OUR BOOKING-OFFICE.
(By Mr. Punch's Staff of Learned Clerks.)
During the past few years the plays and stories, especially the stories, of Anton Tchehov have so triumphantly captured English-speaking readers that there must be many who will welcome with eagerness the volume of his Letters (Chatto and Windus). This happy chance we owe, of course, directly to Mrs. Constance Garnett, who here proves once again that in her hands translation ranks as a fine art. Both the Letters and the Biographical Sketch that precedes them are of extraordinary charm and interest. Because Tchehov's stories are so conspicuously uncoloured by the personality of their writer (his method being, as it were, to lead the reader to a window of absolute transparency and bid him look for himself), it comes almost as a shock to find how vivid and many-hued that personality in fact was. Nor is it less astonishing to observe a nature so alive with sympathy expressing itself in an art so detached. More than once his letters to literary friends are concerned with a defence of this method: "Let the jury judge them; it's my job simply to show what sort of people they are." They are filled also with a thousand instances of the author's delight in nature, in country sights and scents, and of his love and understanding for animals (from which of the Tales is it that one recalls the dog being lifted into the cart "wearing a strained smile"?) Throughout too, if you have already read the eight little volumes that contain the stories—which I certainly advise as a preliminary—you will be continually experiencing the pleasure of recognising the inspiration for this or that remembered scene. In short, one of the most fascinating books that has come my way for a long time.
I needn't pretend that Bed and Black (Methuen), by Grace S. Richmond, is what is known to the superior as a serious work of art or that the men (particularly) of her creating are what would be called likely. But there's a sincerity about the writing which one has to respect. Of her two heroes, Red is Redfield Pepper Burns, the rude and rugged doctor, and Black is the Rev. Robert McPherson Black, the perfect paragon of a padre in an American provincial town. The author's main thesis is that padres are made of the right stuff. Black, who was all for getting into the War from the beginning, rushes off to Europe as chaplain with the first American drafts, gets wounded, decorated and married. The conversion of Red Pepper, the doctor, and of Jane Ray, who became Mrs. Black, is a little too easily contrived to be very convincing. But this is a simple work for simple souls who like a wholesome tale with a distinct list to the side of the angels. Such untoward conduct as here appears is not put in for its own interesting sake, but merely to bring out the white-souled nobility of the principals.
If I had to select an author likely to win the long-distance dialogue race of the British Isles I should, after reading Uncle Lionel (Grant Richards), unhesitatingly vote for Mr. S.P.B. Mais. It is not however so much the verbosity as the gloom of Mr. Mais's characters that leaves me fretful. Nowadays, when a novel begins with a married hero and heroine, we should be sadly archaic if we expected the course of their conjugal love to run smoothly; but I protest that Michael and Patricia overdid their quarrels, or, at any rate, that we are told too many details about them. And when these people were nasty to each other they could be very horrid. All which would not trouble me half so much if I were not sure that Mr. Mais, in his desire to he forceful and modern, is inflicting a quite unnecessary handicap upon himself. At present he is in peril of wrecking his craft upon some dangerous rocks which (though I know it's not the right name for rocks) I will call "The Doldrums." My advice to him is to cheer up. And the sooner the better, for all of us.
There be novelists so fertile in literary resource or so catholic in their choice of subject that the reader is never sure, when he picks up their latest masterpiece, whether he is to have a comedy of manners, a proletarian tragedy, a tale of Court intrigue or a satire on the follies of the age. To the steady-going devotee of fiction—the reader on the Clapham omnibus—this versatility is a source of annoyance rather than of attraction, and I accordingly take pleasure in stating that by those who like a light narrative, in which mystery and romance are pleasingly blended, the author of The Pointing Man can be relied upon to rill the bill every time. Conformity to type is a strong point with this author as far as the mystery and romance are concerned, but within those limits he (or she) provides an admirable range of scene, character and plot. In The Further Side of the Door (Hutchinson), the once handsome and popular hero emerges from a war-hospital badly disfigured and is promptly jilted by his fiancée and avoided, or so he thinks, by his acquaintances. Disgusted he buries himself in an old haunted house in the wilds of Ireland and abandons himself to the practice of magic. The result is highly successful, for he raises, not a spirit indeed, but something much more desirable to a lonely young man who has been contemplating suicide. So much for the romance. The mystery is provided by a villain, an enterprising young married woman, and the sinister denizens of a creepy boarding-house. I heartily recommend Punch readers who like a mystery to buy the book and find out what happens.
The publishers of Sir Limpidus (Collins) call it, in large print, a "new and amusing novel," but I am not confident about your subscription to the latter part of that statement; for Mr. Marmaduke Pickthall's irony is either so subtle or so heavy (I cannot be positive which) that one may well imagine a not too dull-witted reader going from end to end without discovering the hidden intent. The subject of the tale, which has no special plot, is a numbskull landowner, Sir Limpidus, son of Sir Busticus, lord of Clearfount Abbey, and type (according to Mr. Pickthall) of the landowning class that he evidently considers ripe for abolition. As propaganda to that end he conducts his hero through the usual career of the pre-war aristocrat, sending him to public school and Varsity (those sufficiently broad targets), giving him a marriage, strictly de convenance, with the daughter of a peer, and finishing him off as a member of the Government, alarmed at Socialist hecklers and welcoming the War as likely to give a new direction to forces that threaten to become too strong for his well-meaning incompetence. "It would rouse the ancient spirit of the people and dispel their madness.... Even defeat as a united nation would be better than ignoble peace with the anarchic mob supreme." Of course this may be highly amusing, but— The fact is that, with a disappointment the greater from having genial memories of a former book of his, I have to confess myself one of the dullards for whom Mr. Pickthall's satirical darts fall apparently pointless. I am sorry.
I am feeling a little peevish about Ladies in Waiting (Hodder and Stoughton), because Miss Kate Douglas Wiggin has often charmed me by her writing in the past, and now she has disappointed me. Her latest book contains five stories, all nicely written and set in charming scenes; but their innocent sweetness is very nearly insipid, and the fact that Miss Wiggin's only concern has been to find suitable husbands for her six heroines (there are two in one story) makes them curiously unexciting. Of course we all know that in American fiction the hero and heroine will in the end marry, to their mutual satisfaction; but unless the author can contrive en route a few obstacles which will intrigue the reader a marriage announcement in the newspapers would be more economical and quite as interesting. It is difficult to be "nice" and "funny," I know, and it was very noble of Miss Wiggin if one quality had to be left out to cling to the niceness; but I hope that in her next book she will manage to be both.
While reading With the Mad 17th to Italy (Allen and Unwin) I could not help feeling sorry that the public's appetite for war-literature is reported to have become a little jaded for anything that is not a book of revelations; and this because Major B.H. Hody, who was in command of the 17th Divisional Supply Column, describes his trek from Flanders to Italy with uncommon zest. It is an admirable account of an achievement well worth recording, and the author in his advice to C.O.'s, which seems to me full of wisdom and sound common-sense, explains how it was that "the mad 17th" were from first to last "a happy family." There is cause for deep sorrow in the thought that Major Hody died suddenly at Cologne only a few weeks after his preface was finished. He has left behind him a book which will be valued not less for what it contains than for the sake of the man who wrote it.
In Songs of the Links (Duckworth) Mr. Punch commends to his readers the work of two of his contributors, Mr. R.K. Risk and Mr. H.M. Bateman.
GENTLEMAN (LATE OF PARACHUTE SECTION, R.A.F.) AFTER A BAD WEEK'S RACING LEAVES HIS HOTEL WITHOUT UNNECESSARY OSTENTATION.