A Note on A. Neil Lyons (1880-1940)

208 209 A NOTE ON A. NEIL LYONS (1880-1940) By Alan Richardson (University of Western Australia) As^a young boy I came to know many quotations from the works of Neil Lyons as a result of my father's use of them in everyday situations at home. When I grew older I was pleased to recognise them in the stories that my father read in the evenings. Just recently his collection of Neil Lyons' books was passed on to me and I had the pleasure of reading them for myself. From this has stemmed my conviction that the stories warrant a re-examination both by scholars and by those readers who still enjoy 0. Henry, Saki and other great short story writers. My purpose in writing this brief note is to stimulate curiosity concerning a little known writer of considerable talent. Most of what is known about the life of Albert Michael Neil Lyons can be found in Who's Who (1917). He was born in the South African mining town of Kimberley and went to school in nearby Hanover. After some slight training in the law and later in accountancy he began his career as a journalist. By the age of nineteen he had obtained "a subordinate editorial appointment" on The Critic.1 Sometime in the next three years he emigrated to England. In 1902 he was contributing regular pieces to The Clarion,^ an English Socialist weekly under the editorship of Robert Blatchford, and in the same year his first novel, Hookev. was published by T. Fisher Unwin. Like the great majority of his tales, this one is told in the first person . As a disguised Neil Lyons type figure he gets to know Hookey, a fourteen-year-old Cockney girl, who runs the local tobacconist shop. Typical of Lyons' dialogue and character drawing in this and later writings is the following: Because I am afflicted with a club foot and some grosser infirmities, peculiar to middle age, I think she suspected me of evangelistic tendencies. At any rate her indifference to my patronage was marked (p. 2). Their relationship develops and he later asks, "Why do you call me Jeremiah?" "That's what I always 'ave called you," she answered. "You've got a Brothers repent! sort of way with you. Besides a gal's got to call 'er customers something, so's to keep 'em sorted out in 'her 'ead." (p. 4). "Jeremiah" is introduced to the members of a working men's club called The Free Debaters. The chairman begins the official proceedings by announcing that "The subjec' afore the Ouse is 'Future Life' - and if you arst me, a rottener subjec* couldn't 'a' bin 'it 210 on . . . Blessed is 'im as expecteth nix." (p. 6I)0 Although Lyons is almost totally unknown today, it is not difficult to demonstrate that he was appreciated by the critics and reading public of his own time. His first great success was a collection of stories based on the nightbirds who visited Arthur's coffee stall in the East End of London. Arthur's: The Romance of a Coffee Stall was published in I908 and went through three further editions TH the next eight years. Edwin Pugh, who reviewed it for New Age, described it as in its way, a masterpiece. It is a work of realism touched with poetry and romance. I do not know whether most to admire its humour or its pathos, its picturesqueness, its force, or its consummate artistry. Anyway, he has given us a volume that is quite the best thing of its unambitious kind I have ever read.J The qualities of realism and humour have been mentioned by other critics and commentators. Indeed it is to Neil Lyons that Frank Swinnerton^ turns when he wants to show that the two qualities are not incompatible. But English realism is undoubtedly as old as Thomas Nashe and while it has come to modern readers tinctured by_ French and Russian influence we have no more realistic writer than Neil Lyons who is a humourist, (p. 177)· Another mark of his high reputation among the critics of hisday is his appearance among the group...