DONN BYRNE
Donn Byrne
There are more gods than any man is aware of, and there is really more virtue in discovering a new one, and catching him young, than in deferring your tribute until he is old and so old-established that all the world has recognized him for what he is. You may say that Donn Byrne is not a god of modern Grub Street, but you can take it from me that he is going to be. He has all the necessary attributes and is climbing to his due place in the hierarchy so rapidly that he will have arrived there soon after you are reading what I have to say about him.
There is a general idea that he is an American; unless an author stops at home mistakes of that kind are sure to happen. People take it for granted that he belongs where he happens to be living when they find him. Henry James had lived among us so long that he was quite commonly taken for an Englishman even before he became naturalized during the War. The same fate is overtaking Ezra Pound; he is the chief writer of a sort of poetry that is being largely written in his country and in ours, and because he has made his home with us for many years he is generally regarded here as a native. On the other hand, Richard Le Gallienne left us and has passed so large a part of his life in the United States that most of us are beginning to think of him as an American.
The mistake is perhaps more excusable in the case of Donn Byrne, for he was born at New York in 1889, but before he was three months old he was brought over to Ireland which ought to have been his birthplace, since his father was an architect there. He was educated at Trinity College, Dublin, and when he was not improving his mind was developing his muscles; he went in enthusiastically for athletics, and in his time held the light-weight boxing championships for Dublin University and for Ulster. He knows all about horses, too, and can ride with the best, and has manifested a more than academic interest in racing. In fact, he has taken a keen interest in whatever was going on in the life around him wherever he has been, and he has been about the world a good deal, and turned his hand to many things. There is something Gallic as well as Gaelic in his wit, his vivacity, his swiftly varying moods. He is no novelist who has done all his traveling in books and dug up his facts about strange countries in a reference library. When he deals with ships his characters are not such as keep all the while in the saloon cabin; they are the ship’s master and the sailors, and you feel there is a knowledge of the sea behind them when he gets them working; and if he had not been an athlete himself he could not have described with such vigor and realistic gusto that great fight between Shane Campbell and the wrestler from Aleppo in “The Wind Bloweth.”
How much of personal experience has gone into his novels is probably more than he could say himself. But when he is picturing any place that his imaginary people visit, you know from a score of casual, intimate touches that he, too, has been there, and is remembering it while he writes. Take this vivid sketch of Marseilles, for example:
“Obvious and drowsy it might seem, but once he went ashore, the swarming, teeming life of it struck Shane like a current of air. Along the quays, along the Cannebière, was a riot of color and nationality unbelievable from aboard ship. Here were Turks, dignified and shy. Here were Greeks, wary, furtive. Here were Italians, Genoese, Neapolitans, Livornians, droll, vivacious, vindictive. Here were Moors, here were Algerians, black African folk, sneering, inimical. Here were Spaniards, with their walk like a horse’s lope. Here were French business men, very important. Here were Provencals, cheery, short, tubby, excitable, olive-colored, black-bearded, calling to one another in the langue d’oc of the troubadors, ’Te, mon bon! Commoun as? Quezaco?”
There is that same sense of seeing things in the glamorous description of the Syrian city where Shane lived with the Arab girl he had married; and in the hasty outline of Buenos Aires:
“Here now was a city growing rich, ungracefully—a city of arrogant Spanish colonists, of poverty-stricken immigrants, of down-trodden lower classes ... a city of riches ... a city of blood.... Here mud, here money.... Into a city half mud hovels, half marble-fronted houses, gauchos drove herd upon herd of cattle, baffled, afraid. Here Irish drove streams of gray bleating sheep. Here ungreased bullock carts screamed. From the bluegrass pampas they drove them, where the birds sang and waters rippled, where was the gentleness of summer rain, where was the majesty of great storms.... And by their thousands and their tens of thousands they drove them into Buenos Aires, and slew them for their hides....”
That was the Buenos Aires of Shane’s day, in the Victorian era; but in essentials it was probably as Donn Byrne saw it. For when he was about twenty-two he quitted Ireland and went back to America, and presently made his way to Buenos Aires to get married. His wife is the well-known dramatist Dolly Byrne who wrote with the actress Gilda Varesi, the delightful comedy “Enter Madam,” which has had long runs in London and in New York.
