Arthur Stuart Menteth Hutchinson
Success is good for people, when they do not get too much of it too soon. Failure is even better for them, when they do not get more than enough of it for too many years. Hardship, difficulty, failure—these knock the nonsense out of a man and teach him his art or his business; there is something lacking from the character and work of one who has never known them. Many authors recover at last from their failures, but an instant and early success is generally fatal; it makes them take themselves too seriously and their work not seriously enough; their vogue dwindles, in consequence, and the publishers who began to run after them begin to run away from them. There is little more difference between a too triumphant beginning and an unending failure than between a drought and a deluge.
The two extremes are equally devastating, and A. S. M. Hutchinson is among the luckier ones who have been destined to a middle course. He has not won his pearl without diving for it; but he has not had to dive and come up empty-handed.
Those who imagine, as some do, that, with “If Winter Comes,” he simply came, and saw, and conquered, imagine a vain thing. He had come three times before that, and had, moreover, toiled at the oar as a very miscellaneous journalist, a writer of articles and short stories that editors too frequently rejected. If he never exactly lived in Grub Street, he sojourned for a few years in a turning out of it.
He had no literary or journalistic ancestry, and was originally dedicated to another profession, but he did not “drift into journalism”—that not being his way; he walked into it deliberately, having made up his mind to go there. His father is a General in the Indian Army, and A. S. M. was born in India, in 1880. But his grandfather was a doctor of medicine, and at an early age Hutchinson was settled in London, beginning a career of his own as a Medical student. To this day, he has a quiet, kindly, sympathetic bearing that would have served him as an excellent bedside manner, if he had taken his M. D. and put up a brass plate. But he is one of the shyest, most retiring of men; you cannot associate him with any sort of brass; and even while he was trying a ’prentice hand in medicine and surgery at St. Thomas’s Hospital a private ambition was drawing him in another direction.
“I always intended to earn my living with my pen,” he told me, some years ago. “I was writing then in my leisure, sending out all kinds of MSS. and getting most of them back, and at length I took the plunge when I had about one short story accepted by a magazine, two articles by Punch and some verses by Scraps. I did not know a soul who had the remotest connection with literary work, but I chanced it.”
And threw physic to the dogs. He did not limit himself to any working hours, but by writing hard all day contrived to pick up a regular five shillings a week from Scraps for comic verse, and, augmenting this from a precarious sale of articles and tales to various publications, compiled a weekly income of about one pound sterling. He had done this for three months or so, when a letter came from Pearson’s accepting a story and asking for more; and he has related how this sent him crazy all day with excitement. A few days later he was asked to call at the office and undertake a small, special job, and, one thing leading to another, was presently engaged on the staff at £2 10s. a week. By the time he had gained experience as assistant editor of the Royal Magazine and been made co-editor of the Rapid Review, he felt the hour had come for another plunge.
A friend of those days describes him as “a slight, almost boyish young man of middle-height, who gazed at you with intense concentration through the powerful lenses of his glasses.” This still describes him, if you touch in an elusive twinkle of genial humor about the mouth and eyes, and add that his slightness, despite something of a stoop, gives him an appearance of being actually tall. Already he had started on his first novel, “Once Aboard the Lugger,” and wanted to cut adrift from too much editing and escape into other fields. He resigned from Pearson’s and hearing that the Daily Graphic was looking for a leader-note writer, posted specimens, and secured the appointment as a stand-by. In 1907 he was sub-editing that paper, and edited it from 1912 to 1916.
Meanwhile, “Once Aboard the Lugger” being finished, he offered it to one publisher who declined it, because “humor was not in his line,” and to another who published it, in 1908; and it scored what counts for a considerable success, if you do not compare its sales with those of his fourth and fifth books. That out of hand, he commenced “The Happy Warrior,” but when it was done, was dissatisfied with it, and being, as he confesses, “an appallingly, vilely conscientious” worker, he did it all over again. It swallowed the leisure of four years, but when it came out, in 1912, added not a little to his reputation.