MICHAEL SEAN STRICKLAND

The Author of The Author of “Trixie”

The June 9, 1919, edition of The Daily News (London) ran a short review of Caine’s The Wife Who Came Alive. Rather than taking the trouble to give an accurate and comprehensive account of the novel, the unnamed reviewer (a reviewer who, by the way, would become, three and a half years later, a clubmate of Caine’s — E. M. Forster) takes the easy way out and fills half his scantly allotted space with a bowdlerized quote from the end of the first chapter of the novel, where the impending mother-in-law explains her daughter’s name and, obliquely, the novel’s title — odd tactic for a writer who seems to think that ease of reading belies both a book’s worth and its author’s diligence; that apparent lightness of touch implies lightness of literary essence:

This book is easily written and easily read. It is apparently the twentieth book that Mr. Caine has produced, and there is no reason he should not produce twenty more. They cannot cost him the least effort. The subject is a spoilt American beauty, who reforms. Married to an Englishman of moderate means, she grows discontented because he will not let her change the new green wall paper for blue, and finally leaves him to live with her silly, fond mother. The mother is amusingly done, and her Americanisms neatly caught:

“When I was a tiny tad,” she said, “I was ever so fond of all my dolls; but there was one special one called Phœbe, that I simply adored. She was a very considerable doll, and she had real hair, and she could say ‘popper’ and ‘mommer,’ and she had a whole outfit of clothes in her trunk. I first learned to use my needle making things for her. And the one wish of my heart was to have her come alive. ‘Some day,’ I used to say to myself, ‘it will happen really.’ And at last it did, and my Doll was born and all my silly prayers were answered. That’s why I called her Doll, you know. She’s my Doll — my Doll That Came Alive.’”

She ceased, and touched her eyes lightly with her handkerchief. “What a stupid old story!” she exclaimed, gaily. “I’m real ashamed to have told it to you, Mr. March. But I guess you’ll not think the worse of me, will you?”

Finally, Doll leaves her mother too, and tries to become an actress. Her disillusionment is mildly entertaining. Then she is returned to her husband, per his virtuous friend, who loves Doll madly, etc., etc. All ends well, and the book does all right to read in the Tube, provided one can get a seat. But Mr. Caine has not taken the least trouble over it, and if the author won’t take the trouble, why should anyone else? (“Literature; Entertainment,” The Daily News, Monday, June 9, 1919, p. 6).

Forster fails to mention that Doll’s mother is not simply amusingly American, she is doting to the point of insanity, and that Doll’s fiancé, George March, is not merely “an Englishman of moderate means,” he is a talented, successful portrait painter, who, though he does not yet, will in a few years, have the means to satisfy even the most preposterous whims Mrs. Brackett thinks her Doll That Came Alive deserves, such as a larger house with a prettier maid in a more upscale neighborhood of the sort where March’s friend, the wealthier and better pedigreed Dick Crewe, lives. After the wedding, Mrs. Brackett, noticing Crewe’s enchantment with her daughter, will even plot to make him Doll’s excuse for a divorce, to the disgust of both. Perhaps it was Forster’s “smothering closeness” with his own mother which led him to dismiss Caine’s deftly critical yet sympathetic portrayal of avaricious social-climbing and helicopter parenting bien à l’avance — and their repercussions on the child and her relationships — as simply the amusing behavior of a “silly, fond” American mother. In any case, another of Forster’s elisions (one shared, however, with all the reviews of The Wife Who Came Alive which I’ve been able to find) is that the novel was first published two years earlier in New York (perhaps because it was in Germany where Doll and George’s romance began) as Three’s a Crowd, with the subtitle An Anglo-Persian Dict — I mean, An Anglo-American Comedy. Why that slip? Recall the list of books on Sebastian Knight’s bookshelf which I reproduced in § 1 and which is the start of this whole project. The first thing one notices about that list is that several titles are actually, or rather, potentially, doubles. For instance, Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, in the original Michel Lévy edition, consists of two volumes; likewise for the original Gallimard edition of Proust’s Le Temps Retrouvé. And if one imagines Malory’s La Morte d’Arthur to be the version illustrated by Aubrey Beardsley and issued on normal paper by J. M. Dent, London, in 1893-1894, that title, too, would consist of two volumes. Norman Douglas’s South Wind, furthermore, though originally published in a single volume in 1917 by Martin Secker, London, was reissued in a well-known two-volume illustrated version by Argus Books, Chicago, in 1929. Which version was on Knight’s bookshelf in 1936? Moreover, the plots of several of the titles revolve around fictional, spurious, often purloined or inchoate, literary works — the three volumes of bound research notes stolen by Mr. Marvel in The Invisible Man; the enlarged, annotated version of Monsignor Perrelli’s Antiquities of Nepenthe which Ernest Eames has been working on for several years in South Wind; the play to “catch the conscience of the king” in Hamlet; the faux Goncourt in Le Temps Retrouvé; the multi-volume philosophical encyclopedia in potentiali entitled Typical Developments which Burnand so often claims to be working on in About Buying a Horse… In other words, I like to think that, in this list of literary works in which a second literary work is intrinsically (or at least whimsically) involved, this list of books which are, literally, doubles, Nabokov inserted his Anglo-Persian Dictionary (which, by the way, is the only spurious title of the lot) just before The Author of Trixie as an oblique allusion to two other novels by the lesser known Caine, two novels which are actually the same novel doubled over a two-year interval, an interval which takes the form, as it were, of a shimmer of errors, since some typos in the first version are corrected in the second, while others are added.

“Three’s a Crowd,” the tale of an Anglo-American marriage by William Caine, has had an adventurous career. The author is an Englishman and the manuscript came from England to this country during the summer. After a long delay the manuscript, in two volumes, put in an appearance, very much battered and water soaked. It had been on a torpedoed steamer and after being recovered had continued on its journey. A page of the manuscript, showing the damage done by sea water, is now on exhibition at the annual exhibition of the National Arts Club in New York (“Books and Their Writers,” The Courier-Journal (Louisville, Ky), Monday Morning, November 12, 1917, p. 6).

Also include: compare Caine's description of Doll to Dorothea's description of Hannah Caine in Colman n.d.: 13 (quoted in § 2)?

Slight affinity between Kate Reignolds's anecdote how she began her theatrical career and Doll's meeting with theatrical producer. [?] (See Yesterdays with Actors, chapter on Edwin Forrest.)

Caine's dedication of Angler at Large ("one woman")

[Cut from 8: Insert into this section:] Before continuing with the topic just introduced, namely, George Calderon, I would like to pause briefly and note in passing a similarity of a different sort which “A Deal in Villages” seems to share with both Caine’s prefatory note reproduced at the start of this section and his story from The Fan, “The Rout of Sir John,” which I discussed in § 4. Just as Caine implies that he got the title Old Enough to Know Better from his wife; just as the inspiration for using distorting mirrors to rout the ghost of Sir John from a haunted mansion came from a woman, Harry Shaw’s future wife Christina Hendrie; so too is it a woman, specifically his wife Lady Benson, who implants in Sir Benson’s mind (pp. 121–122) the project for building his own English village just outside the gates of his mansion (with, alas, disastrous results). First, however, I would like to reproduce two passages from Old Enough to Know Better which are similar to that from Caine’s story “The Rout of Sir John” (see § 4) where Harry Shaw gazes at Christina Hendrie “in mute admiration” of her ingenuity.

"One woman" show of paintings in Drones

[Refer back to Ulrica Wynd, § 4:] the first character the reader encounters in Caine’s Drones (September 1917) is named Eric Winstanley