i

TO know Christopher Morley is to be interested, amused, enthusiastic, sceptical or even secretly puzzled; but to have him for a friend is to learn the meaning of friendliness in a degree that is very exceptional. And few escape being his friends, though this is less true than formerly. There was, indeed, once a time when the friendship of Morley was among the two or three serious responsibilities of an individual’s life—like marriage, or filial duty or a conscience in regard to one’s chosen craft. Practically every day, sometimes twice in a day, the evidence of Morley’s friendliness would appear in a brief letter or hastily-penned note about this or that or the other thing under the sun.

An image arose of an ever-active, a sleepless mind; of an emotional nature more unresting than the Atlantic and quantitatively as great. This awful abstraction slowly faded out into a visual image of a “burly” man with a smiling face and a lighted pipe, and that, in turn, gave place to the fear lest so much confidence in the human race should prove fatally misplaced.... Somewhat, it has; but what we didn’t foresee was that the change, coming about gradually, would operate as a gradual salvation of (1) his friends from Morley, (2) Morley from his friends, (3) Morley’s work from Friend Morley.

Yet this beneficial and important transformation has been accomplished in the most salutary manner, with a result that may accrue with permanence and advantage to American literature.

ii

As lately as 1920 one estimating American talents could observe of Morley: “His gift is purely journalistic, isn’t it?” and receive the answer from Morley’s friend: “Purely”—an answer conceived in entire truthfulness. Both the asker and the answerer were pretty certain to regard the assumed fact as a great pity. But as to the fact!—why, what further evidence was needed to establish it? Morley had been writing for several years, had averaged several books a year of prose and verse, and nowhere gave the least sign of doing work of a different character. What, then, was the character of his work in those years? He began at Oxford with a book of verse; from a more actual standpoint his beginnings had been made with Parnassus on Wheels, published in 1917. This really capital conceit had engendered a sequel, The Haunted Bookshop, published two years later. There were certain books of essays—Shandygaff, Mince Pie, Pipefuls—pleasant, partly serious, sometimes sentimental and showing a deplorable fondness for the pun. There were books of verse—Songs for a Little House, The Rocking Horse, Hide and Seek. Travels in Philadelphia, the short story, Kathleen, and an unfortunate collaboration called In the Sweet Dry and Dry completed the roll. It is no reflection upon these volumes to say that they gave the impression of a talent strictly journalistic; the best journalism is more than ephemeral and most of the titles enumerated are still actively in demand. The quality we call “journalism” is not an affair of perishability but something very difficult to define, something in the approach, something in the treatment rather than in the choice of subjects. In the last analysis it is probable that the effort to define it would end with hands flung out hopelessly before the mystery of a personal temperament.

The facts were these: Morley had been educated at Haverford College and Oxford; he had then come to Garden City to work for the publishing house which, principally, has published his prose, and his first enterprises as an author were precociously instructed by an “inside” acquaintance with what James Branch Cabell would call the auctorial career. The influence upon his own work of this very special knowledge is not easy to estimate. He saw, as only one in a publishing house sees, the facts of authorship after the author’s child is born. For example: the immense effect upon the fortunes of a writer’s book, or books, of the attitude toward them of the bookseller. And that attitude is quite rightly fixed by what the bookseller (1) knows he can sell, or, less frequently (2), by what he thinks he can sell.

Morley saw that books are sold through bookstores. Looking a little further, he discerned that books which are not in bookstores are, with certain class exceptions, very rarely sold. He learned, as everyone in a publishing house learns, that three-quarters of the books that are sold to retail purchasers are bought because retail purchasers have had these books thrust directly under their noses. He suffered, no doubt, the customary amazement on discovering the vast number of people who (1) either enter the bookstore with no particular book in mind, or (2), on being unable to obtain the book in mind, readily take something else. It was brought to his keen attention that, as Frank Swinnerton reiterates in his admirable brochure on “Authors and Advertising,” direct advertising, as in newspapers and magazines (the commonest mediums) does not sell books. Being a young man of alert perceptions, it cannot have been lost upon him that book reviews do not, with any reliability, sell books, either. What does sell books is talk—in some instances—but the hard rock foundation of book sales is a favourable attitude on the part of “the trade.”

