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When Winter Comes to Main Street, a non-fiction book by Grant Martin Overton |
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Chapter 19. Robert W. Chambers And The Whole Truth |
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_ CHAPTER XIX. ROBERT W. CHAMBERS AND THE WHOLE TRUTH =i= Once a man came to Robert W. Chambers and said words to this effect: "You had a great gift as a literary artist and you spoiled it. For some reason or other, I don't know what, but I suppose there was more money in the other thing, you wrote down to a big audience. Don't you think, yourself, that your earlier work--those stories of Paris and those novels of the American revolution--had something that you have sacrificed in your novels of our modern day?" Mr. Chambers listened politely and attentively. When the man had finished, Chambers said to him words to this effect: "You are mistaken. I have heard such talk. I am not to blame if some people entertain a false impression. I have sacrificed nothing, neither for money nor popularity nor anything else. "Sir, I am a story-teller. I have no other gift. Those who imagine that they have seen in my earlier work some quality of literary distinction or some unrealised possibility as an artist missing from my later work, are wrong. "They have read into those stories their own satisfaction in them and their first delight. I was new, then. In their pleasure, such as it was, they imagined the arrival of someone whom they styled a great literary artist. They imagined it all; it was not I. "A story-teller I began, and a story-teller I remain. I do pride myself on being a good story-teller; if the verdict were overwhelmingly against me as a good story-teller that would cast me down. I have no reason to believe that the verdict is against me. "And that is the ground I myself have stood upon. I am not responsible for the delusion of those who put me on some other, unearthly pinnacle, only to realise, as the years went by, that I was not there at all. But they can find me now where they first found me--where I rather suspect they found me first with unalloyed delight." This does not pretend to be an actual transcription of the conversation between Mr. Chambers and his visitor. I asked Mr. Chambers recently if he recalled this interview. He said at this date he did not distinctly recollect it and he added: "Probably I said what is true, that I write the sort of stories which at the moment it amuses me to write; I trust to luck that it may also amuse the public. "If a writer makes a hit with a story the public wants him to continue that sort of story. It does not like to follow the moods of a writer from gay to frivolous, from serious to grave, but I have always liked to change, to experiment--just as I used to like to change my medium in painting, aquarelle, oil, charcoal, wash, etc. "Unless I had a good time writing I'd do something else. I suit myself first of all in choice of subject and treatment, and leave the rest to the gods." As a human creature Chambers is strikingly versatile. It must always be remembered that he started life as a painter. There is a story that Charles Dana Gibson and Robert W. Chambers sent their first offerings to Life at the same time. Mr. Chambers sent a picture and Mr. Gibson sent a bit of writing. Mr. Gibson's offering was accepted and Robert W. Chambers received a rejection slip. Not only was he a painter but Chambers has preserved his interest in art, and is a welcome visitor in the offices of curators and directors of museums because he is one of the few who can talk intelligently about paintings. He knows enough about Chinese and Japanese antiques to enable him to detect forgeries. He knows more about armour than anyone, perhaps, except the man who made the marvellous collection of mediaeval armour for the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. One of his varieties of knowledge, observable by any reader of his novels, is lepidoptery--the science of butterflies. He collects butterflies with exceeding ardour. But then, he is a good deal of an outdoor man. He knows horses and books; he has been known to hunt; he has been seen with a fishing rod in his hand. His knowledge of out-of-the-way places in different parts of the world--Paris, Petrograd--is not usual. Will you believe me if I add that he is something of an expert on rare rugs? Of course, I am, to some extent, taking Rupert Hughes's word for these accomplishments; and yet they are visible in the written work of Robert W. Chambers where, as a rule, they appear without extrusion. =ii= And here is the newest Robert W. Chambers novel, Eris. Mr. Chambers's The Flaming Jewel, a melodrama of the maddest character, was published last spring. Eris is really a story of the movie world, and reaches its most definite conclusion, possibly, in a passage where the hero says to Eris Odell: "Whether they are financing a picture, directing it, releasing it, exhibiting it, or acting in it, these vermin are likely to do it to death. Your profession is crawling with them. It needs delousing." But I am not really anxious, in this chapter, to discuss the justice or injustice of the view of motion pictures thus forcibly presented. I have read Eris with an interest sharpened by the fact that its hero is a writer. I seem to see in what is said about and by Barry Annan expressions of Mr. Chambers's own attitude of more than casual importance. Barry Annan is obsessed with the stupidity of the American mass and more particularly with the grossness (as he sees it) of New York City. "Annan went on with his breakfast leisurely. As he ate he read over his pencilled manuscript and corrected it between bites of muffin and bacon. "It was laid out on the lines of those modern short stories which had proven so popular and which had lifted Barry Annan out of the uniform ranks of the unidentified and given him an individual and approving audience for whatever he chose to offer them. "Already there had been lively competition among periodical publishers for the work of this newcomer. "His first volume of short stories was now in preparation. Repetition had stencilled his name and his photograph upon the public cerebrum. Success had not yet enraged the less successful in the literary puddle. The frogs chanted politely in praise of their own comrade. "The maiden, too, who sips the literary soup that seeps through the pages of periodical publications, was already requesting his autograph. Clipping agencies began to pursue him; film companies wasted his time with glittering offers that never materialised. Annan was on the way to premature fame and fortune. And to the aftermath that follows for all who win too easily and too soon. "There is a King Stork for all puddles. His law is the law of compensations. Dame Nature executes it--alike