Hugh Walpole

The egotism of most authors stalks in front of them as they enter the room. I have yet to discover such a thing round about the person of Hugh Walpole. He is the most modest author I know; yet, somehow, the most confident. He believes in his books; but he does not expect you to believe in them. If you do, he is glad. If you do not—well, then, there will always be another book, another chance for you to believe. Walpole is tall, broad-shouldered, practically always smiling. He has a wide forehead. He wears glasses. His platform manner is excellent, and he speaks, as he writes, with care and distinction. Walpole’s work is rich in background, as well as in a rare understanding of humanity without an overlarding of the sentimental. He is wise, tolerant, and youthful in his freshness of interest in life. He was born in Auckland, New Zealand. He is a son of the Bishop of Edinburgh. As a boy, he lived in America and attended a private school on Washington Square. While an undergraduate at Cambridge, he wrote two novels. One of them, “The Wooden Horse”, was his first published story. Before this, however, at the age of twelve, he is said to have written a novel concerning Guy Fawkes for the delectation of the family cook. For a time he worked as a journalist on “The London Standard”. Now, both in England and in the United States, he is the greatly popular young novelist of recognized worth. His attitude toward America is far more cordial than that of most English writers. Any differences of opinion he regrets and, as can be seen by his little tiff with Mr. Mencken, he is anxious to act as mediator. Socially popular, invited everywhere in London and New York, the real Walpole, I imagine, is the one who secludes himself in the little Cornish village of Polperro, walks among the fishermen, works long and diligently on his novels.

AN OPEN LETTER TO H. L. MENCKEN

My dear Mencken,

I have been intending to write to you for some months past a personal and private letter with nothing more urgent in it than an affectionate greeting and a strong appeal to you to come over here as soon as possible and share my excellent Irish whisky, but there have been certain utterances of yours in “The Smart Set” during the past few months that have led me to make this letter a public one, because the matter of it seems to me of general interest.

I know that you are set tight in your own opinions like a toad in its hole, and you know how greatly, in the past, I have admired many of those same dogmatisms. It is only because I admire so greatly your critical mind and feel that you are doing a most important work for English as well as American letters, that I write to you as I do. There is little hope of changing you, but it is time that someone on this side of the Atlantic challenged some of your absurd views about the English novel and, above all, about English contemporary criticism.

In these recent numbers of “The Smart Set” you have returned again and again to the main charges; one, that the English critics are engaged in a sort of conspiracy against the contemporary American novel; the other, that the same English critics are busied with log-rolling in connection with their favorite novelists. You make distinct charges, for instance, that no American novelist, save Hergesheimer, and Edith Wharton, is treated with any respect over here: that is, that we deliberately and of malice aforethought despise and condemn James Branch Cabell, Sinclair Lewis, Sherwood Anderson, Floyd Dell, Ben Hecht and the rest, and that we praise the works of, in your opinion, poor novelists like Frank Swinnerton and Michael Sadleir, and neglect the genius of such an author as W. L. George. You also imply that the American public is paying too much attention to the contemporary English novel and is neglecting the brilliant new American novel now arising. Why, you ask, should the Americans flatter the English in this way when the English so utterly neglect the American?

My dear Mencken, it is really time that you paid a visit to this happy little island of ours. I should be very sorry indeed were you to come just at the time of my visit to America. I look forward to eating, if not drinking, with you in Baltimore, but even at the risk of missing your most engaging company, I do beg you to come over. I regard it as a matter of the utmost importance that the English and American novelists should just at this time go hand in hand together. There is a new American novel of the greatest interest and individualism, just as there is a new language. It has already certain characteristics most definitely of its own, yielding nothing to past tradition, English or other, standing strongly on its own feet, the most interesting movement, I think, in American letters of the last fifty years.

There is no reason however why, because of this new and splendid phenomenon, the American critics should decide that the American public has no more use for the English novel. The more individual and distinctive the American novel becomes, the more different will it be from the English and the more enjoyable will both be in comparison and in friendly rivalry. It is quite impossible, for instance (to take one or two recent examples), for any Englishman to father such books as “Main Street”, “Moon-Calf”, “Miss Lulu Bett”, “Cytherea”, or “Three Soldiers”, just as it would be equally impossible for “To Let” or “Dangerous Ages” or “The Death of Society” or “Crome Yellow” to have come from an American talent. Surely this is a good thing. Instead of both countries producing, as they were engaged in doing twenty years ago, insipid historical romances that might have come from anywhere, the younger generations of both peoples are now working on their own grounds, cultivating most happily their own gardens.

