17. Have you an analytic mind? Do you

reason about what you see? Can you apply things you learn?

as a means of expression, a safety-valve in some instances, such as Robert Updegraff, Roger Burlingame, Phillips Russell, Christopher

If one should reverse the question and ask whether the advertisement writer can write, well, say literature, another interesting field of speculation is opened. The mere writing of advertising is certainly a good preparation for writing anything. The demands are drastic, especially the limitation of space. The advertising writer may not use a single unnecessary word. I well remember the stage fright I had when I first undertook to write a piece of copy for space that cost three thousand dollars. Could I say anything that would be worth spending all that money on? Today a hundred thousand dollars is sometimes spent on a single piece of copy. It makes one weigh every word. In literary writing the temptation is to pad, especially where payment is by space or the line or word. This is quite often apparent in current magazine writing. Length is really a very poor measure of literary effort. What would de Maupassant get for "A Piece of String" or "The Necklace" from Lorimer or Ray Long?

A fairly large number of advertising-trained writers have written and are writing outside their daily work, and some have abandoned advertising for literature. Sherwood Anderson tells of his experience in an advertising agency, but it certainly was not responsible for his style. Reviewers, commenting on Helen Woodward's vigorous and vivid account of her own business life, "Through Many Windows" (Harper's), spoke with appreciation of the compactness and economy of her style. She undoubtedly acquired that in writing advertising. Her husband, W. E. Woodward, author of several disillusioned books on business, and recently of a debunked life of Washington, was an advertising man. His style has the desired simplicity of the best advertising writing. A long list could be made of advertising men, or men with advertising experience, who have taken up writing as their work, who write books

liam Filene, Joseph Appel and many others.

Burton Rascoe, William Lyon Phelps and Brander Matthews have all said favorable

things about the literary style of some advertisements. H. L. Mencken, who is seldom accused of soft-heartedness toward any phase or manifestation of American business, says: "It suggests the thought that the American literati of tomorrow will probably come out of advertising offices instead of out of newswriters, in fact, have already gone far ahead paper offices as in the past. The advertisement of the reporters. They choose their words more carefully. They are better workmen if work. I predict formally they will produce a only because they have more time for good great deal of the sound American literature of tomorrow."

It is well worth noting that, in addition to a severe training in writing, advertising supplies one with material. Not even the news

paper reporter gets any more of the flavor of life. The advertising man looks on life from a new viewpoint, that of business, but tinged with imagination. He must keep his enthusiasm, his fresh eye, his flair for the unusual, the different, the novel. And he must constantly translate all that into a few simple sentences that millions will comprehend. He has to do in the space legally allotted to a sonnet, two of the things that the successful writer of a short story, with more words at his disposal, does that is, interest and convince, and in addition must attract his readers and secure action. From a literary viewpoint an advertisement more closely resembles an oration in spirit than other forms of writing. The speech Mark Antony delivered to the Roman mob is an almost perfect advertisement. Addressed to a hostile audience, it secured attention, awakened interest, convinced and secured instant action. When an advertisement does that it is a good advertisement.

WELVE published books in four years, with two more just over the horizon, and any number of published magazine articles and stories, is the remarkable record achieved by the author of "The Splendour of Asia" and "The Exquisite Perdita." How does she do it? From what inexhaustible spring flow these twin streams of ideas, words, plots, characters, incidents, details that surge, mystical and deep, through the Buddhistic Beck books and ripple with historical accuracy through the sparkling Barrington romances? That there is a third stream coming from this same secret spring the Boston publishers of the first Beck as well as of the first Barrington stories now admit. Just how mighty that stream, or what its nature and course, neither the author herself nor any one of her publishers is yet ready to divulge. We may be reasonably sure, however, that this third stream did not well up and begin to flow before 1919. Before that portentous year she who is known as L. Adams Beck, and E. Barrington, was unknown to the world of readers. She had not then written a line for publication.

The impulse to write came to her most unexpectedly. On her slow way from England back to her beloved Orient, where she had spent many happy years, she stopped in Victoria, "where westernmost West leans forward to kiss easternmost East across the Paciflc," to use a bit of her own fluent description. She was in a hotel. The orchestra was playing and there was all around her the usual hotel babble of voices. Suddenly the music and all the voices began to tell her that she must write. She went to her room at once and be

gan to write. What she wrote was one of the short stories collected in "The Ninth Vibraion." It was accepted on its first trip out, and the letter of acceptance called for more and more. That was seven years ago, but these were magazine articles and stories, and no book was published until three years later.

