Mr. Thomas Burke of Limehouse; And the Glow of High Romance He Casts Over the Mean Streets of His Youth

From The New York Times, December 28, 1924.



The naked truth of Mr. Burke’s chronicle is stranger than most fiction and far more fascinating. His memory, like a prismed searchlight, pierces the foggy squalor of the mean streets where his youth was cast and plays among the sinister figures of London’s half world, ferreting ou: even the shadows of dim orientals from archway and riverside by street, and, showing always the bitter and squalid and penury-bitten. yet manages to invest them with the garments of fate and halo them with the glow of high romance. Raw emotion is never very far below the surface of his story. despite his fine reticence. It could hardly be otherwise with a man still very near the days when a wistful little cockney guttersnipe was trying to wring bread from a very adult and insensitive world. A background of drunkenness, orphanage discipline and bootblacking is not exactly the most potent inspirer of self-confidence in a sensitive adolescent mind. If Mr. Burke has found experience a very hard teacher who now barred gates to him and again threw them miraculously open, he at least owes also to that teacher admirable nerves and an ironic insight hardly otherwise arrived at. He has seen the faithful and threadbare clerk. whose munificent salary of $15 a week he once so envied, stay where he was, while the orphanage aummy became first a princely-paid vaudeville star and then a millionaire motion picture producer. He has seen a succession of accidents change his own life from the rare possession of a starved-for shilling cat at the opera to dinner at Monte Carlo with the great tenor whose voice had awed him. He has learned hat the packet for which one prays nay at length come into one’s hands and prove to be empty ‘that all living is hunger and without hunger we perish. That each man’s city of refuge must be built within himself of broken toys. That the only people who truly live are they who are always beginning again. That the mocking magic which comes and goes is the lamp which is lighting us to beauty. Here in three hundred pages Mr. Burke makes his reader live another life than his own and so come to understand not only that life, but his own and all other lives, the better. He has dramatized the events of his life in a succession of episodes, high lights in the long years which span the gap between scant bread-and-mustard and a season of leisurely writing at Monaco. Here is in both senses of the word a moving picture of a man’s life.

No novel of recent days is more filled with human material than this somewhat seared memory he has put before us. Here is the child of 5 already reaching out for the lure of the unknown and finding comfort in the friendship of a stolid Chinese. Here are the terrible inquisitions into the lives of the poor conducted by the well-meaning and the respectable. Here are the people of The Big House Who Take an Interest in their servants and get the gardener’s lad into a home. No novel of Dickens presents a picture of institution life much more terrible than that home and its effect on adolescents. Then there are the kindly people of London’s Bohemia and half-world set off against the grinding labor of respectable offices. But most of all there is the perpetual wistful search for friendship, for beauty, for escape from the drab and the ugly and the vile. Very pathetic is the story of the friendship between the clerk of 20 and the adoring girl of 13 for whom there is no escape. Feverish and terrible is the search, night after night through the highways and byways of London. for something demanded by torture of spirit, something unnamed and half unknown. Always the tantalizing, eluding life around the corner. Little by little through it all grows the desire for expression. The teeming life of the city had got into the blood of this half-starved lad, and spirits from the past seemed to rise close at hand just at the moment of greatest need. Old Quong Lee might have r’n an opium den, but he had been the first friend made and the first to understand the wistful child’s groping for something outside himself. Creegan of the itinerant orchestra might live on the causeway and drink too much, but he too had felt the childish yearning for something lovely and strange. Cicely of the Big House had put him in his place as a child with a gift of broken toys, but a young man making his living by writing was another person than the gardener’s boy her aunt had helped into a home. But Cicely can still wound and must still be decently conventional, throwing back the lad upon the friendship of Cosgrove of the orphanage and the music hall turns, and Jimmy Hayhoe, who spends his secret life with the great composers and writes popular songs for a living. Finishing ‘The Wind and the Rain,” one lingers over the thought that this orphanage boy who had learned early to make out an invoice has here inventoried his world-the world which flowed all about him and crowded him off the sidewalk or helped him unexpectedly out of the gutter, or took no notice of him at all; and that he has come to Conrad’s conclusion that the working truths of life are after all humble and not heroic. He too has felt the sense of tears for mortal things and expressed it finely, but life and the thousand-fold fleeting impressions of living, rather than death, are the things which have touched his mind.


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The Wind and the Rain: A Book of Confessions was first published by Thornton Butterworth, London, 1924.