I have been re-reading his most popular book. The Four Feathers. It is a study of fear, the fear of cowardice. The illustration he has chosen, a general’s son, heir to a long line of military ancestors, brought up for the Service, is an obvious and conventional one, but the story still holds us for a few lazy hours. Indeed, I think I liked it better than I did as a boy. Unlike the film adaptations most of the story takes place in England, off-stage, and I remember that when I was fifteen I wanted to skip all those pages of love and misunderstanding. The boy was bored by what the adult can’t quite swallow. And yet the book has many merits: the military mind of the parent is critically regarded. There are – in so conventional a story – unexpected notes of harshness: the girl who presents her lover with the fourth white feather of cowardice hates his three comrades who started the cruel affair and rejoices when one is killed in the Sudan. These are the touches of reality which force us today to read on, and which make it, I think, a better book than its close kin, The Light that Failed. But the dialogue is hopelessly unreal: it is there to advance the story and not to express character. When the hero is delirious in the Omdurman prison, his feverish utterances are sufficiently lucid and chronological to explain to the man he has come to rescue all the events leading to his capture. It is as if the author had an urgent appointment to keep when the story was done, and he must take the easiest way to reach the end. His task finished (and his MS was like a clean copy) there was mountaineering in the Alps, during the autumn a 2.000-acre shoot, a trip to South Africa. One remembers Conrad writing: ‘It’s late. I am tired after a day of uphill toil. Now it is always uphill with me. And the worst is one doesn’t seem any nearer the top when the day is done.’ One doubts whether Mason would have understood. They had set themselves different summits.
1952
ISIS IDOL
One break comes every year in my quiet life. Then I go to Dresden, and there I am met by my dear friend and companion. Fritz von Tarlenheim. Last time, his pretty wife Helga came and a lusty crowing baby with her. And for a week Fritz and I are together, and I hear all of what falls out in Strelsau; and in the evenings, as we walk and smoke together, we talk of Sapt, and of the King, and often of young Rupert; and, as the hours grow small, at last we speak of Flavia. For every year Fritz carries with him to Dresden a little box; in it lies a red rose, and round the stalk of the rose is a slip of paper with the words written: ‘Rudolf – Flavia – always’.
So The Prisoner of Zenda ended. How one swallowed it all at the age of fourteen, the clever, brittle sentiment of a novel that has been made a schoolbook in Egypt, has been serialized in Japan, which has been filmed and staged time and again. Now it begins to fade out, like the ghost ‘with a melodious twang’.
There is a true Edwardian air about The Prisoner of Zenda, Phroso and The Dolly Dialogues; and they may still survive awhile as period pieces. If one had tried without Sir Charles Mallet’s help,*17 to imagine the author surely one would have hit on this frontispiece: the long well-bred nose, the pointed legal face, the top hat gleaming in the late summer sun, the silver-headed cane, and the chair beside the Row. Ladies with large picture-hats slant off under the trees towards Hyde Park Corner. The author is amused; he has just come up to town from Lady Battersea’s; he is composing a light whimsical letter on the latest political move and his own idleness to the Duchess of Sutherland, whom he knows affectionately as Griss. It is the atmosphere of Sargent, of Fabergé jewels, but one is not sorry that to this author, who enjoyed with such naive relish the great houses, the little political crisis, the vulgarity was hidden.
Rich Jews at Court, in London and at Baden;
Italian slang and golden chamberware;
Adultery and racing; for the garden
Muslin and picture-hats and a blank stare.
