Richard the Literary Lion

THE RICHARD HARDING DAVIS YEARS (336 pp.)--Gerald Lanqford--Holt, Rinehart & Winston ($5.75).

Richard Harding Davis (1864-1916) is one of the century's more vividly forgotten men of letters. His name survives only as a journalistic legend and on the title pages of a few perennially popular books (The Bar Sinister, Van Bibber and Others) read mostly now by children. But 50 years ago, as this workmanlike biography recalls, R.H.D. was one of the most famous writers in America--a world-prowling literary lion who became the most flamboyantly successful reporter of his era, created the archetype of the war correspondent, wrote four hit plays (The Dictator, Ransom's Folly) and six superselling novels (Soldiers of Fortune, Captain Macklin), all offering scarum adventure, pedestalized love and impeccable sophomorality. And on top of that, Davis was "Richard the Lion Harding," a playboy-adventurer who touched glasses with kings and brushed elbows with death, the best-dressed man on five continents and a dozen battlefields, an image of masculine beauty who sat as Charles Dana Gibson's model for the beau ideal of the day: the escort of the famed Gibson girl.

The picture is of course too good to be entirely true. The public image of Richard Harding Davis, says Biographer Langford, concealed a private tragedy: inside the man's man there lived a mother's boy.

The Boy Scout. Mother was a writer too, the author of Life in the Iron Mills, a notable piece of pioneer realism; Father was a newsman who from 1893 to 1904 edited the Philadelphia Public Ledger. Neither of them seems to have guessed what was wrong with their son, and indeed the trouble was not obvious. Dick as a boy was anything but a sissy. He loved to fight, hated school. At 18 he entered Lehigh University, promptly failed chemistry but made himself the freshman class hero by taking on twelve sophomores singlehanded. He also became a star athlete--and flunked out in his third year. "I will go further," he bellowed at the assembled faculty, "than you will ever go!"

Dick was right. At 24 he had gone as far as the New York Evening Sun. Second day on the job, accosted by a con man in City Hall Park, he tackled the fellow, hollered for the cops, and wrote the story up with a gusto that made him from that moment the Sun's star reporter. Within a year he had a national reputation as the author of some witty and wildly popular short stories. At 25 he took over as managing editor of Harper's Weekly, at that time probably the nation's most prestigious periodical, and at 26 he took off for the Mexican border.

In the next 26 years Reporter Davis seemed to visit every country and to cover every war--at $1,000 a week plus expenses. In England Davis hobbed so intimately with the nobs that the P.M., Arthur Balfour, used to drop by at his rooms for a shank-of-the-morning snack. In Venezuela he ate his first avocado, promptly introduced the fruit to the U.S. market. In Cuba he wrote fiery dispatches that, front-paged by Hearst, helped to push the U.S. into war with Spain; and once war was declared, R.H.D.'s spectacular reports on the Rough Riders helped make T.R. a national hero. In Belgium, two years before his death, Davis wrote a classic account of the German invasion--one of the war's finest pieces of frontline reporting.

Davis was a brilliant descriptive reporter with a breezy, intimate flow of language and a sensual precision of phrase. Bullets whirred past him like "rustling silk," shrapnel made "the jarring sound of telephone wires when someone strikes the pole." Politically he was naive and jingoistic. Personally he was humane and brave. Some regarded him as an unconscionable prig--"a robust flower of American muscular Christianity . . . the artistic boy scout," William Rothenstein called him.

There was a note of moral uplift in everything he wrote, and his friends often had a hard time eluding his efforts to improve them. Another critic wrote: "He has an unaffected natural talent for praising courage, chivalry and undemonstrativeness in words which inspire distaste for these good things. Have you never risen from a perusal of Mr. Davis on Chivalry with a determination never again, no matter how infirm the woman or how heavy-laden, to rise from your seat in the car for her sake?"

Boy scout or not, Davis had a genius for the self-advertising gesture. What's more, he was smug--a stuffed shirt, loaded with medals, who found far too many opportunities to deplore the young women who gushed over poor, handsome him. "I am," he concluded comfortably, "too attractive."

The Platonic Wife. The fact is, says Author Langford, that though the girls certainly gushed, they seldom did anything more than that--and neither did he. His mother seems to have been at the bottom of the trouble. Davis wrote her a long, detailed letter almost every day of his life.

At 35 Davis married a wealthy Chicago socialite named Cecil Clark, an "advanced" woman who preferred raising dogs to raising children. Before the wedding she informed him that the marriage would be platonic. He agreed. Thirteen years later, after his mother died, he found the strength to get a divorce. At 48 he married a showgirl, Bessie McCoy, who was half his age.

Shortly after the first marriage a critic wrote: "His work does not change nor grow old. [But] the perennial charm and youthfulness of his stories appear a little unnatural now . . . Will Mr. Davis always remain twenty-three?" He did not. At 51, R.H.D. began to have attacks of angina pectoris. At 52, after an exhausting tour of the Western Front, he died as a good reporter might perhaps prefer to die--with the phone in his hand and a sentence in his typewriter.

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