by Hugh Walpole
But best of all — far, far best of all — was my godfather’s Christmas present of “David Copperfield”, that old blue covered edition with all the pictures and very small crinkly print. I say crinkly because very early in my reading I separated books into this division, the straight and the crinkly. I cannot say at this distant time what it was exactly in my youthful mind that separated the one from the other; something in the type, something in the binding perhaps, but something certainly in the spirit of the book itself. “Alice in Wonderland” was a crinkly book, and so were “Grimm’s Fairy Tales” and Jules Verne and “The Talisman”, but “Ministering Children” and “Little Women” and the adorable, adorable “Flat-iron for a Farthing” (is anyone ever again going to write as well both about and for children as did Mrs. Ewing?) — these were straight books. “David Copperfield” was the most crinkly of them all. It was my first Dickens, and I remember that when I lay in bed thinking about the characters they all seemed to me to have crinkly noses, so that to this very day the Micawbers and Peggotty and Mrs. Gum-midge and Rosa Dartle all seem to me to have noses that turn up at the end like little pigs.
It was “David Copperfield” who first decided me to have a library. When I went back after that wonderful Christmas week to the clergyman’s house where I was a paying guest (it was that same one in which lived Miss Julie) I collected my books together. I had about a dozen and they were, I think, “Stumps”, “Rags and Tatters”, “Alice in Wonderland”, “Ivanhoe”, “The Talisman”, “The Golden Treasure”, the Bible, “The Pilgrim’s Progress”, “Robinson Crusoe”, “St. Winifred’s — or The World of School”, “David Copperfield”, and a volume of Mrs. Ewing’s stories. I arranged these in a row I remember on my window sill, there being no bookcase in my little room, and next day the red faced son of the clergyman came in and threw them all out of the window into the garden pond. This was the origin of my “Mrs. Seagrim” chapter.
I hit the red faced boy and cried of course but was impotent to prevent the tragedy. Those treasures are, I dare say, at the bottom of that pond at this very moment.
But life moves on and tragedies stay behind, thank God. And soon I was staying with another clergyman and collecting books again. Through all my boyhood I had none of the real collector’s impulse. I collected these books because I loved them and for no other reason. I never thought of their “rarity”, their “condition”, their “points”. They were indeed of no rarity at all and their points were those of intimate personal history and none other. One book had a splotch of damp on it where I had washed my hands too vigorously in its neighborhood, another was guilty of schoolroom ink, the pages of another were torn — all my personal history was there.
During most of my boyhood I slept in a little room squeezed in between dormitories of cubicles where most of the students in my father’s college spent their nights. My little collection of books was gathered precariously in a little bookcase that hung totteringly on the matchboard walls, and the nightly jests of the students, which consisted as I remember them of throwing heavy books at one another from cubicle to cubicle, made my bookcase rock at its very foundations. Books would totter over in the middle of the night and fall upon my face and wake me from my dreams but I was, as a rule, too sleepy to move them and would wake in the morning to find quite a little colony of volumes sharing my pillow.
My collection at that time was I think very ordinary and conventional. I admired what I was supposed to admire. My finances also were so slender that I was forced to depend very largely on gifts, and I shall never forget on one birthday my distress when I received no less than three “Kidnapped’s”, all of them written in and of no use therefore for “swopping” purposes.
I was about sixteen I think when the “World’s Classics” suddenly began to appear. No poor words of mine can possibly convey with what a glory and a shining splendor that series surrounded me. These little dumpy red volumes (as they were little) were within my purchasing grasp, and I can see now one wintry evening in the country when there arrived my first volume of the series — Poe’s “Tales of Imagination” — richly wrapped in stiff brown paper just as if it were a most expensive work, and how I drew up the dining room blind so that I might see the snow falling, conspirator-like, through the blue dusk, and how I took the old rocking chair as close to the fire as I might and stole an apple from the plate of fruit on the sideboard and munched and read and munched again.
