Mince Pie

"Owd Bob"

CHAPTER I

(INTRODUCES OUR HERO)

Loitering perchance on the western pavement of Madison avenue, between

the streets numbered 38 and 39, and gazing with an observant eye upon

the pedestrians passing southward, you would be likely to see, about

8:40 o'clock of the morning, a gentleman of remarkable presence

approaching with no bird-like tread. This creature, clad in a suit of

subfuse respectable weave, bearing in his hand a cane of stout timber

with a right-angled hornblende grip, and upon his head a hat of rich

texture, would probably also carry in one hand (the left) a leather case

filled with valuable papers, and in the other hand (the right, which

also held the cane) a cigarette, lit upon leaving the Grand Central

subway station. This cigarette the person of our tale would

frequentatively apply to his lips, and then withdraw with a quick,

swooping motion. With a rapid, somewhat sidelong gait (at first somehow

clumsy, yet upon closer observation a mode of motion seen to embrace

certain elements of harmony) this gentleman would converge upon the

southwest corner of Madison avenue and 38th street; and the intent

observer, noting the menacing contours of the face, would conclude that

he was going to work.

This gentleman, beneath his sober but excellently haberdashered surtout,

was plainly a man of large frame, of a Sam Johnsonian mould, but, to the

surprise of the calculating observer, it would be noted that his volume

(or mass) was not what his bony structure implied. Spiritually, in deed,

this interesting individual conveyed to the world a sensation of

stoutness, of bulk and solidity, which (upon scrutiny) was not (or would

not be) verified by measurement. Evidently, you will conclude, a stout

man grown thin; or, at any rate, grown less stout. His molded depth,

one might assess at 20 inches between the eaves; his longitude, say,

five feet eleven; his registered tonnage, 170; his cargo, literary; and

his destination, the editorial sancta of a well-known publishing house.

This gentleman, in brief, is Mr. Robert Cortes Holliday (but not the

"stout Cortes" of the poet), the editor of _The Bookman_.

--

CHAPTER II

(OUR HERO BEGINS A CAREER)

"It would seem that whenever Nature had a man of letters up her sleeve,

the first gift with which she has felt necessary to dower him has been a

preacher sire."

R.C.H. of N.B. Tarkington.

Mr. Holliday was born in Indianapolis on July 18, 1880. It is evident

that ink, piety and copious speech circulated in the veins of his clan,

for at least two of his grandfathers were parsons, and one of them, Dr.

Ferdinand Cortez Holliday, was the author of a volume called "Indiana

Methodism" in which he was the biographer of the Rev. Joseph Tarkington,

the grandfather of Newton B. Tarkington, sometimes heard of as Booth

Tarkington, a novelist. Thus the hand of Robert C. Holliday was linked

by the manacle of destiny to the hand of Newton B. Tarkington, and it is

a quaint satisfaction to note that Mr. Holliday's first book was that

volume "Booth Tarkington," one of the liveliest and soundest critical

memoirs it has been our fortune to enjoy.

Like all denizens of Indianapolis--"Tarkingtonapolis," Mr. Holliday

calls it--our subject will discourse at considerable volume of his youth

in that high-spirited city. His recollections, both sacred and profane,

are, however, not in our present channel. After a reputable schooling

young Robert proceeded to New York in 1899 to study art at the Art

Students' League, and later became a pupil of Twachtman. The present

commentator is not in a position to say how severely either art or Mr.

Holliday suffered in the mutual embrace. I have seen some of his black

and white posters which seemed to me robust and considerably lively. At

any rate, Mr. Holliday exhibited drawings on Fifth avenue and had

illustrative work published by _Scribner's Magazine_. He did commercial

designs and comic pictures for juvenile readers. At this time he lived

in a rural community of artists in Connecticut, and did his own cooking.

Also, he is proud of having lived in a garret on Broome street. This

phase of his career is not to be slurred over, for it is a clue to much

of his later work. His writing often displays the keen eye of the

painter, and his familiarity with the technique of pencil and brush has

much enriched his capacity to see and to make his reader see with him.

Such essays as "Going to Art Exhibitions," and the one-third dedication

of "Walking-Stick Papers" to Royal Cortissoz are due to his interest in

the world as pictures.

While we think of it, then, let us put down our first memorandum upon

the art of Mr. Holliday:

First Memo--Mr. Holliday's stuff is distilled from life!

--

CHAPTER III

(IN WHICH OUR HERO DARTS OFF AT A TANGENT)

It is not said why our hero abandoned bristol board and india ink, and

it is no duty of this inquirendo to offer surmise. The fact is that he

disappeared from Broome street, and after the appropriate interval might

have been observed (odd as it seems) on the campus of the University of

Kansas. This vault into the petals of the sunflower seems so quaint that

I once attempted to find out from Mr. Holliday just when it was that he

attended courses at that institution. He frankly said that he could not

remember. Now he has no memory at all for dates, I will vouch; yet it

seems odd (I say) that he did not even remember the numerals of the

class in which he was enrolled. A "queer feller," indeed, as Mr.

