog to sniff about in every bush he passes for a rabbit. One writes stories because if one left them in the brain one would be subject to a sort of mental indigestion. As to plots, there are only about a score in the world, and when you have used them all, from A to Z”—which he pronounced “Zed,” for this was in an after-dinner speech—“you can turn around and use them from Z to A.”[51] A favorite illustration with him is taken from a day’s walk in London. “You can take the same walk every day in the year and you will meet a different crowd of people. These people contain the backgrounds of 365 stories a year.” One person a day will keep the typewriter in play, for “I create one more or less interesting personality, try to think of some dramatic situation in which he or she might be placed, and use that as the opening of a nebulous chain of events.”
What he said of himself at 55 is still, two years later, true without abatement. “Even if, like one of the heroes of fiction, I should make a million dollars out of a ten-cent piece in Wall Street, I should still continue to write stories so long as I can sit in an easy chair and my voice will carry as far as my secretary before a typewriter.” Which is reminiscent of Hugh Walpole’s remark in conversation the same year, that he was perfectly sure if a beam fell on his head and made him imbecile, he would continue to write novels for the pleasure of writing them.
iii
Mr. Oppenheim was born in 1866 and went from school into his father’s leather business at Leicester—but he had started writing stories before that. He began to write them at fifteen, and showed his first to the headmaster of the school, “who, instead of giving me the birching I deserved, wished me luck and encouraged me to persevere.” The leather business was successful and was bought up by Blumenthals, a large American and Paris leather firm, who appointed young Oppenheim their director at Leicester. “His experience in that trade,” asserts Mr. A. St. John Adcock in his Gods of Modern Grub Street,[52] “has proved immensely useful to him. It has not only helped him to material for his tales, but it was through the American head of Blumenthals that he had his chief incentive to the writing of the type of story that has brought him such success as a novelist. This gentleman introduced him to the proprietor of the Café de Rat Mort, the once famous Montmartre haunt, for Oppenheim was frequently in Paris on the affairs of his leather company, and at the Café he acquired his taste for the mysteries of those international intriguings and rascalities that figure so largely in several of his books, for the proprietor used to tell him all manner of thrilling yarns about political and international adventurers, some of whom had been among his customers, and his listener formed a habit of weaving stories around the more striking personalities in the cosmopolitan crowd that he met in the Dead Rat.”
He was eighteen years old when his first short story was published, and only twenty when his first novel appeared. Before he was thirty he married Miss Elsie Hopkins, of Chelsea, Massachusetts. Mr. Oppenheim and his wife called their cottage in Sheringham, Norfolk, “Winnisimmet,” which was the Indian name of her Massachusetts home town. The house overlooked the North Sea. Perhaps this detail, as much as another, led the author to the construction in the years before the world war of that series of stories in which, as an element of his plots, Mr. Oppenheim kept repeating Germany in the rôle of the villain. Legend has it that during the war itself his name was on the list of Britons to be shot if captured, although lists of that sort are usually myths. “There was one period,” he has commented since, “in the autumn of 1918, when a well-directed bomb upon the Ministry of Information might have cleared the way for the younger novelists at the expense of Arnold Bennett, John Buchan, Dion Calthrop, E. Temple Thurston, Hugh Walpole and myself.”[53] He visited America in 1911 and again in 1922, when Mrs. Oppenheim came with him. On the latter occasion he made by far the wittiest comment of any visitor in reply to the usual question: what he thought of prohibition. “My only fear,” with a smile, “is that it may make me a drunkard.”[54] Those who met the victim of this reasonable dread saw a sturdy, broad-shouldered figure developed by air and outdoor exercise; and those who played golf with him respected his handicap of seven strokes only. His large, florid face seemed to kindle into laughter from the constant humorous gleam in his blue eyes. Among his own titles he confessed to a fondness for A Maker of History, The Double Life of Mr. Alfred Burton, The Great Impersonation and—perhaps influenced a little by its then impending publication—The Great Prince Shan. At this time he was subjected to one of those sets of questions from the answers to which one may construct a totally wrong picture of the person. However, we may note that his idea of happiness was tied up with his work, and that he gave as his notion of unhappiness, “No ideas.” His particular aversion, he said, was fog.[55] Fog? Yet he has said: “I would be perfectly content to spend the rest of my days in London. Half a dozen thoroughfares and squares in London, a handful of restaurants, the people whom one meets in a single morning, are quite sufficient for the production of more and greater stories than I shall ever write.”[56] He describes himself as no great traveller; he has, though, been in most European countries, and he pretty regularly spends his winters at his villa in Cagnes on the Riviera. He divides his time in England between the house in Norfolk and his rooms in London.