My whole writing life took a fresh impetus from that romantic evening. The sense that Poe has of loneliness and terror went to reinforce that same private sense in myself given to me by S —— . I began story after story in which there was a dark room, someone tapping at the window, a gasp, a groan, something dripping, a dark shadow behind the blind. But they got no further. I had always the sense that it was more interesting to make incident come from the clash of character than to let character be clothes-propped out of incident. I think that, even as I do now, I then worked far too often from the outside inward as Carlyle falsely accused Sir Walter of doing, but that is a crime that we lesser men in these noisy days are only too apt to commit. Sometimes it is the other way — Perrin comes from the inside I think, and Mrs. Trenchard and Maggie and Ronder and Brandon — if this recital of names seems egotistically tiresome I admit the egotism without shame, and isn’t there in any case something unnatural about a father who refuses to recognize his own children?
I recognized meanwhile in these years vividly enough the children of those other literary parents. That shabby little bookcase was bursting with characters so real to me that I don’t wonder that they toppled on my head while I was dreaming. At that time the characters were the only ingredients of the pie that I considered. “Barchester Towers” was a greater book to me than “The Egoist” because Mrs. Proudie was more real to me than Sir Willoughby — and is today more real. “The Antiquary” and “Rob Roy” and “Redgauntlet” I adored by reason of Edie Ochiltree and Diana Vernon and Darsie Latimer and Nanty Ewart and I didn’t care then, and I don’t care now, how careless Sir Walter’s style might be (there are things in “Guy Mannering” and “Old Mortality” and many another that can beat Meredith, Hardy, and James together for fine English), how slow his openings (his prefaces are glorious), how impotent his conclusions (and his conclusions are impotent often enough). Character was the thing in a novel then and is the thing for me now — the one thing that the novel can do supremely better than any other branch of the arts.
I came, after this, to the æsthetic period. I did not carry lilies in my chubby fist (the time for lily bearing was past) but I chose my ties with care, saved up and bought “Marius”, and carried Shelley, Rossetti, and Morris with me everywhere. I was at Cambridge and my soul bumped from Rugby football to poetry and back again. In some way I felt that the two were closely connected and that connection I tried fumblingly to express in “The Prelude to Adventure”. One of the happiest days in my life was when I dribbled the ball half way down the field and scored a try for my college, and that night I sat up for hours reading Morris’s “Jason” aloud and feeling that I was the monarch of the world.
I must confess too that just at this time I had a passion (no lesser word will do) for the works — and they were many — of Francis Marion Crawford. With all my aestheticism — my Turgenev, my Anatole France, my Flaubert, my Meredith, my James, my Doughty (there appeared when I was about seventeen on my horizon the superb “Arabia Deserta” lent to me by a friend) — with all these tawny colored lions was lying down this little woolly lamb! I have read only this very week in one of the ablest American journals the most contemptuous references to poor Crawford possible for man to conceive. Well, let it be. Crawford wrote many poor books; he never did perhaps the best that was in him. He was modest about his work to a fault, a virtue not too conspicuous with the younger generation of today. To him, sportsman, athlete, fine friend, generous nature, life was always of more importance than art.
And yet has anyone tried “Katherin
e Lauderdale” or “The Ralstons” lately? Has any novelist approached so closely to Trollope’s marvelous pedestrian realism as the author of those two books? Is not the creation of the Ralston family something of an achievement? And as for romance, what about “Casa Braccio” and “Corleone” and “Stradella”? Times change and fashions with them. One day when distance has sifted the wheat from the chaff someone will rediscover Crawford. There are many worse novelists with very handsome reputations alive today.
As I approached Cambridge and the age of priggishness, Crawford and many another simpleminded author faded from my shelves. I wanted nothing but the best. We had no psychoanalysis twenty years ago but Samuel Butler and Bernard Shaw and the younger Wells and the older James and the early Conrad were food enough for our groping minds.
One thing as I look back seems strange — I can remember no new poets contemporary with that period. “The Everlasting Mercy” had not appeared. There was Bridges, always from the first an exceeding joy to me; there was Stephen Phillips who never appeared to me quite the real thing; but the de la Mares, the Hodgsons, the Aldous Huxleys did not exist. And as for the women novelists we were in a valley just between the Sarah Grands, the “Iotas”, the Ella D’Arcys of the nineties, and the Rebecca Wests, the Rose Macaulays, the Virginia Woolfs of today.
