(4 of 5)
Author Dewing's approach to her character is, like him, unique. The story is not told straight out; she pretends to collaborate with John's mother, evoking his image and career piecemeal from the recollections and letters of people who knew him; from news cutting about him, interviews, reviews of his books. (There is one review "by"
H. L. Mencken). The result is most vivid, so many unexpected angles appear, so cleverly arranged. There are letters from the mother's onetime butler to his wife in England; letters from a sea captain with whom John rounded the Horn; letters between John's meat-packing Chicago in-laws; letters and statements of his women, "good, bad, but never indifferent."
John Lord was with his mother in England after her divorce. He worried and awed his schoolmasters, surpassing at games and studies alike, developing an early admiration for Napoleon and others to whom victory came naturally. He took his successes simply; handled life as easily as his fine body. He had the quality of inoffensive aloofness, coupled with immense vitality and sure purpose.
His father, gay Seely Lord, who sang at the Metropolitan when Caruso was elsewhere, was delighted when John returned to New York to find himself the father of such a youth. There was something princely in the way he posed, astride an otherwise unmanageable black stallion, for Sculptor St. George; in the calmness with which he retrieved and accepted the handkerchief and door key dropped at his feet by his first woman, a reigning and inaccessible beauty.
After he published his first novel, a boldish tale for its day (1902), it was not adulation but inherent self-confidence that made him vault the footlights in Richard Mansfield's theatre one afternoon and offer that gruff celebrity a play. Mansfield commissioned him. With the aid of Silk Goshen, his mother's Jewish impresario and second husband, he spent a hermit year in a fishing colony off the Maine coast. The play was written and accepted, but what it was, except "about the Civil War," the world never knew. Mansfield died and for friendship's sake, John Lord destroyed his first play. Out of the same year, however, came a narrative poem of the sea, for which he received the International Prize.
Thus exalted, John Lord proceeded to write melodrama and farce comedies for Broadway, not to be flippant but in all honest gusto. And it was then that he pursued and married Bernice Harden, icy and feline. After he had consumed the inner fire she had for him, turned openly to Eva Freyne, a hard worldling, and written his greatest book, Bernice forced him back to her and delicately smothered his life—until the War. What the War meant to him, and why he did what he did in an airplane, are his ultimate revelation, made by himself in a letter which is better read than retold.