To know the people in the bookstore, to have and to cultivate and to deserve their good will (for, in the long run, you must deserve it), and thus to insure the sale of your book to the bookseller and to enlist his energy and enterprise in re-selling it to his customers—this is the “favourable attitude” just mentioned. Few authors succeed in establishing it; fewer succeed in maintaining it. Mr. Morley has done both, with the result that in five years from the time of his Parnassus on Wheels he has been able to publish a highly imaginative, refined and polished satire and see it become, in its field, a pronounced best seller.

iii

One would about as soon expect to see a fantasy by Lord Dunsany a best seller as witness the sale, in tens of thousands, of Morley’s Where the Blue Begins—if one were making one’s estimate solely on the work itself. Where the Blue Begins is the story of the dog Gissing’s search for God—a search conducted in various places and circumstances parallel to human life of the present day by an animal discreetly analogued to the human animal. Such a piece of writing has ordinarily no hope except from unusual and very favourable (or acutely controversial) critical attention; and the hope from that quarter is relatively small. By “hope,” of course, is meant a hope of a considerable sale. Where the Blue Begins belongs to that class of literature which is written because it has lain in the author’s heart to write it, regardless of its fate after it lies on paper. In the case of Mr. Morley, the work has received merited praise; but it would be naïve to suppose that this notice and commendation sold the book; and the book trade might even justifiably be indignant at such a supposition. Did not they, the booksellers, buy Where the Blue Begins because it was Morley’s new book? And did not they and their clerks “push” the book for the same reason? The Ayes have it, to both questions, and unanimously.

On the other hand, the sceptical soul who argues that Chris Morley wrote Parnassus on Wheels, in the first place, because it was a story about a bookseller calculated to “get him in right” with the trade—that man does not know Morley and shows that he does not know him. It is possible to detect in the character of Morley’s work, in the circumstance of its publication and in the accessories provided for that publication evidences of a singularly intelligent literary campaign; it is possible to detect them and believe them to be such; but it is not possible to over-estimate the part played by Morley’s own naïveté, affectionate nature and formerly unchecked and indiscriminate enthusiasm.

Such an attitude is always open to misconstruction. But it takes real intelligence to go beneath the surface; and among Morley’s friends were many who could do that. These perceived his genuineness without being in the least able to predict the outcome of his generosity. Ours is a world thus and thus and so and so. The ultimate effect upon Morley himself of a disposition which he would unquestionably see suffer and change was the problem. It would be very easy for him to come a tremendous cropper of any one of several sorts; and then should we have a soured, an embittered young man? Prophecy was worthless.

Meanwhile, with the auspicious beginning of Parnassus on Wheels, the young man went gaily on. His first book of verse (barring the Oxford experiment) was published in the same year under the valuable title, Songs for a Little House; and at once the small beginnings of a Morley vogue were faintly perceptible. The suspicion that such a title harboured a spirit committed to the sentimental attitude toward life was confirmed within a year by the publication of a book of essays, Shandygaff, named after a reputed or actual beverage and got up with a deliberately quaint title page. One was left in no doubt that Morley liked Stevenson, was affectionately fond of Robert Cortes Holliday, and worshipped the genius of Don Marquis. The seeds of literary jealousy were sown, to be harvested several years later in accusations of log-rolling[2] that were levelled at others a-plenty besides Morley. Here, however, it should be explained that Morley had come from Oxford to go to work, at the age of twenty-three, at Garden City; that while learning the publishing business he had married Miss Helen Booth Fairchild, a New York girl whom he had met in England. If, therefore, he modestly undertook to become the American poet of domesticity with his songs for households “of two or more,” the guilt should by no means be made personal to him, but may justly be laid at the door of the race.