Tarkington has called him. So I cannot attest, with hand on Book, that

he really was at Kansas University. He may have been a footpad during

that period. I have often thought to write to the dean of the university

and check the matter up. It may be that entertaining anecdotes of our

hero's college career could be spaded up.

Just why this remote atheneum was sconce for Mr. Holliday's candle I do

not hazard. It seems I have heard him say that his cousin, Professor

Wilbur Cortez Abbott (of Yale) was then teaching at the Kansas college,

and this was the reason. It doesn't matter now; fifty years hence it may

be of considerable importance.

However, we must press on a little faster. From Kansas he returned to

New York and became a salesman in the book store of Charles Scribner's

Sons, then on Fifth avenue below Twenty-third street. Here he was

employed for about five years. From this experience may he traced three

of the most delightful of the "Walking-Stick Papers." It was while at

Scribner's that he met Joyce Kilmer, who also served as a Scribner

book-clerk for two weeks in 1909. This friendship meant more to Bob

Holliday than any other. The two men were united by intimate adhesions

of temperament and worldly situation. Those who know what friendship

means among men who have stood on the bottom rung together will ask no

further comment. Kilmer was Holliday's best man in 1913; Holliday stood

godfather to Kilmer's daughter Rose. On Aug. 22, 1918, Mrs. Kilmer

appointed Mr. Holliday her husband's literary executor. His memoir of

Joyce Kilmer is a fitting token of the manly affection that sweetens

life and enriches him who even sees it from a distance.

Just when Holliday's connection with the Scribner store ceased I do not

know. My guess is, about 1911. He did some work for the New York Public

Library (tucking away in his files the material for the essay "Human

Municipal Documents") and also dabbled in eleemosynary science for the

Russell Sage Foundation; though the details of the latter enterprise I

cannot even conjecture. Somehow or other he fell into the most richly

amusing post that a belletristic journalist ever adorned, as general

factotum of _The Fishing Gazette_, a trade journal. This is laid bare

for the world in "The Fish Reporter."

About 1911 he began to contribute humorous sketches to the Saturday

Magazine of the New York _Evening Post_. In 1912-13 he was writing

signed reviews for the New York _Times_ Review of Books. 1913-14 he was

assistant literary editor of the New York _Tribune_. His meditations on

the reviewing job are embalmed in "That Reviewer Cuss." In 1914 the wear

and tear of continual hard work on Grub Street rather got the better of

him: he packed a bag and spent the summer in England. Four charming

essays record his adventures there, where we may leave him for the

moment while we warm up to another aspect of the problem. Let us just

set down our second memorandum:

Second Memo--Mr. Holliday knows the Literary Game from All Angles!

--

CHAPTER IV

(OUR HERO'S BOOK AND HEART SHALL NEVER PART)

Perhaps I should apologize for treating Mr. Holliday's "Walking-Stick

Papers" in this biographical fashion. And yet I cannot resist it for

this book is Mr. Holliday himself. It is mellow, odd, aromatic and

tender, just as he is. It is (as he said of something else) "saturated

with a distinguished, humane tradition of letters."

The book is exciting reading because you can trace in it the growth and

felicitous toughening of a very remarkable talent. Mr. Holliday has been

through a lively and gruelling mill. Like every sensitive journalist, he

has been mangled at Ephesus. Slight and debonair as some of his pieces

are, there is not one that is not an authentic fiber from life. That is

the beauty of this sort of writing--the personal essay--it admits us to

the very pulse of the machine. We see this man: selling books at

Scribner's, pacing New York streets at night gloating on the yellow

windows and the random ring of words, fattening his spirit on hundreds

of books, concocting his own theory of the niceties of prose. We see

that volatile humor which is native in him flickering like burning

brandy round the rich plum pudding of his theme. With all his

playfulness, when he sets out to achieve a certain effect he builds

cunningly, with sure and skillful art. See (for instance) in his "As to

People," his superbly satisfying picture (how careless it seems!) of his

scrubwoman, closing with the pr*** of Billy Henderson's wife, which

drives the nail through and turns it on the under side--

Mr. Holliday, then, gives us in generous measure the "certain jolly

humors" which R.L.S. says we voyage to find. He throws off flashes of

imaginative felicity--as where he says of canes, "They are the light to

blind men." Where he describes Mr. Oliver Herford "listing to starboard,

like a postman." Where he says of the English who use colloquially

phrases known to us only in great literature--"There are primroses in

their speech." And where he begins his "Memoirs of a Manuscript," "I was

born in Indiana."

We are now ready to let fall our third memorandum:

Third Memo--Behind his colloquial, easygoing (apparently careless)

utterance, Mr. Holliday conceals a high quality of literary art.

--

CHAPTER V

(FURTHER OSCILLATIONS OF OUR HERO)

Mr. Holliday was driven home from England and Police Constable

Buckington by the war, which broke out while he was living in Chelsea.

My chronology is a bit mixed here; just what he was doing from autumn,

1914, to February, 1916, I don't know. Was it then that he held the fish

reporter job? Come to think of it, I believe it was. Anyway, in

February, 1916, he turned up in Garden City, Long Island, where I first

had the excitement of clapping eyes on him. Some of the adventures of

that spring and summer may be inferred from "Memories of a Manuscript."

