JOHN DAVYS BERESFORD
John Davys Beresford
There seems to be something in the atmosphere of the manse and the vicarage that has a notable effect of developing in many who breathe it a capacity for writing fiction. Not a few authors have been cradled into literature by the Law, Medicine and the Army, but as a literary incubator no profession can vie with the Church. If it has produced no poet of the highest rank, it gave us Donne, Herrick, Herbert, Crashaw, Young, Crabbe, and a multitude of lesser note, and if it has yielded no greater novelists than Sterne and Kingsley, it has fostered a vast number that have, in their day, made up in popularity for what they lacked in genius.
Moreover, when the parsons themselves have proved immune to that peculiarity of the clerical environment, it has wrought magically upon their children, and an even longer list could be made, including such great names as Goldsmith, Jane Austen and the Brontes, of the sons and daughters of parsons who have done good or indifferent work as poets or as novelists.
Most of the novelists moulded by such early influences have leaned rather to ideal or to glamorously or grimly romantic than to plainly realistic interpretations of life and character, and J. D. Beresford is so seldom romantic, or idealistic, so often realistically true to secular and unregenerate aspects of human nature, that, if he did not draw his clerical characters with such evident inside knowledge, you would not suspect that in his beginnings he had been subject to the limitations and repressions that necessarily obtain in an ecclesiastical household.
He was born in Castor rectory, and his father was a minor canon and precentor of Peterborough Cathedral, and, if it pleases you, you can play with a theory that the stark realism with which he handles the facts, even the uglier facts, of modern life is either a reaction from the narrow horizon that cramped his youthful days, or that the outlook of the paternal rectory was broader than the outlook of rectories usually is.
After an education at Oundel, and at King’s School, Peterborough, he was apprenticed, first to an architect in the country, then to one in London; but before long he abandoned architecture to go into an insurance office, and left that to take up a post with W. H. Smith & Son, in the Strand where he became a sort of advertising expert and was placed at the head of a bookselling department with a group of country travellers under his control.
Before he was half-way through his teens, he had been writing stories which were not published and can never now be brought against him, for he is shrewdly self-critical and all that juvenilia has been ruthlessly destroyed. He was contributing to Punch in 1908, and a little later had become a reviewer on the staff of that late and much lamented evening paper the Westminster Gazette. Among the destroyed juvenilia was more than one novel. In what leisure he could get from his advertising and reviewing, he was busy on another which was not destined to that inglorious end. For though “Jacob Stahl” was rejected by the first prominent publisher to whom it was offered, because, strangely enough, he considered it old-fashioned, it was promptly accepted by the second, and its publication in 1911 was the real beginning of Beresford’s literary career. Had it been really old-fashioned, it would have delighted the orthodox reading public, which is always the majority, but its appeal was rather to the new and more advanced race of readers, and though its sales were not astonishing, its mature narrative skill and sound literary qualities were unhesitatingly recognized by the discriminating; it gave him a reputation, and has held its ground and gone on selling steadily ever since. One felt the restrained power of the book, alike in the narrative and in the intimate realization of character; its careful artistry did not bid for popularity, but it ranked its author, at once, as a novelist who was considerably more than the mere teller of a readable tale.
“Jacob Stahl” was the first volume in a trilogy (the other two being “A Candidate for Truth” and “The Invisible Event”)—a trilogy which unfolds a story of common life that might easily have been throbbing with sentiment and noisy with melodramatic sensation; in Mr. Beresford’s reticent hands, however, it is never overcharged with either, but is touched only with the natural emotions, subdued excitements, unexaggerated poignancies of feeling that are experienced by such men and women as we know in the world as we know it.
