Crazy Pavements

by Beverley Nichols

  CRAZY PAVEMENTS

  BEVERLEY NICHOLS

  With a new introduction by

  DAVID DEUTSCH

  VALANCOURT BOOKS

  Crazy Pavements by Beverley Nichols

  First published London: Jonathan Cape, 1927

  First Valancourt Books edition 2013

  Copyright © 1927 by Beverley Nichols

  Introduction © 2013 by David Deutsch

  Published by Valancourt Books

  http://www.valancourtbooks.com

  All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system, without prior written consent of the publisher, constitutes an infringement of the copyright law.

  Cover art by Ben Bailey

  INTRODUCTION

  Crazy Pavements (1927) is a bildungsroman of debauchery. Reminiscent of Aldous Huxley’s Crome Yellow (1921) and Antic Hay (1923), and anticipating Evelyn Waugh’s Vile Bodies (1930) and Put Out More Flags (1942), Nichols’s novel both celebrates and satirizes the decadence of post-War British society. Nichols’s hero, Brian Elme, first appears as an unsophisticated young man who has graduated from some anonymous “School,” probably a third-rate public school, and been “thrown penniless upon London,” where he now works as a gossip columnist (7). Through this job, Brian meets a series of depraved individuals, the broken stones who pave the path to his depravity, i.e. the “crazy pavement” referenced by Nichols’s title. Lady Julia, for instance, is rich, beautiful, and intensely manipulative. Lord William Motley over-eats, over-drinks, and takes cocaine. The Hon. Maurice Cheyne is a malevolent sponger, while Lady Anne Hardcastle is a “nymphomaniac” who looks like “an animated intaglio,” having undergone no less than seven face lifts (118). This is a fantastic cast and Nichols delights in sketching its scandalous eccentricities.

  Seeking some sort of freshness, these sophisticates introduce Brian, and indirectly the reader, into the fascinating, yet poisonous world of the 1920s Bright Young People. For them, life is a “game” to be “played at top speed,” with “perpetually high tension,” while fighting off fears of “being alone,” “of being poor,” and “of growing old,” a battle that they lose all the faster with their constant rounds of cocktails, dope, and late-night bacchanalias (27). Nichols highlights the degradation of this life through several brilliantly bizarre scenes. One afternoon, Lord William invites Brian to his luxurious home in Queen Anne’s Gate where he reveals his hall of masks, each of which he has fashioned to suggest the grotesque psyches of his outwardly refined friends. On another night, while kept waiting in Maurice’s flat, Brian discovers slips of paper in a cigarette box and a tantalus reading “THIEF!” and “YOU THINK I DON’T KNOW, DO YOU?” (111) Maurice has three thousand pounds a year, but fears someone stealing a cigarette or a drink. These characters display a monstrous, egotistical self-indulgence, which Nichols emphasizes through Tanagra Guest’s party where “[e]verybody was to be dressed” and “to act as a child” (110). Nichols likely cribbed this scene from an actual 1926 Bright Young People’s party, to which guests came as they were “twenty years ago,” a curious reversion for party-goers not yet thirty.1 In Nichols’s portrayal, this regression to “infantility” increases disquietingly as socialites converse in baby-talk, scream, and drink champagne scarcely a year after the 1926 General Strike (115).

  Huxley and Waugh, too, castigate Britain’s dissipated socialites; Nichols, however, rarely satirizes his subjects as mercilessly as his more famous contemporaries. Nichols’s depiction of Maurice, for instance, illustrates his sympathy. Maurice seems to epitomize stereotypes linking effeminate, queer men to aristocratic decadence, ridiculousness, and self-loathing. Effeminate men similar to Maurice exist in Rose Macaulay’s The Lee Shore (1912), in E. F. Benson’s Freaks of Mayfair (1916), even in Nichols’s first novel Prelude (1920), where he observes of his hero’s preference for singing, dancing and dressing up, “all this may be looked upon as effeminate. What of it?”2 These characters, however, are fairly docile and any defense of their effeminacy is presented through authorial commentary. Nichols allows Maurice, however, to offer an insistent, even aggressive self-defense. In one particularly chilling scene, Maurice insists to the more masculine Brian, “I’m as natural as you are. . . . I can’t help how I’m made.” Outlining his agony, he admits to being

