Against the Wind

by Geoffrey Household

  Why, then, was I, holding these views, not for Franco rather than for the Republic? Above all, because I loved and pitied the individuals who made up Spain. I knew the ironworkers of Bilbao and the agricultural labourers of Andalusia. Courage and independence, nobility of manners, a pride that was unaggressive formed a proletariat so unproletarian that the very name was an insult. Yet they were treated with the full cruelty of early nineteenth-century economics. So long as poverty compelled them to work, nobody cared whether or not they ate. At least the Republic, with the Mexican example before it, was attempting legislation for the improvement of wages and working conditions.

  I honoured the Republic, too, for its grant of regional autonomy to Catalonia and the Basque Provinces. I admit that this from a foreigner is impertinence. To the Castilian as to the Englishman regional autonomy has always seemed a betrayal of history, and he knows well that in a country of genial anarchists there must be a powerful brake on the centrifugal force. So I can only plead an emotional delight that the Basques had obtained their own republic, and an anger more personal than that of politically-minded demonstrators when Franco and German aircraft destroyed it.

  With the indignation of the Republic against the Church I profoundly sympathised, though I am too unorthodox a Christian to claim the right of a protestant to be impatient. The Church in Spain, with its willingness to use arms, its absorption of wealth, its political patronage and its idle mouths had to be reduced to the more reasonable proportions of the Church in France. That the prayers of the ascetic which perfume the still sky above Toledo should influence us all I can believe; for such intervention the forced fasting of a spiritually heroic people might be a small price to pay. But when paid for an inordinate host of the black-robed, multiplying like the black-coated in any mundane war, starvation is unacceptable.

  Summer in London restored my equanimity, and slowly persuaded me that the Spanish quarrel was not clear enough for one who saw opposing political creeds in shades of grey, never in black and white. The novel, however, still stuck fast. Short stories for the ever-generous Atlantic Monthly just paid the butcher and the wine merchant, and several of them finished in Edward O’Brien’s anthologies which in those days decided the top boys and girls of the year. But I have always distrusted the opinion of examiners. Their accolade gives me a spurious sense of triumph like that of the successful businessman who has outwitted the auditor. Meanwhile, Jack MacDougall on a visit to America heard of the new author and put up another advance. Honour forbade me any longer to tell myself that I was quite incapable of writing a novel.

  We let the flat—always a useful source of income—and went down to a little guest-house at Beachley in the peninsula between Severn and Wye. There in the autumn garden, undisturbed and perhaps inspired by the Severn tides which foamed yellow up and down the narrows twenty yards away, I worked at a speed I have never approached since and at last came to know what in the world I was writing about. From Beachley we went on to Tangier. I hardly noticed the move. The world of imagination was dominant. In May 1937 the novel was finished after a year and a half of gestation.

  There was enough material in The Third Hour for four novels—a common fault of beginners—and until war filled up the void I regretted that I had been so generous. For a first book it had a considerable succès d’estime, and it sold well enough to clear the advances and provide a few hundred pounds as well. The reviewers were kind to the story-telling but disliked the politics. The public took the politics far too seriously and the story-telling for granted. Those who loved the book still do, so that at least there must be a great richness of texture.

  I was unconscious of any political preaching of my own. I had told the picaresque stories of several men and women from several nations, and shown their longing for some purpose greater than themselves which no religion or political creed could supply. To clear the ground for them I had to hold the illusions of capitalist, fascist and communist under a continual harassing fire of irony. Then I allowed the discontented to advance to their own purpose. My characters had the axe to grind, not I; and while I profoundly believed—as a novelist must—that for them the solution was right, I was not recommending monasteries of outlaws as a panacea for the ills of the nineteen-thirties.

  With The Third Hour out of the way, I suffered from a financially alarming occupational hazard which has never left me and which I still refuse to accept as inevitable. I give myself a month or two of idleness and then sit down to another book. It opens magnificently; it proceeds to ten thousand words; it falters, and I suspect myself of laziness. I leave it alone and perhaps write a short story.

  When I return to the manuscript of such high hopes I see at once that it faltered because the subconscious critic knew that it was poor, while the anxious author believed that it was good. I start another, and exactly the same thing happens. I am working hard, although I cannot avoid the thought that I might as well be enjoying idleness. But if I do not work, how am I ever to produce a novel at all? And so the vicious circle continues until my daemon, who is as unsophisticated and indeterminate as a night-gowned guardian angel on a pious postcard, decides that the time has come to break it. No doubt he—or she—would come more intelligently to the rescue if I did not insist so strongly on being master of my fate.

  Meeting for the first time this impotence I was appalled by it. In the autumn of 1937, with a mass of reading for a historical novel, we went to Portugal. The only result was a fine chapter in the middle of a non-existent book. Somehow an income of about six hundred a year was maintained. It sufficed for simple luxuries, and winters abroad were very cheap.

