NON-FICTION: Gentleman Johnny

The Man.* “John Burgoyne was born in London in 1722. The family was of good old stock. . . .” Gentleman Johnny, like many a brave young man of his day or of any day, spent his youth in riotous and genial diversions. A soldier but not inelegant, he wrote a letter to a lord and signed it:

“‘I have the honour to be

‘With the most profound respect, attachment, and sense of obligation

‘Your Lordship’s most obedient, humble servant

‘John Burgoyne.'”

He corrected his reputation as a fiery fop by leading the Light Dragoons to splendid distinction in the capture of Valentia d’Alcantara. after which he was elected to Parliament and later appointed by the King to be Governor of Fort William. The war with the Colonies started and Burgoyne came to America. To him this place must have appeared unreal and picaresque; as it appears in old engravings and panoramas, a country of little, round hills, of funny irregular cities upon whose wide quiet squares a few bewildered people postured, of dark mysterious forests in which Indians trotted and yodeled and performed their gloomy dances. A citizen of London, he smiled; he watched Bunker Hill as if it had been a sham battle fought in an English park and, when Boston was blockaded, wrote a playlet that amused the inhabitants.

His evil fortune stayed skulking behind the great curtains of the woods until after Gentleman Johnny had forced the Rebel army to evacuate Fort Ticonderoga. After that came the first skirmish at Saratoga, in which Burgoyne won a few downy feathers for his hat; then trouble ran towards him with a war whoop. Due largely to the idiotic incompetence of Lord George Germain, who was sending orders from England, Burgoyne lost the battle of Saratoga. In this, one of the world’s fifteen decisive battles, the rocket of British victory broke and splintered down in a bright shower of speeches, excuses, parades and further sprightly but ineffectual engagements. With Saratoga, Gentleman Johnny had lost a war and a continent.

In England again. John Burgoyne began by giving an account, far less prejudiced than those read in most school histories, of how he had lost the battle of the century. This he published in a fine quarto volume prefaced by a narrative in three “‘periods’; by which he really meant acts, for a sense of the drama was always strong in his mind.” After that he wrote plays, all mediocre, which were produced in London. He died in London, aged 70, on a summer day of 1792.

The Significance. Written in a style of Gothic complication and detail, the book possesses, though it does not awkwardly exhibit, a sturdy framework of research and knowledge. It does exhibit many flying buttresses of outside inquiry into the lives of the minor members of the cast (George Germain, General Gates, the Continental Commander Charles Lee) and many gargoyles of antique wit quoted from the talk of the coffeehouses, the clubs, the theatres of the day or from the author’s own invention. Praised by many critics, it caused Frank Sullivan, playboy of the New York World, to join the old, outmoded, bedroom school of literary criticism in his admission that the book had caused his boudoir reading lamp to burn long and late. Perhaps an extravagance, a lack of grace in critical compliments implies a lack of capability in the critic, but in this case the grotesque writhing of reviewers is only in one sense unnatural. Gentleman Johnny Burgoyne thoroughly deserves the applause, if not the applesauce, which has been heaped upon it.

The Author may append to his name, Francis Josiah Hudleston, the enigmatic initials O. B. E., C. B. E.; these signify that he is an officer, a commander of the Order of the British Empire. He is also librarian of the British War Office. His first book Warriors in Undress was a snicker at the absurdities of war. Author Hudleston is not without literary connections; Sylvia Townsend Warner (author of Lolly Willowes, Mr. Fortune’s Maggot) is his niece; Arthur Machen is his brother-in-law.

FICTION

Train of Tutts

WHEN TUTT MEETS TUTT—Arthur Train—Scribners ($2). The two legal Tutts—Ephraim and his junior partner—appear in connection with The Doodle Bug, The Viking’s Daughter, The Meanest Man, The Scarecrow. Then, in When Tutt Meets Tutt, the last story in the book, they fight on different sides of a great dispute about the will of the late Commodore Lithgow. To readers previously acquainted with the legal acrobatics of the two Tutts, it is unnecessary to explain how the elder and more talented member of the firm, aided by the unexpected, scores his point. Such readers will hope that the mind of Author Train, which has already produced, among his other works, Page Mr. Tutt, Tut, Tut! Mr. Tutt, Tutt and Mr. Tutt, will be able to produce an almost endless train of witty, scheming Tutts.

Crude

CRUDE—Robert Hyde—Payson & Clarke ($2.50). Into a peaceful California community, modern style, came lure, bustle, intrigue, Gargantuan charlatanry—the discovery of oil. Into the lives of Able and Ressa Dolac, farmer’s children, came kiss-weary Duncan Ellsworth and Millicent Manning, products of oil money. Thus propitiously starts twenty-seven-year-old Robert Hyde’s first novel, written with variety of style, called, perhaps as a dare to critics, Crude.

