I thought he had, but I also thought he should attempt some justificatory remarks, and said so. His point in regard to This Side of Paradise was its vitality in spite of its having, as Edmund Wilson, Jr., observed, almost every conceivable fault. “It had all imaginable faults, but yet, in Wilson’s words, ‘it did not fail to live,’” Collestamore argued. I nodded, and he went on. Casuals of the Sea, it appeared, pleased him by a lack of anything self-conscious in the writing. He much preferred it to the too purposeful artistry of McFee’s Command. The singularity of those tales in Fiery Particles, he thought, called for no special pleading in its behalf. The Ground Swell was a sea pattern unique in its simplicity; Don Marquis’s heroine and her little group of serious thinkers were the apotheosis of the Great Inane. As for Kai Lung’s Golden Hours, he was merely echoing G. K. Chesterton, Belloc and a dozen others whose judgment was respectable and might command my deference not given to his own.
“Oh, I defer,” I assured him. “You are the Lord High Executioner in this series of literary beheadings. I consider that a reign of terror has begun.”
It wasn’t beheadings, he said. He wasn’t going over the field of daisies like the Syracusan tyrant and with his sceptre, cane, stick or staff cropping off the heads of the taller blooms.
“Daisies? I thought it was a field of corn.”
As to that, he didn’t remember. It was no matter, anyway. He was not demolishing, but singling out for eminence. No whistling cane, but——
“The sceptre gently touching one here, one there, knighting him, commanding him to spring up——”
“You will observe,” in a tone of patient tolerance, “the surprising variety one gets in the shortest possible space of time at this sort of thing. Of course I thought of Jane Austen, and rather than put in Pride and Prejudice I chose The Watsons as completed by Miss Oulton. After all, The Watsons is later work than either Pride and Prejudice or Sense and Sensibility and the conjecture as to why it was never finished gives it special interest. By that time I was running over my books more or less as they stand on the shelves, alphabetised by authors. The next thing, therefore, was Arnold Bennett, and I chose The Truth About an Author. You know, it is the one book of Bennett’s that could not, imaginably, have been written by anybody else. H. C. Bunner was next. I really don’t know whether anyone living besides myself and Franklin P. Adams now cares for Bunner; if not, so much the better!”
“I see. The more lost the Lost Pattern, the more to be prized.”
“Why not? His Stories and his Short Sixes are as American as, perhaps more so than, O. Henry.” He was quietly dogmatic.
“Is O. Henry here?” I looked. “Yes, to be sure. Also portions of Kipling and, I judge, Frank R. Stockton practically complete. But these were among the matter-of-courses. Let’s see: Shouldn’t you put in Frank Norris? The Pit, I suppose. And there’s W. W. Jacobs.”