  One day in December 1938 I wrote the opening pages of a novel—a habit of which I was growing very weary. But these seemed exciting, and eventually I let them go to the printer with hardly a change. To what incidents these pages were to lead I did not know, but the whole of the story was inherent in them, and Rogue Male began, week after week, to live. I observed, faintly protesting, that whereas I had intended a picaresque story in which fear would supply the suspense, what I was really writing had some affinity to Buchan without his coincidences and with the cry of human suffering unsuppressed. But who was I to complain of inspiration? I could have wished the angel less prepossessed with violence, but if that was what it wanted I was prepared to place my craft at its disposal.

  With those two first novels my laborious method of working became standardised, and through the years has only gained in slowness. I cannot think that I am a natural writer at all. To me it is a miracle that the great Victorians should have been able to rise from work at midday—Trollope indeed at breakfast-time—with neat sheets of finished manuscript on desk or floor, demanding nothing more than correction in proof.

  In pencil I drive a sort of pilot tunnel through the underground darkness of the imagination. This is by far the hardest work, and I never sit down to it with any real trust that it can be done at all. On a good morning the result is some three pages legible only to myself. In the evening I pass this inchoate mess through the typewriter, and it comes out with the action settled, speed about right, smoothness poor, and the paragraphs close to their final shape. A five-hour day, between morning and evening, will produce anything between seven hundred and a thousand words.

  With at last the complete typescript in front of me, I retype the whole lot, modelling the characters nearer to their originals in life or imagination, strengthening the dialogue, and correcting the sentences so that any one of them can be read aloud without pain to tongue or ear. This retyping crawls at a rate of ten or twelve pages a day and, though exhausting, is at last capable of giving me pleasure. Stevenson said that the fun of writing is rewriting. I should go further, and claim that it is the only fun.

  Rogue Male, years later, revealed to me the sort of conglomerate through which the pilot tunnel is driven. A favourite book of mine at the age of eight was Patterson’s Man-eaters of Tsavo—strong meat for the young, b
ut I was not more than pleasurably frightened by it. Possibly I lost my copy in the first term at a preparatory school. At any rate I never saw the book again until I reread it nearly forty years later after the war. Suddenly I was pulled up by a sentence which was nearly word for word in Rogue Male, and I soon found half a dozen fainter echoes. There was no doubt about it. That was where my interest in Fear had come from. Yet today I should not rate Patterson’s anatomy of terror very high—perhaps because in all literature which is not ephemeral the better drives out the good, and his lions are surpassed by Jim Corbett’s tigers.

  Whether the reception of Rogue Male was more than polite I have forgotten, for it was published in September 1939 when I had already left England. Certainly I felt a detached pleasure at a sheaf of press cuttings which reached me in Ploeşti, but truth at that time seemed so much more provocative than fiction. Which, by any definition of the real, was nearer to reality I do not know. The attack upon the oil wells petered out into a dining club for diplomatic clerks. Rogue Male is still in the present.

  Before it in England and after it in America came my first book of short stories, The Salvation of Pisco Gabar. I was uncritically in love with this, and a very mixed press permitted me to remain so; for every reviewer who singled out a story as particularly offensive, there was another who chose the same story as the best. Today I should rate the book as no more than promising, for several of the tales ran too close to the traditional smoking-room yarn—not that I despise the form, always provided that the characters are unconventional, the irony at least as important as the forthright action, and the cake from which the slice of life has been cut a living cake still extending in its own space before the beginning of the story and after its end. The man of letters who attacks the smoking-room yarn is in danger of finding Heart of Darkness undetected in the Congo to blow him clear out of the water.

  In July 1945, when I called at the depot in Olympia and exchanged my uniform for a government suit and hat, the achievement of pre-war life—three books and a children’s story—was not enough to promise support for the four of us in the spirited life to which we were accustomed, though admittedly the babies had not been accustomed to it very long. But the war had packed me with self-confidence—a deal easier to attain when writing is in the future not the present—to which was added the encouragement of The Atlantic Monthly, expressed by immediate acceptance of three short stories and an advance of cash for a novel. There was also a film contract into details of which I will not go lest irony should change to invective and be roundly returned to me in the High Court by counsel for the plaintiffs. It would in any case be too savage dentistry upon a gift-horse which provided me with a large cheque when most I needed it.

  The England to which we Middle-Eastern exiles returned was a foreign country. Its overpowering dullness shocked me even more than it did Ilona; for she, as a Hungarian, naturally expected the solid British culture to be somewhat lacking in vitality. The whole people seemed to be living to the motto of their ration books: do nothing until told; and the impression of those of us who had been away five or six years was exactly that of a capitalist tourist entering a communist state. Discipline might pass, as the price of victory; but I resented having to pay it for political experiment. The Army, which I had always felt to be the very ideal of socialism in its willing and common surrender to a common cause, was a far more friendly and less pompous organisation than the State.

  Since the individual and his free development are precious to me, I loathe the State control which is inseparable from socialism. Yet if I were a citizen of an undeveloped peasant country, where the individual has hitherto had no chance of development, I should certainly support a strong, centralised, Socialist government. In China, for example, I might be a communist. But in France I should be a monarchist; in Spain, a liberal. For my own country, where the tendency of the State to sweep up all untidy ends of liberty must be continually checked, I am probably an anarchist.

