Grant M. Overton

“ Even in the fuller light of experience, Maugham could hardly have bettered his study of an impulsive and exigent woman, rising at the outset to the height of a bold and womanly choice in defiance of social prejudice and family tradition, and then relapsing under the disillusions of marriage into the weakest failings of her class, rising again, from a self-torturing neurotic into a kind of Niobe at the death of her baby. ”

“ Wherever there are human creatures there are beauty and courage and sacrifice. The stories in Whispering Windows deal with human creatures, thieves, drunkards, prostitutes, each of whom is striving for happiness in his or her way, and missing it, as most of us do. Each has hidden away some fine streak of character, some mark below which he will not go. And—they are alive. They have met life in its ugliest phases, and fought it. ”

“ On the one hand lay brutality; a hundred imitative louts could have written a similar chapter brutally, with the soul left out, we have loads of such ‘strong stuff’ and it is nothing; on the other side was the still more dreadful fall into sentimentality, the tear of conscious tenderness, the redeeming glimpse of ‘better things’ in Alf or Emmy that could at one stroke have converted their reality into a genteel masquerade. The perfection of Alf and Emmy is that at no point does a ‘nature’s gentleman’ or a ‘nature’s lady’ show through and demand our refined sympathy. ”

“ There are a series of women, of course—drab, pathetic, enticing as the case may be,—who lead him through the mazes of sentiment, sex, love, pity, passion; a wonderful series of portraits and of incidents. There are a series of men friends of a peculiarly inclusive range of intellectuality and taste, who lead him, or whom he leads, through all the intricacies of art, philosophy, criticism, humour. ”

“ When there devolved upon me as a labour of love the editing of Rupert Ray’s book, Tell England, I carried the manuscript to my room one bright autumn afternoon and read it during the fall of a soft evening, till the light failed, and my eyes burned with the strain of reading in the dark. I could hardly leave his ingenuous tale to rise and turn on the gas. Nor, perhaps, did I want such artificial brightness. There are times when one prefers the twilight. ”

“ Sometimes in retrospect of a great book the mind falters, confused by the multitude and yet the harmony of the detail, the strangeness of the frettings, the brooding, musing intelligence that has foreseen, loved, created, elaborated, perfected, until, in the middle ground which we call life, somewhere between nothing and nothing, hangs the perfect thing which we love and cannot understand, but which we are compelled to confess a work of art. ”

“ If there exists a better writing of vulgar lovemaking, so base, so honest, so touchingly mean and so touchingly full of the craving for happiness than this, I do not know of it. Only a novelist who has had his troubles can understand fully what a dance among china cups, what a skating over thin ice, what a tight-rope performance is achieved in this astounding chapter. ”

“ There is always a younger generation but it is not always articulate. The war may not have changed the face of the world, but it changed the faces of very many young men. Faces of naïve enthusiasm and an innocent expectancy were not particularly noticeable in the years 1918 to 1922. The sombreness, the abruptness, the savage mood evident in the writings of such men as Barbusse and Siegfried Sassoon were abandoned. Confronted with the riddle of life, spared the enigma of death, the young men have felt nothing more befitting their age and generation than the personal “gesture.” ”

“ Tahiti, as a whole, seemed unaware of Maugham’s visit.
“They may have adored him; but I suspect he was a quiet joy, the kind native Tahiti soon forgets, certainly not the kind of joy she embodies in her national songs and himines. Such are the merry drunkards, inefficient though earnest white hulahula dancers and the plain (more than everyday) sinners who cut up rough with wild jagged edges and cruel tearings.
“His occasional appearance at the French club would raise his status, removing any light touches with his junketings, perhaps turning them into dignified ceremonies. ”