on species that swarm and on individuals that ripen too quickly. "Annan wrote very fast. There was about thirty-five hundred words in the story of Eris. He finished it by half past ten. "Re-reading it, he realised it had all the concentrated brilliancy of an epigram. Whether or not it would hold water did not bother him. The story of Eris was Barry Annan at his easiest and most persuasive. There was the characteristic and ungodly skill in it, the subtle partnership with a mindless public that seduces to mental speculation; the reassuring caress as reward for intellectual penetration; that inborn cleverness that makes the reader see, applaud, or pity him or herself in the sympathetic role of a plaything of Chance and Fate. "And always Barry Annan left the victim of his tact and technique agreeably trapped, suffering gratefully, excited by self-approval to the verge of sentimental tears. "'That'll make 'em ruffle their plumage and gulp down a sob or two,' he reflected, his tongue in his cheek, a little intoxicated, as usual, by his own infernal facility. "He lit a cigarette, shuffled his manuscript, numbered the pages, and stuffed them into his pocket. The damned thing was done." And again:-- "Considering her, now, a half-smile touching his lips, it occurred to him that here, in her, he saw his audience in the flesh. This was what his written words did to his readers. His skill held their attention; his persuasive technique, unsuspected, led them where he guided. His cleverness meddled with their intellectual emotions. The more primitive felt it physically, too. "When he dismissed them at the bottom of the last page they went away about their myriad vocations. But his brand was on their hearts. They were his, these countless listeners whom he had never seen--never would see. "He checked his agreeable revery. This wouldn't do. He was becoming smug. Reaction brought the inevitable note of alarm. Suppose his audience tired of him. Suppose he lost them. Chastened, he realised what his audience meant to him--these thousands of unknown people whose minds he titivated, whose reason he juggled with and whose heart-strings he yanked, his tongue in his cheek." And this further on:-- "He went into his room but did not light the lamp. For a long while he sat by the open window looking out into the darkness of Governor's Place. "It probably was nothing he saw out there that brought to his lips a slight recurrent smile. "The bad habit of working late at night was growing on this young man. It is a picturesque habit, and one of the most imbecile, because sound work is done only with a normal mind. "He made himself some coffee. A rush of genius to the head followed stimulation. He had a grand time, revelling with pen and pad and littering the floor with inked sheets unnumbered and still wet. His was a messy genius. His plot-logic held by the grace of God and a hair-line. Even the Leaning Tower of Pisa can be plumbed; and the lead dangled inside Achilles's tendon when one held the string to the medulla of Annan's stories." Our young man is undergoing a variety of interesting changes: "Partly experimental, partly sympathetically responsive, always tenderly curious, this young man drifted gratefully through the inevitable episodes to which all young men are heir. "And something in him always transmuted into ultimate friendship the sentimental chaos, where comedy and tragedy clashed at the crisis. "The result was professional knowledge. Which, however, he had employed rather ruthlessly in his work. For he resolutely cut out all that had been agreeable to the generations which had thriven on the various phases of virtue and its rewards. Beauty he replaced with ugliness; dreary squalor was the setting for crippled body and deformed mind. The heavy twilight of Scandinavian insanity touched his pages where sombre shapes born out of Jewish Russia moved like anachronisms through the unpolluted sunshine of the New World. "His were essays on the enormous meanness of mankind--meaner conditions, mean minds, mean aspirations, and a little mean horizon to encompass all. "Out of his theme, patiently, deftly, ingeniously he extracted every atom of that beauty, sanity, inspired imagination which makes the imperfect more perfect, creates better than the materials permit, forces real life actually to assume and be what the passionate desire for sanity and beauty demands." There comes a time when Eris Odell says to Barry Annan:-- "'I could neither understand nor play such a character as the woman in your last book.... Nor could I ever believe in her.... Nor in the ugliness of her world--the world you write about, nor in the dreary, hopeless, malformed, starving minds you analyse.... My God, Mr. Annan--are there no wholesome brains in the world you write about?'" I think these citations interesting. I do not feel especially competent to produce from them inferences regarding Mr. Chambers's own attitude toward his work. Eris will be published early in 1923, following Mr. Chambers's The Talkers. =iii= Mr. Chambers was born in Brooklyn, May 26, 1865, the son of William Chambers and Carolyn (Boughton) Chambers. Walter Boughton Chambers, the architect, is his brother. Robert William Chambers was a student in the Julien Academy in Paris from 1886 to 1893. He married, on July 12, 1898, Elsa Vaughn Moler. He first exhibited in the Paris Salon in 1889; he was an illustrator for Life, Truth, Vogue and other magazines. His first book, In the Quarter, was published in 1893; and when, in the same year, a collection of stories of Paris called The King in Yellow made its appearance, Robert W. Chambers became a name of literary importance. Curiously enough, among the things persistently remembered about Mr. Chambers to this day is a particular poem in a book of rollicking verse called With the Band, which he published in 1895. This cherished--by very many people scattered here and there--poem had to do with Irishmen parading. One stanza will identify it. In the course of writing many books, Chambers has been responsible for one or two shows. He wrote for Ada Rehan, The Witch of Ellangowan, a drama produced at Daly's Theatre. His Iole was the basis of a delightful musical comedy produced in New York in 1913. He is a member of the National Institute of Arts and Letters. IN THE QUARTER SOURCES ON ROBERT W. CHAMBERS Hugh Walpole: An Appreciation, by Joseph Hergesheimer, GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY. English Literature During the Last Half Century, by J. W. Cunliffe, THE MACMILLAN COMPANY. A Hugh Walpole Anthology, selected by the author. LONDON: J. M. DENT & SONS. NEW YORK: E. P. DUTTON & COMPANY. Hugh Walpole, Master Novelist. Pamphlet published by GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY. (Out of print.) Who's Who [In England]. _ |
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