Editions MSS
11 cour du Coq : Paris | Owlstain : Château Methuen
He could write about anything. That was his quality and that was his defect. His genius was too diverse and he was not the man to discipline and to restrain its waywardness. When he wrote about fly-fishing for trout — a sport he loved — he became the despair, the magnet, the idol of others — quorum pars minima — who also wrote about fly-fishing for trout, a sport they loved. His mannerisms were his own. They were inimitable; yet they invited and compelled imitation. I know that I have in my time imitated Caine — copied him shamelessly and unconsciously and made a hash of the copying. He would talk of ‘trouts’ for instance, so that others among us talked of ‘trouts.’ I am sure that he was wrong. I am sure that, at the best, this was a trick such as the tenor uses when he casts a note into the higher octave. But, it seemed, when Caine so wrote, that this preciosity of ‘trouts’ was the most desirable of all literary allures, which means, of course, that Caine had that streak og genius which invested his very own style with an attraction defying the conventions and defeating the contrefaçons.[Connect above with my Nabokov's Infernos Dream; Nabokov's "ichthyology" and red herring of Paul Leiris, etc.]His conversation on fishing was just the same. It is indeed a poverty of wit which renders an angler incapable of provoking interested mirth when he recounts, with mock humility, the tale of his own bungling, failures, terrors and defeats. Caine had the wealth of wit which could interest and divert the listener even if he recounted truthfully the tale of a successful hour.
He was the perfect companion on the bank of a trout stream; never jealous, never too obviously in earnest, always competent and fulfilled with the grace of sportsmanship. He threw a pretty and accurate line, dry or wet. He understood the moods of trout. He had the lore of rivers. And he was anxious to excel.
He was the perfect host. My mind goes back to days long before the war and to visits paid to him and his wife — ‘spouse’ was a literary conceit of his, just as was ‘trouts’ — in a delightful house with a productive mile of water on the Wiltshire Avon. Here were continual sport and never-lacking mirth. H. T. Sheringham was of the party, and lest peradventure his traditional triumphs with a rod should increase too far his self-esteem, Caine and I would set ourselves to make a travesty of his renown; or Caine and Sheringham would tell the cold truth about my frantic efforts to cover the feeding fish that either of their superior rods would have lured to a fair and square rise; or Sheringham and I would tell, by strophe and antistrophe, the heroic tale of Caine’s unsuccessful climbing of a tree to recover the cast and fly that neither of us would ever thus have entangled. And we all laughed, because we were young, ambitious and happy. And no temper was ever even frayed. No, not even when our two wives were found to have watched, impiously and profanely, the proud spectacle of Caine and myself bathing in a hatch hole of a small ‘carrier’ and maintaining ourselves side by side like two self-conscious otters with an occasional stroke in the only deep part of that circumscribed and chilly pool. That was on a very hot day in June when we could do no good with the trouts. Meanwhile, as I remember, ‘H. T. S.’ strode contemptuously up stream and returned at even to confront and confound us with a brace of threepounders.
So memory lives on and links the name of William Caine with joyous adventures by rod and pen. He enjoyed words and sentences and phrases. He enjoyed companionship and talk and sport. He has left a heritage to all his friends, and he hands on between the covers of this book the essence and the savour of a style which was the man. He does not disclose the secret of that style. It died with Caine. But he mixes sound knowledge with elusive charm and surprises you with profundity in the middle of a smile (pp. vii–x).
I began this project with a simple question: Who was the author of The Author of “Trixie”? With the help of other authors, I learned that the author of The Author of “Trixie” was “the lesser known Caine” (§ 1) who had married, on July 26, 1907, in London (§ 3), a “tall, rosy-haired and very good-looking” former “Wellesley girl who played the harp with which she always travelled” (§ 5). That is, the author of The Author of “Trixie” was the “well known humorous english writer” (§ 5) William Caine whose “charming American wife” not only “made a considerable reputation on the London stage as Miss Gordon Walker” before her marriage (§ 15), but also “supplied the spark her husband uses to write with” (§ 7). I learned that the author of The Author of “Trixie”, who “was educated at Westminster School, later at St. Andrew’s University, and finally at Balliol College, Oxford,” and at one time was considered to be “distinctly, deservedly, and definitely reaching the front line of English humorists,” also “attribute[d] a great deal of his success to the influence of” his wife (§ 14) “who always re-arranged the furniture in the hotel room completely, even if she was only to stay one night” (§ 5). I learned that the author of The Author of “Trixie” was born in Liverpool on August 28, 1873, to temperance advocate Alice Caine née Brown and that he died, not on September 1 or 5, but on September 2, 1925, in the arms of his wife, while (or after) dancing a tango (or a foxtrot) during a tea dance at the Kursaal in Ostend.
