The Noblest Profession

Helen McGill has a problem. A self-described ageing spinster – she is, good heavens, approaching forty – Helen is feeling unappreciated by the Sage of Redfield, her brother Andrew, whose books about life on the farm and the virtues of pastoral living have made him a literary celebrity – and to Helen’s thinking, very much at her expense. For it is Helen who bakes the bread and collects the eggs and cooks the meals on her wood-fired stove and cleans the house and darns the socks so that the Sage may amble down country roads and come home to lean on his fence, light his pipe and think big thoughts. Then, having handed his sister his dirty laundry, the Sage will retire to his study, warm and well-fed, to spin yarns about his adventures in ‘the bosom of Nature’ and reflect on the Simple Life. When Roger Mifflin, a caravan-driving itinerant bookseller, appears at her door hoping to meet the great man, who yet again has wandered off on ‘some vagabond jaunt to collect adventures for a new book’ and left Helen to run the farm, Helen decides she has had enough.

Mr Mifflin is interested in moving into a new phase of his life and intends to sell his wagon and wares to Andrew. Alarms go off in Helen’s head. The Sage doesn’t need another bit of nonsense to take him away from the farm chores and send him madly off in all directions. Helen’s own spirit of adventure rises to the surface with her indignation. She’s saved her own money. The price to buy the horse, books and ‘caravan of culture’, colourfully decked out with a sign proclaiming it ‘Parnassus on Wheels’ and fully equipped with bed, linen, cooking utensils and a yellow terrier named Bock (short for Boccaccio, of course), is about the price of the thousands of eggs that Helen has sold over the past decade. Before the day is done she has driven off with Mr Mifflin, her incredulous brother soon in hot pursuit. Helen is the creation of Christopher Morley, a young man with more than a little mischief in his soul. It is 1913. Morley has just returned to America from his Rhodes Scholarship at Oxford and has found gainful employment at Doubleday, Page & Company, working as a publicist and spending hours of unbearable tedium wading through the slush pile of unsolicited manuscripts as a publisher’s reader. (It could have been worse: Alfred Knopf was working in the Mail Order Department.) Refilling his pipe as he works, he soldiers on with the invincible optimism of youth, imagining the day when the mantle of fame and fortune will settle lightly on his shoulders. It is just around the corner. Then he meets the great author at Doubleday: Ray Stannard Baker. Now utterly forgotten, except by those few who have had the wisdom to subscribe to Slightly Foxed (see no. 52), Baker, under the pseudonym David Grayson, has become an international celebrity, having written Adventures in Contentment, Adventures in Friendship and The Friendly Road. A fourth Grayson title, Great Possessions, is about to go to press. The public’s appetite for the Grayson books seems insatiable. Light dawns, and no doubt Morley smiles. What better way for a nascent young author to bring attention to his own literary efforts than by writing a parody of some of the most famous books in the country? He has found his muse. The book Morley began was Parnassus on Wheels (1917), the story of Helen McGill, a restless spinster chafing under the yoke of domestic thraldom as she cares for her brother, ‘the author of those books everyone reads’. Parnassus was an instant success. Morley followed it up with a sequel, The Haunted Bookshop (1919), giving the world two of the most beloved novels ever written about books and readers, and inaugurating a forty-year literary career that would overshadow his unwitting inspirator. Parnassus on Wheels and The Haunted Bookshop remain in print to this day. No one in 1917 could have missed the reference to the Grayson books. Parnassus is a satire, but a most amiable one. Though it cannot quite match the lightness of touch of P. G. Wodehouse, Parnassus has nothing of the viciousness of Swift or the comic-strip vulgarity of Mark Twain. Morley was cautiously respectful in his parody, poking fun gently but always following up with a kind word about the Sage’s graceful prose. When Helen observes of the Sage that ‘The publishers have done their best to spoil him, but for a literary man he’s quite human,’ Mifflin replies, ‘The preposterous thing about him is that he really can write . . . his prose is almost as good as Thoreau.’ Helen thinks it ‘rather dull’. For Roger Mifflin, bookselling is a sacred profession, a calling. A short, stout, pugnacious man, he would have disputed Rupert Hart-Davis’s later quip that bookselling is an ideal profession for one’s second son. For him, nothing is more important than putting good books in the hands of hungry readers, a character trait which alone should endear him at once to any Real Reader. And few literary creations are introduced with greater charm and economy or with a greater helping of delicious candour than Helen, as she introduces herself to the reader.

I wonder if there isn’t a lot of bunkum in higher education? I never found that people who were learned in logarithms and other kinds of poetry were any quicker in washing dishes or darning socks. I’ve done a good deal of reading when I could, and I don’t want to ‘admit impediments’ to the love of books, but I’ve also seen lots of good, practical folk spoiled by too much fine print. Reading sonnets always gives me hiccups, too.

Young Mr Morley would go on to write many more books, including novels, poetry and essays. Alas, they are mostly forgotten. He is to this day fondly recalled and revered as a founding member and first president of the Baker Street Irregulars, the endearing society devoted to all things Conan Doyle and Sherlock Holmes. A founding editor of the Saturday Review, twice editor of Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations and for decades a judge for the Book of the Month Club, Morley had an impact on the reading tastes of generations of Americans as far-reaching as that of Arthur QuillerCouch in England. By the time of his death in 1957 he would be remembered as one of the most prolific and influential men of letters of the twentieth century, but the titles that always bring a smile to the faces of that ever-dwindling group of readers who have not for - gotten him are Parnassus on Wheels and The Haunted Bookshop. As one might expect, both novels are liberally sprinkled with enough literary opinions to provoke half a dozen heated conversations: Omar Khayyám ‘was a coward with his silk pyjamas and his glass of wine’; Henry James ‘had a kind of rush of words to the head and never stopped to sort them out properly’; and Thomas Hardy’s The Dynasts ‘leaves you gasping, ill, nauseated’. In The Haunted Bookshop, we meet Mr Mifflin again, now happily ensconced in a bricks-and-mortar bookshop, haunted not by things that go bump in the night but by the literary spirits of ages past. Seated comfortably behind a desk so laden with books and papers that the only sign of life is the wreath of tobacco smoke that drifts above him, he is undaunted by changing fashions and economic challenges, and has lost nothing of his evangelical zeal.

There is no one so grateful as the man to whom you have given just the book his soul needed and he never knew it . . . The world has been printing books for 450 years, and yet gun - powder still has a wider circulation. Never mind! Printer’s ink is the greater explosive . . .

I was reminded of my occasional trips to our local post office to dispatch books to friends. When asked the routine question about my parcel, ‘Does this contain anything fragile, liquid, perishable, or hazardous?’ I reply, ‘Yes. Ideas.’ Helen, now Mrs Mifflin, returns as well, in the eyes of her husband ‘as plump and full of matter as The Home Book of Verse ’ . There is romance afoot, a mystery, a conspiracy, a bomb, but still at the centre of all stands the allure of books and bookselling. Why, Morley asks, do booksellers – these strange beasts ‘worn at the bindings as becomes men who have forsaken worldly profit to pursue a noble calling’ – pursue that calling? Because

Books are the immortality of the race, the father and mother of most that is worthwhile cherishing in our hearts. To spread good books about, to sow them on fertile minds, to propagate understanding and a carefulness of life and beauty, isn’t that high enough mission for a man?

Quite high enough, Mr Morley.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 85 © Richard Platt 2025