Part 5

Like _Main Street_ a decade later, _The Broad Highway_ was possibly conceived and certainly executed in a spirit of revolt. Such rebellions are common, and the only wisdom that can be uttered in respect of them is embodied in that proverb which says that one man’s meat is another man’s poison. Editors and publishers endeavor to give the public what the public wants. The public, very naturally, never knows what it wants until it tastes it. The public is like a husband sitting down to his wife’s dinner. He may like everything or nothing; he may enormously relish the unexpected, placed before him with inward perturbation and in a spirit of desperate doubt. He may pounce with appetite upon, and sing loudly the praise of, some dish denounced by him and refused by his palate the week before. If a writer attempt to please editors or publishers, who, in turn, are attempting to please their publics, he will be successful with the entrepreneurs and possibly with the audiences. And his temperament may make such a course the very best thing. If his temperament is otherwise, sooner or later he will please himself; and if he can then get published a large public may just possibly discover that he greatly pleases them.

The completed manuscript of _The Broad Highway_ was submitted to the Century Company and Charles Scribner’s Sons in New York, both of whom failed to come to terms and returned it shortly. It was then submitted to Dodd, Mead & Company, who indicated a conditional acceptance and asked the author to come in and discuss possible changes. The firm’s readers offered their suggestions and Farnol took notes. The principal result was that he cut 20,000 words out of the book, which still remained of 200,000-word length, or twice the length of the usual “full-length” novel. The alterations were not enough to give the publisher the necessary confidence; the year was 1907, the year of the money panic; and the manuscript was finally returned to Farnol with a definite declination. The reasons were sound: There had been a bad slump in Wall Street, the book was formidably long, the author was unknown, the interest of the tale might be almost wholly for English readers. But there was another reason in the nature of the novel to which a few words should be devoted.

Robert Louis Stevenson had died in 1894. His work spawned a school of historical fiction, much of it pseudo-historical, which had dominated the American book market for years. The public taste did not discriminate during that decade between the good and the bad; _To Have and To Hold_ and _When Knighthood Was in Flower_ were equally hailed as masterpieces and alike elevated to the top of the heap. From that day, indeed, dates the name and the peculiarity of the “best seller.” The term remains, but it has only in very recent years begun to undergo a transformation of meaning, the idea of relativity having crept in. With a truer perception and a better sense of proportion, we now tend to speak of a book as a best seller _in its class_, or in relation to the literary merit of the work or the record of the author or generally with an eye to what sale could be expected in the circumstances. The fact of a sale in so many figures remains; but the estimation in which the fact is held is quite different. A sale of 20,000 copies that would have passed unregarded twenty years ago is now likely to be accounted as of the greatest significance.

What was fundamentally the trouble in 1907 was not to be stated with vigor until 1914, when Frank Swinnerton’s critique of Stevenson[17] was to appear with such concluding sentences as these: “Stevenson ... created a school which has brought romance to be the sweepings of an old costume-chest.... If romance rests upon no better base than this, if romance is to be conventional in a double sense, if it spring not from a personal vision of life, but is only a tedious virtuosity, a pretence, a conscious toy, romance as an art is dead. And if it is dead, Stevenson killed it.” Such, even in 1907, was in various quarters uneasily felt to be the fact. In 1907, it is true, George Meredith was spending his declining years in poetry, and Thomas Hardy was at work on _The Dynast_; but _The Way of All Flesh_ had been published four years earlier, Shaw’s plays were being staged, the dead George Gissing was at last coming into attention, Mr. Galsworthy had just given us _The Man of Property_, Mr. Wells was brewing _Tono-Bungay_, and Mr. Bennett was at work on _The Old Wives’ Tale_. If the lid of the costume-chest was still raised, it had every appearance of being propped most insecurely. All cogent and immediate reasons aside, the publisher of books had every psychological and intuitive reason for doubting the appeal of a volume of 500 closely printed pages, much of it in dialect and all of it concerned with Kentish scenes of a hundred years earlier.

