FRINGES OF TRUTH

Southland Times, Issue 19690, 24 October 1925, Page 13

FRINGES OF TRUTH

OBITUARY: A.S.M. (By “Rufus.”) Five or six years ago it was my pleasure to read a sparkling little volume called “Once Aboard the Lugger,” by an obscure person whom few seemed to have heard of— A. S. M. Hutchinson. “Once Aboard the Lugger” was a cheerfully irresponsible love story with a comfortably happy ending, mildly satirical, occasionally spicy and most uproariously funny. It is one of the very few books that one goes back to again for a little quiet enjoyment." At the time I made a few desultory inquiries after Mr Hutchinson, but could rind nothing else that he had written.

Then, as everyone knows, that extraordinary phenomenon, "If Winter Comes,” shot into the literary firmament like some blazing comet, obscuring all the lesser stars. The book was read, idolised, dramatised, versified, criticised, plagiarised and satirised in every corner of the English speaking world. Why, Lord knows. The psychology of” me best seller is something that baffles science. Faint memories stirred me, and I recognised my rollicking companion of “Once Aboard the Lugger.” His portrait, which was about as well-known as Lloyd George's or Rudolph Valentino’s, was somewhat disappointing. An emaciated, owlishlooking gentleman with rimless spectacles. For some time I enjoyed some small measure of lame as the man who had not read “If Winter Comes.” Middle-aged ladies would say over their tea-cups when the conversation lapsed, “And isn’t Mr Hutchinson’s book simply wonderful.” And, raising my eyebrows slightly, as one whose memory is vaguely stirred, I would say, “Well, 1 seem to have heard the name, you know, but just at the moment “What!” they would shrill, “not read ‘lf Winter Comes.’ Oh, but you must have—why, everyone has. Do you hear that, Emily, he says he hasn’t read ” In a short time I became quite a celebrity. When the flurry died down I read the book and found I had missed someuiing well worth reading. None of the best critics would have anything to do with it, of course. Any critic who praises a best-seller is instantly damned and forfeits all claim to literary discrimination. “If Winter Comes” was certainly an enjoyable book, and something beyond the ordinary, but those who had first made Mr Hutchinson’s acquaintance through the delightful pages of “Once Aboard the Lugger,” must have been amazed and not a little disappointed at his best seller. Either Mr Hutchinson is a dual personality, or his aged mother died in poverty or he is a martyr to indigestion. Else why should he have deliberately strangled his priceless sense of humour.

"If Winter Comes” was a good enough book, but it was full of the seeds of decay. First, it was a problem novel, and the problem novel carried to excess makes worse tripe than Ella Wheeler Wilcox ever perpetrated. Secondly, it was written in poetic prose, which always hovers on the verge of being mush. Thirdly, when an author loses, or abandons his sense of humour, he also abandons his faculty of self-criticism and self-restraint.

The seeds of decay that were sown in “If Winter Comes” have borne ample fruit, not. only in Mr Hutchinson, but in other writers. The emotional problem novel has enjoyed a great deal of popularity in the last three or four years, and is not yet dead. One of the most distressing aftermaths of “If Winter Comes” was Ernest Raymond’s ‘Tell England,” which was also something of a best seller. The book had one or two redeeming features in the earlier chapters, but it finished in a welter of religious emotionalism, capped off by a rather painful anti-climax. Ernest Raymond took the downward path very rapidly. His “Damascus Gate” was merely a regrettable incident.

Mr Hutchinson has trod the same path. His only hope of rising in the literary world was to exercise rigid restraint, but instead he threw restraint to the winds. The result is well enough known. We have followed Mr Hutchinson down in a darkenin'’ gloom through “This Freedom” and “The Clean Heart,’’ and now Messrs Hodder and Stoughton, in their infinite kindness, have sent me the latest, entitled “One Increasing Purpose.” The quotation from Tennyson did not, I fear, predispose me towards the book. After having read “One Increasing Purpose,” I raise my hat politely and shed a tear over the mortal remains of a once promising writer. I will be kind and think of him as the author of “Once Aboard the Lugger,” and one who, but for perverse circumstances, might have brightened the British race.

“One Increasing Purpose” is a murderous, a pitiable affair. It embodies all the worst tendencies of its class of literature in their most advanced stages. To begin with, Mr Hutchinson’s prose has become freakish and annoying. No one objects to occasional violations of the accepted rules of grammar, or to occasional peculiar turns of expression. But continued without intermission throughout a whole book they are most wearsome. Here, for instance, is a sample from the second page of the book:—“Simon, the youngest, 34, the one ‘senselessly’ (Charles) retired from the army after the war and ‘mysteriously’ gone off to live in the country, was his elder brother’s precise opposite. As tall as Andrew, the stiffness of the elder’s carriage, he was in poise and movement supple; as with Andrew, his hair (though here bleached com against the oth-v’s raven hue) was in a curious way a feature of his anpearance.”

Even Carlyle never made a worse mess of the English language than this. Presumably it is intended to be vivid. Actually it is annoying and incomprehensible unless one reads it over studiously two or three times. It is the same all through the book. One stumbles along through a maze of staccatto phrases, looking ever for some kindly verb that will give us rest. The subject of the book, one cannot say the “hero,” is Simon Paris. Simon comes through the war unscathed, and when it is all over, inquiresof his immortal soul, “Why should I have been spared ?” He also has a dead mother whom he communes with frequently, and he asks her the same question. When he has finished the book, the reader will probably also feel inclined to ask the same question. Simon throws up a promising career because of this same insistent question, and goes about seeking a “purpose” in life. His brother, Andrew, becomes separated from a rather problematic wife. Simon, after a hard struggle, restores them to happiness. In the process he finds his mission; it is to go out into the highways and preach “Christ the Common Denominator.” “Christ, his living actual self, is in you,” he explains to his brother. “Niggs, get that, old man, and think the power and the wonder of it, and call him up in you and realise and have the wonder and the power. And he is in every man and woman whom you meet or see; each time you pass a fellow-hum an being, Niggs, you are passing Christ.” There is much of this.

One does not want to ridicule subjects that ought to be sacred, but this sort of thing must be handled with discretion, and, above all, with restraint. Mr Hutchinson just plunges in and strips souls bare with

a heavy hand. There are many passages calculated to make the average, self-respecting person get hot under the collar. The whole book has a clammy, over-ripe atmosphere about it.