Literary Free-for-All

AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF G. K. CHESTERTON--G. K. Chesterton--Sheed & Ward ($3).

SWINNERTON : AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY--Frank Swinnerton -- Doubleday, Doran ($2.75).

ACROSS SPOON RIVER--Edgar Lee Masters--Farrar & Rinehart ($3.50).

Although the portraits of eminent men of letters usually show features as battered as those of heavyweight prizefighters, the legend persists that the literary life is genteel, academic, serene. Last week three survivors of many a literary free-for-all contradicted the legend with their autobiographies, offering three pictures of those ceaseless struggles that revolve around books and that are fought with the weapons of reviews, debates, lectures, gossip. Gilbert Keith Chesterton wrote of his literary life with all the suavity and aplomb of a generous victor. Poet Edgar Lee Masters described his with all the bitterness of admitted defeat. Novelist Frank Swinnerton described some staggering setbacks with the doggedly hopeful air of a championship contender who does not know he has already been knocked out several times.

Not so much an autobiography as an autobiographical defense of his Catholicism, Gilbert Keith Chesterton's memoirs, completed three months before his death last June, are most interesting when he neglects his theme and describes his relationship with his rivals. Born May 29, 1874, into an honest and respectable middle-class family, Chesterton lived long enough to admire even the hypocrisies of his Victorian household. His father was a real estate agent and surveyor, an ironic individual who reminded his son of a character by Dickens. One of the elder Chesterton's idiosyncrasies was to pretend that he knew a great deal about flowers, gravely lecturing to lady visitors about a "sprig of wild bigamy." When he identified a flower as "Bishop's Bigamy," even his innocent listeners grew suspicious. "Perfectly happy at the bottom of the class," Gilbert Chesterton dreamed through his pleasant schooling at St. Paul's, producing "on most of the masters and many of the boys ... a pretty well-founded conviction that I was asleep." He went to art school, suffered a period of religious despair and moral confusion before he emerged as a Catholic, an optimist, a poet, a radical, an art critic, and lecturer with a reputation as one of the wittiest men of his time.

Although Chestertonian paradoxes are less frequent in his Autobiography than in the famed Father Brown stories, or The Man Who Was Thursday, they abound in his portraits of his contemporaries: Shaw, Wells, Belloc, Cunninghame Graham, Max Beerbohm, Sir James Barrie. Alternately scolding and admiring, he says that Shaw is no Irish rebel, that he is too "pro-British," a charge he seems to feel should cut the Irish dramatist to the quick. Chesterton and Shaw fought for 20 years. They debated on sex, socialism, Christianity, war, Ireland, Shakespeare, until they came to be stock figures in British intellectual life, being put upon lecture platforms especially to pummel each other "like two knockabout comedians." Their social relations were less permanent. When Maurice Baring gave a great birthday party (at which eggs were boiled in Sir Herbert Tree's silk hat and Chesterton fenced with real swords with a gentleman "fortunately" more intoxicated than himself), Shaw left the drunken company "like a 17th Century Puritan leaving a tavern full of Cavaliers." Among other veterans' tales of literary warfare, Chesterton records the story of the great Critic Henley, who got so excited in a controversy over Tolstoy and Ibsen that he hit a brother-critic with his crutch. Corpulent, good-natured Chesterton was too absent-minded to be a good battler. On one of his lecture tours he sent his wife a telegram: "Am in Market Harborough. Where ought I to be?" Another time Shaw persuaded him to take part in a cinema, saying it was being produced by Barrie. Chesterton let himself be dressed in a cowboy suit, submitted to being rolled in a barrel, roped over a fake precipice, ordered to make faces at the camera, before he was politely informed that the whole scheme had been dropped. When he heard that William Archer was also hood winked he was content. "God forbid," he said, "that anyone should say I did not see a joke, if William Archer could see it."

Swinnerton: An Autobiography describes in an uninspired and methodical fashion the career of an engraver's hard working son who became a publisher's reader, a best-selling novelist, a tireless commentator on English literary figures. Filling the first and best part of his book with accounts of his family's poverty after his father's death, of his first newspaper job at the age of 14, of his goading ambition, Swinnerton gives over most of the remainder to polite, discreet, tedious descriptions of his writing friends and acquaintances. Not in direct, slapdash conflict, but in a subtle resentment at intellectual slights, does Swinnerton reveal the hazards of his literary life. Thus he rails against "sleek, conspiratorial, mean-spirited bigotries," without denning them, against reviewers who resent his "rise in the world," against old friends who feel insulted if they do not get inscribed copies of his books, but never acknowledge them if they do. But his clearest picture of the literary jungle is in his account of his first success, Nocturne, with the "tonic" letter it won from Shaw: "I found it a damned dismal book. . . ."

Across Spoon River is not only a grimmer picture of squalid literary squabbles, but one of the grimmest records of literary success in U. S. writing. Otherwise an old-fashioned autobiography, it is written with a detachment that gives a cold and unsympathetic picture of its central character. Born in Garnett, Kans. in 1869, Masters grew up in Petersburg and Lewistown, Ill., where his father was an attorney and politician. He attended Knox College, wrote conventional verses, had a number of tormented adolescent love affairs, studied law at his father's insistence. At 23 Masters broke with his parents, ran off to Chicago, staying at his Uncle Henry's run-down boarding house on Michigan Avenue, where he felt himself to be a country bumpkin among the middle-aged sporting ladies, ambiguous nurses and suspicious characters who were his fellow-boarders. He had a love affair with a nurse, another with the mistress of a gambling-hall proprietor. Prospering moderately as a lawyer, he soon knew the brutal, amoral, sardonic world of Chicago sportsmen, gamblers, shyster lawyers and, since his sister married a wealthy doctor, he also became acquainted with fashionable Chicago circles at the end of the Gilded Age. There was not much to choose between them so far as their interest in poetry was concerned.

Masters was 45 when Spoon River Anthology appeared. By that time a law yer of established reputation, with a well-born wife and three children, he had been through a period of intense emotional strain resulting from his love affair with a passionate girl who was trying, he firmly believed, to wreck his marriage and marry him herself. His wife heard of it, threatened to expose the girl, whose livelihood as a music teacher depended on her good reputation. The girl in turn tricked Masters into situations where he was compelled to accept more and more responsibility for her. Masters broke off the affair. The girl married, then killed herself. For a brief period Masters enjoyed the success of Spoon River Anthology, before literary disputes no less harrowing supplanted the professional and emotional worries that had previously darkened his days.

His old friend Vachel Lindsay was offended by his book on Lincoln. Carl Sandburg, who had been one of the few people who knew Masters' poetry in his early days, grew cool toward him. He was attacked by poetasters, professors, local Illinois patriots. Dwelling bitterly on instances of ingratitude, Masters ends his account in 1917. A personal enemy, and a onetime law partner "made Chicago impossible for me." One of his old flames had become a neighbor, and Masters believed that she was trying to steal his children. Admitting that he may have seen perils where none existed, he felt his whims should have been humored, tried for a summer to control the children, suddenly packed up and left his family forever. Although readers are likely to agree with his own judgment that he was hypersensitive, and may be shocked by the humorless candor of his account, the central impression they are likely to get from Across Spoon River is that a literary career is a fearful struggle, disheartening before recognition is won, and hazardous ever afterwards.

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