Hands Across the Sea

‘Where was th’ hand, I ask ye? ’Twas in me face when I bit it, sez he.’
— MR. DOOLEY

WHEN Mr. J. B. Priestley visited this country a few years ago he exhibited both in his greeting and in his manner thereafter a burliness and bad taste remarkable even for a Yorkshireman. His American hosts could only infer that the novelist had been instructed by some previous traveler to these shores to bite the hand that fed him whenever it was extended — which he did. When that charming emissary from Punch, Mrs. E. M. Delafield, was with us a year ago she was widely entertained, as indeed she deserved to be. But in the Notes which the Provincial Lady subsequently recorded about her tour one failed to find the grace and charm so evident in her person.

Is it our steam-heated air that so sours our cousins when they come to call? Or does our relationship encourage a kind of plain speaking which should be excused since it is all in the family? The association between the English and the American world of letters is obviously of immense value to both parties. But I wonder if it might not be better for a little airing. In what I have to say I shall hope to avoid on the one hand the condescension of the average English lecturer and on the other the condescension of the American tourist when he talks about plumbing, dentistry, and God’s Country.

The prophecy made by a Tory parson shortly after the Revolution to the effect that we Americans would now suffer a ‘speedy relapse into barbarism’ was not, happily for us, borne out in fact. Despite certain barbaric survivals such as our fondness for spitting and our generosity toward strangers, we prospered, and began gradually to develop a thin but indigenous culture of our own. Not unnaturally, England was slow to take this in. In the early years of the nineteenth century, English audiences, if they thought of American books at all, thought of them in terms of those Anglo-American writers, Washington Irving and N. P. Willis. With the emergence of Poe and Emerson and Whitman, English readers became more respectful. But the writers who pleased them most — the writers who seemed to them most characteristically American — were, I’m inclined to think, Artemus Ward and Bret Harte, Joaquin Miller and Mark Twain, men who caught the rough humor and the daring of our uncultivated life, who wrote with the peculiar exaggeration and vigor we like, and whose stories incidentally flattered the English conception of us as tough country cousins.

That conception has survived the nineteenth century; it lives on to-day. Even as recently as 1923, I was asked by an English undergraduate if I traveled with my ’shooting irons’ — and, unlike the Virginian, he did n’t smile when he said it. Perhaps I can furnish another illustration when I ask if you know where the biggest market for Wild West stories is to-day. Not in this country (where Bar-Z’s and hardriding cowboys have grown stale), but in England.

The Englishman bears his white man’s burden philosophically. Prevented by the Revolution from colonizing our industries, he dedicated himself instead to colonizing our intellect. All through the nineteenth century it was fashionable for English men and women of letters to visit the United States, traveling widely and taking careful and usually caustic note of everything that displeased them. Dickens did it and so did Mrs. Trollope, Fanny Kemble, and Mrs. Basil Hall. The fact that we are, as I have said, very generous to strangers made their missionary expeditions easier and certainly a great deal more comfortable than if they had gone to the Congo. And our long-suffering appetite for English celebrities of course placed the undertaking on a profitable basis. The volumes which they wrote on their return to England could hardly be called bread-and-butter letters. With the superiority of our elders and that rudeness of which the Briton has always been past master, they put us in our place.

The patronage of these missionaries was best described by James Russell Lowell in the year 1869. ’I read,’ said Mr. Lowell, ’the other day in print the remark of a British tourist who had eaten large quantities of our salt, such as it is (I grant it has not the European savor), that the Americans were hospitable, no doubt, but that it was partly because they longed for foreign visitors to relieve the tedium of their dead-level existence, and partly from ostentation.’

I grant you they sometimes hit the nail on the thumb. It was not only his strenuous speaking campaign that wore down Matthew Arnold in this country. He said of us, ‘Their universal enjoyment and good nature are what strike one most here. On the other hand, some of the English qualities are clean gone: the love of quiet and dislike of a crowd is gone out of the American entirely. They say Washington had it . . . but I have seen no American yet, except Norton at Cambridge, who does not seem to desire constant publicity and to be on the go all day long. It is very fatiguing.’ When Oscar Wilde, who conferred two hundred orchidaceous lectures upon us in a single season, remarked that Niagara Falls would have been more wonderful if the water had run the other way, he said something I am glad to remember. And when George Bernard Shaw, who once declared he would not come to America for a million (pounds) a minute, put his bank account out of mind and came for the fun of it, he gave us as a nation some of the most apt and tonic advice we have ever received from a stranger. But these are exceptions.

I intend neither compliment nor insult to American listeners when I say that the present generation of Englishmen who lecture and travel still regard us as the geese who lay the golden eggs. Mind you, an Englishman at his best, with something to say and keen to say it, — as John Galsworthy was on his last visit, — is one of the most eloquent and persuasive creatures on earth. But an Englishman at his third best or at his careless worst ought to get the hook just as quickly as any poor hoofer in vaudeville. After all, hospitality has its limits — even among barbarians. Unless I am wrong, the day is approaching when the worm will turn — or rather when the geese will hiss. It betrays no confidence if I recall that, following the dialogue which V. Sackville-West and her husband, Harold Nicolson, performed in Boston last winter, one of the audience rose and said, ‘Mrs. Nicolson, may I ask if you would have given this lecture in London?’ ‘No,’ was the quick and disarming reply, ‘because no one would have come to listen.’ There are evidently occasions when celebrities should be seen but not heard.

