WILLIAM BABINGTON MAXWELL
William Babington Maxwell
It has passed into a sort of proverb that famous men never have sons who equal them in fame. There are, of course, exceptions. Benjamin Disraeli has eclipsed that delightful bookworm, his father Isaac, who wrote the “Curiosities of Literature”; Henry James, having a father who was a distinguished novelist and theologian, used to describe himself on his earlier books as “Henry James, Junr.” but the use of “Junr.” as a means of identifying him has long ceased to be necessary. There are others; but half a dozen swallows do not make a summer, and a dozen such instances would not falsify the proverb.
Perhaps what is true concerning fathers is not so true about mothers. Nobody now reads the once popular novels of Mrs. Frances Trollope, mother of the greater Anthony; Gilbert Frankau, to come at once to our own times, looks like outshining that clever novelist, his mother, “Frank Danby”; Shaw has gone far beyond his mother’s fame as an operatic star; the novels of W. B. Maxwell surpass those of his mother, M. E. Braddon, in literary art, and though he is not so enormously popular in his day as she was in hers, he is widely read now when she is scarcely read at all.
He began to write while she was still writing; her vogue had declined, but remained considerable, and she was still writing as well as ever—in fact, in her two or three latest books, notably in “The Green Curtain,” I think she was writing better than ever. There were disadvantages for a young novelist, no doubt, in having a popular novelist for his mother; but there were also advantages. His father was the publisher, John Maxwell, whose business developed into that of Messrs. Hurst & Blackett. He grew up in a literary atmosphere; the very men who could open doors for a beginner, and make his way easier, were friends of the family; moreover, he had a critic on the hearth who could prompt his first steps and check his ’prentice errors with knowledge drawn from a long and very practical experience.
“Most of the knowledge I possess of how to write,” Maxwell once told Clive Holland, “and, indeed, the fact that I commenced to write at all, I owe to my mother. She was never too busy, or too immersed in her work to discuss my literary ambitions, or work of my own. She did not always know the way any story of mine was going, for I wished neither for it to be an imitation of hers nor in any way to trade upon her own great and worldwide reputation.” He confessed, however, to a frequent feeling that however difficult he might find it to master his art, he had an even more difficult task in the attempt to follow her and necessarily challenge comparison with her work and her unqualified success. “I remember,” he added, “the son of a great man saying in my hearing that the fact that he was so situated had, in a measure, spoiled his life. ‘People expect too much,’ he remarked pathetically, ‘and sometimes get so little. I might have been quite a success if I had not been overshadowed by my great father.’”
But he broke
“his birth’s invidious bar”
and without grasping either his mother’s skirts or those of happy chance (unless Grant Richards was wearing them on the occasion I will presently mention), he became a novelist in his own way and up built his own reputation. Considering the influences that must have been round him in his childhood, taking it that he inherited his literary gift from his mother and that she, as he tells us, taught his young idea how to shoot, if his stories had been more or less of the M. E. Braddon pattern, it would not have been surprising. But, unlike those, his novels are much less concerned with sensational happenings or plot of any kind than with intricacies of character and the mysteries of human psychology. Even from the beginning he struck out in independent line for himself, and his first book, published in 1901, when he was thirty-five, was (to give it its full title), “The Countess of Maybury: Being the Intimate Conversations of the Right Honorable the Countess of Maybury. Collected with Sedulous Care and Respectful Admiration by W. B. Maxwell,” a series of satirical, light comedy dialogues of high society which preceded the “Dolly Dialogues” by a year or two but did not, as they did, set a fashion. His second book, two years later, was a volume of short stories called “Fabulous Fancies,” and this revealed him as a realist—one not without idealism and a sensitive feeling for the romance of life, but a realist none the less, and that quality of realism predominates in all the novels and stories he has written since.