  In argument with politicians I am always beaten. I cannot express what I believe, whereas they express what they cannot possibly believe. But in the last two years I have modified the contempt with which, in thought and in fiction, I treated the man whose sole qualification to represent the people was the mouthing of what they wanted to hear.

  The most unexpected experience which ever happened to me, far surpassing the curiosities of South America and war (since they were in the pattern of my life) was to be elected a borough councillor. No one else could be found to stand. I agreed—for there was I complaining at being tied to the creatures of my imagination, and here was a chance of evenings in a world of action, however mild—and since I was certainly not a Socialist, I permitted myself to be called Conservative.

  The administration I enjoyed; the politics bored me, for there is no need of them in the running of a borough. Press and public, however, like the council chamber to be a cheap and inaccurate debating hall, and it is the democratic duty of councillors to satisfy them—a fairly harmless duty since all the work has already been done in the committees where politics rarely intrude and every question is patiently considered on its merits. I can think of no better way to run local government than through unpaid, conscientious citizens who make the job their hobby.

  As a civic dignitary I was only an amused and competent actor, but the service did teach me that in deriding Members of Parliament I had been attacking the wrong men. The whole basis of politics is the hard-working, unintelligent worker in the ward whose enthusiasm is kept alive by what he or she wrongly believes to be the principles and practical intentions of the opposite party. Their opinions and their tastes are reflected in the executive committees. A coven of retired grocers and colonel’s wives, savagely anti-Socialist, an unseemly chapel of plumbers and female civil servants, savagely anti-Conservative, choose the candidate, distort policy, bombard their leaders in Parliament with telegrams of protest when they have been courageous, and of congratulation when they have sacrificed national to party interest. Even so, they sometimes fail to impress their prejudices upon an unwilling House of Commons; and the elected politicians, whom all my life I have blamed for ignorance and insincerity, should really be honoured as the barrier between their executive committees and national disaster. All must be forgiven to the Member, for he alone protects us from the full effects of democracy.

  But in 1945 I could see only that the politicians had no desire to dispel the queues which ended at their feet. The family emigrated from London to remotest Devon and bought a house. Its position at the head of a creek off the Salcombe Estuary would have haunted the mind of any holiday-maker until he could return; but to civilised man and woman, living there all the year round without paid labour—or, worse, with it—the place had nothing to offer but unlimited rabbits and eggs. House agents would have advertised it as ‘suitable for artist or writer’—though why they should assume that such fastidious professionals will tolerate more discomfort than their fellows I have never understood. More likely to live upon a beauty of surroundings is the man who cannot create it for himself.

  Production was low, and if we had not sold the house at a profit, the effect of idleness would have been more obvious than it was. The independent craftsman is compelled in self-protection to close his eyes to the threat of disaster lest he be over-influenced by it; and that optimism which appears irresponsible to an accountant or an Income Tax Inspector is in fact as essential as the guard-rail upon some malevolent machine. It can be removed for intervals of care and maintenance, but if it is not in place during the working year alarm inhibits or diverts the hand.

  The next move was to a rented house near Dorchester of enormous size and such generous ugliness that one could feel for it nothing but affection—an affection in my case redoubled because there my beloved Magyar first began to be fascinated by England and the English. All the time I was conscious of that heaven, the mutual love of a close-knit family, which is taken for granted by most men a
nd women of goodwill, and for me was an undeserved reward surpassing the most exotic pleasures and excitements.

  Almost immediately I found that disconnected chapters fell into place, and that I was half-way through Arabesque. It was an uneven novel—for in the eight years since Rogue Male my taste had declined through lack of reading as much as lack of writing—into which I poured the essence of my Middle-Eastern experience. And this time I did have an axe to grind. I was infuriated by American ignorance of Palestine and the incompetence of our own official propaganda. I set out to show the Arab-Jewish problem from the neutral army point of view. It was a fair objective, since I understood Palestine better than all but a few specialists and could express what I knew more cunningly than they.

  In America, well reviewed and accepted as fair comment, it was the most profitable of all my books. In England it died still-born—and this at a moment when Palestine was topical and even the opinions of politicians were saleable. Those were the days when newspapers had little space for reviews or for advertisements, and it was hard to get a book noticed at all unless it was by an established writer. My publishers of that time assumed that I was. They had forgotten that eight absorbing years had passed since Rogue Male. My name was completely unknown except to the Intelligence Corps, whose purchases probably accounted for the few copies which were sold.

  I doubt if a writer is ever entitled to blame his publisher for low sales. Serious publishers are not salesmen, and do not claim to be. In England they differ only in their tastes; and what passionately interests them is the making of books, not of money. For books in general they will do any amount of propaganda. Book clubs, press campaigns, literary societies for old ladies—the publisher loves them all. But salesmanship appals him, and he is unwilling to earn the dislike of his equally gentlemanly competitors by lunching once a week in large provincial cities with his travellers and once a month with the director of an unscrupulous advertising agency. Were it his necessity to sell bananas in Spain, he would expect to do so by commissioning a series of evening-paper articles on the superiority of the Banana to the Grape.