FRANK SWINNERTON
Frank Swinnerton
When his first novel, “The Merry Heart,” was published, in 1909, Frank Swinnerton was still so youthful that I remember persons of my own age had a way of referring to him, with an avuncular air, as “young Swinnerton.” He was twenty-four, but his smooth, boyish face, his unassuming manner, that hovered between a natural vivacity and a sort of shyness, made him look and seem younger than he was. In the fourteen years since then he has done work, as novelist and as critic, that has made him famous on at least two continents, he has grown a moustache and a trim, pointed reddish beard that with the lurking twinkle in his eyes, give him somewhat the appearance of an acute Frenchman (though nobody could, in general, be more thoroughly English), and, so far from being shy, he will now rise on a platform or at a public dinner and make you an admirably serious or witty and humorous address with the completest self-possession.
In fact, he has so matured, in himself and in his knowledge of life, that he makes those who once called him young feel as if they had not kept time with him and he had become their senior. Yet in the best way he is still as young as ever. He has that tonic streak of frivolity in him which is better than any monkey-gland for saving a man from getting old. He can be as serious as most people on occasion, but his joyous gifts for telling a droll anecdote or mimicking the voice, manner and peculiarities of an acquaintance are gifts not so commonly shared. He takes his art seriously, but unless you catch him in the right mood he is not ready to talk seriously about it. Some authors appear to be so in love with their work that they will tell you they are never happier than when they are driving the pen and putting their thoughts on paper, but Frank Swinnerton is not one of those. He protests that he writes slowly; with difficulty; that he does not like work; finds it irksome; that he finds pleasure in thinking out an idea, but once he has thought it out he has a feeling that it ought to be all done with, and puts off shaping it into words as long as he can, and then can only bring himself to do it by fits and starts or with intermittent bursts of energy. But if you took him too literally in this I think you would misunderstand him. It would be truer to say of him, as he has said of Gissing, “Conscientiousness was the note of his artistic character.... The books are full of steady and sincere work. Only when they were written with joy (which does not signify gaiety) they were of original value.” For if his own books were not written with that same joy in creation (which may co-exist with a dislike of the mechanical act of writing) they could not be so intensely alive as they are.
You might almost guess from his novels that Swinnerton was a Londoner, or at least, like Dickens, had been made a naturalized citizen of the “dear, damned, delightful, dirty” town when he was a child. He was born at Wood Green, no such ideally rural suburb as its name suggests, and has lived in London all his life. A severe illness when he was eight years old made going to school out of the question for some time, and continued delicate health and recurring break-downs rendered any education so fragmentary as to be pretty well negligible. But he was all the while, without knowing it, educating himself in ways that were fitting him for the career he was to follow. Books were his teachers, and his literary ambitions took an active form so early that at the age of ten he was running an amateur magazine—one of the kind that years ago (and probably still) used to circulate in manuscript among subscribers who were all contributors and usefully, and sometimes mercilessly, criticized each other’s effort.
He was about fourteen when he turned his hand to real business and became a clerk in the London office of some Glasgow newspaper publishers. After an interval, he worked for a few years in the publishing house of J. M. Dent & Co.; then transferred himself to the firm of Chatto & Windus, whose literary adviser he has since remained, dividing his time between writing books of his own and reading and passing judgment on the books of others, to say nothing of his doings as a reviewer or as the writer for an American magazine of one of the best monthly literary letters that go out of London.
At twenty he wrote his first novel, and it was rejected by every publisher to whom it was offered. Two more novels shared the same discouraging fate, and I believe their author has now destroyed all three. But a happier fate was reserved for his fourth, “The Merry Heart,” which was promptly accepted and published; and if neither in story nor in characterization this buoyant, quietly humorous romance of a London clerk will compare with his maturer fiction, it has a charm and morning freshness of feeling and outlook to atone for what it may lack in finish.
