Phyllis Bottome is just as interesting as her novels. When scarcely more than a child with large, delightful eyes, she began to write, and completed at the age of seventeen a novel which Andrew Lang advised an English publisher to accept. Thereafter she wrote regularly and with increasing distinction. Ill-health drove her to Switzerland where, living for some years, she met all kinds of people from all the countries of Europe and America as well.
It is interesting that her father was an American, although after his marriage to an Englishwoman, he settled in England. Later Mr. Bottome came to America and for six years during Phyllis Bottome’s childhood he was rector of Grace Church at Jamaica, New York. Phyllis Bottome is the wife of A. E. Forbes Dennis, who, recovering from dangerous wounds in the war, has been serving as passport officer at Vienna. They were married in 1917. Those who know Phyllis Bottome personally say that the striking thing about her is the extent of her acquaintance with people of all sorts and conditions of life and her ready and unfailing sympathy with all kinds of people. She herself says that she “has had friends who live humdrum and simple lives and friends whose stories would bring a rush of doubt to the most credulous believer in fiction.” “My friendships have included workmen, bargees, actresses, clergymen, thieves, scholars, dancers, soldiers, sailors and even the manager of a bank. It would be true of me to say that as a human being I prefer life to art, even if it would at the same time be damning to admit that I know much more about it. I have no preferences; men, women, children, animals and nature under every aspect seem to me a mere choice of miracles. I have not perhaps many illusions, but I have got hold of one or two certainties. I believe in life and I know that it is very hard.”
The hardness of life, its uproar, its agony, its magnificence and its duty, is the theme of Phyllis Bottome’s latest and finest novel. When it was published, because it was so different from Phyllis Bottome’s earlier work, I tried to draw attention to it by a letter in which I said:
“I don’t know whether you read J. C. Snaith’s The Sailor. People said Snaith got his suggestion from the life of John Masefield. The Sailor sold many thousands and people recall the book today, years afterward. But, as an ex-sailor and a few other things, I never found Snaith’s ‘Enry ‘Arper half so convincing as Jim Barton in Phyllis Bottome’s new novel, The Kingfisher.
“Jim, a boy of the slums, reaching toward ‘that broken image of the mind of God—human love,’ goes pretty deeply into me. Since reading those last words of the book—‘Beauty touched him. It was as if he saw, with a flash of jewelled wings, a Kingfisher fly home’—I keep going back and rereading bits....
“Won’t you tackle The Kingfisher? If you’ll read to the bottom of page 51, I’ll take a chance beyond that. Read that far and then, if you stop there, I’ve no word to say.”
Although this letter called for no special reply, I received dozens of replies promising to read the book and then enthusiastic comments after having read the book. I do not consider The Kingfisher the greatest book Phyllis Bottome will write, but it marks an important advance in her work and it is a novel whose positive merits will last; it will be as moving and as significant ten years from now as it is today.
vii
I come to a group of novels of which the chief aim of all except two is entertainment. The Return of Alfred, by the anonymous author of Patricia Brent, Spinster, is the diverting narrative of a man who found himself in another man’s shoes. What made it particularly difficult was that the other man had been a very bad egg, indeed. And there was, as might have been feared (or anticipated), a girl to complicate matters tremendously.
E. F. Benson’s Peter is the story of a young man who made a point of being different, of keeping his aloofness and paying just the amount of charm and gaiety required for the dinners and opera seats which London hostesses so gladly proffered. Then he married Silvia, not for her money exactly, but he certainly would not have asked her if she hadn’t had money. No wonder E. F. Benson has a liberal and expectant audience! In Peter he shows an exquisite understanding of the quality of the love between Peter and his boyish young wife.