Forty-Odd Years in the Literary Shop
by . New York: E. P. Dutton & Company, 1921. 8vo, x+362 pp. Illustrated. $5.00.
FOR the past forty-odd years Mr. Ford has been understudying the rôle of ringmaster in New York’s literary circus. This Volume of lively and candid memoirs ought finally to gain for him the master’s coveted silk hat, equestrian boots, and long-tailed morning coat.
It was as far back as the late seventies that Mr, Ford began cracking his whip over the heads of those who essayed to ride Pegasus, without a bridle, around the bookman’s sawdust ring; putling them all smartly through their paws, and touching them up roundly if ever they fell at all maladroitly from the back of their old charger.
The literary roles already enacted by the author of these beguiling memoirs include those of critic, — oh. yes, decidedly critic,—novelist, satirist, journalist, editor, anthologist, book-reviewer, and — only a month ago — autobiographer. In these various capacities he has known and foregathered with the chief personal ingredients in the mixed grill of metropolitan life — with writers, of course, but also with actors, diplomats, painters, playwrights, music-hall artists, bishops, opera singers, burglars, ward politicians, negro minstrels, tworhymes-to-the-quatrain poets, side-tent showmen, affluent bankers, and artless chorus girls. His book is full of vivid recollections of all such types, as well as of such widely separated metropolitan figures as Tony Pastor, Vesta Tilley, P. T. Barnum, Mrs. Leslie Carter, Mrs. Grover Cleveland, H. C. Bunner, Edwin Booth, Lillian Russell, John Fiske, Eleonora Duse, William Dean Howells, Carmencita, Weber and Fields, Frank R. Stockton, Ada Lewis, and Brainier Matthews — all of these being pictured (in somewhat yearning poses) among the illustrations in the book. The pages dedicated to such arcadian favorites, and to many another one of fragrant memory, are infused with a full measure of recondite information and a genuine and contagious humor.
Too many of the recent historians of New York have vouchsafed us but partial, single-track pictures of the city. They have shown us only its topography, or politics, or architecture, or finance, or sociological progress — dry and lifeless material at best. But Mr. Ford, because of the variety of his contacts with high and low life in New York, his sympathetic quality as an expositor, and his endless chain of picturesque acquaintances, has managed, in these cross-sectioned memoirs, to recreate for us much of the color and movement of the kaleidoscopic life which he has known so well and enjoyed so keenly.
We regret to note an obvious misprint on the title-page. The author is there alluded to as James L. Ford. But if any inquirer will be good enough to interview a thousand or so of the more prominent figures in the maelstrom of New York, including its dialect writers, lady harpists, psychoanalysts, dowagers of the parterre circle, editors of the New Republic, priestesses in the teadungeons of Greenwich Village, settlement workers, opera singers, and Supreme Court justices, he will discover that, while all of them admit to a long and intimate friendship with a Ford named Jim, not one of them but will denounce, as a palpable impostor, any Ford pretending to be Jim but calling himself James.
FRANK CROWNINSHIELD.