JOHN DAVYS BERESFORD
John Davys Beresford
There seems to be something in the atmosphere of the manse and the vicarage that has a notable effect of developing in many who breathe it a capacity for writing fiction. Not a few authors have been cradled into literature by the Law, Medicine and the Army, but as a literary incubator no profession can vie with the Church. If it has produced no poet of the highest rank, it gave us Donne, Herrick, Herbert, Crashaw, Young, Crabbe, and a multitude of lesser note, and if it has yielded no greater novelists than Sterne and Kingsley, it has fostered a vast number that have, in their day, made up in popularity for what they lacked in genius.
Moreover, when the parsons themselves have proved immune to that peculiarity of the clerical environment, it has wrought magically upon their children, and an even longer list could be made, including such great names as Goldsmith, Jane Austen and the Brontes, of the sons and daughters of parsons who have done good or indifferent work as poets or as novelists.
Most of the novelists moulded by such early influences have leaned rather to ideal or to glamorously or grimly romantic than to plainly realistic interpretations of life and character, and J. D. Beresford is so seldom romantic, or idealistic, so often realistically true to secular and unregenerate aspects of human nature, that, if he did not draw his clerical characters with such evident inside knowledge, you would not suspect that in his beginnings he had been subject to the limitations and repressions that necessarily obtain in an ecclesiastical household.
He was born in Castor rectory, and his father was a minor canon and precentor of Peterborough Cathedral, and, if it pleases you, you can play with a theory that the stark realism with which he handles the facts, even the uglier facts, of modern life is either a reaction from the narrow horizon that cramped his youthful days, or that the outlook of the paternal rectory was broader than the outlook of rectories usually is.
After an education at Oundel, and at King’s School, Peterborough, he was apprenticed, first to an architect in the country, then to one in London; but before long he abandoned architecture to go into an insurance office, and left that to take up a post with W. H. Smith & Son, in the Strand where he became a sort of advertising expert and was placed at the head of a bookselling department with a group of country travellers under his control.
Before he was half-way through his teens, he had been writing stories which were not published and can never now be brought against him, for he is shrewdly self-critical and all that juvenilia has been ruthlessly destroyed. He was contributing to Punch in 1908, and a little later had become a reviewer on the staff of that late and much lamented evening paper the Westminster Gazette. Among the destroyed juvenilia was more than one novel. In what leisure he could get from his advertising and reviewing, he was busy on another which was not destined to that inglorious end. For though “Jacob Stahl” was rejected by the first prominent publisher to whom it was offered, because, strangely enough, he considered it old-fashioned, it was promptly accepted by the second, and its publication in 1911 was the real beginning of Beresford’s literary career. Had it been really old-fashioned, it would have delighted the orthodox reading public, which is always the majority, but its appeal was rather to the new and more advanced race of readers, and though its sales were not astonishing, its mature narrative skill and sound literary qualities were unhesitatingly recognized by the discriminating; it gave him a reputation, and has held its ground and gone on selling steadily ever since. One felt the restrained power of the book, alike in the narrative and in the intimate realization of character; its careful artistry did not bid for popularity, but it ranked its author, at once, as a novelist who was considerably more than the mere teller of a readable tale.
“Jacob Stahl” was the first volume in a trilogy (the other two being “A Candidate for Truth” and “The Invisible Event”)—a trilogy which unfolds a story of common life that might easily have been throbbing with sentiment and noisy with melodramatic sensation; in Mr. Beresford’s reticent hands, however, it is never overcharged with either, but is touched only with the natural emotions, subdued excitements, unexaggerated poignancies of feeling that are experienced by such men and women as we know in the world as we know it.