Bloody Bill Barnes
576 THE COMMONWEAL October 9, I929 La Guardia, the Republican candidate and the one chiefly responsible for the dilemma's posing, can add heavily to his score. And the other mayoralty...
...it is whether he was within his faith as a Christian...
...but we also know that no Catholic priest would dream of duplicating Mr...
...Blackshear's stand, or if he did duplicate it, we cannot imagine his superiors finding it a question "for himself alone...
...You devote a chapter to each of the several occasions on which his six stout serving men carried him to bed...
...Some of his gifts are widely distributed...
...And thus it avoids the whole point at issue...
...For advertising purposes, it insists upon a relationship with him, but it must irk the great man no end to have this bastard call him father...
...It was a very dull sort of writing, guaranteed to exhaust any reader who had to follow zts tortuous course through two fat volumes...
...Thousands of men can write a good phrase, and thousands can transmute a dull record into a lively story...
...It is an answer which proves nothing except that the Brooklyn rector has "in no manner violated the canons of conduct governing his official action...
...Strachey's work is beyond question...
...On April t, I9oo , he first saw the light of day, and on April 8 he was baptized, being given the name of Leonard (William) in honor of his father, an ironmonger, who had it in turn from his grandfather, also an ironmonger, who had first brought the name, and the craft, from Pennsylvania, whither he had arrived as a boy from Glasgow, Scotland, in I8ao, to Detroit, in Michigan Territory in I832...
...It looked easy enough...
...In place of the telltale Life and Letters, most of them have extra fancy titles, meant to give them the display appeal of novels, and it is only by reading the descriptive note that one discovers their secret...
...Blackshear was within his rights as a rector of the Protestant Episcopal Church...
...The formula is rather simple...
...Rightly or wrongly, we feel that we know his eminent Victorians about as well as their intimates did, and much better than if he had not written about them...
...THE first annual meeting of the Protestant Episcopal bishops of the United States was presented with the delicate problem of making some Jim Crow answer to the many protests against the Religions Jim Crow rectorate of the Reverend William Blackshear of Brooklyn, and met it by stating that "the question of expelling Negro members from his congregation is one concerning himself alone...
...But without it there is no value in the new biography...
...And the other mayoralty candidates can also be expected to make the utmost out of the material which has been so providentially offered them by this legal opportunity...
...From it we fled at the first opportunity, but the time comes now when we must return to it, all prodigally penitent...
...It is a gift not so easy to imitate...
...The importance of Mr...
...Their authors are not usually men of standing in scholarship or criticism, but bright enough fellows, nevertheless, who write uniformly well, have a knack for telling a story, and who have picked this avenue to a literary career as quicker, more profitable and on the whole pleasanter than the job on a newspaper which their parents and teachers advised them to secure...
...You describe at length those evenings on which his appetite for ripe goose resulted in acute indigestion, and you tell what came of his stomach troubles...
...He gives reality to whatever he may touch...
...That is because the Church realizes as one of its duties the dispersal of such nonsense, and will not ignore it...
...What there is to recommend them we know not, unless it is an abundance of what the reviewers have been calling "gusto...
...We are convinced that he has made known to us the real Queen Victoria...
...You discover an obsession, because that is the easiest way to give his life a pattern...
...You find a subject, preferably a man who was very fond of eating and drinking...
...But no one in our time has equally with him the gift of divining a state of mind in a word, a gesture, not by comparing and reflecting upon similar words and gestures in the life of his subject, but by recreating the very moment in which the word was written, the gesture made, thereby permitting us to substitute ourselves for the subject, and to feel that what is being said about him is truly said...
...576 THE COMMONWEAL October 9, I929 La Guardia, the Republican candidate and the one chiefly responsible for the dilemma's posing, can add heavily to his score...
...It becomes very really a question concerning, not the Reverend William Blackshear alone, nor the bishops alone, but everyone who is interested in seeing men live together in tolerance and mutual good-will...
...His success was flattering enough to encourage a whole multitude to emulate him...
...Then you let him go to make a really magnificent fool of himself to the extent of some 3oo pages...
...We recognize the fact that within the rank and file of the Church there is perhaps as large a percentage of prejudice toward the Negro as anywhere else, and this we deplore...
...For the question is not whether Mr...
...Lytton Strachey responsible for so unlike an offspring...
...To his business you pay as little attention as possible...
...Unless his favorite authors are Petronius and Boccaccio you say nothing of his reading...
...We have looked into some of these and found them counterfeit in the sense that they are blithely sure in their estimates and judgments without managing to impart anything like the same certainty to the reader...
...This is what the new biography has come to, and it is manifestly unfair to make Mr...
...Without it, we should much prefer that an author write his life of that incorrigible poet, Leonard MacTavish, or that benevolent bandit, Bloody Bill Barnes, in the old honest fashion...
...But it had its virtues: of solidity, of unpretence...
...BLOODY BILL BARNES HIS autumn the publishers are again offering us many biographies in the "new" fashion, "written with all the grace of fiction"--lives of great and near great men of letters, politicians, actresses and villains retake your choice...
Vol. 10 • October 1929 • No. 23