  [h]ideously frightened of life. . . . Sometimes I come back from a party and I turn on all the lights and I play the gramophone, and I stand in the middle of the room, just waiting, till I could scream. The room is bright and noisy, but I feel it’s full of people, looking at me, condemning me. They crowd round me, out of every door, they climb in at the window, they grin down from the ceiling, and oh, God! . . . they all accuse me. (175-176)

  Maurice’s psychological trauma, his intense paranoia, is palpable and these late-night delusions evoke an expressionist nightmare; or perhaps they recall contemporary courtrooms where same-sex-desiring men were judged from on high. Still, despite his torment, Maurice talks back, demanding, “Why should I be accused? Tell me that” (176). Moreover, if Maurice turns to drugs and alcohol to escape from his misery, Nichols suggests, society must share the blame for hounding him. In an age where E. M. Forster felt he could only publish his Maurice (written 1913-14) posthumously, Nichols’s sympathy with the effeminate Maurice is worthy of note.

  Equally worthy of note is Nichols’s sympathetic portrayal of Brian’s relationship with Walter Moore. Walter is Brian’s best friend, his roommate, and, almost certainly, his lover. Bryan Connon, Nichols’s biographer, reports that “Beverley went to some lengths to stress the idealistic and sexless nature of [this] relationship,” understandably, as homosexuality was not legalized in Britain until 1967. Yet, Nichols infuses such romance into the pair’s interactions that his later admission that “[o]f course Brian and Walter were lovers, and Lady Julia was based on one of those predatory young queens,” seems hardly surprising.3 Julia tempts Brian, temporarily, from the “jealous” Walter, but Brian consistently remembers Walter to preserve his sanity (32). When out of his depth at Lord William’s country house, Brian recalls “how he and Walter had once saved up to go to Cambridge for a week-end” and “had slept all night in a punt at Grantchester” (77). Brian’s memory of this trip, with its frugal, Rupert Brooke-like pleasures, comforts him. Similarly, after Tanagra’s party, Brian “wanted to slip his hand through Walter’s arm, and lie back on [their] shabby sofa, and say nothing. And then sleep” (122). Later, after rejecting Julia’s circle, Brian stumbles drunkenly into a bar and collapses onto Walter’s knee. Recognizing Walter, Brian cries “Don’t go . . . I want you – awfully” (218). Walter forgives Brian’s betrayal and the novel concludes with Brian waking and planning a day swimming in Hyde Park with Walter, who lies sleeping across the room. In the 1920s, as Nichols once observed, many people “instinctively shut their eyes” to homosexuality and homosexuality nonetheless persisted, with varying degrees of visibility.4 For discerning early twentieth-century readers, the homoeroticism of Brian and Walter’s relationship would have been fairly obvious. It is notable, then, that the Times Literary Supplement applauds Nichols’s extrication of Brian from a “bog of sensuality” by returning him to Walter and all that their relationship implies.5

  Nichols expands British literary conventions considerably here by depicting two healthy, relatively lower-middle-class men in a nurturing romantic relationship. Brian is “strong, slim, arduous” and makes six pounds a week, while Walter Moore is “an ex-naval officer,” who maintains a “healthy flush” and is content with “a few shillings in his pocket” (13). Together, they share a cozy but small and shabby flat near
the Marble Arch. They are, in many ways, a happier, cohabitating, urban variation on D. H. Lawrence’s Cyril Beardsall and the farmer George Saxton in The White Peacock (1911), or of the vital but self-tortured middle-class men in Reginald Underwood’s Bachelor’s Hall (1934) or Flame of Freedom (1936). Brian and Walter’s simple domesticity, moreover, provides a happy alternative to upper-class excesses, cross-class inequalities, and even the delayed happiness between men envisioned in otherwise optimistic novels, such as Rose Allatini’s Despised and Rejected (1918). Nichols champions, then, for perhaps the first time in British literary history, a fairly physical, if not overtly sexual, homoeroticism between two men with modest incomes as a successful ideal.