It was during this second sojourn in the States that Donn Byrne settled down seriously to literary work. He says he began by contributing to American magazines some of the world’s worst poetry, which he has never collected into a volume; but he is given to talking lightly of his own doings and you cannot take him at his own valuation. One of the poems, at least, on the San Francisco earthquake, appropriately enough, made something of a noise and was reprinted in the United Irishman, but Ireland had not then become such a furious storm-center and an earthquake was still enough to excite it. Before long he was making a considerable reputation with his short stories, and a collection of these, “Stories Without Heroes,” was his first book.
But he will tell you he does not like that book and will not have it reprinted. He says the same about his first novel, “The Stranger’s Banquet,” though it met with a very good reception and had a sale that many successful authors would envy. Then followed in succession three novels that are original enough in style and idea and fine enough in quality to establish the reputation of any man—“The Wind Bloweth,” “Messer Marco Polo,” and “The Foolish Matrons.” These were all written and published in America, and America knew how to appreciate them. The third enjoyed such a vogue that we became aware of him in England and the second, then the first, in quick succession, were published in this country, and “The Foolish Matron” is, at this writing, about to make its appearance here also. And with his new-won fame Donn Byrne came home and is settled among his own people—unless a wandering fit has taken him again before this can be printed.
The beauty and charm of that old-time romance of the great Venetian adventurer, “Messer Marco Polo,” are not easily defined; different critics tried to shape a definition of it by calling it fascinating, fantastic, clever, witty, strangely beautiful, a thing for laughter and tears, and I think they were all right; and that the book owes its success as much to the racy humor, the vision and emotional power with which it is written as to the stir and excitement of the story itself. Half the books you read, even when they greatly interest you, have a certain coldness in them as if they had been built up from the outside and drew no warmth from the hearts of their writers; but “Messer Marco Polo” glows and is alive with personality, it is not written after the manner of any school, but it is as full of eager, vital, human feeling as if the author had magically distilled himself into it and were speaking from its pages.
That is part of the secret, too, of the charm of his more realistically romantic “The Wind Bloweth.” You are convinced, as you read, that those early chapters telling how the boy Shane gets a holiday on his thirteenth birthday and goes alone up into the mountains to see the Dancing Town in the haze over the sea, are a memory of his own boyhood in Ireland. From the peace and fantasy of that beginning in the Ulster hills, from an unsympathetic mother and his two quaint, lovable uncles, Shane, at his own ardent desire, goes to knock about the world as a seafarer, and, always with the simplicity and idealism of his boyhood to lead and mislead him, is by-and-by tricked into marrying the cold southern Irish girl who dies after a year or so, and, his love for her having died before, he can feel no grief but only a strange dumb wonder. Then, while his trading ship is at Marseilles, he meets the beautiful, piteous Claire-Anne, and their lawless, perfect love ends in tragedy. After another interval, comes the episode of his charming little Moslem wife, and he loses her because he never understands that she loves him not for his strength but for his weakness. Thrice he meets with disillusion, but retains his simplicity, his idealism throughout, and is never really disillusioned; and it is when he is in Buenos Aires again that the kind, placid, large-hearted “easy” Swedish woman, Hedda Hages, gives him the truth, and makes clear to him what she means when she says, “No, Shane, I don’t think you know much about women.”
And it is not till his hair is graying that he arrives at the true romance and the ideal happiness at last. The story is neither planned nor written on conventional lines; you sense the tang of a brogue in its nervous English, which is continually flowering into exquisite felicities of phrase, and it lays bare the heart and mind of a man with a most sensitive understanding. It is a sort of Pilgrim’s Progress, and Shane Campbell is a desperately human pilgrim, who drifts into danger and disasters, and stumbles often, before he drops his burden and finds his way, or is led by strange influences, into the City Beautiful.
I daresay Donn Byrne will laugh to discover that I have put him among the gods; he is that sort of man. But it is possible for others to know him better than he knows himself. Abou Ben Adhem was surprised you recollect, when he noticed that Gabriel had recorded his name so high in the list of those that were worthy; and though I am no Gabriel I know a hawk from a handsaw when the wind is in the right quarter.