Talk:Portrait of a Man with Red Hair

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Reviews

• The Bookman, Dec. 1925.

The most exciting story he has written in years, with descriptions surpassing in color the unusual character of the events.

• "A Trivial Portrait" by William Lyon Phelps in The Forum, Jan. 1926.

Of all the great English novelists, Dickens is the only one who enjoyed a reputation before he was thirty. Mr. Walpole achieved something like fame by the publication of Fortitude at the age of twenty-nine; the splendid promise of that interesting though verbose work was fulfilled in three admirable works of art, — The Green Mirror, The Cathedral, The Old Ladies. Now the busy author has taken a vacation in the composition of Portrait of a Man with Red Hair (Doran, $2.00). I have no objection to his amusing himself with writing this story; my objection is to his publishing it. No critic has any jurisdiction over an author's territory; if a realist wishes to invade the fields of romance, it is nobody's business but his own. For my part, I cannot say that I prefer in general realism to romance. All I want is a good story well told. I say this because I have in advance no preconceived theory as to what kind of book Hugh Walpole or any one else should write; and because Floyd Dell, who has chosen to write a beautiful book called Runaway has been roundly abused by those reviewers who thought they had him classified. I had rather read a good romance like Lorna Doone than a dull novel like The Green Hat. I had rather read a fine novel like Esther Waters than a nickel-plated romance like The Strolling Saint.

My lament in reading Portrait of a Man with Red Hair is not that it is a romance, but that it is so excessively unimportant. It is simply one more mechanical tale of mystery, crime, and a beleaguered damozel. The red-headed villain is finally chucked out of the window, like the sly butler in The Green Goddess.

By the way, why do we say black-haired, brown-haired, yellow-haired, and red-headed? When I was a child it was considered a misfortune to have red hair. A boy, if so handicapped, had to demonstrate his right to live with his fists; a girl suffered from daily insults, in which the word "carrots" was the least offensive. Later, owing perhaps to various novelists, red hair lost its sting, became often, indeed, an enviable possession. I hope that the probable popularity of this wild yarn will not bring the redheads back into opprobrium.

Of course this book is well written; its author is a literary artist. The opening chapters are exceedingly fine; I find them more interesting than the later developments of the plot. It is a story of villainy, insanity, torture, and horror; but I did not care for it, and awaited the outcome with complacency.

A man who has shown magnificent ability in The Cathedral and in The Old Ladies ought not to publish a triviality like this. Let the second-raters write the thrillers; they have their day and cease to be. But Mr. Walpole, with a well-earned and hard-won place among the leading writers of our time, should run his race unhindered by excess baggage. He insists that this story is "readable"; I found it not nearly so readable as The Old Ladies.

• "The Book Table," edited by Edmund Pearson in Outlook, 6 Jan. 1926.

"The man's hair was en brosse, standing straight on end as Loge's used to do in the old pre-war Bayreuth 'Ring.' It was, like Loge's, a flaming red, short, harsh, instantly arresting.... For the rest this interesting figure had a body round, short and fat like a ball. Over his protruding stomach stretched a white waistcoat with three little plain black buttons. The color of his face had an unnatural pallor, something like the clown in Pagliacci, or again like one of Benda's masks.... The eyebrows were so faint as to be scarcely visible. The mouth in the white of the face was a thin hard red scratch."

This is the portrait of Crispin, the man with red hair, in Hugh Walpole's latest fantasy, for it isn't a novel. It is a thrilling macabre story of suppressed horror, ghostly towers, torture, and escape through the fog. There is no psychological meaning nor elaborate allegory in the thing, as Walpole himself is only too quick to admit in his Introduction.

The only literary stunt in the entire book, albeit that is a magnificent one, lies in the description of Crispin himself. Hugh Walpole seems to have been much impressed with America on his recent visit. The hero is an art-loving American from Oregon, and if you will but re-read the opening paragraph you must agree that Crispin, the "Man With Red Hair," is none other than our old friend Jiggs of "Bringing Up Father." Jiggs, boon companion of Dinty Moore, lover of corned beef and cabbage, eternally bound to Maggie the wife, is the physical shell into which Walpole has poured the character of this mad sadist with his etchings and his jade, his torture chamber and faithful brooding son.

It is a notable tour de force, for never once does the figure seem incongruous or the story descend to bathos. Here is indeed a book for a winter evening. Would there were more of its caliber!

• The Saturday Review, 16 Jan. 1926.

Hugh Walpole claims only "readability" for his latest novel, "Portrait of a Man with Red Hair." In a recent tilt with H. L. Mencken, Mr. Walpole has named himself as the most conservative of present day English novelists. There is a grain of truth in the statement although the author of "Jeremy" has wandered down many of the bye-paths of literature from the packed realism of "The Captives" through the romance of "The Dark Forest" to the fragile diablerie of "The Old Ladies." In them all, Mr. Walpole has fairly well abided by the mandate of Henry Fielding with which he prefaces the present novel. "Every writer may be permitted to deal as much in the wonderful as he pleases; nay, if he then keeps within the rules of credibility, the more he can surprise the reader the more he will engage his attention, and the more he will charm him." In the literary iconoclasm of the day there are many readers who are glad to have one novelist who has not turned his back on the old gods and yet is conscious of the new. The "Portrait of a Man with Red Hair" is a rapidly moving mystery story, more than touched with horror, and, as the author admits, open to allegorical interpretation. There is no doubt that it is to the highest degree readable.

