Grant M. Overton

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The book by Thomas Burke called More Limehouse Nights was published in England under the title of Whispering Windows. At the time of its publication, Mr. Burke wrote the following:

“The most disconcerting question that an author can be asked, and often is asked, is: ‘Why did you write that book?’ The questioners do not want an answer to that immediate question; but to the implied question: ‘Why don’t you write some other kind of book?’ To either question there is but one answer: BECAUSE.

“Every writer is thus challenged. The writer of comic stories is asked why he doesn’t write something really serious. The novelist is asked why he doesn’t write short stories, and the short-story writer is asked why he doesn’t write a novel. To me people say, impatiently: ‘Why don’t you write happy stories about ordinary people?’ And the only answer I can give them is: ‘Because I can’t. I present life as I see it.’

“I am an ordinary man, but I don’t understand ordinary men. I am at a loss with them. But with the people of whom I write I have a fellow-feeling. I know them and their sorrows and their thwarted strivings and I understand their aberrations. I cannot see the romance of the merchant or the glamour of the duke’s daughter. They do not permit themselves to be seized and driven by passion and imagination. Instead they are driven by fear, which they have misnamed Commonsense. These people thwart themselves, while my people are thwarted by malign circumstance.

“Often I have taken other men to the dire districts about which I write, and they have remained unmoved; they have seen, in their phrase, nothing to get excited about. Well, one cannot help that kind of person. One cannot give understanding to the man who regards the flogging of children as a joke, or to whom a broken love-story is, in low life, a theme for smoking-room anecdotes.

“Wherever there are human creatures there are beauty and courage and sacrifice. The stories in Whispering Windows deal with human creatures, thieves, drunkards, prostitutes, each of whom is striving for happiness in his or her way, and missing it, as most of us do. Each has hidden away some fine streak of character, some mark below which he will not go. And—they are alive. They have met life in its ugliest phases, and fought it.

“My answer, then, to the charge of writing ‘loathsome’ stories, is that these things happen. To those who say that cruelty and degradation are not fit subjects for fiction, I say that all twists and phases of the human heart are fit subjects for fiction.

“The entertainment of hundreds of thousands with ‘healthy’ literature is a great and worthy office; but the author can only give out what is in him. If I write of wretched and strange things, it is because these move me most. Happiness needs no understanding; but these darker things—they are kept too much from sensitive eyes and polite ears; and so are too harshly judged upon the world’s report. I am no reformer; I have never ‘studied’ people; and I have no ‘purpose,’ unless it be illumination.

“What we all need today is illumination; for only through full knowledge can we come to truth—and understanding.”

Burke’s new book, The London Spy, is described by the author as “a book of town travels.” Some of the subjects are London street characters, cab shelters, coffee stalls and street entertainers. The range is very wide, for there is a chapter called “In the Streets of Rich Men,” which deals with Pall Mall and Piccadilly, as well as a study of a waterside colony, including the results of a first pipe of opium (“In the Streets of Cyprus”). Mr. Burke tells a good deal about the film world of Soho and is able to give an intimate sketch of Chaplin. Perhaps the most charming of the titles in the book is the chapter called “In the Street of Beautiful Children.” This is a study of a street in Stepney, with observations on orphanages and reformatories and “their oppressions of the children of the poor.”

Thomas Burke was born in London and seldom lives away from it. He started writing when employed in a mercantile office, and sold his first story when sixteen. He sincerely hopes nobody will ever discover and reprint that story. His early struggles have been recounted in his Nights in London. He married Winifred Wells, a young London poet, author of The Three Crowns. He lives at Highgate, on the Northern Heights of London. He hates literary society and social functions generally. His chief recreation is wandering about London.

There is very little use in doing a book about China nowadays unless you can do an unusual book about China; and that, precisely, is what E. G. Kemp has done. Chinese Mettle is an unusual book, even to the shape of it (it is nearly square though not taller than the ordinary book). The author has written enough books on China to cover all the usual ground and, as Sao-Ke Alfred Sze of the Chinese Legation at Washington says in his foreword, Miss Kemp “has wisely neglected the ‘show-window’ by putting seaports at the end. By acquainting the public with the wealth and beauty of the interior, she reveals to readers the vitality and potential energy, both natural and cultural, of a great nation.” Three provinces are particularly described—YÜnnan, Kweichow, Hunan—and there are good chapters on the new Chinese woman and the youth of China. This book has, in addition to unusual illustrations, what every good book of its sort should have, an index.

In view of the title of this chapter I have hesitated over mentioning here Albert C. White’s The Irish Free State. Whether Ireland now should be numbered among the places to go or not is possibly a matter of heredity and sympathies; but at any rate, Ireland is unquestionably a place to read about. Shall we agree that the Irish Free State is one of the best places in the world to go in a book? Then Mr. White’s book will furnish up-to-the-minute transportation thither.

