Pensive Jester: The Literary Career Of W. W. Jacobs. - Review - book review

Studies in Short Fiction, Wntr, 1998 by Richard Fusco

PENSIVE JESTER: THE LITERARY CAREER OF W. W. JACOBS by John D. Cloy. Lanham, Maryland: University Press of America, 1996. vii 158 pages. $39.50.

Literary reputations are curious things. During his lifetime, humorist W. W. Jacobs (1863-1943) earned wealth and acclaim for his short stories and books, attracting favorable comments from writers as diverse as Henry James, G. K. Chesterton, J. B. Priestley, and Christopher Morley. Today, however, we remember him solely as the author of "The Monkey's Paw"--that unforgettable macabre tale usually encountered in an anthology. Several matters contribute to this developing obscurity. As readers of Studies in Short Fiction already know, throughout most of this century, perfecting the craft of story writing was not the surest of calling cards to present for an artist's entry into the literary canon. Jacobs composed most of his short fiction following the precepts of the "New Humorists," which created texts mired in Edwardian tastes. His conservative values occasionally render even more suspect the value of such humor for a modern audience. Certainly, Jacobs's "decidedly masculine" prose style and questionable treatment of his wife for her suffragist activities would not win him many fans among today's feminists.

John D. Cloy confronts these issues in his bracingly terse study, Pensive Jester: The Literary Career of W. W. Jacobs. City's goals are simple and few: (1) to provide academe with a fuller and more balanced biography of Jacobs than hitherto available, (2) to reexamine the quality of Jacobs's fiction, (3) to clarify important bibliographical issues, and (4) to take the first step to reclaim Jacobs's rightful place in twentieth-century literature. In the latter regard, Cloy has struck a very calculated right note. Those interested in Jacobs would likely expect a more detailed essay than found in Glenn S. Burne's 1994 Dictionary of Literary Biography article, but would shrink from any exhaustive study. City's 90-page essay supplements a thorough review of scholarship on Jacobs with insights culled from interviews with members of Jacobs's family and other new sources of information. The remaining 68 pages of text reveal City's talents as a bibliographer. Those interested in Jacobs's work, the New Humorists, or The Strand Magazine will find this volume to be a valuable resource. Unless Jacobs's status changes enough to merit a longer book, City's effort will likely remain the best available.

For Cloy, Jacobs's reputation will rest upon the quality of his short fiction. The biographer rightfully calls his subject a "flawed novelist" who was more adept in crafting realistic, apolitical, asocial short stories about the British underclass. Along the way, Cloy suggests the symbiotic relationship between humor and the short story, at one point asserting that the "New Humorists' use of the short story as a vehicle signaled a turn toward a more democratic and less exclusive era in literature." His remarks in passing about humor and about the similar connection between the short story and the gothic impulse are insightful and worthy of further investigation.

Pensive Jester does have its flaws. Aside from the mechanical errors one comes to expect in camera-ready copy, Cloy occasionally mislocates a biographical fact. In a chapter covering the years 1926-43, surrounded by chronological references that suggest 1930, Cloy recounts how Henry James praised Jacobs's work upon seeing him at a restaurant. Given that James died in 1916, this scene would have out-pawed the monkey.

RICHARD FUSCO Saint Joseph's University