GETTING BACK AT MR. COMPTON MACKENZIE

With Compliments to Some Less Ambitious Writers

Henry Brinsley

MR. COMPTON MACKENZIE achieved a difficult feat last year: that of engaging the interested attention of a good many readers and most of the reviewers during a season that was notable for an unusual number of admirable novels. And he did this with half a novel. To be sure; the first volume of "Sinister Street" (or "Youth's Encounter") was longer than the average novel; and now the second volume, which completes the work, makes it a fiction nearly the length of "Sir Charles Granclison,"—and leaves the hero at the comparatively tender age of, I think, twenty-three. It is perhaps easier this year in the middle of a far less brilliant publishing season, for a writer of Mr. Mackenzie's calibre to maintain his hold upon his readers, even though his finished book does not meet the promise of the first half. Easier, because Mr. Mackenzie has an excellent sense of style and has essayed an exceptionally interesting and difficult feat. He has set out to give us the history, in meticulous detail, of a human being, a history that shall be as real in its least and multitudinous incidents as our own, and shall depend for its interest not at all upon any well conceived, admirably balanced, and essentially artificial dramatic "plot," but simply upon the mere succession of homely, intimate details and the slow, consequent development of a personality, or "character."

THERE is an immense artistic value in this patient piling up of tiny detail after detail on a canvas of splendidly full size: when well done it achieves a slowly cumulative effect of reality in a way that no other method can. Every detail plays a legitimate contributory part toward the whole, from the most humdrum occurrence to the most unexpected. You finally have to believe in the thing through sheer weight of evidence. Mr. Samuel Pepys, for example, may have been an astonishing liar—I don't know—but you can't read his microscopically circumstantial diary without believing him down to the ground. The more tediously detailed Defoe is, the more splendidly convincing does his imagination become. This, too, is the method of Mr. George Moore, in his masterpiece, "Esther Waters," to which I lately referred. The mere size of the canvas —the length of the book—is a valuable factor in this method; and it is a knowledge of this, I think, that has recently driven certain authors, Mr. Dreiser, Mr. Trevena, and others, to resort to " trilogies." With regard to length, Mr. Mackenzie has certainly had the courage of his convictions, and the result nearly justifies his courage. Nearly, but not quite.

HIS book, the life of a young English boy, Michael Fane, has an effect of reality— definite, clearly visualized and documented, emotionally attested—and then the bottom suddenly drops out! Let me explain. Both Mr. London and Mr. Comfort last year ventured into autobiography. Each book had to do with the youth and early manhood of a personage very much alive, whom the authors knew intimately, and about whom details were given with unflinching conscientiousness. From each book emerged a vigorous "real" personality. Yet the "effect" of each book was largely fictional, because the method was the highly selective fictional one and the canvas was restricted to the size of the developed short story. Mr. Mackenzie's "effect" is, superficially, far more that of reality, owing to method and scale of treatment, but when all is said and done, I don't know very much about Michael Fane as a personality. The trouble is that Mr. Mackenzie wasn't up to his method and has fallen a victim to it; you almost literally can't see the wood for the trees!

I have been to school with Michael, have visited his charming, vague mother and his charming, talented sister and have spent four years with him at Oxford, where I have met, through him, a large group of well-bred, highspirited youth. I have even spent a year with him in the slums of London, looking for a useless drab with whom he thought himself in love. But upon my word, I don't know what Michael is like inside (or any of his friends, for that matter) although I might tell you everything he has ever done. I've been immensely interested in what he has done (yet for all its importance—or lack of it—it wouldn't fill four lines in "Who's Who"), but anybody else might have done it and still not have been Michael—or have been Michael, for all I can see. I feel that Mr. Mackenzie has a wonderful sense of incident and a slight one of character. I know more about the Oxford youths in "Tom Brown," or, more modernly, in "Keddy," than I do about those in "Sinister Street," but I like Mr. Mackenzie's style the best of the three. And certainly so gallant and, above all, sincere an attempt at a really important literary accomplishment, deserves the sympathetic reading of anyone who is at all seriously interested in modern letters.