• Donald Douglas in "The Novelist as Lecturer," The Nation, 9 Dec. 1925:

It takes all sorts of St. Georges and slimy dragons to make a world for novelists to play in, and Hugh Walpole has always been a very special sort of St. George riding down the horrid dragon of modern realism. Ever since he came mounted on his first stallion, “The Wooden Horse,” he has gone about armed with virtue and looking for scaled monsters to demolish with a fine charge of bright words and all kinds of encouragement to other young men vowed to the sacred cause of what he calls romance. Of late years he has taken younger writers under his particular dispensation and informed the public that romance is coming again into her own and that dragons lie waiting to be slain. At one time he planned or appeared to plan a set of novels called The Rising City which somehow was going to include the life of our own time. It began with “Fortitude” and “The Duchess of Wrexe” and trailed off somehow like a lopped dragon’s tail, and now these novels are listed simply as The London Novels and “The Dark Forest” and “The Secret City” are listed as just novels. Has Mr. Walpole lost faith in his skill at building a rising city and does his sentimental flight into books like “Jeremy” and “Portrait of a Man with Red Hair” mean that he has bitten off more dragon than he can chew?

If it were not for the reputation and the importance attached by all sorts of persons and publics to the name of Hugh Walpole there would be no special reason for so serious an investigation of his success at busting dragons. He began by being one of those promising younger novelists whose later works stretch out like promissory notes at a low rate of discount. He has ended by growing more and more sentimental about his heroines and more and more explicit about the world’s need of purity and romance and more and more severe on the sins of modern realism. “Modern cleverness,” he exclaims in his latest work, “has taken one’s beliefs away, modern stupidity has deprived one of the possibility of romance. No God, no heroes any more.” It isn’t any new charge which Mr. Walpole is bringing against the dragon of the slime. Ever since his first book he has tried to substitute something for the omissions of this century. His formula never varies; and even where he calls his “Portrait of a Man with Red Hair” a “romantic macabre” he is simply ringing changes on the ideas of “Prelude to Adventure” and “The Green Mirror” and “The Gods and Mr. Perrin.” One may protest that all this bears little resemblance to the true romance.

The plot of the last book is the plot of the first book; and that is very little objection, provided only that the plot brings enchantment to its capture of the dragon. Mr. Walpole always has a bashful lonely young-old man desperately anxious to stop being bashful and lonely in a world which has made him not a soldier and always afraid. He goes by the name of Maradick or Galleon or Harkness. Somehow in the heart of life glitters a golden adventure which calls him just once or forever passes him by in his shyness and his ingrowing loneliness. It may be war or the Russian revolution or writing a novel or (as in the case of “Fortitude”) marrying a girl who keeps him from real life so that he at last solves things by going out and talking to the ocean. As often as not he goes to some Cornish town and knows before his departure that romance waits for him in some mysterious enterprise and that he simply must not fail his trust. For any number of pages Mr. Walpole clucks round him and explains him and mothers him generally while you cry aloud for the story to get started. At last something exciting catches the hero and encompasses him in an ecstasy shared at great length by Mr. Walpole, and then he has something to do with helping a young girl before whose purity and grace Mr. Walpole himself is utterly prostrate in golden words. At last the young-old man proves his mettle by being unselfish and giving up the girl to a younger man and shaking off the rigid sheath of his bashfulness and slaying dragons and making himself generally useful and ending by being lonely but serene in a proved fortitude. All along the way Mr. Walpole is very edifying.

It is a very special kind of romance which would be acceptable enough if only Mr. Walpole really could spin a yarn. In the preface to “Portrait of a Man with Red Hair” he protests he has done no more than just write a story. He invents a horrible pale man who wants to torture a young girl and locks her in a tower and captures her two knights-errant and tries to torture them and at last gets thrown off the tower into the sea. It takes Mr. Walpole nearly a hundred pages to explain the situation and his hero. It takes him thirty or forty pages to have the hero and the girl sit near the ocean and recognize each other’s purity and merit. The story pads round and round a house where something horrible is about to happen while Mr. Walpole talks and talks about romance and landscape and etchings and pure young girls. After any amount of preparation he takes you into the house and keeps you there possibly one minute while he pushes the villain through the window.

Unless he is as good as Algernon Blackwood there is not much use in any other writer trying to make an Algernorn Blackwood story. It isn’t a question of Mr. Walpole’s good intentions or the niceness of his characters. It is simply that he has no story to tell and any amount of lectures to deliver. He sends you flying away from younger novelists still promising and promising. You go packing toward Algernon Blackwood’s “Dr. John Silence” and “The Willows” and “Max Hensig” and “The Wendigo”—where you are promised horror and where you get horror, and a thrill, and literary genius.