The aura of mystery that surrounds this writer has not been dispelled by her publicity.

Who is this mysterious lady of Vancouver? Where and when was she born, and to whom? What is her background of ancestry and literary tradition? What has been her preparation for what she is now making her life work? What is the power back of the hand that could write, in less than five weeks, "Glorious Apollo," and start immediately the writing of a book so different as "The Treasure of Ho"?

Possibly Mrs. L. Adams Beck never bothers her head over the puzzle of her power. It would seem so from her own statement.

"For me, writing is a thing impossible to describe," she said. "I write at the utmost speed of which my hand is capable. Thus 'Glorious Apollo' was begun the twenty-third of November, 1924, and finished the twentysixth of December, 1924, taking just over a month. And with the interruption of Christmas thrown in." But she said nothing about interruptions. "The Divine Lady" took a few days less than a month.

She cannot work on a Beck story and a Barrington romance at the same time. She seems to use two separate sets of brain cells for these two types of stories. "The Barrington and Beck stories appear to be distinct," is the way she expressed it, "and to come from

different layers of the subconscious self. Nor can I tell which will function when I prepare to write. Whichever it may be, it possesses me to the exclusion of the other. I cannot say whether the Beck or the Barrington books more express what you phrase as 'the real you.' While it lasts, each is the only I, and in my belief, each has its separate history and experience."

The author, except for purposes of making herself understood, does not call these historical romances fiction. To her they are just a charming, readable way of writing the truth. At least, that is the conclusion I drew from her comments on the subject.

"I have written what is called fiction for only five years," she told me. "I believe socalled fiction to be the truest method of expressing life, and romance to be the way in which the deepest truths can be stated. Romance, which is the subject of a remarkable poem of Kipling's, is the very fountain of youth, and I think it a symptom of national disease when a nation's romance is disregarded in its literature." And in the preface to one of her books in which she mixes fact and romance admittedly, and apologizes for nothing, she says: "Their lives are all but stories in a printed book, and a heroine of Jane Austen's is as real as Stella (the Esther Johnson loved by Dean Swift) or the fair Walpole."

In all her Barrington romances it is her intent, she says, "to touch biography with imagination and to present the essential truth as she sees it, clothing the historic truth with speech and action." Usually she makes this "speech and action" more real to her readers than the actual biographical facts she records. Her Barrington books have been as well received and as widely acclaimed in England as they have been here. All of the several British reviews I have seen of the Barrington books credit them with remarkable historical accuracy and fidelity to the characters presented and the social usages of the period in which the characters lived. From all of which it would seem that E. Barrington does not

overestimate her ability when she undertakes, as she has done again in "The Exquisite Perdita," to clothe historic fact with speech and action.

So much for E. Barrington and the historical romances. What about L. Adams Beck and the occult Beck books?

Mrs. Beck went to the Orient when she was a young girl, healthy, imaginative and keenly impressionable.

"As to my experiences in the Orient," she said, "they were made possible by a simple way of living, which, being in accordance with Oriental opinion, opened many closed doors, and by my deep sympathy with the faiths and peoples of Asia. Perfection is not to be found there, and I am the last to assert that it is, but they have studied the science of the soul as we have not and I believe that realization of their belief in the evolution of the soul is perhaps the one thing which can check the West in the growing materialism which may otherwise plunge it into some unimaginable catastrophe. Christianity itself is an Oriental gift, and those generous hands are still laden with treasures. Though my Beck books have not the enormous popularity of my Barrington, I am still glad to know that they have drawn many to consideration of the beautiful marvels of Asia - marvels not to be seen by the casual tourist."

I asked her if any of the strange incidents and happenings about which she writes in the Beck books had been her own experiences. I mentioned, specifically, the experiences of John Mallerdean in "The Treasure of Ho."

"No, they have never been mine," she replied. "I simply satisfied myself by documentary and other witness that these things are (she did not say 'were') true. The characters, scenes and settings for my Oriental books are often purely imaginative; sometimes imagination bordering on a background of fact. Thus, in my story of the building of the Taj Mahal, the legend is my own. In 'How Great Is the Glory of Kwannon,' both background and story are my own. And yet they are so true in the essential that that story has appeared

in vernacular Japanese magazines as a true statement of one angle of Buddhist thought. In all true writing, I insist, fact and imagination blend, and the latter is sometimes the truer."

She began her studies of the philosophies of the Orient because the Western explanations of life and death seemed to her inadequate. She believes in the evolutionary life of the soul, and thinks that this belief with her was instinctive.