Books Reviewed

SINISTER STREET By Compton Mackenzie

D. Appleton & Co.. New York $1-35

THE ADVENTURES OF DETECTIVE BARNEY

By Harvey J. O'Higgins

The Century Co., New York S1.30

MR. GREX OF MONTE CARLO By E. Phillips Oppenheim

Little. Brown & Co., Boston S1.35

JUST AROUND THE CORNER By Fannie Hurst

Harper & Bros., New York S1.35

HIS OFFICIAL FIANCEE By Berta Ruck

Dodd, Mead & Co., New York $1.25

THRACIAN SEA By John Helston

The Macmillan Co.. New York $1.35

STORIES IN GREY By Barry Pain

Frederick A. Stokes Co., New York $1.25

STORIES WITHOUT TEARS By Barry Pain

Frederick A. Stokes Co., New York ' $1.25

For the others, here are some crumbs of comfort. "The Adventures of Detective Barney," by Mr. O'Higgins, ought to amuse anybody who retains his liking for the intrigue of detection and remembers the passion of his youth for Old Sleuth and Company. The great Barney is an engaging Bowery kid, aged sixteen, who secures employment as errand boy and child "stool" in a detective agency headed by Mr. Walter Babbing. The latter has nothing to learn from Mr. Burns and Barney is a rapt and apt pupil. Mr. O'Higgins gives them both plenty to do and marks out their course with much charm, gaiety, and tact. Each is redolent of personality of the most likeable sort, and together they accomplish some delightfully neat successes. Mr. O'Higgins has a keen eye for the dramatic possibilities of the commonplace, and makes his points with a quiet deftness that is "grateful and comforting." And he has a very pleasant, clear, clean-cut style.

MR. OPPENHEIM, of course, is at the other swing of the pendulum. He has a keen eye for the melodramatic possibilities of the un-commonplace, and makes his points by a heavy underscoring. If I could read him in a very noisy, over-lighted cabaret, first putting on a vividly theatrical make-up and screwing a vividly specious monocle into my good eye, I could discuss his "Mr. Grex of Monte Carlo" with more sympathy and feel its Babylonish charm. But without these first aids I can only say that the book is, perhaps, better than his last one. The theme is a diplomatic intrigue preceding the present war and, of course, involves very High Personages. I think that those who go to Mr. Oppenheim knowing what they like, will get in this instance just what they're after.

SOME others will want to get "Just Around the Corner," where Miss Fannie Hurst will tell them a series of striking short stories of rough life in New York, largely in Yiddish circles. Miss Hurst is one of the increasingly large group of ladies who, in Mr. Henry James' dazed phrase, go "romping through the ruins of the Language, in the monthly magazines." Indeed, Miss Hurst writes quite frankly in ragtime, and if anyone has the courage to republish her twenty years hence it will have to be done with endless philological foot-notes. Meanwhile we may legitimately revel among her ruins, for what is back of the rag-time is something astonishingly like genius; and when once you get her pictures and her people they startle you with their truth and vitality. Furthermore, while Miss Hurst's sense of language (under the encouragement of some magazine editors who wallow in this kind of thing) may be deliberately maniacal, her sense of form, in the larger meaning, is that of an exceptionally well-trained artist.

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RS. OLIVER ONIONS (Berta Ruck) also docs a bit of romping in "His Official Fiancée," probably in part to strike a balance with Mr. Onions, who is a rather serious writer. She is avowedly out for light comedy, and her book is sufficiently diverting to justify her, if you take it very lightly indeed. It concerns itself with the affairs of the young head of a commercial house, who, for an ingenious business reason, has to have a fiancée; and it is recounted by the pretty, well-born stenographer who accepts the odd engagement because of is, to her, much needed additional stipend. The chances for comedy are many, and Mrs. Onions juggles them with neatness and despatch toward their inevitably agreeable conclusion. Her stenographer, however, is somewhat more self-consciously charming, in a "fluffy" way, than a more exacting literary discretion would demand. But that, again, is simply the old question of how much icing you like on your cake.

THE other day I started to read a novel called "Thracian Sea," by Mr. John Helston. I haven't got beyond the first chapter yet, but a slight sample of its style may do for the moment (ex pede Herculem). The heroine is on a twilight hillside. "There the presence of the Unseen made itself manifest, through the slowing pulses of the autumn, to a nature simple nor lacking in those other elements of sensuousness and passion that have been held as essential to the making of poetry, as it may be they are prerequisite to every higher articulation of sentient life itself."

TWO volumes by Mr. Barry Pain—"Stories Without Tears" and "Stories in Grey"—have now, after a year or more, reached an American publisher. I commend them as decidedly readable.