“The Young Idea” marks a great advance in his mastery of the type of novel to which he was particularly devoting himself. This “comedy of environment,” traces with a wonderfully sympathetic understanding the mental and moral development of Hilda Vernon, who is a clerk in a London office. She shares a flat with her boorish brother and delightful younger sister, and disillusioned and disheartened by her everyday experiences of the meanness and squalor of the life around her, longing still to believe “in the beauty of something, in the purity of some idea, or the integrity of some individual,” but giving up hope, she meets with a man, a clerk like herself, who by his clean, courageous personality and strength of character saves her from despair and revives her old faith in humankind.
The novel is remarkable for its insight and subtle analysis of character no less than for the interest of its story; but henceforth in Swinnerton’s work the analysis of character grows and the story itself declines in importance. It is so in “The Casement,” “The Happy Family,” “On the Staircase,” “The Chaste Wife,” “Nocturne,” until with “The Three Lovers,” the story begins to reassert itself. I have seen “The Chaste Wife” described as his one failure, but to me it seems one of the ablest and most poignant of his books and Priscilla Evandine one of the most gracious, finely simple women he has ever drawn. “Shops and Houses” is perhaps less satisfactory, though it follows his favorite method and studies very skillfully and with a shrewd irony the various members of a middle-class family. It is in “September,” a brilliant handling of the marriage of incompatible temperaments, in “The Happy Family,” “The Casement,” “On the Staircase,” and, more than all, in “Nocturne” that Swinnerton’s art is at its surest and highest. There are only five characters in “Nocturne,” and from the time when Jenny Blanchard is riding home in the tram to her going out and returning from a covert visit to her lover in his yacht on the Thames, the action occupies less than six hours. Jenny, her sister Emily, their pitiful, tiresome, amusing old father, and the homely, dull Alf Rylett, who pursues Jenny with unwelcome attentions—they and their whole environment are revealed with a most graphic and intimate realism, and Jenny’s impetuous rebellion against the squalor and narrowness of her lot, the spiritual tragedy of her brief, passionate self-surrender are touched with an emotional power and sense of pity that make a story which easily might have been drab and gross a thing strangely beautiful. Few who read it will wonder that H. G. Wells should have declared it is a book “that will not die. It is perfect, authentic, and alive.”
One of his American critics (and his vogue is larger in America than in this country) has described Swinnerton as “the analyst of lovers.” He is that in most of his books, but he is a good deal more than that. It is loosely said that he is a disciple of Gissing, but so far as I can see he is one of the most original of living novelists and derives less from his predecessors than do most of his contemporaries. He deals with the gray, swarming London streets, and with middle and lower class London life, but that life has changed radically since Gissing’s day, and Swinnerton is true to its modern developments. Moreover, he is no pessimist; he writes with a genial sympathy of the people whom Gissing despised, and there is a prevailing sense of humor in his pages that is never in Gissing’s. His mental attitude, his style, his realistic art are altogether different.
In his book on Gissing (I have not read his book on Stevenson, which they tell me is unorthodox, and gave offence to Stevenson’s admirers) he says that in Gissing’s time realism was regarded as “something very repulsive and unimaginative ... he did not see in realism very much more than laborious technical method. We are all realists today, trying very hard to see without falsity and to reproduce our vision with exactitude. Realism, I think, is no longer associated with the foot-rule and a stupid purposeless reproduction of detail.” It is not so associated in the reticent, imaginative realism he practises himself. I fancy, too, that he is getting back to his earlier manner—to the making of the story as important as the study of psychology. “The Three Lovers,” as I have said, moves in that direction, and if it goes so far as to be occasionally melodramatic there is no falsity in that, for life itself is full of melodrama. He recognized in “The Casement” that love is not the whole of life, that “work of any kind seems to absorb the faculties, and some business men do, I suppose, live for their work”; and recently he has owned to a feeling that in its next development the novel will be a definite and plain tale, that there will be a revival of realistic romance which will pay less attention to men’s intermittent amorous adventures and more to the business and general affairs that preoccupy most of the time of the majority. And the signs are that he is of those who are beginning to travel on those lines.