Books, and Other Hors d'Oeuvres

Anatole France, Shaw, James Stephens, Cyril Hume, and "A Lady of Quality"

ERNEST BOYD

DURING Anatole France's life there was only one book about him bya French writer, which could be regarded as a full-length study, and that was the work of a moralizing and indignant pedagogue, who denounced the beloved Master as a wicked fellow and a plagiarist. Since his death, no less than six volumes of a critical and biographical character have appeared in rapid succession. Of these the best and most widely read is Anatole France en Pantoufles, which now appears in English as Anatole France Himself: A Boswellian Record, by His Secretary, Jean Jacques Brousson (Lippincott). I doubt if so complete a picture of a great contemporary has ever been drawn in modern literature. It will give you a chance to talk about something else than The Constant Nymph, for the book is as diverting as any piece of fiction, and yet, has all the marks of authenticity. Chief among the latter, may be mentioned the slight thrill of horror with which respectable Frenchmen—whose name is legion—received Brousson's revelations.

THE English version, it is true, which is the competent work of Mr. John Pollock, tempers the Rabelaisian wind to the shorn lambs of Anglo-Saxondom, but the slight modifications, mainly verbal, arc excessively prudish in my opinion, because they do take away the Gallic salt which is so essential in the flavor of the original. But the situations arc undistorted, and it is possible for the reader to realize from them the lewd, yet refined, scholarly, urbane and malicious character of this man who put every facet of his mind into his writings. For instance, he is discovered sitting in the Bois de Boulogne with a nymph, and their dalliance arouses the ire of a policeman, who comes along to remonstrate, not on moral grounds, but because they are setting a bad example to the children. On reading France's card, the guardian of the law becomes properly respectful in the presence of an Academician, and contents himself by suggesting that, if the lady did not wear a red petticoat, she would be less conspicuous.

On another occasion an intermediary in affairs of gallantry was showing her photograph album to Anatole France, and extolling the qualities of the ladies therein depicted. One fair creature in particular had a bachelor's degree and knew Latin, Greek and Italian, and was recommended as a kindred soul. But France's reply was: "un peu moins dc titres et un peu plus dc tetons," which is rendered by Mr. Pollock as: "Fewer facts, if you please, and more figure," which belies only the form not the intention of the original. In his attitude towards the fair sex, as this book amply proves, Anatole France was essentially the author of Mummer's Tale and The Gods Athirst, over which I have heard earnest souls wag their heads very gravely, as being unworthy of a man of his learning and dignity. Here they will find him speculating with serio-comic irony as to why certain wayward damsels of his acquaintance invariably rushed off to the bedside of a dying relative in the suburbs as soon as their business was transacted and they were in possession of the monetary rewards of love.

Exceedingly interesting, too, is the light which this book throws on the manner in which Anatole France worked. He gave his style to his writing, not in the first draft, but on the proofs, of which he used to demand six, seven, and sometimes eight sets, each of which represented another stage in the direction of that perfect prose of which he was a master. It is a curious fact, at least so far as my experience goes, that all writers whose style seems to run with the utmost smoothness, without any trace of effort, have secured this effect, as Anatole France did, by strenuous rewriting. George Moore, for instance, has now acquired an case of manner which makes it impossible for him to read with patience his earlier books.

His proofs are always heavily marked up with corrections and amplifications, and I have known him to ponder for days over the wording of one sentence, which would appear in the book to have slipped from his pen quite naturally and spontaneously. Henry James, on the other hand, elaborated his meandering and complicated phrases to the rhythm of a typewriter, and he could not dictate for any machine other than one the tempo of which suited him.

