iv · Section 16

iv

Christopher Darlington Morley was born at Haverford, Pennsylvania, 5 May, 1890, of parents both English by birth but long Americans by residence. Dr. Frank Morley, an English Quaker of Woodbridge, Suffolk--the home of Edward Fitzgerald--was graduated at Cambridge and came to Haverford in 1887 as professor of mathematics. His wife was Lilian Janet Bird, of Hayward’s Heath, in Sussex, a woman of some musical and poetical gifts, the daughter of a man at one time with the London publishing house of Chapman and Hall. CDM frequently praises her cooking, which blended as an influence on his boyhood with the Haverford campus, where cricket is played. In 1900 Professor Morley went to Baltimore and Johns Hopkins. His son entered Haverford in 1906, was graduated in 1910 and, in the same year, was chosen as Rhodes Scholar representing Maryland. The three years at Oxford were spent at New College. In the title-poem of a new book of verse, _Parson’s Pleasure_--the name of the old bathing pool on the Cherwell at Oxford--occur the lines:

Two breeding-places I have known Where germinal my heart was sown; Two places from which I inherit The present business of my spirit: Haverford, Oxford, quietly May make a poet out of me.

The confused exigencies of his native land, however, were, more immediately, to make something else out of him. Repairing to Garden City, he interviewed Mr. F. N. Doubleday, otherwise FND (“Effendi”) on the matter of a job. Mr. Doubleday has preserved the record of that interview in an amusing account which fully displays the youth, eagerness, enthusiasm and amiable audacity of the twenty-three-year-old. The noted Effendi, whose philosophy of life is not without its Oriental suggestions and whose sense of humour is at such times gently active, was feeling “a little weighted down that morning with the difficulties of the job which the President of Doubleday, Page & Company takes as a daily routine,” and therefore finally told Morley “to go to work at all his manifold plans and literary philanderings, reserving the right to restrain his commitments if necessary.”

It was Morley who discovered William McFee. English sheets of that long and very fine novel, _Casuals of the Sea_, had been submitted to the firm for consideration and possible purchase. Ultimately it became necessary to set up type for the novel in America. “We were accustomed,” Mr. Doubleday explains, “to hold what we called a ‘book-meeting,’ when each member of the staff gave his suggestion about authors and books. For months when it came Christopher’s turn to speak he always began, ‘Now, about McFee--we don’t appreciate what a comer he is’ and so on for five minutes without taking a breath until finally it became the joke of the meeting that nothing could be done until Morley’s McFee speech had been made. Our jibes influenced him not at all. His only reply to our efforts in humour was to bring on a look of great seriousness and the eternal phrase, ‘Now, about McFee.’”

In leaving Garden City after a stay of nearly four years to become, in his own phrase, one of the “little group of wilful men who edit the Ladies’ Home Journal,” CDM departed from the well-established tradition under which so many men in the book publishing business have fallen. It is some kind of a tribute to Doubleday, Page & Company that the house has been the training-place of a considerable number of the heads in other publishing houses. In Philadelphia a term on the Ladies’ Home Journal was followed by work as a columnist on the Evening Public Ledger, the direct preliminary to Morley’s column on the editorial page of the New York Evening Post, with which he has been since 1920. The book, _Travels in Philadelphia_; the personal acquaintance of A. Edward Newton, author of _The Amenities of Book Collecting and Kindred Affections_; and a deepened interest in Walt Whitman, are some of the concomitants of the Philadelphia period. Also, I think, Morley’s gradual disillusionment began then. The collection of essays called _Mince Pie_ was published late in 1919 and there were still to appear, in 1920, certain overflowings of the Morley of the first period--the story of an Oxford undergraduate prank, called _Kathleen_; a book of verse, _Hide and Seek_; and more essays in _Pipefuls_.

But that was to be about all. Something very definite had happened to the young man who was so friendly with everybody, who was forever talking about William McFee, who wrote forty-leven letters and notes a day, who had made a cult of quaintness and who liked to be called Kit and to have the resemblance of his name to that of Christopher Marlowe’s stretched into a fanciful resemblance of personalities and writing. Some lone reviewer, speaking harshly; or some slight wound received in the house of one of his friends; or the shifts and vicissitudes of commercial enterprise--dissatisfaction with what he had already done, a thirtieth birthday, a wish to do something he had yet to do--together or singly may have been the agents of the change. Only the change itself matters. And what was that? It was not that Chris became less friendly, or autographed fewer dozens of copies of a new book of his, or loved the Elizabethans less or the work of Theodore Dreiser more. But a retractation took place, an alteration of ideas went on ... aided, it may be, by the uniformity with which American magazine editors rejected a short story called “Referred to the Author,” one of the contents of Morley’s book _Tales from a Rolltop Desk_--a story which Morley himself thinks marks the definite line between his old work and new.