  This happy conclusion likewise signals Nichols’s desire for renewed stability in post-war Britain. Many canonical novels published contemporaneously with Crazy Pavements – Ford Madox Ford’s Parade’s End (1924-28), Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse (1927), and Aldous Huxley’s Point Counter Point (1928), for instance – evoke both wartime losses scarcely a decade old and the fragility of hope for the future. Nichols evokes these post-war themes throughout Crazy Pavements, but is more insistent in his optimism. Brian reconnects with Walter late on “August 4th,” the anniversary of “[t]he war. The great war” (215). These italics are carefully ironic, as what was primarily “great” about the war, the increasingly pacifist Nichols implies, was the great destruction it caused. Nonetheless, Walter, who as a twenty-six-year-old “ex-naval officer” would have either served or just missed serving, and many others his age are lucky to be alive and this luck is worth celebrating. As such, while Brian considers that “anniversaries” are “vulgar,” this evening he “wanted vulgarity” and so he celebrates among the cheap markets near Blackfriars and the bars favored by Walter (215). Walking along, he thinks “[t]his was England. This would go on, triumphant, coarse, obscene, vital, long after Lord William, Maurice, Julia and the rest of them had retired to their futile tombs” (218). It is the British middle and working classes, Brian thinks, who keep the nation, even the Empire strong, and he exults in their continuity.

  This is not to say that Nichols endorses unreservedly Brian’s optimism. Brian finds “a sort of peace” here, but he does so among people who worry about how “to afford a Sunday dinner, or to pay for their next week’s rent” (216). These struggles to acquire hearty food, such as a Sunday roast, and housing are depressing when compared to the abundant, unearned luxuries of Lady Julia and Lord William. Brian’s “peace,” even if it is a relief from the “smug brilliance” of West End society, is naïve (217). Also naïve is Brian’s admiration of a “map” for sale that has “the British Empire splashed so generously in red that Canada, for example, almost infringed upon Mexico,” which troubles the “absurd nationalism that made him sing out loud” (218). Troublingly, Brian forgets the violence of imperial expansion on the anniversary of a war between empires.

  Nonetheless, throughout this market scene Nichols infuses an expectation that the best elements of British life will continue. Imperialism is violent but Britain’s international trade provides “wagons of fruit and vegetables, with pomegranates at a half penny” and “sound Spanish” onions, which are affordable for all (218). Also, there is a hint of humor in Canada infringing on Mexico, essentially eliding the United States, Britain’s growing rival. Brian, moreover, is “a little drunk. More than a little,” having visited several bars, the sort which to Walter symbolize “the England of Chaucer and Johnson and Dickens” (90). This drunkenness, then, differs from that of the Bright Young People. It is part of the “vulgar” vitality of English existence, with its mistakes and its pleasures. Brian, true, overindulges in this vitality, but this brief break from twentieth-century morality leads him to stumble upon Walter. This is not particularly refined, but it is “coarse[ly]” pleasant and by the following morning he has recovered from his excess with no plans to repeat it. Britain, unfortunately, would not recover from the war this quickly and, as we know now, Nazi Germany would lead Europe to repeat its violent excesses all too soon. In 1927, however, Nichols maintained hope for the future and on the final morning of the novel, on August 5th, Brian has matured past his desire for decadence and plans to “scamper with Walter over” London’s “clean-swept streets, into the mists of Hyde Park, and splash with a whirl of white and silver into the Serpentine” (219). The world is not perfect and Hyde Park is not Eden. But, swimming in the Serpentine is a new beginning in an experienced world and provides an ardent if imperfect hope for a modern pastoral paradise.

  David Deutsch

  University of Alabama

  February 2013

  David Deutsch earned his Ph.D. from Ohio State University and joined the English Department at the University of Alabama in 2011. He teaches courses in modern American and British drama, poetry, and prose.

  1 D. J. Taylor, Bright Young People: The Lost Generation of London’s Jazz Age. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2007. 67.

  2 Beverley Nichols, Prelude. London: Chatto and Windus, 1920. 15.

  3 Bryan Connon, Beverley Nichols: A Life. Portland: Timber Press, 2000. 126-127.

  4 Beverley Nichols, Sweet and Twenties. London: The Quality Book Club, 1958. 103.

  5 “Crazy Pavements.” Times Literary Supplement. 10 Feb. 1927: 90.

