Have you ever heard of Charles Morgan? I hadn't. I decided this week to just look for a book completely at random and the spine of this one was pretty so I pulled it from the shelf. I know, that sounds really shallow, but you can find the most interesting books that way.
Here's the cover and spine. They're sort of nice, don't you think? The color is not very attractive, but probably when it was new it would have been more so. As it turns out Morgan was an award winning novelist and playwright. At least one of his novels has been reissued by Capuchin Classics and there is a modest website dedicated to his life and work. You can read a bit about his life here, and I am fascinated to discover that he went to sea in 1907 at the tender age of thirteen. He was at sea for seven years serving as a midshipman before he resigned and attended Oxford, though that was cut short as WWI then broke out.
The Fountain was published in 1932 and won the Hawthornden Prize. The story is set in Holland during WWI where an English officer is interned. He discovers his childhood sweetheart is there but now married to a German officer who is away fighting. I do like the sound of this one. From what I have gleaned in my ramblings about on the web, this was a bestseller here in the US, though is perhaps not his "best" work. The New York Times had plenty of good things to say about The Fountain and Charles Morgan, however. They call his book both literate and literary.
"The Fountain is one of the most poetical pieces of prose fiction that has come to light for a long time. Yet, though Mr. Morgan is evidently both of a poetic and scholarly mind--incidentally he is dramatic critic of The London Times--he is not out of touch with the realities of daily living. In fact, it is possible that serving first in the war, and taking his university course after demobilization, was an excellent educative method for one destined to become a novelist. Certain it is that whenever his literary style threatens (as occasionally it does) to become over literary, a stern hand, which we take to be out of his active past, stretches forth to pull him back. One can read The Fountain with relish of its compositional artistry."
The reviewer actually cautions the reader that this is probably not a novel for the masses who want only entertainment and action. It is a story that is thoughtful and moves slowly. With words peppered throughout the review like superlative, exceptional, and literary achievement I think I have found a little gem hidden on the stacks. If all that wasn't enough Morgan is even compared with Willa Cather in their "fineness of texture". I love Willa, so perhaps I should give Charles Morgan a go as well. With such high praise I wonder how he faded away?
One little bit of trivia I will leave you with--Stella Gibbons is thought to have modeled Gerard Challis from her recently reissued novel, Westwood, on Charles Morgan. I am about halfway through Westwood, but it had to be moved to the back burner--first it had to be returned to the library and when I broke down and bought a copy I wasn't able to squeeze it back into the reading stack. Now I am even more interested in getting back to it.