The conclusion, well prepared, promising for the author’s future writings, is nevertheless badly conceived, badly developed. Duncan, sensualist without conscience, pets and buys Ressa into conjugal felicity. Millicent’s choice of poverty with artistic Able is made permanent by the suicide, following oil failure, of her father. Ressa is bright-hued, lovable, loving what Duncan gives her; Able is weak as his watercolors. Yet Millicent, as heroine, can end with no stronger statement to her husband than “Poor Ressa … she has him— and I have you.”

Powerful in oil field vocabulary, Author Hyde wears a beard, runs to matters manual. With his wife he personally built their stone house on the Hudson; he must have won his derrick talk with his hands. He knows less the argot of backseat petting; Duncan annoys with cinema wisecracks, explosive approbations like “Gorgeous girl!” Never out of Hollywood was such amorous preparation before Duncan” and Millicent “kissed a long, warm, wet kiss.”

Young Stevenson

THE CAP OF YOUTH—John A. Steuart—J. B. Lippincott ($2.50). “After many years and in the fullness of his powers Robert Louis Stevenson wrote the story of his great early love. For reasons which need not be stated here it was not then, and cannot now be published. Hence this story.” So explains Author-Historian John A. Steuart, turning from scientific biography* to fiction, producing sentimentally The Cap of Youth.

It presents a youthful Stevenson entirely preferable to the earnest boy of high-school textbooks, scribbling and burning like a pedant for style. Gay, sick, roistering in the face of death, Louis meets Katie Drummond, his Highland lassie, in a barroom, thereby incurs parental dismissal, plans to fling forbidden marriage in the older generation’s face. Katie is too good at heart, however. She will not defy God and Church. She retires to the Highlands to wait vainly for a Louis who is to die far away.

Lady and Gentians

YELLOW GENTIANS AND BLUE— Zona Gale—Appleton ($2).

The Stories. Wm. Leeds, the peddler in Last Night, is not merely a man whom life has defeated: he is a generalization, a symbol, an inclusion of defeat. After a day of selling his pencils to the faces behind back doors, he crawls into a cattle shed near a railroad station, to sleep there tasting the dark murmur and damp smell of cows. “First he had been a bound boy, then a hired man. He had had a room over kitchens. For a summer or two he had tramped it, and slept in groves or in straw piles or on the hay in barns. But this place here, with no one about, was the same as his own.” One night even the little scale room where he slept was crowded with cattle. When the men came to take them out, Wm. Leeds said to the men: “‘Look here, ship me on with the critters. Weigh me and ship me on.'” Said one of them: ” ‘Like to be butchered, eh?’ ‘Something,’ said Wm. Leeds.” Wm. Leeds waits. “Toward night . . . there he was, grim and ugly to look at, heavy and dead. . . . He was buried by the town the next morning, not far from the time of the arrival of the cattle train at the Chicago stockyards. And the beef quotations were showing an active market.”

Bellard, in The Woman, meant to be a financier. One day “he was torn by the look of a house on whose mean little porch near the street sat a shabby old man of 60, without a coat and reading a newspaper. The man’s fate seemed terrible. . . . But the man looked up, and smiled at Bellard as brightly as if he himself had been young.” Bellard, the ambitious Bellard, never becomes a financier but he finds happiness because he loves a woman. So when his children rail at his failure, he goes out on the porch of his scrubby little house to read his paper. “A youth . . . looked up at him with an excess ot visible compassion. On this youth Bellard looked down and smiled, a luminous smile, a smile as bright as if he himself had been young.”

The Significance of these and the other nineteen pieces that the small book encloses are in some way explained by the quotations that furnish its title: from Noah Webster, ” ‘. . .the yellow gentian which has a very bitter taste’ ” and from The New Botany, “‘… flowers, pushing through from some inner plane of being, and with such energy that they are visible to man. Especially the blue gentian.’ ” Even in the bitterest of Author Gale’s stories there is a vein of iron sentimentality; even in her bravest, there is a grimly sentimental irony. Yet sentimentality is only the approximate, not the exact word to describe a humanity that prevents each of Author Gale’s terse episodes from being merely a brilliant chart of the disasters and deep triumphs of people in life.

The Author was born 53 years ago in Portage, Wis., where she now lives. Her literary career began when she went into newspaper work after graduating from the University of Wisconsin. First she wrote for the Evening Wisconsin in Milwaukee, then she joined the staff of the New York World. In 1918 she published the first book that really revealed her importance as an artist, Birth. Her play, Miss Lulu Bett, was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1922; most of Manhattan went to see it. Faint Perfume, in 1923, added to her bouquets from critics and her revenues from readers. Yellow Gentians and Blue epitomizes her theory of brevity as the soul of art.

*GENTLEMAN JOHNNY BURGOYNE—F. J. Hudleston—Bobbs Merrill ($5).

*ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON: A CRITICAL BIOGRAPHY—John A. Steuart—Little, Brown ($8.00).