Almost sixty years ago Ernest Bramah wrote The Wallet of Kai Lung, in which Chinese ways of thinking and speaking were adapted to the English language: the most horrifying events told blandly, the most farcical situations described with a straight face, and the most evil characters tell the most transparent lies in the politest possible way, with aphorisms on every other page. For example: "It has been said … that there are few situations in life that cannot be honorably settled, and without loss of time, either by suicide, a bag of gold, or by thrusting a despised antagonist over the edge of a precipice on a dark night." But the translation of this mannered Far Eastern society and speech into Western idiom under Bramah's hand became something more than farce. Character and situation are often fined to a sharp edge of satire, which cuts no less deep for the humaneness and benevolence that constitute one of Bramah's most appealing qualities. It is not every inmate of a pitch-black dungeon who would protest against personal injury and indignity in such tones as these: "If it is not altogether necessary for your refined convenience that you stand on this one's face, he for his part would willingly forego the esteemed honor."

However, the first eight publishers who read the manuscript of The Wallet of Kai Lung turned it down; after British publication it had to wait 23 years before an American house printed it in 1923. In both England and America it created a small coterie of Bramah lovers, so that Clifton Fadiman asked in June 6, 1928 Nation on the publication of the third Kai Lung volume: "Is it possible, as rumor runs, that there are those who have no relish for these sly Oriental suavities, these delicate evasions of language, this restrained Gongorism carried to a point of fine art?" The answer to the 30-year-old question must be yes. many must have no such relish. For today 16 years after Bramah's death, you cannot even buy a Bramah book in a bookstore in America—he is long out of print. You must either order one of the three or four Kai Lung books still available from the British Book Centre in New York or buy them directly from England. No critic (apart from book reviewers) in this country and no literary historian has paid the slightest attention to Ernest Bramah. He has had no critical reception.

Of course, one is first tempted to ask: should we pay any attention to him? Before this can be answered, certain other questions must be taken care of: who is Ernest Bramah? what has he written? what popular or serious consideration has he received in England? and why has he been, to a large extent, ignored by readers and students of the novel in America? It is these problems with which I should like to deal in in this paper.

Very little is known about the life of Ernest Bramah—born Ernest Bramah Smith—and even less has been written: a page or two here and there is everything a diligent search turns up. Not even the date of his birth is known, but from his first book, the semi-autobiographical English Farming and Why I Turned It Up (London, 1894), we may infer that it was about 1869. (His obituaries give both this date and 1868.) He told the editors of Twentieth Century Authors (New York, 1942, p. 1304), Stanley J. Kunitz and Howard Haycraft, "I am not fond of writing about myself and only in a less degree about my work. My published books are about all I care to pass on to the reader." We do know that he was born in Manchester, England; that at 17 he chose farming as a profession, giving it up after three years of losing money, and turned to journalism. Penguin Books, which still publishes some of his tales, says: "He started as a correspondent on a typical provincial paper, then went to London as secretary to Jerome K. Jerome, and worked himself into the editorial side of Jerome's magazine, To-day, where he got the opportunity of meeting the most important literary figures of the day. But he soon left To-day to join a new publishing firm, as editor of a publication called The Minister; finally, after two years of this, he turned to writing as his full-time occupation."