He was a thoroughly Balliol best-seller: a double first, a President of the Union, he took his popularity (£70.000 earned in the first ten years of writing) with admirable suavity. He was never really a professional writer: it is mainly the respectable underworld of literature that is represented in the letters of which Sir Charles Mallet’s book is more or less a précis: he turned his novels off in a couple of months. Sometimes there were as many as three manuscripts awaiting publication. He managed in his delicate dealings with tragic or even black-guardedly themes to retain the Union air of not being wholly serious. You could forgive his sentimentality because it struck so artificial an attitude. He was a Balliol man: he wasn’t easily impressed by his great contemporaries. It seemed to him that Hardy was rather limited in his opinions, and when Henry James died, he wrote: ‘a dear old fellow, a great gentleman . . . The critics call him a “great novelist”. I can’t think that.’ His own work was highly praised by Sir James Barrie and Sir Gilbert Parker, but he was not conceited. ‘Have you read my Phroso? I wrote it in seven weeks laughing, and now I have to be solemnly judged as though it were the effort of a life. It’s really like explaining a kiss in the Divorce Court. . . .’ An Isis Idol knows that next week he must inevitably be dethroned, and he was quite prepared to see himself superseded by another generation of popular writers who would appeal to a taste which was already beginning to reject the sentimental badinage of The Dolly Dialogues.
‘I should describe you, Lady Mickleham,’ I replied discreetly, ‘as being a little lower than the angels.’
Dolly’s smile was almost a laugh as she asked:
‘How much lower, please, Mr Carter?’
‘Just by the depth of your dimples,’ I said thoughtlessly.
He always said that a run of about fifteen years would be his limit, and he wrote towards the end of his time: ‘If I live to advanced age, I shall, I think, be dead while I yet live in the body. I don’t complain. It is just . . . I’ve had a pretty good run.’ It was sporting, the thoroughly Isis manner, and one is rather sorry that he did live long enough to see his sales decline, that he didn’t die, like Mr Rassendyll, still king in Ruritania. His heart ought to have given way in his own fragile, romantic, rather bogus style at the highest leap – of his carefully recorded statistics.
1935
THE LAST BUCHAN
MORE than a quarter of a century has passed since Richard Hannay found the dead man in his flat and started that long flight and pursuit – across the Yorkshire and the Scottish moors, down Mayfair streets, along the passages of Government buildings, in and out of Cabinet rooms and country houses, towards the cold Essex jetty with the thirty-nine steps, that were to be a pattern for adventure-writers ever since. John Buchan was the first to realize the enormous dramatic value of adventure in familiar surroundings happening to unadventurous men, members of Parliament and members of the Athenaeum, lawyers and barristers, business men and minor peers: murder in ‘the atmosphere of breeding and simplicity and stability’. Richard Hannay, Sir Edward Leithen, Mr Blenkiron, Archie Roylance, and Lord Lamancha; these were his adventurers, not Dr Nikola or the Master of Ballantrae, and who will forget the first thrill in 1916 as the hunted Leithen – the future Solicitor-General – ran ‘like a thief in a London thoroughfare on a June afternoon’?
Now I saw how thin is the protection of civilization. An accident and a bogus ambulance – a false charge and a bogus arrest – there were a dozen ways of spiriting one out of this gay and bustling world.
Now Leithen, who survived the perils of the Green Park and the mews near Belgrave Square, has died in what must seem to those who remember The Power House a rather humdrum way, doing good to depressed and starving Indians in Northern Canada, anticipating by only a few months his creator’s death.*18
What is remarkable about these adventure-stories is the completeness of the world they describe. The backgrounds to many of us may not be sympathetic, but they are elaborately worked in: each character carries round with him his school, his regiment, his religious beliefs, often touched with Calvinism: memories of grouse-shooting and deer-stalking, of sport at Eton, debates in the House. For men who live so dangerously they are oddly con
ventional – or perhaps, remembering men like Scott and Oates, we can regard that, too, as a realistic touch. They judge men by their war-record: even the priest in Sick Heart River, fighting in the desolate northern waste for the Indians’ salvation, is accepted by Leithen because ‘he had served in a French battalion which had been on the right of the Guards at Loos’. Toc H and the British Legion lurk in the background.