Others took place in the austere lunch cathedral known at the press of

Doubleday, Page & Company as the "garage," or on walks that summer

between the Country Life Press and the neighboring champaigns of

Hempstead. The full story of the Porrier's Corner Club, of which Mr.

Holliday and myself are the only members, is yet to be told. As far as I

was concerned it was love at first sight. This burly soul, rumbling

Johnsonianly upon lettered topics, puffing unending Virginia cigarettes,

gazing with shy humor through thick-paned spectacles--well, on Friday,

June 23, 1916, Bob and I decided to collaborate in writing a farcical

novel. It is still unwritten, save the first few chapters. I only

instance this to show how fast passion proceeded.

It would not surprise me if at some future time Mrs. Bedell's boarding

house, on Jackson Street in Hempstead, becomes a place of pilgrimage for

lovers of the essay. They will want to see the dark little front room on

the ground floor where Owd Bob used to scatter the sheets of his essays

as he was retyping them from a huge scrapbook and grooming them for a

canter among publishers' sanhedrim. They will want to see (but will not,

I fear) the cool barrel-room at the back of George D. Smith's tavern, an

ale-house that was blithe to our fancy because the publican bore the

same name as that of a very famous dealer in rare books. Along that

pleasant bar, with its shining brass scuppers, Bob and I consumed many

beakers of well-chilled amber during that warm summer. His urbanolatrous

soul pined for the city, and he used in those days to expound the

doctrine that the suburbanite really has to go to town in order to get

fresh air.

In September, 1916, Holliday's health broke down. He had been feeling

poorly most of the summer, and continuous hard work induced a spell of

nervous depression. Very wisely he went back to Indianapolis to rest.

After a good lay-off he tackled the Tarkington book, which was written

in Indianapolis the following winter and spring. And "Walking-Stick

Papers" began to go the rounds.

I have alluded more than once to Mr. Holliday's book on Tarkington. This

original, mellow, convivial, informal and yet soundly argued critique

has been overlooked by many who have delighted to honor Holliday as an

essayist. But it is vastly worth reading. It is a brilliant study, full

of "onion atoms" as Sydney Smith's famous salad, and we flaunt it

merrily in the face of those who are frequently crapehanging and dirging

that we have no sparkling young Chestertons and Rebecca Wests and J.C.

Squires this side of Queenstown harbor. Rarely have creator and critic

been joined in so felicitous a marriage. And indeed the union was

appointed in heaven and smiles in the blood, for (as I have noted) Mr.

Holliday's grandfather was the biographer of Tarkington's grandsire,

also a pioneer preacher of the metaphysical commonwealth of Indiana. Mr.

Holliday traces with a good deal of humor and circumstance the various

ways in which the gods gave Mr. Tarkington just the right kind of

ancestry, upbringing, boyhood and college career to produce a talented

writer. But the fates that catered to Tarkington with such generous hand

never dealt him a better run of cards than when Holliday wrote this

book.

The study is one of surpassing interest, not merely as a service to

native criticism but as a revelation of Holliday's ability to follow

through a sustained intellectual task with the same grasp and grace that

he afterward showed in the memoir of Kilmer in which his heart was so

deeply engaged. Of a truth, Mr. Holliday's success in putting himself

within Tarkington's dashing checked kuppenheimers is a fine achievement

of projected psychology. He knows Tarkington so well that if the latter

were unhappily deleted by some "wilful convulsion of brute nature" I

think it undoubtable that his biographer could reconstruct a very

plausible automaton, and would know just what ingredients to blend. A

dash of Miss Austen, Joseph Conrad, Henry James and Daudet; flavored

perhaps with coal smoke from Indianapolis, spindrift from the Maine

coast and a few twanging chords from the Princeton Glee Club.

Fourth Memo--Mr. Holliday is critic as well as essayist.

--

CHAPTER VI

(OUR HERO FINDS A STEADY JOB)

It was the summer of 1917 when Owd Bob came back to New York. Just at

that juncture I happened to hear that a certain publisher needed an

editorial man, and when Bob and I were at Browne's discussing the fate

of "Walking-Stick Papers" over a jug of shandygaff, I told him this

news. He hurried to the office in question through a drenching

rain-gust, and has been there ever since. The publisher performed an act

of perspicuity rare indeed. He not only accepted the manuscript, but its

author as well.

So that is the story of "Walking-Stick Papers," and it does not cause me

to droop if you say I talk of matters of not such great moment. What a

joy it would have been if some friend had jotted down memoranda of this

sort concerning some of Elia's doings. The book is a garner of some of

the most racy, vigorous and genuinely flavored essays that this country

has produced for some time. Dear to me, every one of them, as clean-cut

blazes by a sincere workman along a trail full of perplexity and

struggle, as Grub Street always will be for the man who dips an honest

pen that will not stoop to conquer. And if you should require an

accurate portrait of their author I cannot do better than quote what

Grote said of Socrates:

Fifth Memo--These essays are the sort of thing you cannot afford to

miss. In them you sit down to warm your wits at the glow of a droll,

delightful, unique mind.

So much (at the moment) for Bob Holliday.