Percival Pollard was an American literary critic, novelist and short story writer.
Background
Joseph Percival Pollard was born on January 29, 1869, in the homeland of his mother, Greifswald, Pomerania, which was then part of the kingdom of Prussia, now Germany. He was the son of Joseph and Marie Pollard. In 1885, Percival immigrated to the United States.
His father, a grain merchant, was an English subject, while his grandfather in England owned a coal company in Newcastle. Pollard’s childhood was disrupted by the divorce of his parents, but his father eventually married another German woman and from her, the young Pollard achieved fluency in both German and French. In 1885, Pollard moved to the United States with his parents.
Education
As a youth, Pollard attended school in England. Later, he was educated at Eastbourne College in Sussex.
Pollard worked for the railroad and began writing for the local newspaper. In 1891 Pollard moved to Chicago, where he wrote criticism for several minor magazines. He also began writing short stories during this time, many of which were published in the magazine Figaro, a publication that he co-owned during the early 1890s. His critical pieces, however, soon began to earn him a reputation, and he found success when he submitted them to national magazines such as Harper’s Weekly. During these years in Chicago Pollard began working on his first novel, and became a contributor to the short-lived but well regarded Chap- Book.
Pollard decided to launch his own publication in 1895, which he called Echo. It was originally intended as a poster publication, and he tried it out in both New York and Chicago with little financial success. His first novel, Cape of Storms, was privately printed under the Echo imprint in 1895. After 1896 Pollard lived in New York City, where he began contributing criticism to the journals Town Topics and Criterion. At the latter publication he met the critic James Gibbons Huneker, and both men would emerge from this period as the American critical establishment’s most ardent proponents of European fin de siecle culture and avant-garde trends in their writing. Town Topics hired Pollard in 1897, the same year in which he published another work of prose: Dreams of To-Day. The collection contained essays bearing such titles as “The Dream of a Kiss,” “The Dream of a Failure,” and “The Dream of Two Ambitions.”
Pollard, divorced from his first wife by 1899, found that his ties with Criterion were severed, as well as those to a number of figures in the literary establishment. Re-married, he settled in Saybrook, Connecticut, and began taking extended sojourns in Europe. In 1901, he wrote another novel, The Imitator, which was a satire on the actor Richard Mansfield, for whom he had once worked as a press agent; Pollard also adapted works for the stage for Mansfield. The three main works of criticism for which Pollard would be best remembered all appeared in a relatively short span of time. The first of these was the 1909 volume Their Day in Court. This title, like his subsequent books of criticism, contained much of the same sentiments that Pollard had previously expressed in his magazine pieces - namely, that American literature was too puritanical, and that an infusion of ideas from new and more daring European writers could only improve it.
Pollard’s acclaimed second book of criticism was a look into contemporary drama in Germany. Masks and Minstrels of New Germany was published in 1911, and contained individual chapters on the burgeoning cabaret phenomenon as well as examinations of the work of several leading playwrights, Franz Wedekind and Hugo von Hoffmansthal among them. Tragically, Pollard died a few months after the publication of this book. He suffered from a brain abscess that had been initially misdiagnosed; he never woke from surgery. Only a handful of mourners attended the funeral, but among them were Bierce and a young Baltimore journalist by the name of H. L. Mencken, who had found in Pollard an inspiration for his own acerbic criticism. Pollard’s final book, Vagabond Journeys: The Human Comedy At Home and Abroad, was published on the day of his cremation.
“Percival Pollard is rarely read today, though there is a confident assertiveness in his criticism which is attractive. Pollard is at his best. He goes beyond literature and becomes a critic of culture and civilization. The reading public he had in mind was the ‘intelligent minority.’ His approach was again very personal and impressionistic.” - Peter Groth
Connections
Pollard was twice married. His first wife was Sarah Lindsey Myers, but the divorced in 1899, and the same year he married Charlotte T. Renea.
Prejudices: First Series
EVERY now and then, a sense of the futility of their daily endeavors falling suddenly upon them, the critics of Christendom turn to a somewhat sour and depressing consideration of the nature and objects of their own craft.
The Man in the Mirror: William Marion Reedy and His Magazine
A flamboyant and controversial figure, William Marion Reedy was one of the most successful literary entrepreneurs of his day. Editor of the Mirror, a St. Louis weekly, from 1891 to 1920, Reedy played a large role in breaking down the genteel literary tradition, developing a native poetry, and helping to form some fifty significant poets.