  To D——

  in memory of february 1, 1925

  CHAPTER ONE

  ‘SOCIETY is marvelling at the latest example of the Dowager Lady Macrael’s versatility. She is making a collection of the old Scottish ballads and turning them into jazz tunes, employing bagpipes to give the effect of a saxo­phone. No doubt there will soon be some very jolly parties at Macrael Castle, when the old and the new will be happily blended.’

  Brian Elme stared a little dubiously at the above paragraph, which, after great effort, he had concocted for The Lady’s Mail, one of the papers with which the womanhood of England appeases its voracious appetite for Society gossip. Was it too obviously a fake? Was it libellous?

  No. It certainly wasn’t libellous. Even to the most modern mind there could be nothing actually indecent about the bagpipes. Why he had affixed this particular legend to the Dowager Lady Macrael, of all people, he would have found it hard to explain. Perhaps there was something in her photograph, which lay before him, that gave an extra piquancy to the theory. Her face was like a Scottish promontory – rocky and irregular.

  Rather wearily, he laid down his pencil and stared out of the window. His ‘Gossip’ page was almost written, and through his mind floated a grisly procession of coroneted peeresses. He wished that he might never see another Burke’s ‘Peerage.’ He wished there would be a revolution that would sweep all these silly women into the sea. No, he didn’t. He would lose his job if that happened. Two more paragraphs to write. He glanced at The Times to see who had just left England.

  He felt something almost akin to affection for any peeress who departed on a long sea-voyage. She was far out of the reach of the newspapers, and by the time she returned, anything he had written about her would long ago have been forgotten. Ah! Here was one.

  ‘Lady Monk is sailing to-day from Liverpool to visit her son Patrick, who is an undergraduate at Yale.’

  That was perfect. The paragraph was already form­ing in his mind. He looked up Lady Monk in Debrett. God had made her the wife of the first Baron Monk, chairman of the well-known firm of Monk and Cartney Ltd., manufacturers of paper bags. Before her marriage she had been Mrs. Elihu James of Chicago, and she was née Studenmayer. He therefore sat down and wrote with a sigh:

  ‘Quite a little romance, isn’t it, the sailing of the viva­cious Lady Monk to her native land? I learn that there was a very long struggle before his lordship (who is doing so much to rebuild our staple industries) would consent to her scheme for Patrick’s education at Yale, instead of Cam­bridge. However, she won the day. And already, I hear, Patrick is one of the most popular students at Yale, largely owing to the uncanny knack with which he has picked
up the national sport of baseball.’

  There. Nobody could object to that. He had put in a sop to Lord Monk by calling his beastly paper bags ‘a staple industry.’ He had called Lady Monk vivacious, and if she wasn’t vivacious with all that money she deserved to be hung in crepe. As for Patrick . . .

  He found himself dreaming about Patrick, wonder­ing what manner of youth he was. Patrick had cer­tainly never had to make a living by writing ‘Gossip’ paragraphs about people he didn’t know, at the rate of six guineas a week. Patrick had never had to rub tal­cum powder on his only dress-shirt to make it ‘do’ another time. Patrick had never had to go into a shop and buy rubber solution with which to mend the soles of his shoes. . . . Patrick had never . . .

  Brian swallowed, cleared his throat, frowned, and told himself not to be a fool.

  One more paragraph. He wanted something with a touch of sentiment. He looked at the clock. It was nearly five o’clock. The columns of The Times informed him that no other peeresses were going abroad. Per­haps they were grimly remaining in England in order to read The Lady’s Mail. About whom should he write? Lady Schooner, and her latest party? No. He had run her to death already. Lady Melluish, the Diana of the Cotswolds? No. She died of delirium tremens last Tuesday, and one couldn’t be sentimental with such material. It would have to be his old favourite – Lady Julia.

  He had written more about Lady Julia than about any other celebrity because, in spite of the intimate nature of his weekly revelations, she was the only mem­ber of his ‘Gossip’ circle whom he had ever seen. He had been the first to chronicle the fact that she had shingled her blue-black hair. He had attributed to her a passion for white cherries (one of the few passions of which she was really innocent), he had endeavoured, with boyish eloquence, to describe her dresses, and one day in the Park he had followed her, with heart beating high, from the Marble Arch to Kensington Gardens. In that issue of The Lady’s Mail there had appeared the following paragraph: