v
He was 33—ten years older than it has been done, and thirty years younger than it has been done, also.[22] Mr. Henry Sydnor Harrison achieved Queed at 31, Sinclair Lewis was 35 when Main Street appeared. On the whole, the four years seem not an excessive price to have paid for a coup, nor thirty-three years long to have found oneself. The point was neither in the success nor the time taken to reach it; it was in Mr. Farnol’s ability to keep his head on his shoulders. This he proceeded to do; although he sold, while yet unwritten, the serial rights to his next work, pressure upon him did not prevent his destroying ten unsatisfactory chapters, as has been related, and although as he said at the time, “I really cannot blame the magazine people,” he was emphatic in saying, “I never wish to undergo such an experience again.”[23] Two years elapsed after the publication of The Broad Highway before the appearance of The Amateur Gentleman; and except for the publication of a piece of work written before The Broad Highway[24] and his effort to help in the war (Great Britain at War), he has had only nine books brought out in the dozen years since he raised the curtain. And of these one, The Geste of Duke Jocelyn, a romance in prose, blank verse and rhyme, is a novelty written for his daughter, Gillian, published because what had entertained one girl might very conceivably entertain others. Mr. Farnol’s method of keeping his head on his shoulders has been to practise industry without becoming industrial. Although homesick at first on his return to England, he settled in Kent, at Lee, with a den at the top of the house where he could work from midnight to breakfast. Old English books lined two walls of this refuge; another wall was given up to a collection of old pistols and sabres; and on the desk there usually lay a dictionary of slang dated 1812. More recently the Farnols have lived at the seashore at Brighton, but the winters are generally spent at Ospedaletti, which is on the Italian Riviera.
Except for a short visit to report for the London Daily Mail the fight between Jack Dempsey and Georges Carpentier in 1921,[25] Mr. Farnol had not revisited America until autumn, 1923. At that time visitors met a shortish man, anything but a figure of romance, whose outstanding trait was his genuine friendliness, “a friendliness which is not an affectation with which he tries to put strangers at their ease, but an actual part of him.”[26] To see him rehearse and enact, rather than merely outline, his next novel was an exceptional experience, for at such times he suits his voice to his characters and displays a considerable range of dramatic skill. Interviewers developed evidences of a struggle in the romancer’s mind between the type of woman he writes about and the types more usual today; however, chivalry, or perhaps the romantic vision, enabled him to come through the ordeal by newsprint without dishonor. He denied the possibility of platonic love and friendships. “After a certain point, such friendships are bound to be no longer platonic. Mark me! I know they wouldn’t be in my case, anyway.”[27] A subject he did not tire of discussing was the wonder of America.[28] To several who talked with him he expressed the intention of writing another novel about New York City.[29] “New York should be called ‘The City of Great Adventures,’” he said, with characteristic enthusiasm, “because anything might happen in New York.”[30]
More expressive of the man is the story of how his slightest novel came to be published. He was discussing with his mother the advisability of bringing out work written before The Broad Highway. “Look here,” he said to her, “why not rout out Mr. Tawnish? You have been very good to me, and I can never properly repay you, but if you can do anything with Mr. Tawnish you shall have it.” The tale—one that reminds most readers of Tarkington’s Monsieur Beaucaire—was taken out of a drawer, touched up and added to, and accepted for book publication. The advance royalties, constituting a generous gift, were handed over to Mrs. Henry Farnol. This was in the autumn of 1913.