iv
Mr. Oppenheim does not take himself seriously in the rôle of prophet. “Large numbers of people have noted the fact that in certain of my earlier novels I prophesied wars and world events that actually did come to pass. In The Mysterious Mr. Sabin, I pictured the South African Boer war seven years before it occurred. In The Mischief Maker, The Great Secret, and A Maker of History I based plots upon the German menace and the great war that did actually occur. The romance of secret diplomacy has enthralled me for years. In writing my novels I have had no particular advance knowledge of world affairs. I have reasoned to myself, ‘This nation is aiming toward this,’ and ‘That nation is aiming toward that’; then I have invented my puppets representing these conflicting ambitions and set them in action. It was the story first of all that appealed to me, and not any burning desire to express political convictions and lay bare great conspiracies.”[57]
He takes himself seriously only in the rôle of entertainer, of storyteller. “If you tell him you like his books,” says Gerald Cumberland, in Written in Friendship, “he is frankly pleased; but if you pay him high-flown compliments he will begin to yawn.” There need be no paying of compliments in a consideration of Mr. Oppenheim’s work, but no analysis of his method could fairly withhold considerable praise. We have spoken of his confidential, easy manner with the reader as a secret of his toward establishing plausibility for the things he is about to tell. But there is more to be noted. Like the best writers of his sort among his countrymen—and like far too few Americans in the same field—he is unhurried. He is never afraid to pause for the amplification of sentiment, the communication of the moment’s feeling, a bit of characterization or a passage of pure description. And these are the matters which give an effect of rondure, and not infrequently touches of charm, to a story of whatever sort. At the moment I can think of only one American—Hulbert Footner—who has had the wisdom, or perhaps the temperament, to follow British practice in this by no means negligible affair of workmanship; and it is significant that Mr. Footner, an American, has so far had a better reception in England than in his own country. Apparently we value this certain leisureliness when it comes to us from abroad, for Mr. Footner, re-exported to us, is making distinct headway. What the American writer generally does is to accelerate his action to the pitch of implausibility (if he only knew it). This does very well, and may be indispensable, for all I know, with the readers of a certain type of American magazines; unfortunately the habitual buyers and readers of books demand something more careful.
The other interesting point of excellence in Oppenheim’s work derives from his method of spontaneity. He once said: “The lure of creation never loses its hold. Personally I cannot account for the fact. Perhaps it springs from the inextinguishable hope that one day there will be born the most wonderful idea that has ever found its way into the brain of a writer of fiction.”[58] For the creator, the superlative never arrives; but certainly for the reader Mr. Oppenheim has materialized more than one wonderful idea. The Great Impersonation, deservedly one of his most successful books, is a fairly recent illustration. But I would like to call particularly to attention an earlier story, both for what seems to me to be its astonishing merit and for its interesting light on the method of spontaneity which is Oppenheim’s special technique. This is The Way of These Women, now ten years old. That it still sells is evidence that its merit is recognized; that one never hears mention of it in any offhand mention of its author’s work shows that the recognition is by no means wide enough.
Sir Jermyn Annerley, a young man of fine taste and high honor, though certainly inclined toward priggishness, is a playwright of the intellectual type. Sybil Cluley, the actress who has aroused London by her performance in Jermyn’s drama, comes to Annerley Court as his weekend guest. They are to discuss his new play in which Sybil is to appear. Aynesworth, Marquis of Lakenham and Jermyn’s second cousin, chances to pay a visit at the same time. Another distant cousin of Jermyn’s, Lucille, who has divorced a French nobleman, is Jermyn’s hostess. Lucille is in love with Jermyn. During the visit Jermyn surrenders to his love for Sybil; they announce their engagement to the others. Sybil is obviously afraid of Lakenham to a degree not to be accounted for by his reputation for excesses, and after some time Lakenham confirms and shares with Lucille his knowledge of a discreditable episode in Sybil’s career before her success on the stage.
