The success of Sonia was largely due to its description in a facile, popular and yet eminently chaste and polished style, of the social and political situation in England for a half generation before and during the early stages of the war. This description Stephen McKenna was peculiarly well-equipped to produce, not only as the near relative of a prominent cabinet minister, but also as an assiduous frequenter of the leading Liberal centre, the Reform Club, on the committee of which he had sat, despite his youthful years, since 1915. The political interest, indeed, is revealed in the subtitle, Between Two Worlds, which was originally intended for the actual title.
McKenna’s next book, Ninety-Six Hours’ Leave, appealed to the reader’s gayer moods and Midas and Son, with its tragic history of an Anglo-American multimillionaire, to the reader in serious temper.
In spite of certain blemishes due to Mr. McKenna’s unfamiliarity with American life, I should say that Midas and Son is probably his ablest work so far. I think it surpasses even Sonia. Mr. McKenna returned to Sonia in his novel, Sonia Married. His work after that was a trilogy called The Sensationalists, three brilliant studies of modern London in the form of successive novels called Lady Lilith, The Education of Eric Lane and The Secret Victory.
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Writing from 11, Stone Buildings, Lincoln’s Inn, London, in 1920, Mr. McKenna had this to say about his trilogy:
“Lady Lilith is the first volume of a trilogy called The Sensationalists, three books giving the history for a few years before the war, during and immediately after the war, of a group of sensation-mongers, emotion-hunters or whatever you like to call them, whose principle and practice it was to startle the world by the extravagance of their behaviour, speech, dress and thought and, in the other sense of the word, sensationalism, to live on the excitement of new experiences. Such people have always existed and always will exist, receiving perhaps undue attention from the world that they set out to astonish. You, I am sure, have them in America, as we have them here, and in the luxurious and idle years before the war they had incomparable scope for their search for novelty and their quest for emotion. Some of the characters in Lady Lilith have already been seen hovering in the background of Sonia, Midas and Son and Sonia Married, though the principal characters in Lady Lilith have not before been painted at full length or in great detail; and these principal characters will be found in all three books of the trilogy.
“Lady Lilith, of course, takes its title from the Talmud, according to which Lilith was Adam’s first wife; and as mankind did not taste of the Tree of Knowledge or of death until Eve came to trouble the Garden of Eden, Lilith belongs to a time in which there was neither death nor knowledge of good or evil in the world. She is immortal, unaging and non-moral; her name is given by Valentine Arden, the young novelist who appears in Sonia and elsewhere, to Lady Barbara Neave, the principal character in Lady Lilith and one of the principal characters in the two succeeding books.”
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In person, Stephen McKenna is tall, with a slender figure, Irish blue eyes, fair hair, regular features and a Dante profile. He has an engaging and very courteous address, a sympathetic manner, a ready but always urbane wit and great conversational charm. He possesses the rare accomplishment of “talking like a book.” His intimates are legion; and, apart from these, he knows everyone who “counts” in London society. He is known never to lose his temper; and it is doubtful whether he has ever had cause to lose it.
His one recreation is the Opera; and during the London season his delightful chambers in Lincoln’s Inn are the almost nightly scene of parties collected then and there from the opera house.