preparations for his career, and about one hundred pages after the resemblance is discovered by the Montague girl. Between them lies one third of the book describing, with no great ingenuity or invention, Merton's descent to his last dollar. One whole blessed instalment as the story ran in The Saturday Evening Post revealed the fact that Merton slept in the sets on the lot. And here, fighting for space (and gasping for breath) Mr Wilson almost made one forget that he wrote His Majesty Bunker Bean.
Bunker Bean is out of print. For the sake of our standing abroad it ought to be re-issued. It is an entirely trifling book, but it is beautifully trivial. It has actual American humour and presents, so that they have not needed to be humorously presented again, three American types: the business man, the flapper, and the young clerk. It is written totally without smartness; it tells a sufficiently entertaining story; some of its most casual utterances are immortal.
It may be a trick of memory, but Bunker Bean seems a much more finely composed piece of work than Merton, and I cannot for the life of me see why a frivolous novel like this one should be shabbily done. In Bunker Bean the hero is also a bit of a fool, with his Ram-Tah and Napoleon for ancestors; there too an American habit (business) is satirized; the flapper is quite the trouper. But the essential difference, i1t seems to me, i1s that whereas in Bunker Bean Mr Wilson has used business as an element in his story, in Merton of the Movies he has seen the possibilities of the moving picture as a comic subject. He has, in short, done what nearly every American novelist of any pretentions does sooner or later—accepted the magazine editor's idea that locale and subject are vastly important in a story, that you can make a story if you find a new setting. He has exploited the moving picture, let us say, not used it. And it is fair to say that if he hadn't, he would have had to do more with his satire and more with his characters. Perforce he would have done better with the structure of his novel because he would have incorporated the hundred now superfluous pages instead of inserting them.
I do not propose to send an evangelist out to Mr Wilson to recall him to the Better Way; nor do I want to suggest that he has done badly here. But if any one cares to remark that I am breaking a butterfly on a wheel, I will enquire if there is any good reason why this book should fatally be out of the class of Zuleika Dobson?
