When Winter Comes to Main Street

by Grant M. Overton

viii

It was in 1918, when I was exploring new books for a New York book section, that there came to hand a volume called Walking-Stick Papers. Therein I found such stuff as this:

“And so the fish reporter enters upon the last lap of his rounds. Through, perhaps, the narrow, crooked lane of Pine Street he passes, to come out at length upon a scene set for a sea tale. Here would a lad, heir to vast estates in Virginia, be kidnapped and smuggled aboard to be sold a slave in Africa. This is Front Street. A white ship lies at the foot of it. Cranes rise at her side. Tugs, belching smoke, bob beyond. All about are ancient warehouses, redolent of the Thames, with steep roofs and sometimes stairs outside, and with tall shutters, a crescent-shaped hole in each. There is a dealer in weather-vanes. Other things dealt in hereabout are these: Chronometers, ‘nautical instruments,’ wax guns, cordage and twine, marine paints, cotton wool and waste, turpentine, oils, greases, and rosin. Queer old taverns, public houses, are here, too. Why do not their windows rattle with a ‘Yo, ho, ho’?

“There is an old, old house whose business has been fish oil within the memory of men. And here is another. Next, through Water Street, one comes in search of the last word on salt fish. Now the air is filled with gorgeous smell of roasting coffee. Tea, coffee, sugar, rice, spices, bags and bagging here have their home. And there are haughty bonded warehouses filled with fine liquors. From his white cabin at the top of a venerable structure comes the dean of the salt-fish business. ‘Export trade fair,’ he says; ‘good demand from South America.’”

The whole book was like that. I remember saying and printing:

“If this isn’t individualised writing, extremely skilful writing and highly entertaining writing, we would like to know what is.”

But what was that in the general chorus of delighted praise that went up all over the country?—and there were persons of discrimination among the laudators of Robert Cortes Holliday. People like James Huneker and Simeon Strunsky, who praised not lightly, were quick to express their admiration of this new essayist.

Four years have gone adding to Holliday’s first book volumes in the same class and singularly unmistakeable in their authorship. They are the sort of essays that could not be anonymous once the authorship of one of them was known. We have, now, Broome Street Straws and the pocket mirror, Peeps at People. We have Men and Books and Cities and we have a score of pleasant Turns About Town.

Holliday shows no sign of failing us. I think the truth is that he is one of those persons described somewhere by Wilson Follett; I think Follett was trying to convey the quality of De Morgan. Follett said that with Dickens and De Morgan it was not a question of separate books, singly achieved, but a mere matter of cutting off another liberal length of the rich personality which was Dickens or De Morgan. So, exactly, it seems to me in the case of Holliday. A new book of Holliday’s essays is simply another few yards of a personality not precisely matched among contemporary American essayists. Holliday’s interests are somewhat broader, more human and perhaps more humane, more varied and closer to the normal human spirit and taste and fancy than are the interests of essayists like Samuel Crothers and Agnes Repplier.

The measure of Holliday as an author is not, of course, bounded by these collections of essays. There is his penetrating study of Booth Tarkington and the fine collected edition of Joyce Kilmer, Joyce Kilmer; Poems, Essays and Letters With a Memoir by Robert Cortes Holliday.