To return to _The Broad Highway_: An actor with whom the author had become acquainted at the Astor Theatre was about to play an engagement in Boston, and offered to show the manuscript to friends in the office of Little, Brown and Company. Farnol waited for some word in vain; after several months he learned that the actor had returned to New York, and sought him out. The actor had visited the publishing house but had completely forgotten the manuscript.... It was taken from the bottom of his trunk, where it had lain all the while, and Farnol was minded, first to sell it, with all rights, for $500. Mr. Hawley said Farnol would do no such thing, “if I have to buy it myself.” Farnol’s next impulse was to burn the cumbersome bundle. He finally gave it to his wife, and Mrs. Farnol sent it to her husband’s mother in England. Shirley Byron Jevons, at that time editor of The Sportsman, was the next to see it. He took it to the publishing house of Sampson Low, Marston & Company, introducing it with: “Here is another _Lorna Doone_”—Blackmore’s novel having been the firm’s greatest fiction success. The publishing house accepted the book and had drawn an agreement with Mr. Jevons as Mr. Farnol’s agent when the author appeared unexpectedly. In fact, Farnol, discouraged by his fortunes in America, had simply got on the boat with his wife and little daughter. A new agreement was drawn with him direct, and signed. Then, but some time before the book was set up in type, the publisher showed it to Clement K. Shorter, editor of The Sphere, whose devotion to the work of George Borrow was well known. Mr. Shorter’s account of the incident embodies an interesting estimate of the book:[18]

“I read _The Broad Highway_ with avidity, and recognized at once—as who would not have done?—that here was a striking addition to picaresque romances, that the author had not read _Don Quixote_, _Gil Blas_ and the best stories by Defoe and Fielding for nothing, nor had he walked along the broad highways of England without observation and profit any more than had the creator of _Lavengro_ and _Romany Rye_. For the vast multitude of readers of each epoch the dictum of Emerson stands: ‘Every age must write its own books.’ It is of no use for the pedantic critic to affirm, with pontifical fervor, that Cervantes and Le Sage and Defoe are masters of literature and that our contemporaries are but pigmies in comparison. The great reading public of any age will not be bullied into reading the authors who have reached the dignity of classics. The writer who can catch some element of the spirit of the ‘masters’ and modernize it is destined to win the favor of the crowd. And thus Mr. Jeffery Farnol has entered into his kingdom.... _The Broad Highway_ sold in hundreds of thousands. It is a breezy, healthy book, as unpretentious as it is sincere. Neither its author nor his friends need to worry themselves as to whether it is a masterpiece of literature. For our day, at least, it has added to the stock of harmless pleasures. To the critic who complains that ‘it is but an exercise in archæology,’ and that the author ‘has never felt what he has written but has gathered it up from books, one can reply in the language of Goldsmith’s Mr. Burchell, ‘Fudge.’ It is still possible in England, in spite of its railway trains and its mechanical development, to feel the impulse which inspired Charles Dickens, George Borrow and all the masters of the picaresque romance, who have in days gone by traveled with delight through the countryside, seeking adventures and finding them. ‘I felt some desire,’ says Lavengro, ‘to meet with one of those adventures which, upon the roads of England, are as plentiful as blackberries in autumn.’ Mr. Farnol has a talent for recreating such adventures, and he is perfectly frank with his readers, anticipating a certain type of criticism. ‘Whereas the writing of books was once a painful art,’ he makes Peter Vibart say in _The Broad Highway_, ‘it has of late become a trick very easy of accomplishment, requiring no regard for probability and little thought, so long as it is packed sufficiently full of impossible incidents through which a ridiculous heroine and a more absurd hero duly sigh their appointed way to the last chapters. Whereas books were once a power, they are of late degenerated into things of amusement, with which to kill an idle hour, and be promptly forgotten the next.’”