There is reason to believe that Bramah spent some time in the Far East, the New York Times obituary stating flatly that he "lived for many years in China," the locale of his Kai Lung volumes. If this is true, it is most likely that he was there before 1899, for in July of that year he sent to Grant Richards, the English publisher, the manuscript of The Wallet of Kai Lung. Richards said that Smith, Elder, Chatto, Cassell, Heinemann, Constable, Lawrence and Bullen, Macmillan, and Fisher Unwin all turned down the Wallet; Richards writes (Author Hunting, London and New York, 1934, p. 272) "that it was a careful typescript, sewn bookwise into a brown paper wrapper, and that every manuscript of Ernest Bramah's that I have seen since has looked exactly like it." Richards's edition of 1,000 copies, plus 500 for a special Colonial Edition and 750 for a Boston firm did not sell out for seven years: one could hardly call it a publishing success. Richards describes Bramah as "one of the kindest and the most amiable of men … , small and—may I say—he does not look ferocious; I believe him to be uncarnivorous, and indeed I think that he eschews the pleasures of the table—whether from compulsion or inclination I cannot say." Richards wrote Bramah twice a year for a successor to the Wallet (reprinted by Methuen & Co. in a cheap edition in 1917) until Kai Lung's Golden Hours was published in 1922; and in the next year both the Wallet and the Golden Hours were first issued in America as companion volumes under the George H. Doran imprint. While Richards says Doran "had a considerable success with" the set, I think "considerable" is an overstatement.

Meanwhile, however, Bramah had written three other books: The Mirror of Kong Ho (London, 1905), What Might Have Been: The Story of a Social War (London, 1907), and Max Currados (London, 1914). The last two have never been published in America, and the first did not get an American imprint until 1930, when Doubleday, Doran & Company (George H. Doran's successor) brought it out. By then Bramah's literary career was in full swing: he was appearing in British fiction magazines and (later) in anthologies on both sides of the Atlantic, especially with his Carrados stories about the blind detective. Two collections of these short pieces were published, The Eyes of Max Carrados (London, 1923) and Max Carrados Mysteries (London, 1927), but only the former was issued in this country—by George H. Doran in 1924. Another collection, The Specimen Case (London, 1924; New York, 1925), came out between these two: it contains 21 stories by Bramah, each one a single example of what he calls a "literary exercise." His ninth book was Kai Lung Unrolls His Mat (London and New York, 1928), which with The Wallet of Kai Lung and Kai Lung's Golden Hours make up The Kai Lung Omnibus (London, 1936). His writing career, which is about all one can mention in recounting his life, was not yet over. The next volume was a piece of nonfiction in an area which had long interested him and which even crops up in his Max Carrados stories, A Guide to the Varieties and Rarity of English Regal Copper Coins, Charles II-Victoria, 1671-1860 (London, 1929). It has never been published in this country, nor was his next book, A Little Flutter (London, 1930), a light-hearted novel. Two years later he turned back to Kai Lung, this time a full-length narrative in which the Chinaman does not himself appear but his name appears in the title: The Moon of Much Gladness, Related by Kai Lung (London, 1932), published in America after a delay of five years and by a small firm, Sheridan House, as The Return of Kai Lung (New York, 1937). His last two books, The Bravo of London (London, 1934), the only novel in which Max Carrados appears, and Kai Lung Beneath the Mulberry-Tree (London, 1940) were not printed in America, perhaps because the earlier ones did not sell well, for it was a time of financial depression.

Ernest Bramah's total output was fifteen books, only seven of which were issued with American imprints. He also wrote two one-act plays which, according to Penguin Books, "are often performed at London variety theatres, and many stories and articles in leading (British) periodicals." Grant Richards tells us, again in Author Hunting (p. 274): "There is one thing that I think few Bramah admirers know. On 21 February 1931 at 2:30 the Men Students of the Old Vic Shakespeare Company presented Kai Lung's Golden Hours, 'a Chinese Comedy, adapted for the stage by Allan D. Mainds, A.R.S.A.'" To which Richards adds, "But I prefer my Kai Lung within the pages of a book." Bramah died in Somerset, England on June 27, 1942; the New York Times reported the next day: "The life of the writer of detective fiction was somewhat of a mystery, as he lived in great seclusion, his widow even asking suppression of the place of death." From Bramah's own preface to The Specimen Case, however, one gets the impression that the notion of being a "mystery" amused him. For he reports a controversy in London periodicals, with his publisher Grant Richards writing, "I am asked all sorts of questions about (The Wallet of Kai Lung) and its author. Is there really such a person as Ernest Bramah? and so on. … Finally, I do assure his readers that such a person as Ernest Bramah does really and truly exist. I have seen and touched him." Bramah's American publisher told him in a letter, "I have always had a feeling that you were a mythical person," to which Bramah replied, "There is something not unattractive in the idea of being a mythical person … though from the heroic point of view one might have wished that it could have been 'a mythological personage.'"

