The Literary Career of W. B. Trites

By Richard Rex

This book discusses the eight novels by American expatriate author W. B. Trites, who, although highly praised by such contemporaries H. G. Wells, Joseph Conrad, W. B. Maxwell, Max Beerbohm, L. P. Hartley, and Frank Harris, among others, remains curiously unknown today. His spare style, which pre-dated Hemingway’s by several decades, did not impress publishers accustomed to more expansive prose. Worse still, his prospects suffered from the forbidden social he dared to explore in a less open era, when publishers shied away from controversial topics. Richard Rex’s masterful discussion of Trites’s remarkable novels includes contemporary reviews, comments on the author’s themes, his negotiations with publishers, and biographical details heretofore unknown.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Academica Press
• Release date: Mar 23, 2023
• ISBN: 9781680537284

Book preview

Cover: The Literary Career of W. B. Trites by Richard E. Rex

The Literary Career of W. B. Trites

Richard E. Rex

Academica Press

Washington~London

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Rex, Richard, author.

Title: The literary career of w. b. trites | Richard Rex

Description: Washington : Academica Press, 2023. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2023934825 | ISBN 9781680537277 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781680537284 (ebook)

Copyright 2023 Richard Rex

Also by Richard E. Rex

"The Sins of Madame Eglentyne," and Other Essays on Chaucer

Alice Muriel Williamson:

The Secret History of an American-English Author

Contents

Chapter I

The Gypsy

Chapter II

John Cave and Barbara Gwynne

Chapter III

Brian Banaker’s Autobiography

Chapter IV

Ask the Young

Chapter V

Paterfamilias

Chapter VI

A Modern Girl and Miramar

Appendix I

W. B. Trites: A New Novelist By Frank Harris

Appendix II

The Gypsy (Green Lane Press, 1926)

I

II

III

IV

V

VI

VII

VIII

IX

X

XI

XII

XIII

XIV

XV

Bibliography

Books

Short Fiction

Notes

Index

Chapter I

The Gypsy

If W. B. Trites is remembered today it is for The Gypsy, his best-known and best-received work, though not by any means the first of his novels to be praised. It appeared serially in Harper’s Bazaar in 1927 (as The Gipsy) before being published in book form the following year by Stokes in an exceptionally beautiful edition (concurrently by Gollancz in a more modestly presented edition in London). These were preceded by an undated, cheap and unattractive edition printed privately by the author in Nice (Green Lane Press). The story, a novella, had been composed several years earlier, indicated in a private letter of 8 September 1923 wherein the author refers to it as having just been finished.¹ In a letter to the editor of The Dial (30 August 1925) he states that he he had worked on it for over a year.² Additional evidence suggests that its date of conception was almost certainly December 1922 or January 1923, being completed shortly before September 1923.

The story concerns the strange attraction of an older, married American artist to a young gypsy girl, which, owing to the seemingly inevitable playing out of its tragic consequences, has the feel of a Greek tragedy. Praised by some critics for its power, it was dismissed by others for its implausibility. Plausibility, however, in The Gypsy, as in Greek tragedy, has to do as much with emotion as to plot, reactions varying from reader to reader. Writing for the Book of the Month Club, Dorothy Canfield perfectly described the problem of its reception: "More like a poem than a novel, The Gypsy stands or falls by its total effect. If reading it brings you nothing but the unpleasant story of a deservedly unappreciated painter, excited by his model’s flesh to a late flicker of talent, drifting from faithless dreams to connivance in his wife’s murder, weakly repenting, weakly accepting death, getting nothing he desired, but pretty much what he deserved—if that is all you see in it, there is nothing more to be said. Except that, looked at from the same angle, little value would be left to Macbeth, Tristram and Isolde, Orestes. At all events, it is quite useless to qualify, to analyze, to say that this scene is well written, that incident rather out of focus. The whole thing sticks together, a coherent work of art. And for that very reason if you do like it, you like it enormously—more and more; this tiny book, barely a third the average novel length, refuses to be forgotten. It grows in memory, exquisitely restrained, poignant, and for all its sordid plot, strangely beautiful—beautiful in its strong simplicity of phrase and incident, in its pathos."³ A reviewer for the Bristol Evening News found similarly: A summary of the story leaves everything unsaid, its dark, poignant beauty cannot be recaptured thus. Neither does the book lend itself to illuminating quotation—it is such a compact, interdependent piece of work that it is difficult to detach this scene or that for separate appraisal. Everywhere this little book…has been proclaimed as a masterpiece of the true blood, and the present writer joins whole-heartedly in the chorus of praise.⁴