The letter killeth, but the spirit giveth life. On a famous occasion the late Maurice Hewlett tore to shreds the historicity of the work of James Branch Cabell, and Mr. Cabell completely lost his temper. Mr. Farnol’s hero in _Beltane the Smith_ “finds himself in an England which from the internal evidence of friars, bowmen, arms and armor we might vaguely describe as Edwardian (Edward I., II., III.)—the pikes he appears to have borrowed from a later period. And yet it is not Edwardian either; for there is no hint of a king in it all, and never, never was there such an anarchical England, save in the reign of Stephen of Blois.”[19] Mr. Farnol’s Latin, says J. P. Collins, “gives one the shivers. He mixes his _thee’s_ and his _ye’s_, and precisians may murmur at his forms of archaic diction. But ... if Farnol makes a slip in the way of detail, or lapses into excess, he preserves the most important thing, and that is atmosphere.”[20] Everyone will recall Scott’s inaccuracies in _Ivanhoe_, of which the most serious was the depiction of a state of feeling between the Saxons and Normans existing a century earlier than the time of the novel.

Mr. Shorter has made us longer; it remains to say that _The Broad Highway_, accepted in England, was offered by the English publisher in America, in one instance to Dodd, Mead & Company, who again declined it. Little, Brown and Company were the acceptors, learning for the first time of the actor’s delinquency a few years earlier. The book was published on both sides of the ocean and sprang into instant success. In the midst of the smother of applause, appeals, money and golden prospects Mr. Farnol had a moment. He ejaculated: “Just think! I’ve lost four years of my life!”[21]

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He was 33—ten years older than it has been done, and thirty years younger than it has been done, also.[22] Mr. Henry Sydnor Harrison achieved _Queed_ at 31, Sinclair Lewis was 35 when _Main Street_ appeared. On the whole, the four years seem not an excessive price to have paid for a coup, nor thirty-three years long to have found oneself. The point was neither in the success nor the time taken to reach it; it was in Mr. Farnol’s ability to keep his head on his shoulders. This he proceeded to do; although he sold, while yet unwritten, the serial rights to his next work, pressure upon him did not prevent his destroying ten unsatisfactory chapters, as has been related, and although as he said at the time, “I really cannot blame the magazine people,” he was emphatic in saying, “I never wish to undergo such an experience again.”[23] Two years elapsed after the publication of _The Broad Highway_ before the appearance of _The Amateur Gentleman_; and except for the publication of a piece of work written before _The Broad Highway_[24] and his effort to help in the war (_Great Britain at War_), he has had only nine books brought out in the dozen years since he raised the curtain. And of these one, _The Geste of Duke Jocelyn_, a romance in prose, blank verse and rhyme, is a novelty written for his daughter, Gillian, published because what had entertained one girl might very conceivably entertain others. Mr. Farnol’s method of keeping his head on his shoulders has been to practise industry without becoming industrial. Although homesick at first on his return to England, he settled in Kent, at Lee, with a den at the top of the house where he could work from midnight to breakfast. Old English books lined two walls of this refuge; another wall was given up to a collection of old pistols and sabres; and on the desk there usually lay a dictionary of slang dated 1812. More recently the Farnols have lived at the seashore at Brighton, but the winters are generally spent at Ospedaletti, which is on the Italian Riviera.

Except for a short visit to report for the London Daily Mail the fight between Jack Dempsey and Georges Carpentier in 1921,[25] Mr. Farnol had not revisited America until autumn, 1923. At that time visitors met a shortish man, anything but a figure of romance, whose outstanding trait was his genuine friendliness, “a friendliness which is not an affectation with which he tries to put strangers at their ease, but an actual part of him.”[26] To see him rehearse and enact, rather than merely outline, his next novel was an exceptional experience, for at such times he suits his voice to his characters and displays a considerable range of dramatic skill. Interviewers developed evidences of a struggle in the romancer’s mind between the type of woman he writes about and the types more usual today; however, chivalry, or perhaps the romantic vision, enabled him to come through the ordeal by newsprint without dishonor. He denied the possibility of platonic love and friendships. “After a certain point, such friendships are bound to be no longer platonic. Mark me! I know they wouldn’t be in my case, anyway.”[27] A subject he did not tire of discussing was the wonder of America.[28] To several who talked with him he expressed the intention of writing another novel about New York City.[29] “New York should be called ‘The City of Great Adventures,’” he said, with characteristic enthusiasm, “because anything _might_ happen in New York.”[30]

