Old Friends!

Our book today is Old Friends, a 1909 collection of typically syrupy reminiscences put down on paper by the then-legendary drama critic and theater historian William Winter, who immediately sets about answering the charge of a Boston book-critic that he was a “mere maunder, sodden with lazy idolatry for days gone by.” “Let not those readers suppose that I write as a praiser of the Past, in detraction of the present,” he opens his book by writing, “Reverence for that which is old, only because it is old, has often been imputed to me, always without reason or justice.” But the reassured reader can’t go ten steps without stumbling upon passages like this one:

As I think of those times and persons – serene in a halo of poetic distance and reverie – I breathe once more the fragrant syringa and lilac in the half-forgotten springtime that never can return, and hear the patter of the falling leaf in burnished autumn woods of Long Ago.

But for all the highfalutin airs Winter put on as his years lengthened and his career flourished – there were whole decades during which he was always under contract for two or three books at a time – Winter remained at heart what he’d been in his early days in the early 1850s: one of many deadline hacks working for Dan Haskell, the muttery-voiced, utterly fearless managing editor (and then editor) of the dear old Boston Transcript in its glory days, which Haskell did so much to create. The managing editor kept stacks of new and forthcoming books on a shelf in what passed for his office, and smart young reviewers like Winter were encouraged to pick likely volumes and get straight to work (Haskell had already set aside both the volumes he wanted for himself and the garbage he skimmed for sale). And Winter could certainly work: he turned out reviews at a steady clip and over time met and befriended quite a few of the authors he wrote about – hence the germ of this book.

Here he describes the great and near-great literary figures of his day, and like many a professional prose-appraiser, he’s as often wrong as right about which is which. He praises for undying verse and eternal prose men whose entire works have sunk beneath the years without a trace, whether justly – as in the case of Albert Henry Smyth or Arthur Sketchley – or unjustly, as in the case of Bayard Taylor or James Russell Lowell or Thomas Bailey Aldrich or even the great Oliver Wendell Holmes, who’s drawn with wonderful fidelity:

His countenance, pleasingly eccentric rather than conventionally handsome, and more remarkable for intensity and variety of expression than for regularity of feature, would, at such moments, glow with fervency of emotion; his brilliant eyes would blaze, as with interior light; his little, fragile person, quivering with the passionate vitality of his spirit, would tower with intrinsic majesty; and his voice, clear and sympathetic but neither strong nor deep, would tremble, and sometimes momentarily break, with ardor and impetuosity of feeling, while yet he never lost control of either his metrical fabric, his theme, his sensibility, or his hearers. He was a consummate artist, whether in words or in speech.

Precisely because he was sodden with lazy idolatry for days gone by, Winter can often read like a relic-hungry saint on the road to Compostella. The great figures from his literary past – Wilkie Collins, Charles Dickens, and the like – are illuminated in these pages with devotional candles, although even I have to admit two things: a) Winter got very, very good at striking that particular tone, and b) sometimes, just a little, it actually worked:

I worshipped at the shrine of ideal intellect and beauty. It was a lovely night in May. The river Charles, flowing dreamily in burnished darkness under the faint light of the stars. The winds were hushed. The soft air was laden with the fragrance of lilac and woodbine. At some distance the clock in the old church tower was striking midnight; and I stood at the gate of Longfellow, whither I had come, a stranger and a pilgrim, to lay my hand upon the latch that the poet’s hand had touched.

But the best thing about these sketches (and the same is true ten times over for the huge body of writing about the theater that he generated over fifty years – his book Other Days is worth the search for any dyed-in-the-wool theater buff) is Winter’s journalistic – he would have called it poetic – knack for capturing single moments before they vanish like soap bubbles. I’ve noticed how rare such moments are in the big 800-page biographies of some of the more famous men Winter describes here, which just strengthens me in my opinion that Winter’s books are well and truly forgotten (rather than being “imperishable,” as he himself sometimes called them). These unguarded little moments are scattered liberally throughout Old Friends, and to give him credit, Winter is perfectly aware of their value:

Much can be learned, if you have the privilege of looking at a great man when he is alone, wrapt in thought, and unconscious of observation. I once saw Daniel Webster, a little after dawn of a summer morning, pacing to and fro – no other person in sight and no movement anywhere – at the extreme end of the Long Wharf, in Boston; and the image of that noble figure and leonine face, with its gloomy, glorious eyes, has never faded out of my memory.

Nobody saw that moment in Daniel Webster’s life except Winter, and we owe him a real debt for recording it. The wealth of such moments in Old Friends readily makes up for the Great Man’s pomposity, and for his readiness to forget that he was for years just one avid book-reader and equally avid freelance book-reviewer in Dan Haskell’s wonderful little stable, getting great sandwiches at the shop around the corner, being called “Willy” by his disheveled comrades, selling review copies at the Brattle, and crushing a cup of wine on Friday nights over hot food and cheap wine. It’s a shame that young book-hound didn’t think to write a memoir at the time, but Old Friends, though not as good as young friends, are certainly better than no friends at all.