The Art of Autobiography
John Mistletoe, by
[Doubleday, Doran, $2.50]
THIS is Christopher Morley’s portrait of the artist as a young man. Mistletoe, as you may remember, has for many years served as Colonel House to Mr. Morley, advising him on certain worldly and unworldly matters and frequently suffering his name to be attached to prefatory paragraphs and such Morleyan incunabula as belonged exiguously to italics or quotations. Readers of Mr. Morley’s essays will recollect him at once in the company of Effendi, the Urchin, Titania, Dame Quickly, the Caliph, the Old Mandarin, Endymion, Mr. Gissing, Toulemonde, and others of remote control; but a few pages here will reveal him in his true estate — the greater part of a dual personality, and the most genial of Hydes to the author’s Jekyll.
I dislike to say that the book is charming. That means so little. Let us call it essential, or elemental. ‘I honor words and they come with difficulty. Evidence of the first, but not of the second. Sentimental? ‘I see you, Tony, in your blue shirt, in the green and yellow wood. I hear the blows of your axe; the Steady keening of your saw in measured hero couplets. Pure October air is round you, smell of logs and mould, unmitigated sunshine of noon, and you have nothing to think of nor perceive but the split of the axe-blade, the smell of logs, the feel of earth under your bootsoles, the feel of barky wood on your hard brown hands.’ One can do with that.
Cherchez l’oriflamme. I see you, Christopher, with your puns and the Slavic pen, Regus Patoff, and the desk you once described vicariously in Toulemonde; and I know what it means to you to write. I shall not attempt to dissect what you have done. But I can open this book almost anywhere and understand that you write best, what is closest, to you. ‘Be clear,’ said Havelock Ellis. ‘Be not too clear.’ What is continuity? I note with private satisfaction that you have not been hindered by sequence or chronological regimen. From Haverford and Darby Creek to Oxford, Garden City, Philadelphia, and New York, I am glad to see that the anterior substance (did you call it?) which is memory is not too ordered in delivery, but lets things fall with the cadence of first summer rain. You do not believe in method. Indeed, had you employed it, it would have spoiled what you have said so well. You found the Oxford you loved a ‘strange mixture of cathedral, athletic club, monastery and tavern,’ and more in the Leaves of Grass than is good for your readers; you have studied New York ‘as a botanist would study a jungle.’ ‘Smatterer then as now,’ as you modestly call yourself, your obviously vast rending is strewn through 450 pages. Perhaps you have strewn too much. I am not sure. But Morley into Mistletoe, this is, as you say, many of the ‘hard-won inflexions from his own grammar of surprise.’
Thirty years of the twentieth century! You have crowded a lot of enviable life into that. Dr. Canby once said of you: ‘I do not mean to describe Christopher Morley as a man born out of his time. He can be as modern as Joyce when his perceptions are on the alert, although his pose of an ancient hearty (of which heartiness is no pose) may deceive the uninitiate.’ I do not think he will he deceived. He will find you ‘ware an’ wakin’,’ as Henry Newbolt said of Drake. Some of the words you honor he will have to look up. But you can never convince him that they came with any difficulty.
DAVID MCCORD