More expressive of the man is the story of how his slightest novel came to be published. He was discussing with his mother the advisability of bringing out work written before _The Broad Highway_. “Look here,” he said to her, “why not rout out _Mr. Tawnish_? You have been very good to me, and I can never properly repay you, but if you can do anything with _Mr. Tawnish_ you shall have it.” The tale—one that reminds most readers of Tarkington’s _Monsieur Beaucaire_—was taken out of a drawer, touched up and added to, and accepted for book publication. The advance royalties, constituting a generous gift, were handed over to Mrs. Henry Farnol. This was in the autumn of 1913.

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In an article appearing at the height of Mr. Farnol’s first success, Henry Keats wrote: “_The Broad Highway_ has seemed to the critics to invite comparison with so many different masters of the English novel—George Borrow, Blackmore, Le Sage, Dickens, Stevenson, Thackeray, to mention a few—that I asked him about his ‘foster-father.’ Mr. Farnol smiled. ‘I would not know my own literary parent if I met him out here in the broad highway of Kent,’ he exclaimed. Judging from his subsequent confessions, the creator of Peter Vibart and Charmian is under greater indebtedness to Laurence Sterne than to any of the immortals named above. And that was owing to the friend of his ‘boyish ambitions,’ to whom _The Broad Highway_ is dedicated. Mr. Shirley Byron Jevons was the first, some years since, to call Mr. Farnol’s attention to the supreme difficulty of writing a book dealing with the abstract, citing, as a rare example of success in that line, Sterne’s _Tristram Shandy_. A copy of that unusual book was speedily procured by Mr. Farnol, and he recalls as though an impression of yesterday the manner in which he was ‘enthralled’ by its pages. ‘Then,’ he adds, ‘I went on to The Spectator and The Tatler, the reading of which showed me how great is the loss of those who are unacquainted with the Queen Anne essayists.’”[31] This settles the matter of style.

Certain books by Mr. Farnol—_The Honourable Mr. Tawnish_, _Great Britain at War_, and _The Geste of Duke Jocelyn_, each outside the true succession of his work—have been incidentally characterized. A descriptive note on his principal novels may perhaps fittingly conclude this account.

_The Broad Highway_ (1911) has probably already been sufficiently described, as it must be familiar to many who may read these lines. _The Amateur Gentleman_ (1913) has for hero Barnabas, son of a retired and famous boxing champion of England. Having come into a legacy, the young man resolves to journey to London to become a gentleman. The period is that of the Prince Regent. There is a rapid series of adventures on the journey; Barnabas meets Cleone, the heroine; he acquires a valet and establishes himself with the quality, and the fashionable world loses him, for he returns home again. _Beltane the Smith_ (1915) concerns a golden-haired giant and matchless swordsman whose odyssey of adventure is lived in a much earlier England. _The Definite Object_ (1917) is the story of a young New Yorker whose wealth has taken from him all incentive to action. For want of a definite object in life he is toying with the thought of suicide when he surprises a youthful burglar in the act of entering his rooms. Then, as “Mr. Geoffrey,” he takes up lodgings with the housebreaker in the old Hell’s Kitchen district of New York—which was the region between Thirty-fourth and Forty-second Streets and west of Sixth Avenue. _Our Admirable Betty_ (1918) is a return to the dimension of _The Broad Highway_ and _The Amateur Gentleman_. _Black Bartlemy’s Treasure_ (1920) and _Martin Conisby’s Vengeance_ (1921) are tales of piracy and the Spanish Main, the second novel completing the first. _Peregrine’s Progress_ (1922) more closely than any other book approximates the scenes and action of _The Broad Highway_; it is laid in Kent, it relates a boy’s adventurings on the road and by the roadside, and it reintroduces the Tinker. _Sir John Dering_ (1923) keeps to the same period. A skilled swordsman who has incurred the enmity of the Lady Herminia Barrasdaile is forced to fight duel after duel which she has instigated in the hope that he will meet his death.