How did he write his books? I assume that he did not type them à la Hemingway, but wrote them longhand à la Sebastian Knight, and paid a typist to type them [(qua Old Enough; and Intruder?)]. Mrs. Caine did not type them, I suppose, since stenography was not listed among her numerous accomplishments, nor did she mention doing so in any of the forewords she wrote for his posthumously published books.
She was tall, rosy-haired and very good-looking. As I mention in the following section, I, like many others, first chanced upon the author of The Author of “Trixie” in Vladimir Nabokov’s The Real Life of Sebastian Knight. As I also mention in that section, the first book I read by the author of The Author of “Trixie” was not The Author of “Trixie”, published in October 1923, but rather a novel published some three and a half years earlier, The Strangeness of Noel Carton (May 1920). Reading that novel, I thought: Here is a first-person narrator whose prose seems as fancy and unreliable as not only that of Nabokov’s famous humbug Humbert Humbert, but also that of Humbert’s predecessors such Hermann from Nabokov’s Despair (1932), Stephen Wilbeck from H. G. Wells’s Apropos of Dolores (1938), and Archibald More d’Escombe from William Le Queux’s The Death-Doctor (1912) — why, then, have I not only never heard of Carton’s kinship with these better known fictional confessors, why have I never — barring a passing reference in The Real Life of Sebastian Knight which requires a bit of effort to decode — heard of any books by the author of The Author of “Trixie”, i.e., the author of The Strangeness of Noel Carton, i.e., William Caine? At first I reasoned that Caine’s books must not have sold well while he was alive, and that, published in small initial print-runs by obscure publishers, they were not reprinted. But this was not true. Most of his books were published by the major publishers of fiction at the time — Greening, Routledge, John Lane, Methuen, Herbert Jenkins, Putnams — and many ran to second and third editions. Caine, furthermore, sold the European rights of his last four novels to Bernhard Tauchnitz in Leipzig, where they were published in that firms’s well-known Collection of British and American Authors. And for that reason, it seems, they were translated, during the lustrum which immediately followed Caine’s death, into at last three European languages: The Strangeness of Noel Carton became Die Narrheit des Noel Carton (Berlin-Vienna, 1929) and A kétarcú ember (Budapest, 1930); Mendoza and a Little Lady (1921) became Wielki Mendoza i mała Senorita (Warsaw, 1925; reprinted 1928); The Author of “Trixie” became Trixie: Der Roman eines Romans (Munich, 1928) and Anonim: Powieść (Warsaw, 1930); and Lady Sheba’s Last Stunt (1924) became Lady Shebas letzter Trick (Berlin-Vienna, 1929) and Lady Sheba, a reklámkirálynő (Budapest, 1931). Furthermore, it appears that in the month following his death, Caine’s widow sold the rights for a quiver of stories involving Luiz Mendoza, the protagonist of Mendoza and a Little Lady (November 1921), to the Australian monthly The Home, which published them (often with the e dropped from the author’s name) in a series entitled “The Methods of Mendoza.” These stories were subsequently collected and published under that title by the Cornstalk Publishing Co., Sydney, in 1926, which collection was then translated into Polish and published in two volumes as Zrządzenie losu (Przygody Mendozy) [A Quirk of Fate (Adventures of Mendoza)] and Złota wanna (Przygody Mendozy) [The Golden Bathtub (Adventures of Mendoza)] (Warsaw, Bibljoteka Groszowa, 1928, reprinted 1930). Meanwhile, Caine’s widow had Stanley Paul & Co., London, reissue, in June 1926, four of Caine’s early novels — Boom! (October 1909), A Prisoner in Spain (April 1910), The Revolt at Roskelly’s (October 1910), The Devil in Solution (May 1911), all originally published by Greening — to each of which she attached a short note hinting at her own conscientious critical-creative role in the book’s genesis and gestation. Furthermore, Caine’s stories continued to be published through the remainder of 1925 in weeklies and monthlies such as The Tatler, The London Magazine, and The Windsor Magazine, and on into 1926 and 1927. The intent of the foregoing is two-fold. First, Caine seems to have been far from obscure during his lifetime, especially the last ten years of it. The Strangeness of Noel Carton, for instance, was not only widely, and often quite erroneously, reviewed on both sides of the Atlantic, but seems also to have sold fairly well, especially in the US, to judge by the greater availability of the Putnams than the Jenkins edition. So why did Caine’s renown, after peaking in the years immediately before and after his death, suddenly plummet into obscurity? This gets me to my second point, which I will approach obliquely via two historical detours.
for which I would like to indulge my superstitions, before definitively smashing them. Is there a “Curse of Caine”?