The idea (or germ of it) for The Gypsy was almost certainly suggested by an incident in Edith Wharton’s A Son at the Front, which began appearing serially in Scribner’s Magazine in December 1922. Early in Wharton’s novel an American artist, traveling in Spain with his wife, happens to look out of the train window near Ronda, where he sees a compellingly attractive peasant girl (identified later as a gypsy): The vision filled the carriage-window and then vanished; but it remained so sharply impressed on Campton that even then he knew what was going to happen. Abandoning his wife in Ronda on a pretext for a day or two, he disappears for a month. A divorce follows. Asked years later by an acquaintance why he had done it, he is unable to offer any explanation, conscious that he could not explain. And so it is in The Gypsy. The idea in both stories concerns a sensitive American artist whose creative lassitude is suddenly lifted by a peasant or gypsy girl. Trites expands upon Wharton’s incident, developing into profound tragedy what in A Son at the Front had been merely the catalyst for divorce. His debt is apparent by the similarity of ideas, the dates that A Son appeared in Scribner’s, and Trites’s admission to William Lyon Phelps that he looked at Scribner’s every month.⁵ There is, too, in the gypsy’s mother a hint of Mrs. Herne of Lavengro, a book for which Trites had profound admiration.⁶

There is some question about the date of the author’s Green Lane Press edition of the story, privately printed by the author at Nice. The answer lies with an inscription by Trites to Arthur Brisbane, dated Nice 1927, in a detached fly-leaf from that edition preserved in archives of the New York Public Library. The author concludes his inscription by doubting (although obviously hoping otherwise) that Brisbane will read his book. Brisbane, of course, being an indefatigable reader, not only read the book, but liked it, as may be inferred from its subsequent serial appearance in Harper’s Bazaar in May/June 1927. The Green Lane Press edition, therefore, was clearly printed well before May 1927. In fact there is presumptive evidence that it was printed in 1926, the date assigned to it in brackets by a cataloger at the University of California at Santa Barbara who likely employed the year it was received. Brisbane, as Trites was fully aware, made many of the publishing decisions for Hearst magazines which at that time included Hearst’s International, Nash’s Pall Mall, Harper’s Bazaar and Cosmopolitan—the first two having already published several of Trites’s short stories. It was certainly Brisbane, again, who subsequently authorized publication in book form by Cosmopolitan of Trites’s novel, Paterfamilias, in 1929. Thus the Green Lane Press edition served Trites well by bringing his story to Brisbane’s attention, and, following its serialization in Harper’s Bazaar, to Stokes’s attention, who published it as a novel in 1928, leading in turn to the Cosmopolitan edition of Paterfamilias in 1929.

The Gypsy continued to occupy Trites for more than a decade. The film director, Rex Ingram, paid him a substantial option for its movie rights, perhaps envisaging his wife, Ellen Terry, in the role of the artist’s wife.⁷ But those plans never materialized owing to the sudden demise of Ingram’s career brought about by Louis Mayer’s and Irving Thalberg’s refusal to renew his contract with MGM. At some point John Huston appears to have considered filming the story, no doubt envisioning his father in the starring role; at least he told Trites that he thought it would make a fine film.⁸ Subsequently, Trites prepared a scenario for impresario Maurice Bowne, with whom he corresponded for nearly five years concerning its production as a play, followed by a complete playscript which he sent to his agent, Ralph Pinker.⁹ Browne’s interest seems never to have flagged despite the defection of a backer, inasmuch as he was still attempting to have it produced as late as April 1935.¹⁰ Trites’s hopes for a movie or theatrical production of his play eventually came to nothing, and, owing to a worsening financial position, he relocated to Ibiza in May 1934, eking out a subsistence by selling short journalistic articles and anecdotes to the newspaper syndicates (a source of income he had pursued ever since leaving the Philadelphia Record in his twenties)¹¹—acknowleded during an interview in 1913: Journalism of the higher type is the only clean-paying field open to a struggling author in America… He can make money handling facts and use his leisure to write as an artist….Not reporting necessarily; but special articles, anecdotes…syndicate work….By sticking to such work three days a week, a man of ability can readily make…a living out of it¹² After a year’s residence at the Gran Hotel, he took a large castle-like house above the beach just outside the town of San Antonio Abad, where he and his wife, Estelle, continued to reside until his death in 1950. He would publish nothing more in the line of fiction during his remaining fifteen years of exile at Ibiza.

In the late 1940s Estelle contributed a weekly column to the Philadelphia Bulletin, in addition to several travel articles (partly autobiographical) describing life in Ibiza. She implies that her husband was still writing. But whether or not this was true, her contributions to the Bulletin seem more like brave attempts to conceal her husband’s creative lassitude in a setting and circumstance uncannily similar to Arthur Mallock’s in The Gypsy. It may be supposed that Trites’s own lassitude began much earlier, recognition of failure (as well as his debt to Edith Wharton’s story) forming the basis for his novella. In any case, his inability to write fiction during subsequent Ibiza years may have been tied to his efforts toward production of a lucrative play, hoping thus to reinvigorate his career and achieve financial solvency. Certainly he and Estelle were facing indigency, for it was the need to reduce expenses that they moved