The book is written throughout from the standpoint of a vigorous and independent mind. It will annoy extreme partisans of all shades of opinion, and will provoke much discussion. This is especially true of the concluding chapter, in which the author discusses “Some Factors in the Future.” The value of the book is enhanced by the inclusion of the essential documents of the Home Rule struggle, including the four Home Rule Bills of 1886, 1893, 1914 and 1920, and the terms of the Treaty concluded with Sinn Fein.

Whether Russia is a place to go is another of those debatable questions and I feel that the same conclusion holds good. A book is the wisest passport to Russia at present. Marooned in Moscow, by Marguerite E. Harrison, is not a new book—in the sense of having been published last week. It remains about the best single book published on Russia under the Soviet government; and I say this with the full recollection that H. G. Wells also wrote a book about Soviet Russia after a visit of fifteen days. Mrs. Harrison spent eighteen months and was part of the time in prison. She is an exceptionally good reporter without prejudices for or against any theory of government—with an eye only for the facts and a word only for an observed fact.

It is good news that The Secret of the Sahara: Kufara, by Rosita Forbes, is to be published in a new edition. This Englishwoman, with no assistance but that of native guides, penetrated to Kufara, which lies hidden in the heart of the Libyan desert, a section of the Sahara. This is the region of a fanatical sect of Mohammedans known as the Senussi. No other white woman has ever been known to enter the sacred city of Paj, a gloomy citadel hewn out of rock on the edge of a beautiful valley. The Secret of the Sahara is illustrated with pictures taken by the author, many times under pain of death if she were detected using a camera.

C. E. Andrews is a college professor who saw war service in France and relief administration work in the Balkans. His gifts as a delightful writer will be apparent now that his book of travels, Old Morocco and the Forbidden Atlas, is out. This book, unlike the conventional travel book, has the qualities of a good story. There is colour and adventure. There are humorous episodes and there are pictures that seem to be mirrored in the clear lake of a lovely prose. The journey described is through a region of Morocco little traversed by white men and over paths of the Atlas Mountains frequented chiefly by wild tribes and banditti.

Of all places to go, old New York remains, for many, the most appealing. Does it sound queer to recommend for those readers A Century of Banking in New York: 1822-1922, by Henry Wysham Lanier? Mr. Lanier is a son of Sidney Lanier, the poet, and those who believe that a chronicle of banking must necessarily be full of dry statistics are invited to read the opening chapter of this book; for Mr. Lanier begins his tale with the yellow fever epidemic of 1822, when all the banks of New York, to say nothing of the thousands of people, fled “from the city to the country”—that is, from lowermost Broadway to the healthful village of Greenwich. This quality of human rather than statistical interest is paramount throughout the book.

I go back almost four years to call attention again to Frederic A. Fenger’s Alone in the Caribbean, a book with maps and illustrations from unusual photographs, the narrative of a cruise in a sailing canoe among the Caribbean Islands.... It is just a good book.

Robin Hood’s Barn, by Margaret Emerson Bailey, should be classified, I suppose, as a volume of essays. It seems to me admirably suited for this chapter, since it is all about a pleasant house inhabited by pleasant people—and surely that is a place where everyone wants to go. Margaret Emerson Bailey is describing, I think, an actual house and actual people; not so much their lives as what they make out of life in the collectivism that family life enforces. At least, I seem to get from her book a unity of meaning, the lack of which in our lives, as we live them daily, makes for helplessness and sometimes for despair.

With even more doubt as to the exact “classification,” I proceed to speak here and now of L. P. Jacks’s book, The Legends of Smokeover. Mr. Jacks is well known as the editor of the Hibbert Journal and a writer of distinction upon philosophical subjects. I should say his specialty is an ability to relate philosophical abstractions to practical, everyday existence. Those familiar with his essays in the Atlantic Monthly will know what I mean. And is the Smokeover of his new book, then, a place to go? It is, if you wish to see our modern age and industrial civilisation expressed in such terms—almost in the terms of fiction—as make its appraisal relatively easy.

I suppose this book might make Mr. Jacks memorable as a satirist. It brings philosophy down from the air, like a peaceful thunderbolt, to shatter the vain illusions we entertain of our material success and our civilised strides forward. The fact that when you have begun to read the book you may experience some difficulty in knowing how to take it is in the book’s favour. And why should you complain so long as from the outset you are continuously entertained and amused? You can scarcely complain ... even though at the end, you find you have been instructed. In a world thickly spotted with Smokeovers, Mr. Jacks’s book is a book worth having, worth reading, worth reading again.