"Western thought," she elucidated, "accepts the reality of outward things. Oriental thought accepts the reality of the inward life. Oriental thought also accepts the immortality of the soul, not only in the future but in the past, and in this I profoundly believe as according alike with reason, justice and faith. I should like to advise the great public which has drawn so near me in my writings to acquaint themselves with the ancient thought of India, and not with its diluted and often misrepresented modern renderings. There they will learn that the merciless majesty of the law is not to be broken by the supernatural, but that the super-normal is the natural sphere of those who have attained the necessary knowledge."

Does that explain Mrs. L. Adams Beck who is also E. Barrington? Super-normal she is, for it is not normal for any Western writer to write as fast and as much as she does without ever becoming tired.

but I keep the afternoon and often the evening free from writing, unless a book possesses me."

In other words, this fragile looking woman not only turns out something like three books a year, but keeps two-thirds of her waking time for other pursuits. She does a lot of public speaking. She keeps up an enormous correspondence, and she entertains a great deal. Every fortnight about sixty of her friends come to her house in Mountjoy Avenue for tea. After tea she talks to them. One of her friends, Miss Marjorie Lane of Chicago, has this to say about these fortnightly teas.

"If one would sit entranced for hours in a lovely golden-walled room, rich with teak and Japanese paintings, and Japanese paintings, and sweet with the breath of roses and English pinks, and listen to a vibrant silvery voice spin a magic weft of words around almost every subject dear to the heart of artist, student, historian, mondaine or philosopher, then he should join that little company of friends who gather every second Thursday afternoon in L. Adams Beck's drawing-room in far-off Victoria, British Columbia. Perhaps one would better say, 'She should join,' for the frequenters of this salon are for the most part feminine. But whatever the age or sex, it is a tremendous experience to enter that tranquil, beautiful room, and after partaking of jasmine tea from delicate Chinese cups, and loitering among the array of cakes and goodies, where East, in the form of rice cakes and salted ginger, meets West in the guise of Scotch shortbread, gingerbread, and orthodox English sandwiches

then to sit and listen while Mrs. Adams Beck ranges through all the races of antiquity, the modern world, the seven sapphire seas and the seven flaming heavens.

making her own translations to abet those of Mr. Waley. Another day we consider the great migrations of the races and the revolt of the East against Western civilization. Or it may be she will entertain us with a witty 'causerie' on the wives of Henry the Eighth. Perhaps she will talk on Poetic Craftsmanship, with examples from Li-Po, Swinburne, Mahabharata, Tennyson, Victor Hugo. There is no end to the things on which she seems to have the last word of information. And whatever character she touches seems to live and move before our eyes. She flashes the great moguls before our fascinated gaze; Marco Polo the dauntless rides by, still bent on exploring new worlds; and we read above the Portal of Victory that wonderful inscription carved there by Akbar.

"Always she speaks without notes, except when reading a passage in reference. And it is rare to find combined such spontaneous freedom of utterance with such felicity of phrase. The creative artist glows in those moments as surely as on the printed page. Yet it is all most modestly done, not in the least with the attitude of one who feels that her every thought upon whatever subject must be of inestimable value. It is rather the overflow of a rich and exuberant spirit, eager to share its own enthusiasms and fancies and the fruit of its wide research. Somewhere in the 'Song of the Open Road' Whitman contemplating the interminable, casual chatter of our daily human intercourse, cries out that the real self

goes about skulking and hiding, 'speaking of anything else but never of itself.' Mrs. Adams Beck answers that cry. She feels the soul's deep need to speak of itself - the essential, enduring, national, racial, ageless, divine self. She reaches out to that same need."

Jock, her Highland terrier, who goes with her on her long early morning walks, lies at her feet while she speaks. At the end, when the half a hundred and more men and women who have been intently listening, missing no word, no gesture of the long slim hands, burst into applause, Jock leaps up and barks out the need of his own secret soul. It may be only his desire for Scotch shortbread he is voicing, but Miss Lane and the other listeners prefer to think that Jock is reminding his mistress that one of his ancestors was celebrated in the Mahabaratta, and that surely he, too, will be allowed to enter with her the celestial gates.

Asked what she liked best of her own work, this writer said that of her Barrington books she thought "The Pious Coquette" in "The Gallants" was the best.

Of her Beck books, Mrs. Beck likes best "How Great Is the Glory of Kwannon!"

At the end of the interview she said: "I think that interesting questions relating to subsconscious activities are involved in such writings as the Beck-Barrington books, and I shall some day try to throw light on that subject in a more detailed way, in the hope of eliciting valuable experiences elsewhere."