Terrific writer, v. popular in the 1920s–40s, pretty much forgotten today (happily, my local library has a huge collection of his work!). He’s kind of what Robert Benchley might have become if he hadn’t gone into the acting business (and I’ll bet Benchley hugely resented him!). Droll, cynical, warm, funny.
His most successful books were Parnassus on Wheels (1917, his first—and a bit twee for my tastes) and Kitty Foyle (1939—only OK, but it takes place in my hometown, so I like the inside jokes). I love his “wandering around the city” essays, which have been re-issued as Christopher Morley’s New York and Christopher Morley’s Philadelphia.
I am now reading an excellent book, his 1932 Human Being. It’s a fictional biography of an everyday NY businessman, but it’s really an excuse for a wonderful tour of 1932 NY: the Radio City construction site, Times Square, the empty space where Madison Square Garden used to be, the shop windows on Fifth, the Sixth Avenue El . . . It’s got paragraphs so good you want to have them bronzed.
Amazon shows a few, but I’d recommend (except for his wonderful New York and Phila. books), go to a library or used-bookshop (or bookfinder) and dig up his essays and novels.
I haven’t, but he’s been on my list. For reasons I have made no attempt to understand, one of my favorite things (genre? milieu? mise en scene? something french) to read about is the “Lost Generation”–Britain in the 'twenties. As I read and reread Waugh, Huxley, Wodehouse, Stevie Smith, et al., I often find myself beckoned, by association, down tangential paths like Maugham, Fitzgerald, and Morley. I’ve thus become a ravenous consumer of Maugham, but hadn’t yet attempted Morley. This thread, needless, will nudge me a bit further down that detour. As soon as I conclude negotiations with my library (Jimmy Carter has been called in; we’re having a summit at Camp David this week), I’ll move Morley to the top of my list. Meanwhile, I’m feeling a Hamsun binge coming on.
I dunno if I’d class Morley with the Lost Generation. Not that he wasn’t a good writer—I far prefer him to Hemingway and Fitzgerald. But he wasn’t a self-destructive, hard-drinking “ooooh, I’m so damaged by the Great War that I hate everything and am off to Gertrude and Alice’s” type.
He was bemused. Very Benchley-esque. A New York suburbanite, contemplative, good-natured, but with no illusions about life or humanity. He reads very modern. Not “Lost Generation” modern, but 2003 modern.
And FWIW, though your “ooooh . . .” is a pretty good characterization of a lot of “Lost Generation” literature, it certainly doesn’t cover all of it. Wodehouse and Huxley were writing about the same people, but from two utterly different perspectives. Likewise, Maugham and Lawrence can hardly be lumped together, except chronologically, and Stevie Smith was a horse of an enTIREly different color. And then there’s Dorothy Sayers.
Not that I’d expect Morley to fit in well with any of that group; only that his name turns up, tangentially, when discussing some of these other writers.
When I was home over Thanksgiving, I pulled out and reread my old copy of Parnassus on Wheels. I loved it as a kid and I loved it this time too. Along with From the Mixed up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, it provided my favorite daydream scenarios. I didn’t know about his New York essays though. Thanks for mentioning them–I’ll have to go out and get them.
Another Morely fan checking in. The Haunted Bookshop is one of my favorite books, but then I didn’t know about Christopher Morley’s Philadelphia*. I can’t seem to find it reissued and my library doesn’t have it, but Amazon’s got it used. I can hardly wait!
And FWIW, though your “ooooh . . .” is a pretty good characterization of a lot of “Lost Generation” literature, it certainly doesn’t cover all of it. Wodehouse and Huxley were writing about the same people, but from two utterly different perspectives. Likewise, Maugham and Lawrence can hardly be lumped together, except chronologically, and Stevie Smith was a horse of an enTIREly different color. And then there’s Dorothy Sayers.
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but merely being a writer in the 20’s doesn’t make one a member of the “Lost Generation,” well described by Eve. Wodehouse wrote in the Twenties, yes, but his books are farces fillwed with Bright Young Things, and not the doom and anomie of F. Scott Fitzgerald or Sherwood Anderson.
I have to confess I have not yet read any Christopher Morley, but I’ll check with my library today.
I’m not going to hijack this thread, but while the Brits certainly talked (and talk) about a lost generation re: WWI, I don’t know of a group of British writers specially associated with it. And the term itself applied to writers comes from a remark that Gertrude Stein made to Hemingway about Americans. But I’ll leave quietly now.
Sorry, Eve, for the hijack. Feel free, gobear, Exap, to start a new thread on “The Lost Generation.” Meanwhile, I’ll try to remember where I’ve come across the term applied to that generation of Brits, and why I don’t think of it as an exclusively American label. FWIW, I wasn’t using the term to describe the writers, but rather the generation they were writing about. I never meant to suggest that Wodehouse, as a writer, was a member of the literary “movement” referred to by some as the “Lost Generation,” only that he was writing about the same generation of people as were Huxley, Waugh, Smith, Sayers, et al.
I laughed out loud on the subway this morning reading Human Being. One of the receptionists in the office got a love poem from an office boy:
You are my Oriental queen
With midnight eyes and morning hair,
No one that I have ever seen
Is anywhere near so fair,
When you look upward through your lashes
Your lover feels imperative pashes.
All other ladies who control
Telephone boards and switches
Seem totally devoid of soul
And only bitches.
Your radiant beauty sweet
This office hallows,
Since I can’t kiss your hands and feet
I give you these marshmallows.
In short, you certainly are the cats
As sure as my name is Irving Gratz.
I first picked up The Haunted Bookshop in the big leathery cozy reading room at college, and zipped right through it one cold wintery night. I thought the thriller plot stunk, but I loved the depiction of the little Brooklyn bookseller. I read Parnassus on Wheels a few years later and felt the same way…overall, not a great novel, but it had scenes and characters who stayed with me and werre recalled with a great deal of affection.
The New York and Philadelphia essay books are minor classics.
Human Being has a few dragged-in plot points too, that he could have done without. But 90% of it is great vignettes, character studies, strolls around the city, musings on this and that—the sort of thing no one can do better than Morley. And you really do feel awfully fond of the characters after a few chapters.