So much for the life of the creator of Kai Lung and Max Carrados. What about his writings? It is these, after all, which are the reasons he is being discussed in the present paper. Of the fifteen books, several of them can be dismissed in a few words. For example, his first work, the autobiographical English Farming and Why I Turned It Up: the copy I read (and it is a rare book) came from the Library Company of Philadelphia. A notation indicates that it was bought August 22, 1894, the year of its publication. It was first taken out on December 7, 1894, and once more after mat, on April 22, 1913, before I got it on Interlibrary Loan in December 1957. There was hardly a mad rush in Philadelphia reading circles for the book; but then it was catalogued under "Agriculture," which might account for its burial. And an early reader has made a marginal annotation on the first page of the text: "This book was written by an English 'Smarty.' Don't waste time on it." (Incidentally, the Library Company saw so little future demand for English Farming that it was sold to me for $3.00.)

Bramah's book on numismatics, A Guide to the Varieties and Rarity of English Regal Copper Coins, has been called an authoritative work on the subject; but it is not literature in the sense I am using the term in this paper. He did, however, draw on his expert knowledge in this area for several of his stories. One more book that is different from anything else Bramah wrote, except as another expression of his humor, is A Little Flutter. It is a novel about the last surviving specimen of the Patagonian Groo-Groo, which has been sent to the aviary of a man left a legacy on the condition that he spend his life studying birds. Complications become outlandish when an escaped convict is disguised in the skin of the deceased bird. Which is enough said about this book. This leaves us with the detective stories and the Chinese ones, and The Specimen Case, in which both Kai Lung and Carrados appear.

There are four books which have the blind detective as a central character: Max Carrados, the first one; The Eyes of Max Carrados, which came second and contains a long and interesting introduction on blindness and detection; Max Carrados Mysteries, the final collection of short stories of a police nature; and The Bravo of London, the one novel and not a very good one in which Carrados is a character. (Twentieth Century Authors is wrong saying, "There is no full-length Carrados novel.") These stories bring up a provocative question: is the detective novel worthy of serious discussion as a literary type? George Sampson's Concise Cambridge History of English Literature (Cambridge and New York, 1941) devotes a few pages (p. 978, for instance) to the subject, not without some sneers. Professor William York Tindall's Forces in Modern British Literature, 1885-1946 (New York, 1947, pp. 143-144) is far more generous. But an affirmative answer to the question may be suggested by Howard Haycraft's Murder for Pleasure: The Life and Times of the Detective Story (New York, 1941), a full-length account of police fiction as literature. Mr. Haycraft mentions Bramah more than once and gives two pages of information (pp. 77-79), some of which—including the no Carrados novel mistake—he repeats in Twentieth Century Authors. Max Carrados is also discussed briefly a few times in Mr. Haycraft's Art of the Mystery Story (New York, 1946). He calls Bramah skillful, able, conscientious; however: "Occasionally the tales lean a little too far in the direction of intuition, and at other times they partake of the monotony of the arm-chair method; but for the most part they have a basis of sound investigation and deduction, imaginatively set forth." Mr. Haycraft concludes: "Wise, witty, gentle Max Carrados is one of the most attractive figures in detective literature—and a worthy protagonist to bring the (Sherlock Holmes, 1890-1914) epoch to an end."

My own opinion on rereading these stories is that from a literary view they do not hold up; they are far below in quality, to cite one other writer in the same field, Dorothy Sayers. But Bramah surely belongs in a historical survey of detective fiction, and in most of his obits in 1942 he was referred to as a writer of mystery stories and police fiction. In the eyes of many, the Max Carrados tales gave him some popular fame in America at least.