I remember that it was “The House of Mirth” which first drew my attention to contemporary American literature. Before I read that fine work I had fancied that American novels later than James or Howells were like a cloak and sword romance of the “Richard Carvel” kind, or dull heavy tracts of the Robert Herrick variety. First “The House of Mirth”, then “Sister Carrie”, then “The Octopus” and “The Pit”, then the novels of Tarkington, and I realized a new world of experience.
But during all this time I was in no sense of the word a true book collector. I simply bought and kept at my side the books that I wanted to read. Then one day — a never to be forgotten day — I was lured by a friend into the enchantments of Sotheby’s. I had never been present at a book auction before. I stood nervously at his side and watched the proceedings. A first edition of Lewis’s “Monk” appeared. It was passed around. I handled the three slim volumes and my heart leaped up as did Wordsworth’s when he beheld the daffodils.
“Would you like that?” my friend asked me. I said, “Yes”, never dreaming of my possession. He nodded his head once or twice.
“The book’s yours,” he said. I gasped and with that gasp entered a new kingdom.
How many people have said to me in the last eight years, “I cannot think what you want to collect all those old books for.” As though a modern edition would do just as well!
I could write a hook (and am indeed one day going to write it) about “Book Collecting: Its Virtues and Vices”, why it is like drinking, why it breaks up so many marriages — and so on. But in the meantime I recommend that anyone who cannot understand why men grub in twopenny books read Mr. Newton’s two books on the subject and then read “Sylvestre Bonnard”. If, after these books, he is no wiser, he may go to perdition his own way!
At the beginning of my collecting I decided that I would try for two things — first, everything that I could obtain about or by the great Sir Walter and, secondly, a first edition in its original state of every important novel in the English language.
My first ambition I have gone a long way toward achieving. There is, I think, no book written about Scott in the English language that I do not possess. I have all the firsts in boards save “Waverley”, I have proof sheets of six of the novels and the manuscripts of two of them. I have hundreds of letters by him, and the famous Abbotsford correspondence, some seven thousand letters to Scott from all the most important men of his time.
“Now what on earth have you done this for?” someone asked me the other day. It does on the face of it seem folly. Instead of saving I have bought things. I have saved almost nothing out of this, the lucrative period of my life. It is true that I could get a considerable sum for my Scott library were I to sell it, but I should not get — let there be no mistake — what I gave for it. Who can explain the impulses that dominate us? Even those Cheeryble brothers, Messrs. Freud and Jung, have taken us only a little way. I can only say that I have loved Scott since I was a very little boy — loved him as a man, as the example of all that was good and true and pure and fearless and sense-of-humored. Loved him as the greatest creator since Shakespeare of living men and women, between the covers of books, but loved him finally as someone whom at sometime or another I have personally known.
There may be something in the doctrine of reincarnation — there may not, as Mr. Sooch says in “Spite Corner”. But there are times when his grey shadow over my memory seems to lift and I see myself as a bowlegged, snuff taking, spectacled little bookseller in a little bookshop in a back Edinburgh street — and Napoleon has just gone to St. Helena, and James Hogg has just borrowed a book which, if I am not careful, he will never return; and suddenly the jingly bell rings and there is a sturdy thickset figure in the doorway and a merry eye and a jolly voice, and someone limps across the floor and puts his hand upon my shoulder....
Perhaps...
My other ambition is also nearly achieved. I have not every important novel in the English language. I have not “Pickwick” in parts nor several Jane Austens, nor Trollope’s “Mac-dermots” (how surprised that sportsman would be did he know that someone in 1923 was calling “The Macder-mots” important!) nor “Wuthering Heights” nor “Richard Feverel” nor “The Woodlanders”.
