A “documented” study; I chose my word there, also. For an immense amount of work went into His Children’s Children. You may take my word for it, as much as went into the authorship of Indictment No. 1. Or, no, you need not take my word. Take a fact, instead. Mr. Train is now at work upon a very remarkable novel of which it is not my privilege to speak here except to say that its first chapter exemplifies his infinitely painstaking method to-day. In common with a very few other novelists, he likes to derive clearly through several antecedent generations his principal characters. His writing undergoes many corrections but in his first draft he gives himself full rein. In the novel that is to follow His Children’s Children, he spent much time on the first chapter. By a “cut-back” he traced his hero’s family from about the year 1790 to the opening of the story, in the present. This, mind you, was with the deliberate intention that the first chapter should ultimately be of not much, if any, more than ordinary chapter length—perhaps thirty typewritten pages.
Well, he knew he had written a good deal, but the first chapter, first draft, was written and he sent it to be typed. The manuscript had been returned to him on a day when I called; it made exactly 184 typewritten pages—about half the length of an ordinary full-length novel, maybe somewhat more.
v
Arthur (Cheney) Train was born in Boston, 6 September 1875, the son of Charles Russell Train and Sarah M. (Cheney) Train. His father was Attorney-General of Massachusetts, 1873-1880. Arthur Train was graduated from Harvard (A.B.) in 1896 and received the law degree three years later. In 1897 he married Ethel Kissam, daughter of Benjamin P. Kissam, of New York. Mrs. Train, also a writer, died in the spring of 1923. Her book, “Son” and Other Stories of Childhood and Age is being published posthumously.
Arthur Train went almost immediately into the District Attorney’s office in New York. He never entirely sacrificed his connection with it until 1916, when he became a member of the firm of Perkins & Train. As a special deputy Attorney-General of the State of New York, in 1910, he brought about the indictment of over one hundred persons, political offenders in Queens County, in the city of New York. He is a member of the Century, University and Harvard Clubs of New York, and of the Downtown Association. In his attractive home, at 113 East Seventy-third street, New York, there is a room, up one flight, occupying the whole width of the front of the house, with southerly windows, book-lined walls, an ample desk, and a roomy davenport confronting a fireplace. The fireplace is fenced about and the top of the fence is leather-cushioned, making a comfortable seat. Nothing could be more pleasant than to sink into the davenport and face Mr. Train, who has seated himself on the fireplace fence and lighted a cigarette.
“But don’t you mind the interruptions?” you ask him. “Suppose you are in the middle of a novel and a big case comes along——”
“That’s very refreshing,” he answers. “I come back to the novel as from a vacation.”
And you recall the early writing, done, so to speak, between telephone calls.
There has been a change; Mr. Train freely acknowledges it. “I can’t say exactly when it occurred. It was during the war. I felt differently about my writing. I felt much more intent about it. It took hold of me very strongly when I was writing about Ephraim Tutt—Tutt and Mr. Tutt, you know. I think those were possibly the first stories I had written which made me feel emotion.”
It is easy to see why, easier, perhaps, in Mr. Train’s new collection of these tales, Tut, Tut! Mr. Tutt, than in the first book. For the emphasis upon Ephraim Tutt’s attitude is more pronounced as we see him deliberately employing the tricks of the law in the interests of justice. Himself moved by that most permanent of human emotions, the desire for the just, and by that most continual of human delights, the extraction of good from evil or even good wreaked by means of evil, and moved also by that human protest against the application of general rules to individual dilemmas, Mr. Tutt would be strange if he did not arouse in his creator the emotion inseparable from any act of art.