“ Clotilde Graves has become a secondary personality.
There was once a time when there was no Richard Dehan. There now are times when there is no Clotilde Graves.
To a woman in middle age an opportunity presented itself. It was the chance to write a novel around the subject which, as a girl, she had come to know a great deal about—the subject of war. To write about it and gain attention, the novel required a man’s signature.
Then there was born in the mind of the woman who purposed to write the novel the idea of a man—of the man—who should be the novelist she wanted to be. ”

“ But one is never done with knowing the greatest men or the greatest works of art—they carry you on and on, and at the last you feel you are only beginning. That is my experience. I would not say that I know these men, of whom I have written, thoroughly—a man of sense would hardly say that, but I can say that I have enjoyed my work, and that, whatever other people may find it, to me it has been a delight and an illumination. ”

“ It would be a mistake to confer on such a fictional passage a strict autobiographical importance; but I think it significant that the novel with which Walpole first won an American following, Fortitude, should derive from a theme as simple and as strong as that of a classic symphony—from those 22 words with which it opens: “’T isn’t life that matters! ’T is the courage you bring to it.” From that moment on, the novel follows the struggle of Peter Westcott, in boyhood and young manhood, with antagonists, inner and outer. ”

“ There are men who tell side-splitting tales with the face of an undertaker—for example, Irvin Cobb. There are men who can tell side-splitting tales and openly and candidly rollick in them from the first word; and of these latter is Frank Swinnerton. But Frank Swinnerton can be more cruel than Irvin Cobb. Indeed, sometimes when he is telling a story, his face becomes exactly like the face of Mephistopheles in excellent humour with the world’s sinfulness and idiocy. ”

“ Compact of the experiences, the dreams, the hopes, the fears, the disillusionments, the ruptures, and the philosophising of a strangely starved soul, it is a beacon light by which the wanderer may be guided. Nothing is left out; the author writes as though it were a labour of love. It bears the imprint of an eager, almost consuming desire to say truly what is in his heart. ”

“ Italy and Egypt and every other country that was ever 356 warmed by the sun of beauty and shone on by the stars of romance. For the poems in this book are woven of the stuff of sheer romance. There is nothing else in the world as depressing as a romantic poem that doesn’t ‘get there.’ And to us, at least, there is nothing as thrilling as the authentic voice of romance, the genuine utterance of the soul that walks in communion with beauty. ”

“ These normal and excitement-loving readers are overwhelmingly in the majority. Witness the fact that The Bat had a longer run in New York than have all of Dunsany’s and Yeats’s rare dramas, put together. If we insist that our country be guided by majority-rule, then why sneer at a majority-report in literary tastes?
“Ben Hur was branded as a ‘religious dime novel.’ Yet it has had fifty times the general vogue of Anatole France’s pseudo-blasphemy which deals with the same period. Public taste is not always, necessarily, bad taste. ”

“ Swinnerton’s fiction. And, coming at last to Nocturne, I fall back cheerfully upon the praise accorded that novel by H. G. Wells in his preface to it. Said Mr. Wells:
“Such a writer as Mr. Swinnerton sees life and renders it with a steadiness and detachment and patience quite foreign to my disposition. He has no underlying motive. He sees and tells. His aim is the attainment of that beauty which comes with exquisite presentation. Seen through his art, life is seen as one sees things through a crystal lens, more intensely, more completed, and with less turbidity. ”

“ In a sense, all of Stephen McKenna’s writing has been a confession. More than any other novelist now actively at work, this young man bases fiction on biographical and autobiographical material; and when he sits down deliberately to write reminiscences, such as While I Remember, the result is merely that, in addition to confessing himself, he confesses others. ”

“ For years it waited in manuscript until Walpole had become a master in a certain provincial school in England. There he showed the novel to a fellow-master, who, having kept the novel for a period, spoke thus: ‘I have tried to read your novel, Walpole, but I can’t. Whatever else you may be fitted for, you aren’t fitted to be a novelist.’ Mr. Walpole was grieved. Perhaps he was unaware, then, that a similar experience had happened to Joseph Conrad. I am unable to judge the schoolmaster’s fitness to be a critic, because I have not read The Wooden Horse. ”