Literature, thank heaven, penetrates without the aid of missionaries. Mrs. Virginia Woolf does not have to address our women’s clubs to make sure we appreciate Mrs. Dalloway; Kipling had staunch American friends, but they had nothing to do with the nationwide devotion that goes out to Mowgli, Wee Willie Winkie, and Soldiers Three; Dickens would have been as well read if he had never set foot on this continent. There is something to be said for remaining within a room of one’s own and allowing one’s books to do the talking. The welcome we extend to the work of contemporary English authors can be demonstrated by the fact that, between 1924 and 1932, 30 per cent of our best-selling books were of British origin. I should doubt if during the same period as much as 10 per cent of the popular books in England came from the U. S. A.

There is very little snob appeal in our attitude toward English books. We read such quantities of them because we like them, because we realize that in matters of technique and style English authors, by and large, have a certain superiority to our own. The size of our reading public enables us to pay popular English novelists royalties many times greater than what they receive from the Empire. But more to our credit than mere cash is the recognition which we occasionally afford to those who are prophets without honor on the other side of the water. The books of Havelock Ellis were recognized here at a time when he was little sought and less read in England. Indeed, a wag has quoted him as saying that after he had published his first volume on The Psychology of Sex he received so many letters from confidential Americans that he soon had material enough for the five more volumes which followed. Arthur Machen had a loyal if limited band of American supporters before The Hill of Dreams began to stir the English imagination. Americans — and I wish they had been more — had read Mary Webb before the Prime Minister reminded England of its duty. Dutton in New York, the Atlantic Monthly in Boston, gave Henry Williamson an enthusiastic backing when his own country was little aware of this delightful dweller in Devon.

Now let’s reverse the picture and see what we see. England, as I have said, has always been disposed to welcome our bizarre figures: less sensational and more enduring talents, such as Miss Jewett’s and Emily Dickinson’s, have had to wait for acknowledgment. But a change has slowly been taking place. English scholars, once reluctant to give credit to the American investigation of English literature and still apt to deal more sharply with our research than with their own, have come to realize that we can produce scholars who are also gentlemen and worthy of trust. The academic interest in the late Irving Babbitt, the excitement created by the detective work of Leslie Hotson, and the instantaneous applause which greeted The Road to Xanadu by John Livingston Lowes, are cases in point. And when I remember how prompt John Murray II — or was it III? — was to accept Herman Melville’s Oomo and Typee, how cordially the English interested themselves in Walt Whitman, Stephen Crane, and more recently in Robert Frost, how stoutly they compensated for our early neglect of Santayana, when I am told that an English schoolmaster has his class read aloud the translations of Horace made by F. P. A., I am gratified by an attention which seems increasingly alert.

There is, of course, one set of men whose business it is to encourage and to exchange the current works of literature. I mean the publishers. Year after year American editors make their annual pilgrimage to London, where, reading fourteen hours a day and wining, dining, and flattering for the rest, they pick and choose those authors worth importing. Until the war, English publishers reciprocated these visits infrequently, but since then they have been scouting the American market with regularity. Here are shrewd, material critics with a recollection of the literature that has endured and an insatiable zest for the good new books. Their comments are illuminating. Says the American in London: ‘Don’t talk to me of English fiction! They’re doing technique to death. Every day I have to go through a dozen smoothly written novels. The first 240 pages lead up to an act of fornication and the last 80 pages lead away from it. That’s all there is — there is n’t any more.’ Says the Englishman in New York: ‘Some of your novels seem ragged and uncouth, but, my word, they’ve got originality. Your people seem to put such hard work into them. . .‘

It always amuses an American to think what he would do if he were king. If my word were law in English literature to-day, I’d take off a few heads — principally of English reviewers. Where do they find such superlative, such windy and creampuff appraisers? Let me give you a few choice quotations taken from the literary supplement of the London Observer and the Sunday Times. When Compton Mackenzie says of a biography (now fast gathering dust) that it is ‘the best biography since Boswell,’ I confess that my temptation to read the volume is discounted by my suspicion of such exaggeration. When I read that Miss Doreen Wallace, author of a novel entitled Creatures of an Hour, ‘seems to be destined to do for Suffolk what Hardy did for Wessex,’ I know that I, personally, am a gentleman from Missouri. When Gerald Gould, one of the most persistent offenders, tells me that ‘Robert Hichens is a wonderful man. If his book is not a big, a very big, a “howling” success . . . but I need offer no “if’s.” It will be,’ I feel as if I were standing under a shower bath of maple syrup. The Englishman used to be renowned for understatement. Why have his reviewers lost that faculty? Well, I’ll tell you. If a man writes books, and if he and his wife are likewise employed as editorial advisers to a publishing house, and if in a third capacity he also receives pay as a book reviewer, how the deuce can he avoid the backscratching I object to? Is not this within the prohibited degree of consanguinity?

Then for a change of scene I’d turn my attention to Americans. I’d have them taught to discriminate between paying money to look at celebrities and paying money to listen to men who have something to say and can talk. I’d limit our annual quota of celebrities and lecturers, I’d submit them to a good-tempering process at Ellis Island, and I’d see that England kept the lesser of each at home.

Finally, I’d borrow an idea from our hog farmers. The government pays a certain number of them not to raise hogs. I believe I could think of a number of American — and British — authors who should be paid not to write any books for the next three years. I believe the money would be well spent.