Anatole France Himself is a mine of strange facts and anecdotes. France's bathroom was used as a dumping ground for all the books sent to him by admiring authors. When the bath was filled with books, he sent for the dealer and sold them at fifty francs the bathful. Of his own books, he considered The Crime of Sylvesrre Bon?iard the worst, "a monument of platitudinousness," written deliberately to win the Academy prize and so badly written as to win it; and he held A Mummer's Tale and Jeanne d'Arc to be his best. On one of his contemporaries, ill-disguised as Paul B., he expresses himself with a candor which even George Moore has not emulated in belittling his friends and dear colleagues. "He is always talking about women," he says. "A lot he knows about them! His famous psychology is that of a eunuch at a department store linen sale. His adulteries inevitably make me think of mannequins and Louvre catalogues. Everything is there: laces and knots of ribbon—everything except ardor, and ecstasy." Prudery he denounces eloquently as the last offspring of religion, "the most unpleasant and tyrannical of its daughters," and he passionately demands the substitution of modesty, which is "power over one's own soul," whereas prudery is an attitude, which "the most abandoned female" can achieve "with the help of a few buttons and pins." "Why," he asks, "is virtue so disagreeable? Virtue in a woman is the art of slipping the bolt in the door. Every time I have opened a door without knocking, I have stumbled on something ignominious."

TO TURN from this living picture of a fascinating character to The Table Talk of G. B. S. (Harpers) is to realize that Mr. Shaw's biographer, Professor Archibald Henderson, has not the same faculty as has the secretary of Anatole France for making his subject live. I remember wondering, when Professor Henderson's Authorized Biography was published many years ago, how Shaw could have selected a professor of mathematics in North Carolina to write the official account of a career which involved an understanding of the intellectual and social movements of London between 1880 and 1910. Most of us who had grown up in the belief that Bernard Shaw was a man with an unusual sense of humor surrendered that belief in 1911 when the Henderson "Life" descended upon us. But G. B. S. is apparently satisfied, and so he has lent himself to the manufacture of this volume of alleged "table talk," which actually appears, to judge by one of the illustrations, to have been written down and corrected by Mr. Shaw. It consists very largely of reiterations of Shavian ideas on the subject of war, censorship, Irish politics and so forth, interspersed with disquisitions and questions by Professor Henderson which Shaw more or less ignores or evades.

In innumerable forms Shaw declares that he has never been in America and hopes never to come here, that he never reads books by Americans, that he never goes to see American plays. Strange to say, this never deters Mr. Henderson from asking him questions about America, the American theatre and American writers. Naturally, Mr. Shaw's answers arc quite beside the point. Whenever they do come to a topic in which both arc interested, no discussion worth listening to ensues. Henderson pronounces the usual funeral oration over the late President Wilson, and Shaw attacks Wilson's policies; but they never come to grips. Shaw explains at great length how stupid the British public was in suspecting him of pro-Germanism, and satisfies Mr. Henderson by pointing out that the authorities did not arrest him. Henderson does not ask why, in that case, lesser men were jailed for saying exactly what Shaw said.

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James Stephens, who has left for Europe, after a successful lecture tour, is excellent company. Everybody who met him was delighted with the flow of his shrewd, humorous and fanciful ideas, and looking back over many years I can vouch for the spontaneity of his talk and his wit. He is not one of those lecturers who come to America with a memorized programme. A volume of his collected poems has been published by the Macmillan Company, who have included a number of his later verses, in addition to those already famous in the earlier volumes. He has arranged to pay a return visit next year.

If a study of a human rat can be considered part of the proper study of mankind, Cyril Hume's Cruel Fellowship (Doran) is justified. Claude Fisher is so slimy and loathsome a product of thwarted desires, repressed instincts and all the other achievements of pathological puritanism, that he enables one to understand the stuff of which professional moralists are made. As an indirect indictment of certain ideals still prevalent in America, this book is a real document. But, if you want to take the nasty taste out of your mind, the same publishers have also produced that delicious fantasia, Serena Blandish or The Difficulty of Getting Married, by A Lady of Quality, which has not yet had in America the vogue which it enjoyed in London. It is better than Ronald Firbank, and should help to make conversation when The Constant Nymph and Mayfair are ripe for forgetfulness.