“ Here is a novel or biography or autobiography or social transcript of the utmost importance. To begin with, it is unmoral, as a novel of this kind must necessarily be. The hero is born with a club foot, and in consequence, and because of a temperament delicately attuned to the miseries of life, suffers all the pains, recessions, and involute self tortures which only those who have striven handicapped by what they have considered a blighting defect can understand. He is a youth, therefore, with an intense craving for sympathy and understanding. ”

“ This, it seems to me, is most clearly marked in their superiority to the cheap materialism that has been the insistent note of the prevailing optimistic fiction. There is a great deal of happiness in Mr. Walpole’s 30 pages, but it is not founded on surface vulgarity of appetite. The drama of his books is not sapped by the automatic security of invulnerable heroics. Accidents happen, tragic and humorous; the life of his novels is checked in black and white, often shrouded in grey; the sun moves and stars come out; youth grows old; charm fades; girls may or may not be pretty ”

“ I have seen no comment more penetrating than that of Michael Sadleir, himself the author of a novel of distinction. Sadleir says:
“Already Huxley is the most readable of his generation. He has the allurement of his own inconsistency, and the inconsistency of youth is its questing spirit, and, consequently, its chief claim to respect. ”

“ From the great literary talent displayed by this wonderfully precocious child from girlhood, it is difficult not to imagine but that in some, if merely spiritual, way the genius of her mother’s old lover had descended through that mother’s brain as a mantle upon herself. That she learnt to look upon Gibbon with admiration at an early age is sure. ”

“ Yet, there is something to be said in behalf of the man or woman who finds guilty joy in reading a story whose action gallops; a story whose runaway pace breaks its stride only to leap a chasm or for a breathcatching stumble on a precipice-edge. The office boy prefers Captain Kidd to Strindberg; not because he is a boy, but because he is human and has not yet learned the trick of disingenuousness. He is still normal. So is the average grown-up. ”

“ The unique character of Nocturne makes it very hard to write about Swinnerton. It is true that Arnold Bennett wrote: “I am prepared to say to the judicious reader unacquainted with Swinnerton’s work, ‘Read Nocturne,’ and to stand or fall, and to let him stand or fall by the result.” At the same time, though the rule is that we must judge an artist by his finest work and a genius by his greatest masterpiece, it is not entirely just 226 to estimate the living writer by a single unique performance, an extraordinary piece of virtuosity, which Nocturne unquestionably is. ”

“ All kidding to one side it is the straight dope when I say that from being merely the daughter of honest and only moderately poor parents I have now a house of my own, the very one in our town which I most admired as a child; and the quit-claim deed come out of my own easy money. I also got a car or two—and a few pieces of the sort of second-hand stuff which successful people generally commence cluttering up their house with as a sign of outward and visible success. I mean the junk one moves in when one moves the golden oak out.... ”

“ A shy, but normal little girl, twelve years old now, nine when her first volume of verses appeared, Hilda Conkling is not so much the infant prodigy as a clear proof that the child mind, before the precious spark is destroyed, possesses both vision and the ability to express it in natural and beautiful rhythm. Grace Hazard Conkling, herself a poet, is Hilda’s mother. ”

“ No one else, it seems, is so familiar with the unusual corners of New York City, the sort of places that get themselves called “quaint.” No one else manages the affairs of young lovers (on paper) with quite so much of the airy spirit of young love. I can think of no one else who could write such a scene as that in The Owl Taxi, where the dead-wagon, on its way in the night to the vast cemetery in a New York suburb, is held up for the removal of a much-needed corpse. Such material is bizarre. The handling of it must be very deft or the result will be revolting ”

“ My father was one of the most brilliant men I have ever known but as he refused to choose any of the ordinary paths of mental activity his name has remained a family name when it should have become more exclusively his own. If anything, my mother’s famous beauty cast far more lustre on it than his genius—which preferred to bask 48 in the sunshine of intimacy or recline indolently in the shady backwaters of privacy and leisure. ”