She died, however, in October 1927, without ever getting a chance to fulfill her hope of one day publishing her husband’s autobiography, a snippet of which she quoted from in her note to The Devil in Solution.
— though perhaps not in America. Caine seems to have been far from obscure during his lifetime, then immediately forgotten soon after he died. And most readers of the two stories Wodehouse chose to include in his 1934 anthology would feel justified in dismissing Caine’s work as irredeemably jaded.
William Caine, never read anything about his creation Noel
recap with Caine's list of books from The Sun : with brief discussion of why?
Bible : Caine's double irony? He knew it well (from his father's readings of it [see § 1]; memorizing Psalms with mother and sisters see § 1), but had never read it himself? (and quote Colman n.d.: 10?) Caine's aunt Bertha (mother's sister), was a pupil teacher at school in Rodney Street, Liverpool:
They had a Scripture lesson every day from which, at Mother’s request, we were allowed to absent ourselves. When a little girl in our class asked why we were always absent from Scripture we gave as an answer a phrase we had overheard mother use, and which had taken our fancy, that she “did not approve of dogmatic teaching” — we had no idea what was meant, but it silenced our young friend, who had no idea either.While we lived in Rodney Street we had a nursery with a superb view to the west across the Welsh mountains. We used to see the most gorgeous sunsets which we never forgot. H.R.C. in later life kept her love for the sky and its wonders, and this, I think, was due to these early impressions.
After we left Liverpool and went to live at Scarborough, Aunt Bertha came with us and continued to teach us for some time. She was followed by her younger sister Nelly. They were both our very good friends, and taught us a great deal of poetry and the Bible, as well as history, geography, the use of maps, and dictation, largely from the the shorter works of Dicken’s [sic], whose Child’s History of England we knew almost by heart.
When Father was elected member for Scarborough, he took a house on Clapham Common in order to be near the House of Commons, and in that house H.R.C. remained until her marriage. While my father represented Scarborough we also had a house there, to which we went for the holidays. These, being spent in the midst of the fine scenery of the Yorkshire wolds and moors, and by the very beautiful coast, full of rockpools, shells and fossils, were full of interest. It was a lovely place for children and our memories of it were very happy (Colman n.d.: 10).
For instance, importance of Bouvard et Pécuchet: paean to friendship, above all, a collaborative friendship of the sort he had with his wife; with Calderon; with Osborne Roberts
Dichtung und Wahrheit : Goethe, same birthday as Caine's (August 28)
Rabelais : extravagance (can cite Graham (1930: 117) on Rabelais); etc.]; Van Vechten's description of Stein as Rabelaisian [19140923-BostonEveTrans-p021.jpg:] "As a personality," he says, "Gertrude Stein is unique. She is massive in physique, a Rabelaisian woman with a splendid, thoughtful face; mind dominating her matter."
Reginald Sterne's "Comic History of England"; Caine's ditto : his entire oeuvre : The New Foresters: How my wife and I saw England
Cervantes: Manchester Courier and Lancashire General Advertiser Thu, May 23, 1907 ·Page 8: Review of Newton 1907: "From the life as presented to us there stand out in supreme significance the virility, the earnestness, the intrinsic goodness, the wide charity, the noble unselfishness of a great man. Some, maybe, may deem him a burly anachronism, a denizen of the border shadowland, with the windmill-breaking knight-errant of La Mancha; but even such will not deny him the characteristics of chivalry, bravery, and honour which the idealist shared with Philip Sidney."
Reproduce piece from The Graphic, Septe,ber 19, 1925; as well as other pieces about Caine's visual art
Also: Liverpool Daily Post, Mon, Sep 07, 1925 ·Page 4, "The Late Mr. Caine," which alleges that "teetotalism was in his blood"
However, The Gazette (Harrow, Saturday, December 5, 1903, p. 5) notes, under the rubric “Wembley,” that, at the Gospel Temperance Meeting held “At the New Hall, Sudbury, on December 1st, Mr. William Caine delivered an address on ‘Why I am a total abstainer.’” [file in Caine-Coincidences]
Editions MSS
11 cour du Coq : Paris | Owlstain : Château Methuen