“And what good is it to you”, my cynical friend inquires, “now that they are there?” I can only answer that it gives me a deep emotional pleasure to see, to handle, to live with those copies of the books that I love, the copies that came first into the world before anyone alive had time to realize how tremendous an effect upon the world they were going to have! They seem to me the copies that the authors themselves have made, “Jane Eyre” in its purple cloth, “Esmond” in its grey, “Middlemarch” in its stumpy parts, “The Newcomes” in their bright yellow.
I don’t know that I should care to collect books for which I have no affection simply because of their rarity. I have no wish to pay a thousand pounds for Margaret Nicholson or five hundred for Lamb’s “Queen of Hearts”. I should like to have a Kilmarnock Burns and a first “Pilgrim’s Progress” and a “Third Folio”. But there it is. I must buy what I can afford.
And have books no life of their own? Of course they have. Did not my “Jane Eyre” utterly refuse to live cheek by jowl with “Pride and Prejudice”, and how do you think the “Idylls” would take the company of “Pelham” or “The Caxtons”? And do they respond to one’s own love for them? Of course they do. I will tell you. Before I sailed for America not long ago, I went round my library giving my books a last stroke of the hand. My “Almayer’s Folly” (a beautiful copy with a page of Conrad’s own writing inside it) urged itself upon my attention. It fell out of the bookcase. It refused to go back. There was no room. I pushed it back. It groaned. But of course I could not take it. When I unpacked my bag in New York there it was, hidden between Boswell and a book on “Self”. How did it get there?
I leave that to your own judgment.
VIII: AND NOW
I
ONCE upon a time — that is, only the other evening — I thought that I had the Crystal Box in my hands.
I had been spending the evening in Carl Van Vechten’s rooms. I came into the street and the sky was spluttering with lights. There were the stars; and there were the lights, twenty stories high, cut off from earth, darting their way across the velvet path of heaven, twisting and turning between the paws of the Square.
As we came down in the lift someone said to me: “You know ever so many American writers, don’t you?”
“Yes,” I said; and I forgot at once my companion in remembering the names of the American writers who are my friends: Joseph Hergesheimer, Sinclair Lewis, James Branch Cabell, Booth Tarkington
, Carl Van Vechten, Charlie Towne, Owen Johnson, Royal Cortissoz, Don Marquis, Chris Morley, Ellen Glasgow, Tom Beer, Henry Mencken, Burton Rascoe, John Farrar, Robert Chambers, William Phelps, Avery Hopwood, Hal Rhodes — and I thought of my luck and good fortune, walking on air, so that I stumbled on a step and fell on my nose.
My friend, who is a grave fellow, picked me up and, looking at me sorrowfully, said that he would see me into a cab. I could see that he judged me wrongly so I was angry and said: “I have drunk nothing at Carl’s. You must have noticed that I drank nothing. I was only thinking about the friends I have in America, writing men, and I have friends in England too: Frank Swinnerton, Arnold Bennett, Drinkwater, Lucas...” But there he left me, still throwing back at me sorrowful glances. It was then, in the state of happiness that I was in, that I saw the Box floating down Nineteenth Street — all its colors glittering, square and sturdy, floating toward the Square. I followed it but it melted into the stars and lights of the Square. I went home expecting to find it on my bed. The Waldorf is the best hotel in the civilized world but the Box was not there. Perhaps the Waldorf is too civilized....
II
I walked, however, round that New York square several times before going back to the Waldorf and I thought to myself how happy I was. After S —— and Durham and being a missionary and having dysentery in Galicia and being frightened in Petrograd here I was, with “The Cathedral” a real success, and all these friends, and good health.
An old lady once said to me that I was foolish to take people at their face value. “They all talk against you behind your back and laugh at you,” she said. Of course I know how we all behind-the-back-talk, but how little it means! And how fond one is of someone in whom there are weaknesses and how glad one is to hand one’s friends one’s own absurdities for half an hour if they amuse them! No, no, old lady, you are wrong about that as you are about many other things.... On the personal side of my life I’m rich and I don’t care who knows it — I would back my friends for loyalty and humor against any in the world — but on the other side of things why, after all the experience of that I have had, after the friends that I have made, after the years that I have spent in pursuit, after the advice and counsel that I have received, why do I know that I am today only at the beginning of my novel writing?