Cline's most successful book was a work-for-hire translation that he did for his publisher, the Viking Press, of a pseudonymous French novel
L'Honorable Partie de Campagne (1924), by Thomas Raucat. Cline's translation appeared as
The Honorable Picnic, published in June 1927, with a reprint in July. The British edition, as
The Honourable Picnic, appeared from John Lane The Bodley Head in 1928, and was reprinted in 1931 and 1936.
The novel is comprised of a prologue with eight chapters, each from the perspective of a different character, thus giving a breadth of insight into the various actions and motivations. The story is simple: a European man sees a beautiful Japanese girl at an amusement park in Tokyo, and he invites her and her companion to spend a day with him in the country. His Japanese friends attempt to save him from the ignominy of prolonged female society and the situation becomes increasingly complicated. This bald summary does no justice to the elegance of the work. It is witty and poignant and entrancing, and Cline's translation works well in English.
The humor extends to the author's pseudonym, Thomas Raucat, which when pronounced in French and heard in Japanese becomes "tomor
รด ka" which is a familiar shortened form of a Japanese phrase meaning "let's spend the night." The real author was Roger Poidatz (1894-1976), a Frenchman who resided in Japan for several years.
The book was reprinted in paperback by Modern Age Books in 1937, and the Viking Press did a new hardcover edition in 1955 that had two printings. Meanwhile, the Charles Tuttle Company began printing it in 1954 (cover design by Masakazu Kuwata), and it stayed in print through the mid 1980s. Early Tuttle printings were in hardcover, while the eighth (1972) and ninth (1983) were done as mass-market sized paperbacks, but on higher quality paper. A regular mass market edition came from Curtis Books in 1972.
Here follows a gallery of the various editions. The art is uncredited on all but one edition.
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| The Viking Press, 1927 |
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| John Lane The Bodley Head 1928 |
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| Modern Age Books 1937 |
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| Charles Tuttle 1954, art by Masakazu Kuwata |
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| Viking Press, 1955 |
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| Curtis Books, 1972 |
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| Charles Tuttle, 1983 |
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