That brings me directly to your charge that the English critics are neglecting the more recent American novelists. You except Edith Wharton and Joseph Hergesheimer, so I will not speak of them, only hinting in parenthesis that if you imagine that Hergesheimer’s art is European rather than American, you are making the greatest mistake of your young critical life; but is it true for a single moment that Cabell, Booth Tarkington, Sinclair Lewis, Sherwood Anderson, Miss Cather and the others are passed over here? That their novels do not command great sales here is perfectly true. For some reason, the American novel presents English readers with conditions that are very difficult for them to understand. Part of the difficulty is beyond question this problem of the new American language. Take “Main Street” or “Three Soldiers” or “Moon-Calf”, and you will find pages of those books peppered with phrases that to nine Englishmen out of ten are quite unintelligible. When you get to the words of Don Marquis or Ring Lardner they might, for most English readers, be just as readily written in Russian or Chinese. But it is not only difficulty of language. American conditions simply have no parallel in this country. The majority of Englishmen have not visited the United States, and many of those who have been there have penetrated no farther than the wilds of New York and Chicago.

Such a book as one of the very finest of all American novels, “My Ántonia”, is simply not intelligible to the ordinary English reader, and the small sales of “Main Street” over here are entirely due to the fact that we have nothing in our country at all parallel with the cultural conditions of your own small towns. It would be in many ways much better for us if we had.

That these writers are critically neglected, is simply untrue. You mention Cabell’s name. The limited edition of “Jurgen” that John Lane published over here has been one of the great successes of the autumn. The 3,000 copies of that edition were sold out within the first fortnight, and booksellers are besieged with requests for it. That book had columns of reviews in all the leading literary journals. The only important paper that treated it with contempt was “The London Mercury”, whose notices of fiction are by far its weakest section. “Figures of Earth”, which has just appeared here, has again been treated with the most serious attention. Sherwood Anderson has hitherto been presented in England by his weakest work only, and it is not the fault of the English critics if they do not yet realize how considerable an artist he is. Such a book as Ben Hecht’s “Erik Dorn” has not, I think, yet been published here, but in any case you would not, I imagine, wish to have that represented as the finest flower of American contemporary genius. Booth Tarkington has had critical attention here for years. “The Narrow House” by Evelyn Scott received any number of reviews, and “Miss Lulu Bett” was greeted with the greatest enthusiasm.

The fact, however, remains that the American novel is at present dealing with conditions unknown to the English reader, while the English novel is speaking of manners and customs that have been known for generations to American visitors.

I come to your second charge, which is that the English reviewer is a fellow of small cliques and coteries who is engaged in praising only the works of his own set. Never was there anything falser. You instance certain names, Frank Swinnerton, Michael Sadleir and others. The fact of the matter is that there is a very wholesome tendency among English critics here to knock any novelist on the head as soon as he shows signs of getting above himself. This is an admirable and most natural instinct in human nature, peculiar not only to the English. You will remember that Henry James in some articles in the “Times” just before the war collected certain young novelists together and either patted them on the head or rapped them on the knuckles according to the way in which you interpreted his rather mysterious prose. In any case, he gave them undue prominence, they having but just then chipped the egg, having the whole of their young literary lives in front of them. They have suffered from this paternal blessing ever since, and in their case, at any rate, there have been no logs rolled. Neither W. L. George nor Frank Swinnerton was mentioned by Henry James. Mr. George has had, it is true, some severe criticism for his last two or three novels, but that is because they are provocative and argumentative, they were pacifist in tendency during the war, and have on one occasion at least been concerned with backgrounds that were not perhaps the atmospheres in which his talent could work most naturally.

Frank Swinnerton, until after the publication of “Nocturne”, had universal praise from the critics. After “Nocturne” he became a public figure, a definite representative of the younger English novel and therefore a legitimate Aunt Sally. “Coquette”, one of his very best novels and certainly one of the best English novels of the last ten years, received a very mixed press indeed, and you are quite wrong if you imagine that he is being praised unduly. He is working most wisely in a small corner of contemporary English life that he knows absolutely, that is his own by right of mastery, and if you think “Nocturne”, “Coquette”, “On the Staircase”, and “The Happy Family” are poor novels, I can only reply to you that you don’t know the English life of which he is writing.

As to Michael Sadleir, of whose “Privilege” you spoke with a contemptuous sniff, there has, in his case, been no conspiracy to praise. The reviews of that book were very divided. I would not have expected you to be in sympathy with it. It is a romantic work both definitely and deliberately, and has for its most ancient ancestor the highly colored Mrs. Radcliffe whose fiction I suspect you of never having read.

But these are mere matters of opinion. What I want to say to you is that there is no evidence anywhere of log-rolling in the reviewing of fiction in England today. With regard to modern poetry I am not so sure, but I can speak there with no authority.

What it comes to, my dear Mencken, is that we want you over here for a little while. Aren’t you conscious yourself of an increasing tinge of provincialism in your critical utterances? Don’t you really think that there is plenty of room for the contemporary English and American novels to walk hand in hand? What we want over here is some definite authority who will speak to us about the present development of the American novel. You’re the man for that. Come over and help us. I can promise you a most cordial welcome.

Yours ever,

Hugh Walpole.