The year following Shandygaff witnessed the appearance of another book of verse, The Rocking Horse; the sequel to Parnassus on Wheels, entitled The Haunted Bookshop; and a book done in collaboration with Bart Haley. Called In the Sweet Dry and Dry, this is quite exceptional among Morley books, and not too common among any books, for its badness. An extravaganza on the subject of prohibition, the plot may be said to have resided mainly in incessant and outrageous puns, at that time a pronounced Morley weakness. But again it is necessary to point out a detail which, taken in one light, and, as I think, the proper light, reflects great personal credit on Mr. Morley; he has never disowned the bad book. He could not do so openly, of course—copies probably exist—but he has not done so tacitly, as he might have without question or comment. I have in mind a little booklet on Christopher Morley published in 1922 and concluding with a bibliography. There it stands: “In the Sweet Dry and Dry, Boni and Liveright, 1919. (In collaboration with Bart Haley, out of print.)” The book, no doubt. George Moore and Henry James, not to mention other men of literary genius, have had occasion to be ashamed of their work and to drop it quietly from the roll. I like Mr. Morley for not doing so.

iv

Christopher Darlington Morley was born at Haverford, Pennsylvania, 5 May, 1890, of parents both English by birth but long Americans by residence. Dr. Frank Morley, an English Quaker of Woodbridge, Suffolk—the home of Edward Fitzgerald—was graduated at Cambridge and came to Haverford in 1887 as professor of mathematics. His wife was Lilian Janet Bird, of Hayward’s Heath, in Sussex, a woman of some musical and poetical gifts, the daughter of a man at one time with the London publishing house of Chapman and Hall. CDM frequently praises her cooking, which blended as an influence on his boyhood with the Haverford campus, where cricket is played. In 1900 Professor Morley went to Baltimore and Johns Hopkins. His son entered Haverford in 1906, was graduated in 1910 and, in the same year, was chosen as Rhodes Scholar representing Maryland. The three years at Oxford were spent at New College. In the title-poem of a new book of verse, Parson’s Pleasure—the name of the old bathing pool on the Cherwell at Oxford—occur the lines:

The confused exigencies of his native land, however, were, more immediately, to make something else out of him. Repairing to Garden City, he interviewed Mr. F. N. Doubleday, otherwise FND (“Effendi”) on the matter of a job. Mr. Doubleday has preserved the record of that interview in an amusing account which fully displays the youth, eagerness, enthusiasm and amiable audacity of the twenty-three-year-old. The noted Effendi, whose philosophy of life is not without its Oriental suggestions and whose sense of humour is at such times gently active, was feeling “a little weighted down that morning with the difficulties of the job which the President of Doubleday, Page & Company takes as a daily routine,” and therefore finally told Morley “to go to work at all his manifold plans and literary philanderings, reserving the right to restrain his commitments if necessary.”

It was Morley who discovered William McFee. English sheets of that long and very fine novel, Casuals of the Sea, had been submitted to the firm for consideration and possible purchase. Ultimately it became necessary to set up type for the novel in America. “We were accustomed,” Mr. Doubleday explains, “to hold what we called a ‘book-meeting,’ when each member of the staff gave his suggestion about authors and books. For months when it came Christopher’s turn to speak he always began, ‘Now, about McFee—we don’t appreciate what a comer he is’ and so on for five minutes without taking a breath until finally it became the joke of the meeting that nothing could be done until Morley’s McFee speech had been made. Our jibes influenced him not at all. His only reply to our efforts in humour was to bring on a look of great seriousness and the eternal phrase, ‘Now, about McFee.’”

