BOOKS OF THE WEEK
Success Story of a Novelist ,
A. E. W. Mason.- By Roger Lancelyn Green. (Parrish. 21s.) Wnii an engaging personal modesty and in a spirit of affectionate admiration, Mr. Roger Lancelyn Green narrates the Success Story of A. E. W. Mason, who, after an unhappy childhood at the hands of a narrow, domineering and' unimaginative mother, after foozling his Oxford Degree and struggling as a small-part actor to earn his living, turned to writing stories, and rapidly became one of the most popular of English-speaking novelists. Mason's parents were com- fortably off, but the family lacked tradition, and the mother (who was the despot of the family and liked to cut a dash) was not only devoid of taste, but unaware that any such thing existed. This bland and impenetrable mediocrity had a strange effect on the young Alfred, as gradually he became conscious of the obstinate limitations within the home-circle. A deep-down sense of shame took possession of him, which developed into a secret but devouring ambition to acquire .the outward trappings of a member of a county family, and to show that one Mason at any rate could hold his own among men of breeding and culture. So far as an ancestral home and broad acres were concerned, the ambition remained unfulfilled; but he swiftly acquired the easy self-confidence, the clubability and the social and sporting proclivities of the sort of country gentleman who was in his heyday during the twenty years preceding the war of 1914.
Once his financial prospects as a successful writer were firmly established, Mason's personal qualities had free play, and they were the qualities which won for his books and for himself a universal popularity in precisely the circles he most hoped to please. He was strikingly handsome in an alert and hawk-like way. Friendly and courteous, he was everywhere'welcome among his kind, and (more important) treated sanguine youngsters and disappointed men with consideration and generous kindliness. His modesty about his own written work was genuine and inherent. .. Indeed, if only he had been able to rate himself more highly—to have aspired to a loftier level of imaginative writing, instead of playing himself down as a good chap enjoying a good life thanks to a lucky talent for story- telling—he could have put his outstanding capacities to a fuller use. But during the years of his early triumphs he was a clubman first, and a writer second or even third; and who shall gauge the loss to enduring letters of the social charm and nonchalant distinction of a Mason, an Anthony Hope, a W. B. Maxwell' Let such as had the privilege to fall under these writers' personal spell preserie a grateful memory, pass no judgement on their choice of-where and how to shine, and, in Mason's case, salute what one is bound to call his "capacities." FOr exceptional capacities they were.
His memory was phenomenal; and Mr. Green, commenting on the curious facts that now and again Masoli would forget that he had already made use of some dramatic fragment of experience, and, using it again, would repeat himself almost word for word, says expressively, "It was as if originally he had photographed the incident and put the negative away in his mind." His zest for adventure, his wiry athletic frame, his personal courage combined to lead him into strange corners of the world and to bring him back with a store of neatly docketed memories. As a boy he had, loved, in the middle of the night, to creep out of the pretentious Dulwich villa, over which his mother exercised such relentless discipline, and wander in pitch darkness about the lanes and copses of a still rural suburb, afraid, yet determined to conquer fear. In the same way he taught himself to face the dangers of High-Alpine climbing, and to such effect that, alone and guideless, he made the most dangerous and fatiguing of all crossings of Mont Blanc—that by the Brenva, an experience put on permanent record in the thrilling pages of Running Water (1907). Material for stories, then, presented no difficulty to 1Mason. Things happened to him, because every occurrence was a happening; and it was this keen sense of something potentially implicit in quite ordinary incidents which qualified him to take a front place among writers of detective stories. Mason's books fall into well-defined groups. Romantic costume-fiction, during the dominance of Stevenson, Weyman and Anthony Hope, won him his early swift success and to the end attracted him. Social novels—usually turning on the impact of events in remote foreign lands on the lives of well-bred English families—were equally popular, but are to the taste of today less satisfactory, even though they include his best- known story, The Four Feathers (1902). Then in 1910 came At the Villa Rose, which admirable entertainment inaugurated the series of stories for which Mason will be most enduringly remembered.
Historical novels he wrote with a fine flourish, and the convinc- ingness of the characters and dialogue mattered less than the swirl of incident. The social novels (The Four Feathers as much as any) tend to verbosity, with a cursory filling-in of country-house existence and a gallantry of conventional sentinAnt which belongs to its period rather than to real life. The detective stories, on the other hand, have an economy of phrase, an unwavering attention to detail, essential to the sure unravelling of a tangled mystery. The contrast, for example, between At,the Villa Pose and The Turnstile (published two years later) is so great that they might be the work of different authors—the former taut, perfectly controlled and devoid of padding, the latter a pro- tracted pertinictory drama of rich Edwardian society, such as E. F. Benson, W. E. Norris or Robert Hichens right have written.
Between 1895 (he was born in 1865) and 1946 (he died in November 1948) Mason published over thirty novels and books of stories which, constantly reprinted and many of them filmed, earned him from £6,000 to £10,000 a year. He enjoyed his money as he enjoyed his . life. He was as lavish a spender of cash as of energy and friendship. Money was there to be spent, both on helping others and on making smooth his own continual journeyings. It is amusing to read of his grandiose progress from one furnished mansion to another, every arrangement made for him in advance, so that at the last minute milord could stroll on to the scene—cigar, monocle and attaché-case his only luggage.
Thus Alfred Mason, undistinguished son of a chartered accountant from an inner-suburban home, acquired, and fully merited, a second nature as man-about-town, globe-trotter and friend of Everyman. "All my own work," he could truthfully have said, had he been the kind to talk about himself. But all that he left of autobiography were a few random notes in the near-illegible hand of a dying man; and we must be grateful to Mr. Green for a record of a fabulous life which, despite a general prolixity and occasional lapses into triteness or cliché, has been written from the heart. This is as it should be, and as Mason himself would have desired. MICHAEL SADLEIR.
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