Meredith, in “The Invisible Event,” rather grudgingly praises Jacob Stahl’s first novel, “John Tristram,” as good realistic fiction of the school of Madame Bovary. “It’s a recognized school,” Meredith continued. “I don’t quite know any one in England who’s doing it, but it’s recognized in France, of course. I don’t quite know how to define it, but perhaps the main distinction is in the choice of the typical incidents and emotions. The realists don’t concentrate on the larger emotions, you see—quite the reverse; they find the common feelings and happenings of everyday life more representative. You may have a big scene, but the essential thing is the accurate presentation of the commonplace.” “Yes, I think that is pretty much what I have tried to do,” commented Jacob. “I think that’s what interests me. It’s what I know of life. I’ve never murdered any one, for instance, or talked to a murderer, and I don’t know how it feels, or what one would do in a position of that sort.”
That is perhaps a pretty fair statement of Beresford’s own aim as a novelist; he prefers to exercise his imagination on what he has observed of life, or on what he has personally experienced of it. And no doubt the “Jacob Stahl” trilogy draws much of its convincing air of truthfulness from the fact that it is largely autobiographical. In the first volume, the baby Jacob, owing to the carelessness of a nursemaid, meets with an accident that cripples him for the first fifteen years of his existence; and just such an accident in childhood befell Mr. Beresford himself. In due course, after toying with the thought of taking holy orders, Jacob becomes an architect’s pupil. “A Candidate for Truth” shows him writing short stories the magazines will not accept, and working on a novel, but before anything can be done with this, the erratic Cecil Barker gets tired of patronizing him and, driven to earn a livelihood, he takes a situation in an advertising agency and develops into an expert at writing advertisements. Then, having revised and rewritten his novel, he is dissatisfied with it and burns it. He does not begin to conquer his irresolutions and win some confidence in himself until after his disastrous marriage and separation from his wife, when he comes under the influence of the admirable Betty Gale, who loves him and defies the conventions to help him make the best of himself. Then he gets on to the reviewing staff of a daily newspaper, and writes another novel, “John Tristram,” and after one publisher has rejected it as old-fashioned, another accepts and publishes it, and though it brings him little money or glory, it starts him on the road to success, and he makes it the first volume of a trilogy.
Where autobiography ends and fiction begins in these three stories is of no importance; what is not literally true in them is so imaginatively realized that it seems as truthful. Philip of “God’s Counterpoint,” who was injured by an accident in boyhood is a pathological case; there are surrenderings to the morbid and abnormal in “Housemates,” one of the somberest of Beresford’s novels, and in that searching and poignant study in degeneracy, “The House in Demetrius Road”; but if these are more powerful in theme and more brilliant in workmanship they have not the simple, everyday actuality of the trilogy; they get their effects by violence, or by the subtle analysis of bizarre, unusual or unpleasant attributes of humanity, and the strength and charm of the Stahl stories, are that, without subscribing to the conventions, they keep to the common highway on which average men and women live and move and have their being. This is the higher and more masterly achievement, as it is more difficult to paint a portrait when the sitter is a person of ordinary looks than when he has marked peculiarities of features that easily distinguish him from the general run of mankind.
Although, in his time, Mr. Beresford was an advertising expert he has never acquired the gift of self-advertisement; but he found himself and was found by critics and the public while he still counted as one of our younger novelists and had been writing for less than a decade.
He has a subdued humor that is edged with irony, and can write with a lighter touch, as he shows in “The Jervase Comedy” and some of his short stories; and though one deprecates his excursions into eccentricities of psychology, for the bent of his genius is so evidently toward portraying what Meredith described to Stahl as the representative “feelings and happenings of everyday life,” one feels that he is more handicapped by his reticences than by his daring. He is so conscious an artist that he tones down all crudities of coloring, yet the color of life is often startlingly crude. An occasional streak of melodrama, a freer play of sentiment and motion would add to the vitality of his scenes and characters and intensify their realism instead of taking anything from it; but his native reticence would seem to forbid this and he cannot let himself go. And because he cannot let himself go he has not yet gone beyond the Jacob Stahl series, which, clever and cunninger art though some of his other work may be, remains the truest and most significant thing he has done.