As lately as 1920 one estimating American talents could observe of Morley: “His gift is purely journalistic, isn’t it?” and receive the answer from Morley’s friend: “Purely”—an answer conceived in entire truthfulness. Both the asker and the answerer were pretty certain to regard the assumed fact as a great pity. But as to the fact!—why, what further evidence was needed to establish it? Morley had been writing for several years, had averaged several books a year of prose and verse, and nowhere gave the least sign of doing work of a different character. What, then, was the character of his work in those years? He began at Oxford with a book of verse; from a more actual standpoint his beginnings had been made with Parnassus on Wheels, published in 1917. This really capital conceit had engendered a sequel, The Haunted Bookshop, published two years later. There were certain books of essays—Shandygaff, Mince Pie, Pipefuls—pleasant, partly serious, sometimes sentimental and showing a deplorable fondness for the pun. There were books of verse—Songs for a Little House, The Rocking Horse, Hide and Seek. Travels in Philadelphia, the short story, Kathleen, and an unfortunate collaboration called In the Sweet Dry and Dry completed the roll. It is no reflection upon these volumes to say that they gave the impression of a talent strictly journalistic; the best journalism is more than ephemeral and most of the titles enumerated are still actively in demand. The quality we call “journalism” is not an affair of perishability but something very difficult to define, something in the approach, something in the treatment rather than in the choice of subjects. In the last analysis it is probable that the effort to define it would end with hands flung out hopelessly before the mystery of a personal temperament.
The facts were these: Morley had been educated at Haverford College and Oxford; he had then come to Garden City to work for the publishing house which, principally, has published his prose, and his first enterprises as an author were precociously instructed by an “inside” acquaintance with what James Branch Cabell would call the auctorial career. The influence upon his own work of this very special knowledge is not easy to estimate. He saw, as only one in a publishing house sees, the facts of authorship after the author’s child is born. For example: the immense effect upon the fortunes of a writer’s book, or books, of the attitude toward them of the bookseller. And that attitude is quite rightly fixed by what the bookseller (1) knows he can sell, or, less frequently (2), by what he thinks he can sell.
Morley saw that books are sold through bookstores. Looking a little further, he discerned that books which are not in bookstores are, with certain class exceptions, very rarely sold. He learned, as everyone in a publishing house learns, that three-quarters of the books that are sold to retail purchasers are bought because retail purchasers have had these books thrust directly under their noses. He suffered, no doubt, the customary amazement on discovering the vast number of people who (1) either enter the bookstore with no particular book in mind, or (2), on being unable to obtain the book in mind, readily take something else. It was brought to his keen attention that, as Frank Swinnerton reiterates in his admirable brochure on “Authors and Advertising,” direct advertising, as in newspapers and magazines (the commonest mediums) does not sell books. Being a young man of alert perceptions, it cannot have been lost upon him that book reviews do not, with any reliability, sell books, either. What does sell books is talk—in some instances—but the hard rock foundation of book sales is a favourable attitude on the part of “the trade.”
To know the people in the bookstore, to have and to cultivate and to deserve their good will (for, in the long run, you must deserve it), and thus to insure the sale of your book to the bookseller and to enlist his energy and enterprise in re-selling it to his customers—this is the “favourable attitude” just mentioned. Few authors succeed in establishing it; fewer succeed in maintaining it. Mr. Morley has done both, with the result that in five years from the time of his Parnassus on Wheels he has been able to publish a highly imaginative, refined and polished satire and see it become, in its field, a pronounced best seller.
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One would about as soon expect to see a fantasy by Lord Dunsany a best seller as witness the sale, in tens of thousands, of Morley’s Where the Blue Begins—if one were making one’s estimate solely on the work itself. Where the Blue Begins is the story of the dog Gissing’s search for God—a search conducted in various places and circumstances parallel to human life of the present day by an animal discreetly analogued to the human animal. Such a piece of writing has ordinarily no hope except from unusual and very favourable (or acutely controversial) critical attention; and the hope from that quarter is relatively small. By “hope,” of course, is meant a hope of a considerable sale. Where the Blue Begins belongs to that class of literature which is written because it has lain in the author’s heart to write it, regardless of its fate after it lies on paper. In the case of Mr. Morley, the work has received merited praise; but it would be naïve to suppose that this notice and commendation sold the book; and the book trade might even justifiably be indignant at such a supposition. Did not they, the booksellers, buy Where the Blue Begins because it was Morley’s new book? And did not they and their clerks “push” the book for the same reason? The Ayes have it, to both questions, and unanimously.
On the other hand, the sceptical soul who argues that Chris Morley wrote Parnassus on Wheels, in the first place, because it was a story about a bookseller calculated to “get him in right” with the trade—that man does not know Morley and shows that he does not know him. It is possible to detect in the character of Morley’s work, in the circumstance of its publication and in the accessories provided for that publication evidences of a singularly intelligent literary campaign; it is possible to detect them and believe them to be such; but it is not possible to over-estimate the part played by Morley’s own naïveté, affectionate nature and formerly unchecked and indiscriminate enthusiasm.
Such an attitude is always open to misconstruction. But it takes real intelligence to go beneath the surface; and among Morley’s friends were many who could do that. These perceived his genuineness without being in the least able to predict the outcome of his generosity. Ours is a world thus and thus and so and so. The ultimate effect upon Morley himself of a disposition which he would unquestionably see suffer and change was the problem. It would be very easy for him to come a tremendous cropper of any one of several sorts; and then should we have a soured, an embittered young man? Prophecy was worthless.
Meanwhile, with the auspicious beginning of Parnassus on Wheels, the young man went gaily on. His first book of verse (barring the Oxford experiment) was published in the same year under the valuable title, Songs for a Little House; and at once the small beginnings of a Morley vogue were faintly perceptible. The suspicion that such a title harboured a spirit committed to the sentimental attitude toward life was confirmed within a year by the publication of a book of essays, Shandygaff, named after a reputed or actual beverage and got up with a deliberately quaint title page. One was left in no doubt that Morley liked Stevenson, was affectionately fond of Robert Cortes Holliday, and worshipped the genius of Don Marquis. The seeds of literary jealousy were sown, to be harvested several years later in accusations of log-rolling[2] that were levelled at others a-plenty besides Morley. Here, however, it should be explained that Morley had come from Oxford to go to work, at the age of twenty-three, at Garden City; that while learning the publishing business he had married Miss Helen Booth Fairchild, a New York girl whom he had met in England. If, therefore, he modestly undertook to become the American poet of domesticity with his songs for households “of two or more,” the guilt should by no means be made personal to him, but may justly be laid at the door of the race.
[2] The term is borrowed from the Congress of the United States, where it has long been employed, quite unofficially, to describe an exchange of favors among Congressmen, some voting for another’s bill in exchange for his favorable vote upon their pet measures. As here used, it refers to the alleged praise of one writer by another in tacit exchange for similar praise back; the public being expected to take both encomiums at face value and without any discounting for personal friendship, etc. Whether the public has ever quite done so is possibly to be doubted; but, at any rate, in the winter of 1921-22, New York and some other literary circles were so openly under suspicion of log-rolling that the suspects were not able to ignore the charges openly made. The boldest method of counter-attack adopted was that of Heywood Broun, who ridiculed the accusation, not quite successfully from every standpoint. There was, however, an immediate and noticeable diminution of enthusiasm among some of the younger writers for each other’s work, publicly expressed. Morley himself, discussing the matter of log-rolling, explained that the accusers had the cart before the horse; that commonly one liked another man’s work and praised it, and in consequence thereof came into a personal acquaintance. This is without doubt frequently the true situation.