“ Here is the genesis of Maugham’s first serious work, Liza of Lambeth. 287
It will be simpler and less confusing to deal with Somerset Maugham in the first instance as a maker of books rather than as a playwright. One cannot help believing that, while not one of his plays can be regarded as a pot boiler, they yet but seldom display that fervent purpose found in his books. Yet in his plays, one finds a greater attention to conventional technique and “form” than one finds in books like Of Human Bondage and The Moon and Sixpence. ”

“ Instead they are driven by fear, which they have misnamed Commonsense. These people thwart themselves, while my people are thwarted by malign circumstance.
“Often I have taken other men to the dire districts about which I write, and they have remained unmoved; they have seen, in their phrase, nothing to get excited about. Well, one cannot help that kind of person. One cannot give understanding to the man who regards the flogging of children as a joke, or to whom a broken love-story is, in low life, a theme for smoking-room anecdotes. ”

“ There remains Huxley the sensualist, a very ardent lover of beauty, but one that shrinks from the sordid preamble of modern gallantry, one that is apprehensive of the inevitable disillusionment. As others have done, as others will do, he finds in imagination the adventure that progress has decreed unseemly.
“The reader who is shocked by ‘slabby-bellies,’ ‘mucus,’ ‘Priapulids’; the reader who is awed by the paraded learning of ‘Splendour by Numbers,’ by the deliberate intricacy of ‘Beauty,’ or the delicate fatigue of ‘The Death of Lully’ in Limbo—these are no audience for an artist. ”

“ It would be impossible for the hero of a Bennett novel of recent years to be a character like Mark Sabre in If Winter Comes. Arnold Bennett’s married hero would realise that the health, comfort, wishes, doubts, dissimulations; the jealousies, the happiness or the fancied happiness, and the exterior appearances of the woman who was his wife abolish, for practical purposes, everything else. It is due to Mr. Bennett more than to anyone else that we now understand that while “husband” may be a correct legal designation, “lover” is the only possible æsthetic appellation of the man who is married. ”

“ Shrewd and homely wisdom, sympathetic and ironical humour, the insight and the fundamental experience,—above all, imagination in experience—which made their first deep and wide impression with the publication of A Circuit Rider’s Wife. I open The Eyes of Love at random and come upon such a passage as this, and then I don’t wonder that men as well as women read Corra Harris and continue to read her:
“Few women are ever related by marriage to the minds of their husbands. ”

“ Phyllis Bottome is just as interesting as her novels. When scarcely more than a child with large, delightful eyes, she began to write, and completed at the age of seventeen a novel which Andrew Lang advised an English publisher to accept. Thereafter she wrote regularly and with increasing distinction. Ill-health drove her to Switzerland where, living for some years, she met all kinds of people from all the countries of Europe and America as well.
It is interesting that her father was an American, although after his marriage to an Englishwoman, he settled in England. ”

“ It is all very well to say that the man is one thing, his books are quite another; but suppose the man cannot be separated from his books? The Walpole that loved Cornwall as a lad can’t be dissevered from the “Hugh Seymour” of The Golden Scarecrow; without his Red Cross service in Russia during the Great War, Walpole could not have written The Dark Forest; and I think the new novel he offers us this autumn must owe a good deal to direct reminiscence of such a cathedral town as Durham, to which the family returned when Hugh was twelve. ”

“ He is distinctly a man of his time; and it is just because of that modernity, informed by a sane judgment of urgent problems and wide and deep sympathy with all mankind, that we look forward hopefully to the growth and increased importance of his work. In his style, so level, so consistent, Mr. Hugh Walpole does not seek so much for novel as for individual expression; and this search, this 29 ambition so natural to an artist, is often rewarded by success. Old and young interest him alike and he treats both with a sure touch and in the kindest manner. ”