Lakenham is murdered at Annerley Court. Suspicion points directly to Sybil, but Lucille has aided Sybil and Jermyn in the removal of very incriminating evidence. As the price for protecting Sybil, Lucille requires Jermyn to marry her within two months.
The story is developed with admirable intervals and suspense. The point of the first quarter of the book is Lakenham’s knowledge of something in Sybil’s past, and Lucille’s determination to fight Sybil for Jermyn. Then Lakenham is killed. Almost half the book lies between the murder and its solution. It is evident that as he wrote Mr. Oppenheim saw (what he may not have grasped at the beginning) that Lucille was his most striking character. As the novel proceeded he became absorbed in the possibilities Lucille offered; if, as may well be the case, he vaguely contemplated solving the murder and bringing Sybil and Jermyn happily together for a quick “curtain,” he deliberately abandoned so conventional and easy an ending. Jermyn and Lucille are married under the hateful terms Lucille has imposed as the price of Sybil’s safety.
It is this that lifts The Way of These Women out of the run of Mr. Oppenheim’s work. Did Sybil kill Lakenham? If she did not, who did she think killed him? If Lucille used fraud with Jermyn, why not annul the marriage for fraud and bring down the curtain? (And in putting these questions I decline responsibility for your wrong inferences as to the answers.) In any case, the solution of the murder would seem to end the story. But something larger and more fateful, something of very near universal significance, had by this time lodged in Mr. Oppenheim’s mind. The “wonderful idea” had come. The last quarter of The Way of These Women is the material, intrinsically, for a very great novel. And Mr. Oppenheim handles it with touches of greatness. He could, of course, by slashing off most he had already written, by adopting some such technical device as W. B. Maxwell used in The Devil’s Garden, have made it a masterpiece, for his knowledge of his theme and his appreciation of its character are plain to be seen. I do not know whether this novel has ever been dramatized, but it is incredible that it should not have been dramatized; the possibilities of Lucille are greater than those of Camille, for they are less artificial and they are not either sentimental or cheap. Why did Mr. Oppenheim not rework it; why did he let it go as the book is, a mixture? Of several possible extenuations, I think the best is that by leaving it alone he probably was able to take the reader who sought merely to be entertained into a very high place whither that reader could not have been lured directly. And it is an elevation to which the writer of ready-made plots never leads.
BOOKS BY E. PHILLIPS OPPENHEIM
Note: The reader is referred to the bibliography by Mr. Hulings C. Brown appearing in the Boston Evening Transcript for 5 May 1923. Mr. Brown’s arrangement of the titles is alphabetical (including both English and American titles). His list includes Mr. Oppenheim’s five serials of book length, not given below because not published in book form. Mr. Brown also gives the publisher (except in a few cases where no record exists). In the list below books that have been published in America are starred; those that have been published in America and were recorded by Mr. Brown as in print are double-starred. Books written under the pseudonym “Anthony Partridge” are so indicated.
SOURCES ON E. PHILLIPS OPPENHEIM
In addition to those referred to in the text and in footnotes, the reader is urged to consult the full-page interview and account appearing in the Boston Evening Transcript for 8 March 1924 (“Oppenheim the Master Maker of Plots,” by James Walter Smith). This is by all odds the best and most interesting single article. It quotes Mr. Oppenheim’s amanuensis as saying that he dictates 5,000 words a day on good days and about 4,000 words on an average day—a phenomenal speed. “In summer he dictates out of doors and I take it down in my note-book. In winter, he dictates direct to the machine. He likes a low easy-chair while working. It’s amazing to me how sure he is in his dictation, and what a grip he has on his plots. Occasionally he has two or more stories moving at the same time, but no matter what the number of characters or of the places where the action occurs, he rarely becomes confused. When he is held up, sometimes by a trifling detail, or by the more important one of getting a character out of a difficulty, he simply says: ‘Three dots’ ... like that, and moves on. This may happen several times in the course of a sitting, and I usually can divine, as the story proceeds, when I’m going to hear that ‘three dots.’ When the dictation is finished, he goes out for a game of golf, perhaps. Then next day he takes up the typescript where the suspension points appear and unerringly fills in the bits which bothered him. This would be easy if the case were single, but where there are several ‘three dot’ cases it demands skill and concentration to get out of the bunker.”