These letters seem to be the only original source material for the life of the best-selling English novelist A.S.M. Hutchinson, presenting a fascinating story of his progression from popular journalist to popular novelist, and the psychological toll that his success took upon him after the success of his If Winter Comes (1921).
‘Anti-war sentiment combined with postwar disillusionment in A. S. M. Hutchinson’s phenomenally successful If Winter Comes (1921) - a prime example of what the Germans called Heimatkehrliteratur (returned-home novels). Hutchinson’s book, which sold 100,000 copies in its first year in Britain, was the #1 title of 1922 in America. Clergymen gave sermons on ex-officer Mark Sabre’s plight in a postwar world of cads, lounge-lizards, soft-faced profiteers, scrimshankers, and shrewish, less than faithful wives.’ (Sutherland, Bestsellers, a Very Short Introduction. OUP, 2007.)
The story presented is unique, taking us from the breezy camaraderie of a hack journalist, editor of the popular journal The Daily Graphic, commissioning work from a sympathetic struggling author, who did him a huge favour as the first, and very favourable reviewer, of his work in America: ‘For your praises I cannot, simply cannot than you; nor for the good this will do the book in the States. But for the understanding with which you write, the insight and the sympathy, I feel, well, I’m dashed if I can explain what I do feel … It is the sheer fact that I have not written to you earlier because I did not - & cannot – know how to tell you what happiness your notice has given me. Thank you, Shelley.’ His career as novelist continues in parallel with journalism, and the candour of the discourse about war time journalism is impressive: ‘The Board … have developed the sudden caprice that I should have a writer on the war of vigorous, vindictive, sledgehammer, ferocious Anti-German views. Something of the Maxse type … with a baldheaded fury that will make Daily Graphic readers sit up with a jerk and rub their hands with glee. In fact a Red Hot Stuff Man.’ Something then went wrong with Hutchinson, and it’s not clear what, but it seems to relate to his sudden elevation to fame with the success of If Winter Comes. He begins to write of his aversion to publicity, and declines into a solitary life (describing Shelley at one stage as ‘my only friend’ and how in the ‘desperately unsettled life – from pillar to post, from post to pillar – which I lead I am like unto a man at a railway station who has lost his ticket and his luggage & probably his train and in the midst of such a state of mind is asked to give decision on a momentous question.’ ‘My agony always is Do my very few old friends remember me? I should say no one has fewer friends than I have (the fault of my disposition), & I cling on to them desperately.’ ‘I just never go nowhere. I detest it, I shrink from it, utterly and all the time … I have had all the publicity I want for the rest of my life it hurts more than I can say that you should suggest I should meet you for that purpose.’
A clue to the nature of the breakdown must lie in his novel One Increasing Purpose (1925) where the correspondence makes it clear that he strongly identified himself with the character of B.C.D. Ashe, a novelist who goes to pieces after becoming successful: at times in the letters the names of BCD and ASM are used almost interchangeably. If Winter Comes made him rich, but it was also treated unkindly by many critics, as were his later books. The writer St John Adcock seems to have to got it heroically wrong when he wrote in 1923 that Hutchinson ‘took his first successes with a tranquillity that seemed like indifference, and his later and larger triumphs and the denunciations he has endured, have I think, moved him as little.’
The correspondence ends in 1926 (A.S.M. was to live to 1971, and Shelley probably to 1936). A fuller catalogue listing is available on request.