In the early books, fascinated by the new imaginative form, the hair-breadth escapes in a real world, participating wholeheartedly in the struggle between a member of the Athenaeum and the man who could hood his eyes like a hawk, we didn’t notice the curious personal ideals, the vast importance Buchan attributed to success, the materialism . . . Sick Heart River, the last adventure of the dying Leithen seeking – at Blenkiron’s request – the missing business man, Francis Galliard, who had left his wife and returned to his ancestral North, has all the old admirable dry ease of style – it is the intellectual content which repels us now, the Scotch admiration of success. ‘Harold has a hard life. He’s head of the Fremont Banking Corporation and a St Sebastian for everyone to shoot arrows at.’ Even a nation is judged by the same standard: ‘They ought to have made a rather bigger show in the world than they have.’ Individuals are of enormous importance. Just as the sinister Mr Andrew Lumley in The Power House was capable of crumbling the whole Western world into anarchy, so Francis Galliard – ‘one of Simon Ravelston’s partners’ – must be found for the sake of America. ‘He’s too valuable a man to lose, and in our present state of precarious balance we just can’t afford it.’
But though Sick Heart River appears at the moment least favourable to these ideas (for it is not, after all, the great men – the bankers and the divisional commanders and the Ambassadors, who have been holding our world together this winter, and if we survive, it is by ‘the wandering, wavering grace of humble men’ in Bow and Coventry, Bristol and Birmingham), let us gratefully admit that, in one way at any rate, Buchan prepared us in his thrillers better than he knew for the death that may come to any of us, as it nearly came to Leithen, by the railings of the Park or the doorway of the mews. For certainly we can all see now ‘how thin is the protection of civilization’.
1941
EDGAR WALLACE
I ONLY saw Edgar Wallace once, but the moment has stayed in my memory like a ‘conversation piece’. I was twenty-five years old, I had published a first novel, and I found myself a junior guest, very much ‘a stranger and afraid’ at a great publisher’s do at the Savoy Hotel – a banquet (no lesser word will serve) given jointly by the English and American firms of Heinemann and Doubleday, who were then in uneasy partnership.
Dinner at the long tables, set at right angles, seemed a kind of frozen geometry, but for a young man it was worse when the geometrical figure was eventually broken and I found myself with my coffee seated beside Arnold Bennett who, when a waiter gave me a glass of ‘something’ (I was too frightened to refuse), remarked sternly, ‘A serious writer does not drink liqueurs.’ At that moment (which doomed me, so far as liqueurs were concerned, to a lifetime’s abstinence) I looked away from him and saw Edgar Wallace at his first meeting with Hugh Walpole.
I feel quite certain it was the first time these two giants of the commercial novel had met: the giant of the circulating library and the giant of the cheap edition, the writer who wanted, vainly, to be distinguished and recognized and applauded as a literary figure, and the writer who wanted, vainly too, to have all the money he needed, not to bother about debts, to win the Derby every first Wednesday in June, and to escape – to escape from the knowledge of the world which perhaps the other would have given half his success to have shared.
I remember Walpole’s patronizing gaze, his bald head inclined under the chandeliers like that of a bishop speaking with kindness to an unimportant member of his diocese. And the unimportant member? – he was so oblivious of the bishop’s patronage that the other shrank into insignificance before the heavy confident body, the long challenging cigarette-holder, the sense that this man cared not so much as a flybutton for the other’s world. They had nothing in common, not even an ambition. Even in those days I found myself on the side of Wallace.
From what environment Wallace escaped we learn from Margaret Lane’s careful, sensitive and beautifully organized biography*19 (has there ever before been so literate a biography of a writer completely outside the world of serious letters?). There is a curious likeness between the early world of Wallace and the early world of Chaplin: East London and South London were not so far apart.
The mothers of both men were small figures in the theatrical world who never made good. Chaplin was abandoned for periods to the workhouse; Wallace was abandoned altogether to a friendly family in Billingsgate. Chaplin had brief knowledge of his father; Wallace, who was illegitimate, none at all. Of the two children Wallace was the more abandoned, though Chaplin had the crueller experience, and the long distance between love and hate separates the careers of these two men. Chaplin remained, even in his success, rooted to Kennington; Wallace seems to have been concerned only to forget, and there is one repulsive moment in Miss Lane’s biography – otherwise the record of a very generous man – when his old mother, penniless and out of work, appeals to him for help and is sent away with the harsh word to expect nothing from him.
