Books: Jeffery Farnol

Altered, He Is Liked No Less

A real play-boy is Jeffery Farnol. He has reached middle age, but he has still that enthusiastic curiosity about life, that eagerness for romance that made The Broad Highway and The Amateur Gentleman two of the most thoroughly refreshing of “escape” books. I met Mr. Farnol when he was in America two years ago to report the Dempsey-Carpentier fight. He has changed in appearance since then. Today he seemed a quiet, stocky, dark little man in a dark suit, peering through thick glasses, with shoes that were rugged and might have been prescribed for the Boy Scouts. Before, as I recall, he wore splendid shirts and vivid suits, and his manner was boisterous in the extreme. Both times I liked him immensely. He is like his books—breezy, enthusiastic, cordial. Since Sir John Deering, his new novel, just about to be published, he has written twelve chapters of another. The one after that, he informed us, will have for its locale New York City.

It was interesting to see together three of the gayest spinners of romantic yarns. Lloyd Osborne, the son-in-law and collaborator of Robert Louis Stevenson, florid, tall, grey; George Barr McCutcheon, always jovial and kindly; Farnol, shorter than either of them, quite unimpressive until he bubbles over with some sudden enthusiasm for an anecdote.

We accused Farnol gently, of being a prohibitionist. Most of his interviews since he arrived have been devoted to this subject, which, considering the attitude of most Englishmen toward the Volstead Act, is unusual indeed. I asked him if his liking for prohibition was not because it made life so much more adventuresome; but he assured me that his feeling was based entirely upon observations of the havoc caused by the drinking of hard liquor in small towns of England and Scotland.

Well—it’s fine to meet a romantic novelist again, after all these able young gentlemen whose text-book is What Every Young Man Ought to Know. I fancy such things do not greatly worry Mr. Farnol. He takes the facts of life for granted and proceeds from that basis to write of the things which lead away from life. Only think what a book Carl Van Vechten or Floyd Dell might have written if either one of them had been, like Jeffery Farnol, a stagehand and a scene painter on Broadway for two years—or perhaps it would have cured them. At any rate, let us thank Heaven for the Jeffery Farnols, the Oppenheims, the Buchans, the McCutcheons. J. F.