E. PHILLIPS OPPENHEIM
E. Phillips Oppenheim
Even if we grant that there is a wide world of difference between imaginative and inventive fiction, and that the way to immortality is only open to the former, there is still so much to be said in praise of the latter that, if the verdict rested with his contemporaries instead of with posterity, the inventive author would often go permanently crowned with the fame that is now reserved for his more imaginative rival. Within my own recollection Wilkie Collins was the most popular novelist of his day; Meredith and Hardy had their thousands of readers and Collins his tens of thousands; everybody read him then, but hardly anybody reads him now. He used to complain, as Hall Caine records in “My Story,” that the reviewers were all along disposed to sniff and qualify their appreciation, but he boasted that the public always received him with enthusiasm and overwhelmed him with grateful and adulatory letters. Moreover, his brother novelists admired and lauded his amazing ingenuity; Dickens collaborated with him, and his influence is perhaps traceable in “The Mystery of Edwin Drood”—in the unusual dexterity and subtlety with which its plot is constructed.
His own formula for holding the reader’s attention was “make him laugh; make him weep; or make him wait”; and he devoted himself almost exclusively to the third of these methods. Character is of quite minor importance in his stories—Count Fosco was his one masterly creation; the only one of all his dramatis personæ you recall without effort—there is little humor in them, and little pathos. For him, the plot was the thing, a cunningly contrived, carefully dovetailed plot, with a heart of mystery and sensation that should hold the reader in suspense till it was unraveled and cleared up in the last pages. His justification was that he thrilled and delighted enormous multitudes. It is enough that he did triumphantly what he set himself to do; the best and most precious things in life are not often the most lasting; and whether or not his work is immortal, it was great in its kind and an art beyond the genius of novelists who seem destined to outlive him.
And, as a form of literature, the novel of sensation, crime, mystery is immortal if its authors are not. Collins has been dethroned, but his successors are legion, and none has made out a stronger title to the inheritance of his mantle than Phillips Oppenheim. For the skill with which he constructs a baffling plot, intrigues his readers from the opening, and keeps them in suspense till it is time, at last, to give away his secret, none of them excels—I am not sure that more than one of them equals him. I don’t think he aims to be anything but entertaining, and how many of our novelists who claim to be much more are not even that! Two of our most distinguished critics have, at different times, confessed to me that with the passing of years they have lost their taste for fiction; the modern psychological novel seems pretentious and bores them; they are no longer young enough to be susceptible to romantic adventure; they can learn nothing and get no amusement from the crudeness and boyish or girlish naïveté of the latter-day sex novel, but they do find interest, excitement and a tonic recreation in novels such as Oppenheim writes. “I suppose I have seen too much of actual life,” said one of them, “to be startled or particularly interested in what I am told about it by a novelist who knows no more of it than I know myself. I like Oppenheim because he takes me outside my personal experiences; he does not appeal to my memory but to my imagination; he tells me a tale that is new to me, that rouses my curiosity, keeps me guessing, makes me forget everything else in my keenness to follow up the clues to his mystery and see how he solves it. I don’t care whether it is good literature, I know it is a good story, and that’s what every novel ought to be and few are. I sometimes think we take our novelists and they take themselves and their function too seriously. The old troubador, when he sang his ballads and told his yarns in the street, didn’t do it for glory but for the coppers the crowd, if he pleased them, would throw into his hat. He was nothing but an entertainer; people didn’t want him to be anything else—it is all I want his modern representative, the novelist, to be, and it is what Oppenheim emphatically is. He simply writes for the time, and the time is promptly rewarding him with popularity and hard cash, while so many of our little artists will not stoop to the present and are writing neatly for a future that will never read them.”
He has written some sixty novels and books of short stories, having seen his first novel published in 1886, when he was twenty. I do not pretend to have read them all, but since I read “Mysterious Mr. Sabin,” a good many years ago, I have never missed reading any Phillips Oppenheim story that has come within reach of me. Read “The Amazing Partnership,” “The Plunderers,” “A Prince of Sinners,” “Mr. Lessingham Goes Home,” and you will find that while he is as ingenious as Wilkie Collins at fashioning a plot that captures your interest in its complexities, he gets more rapidly into his story, handles dialogue more skillfully, unfolds his incidents as vividly but with a lighter hand and loses no time on the way.
After he left school Phillips Oppenheim went into his father’s leather business at Leicester, but he had started writing stories for his own amusement before that. The leather business was so successful that Blumenthals, the big American and Paris leather firm, bought it up, and appointed Phillips Oppenheim their director at Leicester. His experience in that trade has proved immensely useful to him. It has not only helped him to material for his tales, but it was through the American head of Blumenthals that he had his chief incentive to the writing of the type of story that has brought him such success as a novelist. This gentleman introduced him to the proprietor of the Café de Rat Mort, the once famous Montmartre haunt, for Oppenheim was frequently in Paris on the affairs of his leather company, and at the Café he acquired his taste for the mysteries of those international intriguings and rascalities that figure so largely in several of his books, for the proprietor used to tell him all manner of thrilling yarns about political and international adventurers, some of whom had been among his customers, and his listener formed a habit of weaving stories round the more striking personalities in the cosmopolitan crowd that he met in the Rat Mort. He assured me that however ingenious I might think them, he never really constructs his stories but simply lets them grow. “Two or three people in a crowded restaurant may arouse my interest, and the atmosphere is compelling,” says he. “I start weaving a story round them—the circumstances and the people gradually develop as I go on dictating to my secretary the casual thoughts about them that arose in me while I was looking at them and their surroundings. First of all I must have a congenial atmosphere—then the rest is easy.”
Easy, that is, to him, partly from long practice but chiefly because it was the method that came natural to him and suited his temperament. There is no use in telling any one how to write a novel, in laying down rules for doing it as if it were a mechanical trade. James Payn’s plan was to prepare an elaborate synopsis, divide this into chapters, then write down a description of each character, and keep these details pinned on a screen where they were handy reference while he was working. William De Morgan would start with little more than a general idea of what was going to happen in future pages; he would get his characters together and give them their heads and let them develop the story as it went along. Every way is the best way—for the author who finds it for himself and can do as well in it as Phillips Oppenheim has done in his.
He has traveled considerably; spent much of his time in America, where he was married (and, by the way, large as his vogue is in Great Britain, he is another of our authors whose vogue is even larger in America); but for the most part he divides his days of work and leisure now between his home in London and his other home by the sea, in North Devon.