Turns about Town

by Robert Cortes Holliday

The reasons why I was (I am sorry to say) unable to rise to this occasion were two. For one thing, I have known long and intimately a considerable number of authors and editors. Also, I have had the honor of having been several times to the National Arts Club. And (such is my tact and delicacy) I could not feel that this was any fit place for me to discuss the (as the term is) idiosyncrasies with which a decidedly checkered career has acquainted me. Then, as to one of my own idiosyncrasies: I am like George Moore in this which he says, that he is "the only Irishman living or dead who cannot make a speech"—except that I am not an Irishman.

All of this, however, is merely picking up the threads of my thought. What I have in my eye is an idiosyncrasy of authors which doubtless I could have discussed with some propriety. That is, if I were able to discuss before an audience anything at all. Though with this subject, as many of those present were authors (who had their toes along with them) I should have had to exercise more than a little caution, and considerable skill in maintaining a honeyed amiability. Maybe this theme wouldn't have done at all either.

You see, it's this way: Many people, I believe, do not read the introductions, prefaces, forewords (and whatever else such things are called) to books. I always do. Perhaps this is a habit formed during a number of years spent as a professional reviewer. If you read the introduction, preface (or whatever it's called), to a book you can generally pick up pretty much what the author thought he was about when he wrote it, the points he intended to make in the work, the circumstances in which he wrote it, and so on. This is a great time and labor saving procedure. All you've got to do then is to read a bit in the volume here and there to taste the style, pick up a few errors of fact or grammar, glance at the "conclusion," where the author sums up, to see whether or not he got anywhere—and so far as you are further put out by having this book on your hands it might just as well never have been written. But I am drifting. That's one reason I can't make a speech. Never can recollect what it was I set out to say.

Oh, yes! About these dedications. Less people than read prefaces, I fancy, read the dedications of books. I always read 'em. I read them when I have no intention whatever of reading the volumes which they—well, dedicate. They are fine—dedications. Better, far better, than old tombstones. But never judge a book by its dedication.

I one time knew a man, of a most decidedly humorous cast of mind, who was a great spendthrift, an A 1 wastrel. He ran through everything his father left him (a very fair little fortune), and then when he had run through, in advance of that gentleman's death, everything his wife was to inherit from his father-in-law he had no means whatever. He had a daughter. Without, it was clearly evident, the least suspicion of the pleasant humor of this, he named her Hope. She was a small child. And—it's absurd, I know; but 'tis so; there was not a particle of conscious irony in it; this child's name was the one blind spot in her father's sense of the ridiculous—her parents frequently referred to her affectionately as "little Hope."

So, quite so, with dedications. Whenever, or perhaps we had better say frequently, when a man writes a particularly worthless book he lays the deed (in his dedication of it) onto his wife, "without whose constant devotion," etc., etc., etc., "this work would never have come into being." Amen! Or he says that it is inscribed "To—my gentlest friend—and severest critic—my aged Grandmother." Or maybe he accuses his little daughter, "whose tiny hands have led me." Again he may say benignantly: "To—my faithful friend—Murray Hill—who made possible this volume"; or "the illumination of whose personality has lighted my way to truth."

Doubtless he means well, this author. And, in most cases, highly probable it is that his magnanimous sentiments are O. K. all round. For to the minds of what would probably be called "right-thinking" persons is not having a book dedicated to you the equivalent, almost, of having a career yourself? I know a very distinguished American novelist—well, I'll tell you who he is: Booth Tarkington—who has told me this: Time and again he has been relentlessly pursued by some person unknown to him who, in the belief that did he once hear it he would surely use it as material for his next book, wished to tell him the story of his life. This life, according to the communications received by the novelist, was in every case one of the most remarkable ever lived by man. It was, in every case, most extraordinary in, among a variety of other singular things, this: the abounding in it of the most amazing coincidences. And so on, and so on, and so on. One of these romantic personages nailed the novelist somewhere coming out of a doorway one day, and contrived to compel him to sit down and listen to the life story. He was an old, old man, this chap, and firmly convinced that the tale of his many days (as simple, commonplace, dull and monotonous an existence as ever was conceived) was unique. Now he did not want any pay for telling his story; he had no design on any royalty to come from the great book to be made out of it; no, not at all. All he asked—and that, he thought, was fair enough—was that the book be dedicated to him. And so it was with them all, all of those with the remarkable, obscure, romantic, humdrum lives. So much for that.

Dedications run the whole gamut of the emotions. A type of author very tonic to the spirit is that one whose soul embraces not merely an individual but which enfolds in its heroic sweep a nation, a people, or some mighty idea. What, for instance, could be more vast in the grandeur of its sweep than this—which I came upon the other day in a modest little volume? "To the Children of Destiny." The Great War, which has wrought so much evil and inspired so much literature, is responsible for a flood of noble, lofty dedications. The merest snooping through a bunch of recent war books turns up, among a multitude more, the following: "To the Mothers of America." "To—the Loyalty and Patriotism—of the—American People." "To the Hour—When the Troops Turn Home." "To All the Men at the Front."

I should not affirm, of course, that there is anything new under the sun. And it is very probable that ever since this psychic literature began (whenever it began) authors resident beyond the stars have, naturally enough, dedicated their manuscripts submitted to earthly publishers to folks back in the old home, so to say. But with the War, which has so greatly stimulated literary activity on the other side of life, the dedications of these (to put it so) expatriated authors have perhaps become (in a manner of speaking) loftier in tone than ever before. As a sample of the present state of exalted feeling of authors of this sort I copy the following dedication from the recently published book of a writer "gone West": "To the heroic women of the world, the mothers, wives and sweethearts who bravely sent us forth to battle for a great cause:—we who have crossed the Great Divide salute you."

I wish, I do wish, I had at hand a book which I saw a number of years ago.... As examples of persons to whom books have been dedicated may be specified The Deity, The Virgin Mary, Royalty and Dignitaries of Church and State, "The Reader," and the author himself. Many of the pleasantest dedications have been to children. Besides armies and navies, countries, states, cities and their inhabitants, books have also been dedicated to institutions and societies, to animals, to things spiritual, and to things inanimate. An attractive example of a dedication to Deity is furnished by one John Leycaeter, who, in 1649, dedicated his "Civill Warres of England, Briefly Related from his Majesties First Setting Up his Standard, 1641, to this Present Personall Hopefull Treaty"—"To the Honour and Glory of the Infinite, Immense, and Incomprehensible Majesty of Jehovah, the Fountaine of all Excellencies, the Lord of Hosts, the Giver of all Victories, and the God of Peace." He continued in a poem, "By J. O. Ley, a small crumme of mortality."