At about the same period Wallace wrote to his wife: ‘I hate the British working man; I have no sympathy with him; whether he lives or dies, feeds or starves, is not of the slightest interest to me.’ You can feel the flames of the burning boats flushing his face. One attitude to the hard childhood produced the immortal Charlie, the other at its best The Four Just Men bent on their mission of vengeance.
No one – the theologians and the psychologists agree – is responsible for his own character: he can make only small modifications for good or ill. Chaplin chose the route of the artist and assimilated the hard childhood which Wallace rejected. And Wallace? Instead of the artist we have a phenomenon which might have been invented by Balzac – the human book-factory. We cannot help wondering, reading of the 150 novels he wrote in twenty-seven years (twenty-eight of them written at £70 a time), whether he could not have found an easier road than words to – what? Not exactly financial success, for at his death he left £140.000 of debts, but at least to that state of life where there was money to burn.
Sometimes, looking in the windows of art-dealers south of Picadilly, I find myself wondering how it is that a painter has stopped just here. I could no more paint that sunset or that beetling cliff, that moorland with the clump of sheep, than I could draw a recognizable human face; but with that amount of enviable skill what has made the painter stop? Perhaps the answer is that if he had ever possessed the capacity to enlarge his skill he would never have begun on that sunset, that cliff, that moorland.
The parallel is not exact, for Wallace at the very beginning of his writing career had one great quality: he could create a legend. I read The Four Just Men for the first time when I was about ten years old, with enormous excitement, and when I re-read it the other day it was with almost the same emotion. The plain style sometimes falls into clichés, but not often; the melodrama grips in the same way as The New Arabian Nights (Stevenson, too, had a family history from which he tried to escape through fantasy); Wallace tells an almost incredible story with very precise realistic details. The Foreign Secretary pursued by the four anarchists doesn’t dress up as an old Jew, like the detective in The Flying Squad, nor as a toothless Arab beggar, like the American diplomat in The Man From Morocco, and there is no, thank God, love interest at all. The story moves at a deeper level of invention than he ever tapped again.
Afterwards he invented so rapidly that sometimes he forgot the opening of a paragraph before he reached its end, as in this description of a rather unlikely Bond Street flat (the italics are mine):
The room in which he sat, with its high ceiling fantastically carved into scrolls and arabesques by the most cunning of Moorish wo
rkmen, was wide and long and singular. The walls were of marble, the floor an amazing mosaic covered with the silky rugs of Ispahan. . . . With the exception of the desk, incongruously gaudy in the severe and beautiful setting, there was little furniture.
Grant the initial unlikelihood of four anarchists who terrorize London, the police force, the Government, and then every detail is authentic – so a legend is created. When the hour of doom for the Foreign Secretary pronounced by the Four Just Men approaches, he is locked in his room and detectives fill the passages. The whole city is in the hands of the police.
By order of the Commissioner, Westminster Bridge was closed to all traffic, vehicular or passenger. The section of the Embankment that runs between Westminster and Hungerford Bridge was next swept by the police and cleared of curious pedestrians; Northumberland Avenue was barred, and before three o’clock there was no space within five hundred yards of the official residence of Sir Philip Ramon that was not held by a representative of the law. Members of Parliament on their way to the House were escorted by mounted men, and taking on a reflected glory, were cheered by the crowd. All that afternoon a hundred thousand people waited patiently, seeing nothing, save, towering above the heads of a host of constabulary, the spires and towers of the Mother of Parliaments, or the blank faces of the buildings – in Trafalgar Square, along the Mall as far as the police would allow them, at the lower end of Victoria Street, eight deep along the Albert Embankment, growing in volume every hour. London waited, waited in patience, orderly, content to stare steadfastly at nothing, deriving no satisfaction for their weariness but a sense of being as near as it was humanly possible to be to the scene of a tragedy. A stranger arriving in London, bewildered by this gathering, asked for the cause. A man standing on the outskirts of the Embankment throng pointed across the river with the stem of his pipe.
Collected Essays Page 18
