For a great many years all sorts of people whose opinions I respect have been talking to me about the novels of E. M. Forster. Finally Mr. Galsworthy, when he was last over here, told me about “Where Angels Fear to Tread,” which had never been published in the United States. I issued it last year, and although it did not have the sale I had hoped for, I am going right on reissuing Mr. Forster’s novels. The next will be “Howard’s End,” which has been out of print for a number of years. The regard which competent critics have for Mr. Forster’s work is very striking. A number of them, in fact, feel certain that it is only a matter of time before Forster’s work will be revived as has been that of Samuel Butler. We shall see. Meanwhile I have two other novels by Forster in line for publication, one of which has never been published in America.
Early last year I published “The Secret Battle,” a first novel by A. P. Herbert, a young Englishman. The book to me is still, as it was then, the very finest English novel that has come out of the war. Mr. Herbert has written a second novel entitled “The House by the River.” It is not, like “The Secret Battle,” the overflow of an intense emotional experience—it has nothing to do with the war. It is, in fact, a first rate murder story and of a very unusual kind. But the style of the first book is there,—my, how the man can write—the style that The Westminster Gazette said was “in many ways reminiscent of Defoe’s ... the model of the plain tale ... in which no artistic method of purpose obtrudes itself, but which nevertheless makes a single decisive artistic effect on the reader.”
Some other poetry will be Richard Aldington’s “Medallions in Clay,” translations mostly from the Greek; Conrad Aiken’s “Punch: the Immortal Liar”—a splendid title I think—and a volume by Michael Strange to be illustrated by John Barrymore.
André Tridon will have a new volume entitled “Psychoanalysis, Sleep and Dreams,” Joseph Hergesheimer expects to gather into “The Meeker Ritual” those stories which attracted so much attention when they appeared in The Century, and H. L. Mencken’s “In Defense of Women,” at present out of print, will be reissued—reset from an entirely revised manuscript. Mencken’s “The American Language,” by the way, greatly enlarged, revised and entirely reset, will be published (probably in two large volumes) in the fall of 1921.
Other books that I expect to have ready in the spring are “Deadlock,” the sixth volume in Dorothy Richardson’s now famous Pilgrimage Series, a fifth volume in Mencken’s The Free Lance Books, “Democracy and the Will to Power,” by James N. Wood, and a unique anthology of Devil Stories for which the editor, Dr. Maximilian J. Rudwin, formerly of Johns Hopkins University, has drawn on the literature of many countries. Dr. Rudwin has planned a series of diabolical anthologies of which this is to be the first.
I could go on, I suppose more or less indefinitely unfolding my plans for the future—they lay, didn’t Clarence Day say earlier in this book, “like onions on rafters”—but one must stop sometime and so I will speak only of two other books, both of them really unusual.
One, “In the Claws of the Dragon,” is a novel dealing with the marriage of an aristocratic young Chinaman—one of the bureaucrats—to a well-to-do French girl. The author, George Soulie de Morant is one of the most famous of French Sinologists, and his book presents as well as a fascinating and exciting story, a striking picture of life and customs in the country of Po-Chui.
The other book, “Children of No Man’s Land,” introduces another young English novelist, G. B. Stern. The manuscript was sent to one of my most trusted and capable readers. Here is his comment: “This book is the most brilliant and perfect study that exists of 1, the ultra-modern studio crowd, and 2, the hyphenate in war time; and it touches with wonderful deftness a variety of other matters—the Jews and Zionism; patriotism and internationalism; marriage and free love; heredity, convention and revolt.” I shall say no more, but I reproduce here a little sketch made by H. G. Wells after reading “Children of No Man’s Land”:
52, ST JAMES’S COURT, BUCKINGHAM GATE. S.W.1.