He looked so restive that I stopped. “It’s really no way to go at the thing wholesale,” he protested. “I haven’t made up my mind as to which one or two books of Stockton’s yet; he’s there in bulk only temporarily. I suppose it had better be Rudder Grange.”

“Make it Salthaven from W. W. Jacobs,” I urged. “Unless you strongly prefer At Sunwich Port.”

“I do. Probably it’s just that I read it first. After Bunner I ran against George W. Cable’s The Grandissimes. Then I laid hold of Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage. Then John Dos Passos’s Rosinante to the Road Again.”

“Thomas Beer has just finished a biography of Stephen Crane. Joseph Conrad has written a preface for it,” I said, but Collestamore paid no attention. He was across the room, picking something out, and came back in a moment holding up Edmund Gosse’s Three French Moralists. “Just thought of Gosse. This will do to hold the place for him until I decide. Have you never read it? Then you don’t know Rochefoucauld or La Bruyere as you should know them. And you’ve missed a singularly urbane and exquisite example of English prose style.”

“You have both Compton Mackenzie’s Carnival and his Sinister Street in here. Make it Carnival. Let’s see: David Graham Phillips’s Susan Lennox: Her Fall and Rise; John Ames Mitchell’s Amos Judd; and that new illustrated edition of David Harum. I guess I’d agree with your choice of each of those.” His expression remained polite but I could see it would make not the least difference whether I agreed or not. “Did you see Rodolph Valentino in ‘The Young Rajah’?” I asked, to tease him. He was good-natured about it. “I did. I have no objection to Valentino, but I much prefer the story as told in Amos Judd.” He was ruffling the pages of David Harum. “I like these text drawings, don’t you?” I said I did, adding that David Harum was the kind of book that cried for illustration.

“About biography, or especially, autobiography,” he said suddenly. “Should you say Booker T. Washington’s Up From Slavery, for one? There’ll never be another of that pattern.” But I had a suggestion for him there. “Anyway, you must include Bouck White’s The Book of Daniel Drew.” He said at once, “Oh, yes!”—adding, “Autobiographical in form, anyway. White always contended that he found an actual record left by Uncle Dan’l Drew. Semi-fictional, if you like; but a grand piece of satire. And now I rather think we’re wanted to sit down to lunch. Er—how about a swallow of something first? Or is that among your lost appetites?”

19. Joseph C. Lincoln
Discovers Cape Cod

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ON 13 February, 1870, in the town of Brewster, Massachusetts, which is on Cape Cod, there was born to Joseph Lincoln and Emily (Crosby) Lincoln a son whom they named Joseph Crosby Lincoln. The child’s father was a seaman, so had been his father’s father and his father’s father’s father; and so were all his uncles. His mother’s people followed the sea. For a mile in each direction from the plain little house of the Lincolns every house contained a Cap’n. When the boy was a year old, his father died of a fever in Charleston, South Carolina. Emily Crosby Lincoln had made voyages with her husband, whose death made it necessary to move up toward Boston. In summers, however, the boy got back to the Cape with its sand dunes and cranberry bogs, its chance to fish and swim. “He rode the old stage coach from Harwick to Chatham; he knew the lightkeepers, the fishermen, the life savers, and the cracker-box oracles in the village stores. The perfume of the green salt meadows, the pungent pines and bayberries ... the fishing boats, the dripping nets, ‘the mighty surge and thunder of the surf along the shores’ were part of his very existence.” The description is reminiscent of Walt Whitman’s account of his young manhood. “I suppose if I had been born a few years earlier, I would have had my own ship,” Joseph C. Lincoln says. But the day of steam had begun. He went to school at Brewster and Chelsea. As he grew up, college was seen to be out of the question. The youth and his mother went to Brooklyn and he entered a broker’s office. This work he hated. “I have always felt that they were fully as glad to get rid of me as I was to leave them.” Wishing to draw, he fell under the guidance of Henry Sandham (“Hy”) and went to Boston where, with another fellow, an office was opened for commercial work. To make a picture sell better, Lincoln sometimes wrote a verse or joke to go with it. Sometimes the verse or joke sold when the drawing did not. It was the day of universal bicycling. The League of American Wheelmen Bulletin had a circulation of over 125,000 and Sterling Elliott, its editor, offered Lincoln a job as associate editor. His verses were thus brought to the attention of a considerable public. He married in 1897 Florence E. Sargent, of Chelsea, Massachusetts, and he was writing verse, mostly in the vernacular of Cape Cod, for a number of publications. In 1899 the passion for bicycling began to wane and Lincoln definitely moved from Boston to New York to try to make a living as a writer on his own. He had written a first short story, a Cape Cod narrative, and sold it to Saturday Evening Post. That magazine, Harper’s Weekly, The Youth’s Companion and Puck were taking his verse, which was sometimes in a swinging metre and sometimes humour tinctured with philosophy. In 1902 Albert Brandt, of Trenton, New Jersey, published Lincoln’s Cape Cod Ballads, in a yellow-backed volume with illustrations by E. W. Kemble. It was Lincoln’s first book. Now he was writing short stories in earnest and with some success and he began a novel which could only be written by labouring at it on a corner of the dining room table from midnight on Saturdays through Sunday mornings until the manuscript was completed. It was the story of three old sea captains who, despairing of their joint efforts at housekeeping, advertised for a wife. Published in 1904 as Cap’n Eri, this affair settled two large doubts in Lincoln’s mind; first, that he could sustain the interest of readers through a long story; second, that he could make a living by writing, and by writing books.