"Why do papers send a funny book to an old fossil of a reviewer with no sense of humour?" I said, testily and waited for the next post. Well, it came; it brought three adverse notices and a letter.
"Dear Dominie, I admired your Log, but why, oh why, did you perpetrate such a monstrosity as The Booming of Bunkie?"
Then a friend wrote me a letter.
"Dear old chap,—You are suffering from the effects of the war. If the war has induced you to write Bunkie, I am all for hanging the Kaiser."
For weeks I clung to the belief that the crowd had no sense of humour . . . then I re-read my novel. I still hold that it is funny in parts, but I see what is wrong. It is a specialised type of humour, or rather wit, the type that undergraduates might appreciate. In fact I was recently gratified to hear that the students of a Scots university were rhapsodising about it. The real fault of the book is that it is clever, and to be clever is to be at once suspect.
I naturally like to think that the circulation of a book is generally in inverse proportion to its intrinsic merit. J. D. Beresford's novels are, to me, much better than those of the late Charles Garvice, yet I make a guess that Garvice's circulation was many times greater than Beresford's. Still I cannot argue that the reverse is true—that because a book does not go into its second edition it is necessarily good. I find that the problem of circulations is a difficult one. I cannot, for instance, understand why The Young Visitors sold in thousands; I failed to raise a smile at it. Again, there is my friend although publisher, Herbert Jenkins. I didn't think Bindle funny, yet it has been translated into umpteen European languages. Jenkins himself does not think it funny, and that, possibly, is why he is my friend.
The most surprising success to me was Ian Hay's The First Hundred Thousand. I read Pat MacGill's Red Horizon about the same time, and thought Hay was stilted and superior with a public-school man's patronising Punch-like attitude to the working-class recruits. I thought that he didn't know what he was writing about, that he had not reached the souls of the men. MacGill, on the other hand, gave me the impression of a warm, passionate, intense knowledge of men; he wrote as one who lived with ordinary men and knew them through and through. Yet I fancy that The Red Horizon, popular as it was, did not have the sales of The First Hundred Thousand.
I was lunching with Professor John Adams one day in London. We got on to the subject of circulations, and he said that he had just been asking the biggest bookseller in London what novel sold best.
"Have a guess," said the Professor to me.
"David Copperfield," I said promptly.