The dictum of Mr. Shorter best fits the case of this friendly writer and honest workman. We have already quoted the words: “The great reading public of any age will not be bullied into reading the authors who have reached the dignity of classics. The writer who can catch some element of the spirit of the ‘masters’ and modernize it is destined to win the favor of the crowd.” The love of a fairy tale, delight in action, pleasure in such characterizations as Black George, the Tinker, and the Ancient—picturesque; in outline broadly simple—have been potent. Stevenson was dead; the good as well as the bad of his legacy had been swallowed up in a flood wherein the sound could no longer be distinguished from the meretricious; what we loosely call realism was in the ascendant. Years were to go by before “realism” could be seen to be the necessary clearing of paths to an exploration of the romantic impulse more intelligent as well as more subtle. In the meantime an age-old thirst found these draughts to quench itself. On the porch of the “Bull” at Sissinghurst the readers of Mr. Farnol have sat for many an afternoon, washing the dust from their throats with a pleasant ale and enjoying the surprising procession of knights, scholars, gipsies, gallants, pirates and simple maids and ladies of fashion which has passed before them, coming from and returning to a world without end, truly.

BOOKS BY JEFFERY FARNOL

1907 _My Lady Caprice_ In England: _The Chronicles of the Imp_ 1911 _The Broad Highway_ _The Money Moon._ Earlier, in point of composition, than _The Broad Highway_. 1913 _The Amateur Gentleman_ 1913 _The Honourable Mr. Tawnish_. Earlier, in point of composition, than _The Broad Highway_. 1915 _Beltane the Smith_ 1917 _The Definite Object_ 1918 _Great Britain at War_ In England: _Some War Impressions_ 1918 _Our Admirable Betty_ 1920 _The Geste of Duke Jocelyn_ 1920 _Black Bartlemy’s Treasure_ 1921 _Martin Conisby’s Vengeance_ 1922 _Peregrine’s Progress_ 1923 _Sir John Dering_

SOURCES ON JEFFERY FARNOL

_The Novels of Jeffery Farnol._ Booklet published by LITTLE, BROWN & COMPANY, Boston, 1923.

_The Country of “The Broad Highway,”_ by Henry C. Shelley. THE BOOK NEWS MONTHLY, October, 1912.

_Jeffery Farnol’s Life and Career_, by Herbert F. Jenkins. THE BOOK NEWS MONTHLY, September, 1911.

_How I Began_, by Jeffery Farnol. Booklet published by SAMPSON LOW, MARSTON & COMPANY, LTD., London. The text is reprinted from T. P.’s Weekly of 14 February 1913.

_Love Still Ruling Motive in Life of the Modern Youth and Maiden_. Interview by Marguerite Dean in The Evening World, New York, 28 June 1921. Note especially: “As a matter of fact I knew a charming fellow who did, in real life, just what my hero did in _The Definite Object_—took a little girl from the New York slums, educated her, loved and married her.”

Other references will be found in the footnotes to the text of this chapter. They do not include, by any means, all the interviews in newspapers.

5. Adults Please Skip[32]

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Not that age has anything to do with it. A man is as young as he feels and a woman is as young as her imagination keeps her. The idea of never growing up is a mistake. Everyone wants to grow up, but that’s no reason for not keeping youthful.

There’s something in fellows like Irvin S. Cobb and Owen Johnson and Ralph Henry Barbour which is just as good at forty as at fourteen—maybe better. And there’s something in books like _Little Women_ that you keep coming back to....