Coming in 1924, The Specimen Case is an important book for anyone who is studying Ernest Bramah as a literary figure. At the time he had written two Max Carrados books and two concerning Kai Lung; the new collection, he says in his preface, consists "of a suitable example taken at convenient intervals over the whole time that I have been engaged in writing stories—a span of thirty years." Not only is the preface of more than passing interest on Bramali and what he has to say about writing, but the collection traces, counter-clockwise (from the first tale, dated 1923, to the last, dated 1894) Bramah's development as an author. The 1894 piece, "From a London Balcony," is a "shocker," a little item of journalism; the 1923 piece, "Ming Tseuen and the Emergency," is a brilliant gem of a Kai Lung story. Comparing this with the Carrados story which The Specimen Case contains, "A Bunch of Violets," one can easily see the Kai Lung material as far superior. While the stories as a whole show technical proficiency and writing skill of a high order, nothing a professional author need be ashamed of, the Kai Lung stories in this book and elsewhere approach much closer to genuine literature. One can also see in The Specimen Case that satire was Bramah's metier. If Bramah is to have any claim to fame it is to be in his satirizing of social conventions, espe cially in England during his period, and in the unique style of Kai Lung's tales.

In addition to the first story in The Specimen Case, there are five Kai Lung books (if I may repeat titles already mentioned) published in this order from 1900 to 1940: The Wallet of Kai Lung, Kai Lung's Golden Hours, Kai Lung Unrolls His Mat, Return of Kai Lung (called Moon of Much Gladness, Related by Kai Lung in England), and Kai Lung Beneath the Mulberry-Tree. (There are two other books, The Transmutation of Ling and The Story of Wan and the Remarkable Shrub, and The Story of Ching-Kwei and the Destinies, but they are merely taken from Kai Lung volumes and issued separately.) Finally, there is The Mirror of Kong Ho, which some (including Penguin Books) have called a Kai Lung book: it is in a similar genre, but Kai Lung does not appear in it, nor has he anything to do with it. It has what I might call Kai Lung "qualities"; hence its discussion here. Kai Lung himself does not appear in The Return of Kai Lung—as he does in the other four books as both a character and a storyteller—but Bramah regards him as the teller of this full-length novel; thus he has his name in the title.

The basic pattern of the Kai Lung books is relatively simple. He is a kind of Chinese Chaucer, as Clifton Fadiman calls him, an ingenious and ingenuous professional storyteller among thieves, rogues, and mandarins. Accused of many crimes, he tells his wonderful tales to postpone the verdict (á la Arabian Nights) or get himself out of difficulties by charming his captors from day to day. There are of course other complications, such as in Kai Lung Unrolls His Mat, when he must rescue his beautiful Golden Mouse from the vicious mandarin Ming Shu, who also desires her. These adventures themselves are of small importance: it is the satirical element, the style, and the aphorisms that are everything. In Kong Ho, with the locale shifted from China to London and the characters changed from these thieves, rogues and mandarins to Englishmen, the effect is exactly the same, as Kong Ho—in the Chinese spy tradition—writes letters from England to his father in the Orient about British customs and the situations he gets himself into. In addition to the satire, which so many reviewers have not given its due, there is a delightfully elaborate and circuitous way of expressing the most obvious and simple notions. This polished, exaggeratedly refined verbiage slows each tale down to a less-than-tortoise pace just as the tale itself has completely stopped Kai Lung's own adventure. But a reader never minds: for the framework on which to hang all this is a minor matter.

