Looking Back
BY H. M. TOMLINSON.
ON a preliminary inspection of these two volumes,* which have 509 pages, a reviewer who is pleased to be at home with even the more obscure pamphlets by Mr. Norman Douglas, fears that he may not be able to recommend this autobio- graphical excursion, except to readers who have been faithful since Siren Land ; and they could easily dispense with his testimonial. Those others might be puzzled and annoyed ; they might wonder what it was all about, and it would be impossible to tell them.. However, all would have to confess the noble bookcraft of the publishers of the work.
That fear goes. Presently you do not care whether the others like it or not. That is their: affair ; if they do not know what to make of this author then the loss is theirs. It would be necessary to explain to them, which would be too much of a bother, that this is not an autobiography, in the usual sense. After all, are not the other books by this strange author autobiographical ? What more do we want ? What more could we get? This, as he honestly says—he is shock- ingly honest—is an excursion ; in fact, it is a long series of excursions, from Aberdeen to Darjeeling, from Moscow to East Africa, from music to zoology, from school to less reput- able resorts. It is casual and conversational. It does not proceed with the. years. There is no development. You cannot say the author does not take himself seriously, yet his excursion is in the spirit of a great lark. How else would you go for an excursion ?
Mr. Douglas does not begin with origins and circumstances, and then try to make a-long narrative justify the thing he is. He never attempts to justify himself by any standard but his own ; and what that is cannot be seen if one runs impatiently while reading, though it is fairly plain, and is as old as the natural man. On the contrary, our author, light-heartedly, and very likely Moved by sheer devilment, would seem to prefer to bewilder a reader who is just beginning to feel safe with his book. There a reader is, comfortable 'upon a page, in a certain year, in a place he recognizes, and sympathetically he becomes as doting, with amiable Mr. Douglas, as we ever are in the condoning twilight of the past, with some good people we shall not see again. Yet on the next page the reader is bustled into another place, altogether different, where he would not care for his pious mother to find him, with people too fuddled, if grotesquely amusing, to give anything better than a derisive reply. to whatever protest he may raise. What is he to do ? There is no doubt about what he will do=he will try the following page, and the one after that. Why ? Well, this book is by Norman Douglas. You follow him about wherever he goes—he gets into dubious places. with the same unconcern that he enters a ruined temple to decipher the inscriptions—you follow him everywhere, pro- testing at times, but with increasing curiosity. Somehow, you want to hear what he will say next, unedifying though that may chance to be.
There it is. Mr. Douglas is individual, which is about as rare, exotic, and remarkable as being a bird of paradise. He is a true nonconformist ; he conforms only to himself. He is open to criticism—he himself sees to that—for he comes out into plain daylight, and you are free to say what you like about him. Even his autobiographical method is original ; though one could easily find other names for it. His method is simply to pick out from a bowl a visiting card—the bowl is full of them, and any card will do—and then recall the person, the place, and what happened ; possibly, and luckily, there
• Looking Back -: An • Autobiographical Excursion. By Norman, /Jowls's., (Chatto and Windus. £3 3a.)
will be a long digression. It is all a matter of luck. The visiting card may be of a somebody or a nobody. It may be Elder F. B. Hammond, of Utah, at one dip, and Lord Rosebery at the next. Even the author's memory, when he looks at the card, is a matter of luck. Occasionally he has forgotten who the person was. You begin to feel glad your card is not there. He might have forgotten you, and say so.
The candour of Mr. Douglas is classical, not conventional. It defers to no fashion of thought, to nothing that may he in the minds of his contemporaries. His more pronounced antipathies would so deal with the shrines of most of us that our landscape would be reduced to the support and kindliness of an Antarctic scene after the blizzard had passed. His candour has the embarrassing abruptness of a word by an innocent, though we see it is not that. Pan is no prattling juvenile of a morning earth ; he must be sophisticated enough by now ; he must know well enough by now that his pranks have been assorted, -named, and ranged in the ad; monishment of a civil code, which is commonly accepted. He knows ; " but," says he, " whatever the earth may be to you—and a pretty mess you have made of it—it is still my morning earth, and if you show me your present code I'll name the passing year you happen to be in. You have forgotten Nineveh, but I haven't." There is an answer to that; but it would be useless to make it, to one of the. older gods. . It would be difficult, and it is now unnecessary, to say why the writings of Mr. Norman Douglas please his admirers, notwithstanding the fact that now and then you find a page of his which is so tainted that the dinner seems spoiled ; for sometimes you do feel it would have been better to have buried that bit instead of serving it. The simple truth is that he can write, which means no more than that a dis- tinctive genius is at work, and you must accept him as he is or not at all. That does something towards explaining why his books arc always kept within reach by those who know them ; but not much, for it is certain that some readers, not squeamish yet fastidious folk, are easily revolted by a writer if he shows a humourless predilection for what is ugly; they-leave him to those who like that sort.of thing ; and yet, with the smell of such pervasive pages still in your mind, a new book by Mr. Douglas is a noteworthy event. For lie has humour, and he is a humanist. If you do not like one side of him there is another. There are many others. He has integrity, it is true ; and when you come to think of it he must indeed be a remarkable person to integrate as much as all that. Somehow, he catches you, and always in a way which is a disarming surprise. What can you .do when you find this scholar, who can describe with particularity so many pleasing islands, so many unusual shores and their recondite lore, and good books and good music, and give an opinion of some famous person he has met which does not lose its value because of a glint of malice—what can you do when casually he drops the remark that around 1881 he was reading Figuier's World Before the Deluge ? So were we. He confesses the spell that is still cast by such words as sanidine, tourmaline, Lias, terebratula, biotite, belemnite, and so on. So do we.
Perhaps it is the blithe unworldliness of Mr. Douglas which keeps his books where they are easily reached. He is detached, whether remembering .Bishop Creighton, Rupert Brooke, or D. Ii. Lawrence ; or hunting for lizards on a Mediterranean islet ;. or recounting coronation. festivities in Moscow (he sat next to Madame Albani) ; or his life in Paris and Amiens in. 1918. Watch him, too, when he is graciously delineating an unknown Miss Webb. Where is the novelist who could make her move about and talk like that?
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