W. W. JACOBS

Press, Volume LXXIII, Issue 22243, 6 November 1937, Page 20

W. W. JACOBS

An Impression in Words and Line

(BFICIALI/T WRITTEN FOB THE PBB8I.) [By JOHN ALLEN.]

If you had looked in a window on the second floor of a dull-looking block of flats in St. John’s Wood on a recent afternoon, you might very well have seen the gnome-like figure of a little old man, curiously shrunken and worn, very thin, with a bloodless face and close cropped white hair, sitting deep in an armchair, alone. You would have been struck by his face, very sharp and asceticlooking, and rather prim, and you might have thought of Watts’s portrait of Cardinal Manning. You i would have marked the heavy-lidded eyes and the ears, large and pointed, and you might have got a sudden impression of something impish disputing possession with the Cardinal.

Antipathies Socialism you will find is anathema to him. He believes in laissez-faire. The devil take the hindmost. The English are getting soft. You can’t change human nature. Struggle and hardship are good for the character. Socialism would interfere too much with personal freedom. Fascism and Communism arg both detestable, but of the two he would choose Fascism because he believes in class distinctions.

I disagreed mildly with nearly all he said and we enjoyed ourselves tremendously. It is the fashion nowadays in some circles to decry Jacobs’s work and sav his stories are valueless. This I think is. absurd. Literary fashions will come and go; but I feel sure that people will continue to laugh at “Many Cargoes” and “The Skipper’s Wooing.” His work is as fresh now as it was when it was written. Its appeal is timeless.

Child of the Thames W. W. Jacobs was born 74 years ago at Wapping on the river Thames. As a boy he used to travel up and down the river with the bargees. Later, when he was employed in the Civil Service, he wrote stories about those bargees, comic stories that have made his name a household word. He stayed in the service till he was 36, writing in his spare time. Then with some misgiving he resigned and became a professional writer. That was nearly 40 years ago. Now the famous humorist is an old man. In his slippers he sits and dreams of the past. Few realise he

Were Ever Such Bargees? Jacobs is not a realist in the modern sense. His is a fantasy world, governed by its own Jacobsian conventions. I do not know if bargees were ever like his bargees. And I don’t care. Enough that he makes them move in a lively fashion and manoeuvres them into genuinely funny situations. The righteous flourish and true love is rewarded.

is still alive. But his stories are read and loved by millions the world over.

Men are manly, and girls are pretty and pure. But what of it? Surely the convention can be accepted.

W. W. Jacobs is one of the last of the Victorians. He repudiates the modern world. Sometimes he says “Hell and blast!” at it. But mostly he is not interested. His memories mean more to him.

Ther.e was a time when Jacobs was worried by the criticism that he was repeating himself. He was told that the public wanted novelty. Then he thought of Dickens and George Eliot and other great writers —how they had stuck to what they knew about and were interested in—and he kept on his course. It was said again that Jacobs had no humorous dialogue. His friends were indignant; but die agreed with his critics. “I have no humorous dialogue,” he said, “if by dialogue is meant something that exists in its own right, wise-cracking. My dialogue springs naturally from the situations in which the characters find themselves. It is essential to the story. The humour lies in the situations.”

I have visited him twice; and each time I have stayed longer than I meant to, for W.W. is an excellent host and likes to have someone to talk to. He is a good talker and tells a story well; and great names of the past are often on his lips. And he keeps an excellent old brandy. If you visit him and the talk turns to literature it is likely that very soon he will rise and walk, head and back very erect, to a drawer; and h_ will return with an envelope from which he will produce a collection of “curios”—examples of modem eccentricity in literature and in art. “Does this mean anything to you?” he will say, and read to you some words written by Gertrude Stein: “It is as it is is it it is as it was. . . Or he will show you a reproduction ct come of Maurice Lambert’s sculpture and will demand to. know if you think it beautiful.

I hope I have managed, with the aid of the caricature, which has the approval of Jacobs himself, to convey to you an impression of an original personality, austere yet puckish, a mixture of “pope and faun,” as someone has said —a survival from another age who is outspoken in his distaste for the modern world.