It is impossible to describe the style of Ernest Bramah in these books, for there is nothing else quite like it. One can only give examples: "After secretly observing the unstudied grace of her movements, the most celebrated picture-maker of the province burned the implements of his craft, and began life anew as a trainer of performing elephants." And though all of the characters are invariably polite, rigidly ceremonial, and totally insincere, there is sometimes a loss of temper, as in this ordinary slang phrase turned into a high-flown Chinese idiom: "Thou concave-eyed and mentally bedridden offspring of a bald-seated she-dog." And again from The Return of Kai Lung: "To regard all men as corrupt is wise, but to attempt to discriminate among the various degrees of iniquity is both foolish and discourteous." A final quote from the same book: "It is possible to escape from an enemy carrying a two-edged sword but not from the interference of a well-meaning woman." When Bramah is talking of the Hereditary Confederacy of Superfluity Removers and Abandoned Oddment Gatherers, he is referring to garbage collectors; and when he speaks of the Kochow Throng of Hechild Track-Followers, Kai Lung has in mind the Boy Scouts of the neighborhood.

In spite of the high-level performance of Ernest Bramah in these Kai Lung stories over a period of years, and in spite of the very high praise he got in England from Hilaire Belloc, Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, Sir John C. Squire and S. P. B. Mais, critical attention in Britain has been negligible. A chapter in Squire's Life and Letters: Essays (London, 1920; New York, 1921, pp. 44-51); another in Mais's Some Modern Authors (London and New York, 1923, pp. 45-51; Grant Richards's introduction to The Wallet of Kai Lung (London, 1923) and his pages on Bramah in Author Hunting (London and New York, 1934, pp. 272-275); and Belloc's Preface to Kai Lung's Golden Hours (London, 1922), which is included in every edition of the book in both England and America—these and the book reviews as the various volumes were published just about sum up all the writings about Bramah. In America, as in Great Britain, heis mentioned in no histories of English literature that I am aware of, and I've searched hundred, no studies of the novel, no critiques of contemporary fiction, not in the Cambridge History or the Oxford Companion to English Literature, though William Rose Benát does give Bramah (under his real name, Ernest Bramah Smith) six lines in The Reader's Encyclopedia (New York, 1948, p. 1042).

Other than book reviews of seven of the books published in this country, the obituary notices, and the three Haycraft books cited above (Twentieth Century Authors and the histories of detective and mystery stories), Bramah has been ignored. Not one single article that could be called criticism.

Some of the reviews, on the other hand, are worth citing, though not all are fulsome in their praise. The Nation of January 9, 1924 had this to say about the Wallet: "The measure of one's delight in such a narrative as this is on the basis of one's fondness for humor which is deliberate, satire which is philosophical, and action which is aloof. There is a great deal of color in this story—and an equal apportionment of Oriental calm. If these elements coincide with one's temperament, Ernest Bramah will be quite to the taste; otherwise he is inclined to be insidiously soporific." The Outlook of May 16, 1928 wrote that Kai Lung Unrolls His Mat was "subtle, suave, and intricately satirical," and concluded: "We only refrain from saying these books are the best of their kind because we know of no others that are at all like them. They are really unique." Mary McCarthy's notice of The Return of Kai Lung in The Nation for October 23, 1937 ought to be quoted in full:

This little book, set in the never-never land of dynastic China, has for its ostensible subject the loss of a mandarin's pigtail. In the rigidly ceremonial Chinese world which Mr. Bramah predicates, this deprivation is synonymous with the loss of dignity, sexual and bureaucratic; and the quest of the missing pigtail becomes a national problem. The agent of its recovery is a Chinese girl, disguised in boys' clothes, who has an anachronistic acquaintance with English detective stories. The book is a satire of detective-story writers, who are habitually referred to as "the barbarian sages"; it is also a gentle, ironic commentary of the eternal, international venality and mutability of human nature and the absurdity of accepted social forms. It is, of course, a little démodé, both in its kindly, eclectic cynicism and its comic method. Most of its effects are gained through what H. W. Fowler classifies as polysyllabic or pedantic humor. It assumes that if a Western custom is described in ornate, Oriental verbiage, the reader will find both the incongruity and the custom funny. As a matter of fact, the reader frequently does. Mr. Bramah has an enormous vocabulary and a droll, supple hand. With this equipment, and with considerable effort, he does manage to squeeze a number of laughs out of the old topsy-turvy joke.

