Cargoes for Crusoes

by Grant M. Overton

“The obvious is at the base of all boredom. The thing that provides our perpetual interest in life is that the events lying just ahead of us cannot be determined. It is the mystery in the next moment, the next hour, the next day that we live to solve. If by any mental process we could ascertain the arrival of events ahead, no human being could endure the boredom of life. Something of this mystery, this uncertainty, must be caught up for the reader in the short story if his interest is to abide to the end. The skill of the author in preserving this uncertainty and mystery in events—in this imitation of life—will indicate the place to be assigned to him in the art he has undertaken.”

To an interviewer (by letter) who asked for the principal events of his life, Mr. Post once made a suitably whimsical answer:

“I was born like the sons of Atreus in the pasture land of horses. I was reared by a black woman who remembered her grandmother boiling a warrior’s head in a pot. I was given a degree by a college of unbeautiful nonsense. I have eaten dinner with a god. And I have kissed a princess in a land where men grind their wheat in the sky.”

4. Jeffery Farnol’s Gestes

i

A geste is a great exploit or an heroic achievement; the thing that has today pretty generally dwindled to a gesture. But although the fiction of Jeffery Farnol is full of gestures—of ladies who cry, “La!” and of ladies who swoon; of gentlemen who draw swords as naturally as they draw breath, or even more so—the succession of his work is a series of gestes. For one point, he followed his bent in the teeth of literary fashion and scored, at the outset, an enormous popular success. For another point, he kept his head when success was upon him. Although a favorite scene in his stories is one full of lightning fence, swifter guard and dexterous riposte, the true portrait of the author is decidedly different: It shows him in the patient and laborious attitudes of his own Black George, in the toil the young Farnol was himself committed to for a period in his youth, the heavy work of the forge and the foundry, the slow heating to malleability and the shape hammered out before cooling. After The Broad Highway had captured the fancy of England and America, in an incautious moment Farnol the smith, Farnol the patient artificer, contracted to furnish his next tale as a serial in an American magazine. The editor blithely began publication with only part of the manuscript in hand. Dissatisfied with his work, the author at one stage tore up ten completed chapters. For several months he worked under pressure. In the end he kept the editor supplied. The experience did not lead him into the misconception that his smithy was a Ford factory. Nor has the fact that he can write one kind of tale ever led him to suppose that he ought to succeed with another variety; he followed The Definite Object with Our Admirable Betty. It is surprising to reflect that he made his first hit by reviving a species of romance when romance of that species, and of pretty nearly every species, was justly considered to have breathed its last; but it is vastly more surprising to realize that he has continued to succeed by the same tactics. Almost ten years later another young man, similarly self-willed, was to score an equal success in America (though not in England) by the same sort of reckless behavior, only the title of the book was to be Main Street and not The Broad Highway. But Sinclair Lewis, although unaware of his advantage, was setting a fashion, not defying one. Both Mr. Lewis’s novel and Mr. Farnol’s were the products of that kind of saturation which, while it cannot be relied upon to produce enduring literature, can nearly always be counted upon to produce literary phenomena. Such a phenomenon, certainly, was the Kentish tale of Peter Vibart, Charmian, the Tinker, Black George, and the Ancient, appearing as a book early in 1911 and rolling rapidly up to a sale of 500,000 copies in England and America. And though perhaps not a portent, as Main Street has been a portent, it was a sign of far more significance than the appearance on the scene of a new individual writer. But let us tell the story of that story in orderly fashion.

ii

It begins with two little boys in their nightshirts listening furtively but eagerly outside the door of a room in which their father was reading aloud to their mother, whose eyes were on her needle. The book was The Count of Monte Cristo. The name of the older boy—he was eight—was John Jeffery Farnol; of the younger, who was to fall in the Boer War, Ewart Farnol. The family had removed from Birmingham, where Jeffery was born, to Lee, in Kent. The reading proceeded until a sneeze betrayed the boys. But after that they were admitted for an extra hour to the evening readings. The senior Farnol read excellently, varying his voice to suit the characters. He made the stories live, for Jeffery at least. From Cooper, Scott, Dickens, Dumas, Thackeray and Stevenson heard at home, Jeffery became a schoolboy who invented tales to entertain his fellows; in particular he started a story which he carried on for three months, winding it up with the close of term. When he had finished school he wanted to become a writer, but as there was not money to send him to one of the universities, his father thought the ambition foolish, and at 17 the boy was set to work in Birmingham with a firm of engineers and brassfounders. Manual labor at the forge was varied by a great deal of fighting with fists. He was short and thickset; he spent the lunch hour either telling stories to the other men, “stories from the classics,” as he says, “vividly touched up, no doubt, or making a rough drawing of some scowling diffident sitter.” As he sat drawing one noon, a man of the crowd looking over his shoulder remarked: “Ah, that’s all very well, but drawing ain’t manliness.” A test of manliness, inquiry developed, was the feat of a chap who had climbed up the inside of the big chimney. Farnol laid five shillings to half a crown that he could duplicate the deed. Says one account: “The chimney towered up, one hundred and twenty feet of blackness, choked with the soot of four years and with insecure stanchions, several of them broken.” He fastened his handkerchief at the top for all to see; it is easy to believe that the worst of the thing was the climb down with soot tumbling in his eyes. The men refused to pay their bets, he had to fight one of them, though sick and giddy, and was beaten. But a climax was near at hand. Farnol kept a note-book in which he was forever jotting down ideas and impressions. The foreman most reasonably objected to these interruptions of work. There were blows. Leaving the foreman “reclining in a daze against an anvil”—the words aren’t Farnol’s—the last Farnol saw of the place was his handkerchief fluttering from the chimney top.

“No good for work, always writing.” How singularly right the foreman’s verdict had been, some years were required to prove. For a time Farnol stayed at home and wrote stories, poems, whatnot. A few stories got printed. His father was unimpressed, except by the unanimity of family relatives in declaring that he was encouraging Jeffery to grow into an idle fellow. It seemed as if something might be constructed from his son’s natural aptitude for drawing. Jeffery began the study of line and figure drawing under Loudon at the Westminster Art School. He found everybody else at the school so much more clever that he became discouraged.