In leaving Garden City after a stay of nearly four years to become, in his own phrase, one of the “little group of wilful men who edit the Ladies’ Home Journal,” CDM departed from the well-established tradition under which so many men in the book publishing business have fallen. It is some kind of a tribute to Doubleday, Page & Company that the house has been the training-place of a considerable number of the heads in other publishing houses. In Philadelphia a term on the Ladies’ Home Journal was followed by work as a columnist on the Evening Public Ledger, the direct preliminary to Morley’s column on the editorial page of the New York Evening Post, with which he has been since 1920. The book, Travels in Philadelphia; the personal acquaintance of A. Edward Newton, author of The Amenities of Book Collecting and Kindred Affections; and a deepened interest in Walt Whitman, are some of the concomitants of the Philadelphia period. Also, I think, Morley’s gradual disillusionment began then. The collection of essays called Mince Pie was published late in 1919 and there were still to appear, in 1920, certain overflowings of the Morley of the first period—the story of an Oxford undergraduate prank, called Kathleen; a book of verse, Hide and Seek; and more essays in Pipefuls. But that was to be about all. Something very definite had happened to the young man who was so friendly with everybody, who was forever talking about William McFee, who wrote forty-leven letters and notes a day, who had made a cult of quaintness and who liked to be called Kit and to have the resemblance of his name to that of Christopher Marlowe’s stretched into a fanciful resemblance of personalities and writing. Some lone reviewer, speaking harshly; or some slight wound received in the house of one of his friends; or the shifts and vicissitudes of commercial enterprise—dissatisfaction with what he had already done, a thirtieth birthday, a wish to do something he had yet to do—together or singly may have been the agents of the change. Only the change itself matters. And what was that? It was not that Chris became less friendly, or autographed fewer dozens of copies of a new book of his, or loved the Elizabethans less or the work of Theodore Dreiser more. But a retractation took place, an alteration of ideas went on ... aided, it may be, by the uniformity with which American magazine editors rejected a short story called “Referred to the Author,” one of the contents of Morley’s book Tales from a Rolltop Desk—a story which Morley himself thinks marks the definite line between his old work and new.

v

Those who care for the poet of “households of two or more” will find him most readily now in the volume called Chimneysmoke (1921), which is a representative selection from the earlier books of verse, Songs for a Little House, The Rocking Horse, and Hide and Seek. Vincent O’Sullivan has said that the Morley here represented belongs with “the English intimists, Herrick, George Herbert, Cowper, Crabbe.” Writing an introduction for the English edition of Chimneysmoke, E. V. Lucas remarked: “Domesticity has had many celebrants, but I cannot remember any one work in which such a number of the expressions of Everyman, in his capacity as householder, husband and father, have been touched upon, and touched upon so happily and with such deep and simple sincerity. The poet of ‘The Angel in the House’ was, I suppose, a predecessor; but Coventry Patmore was a mystic and a rhapsodist, whereas Mr. Morley keeps on a more normal plane and puts in verse, thoughts and feelings and excitements that most of us have known but have lacked the skill or will to epigrammatise. If we are to look in literature for a kindred spirit to Mr. Morley’s we find it rather in the author of ‘The Cotter’s Saturday Night.’”

Morley’s new book of essays, The Powder of Sympathy, shows the man changed and changing. It would be impossible to detect any loss of humour or cheerfulness in such papers as those on Sir Kenelm Digby or the Morley automobile, Dame Quickly (to be succeeded some day by the more impressive Dean Swift). But the satire in “The Story of Ginger Cubes” is not less complete or sharp for being throughout good-natured; and in his piece on “The Unknown Citizen” Morley seems to me to strike a single magnificent chord in which satire and humour are simply notes underlain by the deep bass of pathos and truth. The new book of poems, Parson’s Pleasure, shows that where there was so much Chimneysmoke a fire burns also. This book has an inspiring and inspiriting essay for preface—one far too quotable; I must resist it. Instead, let me give the first sonnet in the “Memoranda for a Sonnet Sequence”:

Books by Christopher Morley

Sources on Christopher Morley