Many reviewers have said, with truth, that Bramah writes for a special audience. The Bookman (October 1930): "The pages of Bramah have the bouquet of the rarest tea, of a kind not imported, and drunk only by mandarins of the highest button, and in this amber atmosphere live his amiable personages, displaying, even under the most excruciating trials, that affable demeanor which is the conscious art of the countrymen of the polite Confucius." And Time (September 6, 1937): "(Bramah's) Kai Lung stories … have long delighted patient readers on both sides of the Atlantic. Their low-keyed humor, chess-game pace and subacid satire gave them an effect somewhat less than sidesplitting, but for readers who like slyness slow and stately, Ernest Bramah is a lordly dish. … Their chief delight, however, is an apt aphorisms: 'Two resolute men acting in concord may transform an Empire, but an ordinarily resourceful duck can escape from a dissentient rabble.'" Finally, one of the longest reviews of Kong Ho, by John Carter in the New York Times Book Review of December 14, 1930, which speaks of the Kai Lung tales being "to China what 'Hajji Baba of Ispahan' is to Persia. Here is satire of a sort which stands on its own feet and needs neither apology nor explanation." Mr. Carter continues, "Mr. Bramah is an English savant and philosopher and Kong Ho is a purely ficticious character. This is a device which recommended itself to the greater satirists, to Voltaire as to Goldsmith. … East and West, Mr. Bramah reminds us, are not opposite; they are side-ways from each other. … 'The Mirror of Kong Ho' is something more than an ordinary production. It is part of the carefully distilled and rarefied humor and wisdom of one of the few modern writers of whom it can be truthfully said that they should write far more than they do, but that it would be a pity if they did. Kong Ho takes his place beside, or a little beneath, Mr. Bramah's immortal Kai Lung." Mr. Carter concludes: "This is one of the few books which no intelligent man ought to neglect, as it is one of the few which every intelligent man will enjoy rereading."

Such was the reception from American book reviewers. The reception from book buyers in America was considerably less than in England. All fifteen of his books were published in London, and of the seven published in this country, all are out of print. The Kai Lung books are still in print on the other side of the Atlantic, in both paper-back editions and in hard covers; many more editions were issued there than here. Only the Wallet and Kai Lung's Golden Hours were reprinted in hard covers—there were no paperbacks here—by Doubleday, Doran; and the printings were never large. Today, to repeat what I said at the outset, the books can only be obtained in America through direct import from Britain—or through the antiquarian bookseller.

More than thirty-five years ago Hilaire Belloc wrote in a preface to Kai Lung's Golden Hours an apt conclusion to what I have been trying to say:

In connection with such achievements (of Ernest Bramah's) it is customary to deplore the lack of public appreciation. Either to blame the hurried millions of chance readers because they have only bought a few thousands of a masterpiece; or, what is worse still, to pretend that a good work is for the few and that the mass will never appreciate it—in reply to which it is sufficient to say that the critic himself is one of the mass and could not be distinguished from the others of the mass by his very own self were he a looker-on.

In the best of times (the most stable, the least hurried) the date at which general appreciation comes is a matter of chance, and to-day the presentation of any achieved work is like the reading of Keats to a football crowd. It is of no significance whatsoever to English Letters whether one of its glories be appreciated at the moment it issues from the press or ten years later, or twenty, or fifty. Further, after a very small margin is passed, a margin of a few hundreds at the most, it matters little whether strong permanent work finds a thousand or fifty thousand or a million of readers. Rock stands and mud washes away.

What is indeed to be deplored is the lack of communication between those who desire to find good stuff and those who can produce it: it is in the attempt to build a bridge between the one and the other that men who have the privilege of hearing a good thing betimes write such words as I am writing here.