An Umbrella against Fate

ALL TRIVIA—Logan Pearsall Smifh—Harcourt, Brace ($2.50).

I paused, before opening the front door, for a moment of deep consideration.

Dim-lit, shadowy, full of menace and unimaginable chances, stretched all around my door the many-peopled streets. I could hear, ominous and muffled, the tides of traffic, sounding multitudinously along their ways. Was I equipped for the navigation of those waters, armed and ready to adventure out into that dangerous world again?

Gloves? Money? Cigarettes? Matches? Yes; and I had an umbrella for its tempests, and a latchkey for my safe return.

The umbrella-toting hero of this Great Adventure is the soul of Logan Pearsall Smith viewed under the aspect of eternity. Author Smith, ex-Quaker, ex-American, is one of the few contemporary writers of English prose who can afford to be so viewed. For if stylistic perfection, embalming a wry wit and a flawless sense of human folly, has any preservative powers, the four slender volumes* gathered into this brief (197-page) book have a better chance than most contemporary writing to survive the impartial ages.

Logan Pearsall Smith is the only son of a family of pious, prosperous Philadelphia Quakers. He was doomed to a career in the family bottle factory when he coaxed from his father an annuity on which he was able to live austerely, but without working, for the best part of his life. He at once set out (1888) for England, where he has remained (except for brief periods) ever since. In 1913 Logan Pearsall Smith became a British subject.

You, Hypocritic Reader. In the Sussex farmhouse where he lived for some ten years as a secluded bachelor, Smith dedicated himself to discovering a literary form in which to distill his urbane reflections. One day, leafing through the pages of Charles Baudelaire’s Poems in Prose, Moralist Smith found the form. It was these lapidary fragments which he called trivia, and in which he condensed the discernments, bafflements, exultations, wry exposures to society and to eternity, and shy self-revelations of the Smithian soul, which in Baudelaire’s words is “vous, hypocrite lecteur, mon semblable, mon frère”—”you, hypocritic reader, my likeness, my brother.” All Trivia is Smith’s amused comments on life, heightened by his sense of the precariousness of living:

“When I seek out the sources of my thoughts,” he writes in The Coming of Fate, “I find they had their beginning in fragile Chance; were born of little moments that shine for me curiously in the past. Slight the impulse that made me take this turning at the crossroads, trivial and fortuitous the meeting, and light as gossamer the thread that first knit me to my friend…. So I never lose a sense of the whimsical and perilous charm of daily life, with its meetings and words and accidents. Why, today, perhaps, or next week. I may hear a voice, and, packing up my Gladstone bag, follow it to the ends of the world.”

The Beatific Vision. But sometimes he permits himself to outscorn the indignity of living:

“Shoving and pushing, and pushed and shoved, a dishonoured bag of bones about London, or carted like a herring in a box through tunnels in the clay beneath it, as I bump my head in an omnibus, or hang, half-suffocated, from a greasy strap in the Underground, I dream, like other Idealists and Saints and Social Thinkers, of a better world than this, a world that might be, a City of Heaven brought down at last to earth.

“One footman flings open the portals of my palace in that New Jerusalem for me; another unrolls a red path of velvet to the enormous motor which floats me through the city traffic—I leaning back like Ed ward VII, or like God, on leather cushions, smoking a big cigar.”

God’s Umbrella. Sometimes his exaltation is transcendental: “But oh, those heavenly moments when I feel this three-dimensional universe too narrow to contain my Attributes; when a sense of the divine Ipseity invades me; when I know that my voice is the voice of Truth, and my umbrella God’s umbrella!”

But the Eternal Footman is always there to hold his hat and snicker: “The servant gave me my coat and hat, and in a glow of self-satisfaction I walked out into the night. ‘A delightful evening,’ I reflected, ‘the nicest kind of people. What I said about finance and philosophy impressed them; and how they laughed when I imitated a pig squealing.’

“But soon after, ‘God, it’s awful,’ I muttered, ‘I wish I was dead!'”

The Danger of Churchgoing. Then religion is a staff and a rod: “As I came away from the Evening Service, walking home from that Sabbath adventure, some neighbours of mine met and passed me in their motor, laughing. Were they laughing at me? I wondered uneasily; and as I sauntered across the fields I vaguely cursed those misbelievers. Yes, yes, their eyes should be darkened, and their mocking lips put to silence. They should be smitten with the botch of Egypt, and a sore botch in the legs that cannot be healed. . . .

“But as for the Godly Man who kept his Sabbaths, his should be blessings of those who walk in the right way. ‘These blessings’—the words came back to me from the Evening Lesson—’these blessings shall come upon thee, and overtake thee.’ And suddenly, in the mild summer air, it seemed as if, like a swarm of bees inadvertently wakened, the blessings of the Old Testament were actually rushing after me. From the hot, remote, passionate past of Hebrew history, out of the Oriental climate and unctuous lives of that infuriate people, gross good things were, coming to overwhelm me with Benedictions for which I had not bargained. Great oxen and camels and concubines were panting close behind me, he-goats and she-goats and rams of the breed of Bashan. My barns should burst their doors with plenty, and all my paths drop fatness. My face should be smeared with the oil of rejoicing. . . .My feet should be dipped in butter; I should sit under my fig-tree with my heel on the neck of my enemy, and my eyes stand out with fatness; I should flourish as the Cedar of Lebanon that bringeth forth fruit in old age.”

Last week, gravely ill in his London home, Author Smith was not flourishing. But the trivia, which comprised his life work, were completed. Well might he ponder upon the epilogue to his first volume:

“From under the roof of my umbrella I saw the washed pavement lapsing beneath my feet, the news-posters lying smeared with dirt at the crossings, the tracks of the busses in the liquid mud. On I went through this dreary world of wetness. And through what long perspectives of the years shall I still hurry down wet streets—middle-aged, and then, perhaps, very old? And on what errands?”

But Fate, who is also a great stylist, does not answer rhetorical questions.

*Trivia, More Trivia, Afterthoughts, Last Words.